to a journey on horseback. The railway will take you more rapidly to your journey’s end, and by its aid you will get over much more ground in the day; but you will lose the variety of the walk up the hill, the occasional divergence from the hard road, and the opportunities for examining the country through which you are passing, which the horseman enjoys. The business man will prefer the train, which will carry him quickly to his bank or his warehouse, but he will miss many things which the other will have seen and profited by.33
Here modern reading is aligned not only with the “rapid” speed of the train but also with the urban degeneration of the “business man” who cares only that he be transported “quickly to his bank or his warehouse.” By contrast, the figure of the slow and deliberate reader is likened to the horseback rider, who enjoys all the “variety” and “divergence” that the natural world has to offer. In contending that the former “will miss many things which the other will have … profited by,” this commentator insists that the value of reading cannot be measured by market terms alone.
The train was an especially apt metaphor to speak of the accelerated pace of reading, not only because the railway was responsible for the enhanced distribution of printed matter, but because as a vehicle of rapid transport, the train symbolized much of what was fleeting and ephemeral in modern life. Nathaniel Hawthorne captures this in his 1851 novel, The House of the Seven Gables. When Clifford and Hepzibah—the story’s older aristocratic protagonists—board a railway car they are “swept away with it, as by the suction of fate itself”:
looking from the window, they could see the world racing past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude;—the next, a village had grown up around them;—a few breaths more, and it had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its agelong rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to their own.34
This sense of “unfix[ity]” in which hitherto permanent structures are suddenly “set adrift from their foundations” is an apt characterization of the modern condition in which permanence or “age-long rest” seems a nicety of the past. Traveling at “whirlwind speed,” the train is like a time machine, capable of showcasing the evolution of humanity, the development and elimination of entire generations: “At one moment … a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more and it had vanished.” Meanwhile, within the train itself, passengers with no connection to one another bump and jostle familiarly, making the railway car a fit symbol for the crowded anonymity of modern urban life. Clifford and Hepzibah marvel at the idea that
there were fifty human beings in close relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its grasp.… New people continually entered. Old acquaintances … continually departed. Here and there, amid the rumble and the tumult, sat one asleep. Sleep; sport; business; graver or lighter study; and the common and inevitable movement onward! It was life itself!35
At once part of and symbolic of the drive toward human progress—the “inevitable movement onward”—the train is, in Hawthorne’s estimation, a powerful and ineluctable force. (Indeed, when Clifford and Hepzibah finally disembark, exhausted, it is with the knowledge that they are leaving behind the modern world, choosing their ghostly past and their decaying house over “life itself.”) The train’s connection to the phenomenon of reading is evident in Hawthorne’s text as well. Clifford and Hepzibah’s fellow passengers include those who have “plunged into the English scenery and adventures of pamphlet-novels, and were keeping company with dukes and earls.”36 The “plunge” into fiction here, and the sudden exposure to the new and the foreign that reading engenders, are, of course, an analogue to railway life itself. Both, in other words, involve immersion in strange “scenery,” novel “adventures,” and unknown “company.”
While Hawthorne’s vision of accelerated modernity is, at least in this particular scene, fairly optimistic, for many writers the pace of modern life and its effects on reading augured something far more dire. Edwin Hubbell Chapin mixes awe with dystopic prognostications in his account of the electric speed of book consumption. “A woman takes up her pen to delineate a great social wrong,” he writes, perhaps in reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe, “and the story becomes as the lightning that shines from one end of the heaven to the other. … The press cannot send it out fast enough. From hand to hand, from land to land, it leaps like sparks of electricity.”37 He continues more ominously:
No organ of intellectual and moral influence … is in our day more prominent than the Press … whether its form be that of book or journal.… Sending its influence far beyond the reach of the human voice, and into the most private hours, it gathers to itself all the facilities of the age. Its productions, fast as steam can make and carry them, go abroad through all the land, silent as snow-flakes, but potent as thunder.38
Here, books garner both the force of techno-industrialism (“the facilities of the age”) and the power of the natural world (“silent as snow-flakes, but potent as thunder”), becoming in the process an unstoppable supramortal force. They send their “influence far beyond the reach of the human voice,” thereby upending traditional social ties and face-to-face communication. Still worse, the accelerated industrial speed at which they travel transgresses on sacred time or “the most private hours.” Chapin concludes by asking “what … great evil is blended with this wonderful agency?”39 His account anticipates the anxieties articulated by modern theorists of temporality. Reinhart Koselleck, for example, has commented that the hallmark of modernity is an accelerated temporality and, with it, a sense of the future as dark and unknown, because stripped of its constancy.40 For Brian Massumi the modern subject is the “falling” subject, “defined by the condition of groundlessness,” brought on by the ever-increasing velocity and instability of bourgeois consumer culture.41 While these contemporary theorists blame more advanced forms of technology for this decline, Chapin and other nineteenth-century cultural custodians placed books and periodicals at the center of their apocalyptic vision. In warning of the “headlong speed with which mere knowledge is now pursued all round us,”42 these commentators imagined reading as spiraling and ungrounded, rapidly steering society toward cataclysm.
Social commentators warned that this frenzied state had dire implications for the physical health of readers, particularly women, for whom fast reading could result in accelerated maturation. In his medical treatise, On Diseases Peculiar to Women, Dr. Hugh Lenox Hodge warns that too much reading of “novels, romances, plays,” can cause “undue excitation” and thus “hasten the development of the nervous system and the phenomena of puberty.” These same “excitants,” he adds, can do damage to the older woman as well. If not carefully regulated, they “will often break down the powers of life, and thus give rise to the whole tribe of dyspeptic and irritable disorders.” Chief among these is “irritable uterus,” which can be exacerbated with “any exertion, even of the upper extremities, in holding a book.”43 While women were the primary targets of these physiological assessments, men, too, were imagined as suffering bodily for their reading practices. One American commentator linked excessive reading in men with “mental imbecility” while another questioned how many “full grown men” have grown “enervated, dwarfish, deformed, or crippled” through the practice.44
Anxieties about the physiologically debilitating effects of reading were tied to a larger discourse in which cultural commentators invoked the body to register a reader’s negative engagement with books. This is especially apparent in the metaphor of ingestion, which likened inappropriate reading to “swallowing” or “devouring” texts.45 Edwin Chapin, for example, rails against the “book-worm, who feasts upon libraries … who shuts himself up only to read, read, read … [He] is, perhaps, one of the most useless men in the world. His head is stored with a mass of crude and undigested knowledge, which does no good to himself nor
