Political Readers and the Associational Reading Space in the Age of Reform

The focus of my doctoral research would be on the subject of 'political readers' during the Napoleonic era. Focusing on readers rather than texts, this would involve an analysis of the ways in which political texts were read and understood by readers and how political events impacted the reading of other kinds of material. This approach would further emphasise the social and political dimensions of reading. Readers were not simply one-dimensional recipients of a text's content and instead brought their own partisan leanings and experiences to the reading of a text. Mark Towsey's recent study, Reading History in Britain and America, c.1750-c.1840 (2019), reaffirmed this and demonstrated that eighteenth-century readers often read texts in ways never intended by authors. Moreover, contemporary readers sometimes used the act of reading to better understand and make sense of events happening in their own times. My proposal would continue this approach although with an analysis of other kinds of texts beyond works of history.
The activity of reading did not occur within a vacuum and a reader's approach to a text could be influenced by a host of other factors. Therefore, another aspect of research would be upon the ways in which reading associations, such as subscription libraries or book clubs, negotiated through the politically charged decades of the early nineteenth century. How did events beyond the realm of the associational societies impact proceedings within it, for example in decisions relating to the acquisition of certain books or on the rules which governed the conduct of societal members.
I believe that these are questions not currently being asked by the existing historiography. Previous studies have been limited in both the scope and picture of their analysis, particularly focusing on the political pamphlets of Price, Paine and Burke or on events in specific years during the 1790s. There has therefore been little discussion regarding the reading of other kinds of political texts or of reader's experiences in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, there are a host of other texts from which a reader's response can be analysed particularly in the reading of radical or reactionary novels. This latter group, sometimes termed anti-Jacobin novels, were the subject of my Masters' dissertation, as I charted the publication of sixty-nine novels between 1791 and 1818. In doing so I was particularly interested in charting the longevity of such novels, beyond the dates of their first publications through subsequent editions to libraries, booksellers and ultimately readers. Making use of this research, this proposal will be fixed upon readers receptions not only to anti-Jacobin novels but also to works by radical authors such as William Godwin, Robert Bage, Elizabeth Inchbald and Thomas Croft.
Deciphering a reader's response is possible through a perusal of diaries, marginalia, commonplace books and recollections in autobiographies yet this research proposal will also be interested in the ways in which reading associations engaged with or censored certain texts and how they dealt with political differences between members. As associational societies of private individuals, book clubs or subscription libraries were representative of their members interests with national politics inevitably played out at a local level.