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THE HISTORY OF READING AND READINGCOMMUNITIESMARTYNLYONS

The history of reading has estabijshed its credentials. It has become animponant pan of the series of historical questions we loosely call the Historyof the Book, and it engages some of its leading practitioners. Roben Darnton,for instance, turned from his studies of eighteenth-century publishing andbookselling to pose questions about readers and their responses.! RogerChanier has made invaluable contributions towards conceptualising thehistory of reading.2 Others, including myself. have exploited oral history fromdifferent perspectives to discover reading practices and strategies in the morerecent past) The contributions of Bruce Scates and Victoria Emery in thisnumber of the Bulletin carry this work forward in an Australian context.Much work of course still needs to be done on the more traditional areas of

book history in Australia. Any historical study of the book, including theHistory of the Book in Australia (HOBA) Project, must naturally ask howbooks were produced, what forms they took, what commercial strategies wereadopted to sell them, and through what mechanisms they were borrowed,exchanged and circulated. We must also, however, focus on readers and thehistorical factors which determined how they used, appropriated andresponded to their texts. My aim in this paper is to introduce some generalapproaches to the study of reading, and to outline some of the theoreticalpremises on which that study is based. I will argue that the notion of readingcommunities is a valuable one and, in the second, less-theoretical pan of mypaper, I will discuss some specific illustrations.4

1. R. Damron, 'First Steps Toward a History of Reading', in The Kiss ofLamourettt. ReflectionsIn Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990), pp.154-87; R. Darnton, 'Readers Respond toRousseau: the Fabrication of Romantic SensitiVIty', in The Great Cat Massacre and otherEpisodes in Frern:h Cultural History (New York: Basle Books, 1984), pp.214-56.

2. R. Chanier, LOrdre des LivreJ. LecuuTS. auteuTS. bibliotheque5 en Europe entre le XlVe etXVIII, ,;ee" (Aix-en-Provenee: Alinea, 1992), chaptee 1; R. Chartier, ed., Histoi", de lal,ctur,. Un bilan d, recherthes (paris: IMEC, 1995).

3. M. Lyons & L. Taksa, Australian Readers Remember: an oral history of reading, 1890-1930(Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992); Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance.Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (London: Verso, 1987); Anne-Mane Thiesse, LeRoman du Quotidien. Lecuurs et lectures populaires ala Belle Epoque (paris: Le Chemin Vert,1984).

4. I am very grateful for the criticisms levelled at me by Brian Hubber, Paul Eggert and LucyTaksa, which have helped me to revise an earlier draft of this article.

BSANZ Bulletin, v.21 no.1, 1997, 5-15

6 Martyn Lyons

What IS the history of reading?The historian of reading is interested at one level in how readers first enteredthe world of written culture. The historiah· here becomes a student of firststeps in literacy, assessing how pedagogical practiceS. in the past introducedchildren to reading and writing. The influence of formal education in thisprocess was intermittent in western "ountries until the 1880s. The impact ofschooling must therefore be balanced against the multiplicity of extra-curricular avenues to reading, along which the beginner learns from family,neighbours, workmates, priests and employers, to name just a few resourcesavailable. The historian of reading must then measure the distance separatingliteracy within the family or the workplace from the literary culture absorbedat school.Above all, the history of reading is a study of the norms and practices

which determine the readers' responses to what they read. Certain readingmodels, incorporating recommended reading material, rules and taboos havebeen promoted by churches, trade unions, educators and other groups intenton directing or mobilising the reader. How have readers responded to suchrecommendations? In what social situations did they read? Did they readsilently and alone, or aloud in groups? Did they read casually, purely fordiversion, in a fragmented and 'nonchalant' manner, as Richard Hoggandescribed the approach of English working-class readers?5 Or did they readobsessively, in a dedicated and concentrated way, seeking self-improvement,enlightenment or emancipation? We need to ask these questions if we are toevaluate how readers integrate their reading into the cultural or educationalcapital they have already accumulated. At the heart of this agenda lies aninvestigation into how meaning is ascribed to texts. Only in the act of reading,in the confrontation between reader and text, does literature come alive. Thehistory of the reader, therefore, is a socio-historical study of the factors whichproduce meaning.The (mainly German) exponents of Reception Theory launched their hunt

