Live Event: The Social Life of Books: A History of Reading Together at Home

Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding
stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the
Humanities. If we were able to step inside the parlours and drawing
rooms of the eighteenth century we’d find homes busy with home-made
culture - book groups and tea table parties; amateur dramatics;
groups of women reading and weeping their way through popular
sentimental fiction; children stumbling through poems before their
maiden aunts, and men at punch parties singing songs about dogs. We
used to read aloud, and we used to do it together, at home. This
event, presented by Professor Abigail Williams, gives us a glimpse
of that older world of domestic culture and performance, with some
thoughts on its revival in the current climate. In a short
'masterclass' with Giles Lewin, Abby will also give some tips on
what eighteenth-century reading aloud might have looked and sounded
like. Biographies: Abigail Williams is Professor of
Eighteenth-Century Literature at St Peter's College, University of
Oxford. Her monograph on reading aloud, The Social Life of Books
was published by Yale in 2017. She is currently working on a book
on the history of misreading. Giles Lewin is a performer and
composer, primarily a violinist, specialising in medieval music and
the traditional music of Europe and the Middle East.He has written
and performed music for theatre and radio, and played on many film
and television scores. He is a founder member of the folk band
Bellowhead, and the early music groups The Dufay Collective, Alva,
and The Carnival Band.