ABSTRACT
Sensation novels 'carried the nervous system by steam'. The public library was 'an engine' for 'operating upon' the masses, for good or ill. W. H. Smith's self-advertisement was as a respectable purveyor of 'good' literature across the board. The railway bookstall represented a very different type of public space in which a range of books were both widely available, and anxiously viewed as potential corrupters of women, lower class readers and the mental health of the nation. The railway itself, actually and metaphorically, was an engine for social change, and this had tremendous potential for appropriation by both opponents and supporters, both of modernity and of fiction. The reader, who was meant to visit the public library in a mood of leisurely seriousness, in order to select self-improving literature based on the recommendations of literary columns and librarians, was not the same reader who visited the railway bookstall.
