Reading Public

in the 18th and the 19th Centuries

The 18th century in Europe was the Age of Enlightenment and
literature explored themes of social upheaval, reversals of personal
status, political satire, geographical exploration and the comparison
between the supposed natural state of man and the supposed civilized
.state of man
Reading Public underwent serious changes in the eighteenth century
and the ninth centuries. Many historians argued for the existence of a
“reading revolution” in that time. Until 1750, reading with done
“intensively: people tended to own a small number of books and read
.them repeatedly, often to small audience
After 1750, people began to read “extensively”, finding as many books
as they could, increasingly reading them alone. There are records for
extremely large private and state-run libraries throughout Europe in
the eighteenth-centuries. Of course, the vast majority of the reading
public could not afford to own a private library. And while most of the
state-run universal libraries set up in the eighteenth-century were
.open to the public, they were not the only sources of reading material
There was great interest in reading public in the eighth century and
there were many books published and many public libraries were
.established
Moving up the classes, a variety of institutions of readers access to
material without needing to buy anything. Libraries that lent out their
material for a small price started to appear, and occasionally
bookstores would offer a small lending library to their patrons. Coffee
houses commonly offered books, journals and sometimes even
popular novels to their customers. The Tatler and The Spectator, two
influential periodicals sold from 1709 to 1714, were closely associated
with coffee house culture in London, being both read and produced in
.various establishments in the city
It is extremely difficult to determine what people actually read during
the 18th century. For example, examining the catalogues of private
libraries not only gives an image skewed in favour of the classes
wealthy enough to afford libraries, it also ignores censured works
unlikely to be publicly acknowledged. For this reason, the study of
publishing would be much more fruitful as to hypothesizing reading
.habits
In the 18th century -book sellers and publishers had to negotiate
censorship laws of varying strictness. Indeed, many publishing
companies were conveniently located outside of France as to avoid
overzealous French censors. They would smuggle their clandestine
merchandise – both pirated copies and censured works – across the
border, where it would then be transported to clandestine book sellers
.or small-time peddlers
As for the reading public readers were far more interested in
sensationalist stories about criminals and political corruption than they
were in political theory itself. The second most popular category,
.general works
Nevertheless, the Enlightenment was not the exclusive domain of
illegal literature, as evidenced by the healthy, and mostly legal,
publishing industry that existed throughout Europe. “Mostly legal”
because even established publishers and book sellers occasionally ran
.afoul of the law
The most books that people red in the 18th century were novels.
Borrowing records from libraries in England, Germany and North
America indicate that more than 70 percent of books borrowed were
novels; that less than 1 percent of the books were of a religious nature
.supports a general trend of declining religiosity
The writers in the 18th century were public intellectuals dedicated to
solving the real problems of the world. They wrote on subjects ranging
from current affairs to art criticism. One of the more famous writers
was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The books that he and many others wrote
were snatched up quickly by their broad fan base, even when rulers or
churches tried to forbid such things. The enlightenment acquired its
name from 1740 to 1789, and even though it caused confrontation
between the writers, the government and the churches, it gained
.widespread support
The 18th century saw the development of the modern novel as literary
genre, in fact many candidates for the first novel in English date from
this period, of which Eliza Haywood's 1724 Fantomina is probably the
best known. Subgenres of the novel during the 18th century were the
epistolary novel, the sentimental novel, histories, the gothic novel and
.the libertine novel
18th Century Europe started in the Age of Enlightenment and
gradually moved towards Romanticism. In the visual arts, it was the
.period of Neoclassicism
People in the 18th century have red for many novelists such as Daniel
.Defoe, Tobias Smollett, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding
Daniel Defoe such ambitious debates on society and human nature
ran parallel with the explorations of a literary form finding new
popularity with a large audience, the novel. Defoe, for example,
fascinated by any intellectual wrangling, was always willing (amid a
career of unwearying activity) to publish his own views on the matter
currently in question, be it economic, metaphysical, educational, or
.legal
His lasting distinction, though earned in other fields of writing than the
disputative, is constantly underpinned by the generous range of his
curiosity. Only someone of his catholic interests could have sustained,
