"To do a little and well": Anne Lister's Reading Routine

abstract:Bibliophiles often imagine a pre-digital golden age of undistracted reading, but recent scholarship in the history of reading has refuted the existence of this past idyll. This short article introduces the diaries of Anne Lister (1791–1840) as a useful case study for considering how historical readers managed and worried about their intellectual time, and how this process was influenced by competing social pressures. The article discusses some episodes from the diaries that suggest that reading was subject to class-based expectations about the economy of time during this period, and that Lister carefully managed their reading time to develop a modern gentlemanly persona as part of their endeavor to inherit their uncle's estate.