Reading After Work

I have been most shockingly idle, actually reading two novels at once. a good scolding would do me a vast deal of good...
Charles Darwin, letter to Susan Darwin (January 1826)¹

I idle finely. I read Boswell's "Life of Johnson."
Robert Louis Stevenson, letter to Sidney Colvin (November 1875)²

In 1965, a five-year-old boy named Gregory Jones, playing in a field near his house in the Forest of Dean, in southwest England, came upon a wooden shed.³ Inside the shed was a trunk filled with old books. He reached in and brought forth a volume clotted with dust, which he quickly began to deface with a crayon. Unlike the other books in the trunk, this volume was handwritten, not printed, some sections composed in pencil, others in ink that was starting to fade. It was a diary, and it had been sitting undisturbed for nearly a hundred years.

The diary belonged to a twenty-five-year-old man named Bill Williams, who documented ten months of his life in Pepysian detail before disappearing forever. (The historians Bess and Ralph Anstis, who edited his diary for publication, find no trace of him in municipal records, nor in records of emigrants to New Zealand, where he considered moving, nor in other late-nineteenth-century materials from the Forest of Dean.)⁴ Williams worked as a railway porter and, later, as a storekeeper at Trafalgar Colliery, where, among other duties, he weighed the coal that the miners extracted and hauled to the surface. He was literate and decently educated. Though his hours were long—6 a.m. to 5 p.m., with the occasional late shift keeping him at work until after midnight—his work was not terribly burdensome compared to the toil undertaken by the men sweating in the coal pits. The editors of his diary, which covers the period of July 1872 through May 1873, place him in "the upper stratum of working-class people" in his town of Cinderford in west Gloucestershire.⁵

This retrieval of a voice from the past, conscientiously edited and accompanied by an abundance of period photographs and clippings from local periodicals, has, so far, attracted zero scholarly attention save for a two-page acknowledgement in the Welsh History Review (Gloucestershire is bordered on its western side by the Welsh county of Monmouth).⁶ This is a shame, for in a more just world Bill Williams's diary would already be enshrined as a minor classic of its genre. The pages disclose an ardent, sensitive young man, filled with aspiration, searching for pleasure in a town that with "its stagnant pools of raw sewage in the streets" rivaled in squalor the overcrowded smoke-choked cities of the industrial north.⁷

We have here all the poignancy of everyday life, the beautiful moonlit mornings that greet him as he walks through the forest to the colliery, the sleek black spaniel that tails him home (he is later indicted for dog-stealing), the sad fate of his beloved friend Isaiah Morse, dying of smallpox (after "poor Morse" passes, Williams clips a lock of his hair to keep as a memento). We also find more sexual frankness than we might expect from the 1870s. Though Williams is in love with a servant girl named Rebecca ("Squeezed Beck very tight below the belt, she didn't mind it much"), he has a dalliance with a woman named Mrs. Cook ("Told her I would meet her by the barn. Most awfully cold. Took her into barn and rammed her backwards"). After catching his landlady Mrs. Green reading his private letters ("O that guilty glance ... Downcast eyes, face flushed, red as fire, and messing at my bed") he dreams "that Mrs. Green came to my bed and rode me and that her husband lay sleeping in next room and heard us." The near-daily entries provide a wealth of intimate detail. The effect is something like that of a character from a lost novel by Thomas Hardy come to life, reporting on events and feelings that Hardy, curtailed by the conventions of his time, would have excluded from publication.

The diary's most crucial insights, however, may well lie in its registration of the temporality of reading and the relationship between reading and labor. Like many literate working people in Victorian England, Bill Williams was an autodidact.⁸ His diary circles an essential tension between the demands of paid work and the lure of literary aspiration. This tension is introduced in the very first entry: "Trafalgar works play'd. Bought two books, Dr. Todd's Students' Guide ... and Mason on Self Knowledge." "Play'd" here means that the Trafalgar colliery was on strike (i.e., not working). The books Williams purchases are works on education and self-improvement, presumably intended to guide a self-directed program of study.⁹ The relation between the strike and Williams's reading is presented paratactically. He does not say that he bought the books because of the strike, that the interruption to work spurs his reading. But as the diary continues it becomes clear that his work and his reading have an inverse relation, that as one gains ground, the other recedes.

The diary entries betray an anxious sense of time passing. He records how long he studies, reads, or practices music: "Read Mason on Self Knowledge 1 hour, practised tonic sol-fa half hour, and read chapter from Philemon's Prayers, Meditation and Self Examination." This self-tracking is part of an ethos of self-improvement. But it also reflects an awareness of how little time he can call his own. Multiple entries report on his failure to get any reading done. "Read none this evening." "No reading done." "No reading or writing in own time." "No reading." "No reading or anything." "Not read at all."

