The Clergyman, the Nobleman and the Peasant: Tracing the Reading Revolution in Rural Nineteenth Century Sweden, in a copy of John Tillotson’s "Utwalda predikningar" (Gothenburg 1765-70)

Some forty years ago, the German scholar Rolf Engelsing published his ground-breaking study Der Bürger als Leser (1974), which established that a reading revolution occurred in the course of the late eighteenth century. His results, based on studies of German reading communities, have been subject for debate ever since. Today, many scholars would agree that a profound shift in reading practices permeated European society, transforming the act of reading from an intensive reading and re-reading of a limited number of texts to an extensive mass reading of a large corpus of texts. The question of when the reading revolution occurred is, however, more disputed. As Robert Darnton has pointed out, in terms of history of reading the where is also of great importance. In Sweden, on the margins of Europe, new trends usually spread only slowly and old habits had a way of lingering on. By contrast, when it comes to literacy, Sweden was a forerunner, and as early as the eighteenth century, even the common man could read. A few rare accounts indicate that by the first decades of the nineteenth century, reading was transforming also in Sweden. In 1828, the vicar Muncktell, for example, contemplated that a book that he would now finish in less than a day, the ‘old readers’ would digest for years, even a lifetime. These accounts, however, tells us practically nothing regarding the reading habits of the common man. Here, we have to rely on other sources. In 2015, I stumbled upon a collection of sermons by the archbishop John Tillotson, printed in Gothenburg 1765. The voluminous tome had been read almost to pieces. Owing to previous owners’ signatures and annotations, I was able to establish the provenance for the book’s first hundred years. The cleric Magnus Hedén was the first owner, and when he died in 1794, the nobleman Johan Eberhard von Rappholt acquired the volume. The last verified owner, the farmhand Anders Jansson, is the most mundane but also most interesting identified possessor of the book. His annotations provide new and remarkably detailed information on the reading habits among common men in mid-nineteenth century Sweden.