In 1901 Huntley and Palmers Biscuit Manufacturers produced a series of biscuit tins dedicated to literature. The 'Literature' biscuit tin then can be seen as a signifier of the act of consumption, of reading as an ephemeral action which leaves permanent remains in the form of the book. The original interior design for the Reading Room of the British Museum, by Alfred Stevens, featured a vast pictorial scheme which would have represented literature as a tool of both knowledge and nationalism. Isaac D'Israeli praised the desire to adorn one's library with literary busts, dedicating a whole chapter in Curiositiesof Literature to 'Portraits of Authors'. However the vast majority of images of the reader in the nineteenth century descended directly from a different tradition, an eighteenth-century one that showed women 'languorously' lost in the sensual world of literature. For many Victorians the Bible was the touchstone from which all literature was to be judged. '.