The Common Reader

‘Do the customers at publishing houses, the members of book-clubs and circulating libraries, and the purchasers and borrowers of newspapers and reviews, compose altogether the great bulk of the reading public of England?’

In 1858, the novelist Wilkie Collins began an article, ‘The Unknown Public’, he had written for Charles Dickens’s Household Words with this question. It continues to plague those who study the history of reading, and most would agree with the answer Collins himself gave: ‘So far from composing the bulk of English readers, the public mentioned represents nothing more than the minority.’ But a further puzzle remains – where is this hidden majority to be found?