“Fewer hours of toil mean more time to read.” —Terence V. Powderly, “The Plea for Eight Hours” (1890)

Do you hear the bells? Reading’s death knell is being tolled again by critics, teachers, and authors, in books and essays that turn an expectant face toward their own oblivion. Intellectuals and moralists have long worried about people reading the wrong things, or reading in the wrong way, or not reading enough. But this time, the alarm may be justified.

Mass readerships first emerged in the nineteenth century due to the happy coincidence of several factors. These included “public school systems, cheap wood-pulp paper, browsable bookstores, and taxpayer-funded libraries,” Leah Price writes in her 2019 study What We Talk About When We Talk About Books. Today, there is a darker convergence of trends.

There is a crisis in education: misguided techniques for teaching literacy and the overhauling of curricula in response to standardized testing have imperiled the formation of a new generation of readers. College costs have pressed humanities enrollments downward, as students assume that the humanities offer poor job prospects.

There is a crisis in culture. The stranglehold that tech companies exercise over public life through addictive devices and media platforms has sidelined the literary. The constant stream of ephemeral media might numb a moment’s boredom or nudge you to buy a product, but the clamor of algorithmically targeted content tends to drown thought, not inspire it.

Meanwhile, conservative politicians have taken an interest in literature in the same way we take an interest in a mosquito that whines in our ear before we squash it. Florida, Iowa, and other states banned, in total, more than 10,000 books last year in public schools. In the United Kingdom, some 773 libraries closed during Britain’s decade of austerity. Relentless attacks painting the humanities as effete left-wing nonsense have eroded public support for these fields of study.

These interconnected crises are unfolding against a background of deep inequality, immiseration, and a general lowering of educational and quality-of-life standards. The literary system has not responded effectively to these challenges. The callousness and conformity of conglomerate publishers and the haughty defensiveness of the academy have failed to convince people that it is through words, through language, that bold ideas arise, and that if we give up on reading, we neuter ourselves.

For many, literature has become alien, intimidating, illegible, rather than a tradition that gives their lives meaning. The general sense is that reading is a waste of time, obscure, difficult, and pointless, a hobby comparable to coin collecting or historical battle reenactment. Reading is not treated as a path to liberty. It is treated as a chore we will be liberated from once AI does our reading for us.

Each threat I’ve named has chipped away at humanity’s ability to think for itself. But there is one obstacle to the freedom to read that underlies all the others. This impediment to reading is so fundamental that if we can get it right, some of the other ailments I mention might soon be solved. It is control over our time.

“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things,” Virginia Woolf pronounces in A Room of One’s Own. A mind housed in needy, protesting flesh cannot roam unimpeded. Certain conditions must be met. These conditions, for Woolf, go beyond the basic requirements of survival. The “desirable things” for a writer, she proposes, are “time, money, and idleness.” If women have, historically, produced fewer literary masterworks than men, this is because they have been deprived of these goods. Hence Woolf’s famous call: “Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year” and you shall see what a woman is capable of.

Woolf was more fortunate than most in obtaining the material base needed for intellectual liberty. She lived, in part, on inherited capital. Her prodigious literary output was made possible by the labor of servants. As a girl, she was given unchecked rein in her father’s library. An image that recurs in A Room of One’s Own is that of a hand flitting across well-stocked bookshelves, fingertips grazing the voices of the past. There is, for Woolf, no greater image of abundance.

Woolf published A Room of One’s Own in 1929. Thirty years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, another woman was pursuing the freedom to read under conditions so desperate that her account remains a uniquely harrowing document in world literature. The Brazilian writer Carolina Maria de Jesus lived for much of her adult life in a slum on the outskirts of São Paolo. She was a dark-skinned black woman in a country that imported more enslaved Africans than any other, and in which slavery was abolished just a quarter-century before her birth.

De Jesus moved to the favela in 1947, pregnant and unemployed. Hauling boards from a nearby church construction site, she built a shack with her own hands, flattening out tin cans to make a roof. Her first child was born, then a second, then a third, the family pressed together in a shack that measured four by twelve feet. Foraging for scrap paper in the streets of São Paolo, De Jesus eked out an existence on the edge of starvation.

