'Weeton's reading becomes important in communication with friends, but also a point of conflict: when she visits her brother and his wife, they complain that she spends all her time reading, though she insists that she read very little ("only... Gil Blas, now and then a newspaper, two or three of Lady M. W. Montagu's letters, and few pages in a magazine'), and only because her hosts rose so late. Since her literacy is important as a sign of status, she repeatedly presents herself not as a reader of low status texts like novels but of travels, education works, memoirs and letters, including Boswell's "Tour of the Hebrides", the Travels of Mungo Park, and Mme de Genlis' work. She approves some novels, like Hamilton's "The Cottagers of Glenburnie", but generally finds them a "dangerous, facinating kind of amusement" which "destroy all relish for useful, instructive studies'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Ellen Weeton Print: Book
'A Scottish flax dresser gained his "first or incipient idea of localities and distances" when he was assigned to read aloud at work from Anson, Cook, Bruce and Mungo Park'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: "Jacques", a flax dresser Print: Book
'I also had some good opportunities for borrowing books; and thus read that very interesting quarto volume, Mr. Park's "Travels in Africa". I also read Mr. Colquhoun's large treatise on the "Police of the Metropolis" from which I gleaned much information and amusement.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Carter Print: Book
'Shelley reads Mungo Parks travels loud'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'Read and finish Mungo Parks travels - they are very interesting & if the man was not so prejudiced they would be a thousand times more so. but those Institutions must always have Christians'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Godwin Print: Book
'I am well off for books, for I have a second in hand there almost more interesting, and that is Mungo Park's travels, which I never read before.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Darwin