Chapter 1 Introduction

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

Chapter 3 Caroline and Paul: Biblical Commentaries as Evidence of Reading in Victorian Britain

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

Chapter 5 Learning to Read Trash: Late-Victorian Schools and the Penny Dreadful

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

Chapter 8 The Reading World of a Provincial Town: Preston, Lancashire 1855–1900

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

Chapter 10 James Lackington (1746–1815): Reading and Personal Development

Chapter 11 Henry Head (1861–1940) as a Reader of Literature

Chapter 12 In a Class of their Own: The Autodidact Impulse and Working-Class Readers in Twentieth-Century Scotland