The Advantage of Fiction: The Novel and the ‘Success’ of the Victorian Periodical

Fifty years ago, when Richard Altick published The English Common Reader, he shaped a critical map of a vast field that had been recognized by few scholars in English. The notion of the ‘common’ reader signalled an apparent distinction between the consumers of literature – the object of study in departments of English – and ‘common’ readers of the ‘popular’ press, a working class readership associated with cheap and sensationalist literature huddled at one end of the spectrum, reading papers that insulted the intellect and left ink on one’s hands. If that distinction is slowly collapsing, its demise was fuelled by Altick’s remarkable achievement.