Beth Palmer
School of Literature and Languages, University of Surrey
This essay contextualises the broad increase in literacy and readership across the nineteenth century by considering the changes in educational standards, improvements to printing and communications technology, and legal reforms that combined to enable better access to print culture. The story of the growing reading public is a complex one and we also see reactions, both positive and hostile, to the increase in readers and the hotly debated status of newly literate and women readers in particular. The essay also explores the range of settings available for reading activities in the nineteenth century and considers what evidence we have about how readers actually felt and how they could best express their readerly reactions. The essay concludes by summarising some key themes across scholarship in nineteenth-century readership studies.
Introduction
The nineteenth century saw enormous changes in attitudes to reading, the availability of reading materials, and literacy. The reading public of urban coffee houses and educated gentility in the early 1800s looked very different from the mass readerships of the last decades of the century. Women and the working classes enjoyed exponentially more opportunities for reading by the close of the century when cheap publications were affordable to all but the poorest and reading material jumped out of advertising hoardings, railway timetables, free political pamphlets, and religious tracts. Whilst there were many individual difficulties and much patchiness in the history of nineteenth-century readership, the broad picture is one of increased access and ability.
Increases in literacy and access to print culture
Across the nineteenth century both literacy and access to reading materials improved enormously, although these improvements depended very much on factors including the class, gender, and location of would-be readers. Richard Altick used the ability to sign the church register on marriage to show that by 1900 97% of men and women were able to sign, as compared to 51% of women and 67% of men who married in 1841 (Altick 1957, 171–2). These statistics set a very low bar for literacy, but historians tend to agree that literacy, however it is measured, improved significantly across the course of the nineteenth century for both men and women.
Key to raising literacy were the improvements in education that took place during the nineteenth century. Public schools, grammar schools, factory schools, governesses and tutors, voluntary or religious schools, and ragged schools all provided education and access to reading throughout the century. The standard of this schooling was highly variable and some of the worst teaching establishments were subject to the satire of socially conscious writers such as Charles Dickens with his unforgiving portrait of Wackford Squeers at Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby (1839). Even the shoddiest schools did make some attempt to provide basic literacy lessons for those able to utilise them. Attendance at any school was, though, highly variable until the 1870 Education Act saw the government taking responsibility for compulsory schooling for primary aged children. ‘School boards’ were set up to establish new schools in under-served areas and the idea of sending children to school rather than work became increasingly credible. By 1880 this schooling was compulsory and by 1891 it was free of charge, wholly funded by taxation. Not all schools were well provisioned with printed texts but series like the Royal Readers, published by Thomas Nelson and Sons (1872–1881), were sold in their millions and brought compilations of poetry and prose to schoolchildren like Flora Thompson (1945/2000) who would later write about her love of these volumes in Lark Rise to Candleford.
With the newly compulsory schooling bedding into later nineteenth-century culture, it was little wonder that children, particularly those of the working classes, were often better readers than their parents and grandparents. David Vincent asserts that children educated in the 1830s and 1840s were ‘20 points more literate than their parents’ generation […] and in turn lagged behind their own children by a similar amount a quarter of a century later’ (Vincent 2000, 14). There were, though, routes to literacy for adults outside of the formal education system. We might think of Bartle Massey’s village school in Adam Bede (1859) where rural workers aim for self-improvement; or Mr Boffin in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865) paying Silas Wegg to read to him. It was clear to many Victorian adults that a lack of literacy was an impediment to real social mobility but it was not the only motive. Philologist Joseph Wright, who himself had learned to read at a Factory School, noted that his mother was a woman who ‘did not learn to read until age forty-eight, and then apparently never ventured beyond the New Testament, Pilgrim’s Progress and a translation of Klopstock’s Messiah’ (Rose 2001, 31). Reading for spiritual rather than social improvement was also a key motivator for individuals to take charge of their own literacy.
