So begins an undated, penciled draft of a ‘Lecture on Mary Russell Mitford's Place in Literature’ archived at the Reading Central Library. The writer identified himself in the upper left corner of the page as ‘W. J. Roberts’, evidently William James Roberts, the author of an early biography of Mitford published in 1913, but the ‘century and a half’ phrase suggests a much later date for the lecture, likely associating it with planned events in Mitford's home near Reading, England commemorating the centenary of Mitford's death in 1955. Reading Central Library, the public library of Reading, houses the vast majority of Mitford's papers together with documents associated with archivists and scholars who worked to organize those papers following her death, and it documents other writings from Roberts dated through the 1950s. This public library makes thousands of Mitford's papers far more readily available for viewing and photographing than we typically expect for an archive of the papers of a significant English author from a past century. However, Roberts’ confident assertion about ‘the place she has gained’ seems oddly misplaced today given Mitford's general absence from, or at best minor position in, twentieth-century anthologies of nineteenth-century British literature, through which critical readers could reasonably be expected to learn about her now. His point about ‘the support of a critical public’ highlights an ironic distinction between critical readers within versus outside the academic institution of ‘English literature’ that was forming in England and North America in Roberts’ day. If the importance Roberts places on ‘the support of a critical public’ seems so strikingly out of tune with the values shaping curricula in English in the 1950s, it was nevertheless very much in tune with the cultivation of a reading public in the nineteenth century, a cultivation of readers that seems everywhere evident in Mitford's personal and published writings.