Reading By Hand

I. Set to Work

Is reading a job? Your answer informs whether students should pay or be paid, whether LLM-generated summaries count as efficiencies or killjoys, and whether to consider literary critics parasites. Your mileage may vary depending on who's reading or where and when they're reading, not to mention why.

And then there's what novel critics like me face: the added challenge that even cultures that treat reading itself as labor exempt fiction. Neither hard enough nor boring enough, it's handled on sofas rather than desks. Few scribbles survive in the margins of a genre expected to go in one ear and out the other. The inconvenience to reception historians compounds, closer to home, a fear that the research itself is a category error—if novels aren't designed to be annotated, much less are they made to be studied.

Nothing less intuitive than a novel summoning its reader to work.

Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you; something unromantic as a Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.¹

Charlotte Brontë's decision to begin Shirley (1849) with the recherché verb "betake" reflects a longstanding dream of working from home. In her real (cool and solid) life, Brontë instead migrated to tied housing. Neither writing nor live-in teaching gave her first-hand contact with the daily commute that provided her audience time and space for the "railway edition" of Shirley.

The risk Brontë takes is less that her come-on will turn readers off, than that it won't ring true. When you crack Shirley's spine, are you really heading for the workweek? If not, are you escaping or imitating work? Ask any literature PhD.

II. Easy Money

We're hardly the only people who hesitate whether to classify reading as a subset of work or as its antonym. University English departments did, however, emerge at the same time and place as did cautionary tales about monetizing reading. In 1896, Elizabeth Braddon's story "Good Lady Ducayne" opened in an employment agency, whose recruiter asks an applicant "can you read aloud for two or three hours at a stretch?".² Nominal duties, all you can eat: the position that the protagonist snags as a paid companion seems at first too good to be true. This makes it all the stranger that she begins to lose weight, then to lose color. Her best guess is that reading must be hazardous to health. The hero comes up with a more plausible explanation. The novel-reading is for show: the girl's real job is to have her blood drained for transfusion into her uncannily wrinkle-free employer.³

Not all catfishers are vampires. An 1892 issue of the same magazine in which Braddon's story appears, The Strand, opens Arthur Conan Doyle's story "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," once again, in an employment bureau. A red-headed governess begs Holmes to figure out, first, why her employer pays above the going rate, and second, why he keeps ordering her to leave the hard work of teaching his child to lounge around with a book.

He handed me a yellow-backed novel, and, moving my chair a little sideways, that my own shadow might not fall upon the page, he begged me to read aloud to him. I read for about ten minutes, beginning in the heart of a chapter, and then suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he ordered me to cease.⁴

That mid-sentence interruption tips us off that the yellowback is a red herring. Neither illustrator nor author even names the novel in question. Her reading aloud to the father for which teaching the child provided an excuse turns out to be a pretext; the governess is being tricked, Holmes deduces, into impersonating her employer's imprisoned daughter for the benefit of an observer on the pavement who suspects the father of stealing her fortune. Sherlockians will recognize the governess as the twin of Holmes's own effigy which will later be defenestrated, clutching a book in its waxen hand, in order to fool Moriarty.

III. Wages for makework

Both job-search stories position commuters en route to a day of checking invoices or copying letters one step ahead of a protagonist who deludes herself that fiction pays. (Fiction-reading, not fiction-writing: the fantasy of becoming a celebrity author scales down to something less grandiose but equally implausible.) Both also make mental operations a pretext for covertly using the employee's body.

What differs is the distance that each takes from the paradigmatic instance of that use. I'm thinking—as The Strand encouraged readers to think—of sex work. The false start of "The Copper Beeches" tricks us into dismissing hair-color-based hiring as a family magazine's euphemism for more salacious reasons that a job candidate's bodily appearance might matter. In the bait-and-switch that eventually cancels out that suspicion, reading a yellowback will take on the same stigma as selling an orange: neither entails enough labor to be anything but a cover story.

The Strand relies on readers to fill in the blanks. When an offer "too good to be true" makes Sherlock Holmes's client suspect "something unnatural about the whole transaction," the vagueness entices us to bracket the employment bureau with the London servants' registries long accused of inveigling country girls into prostitution—a second-order bait-and-switch that provided a cover for the less mentionable problem of on-the-job harassment.⁵ As the leisure class shrinks, emigration agencies join classified ads in pushing such fake work up the social scale.⁶ By 1912, even the empire-boosting travel journalist Ella Sykes warned would-be "lady-helps" against accepting a passage to Canada in exchange for two forms of light employment: arranging flowers and reading aloud.⁷

IV. Hard leisure

A media historian might explain these task-scam plots by the competition that new audio recording technologies posed to amateur recitation. Such a historian could just as well adduce new duplicating methods to explain why stories from "The Redheaded League" onward place readers on guard against ads that promise wages in exchange for handcopying print. A literary historian would notice instead what genre seems hardest to monetize. You might reasonably hope that someone would pay you to read Post45, or maybe even Shirley. Less market value accrues to consuming new fiction - that is, to the activity prompted by a disposable monthly like The Strand.

