Reading and the Victorians

Juliet John, Matthew Bradley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317071310
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

What did reading mean to the Victorians? This question is the key point of departure for Reading and the Victorians, an examination of the era when reading underwent a swifter and more radical transformation than at any other moment in history. With book production handed over to the machines and mass education boosting literacy to unprecedented levels, the norms of modern reading were being established. Essays examine the impact of tallow candles on Victorian reading, the reading practices encouraged by Mudie's Select Library and feminist periodicals, the relationship between author and reader as reflected in manuscript revisions and corrections, the experience of reading women's diaries, models of literacy in Our Mutual Friend, the implications of reading marks in Victorian texts, how computer technology has assisted the study of nineteenth-century reading practices, how Gladstone read his personal library, and what contemporary non-academic readers might owe to Victorian ideals of reading and community. Reading forms a genuine meeting place for historians, literary scholars, theorists, librarians, and historians of the book, and this diverse collection examines nineteenth-century reading in all its personal, historical, literary, and material contexts, while also asking fundamental questions about how we read the Victorians' reading in the present day.

PART I
The Public Aspects of Private Reading

Chapter 1
Reading by Artificial Light in the Victorian Age

Simon Eliot

Consider an observation made in an article published in 1892 concerning Gladstone’s reading habits:

He was most particular, it said, in maintaining variety in his reading and, during the previous summer, had on hand Dr Langer’s Roman History (in German) for morning reading, Virgil for afternoon, and a novel in the evening.

If Gladstone read novels in the evening then, for at least six months of the year, and very probably for longer, he would need the help of artificial light to read by. But this was clearly not enough, for his eyesight suffered. An early biographer observed that by the late 1830s Gladstone’s

[…] eyesight had been impaired by hard reading. He had eschewed lamps and read entirely by candle-light, and the result was injurious. The doctors recommended him to make a tour in the South of Europe, and he spent the winter of 1838–9 in Rome.¹

Morley confirms this:

The strain on his eyesight that had embarrassed Mr. Gladstone for several months now made abstinence from incessant reading and writing necessary, and he was ordered to travel.

[…]

At Rome, as the state of his eyesight forbade too close resort to picture galleries and museums, he listened to countless sermons, all carefully recorded in his diary.²

But his eyesight still troubled him. On 8 October 1838 the green spectacles that had been recommended to him were proving more trouble than they were worth, and he was considering returning home rather than enduring more.³ Indeed, the index to the Gladstone Diaries records scores of entries on the subject of eyesight: problems, possible solutions, difficulties with the possible solutions, problems with reading by candlelight.

Candlelight not only provided a common source of illumination for most people for most of Gladstone’s lifetime, it was also a subject frequently mentioned in the novels which Gladstone’s contemporaries were reading. Take this, for example, from Dickens’s Great Expectations published in 1861:

From that room, too, the daylight was completely excluded, and it had an airless smell that was oppressive. A fire had been lately kindled in the damp old-fashioned grate, and it was more disposed to go out than to burn up, and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed colder than the clearer air - like our own marsh mist. Certain wintry branches of candles on the high chimneypiece faintly lighted the chamber: or, it would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its darkness.⁴

‘Faintly troubled its darkness’. Trollope, that most political of novelists, and one who modelled one of his characters, Gresham, on Gladstone, had a similar phrase. In The Kellys and the O’Kellys he wrote:

The candles had been put out, and the gloom of the room was only lightened by a single bed-room taper, which, as it stood near the door, only served to render palpable the darkness of the further end of the chamber.⁵

As Gladstone’s problems with his eyesight in the 1830s indicate, the act of reading before the twentieth century could involve all types of arrangements, and all sorts of sacrifices, in terms of location, time, and physical well-being. All more difficult in the past than now when most of us in the developed world have more money, more domestic comforts, more leisure, the chance of better ophthalmic care – and more access to reading matter. If reading in the past were generally more difficult than now, it was often because the cost of reading was much higher. And by ‘cost’ I mean much more than paying the price of a book. Once you had the book you had to find the time, a place and light enough to read by. All these would cost you something, sometimes quite a lot, and not only in cash. If someone is still prepared, indeed eager, to bear all these costs, then it tells us much about the very high value readers in the past put on books, and that itself changes the value we ought to ascribe to reading in the past.

Of course, most people would prefer to read in daylight: it is extensive, even, and free. Unfortunately, until the twentieth century, many people’s long working hours, added to many post-work domestic chores, would mean that there was usually little access to daylight when reading was possible.

What were the alternatives? Well, of course, there was firelight. But its position was fixed and low; its light output was variable but on the whole dim, so in order to make it usable you would have, literally, to get down and dirty.

Roughly speaking, up to the 1820s, and apart from firelight, you had two choices for domestic lighting: the oil lamp and the candle. Oil lamps burned mostly animal fats: fish, pig, sheep, whale – and sometimes vegetable oils. These oils for the most part were heavy and sluggish; they rose through a wick reluctantly by capillary action and sometimes had to be assisted by gravity, or by being preheated, or by clockwork pumps.⁶ Any lamp that was more than a crude wick in a bowl of fat was expensive and needed maintenance. Even at the end of the nineteenth century when lighting had undergone a series of revolutions, great houses would still have special lamp rooms devoted to the maintenance and refuelling of these lights. The other, and probably more common alternative in most circumstances, was the candle. Most candles were made of two different substances: the first, beeswax, was very expensive, but low in odour and with a bright flame; in domestic circumstances, even in affluent homes, beeswax was frequently kept for visitors and for grand occasions. The alternative was tallow.

