Chapter 3 ‘Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilet’: reading fiction together in the eighteenth century

Reading right

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. – Quick, quick. – Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilet – throw Roderick Random into the closet – put the Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man – thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa … leave Fordyce’s Sermons open upon the table.¹

This passage comes from Richard Sheridan’s 1775 comedy of manners, The Rivals. Lydia Languish, a young woman hopelessly addicted to popular fiction, and intent on leading her life like a romantic heroine, is surprised in her room by her family, and has to disguise quickly what she is doing: it is a furtive attempt to ensure that Lydia is seen to be doing the right kind of reading. Novels are quickly shoved out of sight, and what remains on show is what is respectable: the conduct book The Whole Duty of Man and James Fordyce’s sermons. As Lydia hurries to arrange the right kind of reading matter for her family, we are reminded of the use of books as indicators of the moral propriety of their owners, a shorthand for the kind of person that they really are. It is a little vignette that speaks to habits of reading people through their bookshelves, habits which can be seen in prints and novels throughout the eighteenth century, which often use the titles of books visible in the home as a sign of moral rectitude, or otherwise.

This is not just a fictional trope. As I have argued in The Social Life of Books, the history of reading in the eighteenth-century home reveals that, in the context of domestic sociability, what you read and what you said were often seen as a show to present to the world, rather than as a fundamental aspect of intellectual or personal identity.² The writer and journalist Harriet Martineau looked back scornfully at this practice, within which the female reader was:

expected to sit down in the parlour with her sewing, listen to a book read aloud, and hold herself ready for [female] callers. When the callers came, conversation often turned naturally on the book just laid down, which must therefore be very carefully chosen lest the shocked visitor should carry to the house where she paid her next call an account of the deplorable laxity shown by the family she had left.³

The spectacle of the reading woman, and the conversation that her book furnished her with, were typically ways in which visitors were to evaluate a person and a home. For Martineau, this window-dressing is explicitly gendered. Reading was both a performance and a showcase for social and moral status. But the Rivals passage is also concerned with the vexed moral status of the novel as a genre in the eighteenth century. By the late eighteenth century there was a well-developed opposition to novels and novel reading which was as much about who read, and how, as it was about the books themselves.⁴ Anxious commentators pointed to a nation of women addicted to the seductions of fiction.

One of the most prominent of these was the cultural critic and educationalist Vicesimus Knox, who lamented the way in which modern fictions:

Not only tend to give the mind a degree of weakness, which renders it unable to resist the slightest impulse of libidinous passion, but also indirectly insinuate, that the attempt is unnatural … Every corner of the kingdom is abundantly supplied with them. In vain is youth secluded from the corruptions of the living world. Books are commonly allowed them with little restriction, as innocent amusements: yet these often pollute the heart in the recesses of the closet, inflame the passions at a distance from temptation, and teach all the malignity of vice in solitude.⁵

Knox here presents a series of powerful claims about the novel which are reflected widely in the period: he alludes to the erotic temptations of the fictional text; to the danger of readerly overidentification; a fashion for solitary reading; and the widespread availability of prose fiction.

The furore around narrative fiction was almost certainly a gross distortion of the realities of reading by women and men of the time, but it nonetheless came to shape the way novels were presented in relation to domestic spaces.⁶ Opponents of novel-reading focused on the excessive consumption of fiction by young people, especially women, whose solitary, compulsive reading of fiction in their closets was apt to encourage lascivious thoughts and false expectations. Novels were addictive, serving only to increase the appetite, and critics drew on a vocabulary of gorging, devouring and digestion. The conduct writer Thomas Gisborne described with some alarm the steady corruption of a girl’s virtue:

The appetite becomes too keen to be denied; and in proportion as it is more urgent, grows less nice and select in its fare. What would formerly have given offence, now gives none. The palate is vitiated or made dull. The produce of the book-club, and the contents of the circulating library, are devoured with indiscriminate and insatiable avidity.⁷

