Welcome to Big Tent. Life Events, Life online event series from the University of Oxford as part of the humanities cultural programme.
My name is Phillip Bullock and I'm director of Torch, the Oxford Research Centre Humanities.
I'm professor of Russian Literature and Music here at the University of Oxford.
The Big Ten Live event series brings together researchers, students and practitioners from across different disciplines together.
We'll explore important subjects and ask questions about topics such as the environment, medical, humanities,
A.I. technology, the history of disease, but will also celebrate storytelling, music, song and dance.
We're bringing you this event series online.
Whilst we are all physically distanced, we hope that you are all safe and well during these difficult times.
We look forward to seeing you all again soon in person, as soon as we're able to.
And we look forward to welcoming you at future events as part of a humanities programme.
Everyone is welcome in our big tent. We thank you, our viewers, for your ongoing support and engagement.
We thank to all the participants who have given their time, their words and their big ideas as we come together online.
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So thank you so much.
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And we will answer as many as possible during the end of the session.
Now onto our excellent speakers tonight. It's an honour to host them and to welcome Abby Williams and Giles Lewin for this event.
The Life of Books, A History of read together. Please.
Abby Williams is professor of 18th Century Literature and Peace College, University of Oxford.
I grew up on Reading Aloud The Social Life of Books was published by Yale in 1920 17.
She's currently working on a book on the history of Miss.
Leon is a performer and composer, primarily a violinist specialising in mediaeval music and the traditional music of Europe and the Middle East.
She has written and performed music for theatre radio and played on many film and television scores.
He is a founding member of a folk band, Yellowhead, and the early music groups that do fight concerts.
Oliver and the Carnival Band Tonight I meet will give us a glimpse of an 18th century world of domestic culture.
We'll be joined in some performances by Giles. Together, they'll share their thoughts on the revival of this culture in the IPN.
Charles. Thank you for joining us this evening. Over to you. Thank you.
Good evening. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to an evening at home in the 18th century, coming to life from a 60 semi in suburban Oxford.
I'm going to be talking about being at home together. But I want to start by taking us outside for a little while.
I'm going to start with a diary entry from another April day.
Over 200 years ago from the 15th of April 18th to.
On that day, Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother, William Wadsworth, took one of the most significant walks in literary history.
They set out in blustery weather a day, maybe a bit like today, walking across the fells, Matt Ullswater in the Lake District.
Dorothy tells us that it was misty and mild, the strong wind, the first just their first signs of spring re-emerging in the hedgerows.
There are few daffodils here and there. And then they came a crown upon what she describes as a whole belt of them.
This is how this is how Hadari and she reads. I never saw a daffodil so beautiful.
They grew amongst the Mossy Stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness.
And the rest tossed unreeled and danced and seemed as if they verily loved with the wind that blew upon them over the lake.
They looked so gay. Ever got glancing, ever changing.
Determined she doesn't stop that she continues to talk about the way in which they carried on with their war.
They enjoyed the wild weather and they found refuge in a tavern and had a really hearty meal of ham and potatoes.
And then she says after supper, William was sitting by a bright flower.
When I came downstairs, he soon made his way to the library, piled up in a corner of the window.
He brought out a volume of and filled speaker, another miscellany and an odd volume of Congres place.
We had a glass of warm water and rum. We enjoyed ourselves and wished for merry.
So you've got this day in which she talks about going with her brother on a walk.
They both see this amazing spectacle of the daffodils together. Then they go to a pub.
They enjoy themselves by taking random books off the shelves, drinking rahmah water and thinking about their friend Mary.
That diary entry is has become famous in large part because it provided the basis for a much more celebrated literary representation of that day,
which is Wordsworth. William was this poem. I wandered lonely as a cloud.
And I think the comparison between them is really interesting. I'm just going to remind you how that plan goes by, reading out a couple of sentences.
I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high of vales and hills when all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils.
Beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
He continues later on four oft when on my couch, I lie in vacant or in pensive mood.
They flash upon that inward eye, which is the place of solitude.
And then my heart, with pleasure, fills and dances with the daffodils.
And what you've got there is two very different versions of what that day look like in Dorothy's account.
It's about a shared experience. The literary experience of that day is to do with pulling off the books from the shelves and reading them out loud.
She's not that fussed about what they are. It's a fact that they're doing it together.
And in William Wordsworth's account, it's all about being alone.
Looking at the daffodils and what that then means to him when he reflects on it by himself, the way it prompts the imagination.
I think that is quite telling.
That's the most celebrated of those representations has come to condition the ways in which many of us think about literature and what it does for us,
that it's the thing about individual expression.
It's often about isolation, perhaps a form of solipsism, and that enables a small to reflect upon ourselves.
The model that we've got in Dorothy's account is about togetherness and about reading as a way of linking people.
So I wrote a book which was about the history of reading aloud, though, the history of books in homes in the 18th century.
And I did a lot of al-Qaida research to do that. And when I wrote that book, I it seemed to me something which was was digging out historically,
but not something which had an awful lot of contemporary resonance.