Without doubt millions of people acquired literacy skills throughout the period; for some though, accessing material to read was a struggle. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the idea of controlling the spread of potentially seditious reading material through taxing paper, advertisements, and postage found favour with successive governments. The Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act of 1819 meant that newspapers produced at a more than monthly frequency and a cost of less than 6d were taxed to a prohibitive degree. Although this did not stop ‘unstamped papers’ containing news and political opinion from being produced it did curtail the profitability – and therefore the production – of stamped newspapers. These taxes were unpopular, particularly in liberal and reformist circles, and debates were staged throughout the first half of the century about the problematic and un-democratic nature of the ‘taxes on knowledge’. These debates were interconnected with those around the 1832 reform act which expanded the franchise more widely across the male population. Conservative commentators early in the century feared the effects of giving the vote to a proportion of voters with questionable literacy while opponents wanted larger portions of the population to be able to read news reports and parliamentary papers so that governments could be held to account by an informed electorate (see Hewitt 2014; Brantlinger 1998). It was not until the 1850s and early 1860s, though, that the ‘taxes on knowledge’ were finally repealed to make for a cheaper, freer, and more accessible press.
These changes to the taxation of printed publications were accompanied by technological improvements and both led to a boom in the production and availability of print publications across the nineteenth century. In the first half of the period, hand-press manufacture had given way to the machine press which meant that books could be produced with greater uniformity, speed, and efficiency. Paper also became cheaper and quicker to make during this period which aided both book and newspaper production technologies. Whilst high-quality hardcover volumes still found a market in the later nineteenth century, paperback books began to appear in England in the 1840s, usually in the form of cheap re-prints. The numbers of periodical publications had also increased enormously from approximately 200 titles at the beginning of the century to almost 5,000 newspapers and magazines by 1900 (Law 2016, 42) and the Printers Register tells us in 1870 that the provincial press grew exponentially until ‘Every city, town, village, and we may almost say, hamlet, has now its local organ’ (quoted in Hobbs 2018, 4). Faster and more reliable transport networks meant that this material could circulate to readers with greater ease. Wherever a railway station sprang up a railway book-stall was soon to follow with businesses like W.H. Smith’s selling tempting selections of periodicals, cheap books, newspapers, and travel guides. Of course, the movement of readers and reading matter was not circumscribed by the British Isles, texts flowed around the world: travel guides like Baedeker’s were essential for leisure travellers, and Reuters was established in 1851 to gather and sift global news from its London base.
Reading settings
The archetypal reading space for nineteenth-century readers was by the fireside, on a Sunday afternoon, perhaps reading some improving or religious literature after attending church or sharing in the enjoyment of a serialised novel read aloud to the family. This setting provided ‘light, literacy, and leisure’ (Hartley 2011, 87), the three essentials needed for reading. This is the mode of reading that Dickens invokes in his prospectus to Household Words where he writes reverently of his ambition for the journal to be ‘admitted into many homes with affection and kindness’ (Dickens 1850, 1). Whilst this picture of domestic delight in reading was a reality for many families in the second half of the century, the settings for reading were many and varied. Working-class housing was often cramped and single rooms might house multiple generations, act as the hub for domestic tasks like cooking, or even provide a space for professional activities like sewing. A peaceful space for reading was much more likely to be found in the homes of the wealthier classes, although even a middle-class woman like Jane Austen often read and wrote in shared spaces where interruptions could crop up at any time.
Quiet spaces for reading could be found in libraries. Nineteenth-century politicians recognised that free access to a library could be beneficial to society and the Public Libraries Act of 1850 marked a significant step in encouraging towns and cities to initiate their own library schemes. Winchester was the first to open a free public library in 1851 and Norwich became the first town to open a purpose-built public library in 1857. Efforts in library building were sped up in the later decades of the century and into the pre-war period by the generosity of philanthropists such as John Passmore Edwards who founded 24 free libraries in London and Cornwall and Andrew Carnegie who funded over 600 across Britain and Ireland. These libraries tended to operate on a closed-access system whereby a librarian would fetch the required book for a reader rather an open-access system that allowed readers to browse for books. The browsing of magazines and newspapers though was encouraged in the separate rooms for that purpose enjoyed by many of the new libraries.
