Evolution of Reading

In my view, Joseph Addison intended his essays to be witty and humorous. His lively metaphors and analogies, (for example, Tom Puzzle and Will Dry), highlight this. However, an interesting discussion in last week's seminar arose, concerning whether or not Addison did intend to be funny.

The activity of reading is, and always has been, affected by modern views and beliefs, which shape our understanding of a text. Structuralism dictates whether we find a book funny, sad, or even offensive and this is largely down to the media. The death of Princess Diana was tragic, and although I acknowledge that it is human nature to feel such grief and sympathy at such a time, the media, to a certain extent, also enforced a sense of shock upon us, as the death was so widely reported for such a long time.

In this way, I find it interesting to wonder how Addison's essays were received by the public, when they were first published. Did people find them funny back then? Three hundred years have passed since that time, and so society's view of different issues will have changed radically.

My point being, it is possible that Addison could have been making some serious points in his essays, that were not merely to be taken as light-hearted and witty. Perhaps he was a fervent advocate of the lower classes learning to read and write, and was not just poking fun at their inability to understand what he was saying, describing them as blind 'moles'.

The media, in those days, was a new phenomenon, and so people's reading of the texts was most likely uninhibited by previously enforced ideas, (with the exception of the bible). Therefore it is possible that the essays were all received in different ways by different people. Crossing into media studies momentarily, it may be said that society took on either an alternative or oppositional reading, rather than Addison's preferred reading.

Perhaps we will never know what he truly, originally intended to say, as structuralism has reshaped our way of thinking since his day. We have become 'moles' ourselves in this sense. Nonetheless, his articles would have played an important role during the 1700s, regardless of the reading, as they introduced to society a means by which people could both receive and transmit ideas and views themselves.