History of reading: An introduction to reading in the past

Introduction

The 11 essays comprising this unit cover a wide range of topics in the history of reading, each designed to whet your appetite to explore the subject further, by searching the UK Reading Experience Database RED yourself. We have designed this unit for you to dip in and dip out of, allowing you to select the area that interests you most. Click on the links below to select the essays you’d like to read.

1. Reading the English Bible
2. Charles Dickens and his readers
3. Jane Austen’s readers
4. A famous novel and its readers: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847)
5. Childhood reading in the 1870s and 1880s: the recollections of Molly Hughes
6. Reading and World War I
7. Reading places
8. Reading while travelling
9. Samuel Pepys: diarist, book collector and reader
10. Robert Louis Stevenson’s reading
11. Reading culture in the Victorian underworld