The life of a common reader

"these need no reward... They have loved reading.”

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood

When my wife Catherine went on maternity leave, she decided she wanted to read a classic novel before our daughter arrived. She chose Dickens. Catherine had never read any Dickens and asked my opinion about where to start. As readers of my Substack, The Common Reader, will know, I am a keen Dickensian, to say the least. I recommended Great Expectations, a novel from Dickens’ late, great period, which is not dauntingly long like Little Dorrit. I first read Great Expectations when I was fifteen and remember still the marshes and the smithy, the foaming blood on London’s streets, the death masks in Jagger’s office, and Estella’s beautiful supercilious eyes as if I had only just put the book down. So I was thrilled to get Catherine’s excited updates about plot twists and Dickens’ unparalleled ability to make a whole world of a character in just a few lines.

In the subsequent years, Catherine has purposefully read more classic novels. Like many intelligent, well-educated people, she reached a point where she felt the lack of great literature. At school and university we live with great works, and then, if we are not careful, these marvels that lighted our minds fade from our lives. It is not the least of Catherine’s admirable qualities that she decided to reignite her interest.

And so she has been lost to the worlds of Little Women, Tom Sawyer, Little House on the Prairie (the entire series, out loud to the children, more than once), Jane Eyre, and The Scarlet Letter. Like all the best readers, she does not only read one sort of novel, and has also been engrossed by Maigret (once in French), in tears at Noel Streatfeild, chilled by Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, astonished by Willa Cather, and bored by Barbara Pym (marriage testing).

When Catherine reads classics, though, her response is different. The extraordinary accomplishments of the great nineteenth century novels brings out the best of us as readers, (though I’m not one of those people who thinks the novel has all but died in modern times, quite the opposite.) It is wonderful when she reads books like Barchester Towers or Middlemarch: I get daily updates about the comically outrageous conduct of Anglican clergy or the regrettable dissolution of Fred Vincey. (Oh Fred! Fred, Fred, Fred…) Most recently, she has read Bleak House, which I am maniacally convinced is the great English novel, and even though I only just re-read it, it was a real pleasure to hear her recount the plot twists, and to see the amazement in her eyes. I would preach that novel’s virtues until everyone had read it.

But the bigger pleasure is in seeing just how absorbing Catherine finds these books. Catherine is a busy person—she homeschools our two children (which you can read about on her Substack)—but she reads such good novels that she always wants to get back to them, even when she’s overworked and tired. She is what Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf called a common reader. Although she’s well-educated, she has no degree in literature, no special training. She is simply trying to make her way through some of the great works for her own sake.

Sometimes it can feel like reading is on the decline: people spend all day on their phones; reading fifty books a year, less than one a week, puts you in the top 1% of readers; book sales fluctuate. But readers persist, silently making their way though the great works, keeping unbroken the chain that takes us back, generation by generation, through human history. It is not just scholarship that keeps great texts alive, but the life of the common reader, the silent, unheralded reader, who finds herself unable to complete a bus journey without resorting to her scrawny old copy of Bleak House.

And that is why, over the last few years, I have been increasingly reminded by Catherine’s reading, of one of the best passages in all of Virginia Woolf’s essay, which comes at the end of The Common Reader, suitably enough.

I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”

Henry Oliver writes

The Common Reader

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