The History of Reading, Volume 3

Other publications by Palgrave Macmillan in association with the Instituteof English Studies

Brycchan Carey et al. (eds.), Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and ItsColonies, 1760–1838

Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole (eds.), Victorian Shakespeare, Vol. 1: Theatre, Drama and Performance, Vol. 2: Literature and Culture

Andrew Nash (ed.), The Culture of Collected EditionsJerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literary Study after the World Wide WebElizabeth James (ed.), Macmillan: A Publishing TraditionElizabeth Maslen, Political and Social Issues in British Women’s Fiction, 1928–1968Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (eds.), The New Woman in Fiction and

Fact: Fin-de-Siècle FeminismsWarren Chernaik, Martin Swales and Robert Vilain (eds.), The Art of Detective

FictionRebecca D’Monte and Nicole Pohl (eds.), Female Communities 1600–1800Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (eds.), Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment:

The Making of a Canon, 1730–1820Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (eds.), Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to

Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830–1900Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (eds.), Marvell and LibertyAndy Leak and George Paizis (eds.), The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the

UnspeakableWarwick Gould and Thomas F. Staley (eds.), Writing the Lives of WritersIan Willison, Warwick Gould and Warren Chernaik (eds.), Modernist Writers

and the Marketplace (1996)John Spiers (ed.), George Gissing and the City: Cultural Crisis and the Making of

Books in Late Victorian EnglandMary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed (eds.), Publishing in the First World

War (2007)Mary Hammond and Robert Fraser (eds.), Books without Borders, Volume 1: The

Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture (2008), Books without Borders, Volume 2: Perspectives from South Asia (2008)

Gina Potts and Lisa Shahriari (eds.), Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, Volume 1: Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice (2010), Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, Volume 2: International Influence and Politics (2010)

Robert J. Balfour (ed.), Culture, Capital and Representation (2010)John Spiers (ed.), The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, Volume 1: Authors,

Publishers and the Shaping of Taste (2011), The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, Volume 2: (2011)

Shafquat Towheed and W.R. Owens (eds.), The History of Reading, Volume 1: International Perspectives, c.1500–1990. Katie Halsey and W.R. Owens (eds.), The History of Reading, Volume 2: Evidence from the British Isles, c.1750–1950. Rosalind Crone and Shafquat Towheed (eds.), The History of Reading, Volume 3: Methods, Strategies, Tactics

Also by Rosalind Crone

THE HISTORY OF READING: A Reader (co-editor with Shafquat Towheed and Katie Halsey)

NEW PERSPECTIVES IN BRITISH CULTURAL HISTORY (co-editor with David Gange and Katy Jones)

VIOLENT VICTORIANS: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London

Also by Shafquat Towheed

THE HISTORY OF READING, VOLUME 1: International Perspectives, c.1500–1990 (co-editor with W.R. Owens)

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE: The Sign of Four (editor)r

THE HISTORY OF READING: A Reader (co-editor with Rosalind Crone and KatieHalsey)

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF EDITH WHARTON AND MACMILLAN, 1901–1930(editor)r

NEW READINGS IN THE LITERATURE OF BRITISH INDIA, c.1780–1947 (editor)r

PUBLISHING IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR: Essays in Book History (co-editor with Mary Hammond)dd

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The History of Reading, Volume 3Methods, Strategies, Tactics

Edited by

Rosalind CroneThe Open University

and

Shafquat TowheedThe Open University

Foreword by

Simon Eliot

In association with Palgrave Macmillan

Selection and editorial matter © Rosalind Crone and Shafquat Towheed2011Individual chapters © contributors 2011

Foreword © Simon Eliot 2011

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of thispublication may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright LicensingAgency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2011 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-24756-7

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In loving memory of Ian Stuart Robinson, Henrietta (Ettie)Smart, Joyce Pamela Williams and Helen de Wit

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ix

Contents

List of Figures xi

List of Tables xiii

Foreword by Simon Eliot xv

Acknowledgements xviii

Notes on Contributors xix

Introduction 1Shafquat Towheed

Part 1 Perspectives 13

1 Altick’s Map: The New Historiography of the CommonReader 15

Jonathan Rose

2 Commodity Readers: An Introduction to a Frame forReading 27

Simon R. Frost

Part 2 Methods and Tactics 47

3 Between the Book and the Reader: The Uses of Readingfor the Gratification of Personal Psychosocial Needs 49

Hanna Adoni and Hillel Nossek

4 One Reader, Two Votes: Retooling Fan Mail Scholarship 66 Barbara Ryan

5 The Mediation of Response: A Critical Approach toIndividual and Group Reading Practices 80

Daniel Allington and Joan Swann

Part 3 Interpretive Strategies 97

6 Representing Reading Spaces 99 Stephen Colclough

7 A Book of One’s Own: Examples of Library Book Marginalia 115

Mats Dahlström

Part 4 Reading the Visual 133

8 Reading Ephemera 135 Sadiah Qureshi

9 Books in Photographs 156 Kate Flint

Part 5 Reading in the Digital Age 175

10 Filipino Blogs as Evidence of Reading and Reception 177 Vernon R. Totanes

11 Reading the Book of Mozilla: Web Browsers and theMateriality of Digital Texts 196

Alan Galey

Further Reading and Weblinks 215

Index 218

x Contents

xi

List of Figures

2.1 Kate Sweetser, Boys and Girls from George Eliot,tillustrations by George Alfred Williams (New York:Duffield, 1906), p. 138 38

