The history of reading aloud is longer than the history of reading alone. For most of the past two thousand years, a book was something you heard: read to you by a servant, a monk on duty, a sister at the fireside or, in the 1860s, Charles Dickens on a stage. Here are six moments in that history, each told from a source you can read yourself.
Rome: a reader for every hour
The best ancient description of a household reader comes from Pliny the Younger, writing to a friend about his uncle and adoptive father, Pliny the Elder, author of the Natural History. The uncle had books read to him while he sunbathed after lunch, at supper, and even while he was rubbed down after his bath, taking notes all the while. Pliny tells one story that sums him up. At dinner, a guest made the reader go back and repeat a mispronounced word:
upon which my uncle said to his friend, “Surely you understood it?” Upon his acknowledging that he did, “Why then,” said he, “did you make him go back again? We have lost more than ten lines by this interruption.”
Pliny the Younger, letter to Baebius Macer, trans. William Melmoth
The reader was a skilled servant, and a valued one. In another letter Pliny worries about his own reader, Encolpius, who had fallen ill on a dusty journey:
If that should unhappily result, where shall I find one who will read my works so well, or appreciate them so thoroughly as he?
Pliny the Younger, letter to Septitius, trans. William Melmoth
“Read my works” matters. Pliny’s reader read Pliny’s own writing back to him and to his guests. The voice that performed a book was part of how it was judged.
Milan: Augustine watches Ambrose read in silence
The most famous passage in the history of reading is about someone not reading aloud. In late 384, Augustine moved to Milan for a teaching post and went to hear its bishop, Ambrose, who later baptised him. In Book VI of the Confessions, he describes going to see Ambrose and finding him reading:
But when he was reading, his eye glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were at rest.
Augustine, Confessions, Book VI, trans. E. B. Pusey
What makes the passage so useful is that Augustine finds it worth explaining. He and his friends sat in silence, afraid to interrupt, and then left. Afterwards they guessed at the bishop’s reasons. Perhaps he did not want to be dragged into explaining hard passages to listeners, or perhaps he was saving a voice that “a very little speaking would weaken”. The passage does not prove that nobody else read silently. It does show that a silent reader was strange enough to need a theory.
The monastery: reading with dinner
Reading aloud became institutional in the monasteries. The Rule of Saint Benedict, written around 530, gives a whole chapter, chapter 38, to the weekly reader. In Leonard Doyle’s translation, the rule is that meals must never be without reading. The reader is not whoever happens to pick up the book, but one brother appointed for a week, starting on Sunday, who asks the community to pray that he is kept from pride.
The details are what bring it to life. The table keeps absolute silence apart from the reader’s voice. Monks pass food to one another so that nobody has to ask for anything, and if they must ask, they use a sign. The reader eats a little before he starts, so the fast is not too hard for him, and has his proper meal afterwards with the kitchen servers. Only brothers who edify their hearers are allowed to read. Even in the sixth century, being read to badly was a problem worth a rule.
Chawton, 1813: Jane Austen reads her own novel
In the home, reading aloud was entertainment, and it could be a test. On 29 January 1813, Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra that her copy of Pride and Prejudice had arrived from London. That evening she and her mother tried it on a neighbour, Miss Benn, without telling her who wrote it:
Miss B. dined with us on the very day of the book’s coming, and in the evening we fairly set at it, and read half the first vol. to her
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Jane Austen, letter to Cassandra Austen, 29 January 1813
A week later, the second evening’s reading had gone less well, and Austen knew whom to blame:
I believe something must be attributed to my mother’s too rapid way of getting on: though she perfectly understands the characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought.
Jane Austen, letter to Cassandra Austen, 4 February 1813
It is a novelist’s complaint about a performer. Austen wrote dialogue to be voiced, and she could hear when it was voiced wrong. For the lines Miss Benn heard that night, see Jane Austen quotes, with their chapters.
