ABSTRACT
Sometimes, these instances of rebellious reading took place in carefully chosen social contexts, like Marie Corelli (b. 1855) deliberately startling her governess with quotations from Don Juan,82 or Mrs Benson, wife of the Headmaster of Wellington College, scandalizing his friends by letting her children read George Eliot, and thrusting Adam Bede into the hands of clergymen’s wives telling them not to mind being seen reading it.83 Sometimes they were private ones, like Jean Curtis Brown and her friend Lucy consuming the forbidden magazine Home Chat, borrowed from the kitchen on the cook’s night out.84 But the impact of the transgressive act was not necessarily dependent on breaching obvious moral imperatives or crossing class boun daries. It could signify a different form of assertion: access into the domain of parental property. Joan Evans, later to become a historian of medieval art and a well-known Ruskin scholar, was brought up in the 1890s in a house full of books, most of them dating from the early and mid-century: she could claim that she was more familiar with life in England between 1810 and 1850 than with anything happening in her own time. Yet despite the freedom of her access to the fiction of Scott and Thackeray, she was aware that she lacked poetry, of which there was little in the house other than the well-bound wedding presents, belonging to her mother, kept in a glass-fronted bookcase in the drawing room:
One of my few conscious naughtinesses after I had attained the age of perception was to steal into the drawing-room, when I knew my parents were safe in London, open the case, and take deep delicious draughts of verse. Tennyson and Matthew Arnold are all the sweeter for being read in secret.85
