Round table with Professor Mary Hammond and Professor Katherine Halsey - Reading history in the long nineteenth century Event

Readers and Dinosaurs: The History of Reading and its Fossil Traces

As Mary Hammond writes in her introduction to the volume on Early Readers in the four-volume Edinburgh History of Reading of 2020, ‘reading is always a deeply imbricated, political and social practice, at once personal and public; defiant and obedient; sometimes materially ephemeral, often emotionally and intellectually enduring’ (p.1). Knowledge about the reading publics of the past very often depends on the most ephemeral of materials, and in this paper I will discuss the problems and opportunities involved in finding, collating, and analysing material evidence for reading history in the long nineteenth century. Making use of a metaphorical similarity between palaeontologists and historians of reading, I will consider some of the material evidence with which I have most recently been working – historic library borrowing registers – and consider what kinds of structures of knowledge we might reconstruct from them.

About the speaker

Katie Halsey is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Stirling, and Co-Director of its Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Her publications include Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786-1945, The History of Reading: A Reader (co-edited with Rosalind Crone and Shafquat Towheed), The History of Reading: Evidence from the British Isles c. 1750-1950 (co-edited with W.R. Owens), Shakespeare and Authority (co-edited with Angus Vine) as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She is currently Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded research project Books and Borrowing 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers.