Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen______Literaturwissenschaft Herausgegeben von Reinhold Viehoff (Halle/Saale) Gebhard Rusch (Siegen) Rien T. Segers (Groningen) Jg. 19 (2000), Heft 1

Peter Lang Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften SPIEL Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft

SPIEL: Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft

Jg. 19 (2000), Heft 1

Peter Lang Frankfurt am Main • Berlin • Bern • Bruxelles • New York • Oxford • Wien Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme

Siegener Periodicum zur internationalen empirischen Literatur­ wissenschaft (SPIEL) Frankfurt am Main ; Berlin ; Bern ; New York ; Paris ; Wien : Lang ISSN 2199-80780722-7833 Erscheint jährl. zweimal

JG. 1, H. 1 (1982) - [Erscheint: Oktober 1982]

NE: SPIEL

ISSNISSN 2199-80780722-7833 © Peter Lang GmbH Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2001 Alle Rechte Vorbehalten. Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft

SPECIAL ISSUE / SONDERHEFT SPIEL 19 (2000), H. 1

Historical Readers and Historical Reading

Historische Leser und historisches Lesen

ed. by / hrsg. von

Margaret Beetham (Manchester) & Sophie Levie (Utrecht)

Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft

Contents / Inhalt SPIEL 19 (2000), H. 1

Margaret Beetham (Manchester) and Sophie Levie (Utrecht) Introduction 1

Frédéric Barbier (Paris) History, the Historian and Reading 4

Stephen Colciough (London) Recording the Revolution: Reading Experience and the History of the Book 36

Berry Dongeimans (Leiden) and Boudien de Vries (Leiden) Reading, Class and Gender: the Sources for Research on Nineteenth Century Readers in the Netherlands 56

Margaret Beetham (Manchester) In Search of the Historical Reader; the Woman Reader, the Magazine and the Correspondence Column 89

Titia Ram (Utrecht) The Gentleman's Magazine; or Speakers’ Corner 105

Marita Keiison-Lauritz (Amsterdam) Towards a History of Gay Reading: A Study of Two Early Twentieth Century Periodicals 126

Laurel Brake (London) Gender and the Historical Reader: The Artist and Cleveland Street 141

Lledeke Plate (Utrecht) Women Readers Write Back: Rewriting and/as Reception 155 10.3726/80987_4

SPIEL 19 (2000), H. 1, 4-35

Fréderic Barbier (Chaton) History, The Historian and Reading

Dieser Beitrag plädiert dafür, die Realität des Lesens durch die Jahrhunderte hindurch als Gegen­ stand historischer Forschung zu betrachten. Er zeigt, wie die Buchgeschichte und neuere Ansätze in der Forschung des Lesepublikums Möglichkeiten für die historische Forschung eröffnen. Dabei werden mehrere Aspekte in der Praxis des Lesens und ihrer Erforschung unterschieden. Erörtert werden das Buch als materielles Objekt, Probleme der Interpretation literarischer und kunsthistori­ scher Quellen vom Klassischen Altertum bis heute, welche über das Buch und seine Nutzer infor­ mieren, wirtschaftliche und materielle Aspekte, und der soziale Status des Textes und seiner Leser.

“Moreover, knowledge is not only acquired by hearing, it is also acquired and en­ hanced by studying, by reading and by carefully thinking about and reflecting upon what one has read and studied. Books were not given to men for vanity or folly, but out of pure necessity ...” (Guillaume Fillastre, La thoison d'or). The word “writing” refers in the first instance to a physical object - whether manuscript, printed work, book, newspaper, periodical or ephemera - but this object works across the realms of technology, economics and finance (Petit 1997). In as far as it is a commodity, writing may be analysed using the traditional categories of the consumer economy. How­ ever, it is also a symbolic object on which may be constructed the identity of a culture, a group, or even a nation and it is an object whose form and content are integral to intellec­ tual history, a history which simultaneously shapes writing and is shaped by it. These dif­ ferent perspectives are partly why the task of analysing writing is so complex and am­ bivalent. The rich diversity of possible approaches explains the fascination of the subject for the historian and the despair which it produces because of the apparent impossibility of reaching any conclusion. In addition, books and those who utilise them are constantly changing as new ways of using (or failing to use) the book develop1. Books may be described as “dead” until brought to life in one way or another by those who use them. Print informs the reader in ways which depend upon context, content and form, as well as the particular way in which the reader may make use of it. The uses to which books may be put are not con­ fined to reading proper and these other uses, for example in magic, each demonstrate a particular way of making sense of oneself and the world. The term reading here will be used to mean the protocols and semiotic practices through which particular readers take what a text offers them and make it their own. Reading involves not only the whole collection of material signs through which the text exist, but

1 The word book here is a convenient short-hand which should not obscure the variety of its many forms. History, The Historian and Reading 5

also the medium itself (whether book or periodical but also the style of writing and so on), the different strategies of comprehension which the reader deploys,2 and the physical circumstances in which reading takes place. For example, the narrator of Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdue, immersed in the reading of a railway timetable, discovered something quite different from what was actually printed. When planning to leave for Florence and Venice, [he says]: “Although my elation was motivated by a desire for aesthetic pleasure, guide books sustained it more than art books and railway timetables even more than guide books” (Proust 1973,1, 391). When agreement was reached on the Balbek journey, so long dreamed of but never un­ dertaken; 44We would just leave Paris by the 1:22 train which I had so often looked for and found in the timetable and where each time it gave me a feeling close to the happy sensation of departure, so that I could not but imagine that I knew i t ..... ” (Proust 1973, II, 647). As this makes clear, there are few concepts which the historian finds so difficult to ana­ lyse and so multifaceted as that of reading. Perhaps for the writer there is no “universal reader” who exists beyond “the obscurity of things..... the cloudy ambiguous properties of the words in which it is wrapped”, if so, does reading exist for the historian? (Sartre n.d., 25).

Hidden Reading and Rediscovered Reading

Approaches to the History of the Book and of Reading.3

The history of writing, of the book and especially of the printed word was, traditionally, first led only by a minority: intellectuals, scholars and the nobility would first be inter­ ested in rare books, and the collections they built up were study collections or biblio- philia. As a result, the history of the book practically starts with the undertaking of inventories - the production of such and such a period (the incunabula ...), of such and such a famous workshop (the Aides ...), etc. Then, subsequently, and progressively from the 1750s, the status and the role of the printed work shifted profoundly in western society: the democracies being founded, notably in the United States and France, saw in the access to the written word the necessary condition of their stability: “We did not want a single man in the empire to be able to say henceforth, the law guarantees me equal rights but I am denied the means to know them. I must depend only on the law but my ignorance makes me dependent on those around me ... Thus education must be universal, that is it must be available to all citizens ...” (Condor- cet 1792).

2 Four main determinants: peoples' reading abilities, their education, their personal histories, their horizons of expectation on reading the text. 3 A general introduction is provided by Barbier& Bertho Lavenir 1996. 6 Frédéric Barbier

In most other politico-cultural geographies, the problem posed is that of the construction of nationhood: the identity of the new Nation-States was based on favouring certain cate­ gories of writing and reading, first among which were the national language and litera­ ture. National “book trades” grew up, often following the German model, national librar­ ies were founded, retrospective or contemporary bibliographies were undertaken. The history of the book then became part of the new cultural model taking shape but reading was still not seen as a subject lending itself to a scientific approach other than in peda­ gogy (methods of teaching reading, the history of schools and education). With the “new history” of the book, developed notably by Lucien Febvre and Henri- Jean Martin, the history of reading and printing was reintegrated into a global history of society which shaped it but of which it was simultaneously a part. Books were primarily merchandise, and so researchers set about studying production and circulation figures, analysing the technical systems of which book production formed a part, establishing the economic logic behind “the Ancien Régime book trade” compared to the book trades of the industrial and post-industrial eras. A second approach favoured by historians is that of social history, understood in the widest sense: if books are also a “ferment” [a passion] (Febvre and Martin 1958), the analysis here is a lot more difficult to perform, and studies have focused especially on the ways in which it is possible for reading and the practices of reading to function largely as social determinants, even class determinants (the literate, the dominant classes, the working classes, etc.). Most studies are based on documents such as old library catalogues, whether these are printed catalogues proper or sales cata­ logues, etc., but also on the rich inventories drawn up following deaths (Momet 1967; Medick 1992). Other studies are based on the analysis of contents or on the history of ideas (Begriffsgeschichte), but reading as a reality, as an act and a practice, is still not seen as a scientific subject of research - as a subject of history.

What is Popular Reading?

The fact that collective memory is also selective; makes reading even less likely to be­ come the subject of history and, as Maurice Halbwachs (Halbwachs 1994) notes, re­ searchers can only be sensitive to the fact that the largest part of the population, the dominated social groups, remain buried by the silence of source materials. Some avenues are being explored, notably reading material judged as typical of a “popular consump­ tion” of books, of a “popular reading” and therefore of a “popular literature”: these theo­ ries in France, for example, have led to work being undertaken on the Bibliothèque bleue, the monumental series of printed works produced in Troyes (Champagne) right up to the second half of the nineteenth century which ended up being distributed by pedlars. What may be defined as “popular books” are poorly preserved by public libraries, despite then- wide circulation, but research shows that they were very different from books produced for the literate classes: they were different in terms of their textual content (the popular literature of the Ancien Régime was a vehicle for a tradition dating essentially back to the Middle Ages), in terms of their physical properties (small quartos, poor quality typogra­ phy, xylograph illustrations), in terms of their distribution (by pedlars and dealers scat­ tered throughout the country) and in terms of the way they were used. Consequently, it is by trying to categorise popular reading practices that ultimately the history of the book as History, The Historian and Reading 7

a subject of study is defined. Moreover, the paucity of sources often leads to generalisa­ tions based on in-direct sources of representation such as literary descriptions of home life and o f ’popular’ reading, paintings, etc. “I should tell you that the long evenings started in our region on All Saints' Day ... In rich areas, we made a circle ... around a good farm fire. The neighbours would be there and sometimes strangers passing through ... We would knit, sew, spin ... which did not stop us chatting or having fun from time to time ... Those who were not working would read the newspaper to those who were; those who understood things would explain to those who did not. Everybody had their say about things ...” (Joigneaux 1849). Two comments must be made about the category of popular reading as it has been han­ dled by historians of the book and of reading. First, fundamentally, this category is a long term phenomenon, whether regarding textual content or the form of books and this ap­ plies also, therefore, to the ways in which these were read. Popular literature was a vehi­ cle over the centuries, in Germany as in Spain or France, for content and models in­ herited from the late Middle Ages which would only fade in the nineteenth century under pressure from the new working class literature and the different attitude of the literate classes - consider Heinrich Heine rediscovering popular literature and preferring poorly printed old booklets to the latest works.4 Consequently, given that the definition of popu­ lar was a construction of the literate, the risk is very real of offering only a tautological analysis (what is found is what was put there): in the homes and inns of sixteenth and seventeenth century Flanders, printed works and pictures were conspicuous only by their absence - as is the case in the paintings of festivals, taverns or scenes of daily life by the Antwerp artist David Tenniers the Younger (1610-1690), the son-in-law of Jean Brueghel the Elder.5 Descriptions in literature follow the same archetypes and models just like the one offered by Balzac of the Auvergne mountains in the first decades of the nineteenth century: ““What would thieves come and take from us then?” She pointed to the walls blackened by smoke on which as sole ornament were pictures illuminated in blue, red and green of The Death o f Credit, The Passion o f Jesus Christ and The Grena­ diers o f the Imperial Guard...” (Balzac 1974, 335-354). Moreover, content is not always a sound guide as the literate classes would also have their supposedly “popular” reading material, as is proved by the circulation of the novels of Rabelais or indeed of calendars and almanacs. Consequently, the definition of popular operates in the manner of an upturned cone with the point tangent to a plane: at the point of contact, that of the greatest number of people, only popular printed works are found, whilst the spread of choices on offer widens more and more the further one moves along the sociological axis but the population involved decreases. Popular reading operates less