for the reader in the literary text itself. Embedded in every piece of literature,in this argument, lies an 'implied reader', or a 'hidden reader'.6 Novels give thereader guidelines on which to base judgements, they raise his or herexpectations and leave clues designed to mobilise the reader's imagination. Onoccasion, the eighteenth-century novel would address the reader directly. Thetext, in this theory, may open up several different interpretive possibilities forthe reader, and it assumes his or her active participation. The presence of thereader, and the reader's expectations of a work of fiction, may thus be deducedfrom within the text.

5. R. Hoggart, The Uses ofLiteracy: aspect5 ofworking-class life (Harmondsworth. U.K.: Penguin,1958).

6. Wolfgang !ser, The Implied Reader: Patterns o/Communication in Prose Fiction fromco Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974)i Victor Brombert, The HiddenReader: Stmdhal, Ba/zac, Hugo, Baudei4zre, Fi4ubert (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1988).

Reading Communities. 7

These ideas unfortunately lack a historical perspective. They assume thatliterary texts are static and immutable, whereas they are constantly re-editedover time, in different versions and formats and at different prices. Each re-incarnation of a text targets a new public, whose participation and expectationsare guided not just by authors but by publishing strategies, illustrations and allthe other physical aspects of the boQ,k.In any case, as a historian I am less interested in implied or putative readers

than in actUal readers - readers who have recorded theIr reactions in their ownautobiographies, letters and diaries. I am chiefly concerned not with theimplications of canonical texts fossilised in time but with real readers inspecific historical circumstances, who can provide us with what Radway calls'an empirically-based ethnography of reading?The autonomy of the individual reader is a fundamental principle here. We

can make no prior assumptions about the reader's response. The reader nevercomes to the text passively or empty-handed, and never absorbs the textwithout resistance or criticism. Since the celebrated and oft-quoted case ofMenocchio, the sixteenth-century Friulian miller who staggered the Inquisitionwith his version of the origins of the earth, we have been warned: we predictthe reader's response at our peril. For nothing apparently in Menocchio'sreading authorised his bizarre vision of the world as a curdled cheese,harbouring large worms which transformed themselves into angels.8 How hadMenocchio acquired these notions? Not, apparently, from the Anabaptists orother Protestants, with whom no contact can be found. Nor can his singularviews be directly connected to his reading of the Koran, the Decameron,Mandeville's Travels or the medieval chronicles which came briefly into hispossession. For Ginzburg, his unpredictable views were the result of a comingtogether of popular and learned sources. On one hand, there was thecontribution of an archaic, oral tradition of peasant protest, rooted in a dimpagan past. On the other hand, Menocchio had selected and reworkedinformation received from learned sources: the books which he told theInquisition so much about. It was the mutual imbrication of the oral with theprinted, the popular with the erudite, which produced his very personalheresy.In Michel de Ceneau's metaphor, the reader is a poacher.9 The reader as

consumer hides as it were in the text, but not in the sense understood by thereception theorists. The reader is a trespasser, creeping about the proprietor'sestate for his or her own nefarious purposes. The estate is not his propeny; thelandscape has been laid out by other hands; but, undetected, he takes what heneeds from it, a hare here, a thrush there, even a deer if he's lucky, and escapeswithout leaving a trace on the page. In this way, the individual reader

7. Radway., Reading the Romance, op.cit., p.S.8. Carlo Glfizburg, The Cheese and the Wonns: the Cosmos ofa Sixteenth-century Miller, trans. J.

& A. Tedeschi. (LoDdoD: RKP, 1980).9. M. de Certeau, L'invention du Quotidien -1.Arts de Faire (paris: Gallimard, 1990). [English

translation entitled Practice ofEveryday Life].

