1 00:00:10,010 --> 00:00:19,550 Welcome to Big Tent. Life Events, Life online event series from the University of Oxford as part of the humanities cultural programme. 2 00:00:19,550 --> 00:00:25,160 My name is Phillip Bullock and I'm director of Torch, the Oxford Research Centre Humanities. 3 00:00:25,160 --> 00:00:30,460 I'm professor of Russian Literature and Music here at the University of Oxford. 4 00:00:30,460 --> 00:00:38,490 The Big Ten Live event series brings together researchers, students and practitioners from across different disciplines together. 5 00:00:38,490 --> 00:00:44,850 We'll explore important subjects and ask questions about topics such as the environment, medical, humanities, 6 00:00:44,850 --> 00:00:53,610 A.I. technology, the history of disease, but will also celebrate storytelling, music, song and dance. 7 00:00:53,610 --> 00:00:56,020 We're bringing you this event series online. 8 00:00:56,020 --> 00:01:02,280 Whilst we are all physically distanced, we hope that you are all safe and well during these difficult times. 9 00:01:02,280 --> 00:01:06,820 We look forward to seeing you all again soon in person, as soon as we're able to. 10 00:01:06,820 --> 00:01:13,470 And we look forward to welcoming you at future events as part of a humanities programme. 11 00:01:13,470 --> 00:01:19,200 Everyone is welcome in our big tent. We thank you, our viewers, for your ongoing support and engagement. 12 00:01:19,200 --> 00:01:26,880 We thank to all the participants who have given their time, their words and their big ideas as we come together online. 13 00:01:26,880 --> 00:01:33,300 This series would not be possible, of course, without the support from so many people behind the scenes, including the torch team. 14 00:01:33,300 --> 00:01:37,620 So thank you so much. 15 00:01:37,620 --> 00:01:45,270 If you would like to put forward any questions to our speakers during events tonight, please pop them in the comments box on YouTube. 16 00:01:45,270 --> 00:01:50,730 And we will answer as many as possible during the end of the session. 17 00:01:50,730 --> 00:01:59,360 Now onto our excellent speakers tonight. It's an honour to host them and to welcome Abby Williams and Giles Lewin for this event. 18 00:01:59,360 --> 00:02:04,360 The Life of Books, A History of read together. Please. 19 00:02:04,360 --> 00:02:10,230 Abby Williams is professor of 18th Century Literature and Peace College, University of Oxford. 20 00:02:10,230 --> 00:02:17,070 I grew up on Reading Aloud The Social Life of Books was published by Yale in 1920 17. 21 00:02:17,070 --> 00:02:21,350 She's currently working on a book on the history of Miss. 22 00:02:21,350 --> 00:02:29,620 Leon is a performer and composer, primarily a violinist specialising in mediaeval music and the traditional music of Europe and the Middle East. 23 00:02:29,620 --> 00:02:35,300 She has written and performed music for theatre radio and played on many film and television scores. 24 00:02:35,300 --> 00:02:40,850 He is a founding member of a folk band, Yellowhead, and the early music groups that do fight concerts. 25 00:02:40,850 --> 00:02:48,830 Oliver and the Carnival Band Tonight I meet will give us a glimpse of an 18th century world of domestic culture. 26 00:02:48,830 --> 00:02:56,840 We'll be joined in some performances by Giles. Together, they'll share their thoughts on the revival of this culture in the IPN. 27 00:02:56,840 --> 00:03:40,630 Charles. Thank you for joining us this evening. Over to you. Thank you. 28 00:03:40,630 --> 00:03:51,730 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. 29 00:03:51,730 --> 00:03:57,820 I'm going to be talking about being at home together. But I want to start by taking us outside for a little while. 30 00:03:57,820 --> 00:04:01,870 I'm going to start with a diary entry from another April day. 31 00:04:01,870 --> 00:04:06,560 Over 200 years ago from the 15th of April 18th to. 32 00:04:06,560 --> 00:04:15,430 On that day, Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother, William Wadsworth, took one of the most significant walks in literary history. 33 00:04:15,430 --> 00:04:22,480 They set out in blustery weather a day, maybe a bit like today, walking across the fells, Matt Ullswater in the Lake District. 34 00:04:22,480 --> 00:04:30,070 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. 35 00:04:30,070 --> 00:04:37,210 There are few daffodils here and there. And then they came a crown upon what she describes as a whole belt of them. 36 00:04:37,210 --> 00:04:43,050 This is how this is how Hadari and she reads. I never saw a daffodil so beautiful. 37 00:04:43,050 --> 00:04:51,240 They grew amongst the Mossy Stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness. 38 00:04:51,240 --> 00:04:59,460 And the rest tossed unreeled and danced and seemed as if they verily loved with the wind that blew upon them over the lake. 39 00:04:59,460 --> 00:05:04,670 They looked so gay. Ever got glancing, ever changing. 40 00:05:04,670 --> 00:05:10,620 Determined she doesn't stop that she continues to talk about the way in which they carried on with their war. 41 00:05:10,620 --> 00:05:17,790 They enjoyed the wild weather and they found refuge in a tavern and had a really hearty meal of ham and potatoes. 42 00:05:17,790 --> 00:05:22,680 And then she says after supper, William was sitting by a bright flower. 43 00:05:22,680 --> 00:05:28,680 When I came downstairs, he soon made his way to the library, piled up in a corner of the window. 44 00:05:28,680 --> 00:05:35,490 He brought out a volume of and filled speaker, another miscellany and an odd volume of Congres place. 45 00:05:35,490 --> 00:05:41,610 We had a glass of warm water and rum. We enjoyed ourselves and wished for merry. 46 00:05:41,610 --> 00:05:45,510 So you've got this day in which she talks about going with her brother on a walk. 47 00:05:45,510 --> 00:05:50,040 They both see this amazing spectacle of the daffodils together. Then they go to a pub. 48 00:05:50,040 --> 00:05:57,720 They enjoy themselves by taking random books off the shelves, drinking rahmah water and thinking about their friend Mary. 49 00:05:57,720 --> 00:06:07,980 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, 50 00:06:07,980 --> 00:06:12,040 which is Wordsworth. William was this poem. I wandered lonely as a cloud. 51 00:06:12,040 --> 00:06:20,460 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. 52 00:06:20,460 --> 00:06:32,050 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. 53 00:06:32,050 --> 00:06:38,140 Beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze. 54 00:06:38,140 --> 00:06:44,140 He continues later on four oft when on my couch, I lie in vacant or in pensive mood. 55 00:06:44,140 --> 00:06:49,660 They flash upon that inward eye, which is the place of solitude. 56 00:06:49,660 --> 00:06:55,150 And then my heart, with pleasure, fills and dances with the daffodils. 57 00:06:55,150 --> 00:07:00,080 And what you've got there is two very different versions of what that day look like in Dorothy's account. 58 00:07:00,080 --> 00:07:07,700 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. 59 00:07:07,700 --> 00:07:11,300 She's not that fussed about what they are. It's a fact that they're doing it together. 60 00:07:11,300 --> 00:07:15,050 And in William Wordsworth's account, it's all about being alone. 61 00:07:15,050 --> 00:07:22,100 Looking at the daffodils and what that then means to him when he reflects on it by himself, the way it prompts the imagination. 62 00:07:22,100 --> 00:07:24,060 I think that is quite telling. 63 00:07:24,060 --> 00:07:32,680 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, 64 00:07:32,680 --> 00:07:35,000 that it's the thing about individual expression. 65 00:07:35,000 --> 00:07:43,010 It's often about isolation, perhaps a form of solipsism, and that enables a small to reflect upon ourselves. 66 00:07:43,010 --> 00:07:49,850 The model that we've got in Dorothy's account is about togetherness and about reading as a way of linking people. 67 00:07:49,850 --> 00:07:56,360 So I wrote a book which was about the history of reading aloud, though, the history of books in homes in the 18th century. 68 00:07:56,360 --> 00:08:05,030 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, 69 00:08:05,030 --> 00:08:08,960 but not something which had an awful lot of contemporary resonance. 