2.2 ‘Dorothea finds her husband dead in the garden’ fromLisbeth Gooch Seguin, Scenes and Characters from theworks of George Eliot: a series of illustrations by eminent artists (London: Alexander Strahan, 1888) 39

2.3 Vignette from Blackwood’s 1901 edition of George Eliot, Middlemarch 40

2.4 Birch cycles from the turn of the century, c.1899,Nuneaton and Bedworth Art Gallery and Museum 41

3.1 Dialectical model of media interactions 51

4.1 Postcard from N. Lubschutz to Lew Wallace, 22 May 1904 (front) 68

4.2 Postcard from N. Lubschutz to Lew Wallace, 22 May 1904 (reverse) 69

6.1 Etching by Thomas Rowlandson from Poetical Sketchesof Scarborough (1813) 101

6.2 Depiction of a literary soirée from the PictorialTimes (1844) 105

7.1 Kajsa Dahlberg, Ett eget rum/Tusen bibliotek (2006),pp. 118–19 117

7.2 Kajsa Dahlberg, Ett eget rum/Tusen bibliotek (2006),pp. 34–5 122

8.1 The billstickers’ exhibition, Punch (1847) 136

8.2 John Parry, A London Street Scene (1835) 140

10.1 Cover illustrations of Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto, Pasyonand Revolution (1979) and Ambeth R. Ocampo, RizalWithout the Overcoat (1990, 1995, 2001 and 2008) 180t

10.2 Google search results for blogs with the key term‘pasyon and revolution’ 182

10.3 Blog posts on Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution 186

10.4 Blog posts on Ocampo’s Rizal Without the Overcoat 188

11.1 Zotero running in the Firefox web browser 199

11.2 Agostino Ramelli’s book wheel from Agostino Ramelli,Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli (1588), plate 188 201

11.3 A book wheel from Johann Shreck and Wang Chen, Chhi Chhi Thu Shuo (1627), plate 104 203

11.4 A book wheel from Nicolas Grollier de Servière, Recueil d’ouvrages curieux de mathematique et demecanique (1719), plate 85 204

xii List of Figures

xiii

List of Tables

2.1 Lexical good as a direct modifier in Middlemarch 34

2.2 Inventory of goods by association and metaphor 35

3.1 Percentage of interviewees reporting that mediaconsumption assists them in fulfilling psychosocialneeds 55

3.2 Interchangeability in satisfying psychosocial needs:mean Pearson correlations between all types of mediaconsumption for satisfaction of intellectual, affectiveand social needs 61

10.1 Comparative search results for blogs on Pasyon andRizal 183

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xv

ForewordSimon Eliot

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.(Logan Pearsall Smith, 1865–1946)

To pass her time ’twixt reading and Bohea,To muse, and spill her solitary tea,Or o’er cold coffee trifle with the spoon,Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon.

(Alexander Pope, 1688–1744)

Laudant illa sed ista legunt.(They praise those works, but read these.)

(Martial, c.AD 40–104)

Little that is commonplace registers in history. Until relatively recently history has been a record of the exceptional, of change, of differ-ence, or of contrast. To reverse the cliché, it’s always been about theelephant in the room, and never about how the room was furnished or its other, less striking occupants. Essential commonplaces such as eat-ing, casual conversations in the street, and the street itself, fudge intoa fuzzy background against which sharp change or notable differences are brought into focus. In most history the ordinary is at best out of focus or, more commonly, invisible. The quotidian is never quoted,the ordinary is frequently ignored, and ‘the same old, same old’ isworn out before it is ever recorded.

In most literate societies, reading is usually this sort of prosaicactivity. Most of us do it most of the time. It is not necessarily a mat-ter of settling down to spend a few hours with On the Origin of Speciesor catching up with the latest vogue novel; it is more often a matterof reading a cornflakes packet for want of anything better, or readinga ‘use by’ date on something dubious from the fridge, or a timetable, or a free newspaper, or an email, or an advertisement, or a street name, or a menu, or the instructions on a bottle of aspirin.

