Altick 1957

Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader. University of Chicago Press, 1957. Print.

Intro

• 1 "the place of reading in an industrial and increasingly democratic society"
• "a revolutionary social concept: that of the democracy of print"
  • prefiguring (influencing?) Eisenstein
• 2-3 methodological limitations of anecdotal evidence and records of bestsellers (but they have their uses too) -- the history of reading is rootedness in "the total history of the period" including political, religious, economic, and trchnological
• 3 "The history of the mass reading audience is, in fact, the history of English democracy seen from a new angle "
• 4 industrialization making reading more impt for purposes of escape (and the erasure of the "popular cultural tradition," tho I'm skeptical about the cleanness of that line, if only based on evidence from hardy novels)
• 5 using Collins 1858 "the future of English fiction may well rest with this Unknown Public"
• 7 common reader belongs to working class or expanding bourgeoisie

Ch 4 Social Background

• 81 The development of the mass reading public, in fact, was completely dependent upon the progress of a social revolution [in terms of population increase and the “occupational and geographical distribution” changes of that population]
• 83-4 marked change in shift from agricultural yeomanry to commerce and industry: 40% commerce/trade/manufacture, 19% in agriculture in 1841; 68% vs 10% in 1891
• 84 In the first half of the century English society was shaken as it had not been since the end of the Middle Ages.
• 85 …the C19 witnessed on every hand a sharpening of class consciousness [because of this massive shift in hierarchical social structure]
• reading dependent on leisure, which was not in high supply for most
• 88-9 the “coming of railroad travel” “resulted in an unquestionable increase in reading”
• 90 Not until the cheap periodical press made efficient use of railway transportation and local distributors, and rural education received much-needed aid under the Forster Act of 1870, did the majority of country-dwellers acquire much interest in reading.
• 91-3 factors against the “common man” being able to read: domestic hurly-burly and poor housing; poor lighting until late in the century; exhaustion
• 96 Torn away from the old cultural tradition [and as he says on 95 from their individuality and personal pride in work by industrialization], battered and adrift in a feelingless world, the millions of common people needed decent recreation more urgently than any generation before them.
• With a few noteworthy exceptions like [Sir John] Herschel and Dickens, contemporary social critics and reformers failed to understand, or at least sympathize with, this imperative need on the [97] part of the physically and spiritually imprisoned.

Ch 5 Religion

• 99 Elie Halevy observed that "the fundamental paradox of English society" in the C19 "is precisely the partial junction and combination of these two forces [evangelicalism and utlitarianism] theoretically so hostile." Not the least of their similarities was a curiously ambivalent attitude toward reading. At one and the same time, the evangelicals on the religious side and the utilitarians on the secular did much to popularize reading (for certain purposes) and equally much to discourage it.
• growth of reading with the emphasis on the direct connection with the Bible in evangelicalism
  • this also resulted in the growth of a Biblical and didactic literature industry (100)
• 101 in the first half-century of existence (1804-54) [the British and Foreign Bible Society] issued over two and a half million copies of Bibles and testaments, nearly all of which were for domestic use[.]
  • think of Mrs Pardiggle and the brickmaker's family in Bleak House (1853) - on 106 Altick says she and Mrs. Jellyby were "not exceptional" in their class
• 102 but whether those who received them could read is quite another matter (cf. Mayhew)
• 103 religious literature in C19 England was "a ubiquitous part of the social landscape."
• 104 the problem with these proselytizers, in the words of Charles Knight (Passages of a Working Life, I, 242-3):

...the besetting weakness of [105] the learned and aristocratic, from the very first moment that they begin to prattle about bestowing the virtues of education [was that they] insisted upon maintaining the habit of talking to thinking beings, and for the most part to very acute thinking beings, in the language of the nursery.

• 109 Evangelicals equally skeptical of imaginative literature as they were convinced of the efficacy of cheaply printed and distributed scripture
• 112 [quoting The Christian Observer VII (1808), 326-34, reviewing Bowdler's Shakespeare] "It is scarcely possible for a young person of fervid genius to read Shakespeare without a dangerous elevation of fancy."
• 117 some variation in stringent anti-imaginative literature in different denominations -- the titular Evangelicals more liberal than dissenters; Ruskin's puritanical parents enjoyed Humphrey Clinker
• 126 Throughout the century, the concern for wholesomeness in literature resulted in the production of the "extract," a strained broth concocted from the original work. It was recognized that many books of earlier times could not be read in their complete form without peril to the soul; yet those same classics undeniably had sound qualities which should not be withheld from the virtuous.
  • cross ref with Price 2000
• 127 for ex, Shakespeare: "Down through the century 'Proverbs from Sh' and 'Select Beauties of Sh' were fixtures in middle-class libraries, and alongside them were similar nosegays from other authors[.]"
• 128 influence of Sabbatarianism on "forcing" people to read on Sundays

Ch 6 The Utilitarian Spirit

• 129 Utilitarianism, the philosophy begotten by C18 French rationalism upon C18 English materialism, is associated most immediately with the coterie dominated by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill [John Stuart's father]. But just as the spirit of evangelicalism permeated English society far beyond the denominational boundaries, so utilitarianism spread out from its originating group until it was the part of the atmosphere every C19 Englishman breathed.
  • "less a set of tenets than a state of mind"
• 130 Radical or conservative, laissez faire liberal or Owenite, evangelical or skeptic, everyone seemed to share this faith in a [the printing press] machine that could usher in the social millenium just as surely as the power of steam was transforming the outward face of English life. Each party, naturally, had its special brand of Truth to disseminate through print. The utilitarians' own goal was "the diffusion of useful knowledge"
  • defined as "information...necessary to multiply and spread the blessings of machinery" (i.e., "employable facts" about mechanics and chemistry) and a set of economic and political principles - those ideas coming from Smith, Bentham, Mill et al that "by safeguarding the free operation of those laws could the nation be spared future social anarchy and economic catastrophe." (131)
• 132 "desultory reading" frowned upon, reading with a fixed end in mind encouraged in utilitarian publications and newspapers
• 136 early utilitarianism, incl. Bentham, against imaginative literature, but starting in the 1830s [he quotes a review of Alfred Tennyson's Poems] a shift: "literature, and poetry in particular, was judged above all in terms of its didactic power, its moral usefulness"
• 138 The Chadbands and Gradgrinds clung to their control of the machinery which provided the masses with "suitable" reading matter. But slowly, and with the utmost caution, middle-class VIctorians came to liberalize their notions of the role books have in life, even the life of wage-earners.
• 139 Meanwhile, another tendency helped temper the utilitarian attitude toward books: the emotionalizing of the very idea of literature. With men like Lamb and Leigh Hunt, books (especially old ones) aroused emotios almost as fervent as those with which Wordsworth regarded nature.
• Thus, either because of their joy-bringing contents or because of some extrinsic appeal - rarity, physical beauty, the sentimental associations of certain copies - books, as objects, came to have a magical glamour about them.
  • link to Price 2012 and Deirdre Lynch
  • can this also be said to be linked to the modern sensibility that reframed "ruins" as "ruins" in the way we now understand them?
  • he traces this trend especially to Leigh Hunt
• 140 Despite the eventual recognition of amusement as a valid motive for reading, the evangelical-utilitarian temper of the age insisted that books were, first of all, a means of self-improvement.