Writing in 1936 of his memories of working in a second-hand-bookshop-cum-lending-library, George Orwell painted a horrified pen portrait of a typical reader of popular fiction:

Undiscriminating, without judgement, a passive consumer gulping down rubbish by the gallon: this is the reader of popular fiction as we most often see him (or, more usually, her) in the accounts of concerned commentators down the centuries. From anxieties about the salacious reading of early modern apprentices to imprecations against the novel-reading habits of Victorian middle-class girls, popular reading is repeatedly rendered through tropes of danger, passivity and lack of control. The reader is imagined as solitary, obsessed, his or her engagement with texts virtually masturbatory in the intensity of its self-pleasuring. But an examination of the lived experiences of what I shall call popular readers demonstrates something rather different: a more subtle, nuanced, critical engagement with texts – and one that is surprisingly often not solitary at all, but located within an active community of readers.