It is well known that the English novel took shape in the eighteenth century, but no one knows who read novels like Humphry Clinker and Clarissa when they were first published. Drawing on booksellers' archives and parish records, this book shows who in the Midlands actually bought novels, plays, and

Many scholars have written about eighteenth-century English novels, but no one really knows who read them. This study provides historical data on the provincial reading publics for various forms of fiction - novels, plays, chapbooks, children's books, and magazines. Archival records of Midland booksellers based in five market towns and

Books about Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-century England

The market for print steadily expanded throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world thanks to printers' efforts to ensure that ordinary people knew how to read and use printed matter. Reading is and was a collection of practices, performed in diverse, but always very specific ways. These practices were spread down the

Drawing on a range of methodologies associated with the history of reading, this book explores the reception of the Scottish Enlightenment, assessing the impact that major texts had on the lives, beliefs and habits of mind of contemporary readers.