Altick 1957
From Commonplace Book
Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader. University of Chicago Press, 1957. Print.
Intro
- 1 "the place of reading in an industrial and increasingly democratic society"
- "a revolutionary social concept: that of the democracy of print"
- prefiguring (influencing?) Eisenstein
- 2-3 methodological limitations of anecdotal evidence and records of bestsellers (but they have their uses too) -- the history of reading is rootedness in "the total history of the period" including political, religious, economic, and trchnological
- 3 "The history of the mass reading audience is, in fact, the history of English democracy seen from a new angle "
- 4 industrialization making reading more impt for purposes of escape (and the erasure of the "popular cultural tradition," tho I'm skeptical about the cleanness of that line, if only based on evidence from hardy novels)
- 5 using Collins 1858 "the future of English fiction may well rest with this Unknown Public"
- 7 common reader belongs to working class or expanding bourgeoisie
