What is a common reader?

It seems like we ought to cover this at some point.

Writing elsewhere
I wrote about The Queue (and why queues aren’t typically British) for The Critic.

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The starting point is Samuel Johnson, who wrote in the Life of Gray:

I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.

Johnson said this about Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Much of the rest of Gray’s writing disappointed Johnson. Even poems that start off being praised get this sort of dismissive review:

The second stanza, exhibiting Mars’s car and Jove’s eagle, is unworthy of further notice. Criticism disdains to chase a schoolboy to his common-places.

Criticism does not disdain to point to Gray’s technical faults, and a good thing too: “Gray is too fond of words arbitrarily compounded.” This criticism reflects Johnson’s concern for the common reader. He is careful to help readers to discover the best writing, and to see how it was done.

Johnson is writing for someone interested and intelligent but not necessarily educated in literary things, someone who is interested in learning about poetry and its machinery and what makes it good. The common reader is also, by implication, someone who wants to read criticism, opinion, and argument.

Johnson gives some hint of all this when he praises the Elegy. Gray’s images “find a mirrour in every mind”. The original passages feel familiar: “I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them.” This is not a defence of lowering standards or of anything that would be patronisingly called middlebrow. Johnson believed, as a good neoclassicist, that this sort of timeless originality was high art.

Johnson observed the common reader phenomenon, he did not invent it. As England became a commercial nation, more people started reading. Money creates audiences. He says in the Life of Milton, for example, that reading did not used to be such a common pastime. Johnson was a commercial writer who understood that people would often rather do things other than read; he could see the way the market was shaped by new tastes. This continued in the nineteenth century with a growing reading public, enabled by economic growth, periodicals with long and detailed reviews, and the slow rise of democracy.

So far, so simple. That some people with the time and money sometimes sit down with a good book is obvious enough. It follows that, as well as being learned and subtle and refined, critics must pay attention to the general reader of broad interests. The idea of the common reader has a close relationship with the idea of common sense. But not for twentieth century literary critics, a group of people singularly hostile to common sense. They managed to turn this whole thing into a culture war. It’s no coincidence that this happened in the twentieth century, when new technology outcompeted books, when the elite backlash against democracy took shape, and when the upper-middle-class and the intellectual classes needed a new hedge around their status.

Johnson was not a common reader, and he thought of literary critics as somewhat intellectually superior readers. This distinction became much more pronounced in Virginia Woolf’s essays (called The Common Reader):

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument.

Woolf was at a changing point in literary culture. The common reader was already on the decline. When the final instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop came into the harbour at New York the crowd yelled out to the approaching ship to find out what happened. When they got their answer, many of them fainted. Those days were gone. Radio and cinema were new competitors for attention. People could travel more easily. What had once been an implied difference between reader and specialist became a pronounced division.

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Are you a common reader? If so, you might enjoy my salon series How to Read a Novel. Our next session is on October 4th, all about Silas Marner. Make sure to book a ticket.

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Frank Kermode summed up the way these trends had worked themselves out later in the century. He contrasted the popular periodicals of the nineteenth century with the modern culture of “dons writing for dons and their pupils”. He saw two reasons for this change:

first, the relatively uneducated have found amusements they prefer to reading; second, the universities have taken over both the production and the criticism of literature, except — and it’s of course a large exception — for the books that are read by millions

Literary academics are often hostile to the idea of popularity because they are hostile to the idea of the market. An English Literature lecturer writing on this subject in the Guardian a few years ago, said that the “mythical common reader… slouching towards Bethlehem” was not necessary to the debate about “the function and making of public forms of criticism.” She felt that “Criticism is a contradictory and sometimes incompatible field… It’s about generating the space to think, to encounter risks — to find out, in the fullest sense possible, where your energies can lead.”

