Illustration showing incorrect reading posture, Nicolas Andry de Boisregard, L'orthopedie, 1741 (Wellcome Collection CC BY)
As long as reading has existed, there has been concern that it will do people harm. As literacy rates increased and the number of readers grew, they were warned about the terrible damage they might do to their posture, or their digestive systems - Robert Burton cautioned that students might be struck down by all kinds of bodily complaints due to their study.1 Outbreaks of ‘overpressure’ were reported at schools throughout the nineteenth-century, and well-known asylum doctors were concerned with the phenomenon. Overseer of the York Retreat James Hack Tuke gave a speech relating to overpressure to the British Medical Association in 1879; James Crichton-Browne, former superintendent of the West Riding Asylum, produced a report on the subject in 1884 (though the Government later denied commissioning it). Women were seen by some as particularly at risk of physical consequences of their mental efforts. John Conolly, asylum doctor and pioneer of non-restraint in British asylums, suggested that over-study could cause damage to women’s reproductive organs and cause them to give birth to weak children.2 However, though overpressure was traditionally associated with women and girls, most occurrences of overpressure took place in boys’ schools. Instead, class was a decisive factor; some took the existence of overpressure as an indication that the working classes were not naturally suited to schooling.3
“[...] hard students are commonly troubled with gouts, catarrhs, rheums, cachexia, bradiopepsia, bad eyes, stone and colic, crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases as come by overmuch sitting; they are most part lean, dry, ill-coloured, spend their fortunes, lose their wits, and many times their lives, and all through immoderate pains, and extraordinary studies”
Much like the modern moral panics we’ve seen (Metal music indoctrinates teenagers into Satanism! Video games turn children into mass murderers!), the development of a mass reading public in the nineteenth century also stirred concern for the moral wellbeing of society. This anxiety provoked a flood of essays and articles about the ‘right kind’ of reading, and all the ways in which people were failing to engage in it. Wilkie Collins lamented that the ‘Unknown Public’, reading penny magazines rather than Literature, simply hadn’t been taught ‘the difference between a good book and a bad’.4 This was somewhat ironic, given Collins was the author of The Woman in White, one of the most famous pieces of sensation fiction; this genre was criticised by highbrow critics for what they considered a lack of true literary value.
It wasn’t just an issue of taste: the wrong things read the wrong way also posed a risk to the reader’s mind and spirit. Poet John Ferriar described the addictive ‘book-disease’ of upper class collectors in his poem ‘Bibliomania’ - perhaps this might have been the diagnosis of a nineteenth-century physician if they’d been faced with 1990’s Book Bandit, Stephen Blumberg. For those at the other end of the social classes, especially women, an obsession with reading wasn’t considered as acceptably eccentric. John Kellogg (of anti-masturbatory cereal fame) compared the ‘pernicious habit’ of novel-reading to the consumption of alcohol or opium.5 Reading excessively was not just an addiction, but a disease - Johann Gottfried Hoche described reading addiction as ‘a truly large evil as contagious as the yellow fever in Philadelphia’.6
There were also sexual undertones, as the ‘promiscuous’ circulation of texts was particularly damaging to the morality of women.7 One article entitled ‘Novel Reading: a cause of female depravity’, reprinted several times in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, suggested that books could make young women ‘slaves of vice(s)’ such as extra-marital sex and adultery.8 The overconsumption of printed material and the effects of such a habit were described in terms of ingestion, painting pictures of the gluttonous reader gobbling texts, unable to control their appetite.9 The problem of the voracious reader was one of primal urges, lack of self-control and discipline - exactly like the problem of the ‘lunatic’ under the moral theory of insanity.
Sources:
1 Alexander Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published 1621 - 1883 edition via Archive.org & the Library of Congress.
2 Katharina Rowold, The Educated Woman: Minds, Bodies, and Women’s Higher Education in Britain, Germany, and Spain, 1865-1914 (Routledge, 2010).
3 J. Middleton, ‘The overpressure epidemic of 1884 and the culture of nineteenth-century schooling’, History of Education (2004).
4 Wilkie Collins, ‘The Unknown Public’, Household Words, 21 August 1858.
5 Kelly J. Mays, ‘The disease of reading and Victorian periodicals’, in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-century British publishing and reading practices, ed. by John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge University, 1995).
6 Stefan Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (Zone Books/MIT, 2013).
7 [A. Innes Shand], ‘Contemporary Literature, VII: Readers’, Blackwoods Magazine (1879).
8 Anonymous, ‘Novel Reading: a cause of female depravity’, originally published in 1797 and reprinted in La Belle Assemblée (1817), available to read online (p. 172).
9 Janice Radway, ‘Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor’, Book Research Quarterly (1986).