May 19, 2006
William St. Clair on "the political economy of reading"
William St. Clair, in an essay printed in the May 12 Times Literary Supplement, attempts to reorient our understanding of the relationship between printed matter and its readers' "mentalities." The essay, a condensed version of the John Coffin Memorial Lecture in the History of the Book, is not available online in its TLS form, but the original can be found in PDF form here. A few excerpts:
Literary and intellectual histories, two of the disciplines that have traditionally attempted to retrieve mentalities, have mainly been written in accordance with the "parade of authors" convention. The writings of the past are presented as a march past of great names, described from a commentator's box set high above the column. In literature, we see Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson. . . . In philosophy Hume is followed by Adam Smith, Rousseau, or whichever names the writer wishes. According to the parade convention, those texts which have later been judged to be the best of their age, or the most innovative in a wide sense, are believed to catch the essence, or some of the essence, of the historical situation from which they came. It is a convention centred on newly written works that, for the most part, denies an active role to readers. Another convention that has come in more recently, I call the "parliament of texts." This presents the writings of a particular historical period as debating and negotiating with one another in a kind of open parliament, with all the members participating and listening. Thus, when news of the French Revolution reached England, there was an outpouring of books and pamphlets that discussed its implications, and took the debate from questions of immediate policy to philosophical concerns about the nature of human society, the role of the State, the justifications for political, social and gender hierarchies, and much else.Under both of these conventions, the historian chooses the texts that march in the parade or sit in the parliament. . . . However, as ways of understanding how mentalities may have been formed by the reading of books, neitehr approach is complete or satisfactory. For one thing, any study of the consequences of reading in the past ought to consider those books that were actually read, not a more recent selection.
And then:
A political economy of reading can begin with the economic aspect of political economy. The "history of the book" is, among much else, the history of an industry, one which has parallels with, for example, pharmaceuticals and information technology, in which intellectual property is central. . . .Over the whole print era, the links, both general and particular, between texts, books, reading and wider consequences appear to be secure. For example, the persistence of rural, religious, pre-Enlightenment constructions of Englishness into the industrialized urban world, the emergence of a distinctively working-class sceptical urban reformist culture, and the persistence of believe in astrology and other ancient supernatural systems, despite the efforts of Church and State—in all these cases, the overlap is with books and readers, not with authors and texts. . . . If I am right, and it is accepted that reading can be shown to have shaped mentalities, then the implications are immense. For, having disconnected outcomes from traditional text- and author-centred approaches, we have connected them to other ways of understanding complexity.
Because there is such a precedent for this type of inquiry—the work of Adam Smith, for example, as mentioned in the description of the full lecture given on the page linked above—St. Clair's ideas seem natural, as if they should have already been in the air. And yet I don't think I've come across, in a publication aimed at a more-or-less general readership, an essay that uses these methods to consider histories of publishing and reading. I can't vouch fully for the original lecture, as I've only read the TLS-edited extract, but the latter is fascinating, so the former may well be worth a look, especially among those litbloggers who read this site.