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Chapter 1

Railroad Reading, Wayward Reading

On 15 September 1841, Julia A. Parker, twenty-three years old and a prolific reader and diarist, inscribed her journal with the following:

Read “Stephens’s Travels in Central America.” How happy I am while reading a book like this. I have lived to-day only with the past. I envy the author the terrible dangers he passed; for what comparison do they bear with the satisfaction and interest one must feel in exploring the time-worn monuments of a people who have ceased to exist, and who have no place on the page of history.¹

Parker’s description of reading as having “lived to-day only with the past” captures the book’s ability to remove a reader from linear chronology, to create, in Jay Fliegelman’s words, “the presence of the past in the present.”² As Parker attests, part of what this kind of temporal dislocation enables is a sense of deep intimacy with a book’s author, a mutuality experienced as an erasure of the chasm between writing and its reception. Although she initially characterizes her reaction to John L. Stephens as “envy,” what emerges looks much more like identification, since both she and Stephens are engaged in the same exploration of“time-worn monuments.” That is, her reading allows her to live “with the past” in a way that replicates the author’s own ancient discoveries. Interestingly, these discoveries are also figured outside of official time, involving a people “who have no place on the page of history.” In exiting her present world to study lives that are otherwise unrecorded, Parker achieves a mutuality with Stephens that is intensified and made more satisfying because of its location off the grid.

Such a description of reading limns the practice as remote and confidential, a private affair between reader and author, removed from official chronologies and record-keeping. In spending the day wholly immersed in an obsolescent past, Parker momentarily skirts the temporal realities and quotidian demands of her own middle-class existence. Her reading has a wayward or vagrant quality—its pleasures are associated with recursive movement and self-forgetting. To describe an engagement with books in this way is to divert from the instrumentalist rhetoric that often accompanied nineteenth-century prescriptions for reading. Here reading is characterized as ordered and rational, propelled by what William Alcott calls “the love of progress—the desire of improvement—the never-ending hunger and thirst after righteousness.”³ For Alcott and other cultural authorities, appropriate or dutiful reading emphasized mastery, productive accumulation, and efficient time management. This growth-oriented conception of reading is a far cry from Parker’s fantasy of retrospective escape.

In this chapter, I suggest that Parker’s and Alcott’s descriptions of reading may be understood as two very different reactions to transformations in print culture. The first part of the nineteenth century was characterized by disorienting new technologies and tremendous output, which affected the ways books were both produced and consumed. Alcott’s instrumentalist approach represents one attempt to make reading meaningful at a time of profound media transition. The reading practices he embraced featured prominently in conduct manuals dating between 1830 and 1890, where anxieties about reading often clustered around two specific themes: the frantic, accelerated pace of reading, and the prominence of the body (rather than the mind) while reading. Such concerns, articulated at the onset of modernity, reflected a preoccupation with both mechanized velocity and the incipient stages of a consumer society. Conduct manuals addressed these fears by encouraging readers to control the speed with which they approached their books and to excise the body from the reading process. In this way, they attempted to transform reading from an irrational consumer practice to a productive activity, as regular and predictable as the railroad.

In dialogue with this understanding of reading, a contrasting model emerged in the diaries, letters, and literary works of nineteenth-century subjects like Julia Parker, and also occasionally in the conduct manuals themselves. In these accounts, reading eschews an instrumentalist focus on accounting and productivity; it makes use of an alternative conception of time distinct from the rhetoric of linearity and progress associated with the railroad and other technologies of commercial modernity. Here, readers cede control over books, preferring to imagine themselves as fused with, rather than masters of, their reading material. Such reading, moreover, turns to the body as a site of engagement, replacing producerist directives with consumer pleasures. In so doing, wayward reading reconfigures the world in more sensual terms, assisting in the formation of intimate bonds in the lives of readers.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that reading manuals reflected only the instrumentalist account of reading, and that everyday subjects always articulated a contestatory narrative. On the contrary, many ordinary readers embraced books as a source of productive self-improvement, and reading manuals often proffered a contradictory account, wherein erratic or “desultory” (to borrow the word of a British authority) approaches to reading were valued.⁴ As this chapter and the next will make clear, prescriptive advice on reading was often expressed in deeply ambivalent terms, in a language that argued for the functionality of books while relishing the strange intimacy that accompanied the textual encounter. I also do not mean to suggest that one of these approaches thwarted print capitalism while the other accelerated it. On the contrary, both contributed to the privatization of reading, and both worked to expand and consolidate the market for print. To the extent that I am adopting a schematic model, then, I mean rather to highlight the different psychological effects of these approaches to reading, the way they authorized and activated different subject positions for their audiences. “Railroad reading” (as I call it) located satisfaction primarily in systematization and mastery of material; the encounter with alterity was usually an occasion to synthesize and reaffirm the self. “Wayward reading,” on the other hand, testified to the value of self-forgetting and to the gratifications of imagined contact with another. I insist on the importance of this latter approach so as to recognize its relevance to readers in the nineteenth century and the therapeutic role that it continues to play today.

Reading and Dark Prognostications

As historians of the book have widely established, the nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in print and reading. By now, the advancements are well documented. The Fourdrinier brothers’ innovations in paper production around 1803 meant that cheap, machine-made paper was soon readily available.⁵ The 1830s saw the development of the penny press, and the 1840s marked the mass circulation of serialized fiction, mostly through distribution of affordable weekly periodicals, like the eight-page story paper.⁶ By the 1850s the rapid rotary press (patented by Richard Hoe in 1847) produced inexpensive books on an unprecedented scale, making this decade “the biggest boom American book publishing had ever known.”⁷ Bill Katz has estimated that the value of books manufactured in America between 1820 and 1860 increased from $2.5 million to over $13 million.⁸ Effective distribution of these books and other printed material was enabled by the development of the regional railroad, along with the regularization of coastal transportation.⁹ Literacy rates, which had always benefited from the American Protestant tradition of sola scriptura, skyrocketed during this period. Census data suggest that as much as 90 percent of the adult white population could read and write by 1850.¹⁰ The precipitate advance in literacy was to the result of a variety of factors, from the socioeducational (the spread of common schools and the growing popularity of libraries at mid-century) to the religious (the rise of evangelical Christian movements with their emphasis on private and group interface with the Word) to the economic (the upturn in market activity necessitating a minimally literate bourgeoisie) to the technological (advances in domestic lighting and in corrective eyewear).¹¹ These transformations along with new opportunities for leisure and the increasing cultural prestige associated with books all served to create a culture of reading in which books and literacy became, in the words of one historian, “a necessity of life.”¹²

But these developments also prompted anxieties about the number of books in circulation and the ways readers were approaching these materials. In response, manuals on reading cropped up by the hundreds. Taking their cue from earlier British authorities who railed against the dangers of print culture,¹³ these handbooks bore prescriptive titles—On the Right Use of Books (1878), Hints on Reading (1839), What To Read and How To Read (1870), Exercises in Reading and Recitation (1832)—and issued dire warnings regarding the state of modern publishing. Commentators bemoaned the “mighty flood of unsavory literature,” characterizing its consequences as “Evil, and evil, and evil again.”¹⁴ The Reverend Edwin Hubbell Chapin, who authored several conduct manuals, many including advice on reading, was especially inclined to such eschatological pronouncements. He decried the mass of new texts “which have leaped from the press like the frogs of Egypt, swarming in our streets and houses, our kitchens and bed-chambers.” Most of them, he insisted, “are unmitigated trash, the froth of superficial thinking, the scum of diseased sentiment.”¹⁵ Sounding a note equally dire, W. P. Atkinson asked, “In this wide ocean … of modern knowledge, how shall we save ourselves from being lost?”¹⁶ Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding have written that apocalyptic discourse is a “mode of attention … and voice … [that] has come to inhabit and structure modern American life.” Its idiom of imminent cataclysm is associated with transformation and particularly with “rapid social and cultural change.”¹⁷ Thus, for all its religious resonance, apocalypticism tends to characterize modernity; its dystopic visions and Manichaean orientation serve as both warning of and compensation for a new, chaotic, and disorienting existence. In this context, conduct manuals, themselves a product of new print and distribution capabilities, offered consolation and direction, even as they contributed to an increasingly unnavigable world of print.

