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

There is "no part wherein the Understanding needs more careful and wary Conduct than in the Use of Books" (83). So wrote John Locke in the 1706 "On the Conduct of the Understanding," one of several of the philosopher's works to inform Eve Tavor Bannet's meticulous study of "what readers did, or thought they were doing, while they were reading" in the eighteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic world (3).

These are not unfamiliar questions, of course. Moreover, our responses to them have been significantly expanded by the recent rise in studies of habits, sites, and psychologies of eighteenth-century reading by the likes of Christina Lupton, Betty Schellenberg, Mark Towsey and Abigail Williams. Bannet's work supplements and complements these accounts, adding to the wealth of empirical evidence they have unearthed about the behavior of individuals in the form of a detailed excavation of the "prevailing prescriptions" about reading negotiated by eighteenth-century readers. Shifting our perspective in this way is important, the book contends, not least because we have too long allowed our ideas about reading, literature and, for that matter, literary criticism to be overdetermined by assumptions grounded in the priorities of a "faction" of self-declared "'men of taste'" whose views were as partial as they could be self-serving (3).

Challenging these assumptions through careful attention to a wide range of both well-known and more obscure texts—including grammars, dictionaries, philosophical works, periodicals and novels—Bannet's book illuminates a range of once familiar reading practices that individuals and national, gendered or social groups utilized for different ends. These practices are collectively referred to throughout the book as "manners of reading," a phrase coined by Roger Chartier but usefully expanded here to characterize not only methods of reading—"the means, media, skills and mental processes that contemporaries employed to put books to specific uses"—but also the "mores" of reading—the "proprieties, practices, rituals, and modes of judgment and expression which performed 'the task of showing distinctions, of making manifest differences in the social hierarchy'" that Chartier has described (6). Each of the six "manners of reading" identified by Bannet has its own dedicated chapter—with the exception of Chapter 3, which discusses two—that uncovers its functions, implications, and development over time. The result is a rich and fascinating history not only of reading and the book in the transatlantic eighteenth century, but also of print culture, education and literary criticism.

Chapter 1, "The ABCs of Reading," is concerned with reading for comprehension. It begins by elaborating the multiple impediments faced by aspiring readers, including differences between regional pronunciation and printed English, between printed text and manuscript hand, and the challenge of deciphering the bewildering range of printers' fonts. Outlining these challenges allows Bannet to make what is surely one of the book's most important claims. Much ink has been spilled, of course, in attempts to quantify how many people could read in this period. But the question is unanswerable in part because the assumption that underpins it is faulty. Reading is not a single "homogeneous thing" (45). A reader able to interpret a certain typeface or alphabet, for instance, might not have been able to read a particular or even any manuscript hand. It is much more illuminating, as Bannet advocates, to think of eighteenth-century readers as enjoying a range of "variously limited and extended literacies" (45). The spellers, grammars and dictionaries that are at the heart of this chapter accommodated this plurality of literacies and, in the process, became "the cornerstone of print's campaign to teach more and more members of society to read and understand printed writing" (75). It was a campaign waged on several fronts, but particularly through the teaching of grammar, syllabic reading, and the promotion of "analogical thinking," a form of mental substitution of one thing...