WOOLF AND COMMON READING

The pedagogical history outlined in the last chapter helps to explain the difference between the “English Common Reader” as Altick employs the term and the “Common Reader” as conceived by Virginia Woolf. Altick alternately names his common readers the “mass reading public,” meaning by this term the group of new readers or potential new readers that, in the nineteenth century, emerged from the artisan and laboring classes. The “revolutionary social concept” that he identifies as a belief in the “democracy of print” had, as its object, the extension of cultured reading beyond the upper classes down to what, in 1858, Wilkie Collins referred to as the “Unknown Public” – the great number of people who were then just learning how to read. Defined oppositionally, the nineteenth-century common reader is thus “not the relatively small, intellectually and socially superior audience for which most of the great nineteenth-century authors wrote.” In contrast, Virginia Woolf distinguishes her common readers from the “mass” audience and does not tie them to identifiers of class.