In Our Time - Reading

Episode Date: February 17, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the politics and practice of reading. Gustave Flaubert’s sage advice to us was: “Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”Advice on reading - good and bad - litters the ages, from the Catholic Church refusing to translate the Bible into modern languages, to 18th century women being warned that injudicious reading could turn them to prostitution or worse. It seems that as soon as the written word was invented it came with a health warning. But thankfully, throughout the history of reading from the invention of the printing press onwards, much of that advice has been completely ignored. From the prayer wheel of medieval England to the electronic book, how has the process of reading has changed over time? How will tomorrow’s readers compare to those of the past, and is what we read today - and how we read it - essential or peripheral to the people we become?With Kevin Sharpe, Professor of History, University of Southampton; Jacqueline Pearson, Professor of English Literature, Manchester University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Gustav Flaubert's advice was, do not read as children do to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purposes of instruction.

No, read in order to live. Advice for instructions on reading litter the ages from the Catholic Church refusing to translate the Bible into modern languages to 18th century women being warned that injudicious reading could turn them to prostitution or much worse. As soon as the written word was invented, it came with a health warning. Throughout the history of reading from the invention of the printing press onwards, much of that advice has been completely ignored.

To discuss the history of reading in Britain, I'm joined by Professor Kevin Sharp, author of Reading Revolutions, the Politics of Reading in Early Modern England, and by Professor Jacqueline Pearson, who's written Women's Reading in Britain 1750 to 1835. Kevin Sharp, we're going to start at the printing press, but can you just give us a few sketch marks

before the late Middle Ages? I mean, there was a library at Alexandria, you know, the Greeks wrote, the Romans wrote, and Charlemagne brought back the book and so on, sir. Well, because readings are relatively new subject, there's still a great deal of work to be done here, but, I mean, one of the things that's clear is from the classical world,

the association of reading with power and with privilege was very evident. The Library of Alexandria was very much, as it were, what we might almost call a governmental resource, and reading was one of the marks of privilege and power, one of the ways in which privilege and power were reinforced. I think we can, if we return to classical text with that sense, we could reread particularly someone like Catullus with their very obvious interest in the relationship between authority,

and reading afresh and anew. And in those classical pre-late medieval times is reading most important for instruction? Yes, among an elite. I mean, reading was, of course, restricted. The literate class was the governing class. And we can see depictions of this on Greek vases, as well as within the text themselves.

Do you have anything to bring us from that particular theory, Jacqueline? I think not only was very. reading associated with power, I think it was also meant to transform, wasn't it? There's a story about St Augustine hearing a voice telling him to take up and read, at which point he picks up the Bible and becomes converted to Christianity. So right from the start, I think reading was meant to do things to the individual reader. Yes, and particularly in the Middle Ages and with Christianity, the notion of reading as moral and spiritual improvement and meditation is perhaps the most obvious development.

of the post-Christian world. But we're talking until then about very few people reading, about reading being directly associated with power, and the pleasure of the extremely privileged leisure classes, often expressed, or most often expressed through print in poetry. Now, we come to the invention of the printing press. Now, Kevin Sharp, not in the first year or two after that, but as that gathered pace, what effect did that have?

Well, I think traditionally we've thought that, printing had a revolutionary effect, both on writing, producing books and reading books. And the most obvious effect, as we've traditionally seen it, is that printing standardized. It enabled multiple copies of a shared and common text to be used by groups of people as opposed to the scribal reproduction, which was obviously slower, more expensive. Recent work has somewhat qualified that by reminding us that print itself, was variant and less stable and uniform than we once thought. But I still think printing was a major revolution

in the way in which people reacted to books, read books, and indeed that means also the way in which people wrote books because every act of writing assumes a reader and an audience. We know in this country that the printing is seized on Chaucer and on the Bible as the way to get the money, for the printing works, really. Have you any sort of statistics, anything alike,

an idea of the impact this had at that time? Well, by statistics, I mean, a typical print run in the 16th or early 17th century for a book would be something in the region of 1,500 copies, which is actually very high. It's more than the print run

of an academic book today and probably about half the print run of an unknown novelist's first book. And given the size of the population, given the size of the population, it's quite high. Although literacy rates, which is a very controversial topic in the early modern period, the 16th and 17th century, have been estimated at about 10%. Of course, the question is what do you mean by literacy?

