In this “modern version of Aladdin’s lamp,” the reader mentally visits foreign parts (“the age of Pericles or the gardens of the Medici”) even as he makes physical progress toward a more realistic destination. Railroad reading thus provides the illusion of unfettered travel, while actually participating in highly regulated movement. It engages the reader in imaginary flight, while assuring that he always stays on course. As “master of treasures,” Mabie’s ideal reader thus appropriates the book, without getting lost in it.
As we shall see, however, other nineteenth-century readers played out the potential of Mabie’s vision to more dramatic ends. In their accounts, reading is aligned not with ideation and time management, but with a wayward, deroutinized, and sensual subjectivity. It makes use of cognition, but it also engages the body, so as to remain persistently consumptive, despite rational producerist imperatives. At its most extreme, such reading reconfigures time by imagining author and reader as merged and thereby collectively resisting the chronological expanse that separates the act of writing and its reception. This is a vision of reading that relies less on principles of appropriation and self-improvement, bending instead toward the promise of diffusion and merger.
“And the Hours Were Seconds”
I begin with an excerpt from the journals of Susan Warner. Warner, best known as the author of The Wide, Wide World (1850), began keeping a diary at age twelve, mostly as a way to account for her days and to rid herself of her most persistent bugbear—idleness. Thus many of her journals keep careful record of her minutest activities, as is evident in this entry, provided in full, from 29 May 1832:
After breakfast I made my bed; then from 40 minutes after 8, to half past 9, sewed. Watched the little bird on her nest till 25 minutes past ten. From half past 10 till 25 minutes past 11 played on the piano. Did nothing very particular till 5 minutes past 1, at which time I sat down to read Rollin, but I do not know when I left off. From 4 to 10 minutes past 5, I painted. While I was painting Mr. and Mrs. Clark came in.93
Warner’s painstaking chronicle of her movements is remarkable; even the trifling activities of watching a bird on its nest and doing “nothing very particular” are recorded in exacting detail. It is crucial, then, that reading seems to be the lone activity that resists such temporal calibration. It disrupts her self-scrutiny, creating a zone of unaccountability (“I do not know when I left off”). Importantly, Warner is absorbed not in a sentimental novel or a penny paper, but in the work of Charles Rollin, an eighteenth-century French historian. To be sure, reading history often has the paradoxical effect of causing Warner to forget time, as is evident in this entry recorded eight months later:
I learnt my Latin before 12 o’clock this morning. I did nothing very useful after that, until 1 o’clock, at which time I sat down to practise. I was thus occupied until 2 o’clock. I after wards took up history, but instead of beginning at the pages for the day, I spent some time in looking at other parts of it. At last however, I recollected myself, but did not quite finish it before dinner.94
Here, as above, Warner’s own sense of self-improvement and progress are in lock-step with the advancement of time (“morning,” “12 o’clock,” “1 o’clock,” “2 o’clock”). Indeed, even when she recognizes that she “did nothing very useful,” it is within an acknowledged and limited temporal frame (“until 1 o’clock”). But the sequential and forward-moving momentum of Warner’s day is arrested by her engagement with a history book—itself, ironically, the symbol of a progressivist logic. Rather than “beginning at the pages for the day” (that is, beginning at the beginning, history-like), Warner’s reading is stalled, recursive, indulgent, and retrospective—at least until she has “recollected” herself and returned to linear time and its associated routines (“before dinner”). Hers is a textual engagement characterized by spatial dislocation (“looking at other parts”) and atemporal pacing. Despite her attempts to funnel the time of reading toward instrumental ends—self-improvement, acquisition of knowledge—she finds herself lost in the book, her efforts at mastery replaced by a self unrecollected.
Warner’s characterization of reading as self-forgetting invokes the “rewiring of the senses” that queer theorists have posited as one of the effects of alternative chronometry.95 To engage in practices that circumvent (if only imaginatively) the linear flow of time is to experience one’s self and one’s body in new and different ways.96 M. Carey Thomas offers another example of this phenomenon. Thomas, who would later in her life go on to become dean and then president of Bryn Mawr College, describes returning from a vacation in the Adirondacks in August of 1878. Almost immediately, she heads to the mercantile library, where she does nothing but read for four days: “And the hours were seconds. I was thirsty with an unquenchable thirst. It was like treading on air. It is the purest happiness—the one thing wh[ich] no man taketh from you.”97
Thomas’s description is noteworthy in part because it invokes that brand of reading condemned by nineteenth-century advice manuals—a reading characterized by acceleration (“the hours were seconds”) and insatiety rendered in physiological terms (“I was thirsty with an unquenchable thirst”). Thomas, then, is that female reader whose frantic engagement with books betokens the triumph of modern consumer society. That she willingly describes her reading this way is perhaps evidence that readers could reproduce the dire discourse of advice manuals in their own accounts of reading. And yet, her words also complicate or, at the very least, flesh out this apocalyptic narrative. The pleasure she registers in reading (“It is the purest happiness”) suggests that her insatiety is deeply satisfying, a lack that rests content with never being filled. In this way it is not reducible to the tormented addiction of James Freeman Clarke’s newspaper reader whose motto is “What next?” Something similar is conveyed in Thomas’s phrase, “It was like treading on air,” a description of reading significant because it straddles the borders of materiality and spirituality, the corpus and cognition. To walk or step in a medium that is pure ethereality is to partake of a movement without progress, a corollary, perhaps, to being “thirsty with an unquenchable thirst.” These descriptions limn the reading subject as removed from sequential activity (forward movement) or causal predictability (ingestion followed by satiation). They suggest a type of reading that is neither commensurate with accelerated modernity nor capable of being rerouted into efficiency. Indeed, Thomas’s final characterization of her time in the mercantile library as “the purest happiness—the one thing wh[ich] no man taketh from you” suggests that reading has a holy dimension, remote from the acquisitive and competitive orientation of daily life.
Warner and Thomas are examples of what I am calling “wayward readers,” readers whose engagement with books leads them away from rather than toward measurable ends. Their reading is not easily aligned with directives for productivity. Rather, it remains stubbornly figured as consumption (as evidenced by Thomas’s ingestion metaphor) and thereby tied to the body, albeit a body reconfigured by a new experience of temporality. As yet, however, I have not commented on the consequences of wayward reading, its ability not simply to skirt instrumentalism but to remake the world and one’s relations within it. To do so, I turn first to Mary Austin’s autobiography Earth Horizon and then, finally, to the writing of Henry David Thoreau.
“The Feel of the Author Behind the Book”
Although published in 1932, Earth Horizon is in many ways an account of nineteenth-century reading practices. Austin’s favorite books from adolescence—including Queechy, The Wide, Wide World, The Lamplighter, Beluah, St. Elmo, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin—read like a hit list of mid-century domestic fiction. Her memories of these novels are often accompanied by exact recordings of when and where her reading took place. Yet despite this attention to detail, she often characterizes reading as a felt phenomenon that resists the claims of cognition, as in this description of encountering Tennyson in her fourth year at school, in 1876: “You hadn’t supposed up to that time that poetry had been expected to mean anything in particular. “The Lady of Shalott’ you had chosen for its glittering figures, its smoothly swinging movement of rhyme and meter.”98 Of reading Paradise Lost in the winter of her twelfth year, she offers a similar account, this