ABSTRACT
My starting point is Richard Altick’s famous statement: ‘No longer was it possible for people to avoid reading matter’. But what, I thought, if you were in prison? Could prisoners read? Could they choose what they read, and if so, what did they choose? Even today, when prisoners regularly have access to television, radio and CDs, reading and books have a surprisingly important role to play.1 So how was it for prisoners 150 years ago? What did reading mean to them?
