Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa (review)

In memoirs of rural life, reading is often portrayed as escape—a means of fleeing the monotony and grueling labor of the farm for more colorful and exotic textual worlds. In A Son of the Middle Border (1917), for instance, Hamlin Garland recalls that he was "devoted to literature" as a child. Books such as Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp were a "magic Flying Carpet" that carried him away from his family's "snow bound little cabin" on the Iowa plains "into the wide air of Oriental romance" (qtd. in Pawley 9).

In her study Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa, Christine Pawley shows that accounts such as Garland's obscure as much they reveal. No doubt the writer's several memoirs indicate that reading was central in realizing his literary ambition—and, more generally, in learning to place his family's life on the plains in the broader context of the American scene. But Pawley shows that reading and print played many other roles in the lives of the residents of Osage, Iowa, where Garland and his family moved when he was eleven years old. Using federal and state census data, city records, local newspapers, and the archives of local civic and religious institutions, Pawley uncovers "the day-to-day uses of printed information by men and women, young and old, of all classes and ethnic backgrounds, who lived out their lives in relative anonymity over a hundred years ago" (2). Pawley's concern is not with the reading histories of one or two exceptional writers-to-be but, rather, with the social meaning of print in a Midwestern community at the very moment of its transition from pioneer encampment to permanent settlement.

In separate chapters, Pawley examines how reading and individual and group identity were conditioned by the town's central literary institutions: its schools, public library, churches, newspapers, reading circles, and volunteer associations. Of particular interest is the nearly sixty-page chapter on the town's public library, established in 1876. Pawley studies the library's uncommonly detailed accessions and circulation records, examining not only how age, gender, religion, and class corresponded to borrowing practices but also how the library administration sought to uphold standards of "high culture" while also responding to the decidedly nonelite tastes of many patrons. Some of Pawley's findings confirm what scholars have long suspected. More females borrowed books than males. Of all the books in the collection, romantic and sensational novels were the most popular. Most of the library's patrons came from the population of middle-class Protestants that formed the town elite. (In 1895 only two of the town's ninety-five Catholics borrowed books from the library.) Other findings, however, challenge easy assumptions. Perhaps most notable is that Pawley found little evidence of gender-based reading practices among adults. Though publishers in the late nineteenth century generally assumed that men, women, boys, and girls liked different kinds of books, the Osage public library's borrowing records suggest otherwise. Men frequently borrowed "female" novels such as Diana Mulock's A Brave Lady (1870) and Young Mrs. Jardine (1879); women commonly read "male" writers such as Oliver Optic. Children, by contrast, showed much clearer gender differentiation. Girls and boys were much more likely to pick books that publishers had designed for them. (Another notable though unrelated finding is that, by 1895, the library had yet to buy any of Garland's books!)

The value of Pawley's study lies in such detail as well as in the author's deft examination of the various, often overlapping imagined communities to which Osage residents gained and sustained membership through print. As this fine book shows, for residents of...