Immersed as we currently are in what is typically called "The Information Age," it is easy to forget that the obsession for knowledge is deeply rooted in the nineteenth century. Driven by remarkable changes in technology and science, knowledge was both inspirational and irresistible in terms of its potential for social and cultural transformation. Along with the imposing Britannica, hundreds of popular introductions knowledge emerged in the early nineteenth century. This growth, in what are best called "knowledge texts," reflected the growing value of knowledge in an era marked both by an increase in literacy and in scientific interest. These were texts that, in current parlance, could be "surfed" for scraps of knowledge and information that might, with the right kind of presentation, be made to appear coherent. Such scraps were important rungs in the social-climbing ladder, but the very real importance of knowledge was as a new kind of social and cultural currency. The "march of intellect," as it was commonly called, was proceeding at full speed and it was becoming clear that to be successful in this new age, one had to keep pace or risk falling behind. One of the ways to keep up with the growth of knowledge was through the many private libraries formed independently or in conjunction with Mechanics' Institutes. These libraries were, in effect, information sites for the first instantiation of an information economy."Private Reading: Public Knowledge" is a project that opens up the work that I have done in Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect (Duke University Press, 2001) on the dissemination of knowledge in the early nineteenth century. What I want to pursue now is the materiality and context of the acquisition of knowledge in the early nineteenth century. On a recent trip to Manchester, I visited the Portico Library, one of a handful of private libraries in England, almost all of which date back to at least the early nineteenth century. The materials kept in these libraries, whether books, manuscripts, lending records, or acquisition documents, offer a window to the shaping of knowledge in the early nineteenth century. These libraries played a highly visible role in determining cultural values and ideology in an era that saw an explosion of knowledge consumers.
The purpose of the project is to examine the records of these libraries between 1800 and 1830 in an effort to determine: 1.) who readers were; 2.) what books were being purchased; 3.) what books were being borrowed/read; and, 4.) how books were being used. Some of the data will be available in the form of library records, while other information will be drawn from the book itself as well as supporting materials from other sources. This latter information may draw on anything from graffiti to wear and tear. The focus of the project will be on popular texts in science and technology. One of the central questions driving the project is: "How did common readers come to be informed about science and technology?" To say that scientific ideas "permeated" culture, a common phrase in cultural criticism, is inadequate to explain (or understanced) the nuanced process of the assimilation of "knowledge" and "culture." This project will offer insight into that process by looking at primary materials and evaluating them in broad social and cultural contexts. This is a fundamental concern in cultural studies, particularly as we witness a similar explosion of information on the internet. The value of the project is thus twofold: 1.) it will address a period in cultural history in which the growth of knowledge was significant; and 2.) it will tease out methods of understanding/theorizing the intersections of culture and knowledge. It is critical that we understand that there is a material context to the diffusion of knowledge and that that context must ground any analysis of how ideas are circulated.The project will involved an engaged analysis of records, collections, and correspondence for at least three remaining private libraries: The Portico Library (in Manchester), est. 1806; the Leeds Library, est. 1768; the library at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, est. 1824; and the library at the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne, est. 1793. These libraries represent a cross-section of industrial or recreational cities in the early nineteenth century, where the interest in science and technology, to say nothing of the need for readers to "keep up with the times," was greatest. Materials from other private libraries, including the renowned London Library, will be drawn upon to augment the study as much as is feasibly possible.
One of the functions of this project is to look at previously unexamined materials that may provide insight into the cultural dynamics of early nineteenth century. But the project is not intended to be an archival or bibliographic enterprise, even if valuable findings are made in those areas. The impulse for this project is to try to understand the practices of reading and of the acquisition of knowledge in an effort to understand the impact of that knowledge on culture. The project will thus address, from a theoretical perspective, the modes in which new findings in science, technology, and related areas actually become "tacit" knowledge in popular culture. As literary critics or historians we often make linkages between "ideas of the day" and the cultural productions of the time, without fully exploring how those links are formed, reshaped, and ideologically altered.If we consider knowledge texts in the spirit of Roger Chartier's recent admonition to understand how texts "can be differently apprehend, manipulated and comprehended" (8), a more complex picture of private libraries and their reading patrons emerges. Drawing on Michel de Certeau's notion of the "actualization" of a work in the process of reading, Chartier looks at the spaces of reading in the early modern period as well as the commodification of reading. The most significant implication, for the present purpose, is the displacement of knowledge from a public sphere to a private one. In other words, encyclopedias encapsulated knowledge in relatively compact texts for consumption in private. While knowledge was still the mainstay of libraries, museums, and public lecture halls, it could also be absorbed in isolation, away from the gaze others. The rude and uncultured Heathcliff is, for example, able to return to Wuthering Heights mysteriously transformed not merely into a man of means, but a man of knowledge. This new private space, though wonderful for the dissemination of knowledge, made the interpretation and application of knowledge much more difficult to control. The officers of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, one of the great popularizing societies, recognized this problem and were unable to do anything to rectify it. Knowledge texts, by offering a wide range of topics illuminated by substantial text and often profuse illustrations, thus functioned like the center of Bentham's panopticon. At the core is, of course, is the unobserved reader who not only can scan the material around him anonymously, but can then interpret, infer, and combine the facts and details with impunity. This, in some sense, was the "power" of the private library.