70 00:08:08,960 --> 00:08:17,870 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, 71 00:08:17,870 --> 00:08:22,520 when many of us are confined to our homes and are reading more spending more time with family, 72 00:08:22,520 --> 00:08:29,990 thinking about ways of filling the time at home with homemade culture, returning to reading together as a social practise. 73 00:08:29,990 --> 00:08:38,180 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, 74 00:08:38,180 --> 00:08:43,030 the reading offers us the chance to think about some of the ways in which reading has not. 75 00:08:43,030 --> 00:08:49,310 And this is us together in the past. And also some of the other ideas or the other issues that it speaks to. 76 00:08:49,310 --> 00:08:55,030 So what I found and thinking about reading an 18th century is that reading is linked to lots of other things. 77 00:08:55,030 --> 00:09:01,620 It's linked to anxieties about how to behave, anxieties about what your home look like. 78 00:09:01,620 --> 00:09:06,120 About social aspiration, about being seen to do the right thing, 79 00:09:06,120 --> 00:09:14,990 about what to do in times of idleness and about and worries about the potentially immersive, distracting effects of fiction. 80 00:09:14,990 --> 00:09:18,860 So how did people think about reading in the 18th century? 81 00:09:18,860 --> 00:09:25,990 Part of the whole deal with thinking about reading or practising reading together in the 18th century was linked to middle aspiration, 82 00:09:25,990 --> 00:09:34,310 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, 83 00:09:34,310 --> 00:09:41,000 virtuous person. One of the things about reading out loud is it enables you other people to do productive things while it was happening. 84 00:09:41,000 --> 00:09:43,370 So it wasn't a moment of moment of idleness. 85 00:09:43,370 --> 00:09:50,540 It's enabled productivity and also enabled the consumption of stuff, which was kind of morally or educationally improving. 86 00:09:50,540 --> 00:09:53,820 So it's about virtue and about display. 87 00:09:53,820 --> 00:10:02,520 The writer James Fordyce describes an ideal woman he knows of, so in an instruction booklet telling how young men have to behave. 88 00:10:02,520 --> 00:10:09,180 He describes this really this example and the way in which she uses reading in her social circle. 89 00:10:09,180 --> 00:10:12,750 He says that this woman never sat idling company, 90 00:10:12,750 --> 00:10:18,520 being a perfect mistress of her measle and having an excellent taste in that wasn't many other things. 91 00:10:18,520 --> 00:10:27,540 Hermana, whether at home or abroad, was to be constantly engaged in working something useful or beautiful for the sake of variety and improvement. 92 00:10:27,540 --> 00:10:34,830 When in her own house, someone of one of the company would often read aloud while she and her female visits with us employed. 93 00:10:34,830 --> 00:10:38,340 So that's pulling together lots of those ideas about not being idle, 94 00:10:38,340 --> 00:10:45,060 about making beautiful or useful things, engaging in rational conversation and enlarging your mind. 95 00:10:45,060 --> 00:10:49,320 So there's all that kind of virtuous engagement and activity going on. 96 00:10:49,320 --> 00:10:53,370 And this is all happening in spaces which are getting fuller and fuller of things. 97 00:10:53,370 --> 00:11:01,830 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 98 00:11:01,830 --> 00:11:07,560 wallpapers and China and lacquerware and they are cutting out their houses with 99 00:11:07,560 --> 00:11:11,280 this splendour and then inviting their friends around to come a look at it. 100 00:11:11,280 --> 00:11:13,770 So this is the era in which formal visiting takes off. 101 00:11:13,770 --> 00:11:18,150 You might stick out your diary on a daily basis with lots and lots of different groups of people 102 00:11:18,150 --> 00:11:23,430 coming round to visit you and acting the kind of sociability that was seen as being so important. 103 00:11:23,430 --> 00:11:30,300 So that was partly a cultural sociability, but it's also partly really about nosiness. 104 00:11:30,300 --> 00:11:32,340 The author of a book called The Lady's Companion, 105 00:11:32,340 --> 00:11:38,880 so that these kind of social these kind of social formal visits were often nothing more than inspections. 106 00:11:38,880 --> 00:11:47,610 Many go to see those for whom they are perfectly indifferent, whether they find them alive or dead well or seek such visits. 107 00:11:47,610 --> 00:11:53,630 But in cities, instructions of a spy rather than the good office of a neighbour. 108 00:11:53,630 --> 00:11:59,010 And this makes me it makes me think of one of the high points of any of doing 109 00:11:59,010 --> 00:12:02,130 endless meetings is that you get to cheque out other people's backgrounds, 110 00:12:02,130 --> 00:12:08,070 their houses, where they're working in their offices and their bedrooms or that spare rooms. 111 00:12:08,070 --> 00:12:13,290 You get a good look at what they've got on their walls or how messy they are or what their sofas like. 112 00:12:13,290 --> 00:12:18,090 And I think there's that same kinds of we are suddenly afforded that same possibility of 113 00:12:18,090 --> 00:12:24,400 inspecting other people's houses in a quite intimate way in this new situation of lockdown. 114 00:12:24,400 --> 00:12:28,510 The Museum of the Museum of the Home in East London is running a brilliant digital 115 00:12:28,510 --> 00:12:31,960 collecting project at the moment called the Stay Home Collecting Project, 116 00:12:31,960 --> 00:12:38,130 asking people to send in images of their homes during lockdown. But real images, not ones where they, especially Taisto, 117 00:12:38,130 --> 00:12:44,780 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, 118 00:12:44,780 --> 00:12:52,150 because all of us have this urge to kind of make a better version of our lives for public consumption. 119 00:12:52,150 --> 00:12:57,580 So given that part of the game is in the 18th century, was to examine how other people lived, 120 00:12:57,580 --> 00:13:02,680 those same principles of aspirational display also applied to the ways in which people behave themselves. 121 00:13:02,680 --> 00:13:10,390 In those newly decorated rooms, you could get advice books telling you on how to prepare for a visit at somebody else's house. 122 00:13:10,390 --> 00:13:18,770 A work called The Ladies Preceptor tells its readers to fall into the trap of caressing the first dog that comes to their relief, 123 00:13:18,770 --> 00:13:23,740 and it gives them instructions on how to sparkle in company. So this is how to sparkle. 124 00:13:23,740 --> 00:13:27,460 If the occasion of the visit does not afford you a subject for conversation, 125 00:13:27,460 --> 00:13:35,470 take care not to be so unprovided with one as to be obliged to the weather or the hour of the day feel discourse. 126 00:13:35,470 --> 00:13:43,130 It is not a tool, a mess to consider beforehand. What topics are suitable to the company you're going to see? 127 00:13:43,130 --> 00:13:46,550 And in keeping with this idea that you've got to show your best version of 128 00:13:46,550 --> 00:13:51,770 yourself to the world if you are engaging in any social visiting or activity. 129 00:13:51,770 --> 00:13:58,570 This was paradise parodies in contemporary literature. So in Richard Sheridan's play, the rivals as well include Lydia Languish. 130 00:13:58,570 --> 00:14:04,580 She's completely addicted to reading romantic fiction, but trying to disguise that from her family who disapprove of it. 131 00:14:04,580 --> 00:14:10,520 And so what she does is that she has to rapidly cover up all the evidence of the true nature of her reading material. 132 00:14:10,520 --> 00:14:15,950 When her family is about to enter the room here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. 133 00:14:15,950 --> 00:14:20,150 Quick, quick, quick, quick fling peer at Peregrine Pickle under the toilet. 134 00:14:20,150 --> 00:14:27,590 Throw logic random into the closet. Put the innocent adultry into the whole duty of man, which was a really worthy book thrust. 135 00:14:27,590 --> 00:14:32,960 Lord Aim was under the sofa leave for Dice's Simons open on the table. 