In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Reading Culture and Writing Practices in Nineteenth-Century France
  • Robert Justin Goldstein
Lyons, Martyn . Reading Culture and Writing Practices in Nineteenth-Century France. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Pp. 245. ISBN 978-0-8020-9357-8

This volume contains four photographs of oddly poor quality, apparently reproduced from website illustrations which were, seemingly, a few pixels light. This problem quite literally "illustrates" the key difficulty with this book: it repeatedly leaves the impression that the author (a history professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia) and the publisher just weren't willing to exert the effort needed to produce a really solid volume, but instead were willing to accept a book [End Page 319] which, while including some interesting and useful information, often seems out of focus and fails to live up to its potential.

The first, and general, problem with the book is that it does not even pretend to be a coherent volume, but is rather a collection of articles, most of which are on the short and rather superficial side and have been published before, on the general theme indicated by the title. However, three of the ten chapters don't even quite qualify under this rather loose requirement: two, dealing with worker autobiographies and oral histories of reading practices, are based primarily on non-French materials and another, a very interesting article on the traditional rural French practice known as the "veillée d'hiver" (a winter evening communal gathering), had nothing to do with either "reading culture" or "writing practices" but "was rather part of a traditional popular culture which resisted the spread of the written word" (p. 148). Almost all of the other chapters also have problems. Thus, in Lyons's chapter on nineteenth-century French "bestsellers," he reports that he studied information about the sales of "fifty-six different authors," and his confusing explanation of how he chose these authors rather than others suggests that he largely decided the outcome of his study in advance by focusing on them, rather than following where the evidence led (apparently because there was simply too much to examine all of it). In a chapter of the rise of bookshops and the decline of "colporteurs" (itinerant booksellers), he briefly refers to the government requirement that booksellers obtain a brevet (license), but never really explains or examines the why or how of this; moreover, although he mentions that by the end of the nineteenth century, newspaper, rather than book, sales, accounted for over 75% of the business of railway bookstalls, he repeatedly ignores the "reading culture" associated with newspapers and periodicals in favor of books and, partly as a result, this volume contains only glancing references to the prior censorship and post-publication prosecutions which so critically shaped French reading culture until the passage of the liberal 1881 press law. A chapter on the "écritures intimes" (private writings) of French citizens is based entirely on secondary sources (including, oddly, the family of Russian author Leo Tolstoy) – slightly over 40 diarists, which Lyons cautions is too small a number to "be in any way either representative or exhaustive" (171). However, his chapter on autobiographical writing is based on only 22 French sources (plus another 68 British sources and one Austrian account which is included without any explanation).

Despite these problems, Lyons, the author of two earlier books on related subjects, clearly knows a great deal about his material, and anyone interested in nineteenth-century French reading and writing practices will certainly find a considerable interesting and useful information in this volume. Yet, because his book is so pockmarked with serious problems, this reviewer came away primarily appreciating it for several wonderful quotations: thus, a 1817 French religious periodical, referring to the increasing circulation of Voltaire's writings, termed them "poison" and asked, "do we absolutely have to increase the dose?" while, in contrast, many celebrated the liberating role of writing, including Hugo, who triumphantly declared that "the press will kill the church," and the authors of an 1834 circular urging support for a monument to Gutenberg, which referred to "publications of every kind appearing daily which shine endless waves of light across the...

pdf

Share