"Private Reading: Public Knowledge" thus makes the best use of new and unexplored materials by situating in the literary, historical, and theoretical context of the growth of knowledge. The spirit of self-improvement --or "mental improvement" as it was commonly called-- as well as the promise of scientific innovation held sway as the dominant ethos of the time. In this climate, knowledge, as a cornerstone of progress, improvement, and civilization, answered well as a vehicle for moral growth. "If knowledge were not itself one of the supports of morality," wrote George Craik in his remarkable book The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties (1830-31), "it would not have been worthy of the commendations which have universally been bestowed upon it; nor would its diffusion deserve the warm encouragement it has uniformly received from an enlightened philanthropy."
The purpose of making this link so explicitly is to draw attention to a broader cultural logic that, in many ways, still persists in Western societies. Clearly, knowledge, then as now, can represent a content-based set of "facts" that are useful in the construction and development of disciplines. But, on another level, knowledge has been --and continues to be-- fetishized as something valuable for its own sake. Encyclopedia salesmen have understood the cultural fascination for knowledge and traded on it quite well by suggesting that a family deprived of an encyclopedia is a family that is willing to limit its children. And while traditional salesmen may be a dying breed, their products are alive and well in the form of CD-ROM encyclopedias, many of which are often old text-based encyclopedias that have been digitized and repackaged for personal computers. The expression "instruction and amusement," which has been used to tout knowledge texts since the very early nineteenth century has a contemporary analogue in the newly coined word, "infotainment."
The preoccupation with the value of knowledge also endures in the many debates over cultural, scientific, and technological literacies. Often these debates engage issues of consequence in contemporary culture and education, but just as often they reflect an anxiety about what counts and what should count as proper knowledge. And, once again, the publishing industry capitalized on this cultural concern by flooding the market with pocket encyclopedias, compendia of knowledge, and didactic works for children. Needless to say, the politics of knowledge in contemporary discourse, to say nothing of the electronic proliferation of knowledge are ambitious topic in their own right, and warrant entire an entire study rather than passing mention. As intriguing as these subjects are, my project here, is to engage an earlier form of knowledge production --in a substantive way-- which may nevertheless prove useful in understanding current trends and interests.
An approach to an understanding of the cultural context of knowledge, has been addressed by Jacques Rancière whose term "the poetics of knowledge" characterizes the "study of the literary procedures by which a discourse escapes literature [and] gives itself the status of a science." "We forget too easily," Rancière warns, that "the age of science is also that of literature." Rancière's admonition is well taken in that it reminds us that both science and literature were driven by what I am calling the "growth of knowledge" and the consequential need to arrange genres of representation around both.
The project has already received some support in the form of a small stipend from Georgia Institute of Technology to support undergraduate research. I will therefore be able to work with a student, trained in cultural studies of science, on some of the materials drawn from one or more of the collections.
Although it is widely accepted that nineteenth century England was preoccupied with knowledge, only recently has serious attention, been directed toward the "knowledge industry." The knowledge movement is an important record of a culture's fascination with its own science and technology. The proliferation of books, periodicals, mechanics' institutes and magazines celebrated the progressive accumulation of even more knowledge, to say nothing of the benefits that could be accrued from "mental improvement." But even now our understanding of the knowledge movement is not only superficial, but formed from broad generalizations and speculative platitudes. The collection of private libraries in England, as yet largely untapped and explored, function as something of a time capsule. This project seeks to explore the depths of those libraries in an effort to depict a clearer picture of what people read, of who read, and of how people read. What will emerge from this project is a book-length study that will explore the migration of knowledge from private spaces to the public sphere.