Emotions, Sensations, and Victorian Working‐Class Readers

In his 1858 essay "The Unknown Public," Wilkie Collins revealed his growing concern with the emergence of a large, anonymous, lower class reading public. Collins's essay encapsulated much that is telling about the production and distribution of penny fiction targeted at socially and economically marginal readers. It also directs our attention to the popular practice of reading among the lower classes whose taste, he argued, reflected what they read and how they read it. This essay investigates the ways in which burgeoning literacy among the lower-class reader contributes to our understanding of the interplay between mass reading and cheap sensation in Victorian culture.