Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain

The Victorian Reading Experience

Paul Raphael Rooney, Anna Gasperini, Paul Raphael Rooney, Anna Gasperini

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137587602
• eBook ISBN: 9781137587619
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explores Victorian readers' consumption of a wide array of reading matter. Established scholars and emerging researchers examine nineteenth-century audience encounters with print culture material such as periodicals, books in series, cheap serials, and broadside ballads. Two key strands of enquiry run through the volume. First, these studies of historical readership during the Victorian period look to recover the motivations or desired returns that underpinned these audiences' engagement with this reading matter. Second, contributors investigate how nineteenth-century reading and consumption of print was framed and/or shaped by contemporaneous engagement with content disseminated in other media like advertising, the stage, exhibitions, and oral culture.  

© The Author(s) 2016

Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini (eds.)Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century BritainNew Directions in Book History10.1057/978-1-137-58761-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Paul Raphael Rooney¹ and Anna Gasperini²

(1)

Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

(2)

National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

End Abstract

In opening a study of the history of nineteenth-century reading, a useful point of departure is perhaps the cartographical metaphor that Richard D. Altick employed in introducing his field-defining scholarly enterprise, The English Common Reader. ¹ Such a concept, like much in that foundational study, remains a vital and apposite way of approaching research on this topic. Accordingly, where once the map of the nineteenth-century reading landscape charted by book historians constituted little more than an incomplete sketch that delineated some of the area’s principal landmarks, the accumulation of a critical mass of scholarship on this subfield within the past two decades has contributed to a decidedly clearer (but still by no means complete) sense of the breadth and variety of the Victorian reading experience. Thus, this collection has the advantage of emerging at a moment when it is feasible to examine this period’s readers and their reading from the kinds of standpoints that would not have been possible for the initial wave of scholars piloting this recovery endeavour. Accordingly, framing our enterprise within the parameters sketched by Robert Darnton in his seminal 1986 examination of the history of reading, it is questions of why and how that will concern the essays featured in this collection. ² First, we wish to probe the reasons why nineteenth-century audiences consumed reading matter. Additionally, the macro- and micro-analysis case studies that essayists present look to juxtapose their reconstructions of these motivations with the actual dividends that consumers likely realized from their temporal, monetary, and mental investments in these acts of reading. A parallel and ancillary objective also informs this dimension of proceedings. While it has absolutely been our editorial intention in determining the composition of the volume to reflect the plurality and diversity of the period’s reading landscape, achieving comprehensiveness was not one of our objectives and arguably would be foolhardy even to attempt. Rather, we have particularly looked to illuminate areas of the period’s reading not yet comprehensively explored. Correspondingly, the collection’s second core concern looks to spotlight the heretofore little-examined question of how nineteenth-century readers conducted their reading when such consumption of print culture texts was framed by kindred contemporaneous encounters with content emanating from other media. In foregrounding this latter strand of enquiry, it is our wish to explore the viability of studying nineteenth-century reading in conjunction with affiliated activities like listening and viewing so as to acquire a more complete sense of cultural consumption during this time.

The 2011 three-volume collection of essays, The History of Reading, edited by Shafquat Towheed, Katie Halsey, and W.R. Owens, in many respects represented the culmination of the vision that Darnton had charted in his 1986 meditation on the viability of documenting historical readers’ activities. Commendably ambitious in its scope and coverage, this monumental piece of scholarship casts a wide geographical and chronological net in its exploration of audiences’ consumption of reading matter. The reflections on the methods one can adopt in studying reading and in the accumulation and interpretation of evidence of this activity, which the editors advance in opening each of the trio of volumes, along with the strategies modelled by the prodigious body of contributors offer a blueprint (and indeed a veritable smorgasbord of approaches) for future work on the subject. In our exploration of Victorian reading, this collection also subscribes to the idea of methodological eclecticism and making use of a multifarious body of evidence that Towheed and Owens espouse in opening the first volume. ³ Moreover, one of the key points of departure of the contribution to the field that we as editors wish to register originates in an observation offered by Towheed in his introduction to volume three that emphasizes that ‘reading does not (and has not) ever existed in isolation from a variety of other different forms of communication’. ⁴

In zeroing in on the Victorian period, this collection follows in the footsteps of two other recent edited volumes of note. Matthew Bradley and Juliet John beautifully capture the joys and challenges of this kind of scholarly enterprise in the wonderfully self-reflexive evaluation offered in the introduction to their 2015 volume, Reading and the Victorians, which frames this kind of research as an exercise in ‘reading the Victorians reading’. ⁵ Granted, a certain proportion of the volume’s coverage does orbit somewhat conventional territory in the kind of subjects foregrounded. However, the Bradley and John collection also pursues some pioneering avenues of enquiry featuring scholarship like Simon Eliot’s illuminating essay on the impact of lighting on readers’ experiences, Stephen Colclough’s revisionist take on Mudie’s role in furnishing Victorian readers with their reading matter, and Rosalind Crone’s social network analysis of data harvested from that magnificent boon to the historian of reading, The Reading Experience Database. It is our particular intention to expand further the horizons of the field with this collection with the kinds of topics and questions we spotlight. Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland’s 2011 A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel 1850–1900 frames itself as ‘fruitfully complicating’ ⁶ or engaging in a disaggregation of the portrait of the Victorian reader that emerged from Richard Altick’s magisterial and trailblazing 1957 The English Common Reader. This is an enterprise in which the collection admirably succeeds. While a relatively compelling case is articulated for the key premise and resulting subject emphasis of the Palmer & Buckland collection, which contends that the ‘novel [is] the form that can reveal most to us about the conditions and concepts of reading that operated in the Victorian period’, ⁷ The Victorian Reading Experience aims to reflect the eclecticism of nineteenth-century audiences’ reading matter by also considering the consumption of factual writing, drama, and song alongside the novel.

