ABSTRACT
The inscrutable nature of another person’s subjective experience of a book, particularly when that book is a novel, has long been seen by observers as an intractable condition of reading. The question of what goes on in a novel reader’s mind presented a source of anxiety to early critics of the genre and, more recently, has been regarded as a challenge to book historians.1 Richard Altick’s comprehensive The English Common Reader (1957) refers to the subjective reading experiences of the nineteenth century’s mass reading public largely to comment on their elusiveness within the empirical record. Nineteenth-century reformers and parliamentary committees, Altick notes, made almost no attempt to document the working person’s ‘inner life’ as a whole, beyond basic morality and religion.2 Altick’s work is, nonetheless, dedicated on a broad level to recovering the ‘spirit’ that motivated working-class readers. His work helped to make possible important recent studies which have finely documented, particularly through examining readers’ diaries and autobiographies, some of the subjective reading experiences common to particular groups of Victorian readers.3 The increasing availability of archives of nineteenth-century periodicals in recent years has also, I want to propose, made apparent at least how preoccupied contemporary observers of novel reading were with this very question about the nature of another person’s subjective experience of reading. Victorian literary commentators in the second half of the nineteenth century devoted a massive amount of print to speculating about, alleging, prescribing, appraising and – I will argue in this essay – ultimately privileging the private subjectivity involved in novel reading.