Not all nineteenth-century libraries were free and some operated on a lucrative business model. Charles Mudie is perhaps the best known of those who turned a profit from lending books to readers on a very large scale. Mudie’s Select Library charged a guinea per year for subscription. If you wanted to simultaneously borrow all three volumes of a triple-decker, the standard format for new fiction for a large part of the period, you would need three subscriptions. This was expensive but because a triple decker cost 31s 6d to buy from the bookseller, Mudie’s was a much better alternative for many readers. From 1842 readers could visit Mudie’s Select Library in central London or be sent books from hubs in London, Manchester, or Birmingham. Mudie’s Great Hall was a vast and impressive space where thousands of the newest and most desirable books were displayed for readers to behold (Roberts 2006, 6–7). Whilst Mudie’s stocks were enormous, debates about the library’s selection policy and refusal to stock certain titles led to Mudie becoming a by-word for prudish or censorious attitudes in the early 1860s.
Working-men’s clubs and societies provided opportunities for the working classes to use their evenings to read, learn, and socialise. In 1871 the Examiner, arguing that working men should have access to clubs on the same terms as the elites, argued that ‘The club’ should be ‘well-supplied with newspapers’ as well as refreshments and that a club represents an ‘attempt to escape from the terrible thraldom of the public-house; it is a great step in the direction of enlightenment and civilisation’ (Anon. 1871, 676). For wealthier classes, clubs such as the Athenaeum or the Carlton provided urban spaces where members could socialise with like-minded individuals. Many such clubs boasted comfortable reading rooms containing newspapers, periodicals, and books. Although clubs like these were exclusive to male members, in the later decades of the century women established their own. One of the first female-only reading spaces was that provided by the ‘Ladies Institute’ which used 19 Langham Place as a base to produce feminist publications, to organise reformist activities, and to offer their members a space for reading. At one guinea per year membership was not cheap, although professional (i.e. working) women could gain half price membership (Palmer 2011, 58). Later women’s clubs, such as the Somerville or the Pioneer Club also offered the space primarily to an elite metropolitan membership to organise, agitate, and read.
Readers could be found everywhere, not just in spaces specifically designed for reading. Trains, ships, coaches, omnibuses, all provided capsules of time for reading. Reading a book or a newspaper (then as now) could usefully shield a traveller on public transport from the unwanted attentions of their fellow passengers. Publishers began to target railways series specifically at travellers and brightly coloured cheap volumes vied for the attention of potential buyers at railway stations across the country. Mobility for post and packages, as well as people, improved across the nineteenth century and with the penny post established in 1840, separated friends and families could read each other’s news and gossip much more frequently via the blizzard of letters sent daily across the country.
Reading could be a highly mobile practice, but reading was also important in spaces where readers were more constrained, settings like sickrooms, workhouses, or prisons. Rosalind Crone (2022) has highlighted the importance of penal settings as significant spaces of education and readership. Prison officials and commentators held heated debates about the appropriateness of books for prisoners and were particularly worried about novels that seemed to glamorise crime. Elizabeth Fry was the figurehead for the benefits of reading for prisoners (and others who may have had little access to reading such as coastguards or shepherds) most visibly evidenced by her weekly readings at Newgate Prison. The one text that was univocally endorsed for prison reading was the bible. Felt to be both morally and spiritually improving, the bible could be read by or read to convicts in the hope of moral reformation. The Religious Tract Society, The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, and the British and Foreign Bible Society were large players amongst the organisations that published and distributed Christian reading material (tracts, prayer books, sermons, and bibles), not just in Britain but around the world. By 1861 the Religious Tract Society alone was disseminating approximately 20 million tracts and thirteen million copies of periodicals (Altick 1957, 101).