The rhetoric of apocalyptic modernity was used to characterize not only the vast amounts of literature that were issuing forth from the press, but the manner in which this literature was being consumed. Authorities reviled the tendency to approach multiple books in “snatches” or “mere fragments”¹⁸ and warned that there is nothing more pernicious than a “habit of continuous, systemless, objectless reading.”¹⁹ These comments speak to two related concerns. First, it was feared that readers were reading too widely and without a plan or course of study in mind. According to the Earl of Iddesleigh, the goal is “always to read with an object, and that a worthy object.”²⁰ American writer J. B. Braithwaite seconds this sentiment, commenting that for the many “kindred evils” associated with reading “there is no remedy more efficacious than a sound and healthy PURPOSE, rightly directed, and steadily maintained.”²¹ Second, systemless reading referred to the tendency to skim, what one commentator called the “superficial, careless, nonappropriate skipping habit that incapacitates the mind for assimilating and digesting what it reads.”²² The insistence on programmatic reading thus spoke to a paradoxical fear that readers were at once doing too much and too little, infinitely expanding the field of their consumption while diminishing their attention and focus. Such a state is captured by Braithwaite:

[Some] allow their moments of leisure to be wasted in a kind of “busy idleness;” they look over a great variety of books, but for want of settled diligence, their unsteady wanderings in prose or poetry, are attended with no satisfactory result. While there is a yet larger class of listless triflers, who give way to lounging and indolent habits of mind, wholly unworthy of intelligent and responsible beings.²³

Braithwaite’s image of the reader as engaged in “a kind of ‘busy idleness’”—at once assiduously occupied and nonproductive—speaks to the contradictory vision of a modern subject, both over- and underemployed. Her “unsteady wanderings in prose or poetry” are symptomatic of a restless spirit, always moving but never arriving, and thus “attended with no satisfactory result.” Lost among her “great variety of books,” she is at once undisciplined and morally suspect, characterized by an eroticized ennui, or “lounging and indolent habits of mind.” Given this depiction, it is not surprising that commentators put forward “the much-needed lesson of concentration” as a way of countering this “dissipated” (in the sense of both scattered and wanton) approach to reading.²⁴

As book historians have pointed out, characterizations of reading as fragmentary, compulsive, dissolute, and deroutinized speak to larger anxieties about the effects of modernity.²⁵ New technologies of the nineteenth century from the train to the telegraph created a world of fleeting sensations and perceptions that altered both individual sensibility and mass consciousness.²⁶ Reading was affected by these transformations: according to advice manuals, the mass production of books and newspapers in conjunction with new possibilities for mechanized acceleration reconfigured the manner in which subjects read. As William Alcott put it in 1850, “this busy age seems altogether unfavorable to much reflection.” He identifies “Steamboats, railroads, and electro-magnetic telegraphs” as particularly thwarting “the operations of the mind.”²⁷ Lydia Howard Sigourney adds, “This is emphatically the age of book-making and miscellaneous reading. Profound thought is becoming somewhat obsolete. The rapidity with which space is traversed, and wealth accumulated, the many exciting objects which arrest attention in our new, and wide country, indispose the mind to the old habits of patient investigation, and solitary study.”²⁸ For Sigourney and Alcott, the fear is that modernity is altering reading habits, creating a public incapable of profound and continuous textual engagement—a concern that is, as Karin Littau points out, echoed by contemporary critics of the Internet.²⁹ Especially troubling for nineteenth-century authorities was the emphasis on novelty, as is evident in James Freeman Clarke’s excoriation of the periodical press:

The newspaper creates and feeds the appetite for news. When we read it, it is not to find what is true, what is important, what we must consider and reflect upon, what we must carry away and remember, but what is new. When any very curious or important event occurs, the newspaper, in narrating it, often gives, as its only comment and reflection, this phrase, “What next?” That is often the motto of the newspaper and the newspaper reader, “What next?”³⁰

For Clarke this “What next?” is an index of the compulsiveness and insatiability that characterizes reading in the modern world. The interrogative form of this motto implicitly demands continuous and unabated response; syntactically, it stands as a lack that invites infinite retort and supplementation. In this way, newspapers both fulfill and give rise to readers’ cravings for constant stimulation.³¹

Even more deleterious than the drive for novelty was the speed associated with modern reading. Commentators described the minds of readers as “roaming … without restraint” and warned of the “vain desire to keep pace with the literature of the age.”³² Often the speed of reading was articulated in relation to the instruments of industrial modernity itself. One writer, for example, contrasts a newer form of accelerated reading with an older model of slow, intensive study in the following way:

I would liken the one to a journey by railway, the other to a journey on horseback. The railway will take you more rapidly to your journey’s end, and by its aid you will get over much more ground in the day; but you will lose the variety of the walk up the hill, the occasional divergence from the hard road, and the opportunities for examining the country through which you are passing, which the horseman enjoys. The business man will prefer the train, which will carry him quickly to his bank or his warehouse, but he will miss many things which the other will have seen and profited by.³³

Here modern reading is aligned not only with the “rapid” speed of the train but also with the urban degeneration of the “business man” who cares only that he be transported “quickly to his bank or his warehouse.” By contrast, the figure of the slow and deliberate reader is likened to the horseback rider, who enjoys all the “variety” and “divergence” that the natural world has to offer. In contending that the former “will miss many things which the other will have … profited by,” this commentator insists that the value of reading cannot be measured by market terms alone.

The train was an especially apt metaphor to speak of the accelerated pace of reading, not only because the railway was responsible for the enhanced distribution of printed matter, but because as a vehicle of rapid transport, the train symbolized much of what was fleeting and ephemeral in modern life. Nathaniel Hawthorne captures this in his 1851 novel, The House of the Seven Gables. When Clifford and Hepzibah—the story’s older aristocratic protagonists—board a railway car they are “swept away with it, as by the suction of fate itself”:

looking from the window, they could see the world racing past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude;—the next, a village had grown up around them;—a few breaths more, and it had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its agelong rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to their own.³⁴

This sense of “unfix[ity]” in which hitherto permanent structures are suddenly “set adrift from their foundations” is an apt characterization of the modern condition in which permanence or “age-long rest” seems a nicety of the past. Traveling at “whirlwind speed,” the train is like a time machine, capable of showcasing the evolution of humanity, the development and elimination of entire generations: “At one moment … a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more and it had vanished.” Meanwhile, within the train itself, passengers with no connection to one another bump and jostle familiarly, making the railway car a fit symbol for the crowded anonymity of modern urban life. Clifford and Hepzibah marvel at the idea that

there were fifty human beings in close relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its grasp.… New people continually entered. Old acquaintances … continually departed. Here and there, amid the rumble and the tumult, sat one asleep. Sleep; sport; business; graver or lighter study; and the common and inevitable movement onward! It was life itself!³⁵

At once part of and symbolic of the drive toward human progress—the “inevitable movement onward”—the train is, in Hawthorne’s estimation, a powerful and ineluctable force. (Indeed, when Clifford and Hepzibah finally disembark, exhausted, it is with the knowledge that they are leaving behind the modern world, choosing their ghostly past and their decaying house over “life itself.”) The train’s connection to the phenomenon of reading is evident in Hawthorne’s text as well. Clifford and Hepzibah’s fellow passengers include those who have “plunged into the English scenery and adventures of pamphlet-novels, and were keeping company with dukes and earls.”³⁶ The “plunge” into fiction here, and the sudden exposure to the new and the foreign that reading engenders, are, of course, an analogue to railway life itself. Both, in other words, involve immersion in strange “scenery,” novel “adventures,” and unknown “company.”

