Abstract
What was it like to be in a reading group in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century? Late twentieth and early twenty-first-century historians of nineteenth-century reading in Britain are adding considerably to our knowledge of reading throughout the century. William St Clair has produced a quantified history of reading for the romantic period; Kate Flint and Jonathan Rose have investigated reading practices among women and the working classes.1 At the same time, other studies have emphasized and demonstrated the importance of reading as a collective phenomenon. This chapter takes a qualitative rather than a quantitative approach. It shadows, by way of a real-time experiment, the experience of those first readers enjoying a mid-nineteenth-century serialized novel in a communal setting. In doing so, it explores the implications of such a reading both for our understanding of the novel’s first readers, and for our own appreciation of the novel.
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Notes
1. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Part of this chapter was originally published in Publishing History, 52, 2002. Permission to reproduce it has been generously given by ProQuest Information and Learning (formerly Chadwyck-Healey Ltd), Cambridge.
2. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: the Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 109.
3. R.J. Morris, ‘Clubs, Societies and Associations’, in F.M.L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3, 395–443.
4. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 258.
5. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1989), 51.
8. Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (1866: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 521–2.
9. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (London 1857), I, 302–3.
10. Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), 185.
11. See Ernest H. Boddy, ‘The Dalton Book Club: a Brief History’, Library History, 9 (1992): 97–105, and records of the club held by the secretary, to whom I am grateful.
13. Wilkie Collins, ‘A Petition to the Novel-Writers’, My Miscellanies (London: S. Low, 1863), 172–89.
14. Jennifer Phegley, Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 2, 30.
15. Ann Thompson, ‘A Club of Our Own: Women’s Play Readings in the Nineteenth Century’, Borrowers and Lenders: the Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2, 2 (2006): 15.
16. Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: the Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998), 20.
19. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1855–57), ed. Stephen Wall and Helen Small (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 739. All subsequent references are to this edition.
23. Robert L. Patten, ‘Dickens as Serial Author: a Case of Multiple Identities’, in Nineteenth Century Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 137.
24. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Oxford: Polity, 1993), 31–2.
25. Richard D. Altick, ‘Varieties of Readers’ Response: the Case of Dombey and Son’, Yearbook of English Studies, 10 (1980): 79.
26. Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 16.
27. See John Russell Taylor, Hitch: the Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock (London: Pantheon Books, 1978), 129.
28. M.J. Swanton, ‘A Dividing Book Club of the 1840s: Wadebridge, Cornwall’, Library History, 9, 3 and 4 (1992): 106–21.
31. The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), 373.
32. John Cordy Jeaffreson, Novels and Novelists from Elizabeth to Victoria (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1858), reprinted in Dickens, The Critical Heritage, 381.
33. Quoted in C.P. Snow, ‘Dickens and the Public Service’, in Dickens 1970, Centenary Essays, ed. Michael Slater (London: Chapman & Hall, 1970), 127.
36. Jonathan Rose, ‘How Historians Study Reader Response: or, What did Jo Think of Bleak House?’, in Literature in the Marketplace, ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 208.
37. The Letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim Edition, Vol. 8, ed. Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 228, 129n.
45. Susan Belasco Smith, ‘Serialization and the Nature of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth Century America, eds. Kenneth M Price and Susan Belasco Smith (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 71.
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© 2011 Jenny Hartley
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Hartley, J. (2011). Nineteenth-Century Reading Groups in Britain and the Community of the Text: an Experiment with Little Dorrit. In: Sedo, D.R. (eds) Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230308848_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230308848_3
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