Affected and active readers
Whilst evidence for the ways in which readers were affected by what they read can be scanty or unreliable, literary historians have nonetheless found evidence in reviews, letters, and other documents that situate reading as an active rather than a passive practice. Famously, many readers of The Old Curiosity Shop were moved to write to Dickens asking him to spare Little Nell’s life when it looked as if the serial was building up to a sorrowful death for the young heroine. Dickens did not relent but he was himself moved by the affection readers held for his character (Ackroyd 1990, 182). Recording one’s own reading practices in an autobiography, diary, scrapbook, or letter, was for many a space in which to articulate the emotional effects of reading. Mary Watts, for example, read Cranford (1853) aloud to her husband G.F. Watts on an autumn night in 1887:
I read ‘Miss Mattys’ love story, & said ‘how lovely,’ but had no answer, so I kissed my dear ones [sic] eyes & found why he could not answer. He held my cheek to his, & really cried for the poor tender little suffering heart, though only living in a book.
Elizabeth Barrett’s early diaries mention many books and essays she had read and even recorded the act of ordering books as a moment of excitement and anticipated pleasure; ‘The catalogue arrived in the evening. It did amuse me, looking over it, & marking the eligible books’ (Barrett Browning 1831). The anthropomorphic impulse here marks the books themselves as potential new acquaintances waiting to be met. Writers like Thomas Hardy or Charles Reade physically cut out extracts from their reading (primarily of newspapers) and pasted these cuttings into their notebooks for reference in future writing projects. Sometimes these cuttings would be annotated or commented upon but even in a scrap-book style diary where the effects of reading may be more implicit than a narrative diary, we can still trace readerly engagement through favoured themes or issues to which the compilers return. Diaries sometimes became sources for biographers and autobiographers and much nineteenth-century life writing makes mention of reading undertaken during formative periods of the subject’s life.
Reading brought comfort and hope for many nineteenth-century readers in harrowing or dangerous situations. Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl mentions how much of a ‘relief to the tedious monotony of my life’ it was to read (Jacobs 1861/2016, 100). Oscar Wilde requested numerous books to relieve the misery of his time in Reading Gaol (Ellmann 1987, 476–9). Edmund Gosse conjures up the vivid memory of reading aloud a favourite hymn to his mother whilst she was dying.
To this day, I cannot repeat this hymn without a sense of poignant emotion, nor can I pretend to decide how much of that is due to its merit and how much to the peculiar nature of the memories it recalls. But it might be as rude as I genuinely think it to be skilful, and I should continue to regard it as a sacred poem.
These writers, and many others, used reading as a comforting and constant force that could act as an emotional outlet during times of stress or crisis.
Some nineteenth-century commentators felt that women, predominantly young women, were particularly susceptible to the lure of fiction reading and might find escapism, rather than comfort, in such reading. W. R. Greg wrote in article on the ‘False Morality of Lady Novelists’ that women, and novel readers in particular are ‘always impressionable’, ‘more easily aroused’ than men, and more likely to respond emotionally rather than critically to their reading (Greg 1859, 144). Kate Flint sees this rhetoric as symptomatic of the ‘paternalistic surveillance’ exercised over women readers in the nineteenth century (Flint 1993, 4). We do encounter women aroused in problematic ways by their reading across nineteenth-century fiction; think of Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey (1817) who is over-stimulated by her reading of Gothic literature or the eponymous heroine of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) who becomes dissatisfied with ordinary life due, in part, to the comparison with the much more exciting world of the novels she reads. We also, though, see commentators asserting the rights of female (and male) readers to choose their own reading. George Augustus Sala, for example, writes about warning his imaginary young daughter away from Casanova’s biography or Rabelais’ satires whilst she was young but once she was an adult he would ‘no more think of dictating to her as to what kind of books she should read, than as to what kind of stays she should wear – if she wore any at all’ (Sala 1867, 54). Women, Sala argues, can be trusted just as much as men to decide what fiction they want to read and to take no adverse effects in their roles as wives and mothers from that reading. Scholars in this area of readership studies (Mitchell 1981; Flint 1993; Golden 2003; Phegley 2004) have examined sources including advice manuals, periodical texts, fictive work, visual arts, and educational instruction to show how debates about the woman reader were often a lightning rod for wider discussions around women’s roles in nineteenth-century society.