And now I find, of course, in the last couple of months that it's come to be a much more familiar world than I ever expected it to be at this time,
when many of us are confined to our homes and are reading more spending more time with family,
thinking about ways of filling the time at home with homemade culture, returning to reading together as a social practise.
It's got a new kind of relevance. So I'm going to talk about today is some of the ways in which thinking again about the domestic well,
the reading offers us the chance to think about some of the ways in which reading has not.
And this is us together in the past. And also some of the other ideas or the other issues that it speaks to.
So what I found and thinking about reading an 18th century is that reading is linked to lots of other things.
It's linked to anxieties about how to behave, anxieties about what your home look like.
About social aspiration, about being seen to do the right thing,
about what to do in times of idleness and about and worries about the potentially immersive, distracting effects of fiction.
So how did people think about reading in the 18th century?
Part of the whole deal with thinking about reading or practising reading together in the 18th century was linked to middle aspiration,
a rising middle class to worries about being idle and not being able to use your time productively and in showing that you are a good,
virtuous person. One of the things about reading out loud is it enables you other people to do productive things while it was happening.
So it wasn't a moment of moment of idleness.
It's enabled productivity and also enabled the consumption of stuff, which was kind of morally or educationally improving.
So it's about virtue and about display.
The writer James Fordyce describes an ideal woman he knows of, so in an instruction booklet telling how young men have to behave.
He describes this really this example and the way in which she uses reading in her social circle.
He says that this woman never sat idling company,
being a perfect mistress of her measle and having an excellent taste in that wasn't many other things.
Hermana, whether at home or abroad, was to be constantly engaged in working something useful or beautiful for the sake of variety and improvement.
When in her own house, someone of one of the company would often read aloud while she and her female visits with us employed.
So that's pulling together lots of those ideas about not being idle,
about making beautiful or useful things, engaging in rational conversation and enlarging your mind.
So there's all that kind of virtuous engagement and activity going on.
And this is all happening in spaces which are getting fuller and fuller of things.
So one of the other things that's happening is part of this rise of the middling soul is a consumer culture where people are buying newly imported
wallpapers and China and lacquerware and they are cutting out their houses with
this splendour and then inviting their friends around to come a look at it.
So this is the era in which formal visiting takes off.
You might stick out your diary on a daily basis with lots and lots of different groups of people
coming round to visit you and acting the kind of sociability that was seen as being so important.
So that was partly a cultural sociability, but it's also partly really about nosiness.
The author of a book called The Lady's Companion,
so that these kind of social these kind of social formal visits were often nothing more than inspections.
Many go to see those for whom they are perfectly indifferent, whether they find them alive or dead well or seek such visits.
But in cities, instructions of a spy rather than the good office of a neighbour.
And this makes me it makes me think of one of the high points of any of doing
endless meetings is that you get to cheque out other people's backgrounds,
their houses, where they're working in their offices and their bedrooms or that spare rooms.
You get a good look at what they've got on their walls or how messy they are or what their sofas like.
And I think there's that same kinds of we are suddenly afforded that same possibility of
inspecting other people's houses in a quite intimate way in this new situation of lockdown.
The Museum of the Museum of the Home in East London is running a brilliant digital
collecting project at the moment called the Stay Home Collecting Project,
asking people to send in images of their homes during lockdown. But real images, not ones where they, especially Taisto,
are finding it really difficult to get people to send in actual pictures of rooms with salts on the floor or washing drying on the radiator,
because all of us have this urge to kind of make a better version of our lives for public consumption.
So given that part of the game is in the 18th century, was to examine how other people lived,
those same principles of aspirational display also applied to the ways in which people behave themselves.
In those newly decorated rooms, you could get advice books telling you on how to prepare for a visit at somebody else's house.
A work called The Ladies Preceptor tells its readers to fall into the trap of caressing the first dog that comes to their relief,
and it gives them instructions on how to sparkle in company. So this is how to sparkle.
If the occasion of the visit does not afford you a subject for conversation,
take care not to be so unprovided with one as to be obliged to the weather or the hour of the day feel discourse.
It is not a tool, a mess to consider beforehand. What topics are suitable to the company you're going to see?
And in keeping with this idea that you've got to show your best version of
yourself to the world if you are engaging in any social visiting or activity.
This was paradise parodies in contemporary literature. So in Richard Sheridan's play, the rivals as well include Lydia Languish.
She's completely addicted to reading romantic fiction, but trying to disguise that from her family who disapprove of it.
And so what she does is that she has to rapidly cover up all the evidence of the true nature of her reading material.
When her family is about to enter the room here, my dear Lucy, hide these books.
Quick, quick, quick, quick fling peer at Peregrine Pickle under the toilet.
Throw logic random into the closet. Put the innocent adultry into the whole duty of man, which was a really worthy book thrust.
Lord Aim was under the sofa leave for Dice's Simons open on the table.
So you've got this big mismatch between what you show your doing and what you're actually doing.
Which makes me think of people curating those shelves of the books that they've got of
colleague of mine has got a joke in staff meetings where he tries to arrange the most.
Now that they're online, the most pretentious, there's books behind his head says to intimidate his colleagues.
So I've been describing this world of aspiration and performance and display,
but an evening at home in the 18th century was very much a mixed evening.
