Borders Family History Society on 19th century reading rage

Last week, there was a thread on Facebook about “reading rages”.

One person (in Canada) stated that women and girls were sent to lunatic asylums for reading too much, a girl (in Germany) was scolded by her grandmother for reading too much and warned that no man would marry her “because men don’t like women who read”. It seems there were alternative phrases, too; “reading lust”, “reading mania”, and “reading fever”.

The Sun of May 28, 1844 suggests that the present reading mania is not likely to include Macbeth.

The August 1, 1856 edition of The Limerick and Tipperary Vindicator comments on the improvement in fiction, particularly when it neither ignored Catholicism nor vilified it. They made the point that the reading mania of the times has encouraged more people to write fiction. The September 8, 1856 issue of the Liverpool Albion advised its readers that 56,000 copies, in three editions, of Dred at 2s 6d (12½ p) were sold within a fortnight.

Various papers ran the same article, noting that Dred was the reading rage of the day. ‘Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp’ was the second popular novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe; an American author who was fervently against slavery. It seems strange that there was no reading rage reported for her first novel, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, which sold 300,000 copies in America in its first year.

The April 3, 1860 edition of the Bury and Norwich Post and Suffolk Herald not only called the attention of the Cornhill Magazine to its readers, with instalments by Thackeray, Masson and Millais, but suggested other light reading that might be enjoyed.

The March 21, 1862 issue of the Shepton Mallet Journal reported that the Rev Henry Shrimpton had delivered a lecture on popular delusions to a sizeable audience. He also deprecated the current reading mania because the general tendency was to read works which were ‘anything but profitable’. He held that reading novels was not injurious, providing that those novels enforced moral truth.

The March 31, 1864 edition of the Northern Whig (of County Antrim, Northern Ireland) said that the Paris correspondent of the German newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung, had reported on the reading mania in Paris.

“Paris is one large reading room. Everybody reads – the concierge, the coachman, the lady’s maid, madame and monsieur ... from morning to night.”

The December 24, 1886 edition of The Stroud New and Gloucestershire Advertiser reported the annual concert and prize giving of Stroud Borough School; and Mr F A Hyett, presiding, had deprecated the current novel reading rage. He gave examples of a lady who had confessed to reading no ‘sensible’ novel in the 15 years since she had left school and of other people who read two three-volume novels in a day. It seems that novels by Dickens and Scott fell into the ranks of deprecated novels. How times have changed.

Judging by the emptiness of libraries and the bankruptcies of bookshops, reading rage seems to be a phenomenon of the past.