Reading History in Britain and America, c.1750–c.1840

Abstract

Throughout Reading History in Britain and America, c. 1750–c. 1840 Mark Towsey's fluency as a reader of marginalia is evident in his careful sifting of the traces left by readers of history books in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, including even juvenile insults bandied between users of the books. But this is more than a virtuoso demonstration of how to find and interpret evidence of reading. For Towsey shows how active readers applied their reading to the big issues of the day–including the threat of France, the relationship between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic church, the balance of power between Crown and Parliament, empire, colonialism, slavery and the American Revolution—and how they sometimes used these history books to mean the opposite of what the authors intended.Towsey's stated aim is to use the methods of the history of reading “to establish the wider social, cultural and political significance of history books and their reception in the period … to think about them … as everyday objects encountered and read by ordinary readers as they went about making sense of the world around them” (17). In this he succeeds admirably.His introduction establishes who the readers were (from all sections of society, although he focuses on the middle and upper classes), and where they encountered history books (rarely at school, apart from ancient history). His analysis builds on the ideas of Robert Darnton, Adrian Johns, D.F.Mckenzie, David McKitterick, Benedict Anderson, Stanley Fish, and Michel de Certeau (10–15, 20).Chapter 1 explains how and why history was read in the period, applying Leslie Howsam's “life cycle of the reader” (26–27) to show how readers took up history at an early age and continued to use it throughout their lives. Towsey's sources include notes, summaries, and excerpts made by scores of men and women on both sides of the Atlantic, commonplace books, marginalia in library copies, and letters giving advice on reading or discussing what was read. Many readers kept their personal compilations of history reading all their lives, adding to them as their worldviews, and the world, changed.Chapter 2 focuses on two widely read but controversial histories, Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) and Hume's History of England (1754–61). Reviews in periodicals and other commentary framed both authors as religious skeptics, leading some readers to avoid certain passages, while others interpreted them in their own ways. Chapter 3 picks out the theme of constitutional history, showing how most readers clung to a Whig view of English political progress, rejecting Hume's more nuanced and less triumphalist interpretation. Chapter 4 examines how readers in different parts of the United Kingdom and Ireland read histories of the union and its constituent nations, particularly in Scotland (united with England in 1707) and Ireland (united with Britain in 1800). Towsey notes how an “emotional connection to place … palpably informed how many … readers of the Georgian era engaged with historical writing” (178).Chapters 5 and 6 “deal with the related themes of empire and revolution,” following American readers from colonial times through independence to the early republic and observing how they used histories written by British authors for entirely different purposes, such as William Robertson's History of the Reign of Charles V (1769), a sixteenth-century Spanish monarch, to justify their revolution against the British empire. Chapter 6 focuses on the reception of another book by Robertson, An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients Had of India (1791), an Enlightenment history of the subcontinent, read eagerly by British soldiers and colonial employees of the East India Company. One reader, army officer Thomas Turner Roberts, made selective notes which changed Robertson's meaning, from praise for advanced Indian civilization to criticism of unchanging backwardness (230). Other readers filleted the book for handy tips on how to control the Indian population, while some back home in Britain used the same book to question the whole idea of empire. Throughout, Towsey skilfully balances “the idiosyncrasies of individual readers and … the interpretive constraints that acted upon them” through the intellectual and political climate of the times (21).This elegantly written book is hard to fault, although it has made me very self-conscious about my own note-taking. Towsey cites reviews and commentary from some London newspapers and periodicals, but I suspect that further studies of the history of history-reading will find a great deal more material in papers and magazines published outside London, including extracts, reviews, and readers' letters. But that is a different book. This one achieves what it sets out to do, establishing that readers were active and unpredictable agents in intellectual history.