Midway between "The Copper Beeches" and "Good Lady Ducayne," the novelist Herbert Maxwell filled column inches in a less fiction-heavy magazine by declaring that novels are not "worth reading notebook and pencil in hand."⁸ Such reading produces no deliverable. All process, no product, it makes the reader's labor "as fruitless as that of the daughters of Danaus; it serves to spend our limited capital in time without enriching the ever-diminishing store of future."⁹ Maxwell's mixed metaphors translate from a moral to an economic register the catch-22 dramatized in The Strand: too hard to be healthful, too easy to be honest. In demanding input without promising any output, silent reading inverts the scam of being paid to read.

V. Manual Humanities

Leave no trace: the Jewish Sabbath encourages reading but forbids annotation, even in the minimal form of the underline. That neither law nor practice ban dog-earing shares the logic of Maxwell's specification "pen in hand."¹⁰ Maxwell's ergonomic focus prefigures not only the heroine of "The Copper Beeches," paid for holding the book rather than for internalizing or even voicing its content, but also the literary critic as defined more recently by Jonathan Kramnick. This salaried critic's entry to the long list of early-twenty-first-century attempts to characterize how literary critics do read or should read—slow reading, distant reading, reparative reading, surface reading, just reading—might be dubbed "handy reading," since he characterizes a "reading," in the nominalized literary-critical sense, as "something one does or makes with one's hands."¹¹ The downward displacement from brain to hands goes further to break the hand into its component parts, locating reading at last in "the thoughtful activity of the finger."¹²

Literalizing the digit in "digital humanities" risks bathos. I challenge you to distinguish literary criticism produced through voice recognition from criticism produced by striking the keys. Only an occupational therapist would care whether the hand keyboards, pens, or—as it hovers between "keep source formatting" and "uses destination formatting"—it mouses.

VI. Handy reading

At the risk of one-upping Kramnick's hyperbole, we could identify that therapy as precisely what makes reading an occupation. If an activity causes repetitive strain injury, it must be a job; the Victorians absolved reading aloud of sexual connotations only when employers disqualified candidates for "breath so short" or warned that reading would make a paid companion lacking in respiratory capacity "pale and ill."¹³ Relocated from the brain to some other body part (whether lungs or fingers), reading lumps knowledge workers with physical laborers.

Where Kramnick and Maxwell make handiwork a measure of value, Maxwell's contemporary Harriet Martineau instead makes a manual worker the adjudicator of what counts as an honest day's work. In 1838, Martineau interrupts a book review to describe a clergyman "of my acquaintance" who "spends the greater part of his day with book or pen in hand." We might expect her to specify the title of the book. Instead, she cuts to a working-class perspective:

His wife's housemaid, after various symptoms of indignation, broke forth one day with exclamations against the waste of time of people who are always amusing themselves with reading and writing, while others are toiling away in their service.¹⁴

Martineau herself made a living by writing about her reading, and the resulting reviews address a demographic that understand their own managerial activities as toil. Her relativist scruples can be measured by how abruptly she evens the score by adding "on the other hand, who that does not live by manual labour understands the feelings of those who do?"¹⁵

Two hands proliferate here into a monstrous three: the figure of speech in "one the one hand"; the hand etymologically embedded in "manual labor"; and, more literal still, Martineau's behaviorist description of the master "with book or pen in hand." There's no mention of what he's thinking about, as if the clergyman "reads" only in the performative sense in which a politician signing a giant check onstage "signs."

The book under review—a how-to manual for literate housemaids—is a handbook of how to work with one's hands. Only masters' metaliteracy can distinguish leisure from study. The servant who personifies skepticism about the reader's claim to respect reappears in a cheap 1887 tract that forbids the maid to disturb a lady even when she appears to be doing nothing but "sitting on the sofa, reading a trashy novel."¹⁶

VII. Required reading

An office worker would have been safe from the maid's prying eyes. No commute, though, separates the clergyman's sermon prep from his light reading. (If the servant is a domestic worker, so, in a technical sense, are freelancers who review books or the clergyman whom she describes.) For academics outside the bench sciences, whose work was hybrid long before lockdowns coined that phrase, the spatial muddling of production with consumption places extra pressure on time. Our textual taxonomy can distinguish circadian rhythms (the bedside book is a temporal unit as much as a spatial one) or seasonal cycles (as Tina Lupton points out, "summer reading" is a charged term for those happy few who spend nine, rather than twelve, months reading for a living.)¹⁷

A more linear time sandwiches vocational reading between a before and an after. English professors nostalgic for a childhood spent curled up with a paperback rarely look back to a laminated schoolbook: we remember the reading that preceded, rather than preparing for, an academic career.