The standard test is whether you can sign your name, but there were many who were literate in the sense that they were able to do something with the written word, not necessarily being able to write at the same time. So it's a very controversial topic. but around 10% has been the estimate for literacy. Because we're talking not only about reading for oneself, but by being read too. And so books available to read to people in remote parts of the country

where those texts, as you call them, books as I prefer to call them, were read. But we're talking here in the early days about a fairly interesting relationship between politics, really, in reading, aren't we, Jacqueline Pearson? When we see this, the Bibles written in modern languages, and resisted, of course, by the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Bible in Germany, and then Henry the 8th become James the first version here.

You were talking about people having access to the Word of God themselves without intermediaries speaking for them, often in, most often today in Latin. And a great number of things changed through reading. Yes. I mean, I think you could say that the modern world began with the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages. Suddenly there was access. to the word, to all sorts of groups who'd never previously had it, including women.

I think things changed. And create a lot of fear. I mean, it's interesting that Jacqueline mentioned women because women were banned from reading the Bible in Tudor England. Women and apprentices were forbidden to read the Bible, even when the Bible was produced in an English version. Can you comment on that, Jacqueline? Why do you think that was?

Why do you think that was? I think it's back to what Kevin was saying earlier on about power. Reading is power. And the centre clearly had a certain amount invested in keeping that power centralised, even when the Bible became more available, even when reading became more available, right through the 18th and into the 19th century. I think we can see a contest going on about who gets access to the word. Before we come to your periods, and I know how dangerous it is to talk to historians outside their period,

but when women and apprentices are banned from reading the Bible, does that include, that can't include having the Bible read to them by the master of the household or someone? No, no, it can't. One of the things we need to be aware of, I think, all the time, is that the distinction between literate and illiterate classes was different in all periods, really, up to the early 19th century, even the illiterate groups could listen to reading. And in fact, being read to aloud was one of the major entertainments in families. It was one of the major ways in which information was passed on.

You went to the coffee house, you went to the alehouse, you heard books read. But actually, sorry, can I just a moment? This business of politicising an individual, you write about it intensively, particularly about women in the late 18th century. They start reading enormously. and we have evidence of colossal number of books. Just put it out that way, read by. And the dangers that this was supposed to pose for themselves,

illness, fatigue, and for society, the things like causes of terrible crime, not only prostitution, but can you tell us about that? The resistance was quite hysterical, wasn't it? Quite hysterical, especially when we get to 1789, the fall of the Bastille, You do actually read, you find books where people are arguing that revolution is caused by injudicious reading. There might be something in that, actually. Well, there might be something in it.

The degree to which accounts of the French Revolution tend to circle around ideas of access to reading by new reading groups is quite startling. I think some people meant this metaphorically, but some people meant it quite literally. Some people thought that Rousseau and women reading, were one of the causes of the French Revolution. Can you just colour in a bit more the resistance? I've got your notes here, and why should I read it when you can tell us, about the nature and the scale of the force with which women were criticised and worried over her for reading?

Right, well, I think two things were happening in the late 18th century. One was that women were starting to read and write on a scale never before known. So history is actually changing. And that affected all kinds of things. It affected the way books were marketed. It affected the physical appearance of books. It affected the kinds of spaces in which books were read. It affected the way that writers interacted with their audience.

But I think as important as that, women became metaphors. The woman who read became symbolic of all kinds of things in society, of all kinds of changes in society. Some of these changes were welcomed by some people. But there's a strong conservative backbone that was really terrified in any change of distribution of power for which literacy tended to stand. And so you get accounts warning women to read a novelist tantamount to prostitution, for instance, that it will cause revolution, that it will cause physical illness.

