Introduction

How can we know what historical readers thought about their reading? Since its inception as a field of scholarly enquiry, the history of reading has wrestled with the problem of finding representative evidence about the reading practices of historical readers. Research in the field has uncovered a plethora of different types of evidence: publication and sales statistics, lending library records, informal reading lists, educational syllabi, the notes of reading groups and also the material left by individual readers, including marginalia and annotations, diaries and journals, letters, autobiographies and memoirs.

An interdisciplinary field of study, the history of reading has grown considerably in the half-century since the publication of Richard D. Altick's The English Common Reader (1957). Scholars from a variety of different disciplines have shown an interest in what people read in the past and how they read it. In addition to conducting analyses of individual readers, reading groups and social classes, scholars such as Rolf Engelsing and Paul Saenger have sought to explain the evolution of reading and especially the connections between the peculiarities of reading in consecutive time periods, through a number of large historical frameworks. These grand narratives have tended to emphasize the decisive shift from reading aloud to reading silently (Saenger), and from intensive to extensive reading (Engelsing), during the post-Gutenberg proliferation of print and the rise of mass literacy in the late eighteenth century respectively. Period-specific studies have also argued for specific fashions or tastes in reading. Scholars have often turned to contemporary accounts of reading practice and the quantitative (though not necessarily hard) evidence of print runs and library borrowing records to chart the rise of fall of literary genres or the cultural impact of particular writers. Anecdotal and personal accounts of reading have often been given less weight, perhaps with some reason. Records kept by individual readers have oft en been regarded as too exceptional to offer useful conclusions about reading practice outside the specific cases concerned.

In her first New York society dinner at the Fairfords', the relentlessly upwardly mobile but intellectually ill-prepared anti-heroine Undine Spragg is ambushed by the highbrow conversation at the table, and is forced to concede the limitations of her own literary knowledge: ‘she had read no new book but “When the Kissing Had to Stop”, of which Mrs Fairford seemed not to have heard’ (p. 37). Surprisingly, Undine's recollection is not of a cheap popular novel, as we might expect from her social and cultural background, but of the famous lines from Browning's poem ‘A Tocatta of Galuppi's’, a mid-nineteenth-century elegiac musing on eighteenth-century Venetian hedonism, first published in the critically acclaimed collection Men and Women (1855):

Elaine Showalter has interpreted this small social humiliation, exposing the limited frame of Undine's cultural reference, as uncontested evidence of authorial criticism, and even disapproval; Wharton, Showalter unequivocally argues, ‘mocks Undine's ignorance in reading “When the Kissing had to Stop”’. Show-alter's assessment of Undine's reading is reductive and absolute, and, I would suggest, closed to the multiple interpretative possibilities suggested by almost any act of reading or allusion to a text.

An accomplished interdisciplinary writer, Vernon Lee (pseud. Violet Paget) was one of the most innovative pan-European thinkers of her age. Writing before Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, and intellectually influencing them both, Lee often drew upon ideas, metaphors, phrases and terminology from musical performance, practice and reception. From her first published writing on music, Lee yoked together words and notes, music and literature, and score and libretto. Impressionistic responses to musical performance and the remembrance of specific songs, arias, melodies, chords or musical phrases are ubiquitous in Lee's short fiction, essays and travel writing; she also systematically analysed the experience of listeners. Discussing the relationship between music and drama in her first book, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), Lee declared that ‘the object of the writer has been to study not the special nature and history of any art in its isolation’ but to study the ‘evolution of the various arts compared with one another’. She did not restrict her interpretative approach to the arts. Unlike Woolf, Mansfield, or the majority of her literary peers, Lee was an extensive reader of and commentator on works in physical and experimental science, and saw the impact of music upon literature in scientific as well as artistic terms. While nineteenth-century novelists often drew inspiration from musical themes, structures, forms and motifs, or foregrounded depictions of musical performances in their fiction, Lee's interest lay not only in the creative potential that music offered the other arts (especially literature) but also in the physiological effect of music on the human body and mind.