books manufactured in America between 1820 and 1860 increased from $2.5 million to over $13 million.8 Effective distribution of these books and other printed material was enabled by the development of the regional railroad, along with the regularization of coastal transportation.9 Literacy rates, which had always benefited from the American Protestant tradition of sola scriptura, skyrocketed during this period. Census data suggest that as much as 90 percent of the adult white population could read and write by 1850.10 The precipitate advance in literacy was to the result of a variety of factors, from the socioeducational (the spread of common schools and the growing popularity of libraries at mid-century) to the religious (the rise of evangelical Christian movements with their emphasis on private and group interface with the Word) to the economic (the upturn in market activity necessitating a minimally literate bourgeoisie) to the technological (advances in domestic lighting and in corrective eyewear).11 These transformations along with new opportunities for leisure and the increasing cultural prestige associated with books all served to create a culture of reading in which books and literacy became, in the words of one historian, “a necessity of life.”12
But these developments also prompted anxieties about the number of books in circulation and the ways readers were approaching these materials. In response, manuals on reading cropped up by the hundreds. Taking their cue from earlier British authorities who railed against the dangers of print culture,13 these handbooks bore prescriptive titles—On the Right Use of Books (1878), Hints on Reading (1839), What To Read and How To Read (1870), Exercises in Reading and Recitation (1832)—and issued dire warnings regarding the state of modern publishing. Commentators bemoaned the “mighty flood of unsavory literature,” characterizing its consequences as “Evil, and evil, and evil again.”14 The Reverend Edwin Hubbell Chapin, who authored several conduct manuals, many including advice on reading, was especially inclined to such eschatological pronouncements. He decried the mass of new texts “which have leaped from the press like the frogs of Egypt, swarming in our streets and houses, our kitchens and bed-chambers.” Most of them, he insisted, “are unmitigated trash, the froth of superficial thinking, the scum of diseased sentiment.”15 Sounding a note equally dire, W. P. Atkinson asked, “In this wide ocean … of modern knowledge, how shall we save ourselves from being lost?”16 Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding have written that apocalyptic discourse is a “mode of attention … and voice … [that] has come to inhabit and structure modern American life.” Its idiom of imminent cataclysm is associated with transformation and particularly with “rapid social and cultural change.”17 Thus, for all its religious resonance, apocalypticism tends to characterize modernity; its dystopic visions and Manichaean orientation serve as both warning of and compensation for a new, chaotic, and disorienting existence. In this context, conduct manuals, themselves a product of new print and distribution capabilities, offered consolation and direction, even as they contributed to an increasingly unnavigable world of print.
The rhetoric of apocalyptic modernity was used to characterize not only the vast amounts of literature that were issuing forth from the press, but the manner in which this literature was being consumed. Authorities reviled the tendency to approach multiple books in “snatches” or “mere fragments”18 and warned that there is nothing more pernicious than a “habit of continuous, systemless, objectless reading.”19 These comments speak to two related concerns. First, it was feared that readers were reading too widely and without a plan or course of study in mind. According to the Earl of Iddesleigh, the goal is “always to read with an object, and that a worthy object.”20 American writer J. B. Braithwaite seconds this sentiment, commenting that for the many “kindred evils” associated with reading “there is no remedy more efficacious than a sound and healthy PURPOSE, rightly directed, and steadily maintained.”21 Second, systemless reading referred to the tendency to skim, what one commentator called the “superficial, careless, nonappropriate skipping habit that incapacitates the mind for assimilating and digesting what it reads.”22 The insistence on programmatic reading thus spoke to a paradoxical fear that readers were at once doing too much and too little, infinitely expanding the field of their consumption while diminishing their attention and focus. Such a state is captured by Braithwaite:
[Some] allow their moments of leisure to be wasted in a kind of “busy idleness;” they look over a great variety of books, but for want of settled diligence, their unsteady wanderings in prose or poetry, are attended with no satisfactory result. While there is a yet larger class of listless triflers, who give way to lounging and indolent habits of mind, wholly unworthy of intelligent and responsible beings.23
Braithwaite’s image of the reader as engaged in “a kind of ‘busy idleness’”—at once assiduously occupied and nonproductive—speaks to the contradictory vision of a modern subject, both over- and underemployed. Her “unsteady wanderings in prose or poetry” are symptomatic of a restless spirit, always moving but never arriving, and thus “attended with no satisfactory result.” Lost among her “great variety of books,” she is at once undisciplined and morally suspect, characterized by an eroticized ennui, or “lounging and indolent habits of mind.” Given this depiction, it is not surprising that commentators put forward “the much-needed lesson of concentration” as a way of countering this “dissipated” (in the sense of both scattered and wanton) approach to reading.24
As book historians have pointed out, characterizations of reading as fragmentary, compulsive, dissolute, and deroutinized speak to larger anxieties about the effects of modernity.25 New technologies of the nineteenth century from the train to the telegraph created a world of fleeting sensations and perceptions that altered both individual sensibility and mass consciousness.26 Reading was affected by these transformations: according to advice manuals, the mass production of books and newspapers in conjunction with new possibilities for mechanized acceleration reconfigured the manner in which subjects read. As William Alcott put it in 1850, “this busy age seems altogether unfavorable to much reflection.” He identifies “Steamboats, railroads, and electro-magnetic telegraphs” as particularly thwarting “the operations of the mind.”27 Lydia Howard Sigourney adds, “This is emphatically the age of book-making and miscellaneous reading. Profound thought is becoming somewhat obsolete. The rapidity with which space is traversed, and wealth accumulated, the many exciting objects which arrest attention in our new, and wide country, indispose the mind to the old habits of patient investigation, and solitary study.”28 For Sigourney and Alcott, the fear is that modernity is altering reading habits, creating a public incapable of profound and continuous textual engagement—a concern that is, as Karin Littau points out, echoed by contemporary critics of the Internet.29 Especially troubling for nineteenth-century authorities was the emphasis on novelty, as is evident in James Freeman Clarke’s excoriation of the periodical press:
The newspaper creates and feeds the appetite for news. When we read it, it is not to find what is true, what is important, what we must consider and reflect upon, what we must carry away and remember, but what is new. When any very curious or important event occurs, the newspaper, in narrating it, often gives, as its only comment and reflection, this phrase, “What next?” That is often the motto of the newspaper and the newspaper reader, “What next?”30
For Clarke this “What next?” is an index of the compulsiveness and insatiability that characterizes reading in the modern world. The interrogative form of this motto implicitly demands continuous and unabated response; syntactically, it stands as a lack that invites infinite retort and supplementation. In this way, newspapers both fulfill and give rise to readers’ cravings for constant stimulation.31
Even more deleterious than the drive for novelty was the speed associated with modern reading. Commentators described the minds of readers as “roaming … without restraint” and warned of the “vain desire to keep pace with the literature of the age.”32 Often the speed of reading was articulated in relation to the instruments of industrial modernity itself. One writer, for example, contrasts a newer form
