ABSTRACT
'The Great Fiction Bore' had almost petered out by the First World War. Public spaces like the Free Library, emerging out of mid-nineteenth-century philosophies around the importance of literature to the formation of character and citizenship, made public not just their failures but the ways in which their successes were linked to middle-class hegemonic codes. George Gissing's 1894 novel In the Year of Jubilee, from which the above extract comes, engages overtly and deliberately with a major late-nineteenth-century debate about books, readers and reading. Women readers were clearly seen as important to the success of the movement. The public library, designed to make good books available to all, was originally at least partly conceived as an alternative to Mudie's. The role of the self-styled 'guardian of public morals' is crucial to an understanding of the role of public reading in the literary field towards the end of the nineteenth century.
