Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (review)

Literary historians have rarely known what to make of the reader, or more accurately, of communities of readers. From the Romantics’ emphasis on the originary force of the author to New Critics’ focus on the well-wrought urn, it was easier to ignore the history of readers in favour of close readings or, at best, to deal in abstractions. But with the advent of a network of interests affiliated with the vogue for book history, all of this has changed in recent decades. This attention to the reader has developed along multiple lines. Some theorists, such as Stanley Fish and Walter Ong, have pursued a phenomenological approach that seeks to understand what happens at the level of cognition as we read. Others, following Richard Altick’s materialist lead, have contributed to a rich social history of actual readers across centuries and nations. This latter approach has itself split between two main emphases: discursive accounts of what people thought about different types of readers and an empirically driven search for the facts about who was reading what. At their very best, some accounts have integrated aspects of each of these approaches in their understanding of what has always been a highly mediated and often passionately contested activity.

Jan Fergus’s Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England constitutes a welcome addition to these debates. Staying close to the facts about who was reading what, at least as far as the records of two Midlands booksellers can tell us, it offers an important correction to several inherited assumptions. Fergus’s opening pages situate Provincial Readers in a constructive tension with the most important recent intervention: William St Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. It is not so much that the two always disagree, but where St Clair’s account of reading in the period assumes that readership is supply-driven, Fergus’s emphasis is far more squarely on the consumers themselves. Focusing largely on publishers’ records and on the impact of changing copyright protection laws, St Clair tends to assume that the price and availability of books shape the market that they enjoy. As a result, his focus is far more on the trade than on actual readers, who are relegated to the largely passive role as reflections of commercial developments and legislative changes. In doing so, Fergus argues, “he tends to focus on readers’ access, not their agency” (4). But, as Fergus also suggests, these differences are in many ways outweighed by their shared commitment to grounding judgments about the behaviour of reading audiences on evidence rather than inherited truisms, which, as often as not, turn out to be recycled errors.

Fergus’s evidence is drawn from the records of two booksellers: John Clay and his sons, Thomas and Samuel, whose main bookshop was in Daventry between 1742–81, though they also ran shops in the nearby towns of Rugby and Lutterworth and, briefly, in Warwick; and Timothy Stevens, whose Cirencester shop operated from 1780–1807. The fact that both the Clays and Stevens operated circulating libraries as well as selling books offers Fergus important insights into the habits and preferences of the provincial audiences they catered to. As Fergus herself acknowledges, the limited scale of these two Midlands booksellers does create problems. Not only do the relatively limited numbers of their customers (2,742 for the Clays, 588 for Stevens) weaken the viability of any generalizations she may wish to offer, the provincial focus sidesteps the important literary scene of London (or any of the other metropolitan centres) altogether. The local gentry come off rather poorly as readers compared with their professional counterparts, which may just be the way it was, but then again, it may also be that the gentry were less dependent on local booksellers for their purchases—they could get their books in town. The records themselves, for both sales and borrowing, are by her own admission strikingly uneven: “the Clay records before 1770 are so incomplete, nothing...