Reading Experience Database
1450-1945

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Record 155

Reading Experience:

Evidence:
'Weeton's reading becomes important in communication with friends, but also a point of conflict: when she visits her brother and his wife, they complain that she spends all her time reading, though she insists that she read very little ("only... Gil Blas, now and then a newspaper, two or three of Lady M. W. Montagu's letters, and few pages in a magazine'), and only because her hosts rose so late. Since her literacy is important as a sign of status, she repeatedly presents herself not as a reader of low status texts like novels but of travels, education works, memoirs and letters, including Boswell's "Tour of the Hebrides", the Travels of Mungo Park, and Mme de Genlis' work. She approves some novels, like Hamilton's "The Cottagers of Glenburnie", but generally finds them a "dangerous, facinating kind of amusement" which "destroy all relish for useful, instructive studies'.
Century: 1800-1849
Date: Between 1807 and 1825
Country: n/a
Time: n/a
Place: n/a
   
Type of Experience (Reader):
silent aloud unknown
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown
Type of Experience (Listener):
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

Reader/Listener/Reading Group:

Reader:Ellen Weeton
Age Adult (18-100+)
Gender Female
Date of Birth 1776
Socio-economic group: Servant
Occupation: Governess
Religion: n/a
Country of origin: England
Country of experience: n/a
Listeners present if any:
(e.g. family, servants, friends, workmates)
n/a
Additional comments: n/a

 

Text Being Read:

Author: Mungo Park
Title: Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa
Genre: Geography / Travel
Form of Text: Print: Book
Publication details: n/a
Provenance: unknown

 

Source Information:

Record ID: 155  
Source - Print  
  Author: Jacqueline Pearson
  Editor: n/a
  Title: Women's Reading in Britain 1750-1835. A Dangerous Recreation
  Place of Publication: Cambridge
  Date of Publication: 1999
  Vol: n/a
  Page: 183
  Additional comments: n/a

Citation: Jacqueline Pearson, Women's Reading in Britain 1750-1835. A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge, 1999), p. 183, http://can-red-lec.library.dal.ca/Arts/reading/recorddetails2.php?id=155, accessed: 29 March 2024

Additional comments:

See Edward Hall (ed.) Miss Weeton: Journal of a Governess 1811-1825 (1939), Vol. II, p.33

 

 

Reading Experience Database version 2.0.  Page updated: 27th Apr 2016  3:15pm (GMT)