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8. Some Problems Involved in Reading as a Subject of Book History

The subject of reading presents a number of significant problems for book
historians, perhaps the most obvious among them being controversies over
assessing literacy—do signatures in marriage registers really signify functional
literacy?[71] —and the nature of the so-called "reading revolution."[72]
Yet, there is a more fundamental and not wholly insurmountable difficulty in
studying the history of reading. It may well be impossible to write a representative
history of reading based on the experiences of individuals because the
overwhelming majority of reading events are ephemeral and those that are
recorded are necessarily atypical. How can we develop historically sound approaches
to scrutinizing reading practices when most direct evidence of actual
reading is merely anecdotal?

Alastair Fowler approaches the same problem from a slightly different
angle, noting that scholars seeking to establish a history of reading will
"soon encounter an insuperable difficulty: the absence of data." Accordingly,
a line of historical inquiry that depends on the close examination of an individual's
reading practices—what Fowler styles a "minute phenomenology of
reading"—ultimately "depends on a nonexistent history of sensibility and
psychological events" and, hence, "is not very practical." "In the end," he
argues, "the only reader responses we can know in detail are our own." For
Fowler, there is no authentic way to "resolve the impasse of historical
discontinuity."[73]

Despite the great enthusiasm among book historians for the study of reading,
Andrew Hadfield, co-editor of A History of the Irish Book, Volume III,
The Irish Book in English 1550-1800 (OUP, 2006), pursues a similar line
of thought, writing of "the sort of problems that plague anyone working in
the now ubiquitous but rather amorphously defined interdisciplinary subject,

the `history of the book.' " Above all, he notes the simple truth that
"Evidence left behind by readers is generally scanty, and all too often scholars
are left trying to work out what the reader intended when he or she—if an
identity is known, let alone a date—underlined a particular passage."[74] As
such observations suggest, the value of collecting records of readers' experiences—often
isolated and invariably anomalous—may be rather suspect.[75]
It might well be desirable to know what a person read, especially if we can
learn the salient facts of that reader's life (age, gender, occupation, education,
income, social contacts, etc.), but to know how that person read is almost always
historically unrecoverable.

Leah Price also evinces concern about how historians think about reading
practices and the historical evidence they find. "Familiarity makes reading
appear deceptively knowable," she observes. On the one hand, "[t]he most
impassioned reading destroys its own traces" because it goes unrecorded,
while on the other, "studies drawing on autobiography or marginalia alike
are biased toward certain kinds of readers and styles of reading."[76] Even
potentially more comprehensive projects such as the Reading Experience
Database "are inevitably opportunistic in their cherry-picking of decontextualized
`reading experienes' from sources whose own structure and content
differ widely" with the result that historians of reading may be "like magpies"
(313).

These difficulties are of genuine consequence and too often have not been
sufficiently acknowledged. Thus, we may reasonably ask: given the frequently
suspect nature of the evidence and the troublesome ways that book historians
have sometimes used it, how might we conduct research in this important
area with a greater sense of intellectual responsibility? However formidable
the evidential problems we have been considering, the epistemological predicaments
presented by the surviving traces of individual readers' experiences

do not mean that we should abandon the history of reading as an area of inquiry.
No less an accompished historian and historiographer than Carlo
Ginzburg has argued for the admissibility of incomplete and even distorted
evidence, provided that the interpreters of such information have a thorough
understanding of its limitations. "Without a thorough analysis of its distortions
(the codes according to which it has been constructed and/or it must
be perceived)," he insists, "a sound historical reconstruction is impossible."[77]

In addition, it would seem profitable to develop a history of constructing
and construing meaning not merely from the isolated and evidentially problematic
recorded reactions of readers, but also from bibliography and publishing
history, from the ways in which material forms—bibliographical codes of
many kinds—both effect and affect meanings. The purposive actions of various
agents in the book trade are traceable in tens of thousands of books and
are typically calculated to influence their benign reception in as strong a
manner as possible. Accordingly, we ought to ground our reading and
reception studies more thoroughly in physical bibliography, as well as
in the analysis of book advertisements, reviews, promotional campaigns,
and the like. This is not to say that such studies could be altogether free from
problems of historical interpretation, but at least they would rest on sound
epistemological foundations. Understanding that the book, every book, is an
integrated system of signifiers and that the bibliographical codes embodied in
a particular book most often reflect interpretations and decisions about the
audience, meaning, and cultural significance of that book, some of the most
adept book historians have convincingly delineated the relationships between
forms and meanings. Striving to exhibit the complex relationships
between texts and readers in the production of meaning, Roger Chartier has
demonstrated that "the editorial history of Molièré's comedies has a significant
impact on the reconstruction of contemporary understandings of them,"
and D. F. McKenzie has done much the same for the plays of Congreve.[78]
Both scholars employ a synthetic method, embracing "textual criticism, the
history of the book, and cultural sociology" to show how the presentation of
the text is calculated to affect its reception.[79] If the history of reading and reception

were more nearly allied to the study of the material book, we might
well find that these areas of inquiry are mutually informing.[80]

Moreover, the study of how readers make meanings should not be primarily
confined to scrutinizing individual reader responses. Rather, in keeping
with the need to develop a richer and more complex sociology of texts
(see section 4 above), book historians might profitably focus their efforts on
reading as a social practice that is conditioned by other socially constituted
practices and institutions—just as it, in turn, exercises an influence on them.
Recognizing that even the most solitary reader is, inescapably, engaged in a
culturally situated pursuit, we may perceive that there is a tremendous scholarly
labor to be undertaken in locating reading within the complex forms of
social life that condition this activity at any given moment in history. Accordingly,
we ought to seek a better understanding of how the practices and institutions
of reading and reception are imbedded in and informed by larger
cultural and political structures. So situated in the sociology of texts, the
study of reading holds a scholarly potential commensurate with its difficulty
as an area of investigation.