4 “However fíne Tieck's Geneviève may be, I prefer popular books, poorly printed at Cologne on the Rhine, with wood engravings ...” (Heine 1981, 214). 5 Brueghel the Younger painted his “Visit to the farm” in 1620 probably after a grisaille by Brueghel the Elder, second half of the 16th century, in which are seen xylograph images painted on the back of the rustic bench (Priv. coll. reprod. in Trente-trois tableaux de Brueghel le Jeune in the private Belgian collections 1969, no. 21). 8 Frédéric Barbier in the categories of content and form and more in terms of exclusivity, therefore in terms of status, role and practices. It is in this way that the history of reading has been able to rejoin the history of the book and of writing of which it is both the basis and the culmina­ tion.

The Sociology of Literature, Rezeptionsgeschichte, Anglo-American Physical Bibliography

At the same time, the study of reading and its history have been the subject of research work conducted in scientific fields on the margins of history proper. French university tradition sees literary history as a history of works and their individual authors and is limited “too often [to] biographies of the mind and [to] critical commentaries” (Robert Escarpit). The desire to place the discipline in a scientific and historical framework has led to the development of work in the field of the sociology of literature: the collective context is reintroduced and primarily the problems are raised of the author (his status and role), of literature (“What is literature?”) and of the work of literature. The Canadian Marshall McLuhan has underlined the fact that the message, as a message received, can­ not be isolated from its conditions of production and, especially, of transmission, while Lucien Febvre seeks to free literary history from the simple disembodied history of au­ thors and works to bring it “back down to earth” - and, to do this, he notably studies the principal medium of the modem and contemporary era, the medium of printing. Whence the new importance of a history of the reading public6 and of reception the­ ory. Paradoxically, work in the sociology of literature has rather privileged the study of the text itself, either from the semiotic perspective or from that of its relationship to the social and mental structures in which it was produced and to which it corresponds (The Sociology o f the Novel, Lucien Goldmann): the practices of reading and strategies of comprehension have remained relatively neglected until very recently, and the reading public is only a secondary concern of the main work in the sociology of literature. Finally, historians, after the Annales school, have first explored the overall context in which reading took place, notably the evolution of literacy rates and of book production, and the contents of old private libraries (especially by means of inventories drawn up after deaths). The practices of reading proper have remained until recently outside their research considerations. The German tradition brings into play other ideas and relates back to a different po­ sition in philology and literature in university circles: the æsthetics of reception postu­ lates a direct link between the text transmitted and the mind of the reader, independent of the physical form of the message and its situation. Rolf Engelsing offers a different analysis, more precisely attached to reading practices and textual content, even if there is frequent reference to conceptual constructs seen as axiomatic - the bourgeoisie, the mid­ dle classes, etc., whose reading practices are determined by their relationships to the

6 “The environmental explanation is indeed definitive: the environment produces the writer; this is why I do not believe it. The public proves the opposite, that is questions of freedom arise: the environment is fixed; the public on the contrary represent an expectation, a vacuum to be filled, an aspiration, figuratively and literally ...” (Sartre n.d., 96). History, The Historian and Reading 9

other social groups (Engelsing 1973, 112-154; 1974).7 The change in the dominant read­ ing practices in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century is seen as a 'reading revolution' which corresponds, in Germany, to the economic and political revolutions in Britain and France. Not only does reading as a practice become effectively a subject of history but it is now placed at the heart of the most important inventive processes of the contemporary world. A third angle, which seems particularly fruitful, is notably explored by Anglo- American researchers, who are always careful to avoid submitting to theoretical frame­ works: this is physical bibliography, that is the systematic study of the text itself, its vari­ ants and its “coming into being” (Kirsop 1970). No theory replaces here the most minute observation of the circumstances of the creation of a text in a book. Physical bibliography seeks first of all, by studying the physical text and its variants, to scientifically establish the final version and it has been applied especially to the works of Shakespeare. Subse­ quently, however, the problems posed here are those raised by McLuhan: the text does not exist in itself but only via a certain physical form which, itself, determines the read­ ing practices used to process it which are sometimes relatively limited. Whence the new attention given to the medium and to all the physical elements which are not the text but which frame it and make it readable. Physical bibliography precisely opens the door to a history of reading understood as a practice.

Documenting Reading Practices: Reading Spaces

Book Historians have been inspired by these different perspectives to conduct research into this third category of the history of the book - the history of the reader and of reading practices. One of the main difficulties here is the problem of documentation: not only does the concept of reading denote a hybrid practice, at the interface of a physical act and the intangible psychological processes involved in it, but the act itself and its thought processes have disappeared, effaced by the sands of time. One might have at one's dis­ position excellent sources which provide the most thorough documentation - as with the case of Frioul's Miller “found” by Carlo Ginzburg or, at the other end of the social spec­ trum, as with the Marshall-duke de Croy in the second half of the eighteenth century (Dion 1987), and the notion of normal-exceptional makes it possible to suggest a general overall outline on the basis of specific examples. However, generally, the act of reading has been documented only indirectly, with the consequence that any attempt to write a history of it is confronted straight away with the problem of sources. It is in response to this that four approaches, each applied to a particular area, have been particularly fa­ voured and are today still being elaborated. The first concerns the study of “reading spaces” and was notably explored at two con­ ferences on this topic in Paris. Space is indeed a special feature which allows one better to understand the place accorded to books by social organisations of all types, whether

7 The most important concept is that of compensation: an oppressed social group will look to reading for a sort of compensation for its overall situation and the “German reading revolution” was indirectly caused by a certain delay in economic and political development compared to the other great nations of western Europe. 10 Frédéric Barbier

concerning the spaces of production,8 of distribution,9 or of 'consumption* of books. The location of books in private spaces shows very clearly that reading in no way exhausts all the possible uses for a book: Doctor Bovary in Gustave Flaubert, a wordly doctor, would decorate his book case with books which he had probably never read while a worker receiving a book as a gift, when buying a clock, might dump it forever and leave it to find other uses.10 The distinction between public space and private space is itself not so clear cut. Whilst the public library perfectly represents the former, a certain type of private reading may take place there - e.g. curators and librarians behind the closed doors of their offices - and, increasingly, private reading might take place in public spaces: the custom­ ers at a book auction in Oxford in 1747 were often to be seen engrossed in their read­ ing,11 as were, a hundred years later, the passengers on a Paris omnibus.12 Also, semi­ public reading spaces could be found, whether institutional in some way (reading rooms or, indeed, clubs in London as well as Hamburg) or specific uses of certain private spaces (for example, such and such a collection might be opened to the public or to part of the public).13

Documenting Reading Practices: Book Layouts

A second angle of study being explored is that of the form of the printed work itself. There seems indeed to be a direct link between the form in which the text is realised and the possible uses which may be made of it. A large format, primarily folio, needs to be read flat, the book resting on a table, a stand or a lectern. These are, of course, the tradi­ tional circumstances of religious readings which give prominence to a personality (evangelist, Doctor of the Church, founder of a religious order, etc.), seated before the Book par excellence, open before him and in the reading - and often also the writing or commentaries - of which he is engrossed. The operation was so deep rooted that it underwent no radical changes from the portrait of the evangelist, for example, painted by

8 The spatial distribution of printing presses derived directly from the very conditions of manu­ facture of books and demonstrates very well, for instance, the shift from an artisanal logic of production (“Ancien Régime printing”) to an industrial one. 9 Here we meet the problem of the relationship between the printed product and its public, and implicitly too, therefore, that of reading; we must bear in mind that commercial and financial activity in no way exhausted the range of possible distribution models: books could be given (and the typology of the act is itself highly significant with regard to the status of the object, of its representation and its desired uses), lent (between private individuals, via a public library, etc.) or exchanged. When a prisoner entered the Gulag, he had practically nothing but “always finished up with a book which he would exchange in turn for other books in the camp” (Solz­ henitsyn 1983, II., 990). For a study of distribution systems at the time of “the Ancien Régime book trade”, see... Barbier, Juratic & Varry 1996. 10 Numerous references in Barbier 1995. 11 An Oxford book auction, painting by Wm. Green Jun., 1747 (Oxford, Bodleian Library). 12 Dans l'omnibus, by Delondre (Paris, Musée Carnavalet). 13 This is the model home of the enlightened gentleman described by Voltaire in Zadig: “Zadig had, in a suburb of Babylon, a house decorated with taste where he engaged in all the arts and pleasures worthy of a gentleman. In the morning, his library was opened to all the scholars; in the evening, his table was available to good company...” (Voltaire 1932, 12). History, The Historian and Reading 11

no radical changes from the portrait of the evangelist, for example, painted by Rode14 in the tenth century to the representation of the Annunciation, five centuries later, in the porch of Saint Mark’s cathedral, Venice or again at Saint Clement’s in Rome. The evolution of book formats, and uses, was however already clearly discernible, as is demonstrated by the study and the iconography of the books of Hours. If the Virgin of Antonello da Messina's Annunciation,15 which can be dated to 1472, has her small book before her on a table with a book stand on it, the Virgins, the Annunciations and the por­ traits by German or Flemish artists display more manageably sized books, simply held in the hands or again, as with the very fine screen of the chancel of Chartres cathedral (six­ teenth century), informally resting on the lap of a person engrossed in needlework.16 This examination of the relationship between the form of the book-object and its use has been applied to a number of different types of printed work but still requires systematic study. The external form of the volume (format, thickness, type of cover and titles17) is an extension of the presentation and layout of the text. The scansion of the biblical text in the Codex sinaiticus of the middle of the 4th century is based on the very movements of the text to which the successive paragraphs of the Epistles of Saint Paul correspond and not on the modem division into verses (Martin, Vezin 1990, 60-65). The first illustrated manuscripts of Virgil which we possess, the Vaticanus (end of the 4th century) and the Romanus (end of the 5th century), display a text written in simple capitals with long lines and no word spaces, an arrangement which suggests at least a murmured reading or one based on a prior memorisation of the text of the poem (Ibid., 154-160). Word spaces, the highlighting of different parts of the text by exploiting the characters available in differ­ ent alphabets, by using spidery hand, by inserting capitals or blank spaces, the standard­ ised use of upper and lower case, punctuation, division into paragraphs, into chapters, into parts, all of these are elements which frame and structure possible readings. Finally, recent work in experimental psychology is seeking to explore the relationship between eye movements over the printed page and certain linguistic features of the text being read.18 To continue the analysis, it is possible for a text to appear alone but it is practically always contained within a second system the objective of which is to allow or facilitate