Much of Williams's reading is devotional ("Read chapter from Proverbs") or directed at local newspapers ("Read papers most of day"—the day that allows this, of course, being Sunday). But his interests range widely. He burrows into almanacs and ballads and buys a book on the Franco-Prussian War. He enjoys Uncle Tom's Cabin so much that he buys a copy for a friend. "Was struck most impressively," he reflects, "with some of its beautiful contrasts and the extensive range of mind of the writer." Almost always his reading occurs after work, in the margins of the day, in the dwindling evenings before bed. "Read chapter from Collossian's Prayers and turned in." "Read little, and bed."

Although he occasionally writes about the conditions of his work, the bulk of the diary records what work crowds out: reading, music, visits with friends, excursions into town ("Romp'd ... Had lark with gipsies"). The sense one gets from reading the diary is of talent bursting into initial visibility: the sprout, not the flower. We see him singing, flirting, and composing tunes:

Practised on shorthand half hour, concertina one hour. Went to class, tonic sol-fa. Miss Ridgely back behind listening to progress of new choir. Made her laugh whilst singing her part of the Messiah.


Heavenly evening, thought only Beck was wanted to share that delightful walk between the banks to complete happiness.

And on Christmas Day, 1872:

... took concertina and played with Bill a few waltzes, polkas and country dances. Kissed the girls under the mistletoe, sung and revelled till after 11 p.m. Return'd home and got singing til 1 a.m. Bed.

Leisure seems to have been the ground of Williams's deepest experiences. It was also an explicit subject of fantasy. He is, during the period covered by the diary, composing a work of fiction tantalizingly titled The History of Lazy Dick.

Bill Williams's diary offers a record of a half-realized imaginative life. The strict time-discipline he imposes on his autodidactic endeavors suggests an impulse to protect his reading from work's encroachments. Willpower alone, however, cannot create new hours in the day. The rescued words of this music-loving mineworker make visible the capacities and pleasures that can arise in time unclaimed by work. They also reveal concretely how work wages war on the cultivation of what we might call a beautiful soul.

* * *

What kind of activity is reading, such that it often gets pushed to the fading edges of the evening? A recent ethnographic study of reading habits in Denmark by the anthropologist Anne Line Dalsgård finds that even in "a welfare society with a long tradition of public schooling and well-equipped libraries," reading tends to happen—if it happens at all—during evenings or bedtimes or holidays, periods cordoned off from the demands of work.¹⁰ "I must have peace and quiet. No work I haven't finished," one of Dalsgård's respondents informs her.¹¹

But it is not just the reader's habituation into the work ethic that is at play here; certain formal aspects of the novel (this genre will be my primary example in what follows) accommodate, even invite, a rhythm of post-work reading that assumes the intermittent temporal availability of the reader. In a fascinating discussion of "circadian" chaptering in the nineteenth-century British novel, Nicholas Dames shows how the chapter, in this period, often "equals a day" (in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, for instance, chapters frequently begin with phrases such as "When I awoke in the morning" or end with David falling asleep).¹² The reader's "presumed evening leisure to read—work discipline's necessary complement, limited to the hour or so when consciousness slows before sleep—is the silent partner [...] of the novel's circadian oscillations."¹³ The imagined conceit is that when the chapter ends, the day is over, and the reader, like David, drifts into oblivion.

If people tend to save reading for after work, for intervals of time that are, like the chapters of a Victorian novel, clearly segmented and bounded, what, then, happens to reading in a culture in which work is never over?¹⁴

My wager is that reading depends not just on the availability of a certain quantity of nonwork time, but also on our subjectively experiencing those hours as our own, as time that we possess. Much contemporary service work, Annie McClanahan argues in her new book Beneath the Wage, is characterized by a temporal elasticity: work's demands have become unpredictable, diffuse, or all-encompassing, and workers are increasingly expected to be perpetually available.¹⁵ The standard cited by one of Dalsgård's subjects—"No work I haven't finished"—is coming to seem illegible. It is significant that in the campaign for shorter hours that defined the nineteenth-century labor movement, we find regular invocations of the worker's right to read. Terence V. Powderly, who led the Knights of Labor during its greatest period of political influence, puts the matter plainly: "Fewer hours of toil mean more time to read."