The Edinburgh novelist and editor Henry Mackenzie, writing in the Lounger, further developed the dietary metaphor: ‘when the sweetened poison is removed, plain and wholesome food will always be relished. The growing mind will crave nourishment.’⁸

Visual representations of women’s reading reflect this emphasis on the solitary female reader.⁹ Although books had long been depicted in western painting as emblems of moral virtue or self-improvement, during the eighteenth century they began to reflect the perceived sexualisation of novel reading.¹⁰ In images such as the French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Lady Reading the Letters of Heloise and Abelard (circa 1780) (Figure 3.1), the book in hand is associated with sexual license and solipsistic dreaming. Within Greuze’s painting we see a solitary reader overwhelmed with passion, lips open, hands languorous, and on her table, next to a billet-doux, a book entitled The Art of Love. The lighting and the proximity of the book, the dress and the bosom invite us to see a link between all three: it is this book – which could be either a translation of Ovid’s popular Ars amatoria or the poem attributed to Charles Hopkins – that has transported its reader into a state of distracted arousal. Many paintings and prints of solitary readers depict a degree of absorption in which the painted reader becomes a synecdoche, a shorthand, for the interiority depicted within the fiction itself, and the intimacy of the reading experience.¹¹

Communal reading

It is in the context of these kinds of concerns, this element of moral panic, that we should understand the role of communal reading. Shared domestic reading was presented as a kind of cultural prophylactic. It protected women against the dangers hidden within novels, whilst simultaneously reinforcing the values and the discipline of wholesome family life. To consider a novel within the context of the family circle was a very different thing to envisaging it in the hands of the idle and unguided young. In reading together, the reciter could take guidance from those around: ideally a young woman would read in the domestic circle, and she would discuss what she read with her parents or preceptor, so that any misapprehensions into which she slipped could be corrected.¹² She could use the notion of family reading as a benchmark for what to read on her own: if a book was not fit to be read in company, it was not fit to be read at all. Communal reading offered the chance to gloss what had been read, and many descriptions of family reading frequently imply that the readings were interrupted for commentary, either by the reader or by his or her audience.¹³ The feminist and political radical Mary Wollstonecraft argued that a pointed delivery could shape reception:

If a judicious person, with some turn for humour, would read several [novels] to a young girl, and point out both by tones, and apt comparisons with pathetic incidents and heroic characters in history, how foolishly and ridiculously they caricatured human nature, just opinions might be substituted instead of romantic sentiments.¹⁴

One of the reasons why young women, in particular, were seen to be so susceptible to the ‘giddy and fantastical notions of love and gallantry’ imbibed from novels was that they were perceived to read differently from men. The female reading experience was not ballasted by intellectual engagement but was apt to lapse into affective identification with the characters described.¹⁵ Unable to apply rational judgement to distance themselves from the worlds evoked in the pages before them, women, it was claimed, responded instead with their hearts and imaginations.¹⁶

Reading together had the potential to replace the subjective identification of silent absorption with the socialized framework of the group. And so we find that eighteenth-century novels are peppered with positive instances of communal reading. Rather than seeing those instances as straightforward examples of historical practice, we might also recognise how such passages model correct forms of sociable reading in the context of the moral argument about the dangers of solitary novel reading. Sometimes this practice is shown to enable those involved to establish the correct interpretation of a text. In Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778), Evelina describes the way in which she reads with her suitor, Lord Orville: ‘When we read, he marks the passages most worthy to be noticed, draws out my sentiments, and favours me with his own.’¹⁷ Similarly, shared reading is modelled in Richardson’s sequel to Pamela, Pamela in Her Exalted Condition (1742), in which Lady Davers describes the way in which she and her rather frivolous friends have been educated by their communal reading of Pamela’s story: ‘We have been exceedingly diverted with your Papers. You have given us, by their Means, many a delightful Hour, that otherwise would have hung heavy upon us; and we are all charm’d with you … Lady Betty says, it is the best Story she has heard, and the most instructive.’¹⁸ Lady Davers and her friends are the kind to read novels badly. In both cases, the experience of reading together enables those present to step back from the text in hand and to establish a critical distance through sociable discussion. Other novels emphasised the way in which reading together enabled characters to communicate with one another, or to acquire critical judgement. In the Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Emily recalls the way in which her suitor Valancourt had read to her:

she had often sat and worked, while he conversed, or read; and she now well remembered with what discriminating judgement, with what tempered energy, he used to repeat some of the sublimest passages of their favourite authors; how often he would pause to admire with her their excellence, and with what tender delight he would listen to her remarks, and correct her taste.¹⁹