136 00:14:32,960 --> 00:14:38,360 So you've got this big mismatch between what you show your doing and what you're actually doing. 137 00:14:38,360 --> 00:14:42,740 Which makes me think of people curating those shelves of the books that they've got of 138 00:14:42,740 --> 00:14:46,130 colleague of mine has got a joke in staff meetings where he tries to arrange the most. 139 00:14:46,130 --> 00:14:53,360 Now that they're online, the most pretentious, there's books behind his head says to intimidate his colleagues. 140 00:14:53,360 --> 00:14:57,530 So I've been describing this world of aspiration and performance and display, 141 00:14:57,530 --> 00:15:01,730 but an evening at home in the 18th century was very much a mixed evening. 142 00:15:01,730 --> 00:15:08,060 There would be read bits of reading aloud, as we've said, saying they'll be people who are sewing. 143 00:15:08,060 --> 00:15:20,300 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, 144 00:15:20,300 --> 00:15:24,550 I think it's important to remember there was a lot of kind of smutty fun that was part that as well. 145 00:15:24,550 --> 00:15:31,360 And so now I am going to call on my assistant to give us an example of. 146 00:15:31,360 --> 00:15:34,190 A riddle from an 18th century collection of gests, 147 00:15:34,190 --> 00:15:40,050 which was a really popular form of reading in the 18th century kind of witch, which had, well, riddles and enigmas in them. 148 00:15:40,050 --> 00:15:47,210 So, Giles, give us an 18th century riddle. What's that? 149 00:15:47,210 --> 00:15:55,200 In which good housewife's take delight. Which, no, it has no legs will stand upright. 150 00:15:55,200 --> 00:16:04,190 It is often used to both sexes must agree. Beneath the navel, yet above meet a the end. 151 00:16:04,190 --> 00:16:14,280 It has a hole too stiff and strong, thick as a maiden's wrist and pretty long to a soft place. 152 00:16:14,280 --> 00:16:20,060 Tis very often applied and makes the thing is used to still more wide. 153 00:16:20,060 --> 00:16:27,170 The women love to Vitale to and from what lies underneath the wide road. 154 00:16:27,170 --> 00:16:37,370 By giddy [INAUDIBLE], sometimes it is abused, but by good housewives rub before it is used that it may fitter for their purpose. 155 00:16:37,370 --> 00:16:45,300 B when they too occupy the same free. Now, tell me, Mary, ladies, if you can. 156 00:16:45,300 --> 00:16:51,770 Well, this must be that is no part of that. 157 00:16:51,770 --> 00:17:00,350 Thank you. So answers on a virtual postcard, which you can do by. 158 00:17:00,350 --> 00:17:06,230 If you think you know the answer to that riddle, then you can pop it in the comments, in the YouTube comments. 159 00:17:06,230 --> 00:17:13,160 But this is my special advice on how to interpret 19th century riddle at all about innuendo and the smutty little sounds. 160 00:17:13,160 --> 00:18:04,680 The more innocent is meaning often is an adult's unprecedented piece of music to create that mixed evening entertainment. 161 00:18:04,680 --> 00:18:10,950 So that Pace is probably familiar to quite a few of you as a hint you. 162 00:18:10,950 --> 00:18:15,030 All things bright and beautiful. And it was taken by Vaughan Williams. 163 00:18:15,030 --> 00:18:22,680 He was, in fact, plundered from one of the early English collections of Bounce Music for the English Dancing Master. 164 00:18:22,680 --> 00:18:28,540 Published by John Playford. And the original tune was called the Twenty Ninth of May. 165 00:18:28,540 --> 00:18:36,940 And what we found Williams was doing in the 20th century was very much what the 18th century publishers were doing. 166 00:18:36,940 --> 00:18:45,490 Then they were taking tunes from other places, the attitudes, ballad tunes, Scottish tunes, 167 00:18:45,490 --> 00:18:51,360 anything that they thought would be popular and telling them into dances for their publication 168 00:18:51,360 --> 00:18:59,630 and for people to dance to in their houses and on galleries at the larger houses. 169 00:18:59,630 --> 00:19:07,200 The first tune I played was a tune called The Running Footmen. 170 00:19:07,200 --> 00:19:12,840 Two. Two. OK. Thank you. So back to books. 171 00:19:12,840 --> 00:19:22,850 Here we all are, then reading away in lockdown. In a survey which was commissioned for Will Not last Thursday, 172 00:19:22,850 --> 00:19:29,570 the groups of people who were surveyed revealed that 31 percent of them were reading more since lockdown began. 173 00:19:29,570 --> 00:19:36,890 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. 174 00:19:36,890 --> 00:19:44,360 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. 175 00:19:44,360 --> 00:19:48,560 One of the people they interviewed said talked about the fiction she was reading and said, 176 00:19:48,560 --> 00:19:54,300 it takes me to another better place and allows me to escape the current situation for a while. 177 00:19:54,300 --> 00:20:00,200 And it feels like for many people they would rather lose themselves in a fictional space somewhere, 178 00:20:00,200 --> 00:20:05,390 which is very distinctly different from the present moment as a way of coping with what's going on. 179 00:20:05,390 --> 00:20:10,070 To us that at this moment in the 21st century, that will seems quite wholesome. 180 00:20:10,070 --> 00:20:17,030 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. 181 00:20:17,030 --> 00:20:19,340 We don't think of that as a negative thing, 182 00:20:19,340 --> 00:20:26,660 but in the 18th century that was seen as a really worrying development that was seen as something to be really suspicious of. 183 00:20:26,660 --> 00:20:27,530 In the 18th century, 184 00:20:27,530 --> 00:20:34,130 the novel was a relatively new phenomenon and people were pretty unsure about what the effects it might have on you morally and cognitively. 185 00:20:34,130 --> 00:20:36,800 If you immersed yourself in fiction for that long, 186 00:20:36,800 --> 00:20:43,610 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 187 00:20:43,610 --> 00:20:51,830 terms of creating that model and getting kind of distracted and rather unkind of access to fictional worlds were women and young people. 188 00:20:51,830 --> 00:20:59,330 And there's this kind of hysterical commentary on how terrible it is that women, women will be on their own reading fiction. 189 00:20:59,330 --> 00:21:03,110 And that scene is kind of almost erotically tempting for them. 190 00:21:03,110 --> 00:21:11,810 So here's one content writer describing what happens, what would happen if the prevalence of all of these novels, 191 00:21:11,810 --> 00:21:15,890 every corner of the kingdom, is abundantly supplied with them in vain? 192 00:21:15,890 --> 00:21:24,440 Is you secluded from the corruptions of the living world? Books are commonly allowed them with little restriction as innocent amusements. 193 00:21:24,440 --> 00:21:28,850 Yet these often pollute the heart in the recesses of the closet, 194 00:21:28,850 --> 00:21:35,780 inflame the passions at a distance from temptation, and teach all the malignity of vice. 195 00:21:35,780 --> 00:21:44,030 In solitude, another content writer describes the way in which the girls virtue she got steadily corrupted. 196 00:21:44,030 --> 00:21:50,240 The appetite becomes too keen to be denied. And in proportion as it is more urgent prose less nice and select. 197 00:21:50,240 --> 00:21:55,250 And it's fair. What would formerly have given offence now gives none. 198 00:21:55,250 --> 00:21:58,190 The palate is vitiated or made dull. 199 00:21:58,190 --> 00:22:09,230 The produce of the book club and the contents of the circulating library are devoured with indiscriminate and insatiable avidity. 