Reading, a Necessity of Life

(I’m reposting this, with the video I made for YouTube about the time I originally posted)

Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835

William J. Gilmore, 1993

Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life is a history of Vermont reading habits in the early republic period. In what he called a study of “Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England,” William Gilmore attempted to uncover the intellectual life of early rural Americans. “As intellectual history receded from the forefront of research in the 1960s,” Gilmore said, “the study of the life of the mind turned behaviorist,” becoming chiefly the study of literacy and its spread. Gilmore wanted to “reaffirm the life of the mind…to create a new history of knowledge (that is, information, opinion, beliefs, and values) encompassing its circulation, and its many roles, uses, and purposes in past societies.” That the resulting book is not more widely known is probably due to the chaotic, uncoordinated, and repetitious organization of the text. Its obscurity is unfortunate, as Gilmore set himself an ambitious task, and partly accomplished it.

Gilmore focused first on the “Material and Cultural Foundations” of rural life. He divided the ongoing commercialization of the upper Connecticut River Valley into several discrete stages. This segmentation allowed him to trace changes over time, as commercial participation expanded from towns along the banks of the river, into the more remote back-country. Gilmore constructed five “human habitats,” each with differing degrees of affluence, proximity to markets, and access to print culture.

Building upon his map of human habitats, Gilmore traced the development of a communication system that allowed books and periodicals produced or accumulated in the local centers (Windsor and Chester, Vermont) to circulate into more remote villages and ultimately even to isolated farms. The different types of family lifestyle available to people living in each human habitat formed the basis of Gilmore’s discussion of the wide variety of books present in estate inventories. Finally, Gilmore used these findings to create profiles of the “cultural life” of each of his human habitats.

Gilmore compared a list of over five thousand volumes, drawn from his examination of nearly four hundred estate inventories, to the lifestyle profiles drawn from a wide range of geographic and economic data. The research that went into the making of this book was monumental; one critic called it “heroic.” The result is something Gilmore called the “deep structure” of rural reading habits and rural mentalités. Gilmore explained that “by mentalités we mean compounds of knowledge, emotions, and actions…what was thinkable in the human collective at a given moment of time.” As he used the concept throughout the book, mentalités for Gilmore clearly encompassed the entire mental and emotional lives of his subjects.

“Along with the meeting-house service,” Gilmore said, “the town meeting, the school session, and the multi-purpose general store, the bookstore was one of the most consequential social institutions in rural New England.” Windsor, the center of Gilmore’s study, was “linked by major roads and the Connecticut River to six other permanent print centers” at Brattleboro, Keene, Walpole, Woodstock, Hanover, and Haverhill. Gilmore claimed rural New Englanders were much less isolated than most historians had believed. My own later research on the Yankee peddlers of Ashfield corroborates this claim and suggests yet another way books may have reached remote farmsteads. At least one of the Ashfielders I wrote about carried abolitionist tracts along with the needles, ribbons, and essences he peddled. Two thirds of upper valley families listed books in their estate inventories, and Gilmore found that “nearly 75 percent of all reading matter through the mid-1820s—consisted of British and, to a lesser extent, European works.” And because copyright was impossible to enforce internationally, many American printers freely pirated popular works from England or the continent.

Describing the upper valley, Gilmore said “it is important to understand the extreme rurality of America among North Atlantic nations through 1830.” Compared to the Netherlands and Great Britain, where thirty percent and twenty-one percent of the people lived in cities, respectively, by 1800 the United States ranked just above Russia, with an urban population less than four percent. “For many historians it has come as a revelation that sophisticated knowledge of the self and the world was possible outside the Republic of Letters,” Gilmore said. But by 1800, “nearly two-thirds of all Windsor District families retained a family library past the death of the household head.” Perhaps more surprising for traditionalists, Gilmore found that by 1810 “the balance of reading matter had…already shifted from sacred to secular content.”

“Print Centers” were an important feature of the central towns. Their activities included production of weekly newspapers, printing of original books, acquiring additional domestic titles from other printers or wholesalers, and reprinting of foreign titles. The small bookstore at Walpole, New Hampshire, for example, printed a local newspaper and in 1808 carried 31,280 volumes of nearly 1,500 titles. Most of them had been produced elsewhere. “Fewer than a sixth…were printed in the Upper Valley," Gilmore reported. "The vast majority were shipped in from twenty-three other nodes in a long-distance supply network,” including “about fifty different works…printed in Europe.” With a population of fewer than 2,000 residents, Walpole’s heavy consumption of books easily complicates simplistic assumptions regarding the intellectual abilities and interests of rural New Englanders.

The major flaws of Gilmore’s book were the organization of his data and the repetitive nature of his narrative. Gilmore’s analysis hinged on his construction of several lists of enumerated “factors of change,” which he used sporadically and inconsistently throughout the text. These lists frequently failed to line up with each other, as was the case when Gilmore described the five human habitats (based primarily on proximity to market centers) and eight family types (Artisan, Gentleman Farmer, Tenant, etc.), but failed to explain how the two were related. The reader was given a great deal of data about each list, but had difficulty formulating an idea how many of each family type lived in each habitat. To make matters worse, the text jumped from point to point almost randomly and frequently reiterated previous points with slightly different data. A highly motivated reader could piece together the information, and as a whole it was extremely valuable. But this does not excuse the poor construction of the text, which should have been addressed by the author and editor.