In Charlotte Smith’s early novels, reading is shown to be a way of establishing social bonds and strengthening friendship – in Emmeline: or The Orphan of the Castle (1788) the heroine takes much comfort from reading with a sympathetic friend.²⁰ In Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) there are – as we shall see – prominent examples of the negative aspects of reading as performance, but also examples of reading together as a form of moral and aesthetic guidance. We hear that Fanny is guided by Edmund: ‘he recommended the books which charmed her leisure hours, he encouraged her taste, and corrected her judgment; he made reading useful by talking to her of what she read, and heightened its attraction by judicious praise’.²¹

These fictional examples all illustrate the notion of reading aloud as a corrective to the solipsism of reading silently. Other works addressed the damaging effects of fiction within their prefatory material. The championing of the novel in company is manifest in the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). Pamela is a work which in some ways embodied controversy about the value of prose fiction. As a story of a servant-girl who resisted the approaches of her master, only to be rewarded by marriage to him (once he had reformed), Pamela polarised contemporary opinion. Was it a morally uplifting fable about the triumph of virtue over vice? Or a voyeuristic encomium to a young jilt? Richardson was concerned that his readers might enjoy his book for the wrong reasons. Pamela was a work designed ‘to inculcate Religion and Morality’, not a titillating romance. And part of Richardson’s strategy in securing the ‘right’ kind of reading of his novel was to present it as a book that was and should be read in a group.²²

In his letters, Richardson emphasised the way the novel had evolved as a communal exercise. When he revised Pamela for its second edition, he did so by surrounding it with documents that illustrated its use in the family circle. The dramatist Aaron Hill, along with many of Richardson’s friends, had written to the author in praise of his novel. In the second edition, Richardson cited Hill’s letters in response to the barrage of criticism of the novel’s inflaming and ‘low’ scenes. In the first excerpt used, Hill declared that: ‘I have done nothing but read it to others, and hear others again read it, to me, ever since it came into my Hands; and I find I am likely to do nothing else.’²³ Hill’s comments identify Pamela as the kind of book to be shared, not read furtively alone in closets or languorously on sofas. His emphasis is on the novel within the family:

’Tis sure, that no Family is without Sisters, or Brothers, or Daughters, or Sons, who can read; or wants Fathers, or Mothers, or Friends, who can think; so equally certain it is, that the Train to a Parcel of Powder does not run on with more natural Tendency, till it set the whole Heap in a Blaze, than that Pamela, inchanting from Family to Family, will overspread all the Hearts of the Kingdom.²⁴

Hill seems to be taking the metaphors of contagion used by contemporary critics of the novel and reusing them to suggest that Pamela’s virtue was infectious. He effectively repositions the novel in the parlour, where it was relished as the topic of polite discussion amongst wholesome families. He finishes the letter with an anecdote about one particular collective reading of the novel, involving a young child. The little boy stole into an assembled family group while Hill was reading an affecting passage in which Pamela momentarily contemplated drowning herself after having tried to escape from the house of her pursuer. Hill says that the child had sat in front of him with his head hung low:

He had sat for some time in this Posture, with a Stillness, that made us conclude him asleep: when, on a sudden, we heard a Succession of heart-heaving Sobs; which while he strove to conceal from our Notice, his little Sides swell’d, as if they wou’d burst, with the throbbling restraint of his Sorrow … All the Ladies in Company were ready to devour him with Kisses: and he has, since, become doubly a Favourite—and is perhaps the youngest of Pamela’s Converts.²⁵

Hill’s anecdote reversed the expectations around novel reading. Novels were thought to be bad for unformed minds, yet here we have a story of a child who is a ‘convert’ to Pamela, who is visibly moved not by her sexuality, but by her moral sentiments. The group reading provided him with controlled access to the book, and his response was applauded by the other adults, who affirmed his ‘right’ reading of the novel. Here, the little boy’s physical response to the text becomes a testament to the novel’s ability to refine the feelings of everyone who hears it.

