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36Historically Speaking · January 2004 Arriving at a History of Reading Jonathan Rose In ourline ofwork, nothing is more gratifying than to lay outan agenda forfuture scholarship, and then see it fulfilled well before one reaches retirement age. On that count, RobertDarnton has a rightto feelvindicated . In his 1986 essay"First StepsToward a History of Reading," he suggested (with due caution) that "it should be possible to develop a history aswell as a theory ofreader response. Possible, but not easy," for how could the historian recapture something so private, so evanescent as the mental experience of the "common reader"? As Darnton warned, "the documents rarelyshowreaders atwork, fashioning meaning from texts, and the documents are texts themselves, which also require interpretation. Few ofthem are rich enough to provide even indirect access to the cognitive and affective elements of reading, and a few exceptional cases maynot be enough for one to reconstruct the inner dimensions ofthat experience."1 In fact, in less than two decades, the historiography of reading has advanced more quicklythan either Darnton orI expected. It constitutes one-third ofthe mission ofa new scholarly organization, the Society for the History ofAuthorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), founded in 1991. Using some of the methods that Darnton suggested —and sometimes inventingnewtechniques for recovering reading experiences— scholars have sketched in some of the blank spaces on this vast empty map. They have constructed and debated historical models. And theyhave produced a remarkable string ofsurprising discoveries, often quite different from what literary theorists predicted. The great obstacle to a history ofreading , as Darnton acknowledged, was a lack of sources. But laborers in this field have, with considerable ingenuity, located and used a wide range ofraw materials that offer some insight into the mental world of ordinary readers: Police records should be mentioned first and foremost. Say what you like about inquisitors and secret policemen: no one has been more helpful to historians ofreading. They asked precisely the questions we want to ask: Whatdidyou read, andhow didyou read it? Where didyou obtain this book? Didyou discuss it with anyone? How didyou interpret this particularpassage? The proceedings of the Inquisition were famouslyused to investigate the reading of a 16th-century Italian miller in Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheeseandthe Worms (1980)—and Ginzburg is by no means the only historian to rely on that kind of documentation . Probate and booksellers' records ofcourse cannot reveal how or even whether a particularbookwas read, buttheycan generate useful statistics ofbookownership and distribution . Wills in particular are one of the few records we have of readers in medieval Europe. In ReadingBecomesa Necessity ofLife: Materialand CulturalLife in RuralNew England , 1?80-1835 (1989), WilliamJ. Gilmore used these sources to reconstruct in astonishing detail the literaryculture ofaVermont backwater in the earlyAmerican republic. Sociological surveys ofreading go back much farther than you might imagine. The StatisticalAccount ofScotlandwas compiled in the 1790s, and it is a mother lode of information on reading habits and local libraries. The USSRmade a large academic investment in the sociologyofreading, and as long as one allows for its ideological biases, one can use these studies to recover the Soviet common reader, as Stephen Lovell did in The Russian ReadingRevolution: Print Culture in the Soviet andPost-SovietEras (2000). Reading groups and literary societiesseem to have been ubiquitous in modern Western societies among all races, all social classes, and both sexes. And fortunately, they often keptminutes. Forherprize-winningForgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of AfricanAmerican Literary Societies(2002), Elizabeth McHenry drew on these records to rediscover a literarytradition thatwe scarcely knew existed. Memoirs and diaries of ordinary people have been collected and used bysocial historians to illuminate family life, work experiences , gender roles, and popular mentalities. It is significant that when the "inarticulate masses" write their own history, they have quite a lot to say about their reading. These documents made possible David Vincent's Bread, Knowledge, andFreedom (1981), as well as my own The Intellectual Life ofthe British Working Classes (2001). Of course, some literary cultures produced more autobiographies than others. Britain seems particularly well-favored in this respect: for my book, I was able to draw on about 900working-class memoirs for the 19th century alone, whereas Martyn Lyons could only locate...

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