Whether full-blown memoir or parenthetical asides aerating an argument, such first-person asides are often published by emeriti.¹⁸ What past selves do for retirement projects, wives and children do for tenure monographs. Rueful acknowledgments to a daughter who learned to read in less time than the book took to be written form the sentimental pole of a motif whose satirical end is occupied by Elizabeth Long's account of telling her sociologist colleagues about her ethnography of book clubs. They'd look puzzled before suddenly recognizing the term: "oh, my wife's in one of those."¹⁹ Formally, professional readers' unprofessional reading skews anecdotal. Thematically, it's all women and children. The lower-upper-middle-brow faculty wife whom acknowledgments cast as a delegate for professional reading ("and to my wife, who read the proofs") changes, in Long's digression, to its mirror-image.

Like the clergyman's maid who observes other people's leisure with an equally skeptical eye, this literary sociologist makes someone else's home her workspace. And where the protagonists of "Good Lady Ducayne" and "The Copper Beeches" risk being demoted from a mind to a body, the overlap of domestic with vocational leaves Long vulnerable to being recategorized from officemate to family visitor. What the book clubs read remains incidental to her account, but you won't be surprised to learn that it's novels. A century after The Strand's white-collar readers probed the boundary separating paid entertainers from paying customers, fiction remained the test case for the value of reading.

More specifically, the question of whether reading belongs in the home or in the office continued to map onto gender. The faculty wife's cameo in Book Clubs rewrites for our century literary criticism's most famous his-and-hers pair, Q. D. Leavis's Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) and her husband's The Great Tradition (1948). As Mrs. Leavis satirized the novels read in the intervals of housekeeping, her husband made the novel tuition-worthy by entangling its pains with its pleasures. A century on, cuts to undergraduate scholarships and graduate stipends once more cast doubt on the promise of getting paid to read.²⁰ Whether our reading should be distant, slow, surface or just, the more basic question may be whether to count it as credit or debit.

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Leah Price's (https://hcommons.social/@LeahPrice) books include What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (Basic Books 2019),  How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton University Press 2012), and The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge University 2000). She writes for the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, and Public Books. 

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References

1. Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1849), 5. ↩︎
2. Elizabeth Braddon, "Good Lady Ducayne," The Strand 11, 185. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.31951002786777f. ↩︎
3. Braddon, "Good Lady Ducayne," 197. ↩︎
4. Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," The Strand 3, 621. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015056049268. ↩︎
5. Doyle, "Copper Beeches," 615. ↩︎
6. While Chartist newspapers warned readers that the likeliest harasser was the master (How Domestic Servants Can Obtain a Compulsory Character and Establish Homes and Registry Offices of Their Own, 7, https://www.jstor.org/stable/60218261), Christian moralists warn instead against "the Temptations and dangers which beset a poor servant girl, when she is out of service" (The Servant Girl in London. Showing the Dangers to Which Young Country Girls Are Exposed on Their Arrival in Town, Etc 1840, 30). ↩︎
7. Ella C. Sykes, A Home-Help in Canada (London: Smith, Elder and Co.). ↩︎
8. Herbert Maxwell, "The Craving for Fiction," The Nineteenth Century 33, June 1893, 1060. ↩︎
9. Maxwell, "The Craving for Fiction," 1046-61. ↩︎
10. Thanks to Nir Eyal and Noam Sienna for drawing this distinction. ↩︎
11. Jonathan Kramnick, "Criticism and Truth," Critical Inquiry 47, no. 2, 223. ↩︎
12. Kramnick, "Criticism and Truth," 228. ↩︎
13. A.C. Marsh, Lettice Arnold; a Tale (Paris: A. and W. Galignani and Co., 1851), 3; Mary Howitt, "The Author's Daughter," Boston 6, no. 70, 32. ↩︎
14. William James, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" in Selected Papers on Philosophy (London: J.M. Dent and Co., 1899). ↩︎
15. martineau 424 ↩︎
16. percy 39 ↩︎
17. "One of the reasons that it is hard for literary professionals to situate literature within the framework of a life led in and away from work is that humanist academics are implicated historically in the running together of all the parts of our lives." (Christina Lupton, "Literature in an Age of Endless Work," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift Für Literaturwissenschaft Und Geistegeschichte 97, no. 4, 1137). ↩︎
18. Lupton traces this motif not just to age, but more specifically to the status of retirees in states that provide a pension. ↩︎
19. Elizabeth Long, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 225. ↩︎
20. Ben Davies and Christina Lupton, "When and Why Do We Read? The Time and Value of Reading in the Twenty-First-Century University: Project Report." CDBU. October 24, 2023. https://cdbu.org.uk/when-and-why-do-we-read-the-time-and-value-of-reading-in-the-twenty-first-century-university-project-report/ ↩︎