for instance, the superb Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain
(1724-27), a vivid, county-by-county review and celebration of the
state of the nation. He brought the same diversity of enthusiasms into
play in writing his novels. The first of these, Robinson Crusoe (1719),
an immediate success at home and on the Continent, is a unique
fictional blending of the traditions of Puritan spiritual autobiography
with an insistent scrutiny of the nature of man as social creature and
an extraordinary ability to invent a sustaining modern myth. A Journal
of the Plague Year (1722) displays enticing powers of self-projection
into a situation of which Defoe can only have had experience through
the narrations of others, and both Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana
(1724) lure the reader into puzzling relationships with narrators the
degree of whose own self-awareness is repeatedly and provocatively
.placed in doubt
As for Samuel Richardson, the enthusiasm prompted by Defoe's best
novels demonstrated the growing readership for innovative prose
narrative. Samuel Richardson, a prosperous London printer, was the
next major author to respond to the challenge. His Pamela: or, Virtue
Rewarded (1740, with a less happy sequel in 1741), using (like all
Richardson's novels) the epistolary form, tells a story of an employer's
attempted seduction of a young servant woman, her subsequent
victimization, and her eventual reward in virtuous marriage with the
penitent exploiter. Its moral tone is self-consciously rigorous and
proved highly controversial. Its main strength lies in the resourceful,
sometimes comically vivid imagining of the moment-by-moment
fluctuations of the heroine's consciousness as she faces her ordeal.
Pamela herself is the sole letter writer, and the technical limitations
are strongly felt, though Richardson's ingenuity works hard to mitigate
them. But Pamela's frank speaking about the abuses of masculine and
gentry power sounds the skeptical note more radically developed in
Richardson's masterpiece, Clarissa: or, the History of a Young Lady
(1747-48), which has a just claim to being considered the most
reverberant and moving tragic fiction in the English novel tradition.
Clarissa uses multiple narrators and develops a profoundly suggestive
interplay of opposed voices. At its centre is the taxing soul debate and
eventually mortal combat between the aggressive, brilliantly
improvisatorial libertine Lovelace and the beleaguered Clarissa,
maltreated and abandoned by her family but abiding sternly loyal to
her own inner sense of probity. The tragic consummation that grows
from this involves an astonishingly ruthless testing of the
psychological natures of the two leading characters. After such
intensities, Richardson's final novel, The History of Sir Charles
Grandison (1753-54), is perhaps inevitably a less ambitious, cooler
work, but its blending of serious moral discussion and a comic ending
.ensured it an influence on his successors, especially Jane Austen
But Henry Fielding turned to novel writing after a successful period as
a dramatist, during which his most popular work had been in
burlesque forms. His entry into prose fiction was also in that mode. An
Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741), a travesty of
Richardson's Pamela, transforms the latter's heroine into a predatory
fortune hunter who cold-bloodedly lures her booby master into
matrimony. Fielding continued his quarrel with Richardson in The
History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742), which also uses
Pamela as a starting point but which, developing a momentum of its
own, soon outgrows any narrow parodic intent. His hostility to
Richardson's sexual ethic notwithstanding, Fielding was happy to
build, with a calm and smiling sophistication, on the growing respect
for the novel to which his antagonist had so substantially contributed.
In Joseph Andrews and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)
Fielding openly brought to bear upon his chosen form a battery of
devices from more traditionally reputable modes (including epic
poetry, painting, and the drama). This is accompanied by a
flamboyant development of authorial presence. Fielding the narrator
buttonholes the reader repeatedly, airs critical and ethical questions
for the reader's delectation, and urbanely discusses the artifice upon
which his fiction depends. In the deeply original Tom Jones especially,
this assists in developing a distinctive atmosphere of self-confident
magnanimity and candid optimism. His fiction, however, can also cope
with a darker range of experience. The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the
Great (1743), for instance, uses a mock-heroic idiom to explore a
derisive parallel between the criminal underworld and England's
political elite, and Amelia (1751) probes with sombre precision images
.of captivity and situations of taxing moral paradox
In France, This century of enormous economic, social, intellectual and
political transformation produced two important literary and
.philosophical movements
They applied rationalism and scientific analysis to society; and a very
different movement, which emerged in reaction to the first movement;
the beginnings of Romanticism, which exalted the role of emotion in
.art and life
In common with a similar movement in England at the same time, the
writers of 18th century France were critical, skeptical and innovative.