There were paradoxes at the heart of novel reading. On the one hand, young people were warned against the tendency of novels to ‘pollute the heart in the recesses of the closet, inflame the passions at a distance from temptation’, as Vicesimus Knox put it. Readers became too involved in fictional worlds and were thus unable to distinguish between life and fantasy. On the other hand, a child’s ability to manifest an emotional response in a social setting was lauded as evidence of precocious sensibility. The anecdote we are given here of the little boy illustrates the way in which the concept of reading together could be used to shape the idealised presentation of a novel.

Fiction and performance

As this discussion suggests, perceived anxieties about the moral dangers of fiction were framed within novels themselves. Fictional reading reflected external reality, but it was also used to address concerns about habits of reading and their impact on readers. In referencing, and performing acts of reading, fiction stages its own metafictional debates. If part of the suspicion of the novel was its fomenting of interiorised imaginative excess, another key element was the idea of performance, which was also acted out at the level of fictional representation.

Here is one of the most famous – and for many readers, surprising – instances of domestic performance in Jane Austen’s fiction:

To the Theater he went, and reached it just in time to witness the first meeting of his father and his friend. Sir Thomas had been a good deal surprized to find candles burning in his room; and on casting his eye round it, to see other symptoms of recent habitation and a general air of confusion in the furniture. The removal of the bookcase from before the billiard-room door struck him especially, but he had scarcely more than time to feel astonished at all this, before there were sounds from the billiard-room to astonish him still farther. Some one was talking there in a very loud accent; he did not know the voice – more than talking – almost hallooing. He stept to the door, rejoicing at that moment in having the means of immediate communication, and opening it, found himself on the stage of a theater, and opposed to a ranting young man, who appeared likely to knock him down backwards.²⁶

The Bertrams’ amateur performance of Lovers’ Vows in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is probably one of the most celebrated fictional examples of the performance of drama at home in this period. The passage above describes Sir Thomas Bertram’s surprised disapproval on returning home to find rehearsals in full flow. It is a puzzling moment in Austen’s novel for many modern readers, an instance of historical disconnect. Generations of readers have wondered over exactly what was so wrong with staging a play at home. They have interpreted the incident as an indicator of Sir Thomas’s tyrannical tendencies, or as Austen’s way of signalling the theme of dissimulation.²⁷ Yet placing this scene within the context of eighteenth-century domestic culture, we can see that it also neatly frames its era’s moral concerns with how to read at home, and how it makes distinctions between recitation and performance.

The context of the passage within Austen’s novel is that the Bertrams are preparing an amateur performance of an English adaptation of a German romantic play, Lovers’ Vows. The virtuous Edmund Bertram is not keen on this plan, and makes his discomfort clear, urging the group of young people that the absent father of the family, Sir Thomas Bertram, would have been deeply disapproving of such an enterprise. In an attempt to overcome this opposition to the Lovers’ Vows performance, Tom Bertram, leading the play, had earlier reminded the would-be actors that his father had in fact always encouraged domestic recitation:

and for any thing of the acting, spouting, reciting kind, I think he has always a decided taste. I am sure he encouraged it in us as boys. How many a time have we mourned over the dead body of Julius Caesar, and to be’d and not to be’d, in this very room, for his amusement! And I am sure, my name was Norval, every evening of my life through one Christmas holidays.²⁸

