Secret Lives of Readers (2)

Oleh : Jennifer Howard

senior reporter for The Chronicle

While the history of the book is well established, the history of reading has really come together in the last two decades, according to Shafquat Tow­heed, a lecturer in English at the Open University in Britain and director of the Reading Experience Database, or RED. "We're beginning to get students studying it as an option at the graduate level and the undergraduate level," Towheed says.

The existence of online resources such as RED has helped push the field along. The brainchild of Simon Eliot, another influential figure in the history of reading, RED dates back to the 1990s but was revamped as an online resource in 2006.

Its scholarly team has trawled libraries and archives for mentions of reading recorded in published works and in manuscript materials. The database draws on letters, diaries, commonplace books, published accounts such as biographies and memoirs, and less obvious resources such as prison and court records. The researchers have asked authors' societies for help in finding references to specific writers. Since the database moved online, they've thrown it open to crowdsourcing, asking volunteers to contribute records, too.

The open-access database collects accounts of British reading experiences from 1450 to 1945, and has gathered about 31,000 records so far. "British" includes anyone born or living in Britain during that period. Users can search by keyword, reader, or author. Each entry gives the date of the reading experience, as closely as it can be pinpointed; where it took place (in London, in a house, etc.); who was reading (age, gender, occupation, and so forth); what they were reading; whether they were alone or in company.

One especially rich source has been the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, whose records from 1674 to 1913 have recently been put online. Another important source is Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, an epic multivolume account published by the journalist in 1851 based on his investigations into how the city's working and poorer classes lived.

Roaming through such material brings the experiences of past readers alive. In a Reading Experience Database-related essay on "Reading Culture in the Victorian Underworld," Rosalind Crone, a lecturer in history at the Open University, recounts a couple of anecdotes from Mayhew's forays among less fortunate Londoners: "The crippled penny mousetrap maker, 'for an hour's light reading,' turned to Milton'sParadise Lost and Shakespeare's plays. And a sweet-stuff maker bought unwanted printed paper to wrap his wares from the stationers or at the old bookshops—as he read the text before he used the paper, 'in this way he had read through two Histories of England.'"

The largest amount of data in RED comes from the 19th century, an era richly represented in writings and archives. The archive is pushing beyond that period, though, as well as "internationalizing," Towheed says. RED projects have been established in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the Netherlands.

Edmund King, a research associate with the project, oversees the daily operations of the database. He joined RED in 2010 to hunt down references to World War I reading—a RED research priority, with the centennial of the conflict almost upon us.

"I've had quite a broad remit to go to various archives and libraries in Britain and basically read through letters and diaries and see what I can find," King says. He's amassed some 2,000 World War I records so far, which have already produced glimpses of reading in the trenches. Contrary to some stereotypes from the 1920s and 1930s suggesting that soldiers at the front were reading propaganda or jingoistic tracts, King says, "My sense of reading soldiers' diaries is that they were looking for something escapist, a reminder of home."

Families would send hometown papers to the boys in uniform. "Reading local newspapers was extraordinarily popular," he says. So was fiction that reminded them of childhood and let them escape, if only into the pages of a book. "Teenage adventure fiction becomes a big part of their lives."

Katie Halsey, now a lecturer in 18th-century English at the University of Stirling, also worked as a research fellow on the RED project. That stint led to a book, Jane Austen and Her Readers, 1786-1945 (Anthem Press), published this year.

Halsey wrote her dissertation on Austen. "I wanted to find information on her readers, and it had been incredibly difficult to do," she says. Before RED, "there was just nowhere to start."

"Nobody had been interested in that kind of thing," she says, "possibly because it was just so difficult to do" or because academe hasn't always cared what ordinary people said about books.

During Halsey's time at RED, a colleague gave her a tip about a Quaker reading group in Reading that had been meeting since the 1890s. "The fantastic thing about it was that they had kept written records of every meeting," Halsey says.

Studying the responses of Jane Austen's readers over 200 years confirmed what Halsey had suspected: "Janeites" tended to feel a great personal affinity for the author and "to build communities around her." The Quaker reading group did a dramatic reading of Austen the first time they read her, Halsey reports, and returned to her work over the decades.

RED's emphasis on recovering the experience of general readers has a lot to do with Simon Eliot, a professor of the history of the book at the University of London's School of Advanced Study. Eliot says he got the idea for RED 20 years ago in a car park in Coventry. He'd been to a conference on reading where most of the papers trained attention on a single, notable reader, he says. "I was worried that too much of our work was based on these rather anomalous, rather extraordinary, and therefore unreliable cases."

For every Pepys or Johnson or Woolf there were thousands of people just ... reading. Where were they? Eliot wanted to know more about what he calls "the reader on the Clapham omnibus." What, where, and how did the average Joe, however defined, actually read?

Of special interest were commonplace books, Eliot says, referring to the miscellanies or scrapbooks people often kept to help them remember intriguing or useful tidbits they'd read. Commonplace books were especially popular in the days when paper was still scarce and expensive, before a mid-19th-century revolution in papermaking technology caused manufacturers to switch to cheaper, readily available wood pulp. "Sometimes people just copied out huge chunks of a novel, because they couldn't afford to buy it," Eliot says.

The scholars involved with RED didn't want just lists of reading matter. "It wasn't enough to record a reading experience. We wanted to know where it took place," Eliot says. So they took pains to make sure the database record forms could capture other kinds of descriptive information about the reading experience. Did a reader's encounter with a book or newspaper happen in daylight or by candlelight? Was the book read out loud or in solitude? On the move or in bed? Eliot talks about a kind of punctuated reading dictated by stagecoach travel, in which a reader jolted along rough 18th- or 19th-century roads might snatch a few minutes with a book at inns whenever the coach stopped to change horses, kind of like how travelers now might read in the airport lounge before boarding.

Today's readers, at least in the West, tend not to fret about having something to read and light enough to read by, "because books are so cheap and light is so cheap," Eliot says. British readers of earlier eras were not so lucky. Unless they could afford oil lamps or beeswax candles, they had to deal with messy, smelly candles made from tallow. Those imperfect sources of light required frequent trimming and were a fire hazard. Under such circumstances, "reading has to be choreographed," Eliot says. "You have to stop and trim" the wick as well as avoid setting yourself on fire.

British newspapers have turned out to be sources of valuable information about reading circumstances and how they could turn deadly. "One account in the Timesdescribes a woman in her bedroom, dressed for bed, reading a play, and the candle caught her hair, and she was found severely burned," Eliot says. "In fact it was suggested she wouldn't survive the day."

The play text found by the woman's chair was popular, budget-friendly reading material at the time: a kind of 19th-century proto-paperback, marketed to the reading masses long before Penguin came along. "They were usually 20 to 30 pages long," he says. "They were paper-covered. They would sell for sixpence, often as cheap as a penny or twopence."

Accounts of crimes sometimes include revealing details. For instance, Eliot mentions descriptions of pickpockets benefiting from the distraction of people "clustering around the latest poster" for a theatrical event. Such accounts, along with photographs and illustrations of Victorian cityscapes, and novels—Dickens describes paper blowing through the city—bring everyday experience back to life. "People in the 19th century are walking in a forest of print," he says.

That kind of "ephemeral reading" is exactly what people don't record in their diaries or commonplace books or in letters to friends. "Even if you're writing a quiet, secret diary, are you going to reveal that you spend time reading cornflake packets?" Eliot asks. "My guess is not."