"When found, make note of"

What I learnt from writing about reading

Captain Cuttle Reading by W. L. Sheppard. From https://victorianweb.org

Dear Supporters,

The Inconstant Reader was my most read, liked, and commented on post of September. This is perhaps not surprising. Everybody has a stake in reading; by definition, we’re all readers on this platform. And posts that talk about Substack, whether positively or negatively, tend to attract comments. Again, it's something we all have in common. 

I envisaged this month’s Supporter Sidebar as a bit of a Notes and Queries kind of post. The original periodical of that name (it’s still going) was founded in 1849 and went under the motto, “When found, make note of.” This exhortation came from the wonderful Captain Cuttle, from Dombey and Son, which is among my favourite Dickens novel. Cuttle is a wonderfully quaint character, but as the first edition of Notes and Queries said, “If the excellent Captain had never uttered another word, he might have passed for a profound philosopher.” The editor went on, “It is a rule that should shine in gilt letters on the gingerbread of youth and spectacle-case of age.” They don’t write editorials like that any more! 

Notes and Queries felt old-fashioned even at Oxford in the 1980s when I studied there, itself surely the most old-fashioned of English faculties in the country at the time. The journal has the rather dusty air of old-school scholarship about it, not only in comparison to the way literature has been taught for decades in most institutions but also in relation to the rapid “consumption” of books that we read about on some parts of this platform and online generally.¹  

In my essay, I quoted Hazlitt on Lamb’s reading tastes. And another section from the same essay seems to suggest a similar dichotomy of interest, this time in comparison between Lamb and Washington Irvine: 

Mr. Washington Irvine has culled and transplanted the flowers of modern literature, for the amusement of the general reader: Mr. Lamb has raked among the dust and cobwebs of a more remote period, has exhibited specimens of curious relics, and pored over moth-eaten, decayed manuscripts, for the benefit of the more inquisitive and discerning part of the public.

I probably gravitate more towards Lamb than Irvine in this respect, but I wonder whether there’s a split on Substack between Irvinites and Lambites? (Lamb bites???)