The History of Reading, Volume 2

1. Introduction
Katie Halsey, W. R. Owens

Part 1. Reading Communities

2. ‘The Talent Hid in a Napkin’: Castle Libraries in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
Mark Towsey

3. Caroline and Paul: Biblical Commentaries as Evidence of Reading in Victorian Britain
Michael Ledger-Lomas

4. Reading the ‘Religion of Socialism’: Olive Schreiner, the Labour Church and the Construction of Left-wing Reading Communities in the 1890s
Clare Gill

Part 2. Reading and Gratification

5. Learning to Read Trash: Late-Victorian Schools and the Penny Dreadful
Anna Vaninskaya

6. ‘Something light to take my mind off the war’: Reading on the Home Front during the Second World War
Katie Halsey

Part 3. Reading and the Press

7. What Readers Want: Criminal Intelligence and the Fortunes of the Metropolitan Press during the Long Eighteenth Century
Rosalind Crone

8. The Reading World of a Provincial Town: Preston, Lancashire 1855–1900
Andrew Hobbs

9. ‘Putting literature out of reach’? Reading Popular Newspapers in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain
Adrian Bingham

Part 4. Readers and Autodidacticism

10. James Lackington (1746–1815): Reading and Personal Development
Sophie Bankes

11. Henry Head (1861–1940) as a Reader of Literature
Stephen Jacyna

12. In a Class of their Own: The Autodidact Impulse and Working-Class Readers in Twentieth-Century Scotland
Linda Fleming, David Finkelstein, Alistair McCleery

Keywords: Literature, Literary History, Literary Theory, Cultural Theory, Cultural History