Going Out to Play

For all that we know about the effects and materials of reading, the process itself remains mysterious. One of many revealing patterns to emerge in The History of Reading, a new anthology in the Routledge Literature series, is the recurrence of metaphors of food, from late antiquity to the present day, when an individual seeks to characterise the reading experience. Paulinus of Nola wrote of his receipt of a letter from Augustine: 'the loaves that I longed for were in my hand, in the form of the letter [. . .] which later tasted most sweet to my mouth and stomach when I devoured it' (p. 53). Louise Mejer, in 1784, described certain forms of 'excessive' reading in Germany: 'Here people are stuffed with reading matter in the same way that geese are stuffed with noodles' (p. 45). In a more recent context, in postings on a website for the Canada Reads project, readers speak of 'the chapters I had devoured' or, conversely, of being 'consumed by the story' (p. 418). Theorists of reading are equally likely to think in such terms; Bakhtin reminds us that 'Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life' (p. 113). And, of course, there is always someone who takes a metaphor to heart; Robert Darnton notes 'the case of a woman in Hampshire, England, who "ate a New Testament, day by day and leaf by leaf, between two sides of bread and butter, as a remedy for fits"' (p. 30).

This reversion to a metaphor of eating (or being eaten) points to an intrinsic problem for any history of reading, to which numerous contributors to this volume refer: we know so little about what happens when we read. As Darnton writes:

We have some answers to the 'who', 'what', 'where', and 'when' questions. But the 'whys' and 'hows' elude us. We have not yet devised a strategy for understanding the inner process by which readers made sense of words [. . .] Is the cognitive process different for Chinese, who read pictographs, and for Westerners who scan lines? For Israelis who read words without vowels moving from right to left and for blind people who transmit stimuli through their fingers?

(p. 29)

The editors note in their general introduction that 'the history of reading is still in its infancy' and that its relationship to related disciplines (such as book history or literary history) is not clearly defined; difficulties also press in when one considers the relevance of histories of art or music and 'the physiology, psychology and neurology of reading as an evidence-based enquiry' (p. 4). Darnton's questions point also to a wider difficulty. It is hard to know where this discipline might find its boundaries. The history of literature, for example, is nearly always the history of a particular tradition. But a history of reading lends itself to a much wider canvas, to comparisons between languages and cultures and to existential questions about when the reading experience begins for any particular individual - with the advent of literacy, for example, or before or after that (as one begins to make sense of the world).¹

The anthology is divided into seven sections and the General Introduction claims that it is 'organised along a clearly marshalled intellectual trajectory' (p. 5). Section 1 makes attempts at 'defining the field', through contributions such as Q. D. Leavis on 'the book market' and Reinhard Wittmann, in a stimulating chapter entitled 'Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?', which evaluates the growth of mass literacy (particularly in Germany) and its connections to fiction reading. Section 2 focuses on 'theorising the reader', drawing in Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, Paul Saenger, and others. Section 3 looks at 'researching and using literacy', with contributors including Roger S. Schofield, who argues convincingly that the growth of literacy in England in the period 1740-1850 was a symptom rather than a cause of economic growth, and Richard Hoggart, whose claims to...