There would be read bits of reading aloud, as we've said, saying they'll be people who are sewing.
They would also be music. And before you get the impression that all of this was a very kind of prim and prudish display of propriety,
I think it's important to remember there was a lot of kind of smutty fun that was part that as well.
And so now I am going to call on my assistant to give us an example of.
A riddle from an 18th century collection of gests,
which was a really popular form of reading in the 18th century kind of witch, which had, well, riddles and enigmas in them.
So, Giles, give us an 18th century riddle. What's that?
In which good housewife's take delight. Which, no, it has no legs will stand upright.
It is often used to both sexes must agree. Beneath the navel, yet above meet a the end.
It has a hole too stiff and strong, thick as a maiden's wrist and pretty long to a soft place.
Tis very often applied and makes the thing is used to still more wide.
The women love to Vitale to and from what lies underneath the wide road.
By giddy [INAUDIBLE], sometimes it is abused, but by good housewives rub before it is used that it may fitter for their purpose.
B when they too occupy the same free. Now, tell me, Mary, ladies, if you can.
Well, this must be that is no part of that.
Thank you. So answers on a virtual postcard, which you can do by.
If you think you know the answer to that riddle, then you can pop it in the comments, in the YouTube comments.
But this is my special advice on how to interpret 19th century riddle at all about innuendo and the smutty little sounds.
The more innocent is meaning often is an adult's unprecedented piece of music to create that mixed evening entertainment.
So that Pace is probably familiar to quite a few of you as a hint you.
All things bright and beautiful. And it was taken by Vaughan Williams.
He was, in fact, plundered from one of the early English collections of Bounce Music for the English Dancing Master.
Published by John Playford. And the original tune was called the Twenty Ninth of May.
And what we found Williams was doing in the 20th century was very much what the 18th century publishers were doing.
Then they were taking tunes from other places, the attitudes, ballad tunes, Scottish tunes,
anything that they thought would be popular and telling them into dances for their publication
and for people to dance to in their houses and on galleries at the larger houses.
The first tune I played was a tune called The Running Footmen.
Two. Two. OK. Thank you. So back to books.
Here we all are, then reading away in lockdown. In a survey which was commissioned for Will Not last Thursday,
the groups of people who were surveyed revealed that 31 percent of them were reading more since lockdown began.
What's interesting, I think about some of that research is that it seems to suggest that people will read all reading more fiction, the non-fiction.
So adult non-fiction has gone down by 13 percent and it looks like readers are finding at the moment are finding solace in imagining worlds.
One of the people they interviewed said talked about the fiction she was reading and said,
it takes me to another better place and allows me to escape the current situation for a while.
And it feels like for many people they would rather lose themselves in a fictional space somewhere,
which is very distinctly different from the present moment as a way of coping with what's going on.
To us that at this moment in the 21st century, that will seems quite wholesome.
The idea of losing ourselves in a novel is a really good thing. You go on a voyage with your mind and it takes you out out of where you are.
We don't think of that as a negative thing,
but in the 18th century that was seen as a really worrying development that was seen as something to be really suspicious of.
In the 18th century,
the novel was a relatively new phenomenon and people were pretty unsure about what the effects it might have on you morally and cognitively.
If you immersed yourself in fiction for that long,
that you might get muddled up about what was fiction and what was true life and the people who were seen as particularly vulnerable in
terms of creating that model and getting kind of distracted and rather unkind of access to fictional worlds were women and young people.
And there's this kind of hysterical commentary on how terrible it is that women, women will be on their own reading fiction.
And that scene is kind of almost erotically tempting for them.
So here's one content writer describing what happens, what would happen if the prevalence of all of these novels,
every corner of the kingdom, is abundantly supplied with them in vain?
Is you secluded from the corruptions of the living world? Books are commonly allowed them with little restriction as innocent amusements.
Yet these often pollute the heart in the recesses of the closet,
inflame the passions at a distance from temptation, and teach all the malignity of vice.
In solitude, another content writer describes the way in which the girls virtue she got steadily corrupted.
The appetite becomes too keen to be denied. And in proportion as it is more urgent prose less nice and select.
And it's fair. What would formerly have given offence now gives none.
The palate is vitiated or made dull.
The produce of the book club and the contents of the circulating library are devoured with indiscriminate and insatiable avidity.
Actually, the evidence of contemporary library borrowing records and book sales from the mid 18th century
shows that the people who are most likely to be buying novels were in fact middle aged men.
But there's a total mismatch between the kind of moral hysteria over women and
young people reading fiction and the actual likelihood of them consuming them.
I think one of the reasons for that was because women and young people see it not very good at distancing
themselves from the fictional worlds that they encountered and so much more likely to muddle them up.
And so this creates a particular role for reading together in the family because it's enabled a kind of shared and
more controlled exposure to fiction than the idea of people scurrying of up to their rooms to do it on their own,
on their beds. I was a little bit like a kind of moral prophylactic in a way, this reading together in a family,
because you got to shape not only what was read, but house read, how it was raised.
And I think all of this reminds me of all Rizzolatti about, OK, well, all kids are teenage kids doing in their rooms with gaming and screens.