14 Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. 15 Galleria Nazionale, Palermo. 16 Equally well known is the “pocket book”, in reality carried in a purse attached to the belt as found, for example, on the effigies of the tombs of the dukes of Burgundy (Dijon, Musée des Beaux Arts). 17 Cover: books in leaves, bound, backed in one way or another. Titles: the scrolls represented in a mosaic in Trier (middle of the 3rd century AD) are stacked like a wicker basket, and they were often provided with labels attached to strings which allowed them to be identified without being opened. Numerous manuscripts of the Middle Ages, of the incunabula, even of the printed works of the 16th century still carried titles or partial titles on their side. The classic system is that of references on the spine of the volume (name of the author, abbreviated title), whilst, from the nineteenth century, collections were identified by the homogeneity of their covers (consider Reclam's Universal Bibliothek). 18 The use of diacritics was to remove ambiguities before they arose. 12 Frédéric Barbier the reading of the text: the paratext, to use a common term in a slightly different sense. The paratext includes reader orientation marks (pagination, leaf numbering, other num­ bering systems, different sorts of running titles ...), but also tables of all kind (tables of contents, index nominum or index rerum, etc.). A typical example is provided by the publications of scholasticism, that rigorous way of thinking par excellence based on the reading {lectio) of great texts (holy books, Peter Lombard’s Book of Sentences ...).19 The text is arranged in questions (quaestiones) to which replies are successively given. The keystone of scholasticism is the Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas (1224/1225- 1274), divided into three parts (partes), themselves divided into sub-parts (membra), questions (questiones) and articles (articuli). Each article is introduced by the formula utrum ... an (either ... or), then the reply starts with videtur quod non (it is to be noted that ... not), and the following elements with praeterea (moreover). Subsequently, the op­ posing arguments are introduced by sed contra (but on the contrary). Finally, the author gives his reply using the formula respondeo dicendum (I shall reply by saying that ...), and by subdividing it according to the order of the objections raised (ad primam, ad sec- ondum, etc.). This is, then, a very complex method of intellectual working which is based on and reproduces the very structure of spoken discourse. This structure is indeed repro­ duced in the typography of the edition published nearly three centuries later in Haguenau (1512) which is, however, complemented by an index of the main points made and an alphabetical table of the questiones and articuli. The very circumstances of publication are not without influence on the layout of the text and, therefore, the way in which it might be read. Consider here the first appearance of many of the great novels of the nineteenth century in serial form in periodicals, e.g. The Wandering Jew by Eugène Sue, The Count of Monte Christo by Alexandre Dumas, and many others. The quick succession and increased number of episodes following on from number to number made of the serialised novel a sort of permanent improvisation while its reading led to the periodical circulating throughout the whole household from the master's apartments to the concierge's lodge. Similarly, the industrialisation of the book trade accelerated the rapid turn over of titles and led to new ways of reading appear­ ing (speed reading). The last angle of study, individual books' characteristics, will simply be mentioned here for the record. The bottom right hand comer of the leaves of certain manuscripts appears smoother because that is where they have been turned over during reading and subsequent re-reading. Covers are equally significant, the bookbinding enthusiast is not necessarily a reader or even interested in books: “He added that books teach more he had a library, I wanted to see it; [he] re­ ceived me in a house where, at the staircase, I was entranced by the smell of black morocco in which all of his books were covered. He shouted in vain, to bring me round, that they were all gilt-edged, decorated with gold fillets and deluxe editions ..., and to say that his gallery is almost full of them, that they are painted in such a way as to be taken for real books arranged on shelves to generate an optical illu­ sion, to add that he never reads, that he never sets foot in this gallery, that he would go there to make me happy; I thanked him for his kindness but did not want any

19 A practice in direct contrast to the old monastic meditatio. History, The Historian and Reading 13

more than he, to visit the tannery that he calls his library.” (La Bruyere 1898, XIII, 398-399). Finally, of course, marks of origin, readers' notes, etc. are all clues which provide infor­ mation about the practice of reading itself but the use of these by researchers is made all the more difficult by the absence of any systematic account of them - even in library catalogues.

Documenting Reading Practices: a Consumer Economy

The third approach can generally be applied only to relatively recent periods: here work is organised according to economic categories on the basis of the sources that are the evolution of print runs and book prices, the main series of statistics of the nineteenth century and statistical surveys of the economy. We have already seen several examples relative to Germany and France at the time of the “second reading revolution” - industri­ alisation and the invention of the mass book trade (Barbier 1995). In practical terms, changes in the book trade were based on a drop in the sale price of books, a reduction which the mechanisation of book production and the increase in average print runs more than made up for. For the sums to add up, though, the potential new consumers had to want to and be able to get hold of the products offered them. The statistician Ernst Engel has shown how, in the nineteenth century, the demand for a certain product varied ac­ cording to the evolution of relative income: elasticity is the greater or lesser variation in consumption depending on the movement of the average price of the product relative to income. The least elastic products are the most necessary, and, additionally, other factors influence elasticity such as living conditions, the environment (city or country, a certain district in a city, etc.) and consumer habits. We do not need to give an account here of the results of the study into German book consumption in the second half of the nineteenth century, a study which is based on a double correlation between price and production levels and income levels and consump­ tion patterns (Barbier 1995, 469 ff.; 1991, 578-623). The analysis of income levels shows that, firstly (for the lowest incomes), there was a logic of the indispensable where all the available resources were drained by essential consumer items - food, and, to a lesser extent, clothing and housing. Beyond a certain threshold, which can be set at about 400 Marks per year, other purchases became possible, if not necessary, in which the printed work had a place which is not negligible: this was a time of increased learning opportuni­ ties and when the printed work became commonplace. The third model is that of the higher income levels for which living conditions and “life style” demanded another type of purchase - servants, holidays, travelling, etc. In this last model, the relative share rep­ resented by book purchases and subscriptions to newspapers and periodicals tended gen­ erally to be smaller. The relationship between consumption levels (book purchases) and income levels tended, then, to describe a flattened “S” shaped curve of which the middle part displayed the most noticeable increases (very high elasticity), whilst the ends would be less prominent (low, zero or even negative elasticity). Of course, statistical studies in no way exhaust the infinite diversity of real individuals’ situations and experiences but they do have the tremendous advantage of providing a global analytical framework from 14 Frédéric Barbier

which to better observe specific real situations. A good example is provided by the young Eckermann who, although from a very poor background, was able to pursue his primary education: his gifts and his curiosity of mind allowed him to become very much a part of one of the most enlightened intellectual environments in the Germany of the 1820s (Goethe 1988). On the other hand, there are often characters with a large disposable income whose intellectual curiosity was poorly developed or non existent. Consider, with Theodor Fon- tane, the overly luxurious Berlin flat of the rich and noble Baron Botho von Rienácker whose life style far exceeded his means. The Baron, who won by chance (in a lottery!) an Aschenbach painting, found at the time that he had a taste for art. The logic of distinction here is dual, the Baron, on the one hand, keeping his distance from a cultural capital he considered useless but also demonstrating artistic abilities which precisely operated as an additional distancing mechanism. Affectation in furnishings but also a desire to display a certain detachment which, in principle, had to be aristocratic: the new politics, which called into question the supremacy of the nobility, was greeted with derision, and, on the couch, “all sorts of newspapers were to be seen scattered, some political, others more sur­ prising in this place, the presence of which could be explained only by one of the Baron's favourite phrases: “humour comes before politics”...” There is no doubt that, beyond the clichés, the description corresponds to a certain social reality, especially at the time of the Second Reich.

Documenting Reading Practices: Representational Sources

We have already made numerous references to a last set of documentary sources: repre­ sentational sources, whether iconographic (paintings, engravings, even photographs) or literary (novels, biographies, etc.), archives (especially correspondence) or first person documents (diaries, autobiographies). Their study must be rigorous: if the representations always refer to something in the social and cultural environment which has produced them and of which they are part, they often do so in an indirect way and, therefore, they have to be examined by reference to their form, their type and their nature. These limi­ tations peculiar to representational sources and also the difficulty of categorising them (there might be no corpus or it might be impossible to study them systematically) and of analysing them scientifically explain why they are practically used only in isolated ways. However, attempts at systematic use do exist, whether by Fritz Nies working on images of readers, or the study of the occurrences of the word 'reading1 in the French nineteenth century novel (Nies 1995; Barbier 1991, 1995). Finally, the different approaches to the study of reading which may be adopted each refer to a system based on a wider field of objective study - the sociology of literature and reading, the consumer economy, different types of representation, etc. The very prac­ tice in its different realisations and the impact it can have on those who engage in it, how­ ever, derive from a different order of knowledge. What it is possible to study does not cover everything that might happen in reality; the art of “making do” (Michel de Certeau) reinvents even at the heart of the most apparently implacable reasoning a range of free History, The Historian and Reading 15

choices which escapes the researcher. A book may be bought but it is not necessarily read or even put to some “other” use; it can be given (and the analysis of giving would be most fruitful for the book historian), lent, stolen, sometimes also forgotten, even lost, thrown away or destroyed. It might feature in a library but it might never have been ope­ ned (how many unopened books there are in scholarly libraries ...), it might feature in the home, but it might not be used, sometimes nobody would even know how to read. Consi­ der all those readers asleep on their books,20 all those books fallen from those hands, or consider, on the other hand, the portrait painted by Alphonse Daudet of the former journalist who had gone blind : “Do you know what is the most terrible thing for me? It is not to be able to read my newspapers any more. You have to have been in the business to understand that... Sometimes, in the evening, on coming home, I buy one, just to breathe in that smell of moist paper and fresh news ...” (Daudet 1994, 112).

