The Informed Victorian Reader

Abstract

How did Victorian readers choose what to read, and why should this matter? Studies of Victorian reading practices have explored which texts Victorian readers chose to read and how they interpreted them, but scholars have generally neglected the actual processes through which readers became informed about and made their reading selections, as well as the Victorians’ discursive treatment of those processes. Addressing this lapse, I argue that from the Victorians’ perspective, the ways readers selected books had a profound effect on their reading experiences, shaping how they understood texts’ meanings, developed relationships with books, and characterized themselves as readers.

To investigate this overlooked aspect of reading in the nineteenth century, I draw on a variety of sources from the Victorian period, including metadata, literary representations of readers, and nonfiction prose that addresses book selection, by figures such as John Stuart Mill, Henry Morley, Mark Pattison, and John Ruskin. These sources provide a rich sense of the varied ways in which Victorian readers came across books and made book selections, including searching through catalogues, following others’ recommendations, and browsing book stall shelves or stacks of books at home. I outline two divergent attitudes circulating in Victorian publications about book selection, one advocating readers’ purposeful pursuits of information about books, arranged by educated individuals, and the other celebrating the many ways readers could approach literature from outside of the formal infrastructure of information.

The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts that feature most prominently in my analysis of Victorian book selection habits include the catalogues of Mudie’s library from the 1850s through the 1930s, as well as a number of novels and poems: Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (1923), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868-69), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), Ouida’s The Tower of Taddeo (1892), and Mark Rutherford’s Clara Hopgood (1896). I conclude the dissertation by bringing into the present the Victorians’ concerns about informed reading, analyzing Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (2014) to study the relationship between expert guidance on texts and emotional identification with texts.