Professional reviewers in the quarterly and monthly magazines shared their influential opinions through book reviews. Reviewing was often not a career in and of itself but part of a writer’s or scholar’s portfolio of work. The frequent practice of extensive quotation from the reviewed text gave readers a taste of the work although the way in which these quotes were framed ensured that reviewers wielded considerable power (see Demoor 2000; Wilkes 2015; Miller 2016). Anonymity was standard practice for such reviews and ‘puffing’ (or promoting) a friend’s book, or eviscerating an enemy’s, was not unusual in the nineteenth-century press. Margaret Oliphant reviewed for Blackwood’s Magazine for several decades and was often amenable to promoting the latest offerings from the William Blackwood & Sons publishing house and thereby staying on good terms with her own publisher and editor (Shattock 2017, 344). Amateur readers too, could make their mark on the periodical press. Periodicals like the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and the Englishwoman ran essay competitions for its readers on topics from recent fashions to poetry appreciation. Periodicals aimed at young or relatively newly literate readers, such as the Boys Own Paper (1879–1967) or the Girls’ Realm (1898–1915), also invited readers to send in their poetry, answers to puzzles, and their book reviews. Dorothy magazine (1889–1899) even set up its own literature class particularly for its rural readers which became a ‘prototype correspondence book club’ (Macdonald 2011, 30). When readers saw their names or their work printed in an issue, they became co-creators in a magazine’s endeavours and were more likely to align themselves with its messages and to buy it again.
Conclusion
Because the nineteenth century saw such a significant increase in both the production and consumption of print culture it has often been a fruitful period for readership scholars to investigate. Jonathan Rose’s (2001) The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and William StClair’s (2004) The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period followed in the footsteps of Richard Altick’s (1957) The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Reading Public 1800–1900 which laid important foundations in its ambitious scope and its attention to the notion of the common rather than the exceptional reader. In the twenty-first century, digital scholarship has enhanced the opportunities to understand and analyse nineteenth-century reading practices and readerships. The Viral Texts project (Cordell and Smith 2022–) maps the networks of re-printing across nineteenth-century periodicals whilst Reading Like a Victorian (Warhol and Morrisey 2022–) brings together ‘stacks’ of serialised novels to allow browsers to re-create the intertextual connections available to Victorian readers across multiple serial works month by month.
Recent readership studies have gone beyond the text to investigate reading as part of a history of visual, as well as literary, culture. Lisa Surridge and Mary Elizabeth Leighton (2018), in their work on Victorian illustrated books, argue for the expertise of Victorian readers in interpreting text and image in complex interactions to understand how images might offer alternative readings to the written word. The collection Picturing the Reader: Reading and Representation in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palmer and Yeates 2022) pushes forward questions around the relationship of the written word to the image in nineteenth-century culture and includes chapters on images of readers in fine art and photography as well as illustration. Leah Price understands reading as only one of the many ‘social transactions in which the book was enlisted’ (Price 2012, 6) and investigates the many uses to which books were put from gifts, to cushions, to curl papers.
One of the key themes to come out of much of this scholarship is a sense of readerships as communities over and above readers as solitary individuals (e.g., Colclough 2007). Robert Darnton’s early work to understand circuits of readerships is an important foundation here. His proposal of a ‘communications circuit that runs from the author to the publisher […] the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader’ positions the reader as completing the circuit and beginning it again through their influence on the author (Darnton 1982, 67). Although, of course, reading is often an individual and interior activity (and nineteenth-century commentators did register their anxieties about the potential solipsism of reading), both real historical readers unearthed through archival scholarship and implied readers who were assumed to behave in particular ways often coalesce into groups (women readers, child readers, working-class readers, reviewers). Whether these are the ‘unknown millions’ of newly literate readers imagined to exert a growing influence on literary culture (Collins 1858, 222), or the small clusters educating themselves as part of the National Home Reading Union (1889–1930, see Stimpson 2002), reading brought people together across the nineteenth century.
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