200 00:22:09,230 --> 00:22:17,600 Actually, the evidence of contemporary library borrowing records and book sales from the mid 18th century 201 00:22:17,600 --> 00:22:23,120 shows that the people who are most likely to be buying novels were in fact middle aged men. 202 00:22:23,120 --> 00:22:27,860 But there's a total mismatch between the kind of moral hysteria over women and 203 00:22:27,860 --> 00:22:32,600 young people reading fiction and the actual likelihood of them consuming them. 204 00:22:32,600 --> 00:22:37,670 I think one of the reasons for that was because women and young people see it not very good at distancing 205 00:22:37,670 --> 00:22:43,820 themselves from the fictional worlds that they encountered and so much more likely to muddle them up. 206 00:22:43,820 --> 00:22:49,970 And so this creates a particular role for reading together in the family because it's enabled a kind of shared and 207 00:22:49,970 --> 00:22:55,400 more controlled exposure to fiction than the idea of people scurrying of up to their rooms to do it on their own, 208 00:22:55,400 --> 00:23:01,880 on their beds. I was a little bit like a kind of moral prophylactic in a way, this reading together in a family, 209 00:23:01,880 --> 00:23:06,920 because you got to shape not only what was read, but house read, how it was raised. 210 00:23:06,920 --> 00:23:14,350 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. 211 00:23:14,350 --> 00:23:19,130 Are we also anxious about people going off into private spaces and becoming 212 00:23:19,130 --> 00:23:23,020 immersed in fantasy worlds that they will struggle to emerge from in their heads? 213 00:23:23,020 --> 00:23:27,860 That we feel that's dangerous in a way that we can't necessarily quantify or explain. 214 00:23:27,860 --> 00:23:35,310 And that seems really parallel with the ways in which fiction, prose, fiction and the novel was viewed in the 18th century. 215 00:23:35,310 --> 00:23:39,560 So I've written this book about reading out aloud. 216 00:23:39,560 --> 00:23:45,840 And one of the things that it really made me think about was the role of all reality in thinking about books and literature. 217 00:23:45,840 --> 00:23:53,430 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. 218 00:23:53,430 --> 00:24:01,380 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. 219 00:24:01,380 --> 00:24:08,010 And she said that the best prose style was that which could be longest read without exhausting the breath. 220 00:24:08,010 --> 00:24:14,310 And it's totally true that how long the sentence is completely conditions. Still pleasure of being able to read this out aloud. 221 00:24:14,310 --> 00:24:20,490 At the moment, I am most days doing a little reading on face time of chapters for a book of a book. 222 00:24:20,490 --> 00:24:27,900 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, 223 00:24:27,900 --> 00:24:31,290 but when there are too many consonants and I trip up in the way that I'm reading. 224 00:24:31,290 --> 00:24:33,330 And I also really learnt about how all the chapters are. 225 00:24:33,330 --> 00:24:38,310 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. 226 00:24:38,310 --> 00:24:46,530 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. 227 00:24:46,530 --> 00:24:53,010 So reading out aloud this is 18th century is often called the great edge of elocution, 228 00:24:53,010 --> 00:25:01,980 because one of the consequences of this rise of the middling sort and of rising affluence is that more there's rising literacy, 229 00:25:01,980 --> 00:25:08,520 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, 230 00:25:08,520 --> 00:25:12,390 to distinguish yourself from all the other people who read in a really ordinary way. 231 00:25:12,390 --> 00:25:16,260 So you could buy books that taught you how to read aloud and you could hire a tutor. 232 00:25:16,260 --> 00:25:18,120 You could go to a lecture to see how it was done. 233 00:25:18,120 --> 00:25:24,390 You could go to a spouting club, which was where you would learn to read out plays in a really dramatic manner. 234 00:25:24,390 --> 00:25:33,300 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. 235 00:25:33,300 --> 00:25:40,380 So I am going to do a master class, an 18th century, reading aloud with my willing pupil here. 236 00:25:40,380 --> 00:25:48,270 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. 237 00:25:48,270 --> 00:25:55,170 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. 238 00:25:55,170 --> 00:26:01,650 So it's total handholding for the would be elocution re student. 239 00:26:01,650 --> 00:26:10,200 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. 240 00:26:10,200 --> 00:26:16,500 And I'm going to instruct Giles here, if you're willing, in how to read it out loud. 241 00:26:16,500 --> 00:26:21,840 18TH century style. So Giles and Eastern Story. 242 00:26:21,840 --> 00:26:30,380 Obiter the sun of up Seener left the caravanserai early in the morning and pursued his journey through the plains of India, 243 00:26:30,380 --> 00:26:38,280 St. Louis now a little warm and animated in your expression. 244 00:26:38,280 --> 00:26:44,070 He was fresh and vigorous with rest. He was animated with hope. 245 00:26:44,070 --> 00:26:51,080 He was incited by desire. Now, look as if you were viewing the scene described. 246 00:26:51,080 --> 00:26:57,740 He moved swiftly over the valleys and saw the hills gradually rising before him. 247 00:26:57,740 --> 00:27:06,010 You must glow with the writer in your expression as you proceed with this enchanting description. 248 00:27:06,010 --> 00:27:13,210 As he passed along his is, we're delighted with the morning song of the Bird of Paradise. 249 00:27:13,210 --> 00:27:21,730 He was fined by the last flutters of the sinking breeze, and Sprinkel was due by Karroum Spices. 250 00:27:21,730 --> 00:27:26,830 Let your tone be now more powerful in order to greater contrast. 251 00:27:26,830 --> 00:27:34,000 That follows of great beauty mark, particularly the word towering. 252 00:27:34,000 --> 00:27:40,390 He sometimes contemplated the towering height to evoke monarch of the hills. 253 00:27:40,390 --> 00:27:41,410 Here comes the crown jewel, 254 00:27:41,410 --> 00:27:52,240 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. 255 00:27:52,240 --> 00:27:59,370 Eldest daughter of the scream conclude the sentence with a glow of satisfaction. 256 00:27:59,370 --> 00:28:07,020 All his senses were gratified and all care was banished from his heart. 257 00:28:07,020 --> 00:28:13,950 Thus he went on till the sun approached his meridian and the increasing heat preyed upon his strength. 258 00:28:13,950 --> 00:28:23,340 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. 259 00:28:23,340 --> 00:28:28,740 He entered it and found the coolness and verdure irresistibly pleasant in descriptions. 260 00:28:28,740 --> 00:28:34,700 The equally descriptive in your manner of. So when you mentioned the sun as above, 261 00:28:34,700 --> 00:28:41,820 cast your eyes upwards and give a look as if you discovered the grove when you read his or his right hand to grow, 262 00:28:41,820 --> 00:28:46,130 etc., your forefinger pointed at the same time. 263 00:28:46,130 --> 00:28:58,430 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. 264 00:28:58,430 --> 00:29:02,480 He then looked around for some far more commodious Paul. 265 00:29:02,480 --> 00:29:10,040 He saw on his right hand a grove that seemed to wave at Schayes is a sign of invitation. 266 00:29:10,040 --> 00:29:18,080 He entered it and found the coolness and verdure irresistibly pleasant. 267 00:29:18,080 --> 00:29:22,620 Billions, billions? Not at all. How many, right? 268 00:29:22,620 --> 00:29:32,280 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. 269 00:29:32,280 --> 00:29:37,020 B, supernatural wouldn't say supernatural. They said be very natural. 270 00:29:37,020 --> 00:29:41,100 In fact, it was pretty stagey, judging by those instructions. 271 00:29:41,100 --> 00:29:50,340 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. 272 00:29:50,340 --> 00:29:56,700 And you probably all need to learn to raise your game a bit in terms of the pointing and general hand gestures. 273 00:29:56,700 --> 00:30:01,620 And with that, that seems a really good moment for us to see if there's any questions, 274 00:30:01,620 --> 00:30:05,730 if anyone wants to and wants to ask any of the things that we've been talking about. 275 00:30:05,730 --> 00:30:15,260 And I think Phillip is going to help us that to see what people might have to say about it. 276 00:30:15,260 --> 00:30:34,130 Philip either setting up a team next. I'm not quite sure where it is at the moment. 277 00:30:34,130 --> 00:30:50,170 You know, any good 18th century jokes? Shall I read some more readings? 