If work is what crowds out reading, why don't people today read more in their off hours? Would reducing work revive reading, or would it simply free up more hours for the infinite scroll? It is fallacious to infer, from current time use patterns, what people might do under freer conditions. Contemporary subjects worn down by diffuse labor pressure are left with what Karl Marx, in his famous chapter on the working day in Capital, called "scattered shreds of time."¹⁶ The porousness of contemporary work is compatible with fragmented and immediately stimulating forms of cultural consumption—often consumed on the same devices used for work. It is less compatible with prolonged literary absorption.

Reading requires more than time. It draws on certain habits of receptivity and sustained attention; and these capacities, too, are eroded in a culture of frenetic and unbounded work. The phenomenology of reading is, of course, hugely various. There are perhaps as many kinds of reading-experience as there are readers or texts. Nonetheless, several major contributions to the phenomenology of reading converge on a description of literary reading as a form of structured receptivity. Consider Elaine Scarry's account of reading as daydreaming "under authorial direction," in which by following the instructions authors give us for the construction of mental images, we recreate, while reading, the "givenness or receptivity" of sensory perception; or Derek Attridge's notion of reading as constituted by an openness to alterity, in which "we feel ourselves pulled along by the work as we push ourselves through it," an act that "requires a particular kind of passivity that does not preclude a high degree of alertness"; or Rita Felski's mapping of the dynamic processes and relations underlying our "attunement" with an artwork ("Such reorientations," Felski comments, "are less a matter of making things happen than letting things happen").¹⁷ Taken together, these diverse accounts frame reading as an intricate dance between the active and the passive; and it is the passive element in literary reading that seems both more crucial and more difficult to describe. We offer up our minds as screens on which an author's images are projected and test the sounds of another person's words on our tongues.

This capacity for receptivity can be taught, practiced, and strengthened, but it is at odds with contemporary demands for perpetual availability, what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht describes as "the technological and epistemological noise of our general mobilization."¹⁸ It is also at odds, more subtly, with some of the moral imperatives of the contemporary work ethic. The contemporary work ethic prizes the assertion of control, the manipulation of materials or persons to achieve a desired outcome. Reading, as I have described it, entails a relinquishment of control, a willingness to be affected, even altered, by a text.

* * *

I am aware that the clash I have been describing between reading and work might sound unfamiliar. This may be because literary scholars have, in recent years, energetically redescribed reading as a form of professional labor—specifically, as the production of written academic commentary on a text, i.e. "doing a reading." Recent defenses of our discipline's practices of reading invoke the moral prestige of labor, as in Jonathan Kramnick's argument, in his widely reviewed Criticism and Truth (2023), that close reading "is a craft."¹⁹

John Guillory occupies an unusual position in this discussion because he explicitly locates the work-character of reading within the internal structure of the activity, not just reading's institutional or professional location (i.e. the fact that scholars are paid to read).²⁰ Close reading, Guillory points out, is a form of "methodized action." "All forms of labor ... are methodized actions," he writes. All forms of labor may be methodized actions, but are all forms of methodized action labor? Guillory's most compelling—and, to my mind, most accurate—analogy for reading comes from musical performance. Close reading is how we activate or "play" the literary work; and as with the playing of the violin or piano, "[i]t can be done in virtuoso fashion or as a mediocre exercise."²¹ Reading, as Guillory says elsewhere, is an art. His account, however, tends to collapse the distinction between art and labor. As an activity becomes more disciplined and skill-intensive, he suggests, it crosses out of "play" into the category of "labor": "all sophisticated play becomes labor," he writes.²² It is this slippage from artistry to labor that I wish here to question.

A discipline that has been attacked and delegitimized for its supposed dilettantism and escapism, for allegedly not preparing graduates for jobs, for not producing real knowledge or doing real work—that this discipline would seek to defend its central practice as a form of labor is wholly understandable. An underacknowledged source of public resentment toward the university, and especially toward the humanities, is the fact that, as Helen Small observes, the work of scholars "may appear to others, and perhaps also to themselves, suspiciously like pleasure."²³ The association between leisure and scholarship goes back at least to the Greek ideal of scholê, or studious leisure (the root of our words "school" and "scholar"). This linkage endures powerfully if unevenly into the modern period.²⁴ Bertrand Russell comments, in his essay "In Praise of Idleness" (1932), that the purpose of the university is to endow people with the leisure needed for advances in the arts and sciences: "the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a by-product." Although scholars today are, with a few sparkling exceptions, generally overstretched and beleaguered, the entanglement of intellectual life with leisure—reading, reflection, conversation, the cultivation of curiosity and wonder, the ability to try something new with little hope of success or spend days meandering down dusty byways in search of some elusive truth—is as obvious as it is politically embarrassing. The scholarly redescription of reading as labor can be seen as a disavowal of special privilege in a period in which the work conditions of the general population are deteriorating.