8 Martyn Lyam

insinuates his own meanings and purposes into another's text. Each individualreader has silent and invisible ways of subverting the dominant order ofconsumerised culture. ' 'Janice Radway examines romance readers in the American Midwest from a

similar perspective. The women readers she questioned saw their romancereading not as an act of conformisllJ. which reinforced a patriarchal ideologybut rather as a claim to female independence. For the romance readers ofSmithton, the act of reading was in itself an assertion of the right to privacy,and a temporary refusal of their everlasting duties as wives, mothers andhousekeepers. Romance reading, Radway argued, Was a mild protest againstthe emotional demands of husbands and children. She reminds us that'commodities like mass-produced literary texts are selected, purchased,constructed and used by real people, with previously existing needs, desires,intentions and interpretive strategies'.l0At this point, however, I run into a serious practical problem. If, as I have

argued, individual readers engage in a dynamic interaction with what is read,and share in the production of meaning; if, in addition, they develop privateinterpretations which are not in any way predetermined; then how are we towrite their personal histories? The danger is that we are faced with amultiplicity of individual stories, all of them unique. If we dissolve the historyof reading into a myriad of free agents, all arriving at unexpected conclusions,we have a state of subjective anarchy in which no generalisations are eitherpossible or legitimate. The notion of 'interpretive communities' of readers mayoffer a constructive way out of this trap.Stanley Fish, the American literary critic to whom we owe this idea, offers

a useful corrective to the anarchic tendencies of reading history justmentioned.!! To adapt a much-used phrase, readers make their own meanings,but they do not make them entirely as they wish. Readers do so as members ofa community which makes certain assumptions about literature and what itconstitutes. Members of a reading community may not know each other oreven be aware of each other's existence, and I am well aware that this fact alonestretches our conventional ideas of community. Members of a readingcommunity, however, have a common set of criteria for judging what is 'good'and 'bad' li terature, for categorising texts as belonging to certain genres, andfor establishing their own genre hierarchies. Reading communities may bereaders of the same newspaper, they may have an institutional basis like aliterary society or a university faculty, or they might be defined more looselyin terms of gender or social class. Perhaps as women readers, or as militantworkers, they employ similar interpretive strategies in anributing meaning totheir books. Individual readers may of course belong to several readingcommunItieS at once.

10. Radway, Reading the Romance, op.cit.. p.221.11. S. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class.' The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).

Reading Communities. 9

Fish would probably be enormously surprised by the distance thathistorians since run with his conception. Smith totake a prOI1llllent example, took the .dea 6f the mterpretlve commuruty as thestarting-point for his analysis of readers' leners to nineteenth-eentury Frenchfiction writers. 12 He found that, at the beginning of the century, readers'leners valued the noble sentiments expressed in fiction. They envisaged theauthor as a man of fme, aristocratic'sensibilities (thus Stendhal received lettersaddressed to Monsieur de Stendhal). Readers judged writers according totraditional shared criteria, which demanded moral lessons and allegiance toneo-classical virtues of simpliciry and restraint. They adapted slowly to therealist ethic, and their correspondence suggested to Allen that for some timethey associated realism with immoraliry. Gradually, the impact of Flaubert and20la redefined the expectations of the public. Instead of praising a novel'srefinement and delicate taste, readers were more likely to appreciate its energyand power. These insights, building on valuable direct evidence of readers'responses, gave Allen's work shape and direction.Fish's notion, to which AlIen's work refers, is only a starting-point. It does

not give us enough help to define the social realities of reading communities inhistorical time. For this we need a social context. As Robert Darntonreminded us in his most recent work, ascribing meaning to texts is a socialactivity.13 The process is not wholly individual and random, but relies onbroader social and cultural conditioning factors. The expectations brought tothe book by readers are formed through shared social experience. Theseexpectations may also be encouraged by publishers who adopt marketingstrategies aimed at particular communities of readers. This already goes beyondFish's own formulations, but I make no apology for giving his ideas the broadinterpretation I believe they need if we are to extract most profit from them.Sociologists of consumption like Pierre Bourdieu may add substance to