Most of the paper she found, she sold to junkyards for pennies. But some she kept. On cardboard, on newsprint, and on the clean side of discarded notebooks, she wrote in a curling, even hand about life in the favela.

Carolina Maria De Jesus is that instantly recognizable being, a writer, and like any writer trying to enter the literary scene, she seethes at the publishers who reject and scorn her. For years she labored without success to publish her stories and poems, even managing to send a notebook containing a novel to Reader’s Digest in the United States. (Editors returned her manuscript in the mail.) In 1958, she was “discovered.” A journalist reporting a story on the favelas found his way to her shack, and she spread the notebooks before him. Her diary, published in 1960, became, within six months of its publication, the bestselling book in Brazilian history. For a moment, she achieved global fame.

But like most people born poor, de Jesus died poor as well. Her celebrity waned. Publishers managed to avoid paying her full royalties from sales abroad. The money ran out. In her final years she was reduced to traveling two hours by bus to scavenge for refuse in the same streets she had trudged through during her years in the favela. Virginia Woolf’s ashes are buried under an elm tree in the garden of a country house operated by the National Trust. De Jesus was put to earth in a pauper’s grave.

Two women, one rich, one destitute. Yet in de Jesus’s diary, Woolf’s dream of “a room of one’s own” rings out. “I had found some boards,” de Jesus writes, “and was going to make a little room where I could write and keep my books.” Two years of schooling was enough to vault de Jesus into literacy. “Since the day I learned how to read,” she declares with pride, “I have been reading every day in my life.” Each night, before she sleeps, she lights a kerosene lamp, covers her nose with a rag “to take away some of the favela stench,” and reaches for a book or magazine or newspaper that some wealthier person discarded. “I don’t know how to sleep without reading,” she reports in her diary. “The book is man’s best invention so far.” A man says to her: “I never saw a black who liked books as much as you do!” Later that day, she reflects: “Everyone has an ideal in life. Mine is to be able to read.”

Like Woolf, de Jesus believed that reading was life’s sweetest joy. Unlike Woolf, she was punished for this. When she was a girl, her biographers report, she would spend long hours sitting under a tree reading The Lusiads, the great Portuguese epic. Passersby, seeing a young black woman poring over thick books, accused her of studying witchcraft and reported her to the police. She and her mother were jailed for five days and beaten with rubber batons. Later, in the favela, de Jesus accepts social alienation as the price of pursuing a literary vocation. Though she takes lovers, she decides not to marry. She’d rather read instead. “A man isn’t going to like a woman who can’t stop reading and gets out of bed to write and sleeps with paper and pencil under her pillow,” she explains in her diary. “That’s why I prefer to live alone, for my ideals.”

Gathering sellable scraps, de Jesus fills her burlap sack with so much paper that the dragging weight bruises her shoulder. “I worked too hard and felt ill.” “I was so tired that I couldn’t stand up. … I thought: if I don’t die I’ll never work like this again.” Sometimes, she gets up in the middle of the night to fill tin cans with water from a communal tap.

But other nights are hers. In the darkness she reads, writes, and looks at the stars hanging over Brazil. These acts of psychological self-maintenance are difficult in the favela’s daytime clamor. Exhaustion, hunger, filth, irritation, and sorrow leach her powers of concentration. Woolf complains, in A Room of One’s Own, about the “plain gravy soup” served at an underfunded women’s college; de Jesus cooks macaroni that her children fish out of the trash.

“The poor don’t rest nor are they permitted the pleasure of relaxation,” she writes. Yet when she can snatch a moment from laboring for survival, she sits with a magazine “on the grass, letting the rays of the sun warm me as I read a story.” Awakening from a lovely dream, she thanks God for sending her visions to soothe her “aching soul.” “I can’t afford to go to a play so God sends me these dreams.” When she writes, she feels as if she is “in a golden palace … My dress was finest satin and diamonds sat shining in my black hair.” Then she puts her book away, and the “satin turned to rags and the only things shining in my hair were lice.”

