Towards a Mass Audience, or, John Clare and the Problem of the Unknown Public

Most work on working-class readers has, of necessity, concentrated on the evidence recorded in the autobiographies of an elite group within that class. From Robert Altick’s The English Common Reader (1957), through David Vincent’s Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (1982), to Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), John Clare’s autobiographical writings have played an important role in recovering the history of working-class reading. This chapter looks at the various ways in which Clare and a number of contemporary working-class writers represented reading in order to suggest something of the overdetermined nature of these scenes in working-class autobiography. Despite the derogatory comments that he often makes about other working-class readers, Clare cannot help but acknowledge that he was surrounded by a number of different reading communities as he was growing up in the early years of the nineteenth century. This chapter uses his autobiographical writings to call attention to the complex interpenetration of literate and illiterate communities during the early nineteenth century in order to complicate the picture of dominant reading practices presented in the previous chapter. It then goes on to look at Wilkie Collins’s essay on ‘The Unknown Public’ (1858) in order to suggest that the ‘mass’ audience who read the new ‘penny’ press in the 1840s and 1850s still remains largely unexplored by historians of reading. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.