A Companion to the History of the Book (12 page)

Most of the studies of marginalia undertaken so far have tended to look at professional writers, such as Piozzi, or the reception of canonical texts, but it is possible to find collections of books that belonged to readers who did not have the easy access to texts enjoyed by many intellectuals. For example, much of the library compiled by an officer in the London excise, John Dawson (1692–1765), has survived because it was left to the local parish church in his will. A catalogue compiled by Dawson during the 1730s reveals that he owned over a hundred volumes. To possess this number of books was not that unusual for a Londoner of the “middling sort” during this period, but Dawson’s library was particularly well stocked with histories and chronologies and he added more annotations to this genre than any of the other books that he owned. Dawson corrected printers’ errors and added pagination where it was missing in order to make these books easier to use, but he also used them to store information. Many of his histories have additional manuscript pages containing chronological tables or lists of significant historical figures, and he added new indices and tables of contents in order to make the information that he had stored there easier to recover. Like a reader from before the age of print, Dawson treated the book as an object to be augmented and adapted.

There are few marginal comments in any of Dawson’s books, but his copy of Thomas Salmon’s
The Chronological Historian
(1733) is marked throughout with a strange code. Some passages are marked “R R” or “R R R,” others “PM” and “PD.” As a manuscript table of “The Signification of the marks in this book” added to the end pages makes clear, Dawson used these codes to compile a series of lists and tables that were later bound into the rear of the book. The use of “PM” and “PD” in the margins identified passages that recorded when “Parliament met” and when it was “dissolved.” Dawson used this information to compile a table of the parliaments associated with each English monarch which was later bound into the book. All of this evidence suggests that when Dawson “read” history, he engaged in this practice of compiling lists and constructing tables, but his annotation practices – including the use of code – would have been familiar to many contemporary scholars. As an examination of the rare books collection of the British Library reveals, during the eighteenth century many books were used to store information on the same (or a similar) topic, and additional indices or tables were often added to works of history (Colclough 2004).

As Robert Darnton has argued, there is enough evidence to suggest that early-modern readers tended to concentrate on small chunks of text, which they picked out of the books that they were reading and placed in manuscript books, or, as in Dawson’s case, rearranged into new lists that could be easily consulted (Darnton 2000). Dawson certainly imposed his own pattern on texts such as Salmon’s
Chronological Historian
, but he also used his reading to construct a series of autobiographical writings that placed his own life within the context of contemporary European history. This context was mined from the large number of chronologies and contemporary histories that he owned, but he did not simply read for this purpose as his compilation of a chronology of the Anglo-Saxon period attests. Reading for Dawson was a process of reconfiguration that remade the text into a series of lists or tables.

It is not my intention to suggest here that
all
early-modern readers engaged in this process of annotation, list-making, and extraction, but the evidence from surviving texts indicates that reading with the pen in hand was a much more common practice during this period than it is today. Early-modern readers frequently marked the pages of the books that they owned and filled manuscript books with extracts from their reading. These readers understood reading as a process of taking the essence from a book. For example, between 1627 and the end of the 1650s, William Drake left extensive notes in the texts that he owned and filled thirty-seven commonplace books with extracts (Sharpe 2000). The term “commonplace book” needs some explaining as not all manuscript books followed the format developed during the Renaissance. The commonplace book proper encouraged the compiler to make notes on their reading under a series of predetermined headings that were then recorded in the book’s index in order to allow the reader to retrieve information. The most influential model was that proposed by Erasmus in his
De Copia verborum
(1513). Peter Beal has argued that this form of the commonplace book was the “primary intellectual tool for organising knowledge” in the early-modern period. Such books certainly made readers look at texts in the context of pre-existing headings, and encouraged them to recognize sententiae in established authors (Beal 1993: 134).

