READING

Daniel P. Resnick and Jason Martinek

The ability to make sense of signs and images has been within the range of human capacity for close to five millennia, since the appearance of written scripts around 3000 to 4000 b.c. Yet for most of its history the combination of visual perception and brain processing that we call reading has been the practice and habit of elites. For Europeans, it is only since about 1500 that reading started to become the practice of substantial numbers of ordinary people.

Social historians have understood reading as an interaction between reader and text in specific social contexts. In arguing for this position, they deviate from narrower theories of context-free cognitive processing advanced by cognitivists. Historians have argued, for example, that the understanding of biblical texts of a voracious reader like the mid-sixteenth century miller Menocchio can be explained only by a careful examination of both his own life experience and the other books that he had read (Ginzburg, 1976). Less idiosyncratic readers in other times and settings have also brought to their texts lived experiences that have affected their way of referencing oral and written traditions.

But why read? Reading was a choice that increasing numbers of Europeans made to engage themselves in particular communities, real and imagined. Women and men, churchmen and nobles, clerks and secular administrators, merchants and artisans, and rural villagers and vagabonds did so for many different reasons. For some it was a necessary skill to make a livelihood, for others a way to challenge authority, but for many, largely among the young, it was a demand imposed upon them, intended to legitimate and uphold clerical and later secular authority. Nevertheless, reading had the potential to offer escape from the isolation of individual experience and to bind readers to a larger social body. To a real extent, the languages in which reading took place were binding readers to linguistic, national, religious, and economic communities (Anderson, 1991).

Despite advances in the accessibility of texts and the growth of opportunities for schooling over the last five hundred years, reading has persisted as a bounded "low literacy" experience for most of the European population, associated with the decoding of relatively simple and familiar texts. At the same time, a "high literacy" tradition—associated with unfamiliar texts, complex construction, inferential reasoning, and solitary reflection—has persisted for elites.

GROWING ACCESSIBILITY OF TEXT BEFORE 1500

Since the time of the first Sumerian tablets, reading had been understood as a vocal, difficult, and time-consuming exercise in which readers sounded out the text (Mangruel, 1997). Although some scholarly readers in the late Roman and medieval periods had been silent readers thanks to their familiarity with linguistic constructions and specific texts, most readers had had to turn written language into spoken words before they could understand it. No "take-off" for reading could take place without a more rapid and silent processing. The first steps in this direction were taken for Latin by the twelfth century and for the vernaculars of Europe in the three centuries that followed.

The vernacular languages became accessible to the reader through changes in the appearance of text. In the interest of more readers and easier reading, publishers of manuscripts copied by commissioned scribes changed the shapes and forms of letters, making them simpler and more distinct. The reader was helped along not only by the clean look of the letters, but by spaces between words, punctuation, and separations between paragraphs.

The alphabets of the European languages distinguished between vowels and consonants and made a place for both. The inclusion of vowel sounds made it possible for written languages and dialects to capture the vocabulary and usage of oral exchanges. At the same time, the accessibility of script was also advanced by changes in the appearance of text. Scripts were standardized and simplified, words were separated, spaces appeared between sentences and paragraphs. In this way written text became very accessible to novice readers. By the mid-fifteenth century, it was possible to read vernacular texts—French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and German, high and low, and in many dialects—as a silent reader (Saenger, 1989).

Silent reading, in turn, gave readers the possibility of moving through text discreetly, without alerting others to what they were encountering. In an age preoccupied with challenges to orthodoxy and rife with real and perceived heresies, this was very important. But silent reading did not bring about the demise of oral tradition or a wave of independent and critical challenge to received orthodoxies. Reading aloud to others continued to be a popular practice, whether in the home or the church, for instruction, entertainment, and information. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and Germany, for example, men and women would listen to readers of stories as they worked evenings in homes and workrooms.

