The Reading Lesson
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Mudie's, partly from the pattern of reading aloud within family circles, and partly from the rhetoric of direct address adopted by novelists themselves - the rhetoric of "dear reader," "gentle reader"."--The Reading Lesson (1998) by Patrick Brantlinger "Historically there is a direct relationship between the sensation novel and sensational journalism, from the extensive ... With some justice, Dean Mansel complained about the emergence of "the criminal variety of the Newspaper Novel, a class of fiction having about the same relation to the genuine historical novel that the police reports of the “Times” have to the pages of Thucydides or Clarendon."--The Reading Lesson (1998) by Patrick Brantlinger "In 1863, Dean Henry Mansel opined in The Quarterly Review that sensation novels belong "to the morbid phenomena of literature." Such novels are "indications of a wide-spread corruption, of which they are in part both the effect and the cause; called into existence to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite, and contributing themselves to foster the disease". For Mansel, sensation novels are "poison, like "those French novels devoted to the worship of Ball-Peor and the recommendation of adultery"."--The Reading Lesson (1998) by Patrick Brantlinger |
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The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (1998) is a book by Patrick Brantlinger.
The book is a study of 19th-century elitist attitudes toward mass literacy in which Brantlinger reminds us that the reading of popular Victorian novels was viewed as "vampiric" and "addictive."
The book is similar in tone and thematics to John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992).
From the publisher
- Fear of the novel stalks the pages of Patrick Brantlinger's latest book. Its central plot involves the many ways in which novels and novel reading were viewed - especially by novelists themselves - as both causes and symptoms of rotting minds and moral decay among nineteenth century readers. The fear of mass literacy is a familiar theme in histories of the period. The guardians of middle class culture were alarmed by the mass literacy that brought with it a mass consumer market for such popular, supposedly low forms as Gothic romances, penny dreadfuls, and Newgate crime stories. Nor were their higher priced and higher brow cousins, the three-decker novels, immune from concern: after Zola, 'serious' realistic novels were no longer thought to be a palliative for the excesses of romance and crime fiction. Brantlinger demonstrates how these attitudes were shared in various ways by Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, Collins, Gissing, Stevenson, and others, who echoed the suspicion of their audiences about the negative consequences of reading. Brantlinger sets the scene with discussions of the Gothic romance and other 'poisonous fictions' and of the anxieties about democracy and the mob during and after the French Revolution. Among other examples, he analyzes M. G. Lewis' "The Monk", William Godwin's "Caleb Williams", and the surprising literacy of the monster in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein". He then explores respectable vs. criminal reading in Dickens's "Oliver Twist" and Henry Mayhew's "London Labour and the London Poor"; representations of the working class in novels by Harriet Martineau, Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, and Charlotte and Emily Bronte; counterfeit money as a metaphor for realism and the novel in the realistic novels of Thackeray and Trollope; and, the 'moral panic' caused by the Sensation Novels of the 1860s. He closes with studies of the conflict between respectable and mass or low culture played out in Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and George Gissing's "New Grub Street" and of 'overbooked vs. bookless futures' in William Morris' "News From Nowhere" and H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine".