However, the reading that we tend to remember, and the read-ing that much more frequently gets recorded, is of the exceptional

sort: the book, the chapter, perhaps even just the sentence, whichstrikes home, which affects us in some profound way, which some-times even transforms us. One should never underestimate the powerof reading to surprise with joy, shock with facts or reason, or force usto see things from a disturbingly different point of view, and doing so commonly against our will and inclination. Samuel Johnson’s experi-ence, while he was an undergraduate at Oxford, of taking up Law’s Serious Call to a Holy Life on the assumption that he might laugh atit, only to find Law ‘an overmatch for me’ is an example of suchunexpected and sometimes unwelcome power. Reading, as so many other human experiences do, often relies for its impact on the law of unintended consequences.

Now, there is a natural and understandable tendency of those, par-ticularly in literary studies, to prioritize this exceptional form of read-ing. After all, what is the use of studying something if it does not havea huge potential power to change and to convert? To study something that merely entertained, or diverted, or allowed escape or, worst of all,simply passed the time, is somehow demeaning. What we want are roads to Damascus: the flash, the crash, the conversion.

But if most, or even a significant minority, of reading experienceswere of this transformational sort, we as readers would soon beexhausted by it, like Mr Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, end-lessly buffeted from one set of opinions to the next as he read onepamphlet and then another.

There is, of course, a middle type of reading between the entirelyfunctional and the disconcertingly transcendental. This consists of reading for entertainment (escapist or otherwise), for instruction andinformation – and for confirmation. The first two are self-explanatory, but the third may need some unpacking. Although we are occasion-ally subject, often accidentally, to a reading experience that is trans-formational, we do spend a lot of our reading time trying to avoid such experiences. For instance, we usually choose for our newspaperone that tends to parallel our own views, and we naturally gravitateto other texts that are disposed to assure us that our opinions arethe correct ones, and to provide us with further examples to back up our own prejudices. To provide the ‘And I am right, and you areright’ reassurance is one of the necessary and comforting functions of reading. Much of the content of even the most modern forms of communication, the text and the tweet, are devoted to variations on

xvi Foreword

the theme of ‘I’m OK, and you’re OK’. It was ever thus: many of theclay tablets exchanged between Assyrian monarchs and their civilservants performed a similar function.

We must not forget that the act of reading or, at least, the act of appearing to read, is also an invaluable social tool. For those wishingto promote themselves as studious, for those wanting to avoid socialcontact or (even worse) eye contact, for those wishing to create spacearound themselves in a crowded place, reading is a godsend. Howmany of us, in dining alone in a restaurant, have taken a book ora newspaper not merely for entertainment, but in order to indicate that we are certainly not sad and lonely people?

Finally, there is the history of implied reading; that is, of reading wehave not done but either implicitly or explicitly claimed to have done.The unread books borrowed from libraries, the un-perused books on our tables and bookshelves, all those monuments to our good inten-tions. Or, equally common, the books we bluff about, the allusion toa text that we hope will impress without being picked up by someone who has actually read the book to which we have casually referred.That this is both not new and all too human is attested by the quota-tion from Martial at the beginning of this foreword.

The history of reading is as much about the reader as it is about what is read. It is about the cocktail of motives and circumstancesthat leads us to select one text rather than another, and about thetexture of our personalities and the nature of our predicament thatdetermine how we react to that text. In our various attempts to recre-ate the humanity of the world we have lost, the study of the readingexperiences of those in earlier centuries is an important and worth-while endeavour. The essays that follow are part of a heroic project to explore one of the most significant of the intellectual experiencesthat we share with the past.

Foreword xviid

xviii

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the Arts and Humanities ResearchCouncil for funding The Reading Experience Database, 1450–1945 (RED)project, established at The Open University in collaboration with theInstitute of English Studies, University of London. Among the out-comes of the RED project was an international conference, ‘Evidence of Reading, Reading the Evidence’, held at the Institute of English Studies in July 2008, from which many of the essays in these three volumes emerged. Thanks are also due to Adam Mathew Digital, TheBibliographical Society, the British Academy, History Today, The OpenUniversity and the Royal Historical Society, who provided additionalfinancial support for the conference, and to all the colleagues at the Institute of English Studies and The Open University who helped with its organization, in particular Dr Karen Attar (Rare Books Librarian, Senate House Library), curator of the accompanying exhibition. We thank colleagues and students at the University of Cambridge, The Open University, the University of Stirling, and the School of Advanced Studies, University of London, for helpful comments and suggestions. Permission to reproduce ‘Cross References’ by Jonathan Wolstenholmeon the cover of this volume was kindly granted by Bridgeman Education. We would also like to thank the following for permission to quote orreproduce material in individual chapters: Reading University Library;John Burton of the George Eliot Fellowship; and Rebecca Walker of the Nuneaton and Bedworth Art Gallery and Museum (Chapter 2); The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana for thepostcard by N. Lubschutz (Chapter 4); Kajsa Dahlberg for pages from her copy of Ett eget rum/Tusen bibliotek (Chapter 7); ANVIL, Ateneo de kManila University Press, Valerie Barcinal, Camille Maria Castolo, Mark Andrew Lim, Sherwin A. Mapanoo, Jason Tabinas and Melissa Villa for images of Filipino blogs (Chapter 10); and The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, for the illustrations in texts by Ramelli (RB47853), Shreck and Chen (RB713373) and Grollier (RB714532), (Chapter 11).Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased tomake the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

