A few years ago, I visited the palm house of the Amsterdam botanical garden. Here, under a glass roof built to house imperial specimens, I found a VCR and its monitor, a film continuously repeating to an audience of an empty garden bench and a few potted palms. The film was part of an exhibit on tropism, or the movement of organisms in response to external stimuli. I sat on the bench and watched as, in stop-time recording, sunflowers turned toward the sun, babies moved their feet away from pins, tree roots pushed into the earth. Condensed in time through the medium of film, the relationships of agents to external stimuli over time was rendered visible.
Christina Lupton offers a study of the tropic relationship of readers to the codex in eighteenth-century England. Lupton's focus is on reading as the enactment of a relationship with time, one taking differing forms and embodying differing expectations for her subjects. A central question underpins the work: “why [the] reading of books in particular has been, and continues to be, a juncture where technical and human agents collaborate fiercely in creating much-desired and nonlinear experiences of time” (3). Lupton asks how, in an age of an accelerating media culture, readers encountered and experienced the machinery of the codex, and how the codex's forms and genres structured its readers’ relationship with time.
Lupton organizes this analysis around a series of case studies of individual readers, examining their reading as a response to change in the cultures of media and work. She draws these examples together to ask the overarching question, “If it is really the case that this was the age in which the private purchase, consumption, and circulation of books picked up speed exponentially as an activity, how are we to square this with the fact that the hours in which normal people were at ease were dwindling at an inverse rate” (5). It is these “normal people” who form the focus of Lupton's study, the “actors, clergy, professional novelists, translators, housekeepers and politicians” whose habits and expectations of reading frame her analysis (3). Lupton focuses particularly on her readers’ consumption of the codex, in contrast with the proliferation of more ephemeral formats, the “newspapers, periodicals, almanacs, and sermons” appearing in ever-increasing numbers through the eighteenth century.
The book is organized in four chapters, each examining a different form of temporality. Chapter 1 focuses on “Sunday readers,” with the example of Catherine Talbot as its primary focus. Chapter 2 focuses on reading, and specifically rereading, over longer time periods or the lifetime. Chapter 3 has as its subject the reader's experience of contingency, as encountered through the material form of the codex in Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751) and Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761). Chapter 4 examines the understandings of the future enacted by books and their readers, in a study of Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791) and William Godwin's analysis, in particular in his Political Justice (1793).
Lupton's readers are profoundly nonlinear. Her analysis corrects an understanding of reading couched in “empirical” terms, as she states, or as “a reaction of a person to a particular text” (156). Her overarching thesis extends beyond eighteenth-century England to examine reading as a relationship of the self, with itself, over time. In her articulation of a relational and nonlinear theory of reading, Lupton has made a significant contribution to media studies, one that extends well beyond the subject of her study.
This is a politically situated book, one whose methodology serves to highlight the historical contingency, and fragility, of the modern self. Lupton gestures to the work of E. P. Thompson, British Marxist historian and author of The Making of the English Working Class (1963), and Thompson's concept of “time-discipline” as one of the formations of the British industrial revolution. Where Thompson wrote to be read as a Marxist historian, Lupton articulates a subtler, yet likewise politically charged statement on the role of the individual and the state. She consciously inserts herself into her historical narrative, framing her chapters with first-person commentary on her own experiences as a reader and critic, in a period as conscious of its proliferating media and as anxious about the potential fragmentation of political, economic, intellectual, and emotional structures of the self as that encountered by her subjects.
This is a compelling contribution to the field of media studies. The anxiety inherent in the relationship of time and reading is something Lupton's agents only sometimes recognize, but to which they always respond. In her examination of her readers’ anxieties in eighteenth-century England, Lupton presents a theory of time and reading that speaks to readers in the present. The book can be read as a stop-motion film of English literary readers in the eighteenth century, radically revealing their relationship with the codex and its possibilities, turning toward it even as the circumstances change in which reading is expected or made possible.
