Abstract
Walter Scott’s historical novels were written for the middle-class, but downmarket readers were no less interested in popular new novels. New forms of the chapbook made upmarket novels available to a spectrum of readers who could not afford to buy the latest novels or rent them from a circulating library. This essay shows that even at the lowest prices, chapbook versions of the Waverley novels varied considerably. Ultimately, I argue that description of the social production of chapbooks should be the basis of a revaluation of chapbook reading in terms of community interests. The essay concludes with a practical consideration of how critical multimedia histories of reading might change classroom encounters with canonical novels such as Waverley and Ivanhoe.
| Original language | Canadian English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 139-157 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society |
| Volume | 10 |
| Publication status | Published - 2015 |
Keywords
- literature
- Romanticism
- book history
- Popular print culture
- Walter Scott
- novel foods
- nineteenth century