In the age of radio and then television, paid readers and broadcasters have continued the oral tradition so important to the spread of a rudimentary basic literacy. Religious programming, human interest stories, tales of heroic feats, and gossip about the well-to-do have remained the staples in the new media, relaying information that passes at the same time through newspapers and workplace conversations. The fears of early modern clerics and nineteenth-century social elites that the spread of reading would introduce novel and challenging ideas to a large public and thereby undermine authority has not been confirmed, although the spread of literacy has been associated with modernization, democracy, and economic growth.

READING IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

Communication in sixteenth-century Europe remained largely oral. Estimates of those who could read are low and tell us little about the kinds of reading ability people had. Such estimates are based largely on the ability to sign one's name, an indicator of the ability to read that is useful in charting poorly mapped waters but not a reliable indicator. Perhaps only 3 to 4 percent of the population in German-speaking rural areas and 10 percent in towns could read (Engelsing, 1974). In England, we can estimate that possible readers were no more than 10 percent of the male population and a much smaller portion of women (Cressy, 1980). In Italian cities like Venice, which had enjoyed considerable commercial growth in preceding centuries, reading rates were higher but did not embrace more than 25 percent of the male population.

Reformation and counter-reformation. Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1450, which in fact built on earlier European work and the Chinese precedent, began to increase the amount of reading material available in ways that would ultimately expand potential readership. Most initial printed material was religious, and it was the change in Europe's religious map, more than the new technology, that really launched a new stage in the social history of reading. The first movements to extend reading practice in northern Europe were led by religious reformers and their state backers in the first decades of the sixteenth century, when large portions of northern Europe rejected the hegemony of the Roman church in matters of creed, sacrament, and religious organization. Reformers made sermons, distributed flyers designed for public discussion, and argued for a revival of the early church practice of catechism, linking orality to the reading of text.

Catechism (to teach by word of mouth) had its origins in the effort to enlist recruits to Christianity in the early church and is referenced in the patristic writings. As oral instruction, it took on forms that were appropriate to the absence of written text: memorization, drill, and repetition of a set of beliefs. Later on, manuals for confessors developed the practice of defining what was to be learned by sets of questions and answers, which were also to be memorized.

Catechetical instruction in some form was maintained as a priestly obligation throughout the medieval period, and it served as the principal form of primary education. Manuscript texts were useful to priests and clerks engaged in teaching, and the extant copies of catechisms, songbooks, prayers, and lives of saints are evidence of this. Instruction clearly varied in quality and form from parish to parish, but in general it had limited aims.

Martin Luther's (1483–1546) own visits to parishes in Saxony in the 1520's had convinced him that religious instruction was moribund and that a new set of written guides to instruction was necessary for both pastors and laity. In the ferment of the sixteenth century, many reformers adopted the same strategy, among them John Calvin (1509–1564) and Johann Agricola (1494?–1566). In 1529, Luther published a "Little Catechism" along with an expanded one to assist in proselytizing for his movement.

The Little Catechism had a major role in guiding household reading habits in the areas of Lutheran influence. It began with the Ten Commandments, which was followed by the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer (the Twenty-Third Psalm), and the sacraments. Reading of the text was designed to move the reader from fear of God to faith, prayer, and the promise of grace. Luther, who had demanded instruction and examination through catechism and developed texts that could guide both pastoral instruction and household reading, had many competitors in German areas that had broken with Rome (Strauss, 1978). More than a thousand catechisms have been catalogued in the holdings of the Weimar library (Reu), not counting the many that have disappeared.

Catechisms would be read on Sundays in churches and practiced in homes throughout the year, while schoolmasters used them as texts for their classes. Examinations of the young on their catechisms because a regular Lenten spring ritual for public authorities in the lands where Lutheranism was a state religion. The texts of these recitations were extended in some cases to embrace information about rulers, governments, and systems of justice. Public examinations on catechism thus served as civic exercises. The practice of examinations and home visitations was carried on into the eighteenth century in Lutheran Sweden, as confirmed by parish registers ( Johansson, 1977).

Instruction in catechism had its own particular forms, associated with oral repetition, familiar text, and a set of memorized questions and answers. The blinders placed on reading by the outlook of catechetical instruction are well expressed in the observations of Tettelbach, a pastor and teacher in Saxony, in 1568:

I have been noticing that schoolboys and other children merely memorize this precious book. This is a praiseworthy thing to do, to be sure. But they remember it without having thought or reflected on what it means, and they parrot the words with so little feeling that when one asks them a question about it, they can't explain even the simplest thing. (Strauss, p. 174)

Roman Catholic authorities, responding to the wave of challenges to orthodox belief and practice, developed and encouraged use of specially prepared digests of religious material and continued to limit the access of the laity to the Bible in the vernacular ( Julia, in Cavallo and Chartier, 1999). Both Catholic and Protestant communities relied on guided reading of printed catechisms along with inspirational lives, prayers, and hymns. Direct access to the Bible itself, which Luther had at first promoted, was for some time opposed by both Catholic and Lutheran authorities and promoted only by those who were willing to leave interpretation of the texts open to the lay reader.

Vernacular translations of the Bible remained on the Index for two hundred years. Pius IV's (1499–1565) Index of Prohibited Books (1559) permitted reading of the Bible in translation by only two categories of readers. The first to receive this exemption were those who had the permission of their bishop and the support of their parish priest and confessor. The second group was the scholarly community—"learned and pious men" who were said to be "able to draw from that reading not harm but some increase of faith and piety."

Humanist elites. Humanists were a major part of the book buying market in these two centuries. They were noblemen, clerics, rulers, scholars, and civil administrators, people of some means who fostered the revival of respect for the contributions of Greece and Rome to later European values and institutions. As readers they identified with the Greek and Roman tradition in literature, history, and public administration. They were part of a movement to promote access to Greek and Roman texts in largely vernacular languages, a movement that began in the Italian city-states and spread throughout Europe. Although some, like Erasmus (1466?–1536) played a role in religious reform, many had markedly secular tastes.

Humanists called for major changes in the format of the book, the appearance of the page, and the variety of published texts, even before the introduction of the printing press (Grafton, 1997). They wanted and got small portable books, pleasing fonts, and a long list of titles. They promoted the habit and practice of reading in ways that affected the availability of varied reading material for all social classes. The genres of non-religious texts that they demanded, particularly romances and picaresque fiction, appeared in inexpensive editions for regional urban markets in the seventeenth century and then circulated more widely by the end of next century.

Humanist readers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, before and after the introduction of the printing press, had an interactive and dynamic relationship with the publishers, middlemen, and printers who invested in the production and inventory of codex manuscripts and then printed books. As humanists reviving an interest in antiquity, their tastes ran predominantly to ancient Greek and Roman histories, literature, poetry, plays, biography, and autobiography of writers of antiquity, but they also read medieval Christian writers. They wanted to read the texts without the mediating apparatus of glosses on the page prescribing interpretation and the barriers to accessibility created by large, dark Gothic typefaces.

Reading had five characteristic features for the humanists. First, it was a social practice. They liked to discuss what they had read, hold symposia, and entertain one another with debates and readings. In succeeding centuries the practices they cultivated found their way into political discourse, entertainment, and the practices of book clubs and debating societies. Second, reading was used to shape and train memory. It was often simply the first step in a process that led to the memorization of a particular text. The recall and recitation skills of Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) and other sixteenth-century humanists were a source of celebrity among contemporaries.

Reading was also a step in the growth of personal knowledge, to be cemented by note-taking, copying, and paraphrasing. The personal libraries of humanists indicate their pride in creating their own comments and glosses on texts. "Whatever you read," wrote Guarino of Verona (1374?–1460) to a pupil, "have a notebook ready." Fourth, reading was an act of veneration. Just as the reading of lives of saints had shown consideration for Christian holiness, so did the reading of Greek and Roman literature and history indicate a reverence for the wisdom of pre-Christian antiquity. Readers of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) on Livy, like those who read Erasmus's Adages (1500), were brought to deference by the act of reading.

Finally, reading was very often the occasion for tasteful and showy investment. Readers were eager to display to contemporaries and posterity the evidence of their personal reading tastes. The ornate covers and bindings of texts in humanist libraries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, like the reader's comments on the pages, served as evidence of the association of reading and artful display. Jean Grolier de Servières (1479–1565), a leading French collector of the sixteenth century, inscribed in Latin on the cover of handsomely bound leather volumes that they were intended for the use of Grolier and his friends (British Museum, 1965).

The pedagogy of catechism heavily influenced the secular schools that were set up in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The German school system in Prussia, Bavaria, and other states established in the second half of the nineteenth century and greatly admired by the other European states was deeply rooted in the relationship between religious bodies and state power in the period of the Reformation.

READING AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: 1600–1900

Reading was not simply a solitary transaction between a reader and a text; the relationship between reading and social change was complex. On the one hand there were the interactions between readers, authors, and texts. Printed texts allowed authors who would have had a limited impact as individuals in preliterate societies to broadcast ideas widely. Texts could also provide political movements with a thread of ideological cohesion by providing individual readers with a shared set of beliefs and understanding of what was wrong with society and how to change it.

On the other hand there were interactions between readers, lived experience, and censorship. Reading could only lead to action if readers made a connection between the ideas contained in printed texts and their own experience. The viability of political tracts depended on readers' ability to believe what authors told them. Viability also depended on readers' access to printed material, which the state, because it had the most to lose from wide dissemination, tried to limit through strict censorship. When the state's ability to control what got printed and read was compromised, as occurred in England between 1640 and 1660, the world, as Christopher Hill has noted, could be turned upside down (Hill, 1972).

Prior to the English Revolution, the state's activities were shrouded under a veil of secrecy and privilege. Although newsbooks, the precursors to the modern newspaper, began appearing in the 1620s, readers learned little about domestic affairs from them because it was illegal to report on such matters. Instead, readers found information about events in other countries, in which merchants, the major consumers of the early newsbooks, had a great interest because their livelihoods depended on foreign trade. In the 1640s, however, the content of the newsbooks changed with the failure of the state, despite its own best efforts, to control what got into print.

Thus, what had previously been the private deliberations of the state became a matter of public discourse. This emergence of what historians have called the public sphere (Zaret, 2000) was due to the breakdown of censorship in the 1640s and 1650s, the wider availability of printed materials of an overtly political nature, increased literacy rates, and a heightened interest in political issues. In the public sphere, readers came together to discuss and debate arguments presented in journals, periodicals, and books. Collectively, these readers became the target for competing groups vying for power during the English Revolution.

The war between Parliamentarians and Royalists and among the factions in the Parliament was as much a war in print as a physical one. The war in print took two distinct forms. The first was a battle of righteousness and citation. Both sides tried to win over readers by using the Bible and religious imagery. "In the turmoil of the seventeenth century," wrote Hill, "the Bible became a sword to divide, or rather an armoury from which all parties selected weapons to meet their needs" (Hill, 1993, p. 6).

In a second arena, factions fought to win over readers through gossip, innuendo, and occasionally pornography. In the process, they borrowed deeply from oral traditions of gossip, bawdiness, and defamation. Printed gossip was passed on predominantly through newsbooks. In these newsbooks readers found detailed descriptions of the other side's transgressions and a view of events that reflected their prejudices, beliefs, and interests. The Parliamentarians' Mercurius Britanicus and the Royalists' Mercurius Aulicus carried on this war in the 1640s, at the same time that their troops took their arguments to the battlefield.

