Difference between revisions of "Wynne 2011"

Latest revision as of 19:08, 7 October 2017

Wynne, Deborah. "Readers and Reading Practices." The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 3: The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820-1880. Ed. John Kucich and Jenny Bourne Taylor. Oxford: UP, 2011. Web. Oxford Scholarship Online.

• 23: The C19 saw an unprecedented growth in literacy. Increased access to education led to reading becoming a popular pastime, a situation stimulated by the growing availability of affordable reading matter, the greater leisure brought about by the regulation of working hours, and the emergence of free public libraries in the 1850s.
• Other ways of reading novels developed which did not necessarily involved the buying or borrowing of books, as many novels first appeared in instalments, either as separate part-issues or in the pages of periodicals. This mode of publication involved enforced interruptions to the reading process, making specific demands on readers in terms of curbing the pace of reading and denying them the freedom to curtail suspense by turning to the end to discover the outcome of the novel. The reading experience would often be stretched over months, even years. Novel-reading could also involve the skill of interpreting illustrations, as novelists and illustrators sometimes collaborated to promote particular meanings. These relatively alien modes of reading indicate that any simple analogy between ways of reading and responding to texts in the nineteenth century and reading in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries needs to be viewed with caution.
• 23: Even before the passing of Forster's Education Bill of 1870, which made the provision of universal elementary education a legal requirement, reading had gained an enormous popularity among working people. The often haphazard educational provision for the poor before 1870, which had included dame schools, ragged schools, charity schools, and Sunday schools, had resulted in a growing body of readers as the C19 advanced.
• 26 Writing in the radical Westminster Review in June 1844, William Newmarch argued that the poor should be encouraged to read novels. 'Let no one take fright to the idea of novel reading at a time when the strength with which the best and purest current of thought amongst us runs in the channel of fiction,' he argued. The novel was thus gaining credence as a potentially didactic form capable of promoting middle-class values.
• 27 Despite these strictures [taxes on knowledge primarily], novel-reading constituted a major form of entertainment and increasingly became a source of social cohesion for a range of people, literate and illiterate, male and female, young and old, as the century advanced. 'I could well remember that in my own young days [novels] had not taken that undisputed possession of the drawing room which they now hold...', Anthony Trollope remarked in An Autobiography. 'There is, we all know, no such embargo now ... Novels are read right and left, above stairs and below, in town houses and country parsonages, by young countesses and by farmers' daughters, by old lawyers and by young students (ch. 12). And in an article on 'English Novels' in the Westminster Review in December 1892, Charles J. Billson, looking back at the development of the novel through the century, noted that a high proportion 'of the books taken out of the Public Free Libraries of this country contain nothing but novels, and these novels are the literary food of thousands and millions of English-speaking people.'
• 29: Dickens's Household Words, established as a two-penny weekly in 1850, offered the middle classes a similar, if slightly more highbrow, miscellany [to Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper]. Dickens's magazine also attracted some working-class readers, another indication of the increasing convergence of socially diverse readers in the mid-Victorian period.
• 30: The communal nature of reading was evident at all levels of C19 society. Prince Albert read novels aloud to Queen Victoria and their children, a practice which, as numerous diaries and autobiographies have idicated, was an important feature of domestic life in a diverse range of households. As Philip Waller has noted, 'Reading was not just a solitary pursuit. The habit of husbands and wives reading together is a marked feature of memoirs of the period. The family constituted a reading unit.' We can only speculate about some of the likely practices and responses experienced by readers who engaged in communal forms of reading. The most popular mode of novel publication (and certainly the cheapest) was periodical serialization, and an examination of C19 litearry magazines can offer useful insights into the original reception of works which we tend to read today as single-volume books. Serialization encouraged communal reading and offered the potential for a rapport between author and reader. The serial format suited both readers and novelists alike as instalments could capitalize on suspense, drawing out readers' pleasure in the narrative by forcing them to wait for the next instalment with its promise of satisfying their curiosity, while authors could monitor sales and make changes to plots if they believed that readers' interest was flagging.
• Jewsbury quote about the Moonstone, Athenaeum 1868
• 31: Magazines containing serial fiction, such as Household Words and All the Year Round, were usually on sale on Saturdays, a half-holiday for most workers by the mid-Victorian period. It is likely that the reading of the instalments of novels aloud within the family circle was a common weekend leisure activity and, as many readers testified in memoirs and diaries, this could be accompanied by discussion of the plots and characters, speculation about the outcome of the narrative, and expressions of personal preferences and dislikes. This communal reading process lent itself to what Jennifer Hayward describes as 'collaborative interpretations' not dissimilar to the twentieth-century taste for communal viewing of television serials [and 21st century: think Netflix and Game of Thrones!].
• 33: Similar debates [to those about working class people] were also applied to female readers. Women across social classes were frequently viewed as vulnerable consumers of fiction whose habits needed to be guided and controlled.
• 34-5 Attempts to censor women's reading were not altogether successful. The novel as a genre was largely designed with the female reader in mind, and despite attempts by publishers and promoters to render the form innocuous, it offered information about the world which some women could not have found elsewhere. In one sense the reading experience offered women a sense of community, even a shared language and set of ideas. The increasing isolation of the middle-class woman in the suburbs of towns and cities made reading an important form of recreation, offering opportunities to meet other female readers at public libraries.