(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Fuller was a journalist, Transcendentalist, and women’s rights advocate.
She was educated at home by her father because he was proud of his Harvard education, yet couldn’t send his daughter there because of her gender. She was reading Ovid and Horace in Latin, and learning French, before becoming a teen. When reading of Greek and Roman heroes, she considered “these luminaries her companions, their struggles her inspiration” (D. M. Robinson 2013). She read herself into the texts making “the classical heritage and Western culture her own” (ibid.). This study program was intense, but transformed from a burden into reading becoming “a habit and passion” (Anthony 1921, 12). Her homeschooling fostered a lifelong practice of self-directed education through reading and conversation. Guided by the principle of self-culture, Fuller remarked: “Very early I knew that the only object in life was to grow” (D. M. Robinson 2013 (quoted in)).
This precocious childhood led her to conclude that children shouldn’t learn to read too early because “they should not through books antedate their actual experiences, but should take them gradually, as sympathy and interpretation are needed” (Anthony 1921, 22). Likewise, of adults she wrote: a “moment of action in one’s self, is worth an age of apprehension through others; not that our deeds are better, but that they produce a renewal of our being” (ibid.). In a letter she phrased this notion as: “There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes” (M. Fuller 2001, 79).
She realised that the rigorous pedagogical methods her father employed “had prevented the harmonious development of my bodily powers, and checked my growth” (D. M. Robinson 2013 (quoted in)). From this came her belief in the necessity of harmonious development in pursuing self-culture. Reading in this way must be combined with “the teachings of the little garden”—a refuge in nature which “provided a measure of the security and expressive release that she had been denied” (ibid. (quoted in)). In the garden, her “thoughts could lie callow in the nest, and only be fed and kept warm, not called to fly or sing before their time” (ibid. (quoted in)).
Harmonious self-culture requires not only nature and time to reflect at one’s own pace but also a “self-in-relation, unfolding its nature in association with others” (ibid.). Cooperative relationships and community became a vital part of Fuller’s conception of personal growth and reading. She came to approach “reading and writing not as separate and autonomous acts but instead as continually intersecting and mutually constitutive habits” of collaboration (ibid.). Her letters to friends and associates always came back to reflections on what they read, and especially in her later literary criticism, this organic perspective on the use of books for growth contrasted sharply with the scholarship endorsed by her father (M. Fuller 2001). Without discussion, writing, and nature, she concluded, reading may achieve utilitarian aims but at the cost of one’s health and spirit.
The casual literary criticism that Fuller and her correspondents engaged in, which led to her later professional criticism, confirmed to her that reading the criticism of others is useful in stimulating and suggesting thought. It does not benefit us when “a polite response to what we thought before”, but when it expresses “the freshness of thought in other minds” which awakens new thoughts in us: “We do not want stores of information only, but to be roused to digest these into knowledge” (S. M. Fuller 1846, 7). “In books, in reviews…we wish to meet thinking men, not schoolmasters or pleaders”—“we would live with them, rather than be taught by them how to live” (ibid.). It is not, then, the place of critics to advocate causes or ideologies or tell us what not to read or how specific books should be interpreted (p. 5). We must not indolently acquiesce to dictatorial reviewers. Fuller classifies critics as “subjective”, “apprehensive”, or “comprehensive”.
The subjective “state their impressions as they rise, of other men’s spoken, written, or acted thoughts”, and don’t consider other perspectives and points of view (p. 2). They “love, they like, or they hate…these statements they make with authority” (ibid.). Such criticisms merely record impressions, they are reflexive responses (ibid.). The are from “a savage who does not hesitate to say of the product of a civilization on which he could not stand, or ” (ibid.). We can recognise this approach in how children often read; one they don’t necessarily grow out of.
The apprehensive critics are able to “go out of themselves and enter fully into a foreign existence”, reproducing the text to “make it better known to us” (p. 3). Their work is “ideal as well as historical” (ibid.). This kind of criticism can be more pleasurable to read, more truer, than the text being reviewed. It more closely approximate the standard of criticism than the subjective class (ibid.).
The comprehensive type is also apprehensive—they “enter into the nature of another being and judge his work by its own law”—but then they “also know how to put that aim in its place, and how to estimate its relations” (ibid.). This critic is “worthy to judge” the work because they perceive “the analogies of the universe, and how they are regulated by an absolute, invariable principle” (ibid.). From this, the comprehensive critic can “see how far that work expresses this principle, as well as how far it is excellent in its details”, they “can walk around the work…try its weight” (ibid.).
A critic has “the poetical temperament to apprehend, with the philosophical tendency to investigate” (ibid.). They are analytic, a “historian who records the order of creation” (p. 4). They “should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three” (ibid.). These classifications of critic not only map to how good readers develop, but also describe an ideal: a holistic combination of traits with which to pursue harmonious self-culture.
If the only object in life is to grow, how do we grow as readers? Perhaps, we should identify the type of reader we are currently—i.e. subjective, apprehensive, or comprehensive—and consider how to progress to the next stage; if we’re already a comprehensive reader, how can we refine our approach? To develop taste and background knowledge a great deal of wide, apprehensive reading is necessary. Before the comprehensive practice becomes habitual we may need to intentionally emulate it by seeking out and evaluating the relations between works as we read. Further, we must integrate discussion with our reading, both in writing and in person, in order to expand our perspective on what we’ve read and keep us connected to others, and also reflect in nature, so as to allow our reading to work on us and develop into knowledge.