The Fruits of Reading: The Rationale Driving Victorian Audiences’ Print Consumption

But suppose we first ask, quite simply and candidly, What is the object of our reading?—to answer which simple-looking question would perhaps to some people be a puzzle indeed. Reading, to some people, is a mere pass-time, a mere kill-time, we might call it. [Haultain offers a lengthy anecdote about ‘a portly matron’ he supposedly encountered on a train who confessed to a particular fondness for reading love stories—an appetite he deems entirely legitimate and harmless in a person of her maturity] Youth should read—What for? Surely to settle a creed, or at least to discover grounds for believing few things credible, to form ideas, or to give reasons for lacking them, about the constitution of the world and its relation to its Maker, to gain estimates of philosophy, and science, history and art; to learn something of man, of nature, and of human life; to obtain relief from care or recreation from toil; to quicken our perceptions of beauty; to make keen our conceptions of truth; to give clarity to thought, and learn expression of emotion; to plumb the deeps of friendship and take altitude of love; to study character as depicted by those who could read it; to watch how great lives have wrestled with problems of life; to set us standards and samples of nobility; to ‘cheer us with books of rich and believing men’; to seek solution for those doubts which come when intellects of different calibre and conviction clash; to find assuagement for the pangs which pierce sundered hearts; ‘to maintain around us the “infinite illusion” which makes action easier’; to ‘stir in us the primal sources of feeling which keep human nature sweet’; to ‘familiarize ourselves with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence’.

Arnold Haultain, ‘How to Read’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (February 1896), pp. 249–50.

Arnold Haultain’s wide-ranging inventory of the prospective gains that he perceived as arising from youthful Victorian audiences’ engagement with reading matter points towards the myriad of motivations that could conceivably lead readers of any age, gender, or class to acquire and consume print culture objects. Haultain paints a tremendously rich tableau and the essays featured in this collection will spotlight a number of the principal advantages that particular audiences were likely to hold up as the desired outcomes of their reading. To that end, a number of common themes run through our contributors’ reconstructions of these experiences.

Firstly, the belief that reading could stimulate one to become a better person intellectually or morally and perhaps in turn even serve as a catalyst for professional or socio-economic advancement is a principle that Barbara Leckie and Lauren Weiss examine. Leckie’s chapter considers the readership of what was perhaps the archetypal and still most widely-known work of Victorian improving reading, Self-Help by Samuel Smiles. Leckie focuses on the kinds of reading strategy Smiles’s book sought to foster across audiences’ wider navigation of the reading environment and also profiles the historical readers likely to have engaged with this work upon its original publication but who have yet to be the subject of sustained examination in scholarship on Smiles. By contrast, Weiss’s chapter is an enterprise in recovery that sets out to retrieve the consumption history of an important but now less widely considered class of nineteenth-century edifying reading matter: the manuscript magazine created and consumed by mutual improvement societies. Focusing upon a Glaswegian example of this kind of group, Weiss tracks how reading was undertaken within this kind of communal context and highlights the stimuli that lead such coterie audiences to consume these varieties of text.

Secondly, the sense that investing in the consumption of reading matter would furnish a lens through which one might interpret, frame, or indeed ‘read’ one’s everyday experiences within various different spheres is an idea that Katie Garner, Anne Humpherys, Ruth Doherty, and Caroline Bressey, all explore in the context of a diverse array of print culture texts. Garner’s revisionist take on the nineteenth-century readership of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur presents a challenge to the conventional conception of this medieval literature text as a work intended for a predominantly male audience. This essay spotlights a noteworthy and substantial female Victorian readership of the tale for whom it furnished a worldview and model of behaviour to which they could aspire. Humpherys’s examination of the cheap reprint series publishing ventures of John Dicks also sets out to reframe received thinking about historical audiences’ consumption of content repackaged in new and affordable formats. This Dicks chapter underlines how the paratextual material and series configuration of titles in the firm’s collection furnished consumers of the series with a decidedly eclectic conception of what constituted legitimate culture. Such heterogeneity had the potential to affirm the tastes and preferences of audiences who sought a more varied diet of reading that comprised both the usual class of ‘standard’ works alongside more obviously ‘popular’ content. History of reading scholarship routinely foregrounds the target readership demographic of a particular category of reading matter. Caroline Bressey’s chapter treating the late nineteenth-century British anti-racist periodical, Anti-Caste, offers an excellent counterpoint to this by exploring why many black British readers of the time did not engage with the kind of publication that featured content that had potential to speak to their experiences of racial discrimination. Doherty’s chapter takes as its focus a cultural phenomenon, which was arguably one of the bestselling and most widely-read titles of nineteenth-century fiction, The Mysteries of London by G.W.M. Reynolds, and spotlights one particular keystone of the works. Doherty demonstrates that in addition to the entertainment a work of this kind might ostensibly furnish, Reynolds’s expansive narrative offered the implied audience of The Mysteries a template that they could utilize to interpret and conceive of their everyday experiences of living amidst the urban environment.

