The rhetoric of apocalyptic modernity was used to characterize not only the vast amounts of literature that were issuing forth from the press, but the manner in which this literature was being consumed. Authorities reviled the tendency to approach multiple books in “snatches” or “mere fragments”18 and warned that there is nothing more pernicious than a “habit of continuous, systemless, objectless reading.”19 These comments speak to two related concerns. First, it was feared that readers were reading too widely and without a plan or course of study in mind. According to the Earl of Iddesleigh, the goal is “always to read with an object, and that a worthy object.”20 American writer J. B. Braithwaite seconds this sentiment, commenting that for the many “kindred evils” associated with reading “there is no remedy more efficacious than a sound and healthy PURPOSE, rightly directed, and steadily maintained.”21 Second, systemless reading referred to the tendency to skim, what one commentator called the “superficial, careless, nonappropriate skipping habit that incapacitates the mind for assimilating and digesting what it reads.”22 The insistence on programmatic reading thus spoke to a paradoxical fear that readers were at once doing too much and too little, infinitely expanding the field of their consumption while diminishing their attention and focus. Such a state is captured by Braithwaite:
[Some] allow their moments of leisure to be wasted in a kind of “busy idleness;” they look over a great variety of books, but for want of settled diligence, their unsteady wanderings in prose or poetry, are attended with no satisfactory result. While there is a yet larger class of listless triflers, who give way to lounging and indolent habits of mind, wholly unworthy of intelligent and responsible beings.23
Braithwaite’s image of the reader as engaged in “a kind of ‘busy idleness’”—at once assiduously occupied and nonproductive—speaks to the contradictory vision of a modern subject, both over- and underemployed. Her “unsteady wanderings in prose or poetry” are symptomatic of a restless spirit, always moving but never arriving, and thus “attended with no satisfactory result.” Lost among her “great variety of books,” she is at once undisciplined and morally suspect, characterized by an eroticized ennui, or “lounging and indolent habits of mind.” Given this depiction, it is not surprising that commentators put forward “the much-needed lesson of concentration” as a way of countering this “dissipated” (in the sense of both scattered and wanton) approach to reading.24
As book historians have pointed out, characterizations of reading as fragmentary, compulsive, dissolute, and deroutinized speak to larger anxieties about the effects of modernity.25 New technologies of the nineteenth century from the train to the telegraph created a world of fleeting sensations and perceptions that altered both individual sensibility and mass consciousness.26 Reading was affected by these transformations: according to advice manuals, the mass production of books and newspapers in conjunction with new possibilities for mechanized acceleration reconfigured the manner in which subjects read. As William Alcott put it in 1850, “this busy age seems altogether unfavorable to much reflection.” He identifies “Steamboats, railroads, and electro-magnetic telegraphs” as particularly thwarting “the operations of the mind.”27 Lydia Howard Sigourney adds, “This is emphatically the age of book-making and miscellaneous reading. Profound thought is becoming somewhat obsolete. The rapidity with which space is traversed, and wealth accumulated, the many exciting objects which arrest attention in our new, and wide country, indispose the mind to the old habits of patient investigation, and solitary study.”28 For Sigourney and Alcott, the fear is that modernity is altering reading habits, creating a public incapable of profound and continuous textual engagement—a concern that is, as Karin Littau points out, echoed by contemporary critics of the Internet.29 Especially troubling for nineteenth-century authorities was the emphasis on novelty, as is evident in James Freeman Clarke’s excoriation of the periodical press:
The newspaper creates and feeds the appetite for news. When we read it, it is not to find what is true, what is important, what we must consider and reflect upon, what we must carry away and remember, but what is new. When any very curious or important event occurs, the newspaper, in narrating it, often gives, as its only comment and reflection, this phrase, “What next?” That is often the motto of the newspaper and the newspaper reader, “What next?”30
For Clarke this “What next?” is an index of the compulsiveness and insatiability that characterizes reading in the modern world. The interrogative form of this motto implicitly demands continuous and unabated response; syntactically, it stands as a lack that invites infinite retort and supplementation. In this way, newspapers both fulfill and give rise to readers’ cravings for constant stimulation.31
Even more deleterious than the drive for novelty was the speed associated with modern reading. Commentators described the minds of readers as “roaming … without restraint” and warned of the “vain desire to keep pace with the literature of the age.”32 Often the speed of reading was articulated in relation to the instruments of industrial modernity itself. One writer, for example, contrasts a newer form of accelerated reading with an older model of slow, intensive study in the following way:
I would liken the one to a journey by railway, the other to a journey on horseback. The railway will take you more rapidly to your journey’s end, and by its aid you will get over much more ground in the day; but you will lose the variety of the walk up the hill, the occasional divergence from the hard road, and the opportunities for examining the country through which you are passing, which the horseman enjoys. The business man will prefer the train, which will carry him quickly to his bank or his warehouse, but he will miss many things which the other will have seen and profited by.33
Here modern reading is aligned not only with the “rapid” speed of the train but also with the urban degeneration of the “business man” who cares only that he be transported “quickly to his bank or his warehouse.” By contrast, the figure of the slow and deliberate reader is likened to the horseback rider, who enjoys all the “variety” and “divergence” that the natural world has to offer. In contending that the former “will miss many things which the other will have … profited by,” this commentator insists that the value of reading cannot be measured by market terms alone.
The train was an especially apt metaphor to speak of the accelerated pace of reading, not only because the railway was responsible for the enhanced distribution of printed matter, but because as a vehicle of rapid transport, the train symbolized much of what was fleeting and ephemeral in modern life. Nathaniel Hawthorne captures this in his 1851 novel, The House of the Seven Gables. When Clifford and Hepzibah—the story’s older aristocratic protagonists—board a railway car they are “swept away with it, as by the suction of fate itself”:
looking from the window, they could see the world racing past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude;—the next, a village had grown up around them;—a few breaths more, and it had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its agelong rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to their own.34
This sense of “unfix[ity]” in which hitherto permanent structures are suddenly “set adrift from their foundations” is an apt characterization of the modern condition in which permanence or “age-long rest” seems a nicety of the past. Traveling at “whirlwind speed,” the train is like a time machine, capable of showcasing the evolution of humanity, the development and elimination of entire generations: “At one moment … a village had grown up around them;