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

An enduring narrative of eighteenth-century literary culture explains that the new genre of the novel raises its head in the literary marketplace and propagates a developing idea of the individual. That idea finds expression in novelists' explorations of individual character, but it is also mirrored within literary reception in a rise of self-absorbed readers separately indulging themselves in the private—and possibly dangerous—pleasures of prose fiction. Since that narrative gained influence in the second half of the twentieth century, numerous studies have sought to refine or puncture it. Scholars have questioned both the idea of the novel's dominance within a variegated culture industry and the depiction of literary consumption that, while revolving around a notion of a broad reading public, sees readers largely seeking seclusion for the activity that places them within that public. Now The Social Life of Books entirely overturns that story with a magnificently well-researched account of how books of many different kinds were used communally in the period and functioned as a binding agent within families, among friends, in clubs and associations, and within eighteenth-century society as a whole. Appealing to readers within the academy and beyond, Ms. Williams explores both what was read and how it was read in her rich examination of "the many ways in which books have knitted people together," demonstrating with a mass of newly unearthed examples that social consumption of books was the norm rather than an exception.

Ms. Williams builds on recent histories of bookselling and collecting, circulating libraries, elocution, letter-writing, and of the eighteenth-century home, discreetly synthesizing the existing scholarship in her telling of this fascinating episode in the history of sociable reading. In the foreground of her narrative are the many revealing examples of books being consumed communally or serving as a social mediator by being talked about, discussed in letters, given as gifts, borrowed, cited in company, and other communal activities. Examples are the primary tools of argument here, and one of the best achievements of this study lies in the gathering and assemblage of material from diaries, private letters, records of book borrowing, commonplace books, and scrap-books, the mass of which offers irrefutable support for the several strands within Ms. Williams's fabric of evidence demonstrating that a key function of books in the eighteenth century lay in their facilitation of social bonding.

Books were commonly read aloud in the home. This is familiar enough—thanks not least to well-known fictional representations such as Austen's depiction of Mr. Collins's tedious reading of James Fordyce's Sermons in Pride and Prejudice. The Social Life of Books greatly enriches the existing picture in its probing of the practicalities and purposes of such reading, and in its attention to what Mr. Collins seems to be oblivious to: the eighteenth century's interest in performance techniques as witnessed by the numerous guides to reading aloud, anthologies of passages suitable for performance, and the widespread emulation within the home of admired actors and orators. Ms. Williams is interested in such basic matters as how printed matter was seen, with her research reminding us that candles were precious commodities and that ophthalmic spectacles were the preserve of the few until the end of the century. She tells us how books, both new and secondhand, were bought and where these owned objects were typically kept in the home, and she examines different ways in which books were borrowed: in organized ways through libraries and clubs and more casually between friends and relatives.

Most important, she presents numerous scenes of communal reading to show the many different reasons why people read aloud. "They did it because they had to, and because they wanted to. Families gathered together for their evening 'duty' of reading psalms and prayers; parents read to their children and asked their children to read to them; married couples and friends...