Nevertheless, this claim is more costly than might initially appear. First, it ratifies a division between scholarly reading ("work") and "lay" reading ("leisure") that seems to me self-aggrandizing and false. Recall Guillory's analogy between reading a literary work and playing the violin. Is a non-academic reader who reads with great sensitivity and imaginative vividness—and there are many such readers—doing "work" as she brings a novel to life?

Second, this self-conception has distorting effects on our practices. In a study of reading practices of humanities scholars in Denmark and the UK, Ben Davies and Christina Lupton report that a certain kind of "open-ended, exploratory reading" is getting squeezed out of the everyday lives of academics "as they come under pressure to spend their time on more directed and 'productive' kinds of reading and writing."²⁵ Time-strapped scholars find themselves skimming and scanning and scrabbling for instrumental takeaways. "Students and faculty in the humanities," Davies and Lupton write, "all felt that they came closest to reading as they wanted to in summer, or after their work for classes was done."²⁶ There is a bitter irony in this story of intellectual narrowing. The ingenuity that is the hallmark of humanistic scholarship is nourished by non-instrumental reading—yet such reading can, increasingly, occur only in time for which scholars "are not paid."²⁷

Last and most crucially, this move seeks to justify literary studies by invoking the very activity—labor—from which reading has long offered relief. Defending leisure as a condition of reading and study for academics only is an ethical nonstarter. But what survives of leisure in today's universities may provide a model of human freedom that could be scaled up. That defense ought not to stop, however, at preserving small islands of decommodified absorption within the university. The shorter-hours movement made time for reading a political demand. The future of reading as a widespread social practice, rather than a subcultural tradition carried on by a small caste of elites, may in our century depend once more on political contestation over time.

* * *

If we were, collectively, to work less, could reading come back?

The anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin thought so. "After bread has been secured," Kropotkin writes, "leisure is the supreme aim."²⁸ Literature is the first example Kropotkin gives of a form of social association that he expects will flourish in conditions of leisure. "Some," he writes, "...will give their hours of leisure to literature. They will then form groups comprising authors, compositors, printers, engravers, draughtsmen, all pursuing a common aim."²⁹ Not everyone in his transformed society will spend their newly won time reading, but enough people will that literature will be rejuvenated. His vision for reading after work is, in effect, a high-minded amateurism. "Letters and science will only take their proper place in the work of human development when, freed from all mercenary bondage, they will be exclusively cultivated by those who love them, and for those who love them."³⁰ This is a far more capacious claim for reading than what we find in Bill Williams's diary: "No reading done." "Read little, and bed."

The poet John Clare tells us of how, in the evenings, "When labour done and in the hedge put bye / My delving spade," he would dash home thinking of the books awaiting him, "books I often read by stealth." It is with Clare, reading by the winter fireplace, that I will end:

Where bending oer my knees I used to read
With earnest heed all books that had the power
To give me joy in most delicious ways
And rest my spirits after weary days³¹

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Charlie Tyson (@charlietyson1) is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brown University's Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. His scholarship has appeared in Textual Practice, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Victorian Literature and Culture, Poetics Today, and other journals and edited collections. His monograph The Art of Idleness: The Questioning of Work in Modern Literature, a study of the aesthetics of idleness in literature from the late nineteenth century forward, is under contract with Harvard University Press.

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Banner image credit: Caillebotte, Gustave, Raboteurs de parquet. 1875. Oil on toile. Musee d'Orsay. https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/raboteurs-de-parquet-105

