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Review Essay
There is, perhaps, no richer archive of Victorian reading experiences than Victorian literature itself. We know how Maggie Tulliver, child of the rural Midlands in the early years of the nineteenth century, felt when reading the Imitation of Christ in the bleak aftermath of her father's bankruptcy, how the young David Copperfield felt sitting on his bed in Suffolk, "reading as if for life" in the shadow of an abusive home life (56; ch. iv), and how a besieged Jane Eyre felt reading Bewick's History of British Birds in the window-seat at Gateshead; we know because Eliot, Dickens, and Brontë trace those feelings and their significance in vivid detail. We know more: Maggie's book, is a "little, old, clumsy book. . .the corners turned down in many places" with "certain passages" marked in "strong pen and ink," one of a job lot brought to her by Bob, the packman (301; bk. 4, ch. 3). We know that the novels available to David from the small collection on his father's shelf were largely picaresque tales from a hundred years earlier, Gil Blas, Humphrey Clinker, and Roderick Random; and that Jane was reading the second volume of Bewick's Birds with its evocative vignettes in the introductory pages, an edition whose letter-press the ten-year-old Jane "cared little for" (14; vol. 1, ch. 1).
It is one of those minor disciplinary ironies that frequent the practice of literary criticism that, for recent scholarship in the history of reading, these sources have lost some of their illustrative value - Maggie, Jane, David, Alton Locke, Jude Fawley and all the other protagonists reading as if for life in the Victorian novel, aren't, after all, "actual readers"; they are characters, each harnessed to the mechanics of plot, encrypted figures in a given text. The fictional reader - her spatial disposition, her reading matter, and her response to it - only takes on evidentiary substance once her likeness has been found and multiplied in diaries, autobiographies, publication catalogues, or library records. Yet, the shift of interest from represented reader to "real" or historical reader, from interpretation to cognitive process and affective response, presents us with readers who are just as elusive, and in many ways, even more unknowable...