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  • A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900 edited by Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland
  • Kate Flint (bio)
A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900, edited by Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland; pp. xii + 188. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011, £55.00, $99.95.

What, exactly, do we mean when we speak of “the common reader”? In George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) the term signified, at least to the Reardons, someone who failed to recognize literary quality, and who read indiscriminately. By self-conscious contrast, Amy Reardon, in the early days of her marriage, would often give “her husband a thrill of exquisite pleasure by pointing to some merit or defect” in a new library volume “of which the common reader would be totally insensible!” ([Oxford University Press, 2009], 68). When Richard Altick employed the phrase in the title of his enormously influential The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (1957), he used it in much the same way. The “common reader” is here constructed as the reader of newspapers and penny fiction, of sensation literature and Newgate tales—of works, in other words, that were often ephemeral, and that certainly did not, at the time that Altick published his study, find their ways onto university curricula.

Altick took his term, of course, from Samuel Johnson, who in his “Life of Gray” (1779) said that “I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours” (The Lives of the Poets: A Selection, edited by John Mullan and Roger Lonsdale, [Oxford University Press, 2009], 461). Common readers were not just those who existed outside of academia and literary institutions. Johnson’s emphasis on “common sense,” and on the ability of readers to make up their minds about the value, utility, and enjoyability of the works that they read, is in many ways the unacknowledged thread running through this new volume of essays. Its origins lie in the conference that was held at Oxford in January 2007 in celebration of the fifty continuous years that Altick’s volume had been in print.

The questions raised by the essays that Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland have brought together concern the relationship of reading to democracy, the process of learning to think for oneself, and the resistance to conventions and the expectations of class and gender. They hark back, in many ways, to Johnson’s concerns. The fact that they so do is, of course, a mark of the way in which Altick’s work was crucial in opening up the field of reading studies to include many different types of readers and texts; the uniformly interesting, well-researched essays in A Return to the Common Reader offer persuasive testimony to the breadth of Altick’s enduring influence.

For the most part—and this perhaps befits what is, in essence, a commemorative volume—these are not essays that seek to make new position statements. Although the collection is divided into two parts—“Publishers, Authors, Critics, Readers” and “Scenes of Reading”—this does not signify a sustained divide between theory and praxis. The volume opens with Laurel Brake’s very useful overview of nineteenthcentury publishing practices, and all the subsequent authors make detailed use of primary materials. These include Ouida’s (Maria Louise Ramé) correspondence with her publishers, through which Jane Jordan shows that being marketed, priced, and packaged as a popular novelist ensured that critics judged one’s work accordingly; the journals, letters, and autobiographical accounts consulted by Rosalind Crone for her entertaining, informed account of how prisoners read the Bible on convict ships; and [End Page 544] the archives of the Royal Colonial Institute, which Palmer consulted for her fascinating investigation of the kinds of reading that its organizational practices enabled. Palmer pays scrupulous attention to shelving and cataloguing, showing that even if the library contained plenty of works that unquestioningly assumed Britain’s place at the center of the world...

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