Tom reminisces affectionately about the way in which their family had read aloud bits of famous plays, mentioning here lines from Hamlet, and with ‘Norval, Norval’ from John Home’s hugely popular blank verse tragedy, Douglas (1756). But in his linking of ‘acting, spouting, reciting’, Tom conflates disingenuously the planned private theatricals, of which his father would not have approved, with the social recitation that was widely acceptable.²⁹ And they were putting on not just any kind of amateur theatrical: the play which the Bertrams had chosen was a high-water mark of Romantic sensibility, a story of illicit love, dubious morality and high passion. Lovers’ Vows, first performed in October 1798, was a play freely adapted by Elizabeth Inchbald from August F. F. von Kotzebue’s sentimental melodrama Das Kind der Liebe (1790). While it was commercially successful, and a popular subject for amateur performance, from its first public performance onwards it also attracted robust moral criticism for its representation of lower-class characters and scenes of seduction. Although Inchbald claimed that she had tamed the excesses of the original to suit English tastes, it remained unpalatable to some audiences on moral and political grounds.³⁰

The late eighteenth century saw a vogue for amateur dramatic performance, largely associated with a social elite, which generated significant moral debate. But for many middling sorts of eighteenth-century readers, it was seen as perfectly fine, even morally improving, to read plays, or parts of plays, aloud at home. They were seen as totally different kinds of activity. The quotations to which Tom alludes were probably taken from one of the most popular recital miscellanies of the late eighteenth century, William Enfield’s The Speaker (1774).³¹ Enfield was a Unitarian minister and tutor in belles lettres at Warrington Academy, and his book, like many other compilations of the time, yoked together moral and social improvement.³² Enfield prefaced the book with a substantial essay on elocution, in which he argued that oratorical skill was not to be used by readers merely for social show, but for speaking in public life.³³ Yet as Tom’s reminiscence suggests, the collection was also much used for domestic entertainment, in this case, during the Christmas holidays, a period long associated with ‘gambols’.

What has happened in this situation at Mansfield Park is that the Bertrams have confused wholesome recitation with amateur theatricals. The fictional event described here is used to frame contemporary debate about what kind of play-reading is acceptable, and what is not. Where did honest family fun end and narcissistic and dangerous self-display begin? Private theatricals were a huge vogue towards the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth centuries: we have collections of some of the printed ephemera from these events and can see a rich history of amateur performance often enacted in country houses.³⁴ This practice aroused a furore of virtuous disapproval in contemporary onlookers. Recitation was pleasurable and improving – but the kinds of lavish theatrical spectacles that became fashionable in the later decades of the eighteenth century were widely perceived as corrupting. Critical attacks highlighted the dangers of confusing stage and domestic practice. Vicesimus Knox, who was the compiler of the popular recitation anthology Elegant Extracts, was severe in his condemnation. In an essay criticising the current fashion for acting plays at home, he began by noting the positive social attractions: ‘Nothing can enliven a rural residence more effectually than the prevailing practice of representing plays in a neighbourly way by friends and relations. Music, poetry, painting, fine dresses, personal beauty, and polished eloquence, combine to please all who are admitted to partake of the entertainment.’³⁵ Yet warming to his theme, Knox warned of hidden dangers: the ruinous cost of such productions, and worse still, the erotic temptations that followed the acting out of romantic scenes (to which stage actors were apparently immune by virtue of their professionalism). ‘Paint and gaudy dress’ encouraged vanity and folly, while amateur actresses immersed in the sentimental displays of the emotion were, he thought, likely to neglect their families: this is his caution to women considering acting out plays at home: ‘Let us see no more your black velvet train, your disheveled hair, and your white handkerchief. Be no longer desirous of personating the afflicted parent on the stage, but go home and be the good mother in your nursery and at your family fire-side.’³⁶

Knox’s arguments defined the home as a place of responsible parenting and household duty rather than as a venue for show and entertainment.³⁷ He suggested that those who truly loved drama should either see it in a public theatre, or:

If, indeed, they are lovers of dramatic poetry, and possess taste and sense enough to be delighted with fine composition, independently of dress, stage-trick, and scenery, why will they not acquiesce in reading the best plays in their closet, or in the family circle?³⁸

His advice makes explicit the responsible reader’s choice – between the superficial temptations of dramatic performance and the improving benefits of recital in the family circle or closet.