Woolf kept a diary to sweep up what she calls “the diamonds of the dustheap” – precious insights gleaned from the rapid flow of experience. De Jesus, too, writes to discover jewels glinting in waste. Her diary is testimony, escapism, an altar stone on which she lays her prayers for a better life. It is also an assertion of superiority. Thrillingly, she is a snob. “I’m going to write a book about the favela, and I’m going to tell everything that happened here,” she crows at the women in the shantytown who torment her. “You with these disgusting scenes are furnishing me with material.” Although she walks dressed in rags and often does not have soap to clean herself, she has a radio, a pile of books, and a lamp by which to read them. She sneers at her neighbors: “At night when they are begging I peacefully sit in my shack listening to Viennese waltzes.”

We know that reading enables a certain self-consciousness, sharpening our sense of who we are and what we are doing. At the same time, it enlarges the imagination, nourishing our power to come up with alternatives to how we might think or live otherwise. For literature to do its work of intellectual emancipation, however, a prior freedom is needed: the freedom to read in the first place. Wresting that freedom from a world that doesn’t want you to study, think, or imagine even in extreme circumstances, as de Jesus’s story shows. Even so, Woolf’s dictum is as true as ever: “Intellectual freedom depends on material things.”

We have lost a vocabulary for speaking of free time in political terms. We speak of time management, of efficiency, of making room in our schedules for activities we value. Time is individualized. But “making” the time is not just a matter of individual responsibility; it’s a collective mission. Free time and free reading go together. Each depends on the other. And both are needed for larger projects of existential, intellectual, and political liberation.

Both leisure and reading have become depoliticized. Most contemporary economists treat leisure as substitutable with consumer goods. One person might choose to work less and enjoy more free time, while another might prefer to work more and spend more. All this is, supposedly, a matter of personal preference. Leisure is a good that one “purchases” by forgoing additional income from paid work.

Reading, too, is widely seen as consumption. Literature may be something of an oddball form of entertainment, its demographic skewing female, older, and college educated. But it is considered one form of media among its competitors in the culture industry. The choice between TikTok and Tolstoy, Survivor and Sappho, Broadway and the Brontës might occasion anxiety about class and status, but it is treated as no different than the choice between Sprite and seltzer.

The depoliticization of leisure and of reading has happened in part because advocacy for reading and the fight for free time have become disconnected struggles. A vision of leisure as the ground of imagination and self-discovery gets lost when reading falls out of the picture. Likewise, calls to carve out room to read amid the frenetic busyness of contemporary society are stunted when oriented only toward the individual. There needs to be attention to the institutional arrangements that deprive people of time for study and imagination. Our lack of control over our own time is maintained by the political choices our society makes.

In political philosophy, the earliest articulation of a universal right to leisure links it explicitly to reading. Literature, argues the anarchist philosopher William Godwin in his 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, is the instrument by which “the mind is strung to a firmer tone.” The overworked “multitude,” Godwin laments, cannot partake of the “illuminations” of literature – a category which for Godwin would have included not just poetry, drama, and fiction but also history and philosophy. For this injustice to be remedied, what is needed is a new general policy “that every individual should have leisure for reasoning and reflection.” Notably, Godwin argues for the shortest workday ever proposed by a serious philosopher, estimating rather fancifully that if we reduce unnecessary wants, we could feed, clothe, and house everyone by working half an hour a day, leaving a luxuriously ample remainder for leisured contemplation.

Godwin’s argument that workers deserve leisure to share in literature’s “illuminations” was radical. But this view soon found wider purchase. Across the nineteenth century, many labor activists and social reformers took up similar claims. Nineteenth-century reformers arguing for shorter working hours – the people who won us the eight-hour day – appealed directly to reading as an ideal. Workers needed time away from work because they needed time to read. Campaigners for a shortened working week deemed reading crucial for participation in democratic governance. A fully human life, in their view, included time to read.

