Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (review)

Historians of reading and of the book are sometimes frustrated by the failure of their findings to penetrate beyond their own circle. The field has advanced at a great pace in the last twenty years, but there has been no commensurate impact on other branches of literary inquiry, nor on university curricula. Projects that combine expertise in other literary fields with the history of reading are therefore greatly to be welcomed. This book combines a sensitivity to present day theories of reading with an awareness of historical context. Scott Black is also innovative in his aim of relating changing print culture to generic change, and in focusing on a neglected genre such as the essay, whose very ubiquity seems to render it invisible to many.

Five chapters are arranged in two parts. Part 1 discusses essays and remarks about essays from the seventeenth century, paying close attention to individual extracts from texts. An example is Black’s meditation on an extract from a work of 1655, Morall Discourses and Essayes, Upon Severall Subjects by T.C., in which T.C. meditates on the form itself: “T.C. figures the essays as a trick and a medicine, or perhaps a trick to get you to take your medicine ... But of course this is not a practice of sugarcoating, disguise or trickery, but of flavoring. Salt brings out flavor, it doesn’t change the taste, and T.C.’s point is that if you buy the old horse back, the proof is in the riding of it” (24). Black does not use close reading of formal characteristics here nor use the source as an empirical tool to recreate a seventeenth-century reader’s responses to this (or a contemporary) text; instead, he uses the extract to stimulate reflection on what we think reading is or might be. Meditations of this kind, rather than engagement with current debates in the history of reading, make up an important part of the book. In this chapter, he considers the metaphor of writing as a way to digest reading, reflecting on the essay as a mode of reading as much as writing. Chapter 2, the concluding section of part 1, pays the same close attention to metaphors of travel in and about a range of essays from the same period. Part 1 concludes that an account of early modern print culture is incomplete if it does not include those modes of reading that the early modern essay both discusses and demonstrates.

Part 2 moves on to chronological discussions of individual authors, with a chapter each on Robert Boyle, The Spectator (both Jonathan Swift and Joseph Addison), and Henry Fielding. The chapter on Boyle revisits work by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, among others, on the relationship between Boyle’s work as a pioneer of scientific method and the genre in which he chose to present his findings, suggesting that “Boyle’s ‘Essay’ has been mischaracterized and miscontextualized” (72). A welcome reluctance to consider Boyle’s work as a conflict between “language as exposition and language as persuasion” (75–76) yields interesting insights into Boyle’s use of the essay “to solicit a skill of attentive reflection that is construed as reading” (79).

Chapter 4 on the Spectator “offers an account ... of how a particular literary form, the essay, was used to organize one of the first and most influential articulations of the nascent social formation, civil society” and “traces the development of the Spectator from its predecessor, the Tatler, through its own statements about its workings and use” (88) in order to do so. The chapter concludes that the formal properties of the essay in this period had political overtones independent of each individual essay’s content: “The essay form tended to the mode of politeness, an ethos of conversation that defined the conditions of participation in the emergent urban spaces” (104).

The final chapter on Fielding considers the balance between wit and narrative in Tom...