Child’s letter evidences the internalization of the self-improving model of reading, particularly its emphasis on “habits of thought and reflection.” It also betrays a more general suspicion about celerity, since her “quickness of perception” and her ability to “at one glance take in a subject” are understood as deterrents for the more appropriate activities of “profound.… thought” and “investigation.”
What is significant in these and earlier descriptions is the way the crisis of reading is redressed through a turn toward instrumental efficiency, what Max Weber has called “the specific and peculiar rationalism of Western culture.”75 As indicated earlier, the plague of new books is blamed on overzealous production on the part of the printing press, that “great engine of civilization.”76 With the advent of so many new texts, readers find they must skim and skip to get through them all, and this accelerated pace of reading comes to mirror the frantic chronometry of capitalist modernity itself. Such a crisis is resolved not through a rejection of the market altogether, but through an appropriation of its instrumental and bureaucratizing logic. This is evident in the calls for “supremacy and efficiency” in reading, its characterization as “a discipline … an efficiency of all our mental powers.”77 Stated slightly differently, authors of reading manuals were not calling for a return to an older model of reading, what Rolf Engelsing has famously characterized as an “intensive” paradigm in which individuals read only a few religious texts closely.78 On the contrary, these authors clearly sanctioned an extensive variety of secular books. But by emphasizing system, method, and time management, they were importing a particular conception of rational instrumentality specific to the industrial age. They rejected the phenomenon of “mechanical reading” with its associations with machine culture, but at the same time their emphasis on “fixing the attention …; of detecting and uniting …; of comparing, analyzing, constructing”79 indicates that reading could be subject to modern processes of order and management, mobilized in the name of a superior, goal-oriented end. This “end,” of course, was the creation of the middle-class subject. As Thomas Augst has written in relation to the mercantile libraries of the mid-nineteenth century, “books were the medium of individual development in a civilization organized around the forces of market capitalism: one could become a responsible ethical agent in economic and public life only through the process of reading.”80 Thus, despite the fact that reading was primarily situated as a leisure activity—something generally pursued outside the limits of the paid work day—there was a consistent effort on the part of cultural custodians to align it with notions of productivity and work.
If discontinuous reading is redressed through an increased systematization of readers and reading practices, a similar reconfiguration goes on in relation to time, which must also be subject to market discipline. Advice manuals may begin by invoking a frenzied chronometry as a way of signaling modernity-inspired apocalyptic anxieties, but ultimately this is replaced with a controlled vision of the time of reading, one carefully calibrated by clock, timetable, and calendar.81 “Take care of the minutes, and the days will take care of themselves,” advises Eliza Ware Farrar in The Young Lady’s Friend. “If the minutes were counted, that are daily wasted in idle reverie and still idler talk … they would soon amount to hours, and prove sufficient for the acquisition of … some useful science.” By “scrutinizing her appropriation of every hour in the day,” and “by turning all the odd minutes to account,” the young lady learns “a spirit of order and method” in all her occupations, including reading.82 “There is time enough, in a well-ordered day for everything that a young lady ought to do… nothing need be left undone for want of time; if only you know how to economize… and are resolute to perform all that you can.”83 Farrar thus suggests that reading be subject to the same forms of routinized efficiency that characterized America’s burgeoning markets. Rational and ordered, its pace becomes a figure for the teleological, productive movement of modern society, or what Lee Edelman calls “the promise of sequence as the royal road to consequence.”84
The relationship between the prescribed time of reading and the controlled linear progress of modernity is evident if we return to the trope of the train. As already mentioned, the train could stand as a metaphor for tremendous power and inevitable forward movement. In Hawthorne’s words, it conveyed “The idea of terrible energy,” “the swiftness of the passing moment.”85 But the train was also, of course, a figure for discipline, a meaning that it carries homonymically—to “train” as to develop the habits, thoughts, or behavior by regular instruction. Indeed, the significance of the train for modernity was principally that it could combine tremendous force with precision and predictability, harnessing all the energy of nineteenth-century techno-industrialism in a controlled and systematic way.86 Such is evident in Herman Melville’s description of the train in Moby-Dick:
the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour.87
Although Melville invokes the “iron Leviathan” here as an analogue to that other natural Leviathan, whose direction and “probable rate of progression” can likewise be accurately predicted by the discerning whaleman, in fact, Moby-Dick’s notorious resistance to pursuit, ownership, and dissection (both metaphysical and actual) would seem to suggest that the great whale cannot be controlled by a civilizing force bent on rational calibration and possession. The “iron Leviathan” or train, by contrast, stands as a figure for the triumph of instrumentalism in modern society. It could thus function as an appropriate metaphor for a certain kind of productive reading whose hallmarks were also “supremacy and efficiency.”88
In exploiting this metaphor, cultural authorities emphasized that train travel provided a crucial opportunity for reading. Collections such as Reading for the Railroad (1848) were published explicitly for the traveler “in want of employment for his time and his thoughts.”89 Hamilton W. Mabie, another conduct advisor, also extolled the benefits of reading when traveling:
Always have a book at hand, and, whether the opportunity brings you two hours or ten minutes, use it to the full.… Every life has pauses between its activities. The time spent in local travel in streetcars and ferries is a golden opportunity, if one will only resolutely make the most of it. It is not long spaces of time but the single purpose that turns every moment to account that makes great and fruitful acquisitions possible.90
Here the effects of modernity on reading are recalibrated. No longer is reading comparable to the fragmented, impressionistic blur produced by accelerated travel. Rather, this travel now provides the opportunity for regulation and control in one’s reading practices. In particular, the time associated with travel (heretofore accelerated and apocalyptic) can be systematized and disciplined so that every interval, from “two hours” to “ten minutes” can be used “to the full.” Foreshortened and fractured time can be made productive if it, too, submits to rational ordering. It is “the single purpose that turns every moment to account.” Thus reading on the railroad (or in street-cars and ferries) is an activity capable of exploiting all the disciplinary force of market capitalism for its own use.
In Mabie’s account, books are valuable as a means toward self-improvement, a way of making “great and fruitful acquisitions possible.” Indeed, even when he writes of the joys of “mental traveling,”91 it is always with an eye toward how this can consolidate (rather than disorient) the self. In another passage, for example, he ties the movement of the railroad to the imaginary transport of books, emphasizing the acquisitive benefits of both kinds of travel:
To sit in a railway car, and by opening the pages of a book to transport one’s self in a second into the age of Pericles or the gardens