And of course this affected women readers and women writers in all kinds of profound. ways, it's sometimes hard for us to imagine. I mean, we have some, the bachelor's listening, little dog rolls another day which you quote. The bachelor asked to be saved from a wife who went stocking, and stockings and shirts want repairs, sits reading a novel all day in her chair. And we have this other one, a dread image, a really subversive image, this is when a servant girl is sitting,

reading a book with her mistress in the same room. This portends disaster. Yeah, the bachelor's litany, the Richard Newton, doggeral comes with a beautiful picture of a woman sitting in a chair reading a novel. She's wearing an enormous hat. She's very, very well dressed. So there's one thing. Reading for women is associated with vanity.

It's associated with conspicuous consumption. She's lolling in the chair and she's showing her ankle. So it's also associated with the possibility of sexual laxness. Her poor husband is standing behind her with a stocking with a hole in it. And she's looking at her little. and paying no attention to her domestic duties. The other thing is the contradictoryness, though. I mean, as you say, there is this letter

which encapsulates the whole of the French Revolution by the fact that here is a servant girl sitting down while her mistress wants her to work, reading a book. But likewise, people who supported the French monarchy tend to create sentimental snapshots of Marie Antoinette teaching her children to read. So the difficulty for women, I think, in this period

is that women's reading could figure either prostitution and revolution or it could figure obedience to domestic values. And a woman never kind of knew where she was, really. Do you mind if we step back 100 or so years here, Kevin Chapman, talk about the pamphlet in the Civil Wars, and I know you've written a thousand pages defending Charles I first, so if you're not an expert, nobody else in the world is. In the Civil Wars, pamphleteering was an enormous.

importance and that was obviously going directly to people who could read and also the use of the Bible for as metaphors and using it for their own purpose whichever purpose it was can you talk a bit about the the way that the reading of pamphlets in the Civil Wars and since has has politicised reading has been part of the political act of reading well I think this goes back to your earlier point about the fact that for most people in the years before the Civil War reading would being read to. The illiterate would have heard homilies in church, often homilies on obedience, they would have heard proclamations read to them. In a household, the father would have read the scriptures to the servants and to the women. This is a very important point, and being read

too is a form of control. It means you don't have the liberty to sit down privately and formulate your own interpretation of the book you're reading. With the growth of literacy and clearly the emergence of the news books, the pre-precursors of the Civil War pamphlets in the early Stewart period, the newsbooks do suggest and appeal to an expanding urban literate public. And the pamphlets in the civil war were clearly read as well as heard, as it were. And the Civil War pamphlets, I think, are important in a number of ways. Firstly, they encourage contestatory reading. They're actually themselves contesting authority, they're often in the form of a dialogue,

and a dialogue like a play leaves the reader space to make up their own mind, a pamphlet where two characters are disputing two sides of a major political question means the reader is the person privileged to make a political choice. So I think the debates leading up to the Civil War and the pamphlets produced during the Civil War do create what one scholar has called a revolutionary

reader, that is to say a reader armed with all the knowledge, all the information to make political choices. And this is going to transform not just the culture of reading and writing, but the whole political culture as well. We know that literacy politicised the urban lower class, middle class, lower class.

But what effect did it have on redefining the aristocracy Kevin Chubb? And that started with the El Castellona, the courtier. had that change, the aristocracy had retreated from being warriors and proved themselves rather at courted by their aesthetic distinction. Indeed, I mean, learning became an absolute essential mark of aristocratic virtue during the age of humanism, which in England is the 16th and 17th centuries, and not to be learned is a mark of indignity.

One sees this in the courtesy literature, not just the one you mentioned Kestan, Diclione's book of Bacortia, but English texts like Picham's Complete Gentleman in its various editions stress more and more the need for learning, literacy, acquaintance with the classics, etc. So learning is again a mark of aristocratic authority during the early modern period. The act of reading can be now, obviously hard to get hold of really, except we know from a few great writers or from a few accidents or from a few great text that, certain persons read this number of books and so. Let's just start at the Renaissance. It's maybe too difficult, or we haven't got enough time to start before that.