278 00:30:50,170 --> 00:30:56,440 Hello, hello, hello. Apologies for that. I was having some technical difficulties and then the great moral quandary of 279 00:30:56,440 --> 00:31:00,700 where to relocate myself in a way that wouldn't reveal my terrible interior décor. 280 00:31:00,700 --> 00:31:05,560 So but anyway, I'm I'm back. 281 00:31:05,560 --> 00:31:11,890 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, 282 00:31:11,890 --> 00:31:18,520 which was a what about a guide to gestures and the appropriate physical expression of the words. 283 00:31:18,520 --> 00:31:23,510 And you were simultaneously answering that as as you talk. 284 00:31:23,510 --> 00:31:25,990 So thank you for that terrific demonstration. 285 00:31:25,990 --> 00:31:34,030 And also this historical look back with Claire, extraordinary contemporary residences is one cheeky quick question, 286 00:31:34,030 --> 00:31:39,290 which is coming from one of the viewers is what you get your wallpaper from and do that. 287 00:31:39,290 --> 00:31:47,140 Do we get a commission? Is it cold, cold and sunny? 288 00:31:47,140 --> 00:31:51,460 That's what it's called. Yeah, some Italian sort of sexy. 289 00:31:51,460 --> 00:31:54,880 I think that some design and it's cool. 290 00:31:54,880 --> 00:32:02,950 Well, in the spirit of kind of commercial uncompromised, we should say, the other wallpaper brands are also available. 291 00:32:02,950 --> 00:32:10,260 So. Yeah. Thank you. I'm sure one viewer is very, very pleased that we bought more seriously. 292 00:32:10,260 --> 00:32:15,700 I'm one of one, as the viewers has asked, whether there's a sense that people were writing, 293 00:32:15,700 --> 00:32:22,900 knowing that little works would be read aloud or read collectively or performed in the way that you demonstrated. 294 00:32:22,900 --> 00:32:29,380 Can we see traces in the written texts of an assumption of a kind of oral culture that's going on at this time? 295 00:32:29,380 --> 00:32:34,330 I think that's such an interesting question and probably a there's a whole other book about that. 296 00:32:34,330 --> 00:32:41,290 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, 297 00:32:41,290 --> 00:32:47,770 which makes those little kind of aphoristic snippets very kind of take ible article 298 00:32:47,770 --> 00:32:52,750 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. 299 00:32:52,750 --> 00:33:00,190 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. 300 00:33:00,190 --> 00:33:03,160 So what I really loved was people who wrote diaries and just told you everything 301 00:33:03,160 --> 00:33:09,310 about that day because then they would tell you what they were reading, how many pages they read and who they read it with. 302 00:33:09,310 --> 00:33:14,410 And you can start to map a sense of that, the kind of social life of the book in a quite practical way. 303 00:33:14,410 --> 00:33:17,470 And one of the things that you realise when you start to look at those diary entries 304 00:33:17,470 --> 00:33:21,430 is that it's never the same group of people assembled for every book reading. 305 00:33:21,430 --> 00:33:26,510 So say you're reading something like Fanny, Fanny, Cecilia or Avellino, quite long novels. 306 00:33:26,510 --> 00:33:33,140 They read every series of weeks. And because in the kind of boring but deep, brilliantly detailed typed diaries, 307 00:33:33,140 --> 00:33:40,090 the because the people assembled each time a different you can three understand has episodic fictionalises 308 00:33:40,090 --> 00:33:45,370 that you have to have each seen as a kind of set for little vignettes that it sense in its own terms, 309 00:33:45,370 --> 00:33:50,220 because people are not going to be always knowing exactly what happened in the last chapter. 310 00:33:50,220 --> 00:33:56,160 So I think that kind of episodic structure of a lot of 18th century fiction lends itself to serialisation, 311 00:33:56,160 --> 00:34:00,840 even when the book wasn't published in serial form, even when it's published, publishes the whole thing. 312 00:34:00,840 --> 00:34:05,190 It would have been consumed in little chunks. 313 00:34:05,190 --> 00:34:08,640 And therefore, Richard, structures in this, which is fascinating. 314 00:34:08,640 --> 00:34:13,260 I mean, from my point of view, as someone who works on 19th century Russian literature, we think of big, long novels. 315 00:34:13,260 --> 00:34:18,840 But in fact, they were consumed in a very similar way with a chapter a month. 316 00:34:18,840 --> 00:34:22,560 Which explains why in a novel like Anna Karenina, one moment, 317 00:34:22,560 --> 00:34:27,490 the plots duelling with one group of people and the next moment that episode structures is there. 318 00:34:27,490 --> 00:34:33,810 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. 319 00:34:33,810 --> 00:34:40,020 It's fascinating to see your 18th century work resonating in it in a slightly later period. 320 00:34:40,020 --> 00:34:44,520 Another question that's come in is about the relationship between this sort of written culture 321 00:34:44,520 --> 00:34:49,680 and the reading aloud of words already written and kind of aural folk culture and storytelling, 322 00:34:49,680 --> 00:34:55,740 which is perhaps more spontaneous or passed down without being mediated by by the written form. 323 00:34:55,740 --> 00:35:02,940 Do you see a kind of interaction there between these these two modes of producing stories and texts? 324 00:35:02,940 --> 00:35:11,010 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, 325 00:35:11,010 --> 00:35:18,480 which is around the aspirational sorts of reading aloud and creating compilations for middling small 326 00:35:18,480 --> 00:35:23,100 audiences which enable them to do a really fabulous general things containing their friends in the evening. 327 00:35:23,100 --> 00:35:29,550 But there's clearly running alongside at the strong the, you know, a kind of aural folk culture, 328 00:35:29,550 --> 00:35:36,900 which is about the passing down of a story which gets modified each time it's read out loud and they coexist. 329 00:35:36,900 --> 00:35:40,450 And I think that we would want to think about different models of reading aloud. 330 00:35:40,450 --> 00:35:44,130 You know, there's a reading aloud in communities which aren't all literate where the person who has 331 00:35:44,130 --> 00:35:50,820 literacy enables something to become spoken or read for those who don't have access to it. 332 00:35:50,820 --> 00:35:57,450 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. 333 00:35:57,450 --> 00:36:05,760 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 334 00:36:05,760 --> 00:36:10,890 friends bits of smart packaging them up and selling them as part of the print culture. 335 00:36:10,890 --> 00:36:21,330 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. 336 00:36:21,330 --> 00:36:26,100 Mm hmm. I'm going to bring together two two related questions. 337 00:36:26,100 --> 00:36:33,820 One was, how were the books selected that were read in these in these groups and in these domestic spaces? 338 00:36:33,820 --> 00:36:40,530 Is there any evidence of that process of selection and then a sort of more presentist one, which is could you reckon? 339 00:36:40,530 --> 00:36:44,850 Now that would be really good to read in the ways that you've been describing? 340 00:36:44,850 --> 00:36:49,230 If people want to go and try this at home for themselves. OK. 341 00:36:49,230 --> 00:36:53,070 So the first of the first question is about how people chose this stuff. 342 00:36:53,070 --> 00:36:53,250 Well, 343 00:36:53,250 --> 00:37:00,240 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? 344 00:37:00,240 --> 00:37:07,500 So the idea that it's a carefully curated event, each reading an ad session is given the light by that instance. 345 00:37:07,500 --> 00:37:11,580 I think that there will have been times where people just went for what they had. 346 00:37:11,580 --> 00:37:14,460 The fact that you could get compilations which gave you easily accessible, 347 00:37:14,460 --> 00:37:20,930 inappropriate material for family consumption was one way of kind of preselecting. 348 00:37:20,930 --> 00:37:28,420 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. 349 00:37:28,420 --> 00:37:34,230 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. 