Willful Listeners by Kate Nesbit

A cultural and literary history of domestic reading aloud

“Listening,” a recent Audible advertising campaign proclaimed, “is the new reading.” But this is no new phenomenon. In the nineteenth century, reading aloud was one of the most popular evening entertainments and one of the primary ways people consumed fiction. In Willful Listeners, Kate Nesbit considers the Victorian practice of reading aloud from the perspective of listeners—especially the rowdy and disobedient ones.

A counternarrative to more nostalgic portraits, this book spotlights fiction’s unruly audience: tired laborers who zone out while listening to the Bible, women who fall asleep to their husbands’ Shakespeare delivery, and children who eavesdrop on their parents reading the newspaper’s sex scandals. Nesbit analyzes the ritual of reading aloud not merely as an idealized form of domestic intimacy or a method of moral improvement but rather as a praxis enmeshed in the period’s contentious politics of attention. These scenes are about more than reading and reading aloud, Nesbit argues—they speak to attention’s ties to social hierarchy. These are moments that call into question assumptions about who needs to pay attention to whom, about whose voices were deemed worth a listen, and whose voices required amplification. This is a history of both the audiobook and its audience before sound recording.