xix

Notes on Contributors

Hanna Adoni is currently teaching at Sammy Ofer School of Commu-nications Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel. She is Professor Emeritus and Danny Arnold Professor of Communications from the Hebrew University at Jerusalem. She has written numerous articles and books including Social Conflicts and Television News (1990 withA. Cohen and C. Bantz), Media, Minorities and Hybrid Identities (2006 with A. Cohen and D. Caspi) and Readers’ Voices (2007 with HillelNossek).

Daniel Allington is Lecturer in English Language Studies and Applied Linguistics at the Open University, UK, with interests in the history and sociology of culture, language and texts. He has written exten-sively on discourse analysis and reception study, with papers appear-ing in such journals as Poetics Today and y Social Semiotics.

Stephen Colclough is a Lecturer in the School of English at Bangor University, Wales. He is the author of Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities 1695–1870 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and0co-editor (with Alexis Weedon) of The History of the Book in the West:1800–1914 (2010).

Rosalind Crone is Lecturer in History at The Open University, UK,and Co-Investigator on The Reading Experience Database, 1450–1945(RED) project. She has published widely on popular culture, crime and literacy in the nineteenth century and is author of Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London (forth-coming 2012).

Mats Dahlström is an Associate Professor at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, within the universities of Borås and Gothenburg. His research concerns bibliography and scholarly editingas well as digitization, text encoding and digital artefacts.

Simon Eliot is Professor of the History of the Book at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He has published on quantitative book history, publishing history, the

history of lighting and library history. He is General Editor of the new multi-volume History of Oxford University Press.

Kate Flint is Professor of English and Art History at the Universityof Southern California. She is author of The Transatlantic Indian 1776–1930 (2009), The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000), The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (1993) and Dickens (1986), as well as many articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature,cultural history and art history.

Simon R. Frost is External Lecturer at the University of SouthernDenmark. Co-editor of Moveable Type, Mobile Nations (2010), his book history publications also include ‘The Good in a Little Fiction:Conrad, Consumer Readers and Commodity Culture’, in English inAfrica, 35 (2008), pp. 45–66.

Alan Galey is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information atthe University of Toronto, Canada where he also teaches in the Book History and Print Culture program. His research focuses on theories of the archive and prehistories of digital scholarly editing.More information may be found on his website: individual.utoronto.ca/alangaley/

Hillel Nossek is Professor of Communication at the School of MediaStudies of the College of Management Academic Studies, Israel. He isthe co-author of Readers’ Voices (2007 with Hanna Adoni) and co-editorof Media and Political Violence (2007 with Annabelle Sreberny and Prasun Sonwalkar), and is the author of various articles and book chapters on these topics.

Sadiah Qureshi is a Research Fellow with the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group based at the University of Cambridge, UK. Herbook, The Tribes of Hyde Park Corner: Human Exhibitions, Empire and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain is forthcoming in 2011.

Jonathan Rose is Kenan Professor of History at Drew University, USA. He was the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing. His publications include A Companion to the History of the Book (2007 edited with Simon Eliot),The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), The Holocaust and the Book (2008), and (forthcoming) The Literary Churchill.

xx Notes on Contributors

Barbara Ryan teaches in the University Scholars Programme at theNational University of Singapore. She is the author of Love, Wages, Slavery (2006) and y Reading Acts: U.S. Readers’ Interactions with Literature,1800–1950 (2002 co-editor with Amy M. Thomas). She is currentlyco-editing a collection of essays about receptions of Ben-Hur.

Joan Swann is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communication at the Open University, UK. Recent books includeThe Routledge Companion to English Language Studies (2010, co-editedwith Janet Maybin), and Creativity, Language, Literature: The State of the Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, co-edited with Rob Pope and RonCarter).

Vernon R. Totanes is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto,Canada. His publications include ‘History of the Filipino People and Martial Law’, Philippine Studies, 58 (2010); and ‘Borrowing Privileges: Tagalog, Filipinos and the Toronto Public Library’, in Spectres of In/ visibility (2011).y

Shafquat Towheed is Lecturer in English at the Open University, UK,and Co-Investigator on The Reading Experience Database, 1450–1945(RED) project. He is co-editor of The History of Reading: A Reader(2010) and The History of Reading, Vol. 1: International Perspectives, c.1550–1990 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Notes on Contributors xxi