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.

Paul Raphael Rooney is an early career researcher of Victorian print culture and popular fiction. He was an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin and has also worked as a research assistant on the Irish Research Council Nineteenth-Century Trade Periodicals project at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Introduction: Audiences and Publisher's Series 1. Railway Readers in the Post-1870 Reading Climate 2. "Food for the Mind," Consumer Choices, and the Railway Bookstall Environment 3. Second Generation Yellowbacks: Chatto & Windus's Cheap Editions of Popular Novels (1877-1897) 4. Transnational Crime Writing and the Cheap Series Reprint: Routledge's Sixpenny Detective Books (1887-1888) 5. "As necessary to the traveller as a rug in winter and a dust-coat in summer": Light Reading and Arrowsmith's Bristol Library (1884-1898) Conclusion