Are we also anxious about people going off into private spaces and becoming
immersed in fantasy worlds that they will struggle to emerge from in their heads?
That we feel that's dangerous in a way that we can't necessarily quantify or explain.
And that seems really parallel with the ways in which fiction, prose, fiction and the novel was viewed in the 18th century.
So I've written this book about reading out aloud.
And one of the things that it really made me think about was the role of all reality in thinking about books and literature.
I think that we don't often imagine that the ways in which readers judge books or have judged books is how easy they are to read out loud.
There's a great quote from Elizabeth Hamilton, a young woman who is growing up in a gentry family in Stirlingshire, second off of 18th century.
And she said that the best prose style was that which could be longest read without exhausting the breath.
And it's totally true that how long the sentence is completely conditions. Still pleasure of being able to read this out aloud.
At the moment, I am most days doing a little reading on face time of chapters for a book of a book.
It's a boy who's living in London. And I really notice, as I do every day, that it matters not only how long the sentence is out,
but when there are too many consonants and I trip up in the way that I'm reading.
And I also really learnt about how all the chapters are.
I want them to be the same length because then I know how many I can do and the amount of time I've got available.
Those aren't questions that ever really fit figure in his journalistic criticism, but they're clearly affected by the idea of reaching out to labs.
So reading out aloud this is 18th century is often called the great edge of elocution,
because one of the consequences of this rise of the middling sort and of rising affluence is that more there's rising literacy,
some more more people able to read. And because more and more people are able to read, it becomes more more important to be able to read well,
to distinguish yourself from all the other people who read in a really ordinary way.
So you could buy books that taught you how to read aloud and you could hire a tutor.
You could go to a lecture to see how it was done.
You could go to a spouting club, which was where you would learn to read out plays in a really dramatic manner.
And I felt that what we should do to finish this little tool is to see what reading aloud in the 18th century actually looked and sounded like.
So I am going to do a master class, an 18th century, reading aloud with my willing pupil here.
And what we're going to do is to take a book which was called The Reader or a Seiter, which gives you little passages of prose.
And within the prose there are instructions in italics which tell you how you've got to do it in a really, really specific way.
So it's total handholding for the would be elocution re student.
So we've got this passage from the reader or reciter, which is an eastern story from the radical left, from Samuel Johnson's The Rambler.
And I'm going to instruct Giles here, if you're willing, in how to read it out loud.
18TH century style. So Giles and Eastern Story.
Obiter the sun of up Seener left the caravanserai early in the morning and pursued his journey through the plains of India,
St. Louis now a little warm and animated in your expression.
He was fresh and vigorous with rest. He was animated with hope.
He was incited by desire. Now, look as if you were viewing the scene described.
He moved swiftly over the valleys and saw the hills gradually rising before him.
You must glow with the writer in your expression as you proceed with this enchanting description.
As he passed along his is, we're delighted with the morning song of the Bird of Paradise.
He was fined by the last flutters of the sinking breeze, and Sprinkel was due by Karroum Spices.
Let your tone be now more powerful in order to greater contrast.
That follows of great beauty mark, particularly the word towering.
He sometimes contemplated the towering height to evoke monarch of the hills.
Here comes the crown jewel,
saluted to be peculiarly soft and gentle in your voice to the end of the colon and sometimes called the gentle fragrance of the primrose.
Eldest daughter of the scream conclude the sentence with a glow of satisfaction.
All his senses were gratified and all care was banished from his heart.
Thus he went on till the sun approached his meridian and the increasing heat preyed upon his strength.
He then looked round about him for some more commodious path. He saw his right hand, a growth that seemed to wave its shades as a sign of invitation.
He entered it and found the coolness and verdure irresistibly pleasant in descriptions.
The equally descriptive in your manner of. So when you mentioned the sun as above,
cast your eyes upwards and give a look as if you discovered the grove when you read his or his right hand to grow,
etc., your forefinger pointed at the same time.
Yes. We'll produce a good effect. Thus, he went on till the sun approached his maryjane and the increasing heat preyed upon his strength.
He then looked around for some far more commodious Paul.
He saw on his right hand a grove that seemed to wave at Schayes is a sign of invitation.
He entered it and found the coolness and verdure irresistibly pleasant.
Billions, billions? Not at all. How many, right?
So I think that you can see that that although people in 18th century said, oh, it's really important not to be too actively when you read out loud.
B, supernatural wouldn't say supernatural. They said be very natural.
In fact, it was pretty stagey, judging by those instructions.
So I think I guess the lesson for us all to learn is you need to learn to glow with the writer as you read out your books at home.
And you probably all need to learn to raise your game a bit in terms of the pointing and general hand gestures.
And with that, that seems a really good moment for us to see if there's any questions,
if anyone wants to and wants to ask any of the things that we've been talking about.
And I think Phillip is going to help us that to see what people might have to say about it.
Philip either setting up a team next. I'm not quite sure where it is at the moment.
You know, any good 18th century jokes? Shall I read some more readings?
Hello, hello, hello. Apologies for that. I was having some technical difficulties and then the great moral quandary of
where to relocate myself in a way that wouldn't reveal my terrible interior décor.
