From "Crowd" To "Audience": The Making of an English Mass Readership in the Nineteenth Century

The crowd-no subject was more entitled to the attention of nineteenth-century writers. It was getting ready to take shape as a public in broad strata who had acquired facility in reading. It became a customer; it wished to find itself portrayed in the contemporary novel, as the patrons did in the paintings of the Middle Ages. The most successful author of the century met this demand out of inner necessity. To him, the crowd meant-almost in the ancient sense-the crowd of clients, the public. Victor Hugo was the first to address the crowd in his titles: Les Miserables, Les Travailleurs de la mer.1