While Hawthorne’s vision of accelerated modernity is, at least in this particular scene, fairly optimistic, for many writers the pace of modern life and its effects on reading augured something far more dire. Edwin Hubbell Chapin mixes awe with dystopic prognostications in his account of the electric speed of book consumption. “A woman takes up her pen to delineate a great social wrong,” he writes, perhaps in reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe, “and the story becomes as the lightning that shines from one end of the heaven to the other. … The press cannot send it out fast enough. From hand to hand, from land to land, it leaps like sparks of electricity.”³⁷ He continues more ominously:

No organ of intellectual and moral influence … is in our day more prominent than the Press … whether its form be that of book or journal.… Sending its influence far beyond the reach of the human voice, and into the most private hours, it gathers to itself all the facilities of the age. Its productions, fast as steam can make and carry them, go abroad through all the land, silent as snow-flakes, but potent as thunder.³⁸

Here, books garner both the force of techno-industrialism (“the facilities of the age”) and the power of the natural world (“silent as snow-flakes, but potent as thunder”), becoming in the process an unstoppable supramortal force. They send their “influence far beyond the reach of the human voice,” thereby upending traditional social ties and face-to-face communication. Still worse, the accelerated industrial speed at which they travel transgresses on sacred time or “the most private hours.” Chapin concludes by asking “what … great evil is blended with this wonderful agency?”³⁹ His account anticipates the anxieties articulated by modern theorists of temporality. Reinhart Koselleck, for example, has commented that the hallmark of modernity is an accelerated temporality and, with it, a sense of the future as dark and unknown, because stripped of its constancy.⁴⁰ For Brian Massumi the modern subject is the “falling” subject, “defined by the condition of groundlessness,” brought on by the ever-increasing velocity and instability of bourgeois consumer culture.⁴¹ While these contemporary theorists blame more advanced forms of technology for this decline, Chapin and other nineteenth-century cultural custodians placed books and periodicals at the center of their apocalyptic vision. In warning of the “headlong speed with which mere knowledge is now pursued all round us,”⁴² these commentators imagined reading as spiraling and ungrounded, rapidly steering society toward cataclysm.

Social commentators warned that this frenzied state had dire implications for the physical health of readers, particularly women, for whom fast reading could result in accelerated maturation. In his medical treatise, On Diseases Peculiar to Women, Dr. Hugh Lenox Hodge warns that too much reading of “novels, romances, plays,” can cause “undue excitation” and thus “hasten the development of the nervous system and the phenomena of puberty.” These same “excitants,” he adds, can do damage to the older woman as well. If not carefully regulated, they “will often break down the powers of life, and thus give rise to the whole tribe of dyspeptic and irritable disorders.” Chief among these is “irritable uterus,” which can be exacerbated with “any exertion, even of the upper extremities, in holding a book.”⁴³ While women were the primary targets of these physiological assessments, men, too, were imagined as suffering bodily for their reading practices. One American commentator linked excessive reading in men with “mental imbecility” while another questioned how many “full grown men” have grown “enervated, dwarfish, deformed, or crippled” through the practice.⁴⁴

Anxieties about the physiologically debilitating effects of reading were tied to a larger discourse in which cultural commentators invoked the body to register a reader’s negative engagement with books. This is especially apparent in the metaphor of ingestion, which likened inappropriate reading to “swallowing” or “devouring” texts.⁴⁵ Edwin Chapin, for example, rails against the “book-worm, who feasts upon libraries … who shuts himself up only to read, read, read … [He] is, perhaps, one of the most useless men in the world. His head is stored with a mass of crude and undigested knowledge, which does no good to himself nor to any one else.”⁴⁶ Chapin presents us with the familiar paradox of the modern reader at once diligent and underemployed, whose efforts at continual study (“read, read, read”) are merely a register of his idleness (“most useless”). His propensity toward wasteful and nonproductive activity is articulated effectively through metaphors of the body—he gluttonously “feasts upon libraries” only to amass “crude and undigested knowledge.” Such a reader is guilty of sacrificing rational enjoyment for crass sensual pleasure. He has, in Kelly Mays’s formulation, “confused the proper hierarchical relation between body and mind.”⁴⁷

Janice Radway has written that metaphors of reading-as-eating have the effect of imagining readers (and especially female readers, for whom these metaphors were most often in place) as passive consumers of mass culture rather than active, sense-making agents. Such rhetoric, she claims, “was marshalled to characterize this process by which large numbers of users bought, in a dual sense, the ideas of others.”⁴⁸ More recently, critics have challenged Radway’s position as a denial of biology. By understanding reading only in terms of perception, comprehension, and sense-making, they argue, she has deprived the practice of its sensual aspects and in the process denied her historical readers their materiality. Retaining or resuscitating the eating metaphor is thus crucial for rounding out our understanding of the noncognitive or sensual aspects of reading, and thus for rematerializing the abstracted body of the reader.⁴⁹

The problem with this intervention, however, is that it fails to account for the variable meaning of the ingestion metaphor for the different populations who mobilized it. While everyday readers may have invoked this metaphor as a way of commenting on the physical delights of book consumption, cultural authorities rarely deployed it in the same way. For them, “devouring” books was indeed a statement about the cognitive failure of readers. “Injudicious reading is just as likely to produce mental debility as indiscriminate loading of the stomach is likely to produce dyspepsia,” wrote one; “and let us never forget that a healthy and vigorous mind, though its fare be scanty and homely, is far preferable to a pampered and sickly one.”⁵⁰ It is difficult to understand this as a celebratory statement about the physicality of reading, since references to the body serve only to reinforce the “mental debility” that is the writer’s primary concern. The eating metaphor was usually deployed in conduct manuals precisely as a way of talking about the necessity to read mindfully, that is, to read in a way that eliminated the body and its associations with passion, carnality, and desire. Even when writers spoke of “wholesome” and “healthy” reading, it was with an eye toward emphasizing the perceptive acuity that accompanies such a diet. Moreover, the reading-as-eating metaphor was a way of denigrating not only bad readers but also the mass-produced texts they “consumed,” since images of uncontrolled ingestion were usually paired with admonitions concerning the deluge of trash issuing forth from the press. Radway is thus correct in locating in this metaphor a condemnation both of passive readers and of mass culture, both of which are referenced negatively by the term “consumption.”⁵¹ Apocalyptic tirades on the indiscriminate ingestion of books were a way of warning against an emerging consumer society of readers gone wild.