Other critics also focused on the unseemliness of certain kinds of dramatic performance in the home, worrying that would-be actors were likely to confuse their roles in life and art, to the degree that: ‘the open embraces of the Actor are exchanged without difficulty for the private of the Seducer’.³⁹ All these critics articulate a concern that in acting out scenes of passion and illicit love, ordinary men and women might begin to muddle up their stage roles and their domestic ones, and accidentally begin to live out the imagined lives they read about.

What we see here, as in the earlier passage from The Rivals, is the way in which eighteenth-century debates about what and how to read focussed on the dynamic between real-world reading and the fictional world. Both in the case of the novel debate, and the furore over amateur theatricals, there is a concern over the reader’s over-identification with the invented worlds of books, whether they might be unable to distinguish between on-page and off-page reality, and how best to manage the confusion between the two. And what we also see in both these cases is the way fiction provides a space for talking about those issues. One of the questions at the heart of this volume is ‘how far does fiction mirror reality?’ But what we have seen in the examples above is a more complex relationship between fiction and reality, one in which fiction created a unique space for a self-conscious reflection on its own form. Fiction offers far more than a mimetic representation of historical reading – it offers a way of exploring what the very nature of reading is and means.

Notes

1. 1.  Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals, a Comedy, in The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ed. by Cecil Price, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), vol. 1, p. 25 (Act I, Scene ii).

2. 2.  Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017).

3. 3.  Amy Cruse, The Englishman and His Books in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Harrap, 1930), quoted in Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Reading (London: Reaktion, 2003), p. 273.

4. 4.  For a sense of the range of debate about the novel over the century, see Novel and Romance 1700–1800: A Documentary Record, ed. by Ioan Williams (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).

5. 5.  Vicesimus Knox, ‘ “On Novel Reading”, No. XIV, Essays Moral and Literary, 1778’, in Williams, Novel and Romance 1700–1800, pp. 304–7.

6. 6.  Jan Fergus’s work on the sales and circulation of books in provincial libraries around Daventry and Rugby shows substantial evidence of men’s interest in fiction by women, and in their borrowing of novels in general. Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 40–7.

7. 7.  Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, 3rd edn, corr. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1798), pp. 228–9.

8. 8.  Knox, ‘On Novel Reading’, in Williams, Novel and Romance 1700–1800, p. 306.

9. 9.  See William Beatty Warner, ‘Staging Readers Reading’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 12 (2000), 391–416.

10. 10.  Warner, ‘Staging Readers’, p. 393.

11. 11.  Robert Folkenflik, ‘Reading Richardson/Richardson Reading’, in Representation, Heterodoxy, and Aesthetics: Essays in Honor of Ronald Paulson, ed. by Ashley Marshall (London: University of Delaware Press, 2015), pp. 41–59 (p. 43); see also Roger Chartier discussing Chardin’s painting of a woman with a book in The Amusements of Private Life (1745): ‘a pictorial synecdoche: the part (reading) stands for the whole (private life). A single practice, that of reading, stands for the whole range of private pleasures in the time left free after family chores and obligations.’ Roger Chartier, ‘The Practical Impact of Writing’, in A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. by Philippe Aries and Georges Duby (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 111–60 (p. 144).

12. 12.  On the importance of communal domestic reading in contemporary novels, see Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 17–175.

13. 13.  See accounts of the Burney family reading practices described by Patricia Michaelson in Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading and Speech in the Age of Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 165.

14. 14.  Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: J. Johnson, 1782) p. 431.

15. 15.  ‘Mr Urban’, The Gentleman’s Magazine (Dec. 1767), p. 580.

16. 16.  See Cynthia Richards, ‘ “The Pleasures of Complicity”: Sympathetic Identification and the Female Reader in early Eighteenth-Century Women’s Amatory Fiction’, The Eighteenth Century, 36 (1995), 220–33.

17. 17.  Frances Burney, Evelina or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. by Edward A. Bloom (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 296 (letter LXV).

