reader

   Used by eighteenth- and nineteenth century novelists to address the reader of their works. Henry Fielding, for example, used it eleven times in Joseph Andrews, adding instances of ‘O reader’, ‘(O) my good reader’. One of the best-known literary quotes is from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: ‘Reader, I married him.’

   It is no longer fashionable to address the reader of a book in this way, though modern novelists might not go as far as Zoë Fairbanks, who says in her novel Down: ‘I’m not going to call you “Dear Reader.” You aren’t “dear” to me. Strangely enough, I feel rather hostile to you. You are prying into my affairs and arriving at conclusions about me, and I don’t like that.’

   Eighteenth-century novelists, knowing full well that their readers were mainly women, sometimes acknowledged that fact. Thus Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, spends a lot of time carrying on a conversation with ‘Madam’, his reader. Fielding, in Joseph Andrews, at one point pauses to address directly ‘my fair countrywomen’. Sterne plays safe by using ‘sir’ as well to his readers, and on the first page of his novel calls them ‘good folks’. When offering to dedicate his book to a suitable applicant he resorts to ‘My lord’.

   The modern fashion, if there is one, is perhaps shown by Philip Roth in Portnoy’s Complaint He uses ‘Doctor’ throughout, as if the whole of his text is being said while he lies on the psychiatrist’s couch. though at one point he says: ‘And, Doctor, Your Honor, whatever your name is…’ William Thackeray, in an essay-like passage of The Newcomes, has: And as for women - O my dear friends and brethren in this vale of tears - did you ever see anything so curious, monstrous and amazing as the way in which women court Princekin when he is marriageable, and pursue him with their daughters?