Placing Literary Culture: Books and Civic Culture in Milton‪.‬

In her recent Reading on the Farm, Lydia Wevers offered a powerful argument that we need to understand reading as a 'situated activity'. (1) Reading always happened somewhere and readers were located in particular places, had access to specific collections, and made sense of books in light of their own physical and social location. This approach fits with well with my own recent work on everyday colonial intellectual life in Otago and Southland, which has argued for closer attention to the institutional framework and intellectual infrastructure that underpinned the cultural development of particular colonial communities. (2) In this essay, I develop these lines of thought further, arguing that colonial literary culture also needs to be 'placed'; we must situate it through the particular practices, institutions, and traditions that developed in specific locations. These places were not the abstract space of New Zealand, but rather consisted of clusters of colonists who settled together at particular locations and struggled to build institutions, foster civic culture, and 'improve' themselves and their community in the face of the restlessness and mobility of colonial fife. The cultural fives of these colonists were primarily defined by the locality and region and were grounded in the cultural authority of Christianity, the social importance of the newspaper and libraries (of various types), and a vigorous associational culture that was deeply preoccupied with the power of the word. In reconstructing the sites and processes that shaped these significant dimensions of everyday intellectual life, this essay reconstructs the place of literature in shaping colonial civic culture. Reading in colonial Otago was an interior act, but it could be a social act as well and as a practice reading always took place in a specific set of social and political relationships. Drawing heavily on local newspapers and some fragmentary archival evidence, this essay is concerned with the social contexts and cultural meaning of literature in a specific place and time. It explores the worlds of reading and writing in the town of Milton and the broader Tokomalriro district from the 1860s to 1900.