relationship between nineteenth-century literary culture and individualism. If, in other words, writers like Melville and Douglass valued reading as a means toward achieving decentered intercorporeal experience, then we need to reassess the critical and political traditions that have aligned them—along with the very practices of authorship and reading they engaged in—with notions of privacy, autonomy, and selfhood. This seems particularly pressing at the moment, since much of the public discourse around electronic communication augurs the disappearance of the private self as we know it. According to this logic, the Internet has spawned a culture of rapid skimming and frenzied sharing that threatens to eradicate profound thinking and even interiority itself. But what if the idea of the isolated deep reader was itself a fiction belied by the reader’s search for oneness? The epilogue of this study takes up this question. It suggests that digital technologies have transformed the physical experience of reading, while sustaining the fantasy of connectedness that is the legacy of nineteenth-century book practices. Rather than bemoaning the current moment for its tendency to destroy the individual, then, we might see it as part of a longer tradition in which reading was valued precisely for its ability to undo the self, to replace, however briefly, the acquisitive project of identity formation with a vision of the self permeated with and inseparable from its objects.
Chapter 1
Railroad Reading, Wayward Reading
On 15 September 1841, Julia A. Parker, twenty-three years old and a prolific reader and diarist, inscribed her journal with the following:
Read “Stephens’s Travels in Central America.” How happy I am while reading a book like this. I have lived to-day only with the past. I envy the author the terrible dangers he passed; for what comparison do they bear with the satisfaction and interest one must feel in exploring the time-worn monuments of a people who have ceased to exist, and who have no place on the page of history.1
Parker’s description of reading as having “lived to-day only with the past” captures the book’s ability to remove a reader from linear chronology, to create, in Jay Fliegelman’s words, “the presence of the past in the present.”2 As Parker attests, part of what this kind of temporal dislocation enables is a sense of deep intimacy with a book’s author, a mutuality experienced as an erasure of the chasm between writing and its reception. Although she initially characterizes her reaction to John L. Stephens as “envy,” what emerges looks much more like identification, since both she and Stephens are engaged in the same exploration of“time-worn monuments.” That is, her reading allows her to live “with the past” in a way that replicates the author’s own ancient discoveries. Interestingly, these discoveries are also figured outside of official time, involving a people “who have no place on the page of history.” In exiting her present world to study lives that are otherwise unrecorded, Parker achieves a mutuality with Stephens that is intensified and made more satisfying because of its location off the grid.
Such a description of reading limns the practice as remote and confidential, a private affair between reader and author, removed from official chronologies and record-keeping. In spending the day wholly immersed in an obsolescent past, Parker momentarily skirts the temporal realities and quotidian demands of her own middle-class existence. Her reading has a wayward or vagrant quality—its pleasures are associated with recursive movement and self-forgetting. To describe an engagement with books in this way is to divert from the instrumentalist rhetoric that often accompanied nineteenth-century prescriptions for reading. Here reading is characterized as ordered and rational, propelled by what William Alcott calls “the love of progress—the desire of improvement—the never-ending hunger and thirst after righteousness.”3 For Alcott and other cultural authorities, appropriate or dutiful reading emphasized mastery, productive accumulation, and efficient time management. This growth-oriented conception of reading is a far cry from Parker’s fantasy of retrospective escape.
In this chapter, I suggest that Parker’s and Alcott’s descriptions of reading may be understood as two very different reactions to transformations in print culture. The first part of the nineteenth century was characterized by disorienting new technologies and tremendous output, which affected the ways books were both produced and consumed. Alcott’s instrumentalist approach represents one attempt to make reading meaningful at a time of profound media transition. The reading practices he embraced featured prominently in conduct manuals dating between 1830 and 1890, where anxieties about reading often clustered around two specific themes: the frantic, accelerated pace of reading, and the prominence of the body (rather than the mind) while reading. Such concerns, articulated at the onset of modernity, reflected a preoccupation with both mechanized velocity and the incipient stages of a consumer society. Conduct manuals addressed these fears by encouraging readers to control the speed with which they approached their books and to excise the body from the reading process. In this way, they attempted to transform reading from an irrational consumer practice to a productive activity, as regular and predictable as the railroad.
In dialogue with this understanding of reading, a contrasting model emerged in the diaries, letters, and literary works of nineteenth-century subjects like Julia Parker, and also occasionally in the conduct manuals themselves. In these accounts, reading eschews an instrumentalist focus on accounting and productivity; it makes use of an alternative conception of time distinct from the rhetoric of linearity and progress associated with the railroad and other technologies of commercial modernity. Here, readers cede control over books, preferring to imagine themselves as fused with, rather than masters of, their reading material. Such reading, moreover, turns to the body as a site of engagement, replacing producerist directives with consumer pleasures. In so doing, wayward reading reconfigures the world in more sensual terms, assisting in the formation of intimate bonds in the lives of readers.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that reading manuals reflected only the instrumentalist account of reading, and that everyday subjects always articulated a contestatory narrative. On the contrary, many ordinary readers embraced books as a source of productive self-improvement, and reading manuals often proffered a contradictory account, wherein erratic or “desultory” (to borrow the word of a British authority) approaches to reading were valued.4 As this chapter and the next will make clear, prescriptive advice on reading was often expressed in deeply ambivalent terms, in a language that argued for the functionality of books while relishing the strange intimacy that accompanied the textual encounter. I also do not mean to suggest that one of these approaches thwarted print capitalism while the other accelerated it. On the contrary, both contributed to the privatization of reading, and both worked to expand and consolidate the market for print. To the extent that I am adopting a schematic model, then, I mean rather to highlight the different psychological effects of these approaches to reading, the way they authorized and activated different subject positions for their audiences. “Railroad reading” (as I call it) located satisfaction primarily in systematization and mastery of material; the encounter with alterity was usually an occasion to synthesize and reaffirm the self. “Wayward reading,” on the other hand, testified to the value of self-forgetting and to the gratifications of imagined contact with another. I insist on the importance of this latter approach so as to recognize its relevance to readers in the nineteenth century and the therapeutic role that it continues to play today.
Reading and Dark Prognostications
As historians of the book have widely established, the nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in print and reading. By now, the advancements are well documented. The Fourdrinier brothers’ innovations in paper production around 1803 meant that cheap, machine-made paper was soon readily available.5 The 1830s saw the development of the penny press, and the 1840s marked the mass circulation of serialized fiction, mostly through distribution of affordable weekly periodicals, like the eight-page story paper.6 By the 1850s the rapid rotary press (patented by Richard Hoe in 1847) produced inexpensive books on
