Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading: Print Culture and Popular Instruction in the Anglophone Atlantic World by Eve Tavor Bannet (review)

Eighteenth-century guides to reading, such as Isaac Watts's extremely influential Improvement of the Mind (1741), often presented reading as akin to surveying and mapping, according to Ms. Bannet. The experience of reading her study is akin to seeing a well-known landscape from an unfamiliar angle—the top of a bus or a low-flying plane—occasionally surprising and undeniably satisfying.

Manners of Reading aspires to delineate "common, once familiar, ideas and practices" of reading as recommended or presented in a varied range of eighteenth-century texts: copybooks, grammars, guides to study, periodical pieces, philosophical essays, and novels. Urging at the outset that the most illuminating way to think of eighteenth-century reading is in terms of "variously limited and extended literacies," Ms. Bannet ranges her six chosen "manners" of reading according to increased complexity. In chapter 1, plurality presents itself in the form of the eighteenth-century's multiple alphabets; she notes that eighteenth-century copy-books, such as those published by the engraver George Bickham, ordered variety without attempting to eliminate it. In relation to spellers, dictionaries, and grammars (approximately 155 grammars printed between 1750 and 1800) she again emphasizes diversity, remarking that even apparently authoritative works such as Johnson's Dictionary (1755) and Robert Lowth's Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) reached readers in multiple ways, often in abridged or amended form. Spellers and grammars had priorities other than the promotion of a standardized English, including the teaching of syllabic reading and the conventions of analogic thinking, which, once again, allowed readers to manage variety. The popularization of the art of reading aloud, instructions for which were increasingly available to general readers, is the subject of the appealing second chapter. Pronouncing anthologies such as James Burgh's Art of Speaking (1761), William Scott's Lessons in Elocution (1779), and Vicesimus Knox's Elegant Extracts (1784), provided passages of poetry and prose for daily practice. Ms. Bannet interestingly speculates that the demands in such works for readers to exercise sympathy "may have played a neglected role" in producing the taste for literary representations of the passions so crucial to sentimental literature at century's end.

Chapter 3 turns to reading as study, with particular attention given to Watts's Improvement of the Mind, and Hester Chap-one's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773) as the most influential guides, noting how the intersection of chronology and geography was considered fundamental to a studious reader's retention of knowledge. One reason Manners of Reading is so informative is that it is constructed around, and driven by, often ignored primary sources. Throughout, the apparently artless methodology of the book provides detailed and impressive reconstructions of eighteenth-century recommendations to readers. In the book's final chapters, however, its boldness of conception and interpretative drive become much more apparent. The subject of chapter 4, "discontinuous reading," is not a term readers in the eighteenth century would recognize, although they were almost certainly familiar with the practice. Borrowing the term from Peter Stallybrass, who uses it in describing the shift from scroll to codex, Ms. Bannet extends the designation to indicate a taste for "variety, discontinuity and the shock of novelty and surprise."

This taste was satisfied by "miscellarian" writing as described and practiced by Shaftesbury in his Characteristicks (1711); by Addison, the "great theorist" of such writing, in The Spectator (1711–1714); and by Isaac D'Israeli in his Miscellanies (1796). Some works are conceived as miscellanies, but some have the miscellaneous thrust upon them. What most interests Ms. Bannet is the unruly energy of readers as they read discontinuously: reading the bits that appeal, skipping chapters, letting the eye glide over intractable matter. For her inclusion of novels under "miscellaneous," she can adduce several arguments: it was the classification often used for novels in reviews, many eighteenth-century novels are episodic...