Read!

The Reading Rainbow. The Big Read. "Read with your child for 20 minutes every day." We make a pretty big deal out of reading and literacy in this country today; indeed strong habits of reading have been connected with involvement in "cultural, sports, and volunteer activities." Readers are more likely to "visit an art museum . . . [and] volunteer or do charity-work" (Reading at Risk). Other studies suggest that people who don't read as much "do less well in the job market." People in jail are more likely to poor reading skills and people who don't read are less likely to vote (To Read or Not to Read ).

Such studies, in other words, show a strong correlation between civic participation and reading. In this country (the United States), at this historical moment (the early 21st century), we want people to read so that they can be better citizens and have more productive lives.

But this has not always been the case. In eighteenth-century England (the historical context for Austen's Northanger Abbey), many were quite worried about increasing literacy and habits of reading. They were worried about what the lower classes might read--would they get dangerous ideas about overturning the social hierarchy? Some cultural arbiters tried to promote "safe" reading that would be "the best security you can have, both for the industry and obedience of your servants" (Hannah More, The Cheap Repository Tracts, c. 1795). Here, the proposed "safe" reading was the Bible, which might raise other questions, but the intent--to keep people in their places--is clear. Samuel Johnson saw novels as the "entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impression" and therefore recommended that writers be very careful about the kinds of lessons and examples they put forth in their novels (Rambler #4, 1750). Hester Mulso Chapone, while mostly encouraging young women to read and educate themselves, cautioned that "the greatest care should be take in the choice of those fictitious stories, that so enchant the mind--most of which tend to inflame the passions of youth" (Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, 1773).

These are two very different sets of assumptions! Both moments see that reading has strong effects on people, but the earlier time tends to fear rather than applaud those effects as inflaming the passions and generating disruptive trends in thinking. Another way of thinking about this, I suppose, is that we now see reading as a path to critical thinking: we think (generally--there are still exceptions) it is good to read in order to shake up our established ideas.