In Bed with the Duchess

Samuel Pepys was in the habit of enjoying life, and books were among his greatest pleasures. Plays, music, and poetry together make up almost a third of his recorded reading. The subject catalogue for his library has a whole section named ‘For Diversion’ including poems, satires, and novels. When he read he did so with an enthusiasm which could overwhelm judgement. Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes was apparently ‘the best poem that ever was wrote’ whilst The Fruitlesse Precaution (a translation of a French novel) was ‘the best-writ tale that ever I read in my life’. Hudibras baffled him, but he persevered because he knew it was fashionable. As a diarist, a letter writer, a government official, a published author, and both a collector and donor of books Pepys is a uniquely well documented seventeenth-century reader. He left a record in his own words of not only what he read but how and, most importantly, why he read it. This is an extremely promising source of evidence for understanding seventeenth-century readers’ practices and the motivations which lay behind them.

Understanding how people used books in the past is important because nothing, not even a book, speaks for itself. Objects have an importance in human life as a result of how people encounter them and how they think about those encounters, their consequences, and the objects themselves. An unread book, or one that is encountered only in the schoolroom, or one that is universally known to be not just immoral but evil, will work in its own particular way partly dependent on that context. In recognition of this, there has been a gradual shift of attention within the field of the history of the book away from how books were made and towards how they were used. This marks a departure from the tradition of analytical bibliography which dominated book history until after the middle of last century and which focused on understanding how books were manufactured. But understanding what books are, why they have been important, and what they have done to shape history depends on knowing how they were used and how they were thought of as well as how they were made. The history of reading is an attempt to recover this history of use. It assumes that knowing how books were made is important but that it isn’t enough on its own to explain their cultural and historical significance. What is needed is an understanding of how books as objects existed within a context of practices and ideas which together formed print culture.

Kate Loveman’s study of Samuel Pepys and His Books is concerned with one such context in London in the last four decades of the seventeenth century. It is an attempt to understand the particular circumstances which shaped one reader’s activities rather than an account of how reading practices have changed over time. It is therefore a case-study (albeit a substantial one) of the sort which has become common since Rolf Engelsing’s theory of a ‘reading revolution’ lost its prominence in the field of the history of reading. Engelsing argued that readers had shifted from ‘intensive’ reading (repeated reading and rereading of a small number of texts) to ‘extensive’ reading (reading as much as possible and rarely returning to a text).¹ Extensive reading was a consequence of printing, of urbanisation, and of consumer economies which stimulated demand for novelty and then satisfied it. The theory was eye-catching but, as more evidence about historical readers was accumulated, it became apparent that historical reading practices were more varied than Engelsing’s model allowed for. Loveman’s findings provide more examples of this variability. Pepys, for example, would read and reread his favourite plays but would dispose of other books after a single reading. Lots of twenty-first-century readers are like that, and so were lots of sixteenth-century readers.

As faith in the reading revolution waned, no other grand...