The Dangerous Potential of Reading

Readers & the Negotiation of Power in Selected Nineteenth-Century Narratives

Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135883485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The development of a mass readership, a mass market for books, and a prominent status of reading and readers is reflected in the central role of literacy, reading, and books in the lives of protagonists in nineteenth-century American and French literature. In this book, Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau examines the destabilizing role of reading in the works of Frederick Douglass, Horatio Alger, Emile Zola, Louisa May Alcott, and Gustave Flaubert. This book-the first to study nineteenth-century protagonists across lines of nationality, class, and gender-demonstrates the empowering effects of reading for Douglass, Alger's Ragged Dick, Zola's Etienne, Alcott's Jo, and Flaubert's Emma.

Chapter One
Reading and Power in the Nineteenth Century

How unfit the lower orders are for being trusted indiscriminately with the dangerous power of education [and reading].

Elizabeth Gaskell,My Lady Ludlow (1858)¹

I n this passage, Lady Ludlow refers to the connection that exists between reading and power. She opposes Sunday School for the lower classes and argues that the knowledge of reading produces “leveling and revolution.”² Indeed, she goes as far as to say that she would only hire illiterate serving maids. Lady Ludlow’s comments speak of a fear disguised as disdain. She recognizes that the knowledge of reading could give the lower classes powers that could lead to “leveling,” that is, the destruction of the hierarchical social structure and to an even worse fate: that of revolution. Education and the teaching of reading to the lower classes present a threat to her stable world. Lady Ludlow fears a disruption of her world, and she is not alone in her fears. Many contemporaries of this fictional character voice similar concerns.

Destabilization is by definition an act of making unstable, of disrupting an established order. The nineteenth century saw an upheaval in everything concerning the act of reading. Revolutionary changes took place in all aspects of the book market: production, distribution, and readership. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the historical development of the book market and the readership in the nineteenth century. It shows that the changes represent an overthrow of the established order and customs, and that a large part of the population in the United States, France, and England reacted with fear to these changes. This chapter examines how the relationship between reading and power accounts for these feelings of fear. This discussion provides the background for examining the selected narratives. The approach to fiction and history in this study is a combination of various theoretical models. I combine the ideas of new historicism that texts are linked to multiple institutions, beliefs, and cultural practices with ideas of cultural materialism. According to Hayden White, all history is interpretation and a narrative discourse, that is, fiction itself. While I do see a dividing line between history and fiction, the two are intertwined, and one informs the other. It is before this background that I wish to look at the historical changes in the nineteenth-century related to reading, publishing, and bookselling. I show how narratives—fiction primarily written by middle-class intellectuals— incorporate and “digest” historical realities.³

To examine the development in the book market in the nineteenth century, it is necessary to analyze the intertwined issues of the history of the book, the history of reading and the history of literacy. This study can only briefly outline the developments that occurred in the United States, England, and France.⁴ It is important to note that in each country the changes took place in different phases and at a different rate. However, it can be said that in these three countries, the nineteenth century witnessed major changes and an unbalancing of the old “reading world.”

In England and France, in particular, reading had for centuries been the preserve of small social, religious, and political elites.⁵ The church monitored the reading of the scriptures in monasteries and universities, and the king or queen controlled secular publications. In addition, the landed nobility played an important role through its function as patrons.⁶ Their large influence could allow authors to rise to fame, or it could destroy them. In the United States books and reading had also been the pastime of small elites. Yet higher rates of literacy speak for the “uniqueness” of the United States in that a larger portion of the population had access to reading and the book market.⁷

During this time, the book was considered a luxury item in the western world; its cost made it unattainable for anyone but the wealthy. Books were produced for a limited market in a slow process with old machines. Printers—organized in guilds—and booksellers still held those functions later to be taken over by publishers. The books were sold to a very small percentage of the population in the large urban centers. The Bible, chapbooks, almanacs, and devotionals were an exception to this pattern in that they were sold in rural areas as well.⁸

This situation affected the writing of books as much as their production and distribution. Authors considered themselves participants in the culture of belles-lettres, and they wrote for a defined known readership. They wrote to please their patrons but also with the aristocracy and upper class as readership in mind.

The readership before the nineteenth century was a rather predictable group. In France, reading before the nineteenth century was a very public event. Reading aloud to others took place in the church, school, or in the salon among the aristocracy. Both in France and in the United States, reading was in a sense a collective endeavor because like-minded readers shared their interpretations and refined their understanding by discussing the works together. The same type of interpretive communities existed in England.⁹ A few works circulated and were known by everyone as a common canon: a narrow range of traditional literature was read aloud over and over again in groups and became deeply embedded in the readers’ consciousness.¹⁰ This type of reading habit has been labeled “intensive” reading.¹¹ An “intensive” reading resulted in communal understanding, but it also insured the acceptance of the “correct” interpretation.¹² During the eighteenth century the middle classes—including women and children—became more and more important as readers in all three countries. However, the lower classes remained largely illiterate and had very limited access to education. The nineteenth century saw almost all of these characteristics of the book market replaced by new realities in most of Western Europe and North America.¹³

In France, the 1789 revolution has been called the origin of modern publishing. The revolution awakened the political consciousness of the population and created an interest in literate skills because printed material was a form of receiving information and voicing opinion.¹⁴ This new interest created a larger market for printed matter which in turn spurred on a new industry. Another explanation for the changes posits the Industrial Revolution, which began in eighteenth-century England and then spread to the Continent and the United States, as a prerequisite for the widespread changes in the book market in the nineteenth century. While the new technologies revolutionized the production and distribution of printed matter, the Industrial Revolution also led to the emergence of the “masses,” the future consumers of all this printed matter. The grouping of people in factories, and the ensuing creation of large cities, led to the concentration of people in large urban centers.