So but anyway, I'm I'm back.
And bear with me was to me just to to try and get things on the line. But we've been getting terrific questions and one which just came in,
which was a what about a guide to gestures and the appropriate physical expression of the words.
And you were simultaneously answering that as as you talk.
So thank you for that terrific demonstration.
And also this historical look back with Claire, extraordinary contemporary residences is one cheeky quick question,
which is coming from one of the viewers is what you get your wallpaper from and do that.
Do we get a commission? Is it cold, cold and sunny?
That's what it's called. Yeah, some Italian sort of sexy.
I think that some design and it's cool.
Well, in the spirit of kind of commercial uncompromised, we should say, the other wallpaper brands are also available.
So. Yeah. Thank you. I'm sure one viewer is very, very pleased that we bought more seriously.
I'm one of one, as the viewers has asked, whether there's a sense that people were writing,
knowing that little works would be read aloud or read collectively or performed in the way that you demonstrated.
Can we see traces in the written texts of an assumption of a kind of oral culture that's going on at this time?
I think that's such an interesting question and probably a there's a whole other book about that.
I think that's exactly right. I mean, I think we might think about the way in which the heroic couplet is used in 18th century poetry,
which makes those little kind of aphoristic snippets very kind of take ible article
of a lot of the verse of the time that you don't have to remember the whole thing. You can just take a little bit out of it.
But I think also thinking about 18th century fiction. So one of the things I found really interesting when I looked at diary entries of people.
So what I really loved was people who wrote diaries and just told you everything
about that day because then they would tell you what they were reading, how many pages they read and who they read it with.
And you can start to map a sense of that, the kind of social life of the book in a quite practical way.
And one of the things that you realise when you start to look at those diary entries
is that it's never the same group of people assembled for every book reading.
So say you're reading something like Fanny, Fanny, Cecilia or Avellino, quite long novels.
They read every series of weeks. And because in the kind of boring but deep, brilliantly detailed typed diaries,
the because the people assembled each time a different you can three understand has episodic fictionalises
that you have to have each seen as a kind of set for little vignettes that it sense in its own terms,
because people are not going to be always knowing exactly what happened in the last chapter.
So I think that kind of episodic structure of a lot of 18th century fiction lends itself to serialisation,
even when the book wasn't published in serial form, even when it's published, publishes the whole thing.
It would have been consumed in little chunks.
And therefore, Richard, structures in this, which is fascinating.
I mean, from my point of view, as someone who works on 19th century Russian literature, we think of big, long novels.
But in fact, they were consumed in a very similar way with a chapter a month.
Which explains why in a novel like Anna Karenina, one moment,
the plots duelling with one group of people and the next moment that episode structures is there.
We don't often feel that when we go by a big, thick book from this book and sort of try to read it all in all in order one goes.
It's fascinating to see your 18th century work resonating in it in a slightly later period.
Another question that's come in is about the relationship between this sort of written culture
and the reading aloud of words already written and kind of aural folk culture and storytelling,
which is perhaps more spontaneous or passed down without being mediated by by the written form.
Do you see a kind of interaction there between these these two modes of producing stories and texts?
Yeah, that's that's also a very interesting question. So I so much the work I've done has been on the printed this kind of print culture,
which is around the aspirational sorts of reading aloud and creating compilations for middling small
audiences which enable them to do a really fabulous general things containing their friends in the evening.
But there's clearly running alongside at the strong the, you know, a kind of aural folk culture,
which is about the passing down of a story which gets modified each time it's read out loud and they coexist.
And I think that we would want to think about different models of reading aloud.
You know, there's a reading aloud in communities which aren't all literate where the person who has
literacy enables something to become spoken or read for those who don't have access to it.
And it's very much a mixed model. I think one of the things that is interesting is the way AURIN or culture gets turned into print culture.
So in that of just Ridgell books that I was talking about, they are really about taking the snippets of oral life of jokes in the pub or with your
friends bits of smart packaging them up and selling them as part of the print culture.
So it becomes harder to divide into us into a world of of kind of polite print, if you like, and and traditional aural folk culture.
Mm hmm. I'm going to bring together two two related questions.
One was, how were the books selected that were read in these in these groups and in these domestic spaces?
Is there any evidence of that process of selection and then a sort of more presentist one, which is could you reckon?
Now that would be really good to read in the ways that you've been describing?
If people want to go and try this at home for themselves. OK.
So the first of the first question is about how people chose this stuff.
Well,
I think isn't it interesting that Dorothy was Wistar and you think that she just pulls any random old thing off the shelf to read aloud in the pub?
So the idea that it's a carefully curated event, each reading an ad session is given the light by that instance.
I think that there will have been times where people just went for what they had.
The fact that you could get compilations which gave you easily accessible,
inappropriate material for family consumption was one way of kind of preselecting.
What that material was. One of the things that I found really funny thing that I found was a collection of works for the family instructor.
So it's a series of things which are suitable for a Daniel family on a Sunday after it's presented as good, clean fun.
And the person who owned that book clearly didn't think it was all good, clean fun.
And so they got some soap labels and stuck them down of the pages of a poem that they thought was too rude for the family to read.
