Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States (review)

Hamilton Wright Mabie is a neglected figure in literary and cultural history. His advice column for readers, which ran for ten years in the Ladies’ Home Journal, was effectively elided from his “official” biography and often ignored in subsequent studies of literary culture. But as Amy Blair suggests in her evocatively titled Reading Up, Mabie is well worth attention, not for his critical acumen but because his work at the Ladies’ Home Journal provides an illuminating vantage point from which to grasp the way an ideology of literacy—the belief “that reading ‘good’ books would somehow be good for you both socially and financially”—became naturalized in the early-twentieth century U.S.

Drawing on the work of recent historians of reading such as Joan Rubin and Barbara Sicherman and on scholars of reception study such as Tony Bennett, Steven Mailloux, and James Machor, Blair emphasizes the importance of contextualizing books and readers in their own cultural moment. She thus joins the growing number of historians and literary scholars who believe that the popularity of a text is good reason to pay attention to it, rather than a reason to dismiss it from scholarly consideration. Unlike earlier advice-givers in the Journal, Mabie had significant influence on a growing segment of the American reading public; with an audience of a million by 1904, the Journal was “the most widely circulated . . . women’s lifestyle magazine of the early twentieth century.” Through his recommendations for particular books and specific modes of reading, Mabie helped guide the aspiring middle-class regarding both what and how to read. As Robert Darnton has suggested, understanding the “how” of reading is among the most elusive of goals, and it is here that Blair makes her most substantial contribution.

By analyzing Mabie’s language (of spiritual, moral and economic value) alongside the plot and themes of the texts he recommends, Blair effectively employs her concept of “reading up” to explain “why some texts became popular bestsellers despite their critique of, or even contempt for, popular tastes and ambitions.” Her analysis of the way canonical texts were often “misread” in their own time demonstrates the interpretive creativity available to new readers who (unlike Howells, Wharton, or James) understood novel-reading itself as instrumental—milestones on a pathway to success. Some of Mabie’s recurrent terminology (e.g., “wholesome”) could benefit from additional pressure, but Blair’s many citations from neglected reviews enable her to situate both Mabie and the books he recommends within widely shared norms of the period—assumptions about literature often overlooked by scholars more familiar with contemporary academic criticism than with reading practices of the past. In addition, Blair’s emphasis on the “historically contingent aspects of reception” helps her avoid two common pitfalls: essentializing texts and making sweeping assumptions about readers. Instead of generalizing about “the readers” of the Journal, Blair extrapolates “the kind of reader the Journal imagined for itself” and the likely ways its readership “would look for itself in the wide-ranging contents of each issue.” I sometimes found myself wondering whether Blair’s authorial “we” reflects her own position as an academic or as a more “general” reader, but her analysis creates a keen historical perspective on “the reading formation” that was “produced by, and produced demand for, Mabie’s columns.” While conceptualizing Mabie’s “remarkably consistent philosophy of reading” Blair complicates recent claims about the opposition between realism and romance, exposing the limits of generic boundaries. Her idea of the “highbrow bestseller” is one of several extremely useful concepts (the “readable James” is another!) through which Reading Up highlights the blurry line between aesthetic taste, cultural capital, and financial ambition in the “culture of success.”