In 1827, carpenters in Philadelphia struck for a ten-hour day, beginning a century-long, nationwide struggle for a shorter working day. In defense of their cause, the Philadelphia artisans cited the importance of leisure for study. “All men,” they declared, “have a just right, derived from their Creator, to have sufficient time in each day for the cultivation of the mind and for self-improvement.” Employers had time to keep their minds active, to carry out devotional and secular reading, and to study the political, social, and economic questions of the day. The carpenters claimed the same freedom – the freedom to read – as theirs by right.

In the decades that followed, workers pressing for shorter hours in America, England, Canada, and elsewhere stressed the educative potential of leisure. A millworker in Lowell, Massachusetts, bemoaned the “starving intellect” of workers deprived of time to read. “When I hear people say they have not time to read,” she wrote in the labor publication Voice of Industry, “O, how does the thought come home to my heart – ‘in heaven’s name what do they live for.’”

Workers often connected time for reading to political self-governance. Self-education supported responsible citizenship. This argument was a mainstay of labor activism across nearly a century of organization. As late as 1910, in Canada, a shorter-hours advocate pleaded in the House of Commons: “Give us opportunity to read, learn, and inwardly digest. Let us have time to straighten our backs from toil – to look around at what is transpiring in public life. If we are not to be led to the polls like sheep, then give us time to study the welfare of our country.”

The link between reading and citizenship was forcefully asserted in the United States by “labor republicans” – the political theorist Alex Gourevitch’s name for artisans, laborers, and reformers who took up “the language of republican liberty and civic virtue” in their attacks on wage labor, which they saw as incompatible with political freedom. Popular sovereignty was impossible in a system that left people dependent on the whims of their employers. The abridgement of workers’ freedom to read was, for labor republicans, a key aspect of their larger disenfranchisement. Because workers “condemned to long hours could not read,” Gourevitch writes, summarizing the republican view, the industrial system produced an “aristocracy of intellect” that might be suitable in a monarchy, but not a republic.

The Knights of Labor, the largest and most powerful labor association in late-nineteenth-century America, cultivated a literary culture among workers by establishing reading rooms, lending libraries, study groups, and debating societies. Knights often quoted John Ruskin and William Morris at their assemblies. Thousands of members attended Oscar Wilde’s 1882 lectures in Colorado (where, in Leadville, he was lowered by bucket into a silver mine and spent hours drinking and talking with the miners underground). Several local assemblies had dramatic societies, or would read plays aloud; in Toledo, Ohio, the assembly’s members staged their own theatrical productions. Labor publications regularly advertised lectures readers could attend and books they could buy. One Knight reflected, triumphantly: “The people are reading for themselves; they are reading labor papers.”

Because leisure was necessary (though not sufficient) for self-education, shorter worktime was always among the Knights’ central political aims. The Knights believed, Gourevitch writes, that leisure would awaken a “taste for freedom” in America’s laborers. A leisured and literate working class would not tolerate subjection. Free time – and the freedom to read that accompanied it – would ultimately lead to a transformation of the social order.

The Massachusetts statesman George Bancroft went further, arguing in an 1835 lecture that humankind possesses a “universal right to leisure.” He anchors this right in the glory of the world that God has made, declaring:

The universe opens its pages to every eye; the music of creation rebounds in every ear; the glorious lessons of immortal truth that are written in the sky and on the earth address themselves to every mind, and claim attention from every human being. God … calls upon everyone not merely to labor, but to reflect … to contemplate the displays of divine power. Who can look upon the beauty of the universe and believe that the bulk of humanity is meant to do no more than labor for sustenance? Every eye can see its wonder, every ear can hear its song.

Bancroft’s call for a universal right to leisure was ahead of its time. It remains ahead of ours. A Washington, DC, newspaper scoffed that Bancroft might as well have asserted that “every man had a right to a palace, and to ride in a coach.”

