Romantic Readers
The Evidence of Marginalia
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- £24.99
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- £24.99
Publisher Description
When readers jot down notes in their books, they reveal something of themselves—what they believe, what amuses or annoys them, what they have read before. But a close examination of marginalia also discloses diverse and fascinating details about the time in which they are written. This book explores reading practices in the Romantic Age through an analysis of some 2,000 books annotated by British readers between 1790 and 1830.
This period experienced a great increase in readership and a boom in publishing. H. J. Jackson shows how readers used their books for work, for socializing, and for leaving messages to posterity. She draws on the annotations of Blake, Coleridge, Keats, and other celebrities as well as those of little known and unknown writers to discover how people were reading and what this can tell us about literature, social history, and the history of the book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Before there were television and movie screens to talk back to, people vented, pontificated and waxed poetic in the margins of their books, leaving heaps of material for Jackson, an English professor whose Marginalia was a general survey of this practice, to cull and study. She focuses here on the years between 1790-1830, when she says a "reading boom" occurred. Her goal, she writes, is to use marginalia to understand the inner workings of the Romantic-era reader. After a lengthy, fascinating introduction to period's "reading environment" and the then-nature of the publishing industry, she presents three major spheres of Romantic marginalia: everyday markings by students and businesspeople, annotations for friends and lovers, and inscriptions by collectors and writers. Unfortunately, the majority of her lengthy case studies involve literary figures both major and minor (Samuel Coleridge, John Keats and Horace Walpole figure prominently among them), leaving largely unexamined the "ordinary" reader she initially intended to describe. The book is aimed at a narrow audience of bibliophiles and academics, and Jackson's scholarly tone and obscure references make it unlikely to appeal to anyone outside that circle.