And the Renaissance reader would be likely to use a book wheel. Now, can you just, is that so? What's a book wheel? And would they read aloud, or would they read to themselves? We don't know how widely used bookwheels were. We have an illustration of a 16th century book wheel, and a book wheel was essentially a series of bookstands or lector on a rotating drum that was cranked round with a handle by a sort of gear mechanism

so you could move from one book to another. Now what is interesting about that, it's rather like the moving computer screens from one text to another. What is interesting is it suggests that readers in the 16th century, particularly scholarly readers, were reading several books at once, which is not for us a common practice, even in, even in the 16th century, the scholarly world. And of course it suggests that the reader did not privilege authors or books, but actually read for his, and it usually was his in this period, own use. And I think that is very interesting because it reminds us, too, that in normal educational practice, when people

took notes from books and every schoolboy kept a commonplace book in this period. And a commonplace book, unlike students today where you take notes from a book and when you finish with the book, you move to another. The normal practice then was to start a heading, let's call it, wealth or beneficence or, and you took notes from a whole variety of books where you extracted key sentences. So the reader was breaking books up into headings defined by his own purposes. So the personal anthologies, really? Personal anthologies. And this, of course, means that the reader. in some ways has power over the work.

The work is not the dominant thing. The reader is actually the dominant person. Jacqueline Pearson, how do you see the relationship between the author and the reader developing? We know that Spencer's name wasn't on the title page of Fairy Queen, but 17th century Dryden gets his name on the cover, as it were. What does that signify? What does that tell you about the relationship between the author and the reader?

I think one thing it signifies is that there's a growing professionalisation which really we've always known about authorship into the 18th and into the 19th century. I mean, in terms of what Kevin was saying about class, I think less and less was the model, the aristocracy in the 18th and 19th century.

In fact, aristocracy and royalty were being kind of advised to read more like the professional middle classes. So there's a kind of movement towards the centre, I think. I think also in terms of my particular interest in women, the rise of the woman writer and the rise of the woman reader

are very intertwined. And I can't see one of those actually being possible without the other. And of course in lots of cases, the same individual was both. Lots of our evidence from women readers is from women writers. Yes. And again, as I mentioned, perhaps you want to flesh it out, the number of, I mean, in your book, women, what they read is prodigious.

Mary, Russell, Mitford read 22 books in January. 1806, and Elapet read 440 titles and so on, and so on, not in January. But we have great long lists. But while they're reading massively, they're still accused, women are accused of skipping, and Catherine McCauley tears pages out of books she doesn't like, and this is, of course, a larabre, and so on. So even if they get through the politics, they still sort of don't do it properly, do they? Yeah, I think that's right.

I mean, I think something's happening that's different from Kevin's eclectic reader. I think readers are being advised not to read across, but to read consistently, to take one book and read it till it's finished, digest that, and then start on something else. Women allegedly didn't do that. Women did have two books on the go at once. Women did skip allegedly. Do you see a sort of shift, a reading shift,

a great reading shift, like a great vowel shift, from reading principally, information and instruction to reading for exercising the imagination for fantasy escape. And if so, can you give us some idea of when that happened, why? I mean, you know, you've got three minutes. I mean, if you could give us a wonderful question. I mean, it's undoubtedly the case that reading for use does shift to some extent to reading for pleasure.

And one of the obvious examples is a marvellous essay about how a reader read Rousseau and the interest in the emotive charge of books, which Jacqueline writes a great deal about the power of the emotion of reading, which is something that certainly wasn't true or very often commented on in the period I work on the 16th and 17th centuries. I think crucially here are the Civil War, and in particular the culture of the restoration, the coffee house, the rise of a consumer culture,

the spread of literacy to an urban, what we would call middle class, the emergence of women in the salon of the late 17th and early 18th century, the emergence of provincial capitals and a provincial season and social life. It seems to me that books become part of a larger leisure culture, and it's interesting that commonplacing,

the sort of habit I described earlier, of breaking up books under notes, does seem to fade in the 18th century as a principal pedagogic exercise. It doesn't disappear, but it's no longer dominant. So if I were asked to put a date, and I couldn't specifically put one, I would say the late 17th and early half of the 18th century is an important period. And I would put the rise of the novel as part of that story of the shift from reading for use,

for reading for emotive reaction and pleasure. I don't know whether Jack... Now I've held back from Breggle, I think, because it's such a topic I'd love to talk more about, but I can't sort of a hug about it. But let's talk about that now. I mean, it seems to me one of the things you missed out in your list of what women did was the way they influenced men writers. Now, I'm just guessing this from my own reading. I mean, you've done all this properly.

