Robert Darnton’s History of Reading is an essay which argues that we can find a greater level of meaning in our own lives by developing a greater sense of understanding as to how readers interpreted what they read in the past, and, as readership evolved how did their interpretation of what they read change and affect their lives and cultures. The history of reading encompasses more than a chronology of changes that occurred in the history of reading. It also involves an understanding of how changing readerships interpreted shifting texts. Darnton theorizes that not only changing readerships but also changing texts themselves created different interpretations of them, thereby creating different reactions to reading in different eras, cultures and even within the same one. One example of this is when the works of Congreve underwent a typographical change which, though the text remained in tact from previous versions, changed the nature of the works and represented a different society than the previous one, “Individual words rarely changed from one edition to another, but a transformation in the design of the books gave the plays an entirely new flavour…To go from the quarto to the octavo volumes is to move from Elizabethan to Georgian England” (Darnton 159).
Darnton makes many valid points about how the reader’s social conditions, personality, and subjective interpretation of what is read affect a historian’s understanding of interpretation at various points in history and in different societies. As he states in the essay, “Interpretive schemes belong to cultural configurations, which have varied enormously over time” (Darnton 161). Therefore, Darnton underscores the significance of not only the type of text as being relevant to a greater understanding of the history of reading, and history in general, but also the human element in the equation. We can approach such an understa
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