350 00:37:34,230 --> 00:37:38,250 And the person who owned that book clearly didn't think it was all good, clean fun. 351 00:37:38,250 --> 00:37:44,490 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. 352 00:37:44,490 --> 00:37:52,780 And that comes about when we're getting a little stuck up there. And they just clearly thought that a family entertainment. 353 00:37:52,780 --> 00:37:56,880 So I suppose the sense of where the 9:00 watershed was in terms of appropriate. 354 00:37:56,880 --> 00:38:04,140 This is the kind of question there about what people chose. And then in terms of what I think will be good. 355 00:38:04,140 --> 00:38:11,970 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, 356 00:38:11,970 --> 00:38:16,670 then you want something which has got a bit of an episodic structure which has which is broken down into little chance. 357 00:38:16,670 --> 00:38:21,210 As we discussed, so that you don't have to have too much catch up between each moment. 358 00:38:21,210 --> 00:38:26,490 Dialogue works really well. Accent's kind of mixed tone. 359 00:38:26,490 --> 00:38:33,540 So that I mean, that is what is good about many 18th century novels that a shoot between tragedy and comedy 360 00:38:33,540 --> 00:38:39,000 description and dialogue so that you get a kind of generic mix within within an individual. 361 00:38:39,000 --> 00:38:45,620 What I'm thinking about at the moment, because we're teaching online and thinking of how not just to do the same old, 362 00:38:45,620 --> 00:38:48,780 but how to use the new format to even change what we're doing. 363 00:38:48,780 --> 00:38:53,920 I'm very much the kid that actually some some drama would be a really good way to shoot a more episodic. 364 00:38:53,920 --> 00:38:58,050 And in my field, checkoffs captures that sort of tragicomic mixture. 365 00:38:58,050 --> 00:39:02,450 And that's so I'll follow up on that and credit you for that. So that's sort of. 366 00:39:02,450 --> 00:39:08,550 So the inspiration, a number of questions have coming, which are really to do with with gender here. 367 00:39:08,550 --> 00:39:15,390 Which other is there a difference between the way men may read or women may read or mixed communities? 368 00:39:15,390 --> 00:39:19,980 Is there a difference in the kind of social function over the function in the family 369 00:39:19,980 --> 00:39:26,160 that people might perform dependent depending on whether they are men or women? 370 00:39:26,160 --> 00:39:30,300 That's a good question. I mean, so clearly some of that rise of the novel, 371 00:39:30,300 --> 00:39:39,330 anxiety about novels being too erotically charged and seductive and dangerous for women or young people to be reading on their own agenda elements 372 00:39:39,330 --> 00:39:47,400 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. 373 00:39:47,400 --> 00:39:53,310 So this clearly agenda element that I think that in terms of so there are some situations in which the same 374 00:39:53,310 --> 00:39:58,350 kind of reading type seems tacked on the same day of the week across many households and many decades. 375 00:39:58,350 --> 00:40:02,550 And that is that Sunday is a special day for devotional reading and the reading of scripture. 376 00:40:02,550 --> 00:40:06,120 And I think that would often have been carried out by the kind of patriarch of the 377 00:40:06,120 --> 00:40:11,190 house who had a responsibility for the spiritual guidance of everyone in the household, 378 00:40:11,190 --> 00:40:18,960 not just family, but the servants as well. So there's a kind of dented aspect to that. 379 00:40:18,960 --> 00:40:22,710 Then there's the whole question of who has the literacy in the household that, you know, 380 00:40:22,710 --> 00:40:27,000 we can talk about households where you have a choice about who reads and then there have their hassles, 381 00:40:27,000 --> 00:40:29,970 where there's no choice about who reads because not everyone carry. 382 00:40:29,970 --> 00:40:35,820 So a key part of the education of the dissenting education of children was in enabling 383 00:40:35,820 --> 00:40:40,110 kids to learn so that they could reach their parents who didn't have literacy. 384 00:40:40,110 --> 00:40:45,360 And so in that case, you get the reverse of what we expect our generational model of reading aloud to be, 385 00:40:45,360 --> 00:40:52,410 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. 386 00:40:52,410 --> 00:40:58,050 So there are lots of different kinds of knowledge dynamics going on in that situation. 387 00:40:58,050 --> 00:41:05,670 I think when you talk about sort of access to literacy and knowledge and that sort of instances, I suppose, power and authority. 388 00:41:05,670 --> 00:41:14,880 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 389 00:41:14,880 --> 00:41:19,870 social costs and costs are actually faced by collective reading or shared the 390 00:41:19,870 --> 00:41:24,750 kind of shared performance reading cultures that you've mapped out for us? 391 00:41:24,750 --> 00:41:29,190 Yeah, I mean, there are some examples. Yeah, there were some. 392 00:41:29,190 --> 00:41:36,180 There were some. There's some anecdotal evidence of people having this literate servants reading to them while they do other things. 393 00:41:36,180 --> 00:41:45,930 So in that case, that's a shared reading experience. But not one person is being employed to do the reading for another person. 394 00:41:45,930 --> 00:41:48,380 There's a really extraordinary. 395 00:41:48,380 --> 00:41:56,840 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? 396 00:41:56,840 --> 00:42:00,350 And I guess there were two things that took a really long time in 18th century. 397 00:42:00,350 --> 00:42:04,820 One was reading Clarissa and the other one was having a hard time with us in place. 398 00:42:04,820 --> 00:42:10,300 And that's a description of a woman having her hair dressed with a group of female friends around her. 399 00:42:10,300 --> 00:42:17,400 So the maid behind her is doing her hair. All the women are listening to one of them reading aloud from Clarissa. 400 00:42:17,400 --> 00:42:24,050 Woman having a hair done suddenly realises she can. Filson Black plucks of water landing on top of her head. 401 00:42:24,050 --> 00:42:29,600 And the maid who is doing her hair listening to Clarissa has to cry. The pathos of the scene. 402 00:42:29,600 --> 00:42:35,360 So they will kind of stop the woman having the head and goes outside with the maid. 403 00:42:35,360 --> 00:42:41,750 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 404 00:42:41,750 --> 00:42:51,770 the maid is kind of rewarded for her refined feelings at having cried this fictional this fictional story in polite company, 405 00:42:51,770 --> 00:42:58,310 and then gets to kind of in some way join the group of feeling that is normally outside of her kind of class remit. 406 00:42:58,310 --> 00:43:02,720 Mm hmm. Cause that's that's that's really everything. It sounds like a story in its own right. 407 00:43:02,720 --> 00:43:09,020 That's right, Rita. I wonder I mean, you've you've talked about your your academic interest in this. 408 00:43:09,020 --> 00:43:18,380 And then clearly, Charles, you perform and you were you creating this kind of literary musical sounds before you embarks on this project. 409 00:43:18,380 --> 00:43:24,700 So as you know or have you become very self-conscious about doing these things, thinking about it in a historical context, 410 00:43:24,700 --> 00:43:31,220 or just all that knowledge in writing fall away when you start reading aloud and you start interacting and sowing immediacy. 411 00:43:31,220 --> 00:43:41,480 So at the same time playing. And what does your academic engagement with this material do to your own experience of reading such finnessey? 412 00:43:41,480 --> 00:43:47,420 I think. Well, I mean, I've always been interested in this this era of music anyway, so. 413 00:43:47,420 --> 00:43:51,320 And and earlier music, which which obviously it was, 414 00:43:51,320 --> 00:43:58,590 involves a certain amount of research just because the further back you go, the less that's known, by the way, is performed. 415 00:43:58,590 --> 00:44:06,170 So it's always been interesting to note to see the context of how the music is placed. 416 00:44:06,170 --> 00:44:13,190 You know, we've when I started out playing music, it was very much a fixed concert hall format. 