The Act of Reading: From Writing Surfaces to Reading Practices

Generally the history of the book and of the written word must primarily be a study of continuity in which times of great change (Gutenberg in the fifteenth century and in­ dustrialisation in the nineteenth century) provide further evidence of the importance of the long term. Even leaving aside the problems of xylography and the influence of the far east, the invention of movable metal type brought to an end a complex series of changes in writing practices which had evolved over two hundred years, whilst many incunabu- lum printers continued to work for several decades within the framework of the manu­ script (page make up, abbreviated characters, etc.). Similarly, the industrial revolution impacted on the printing industry in a much more complex way than has been described by traditional historiography, whilst ’the book trade of the industrial era', and even of the post-industrial, retains many elements typical of its Ancien Régime counterpart. If the dialectic is still essentially that of the long term, the very concept of sudden change should be taken up in some depth.

Writing Surfaces: Scrolls

It is the same concerning the study of reading practices: that which is permanent domina­ tes, change obviously takes place on the horizontal axis of the long term but essentially the study of changes and contrasts remains to be undertaken. The identification and the description of reading practices and of the ways in which texts are understood would be based firstly on a typology of writing systems, then of the forms taken by and the writing surfaces used for the written word, the variants of which evolved over several millennia.

20 “Half an hour later, the thought that it was time to get some sleep aroused me; I wanted to put down the volume that I thought I still had in my hands and blow out the light; while asleep I did not stop reflecting on what I had just read, but these reflexions took a strange turn ...” (Proust 1973,1, 3). 16 Frédéric Barbier

Let us leave aside inscriptions on stone, the multiplicity of writing surfaces used in antiq­ uity and the ephemeral writing surfaces of intellectual work such as wax tablets. The canonical form of the ancient book is the scroll (volumen), a roll of leaves of papyrus, later parchment, stitched end to end to make rolls which could reach several metres long.21 The text was displayed perpendicular to the axis of the scroll, while the pages (paginae) constituted the basic physical units and were made up of columns written in a width which allowed them to be read together in sequence. The scroll was generally supported by a wooden handle which allowed it to be handled or stored. Reading prac­ tices here seem relatively limited and are moreover documented by the iconography of Roman paintings and mosaics: the scroll had to be held in the hands and progressively unfurled by rolling it open with the left hand and rolling it back up with the right. If need be, there would be a special piece of furniture on which to place the document to leave the hands free, as demonstrated by a portrait at Pompeii. And then there is the case re­ ported by Pliny the Younger of the old Verginius Rufus who, at the age of 83, “was reading a scroll so heavy that it ended up falling from his hands. Trying to catch it, he lost his balance, fell, broke his leg and died ...” (Pliny n.d., II, 1, 5). Moreover, the nature of the scroll proved relatively fragile and especially burdensome in that the text could be written only on the inside of the medium. It was all the more dif­ ficult to read the text in part, to find a particular passage, or to take notes because it had to be unrolled and rolled to the required place while handling the scroll was quite tricky and generally required both hands. Finally, the scroll had to be re-rolled after use ready for the next user - otherwise the text would be displayed backwards. There are, however, examples of more manageable scrolls as in the mosaic at Plato's Academy (1st century AD),22 but it is significant that none of the characters depicted is reading or taking notes: the favoured medium is indeed, by all accounts, the spoken one.

Writing Surfaces: Parchment, Codices and Reading Practices

The decisive invention, the one allowing new reading practices to develop, was that of the codex, that is of the hard bound book, at the same time as the change in the writing surface most often used with papyrus progressively giving way to parchment. Papyrus was produced from reeds growing in the Nile valley in Egypt. Papyrus stalks, triangular in shape, were cut into small strips which were laid on top of each other and stuck down in vertical and horizontal bands. Papyrus was relatively expensive and, above all, fragile, so replacements were very quickly sought. Among these, parchment (pergamentum) was

21 The very form of the scroll is, moreover, replicated in the nature of ancient monumental archi­ tecture: Trajan's Column in Rome displays in the manner of a scroll its sections illustrating the history of the victories of the Emperor over the Dacians and this style was also revisited in the modem era and the nineteenth century. The column was built in Rome in the middle of Trajan's Forum, near to two libraries housing archives and collections of legal texts. The south-west li­ brary of Trajan's Forum has been relatively well preserved and displays the classical arrange­ ment of those buildings of Antiquity which housed scrolls: the nooks and cupboards placed be­ tween the pillars were divided into compartments where scrolls were placed. 22 National Museum of Archaeology, Naples. History, The Historian and Reading 17

said to have been invented in Pergamum, on the Asia Minor coast: texts were written on tanned hide which was starting to be used from the end of the 1st century. The progres­ sive breakdown of trade between the two parts of the Mediterranean in late antiquity tended to make supplies of papyrus difficult to come by for western centres and acceler­ ated the change in favour of parchment. The use of parchment had huge advantages over papyrus. It was easier to make on site, stiffer, and could be written on both sides of the page - whence a more rationalised usage. But the main thing was the abandonment of the scroll in favour of the hardback book (the codex), made up of leaves of folded parchment stitched together and bound. By the 5th century AD, the break was complete with the codex taking over completely from the ancient volumen. The consequences of this triumph of parchment and of the codex for reading practices themselves were considerable. It became possible to take notes while reading, to reread, to consult or look for a passage without having to unroll or roll back the text, and to find immediately the volume one was looking for thanks to the title borne on the spine. The conditions of intellectual work were transformed, even if this potential was only slowly realised at first: the early Middle Ages in the west were a time of col­ lapse with a dramatic population decline and severe limitation of economic activity. With a practically illiterate population and a subsistence economy, written culture could sur­ vive only in very circumscribed contexts, mainly religious establishments, which were like oases in an almost exclusively oral environment. Even in monasteries, there were very few books, a few dozen at most, while exchanges of information were all the more difficult because of the wide diversity of writing styles. This was the time of reading and rereading of the same texts (intensive reading), which progressively become known by heart and around which commentaries and glosses developed apace. This practice is, in fact, met in all of the environments typified by a shortage of books - on journeys, in hos­ pitals, even in prisons: “[This prisoner] hardly ever spoke to anyone A big reader in the eyes of God, he spent the whole of his last year ceaselessly poring over the Bible, day and night. When everyone else was asleep, he would get up in the middle of the night, light a candle, settle down on the hearth, open his book and read until morning ...” (Dosto­ evsky 1977, 73). The Carolingian Renaissance, from the end of the eighth century, did not greatly change things: its main novelty was the copying of numerous manuscripts and especially the use of a standard writing script, Carolingian, which was much more legible and which tended to take the place of the various regional scripts used across western Europe.

Writing and Power: New Intellectual Methods, New Forms of Writing, New Reading Practices

However, changes made themselves felt which would gradually transform the structures of written culture and the practices constituting it. We need not dwell on these here, other than to underline the slowness of the process (which took several centuries) and the di­ versity of time spans (innovative regions contrasted with those lagging behind). The prime novelty derived from the private sphere and the needs of the economy: in a more 18 Frédéric Barbier

open environment, lawyers and businessmen, mainly Genoan and Venetian, perfected, from the eleventh century, new methods of accounting and trading based on written re­ cords. Analogous methods, also based increasingly on the written word, were profitably developed by government agencies, notably in the Italian principalities (including the Curia in Rome and later in Avignon), and in England (the Domesday Book, a general census commissioned by William the Conqueror), but also in France, too. Everywhere, the written word was gospel, taking the place of traditions kept alive orally and neces­ sitating groups of clerks and literate people, real specialists in the manipulation of this new culture. Finally, the twelfth century was also the century of scholarship with its often brilliant monastic or cathedral schools and, especially, the founding of small schools in most cities and many towns as well as the appearance of the first universities (Bologna 1088, Paris around 1150, Oxford 1167, Salerno 1173). Learning to read and write necessitates a certain discipline, and the birch remained an attribute of schools into modem times,23 while practices associated with writing also resembled physical exercise, backs bent, ribs pressing into the stomach, eyes wearied by overly weak light, fingers stiffened by the cold and wet. The stimulation of learning by the written word was the most advanced in the richest and most urbanised regions, northern Italy, Flanders, certain parts of Germany, etc. In 1516, a Basle school master offered his services on painted signs outside his house: “Wer jemand hie der gem welt lemen dutsch schriben und lasen ...”24 Power, then, whether economic, political or cultural, tended from now on to be based on the mastery of the written word, and this new relationship was itself behind another logic of social domina­ tion: the superiority, in developed societies, of wordsmiths over the hoards of the il­ literate as well as a general political superiority of those societies mastering these tech­ niques over those lagging behind in this respect. Linked to universities, booksellers started to populate the new student districts.25 Once again, representational sources are highly revealing here: the wealth of the money lender painted by Quentin Metsys in 1514 was based on the mastery of intellec­ tual methods linked to the written word and to accounting; in the background can be seen books and documents on shelves, while his wife casually leafs through a hand-written, illustrated book of Hours.26 It was the same in the worlds of government and politics:

23 See the representation of Grammar on the great door of Chartres cathedral. 24 Öffentliche Kuntsammlung Basel, Kunstmuseum. 25 Few illustrations in manuscripts, but see especially Cambrai, Bibliothèque municipale, manu­ script no. 620. 26 Paris, Musée du Louvre. The same arrangement is found in the painting “Percepteur et sa femme” by Marinus Van Roymerswael (Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek), The woman here is holding in her hands not a Book of Hours but a work book in which duties are recorded. Bundles of paper can also be seen in the background. The same dé­ cor of “writing” is seen in the portraits of traders painted by Hans Holbein the Younger (Georg Gisze, in 1532, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussicher Kulturbesitz; and in Cyriacus Kale, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Brunswick). As for Rembrandt’s “Changeur” (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussicher Kulturbesitz), he is almost engulfed by the piles of registers and dossiers stacked up around him. History, The Historian and Reading 19

reference to writing and to books became progressively obligatory in many portraits of the nobility, as if to display the distinction inherent in the dignity of the character - but also to consolidate his power,27 while the arrival of the written word profoundly trans­ formed the traditional elements of rural society. Brueghel the Younger painted in his Dénombrement de Bethléem a small Flemish town at the time of the arrival of the tax collectors: the latter set up in the public space par excellence which was the inn where, armed with their registers, they collected the sums due from the crowd of assembled peasants.28 Entering the inn, with the painter, we find a veritable sea of paper piled up on the tax collector's and scribe's tables as the former consults a manuscript.29 Abstraction and rationalisation go hand in hand with another relationship, to time: reference is no longer made to nature's seasons but to the precise calculations and measurements symbolised by the printed Calendar fixed to the wall and the hourglass sitting on the table of the main character. Finally, apart from government agents, it was notably through lawyers that the written word entered the daily lives of the greatest number of people, and the scene of the reading of the marriage contract, or of the will, became one of the clas­ sics of painting - and of literature - up to the nineteenth century. 30 So, even before Gutenberg and the fifteenth century, we are in the presence of another relational logic with regard to the written word and the book. The relatively common­ place nature of the object, new uses of the written word and the extension of skills (who knew how to read and write?) to a greater number of people posed difficult physical problems, starting notably with writing surfaces. Parchment was expensive and difficult to work with, while a new writing surface, paper, travelled slowly from the far east across the Muslim world into Syria, Ifriqya (present day Tunisia) and southern Spain. From the middle of the eleventh century, the chancellery of Byzantium adopted paper, the manu­ facture of which extended to Italy (the Genoa region, especially Fabriano) in the first half of the thirteenth century. A hundred years later, paper mills were operating in France, in Flanders, in the Brabant and in the Netherlands, and shortly after in Germany. The west, where the need for the written word became greater and greater, now had a writing sur­ face which was cheap and the production of which nothing seemed likely to hinder. The revolution in writing and reading preceded that in printing. Following the same route as the silk road, another Chinese invention arrived in the west, namely xylography, or wood engraving. Religious images run off on paper were produced in large quantities from the end of the fifteenth century in regions close to the

27 Consider the numerous dedication scenes painted at the beginning of manuscripts offered to the nobility, or the portrait of Philippe le Bon, Duke of Burgundy, by Roger Van der Weyden (Groeningue Museum, Bruges). 28 Brussels, Musées royaux des Beaux Arts. Copy, Vaduz, Sammlungen des Fürsten von Liech­ tenstein. 29 Museé Groeningue, Bruges. 30 For example, the home of the well off English country family by Sir David Wilkie, 1820 (Mu­ nich, Bayerische Staatsgemâldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek): the lawyer is reading the mar­ riage contract, the whole family has gathered to hear it. On the wall, a large manuscript doubt­ less relates the property and the rights possessed in the country. Also noteworthy are a small li­ brary on several shelves, a mandolin and a family portrait. 20 Frédéric Barbier main pilgrimage centres, and they were found in the most humble of homes in towns and in the countryside (fixed to the walls). Engraved legends and short textual commentaries were soon added to the images proper. If the invention of movable metal type in the middle years of the fifteenth century did not profoundly affect book circulation patterns or reading practices, this was no longer the case after a generation or two: the increased numbers of printed books imposed new scholarly practices, the construction of bigger and more numerous libraries was accom­ panied by a form of extensive reading (different works were read, or consulted, quickly) while the first great reference bibliographies appeared (allowing scholars and librarians to keep on top of an ever increasing book production). Painted by Cardinal Bessarion, Saint Augustin of Carpaccio is the model of the new intellectual, surrounded by books and his cabinet of curios, working at his table, pen in hand, books scattered and open all round him.31 With regard to the greater part of the population, the very success of the Reformation was directly linked to the publishing policy followed by the great Reformers: short texts circulated in large numbers of copies. Categories and types of texts changed and, if the description of Saint Victor's library is for Rabelais only a pretext to satirise traditional literate culture, his Letter from Gargantua to Pantagruel bears witness to the changes brought about by the invention of printing: “Now all disciplines are in vogue and languages studied: Greek, without which it is shameful to claim to be a scholar, Hebrew, Chaldean, Latin; elegant and fíne print­ ing was invented at this time by divine inspiration ... The whole world is full of knowledgeable people, of very learned teachers, of well stocked libraries, and, I am advised, not in the time of Plato, nor of Cicero, nor even of Papianus was there so much studying as now ... I can see brigands, butchers, adventurers, grooms more learned than the doctors and preachers of my own time. What shall I say ... ?” (Ra- blais 1934, chap. VIII, 22Ó-227).32

Paper Empires

The effectiveness of western thought and its political supremacy were precisely based on the increasing number and mastery of symbols - printing, the circulation of printed works and reading. As Marshall McLuhan has already noted (McLuhan 1977, 113 ff), the most powerful empires are those founded on the control and processing of information, “paper empires” and, paradoxically, the increased fragility, lightness and even intangibility of the writing surface (up to contemporary forms of digital information) seemed to be the corollary of the efficiency of the system. Rare writings would be perpetuated as a monu­ ment fixing them in time; commonplace writings implied a writing surface which was itself commonplace, and which was not necessarily fated to be preserved. Significant moments in time were translated into space: in a town in the southern Slav provinces, the Turks built a magnificent bridge across a river, reinforcing the role of the town as a mar­

31 Venice, Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. 32 Note the fourfold reference to the generational effect: “Now all disciplines ...”, “invented at this time”, “studying as now”, “of my own time”. History, The Historian and Reading 21

ket and trading centre; they then placed a white slab on it, inscribed with a verse com­ memorating the completion of the project (1575). Manifestations of the power of Con­ stantinople were even rarer in this far flung province than books with the result that: “people gathered round this inscription and spent a long time contemplating it until a theology student or other young expert turned up who, for a coffee or a slice of watermelon, or just to be civil, would read the inscription as best he could ... Our people being poorly educated, stubborn, and equipped with a vivid imagination, each of the town's literate ones would read and interpret in his own way the inscrip­ tion of Badi engraved on the w all... and each of those who listened would retain in his memory the verses which best suited him and his character. Thus, that which was there, in plain view of everyone, engraved on hard stone, would be repeated and passed on from mouth to mouth in different forms, changed and distorted sometimes to the point of absurdity ...” (Andric 1997, 71 fif.). However, by the turning point of the 1900s, things had changed, the Ottoman Empire was in decline whilst the Government of Vienna was extending its power towards the Balkans to rival the power of Saint Petersburg. In 1906, the Austrians annexed Bosnia- Herzogovina and the town on the Drina fell into their hands. On the bridge, the old stone inscription survived but now had only archæological significance while the change of régime was announced by posters. If reading practices were at first not very different from what they were under the Turks, paper proved more durable than stone, and the following years saw the town enter the modem western era, beginning with increased circulation of men, of goods and of news: “Just under the Turkish stone inscription, a soldier stuck a large sheet of white pa­ per. It was a proclamation ... in Serbian and in Turkish ...” Later, following the an­ nexation, another poster was displayed: “A large white poster was displayed. It was Drago, the land registry employee who put it up ...” (Andric 1997, 71 ff.).33

Writing Surfaces and Practices of the Modern Era

The modem era was the time of a slow evolution beginning with the object itself, an evolution which happened earlier and which was more marked the more advanced the region, and which many sources have documented. Book formats got smaller, their man­ ageability increased, and page layouts changed profoundly with the first edition of Des­ cartes’ Discourse on Method (1637). Murmured reading, or even silent reading, became a much more common practice. After Italy it was the United Provinces where a new modem way of life was invented, where a wealthy middle class kept refined and comfortable homes and commissioned painters to portray it on canvas: a comfortable but closed world of shuttered windows, subdued lighting, varied furniture with, when the subject of the painting lent itself to it, coveted objects and collectors' pieces to enrich the life style. Above all, there would be characters painted alone, whether servants in the kitchen, young girls lace making, or

33 It is to be noted that this analysis uses the same metaphor as Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris regarding “the stone book” of cathedrals: “the stone book, so solid and so durable, [gave] way to the paper book, even more solid and durable ...” 22 Frédéric Barbier

readers, hunched over the books before them or which they would be holding in their hands. In this world of the interior, reading was also internalised, even if it is possible to tell from the way his lips are drawn that the young boy painted by Franz Hals is mur­ muring or mouthing the words of the text he is reading.34 In Pieter Janssens1 work, the isolation of the reader is reinforced by the position of the character's back, turned towards the light.35 Learning gradually affected the mass of the population, the number of schools and lit­ eracy rates increased: Teniers the Younger shows us a very humble peasant home where a small group had gathered to smoke pipes, have a drink and listen to the news that one of them was reading from the newspaper.36 Everyone is leaning towards the reader, curi­ osity written on their faces, except for the young man who is evidently more interested in the contents of the jug than in those of the newspaper. The need for news shows that people were part of larger collective - and no longer just part of their own village com­ munity; this was one of the most obvious characteristics of life in the modem era, right up to the American War of Independence which confirmed the trend and extracted from it economic consequences by sending war correspondents right up to the front line. Silent reading in isolation, thirst for information. A third characteristic of the modem era is found in the now systematic role accorded to the book and to the printed word by Enlightenment thought. Writing and printing were now seen as the main vector by which progress, and, therefore, happiness, were circulated - and this theory knew no limits in the portraits of great characters portrayed with their books which symbolised their com­ mitment to serve the greater good. Poses were primarily formal, using the cube as a model, with the character standing or seated in the foreground, a book in the hands or placed on a table close by, and a curtain in the background partly drawn back to reveal a library or some objects from a cabinet of curios: Madame de Pompadour, painted by François Boucher, is seated with a book in her hands (but she is not reading: we are look­ ing at a carefully constructed image which has to be decoded), and in the background can be seen the folio volumes of the Encyclopœdia?1 Here, rather than the reader or reading, it is Enlightenment society itself which is being portrayed via one of its most powerful protectors and via the imagery of its principal medium of communication. Other pictures put the accent rather more on the individuality and isolation of the modem reader, notably those of Fragonard: the portrait of Diderot,38 the opera singer thumbing a score,39 the young girl reading40 or the red chalk drawing of the young man, elegantly dressed, standing, engrossed in his reading of a page held in his left hand.41 By

