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Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history
Why did books start being divided into chapters? Joshua Barnes reviews Nicholas Dames’ history of literary segmentation, a study that slices through and pauses over what chapters have always told us about the times we live in.
However sceptical we might like to be about periodisation, and nasty but inevitable grand narratives, it’s observable that history has, well, happened; historical experience makes ‘norms’ normal, and it is potentially why – to return to Davis’ question with which I began – more people still read Austen for pleasure than Smollett, Fielding, Defoe, or, um, John Bunyan. Not unrelatedly, I recently invited some students to read paragraphs from the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries (respectively, Margery Kempe, Edmund Spenser, Margaret Cavendish, Eliza Haywood, and Sterne: I welcome criticisms of my selections) and one of them said, in so many words, ‘Perhaps some things are forgotten for a reason.’ Perhaps. At the end of Amnesiac Selves,he speculates on the way that Victorian fiction inculcates a special kind of nostalgia – its warm selective memory is the flipside of the alienating nausea of the historical difference that makes you want to throw a book out the window (or, in homage to Sterne, down the stairs).
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