Fish's vague outline of an interpretive community.14 Bourdieu posed apertinent question for the historian of reading, namely: what are the socialconditions determining the consumption and appropriation of culture? Somekey socio-eultural components of class, including one's level of schooling,produce a cultural competence which defines what we call 'taste'. In otherwords, it allows the reader to 'decode' a literary work, identify its style,period, genre or author. For Bourdieu, even the ways we acquire culturalobjects like books and use them are themselves signs of class, through whichwe identify ourselves with certain groups and distance ourselves from others.Some readers buy books from antiquarian dealers, others subscribe to the finereproductions edited by the Folio Society, as distinct from others who findtheir books in supermarkets or second-hand paperback exchanges. In the

12. James Smi.h Allen, In the Public Eye: a history of reading in modem France, 180().1940(princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

13. R. Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of France (New York & London:Nonon, 1995), p.186.

14. Pierre Bourdieu. La D!stinction: critique sociale du jugemmt (paris: Eds. de Minuit. 1979).

10 Martyn Lyons

process of selecting and responding to what we read, according to Bourdieu,we are operating a strategy of distinction. and affirming our of apamcular SOCIal or cultural group. SOCIal' groups or communlties share acommon habitus which determines their cultural practices and shapes thecommon characteristics of an entire life-style. This goes well beyond the ideasof Stanley Fish; to his idea of interpr<:,tive communities I have tried to add theinsights of a sociology of consumer ·practices. If we take into account thissociological extrapolation of the notion of the reading community, we arebetter-armed the task of identifying readers with shared values andcommon practices.

I have .argued elsewhere that self-educated and self-improving workers formed adistinctive interpretive community of readers. 15 In the nineteenth century,they fought grinding poverty and material handicaps to improvise a literaryculture. The process of cultural appropriation, according to Pierre Bourdieu,depends on tlie balance between an mdividual's economic capital and his or hereducational capital.1 6 In other words, the cultural goods we consume andcherish are determined by our income level and the level of schooling we haveattained. It follows from this formula that autodidact workers were doublydisinherited. They were both poor and lacking in educational qualifications.The self-taught worker, deficient in both inherited and acquired culturalcapital, was forced to accumulate it through his or her own efforts, and byunorthodox means. Excluded from the kinds of cultural consumption enjoyedby the well-off, the autodidact inevitably became a usurper of culturalproperty. He or she was an interloper who had been denied access to an enviedcultural world.Self-improvement - material, moral and intellectual - was a very demanding

objective. It required serious application and self-abnegation. Time had to beset aside for the acquisition of knowledge, money had to be saved for thepurchase of books, sleep was sacrificed, health deteriorated, friendships wereput at risk by the fervent determination to read and to know. The zoal of self-improvement was often inspired by a non-conformist Protestant faith; and itoften went hand-in-hand with the taking of the 'pledge' to abstain fromalcohol. Temperance and non-conformity were expressions of a commonhabitus.J7 Planning a personal budget in order to save money for future needs,the purposeful use of leisure time, together with the choice of books and theconsumption of food and drink were all cultural practices generated by ashared aesthetic. This aesthetic valued the work ethic and the postponement ofpersonal satisfactions. It could be seen as a strategy aimed at distinguishing theself-improver from other workers.

15. M. Lyons, 'Working-class autobiographers in 19th century Europe: some Franco·Britishcamp-arisans·. His,ory ofEuropean Ideas. 20(1·3). 1995, pp.235-41.

16. Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction, op.cit.17. Ibid., pp.190-4.

