ENGL 109 Lecture 3: 1/18 notes
25 Jan 2019
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ENGL 109 1/18 notes
• Safe fear
• Good fright and nobody gets hurt
• “pleasing fear”
• Who’s doing the writing and who’s doing the reading
• Novels were very, very expensive- bound in leather, good quality paper
• They did not buy novels because they needed to feed their families
• Owning books is a luxury thing
• If a family during the early 19th century owns a book, it’s going to be a family bible
• Passed down through generations
• That doesn’t mean that people didn’t have access to books
• Books during this time were divided into volumes
• The people who were doing this kind of reading were probably educated and have
disposable income
• Super wealthy = own library
• If you were anyone who read books or were educated, you knew who Radcliffe was
• She didn’t have to work- rare thing
• Leather bound books lasted the longest
• Chat books- same thing as paperbacks or street literature
• Chat books only 36 pages, very small, and were very popular
• A lot cheaper- if you had any disposable income
• How people consumed literature
• A lot of time just outright plagiarism
• Gift book- volume single (maybe leather bound or not good leather) and have poetry in
it, a couple short stories, light entertainment for kids
• Wilkinson wrote a lot for chat books and gift books
• Romances looked down on as trash
• Earliest kinds of popular literature- a larger reading public can sit down and read it
• A lot of books in the 19th century were anonymous- a lot of times it’s because they’re
written by women
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