The use of the printed word to mobilize readers took place at the periphery as well as the political center. Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, and millenarian sects such as the Fifth Monarchy Men, who called for the abolition of the monarchy, the established church, and class distinctions, all used the printed word to attract supporters. Like the Parliamentarians and Royalists, they looked to the Bible for validation. In Acts 4:32, Gerrard Winstanley (1609?–1660?), a leading Digger, found support for his attack on private property: "All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had."

Reading clearly helped to fuel the French Revolution. Individuals have long noted the significance of reading to the revolutionary fervor of the late eighteenth century. The revolutionary texts in France were the great texts of the Enlightenment, authored by such men of letters as Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), but influenced by Roman republican texts and classical example. Their texts criticized the absolutist state on what they saw as rational, not religious grounds. Readers found in these authors' texts an alternative way to construct society.

Voltaire's Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733, known in French as Lettres philosophiques), written during his exile to England, praised English customs, institutions, and intellectual life. The book's major implication was not lost on French readers; French customs, institutions, and intellectual life were, it suggested, far inferior to their English counterparts. French authorities suppressed the book and Voltaire was forced to flee Paris. Rousseau's work raised similar questions about the foundation upon which French society rested. In The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau argued that a legitimate government was one that rested on common consent, not oppression. Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) and other leaders of the French Revolution acknowledged a debt to Rousseau.

That such texts shaped readers' minds is clear by the lengths to which the state worked to suppress them. They were placed in the same category as pornography and censored as "bad books." Reading was dangerous precisely because it could lead readers to challenge the status quo.

Once the revolution started, the number of newspapers read and circulated increased dramatically. Readers found in these newspapers reports on the activities of the legislative body. Although politician publicists like Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville (1754–1793) envisioned newspapers as a means of establishing political legitimacy—"One can teach the same truth at the same moment to millions of men"—quite the opposite was actually the case. Newspapers presented a government being torn apart by internecine strife. Hence, just as reading could help inspire revolution, it could also work to undermine it (Popkin, 1990).

In the nineteenth century leaders of social movements continued to turn to readers for support and legitimacy, whether through newspapers, pamphlets, flyers, or books. Books such as August Bebel's (1840–1913) Woman under Socialism (1883) went through dozens of editions and reached many thousands of readers. Many leaders of the German Social Democratic party were also editors of newspapers. In Britain in the 1890s Robert Blatchford, who claimed to have been converted to socialism through reading, published one of the most popular socialist newspapers of the day, The Clarion. Reading never completely replaced the more traditional way of transmitting ideas—conversations in the market and workplace, political meetings, strikes, and demonstrations. But it raised the distinct possibility of reaching more dispersed populations over a more extended area than any speech ever could.

READING IN LIBRARIES

Until the nineteenth century, books were too expensive for all but wealthy individuals and institutions to purchase in great number. Most Europeans, if they owned books at all, had a collection limited to a catechism or book of hours, the life of a saint, a Bible, and perhaps an almanac. Martin's examination of 400 estate inventories in Paris in the seventeenth century indicates that merchants and artisans were rarely buyers of books, and when they did own books, they owned very few. Circulating libraries and reading cabinets appear in the eighteenth century to meet the demand for access to books without the requirement of purchase.

In the mid-eighteenth century the emergence of lending libraries and reading societies helped give readers access to a large number of texts. Middle-class readers often belonged to reading societies. In these societies, readers would have access to the latest books and journals, mostly of a political nature, which they would then discuss and debate. Unlike lending libraries, private reading societies were geared to the interests of their members. By the nineteenth century, however, reading societies were largely superseded by commercial lending libraries, which served a more heterogeneous population. (Wittmann, in Cavallo and Chartier, 1999).

In the nineteenth century municipal governments created municipal libraries, first in England and then on the continent. These libraries were aimed particularly at working-class readers and had a strong moral component. Reformers and employers hoped to elevate the moral sensibilities of the working classes, shape character, and ease social tensions. They saw the library as an uplifting alternative to the pub or alehouse, the traditional sites for male working-class leisure. Reformers discouraged workers from reading pulp fiction, urging them instead to read edifying literature. Despite these attempts, working-class reading continued to consist mostly of pulp fiction.

