ABSTRACT
For the most part, studies of the nineteenth-century common reader have revolved around the positive element of ‘choice’. The question for scholars continues to be, what did ordinary men, women and children, in the midst of an unprecedented proliferation of cheap print and rising literacy rates, choose to read? Evidence collected from diaries, memoirs, library borrowing records, literary clubs, correspondence columns in newspapers and journals, and educational institutions has highlighted the diversity of taste which, combined with the presence of a buoyant and innovative publishing industry, has also emphasized the limits of the many efforts by legislators, reformers and moralists to control the literary diet of the common reader.