34 Franz Hals, Young boy reading, Winterthur, Coll. Reinhart. 35 Pieter Janssens, Lesende Frau, Munich, Alte Pinakothek, no. 284. 36 David Teniers the Younger, Die Neuigkeit, Hamburger Kunsthalle. 37 Munich, Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, no. 18. 38 Another arrangement for the portrait of the philosopher: Louis Michel Van Loo, 1767 (Paris, Musée du Louvre). 39 Paris, Musée du Louvre. 40 Washington, National Gallery, no. 1961.16.1. 41 Bibliothèque municipale de Besançon, vol. 453, no. 107. History, The Historian and Reading 23

1759 it is the little duodecimo, the typical format of the Enlightenment library, which Madame d’Epinay holds half open in her left hand.42 And, in the Encyclopcedia, Jeau- court outlines, after having gone over the learning required, his preference for reading alone and silently. Reading is to be distinguished from declamation (by an actor), and, “once learnt, it is done by the eyes or aloud ... One judges more rationally through reading; that which one hears is gone quickly, that which one reads may be digested at leisure. One may at one's ease return to the same place, and discuss each sen­ tence, so to speak. We know well that declamation, recitation, imposes on our judgement so we turn to praise the merits of a work we read with our own eyes. The experience we have of our own senses teaches us ... that the eyes are a more severe critic and a much more exacting scrutineer than the ears. Now, the work which one hears recited, which one hears read agreeably, is more seductive than the one which one reads oneself calmly in one's study. It is also in this way that reading is most useful: for to enjoy the full fruits of the work, one must have silence, calm and meditation. I shall not list the multitude of benefits brought by reading. It suf­ fices to say that it is indispensable to hone the mind and shape one's judgement; without it, that which is most beautiful in nature withers and fades ...” (Jeaucourt 1777, vol. XIX, 732-733). The typology of reading and its practices as a function of the writing surface itself is, as we have seen, very complex and varied. The nature of the writing surface is admittedly the first variable which directly conditions its own use but the range of formal possibili­ ties in which the practice of reading itself may take place must be seen in conjunction with its own environment and its relationship with the text. Thus, if the town was indeed, until very recent times, the space of learning par excellence, it is because it was a place of exchanges and meetings but also because it was the favoured place where a culture of writing developed, where there were always before the eyes, without need to seek them out, printed or written words and texts: book shop windows and displays, reading rooms and organs of the press,43 signs and notices of all descriptions, posters, etc. Public an­ nouncements were made on posters, theatres advertised their shows, commercial advertising was everywhere, shop signs took over the street. Already by the eighteenth century, peddlars, stall holders and salesmen haunted the streets while the first decades of the nineteenth century saw the triumph of the Palais Royal in Paris and, shortly after, the

42 Jean Etienne Liotard, Madame d'Epinay, Geneva, Musée d'art et d'histoire. 43 [The periodical's shop is on view on the Paris boulevards.] “A bit further up than the rue Montmartre, ... opposite on the other side, he read on a marble plaque: Jacques Amoux ... He went towards the shop but he did not go in ... The large transparent windows displayed, in clever arrangements, statuettes, drawings, engravings, catalogues, issues of Art industriel, with the subscription rates repeated on the door, decorated with the initials of the publisher. On the walls could be seen great paintings, varnish shining, then, in the background, two sideboards loaded with porcelain, bronzes, and charming curiosities; a small staircase separated them, closed at the top by a portiere; and a chandelier in old Dresden china, a green carpet on the floor, and an inlaid wooden table gave to the interior something of the appearance of a lounge rather than of a shop ...” (Flaubert 1942, vol. I, 27-28). 24 Frédéric Barbier newspaper seller became one of the obligatory characters in any big city landscape - as in the photos of New York taken around 1900.44 The study of writing surfaces and reading methods leads to the analysis of a context and of the more general categories of thought of morality and politics. If the town be­ came a more dangerous place, then it was precisely because people started to read so it had to be kept under surveillance and reading controlled. When the young Adamantos Coray came to Paris in 1788, he was most of all struck by the intensity of life and rela­ tionships and by the hive of activity he sensed in the buzzing metropolis: “Imagine a city larger than Constantinople, containing 800,000 inhabitants, a varied multitude of academies, a host of public libraries, all the arts and sciences per­ fected, a crowd of scholars spread all over the city, in the public squares, in the market places, in the cafés where one may find all the latest literary or political news, newspapers in German, in English, in French, in a word, in every language ... Add to that a crowd of pedestrians, another crowd being transported in carriages to all parts, ... such is the city of Paris! ... Expect great things, extraordinary things to happen. Whatever happens, it would seem impossible to my feeble mind that there will not soon be a revolution the like of which has never been seen before ...”45

Introduction to a Typology of Reading Skills

Skills and Performance

Reading obviously implies a certain range of skills which need to be kept up and which lead to an infinite range of reading practices, but studying the history of reading through a history of literacy is an approach which needs to be greatly refined: if there is indeed a correlation, illiteracy in no way excludes the understanding of a text through hearing it read aloud. The quality of the reading would be a much more meaningful indicator but one which is much more difficult for the researcher to establish. Let us return to the Drina, where the proclamation announcing the annexation by Austria-Hungary was dis­ played: “Those who knew how to read deciphered the text out loud, stumbling over the for­ eign phrases or new words which they spelled out. The others listened without say­ ing anything ... This time, the text was not translated into Turkish [and many, there­ fore, could not read it]. A young man deciphered it out loud, in a mechanical tone, as if at school, [followed by] a stranger in a leather coat, who ... started to read

44 It is possible in Paris as in any other big city regularly to walk round on the look out for books and to be led from work to work as one goes. Nodier left home and wandered adventurously, following a carefully planned itinerary: “Whether he took this route or that one, three things would preoccupy him: the booksellers’ stalls, book shops, bookbinders' shops ... Nodier's ad­ venturous route, on which he might find books or meet friends, usually started at midday and finished almost always between three and four at Crozet's or at Techener's. It was there, at that time, that the bibliophiles of Paris would m eet... where people sat and chatted until five o'c­ lock ...” 45 Coray's letters to Dimitrios Lotos ... Ed. marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire. Paris 1880. History, The Historian and Reading 25

quickly and without hesitation, as if he were reciting a prayer learnt a long time ago ...” (Andric 1997, 71 ff.). The different ways in which each individual undertakes to read clearly shows the quality of the relationship to the culture of writing, and therefore the conditions in which the text may be understood. Notably, the fact of being able only to read, but not to write, does not characterise any particular chronological era nor any transitory stage on the way to being able to write, but rather the permanent nature of an ancient form of literacy close to deci­ phering. A second variant is that of phonetic literacy, which is largely based on texts already memorised (prayers, for example), and not on the decoding of a series of charac­ ters. Finally, the greatest level of abstraction is reached by reading to comprehend, in which the reader discovers the text as he reads and directly constructs a more or less complex meaning from it. Abstraction developed in parallel with the slow transition from reading aloud to murmured reading, then to mouthing words silently with the lips, and then to silent read­ ing proper - the mechanics of which are the subject of many studies. The latter is practis­ ed by an individual for himself, it is in a way secret and the reader is enclosed in his own world: silent reading equates to that reading termed de cuore in the Middle Ages, as opposed to reading aloud, or de bocca. Moreover, the quality of understanding was not necessarily proportional to the increasing internalisation of the practice: when, during the tragic summer of 1913, borders were constantly changing throughout the Balkans, the inhabitants of Visegrad followed the news in newspapers. “A dozen of the town's old Muslims were seated, downcast, around a younger man who was reading them the papers, commenting on the foreign phrases and unusual names, and explaining the geography of i t ... They were studying a map illustrating the next partition to take place in the Balkan peninsula. They looked at the paper and saw nothing in those winding lines but they knew and understood everything because their geography was in their blood ...” (Ibid., 266-267). The speed of reading, on the other hand, seems to constitute an interesting indicator of the quality of reading in that, insofar as one can tell from recent work, it increases pre­ cisely as a function of the intensity of the practice. Rolf Engelsing believes that, as far as German is concerned, a few weeks of learning are sufficient to go from two hundred and fifty to four or five hundred words a minute. Finally, reading in a group does not necessarily derive from the model of the literate reader transmitting a message to listeners who might be illiterate or who have not suf­ ficiently mastered the skill of reading. This practice, which is typified as much by proc­ lamations as by education (teacher and pupils), bringing up children (parents and off­ spring) or acts of worship (reading during a service or even before or after a meal), also functions as the indicator of a certain type of social relationship.46 A tradition based on

46 Performed by one person for another or others, reading may be analysed as a gift, in the same way as a present of books or a dedication. In Reformist circles, the reading of the Bible before a meal is well attested, and bears witness to the primacy of the family unit as well as its regular reinforcement via divine office: cf. e.g. Adolph Tidemand, Husandakt 1849, Oslo, Nasjional- gelleriet. The theme of reading aloud is also frequently seen in Daumier: such as the man in his 26 Frédéric Barbier

an environment as enlightened as that of Goethe's in Weimar may also be founded on reading aloud because this allows deference to be shown to the hero as the centre of at­ tention and because it would be the prelude to discussions and exchanges of ideas or experiences out of which was bom “enlightenment”: “After we had spent a considerable time studying engravings and rare books, Goethe did us the pleasure of reading a poem of his entitled Charon ...” (Goethe 1988, 438-439). Those ideological values found here could give way, especially when reading aloud was performed for the benefit of children, to an exchange probably based more on the feel­ ings. It was, moreover, usually the mother or “Miss“ (the governess) who would read to the children, sometimes the grandmother, or even, as in Buddenbrooks, a character as significant as that of the “old maid”, Ida, gentle and patient, with her very quiet voice, reading and rereading stories that she practically knew by heart. Later, the relationship might be reversed, and numerous mentions are found of chil­ dren reading to their mothers when they were older. And, still with that Liibeck house­ hold, it was through the reading he performed for Mrs Buddenbrook that the young claimant of the hand of her daughter introduced himself into the family, profiting from the occasion to show off his good taste as well as his language skills (he had a good Eng­ lish accent) and the extent of his business transactions (he had been over the English Channel, something a Hanseatic trader could not fail to be impressed by): “Indeed, one evening when [Antonia] returned from meeting her female compan­ ions, she found Mr Grunlich making himself at home in the drawing room. He was reading Walter Scott’s Waverly to her mother, and with such exemplary pronuncia­ tion, his many business trips having, he said, taken him as far as England ...” (Mann 1981). Finally, the institution of the “reader“ was still alive and well in the highest circles, nota­ bly in the Imperial court in Berlin. Usually, tradition demanded that the reader be a Frenchman, the most famous being Jules Laforgue, reader to the Empress Augusta be­ tween 1882 and 1887 (Laforgue 1922). Having at one's disposal a “reader“, just as a “music teacher“ or, for the children, one or more private tutors, displayed primarily, via the permanence of a life style inherited from the nobility of the Ancien Régime, the signs of a social status that needed to be kept and confirmed as privileged given that it was precisely felt to be under threat.

