The Tip of the Iceberg

This article evaluates the benefits and drawbacks of using quantitative digital analysis to reconstruct eighteenth‐century reading practices using manuscript life writing. Our corpus is over a thousand pages of Mary Hamilton's letters and diary entries covering one year of her life. We report significant findings concerning the space, time, nature, and mode of Hamilton's reading, and the media, genre, authorship, and provenance of her material. Her reading diet is more dominated by female‐authored manuscript prose, inflected by personal acquaintance, and reliant on a private loan economy than we anticipated — conclusions that we would not have reached using qualitative analysis alone

Loan · Private life · Qualitative analysis · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Historical Economic and Social Studies