Avid Readers

Victorians were avid readers. Just as we bury our faces in our mobile devices on the morning commute, so too did Victorians with the latest penny fiction. Perhaps the best know serialized novels were the "Penny Dreadfuls". Costing just one old penny, they focused on the exploits of detectives, criminals, or supernatural entities. The price of new books-often only available as a set of three-was out of reach for most working-class people, so they borrowed from circulating libraries such as Mudie's (founded 1842), which dispatched books all over Britain for a modest subscription fee. For the wealthier classes who could afford first editions, reading from their own collection would be an everyday occurrence.