Is that right? I mean, men wrote differently. They read about women differently. They wrote about different subjects in different ways because, A, they had a woman's readership and B, they had women writing, so they read women's writing, and so on. Yeah, that's very true. I mean, the very end of the 18th century, start of the 19th century, in some respects, was a unique period in English. English literary history, I think, because women dominated the field of novel writing in particular. There are lists of popular novelists from this period, and they're almost exclusively women.

So there's a big problem for male writers who want to write novels. How are they going to deal with this? And I think you can see that happening in the case of early 19th century male writers like Charles Robert Maturin, or particularly famously like Walter Scott. One of the things that Scott is doing in Waverly is that he's trying to the novel back to a more masculine agenda. It's a novel that's dealing with history and not as the woman's novel was supposed to be primarily with domestic issues. And Scott has a preface where he actually talks about

what he's not doing in that novel. He's not writing about heroines with harps. He's not doing female Gothic. He's not doing the female sentimental novel. He's doing something new and masculine. And the moment it was perceived that masculine control had been reasserted over the novel, the whole reputation of the novel changed.

Suddenly, with Scott, novels were now respectable reading matter for just about everybody, as previously they never had been. Well, just about everybody, is that a code for men? No, I mean just about everybody. Now, I wasn't trying to be clear. I mean, it seems to me that what you were saying is that women had, I was fascinated, taken over that market for, let's say 30 years, around the 10th century, Scott fought back, but if taken over that market,

would they be taking over the market for women readers, or would be men be reading these masses and masses of dominating popular novels that you tell us women are writing them? I think, you see, the stereotypes tend to deal with very separate male and female readerships. But once you look at reality, that just wasn't the case. Women were reading books that were theoretically men's books, and men were reading all those novels and those magazines for women, as much as, almost as much as women were.

I think Scott's impact was to allow that, I think, to become more codified. Suddenly everybody accepted that because there were male writers, the novel was a more universal kind of form. Yeah, well, it's sort of what I meant to, yes. This does raise, though, the very interesting relationship of genre to ideology. I mean, the novel did not, the way the novel becomes a feminized genre, the way pastoral earlier on became a genre of political protest and critique. The way that genres of writing and reading become associated with ideological positions

and move those associations is an interesting question. I want to ask one more question before we bow out. It's a relatively new discipline, the history of reading, trying to track the history reading. Very difficult to do. And we can never know how people read a text. I mean, Richard Hoggart was, as one would expect, absolutely brilliant in the uses of literacy, saying that people can pass over certain things, they can miss sort of the obvious crudities in text, he uses Kipling and so and so forth.

What are you trying to do in giving us a history of reading? What do you think is going to come out of it that will really add to the gate of our lives? Well, I think something really quite uplifting and gratifying, that is to say the capacity of often quite ordinary people who are literate to formulate their own values and their own politics, their own identity, even in circumstances in which the processes of education and government are doing all they can to put out a set of principles, beliefs, values that are orthodox. I mean, one of the great surprises to me in the study,

I made is the capacity of someone to read against the grain, to read in a resistant way, in the same way that Jacqueline's female readers are constantly being found reading against the patriarchal ideology in which they were all officially educated and brought up. In this piecing together history of reading, isn't it a bit like piecing together history of sex or history of money that the tendency on the part of a lot of people is to, well, fib, Yes, that's true. It's really interesting when you catch someone out, Fibbing. Fanny Bernie didn't always tell the truth about what she hadn't read.

It was more important to preserve her reputation for respectability than to tell the truth about reading. So you have to read carefully and you have to be prepared to read between the lines. So does that bother you, Kevin, when you get these surveys of yes, no, we were reading the Iliad last night, which again, we know that a lot of so-called working-class people do. We've got to stop. Right, okay.

Well, thank you very much, Jacqueline Pearson, and thank you very much, Kevin Sharp. Next week I'll be talking to Brian Green and John Gribbin about the quest for the ultimate theory of everything. Well, what do you know? Thank you and thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes

about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.