ABSTRACT
Idiosyncratic interpretations of works by untrained readers might suggest that any interpretation based on a history of audiences would be a mass of openended subjectivity, inaccessible to analytical investigation. However, I would suggest that since the late 1800s, a stable area of interpretation has appeared, one amongst limitless others, but nevertheless a signi cant mode; namely that of interpreting works as if they were commodities. Responding to the world of exchangeable objects for the goods they bear with them is to undertake a commodity assessment. And since the literary works produced by the Victorian book trade were also commodities, it seems reasonable to carry out a similar commodity assessment in the form of a reading. Langford, Blackwood’s manager, in the few nervous days before Middlemarch’s release, still worried about their publishing venture: ‘My objection to the form and price (I have not seen what it is like) is that it does not even appear to give any advantage to purchasers’. Advantages to purchasers, bene ts to readers, the utility key to commodities everywhere, is a viable form of reading for the late nineteenth as well as the twentieth and twenty- rst centuries.