18. 18.  ‘Letter VI. From Lady Davers to Mrs. B’, Samuel Richardson, Pamela in her Exalted Condition, ed. by Albert J. Rivero (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 24.

19. 19.  Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. by Bonamy Dobree with commentary by Terry Castle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 585 (ch. 10).

20. 20.  See Joe Bray, The Female Reader in the English Novel: From Burney to Austen (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 35–8. For a modern edition of Emmeline, see Charlotte Smith, Emmeline: The Orphan of the Castle, ed. by Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).

21. 21.  Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. by John Wiltshire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 25 (ch. 2).

22. 22.  For fuller discussion, see Folkenflik, ‘Reading Richardson/Richardson Reading’, pp. 41–59.

23. 23.  Introduction to the second edition of Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (London: C. Rivington and J. Osborn, 1741), in Samuel Richardson, Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded, ed. by Albert J. Rivero (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 464.

24. 24.  Richardson, Pamela, p. 471.

25. 25.  Richardson, Pamela, p. 473.

26. 26.  Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 213.

27. 27.  For discussion of the episode, and the wider depiction of reading in the novel, see Michaelson, Speaking Volumes, pp. 127–34.

28. 28.  Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 149.

29. 29.  The disapproval might additionally be related to the presence of Mr Yates, who is not a member of the family, but who is performing in the play. A similar instance involving a private theatrical occurs in Fanny Burney, The Wanderer (1814).

30. 30.  For fuller discussion of the play and its contemporary reception, see Laura Carroll, ‘Introductory Note on Lovers Vows’, in Mansfield Park, ed. by Wiltshire, pp. 549–53.

31. 31.  See Margaret Weedon, ‘Jane Austen and William Enfield’s The Speaker’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 11 (1988), 159–62.

32. 32.  William Enfield, The Speaker: Or, Miscellaneous Pieces, Selected from the Best English Writers, And Disposed Under Proper Heads (London: L. Davis et al., 1774), p. iii.

33. 33.  William Enfield, ‘An Essay on Elocution’, prefixed to The Speaker: Or, Miscellaneous Pieces, pp. iii–xxviii (p. xxviii).

34. 34.  The fullest collection of documents relating to private theatre in this period is the scrapbook of playbills, printed programmes, newspaper cuttings and tickets assembled by Charles Burney and Sarah Sophia Banks. British Library, A Collection of Playbills, Notices, and Press Cuttings Dealing with Private Theatricals, 1750–1808. See Gillian Russell, ‘Sarah Sophia Banks’s Private Theatricals: Ephemera, Sociability, and the Archiving of Fashionable Life’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 27(3–4) (2015), 535–55. A full account of elite theatrical domestic performance can be found in Sybil Rosenfeld, Temples of Thespis: Some Private Theatres and Theatricals in England and Wales, 1700–1820 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1978).

35. 35.  Vicesimus Knox, ‘Of the Prevailing Practice of acting Plays by private Gentlemen and Ladies’, in Winter Evenings: or Lucubrations on Life and Letters, 3 vols (London, 1788), III:33.

36. 36.  Knox, ‘Of the Prevailing Practice’, pp. 35, 37.

37. 37.  For a discussion of the gendering of the debate about amateur theatricals, see Michaelson, Speaking Volumes, pp. 127–34.

38. 38.  Knox, ‘Of the Prevailing Practice’, p. 38.

39. 39.  The Oracle, 9 March 1798; see also Rosenfeld, Temples of Thespis, pp. 12–15.

Bibliography of secondary literature

• Bray, Joe, The Female Reader in the English Novel: From Burney to Austen (London: Routledge, 2009)
• Carroll, Laura, ‘Introductory Note on Lovers Vows’, in Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. by John Wiltshire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 549–53
• Chartier, Roger, ‘The Practical Impact of Writing’, in A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. by Philippe Aries and Georges Duby (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 111–60
• Fergus, Jan, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
• Fischer, Steven Roger, A History of Reading (London: Reaktion, 2003)
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• Michaelson, Patricia, Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading and Speech in the Age of Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002)
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