The Business of Reading in Nineteenth-Century America: The New York Mercantile Library

In 1853 the New York Times offered an editorial about the proposed relocation of a popular circulating library uptown. “Should the Mercantile Library Company decide to occupy the Opera House” at Astor Place, joining the Astor Library, the Society Library, and the Historical Society, the largest book collections in New York City would be within a stone’s throw of one another. “No arrangement could be more satisfactory to the literary man by profession,” the editorial declared. “His sedentary habits will not be overtasked” by hunting down a source, and so “it becomes easy to be learned and lazy at the same time.” While midtown Manhattan would become the fashionable locale for “spectacled young men of pale complexion,” and a “market will exist there for the acquisition and exchange of ideas,” the proposed move would have less salutary benefits for “those who do not study but only read; in whose lives literature is an incident and not an aim, an amusement or a solace, and not a business”:

Certainly, the centralization of our stores will be a source of inconvenience to promiscuous and un-methodic readers, to whom books are merely time-killers. Young men may be tempted to forego the trouble of procuring them, if they are not at hand, and supply their place with a dangerous study of the book of city life, whose illuminated leaves are the theatre, drinking-saloon, and gaming parlor. . . . If books are to be an attraction from such mischiefs, the attraction should unquestionably be found in the thickest of the evil, courting the eye of the tempted. The managers of the Mercantile Library Association are maturely advising upon the subject. All these points will, doubtless, have their full weight. If the balance be struck in favor of removal, the civilization of the Fifteenth Ward may be regarded as complete. It will presently hold all the wise men of Gotham. ¹

Cultural reformers have argued since the emergence of mass educational systems that books are mediums of moral pedagogy: we prefer, according to the ideology of literacy, to see our children absorbed in the pages of textbooks or literature rather than the book of urban life. But this editorial also recognized a fact that has often been overlooked in histories and theories of reading: the experience of reading, and education for civic and moral ends more generally, takes place within a dense cultural landscape of “attractions,” within communities mediated by institutions of various kinds. It also recognized that the study of books as a “business” by “professional” men of letters meets values and needs very different from the “amusement or solace” of “promiscuous and un-methodic readers”—from reading by people who, as the editorial’s sarcasm about pale book-worms suggests, have real business to which to attend. If the editorial seems unkind in its lampooning of the scholar, it is worth remembering that most Americans at this time habitually associated some styles and values of reading with the inequalities of aristocratic culture. Scholarly “ease” and “laziness” connoted privileged access to cultural goods and a professional monopoly on the moral authority traditionally conferred by liberal learning—the cultural authority of the “professional man of letters” which was denied to most working people, struggling to make a living and to exercise autonomy amidst the pressures and distractions of the book of life.

Behind this seemingly arcane debate about where to locate a library in nineteenth-century New York is a question that remains a pressing one for late twentieth-century America: how do we construct a democratic civic culture amidst the social havoc that historians and sociologists have identified with the process of capitalist development? Industrialization and urbanization resulted in the dissolution of traditional, “organic” forms of social organization: the mechanic’s paternal regard for and intimacy with his apprentices gave way to wage relations and polarized class interests. The home decreased in significance as a site of economic production shared by women and men, becoming a separate sphere governed by domestic ideology where mothers nurtured smaller numbers of children. Towns and...