1. Robert Darnton, ‘First Steps Toward a History of Reading’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 23 (1986), 5–30, reprinted in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), pp. 154–187 (p. 155).
2. Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 379–380.
3. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 9.
4. Altick, Common Reader, p. 259; Jonathan Rose, ‘How Historians Study Reader Response: Or, What Did Jo Think of Bleak House?’, in Literature in the Marketplace, ed. by John O. Jordan and Robert Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 195–212 (p. 195);
5. Altick’s findings are confirmed by Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) and St Clair, Reading Nation.