James Marriott's new book confronts the reality of the reading crisis

Writer and Times columnist James Marriott’s debut book, The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society, is a staunch defence of the written word. Charting the history of literacy from ancient times, through the reading revolution of the 18th century, to the present, he argues that “our tolerant and scientific civilisation is the contingent product of the literate culture created by the spread of reading”. But that culture is now under threat. “Much of the disorder and unreason of the twenty-first century is a direct consequence of the fading of the written word and the rise of a culture shaped by images and videos,” he writes.

This gloomy hypothesis could hardly be more timely in our National Year of Reading, when more than a third of UK adults state they have given up reading, and with the National Literacy Trust reporting “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record.

The decline of reading and its consequences have preoccupied Marriott since he began writing his column for the Times five years ago. “At first, writing about how no one is reading anymore felt like the typical moan of a columnist,” he tells me when we speak via video call. “But then I read reports from universities saying their students were struggling to read, and about declining reading levels in both Britain and America. And I began to feel like I had a grand theory of how all this had come about. I wrote a 7,000-word essay for my Substack, and it went viral, far more so than anything else I’ve ever written.” The essay’s readership of more than one million suggested that the decline of reading is a concern shared by many, and convinced The Bodley Head to publish a book. Marriott also pitched the idea to BBC Radio 4, and the result was a complementary three-part series entitled How Reading Made Us that was broadcast last month.

Pleasure will certainly be part of making the case for reading. But we also have to say: this is a smart thing to do, an important thing to do

Even with our now diverse publishing ecosystem of audiobooks and e-books as well as those that are physical, Marriott’s view is that off-screen reading is king. “It’s a spectrum and I’m not going to say I have the definitive answer. But there seems to me a lot of convincing scientific research that when we read on the printed page we are engaging with what we read more and we are thinking more critically. With an audiobook you still get that density of thought. But when you have a written text physically in front of you, you can study it, you can go back over sentences you don’t understand, you can underline things. That part of the reading process is very important”.

Drawing on the work of theorists including Walter J Ong and Steven Pinker, and the neuroscience of reading specialist, Maryanne Wolf, The New Dark Ages (which appropriately concludes with a list suggesting further reading) is cogently argued and alarmingly convincing. But I put it to Marriott that as people for whom reading and access to books has always been a given, he and I and other bookish types could appear elitist and even sanctimonious in our advocacy. For example, here is how he describes his Newcastle-upon-Tyne childhood in the early part of his book: “My English teacher father brought me up to regard literature as the central part of life in a way that was not exactly common in the north of England in the early 2000s. Literature was how we explained and interpreted our lives. We quoted books and novels every day… This all seemed normal to me at the time. Though I can now see that we were cultural outliers”.

Marriott – who was formerly deputy on the Times books desk, and prior to that worked in rare books – tells me he is cognisant of this “cultural outlier” danger. “We do have to understand that reading for a lot of people is just not obvious in the way it is for us.” The book does also address what might be construed as a patronising attitude to cultures and people without writing as a central cultural pillar. This does not, argues Marriott, make the threat any less real. “A guy who works at Stanford University told me that his students basically view reading as being for suckers.”

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