Reading and the Mandate for Self-Improvement

What was the cure for reckless, compulsive ingestion of books? As I have already suggested above, conduct manuals tried to redress this condition by turning reading into a productive (rather than a consuming) activity, in which the body was regulated or better yet eliminated altogether, and the pace of reading was routinized and controlled. This involved embracing a rhetoric of self-improvement, in which books were promoted as the gateway to moral development, religious uplift, and intellectual advance. Books should “inform the mind, refine the taste and improve the heart,” wrote the Rev. Edwin Hubbell Chapin in 1840, “and we may be both wiser and better for the perusal.”⁵² These twin imperatives—to be “wiser and better”—constituted the majority rationale for reading. Books, when used well, worked to “cultivate the intellect,” but even more importantly, they created “moral character,” defined by one writer as “the love of beauty, goodness and truth … a sense of duty and honor.”⁵³ Lydia Howard Sigourney echoed this assessment. Reading, she claimed, could do much to “cultivate the intellect,” but “This is not enough. It must also strengthen the moral principles, and regulate the affections.”⁵⁴ What is stressed time and again in these accounts is the utility of reading, its serviceability in creating a more virtuous and better-informed citizenry. Even fiction, the most distrusted of genres, was generally sanctioned for its functional contributions.⁵⁵ Chapin, for example, approved novels because they advanced “a keener insight into men and manners, a more graphic knowledge of the past, a more vivid sense of our relations to humanity, and of the claims of duty.”⁵⁶ Of course, contemporary commentators did not deny the pleasures of books. Indeed, they often waxed effusive about the “profound delight in a course of reading.”⁵⁷ But these satisfactions were generally understood as ancillary to the primary goal of self-improvement, and, indeed, too much pleasure was often a sign that the “duties” of reading were being neglected.⁵⁸

Dutiful reading was typically articulated in two ways—through metaphors of ideation and systematization. First, readers were expected to read actively, that is, to make use of their minds while reading and to “reflect” on their reading material assiduously. In an interview meant to act as a model for young readers, Henry Ward Beecher claimed, “Reading with me incites to reflection instantly. I cannot separate the origination of ideas from the reception of ideas.”⁵⁹ Cultural custodians echoed Beecher’s method, insisting that reading always be accompanied by thoughtful scrutiny. “Reading in a hasty and cursory manner, without exercising your own thoughts upon what you read, induces a bad habit of mind,” writes Harvey Newcomb in How to Be a Lady.⁶⁰ He adds, “THINK AS YOU READ.—Do not drink in the thoughts of others as you drink water; but examine them, and see whether they carry conviction to your own mind; and if they do, think them over, till they become incorporated with your own thoughts, part and parcel of your own mind.”⁶¹ Newcomb’s language is significant, because here he actively replaces the discourse of gustation (“Do not drink in the thoughts of others as you drink water”) with that of cerebral introspection. His prescriptions for readers still rely on a metaphor of absorption (“think them over, till they become incorporated with your own thoughts, part and parcel of your own mind”), but it is one that is largely free of the baser corporeal appetites (eating, drinking, swallowing). Similarly, in the interview referenced above, Henry Ward Beecher’s book practices are referred to as “moral hygienic reading,” a description remarkable for the way it attempts to divest the reading process of all bodily adulteration.⁶²

Newcomb’s characterization of reading as an active, assimilative exercise in which new information is slowly absorbed by a controlling agent was the standard for appropriate reading—a way of dealing with the tricky problem of a book’s influence. “An author should be valued, not so much for what he has thought for us, as for what he has enabled us to think,” writes an anonymous author in 1866, thereby emphasizing the necessity of readerly preeminence.⁶³ This approach to books was infinitely preferred over what commentators described as “the mechanical exercise of reading,”⁶⁴ a mode of intake in which the mind automatically processes material without questioning its merits or integrating it with previously arrived-at truths. Such a depiction likens readers to machines, suggesting that in rapidly consuming books they have become cogs in the modern industrial complex rather than controlling agents set apart from it.⁶⁵ Referencing this phenomenon, Chapin differentiates between “the acquisition of knowledge” and the “development of the faculties.” To engage in the first is “merely to learn by rote, to cram the memory with a collection of facts,” while the second means to “to draw out the mind so that it may know how to use facts, so that it may become greater than those facts.”⁶⁶ There are “mere encyclopedias from whom you can get any fact upon any subject,” he adds later, “but those facts are packed up in their minds as dry items; they have been preserved, not planted there.”⁶⁷ In invoking the metaphor of industrial assembly (“packed up … as dry items … preserved, not planted”) and contrasting it to a more agricultural vision, Chapin connects bad reading to a mechanistic market process in which readers sacrifice their command over their reading material instead of controlling its organic growth and assimilation.

Worse still than mechanical reading was the state of absorption that particularly characterized forays into fiction. Here the mind didn’t simply memorize material by a rote, unthinking process; it surrendered itself entirely to the book. Or, to state this slightly differently, the mind ceased to be the active, absorbing agent and, instead, was itself absorbed by foreign and often threatening material. “The reader must master the book, instead of the book mastering him,” wrote an anonymous authority in 1866; “otherwise he forfeits his own mental individuality, his freedom of mental action.”⁶⁸ Nina Baym has suggested that while novels were expected to rouse interest and emotions in the reader, too much of this amounted to a “possession” that threatened to subordinate the reader’s control. Baym cites an 1838 review of the novel Richard Hurdis in The Knickerbocker, which bemoaned that the “object of novelists in general … appears to be to seize the public mind, and hold it with a sort of enchantment; a fascination which arises from the power which a master will exercise over the volition of inferior spirits, leading them captive, and exciting them with the stimulus they love most.”⁶⁹ I will be investigating this phenomenon of the author as enchanter or mesmerist in the next chapter. For now, suffice it to say that the remedy for this kind of authorial takeover (in novels as well as other texts) was, again, mindful exertion on the part of the reader. As the contemporary critic J. Brooks Bouson puts it, “If to read is to feel temporarily merged with and carried away by a text, to criticize is to be ‘back in one’s own mind,’ to act ‘upon the work rather than being acted upon.’”⁷⁰

The second prescription for dutiful, productive reading was systematization, a process that, as mentioned earlier, referred both to reading continuously (rather than skipping or skimming) and to reading with a plan or regimen in mind. “The main reason for the ill success of our reading and our education,” wrote W. P. Atkinson, “is because they lack point, lack system, lack concentration.” Atkinson was not advocating that people read less, but that they come at their studies methodically, a point that he articulated through (mixed) metaphors of concentration: “we must not dissipate our forces. It is the bad farmer who just scratches the surface of too many acres; the good general who fights it out on the same line.”⁷¹ Other writers focused on the issue of temporality, insisting that readers approach books “with the utmost economy of time.”⁷² Significantly, economizing here often involved slowing the pace of reading, a paradox not lost on the advice writers themselves: “there are endless subjects which you may be pursuing while you seem to be aimlessly turning over the leaves of one book after another, and to be wasting time which you are, in fact, employing most profitably as well as most diligently.”⁷³ Here, slow reading, while bearing the appearance of “wasting time,” is in fact far more productive than the “busy idleness” characteristic of modernity. This purposeful approach to reading is captured by Lydia Maria Child in an 1819 letter to her brother:

I am aware that I have been too indolent in examining the systems of great writers; that I have not enough cultivated habits of thought and reflection upon any subject. The consequence is, my imagination has ripened before my judgment; I have quickness of perception, without profoundness of thought; I can at one glance take in a subject as displayed by another, but I am incapable of investigation.⁷⁴

Child’s letter evidences the internalization of the self-improving model of reading, particularly its emphasis on “habits of thought and reflection.” It also betrays a more general suspicion about celerity, since her “quickness of perception” and her ability to “at one glance take in a subject” are understood as deterrents for the more appropriate activities of “profound.… thought” and “investigation.”

