Jonathan Rose (2002), ‘Education, Literacy and the Victorian Reader’, in Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing (eds), A Companion to the Victorian Novel, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 31-47

In the 1970s Rolf Engelsing posited that there had been, around 1800, a Reading Revolution, the literary counterpart of the Industrial Revolution. He identified a general shift from religious to secular reading; from collective to individual reading; from intensive and repeated reading of a small canon of texts to extensive and rapid reading of an ever-increasing flow of ephemeral literature, particularly newspapers and magazines. Engelsing developed his historical model in the context of Protestant Germany, but it serves even better to explain the transformation of the reading public in nineteenth-century Britain.