ABSTRACT
It is rare that a book retains its place on student reading lists for over half a century. Richard Altick’s 1957 work The English Common Reader has done just that. Plotting meticulously researched data on the book trade and its consumers ‘against a panoramic background of nineteenth-century English history’, Common Reader was the first book to conceptualize in detail the rise of mass literacy in the nineteenth century and to imagine the experiences of ordinary readers.1 In 50 years it has never gone out of print, emerging as the seminal text for a whole range of intellectual projects that have come to dominate humanistic studies. To Altick the now-booming fields of Victorian literature, book history, the history and sociology of reading, the study of print culture, and cultural studies continue to owe an irredeemable debt.2