Even in non-capitalist countries, libraries served as a means to shape working-class minds. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, revolutionary leaders hoped to use libraries as a means to lift up workers, both morally and intellectually. One Party activist, for example, urged the citizens of Petrograd two years after the Revolution, "As the proletarian revolution wants you to be sober and clear minded you should not fail to obtain a book at your local library." (Lerner, 1998, p. 150). As this suggests, libraries were not value-free institutions.

Finland and Iceland, known for the high literacy of their adult populations, have had active circulating libraries and reading societies since about 1800. In Finland, where the public literacy of adults is among the highest in the world and where school-age children show the highest reading performance in international comparisons, circulating and public libraries seem to have contributed to this success. With strong financial backing from the Finnish government in the twentieth century and attention to community needs, Finnish library administrators have greatly expanded their holdings for children. They work closely with schools to stimulate children to read and teach children how to use the library. They have also offered on-site services for hospital patients and residents of nursing homes. To enrich the holdings of small rural libraries they started bookmobiles. Finnish libraries may be the most patronized in Europe, registering a full 25 percent of the population in a count made thirty years ago (Hatch, 1971).

READING FOR PLEASURE AND ESCAPE: THE NOVEL 1700–1900

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there are many examples of readers who followed Luther's counsel and focused on a religious text with great intensity. They can be considered "intensive" readers, like the character Christian in John Bunyan's (1628–1688) The Pilgrim's Progress (1678). Christian's reading of apocalyptic portions of the Bible leads him to a catharsis of emotions and an affirmation of faith. Bunyan wanted his own readers to read his work with that same intensity, and he hoped that it would help them to find their own routes to salvation. Intensive reading involved a highly intimate relationship for readers, authors, and texts. It gave an individual reader the sense that the author's words were spoken directly to him. The trust bound up in this relationship could lead the reader to find in the author someone who could answer his deepest and most provoking questions or even completely redirect the trajectory of his life.

Some historians, such as Engelsing, have argued that reading changed in the eighteenth century. Not only did reading matter become more varied and secular, but the way of approaching a text changed for readers. Adapting to the more abundant literature, they turned to sampling, critical engagement with many different works, and perhaps a cursory examination of some of that material. Others, such as Darnton and Chartier, have disputed this argument, pointing to evidence of intensive engagement with novels in the eighteenth century and some examples of extensive reading by humanists in the two preceding centuries. One historian has even called the eighteenth century, because of its taste for the novel, a " 'revolution' in reverse—far more 'intensive' than before and not in the least 'extensive' " (Wittmann, in Cavallo and Chartier, 1999, p. 296).

Although the reading of religious texts remained an important staple of eighteenth century life, a shift had begun whereby readers increasingly turned from reading primarily for salvation to reading for information and pleasure. The growing popularity of novels, periodicals such as the Spectator (1711–1712), and newspapers over the course of the century demonstrates that readers' tastes were indeed changing.

That readers had begun approaching texts more superficially is evident in the emergence of the term "skim" in the English language to refer to a practice of readers. Only in the mid-eighteenth century did the term come to mean, "to glance over, without reading closely." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest record of the term used in this way dates to 1738 when Mary Granville Pendarves Delaney (1700–1788) described the practice in a letter to a friend: "I skimmed over [Your last letter] . . . to satisfy myself of your health." Three years later, Isaac Watts (1674–1748) used the term in a published work titled The Improvements of the Mind. "Plumeo," he wrote, "skimmed over the pages, like a swallow over the flowery meads."

Although extensive reading certainly gained ground in the eighteenth century, intensive reading persisted, particularly in the way readers approached novels like Samuel Richardson's (1689–1761) Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), Rousseau's La nouvelle Heloise (1761), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's (1749–1832) The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Historians have documented well the sentimental or empathetic responses these novels elicited from readers, particularly women, who were well represented among their readers.

