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negatively by the term “consumption.”⁵¹ Apocalyptic tirades on the indiscriminate ingestion of books were a way of warning against an emerging consumer society of readers gone wild.

       Reading and the Mandate for Self-Improvement

      What was the cure for reckless, compulsive ingestion of books? As I have already suggested above, conduct manuals tried to redress this condition by turning reading into a productive (rather than a consuming) activity, in which the body was regulated or better yet eliminated altogether, and the pace of reading was routinized and controlled. This involved embracing a rhetoric of self-improvement, in which books were promoted as the gateway to moral development, religious uplift, and intellectual advance. Books should “inform the mind, refine the taste and improve the heart,” wrote the Rev. Edwin Hubbell Chapin in 1840, “and we may be both wiser and better for the perusal.”⁵² These twin imperatives—to be “wiser and better”—constituted the majority rationale for reading. Books, when used well, worked to “cultivate the intellect,” but even more importantly, they created “moral character,” defined by one writer as “the love of beauty, goodness and truth … a sense of duty and honor.”⁵³ Lydia Howard Sigourney echoed this assessment. Reading, she claimed, could do much to “cultivate the intellect,” but “This is not enough. It must also strengthen the moral principles, and regulate the affections.”⁵⁴ What is stressed time and again in these accounts is the utility of reading, its serviceability in creating a more virtuous and better-informed citizenry. Even fiction, the most distrusted of genres, was generally sanctioned for its functional contributions.⁵⁵ Chapin, for example, approved novels because they advanced “a keener insight into men and manners, a more graphic knowledge of the past, a more vivid sense of our relations to humanity, and of the claims of duty.”⁵⁶ Of course, contemporary commentators did not deny the pleasures of books. Indeed, they often waxed effusive about the “profound delight in a course of reading.”⁵⁷ But these satisfactions were generally understood as ancillary to the primary goal of self-improvement, and, indeed, too much pleasure was often a sign that the “duties” of reading were being neglected.⁵⁸

      Dutiful reading was typically articulated in two ways—through metaphors of ideation and systematization. First, readers were expected to read actively, that is, to make use of their minds while reading and to “reflect” on their reading material assiduously. In an interview meant to act as a model for young readers, Henry Ward Beecher claimed, “Reading with me incites to reflection instantly. I cannot separate the origination of ideas from the reception of ideas.”⁵⁹ Cultural custodians echoed Beecher’s method, insisting that reading always be accompanied by thoughtful scrutiny. “Reading in a hasty and cursory manner, without exercising your own thoughts upon what you read, induces a bad habit of mind,” writes Harvey Newcomb in How to Be a Lady.⁶⁰ He adds, “THINK AS YOU READ.—Do not drink in the thoughts of others as you drink water; but examine them, and see whether they carry conviction to your own mind; and if they do, think them over, till they become incorporated with your own thoughts, part and parcel of your own mind.”⁶¹ Newcomb’s language is significant, because here he actively replaces the discourse of gustation (“Do not drink in the thoughts of others as you drink water”) with that of cerebral introspection. His prescriptions for readers still rely on a metaphor of absorption (“think them over, till they become incorporated with your own thoughts, part and parcel of your own mind”), but it is one that is largely free of the baser corporeal appetites (eating, drinking, swallowing). Similarly, in the interview referenced above, Henry Ward Beecher’s book practices are referred to as “moral hygienic reading,” a description remarkable for the way it attempts to divest the reading process of all bodily adulteration.⁶²

      Newcomb’s characterization of reading as an active, assimilative exercise in which new information is slowly absorbed by a controlling agent was the standard for appropriate reading—a way of dealing with the tricky problem of a book’s influence. “An author should be valued, not so much for what he has thought for us, as for what he has enabled us to think,” writes an anonymous author in 1866, thereby emphasizing the necessity of readerly preeminence.⁶³ This approach to books was infinitely preferred over what commentators described as “the mechanical exercise of reading,”⁶⁴ a mode of intake in which the mind automatically processes material without questioning its merits or integrating it with previously arrived-at truths. Such a depiction likens readers to machines, suggesting that in rapidly consuming books they have become cogs in the modern industrial complex rather than controlling agents set apart from it.⁶⁵ Referencing this phenomenon, Chapin differentiates between “the acquisition of knowledge” and the “development of the faculties.” To engage in the first is “merely to learn by rote, to cram the memory with a collection of facts,” while the second means to “to draw out the mind so that it may know how to use facts, so that it may become greater than those facts.”⁶⁶ There are “mere encyclopedias from whom you can get any fact upon any subject,” he adds later, “but those facts are packed up in their minds as dry items; they have been preserved, not planted there.”⁶⁷ In invoking the metaphor of industrial assembly (“packed up … as dry items … preserved, not planted”) and contrasting it to a more agricultural vision, Chapin connects bad reading to a mechanistic market process in which readers sacrifice their command over their reading material instead of controlling its organic growth and assimilation.

      Worse still than mechanical reading was the state of absorption that particularly characterized forays into fiction. Here the mind didn’t simply memorize material by a rote, unthinking process; it surrendered itself entirely to the book. Or, to state this slightly differently, the mind ceased to be the active, absorbing agent and, instead, was itself absorbed by foreign and often threatening material. “The reader must master the book, instead of the book mastering him,” wrote an anonymous authority in 1866; “otherwise he forfeits his own mental individuality, his freedom of mental action.”⁶⁸ Nina Baym has suggested that while novels were expected to rouse interest and emotions in the reader, too much of this amounted to a “possession” that threatened to subordinate the reader’s control. Baym cites an 1838 review of the novel Richard Hurdis in The Knickerbocker, which bemoaned that the “object of novelists in general … appears to be to seize the public mind, and hold it with a sort of enchantment; a fascination which arises from the power which a master will exercise over the volition of inferior spirits, leading them captive, and exciting them with the stimulus they love most.”⁶⁹ I will be investigating this phenomenon of the author as enchanter or mesmerist in the next chapter. For now, suffice it to say that the remedy for this kind of authorial takeover (in novels as well as other texts) was, again, mindful exertion on the part of the reader. As the contemporary critic J. Brooks Bouson puts it, “If to read is to feel temporarily merged with and carried away by a text, to criticize is to be ‘back in one’s own mind,’ to act ‘upon the work rather than being acted upon.’”⁷⁰

      The second prescription for dutiful, productive reading was systematization, a process that, as mentioned earlier, referred both to reading continuously (rather than skipping or skimming) and to reading with a plan or regimen in mind. “The main reason for the ill success of our reading and our education,” wrote W. P. Atkinson, “is because they lack point, lack system, lack concentration.” Atkinson was not advocating that people read less, but that they come at their studies methodically, a point that he articulated through (mixed) metaphors of concentration: “we must not dissipate our forces. It is the bad farmer who just scratches the surface of too many acres; the good general who fights it out on the same line.”⁷¹ Other writers focused on the issue of temporality, insisting that readers approach books “with the utmost economy of time.”⁷² Significantly, economizing here often involved slowing the pace of reading, a paradox not lost on the advice writers themselves: “there are endless subjects which you may be pursuing while you seem to be aimlessly turning over the leaves of one book after another, and to be wasting time which you are, in fact, employing most profitably as well as most diligently.”⁷³ Here, slow reading, while bearing the appearance of “wasting time,” is in fact far more productive than the “busy idleness” characteristic of modernity. This purposeful

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