Abstract

Reviews Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. 352 pp. ISBN: 9780300228106 Elocution has long been relegated to the margins of rhetoric's history. While it was dutifully acknowledged as the subject of numerous treatises, the elocutionists' elevation of delivery over the presumably more substantial aspects of rhetoric often led historians to conclude that elocution was inferior to more recognizable approaches to eighteenth-century rhetoric. And the elo­ cutionists' penchant for diagrams, notational devices, charts, and elaborate illustrations seemed more a sign of eccentricity than seriousness. This histor­ ical inattention to elocution was rather at odds with elocutionism's incredible popularity, prevalence, and persistence in the Anglophone world. In recent years, scholars have begun to see the movement not as an aber­ ration but rather as an important cultural and educational moment in the development of rhetoric. This réévaluation of elocution has been furthered by relatively recent essays in this journal by Philippa Spoel, Dana Harrington, Debra Hawhee and Cory Holding, Paddy Bullard, Thomas Sloane, and others. More recently, the almost simultaneous publication, in 2017, of three major books has significantly enhanced our understanding of elocution: Marian Wilson Kimber, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word (Univer­ sity of Illinois Press); Paula McDowell, The Invention ofthe Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices In Eighteenth-Century Britain (University of Chicago Press); and, of course, the subject of this review, Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home. All three of these books extend, in important ways, our understanding of elocution beyond existing accounts. "Elocution" does not appear in the title, but nearly every page of The Social Life of Books is about the movement, either directly or indirectly. Williams calls her subject "sociable reading," and reading is what elocution was about. Although elocutionists would sometimes attend to oratory, their focus remained the reading of a text written by another, and reading it aloud and well. Williams considers many familiar figures of what she calls the "elocu­ tion industry" including William Enfield, Thomas Sheridan, and John Walker. But she goes well beyond the recognized scenes of elocution—the schoolroom, the lecture hall, and the pulpit—to investigate, in intimate detail, the mostly unexplored patterns and practices of oral reading in the English home. Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 1, pp. 83-94. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37T.83. 84 RHETORICA Her portrayal of the quotidian orality of the eighteenth-century English derives from an impressive immersion in letters, diaries, journals, periodi­ cals, library records, commercial transactions, and myriad other documents. What emerges from this meticulous scrutiny of the records of ordinary Britons is the realization that oral reading was a pervasive feature of English home life that transversed social class, educational attainment, economic status, and geographical boundaries. Williams explains that sociable reading was so ubiquitous because, well, it was sociable. Reading aloud to others is a pleasurable and very human experience. In addition to sharing the pleasures of the printed word, Williams also documents other more practical motiva­ tions for sociable reading. Such reasons include what she calls "limited oph­ thalmology." Thus, "reading aloud gave those with failing vision access to books and letters" and so "many read with others' eyes" (66). The ill and the dying were also read to as a source of comfort and a demonstration of the reader's sympathy. And, of course there were economic reasons for read­ ing aloud. While book ownership increased in the eighteenth century, books remained expensive. Communal reading became a form of "book sharing" in which many could participate without incurring the cost of book own­ ership. And perhaps most importantly, reading aloud at home offered an effective method of moral instruction. This was particularly applicable to young ladies "whose solitary, compulsive reading of fiction in their...