What rankles in all of this is not the idea that some writing or thinking is better, difficult to appreciate, or in some other way highbrow. What causes the rift is the idea that there are some things you ought not to read or that there ought to be a hieratic caste who can decide what is off limits: the preservation of criticism for critics and disciples. We do not need readers and their preferences to create literary criticism. Frank Kermode said:

There is something to be learned, perhaps, from the success of F. R. Leavis as a teacher: these books prescribed, those proscribed; a bold doctrine of minority culture, and the creation of an image of it that made the young want to join it.

You can still have success in that mode today: Christian Lorentzen is probably the best example. (He’s excellent and you should read him.) But if the purpose of literary scholars and gatekeepers is to create “a bold doctrine of minority culture” it becomes a self-serving elite rather than a public one.

Criticism cannot merely be a way of generating the space to think for a small number of professionals. Johnson, and Woolf were, as Helen Gardner said, “appealing, against judgements by academics or professional critics, to the free judgement of those who read widely for enjoyment and find confirmation and extension of their own experience and values in what they read as a main element in their enjoyment.”

The anti-common reader argument fails because it is myopic. What should we make of the history of ordinary people reading the Bible? Can that be a myth or somehow a bad thing for Christianity? Zadie Smith is sometimes cited as a defender of modern literary theory and all that uncommon jazz — who exactly do we think it is that buys her books in such large numbers? How did Harold Bloom have such an outsize impact on the culture wars if the audience of common readers he appealed to wasn’t really there?

Rather than deny the common reader or try to argue that they are somehow a distraction, academics ought to be helping to create and expand the audience, as Johnson did. Kermode reached something like this conclusion:

To be realistic again, we have little to do with the oppressed, with the hapless victims of television and advertising, in so far as they constitute an inaccessible mass. We have to do with the new Common Reader, who has to be our creation, who will want to join us, as people who speak with the past and know something of reading as an art to be mastered. We are carrying something on, but have the responsibility of making the generation that will agree that carrying it on in its turn is worth the effort. In the end, that is the only feasible task of reviewers as well as academics. And every narcissistic, venal, or impudent review, every clever academic stunt, is a dereliction of this duty of continuance and creation. That, I think, is where we may speak of the morality of the business: in terms of our duty to the only real Common Reader, and the strong temptations to neglect it.

This is another false division. Elites can be “victims” of advertising as much as anyone (although I object to that word very strongly). Imaginative literature has been open to everyone for a long time. Richard Altick showed that in his history of common readers. When the common reader resembles English graduates and other people are thought to be an “inaccessible mass” something has gone wrong in our analysis.

Literature can be broad. The more efforts literary people make to exclude themselves from the world of the common reader, or the more they deny that the common reader exists, nebulous a group though it may be, the more they can expect to be found irrelevant.

Perhaps the real issue is that the common reader today is more likely to read non-fiction, serious non-academic books by experts or professional writers. As Woolf observed, many of these readers will be passing the time (and so what?) but most of them will be trying to learn, to find ways of working or living differently. The room for handing literary culture along the generations is thus somewhat smaller in relative, if not absolute, terms. This is fully within the common reader tradition — think of all those histories, biographies, theologies, books of essays and so on. But the production and analysis of such books is increasingly the job of non-literature specialists.

To that extent, they are far less relevant to the culture than they once were and are reacting by entrenching themselves in an elite, minority culture. The role of the critic ought to be to help people find and understand good writing. Many literary academics write useful and interesting books, go on podcasts, tweet, have blogs, and are generally informed by modern ideas and culture; many do not.

I have recently been enjoying Hollis Robbins, Forms of Contention — an absorbing account of the African American sonnet tradition and how it interacted with the European sonnet tradition. This is the best sort of literary criticism that is pitched for a professional audience but can easily be of use to the common reader. Katherine Rundell is another example.

Otherwise, the common reader is a generalist and with the internet at their disposal can find the right mix of writers to suit themselves. The more that critics resent that and react with Kermode’s bold doctrine of minority culture, the more they will have to learn to enjoy their discontent with the world.

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Are you a common reader? If so, you might enjoy my salon series How to Read a Novel. Our next session is on October 4th, all about Silas Marner. Make sure to book a ticket.

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