And that comes about when we're getting a little stuck up there. And they just clearly thought that a family entertainment.
So I suppose the sense of where the 9:00 watershed was in terms of appropriate.
This is the kind of question there about what people chose. And then in terms of what I think will be good.
I can't think of anything in particular. I think you want if you're going to be reading something over a series of days or weeks,
then you want something which has got a bit of an episodic structure which has which is broken down into little chance.
As we discussed, so that you don't have to have too much catch up between each moment.
Dialogue works really well. Accent's kind of mixed tone.
So that I mean, that is what is good about many 18th century novels that a shoot between tragedy and comedy
description and dialogue so that you get a kind of generic mix within within an individual.
What I'm thinking about at the moment, because we're teaching online and thinking of how not just to do the same old,
but how to use the new format to even change what we're doing.
I'm very much the kid that actually some some drama would be a really good way to shoot a more episodic.
And in my field, checkoffs captures that sort of tragicomic mixture.
And that's so I'll follow up on that and credit you for that. So that's sort of.
So the inspiration, a number of questions have coming, which are really to do with with gender here.
Which other is there a difference between the way men may read or women may read or mixed communities?
Is there a difference in the kind of social function over the function in the family
that people might perform dependent depending on whether they are men or women?
That's a good question. I mean, so clearly some of that rise of the novel,
anxiety about novels being too erotically charged and seductive and dangerous for women or young people to be reading on their own agenda elements
that because women are seen as not having enough kind of barriers to prevent them from being seduced by the fiction in front of them so sick.
So this clearly agenda element that I think that in terms of so there are some situations in which the same
kind of reading type seems tacked on the same day of the week across many households and many decades.
And that is that Sunday is a special day for devotional reading and the reading of scripture.
And I think that would often have been carried out by the kind of patriarch of the
house who had a responsibility for the spiritual guidance of everyone in the household,
not just family, but the servants as well. So there's a kind of dented aspect to that.
Then there's the whole question of who has the literacy in the household that, you know,
we can talk about households where you have a choice about who reads and then there have their hassles,
where there's no choice about who reads because not everyone carry.
So a key part of the education of the dissenting education of children was in enabling
kids to learn so that they could reach their parents who didn't have literacy.
And so in that case, you get the reverse of what we expect our generational model of reading aloud to be,
which is that adults read to children to teach them. But in fact, in this case, as children, newly literate, reading to the non literate parents.
So there are lots of different kinds of knowledge dynamics going on in that situation.
I think when you talk about sort of access to literacy and knowledge and that sort of instances, I suppose, power and authority.
What about clops and the sort of upstairs downstairs dynamics or other instances of how what might be seen as actually quite rigid boundaries between
social costs and costs are actually faced by collective reading or shared the
kind of shared performance reading cultures that you've mapped out for us?
Yeah, I mean, there are some examples. Yeah, there were some.
There were some. There's some anecdotal evidence of people having this literate servants reading to them while they do other things.
So in that case, that's a shared reading experience. But not one person is being employed to do the reading for another person.
There's a really extraordinary.
What about a group reading of something which is its clearest, that which, as many of you know, is the longest novel innate in the English language?
And I guess there were two things that took a really long time in 18th century.
One was reading Clarissa and the other one was having a hard time with us in place.
And that's a description of a woman having her hair dressed with a group of female friends around her.
So the maid behind her is doing her hair. All the women are listening to one of them reading aloud from Clarissa.
Woman having a hair done suddenly realises she can. Filson Black plucks of water landing on top of her head.
And the maid who is doing her hair listening to Clarissa has to cry. The pathos of the scene.
So they will kind of stop the woman having the head and goes outside with the maid.
We're told that she goes outside of the room and she presses some coins into her hands as payment for her sensibility so that
the maid is kind of rewarded for her refined feelings at having cried this fictional this fictional story in polite company,
and then gets to kind of in some way join the group of feeling that is normally outside of her kind of class remit.
Mm hmm. Cause that's that's that's really everything. It sounds like a story in its own right.
That's right, Rita. I wonder I mean, you've you've talked about your your academic interest in this.
And then clearly, Charles, you perform and you were you creating this kind of literary musical sounds before you embarks on this project.
So as you know or have you become very self-conscious about doing these things, thinking about it in a historical context,
or just all that knowledge in writing fall away when you start reading aloud and you start interacting and sowing immediacy.
So at the same time playing. And what does your academic engagement with this material do to your own experience of reading such finnessey?
I think. Well, I mean, I've always been interested in this this era of music anyway, so.
And and earlier music, which which obviously it was,
involves a certain amount of research just because the further back you go, the less that's known, by the way, is performed.
So it's always been interesting to note to see the context of how the music is placed.
You know, we've when I started out playing music, it was very much a fixed concert hall format.
You know, we played concerts. You had a programme. We didn't really know what music was.
And. And during my career, I think more laws, as is being done on imaginative programming,
I'm putting programmes in different places and contextualising music.
It makes all the difference to the way the music is played.
I mean, really, I was playing some dance pieces there and I don't know really many examples or if any, where dance music was played without a dancer.
You know, nowadays we think of it play, dance. It's nice to play.
