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"Dear, darling Nicholas Nickleby came today and I enjoyed reading it very much."
Reading and writing played a very important role in the Hall sister's lives. Many hours a day were spent writing in their diaries, and you can read why and how here. Reading other peoples literature was also an enjoyable and educational pass-time. Both of the sisters sometimes confided in their diaries what they had been reading and what they thought of it. What they wrote tells us that they read a wide range of literature on a wide range of topics. Here, Emily writes about what she read in The Penny Magazine. Emily read on many informative subjects, and showed that she wished not to be ignorant of any subject, or to be seen as ill-informed. For example, she noted in her diary one day that she had found a piece of writing that enlightened her of the "true" state of the problems in Ireland. You can read it here. Sherrard's reading of the diary has also revealed that Emily read other women's memoirs, something that may have influenced her own diary writing. He found this extract, that I believe was written in around January, 1839:
Like
many other middle-class people of this era, Emily and Ellen and their elder
sister Louisa set up a book society while they were
still living on Jersey. Unfortunately it was only a partial success, as these
extracts from their diaries show. Between 1842 and 1843, Ellen got in the habit of recording all the books she had read each month in her diary, so we can retrieve what my be a complete reading list for her year. Most striking are the number of travel books that are on the list. It is easy in these circumstance to see how ideas and perception of Empire became so important in the ways that the Victorian middle-classes saw themselves and the rest of the world. There is also a fair amount of domestic and religious literature, such as Self-Devotion, by Harriet Campbell. In her earlier diaries, Ellen often jotted down what she had been reading while she was making her daily entries. On two ocassions she mentioned she was reading the recent publications by Charles Dickens - Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist. Another time, Ellen notes that she has been reading the work of William Wilberforce.
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