What Bancroft was objecting to, however, was a matter of unequal distribution, what he calls “the exclusive enjoyment of leisure by a privileged class.” From the “universality of the intellectual and moral powers,” he argues, we can deduce that all human beings, not just the rich, deserve leisure for reflection and cultivation – and that God has willed that this be so. Economic arrangements which compel “unceasing toil” violate the divine plan.

The freedom to read may be grounded in philosophy or aesthetics or theology, but it is always, inescapably, political. As the historian Jonathan Rose makes plain in his magisterial work The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, the spectacle of people at the bottom of society pursuing self-education has long been seen as an affront to the social order. Workers who seized on their scant leisure time to immerse themselves in music, literature, and other intellectual pursuits sometimes kept their activities secret. “Had it been known to all my customers,” one London tailor reflects, “that I had accumulated a considerable library in which I spent all the leisure time I could spare … half of them at the least would have left me.” For workers who managed, against the odds, to learn languages, write poetry, compose music, study mathematics, master the philosophical tradition, or collect botanical or biological specimens, leisure provided the chance to throw off, at least from time to time, the limitations set by class.

Viewed from the top of the social ladder, such aspirations would have seemed like dangerous attempts to rise above one’s station. As the evangelical reformer William Wilberforce put it, for the poor to deviate from the “more lowly path … allotted to them by the hand of God” was an affront to the divine order. Arguments for free time and free reading disconcerted an upper class disinclined to see workers as anything more than labor power – and who assumed that, if poor people were given time away from work, they would waste it in orgiastic drunkenness.

Those who most benefitted from the status quo had good reason to view working-class readers with alarm. Reading can offer escape or private solace. But it can also lead people to ask for more.

Terence V. Powderly, who led the Knights of Labor during its era of greatest influence, argues that workers’ growing freedom to read spurred the creation of new wants. After workers won a ten-hour day, Powderly writes, they “had more time to read; having more time to read, they learned what was going on throughout the world, and they naturally acquired new tastes and desires.” Samuel Gompers, the leader, for decades, of the American Federation of Labor, declared before Congress in 1886 that fewer work hours “means more leisure, more rest, more opportunity … for going to the parks, of having better homes, of reading books, of creating more desires.”

What kind of new desires does leisure create? For one, an increasing fineness of aesthetic perception. Powderly notes that among workers empowered by the ten-hour day, “the demand for articles of home consumption and adornment increased very rapidly,” in part because workers now had the chance to see their homes by daylight. For Gompers, the overworked laborer “has no time” for “books and the study of political economy, or books treating of the condition of the people.” But a man who works eight hours a day will “go to the theater, read a magazine … have a pretty picture on the wall, or perhaps a piano or organ in his parlor, and he wishes everything about him to be bright and attractive.”

This heightening of aesthetic sense might seem trivial, so long as it results only in a painting where there had once been blank wall, or the chords of a piano where there had once been silence. But suppose that the picture and the piano are visible signs of something else, something happening inside a person’s mind. The presence of the “pretty picture on the wall” might already indicate an altered orientation to the world. The mind feeds on the picture and begins to ask questions, about the painting’s subject, its composition, its use of curves and diagonals, its manipulation of light and shadow, its color and texture. It asks about other paintings, other painters, how they lived, what they feared and suffered, and how they used the materials at hand to help us see beyond the limits of ordinary perception.

The stirring of the mind is invisible. But the effects of a cultivated imagination are – because we are talking about creativity and originality – impossible to predict. The imagination is often modest in its workings. It does not always announce itself. But over time, it erects towers and bridges, discovers new planets, and corrodes the dictates of kings.

Every humanly made object must be imagined before it can be concretely realized. Political systems are among the things that human beings make. Free time and free reading help us understand what freedom is, and how we might achieve it. Leisure and literature are linked causes. Each needs the other, and humanity needs both. The progress of the imagination and of humanity are one.

“The tears of the poor stir the poets,” Carolina Maria de Jesus writes. “They don’t move the poets of the living room, but they do move the poet of the garbage dump, this idealist of the favela, a spectator who sees and notes the tragedies that the politicians inflict on the people.”