I think, you know, it always had a social context where people would have actually played the function of dancing to.
So NATO has been very interesting from that point of view to try to make again.
With that, we've just had a question. I'm asking people asking whether both sides and chequebook's were involved in these in these events,
as well as the kind of printed literary texts that we've talked about. Yes.
Well, some of the broadsides appear in these miscellany is that we used in the hunger and they refused.
And we've used ballots from from the texts that these mistletoes in this programme.
And to go back to that question about how. So the question was really about how this research has influenced or practise.
But in fact, it's been for me is the really big impact has been the other way round.
So doing kind of semi or public performances has really changed the way I've understood the material that actually doing it makes you think,
oh, that's how it works, John. I mean, so we had this really well, to me, it was really striking.
We did a gig at your early music festival and we were singing a song in Praise of Yum,
which was kind of really kind of vanilla ish pastoral celebration of the town of Young,
which used these sort of neoclassical ideas of green verdure, an idyllic green and, you know, calm.
And those are so many of those funds in 18th century.
So many of those songs and never really answered why they're so popular.
And so we're singing it in this or dressing it in this church in York and had begun the piece by saying anyone here from your home.
And there are a whole lot people that your home. And then during the song, when they sang the line, The Streets Clean and spacious,
the verdure is the same that houses a neat and the gordis Minerva has here has seats.
Everyone laughed and it became kind of ironic because they were measuring up their
own lived experience of Young with this idealised version that was in the song.
And I realised, oh yeah, of course, people enjoyed the mismatch between their lived reality and its idealisation,
and they saw that as a kind of funny, ironic thing rather than what I had thought, which is, oh my God, this is so trite and boring.
Wants everyone to read postural idealisation of the rural countryside.
It was because so they enjoy against the rotation of that gap.
And I would not have thought about it like that had we not had we not performed it well.
Fascinating. Another question just come in which asks about the relationship between reading
aloud and the kind of advice that you were talking about in the domestic space,
which was a sort of about an artful form of naturalness, as opposed to what we might know about stage declamation and theatrical practises
and the advice given to to those who are working in those kind of public spaces.
I mean, is other.
Is there a continuum or is there a discontinuity between the kind of very different practises that were going on in these different spaces?
Yeah, I find that really interesting. So lots of the education books that appear to teach you how to do reading aloud at home, say, at the beginning.
Oh, it's just totally not like the theatre you must be to have me in stagey. And it's a different kind of space.
But then the examples that are given are often taken from famous players of the era, like, oh, this is how Garik did that bit of Hamlet.
So it was definitely informed by stage practise, but also very distinctly separate from it.
And I think some of the issues around not being too much like the theatre were less to do with a kind of don't be to
actually in style than to do the kind of perceived moral consequences of embodying a fictional role rose in the home.
So tools into the 18th century, you get the rise of amateur dramatics. Are people staging theatricals in their homes?
That was a huge opposition to that because it was seen as really inappropriate for women to act as somebody else and to forget about their
kids and their domestic responsibilities and get too carried away with the idea of being actresses who often had dubious reputations.
So I think some of the don't be too like the fear to what to do with don't be too like the whole
world theatre and everything that speaks of rather than don't get carried away your hand gestures.
And interesting as well to put us to another angle on this is thinking about the reading aloud.
You mentioned earlier the patriarch reading the family Bible and the religious text.
That's a form of reading which is about truth and not impersonating, but conveying something kind of unmediated.
And it's interesting to think of that this kind of reading precisely being about artifice and impersonation.
I'm taking you to very different areas. One of the questions, which is literally, has anyone guess the answer to the riddle?
Well, I'm saving up the red lobsters. We'll come on to those as a teaser to the audience to make sure that they stay out of the conversation.
We've had a glimpse of the suggestions and they are brilliant and inventive.
So there it goes. But a little suspense. That's one question was about dressing up.
Did was this just took something that took place in sort of ordinary time or was there a kind of staging
and framing of the reading and the reading aloud by by kind of marking it as special and different?
By changing closing? Well, who knows?
I mean, you know, which was my reasoning as it was. Well, one thing, but they will have been many different kinds.
You know, there will just be one person reading to another embed or that will have been, you know,
these rather more performative social occasions where people made it into a kind of parlour game or the devotional experience of a Sunday reading.
I don't know. It's a really good question about the dressing up. I mean, I guess in the comic and format, that's more likely to have happened.
But I don't think that every time anyone go out book,
they especially went upstairs and puts on a new outfit for it's all given that it's a single person reading a book,
which often they would inhabit different set range of character roles.
It seems quite likely that you would have some Matt sweatshop thing where you run out the door
and put on a new outfit to be a different person that you'll know whose voice you're doing.
So it sounds like it sounds like a future project for someone to it's some material culture
that I'm just looking over at the questions which I try to create and separate nice,
coherent groups up. I think one of the things that might be nice to finish up on is a series of questions which are
about the present moment and how we can use what we've been talking about to help us through this.
One is question has come in, which was how often did the social life of books extend beyond the family?
Was it common for neighbours or community members to join in reading together either at home or in the news at night?
And I see that as a historical question, but also as a present question, because we are all with all of our households that we're allowed to be with.