Reading 11

Reading, for those working-class autobiographers intent on self-improvement, was an earnest and difficult ,. task. Their reading wasconcentrated and purposeful. It was, in many ways, an 'intensive' mode ofreading, relying heavily on repetition, recitation and oralisation as aids tomemory. Autodidaets had a specifically ardent and determined relationshipwith their texts.One characteristic feature of th'? self-taught intellectual was the extremely

demanding course of reading he set himself. At a cenain point the readerwould be struck by the revelation that his reading had been desultory,indiscriminate and poorly directed. He determined to pursue a morepurposeful reading plan in future. This turning-point has been effectivelydescribed by Noe Richter as 'la conversion du mauvais lecteur', when theautodidact resolved to renounce his 'bad' reading habits.l8'Bad' reading habits meant reading too much idle fiction and recreational

literature. Novels were often condemned as futile amusements which shouldbe discarded for more serious reading. The readers' aim was self-instruction,and they were contemptuous of recreational reading purely for its own sake.When they did turn to fiction, they looked for novels which spoke to them oftheir own hardships, and which had some serious social comment to make.Self-improving workers had quite specific uses for the contemporary noveliststhey read. They compared their fictional worlds to their own, and judged themaccording to their own standards of realism. They usually also demanded thatnovelists should be aware of social problems and social inequalities. It was onthese terms that British workers appropriated the work of writers like VictorHugo and Charles Dickens. What Dickens impaned to the Labour Member ofthe House of Commons, George Robens, was 'a deep and abidin!, sympathywith the poor and suffering'.19 Similarly, what the Chartist, William Lovett,appreciated most about Dickens were his heart-piercing exposures ofhypocrisy and callousness, especially the attack on bureaucracy in thedescription of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorritt.20The reading community of nineteenth-century working-class readers

applied the test of realism in judging their fiction. Thomas Dobeson quotedsimilar examples of adventure fiction, but in doing so he wanted to expose thegap between the glamorous exciting world of the thrillers and his own harshexperiences. Dobeson was a 'geordie' who had emigrated to Australia in 1883,only to discover that there was little use for his skills as a pattern-maker. Hewrote between 1887 and 1890, a time when he was frequently unemployed anddisconsolate.You will perhaps say that this is a very doleful history but I am dealingin stem facts. I have no hairbreath's escapes from Indians, you will have

18. N. Richter, La Conversion du Mauvau Lecteur et la Nais54nce de la Lecture publique (Marigne:Eels. de la Queue du Chat, 1992), pp.9-22.

19. G.H. Robens, 'How I Got On', PeaTson's Weekly (London), 17 May 1906, p.806c.20. W. Lovett, Life and Struggles of William Lovett, in his pursuit of Bread, Knowledge andFreedom (London: Trubner, 1876), p.416.

12 Martyn Lyons

to look to Thos. Mayne Reid's novels for these. I have no thrillingtales of the sea. You will have to refer to Fenimore Cooper for these.... I have no spicy intrigues in high life.'You must read Ouida. ... Icannot e\'en produce a scrap of poetry, not as much as a police courtdo. ... I have in fact no nothing.'21

Dobeson was clearly familiar with a wide range of nineteenth-century popularfiction, but he recognised it as literature, whose themes contrastedsharply with his own frustrated struggle to find work.Ned Peters, who gave us a very detailed account of his reading on the

goldfields in the 1850s, is an exemplary member of this community of self-improvers. 22 Like the group of workers already mentioned, he made aconscious decision in 1833 to fight temptation and to improve his mind. Heread non-fiction for his own edification, relying chiefly on Chambers' Papersfor the People. Much of his reading was Protestant in flavour, including PaxtonHood and Oliver Goldsmith. He approved of a few novels, provided theywere, in his words, 'founded on fact'.Since Brian Hubber has already analysed Peters' reading, I will limit mrself

to a few comments on his diaries.23 Hubber estimated that over half 0 thetitles Peters read fell into the categories of Travel, Geography, PoliticalBiography, and History. Yet even this classification probably disguised Peters'reliance on the exemplary biography, often used as an educational model bywriters of advice books like Samuel Smiles (Self-Help) and George Craik (ThePursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties). Much of Peters' history-readingfavoured the biography, as did many of the articles in Chambers' Papers for thePeople.Secondly, the diaries reveal a regular rhythm to Peters' reading. Reading

was predominantly a Sunday activity. Sunday was the most popular day tomake a diary entry about reading - in 1855,41% of his entries about readingwere on a Sunday. But Peters seemed to weary of the regular reading disciplinehe had imposed on himself. On one Sunday in November 1855, he confessedthat his dutiful reading of Chambers' Papers 'became irksome'.24 On Sunday 1June 1856, when faced with a Chambers' article on Railway Communication,he was 'little disposed to read'. In the following month, again on a Sunday, thelife of Fichte left Ned 'tired and careless about reading'. Peters' diary hints atthe conflicts and difficulties created by the disciplined and highly-structuredreading regimes of self-improving readers.