Dickens on stage, 1858-1870
Dickens turned reading aloud into a profession. His friend and biographer John Forster records that the first paid series began with sixteen nights at St Martin’s Hall in London, the first on 29 April 1858. A provincial tour followed, and that first series alone ran to 125 readings.
The most demanding piece was the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist, which he added late in his career. Forster quotes a letter in which Dickens jokes about his bad foot:
“The foot goes famously,” he wrote to his daughter. “I feel the fatigue in it (four Murders in one week…) but not overmuch.
John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, chapter “Last Readings”
The cost was real. For the final London series in 1870, Forster prints notes of Dickens’s pulse taken by a Mr Beard. His normal pulse was 72. On the first night of the Sikes and Nancy scenes, on 21 January, it rose from 80 to 112. The last of those twelve readings, at St James’s Hall on 15 March 1870, ended with A Christmas Carol and the trial from Pickwick. Then he closed the book and said goodbye:
In but two short weeks from this time I hope that you may enter, in your own homes, on a new series of readings at which my assistance will be indispensable; but from these garish lights I vanish now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, affectionate farewell.
Charles Dickens, final public reading, quoted in Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, chapter “The End”
The “new series of readings” in his listeners’ homes was his next novel, Edwin Drood, which would come out in numbers. He took it for granted that families would read it aloud to one another, and Forster records that Dickens had read the first number aloud at Forster’s own house the previous October. He died at Gadshill on 9 June 1870. More of his lines are collected in Charles Dickens quotes, with their chapters.
The cigar factory: a reader paid by the workers
The strangest and most democratic reading room was a factory floor. In Cuba, from 1865, cigar rollers hired a lector to read newspapers and books aloud while they worked. The workers paid the reader themselves, so they chose what was read. The custom spread to Cuban communities in Florida, including Ybor City in Tampa. Lectors often read left-wing papers and became part of union organising. In the United States the tradition ended after the Ybor City cigar makers’ strike of 1931. In Cuba it continues, and as of 2017, UNESCO was considering recognising it as intangible cultural heritage.
Reading aloud through history: the main moments
| When | Where | Who reads | Who listens | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st century AD | Rome | A household reader | Pliny the Elder, at meals and in the bath | Pliny the Younger, letters |
| 380s | Milan | Ambrose, silently | Nobody, which is the point | Augustine, Confessions VI |
| c. 530 onwards | Benedictine monasteries | The weekly reader | Monks at table, in silence | Rule of St Benedict, ch. 38 |
| 1813 | Chawton | Jane Austen and her mother | A neighbour, Miss Benn | Austen’s letters |
| 1858-1870 | Britain, Ireland, America | Charles Dickens | Paying audiences | Forster, Life of Dickens |
| 1865 onwards | Cuba; Tampa until 1931 | A lector chosen by workers | Cigar rollers | History of the lector |
Reading aloud left other traces too. Readers who heard a passage they liked often copied it out, which is the subject of a short history of the commonplace book. And in Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, one of the novels set in bookshops on this site, a boy falls in love while reading a forbidden novel aloud to a blind girl. One more Forster detail to finish: through the last six nights of that final series, Dickens’s pulse never fell below 110 after the first piece. He kept reading anyway.
Sources
- Pliny the Younger, Letters, trans. William Melmoth, Project Gutenberg #2811 (letters to Baebius Macer and to Septitius)
- Augustine, The Confessions, trans. E. B. Pusey, Project Gutenberg #3296, Book VI
- Wikipedia: Augustine of Hippo (Milan, Ambrose, baptism in 386)
- St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries, trans. Leonard J. Doyle, Project Gutenberg #50040, chapter 38 (paraphrased)
- Wikipedia: Rule of Saint Benedict (date)
- The Letters of Jane Austen, ed. Lord Brabourne, Project Gutenberg #42078, letters XL and XLI
- John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Project Gutenberg #25851
- Wikipedia: Lector (cigar manufacture)