Rereading the History of the Book

In 2002, I was asked to find an image for a book cover. The requirement was to identify a picture of an eighteenth-century woman writer at work. The task was more difficult than either my editor or I had imagined it would be (Google Images was, after all, still in its infancy). Portraits and engravings of eighteenth-century women writing existed, of course, but they were the needles in the proverbial haystacks of images of eighteenth-century women readers that appeared in my lists of search results. These often uncomfortably eroticized images tended to picture a solitary woman reader against the backdrop of a partially visible domestic interior. Reading, according to these portraits, was a lonely but also titillating pastime, an intimate activity performed for an unseen viewer. As Abigail Williams's insightful, ingeniously researched and eminently readable The Social Life of Books proves conclusively, however, such depictions of reading are works of fiction as seductive and potentially misleading as any of the novels held by these entranced sitters.

The "history of sociable reading" (3) that Williams's book eloquently and brilliantly constructs from an impressive range of print, manuscript, and material archives successfully challenges familiar notions that the eighteenth-century reader was typically a young, female, middling-sort, and solipsistic devourer of fiction. The Social Life of Books thus endorses what book historians have been telling us for some time: that "respectable middle-aged men" consumed more than their fair share of books; that texts were accessed (if not necessarily purchased or traditionally read) across the social spectrum (11); and that "book" is not a synonym for the novel, which was just one of dozens of genres readers encountered in multiple formats, media, and contexts in their day-to-day lives.

Williams's major intervention is to demonstrate that while the experiences of individuals can be mined to revise our understanding of the history of the book, that history is inherently plural, communal, and preeminently social. This is not simply because social (performative or communal) reading was recognized as a necessary corrective to the deleterious effects of solitary reading feared by conduct-book writers and even some novelists. Rather, Williams uncovers how reading, even when on one's own, was understood as a powerful social act. Owning, displaying, reading, reciting, or quoting from books were key mechanisms by which our eighteenth-century forebears "displayed a self to the world" (63). These acts took place in social spaces: the home, the coffee-house, or the circulating library. And these acts were predicated upon a shared recognition of the orality of books, a quality that mattered to publishers and readers in ways to which we have become largely unattuned.

This is a history of reading, then, that is both familiar and, simultaneously, delightfully strange. The book's defamiliarization of its subject opens by reminding us that this history of reading is one of a changing soundscape as much as it is of a changing bookscape. Chapter 1, "How to Read," is less interested in what people chose or were told to read than in the mechanics of orating and performing texts in the pulpit, the spouting club, or drawing room. In what Williams dubs the "great age of elocution" (11), good readers were not always or even often silent readers. On the contrary, reading aloud was a polite accomplishment cultivated not only by those who made their livings as professional readers—clergymen and actors—but also by young men, women, and tradesmen for whom oration offered a path toward self-improvement. Luckily for these amateur and domestic orators, help was at hand. Much of the chapter is devoted to fascinating discussions of a number of guides to reading—elocution manuals by the likes of Thomas Sheridan, primers and gobbit-filled collections of textual extracts organized by emotional theme—produced to give guidance on such matters as pronunciation, gesture, and facial expression.

Williams gives a full and careful account of the ideal readers these various...