21. T. Dobeson, Que of Work Again: the autobiographical narrative of Thomas Dobeson. 1885·1891, ed. G. DavisoD & S. Constantine ('tv1.elbourne: Department of History, MonashUniversity, 1990), p.33.

22. N. Petm, A Gofd Digger's Di4ries, ed. Les Blake (Newtown, Vie" Neptune Ptess, 1981).23. M. Askew and B. Hubber, 'The Colonial Reader Observed: reading in its cultural context' inD.H. Borchardt & W. Kirsop, eds., The Book in Ausrralia: essays towards a cultural and socialhistory (Melbourne' Australian Reference Publications, 1988), pp.129·30.

24. Peters, A Gold Dtgger's Diaries, op.cit., pp.SC-l, p.l14, &. p.124.

Reading Communities . 13

A more recent member of this community is Randolph H., the son of aSydney Methodist minister, born in 1915, who told us in 1986 that non-fictionwas the only worthwhile reading material. 'My greatest pride and joy', he said,'is the Australian Dictionary ofBiograplry'.25 As a twentieth-century autodidact,he was not interested in poetry, and if it were not for his Australiannationalism, he wou!d have altogether. 'I'm notreally tn novels at all , he saId, except Austrahan. I have never been tnterestedin light reading, other than Australian literature'. He, too, applied the test ofrealism to Australian fiction, when he admitted that Marcus Clarke wasinteresting for his 'historical aspect'. Randolph H. finnly believed in self-improvement. He despised his local School of Arts in Ashfield, because itsmembers were absorbed in playing billiards and the institution seemed to havelost any sense of its educational mission. For Randolph H., reading was aserious enterprise. At home, he would let nothing interfere with it. When hewanted to read, he insisted, the radio had to be turned off.

*****A community of readers can exist on various levels. On one level, it shares acommon stock of literary references or images drawn from a shared imaginarylibrary. Thus early British migrants, faced with the novel and threateningexperiences of their new life, refracted them through shared literary analogies.On the long sea journey to Australia, for example, Coleridge was a regularcompanion. Emigrants' diaries and journals rarely failed to describe oneparticular landmark experience: the first sighting of the albatross, followed byattempts to kill or capture a specimen, in the style of the Ancient Mariner.'Who could doubt their supernatural attributes? Certainly not a spirit-ehilledlandswoman, with Coleridge's magic legend perpetually repeating itself to her',wrote 27-year-old Luisa Meredith, arriving in Sydney in 1839. Luisa was tosurround herself with mementos of the reading community from which shefelt uprooted She called her spaniel Dick Swiveller (from the Old CuriosityShop), and she rode horses called Touchstone and Audrey (from As You LikeIt).26Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was another common refuge for the disorientated,

not merely because the danger of shipwreck was real enough in the earlynineteenth century, but also as a literary guide for the first apprehensivecontact with Aborigines. Jane Watts found Kangaroo Island a 'wild,uninhabited Robinson Crosoe sort of island' when she landed at her new placeof residence in 1838, and she looked like many others for a resourceful

25. Lyons & Taksa, Australian Read", Remember, op.cit., pp.52, 107·8, 139, 183.26. Luisa Anne (Mrs.Charles) Meredith, Notes and Sketches ofNew South Wales during a residence

in that colony from 1839 to 1844 (London: John Murray, 1844), p.30: and the same author'sMy Home in Tasmania or Nine Years in Australia (New York: Bunce and Brother, 1853).pp.l71 & 292·3.

