Richard D. Altick Books

The English Common Reader was the first comprehensive and systematic exploration of how the ordinary Englishman became a reader. A rich social history as well as a history of the English reading public, the book has become a classic. It will continue to be read and enjoyed by scholars and students as we make our way through another age of profound social change for the reader and for the book. This edition features an extensive new bibliography.

In slightly less than three hundred pages, Altick, a self-described child of the Depression, takes us from his birth in 1915 through his early interest in reading turn-of-the-century bestsellers, rarely the Bible or the usual classics, to his secondary school, college, and postgraduate education, pausing frequently to provide fascinating portraits of now-vanished scholars and educational practice. It is all both so similar and so different. Always modest and always happy exploring libraries, Altick, a man known for his apparently encyclopedic knowledge of subjects he's studied--research techniques, the nineteenth-century reader, Victorian popular entertainment, and so on--described himself as having a primarily journalistic bent. Modestly plugging away at research apparently far too daunting for the rest of us, he produced valuable work that has stood the test of time.