Their lasting contributions were the ideas of liberty, toleration,
humanitarianism, equality, and progress, which became the ideals of
.modern western democracy
In other words I can say that the novel in the 18th century saw
innovations in form and content which opened the way for the modern
novel, a work of fiction in prose recounting the adventures or the
evolution of one or several characters. In the 18th century the genre
of the novel enjoyed a great increase in readership, and was marked
by the effort to convey feelings realistically, through such literary
devices as first-person narration, exchanges of letters, and dialogues,
all trying to show, in the spirit of the lumieres, a society which was
evolving. The French novel was strongly influenced by the English
novel, through the translation of the works of Samuel Richardson,
Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe. The novel of the 18th century
explored all the potential devices of a novel - different points of view,
surprise twists of the plot, engaging the reader, careful psychological
analysis, realistic descriptions of the setting, imagination, and
attention to form. The texts of the period are difficult to neatly divide
into categories, but they can loosely be divided into several
.subgenres
Magazines were one of publishing tools in the 18th century with
increasing literacy especially among women—and a quickening
interest in new ideas, the magazine filled out and became better
established. Though they resembled newspapers in the frequency of
.their appearance, they were more like magazines in content
As for the 19th century that is dominated by the Victorian era,
characterized by Romanticism, with Romantic poets such as William
Wordsworth, Lord Byron or Samuel Taylor Coleridge and genres such
.as the gothic novel
The period of the start of 19th century merges into a Classicist and
Romantic period, epitomized by the long era of Goethe's activity,
.covering the first third of the century
In the later 19th century, Romanticism is countered by Realism and
Naturalism. The late 19th century, known as the Belle Époque, with its
Fin de siècle retrospectively appeared as a "golden age" of European
.culture, cut short by the outbreak of World War I
Reading public in the 19th century witnessed great range of years
is, that has many novels and articles that were written from (roughly)
1799 to 1900. Many of the developments in literature and public
reading in this period parallel changes in the visual arts and other
.aspects of 19th century culture
This period of the late 18th century merges into a Classicist and
Romantic period, epitomized by the long era of Goethe's activity,
.covering the first third of the century
In Britain, the 19th century is dominated by the Victorian era,
characterized by Romanticism, with Romantic poets such as William
Wordsworth, Lord Byron or Samuel Taylor Coleridge and genres such
.as the gothic novel and the fashionable novel
In the later 19th century, Romanticism is countered by Realism and
Naturalism. The late 19th century, known as the Belle Époque, with its
Fin de siècle retrospectively appeared as a "golden age" of European
culture .In the middle of the nineteenth century the push for truly
public libraries, paid by taxes and run by the state gained force after
numerous depressions, droughts, wars and revolutions in Europe, felt
.mostly by the working class
Reading public flourished in the ninth century specially the
romanticism that began in Europe in the late 18th century and was
.most influential in the first half of the 19th century
The Victorian Age is marked roughly by the reign of Queen Victoria of
.England from 1837-1901
The Victorian reading public firmly established the novel as the
dominant literary form of the era. The novel is the most distinctive and
.lasting literary achievement of Victorian literature
Earlier in the century Sir Walter Scott had created a large novel-
.reading public and had made the novel respectable
The publication of novels in monthly installments enabled even the
.poor to purchase them
The novelists of the Victorian era accepted middle class values,
treated the problem of the individual's adjustment to his society,
emphasized well-rounded middle-class characters and portrayed the
hero as a rational man of virtue and believed that human nature is
fundamentally good and lapses are errors of judgment corrected by
maturation. The Victorian novel appealed to readers because of its
realism, impulse to describe the everyday world the reader could
recognize, introduction of characters who were blends of virtue and
vice, attempts to display the natural growth of personality, and
expressions of emotion: love, humor, suspense, melodrama, pathos
(deathbed scenes), and moral earnestness and wholesomeness,
including crusades against social evils and self-censorship to
.acknowledge the standard morality of the times
People in the 19th century red for a huge literary output during the
19th century. Some of the most famous writers included the Russians
Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekov and Fyodor Dostoevsky; the English Charles
Dickens, John Keats, and Jane Austen; the Scottish Sir Walter Scott; the