The influence of British thought on rural New Englanders was a question Gilmore raised several times, but failed to conclusively answer. By 1800, he said, “two-thirds of all law books, four-fifths of all medical works, and seven-tenths of all works in modern literature” in the estate lists he reviewed were by British authors. “Anglo-American intellectual dialogue dominated the life of the mind into the mid-1820s,” Gilmore suggested, without specifying how this dialog changed the development of popular culture in the region. His closest approach to an answer was the observation that “fundamental reevaluation of the relationship of the individual to the larger structures of society, polity and economy was underway in Great Britain and was finding its way into the Upper Valley.” Even “hill country residents” were avid readers, and some of them “fed on opposition to many of the new forms of material and cultural life in the New Republic” through the books that found their way into the region. The form this opposition took and its consequences for New England society at the dawn of the commercial-industrial era, was a question Gilmore had intended to take up in a subsequent volume titled The Republic of Knowledge, which he was unable to complete before his death in 1999.

From my reading notes:

Gilmore's actual findings were as follows:

Windsor Vermont district households with a family library (n=396):

1787-96: >75%, Average # of books, about 7.5

1807-1816: about 65%, Average # of books about 10

1827-1836: about 60%, Average # of books about 45

64% of libraries had 1 to 5 books (total books = 5,630, over 2,500 titles)

19% had 6 to 14 books

14% had 15 to 99 books

2% had over 100 books

385 were religious texts, about 1,700 were secular (schoolbooks, geographies, law literature, medicine, general knowledge, history, philosophy)

38.5% of books were in the libraries of professionals,

21% were in the libraries of gentleman farmers,

26% were in the libraries of merchants, manufacturers, artisans,

15% were in the libraries of yeoman and tenant farmers.

Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life received several positive reviews, but the book was generally considered to be severely compromised by Gilmore’s poor presentation of his argument. Even the most critical reviews, however, provide a perspective on the changing nature of intellectual history and Gilmore’s contribution to this development. In the Journal of the Early Republic, book historian Ronald J. Zboray called Gilmore’s book a “historicist and materialist corrective to stalwart intellectualist analyses of reading that assume cultural uniformity during the early republic.” Zboray praised Gilmore’s suggestion that books, like “ploughs, hoes, and cooking utensils,” were regularly used by the whole family, reinforcing the idea that material culture in the form of the family library can shed a valuable light on the family’s world-view, attitudes, and politics.

In the Business History Review, Richard R. John focused on the “communications revolution” that made it “possible for rural Americans to participate directly in mass culture” for the first time. John was especially intrigued by Gilmore’s observation that “certain northern New Englanders, such as Orestes Brownson, responded to this informational deluge by fashioning a ‘new rural critique of commercial society’. Literary critic Robert B. Winans praised Gilmore’s construction of “a diversity of rural mentalités,” while also acknowledging that Gilmore’s description of “society-wide reading patterns” allowed him to find “five different intellectual traditions.” And, despite of his judgment that Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life was a “cranky and almost indecipherable book,” Paul Johnson told readers of the Journal of American History that the book was “a solid accomplishment” and “the first map of reading [in which] the contents of family libraries document aspects of the ‘democratization of mind’ in the early republic in unprecedentedly direct ways.”

In a six-page review article for American Quarterly, Lawrence Buell agreed that Gilmore was “rightly…excited by the anomaly of a rural cosmopolitanism: a society rustic, yet in a genuine sense also modernized, having full access to the transatlantic communications network and, thereby, open to the rapid technoeconomic changes occurring elsewhere without as yet having been transformed by these.” Ironically, given the opacity of his own comments, most of Buell’s six pages are given to enumerating the flaws of “one of the worst-written scholarly books of real importance that I have ever read.” Similarly, while criticizing his organization and presentation quite harshly, Gloria L. Main praised Gilmore’s “richly complex geographic and economic context for these readers and their books,” suggesting Gilmore’s attempt to merge intellectual history with hard economic and demographic data was perhaps on the right track.

Most reviewers were able to credit Gilmore for the his voluminous research and for the interpretive attempt he made in Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, even though his reach exceeded his grasp. Their appreciation of Gilmore’s use of sources and methods from a variety of disciplines, to understand the mental world of rural New Englanders, is a hopeful sign. While he may have been a crank, Gilmore was willing to ignore sub-disciplinary boundaries in a way that highlighted unprecedented anomalies that might have remained invisible to historians pursuing more traditional approaches. In spite of its many faults, the book is full of random insights and remarkable data. The questions Gilmore asked and the techniques he used to try to answer them should inspire further investigation into the power of ideas among the non-elite. Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life was a stumbling, imperfect first step toward a really new intellectual history of regular people. But it was a first step.