This book explores Victorian readers’ consumption of a wide array of reading matter. Established scholars and emerging researchers examine nineteenth-century audience encounters with print
culture material such as periodicals, books in series, cheap serials, and broadside ballads. Two key strands of enquiry run through the volume. First, these studies of historical readership
during the Victorian period look to recover the motivations or desired returns that underpinned these audiences’ engagement with this reading matter. Second, contributors investigate how
nineteenth-century reading and consumption of print was framed and/or shaped by contemporaneous engagement with content disseminated in other media like advertising, the stage, exhibitions, and
oral culture.