Irish Oscar Wilde; the Americans Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and Mark Twain; and the French Victor Hugo, Honoré de
.Balzac, Jules Verne and Charles Baudelaire
Also, people in the ninth century red for women writers who have
made an impact through their fiction or journalism or poetry. From the
women writers in the 19th century Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1849-
1924, Hannah Adams, 1755-1831, Kate Chopin, 1851-1904, Maria
.Edgeworth, 1767-1849, and Martha Finley, 1828-1909

Written by
Asma AL-Qunisi
Asma AL-Dliqan
Afnan AL-Shabwi
Dana AL-Gorepy
Hunoof AL-Gassem
Tahani AL-Shehry
 Hanan AL-tamimi

One of the most critical elements of the 18th century was the increasing
availability of printed material, both for readers and authors. Books fell in
price dramatically. This was furthered with the establishment of periodicals,
including The Gentleman's Magazine and the London Magazine. Before
copyright, pirate editions were commonplace, especially in areas without
frequent contact with London. Pirate editions thereby encouraged
.booksellers to increase their shipments to outlying centers like Dublin
All types of literature were spread quickly in all directions. Newspapers not
only began, but they multiplied.. Periodicals were exceedingly popular, and
the art of essay writing was at nearly its apex. The latest books of
scholarship had "keys" and "indexes" and "digests" made of them that could
popularize, summarize, and explain them to a wide audience. Books of
etiquette, of correspondence, and of moral instruction and hygiene
multiplied. Economics began as a serious discipline, but it did so in the form
of numerous "projects" for solving England's (and Ireland's, and Scotland's)
ills. In short, readers in the 18th century were overwhelmed by competing
voices. True and false sat side by side on the shelves, and anyone could be
.a published author
The positive side of the explosion in information was that the 18th century
was markedly more generally educated than the centuries before.
Education was less confined to the upper classes than it had been in prior
centuries. It was an age of "enlightenment" in the sense that the insistence
and drive for reasonable explanations of nature and mankind was a rage. It
was an "age of reason" in that it was an age that accepted clear, rational
methods as superior to tradition. However, there was a dark side to such
literacy as well, a dark side which authors of the 18th century felt at every
turn, and that was that nonsense and insanity were also getting more
adherents than ever before. As with the world-wide web in the 21st century,
the democratization of publishing meant that older systems for determining
value and uniformity of view were both in shambles. Thus, it was
increasingly difficult to trust books in the 18th century, because books were
.increasingly easy to make and buy
The literature of the 18th century—particularly the early 18th century,
which is what "Augustan" most commonly indicates—is explicitly political in
ways that few others are because the professional author was still not
.distinguishable from the hack-writer
The satires produced during the Augustan period were occasionally gentle
and non-specific—commentaries on the comically flawed human condition.
Consequently, readers of 18th-century literature today need to understand
the history of the period more than most readers of other literature do. The
authors were writing for an informed audience and only secondarily for
posterity. 18th-century poetry of all forms was in constant dialog.
 Therefore, history and literature are linked in a way rarely seen at other
times. On the one hand, this metropolitan and political writing can seem like
coterie or salon work, but, on the other, it was the literature of people
deeply committed to sorting out a new type of government, new
technologies, and newly vexatious challenges to philosophical and religious
.certainty
Prose
The essays thrived in the age, and the English novel was truly begun as a
serious art form. Literacy in the early 18th century passed into the working
classes, as well as the middle and upper classes (Thompson, Class). The
.literate, circulated libraries in England in the Augustan period
Secular learning could now produce ideas more fascinating to intelligent
men than theology. An anthology including the famous Methodus of the
French political philosopher Jean Bodin, was published at Basel in 1576.. It
has been estimated that between 1460 and 1700 at least 2,500,000 copies
.of 17 leading ancient historians were published in Europe
Immense progress was taking place in mathematics, astronomy, and
physics. History not only did not seem capable of much further
development, but scientifically minded men were beginning to dismiss it as
.a branch of knowledge that would never be worthy of serious respect
One major obstacle to the progress of historiography was the hostility of
rulers to publications that did not favour their governments. In 1599
Elizabeth I of England censured an author for describing the deposition of
one of her predecessors, Richard II. The great jurist Hugo Grotius avoided in
his history of the wars of the Dutch against Spain discussions of the
.religious aspects
Written by
Taghreed AL-omary