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Early novel reading typically conjures images of rapt readers in
quiet rooms, but commentators at the time described reading as a
fraught activity, one occurring amidst a distracting cacophony that
included sloshing chamber pots and wailing street vendors. Auditory
distractions were compounded by literary ones as falling paper
costs led to an explosion of print material, forcing prose fiction
to compete with a dizzying array of essays, poems, sermons, and
histories. In Distraction, Natalie M. Phillips argues that
prominent Enlightenment authors-from Jane Austen and William Godwin
to Eliza Haywood and Samuel Johnson-were deeply engaged with
debates about the wandering mind, even if they were not equally
concerned about the problem of distractibility. Phillips explains
that some novelists in the 1700s-viewing distraction as a dangerous
wandering from singular attention that could lead to sin or even
madness-attempted to reform diverted readers. Johnson and Haywood,
for example, worried that contemporary readers would only focus
long enough to "look into the first pages" of essays and novels;
Austen offered wry commentary on the issue through the creation of
the daft Lydia Bennet, a character with an attention span so short
she could listen only "half-a-minute." Other authors radically
redefined distraction as an excellent quality of mind, aligning the
multiplicity of divided focus with the spontaneous creation of new
thought. Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, for example, won
audiences with its comically distracted narrator and uniquely
digressive form. Using cognitive science as a framework to explore
the intertwined history of mental states, philosophy, science, and
literary forms, Phillips explains how arguments about the diverted
mind made their way into the century's most celebrated literature.
She also draws a direct link between the disparate theories of
focus articulated in eighteenth-century literature and modern
experiments in neuroscience, revealing that contemporary questions
surrounding short attention spans are grounded in long
conversations over the nature and limits of focus.
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