The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [63]
When English was taught in the university, it was often in the form of historical surveys (“without reference, necessarily, to the texts of the classics themselves”4) or the study of philology and rhetoric. The first real courses in English were not offered at Harvard until 1872–73 (long after Henry James was a student), and even then two of the three courses were in Anglo-Saxon and in the history and grammar of the English language. Shakespeare, a popular subject for undergraduates, became a Harvard course in 1876, but even so, the reading and discussion of English poetry and of Shakespeare continued to be largely relegated either to family training at home (or through tutors) or to social clubs on college campuses. Love of literature, when it existed—as manifestly it did, since the period produced numerous writers and poets of distinction—was a personal pleasure, not an academic goal. Was literature useful—or useless? For Emerson, Longfellow, and Henry James, it was invaluable; they lived it and breathed it. Longfellow retired from teaching and devoted himself to writing once his income from publishing permitted him to do so. James decided he did not want to study law (and as we’ve seen, he couldn’t have studied English or literature in the sense we understand those fields today). Instead, he traveled in Europe, wrote fiction, and began to contribute to magazines like The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly.
In the novels of Jane Austen, both women and men read aloud for their own pleasure and for the pleasure of their listeners. In Mansfield Park (1814), Fanny Price is inclined to resist the too easy manner of Henry Crawford, but she has to acknowledge his skill as a performer when he takes up the “volume of Shakespeare” she herself had been reading aloud to entertain the indolent and demanding Lady Bertram:
[H]is reading was capital, and her pleasure in good reading extreme. To good reading, however, she had been long used; her uncle read well—her cousins all—Edmund very well; but in Mr. Crawford’s reading there was a variety of excellence beyond what she had ever met with. The King, the Queen, Buckingham, Wolsey, Cromwell, all were given in turn; for with the happiest knack, the happiest power of jumping and guessing, he could always light, at will, on the best scene, or the best speeches of each; and whether it were dignity or pride, or tenderness or remorse, or whatever were to be expressed, he could do it with equal beauty.5
Even more striking is the way in which courtship is accomplished through reading aloud in the posthumously published Persuasion (1818), where the flighty Louisa Musgrove, confined to a sickbed because of an accident, is wooed, and won, by the widower Captain Benwick, described as “a clever man, a reading man,” who sits by her bed and reads her poetry. However dissimilar they might be, muses the heroine, Anne Elliot, they would become more alike over time. Louisa “would learn to be an enthusiast for Scott and Lord Byron; nay, that was probably learnt already; of course they had fallen in love over poetry.”6
Reading aloud, taking books from the public library, participating in book clubs and reading groups—these were not only modes of self-improvement but also opportunities for pleasure and sometimes for romance. As they are still today. Oprah’s Book Club and thousands of individually organized book groups invite lovers of literature (or “lovers of books”) to participate in weekly or monthly discussions. Some of these groups read best sellers; others read classics or books chosen to reflect on a central theme. Special-topic areas, like African-American women’s reading groups and gay men’s reading groups, have formed, and are flourishing, around the country and the world. Lists of book-group favorites are posted, and authors of popular novels and self-help books periodically make themselves available to attend sessions. Dozens of Shakespeare reading groups advertise online and by personal invitation offering an opportunity to read the plays aloud. And many successful adult professionals,