Watt has noted the role of English women in ensuring the success of Richardson's Pamela. He attributed this appeal in part to the author's ability to write about women and their experiences with sensitivity and accuracy, far more so than any author before him. He also attributed it to the intimacy Richardson created between his readers and the text, which allowed for the "complete engrossment of their inner feelings, and the same welcome withdrawal into an imaginary world vibrant with more intimately satisfying personal relationships than ordinary life provided" (p. 196).

Darnton has shown how Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise, which went through at least seventy printings between 1761 and 1800, evoked a similarly strong emotional response among readers, male and female. In Germany, the emotional intensity with which readers read Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther is widely believed to have resulted in a wave of suicides. Thus, although what readers read had changed in the eighteenth century, how they read necessarily had not; they continued to have a passionate engagement with their texts. That novels aroused readers' emotions, however, made them a prime target for criticism. Critics also lambasted them for fostering unrealistic notions of romantic love and potentially compromising female chastity through their erotic suggestions. Novels were also imbued with the power to corrupt impressionable readers. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) wrote that novels were "written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions into life. They are entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions." According to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) the long-term effects of novel reading on the mind were catastrophic. Novel reading, he believed, "occasions in time the entire destruction of the power of the mind" because it encouraged "no improvement of the intellect, but fills the mind with a mawkish and morbid sensibility which is directly hostile to the cultivation, invigoration, and enlargement of the nobler power of understanding."

Despite critics' best efforts, novel reading continued to be a popular leisure activity. Novels offered readers psychological mobility, opening up for them portals to other worlds. From the privacy of their own homes, individual readers could travel to the Swiss Alps, meet people from other classes, witness a barroom brawl, or attend a fancy ball. Novels also had the power to excite, scare, titillate, or depress. In short, they provided readers with a diversion from otherwise mundane ordinary lives.

By the second half of the nineteenth century extensive reading had become the dominant mode. For the sake of bourgeois propriety, readers were expected to read not only in silence, but with greater restraint and control. A text's success, therefore, was measured less by the feelings it evoked than its aesthetic qualities. The taming of readers' emotions occurred simultaneously with the taming of the novel itself, a process spearheaded by writers like Jane Austen (1775–1817) and Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). No novel better illustrates the shift that took place than Austen's 1811 work, Sense and Sensibility. In this novel, sense reigns over sensibility. Even Marianne, a paragon of excessive emotionalism, settles down in the end.

The preeminent literary critic Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) codified the more restrained approach to reading in "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864): "Everything was long seen, by the young and ardent amongst us, in inseparable connection with politics and practical life. We have pretty well exhausted the benefits of seeing things in this connection, we have got all that can be got by so seeing them. Let us try a more disinterested mode of seeing them; let us betake ourselves more to the serener life of the mind and spirit." For Arnold, reason, not emotion, was to guide the reader.

The taste for novels was shared by urban workers who were who were emerging as readers of printed matter of all kinds in urban centers in Europe. Their tastes did differ from those of the bourgeoisie, ranging from the sensationalistic literature of the pulp press to moral and didactic literature generated by both socialist and evangelical movements. That said, clerks, office workers, shop assistants, workers, and laborers made up almost half of the borrowers in municipal libraries in Paris in the 1880s and 1890s, and more than half of the books that circulated were novels (Lyons, p. 336). The sheer proliferation of printed materials made it impossible to go back to the heyday of intensive reading.

READING FOR UTILITY AND INFORMATION

By the eighteenth century Europeans received so much information by way of the printed word that it had become an integral part of everyday life. It would have been hard to imagine a world without it. Since the seventeenth century and particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of printed information Europeans had to process increased dramatically and made the ability to read even more necessary to function in European society. Europeans had to be able to make sense of the information found in such items as schedules and timetables, menus, advertisements, product labels, telephone books, recipes, how-to manuals, bills, and road signs.

