Reading Histories
Introduction: Grangerizers, Commenters, and Extra-Illustrators
How do you feel about writing in books?
- Do you refuse to take a highlighter or pen to their pages?
- Do you take the middle ground, leaving the faintest of pencil traces (only to furtively erase them before returning the book to the shelf)?
- Perhaps you’re a proud scribbler, adding questions, doodles, and even grocery lists to your texts.
- Maybe you’ve had entire conversations with friends or strangers in the margins of books.
No matter which approach you take, you have something in common with a nineteenth-century reader. People have been writing in books since books were invented, but social and technological changes during the 1800s made this practice much more common. As it became less expensive to print and ship texts, books became accessible to a larger number of people. In Britain, educational opportunities expanded for the middle and working classes, and higher literacy rates further accelerated the demand for print (Hayward 21-22, Darnton 77). The resulting expansion in reading matter was so vibrant that scholars often refer to it as the nineteenth-century “print boom.” With this increase in media accessibility came a separate boom in the range of ways that people interacted with texts—and with one another through texts.
The book you’re reading right now is a critical edition of The Woman in White, a novel that emerged at a time when many of these changes in publishing and circulation were redefining how fiction operated in the world. The supplemental readings in this project will invite you to reflect on the idiosyncratic ways that nineteenth-century readers interacted with literature. Such readers, I hope you’ll agree, were varied, active, purposeful, social, and often wonderfully creative. Learning more about them can help us see the transformative potential of literary texts and literary audiences alike.
But this project is interested in more than just readers who lived two hundred years ago. Present-day readers are just as varied, active, purposeful, social, and creative as past audiences were. We alter and reinvent the things we read, and our interactions can also be surprising and transformative. Like the Victorians, we’re living during a time when the technologies we use to communicate are changing dramatically. These technologies are reshaping how we learn and what our entertainment media look like.
These are some of the reasons why this edition of The Woman in White is not just a critical edition, but also a participatory edition. We encourage you to shape this text in ways you feel will help others engage with the novel more deeply. If you’re comfortable doing so, we invite you to contribute comments in the social annotation layer, compose footnotes to explain concepts that puzzled or inspired you on first encounter, and share essays of your own for inclusion in this volume.
In many ways, this edition is an experiment. Critical editions of nov