John Locke’s essay “A New Method of a Common-Place Book” (published posthumously in 1706) modified the form and helped to perpetuate the use of these books well into the eighteenth century and beyond. Gertrude Savile (1697–1758), a member of the gentry who spent much of her life in London, compiled a manuscript book during the 1720s (Savile n.d.). This book is divided into twenty-seven different subjects, including “Hope,” “The Passions,” and “Ruin.” Under these headings, she transcribed short, apposite quotations from contemporary plays, such as John Sturmy’s
Sesostris, Or, Royalty in Disguise
(1728), older dramatic works, including Shakespeare, and the poetry of Cowley and Young. Savile’s commonplace book is thus a great source for recovering information about the kinds of texts that she read, but it also tells us something about
how
she read. In order to construct this volume, Savile must have kept her commonplace headings in mind as she read, and a close analysis of the extracts shows that she often needed to adjust or amend the text in order to make it fit these categories more easily.

As Darnton has noted, by studying commonplace books historians and literary scholars “have come closer to understanding reading both as a specific cultural practice and as a general way of construing the world,” but moving from an analysis of “what they read to the problems of how they made sense of books” is fraught with difficulty (Darnton 2000: 82). Savile’s commonplace book reveals that, like other early-modern readers, she tended to break texts into fragments in order to reassemble them into new configurations, but her contemporaneous journal also reveals that she employed a wide range of other reading strategies or techniques. She enjoyed reading aloud to friends and acquaintances, and was sometimes read to by her maid. This evidence suggests that manuscript books can only ever reveal one aspect of the reading life of the compiler. Savile did not always read with the pen in hand, but the methodology of cutting texts into digestible chunks associated with the commonplace-book tradition remained an important part of the way in which she made meaning from the various texts that she consumed (Saville 1997).

For early eighteenth-century readers such as Savile, the commonplace book remained an important but residual reading practice. Despite the continued production of printed commonplace books throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, readers rarely used their organizing principles, preferring instead to write across the page as though it were a blank notebook. Of course, some scholarly readers continued to keep traditional commonplace books, but in the nineteenth century it was much more common for readers to compile miscellanies of their favorite verse. Often called albums, these manuscript books provide important evidence about reading during this period. Although they sometimes belonged to an individual, during the 1820s and 1830s albums tended to be compiled by groups of friends or the members of a family. Each book thus provides an important record of the texts that these groups were sharing. Reading in the past was rarely a solitary activity and albums provide a record of the way in which small communities of readers appropriated and preserved texts in new contexts. There is some evidence to suggest that texts sometimes passed from album to album without the reader ever having seen the original printed text. This process of transmission allowed readers to share extracts from, or versions of, texts that were rare, or too expensive to buy.

The study of these books reveals the complex interweaving of manuscript and print culture in an age that we usually associate with the fixity of print. They suggest that, until at least the late 1830s, many readers continued to experience texts in quotation, that is, in forms dictated by the reader as scribe rather than by the printer. The transcription of a text allowed it to be rewritten, and such rewritings provide evidence of the transcriber’s attitude toward the original text. For example, one group of friends who compiled an album in the 1820s chose to transcribe Letitia Landon’s “The Improvisatrice” (1824) in its entirety, but the majority of readers tended to transform such long poems into short extracts (Colclough 1998). These extracts help to reveal what it was that Romantic readers most admired about authors such as Landon, Byron, and Scott, whose books were popular but expensive.

Joseph Hunter was inspired to keep a commonplace book after reading Locke’s famous essay on the subject, and he used it to transcribe passages from the various texts that he borrowed from the Surrey Street Subscription Library. Unfortunately, Hunter’s miscellany has not survived, but we know of its existence from the diaries and journals that he kept during the late 1790s. These journals provide a comprehensive record of
what
he was reading throughout this period. Recently published works borrowed from the Surrey Street Library dominated his reading at this time. He particularly enjoyed the novels of Ann Radcliffe, and his enthusiasm for the Gothic novel was shared by many of the other members of the library. In March 1797, he noted that Radcliffe’s
The Italian
was in such “great call” that he was forced to wait for the second volume to be returned by another reader. It took ten days and many, often fruitless, visits to the library to complete the whole text. He also sometimes used a local circulating library to supply the novels that he could not find at Surrey Street (Colclough 2000: 33). Hunter was a library-goer, rather than a library owner, and as his reading of Radcliffe suggests, this meant that his reading was often dictated by the availability of texts at the library. Such was the demand for
The Italian
that a strict limit was placed upon the amount of time that he could spend reading the text.

Hunter recorded relatively little about
how
these texts were consumed, but his combination of elements of “extensive reading” (the ability to pass from text to text) with the practices associated with “intensive reading” (such as close study and transcription) suggests that he had much in common with other readers from the same period. The terms “intensive” and “extensive” come from one of the key debates in the history of reading. As Darnton has noted, historians of reading often look at the “interplay of binary opposites”:

Reading by turning the leaves of a codex as opposed to reading by unrolling a volumen, reading printed texts in contrast to reading manuscripts, silent reading as distinct from reading aloud, reading alone rather than reading in groups, reading extensively by racing through different kinds of material vs. reading intensively by perusing a few books many times. (Darnton 2000: 87)

Each of these oppositions marks a supposed paradigm shift in reading practices, and the movement from “intensive” to “extensive,” usually associated with the eighteenth century, is sometimes referred to as “the reading revolution.” This phrase was first used by Rolf Engelsing to describe changes in book ownership and consumption in urban Germany after 1750, but the term has been adopted to describe both eighteenth-century Europe and early nineteenth-century America (Engelsing 1974; Darnton 1984; Hall 1996). These studies suggest that as books became more widely available, readers moved from an “intensive” to an “extensive” style of reading. In the “intensive” mode, it is argued, readers had access to a limited number of books, often religious in character, or designed to be read regularly and frequently. This kind of reading was often practiced publicly and aloud, and recitation and learning by heart imbued the printed word with a strong sense of authority. By contrast, “extensive” readers had access to a much wider range of texts, and most of their reading took place privately and silently. This allowed them to pass rapidly from text to text and the written word was no longer imbued with the same power.

In order to test this model, we need sources that provide evidence of the kinds of text that an individual was reading and of the way in which they were read (silently, aloud, and so on). Diaries and letters provide the best evidence for these practices, and a number of recent studies have used these sources to test and challenge the “reading revolution” hypothesis. For example, Darnton has used the letters written by a “solidly middle-class” French reader of the 1780s to demonstrate that “extensive” readers did not simply pass from one book to the next. Jean Ranson, who was a significant figure in the merchant oligarchy of La Rochelle, read a wide range of texts, but he was also “an impassioned Rousseauist” who incorporated the philosopher’s ideas “in the fabric of his life as he set up business, fell in love, married and raised his children” (Darnton 198 4 : 156 ) .

A similar challenge to the model comes from John Brewer’s survey of the diaries of an English middle-class reader, Anna Larpent. Between 1773 and 1783, Larpent read 440 titles from many different genres. She often read novels and plays aloud to her family, but also engaged in regular, repeated readings of sermons and the Bible while alone in her room. Like Darnton, Brewer discovers a reader engaged in a diversity of reading practices. He concludes that if a general theory of reading were to be constructed from this record it would be that “reading practices did not become more extensive but rather more diverse.” Intensive and extensive modes “were complementary rather than incompatible” (Brewer 1996: 244). Other investigations of diaries have questioned the progressive optimism of the reading revolution theory. Arianne Bagger-man’s study of Otto Van Eck, a young boy from a Dutch gentry family who kept a diary in the early 1790s, discovers a reluctant reader, forced to study by parents who controlled his access to texts (Baggerman 1997). However, Brewer is reluctant to move toward a general theory using just the evidence from Larpent’s diaries because she lived in a household where books were unusually common. Her husband was a professional reader and she had easy access to the bookshops and libraries of London, the center of the English book trade. Ranson, Van Eck, and Joseph Hunter all shared a similar easy access to texts, and it is important to note that any modification to the “reading revolution” theory put forward by these studies rests upon the testimony of only a handful of middle-class readers. In the late eighteenth century, extensive reading was a possibility for readers such as Larpent and Hunter, but the number of texts that they regularly acquired would have amazed many of their contemporaries. It is perhaps best to think of these readers as in the avant-garde of a new and emerging set of reading practices rather than as representing the norm.