What is significant in these and earlier descriptions is the way the crisis of reading is redressed through a turn toward instrumental efficiency, what Max Weber has called “the specific and peculiar rationalism of Western culture.”⁷⁵ As indicated earlier, the plague of new books is blamed on overzealous production on the part of the printing press, that “great engine of civilization.”⁷⁶ With the advent of so many new texts, readers find they must skim and skip to get through them all, and this accelerated pace of reading comes to mirror the frantic chronometry of capitalist modernity itself. Such a crisis is resolved not through a rejection of the market altogether, but through an appropriation of its instrumental and bureaucratizing logic. This is evident in the calls for “supremacy and efficiency” in reading, its characterization as “a discipline … an efficiency of all our mental powers.”⁷⁷ Stated slightly differently, authors of reading manuals were not calling for a return to an older model of reading, what Rolf Engelsing has famously characterized as an “intensive” paradigm in which individuals read only a few religious texts closely.⁷⁸ On the contrary, these authors clearly sanctioned an extensive variety of secular books. But by emphasizing system, method, and time management, they were importing a particular conception of rational instrumentality specific to the industrial age. They rejected the phenomenon of “mechanical reading” with its associations with machine culture, but at the same time their emphasis on “fixing the attention …; of detecting and uniting …; of comparing, analyzing, constructing”⁷⁹ indicates that reading could be subject to modern processes of order and management, mobilized in the name of a superior, goal-oriented end. This “end,” of course, was the creation of the middle-class subject. As Thomas Augst has written in relation to the mercantile libraries of the mid-nineteenth century, “books were the medium of individual development in a civilization organized around the forces of market capitalism: one could become a responsible ethical agent in economic and public life only through the process of reading.”⁸⁰ Thus, despite the fact that reading was primarily situated as a leisure activity—something generally pursued outside the limits of the paid work day—there was a consistent effort on the part of cultural custodians to align it with notions of productivity and work.

If discontinuous reading is redressed through an increased systematization of readers and reading practices, a similar reconfiguration goes on in relation to time, which must also be subject to market discipline. Advice manuals may begin by invoking a frenzied chronometry as a way of signaling modernity-inspired apocalyptic anxieties, but ultimately this is replaced with a controlled vision of the time of reading, one carefully calibrated by clock, timetable, and calendar.⁸¹ “Take care of the minutes, and the days will take care of themselves,” advises Eliza Ware Farrar in The Young Lady’s Friend. “If the minutes were counted, that are daily wasted in idle reverie and still idler talk … they would soon amount to hours, and prove sufficient for the acquisition of … some useful science.” By “scrutinizing her appropriation of every hour in the day,” and “by turning all the odd minutes to account,” the young lady learns “a spirit of order and method” in all her occupations, including reading.⁸² “There is time enough, in a well-ordered day for everything that a young lady ought to do… nothing need be left undone for want of time; if only you know how to economize… and are resolute to perform all that you can.”⁸³ Farrar thus suggests that reading be subject to the same forms of routinized efficiency that characterized America’s burgeoning markets. Rational and ordered, its pace becomes a figure for the teleological, productive movement of modern society, or what Lee Edelman calls “the promise of sequence as the royal road to consequence.”⁸⁴

The relationship between the prescribed time of reading and the controlled linear progress of modernity is evident if we return to the trope of the train. As already mentioned, the train could stand as a metaphor for tremendous power and inevitable forward movement. In Hawthorne’s words, it conveyed “The idea of terrible energy,” “the swiftness of the passing moment.”⁸⁵ But the train was also, of course, a figure for discipline, a meaning that it carries homonymically—to “train” as to develop the habits, thoughts, or behavior by regular instruction. Indeed, the significance of the train for modernity was principally that it could combine tremendous force with precision and predictability, harnessing all the energy of nineteenth-century techno-industrialism in a controlled and systematic way.⁸⁶ Such is evident in Herman Melville’s description of the train in Moby-Dick:

the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour.⁸⁷

Although Melville invokes the “iron Leviathan” here as an analogue to that other natural Leviathan, whose direction and “probable rate of progression” can likewise be accurately predicted by the discerning whaleman, in fact, Moby-Dick’s notorious resistance to pursuit, ownership, and dissection (both metaphysical and actual) would seem to suggest that the great whale cannot be controlled by a civilizing force bent on rational calibration and possession. The “iron Leviathan” or train, by contrast, stands as a figure for the triumph of instrumentalism in modern society. It could thus function as an appropriate metaphor for a certain kind of productive reading whose hallmarks were also “supremacy and efficiency.”⁸⁸

In exploiting this metaphor, cultural authorities emphasized that train travel provided a crucial opportunity for reading. Collections such as Reading for the Railroad (1848) were published explicitly for the traveler “in want of employment for his time and his thoughts.”⁸⁹ Hamilton W. Mabie, another conduct advisor, also extolled the benefits of reading when traveling:

Always have a book at hand, and, whether the opportunity brings you two hours or ten minutes, use it to the full.… Every life has pauses between its activities. The time spent in local travel in streetcars and ferries is a golden opportunity, if one will only resolutely make the most of it. It is not long spaces of time but the single purpose that turns every moment to account that makes great and fruitful acquisitions possible.⁹⁰

Here the effects of modernity on reading are recalibrated. No longer is reading comparable to the fragmented, impressionistic blur produced by accelerated travel. Rather, this travel now provides the opportunity for regulation and control in one’s reading practices. In particular, the time associated with travel (heretofore accelerated and apocalyptic) can be systematized and disciplined so that every interval, from “two hours” to “ten minutes” can be used “to the full.” Foreshortened and fractured time can be made productive if it, too, submits to rational ordering. It is “the single purpose that turns every moment to account.” Thus reading on the railroad (or in street-cars and ferries) is an activity capable of exploiting all the disciplinary force of market capitalism for its own use.

In Mabie’s account, books are valuable as a means toward self-improvement, a way of making “great and fruitful acquisitions possible.” Indeed, even when he writes of the joys of “mental traveling,”⁹¹ it is always with an eye toward how this can consolidate (rather than disorient) the self. In another passage, for example, he ties the movement of the railroad to the imaginary transport of books, emphasizing the acquisitive benefits of both kinds of travel:

To sit in a railway car, and by opening the pages of a book to transport one’s self in a second into the age of Pericles or the gardens of the Medici at Florence, is the modern version of Aladdin’s lamp, and makes one master of treasures more rare and lustrous than those which adorned the palaces of Bagdad.⁹²

In this “modern version of Aladdin’s lamp,” the reader mentally visits foreign parts (“the age of Pericles or the gardens of the Medici”) even as he makes physical progress toward a more realistic destination. Railroad reading thus provides the illusion of unfettered travel, while actually participating in highly regulated movement. It engages the reader in imaginary flight, while assuring that he always stays on course. As “master of treasures,” Mabie’s ideal reader thus appropriates the book, without getting lost in it.