417 00:44:13,190 --> 00:44:18,120 You know, we played concerts. You had a programme. We didn't really know what music was. 418 00:44:18,120 --> 00:44:26,430 And. And during my career, I think more laws, as is being done on imaginative programming, 419 00:44:26,430 --> 00:44:30,330 I'm putting programmes in different places and contextualising music. 420 00:44:30,330 --> 00:44:34,520 It makes all the difference to the way the music is played. 421 00:44:34,520 --> 00:44:44,920 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. 422 00:44:44,920 --> 00:44:48,710 You know, nowadays we think of it play, dance. It's nice to play. 423 00:44:48,710 --> 00:44:56,960 I think, you know, it always had a social context where people would have actually played the function of dancing to. 424 00:44:56,960 --> 00:45:02,360 So NATO has been very interesting from that point of view to try to make again. 425 00:45:02,360 --> 00:45:09,590 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, 426 00:45:09,590 --> 00:45:13,850 as well as the kind of printed literary texts that we've talked about. Yes. 427 00:45:13,850 --> 00:45:20,900 Well, some of the broadsides appear in these miscellany is that we used in the hunger and they refused. 428 00:45:20,900 --> 00:45:30,070 And we've used ballots from from the texts that these mistletoes in this programme. 429 00:45:30,070 --> 00:45:39,400 And to go back to that question about how. So the question was really about how this research has influenced or practise. 430 00:45:39,400 --> 00:45:43,390 But in fact, it's been for me is the really big impact has been the other way round. 431 00:45:43,390 --> 00:45:52,310 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, 432 00:45:52,310 --> 00:45:58,390 oh, that's how it works, John. I mean, so we had this really well, to me, it was really striking. 433 00:45:58,390 --> 00:46:05,110 We did a gig at your early music festival and we were singing a song in Praise of Yum, 434 00:46:05,110 --> 00:46:12,130 which was kind of really kind of vanilla ish pastoral celebration of the town of Young, 435 00:46:12,130 --> 00:46:19,440 which used these sort of neoclassical ideas of green verdure, an idyllic green and, you know, calm. 436 00:46:19,440 --> 00:46:22,810 And those are so many of those funds in 18th century. 437 00:46:22,810 --> 00:46:25,630 So many of those songs and never really answered why they're so popular. 438 00:46:25,630 --> 00:46:32,830 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. 439 00:46:32,830 --> 00:46:42,280 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, 440 00:46:42,280 --> 00:46:47,890 the verdure is the same that houses a neat and the gordis Minerva has here has seats. 441 00:46:47,890 --> 00:46:51,880 Everyone laughed and it became kind of ironic because they were measuring up their 442 00:46:51,880 --> 00:46:55,810 own lived experience of Young with this idealised version that was in the song. 443 00:46:55,810 --> 00:47:01,900 And I realised, oh yeah, of course, people enjoyed the mismatch between their lived reality and its idealisation, 444 00:47:01,900 --> 00:47:07,360 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. 445 00:47:07,360 --> 00:47:12,310 Wants everyone to read postural idealisation of the rural countryside. 446 00:47:12,310 --> 00:47:15,550 It was because so they enjoy against the rotation of that gap. 447 00:47:15,550 --> 00:47:20,950 And I would not have thought about it like that had we not had we not performed it well. 448 00:47:20,950 --> 00:47:27,280 Fascinating. Another question just come in which asks about the relationship between reading 449 00:47:27,280 --> 00:47:31,630 aloud and the kind of advice that you were talking about in the domestic space, 450 00:47:31,630 --> 00:47:39,820 which was a sort of about an artful form of naturalness, as opposed to what we might know about stage declamation and theatrical practises 451 00:47:39,820 --> 00:47:44,290 and the advice given to to those who are working in those kind of public spaces. 452 00:47:44,290 --> 00:47:45,370 I mean, is other. 453 00:47:45,370 --> 00:47:52,630 Is there a continuum or is there a discontinuity between the kind of very different practises that were going on in these different spaces? 454 00:47:52,630 --> 00:48:01,270 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. 455 00:48:01,270 --> 00:48:07,330 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. 456 00:48:07,330 --> 00:48:14,770 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. 457 00:48:14,770 --> 00:48:20,470 So it was definitely informed by stage practise, but also very distinctly separate from it. 458 00:48:20,470 --> 00:48:27,520 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 459 00:48:27,520 --> 00:48:34,030 actually in style than to do the kind of perceived moral consequences of embodying a fictional role rose in the home. 460 00:48:34,030 --> 00:48:39,550 So tools into the 18th century, you get the rise of amateur dramatics. Are people staging theatricals in their homes? 461 00:48:39,550 --> 00:48:46,090 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 462 00:48:46,090 --> 00:48:52,210 kids and their domestic responsibilities and get too carried away with the idea of being actresses who often had dubious reputations. 463 00:48:52,210 --> 00:48:56,800 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 464 00:48:56,800 --> 00:49:03,160 world theatre and everything that speaks of rather than don't get carried away your hand gestures. 465 00:49:03,160 --> 00:49:07,420 And interesting as well to put us to another angle on this is thinking about the reading aloud. 466 00:49:07,420 --> 00:49:10,930 You mentioned earlier the patriarch reading the family Bible and the religious text. 467 00:49:10,930 --> 00:49:18,310 That's a form of reading which is about truth and not impersonating, but conveying something kind of unmediated. 468 00:49:18,310 --> 00:49:24,910 And it's interesting to think of that this kind of reading precisely being about artifice and impersonation. 469 00:49:24,910 --> 00:49:33,010 I'm taking you to very different areas. One of the questions, which is literally, has anyone guess the answer to the riddle? 470 00:49:33,010 --> 00:49:43,170 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. 471 00:49:43,170 --> 00:49:47,140 We've had a glimpse of the suggestions and they are brilliant and inventive. 472 00:49:47,140 --> 00:49:55,930 So there it goes. But a little suspense. That's one question was about dressing up. 473 00:49:55,930 --> 00:50:01,090 Did was this just took something that took place in sort of ordinary time or was there a kind of staging 474 00:50:01,090 --> 00:50:07,190 and framing of the reading and the reading aloud by by kind of marking it as special and different? 475 00:50:07,190 --> 00:50:10,650 By changing closing? Well, who knows? 476 00:50:10,650 --> 00:50:15,250 I mean, you know, which was my reasoning as it was. Well, one thing, but they will have been many different kinds. 477 00:50:15,250 --> 00:50:19,560 You know, there will just be one person reading to another embed or that will have been, you know, 478 00:50:19,560 --> 00:50:27,450 these rather more performative social occasions where people made it into a kind of parlour game or the devotional experience of a Sunday reading. 479 00:50:27,450 --> 00:50:34,560 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. 480 00:50:34,560 --> 00:50:37,130 But I don't think that every time anyone go out book, 481 00:50:37,130 --> 00:50:44,550 they especially went upstairs and puts on a new outfit for it's all given that it's a single person reading a book, 482 00:50:44,550 --> 00:50:47,580 which often they would inhabit different set range of character roles. 483 00:50:47,580 --> 00:50:52,230 It seems quite likely that you would have some Matt sweatshop thing where you run out the door 484 00:50:52,230 --> 00:50:57,990 and put on a new outfit to be a different person that you'll know whose voice you're doing. 