The standard tallow candle was made by dipping a wick recurrently into hot tallow by which means layers of solidified fat were built up to produce a slightly conically-shaped candle. Tallow was generic name for a variety of solidified animal fats: commonly pig, sheep or ox. In some cultures oily fish or even birds like stormy petrels could be converted into a primitive candle by threading a wick through them. Conducting life by means of a flicking light provided by a slowly burning salmon is an image that escaped even the imagination of Salvador Dali!⁷

There was also a variation on the tallow candle called a rushlight. This consisted of a rush carefully stripped and then dipped in hot tallow fat – usually mutton – and then left to dry. Rush lights would usually be burned in a nearly-horizontal position which would leave a line of greasy drops marking the route of the flame as it burned backwards.

Central, both metaphorically and literally, to the combustion of any candle, other than a rushlight, is the wick. Until the 1820s most wicks consisted of twisted strands of cotton or a similar textile.⁸ The one drawback to this otherwise cheap system was that the wick was not self-consuming. That is, as the candle burnt down, the exposed part of the wick got longer and longer. This apparently minor problem had a quite remarkable impact on readers – something to which I will return.

The 1820s marked the first decade in which major technical innovations started to make themselves felt. Gas lighting, first introduced into factories in 1805, became more widely available domestically. Remember though, that until the introduction of the gas mantle in the 1880s (in response to competition from the new electric light), gas lighting was essentially a raw gas flame that glowed because of all the impurities, particularly carbon, which town gas carried within it.⁹ All those sermons read to the impoverished in night shelters of the sort illustrated by Gustave Doré were being read by the light generated by flaring impurities.

Candles were also improved by the use of stearine extracted from tallow. And plaiting rather than twisting the cotton wick resulted in wicks that needed less maintenance.¹⁰ But all these innovations were much more expensive than the standard tallow candle.

The late 1860s saw the introduction of paraffin or kerosene. Paraffin is a mineral oil which, being very light, flowed easily up a wick by capillary action and needed no pumping. It was cheap, relatively clean, the smell was slight and it was virtually smoke-free.¹¹ But even paraffin lamps needed management such as attention to wicks and to oil levels. Finally, the 1880s saw the first tentative introduction of electric lighting.

All these were real breakthroughs, but we must remember that innovations take some time to work their way through: to become widespread and cheap enough to have an impact on the ordinary user – and innovation could take much longer to spread in the nineteenth century than it does in the twenty-first, particularly in non-urban areas.

Certainly up until the 1870s and probably well beyond, the bulk of less affluent readers in ordinary circumstances would probably have used naked flame candles mostly consuming tallow. Tallow was an unappealing substance. It was smelly and greasy. It was soft so that it could be stuck on an iron spike but had such a low melting point that it would become soft and unusable as temperatures rose in summer. Unless it had been highly purified so that every trace of anything that might go rancid had been removed, the stench might be very unpleasant, particularly once extinguished when a cloud of greasy, choking smoke would be sent up to perfume the room and deposit soot and grease upon the ceiling. Even when the tallow was completely purified, the room might smell like a fish and chip shop on the morning after. Being heavy animal fat, any drips on to table tops, carpets or hangings would be difficult to remove and would leave a distinctive smell. Virtually every reference to tallow or heavy oil lamps links them to dirt, grease or smell – to something filthy and contaminating.

In Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors we have:

Dromio of Syracuse. Marry, sir, she’s the kitchen wench, and all grease; and I know not what use to put her to but to make a lamp of her, and run from her by her own light. I warrant her rags and the tallow in them will burn a Poland Winter. If she lives till doomsday, she’ll burn a week longer than the whole world.¹²

On 15 December 1664 Pepys recorded that he had:

[…] begun to burn wax candles in my closet at the office, to try the change and to see whether the smoke offends like that of tallow candles.¹³

In the 1790s Count Rumford commented:

[…] lamps in general have hitherto been so filthy, and liable to so many disagreeable accidents, that the name can hardly be pronounced or heard without calling up several disgusting ideas […]¹⁴

And Dickens in Dombey and Son observed of a tallow candle that:

Its dirty wick burnt dimly at first, being choked in its own grease.¹⁵

But let us return to the candle and the primitive wick that got longer as the candle burned down. As the wick got longer it became less efficient so the flame and the light output diminished. As the wick got longer, it curled out of the flame and downwards towards the solid wall of tallow that acted as a cup that kept in the molten tallow. When the hot wick touched the wall it melted a gap in that wall and allowed the molten tallow to flow out and down the candle. This is called ‘guttering’. This meant that you lost a considerable amount of the tallow that would otherwise have given you light. In order to avoid this, you had to trim the wick back by use of specially-designed scissors. This process was called ‘snuffing’. Once properly snuffed, a candle would return to its original brightness. Here again is Count Rumford describing an experiment with his newly-designed photometer, in a letter read to the Royal Society on 6 February 1794:

An ordinary tallow candle, of a rather inferior quality, having been just snuffed and burning with its greatest brilliancy, its light was as 100; in eleven minutes it was but 39; after eight minutes more had elapsed, its light was reduced to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The Public Aspects of Private Reading
• Part II The Reading Relationship
• Part III Reading the Victorians Today
• Afterword
• Works Cited
• Index