The twin processes of state bureaucratization and the commercial revolution made reading an increasingly invaluable skill for Europeans to have at all levels of society. Even before the invention of the printing press, European states, which had previously relied predominantly on oral testimony, had become ever more dependent on written records. In the Middle Ages, the ability to read was not a prerequisite for holding office. That changed in the early modern period. The mid-sixteenth century witnessed the last illiterate high-ranking government officials in northern Europe—the first earl of Rutland in England and Constable Montmorency in France (Stone, 1968). Reading was required to process legislative initiatives, petitions, and other matters of state, particularly those relating to the military and taxation.

Similarly, the commercial revolution helped make reading a necessity of life. Merchants had long relied on written bills of exchange in their international trade. The printed word also impinged on the lives of farmers, shopkeepers, and artisans in the form of promissory notes, wills, and apprenticeship contracts. In addition, farmers and artisans increasingly relied on the printed word to provide them information about their occupations.

Since the early sixteenth century, Europeans had disseminated knowledge about agriculture in print. Humanists discovered Virgil's Georgics and further developed the genre. In Sir Anthony Fitzherbert's Book of Husbandry (1523) and other works that followed, readers found information on agricultural practices in different parts of England and recommendations on how to best raise crops and animals. In the eighteenth century, when agricultural improvement was of great concern to landowners, Arthur Young's (1741–1820) Travels in France (1792) was able to show a comparable concern with agricultural practices across the Channel.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries manuals written by master craftsmen appeared for those already practicing the same craft. Manuals provided illustrations, patterns, and models. Although few sixteenth-century French artisans owned books, those who did were most likely, after religious texts, to own craft manuals or books of "pourtraicture" (Chartier, 1987, p. 150). These manuals were not intended for the general public because of the need for craftsmen to protect the secrets of their trades.

The dissemination of information about crafts could be a double-edged sword. At the same time that it could improve the quality of the end product, it could undermine the legitimacy of a craft's traditional practitioners. In the dairy industry in England before the eighteenth century, women played a leading role producing cheese for the family and perhaps a small surplus for sale. Dairywomen had learned the craft from other women, not from manuals or recipes. The process often lacked exactness, which meant that the product could differ greatly from batch to batch. In the eighteenth century, due to the commercialization of the dairy industry, men began to rationalize the process of cheesemaking by applying scientific knowledge to the craft. They published texts on the science of cheese-making with recipes that encouraged product standardization. This led to the demise of dairywomen's control over the process (Valenze, 1995, p. 48–67).

In these two areas and in others, readers in the eighteenth century found that reading books offered an alternative to on-site apprenticeship for the development of skills and knowledge that were useful in the workplace. The genre grew again at the end of the nineteenth century with the decline of apprenticeship and became important to industrial education in schools and post-secondary institutes in the twentieth century. In the latter half of that century, this genre migrated in part to the television medium, where printed materials were a tie-in to demonstrations on screen. How-to manuals, however, persisted as an autonomous genre, responding to the demands of readers who wanted utility in their texts, and not simply pleasure and recreation.

THE FUTURE OF READING

By the late nineteenth century, nearly universal education in Europe had produced official literacy rates of 90 percent or more in countries like Belgium and Germany. Eastern Europe lagged, but both literacy rates and popular reading were growing there as well. Traveling book salesmen in rural areas throughout Europe complemented more organized bookstores and libraries found in urban areas.

The advent of mass reading raises several questions. Mass taste often differed from the reading matter recommended by social reformers. Trade union and socialist libraries, for example, urged working-class readers to consult serious works of philosophy and economics but found marked preferences for escapist novels. Children's books were divided between worthy, educational tracts, preferred by many parents, and more exciting fare sold directly to children, such as cowboy novels set in the American West, available in many languages. Mass-circulation newspapers offered large type and a simple vocabulary, as well as a sensationalist style that many social critics found repellent. Mass reading did not mean uniformity in the approach to reading.

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Victor Li provided research assistance in the preparation of this article.