Thirdly, the practice of reading for pleasure, diversion, or literally as a pastime (as touched on by Haultain in the context of the mature lady fond of reading love stories whom he apparently encountered during a train journey) will of course figure in any examination of the Victorian reading experience. Chapters by Paul Rooney, Kate Mattacks, Isabel Corfe, and Marie Léger-St Jean all engage with various permutations of print culture encounters that were rooted in audiences’ use of reading as a recreational or leisure activity. Focusing on the particular example of the late-Victorian sensation novel, Rooney explores specific intra-media consumption strategies that audiences enlisted to augment the pleasure derived from their readership of ephemeral varieties of light fiction. Similarly, Mattacks’s essay on Victorian theatre writing examines the allure of the playtexts of works of contemporary drama circulated in the T.H. Lacy Acting Editions series. These volumes granted readers who were not theatre practitioners access within the medium of print to entertaining cultural matter otherwise only to be encountered within the playhouse. Thus, audiences had the potential to enjoy in their own time and space a genre of writing that would not only amuse but also as Mattacks shows, had the potential to precipitate a process of reflection on the reading process itself. Corfe’s examination of Victorian street ballad literature tackles a similar kind of domestic readership. This chapter’s discussion seeks to reconceptualize the locus of the appeal of this print culture genre for its historical audience by demonstrating that its allure was significantly more multifaceted than merely satisfying a supposedly debased appetite for tawdry tales of violence. The gratification that a print culture artefact could yield obviously did not manifest in a uniform way for all readers. Léger-St-Jean’s chapter on penny dreadfuls and their visual co-texts engages with this sense of diversity from the standpoints of socio-economic difference and reading ability by juxtaposing the consumption of reading matter from this stratum of the reading environment by the young Robert Louis Stevenson and two less advantaged East London boys.

As editors, we are of the view that the sorts of case studies and questions our contributors explore no doubt merit consideration in themselves and have the potential to advance scholarly discourse about the individual topics examined and the larger issue of the intended outcomes of Victorian readers’ consumption of print. Additionally, it is our aspiration that the research featured will potentially offer a methodological model for future work on the history of reading within a nineteenth-century context and across the field more broadly. Thus, in curating the scholarship featured in the volume, we have looked to emphasize the merits of pursuing a hybrid or blended approach that draws on and appropriates strategies from both the theoretical and the empirical sides of the methodological divide that Bonnie Gunzenhauser cites as one of the defining factors of this discipline. ⁸ While we have not opted to structure the collection’s ten chapters in quite so formal a manner as the tripartite methodological toolbox, comprising artefactual, paratextual, and institutional approaches, that Gunzenhauser’s collection showcases, there are a number of distinct commonalities and strands in the strategies that our contributors bring to bear on the topics they examine. First and foremost, each essay is defined by its use of a composite approach. For instance, Leckie, Garner, Corfe, Rooney, Bressey, Doherty, Humpherys, and Léger-St-Jean all mine extant historical or anecdotal sources such as journalism, criticism, life writing, and literature that attest to the motivations underpinning audiences’ consumption of reading matter and then fuse this brand of analysis with discussion of the artefactual or material remnants of this reading. A number of contributors including Garner, Rooney, and Doherty enlist fictional representations of reading often extracted from literary sources that they consider alongside authentic or factual accounts. Given that this is one class of evidence that The Reading Experience Database precludes, it is important to weigh up our usage of this kind of data. The insights one can procure here no doubt rank below those combed from historical sources. However, as the chapters in question demonstrate, the sorts of avenues that literary sources open up c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Reader-Help: How to Read Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help
• 3. More than a ‘Book for Boys’? Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and the Victorian Girl Reader
• 4. The Manuscript Magazines of the Wellpark Free Church Young Men’s Literary Society
• 5. Black Victorians and Anti-Caste: Mapping the Geographies of ‘Missing’ Readers
• 6. John Dicks’s Cheap Reprint Series, 1850s–1890s: Reading Advertisements
• 7. Serialization and Story-Telling Illustrations: R.L. Stevenson Window-Shopping for Penny Dreadfuls
• 8. Sensation and Song: Street Ballad Consumption in Nineteenth-Century England
• 9. Reading Reynolds: The Mysteries of London as ‘Microscopic Survey’
• 10. Cross-Media Cultural Consumption and Oscillating Reader Experiences of Late-Victorian Dramatizations of the Novel: The Case of Fergus Hume’s Madame Midas (1888)
• 11. Reading Theatre Writing: T.H. Lacy and the Sensation Drama
• Backmatter