Desires Relating To Reading in the Eighteenth Century

The recollections of reading experiences from readers of the eighteenth century show that novels often evoked strong emotions in the readers. In the UK Reading Experience Database, some readers described their desires for reading the novels, and others described how the novel or book shaped their desires for other parts of their lives. I also found it interesting that people from many different types of socio-economic groups used the word “desire” in their descriptions. Perhaps this shows that desire, like many other states of mind, is an innate human feeling or reaction, in this case to a piece of literature.  It was also interesting that the reader’s outlook on desire could change.

One man, a shoemaker from 1746, wrote, “I was but about twenty-two years of age when I first began to read them, and I assure you, my friend, that they made a very deep and lasting impression in my mind. By reading them [Plato’s On the Immortality of the soul and Plutarch’s Morals and Confucio’s texts] I was taught to bear the unavoidable evils attending humanity, and to supply all my wants by contracting or restraining my desires.”  The same reader wrote about the bible when he was a child, saying, “But these extraordinary accounts and discourses, together with the controversies between the mother and sons, made me think that they know many matters of which I was totally ignorant. This created in me a desire for knowledge, that I might know who was right and who was wrong.” I find it very interesting that when this reader was a child, he welcomed his desire and spoke of it positively, but later in life he came to believe his desires were something to be “contracted” or “restrained.”   In 1790, a writer Horace Walpole wrote, “as she was going she desired me to read to her Prior’s ‘Turtle and Sparrow,’ and his ‘Apollo and Daphne,’ with which you were so delighted, and which, tho’ scarce known, are two of his wittiest and gentelest poems.” Here, a person of a much different background than shoemaking also describes how her friend had evoked emotions of desire stemming from the poems she wished to be read. It is very interesting how pieces of literature can stimulate people’s desires, as well as diminish them.