


In the three essays gathered here, describing particular domestic frameworks through which, we believe, Emily Dickinson’s reading must be read, the aim is not, then, to dispute earlier analyses that have focused on her exposure to texts that might be categorized as public, civic, or central to the most celebrated political, poetic, or philosophical projects of her time. Most provocatively, it could take place across and in between different modes, values, and environments. Reading could be a secular or a sanctified pursuit, meditative or casual, communal or solitary, mute or thunderous. What nineteenth-century readers like Emily Dickinson inherited was, rather, a host of options suitable to different occasions. Her 1844 Webster’s contains five definitions of “read” and seven cognates the etymological history propelling all of these words, lavished upon the definition for the transitive verb, tells us that the speakers of the ancestral Saxon, German, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, and Gothic languages behind our English word (to which modern dictionaries add Frisian and Old Icelandic, among others) employed variants meaning not just “speech,” “discourse,” “tell,” and “narrate,” but “counsel,” “decree,” “command,” “rule or govern,” “berate,” and “verdict.” The Germanic “rath” meant, and still means, “council or senate.” The Danish “ret” is “law, justice, right, reason.” Webster notes that “the primary sense of read is to speak, to utter, that is, to push, drive or advance,” relating it to “ready, that is, prompt or advancing quick” and “ride.” And yet the definition includes, in its second and third senses, “to peruse silently,” “to discover or understand by characters, marks or features as, to read a man’s thoughts in his countenance,” “to learn by observation.” These are activities that are quiet, reflective, and analytical.īuilt into Webster’s definition is evidence that the “reading revolution” of the eighteenth century-an expression of new, so-called “extensive” reading opportunities and voiceless reading habits produced in part by cheaper publishing technologies and increased literacy-could not and did not, in fact, cancel out older modes of consuming words: the “intensive” reading, often out loud, of texts that offer rules to live by, often sacred.

Emily Dickinson’s dictionary makes it very clear that reading is voiced, directive, and juridical in its origins.