The Industrial Revolution

The second half of the nineteenth century marked a profound change in the definition of reading categories and, therefore, of readers. The book trade of the industrial era was built on the invention of a new object, new as much in its content as in its physical form and in the economic structures which underpinned it. Content: the books and periodicals of the industrial age did go back to the classics of literary tradition but also especially

forties, holding a book high to get better light, who is reading aloud to an attentive old man sit­ ting opposite him (New York, Pierpoint Morgan Library, Eugene Victor and Clare Thaw coll.)- History, The Historian and Reading 27

innovated with new texts, novels and serialised novels, then later youth literature, aimed at capturing the largest number of readers possible. Physical form: publishers tried to bring together density and legibility in such a way as to reduce the number of volumes (one single volume where several used to be necessary), and to increase the amount of reading possible for a single price. Attention also turned to the form of printed works, books or periodicals, which were to be distinguished by the quality of their manufacture (sharpness of the characters, quality of the paper, etc.), and by certain elements linked to page layout, illustrations and, for books, to the covers or bindings. It needs to be shown that mass production was not incompatible with searching for a certain quality of physi­ cal form to which readers were increasingly sensitive. Finally, economic logic was ob­ viously paramount: the reduction in selling prices allowed a proportional increase in circulation which would be offset, for the publisher, by economies of scale and by the increase in production rates. We see, then, naturally, the disappearance of the old categories of literature and popu­ lar reading in favour of new writing surfaces, new textual content and new reading prac­ tices. The Second Empire in France was the final high point of the circulation of novels about chivalry inherited from the Middle Ages (Histoire du Juif Errant, Histoire de Robert le Diable, Histoire de Geneviève de Brabant), whilst the competition from new popular models got greater and greater: these were the novels launched first as serials in big newspapers and circulated later in instalments or as books proper. Even if the nar­ rative structure tended to be mainly the same, reinvestment in it by the literate changed it radically, just as it changed its circulation patterns and the ways it was consumed, by the mass of the population. Eugène Sue (1804-1857) sold 150,000 copies of The Wandering Jew alone to the Constitutionnel and the newspaper gained fifteen thousand subscribers. And, a few decades later, it was through the magic lantern and the surface provided by his wall and the curtains of his room that a young narrator followed the ups and downs of the adventures of Golo and of Geneviève de Brabant: “Golo stopped for a moment to listen with sadness to the story read aloud by my great aunt ... then he went on his way in the same jerky way. And nothing could stop his slow ride, [he] continued to advance on the window’s curtains, bulging with their folds, sliding down their rucks. The body of Golo himself, in essence as supernatural as that of his mount, accommodated itself to any physical obstacle, to any hindrance that it met by using it as a skeleton and by internalising it, even the door handle to which it adapted immediately and ... showed no trace of the transmutation” (Proust 1973,1, 9-10). The second high point of this juxtaposition was that of the mass circulation popular press - the methods of consumption of which would soon be equally specific.

Reading and morality

Reading is not a transparent act, its practice operated for a long time as an indicator of social distinctions and it was of all the more relevance to power when it was directly linked to the Book par excellence, and to the transcendental nature of the religious. When monastic rules stipulated the number of hours a day to be dedicated to reading, it was to 28 Frédéric Barbier read, reread, meditate upon and copy out holy books, and when the laity in their turn got hold of religious treatises, books of hours and manuscripts of the Scriptures, it was with an eye on their own salvation. When reading and writing became more commonplace activities, it was primarily to respond to specific needs, whether in the conduct of one's own business or to train administrators and politicians. Finally, when reading seemed to become more disinterested, there appeared and developed a literature in the common language, this disinterestedness was even objectivised as a sign of distinction, and the nobility would seek to attach themselves to intellectuals and writers who would make manifest their glory. A triple role (religion, usefulness, power) thus determined in general the reading practices of the Ancien Régime, and the very extension of these practices did not take place without calling into question the dominant cultural model. That a larger number of people were learning to read was desirable, if it consolidated their integration into one of these three categories - notably that of the religious. These roles, by attributing a specific aim to the act of reading, provided a framework for it, gave it a meaning and generally made it harmless. Their being called into question led to the development of criticisms of the extension of reading practices, especially from the eighteenth century. The premises of the second book revolution were in fact felt more and more from the 1760s and 1770s because the process reached a critical mass: the increase in demand, stimulated by several factors, exerted pressure on the structures of book production and circulation and on those of other printed matter (brochures, pam­ phlets, etc.), and led to the first technical innovations of the Industrial Revolution (paper on continuous rolls, power driven presses, Lord Stanhope's stereotyping). Production levels took off, evidence of wide and speedy circulation was found in increasingly large numbers, reading was being practised everywhere in towns, and the impatience of the public for novelties was underlined, in 1781, by observers such as Sébastien Mercier: “People in Paris certainly read now ten times as much as they did a hundred years ago, to judge by the host of small book sellers sprouting up all over the city, camped in stalls on street comers, sometimes in the open air, who sell old books or new brochures which appear constantly. [The customers] linger as if glued to the counter; they upset the traders, who, to make them stand, have removed all the seats; but they nonetheless stay for hours on end looking at the books, burying themselves in the brochures and pronouncing in advance on their merit and fate ...” (Mercier 1781-1788, vol. 12, 151-155). The same phenomenon was found, in varying measure, right across Europe, this expans­ ion being found in the Habsburg states as well as in Russia, Scandinavia and even in Turkish occupied Greece. In Germany, this was the time of the controversy surrounding the “reading mania” {Lesesucht, Lesewut): especially criticised was the extension of reading practices to women and children from the poorest backgrounds because these groups, whose standard of education made them the least able to take the necessary dis­ tance from what they had read, were the most likely to be influenced to the point of en- trancement by their reading (König 1977). The rise in production of classic works, espe­ cially novels, was particularly criticised. The epidemic of suicides following the publica­ tion of Goethe's Werther is well known, and the reading of novels was held responsible for a certain type of apathy, a lack of interest in the real world, a spiritual uncertainty, corresponding to a veritable psychopathology of reading as an imprisonment in an illu­ History, The Historian and Reading 29

sory world. The metaphor was revisited a hundred years later by a narrator asleep on his book: “I was myself that of which the work spoke [and] this belief survived for a few sec­ onds after I woke up; it was not a shock to my system ... then I started to understand ... the subject of the book became separate from me and I was free to invest in it or not; at the same time, my sight came back, and I was rather surprised to see around me a darkness, gentle and restful to my eyes, but perhaps even more so to my mind ...” (Proust 1973,1, 3). To a sort of psychopathology operating on the principle of dependence as in the case of drugs, one might respond with a therapy founded on distinguishing different levels of culture and on the general uptake of learning. Only a minority had the necessary cultural baggage to tackle head on all reading, and in any case the constitution of women and children did not allow them this luxury. In the vast majority of cases, diversity was to be avoided in favour of canonical reading of which the model, alongside religion, would henceforth be provided by the classics.47 For the historian, the diagnostic needs to be more widely applied in that the new practices of reading contributed to the calling into question of the central classical cultural model and its social hierarchies. The very slow process of secularisation had begun some time earlier, but its effects were being felt more by the end of the eighteenth century which heralded the extension of reading practices for secular ends and entertainment purposes. Secularisation initiated a new relationship with time itself: the traditional signpost was that of salvation, collective in the Middle Ages (the societas Christiana), individual with the Reformation. Secularisation brought the finality of heaven down to earth by writing human activity into a perspective which was now explicity chronological, favour­ ing a future presented as desirable. The old transcendental relationship to God was re­ placed with an individual ethic which was to govern everyone's actions and notably their reading habits. The result was an attack on the extension of reading practices because of their gratuitous nature, their avowed aim being to 'pass' or even to 'kill' time because one was bored: “The following day, incapable of suffering the torture of waiting at length for evening, I went to borrow a novel and spent the day reading it, putting myself in a position where it was impossible to think about or tell the time ...” (Balzac 1974, 154). The second main criticism remained largely implicit but was based on the calling into question of the logic of social hierarchies which had hitherto been taken for natural. The cutting off of the poorly educated reader, that is the majority of new readers, from the real world relativised the scope of the old order. The portrayal of the relationship be­ tween women and the world of books and reading fully underlines this fact (Westhoff- Krummacher 1995): at the heart of the contemporary middle class environment, the dis­ tribution of tasks was still the same, the man worked whilst the woman was in charge of

47 “Apart from the authors you have to read for your present or future profession, read only the classics!” (Karl Morgenstern, 1805: “Lies, außer den Schriftstellern, die du deines gegenwärti­ gen oder künftigen Berufs halber lesen musst, nur die Klassischen! ”). 30 Frédéric Barbier the upbringing of the children and the running of the house. Whilst the husband is seen with his secretary, writing and surrounded by books, increasingly reading a newspaper, it was the washing basket which was the natural library for a woman - and the only women seen with books were actresses. The conquest of reading by women would put an end to the old attribution of status and roles to men and women. When women read, it would first be a religious book, which they read and reread following the practice of intensive reading. If Emma Bovary met her well known fate, it was because she allowed herself to be overtaken by her read­ ing but also especially because the life style in which she was trapped both by her mar­ riage and the mediocrity of her husband could not satisfy her. She was bored, got some books (novels!) from a reading room in Rouen and her family soon spotted the origin of the poison: “So, it was resolved to prevent Emma from reading novels ... [Madame Bovary the elder], when she went to Rouen, had to go in person to the book lender and tell him that Emma was to end her subscriptions. Would one not have the right to inform the police if the book seller carried on trading in his poisons? ...” (Flaubert 1970, 173).48 Once again, iconography confirms the close relationship between women and books, but also between women and daydreaming. Female characters are alone, engrossed in then- reading, as with Corot's young silhouette, leaning on a tree, facing the river: doubtless she is reading, or rereading a letter we imagine to be from a lover from whom she has been parted for a time.49 Reading has led to a daydream, and the book is closed on her lap while her eyes gaze into the distance,50 or look pensively at the observer: it is sum­ mer, the elegant young woman painted by Manet is seated on the wall which overhangs the platforms at Saint-Lazare station in Paris, she has in her hands a half open book and a fan, but she is not reading, she is looking ahead (at the painter, a passer by?), while her young daughter follows the movement of the trains.51 Elegant characters, gratuitous reading, favoured relationship with children: reading here reinforces the old distribution of roles and the place reserved for women in contemporary middle class society. More subtly, the criticism of the extension of reading practices also focuses on the analysis of textual content: the growth in the reading public changed the nature of genres, forms and practices, leading to ever sharper contrasts between quality reading and low brow reading. The metaphor to use is that of a liquid in a fixed quantity so that, if the surface area gets bigger, its depth is correspondingly reduced. To practice an ethic of reading required the necessary means, so that one could engage in a certain quality of reading and take the necessary distance from it to be able to make a judgement about that quality. Traditional literature spread in the countryside a form of culture which was now

