The Enlightenment

In the 18th you get into Romanticism and the Enlightenment where reading becomes a hobby and part of culture. Literacy rates rose throughout Western Europe, and the rise of the bourgeoisie incorporated literature into part of civic life. There was also the rise of the children's novel. Moral readings and fictions were introduced rather than just religious works.

The 18th century is sometimes known as the age of the novel. Books were published and devoured. The subject matter of these books was shifting as well. Literature moved away from epic heroism and more towards domestic/psychological/emotional realism. Philosophic works from writers like Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Hume were contributions of the Enlightenment movement. Like I mentioned in my last article, the circulation of periodicals and newspapers also became popular. The news of the day was now printed and published rather than spread by word and gossip. All of these new methods of reading (secular reading) did not replace religious reading and study but greatly reduced it.

The way people were reading changed, too. Silent, introspective reading became more popular, replacing oral reading in communal settings. There were still communal readings, in coffeehouses and the like, but reading became a popular method of self-fashioning. Libraries, like Samuel Fancourt's (1740), allowed readers to borrow books they could not afford, democratizing access to print. People also liked the concept of emotional reading. So, weeping over a book was seen as a socially acceptable thing, even during public readings.

In 1710, the Statute of Anne was passed, a law formalizing authorship and literary property. This led to the commercial marketing of books. Some of the first publishers and booksellers were John Newberry and Samuel Johnson.

Reading had, by this time, turned into something moralistic and emotionally developing for the public, especially the youth. Enlightenment principles were of reason, progress, science, and universal truth. From such grew the generation of Romantic writers, who grew from the Enlightenment movement and railed against the confines of reason. Where the Enlightened prized intellect, the Romantics turned to imagination. Instead of studying science, Romantics desired to commune with it and feel it. Romantics turned reading into an instrument of emotional and spiritual education.