Reading and the Victorians
The Nineteenth Century Series

What did reading mean to the Victorians? This question is the key point of departure for Reading and the Victorians, an examination of the era when reading underwent a swifter and more radical transformation than at any other moment in history. With book production handed over to the machines and mass education boosting literacy to unprecedented levels, the norms of modern reading were being established. Essays examine the impact of tallow candles on Victorian reading, the reading practices encouraged by Mudie's Select Library and feminist periodicals, the relationship between author and reader as reflected in manuscript revisions and corrections, the experience of reading women's diaries, models of literacy in Our Mutual Friend, the implications of reading marks in Victorian texts, how computer technology has assisted the study of nineteenth-century reading practices, how Gladstone read his personal library, and what contemporary non-academic readers might owe to Victorian ideals of reading and community. Reading forms a genuine meeting place for historians, literary scholars, theorists, librarians, and historians of the book, and this diverse collection examines nineteenth-century reading in all its personal, historical, literary, and material contexts, while also asking fundamental questions about how we read the Victorians' reading in the present day.

Contents: Introduction, Matthew Bradley and Juliet John. Part I The Public Aspects of Private Reading: Reading by artificial light in the Victorian age, Simon Eliot; New innovations in audience control: the select library and sensation, Stephen Colclough; Reading Langham Place periodicals at number 19, Beth Palmer. Part II The Reading Relationship: Deep reading in the manuscripts: Dickens and the manuscript of David Copperfield, Philip Davis; ’Telling all’: reading women’s diaries in the 1890s, Catherine Delafield; Reading across the lines and off the page: Dickens’s model of multiple literacies in Our Mutual Friend, Sheila Cordner. Part III Reading the Victorians Today: Victorian readers and their library records today, K. E. Attar; Query: Victorian reading, Rosalind Crone; Gladstone’s unfinished synchrony: reading afterlives and the Gladstone database, Matthew Bradley; The sharing of stories, in company with Mr Dickens, Clare Ellis. Afterword, Jenny Hartley; Works cited; Index.

Matthew Bradley is Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Liverpool, UK, and Juliet John is Hildred Carlile Chair of English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.