Historicizing Communities of Reading in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Report from the Classroom

This essay offers a case study that examines how the history of reading can provide an ideal entrée to doing historicist work in the eighteenth-century literature classroom. Seeking to connect recent scholarly innovations in book history with classroom practice, the author discusses how teaching a set of texts by William Cobbett and Hannah More illuminates both the debate about lower-class literacy in late eighteenth-century Britain and the contemporary student's practice of reading. Manifestly, the texts raise the question of what "literacy" meant in late eighteenth-century Britain, and what the political implications might be if lower-class readers were taught not merely to read, but also to write. But because these texts are less than canonical, they also raise the question of why the debate over lower-class literacy does not constitute part of the literary canon today—a question that helps students to think not just about standards of canonicity, but also about the relationship between those standards and the kinds of reading practices that are privileged in our literature classrooms.