But that kinship group and family group and friendship groups, I think we're all missing those kind of relations.
So I wonder whether you have any historical evidence about about how the reading groups were extended beyond the immediate households.
Yeah.
So that's something that really emerged from those kinds of detailed diary entries that I talked about where people say, oh, Mrs. Overton was there.
And so was Miss Helton.
When they talk about the changing cluster around that, what is essentially a family group because of this whole practise of visiting on a daily basis.
You know, you get like four different sets of people coming to see you and reading.
And I have to be part of that. But you don't know that the reading will happen with the same group of people who were there yesterday.
So I think that was probably kind of, you know, extended family in a rather more fluid sense,
a kind of a number of other acquaintances who will have been part of those occasions.
I think you can also just think about that, translate into the kind of contact. Remember why we're doing everything you know?
Well, so many things that she said that we see people, but we're not actually seeing them.
We're seeing them through a screen or on a phone. And one of the ways in which books link people together and create social bonds is
through the way in which people discuss them over letters in the 18th century.
So you will get groups of friends who are discussing in an exchange between them what they make of the thing that they've all recently read to get.
So they have a kind of virtual book club which is conducted through the post.
And that seems a very kind of parallel thing.
And they often talk about longing to see one another being stuck in a house, in a company, not being able to get out.
But this being an alternative or replacement for the physical sociability that they lungful.
One of the things that's really interesting about these life events is the way that as we're talking, questions are coming in.
You're anticipating in your office the questions that come in.
And someone has just asked about academic writing groups and book groups and the way we share our views and the way that what you're
describing looks like a very modern phenomenon as we share our views of a book that we're reading as as when we're doing it,
waiting for the next example. But a really curious questions come in that set me thinking.
We had a little bit words, a lot about language, about music.
We have we've had a sort of noise led session. But what about silence and all of this?
And this comes from a questioner who's asked about these kind of Zoome meetings for meditation where people tune in and share silence with each other.
And I'm fascinated by that phenomenon. What do you think about the relationship between Nois voice, music, making sound and then silence?
Yeah, I think some. Yes, it's interesting, isn't it?
We have replaced a whole story about silent reading in what we've been saying today with one about noisy, busy reading.
And that is a kind of counterargument to the idea of the rise of the silent reader.
And it's a form of self absorption.
And but in doing so, we have got a history of quietness in reading that is a key part of the way in which many people experienced reading together.
I think I'm just looking at the kind of historical evidence of discussion of silence and noise.
There were examples that I found in diaries and letters that I read where people talked about the kind of bullishness
of reading aloud in social spaces that they would go into a room and some would insist on reading the paper out loud,
even when they just wanted to sit down quietly and write a letter or read their own book.
So I think, you know, sometimes that noise can be invasive,
especially when you've got a whole load of people in a house and a limited number of social spaces to be in.
It's not always this kind of Pollyanna ish, lovely, binding bonding experience, writing joint noise and reading in a house.
Sometimes it's alienating and pretty much pretty irritating to have somebody else literary tastes or elocution aspirations foisted upon you.
Well, there's been certainly nothing alienating or irritating about a discussion for the last hour.
But before I thank you and wrap up, I've got one last question and then we'll go to the suggestions that the viewers have given about the results.
One person would say, what's the name of the real book? Because clearly the sales of this are going to be very, very, very hard.
Yeah. It is called and it's identical to features wit or the muse in masquerade.
And which one is from so many of the NIE found, so many of them tend to be less readable.
Well, this is once the torch team will find out the title and we'll put it on our Twitter feed afterwards in case people want to track it down.
But it sounds like there are several of these. Let me. Let me. So I think it might be available.
Google book. So we might be able to link to PDAF.
Yeah, great. We'll we'll crack up with it. But I just want to share with you the inventive suggestions from our imaginative viewers.
So someone has suggested it might be a purse. Someone has gone with a needle.
Someone has gone for a pocket that is tied around the waist and not sewn in the pockets.
Also suggested a book on a lap. Someone has suggested a chair.
Someone has suggested a toilet. And someone has gone for a cello and.
Yeah. Well, there is I put in mind of it.
Absolutely. On principle. Thomas Beecham.
Story of people and yes, those of us who know it can enjoy some silent pleasure from that one.
But I think we should ask you to reveal the punchline now. The answer is a rolling pin boom.
Excellent. Well, you know, for all those home bakers who've discovered long hours in the kitchen during the lockdown, that's one for you.
That's brilliant. Thank you every. Thank you, Giles.
That's just been a terrific trip to the 18th century and a whole series of wonderful parallels with our own time.
Thank you for your energy and your insights and all your answers to the questions.
Thank you to to all the viewers at home for watching. And for joining in with the intellectual discovery and also the delights of this session.
So please join us next week for Big Tent Life event.
This will take place on Thursday, the 7th of May at five pm.
Next week, I will be in conversation with Dr. Leah Broad.
And together, we'll be celebrating philtre Tchaikovsky. Russia's most famous 19th century composer.
And that will form part of our Music Week. We hope that you'll be able to join us again then.
Thank you for joining us today. And goodbye.