48 By contrast, Sylvestre Bonard's governess owned only two books “suitable” for her, a liturgy and a cookery book for ladies. 49 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, La liseuse sur la rive boisée, Musée des Beaux Arts, Rheims. 50 Max Liebermann, Die Gattin des Künstlers, Weimar, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Schloss­ museum. 51 Eduoard Manet, Gare Saint-Lazare (1873), Washington, National Gallery of Arts. History, The Historian and Reading 31

criticised with its references to magic, its stories of chivalry, etc. But the industrialisation of the book trade was accompanied by an industrialisation of literature, a commissioned writing (it was now the publisher who would commission work from an author) or an industrial form of writing followed by an industrial manufacturing and a reading which was itself industrial - that is, a superficial reading of texts which demanded no effort to be understood. Novelty was all, but was forgotten as soon as it appeared, and stocks of titles were turned over increasingly quickly: “Popular novels are needed, if I dare speak this way, because the people want to read novels; they are needed for the trader in his shop, for the small dressmaker in her humble attic, for the darner ...; they are needed for the simple minds ... all these one day wonder novels, all these insipid products. Let us be quick to flood the country with them, let us offer them at the vilest of discounts without worrying what is to become of the copies that we have just sold wholesale to our colleague, let us have our publications peddled, at any price, in the streets, in the market places, otherwise they will soon become a fixture in our shops ...” (Pigoreau 1823, IV).

Reading and Politics

However, if reading became the subject of specific legislation, then it was above all be­ cause it directly connected with politics - understood in the widest sense. As soon as texts became more numerous and their circulation more widespread, the powers that be saw in them a risk that had to be curbed. Whence censorship, preventive or exercised a posteri­ ori, which operated on textual content itself. The typology of censorship would take us way beyond official versions with examples of censorship within such and such an or­ ganisation (“the hell“ of libraries, banned books, but which have been bought and which feature in the library of religious establishments ...), of self censorship exercised by pro­ fessionals themselves to avoid any possible difficulties with the authorities, even censor­ ship by readers with regard to some of their earlier reading - in the image of the Duke de Croy setting fire to the books in his own library. Whence above all the regulations put in place to control the production and circulation of books: printers and libraries would need permission to set up and this could always be revoked so efficient was the monitoring of them. For all that, the gap between what was allowed and what was actually read got pro­ gressively bigger. Banning a book, sensational in the nineteenth century, turned out to be good publicity for it as it aroused the curiosity of the public: Diderot returned on many occasions to this subject, arguing the inefficiency of the system and the financial loss suffered by the kingdom. Finally, the total suppression of reading could only ever be theoretical, as demonstrated by the Notes from the house of the dead: the books were so rare and read all the more, and reread, that they were banned, and then prison allowed extraordinary discoveries to be made in texts which were not allowed to circulate outside, 32 Frédéric Barbier in the “normal” world - as in the Gulag (Solzhenitsyn 1983, II, 588) or in the prisons of Tirana.52 The relationship between reading and political subversion was soon posited by the contemporaries of the Revolution of 1789 themselves. What they most often first of all saw as a series of disorderly activities originated in the diverse reading practices which had developed at the end of the Ancien Régime and which were perpetuated by the Revo­ lution itself: circulation was relaxed, production of periodicals, pamphlets and brochures boomed, while readings aloud, in meetings, in clubs, in public spaces were one of the most visible manifestations of the mass of the population making their voice heard. De­ spite attempts at the time by different governments, it would never be possible, though, in France at least, to return completely to the principle established of a democratic nation being founded on the participation of all in public life. The favoured medium allowing this participation was the newspaper and the representations of newspaper readers re­ vealed a contrario those who remained on the margins of the new political society - no­ tably women. In a German café in the 1840s, there were indeed only men, all (except the waiter) engrossed in the reading of a newspaper; at the Browns, in 1869, everyone was sitting pleasantly by the fire, the husband with a newspaper in his hands whilst the wife had her “work;”53 equally well known is the magnificent portrait almost contemporary with the previous painting (1866) in which Cézanne painted his father, in the evening, in his arm­ chair, reading L*Evénement.5 4 In a well-ordered world, the status of reading matter direct­ ly indicated the status of readers. Thomas Mann picked up the theme when he portrayed, in Buddenbrooks, the men and especially the women whose social status did not put any special obligations on them with regard to the outside world and who could, therefore, engage in more gratuitous reading: “one June afternoon, shortly after five, everyone had gathered in the summer house and had coffee ... The consul was engrossed in his cigar and in his gazette ... Tony, her head in her hands, was deep in her reading, Hoffmann's Les Frères de Saint- Séraphin ... As for Clotilde, thin and unfashionable in her dress of floral cretonne, she was reading a novella entitled Blind, deaf, mute and yet overcome with happi­ ness And when Tony met the young Schwarzkopf in Travemünde and told him what she was reading, that is Hoffmann, the latter’s reply was blunt: “Yes, very nice ... But, you know, that really is for women. Men today have other things to read...” To attempt to realign the historian's sights on a subject which can be as complex as read­ ing, and which directly affects him in everyday life, implies choices which are mainly

52 Mustafaj 1994, 80-81. Similarly, when the Chinese writer Jia Ping-Wa ironically announces in his text that he is himself censoring a passage which is too daring, he succeeded only in having his novel (La capitale déchue. Paris 1997) banned by the authorities but also guaranteed its success abroad, primarily in Taiwan. 53 Eastman Johnson, The Brown Family, 1869, Washington, National Gallery of Arts, 1978.72.1. 54 Paul Cézanne, Le père de Vartiste, Washington, National Gallery of Arts, 1970.5.1. History, The Historian and Reading 33

geographical and chronological - concentrate on the western experience and focus on the logic of change, sometimes abrupt, which took place over a period lasting more than two thousand years. A multitude of other elements by definition remains unilluminated, whether concerning the study of different representational systems, of their genetic hier­ archies and their relationships with reading practices, of the very physiology of the lat­ ter,55 or whether concerning the sociology of readers and the place of religion (the reli­ gious spirit of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries!). For all that, the attempted over­ view has not been achieved without presenting its own lessons. The main element is chronology itself, especially the process of change. Of course, and even if those changes tended to gather pace latterly, a history of reading can only ever be applied to the wider long term history of culture and cultural practices. But the particular study of “reading revolutions” does lead to certain common observations: the expansion was primarily geographical, that is, in the eleventh century as in the eight­ eenth, into wider areas accompanied by an increase in avenues of exploration. Horizons of expectation were broadened, as much physically (circulation increases, relations de­ veloping over longer distances, growth in exchanges) as culturally. Whence a first impact felt in the intellectual arena with the growth in importance of a different type of demand - from the eleventh century, books ceased to be solely the domain of clerics and the En­ lightenment profoundly changed the status and role of the written and printed word in the eighteenth century. It was only subsequently that the process of technological innovation played a part with, for example, the adaptation of writing styles and the use of the pecia at the time of manuscripts, and with research into paper, casting and presses at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Of course, there was a return in this, the accumulation of written and printed works and peoples’ investment in them affected “the little world of the book” (consider the status of the author) as well as reading practices and the comprehension of texts. If technological innovation was indeed made possible by an earlier expansion, it was also given impetus by “consumers” - that is, here, readers - who would greet it favourably: subsequently, feedback took place and the market and its practices were in their turn subject to the pressure of the technical and economic struc­ tures of book production and distribution. Balance was only established gradually and incompletely. Even if research still needs to be done to examine in what measure this global schematic could be applied to the two other main “high points” of the reading revolution (the move to the codex at one end and the present media revolution at the other), our study nonetheless has shown the different logics at work and allowed man - here, the reader - and his practices to be placed at the centre of the operation. Finally, the historian of reading is constantly faced with tensions and shifts which are all the more fascinating to study as they are difficult to categorise. The object, the uses of

55 Jack Goody (1986) demonstrates the link between the linearity of alphabetic systems and the layouts of books with the development of rational thought in the west. The question remains to work out the extent to which the change in writing surface, with the rise of information tech­ nology and hypermedia, might influence a change in the old categories of thought linked to the alphabet and the codex, of which Descartes gave the perfect explanation and the practical ap­ plications of which he codified. 34 Frédéric Barbier

writing, can usually only be reconstructed by induction, with the result that possible di­ vergences, if they are known about, are often impossible to document and categorise: the efficiency of the object conditions its possible uses, as do the social map (in the widest sense) of its use56 and the determinism of the reader. For all that, freedom is always present, it is the reader who, paradoxically, informs the text which he is reading and the book which he is holding, and reading must always be, even for the historian, a never ending story. Let us close with Goethe - and Eckermann: “Goethe then joked about the difficulty of reading and the presumption of so many people who, with no educational preparation whatsoever, with no knowledge, claim to read any work of science or philosophy as if they were novels: “These good peo­ ple” he continued, "know nothing of what it costs in time and effort to learn to read. I have spent 80 years of my life at it, and I still cannot say that I have achieved my aim” ..”

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56 “The fact of offering to the public a hierarchy of qualities has the sole aim of an ever more complete quantification. Everyone must behave spontaneously so to speak in conformity with a level determined beforehand by statistics, and choose the category of mass produced goods manufactured for their group ... This is the triumph of capitalism ... For the consumer, there is no more selection process, producers have already done everything for him ... The technology of the culture industry has led only to standardisation and mass production, sacrificing every­ thing that used to differentiate between the logic of the work and that of the social system. This is the result not of any law of evolution of technology itself but of its operation in the modem economy ...” (Horkheimer, Adorno 1974). History, The Historian and Reading 35

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