485 00:50:57,990 --> 00:51:05,530 So it sounds like it sounds like a future project for someone to it's some material culture 486 00:51:05,530 --> 00:51:12,120 that I'm just looking over at the questions which I try to create and separate nice, 487 00:51:12,120 --> 00:51:18,600 coherent groups up. I think one of the things that might be nice to finish up on is a series of questions which are 488 00:51:18,600 --> 00:51:23,670 about the present moment and how we can use what we've been talking about to help us through this. 489 00:51:23,670 --> 00:51:29,790 One is question has come in, which was how often did the social life of books extend beyond the family? 490 00:51:29,790 --> 00:51:36,400 Was it common for neighbours or community members to join in reading together either at home or in the news at night? 491 00:51:36,400 --> 00:51:43,140 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. 492 00:51:43,140 --> 00:51:49,270 But that kinship group and family group and friendship groups, I think we're all missing those kind of relations. 493 00:51:49,270 --> 00:51:57,890 So I wonder whether you have any historical evidence about about how the reading groups were extended beyond the immediate households. 494 00:51:57,890 --> 00:51:58,530 Yeah. 495 00:51:58,530 --> 00:52:05,370 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. 496 00:52:05,370 --> 00:52:07,410 And so was Miss Helton. 497 00:52:07,410 --> 00:52:15,540 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. 498 00:52:15,540 --> 00:52:19,810 You know, you get like four different sets of people coming to see you and reading. 499 00:52:19,810 --> 00:52:24,450 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. 500 00:52:24,450 --> 00:52:29,940 So I think that was probably kind of, you know, extended family in a rather more fluid sense, 501 00:52:29,940 --> 00:52:37,140 a kind of a number of other acquaintances who will have been part of those occasions. 502 00:52:37,140 --> 00:52:42,390 I think you can also just think about that, translate into the kind of contact. Remember why we're doing everything you know? 503 00:52:42,390 --> 00:52:45,840 Well, so many things that she said that we see people, but we're not actually seeing them. 504 00:52:45,840 --> 00:52:54,060 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 505 00:52:54,060 --> 00:52:57,390 through the way in which people discuss them over letters in the 18th century. 506 00:52:57,390 --> 00:53:03,890 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. 507 00:53:03,890 --> 00:53:08,460 So they have a kind of virtual book club which is conducted through the post. 508 00:53:08,460 --> 00:53:10,380 And that seems a very kind of parallel thing. 509 00:53:10,380 --> 00:53:15,840 And they often talk about longing to see one another being stuck in a house, in a company, not being able to get out. 510 00:53:15,840 --> 00:53:25,980 But this being an alternative or replacement for the physical sociability that they lungful. 511 00:53:25,980 --> 00:53:31,230 One of the things that's really interesting about these life events is the way that as we're talking, questions are coming in. 512 00:53:31,230 --> 00:53:33,700 You're anticipating in your office the questions that come in. 513 00:53:33,700 --> 00:53:40,500 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 514 00:53:40,500 --> 00:53:46,620 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, 515 00:53:46,620 --> 00:53:52,950 waiting for the next example. But a really curious questions come in that set me thinking. 516 00:53:52,950 --> 00:53:57,200 We had a little bit words, a lot about language, about music. 517 00:53:57,200 --> 00:54:02,910 We have we've had a sort of noise led session. But what about silence and all of this? 518 00:54:02,910 --> 00:54:11,070 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. 519 00:54:11,070 --> 00:54:20,910 And I'm fascinated by that phenomenon. What do you think about the relationship between Nois voice, music, making sound and then silence? 520 00:54:20,910 --> 00:54:25,170 Yeah, I think some. Yes, it's interesting, isn't it? 521 00:54:25,170 --> 00:54:33,660 We have replaced a whole story about silent reading in what we've been saying today with one about noisy, busy reading. 522 00:54:33,660 --> 00:54:38,100 And that is a kind of counterargument to the idea of the rise of the silent reader. 523 00:54:38,100 --> 00:54:41,370 And it's a form of self absorption. 524 00:54:41,370 --> 00:54:49,980 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. 525 00:54:49,980 --> 00:54:55,530 I think I'm just looking at the kind of historical evidence of discussion of silence and noise. 526 00:54:55,530 --> 00:55:02,250 There were examples that I found in diaries and letters that I read where people talked about the kind of bullishness 527 00:55:02,250 --> 00:55:08,670 of reading aloud in social spaces that they would go into a room and some would insist on reading the paper out loud, 528 00:55:08,670 --> 00:55:13,080 even when they just wanted to sit down quietly and write a letter or read their own book. 529 00:55:13,080 --> 00:55:16,710 So I think, you know, sometimes that noise can be invasive, 530 00:55:16,710 --> 00:55:21,930 especially when you've got a whole load of people in a house and a limited number of social spaces to be in. 531 00:55:21,930 --> 00:55:29,310 It's not always this kind of Pollyanna ish, lovely, binding bonding experience, writing joint noise and reading in a house. 532 00:55:29,310 --> 00:55:38,810 Sometimes it's alienating and pretty much pretty irritating to have somebody else literary tastes or elocution aspirations foisted upon you. 533 00:55:38,810 --> 00:55:44,540 Well, there's been certainly nothing alienating or irritating about a discussion for the last hour. 534 00:55:44,540 --> 00:55:51,290 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. 535 00:55:51,290 --> 00:55:56,180 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. 536 00:55:56,180 --> 00:56:05,360 Yeah. It is called and it's identical to features wit or the muse in masquerade. 537 00:56:05,360 --> 00:56:10,970 And which one is from so many of the NIE found, so many of them tend to be less readable. 538 00:56:10,970 --> 00:56:17,510 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. 539 00:56:17,510 --> 00:56:23,060 But it sounds like there are several of these. Let me. Let me. So I think it might be available. 540 00:56:23,060 --> 00:56:26,960 Google book. So we might be able to link to PDAF. 541 00:56:26,960 --> 00:56:35,060 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. 542 00:56:35,060 --> 00:56:40,970 So someone has suggested it might be a purse. Someone has gone with a needle. 543 00:56:40,970 --> 00:56:47,230 Someone has gone for a pocket that is tied around the waist and not sewn in the pockets. 544 00:56:47,230 --> 00:56:54,380 Also suggested a book on a lap. Someone has suggested a chair. 545 00:56:54,380 --> 00:57:01,320 Someone has suggested a toilet. And someone has gone for a cello and. 546 00:57:01,320 --> 00:57:04,640 Yeah. Well, there is I put in mind of it. 547 00:57:04,640 --> 00:57:08,030 Absolutely. On principle. Thomas Beecham. 548 00:57:08,030 --> 00:57:16,490 Story of people and yes, those of us who know it can enjoy some silent pleasure from that one. 549 00:57:16,490 --> 00:57:25,820 But I think we should ask you to reveal the punchline now. The answer is a rolling pin boom. 550 00:57:25,820 --> 00:57:34,880 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. 551 00:57:34,880 --> 00:57:38,530 That's brilliant. Thank you every. Thank you, Giles. 552 00:57:38,530 --> 00:57:44,930 That's just been a terrific trip to the 18th century and a whole series of wonderful parallels with our own time. 553 00:57:44,930 --> 00:57:50,450 Thank you for your energy and your insights and all your answers to the questions. 554 00:57:50,450 --> 00:58:00,140 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. 555 00:58:00,140 --> 00:58:04,400 So please join us next week for Big Tent Life event. 556 00:58:04,400 --> 00:58:09,230 This will take place on Thursday, the 7th of May at five pm. 557 00:58:09,230 --> 00:58:13,040 Next week, I will be in conversation with Dr. Leah Broad. 558 00:58:13,040 --> 00:58:19,880 And together, we'll be celebrating philtre Tchaikovsky. Russia's most famous 19th century composer. 559 00:58:19,880 --> 00:58:25,910 And that will form part of our Music Week. We hope that you'll be able to join us again then. 560 00:58:25,910 --> 00:58:59,069 Thank you for joining us today. And goodbye.