The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home by Abigail Williams (review)

The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home is one of the latest volumes in Yale University Press's Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History. The series boasts a wide range of socio-historical studies of the long (and, significantly, not exclusively Western) eighteenth century, including in-depth looks at topics as diverse as the slave trade, capitalism, empire, environmentalism, and even happiness.

With its interdisciplinary scope, extensive primary research, and attention to the connection between literature and culture, Williams's book fits well with those that came before it in the series. It also exemplifies the kind of work that scholars of the history of authorship, reading, and publishing have been doing for decades: placing the book firmly in its socio-historical context and in the hands of those who actually consumed it. Moreover, with its literary focus, it will simultaneously draw in the more traditional or canon-focused literary scholars looking to contextualize eighteenth-century texts or expand their knowledge of certain authors. Seeming to nod or wink in that direction, Williams's opening example is about the composition of a well-known William Wordsworth poem, though not through the lens of his inspirations or writing process but of his sister Dorothy's diary and her narrative about their joint walk in nature. Immediately, Williams turns on its head the old school notion of the individual "Author figure" composing and/or reading great, long-lasting literature alone in a room.

Williams calls her study a look into "the history of sociable reading," though that description hardly covers all it aims to (and succeeds in) doing. The Social Life of Books finds its place among studies of domestic life and the emerging middle class and public sphere, as well as within histories of eighteenth-century publishing houses and the emerging popular book trade. Williams's study manages to be both an overarching look at trends throughout the century and an intricate look at the particulars of certain texts or kinds of readers.

The Social Life of Books is comprehensive and dense, employing careful and detailed secondary and primary text research and archive work. Williams quotes from private journals, letters, and subscription lists as well as the more expected novels, newspapers, and poems. Her focus is on England (and often London in particular), though Williams nods to the increasing geographical dispersal of books and book culture in Chapter 4 ("Access to Reading"). Each of the eight chapters focuses one particular aspect of or influence on "sociable reading," including the elocution movement, increased literacy, the appearance of book clubs and subscription libraries, the trade in mass market paperbacks and newspapers, the consumption of nonfiction, the development of satire as a genre, and the mutually influential history of orality and silent reading. Together, these chapters allow Williams to examine many genres of literature and provide countless examples of printed texts and manuscripts (sermons, drama, poetry, popular science, textbooks, commonplace books, abridgements, letters); collectively, she also considers the interests, experiences, and opportunities of any group of readers one might imagine (women, children, large middle-class families, and servants, to name a few). She even delves into discussions about "book-related furniture and accessories" such as lighting, bookcases, other books where one could record or index the family library, and even "status symbol" labels or book plates to paste inside a new purchase. For Williams, books were intricately and inextricably connected to all aspects of one's home and social life. Moreover, this home and social life simultaneously influenced the content, composition, and consumption of the long eighteenth-century's "books" in whatever format we take that to mean.

The scope of The Social Life of Books (and, indeed, each individual chapter) is so sweeping, in fact, that at times I wondered if this could instead have turned into eight—or more—separate books, each focused on the place of...