As we shall see, however, other nineteenth-century readers played out the potential of Mabie’s vision to more dramatic ends. In their accounts, reading is aligned not with ideation and time management, but with a wayward, deroutinized, and sensual subjectivity. It makes use of cognition, but it also engages the body, so as to remain persistently consumptive, despite rational producerist imperatives. At its most extreme, such reading reconfigures time by imagining author and reader as merged and thereby collectively resisting the chronological expanse that separates the act of writing and its reception. This is a vision of reading that relies less on principles of appropriation and self-improvement, bending instead toward the promise of diffusion and merger.

“And the Hours Were Seconds”

I begin with an excerpt from the journals of Susan Warner. Warner, best known as the author of The Wide, Wide World (1850), began keeping a diary at age twelve, mostly as a way to account for her days and to rid herself of her most persistent bugbear—idleness. Thus many of her journals keep careful record of her minutest activities, as is evident in this entry, provided in full, from 29 May 1832:

After breakfast I made my bed; then from 40 minutes after 8, to half past 9, sewed. Watched the little bird on her nest till 25 minutes past ten. From half past 10 till 25 minutes past 11 played on the piano. Did nothing very particular till 5 minutes past 1, at which time I sat down to read Rollin, but I do not know when I left off. From 4 to 10 minutes past 5, I painted. While I was painting Mr. and Mrs. Clark came in.⁹³

Warner’s painstaking chronicle of her movements is remarkable; even the trifling activities of watching a bird on its nest and doing “nothing very particular” are recorded in exacting detail. It is crucial, then, that reading seems to be the lone activity that resists such temporal calibration. It disrupts her self-scrutiny, creating a zone of unaccountability (“I do not know when I left off”). Importantly, Warner is absorbed not in a sentimental novel or a penny paper, but in the work of Charles Rollin, an eighteenth-century French historian. To be sure, reading history often has the paradoxical effect of causing Warner to forget time, as is evident in this entry recorded eight months later:

I learnt my Latin before 12 o’clock this morning. I did nothing very useful after that, until 1 o’clock, at which time I sat down to practise. I was thus occupied until 2 o’clock. I after wards took up history, but instead of beginning at the pages for the day, I spent some time in looking at other parts of it. At last however, I recollected myself, but did not quite finish it before dinner.⁹⁴

Here, as above, Warner’s own sense of self-improvement and progress are in lock-step with the advancement of time (“morning,” “12 o’clock,” “1 o’clock,” “2 o’clock”). Indeed, even when she recognizes that she “did nothing very useful,” it is within an acknowledged and limited temporal frame (“until 1 o’clock”). But the sequential and forward-moving momentum of Warner’s day is arrested by her engagement with a history book—itself, ironically, the symbol of a progressivist logic. Rather than “beginning at the pages for the day” (that is, beginning at the beginning, history-like), Warner’s reading is stalled, recursive, indulgent, and retrospective—at least until she has “recollected” herself and returned to linear time and its associated routines (“before dinner”). Hers is a textual engagement characterized by spatial dislocation (“looking at other parts”) and atemporal pacing. Despite her attempts to funnel the time of reading toward instrumental ends—self-improvement, acquisition of knowledge—she finds herself lost in the book, her efforts at mastery replaced by a self unrecollected.

Warner’s characterization of reading as self-forgetting invokes the “rewiring of the senses” that queer theorists have posited as one of the effects of alternative chronometry.⁹⁵ To engage in practices that circumvent (if only imaginatively) the linear flow of time is to experience one’s self and one’s body in new and different ways.⁹⁶ M. Carey Thomas offers another example of this phenomenon. Thomas, who would later in her life go on to become dean and then president of Bryn Mawr College, describes returning from a vacation in the Adirondacks in August of 1878. Almost immediately, she heads to the mercantile library, where she does nothing but read for four days: “And the hours were seconds. I was thirsty with an unquenchable thirst. It was like treading on air. It is the purest happiness—the one thing wh[ich] no man taketh from you.”⁹⁷

Thomas’s description is noteworthy in part because it invokes that brand of reading condemned by nineteenth-century advice manuals—a reading characterized by acceleration (“the hours were seconds”) and insatiety rendered in physiological terms (“I was thirsty with an unquenchable thirst”). Thomas, then, is that female reader whose frantic engagement with books betokens the triumph of modern consumer society. That she willingly describes her reading this way is perhaps evidence that readers could reproduce the dire discourse of advice manuals in their own accounts of reading. And yet, her words also complicate or, at the very least, flesh out this apocalyptic narrative. The pleasure she registers in reading (“It is the purest happiness”) suggests that her insatiety is deeply satisfying, a lack that rests content with never being filled. In this way it is not reducible to the tormented addiction of James Freeman Clarke’s newspaper reader whose motto is “What next?” Something similar is conveyed in Thomas’s phrase, “It was like treading on air,” a description of reading significant because it straddles the borders of materiality and spirituality, the corpus and cognition. To walk or step in a medium that is pure ethereality is to partake of a movement without progress, a corollary, perhaps, to being “thirsty with an unquenchable thirst.” These descriptions limn the reading subject as removed from sequential activity (forward movement) or causal predictability (ingestion followed by satiation). They suggest a type of reading that is neither commensurate with accelerated modernity nor capable of being rerouted into efficiency. Indeed, Thomas’s final characterization of her time in the mercantile library as “the purest happiness—the one thing wh[ich] no man taketh from you” suggests that reading has a holy dimension, remote from the acquisitive and competitive orientation of daily life.

Warner and Thomas are examples of what I am calling “wayward readers,” readers whose engagement with books leads them away from rather than toward measurable ends. Their reading is not easily aligned with directives for productivity. Rather, it remains stubbornly figured as consumption (as evidenced by Thomas’s ingestion metaphor) and thereby tied to the body, albeit a body reconfigured by a new experience of temporality. As yet, however, I have not commented on the consequences of wayward reading, its ability not simply to skirt instrumentalism but to remake the world and one’s relations within it. To do so, I turn first to Mary Austin’s autobiography Earth Horizon and then, finally, to the writing of Henry David Thoreau.

“The Feel of the Author Behind the Book”

Although published in 1932, Earth Horizon is in many ways an account of nineteenth-century reading practices. Austin’s favorite books from adolescence—including Queechy, The Wide, Wide World, The Lamplighter, Beluah, St. Elmo, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin—read like a hit list of mid-century domestic fiction. Her memories of these novels are often accompanied by exact recordings of when and where her reading took place. Yet despite this attention to detail, she often characterizes reading as a felt phenomenon that resists the claims of cognition, as in this description of encountering Tennyson in her fourth year at school, in 1876: “You hadn’t supposed up to that time that poetry had been expected to mean anything in particular. “The Lady of Shalott’ you had chosen for its glittering figures, its smoothly swinging movement of rhyme and meter.”⁹⁸ Of reading Paradise Lost in the winter of her twelfth year, she offers a similar account, this time writing in her preferred third person voice: “Through Milton, the magic of words carried Mary swimmingly much of the way.… But she kept forgetting the sequences of the story, mazed by the magic of the verse” (105). Still again, in reference to her reading during the 1880s: “She could recite whole pages of‘Laus Veneris,’ not really knowing what it was about, but captivated by the swinging rhythm” (165). In each of these descriptions, Austin emphasizes the failure of comprehension and the neglect of plot in favor of a reading process that is marked by convolution, iteration, and belatedness. Her preferred spatial model is not the “sequence of the story” (since it is that which she consistently forgets) but the repetitive and meandering figure of the “maze.” Indeed, Austin’s own use of alliteration in these descriptions (“smoothly swinging,” “mazed by the magic”) works to emphasize the emotive over the perceptive and to create a sense of elongated or deferred temporality. Thus what arises is a curious contrast between Austin’s own placement of her reading in linear time (the fourth year at school, the winter of her twelfth year, the 1880s) and the ability of that reading to create an alternative chronometry—a “swinging movement” not reducible to “sequence.”

