In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), the protagonist Laura, having swapped the bustle of London for the peace and quiet of the Chiltern Hills, decides to spend some of her new-found leisure time reading. Having brought no books of her own, she borrows a couple of volumes from her landlady:

Like many modern readers, Laura finds herself dividing her attention between the escapist pleasures of literary romance and the valuable facts to be gleaned from a work of information. In this case, however, these two forms of reading also suggest the two worlds between which Laura herself is beginning to transition. The practical if soporific advice retailed by Enquire Within (1856) – the Chartist editor Robert Kemp Philp’s most successful contribution to the Victorian craze for self-improvement – recalls the bourgeois domesticity of daily life in her late brother’s London household. Meanwhile, the popular gothic novel Mehalah (1880), by the eminent nineteenth-century folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould, feeds the fascination for the supernatural and the weird that will ultimately carry Laura into a new life as a bona fide modern-day witch.

Laura Willowes’s reading preferences might seem to have little to do with questions of modernism and technology. Yet this marginal moment in a middlebrow novella of the 1920s serves to demonstrate both the evident popularity of informational reading in the early twentieth century and the sharp contrast many writers had begun to draw between such reading and its literary alternatives or complements. It also gives a good sense of what ‘information’ most readily suggested to a typical reader of the 1920s: an organised but discontinuous collection of facts, figures, measurements, recipes, instructions and the like, which might (or might not) turn out to be of practical use.