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References

1. Charles Darwin to Susan Darwin (January 29, 1826), Darwin Correspondence Project, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-22.xml. ↩︎
2. Stevenson, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, vol. 2, eds. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 166, https://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=21871. ↩︎
3. Bess and Ralph Anstis, introduction to The Diary of a Working Man 1872-1873: Bill Williams in the Forest of Dean, eds. Bess and Ralph Anstis (Dover, NH: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1994), xiii. ↩︎
4. Diary of a Working Man, 113. Subsequent references come from this edition. ↩︎
5. Bess and Ralph Anstis, introduction, xxi. ↩︎
6. See Chris Evans, "Anstis and Anstis (eds.), 'The Diary of a Working Man' (Book Review)," Welsh History Review vol. 18, issue 1 (June 1996): 171-172. ↩︎
7. Bess and Ralph Anstis, introduction, xvii. ↩︎
8. For hundreds of examples see Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). ↩︎
9. Rev. John Todd's Student's Manual was a popular guide to self-education in the period; it is, for example, the same work that Edmund Widdowson uses in George Gissing's The Odd Women (1893). See Gissing, The Odd Women, ed. Arlene Young (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998), 169. ↩︎
10. Anne Line Dalsgård, "Reading Times: Temporalities and Time Work in Current Everyday Reading Practices," Poetics Today 42, no. 2 (2021): 207-227, 209. ↩︎
11. Dalsgård, "Reading Times," 214. ↩︎
12. Nicholas Dames, The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), 211, italics in original. ↩︎
13. Dames, The Chapter, 214. ↩︎
14. For a recent discussion of this question, see Christina Lupton, "Literature in an age of endless work," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 97 (2023): 1135-1142. ↩︎
15. McClanahan, Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work (New York: Zone Books, 2026), 25, 36. ↩︎
16. Marx, Capital vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 403. ↩︎
17. Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 31, 33; Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), 81; Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 168. Other accounts stressing receptivity include Michel Chaouli's description of the "intimacy" that renders the reader vulnerable to the poetic work, or Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's worry about the loss of aesthetic "presence" under "conditions of extreme temporal fragmentation." See Chaouli, Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024), 33-37; Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 20, 128. ↩︎
18. Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, 141. ↩︎
19. Kramnick, Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), 16. Of course, what Kramnick is talking about is not reading but academic writing, with all its various learned conventions. As Elaine Auyoung points out, the discipline's ongoing debates about "how we read" tend to erase much of the phenomenology of reading. "Far from capturing the messiness and multiplicity of their actual experiences of reading," Auyoung remarks, "critics construct coherent arguments by presenting an extremely limited selection of the inferences they have made during the reading process." Auyoung, "What We Mean by Reading," New Literary History 51, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 93-114, 94-5. For the prehistory of Kramnick's analogy between writing and artisanal labor, see Marcus Wraithe, The Work of Words: Literature, Craft, and the Labour of Mind in Britain, 1830-1940 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023). ↩︎
20. See Guillory, On Close Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025), 63-80. It is worth pointing out here that work almost certainly belongs to the class of concepts that the philosopher W. B. Gallie calls "essentially contested." Which activities are socially recognized as "work" is fluid, culturally variable, and often politicized, a point brought into special focus by feminist thinkers, for example in the "Wages for Housework" campaign. Ongoing upheavals related to AI give the question of what activities might be credited as "real work" a new twist of complication. Gallie, "Essentially Contested Concepts," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56, no. 1 (1956): 167-198. ↩︎
21. Guillory, On Close Reading, 70. ↩︎
22. Guillory, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 334. ↩︎
23. Helen Small, The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 195-6. Small's chapter "In Praise of Idleness? Cynicism and the Humanities" deals centrally with the question of the university's work conditions (190-223). ↩︎
24. Strikingly, early theorists of capitalism like William Petty and Adam Smith partially exempt the philosopher from the new regimes of work and production they see coming into view. Though William Petty is so troubled by the problem of idleness that he says, in his Treatise of Taxes (1662), that it is "better to burn a thousand mens labours ... than to let those thousand men by non-employment lose their faculty of labouring" and imagines, as a project of monumental make-work, superfluous laborers "employed to build a useless Pyramid upon Salisbury Plain," he also introduces his discussion of customs duties by saying, "I take leave as an idle Philosopher to discourse upon the Nature and Measures of it." Adam Smith, for his part, muses in The Wealth of Nations that the division of labor brings forth "an almost infinite variety of objects to the contemplation of those few, who, being attached to no particular occupation themselves, have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people"—a contemplative procedure at the heart of the book that Smith is writing. These pioneering theorists each insert, in their analyses of political economy, a shadowy figure of leisured observation. Petty, A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions (London, 1662), 41, 13, 36. I thank Alex Walton for encouraging me to read William Petty. See Walton, "A Useless Pyramid: Figure and Surplus in Petty's Treatise on Taxes," Modern Language Quarterly 86, no. 1 (March 2025): 31-57. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, eds. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, vol. 2 (Carmel, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981), 783. ↩︎
25. Ben Davies and Christina Lupton, "When Your Job Is to Read After Work," Reception 15 (2023): 51-57, 52. ↩︎
26. Davies and Lupton, "When Your Job Is to Read After Work," 55. ↩︎
27. Davies and Lupton, "When Your Job Is to Read After Work," 56. ↩︎
28. Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings, ed. Marshall Shatz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 95.h ↩︎
29. Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, 97. ↩︎
30. Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, 100. On the complex attachments involved in "loving literature" as a professional scholar or teacher, see Deidre Lynch, Loving Literature: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); on amateurism see Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3-51. ↩︎
31. Clare, "Labours Leisure," in Major Works, eds. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 194-5. ↩︎