This sense of altered temporality is at its most profound in Austin’s account of reading a geology textbook, Old Red Sandstone (1841), introduced to her in the eighth grade through the auspices of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle:

the title had a calling sound; there was, for the child, a promise in it of reinstatement in that warm reciprocal world of outdoors, for lack of which she was for years, after her father’s death, a little sick at heart. I remember the very look of the pages, the easy, illustrative charts, the feel of the author behind the book, the feel of the purposeful earth—I must have been reading it out-of-doors, in my favorite seat in the cherry tree which stood to the left of the door of the yellow house as you came out. I remember how, as I read, the familiar landscape of Rinaker’s Hill, the Branch, the old rock quarry, unfolded to the dimensions of a geological map—the earth itself became transparent, molten, glowing. (104)

The intensity of the experience is signaled in part through Austin’s reversion to the first person voice, as if the memory is too powerful to accommodate the distanced objectivity of third person narration. What the “I” of her account remembers is a series of vivid details, both empirical–“the very look of the pages, the easy, illustrative charts”—and numinous—“the feel of the author behind the book, the feel of the purposeful earth.” This fusing of the actual and the mystical continues in the sentences that follow, where Austin locates the coordinates of her physical bearings (“I must have been reading it out-of-doors, in my favorite seat in the cherry tree”) and undoes these through her descriptions of spatial transformation (“I remember how, as I read, the familiar landscape … unfolded to the dimensions of a geological map”). Here, as in her descriptions of poetry above, reading is accompanied by a curious pairing of precise temporal-spatial measurement and the utter destruction of these, so that the reading subject feels herself both familiarly located and lost in space, uncannily situated between “Rinaker’s Hill” and a newly made earth, “transparent, molten, glowing.” This is a decisively more radical articulation of what Hamilton W. Mabie describes as “mental traveling.” His was a transport without disorientation, in which the reader remained in control of his new environs. Austin, by contrast, conjures up a world in which the book remakes the reader, thoroughly reconfiguring her sense of self and place.

Austin intensifies this feeling of dislocation by fusing the materiality of the geology textbook with that of her immediate vicinity, as if Old Red Sandstone and the “rock quarry” that surrounds her are somehow coextensive. The book, in other words, appears not just about the earth, but of it, deeply entwined with her physical environs. She describes the title as issuing “a calling sound,” thereby suggesting the book’s complicity with primordial nature. And she speaks of the book’s “promise … of reinstatement in that warm reciprocal world of outdoors,” a promise made good by the fact that Austin reads it in the open air. Most striking, however, is the way the text’s unfolding is metonymically linked to the transformations she experiences in physical space, in which her “familiar landscape” is “unfolded.” Austin’s reading, in other words, establishes a connection between narrative disclosure and spatial dis-closure, a theme reiterated in her final account of the book:

”Old Red Sandstone” disappeared from the family bookshelves about the time Mother gave away Mary’s collection to a neighbor’s child, after Mary went away to normal school, but the sense of the unfolding earth never left her. There are moments still, when she is alone with the mountains of New Mexico, when the first geological pages of the past begin to open and turn, when they are illuminated by such self-generated light as first shone from the chapters of “Old Red Sandstone.” (104–5)

Despite the fact that Old Red Sandstone is given away, Austin retains her memory of the book’s unfolding and, with it, “the sense of the unfolding earth.” Indeed, the connection between the open book and the open earth is so powerful, Austin confesses, that even now, “when she is alone with the mountains of New Mexico,” the memory of reading transforms her surroundings, so that the “geological pages of the past begin to open and turn.” The ability of the earth to become book-like (the “geological pages of the past”) and the book to become earth-like (the “self-generated light” that “shone from the chapters”) attests to the deep imbrication of text and context, the capacity of reading to alter the grounds of understanding. Austin’s account, in other words, speaks to the transformative power of reading, not as a source of individual self-improvement, but rather as a catalyst for a regenerated relationship to one’s surroundings. Old Red Sandstone leaves the bookshelf in normative chronology—“about the time Mother gave away Mary’s collection to a neighbor’s child, after Mary went away to normal school”—but the memory of its reading allows Austin to play with the coordinates of time and space, conjuring up and losing herself within the mountainous terrain the book describes.

By Austin’s account, this kind of imaginative activity was crucial in relieving her isolation, in creating a sense of connection to forces and people beyond herself. Reared by a remote, indifferent mother, largely unsympathetic to Austin’s intellectual ambitions, she saw books as the only evidence that she was not alone in her curiosity and aesthetic appreciations, “that there were people in the world to whom these things were not strange, but exciting and natural” (132). More particularly, Austin praises books for providing her a sense of correspondence and intimacy with other objects. After reading Seven Lamps of Architecture, a book “associated in her mind with her father’s reading,” Austin describes how

Mary had wanted just to turn and savor the work in her mind, make it real for herself that there were buildings in the world like that, strange and lovely whorls and intricate lacings and vinelike twistings of forms in stone; that you could go to them; that she herself might go there sometime. (132)

Austin’s dual desire for authenticity and for connection creates the effect of a reader imbricated in the structures she reads about—her descriptions of wanting to “turn … the work in her mind” read as an analogue to the “vinelike twistings of forms in stone.” Her reading not only assuages her loneliness, it also provides her with what Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit call “inaccurate selfreplications,” forms that correspond to the self without being absolutely reducible to it.⁹⁹ It thereby allows her to achieve a profound connection with objects (both human and nonhuman) in the external world, what Austin elsewhere describes as “a continuing experience of wholeness” (283). In the introduction to Earth Horizon, she writes, “It has always been a profound realization of my life that there was a pattern under it.… It was to appreciation of this inherency of design that I came as a child, reassured of its authenticity; felt it hovering in advance of moving to envelop me in its activities, advising and illuminating” (vii). To be “envelop[ed]” by a pattern or design is, for Austin, to be cloaked, willingly, by sentient forces greater than the self, to experience “the totality which is called Nature” (vii). It is this sense of nonsubjugating fusion that reading books like Old Red Sandstone and The Seven Lamps of Architecture seems to generate. The unfolding of the narrative creates an unfurling of environs, so that the self is set adrift among the elements. In the process, unitary identity gives way to a sense of collaborative merging with author, text, ancestral forces, and material earth.¹⁰⁰

Austin’s vision of communion was, of course, inflected by her deep immersion in Native American tradition. Reading for her facilitated a connection not simply to an individual but to the specific landscape in and about which she read (the mountains of New Mexico, the architecture of Venice). In this way, she is a fascinating, albeit perhaps not altogether typical, model of the phenomenon of readerly communion I am outlining. More to the point is the example of Henry David Thoreau, who, like Austin, imagined the activity of reading as radically remaking time and space, but with more interpersonal consequences.

In the section of Walden (1854) entitled “Reading,” Thoreau begins by differentiating the exalted activity of scholarship from the more prosaic occupations of “accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity,” “founding a family or a state,” and “acquiring fame even.” The former, he insists, deals with “truth,” and, in taking this up, “we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.” Reading, then, is significant because of its removal from the quotidian world of contingency, a point reinforced in his next sentences:

The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.¹⁰¹

Here Thoreau suggests that reading belongs to an alternative chronometry divorced from linear or progressive time. The temporal lapse between when an author writes, or, in Thoreau’s language, “raises a corner of the veil,” and when a reader reads is imperceptible—“no time has elapsed.” The writer’s revelation, even if it happened centuries ago, is made simultaneous with the reader’s discovery: “I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did.” Why is this? Because at the moment of reading, reader and writer are fused and inseparable: “It was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision.” In other words, it is the reader who ultimately enables and makes real the author’s initial discoveries, a variation of Maurice Blanchot’s radical reader response position—“What is a book that no one reads? Something that has not yet been written.”¹⁰² Likewise, in perusing the ancient book, the reader is inhabited by the subjectivity of the author who “reviews” his original discoveries through the reader’s own eyes. The result is a profound imbrication of the two beings, so that writer and reader exist in one another (“I in him,” “he in me”), and the time between them is suspended—“neither past, present, nor future.” That Thoreau describes this alternative temporality as “really improv[ing]” suggests his interest in aligning reading with a form of productivity not reducible to traditional notions of progress.

Thoreau’s account of the curious bodily fusion between reader and author recalls Austin’s description of her forays into Old Red Sandstone—“the feel of the author behind the book.” Both are examples of what Annamarie Jagose has called the “transformed relationalities” that are made possible and necessary by rethinking temporality.¹⁰³ In other words, if reading brings with it new ways of understanding time and space, it also, in the process, suggests new relationships between readers and the players associated with a book’s narrative world (author, character, fellow reader, etc.). For Thoreau, the book thus creates an intimacy unlike that found in any other art form:

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;—not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech.¹⁰⁴

What is significant about the “written word,” the book, as distinct from painting and sculpture, is its relationship to the material body of its reader. It is not, as is the case of the visual arts, viewed abstractly from afar, but rather “breathed from all human lips … carved out of the breath of life itself.” Thoreau is not unaware of the paradox of the book’s reception: On the one hand, it is easily reproduced and disseminated and thus “more universal than any other work of art.” On the other hand, its ability to be grasped and spoken aloud renders it an intimate part of the reader’s bodily experience. It is thus capable of both reaching the masses and physically engaging with the individual, a point that anticipates Walter Benjamin’s claims some eighty years later about the art form in the age of mechanical reproduction.¹⁰⁵ In breathing the words of a book, we are, in effect, sharing the originating breath of the author, and it is this physical intimacy between reader and writer that serves to suspend or distort the chronological time between them. When Thoreau writes “The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech,” he describes a book’s trajectory not exactly through time but, asequentially, across it—the “becomes” signaling a transmutation from “thought” to “speech” that is less historical than spectral.

I have been arguing that reading in the nineteenth century could create new modes of perception, feeling, and identification. Thus, alongside the discourse of improvement that issued forth from conduct books and that was readily taken up by readers, there existed another narrative embraced by both cultural authorities and everyday subjects—an alternative to the emphasis on realized potential, measurable gains, and ineluctable progress. Anne-Lise François has described this latter rhetoric as an embrace of “uncounted experience,” “freeing desire from the demands of goal-oriented action.”¹⁰⁶ For Susan Warner, M. Carey Thomas, Mary Austin, and Henry David Thoreau, reading involved satisfactions that were not always tied to the advancement of knowledge or the productive realization of the self. It was a practice that was not necessarily plot-driven, indeed, not even propelled by a desire for comprehension or understanding. It engaged the mind but also a wider conception of self that included both spirit and body. It was often voracious and yet could rest content with partiality and noncompletion. It was marked by a sense of recursivity, belatedness, dislocation, and convolution, all of which challenged its placement in normative temporal and spatial frames. Finally, in the case of Austin and Thoreau, it was characterized by a bodily intimacy with the book itself or with a figure associated with the book’s narrative world. It bears repeating that such a reading experience was not simply an effect of the novel—the genre most often associated with imaginative flight and the vitiation of normative experience. On the contrary, history, geology, and classical philosophy (in the case of Thoreau) were equally capable of producing this nonunitary sense of being in the world.

As I mentioned in the introduction to this study, it is tempting to align this kind of reading with a Romantic sensibility, for indeed the two have much in common. This is especially evident in the language of immediacy, personal transformation, and spiritual longing that accompanies the accounts of Thomas, Austin, and Thoreau, each of whom can easily be placed within an American Romantic tradition. All three align reading with a desire to exit the predictabilities of their everyday existence, to partake of “experience disengaged … exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it”—the premier attribute that Henry James ascribed to the romance.¹⁰⁷ In this way, the alternative time connected with reading is a version of the “transport” associated with the Romantic sublime. And yet, there are also important differences. The commitment to “totality” characteristic of many strains of Romantic writing—what one critic describes as the “possible-impossible expansion of the self to a seamless identification with the universe”¹⁰⁸—seems more abstract and all-embracing than the specificity of connection to another that I have discussed in this chapter. Even with Austin, the desire for merger was directed at a particular landscape rather than at the universe in general. For many Romantic writers (especially in the American transcendentalist context), the interest is in the “currents of Universal Being”¹⁰⁹ and the speaker’s place among these. Thus when this writing celebrates the oneness of the world, it is often with an eye toward how this makes possible a renewal or coalescence of the self.

The visions of reading articulated by Warner, Thomas, Austin, and Thoreau, on the other hand, do not speak to self-realization so much as they offer possibilities for removal and self-forgetting. To be sure, each of these thinkers associates reading with power, but it is hardly themselves who are emboldened by this activity. Warner’s account of a self un-recollected and Austin’s description of being “mazed by the magic” of books invoke less Thomas De Quincey’s Romantic vision of a reader “ascending as upon a Jacob’s ladder,”¹¹⁰ than of a reader scattered and nomadic. Likewise, when Thoreau describes how “The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil …; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did,” he invokes an attitude toward books that is marked not by acquisition and ascension but by deference, deferral, and diffusion. Such an attitude suggests an important resistance to the logic of self-formation associated with some strains of Romantic exploration. As Bersani and Dutoit put it, “We cannot dominate a space in which we are disseminated.”¹¹¹

Thoreau’s “trembling robe” is a powerful figure for both the suspended time and the erotic intimacy he associates with reading. First “raised” by the philosopher, it “remains raised” for the contemporary audience. It evidences both the erasure of chronological time—“No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed”—and the intimate merging of writer and reader, who are joined by the simultaneous “gaze” they direct beneath the garment. For Thoreau, then, reading is significant for the ways it eradicates the distance between author and reader, leaving the two in a libidinally inflected state of mutual existence. To read in this scenario is to insist on sensual proximity in the face of natural deterrents—to circumvent time, geography, and even death itself. As the next chapter will elaborate, Thoreau was not alone in this conception. Many nineteenth-century subjects valued reading both as a model for achieving contact with the dead and as a way of reconfiguring separation as mutual presence. But why was this mutuality so satisfying to nineteenth-century subjects? What were its limits? And to what extent did it threaten the autonomy of readers? The pleasures, dangers, and ambiguities of author-reader communion are the subject of the following pages.