Teaching Students to Imagine Nineteenth-Century British Readers

Literature professors regularly assign Victorian novels to be read in serial installments, an activity that helps students imagine how an original reader might have experienced the texts.¹ Such an activity draws attention to formal issues, such as how an author reminds readers of previously introduced characters who might not have appeared for several installments. Reading serially also helps students notice an author’s decisions about plot, pace, and structure—especially when they must stop reading at a particularly gripping cliffhanger. Absorbing the text more slowly also recreates, in part, the social aspects of reading because students often find themselves discussing scenes, characters, and predictions outside as well as inside class.

While reading serially can effectively and enjoyably help students imagine nineteenth-century readers, it is not the only way that people of the period read—or that contemporary students can approximate their reading experiences. In my “British Literature since 1780” course, I introduce students to two additional nineteenth-century reading strategies: reading aloud and creating a commonplace book. Assignments based on these ways of reading allow students to experience texts with fresh eyes, which leads to deeper understandings of literature, history, culture, and even themselves.

In order to create a structure that supports these two assignments, I build my course on the topics of reading, writing, and publishing. Such a foundation allows the students to trace common themes and issues that rose to prominence in the nineteenth century, when changes in education and printing technologies (among other factors) radically increased literacy rates and altered reading audiences. At the same time, this approach is loose and broad enough to allow exploration of varied topics. For example, throughout the semester, we discuss the changing sources of authorial inspiration, new or modified genres of writing (such as social-problem fiction, the dramatic monologue, and Modernist experimentation), and the role of the literary marketplace in shaping writing opportunities (especially for women and postcolonial writers). We also discuss the period’s common reading practices to understand how writers might have shaped their writing decisions out of their awareness of audience reading conventions or how reading practices may have altered a text’s reception. Therefore, in the context of the course, mimicking nineteenth-century ways of reading becomes an integrated and natural component of the class.

In our unit on the Romantic period, students learn that people commonly read aloud to each other. In fact, reading aloud was such a universal experience that Muriel Harris calls it an “institution” in the nineteenth century (346). Multiple factors influenced this practice. First, books were expensive, and, according to Richard Altick, at the time there was still “a low literacy rate among the masses” (35). Altick provides several anecdotes that reveal people’s responses to those challenges: in one case, twenty people assembled in a locksmith’s shop to listen to Pickwick Papers, which they had borrowed from a circulating library (11); in another, laborers pooled their money to buy radical periodicals, reading them aloud in alehouses (324). Second, because reading matter proliferated like never before, there was cultural anxiety about reading, and reading aloud gave parents an opportunity to protect children (or husbands to protect wives) from objectionable texts. Parents or authority figures found this “improving” function particularly attractive because they could, as Karen Flint describes, “check the dangerous delights of solitary reading” and “introduce children to valued works of literature” (100, Flint’s emphasis). As an example, Sarah Stickney Ellis in The Young Ladies’ Reader (1845) writes, “It is scarcely possible to imagine a prudent and judicious mother allowing the unrestrained and private reading of Shakespeare amongst her children; but if herself a good reader, thoroughly imbibed with a sense of the beautiful and the pure, it is possible to imagine her reading passages from Shakespeare to her family in such a manner, as to improve the taste of those around her, and to raise their estimate of what is great and good” (qtd. in Flint 83, Ellis’s emphasis). Finally, research (and common sense) also suggests that people found pleasure and unity in the shared social experience, much in the...