14 Martyn Lyons

Dickensian 'Mark Tapley' to guide her through this alien colonial territory.27When Richard Howin actually came upon a naked human footprint on thebanks of the Yarra in 1841, he automatically made the predictable literarycomparison. Then, however, in the .process of recording his memoirs, hereconsidered his initial Crusoe-like reflex. Unlike Crusoe, Howin could takecomfort in numbers. 'The impression we behold', he wrote, 'is the trace left bya cannibal, but we know his power aitd our own. We are not solitary. There isnothing vague, large and mistily defined; there is nothing startling and hair-bristling'.28

In the press and in other forms of 'advice literature', ideal models of readingcommunities were being formulated. In the radical press of the 1890s,systematically analysed by Bruce Scates, we find attempts to promote a readingmodel for the militant worker, which mayor not have corresponded to theway individual workers actually read. Nathalie Ponsard, similarly, has usedoral history techniques to probe the trade union discourse on reading in aworking-class suburb of Rouen in the 1930s.29 This reading model stressed theworker's duty to read, as well as the importance of literature as an instrumentof militant socialism. The militant, in this model, must learn how to readwisely. If he or she read novels, they should be 'authentic', and they shouldcarry a message. In the ideal unionist's library, female escapist fiction wasbanned.From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, the feminist press in

Australia and elsewhere promoted another reading model: it addressed aputative reading community of emancipated women. This imaginary readingcommunity of New Women had its own genealogy, tracing its literaryancestry back to Mary Wollstonecraft, and descending through George Eliotto Olive Schreiner. Reading lists were prescribed, to draw female readers awayfrom melodramatic fiction and to urge on them the importance of moreserious reading on political issues, the extension of the franchise or theeradication of poverty. The 'new woman' was educated, independent, and notnecessarily married. She was interested in politics and science, as well as art andhistory. She might well be a pacifist, and she was almost certainly opposed tothe common male vices of drinking and gambling. She was encouraged to be adiscriminating reader, not a casual or 'desultory' one. The elements of asuffragette library outlined and prescribed by The Woman's Voice in 1895included works on slum housing, alcoholism, and illegitimacy.30 It offered,

27. Jane Isabella Watts, Family Life in South AustTali4, Fifty-Three Years Ago (Adelaide: LibrariesBoard of South Australia, 1978), p.IO.

28. R. Howitt, Impressions ofAustralia Felzx, during Four Years 'Residence in that colony {London:Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1845), p.l02.

29. Unpublished research in progress at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris,into working-class reading in St.Etienne-du-Rouvray.

30. 'Books Tha' Everyhody Should Read', The Woman', Voice, vol.2, 00.24, 29 June 1895, p.282.

Reading 15

with Aveling and Bebel, a brief introduction to European Socialism. Itpromoted the ancestors of the movement, like Wollstonecraft and theexamples in Charlotte Stopes's Briti5h Freewomen, from Boadicea on. Thepoliticised woman reader was thus provided with a European rather than anAustralian agenda.

The self-improving or militant worker, the early nineteenth-eentury Englishmigrant and the New Woman of the 1890s were all members of specificreading communities, with their own preferences for one genre over another,their own pantheons of masterpieces, together with the reading styles andinterpretive strategies which identified them.We might go further to ask whether there also existed, at another level

entirely, an even broader reading community: the hypothetical community ofAustralian readers. Were Australian readers, in their approaches to reading,clearly different from their counterparts in the English-speaking (colonial orpost-eolonial) world? Were they, as some myths would have it, pragmatic andmaterialistic readers, who shared a utilitarian view of cultural life as they builtthe infrastructure of a new society? Or, as other myths would have it, did theclimate and their love of the outdoors make Australian readers into necessarilyreluctant readers? The question of whether a distinctive Australian readingcommunity exists or has ever existed is a question I am too cautious to try toanswer here. It is a question, however, which must remain at the head of theHOBA agenda over the next two years.

University ofNew South WalesSydney