ABSTRACT
There is no way of verifying the accuracy of these numbers precisely, but, even if more or less correct, they do not tell us much about the actual social composition of Eugene Sue's public. Various contemporaries maintained that the spectrum was broad. Indeed, several of the letters to Sue make the very claim of which they themselves were deemed, by later commentators, to be an instantiation or even a proof. Against that background of incompleteness and uncertainty, one thing we can do is to establish what were the general conditions of possibility for the existence of a significant working-class readership of Sue's novel. This will not in itself 'prove' much by way of testing the representative value of the letters to Sue from working-class correspondents, but may permit a range of varyingly plausible inferences and estimates.