Both of these explanations show that in the nineteenth century a revolution¹⁵ took place in the marketplace; a revolution that affected publishers, writers, and readers alike.¹⁶ With the rise of an industrial economy, new inventions facilitated the publishing and printing process. A steam-powered mechanical press (which allowed printing of 1,000 rather than 150 sheets per hour), the paper making machine, the binding machine,¹⁷ and later in the century the linotype,¹⁸ the photoengraving machine, and new methods of binding¹⁹ allowed for faster and better production of more printed matter than ever before. In addition, the decline in paper and ink prices (and the abolition of the newspaper and paper tax in England)²⁰ helped the expanding business of publishing.²¹

By the mid-1800s, the creation of literature and its publishing had become a vast business proposition. Along with mass production came the need for mass distribution. Initially, itinerant book peddlers made printed matter available to even the most remote areas.²² Moreover, the building and extension of railway networks connected these remote areas with the centers of “civilization” and allowed reliable widespread distribution of printed matter.²³

The publishing business produced a new figure—the publisher—who served as an intermediary between author, printer and bookseller.²⁴ As businessmen, publishers did not consider belles lettres the goal of their work. Instead, they invented ever better sales tactics to market their products. Advertisements, the bestseller system, the metropolitan tabloids, commercial images and slogans, as well as cheap magazines and the serialized novel of the feuilleton, were all invented and used to gain ever larger shares of the reading public.²⁵

Authors adapted to the new system, writing with financial concerns in the back of their minds. They did so grudgingly at times, but they needed to respond to the demands of a mass market. While they catered to the demands of the consumer, the authors and the publishing industry influenced the readership by creating desires and reading habits in the consumers of printed matter.²⁶

Not only did the publishing and producing aspects of the book market undergo dramatic change as a result of these developments, but the readership underwent significant transformations as well. According to one critic, the nineteenth century witnessed the “demise of the gentle reader.”²⁷ The gentle reader was a definable and predictable entity known to the author and the booksellers as well as all other people involved in the production and distribution of books. However, this clearly defined group of readers became submerged in the new mass readership of the nineteenth century, including a large variety of people from different social classes, regions, and with a diversity of opinions. In short, the readership had in one sense become a lot less predictable. However, the market also found the lowest common denominator among the reading public and aggressively marketed printed matter that catered to the desire of the largest possible group. In addition, they manufactured for all these diverse readers the same desires—creating, in a sense, a unified readership.

New inventions figured among the many factors that contributed to the changing makeup of the reading public. Better lighting at home and in public places—first with gas lamps and then with electric bulbs—allowed longer possible reading time. Many towns established public reading rooms which provided good lighting and a more pleasant environment for reading than the overcrowded home.²⁸ In addition, public libraries came into existence, the use of which, however, remained limited due to discriminatory admittance policies.²⁹ Small lending libraries such as the cabinet de lecture in France were more successful than these public libraries in making available printed matter to a large group of people.³⁰ Newly designed furniture facilitated comfortable reading, convenient clothes for ladies allowed for more comfortable reading positions, and reading glasses became available to many more people than heretofore.³¹ In addition, a gradual shortening of working hours permitted more leisure time that could be spent on reading. All these factors contributed to easier access and more opportunities to read for those who had read little or nothing at all before.³²

In addition, books became more affordable for a growing number of people, as buying power increased throughout the nineteenth century while the relative price of books declined. In the second half of the nineteenth century in particular, rising wages allowed more employees to spend money on printed matter. Whereas a novel had previously cost more than a week’s wages, many workers were now able to afford buying printed matter.³³ Members of the working class could not afford literature in the strict sense of the word in the early part of the century, where a novel still cost two days’ wages. The few working people who did buy literature acquired it from street vendors, while most of their reading peers concentrated on even cheaper street literature and newspapers.³⁴ The explosion of print thus affected almost every part of the population.

The result of the above-mentioned changes was a mass consumption of printed matter and an obsession with news, information, and entertainment. People did not read “intensively” as they had done for centuries. Instead of few works read continually by a well-defined readership, readers now consumed a large number of printed texts that they read quickly, one after the other. In lieu of “intensive” reading as practiced earlier, the nineteenth century witnessed “extensive” reading.³⁵ Readers read “all kinds of material, especially periodicals and newspapers, and read it only once, then raced on to the next item.”³⁶ In France, reading became more individualized and less public, as reading was not an activity of the salons anymore. Similarly, in England and the United States, communities of like-minded readers ceased to exist. Instead, individual appreciation and taste came to define the readership.³⁷

One of the main changes in the readership of the nineteenth century was its social makeup. Previously, only members of the upper class and religious and political elites in urban centers had enjoyed access to literacy and to reading material. In the eighteenth century members of the middle class became more and more prominent as readers.³⁸ Now the mass market expanded “downward and outward,”³⁹ reaching the rural areas as well as the lower classes.

Therefore, one of the major changes in the nineteenth century was the unprecedented access of the lower classes to schooling and literacy. In France, in the United States and in Britain, laws regarding mandatory primary schooling ensured that by the end of the century virtually everyone was literate or had at least undergone some years of primary schooling.⁴⁰ Whereas for centuries literacy h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• The “Dangerous” Potential of Reading
• Chapter One Reading and Power in the Nineteenth Century
• Chapter Two “the Pathway from Slavery to Freedom”
• Chapter Three the Passage to Middle-Class Respectability
• Chapter Four the Road to Revolt
• Chapter Five Women, Reading, and Power
• Chapter Six the Demonic Underneath the Angelic Little Woman
• Chapter Seven a Little Woman Gone Astray
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography