Abstract
If we set aside the roll-call of readings no one would want to do without, then the record of readers’ encounters with literary work from the past, the everyday record, as it were, seems mainly a curious mix of complacency and misreading. The complacency is essential to the whole enterprise of reading and has to do with our comfortable, routine, and heedless assumption that we can read something from the past without undue trouble. If we didn’t make this assumption much of the time then surely a lot less reading would get done. But still, our utilitarian complacency goes to the heart of one of the cardinal questions about reading the past: How confident can we be, as readers, about our understanding of any given moment before our time? In this way complacency can easily lead to misreading—as, for example, in the case of Thomas Bowdler and his Family Shakespeare. Bowdler’s misreading arises from his conviction that he can provide his time with a better Shakespeare than, well, Shakespeare. Bowdler’s success suggests that maybe he was more right than we’re willing to allow today—and anyhow wasn’t Bowdler doing what we all do, that is, offering a reading of a particular text? Bowdler’s case nevertheless leads to a second cardinal question about reading the past: How confident can we be that our understanding of a work is any more than an imposition on the past of our own preferences, prejudices, or ideologies?
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Notes
Macdonald Daly, Introduction to Mary Barton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), xxviii.
Since MacDonald Daly’s version, three significant editions have appeared: Jennifer Foster, ed., Mary Barton (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2000)
Shirley Foster, ed., Mary Barton, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
Thomas Recchio, ed., Mary Barton (New York: Norton, 2008).
Angus Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1991), 74. Subsequent references are cited in the text.
Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 79.
Edgar Wright, Introduction to Mary Barton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), xii.
Wright’s Mrs. Gaskell: The Basis for Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer and Other Stories (New York: Dover, 1993 [1912]), 32.
John Lucas’s The Literature of Change: Studies in the Nineteenth Century Provincial Novel (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1977). References are cited in the text.
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, Emcee Editores, trans. (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 48.
Georges Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History I (1969) quoted in Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 292.
Frank Lentricchia objects that Iser “ignores both author and reader as cultural constructions” and offers a view of reading that is just “hedonistic” (After the New Criticism [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 149).
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 94; my italics. Subsequent references are cited in the text.
Cf. Hippolyte Taine’s opening to The History of English Literature, H. van Laun, trans. (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1871)
Alan Shelston, Introduction to Mary Barton (London: J.M. Dent, 1996), xxiv.
Susan Zlotnick, Women, Writing, and the Industrial Revolution (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 81.
Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832–1867 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Cf. W. A. Craik’s remark in her Elizabeth Gaskell and the English Provincial Novel (London: Methuen, 1975), 25
Anthony Appiah, “Tolerable Falsehoods: Agency and the Interests of Theory,” in Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson, eds., Consequences of Theory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 66–67.
Mary Poovey says that as Mary’s situation develops she “begins to resemble the middle-class heroines of novels like Clarissa, Evelina, or Sense and Sensibility.” Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 152.
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994 [1928]), 206.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 56.
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© 2010 Igor Webb
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Webb, I. (2010). Reading Mary Barton: The Writer and the Reader. In: Rereading the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106116_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106116_2
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