Railway Reading and Late-Victorian Literary Series

Focusing on the publisher’s series, this book explores the leading audience demographics in the late-Victorian railway with particular focus on key variables like socio-economic status, gender, and cultural aptitude. It examines three leading examples of late-Victorian series, which sought to satisfy railway passengers’ need for literary reading matter and belonging to each of the three main pricing tiers of series publishing. This study reflects the recent growth in scholarship on historical readership, the expansion in the canon of Victorian popular literature, and the broader material turn in nineteenth-century studies.