Afterword

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book offered a series of vignettes of reading lives and practices. It presented a cluster of historical figures and a range of historical books, and used them to try to reconstruct what literature has meant and what it has been used for. It showed that the way in which people used the books they read are closely bound up with other aspects of amateur, domestic culture. This book also showed that anxieties about forms of reading are not new. Eighteenth-century commentators worried about learning bought too easily and readers who could no longer engage with whole texts. Families encouraged reading together because they feared that young people were losing their sense of reality through their immersion in addictive imaginative fictions. The world of eighteenth-century reading was a very different land, but in some ways, perhaps not so far from our own as we like to think.

Using Books

This chapter attempts to recover the history of how and why we read communally. While increasing literacy and access to books undoubtedly made solitary reading possible for some, there were many reasons why individuals continued to read together. Some of these had to do with control over what was being read, and how: the perceived social benefits of being together, of the book as the basis for communal entertainment, performance, and discussion. But there were also straightforwardly practical reasons—light and sight. Up until the advent of the Argand oil lamp, and cheap supplies of North American mineral oil in the early nineteenth century, domestic lighting was primitive, and prohibitively expensive. Another technical obstacle to easy reading was limited ophthalmology. Reading aloud gave those with failing vision access to books and letters, and many read with others' eyes.

Access to Reading

This chapter considers where readers got books from. Recent studies of the eighteenth-century book trade have emphasised how expensive books were—and thus should be regarded as luxury objects of that time. In addition, literacy was limited, and had not changed very much in half a century. Nonetheless, there were multiple points of access: alongside booksellers and their new books, there were newspapers and periodicals, second-hand stalls and shops, circulating libraries, abridgements, adaptations, books sold in numbers, and old-fashioned sharing, borrowing, and lending. Books, newspapers, pamphlets, and letters could be and were read aloud, in the home, in groups, in public places. All of this created ways into literature for a broader reading public, and offered alternative models for literary consumption.

Reading and Sociability

This chapter shows how the social history of the book was closely linked to other practices—to ideas about sociability, conventions of visiting, use of leisure time, nature of domestic spaces, value of conversation. By the end of the eighteenth century there were plenty of newly available places in which to spend leisure time and money in company, including pleasure gardens, coffeehouses, museums, and concerts. Although many people took full advantage of these innovations in external leisure activity, the home remained an essential place of recreation for men and women of property. People supped, dined, played cards, read, gossiped, argued, and performed music together in their homes throughout the eighteenth century. The choice of books on display within a house—whether being read or in sight on table or shelves—was also significant. In larger houses, it had an added significance because of the eighteenth-century shift towards the use of the library as a general living space.

Fictional Worlds

This chapter discusses the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the century, readers had little more than short continental prose fictions, or romances; by the end they had thousands of pages of invented lives and stories that were consumed in books, anthologies, part books, abridgements, and magazine instalments. The development of a tradition of extended prose fiction had a transformative impact on the landscape of literary culture at this time. Critics viewed the rise of narrative fiction as the reason for, amongst other things, a crisis in poetic identity, the rise of the solitary reader, and the development of a complex sense of self. The development of the novel also generated what now seems like bizarre mass hysteria over the uses of this new form—reading novels was thought by many to be seductive, dangerous, and enervating for those who consumed too much, too fast.

Drama and Recital

This chapter discusses the consumption of drama in the eighteenth century. Readers in the eighteenth century consumed plays as avidly as we now read novels. Texts designed for the theatre swiftly migrated into domestic environments, where they had alternative lives—read silently, adapted into narrative form, recited, or turned into amateur performance. Both the vogue for elocution and the rise of private theatricals at the end of the century shaped perceptions of amateur drama and recitation. There were clear distinctions between reading, reciting, and performing, and these were linked to fundamental issues of propriety. Shakespeare also became ever more firmly ensconced as the national bard over the course of the eighteenth century.

Verse at Home

This chapter considers the use and transmission of verse by eighteenth-century readers. It argues that certain characteristics of eighteenth-century verse ensured that its take-up was different from other forms of writing. Most obviously, it is the genre most closely related to an oral tradition—to make metre and rhyme work, we need to hear, or imagine, how a poem sounds. The transition from print to vocal performance is assumed, even if it does not actually happen. Moreover, the couplet form and the liftable, aphoristic quotability of much eighteenth-century verse made it highly transferrable into a whole range of media, from commonplace books and printed miscellanies to cups and rings and samplers. The relative brevity of entire poems ensured it was possible to copy them out, collect them, compose them, read them out, or send them with a frequency not possible for the longer genres such as plays, novels, or essays.

How to Read

Over the course of the eighteenth century, ideas about delivery and linguistic effect were repackaged in more plentiful and accessible forms for aspirational audiences eager to acquire skills of self-improvement. We see a tension between nostalgia for ancient eloquence, so privileged in the early modern period, and a new emphasis on polite style and genteel social accomplishment. Reading out a written text becomes a popular art form, hobby, spectator sport, subject of academic enquiry, and topic of satire. This chapter explores the culture of learning to read well, and considers what it was that the good reader was supposed to be doing.

Piety and Knowledge

This chapter considers how books about history, science, or religion were shared. Library catalogues and diaries show that the borrowing, selling, and reading of sermons, histories, and travel writing dwarfed that of literary works. Records of books sold in parts show that the largest genre available in this form was history, followed by geography, topography, and travel, then biblical commentary, church history, and treatises on morality. The expanding print market created newly accessible formats across many areas of intellectual enquiry, and the display of generalist knowledge about historical figures, botany, or astronomy was a prominent part of polite accomplishment for both men and women. Eighteenth-century readers consumed nonfiction works together at home—for piety, self-improvement, and entertainment.

Introduction

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the lesser known world of the everyday uses of books and reading in company, in the homes of the middling sort and lesser gentry. Although the schoolroom, the parish church, the tavern, the coffeehouse, and the university all provided important locations for reading aloud, the home was a space distinct in itself, a place that was both public and private, a site of intimacy and also of social display. It was a place of leisure and also of work: a way in which to retreat from the world, but also to prepare oneself for it. In exploring the reading life of the home, we get a sense of the complex mix of piety, control, self-improvement, irreverence, and social exchange that shaped eighteenth-century society.