Yellow-Backs, Station Book Stalls and Sensational Reading

Abstract

Blending together different academic disciplines and approaches, even in more accepted interdisciplinary fields, can be a challenging task for any author. Balancing the weight of scholarship, and the critical currents of competing methodologies is hard enough even before plunging into the complexities of nineteenth-century source material. Thus, it is gratifying to see texts such as this, by Paul Raphael Rooney, that aim to bridge the literary-historical divide in its examination of reading and book history and literary genre in the mid-Victorian period. Rooney’s analytical focus is to consider the relationship between literary series, their construction and dissemination, and that mass of relatively under-considered literary consumers, the railway passenger. How were these collections branded and shaped, he asks in the introduction, and how did these ‘marks of series affiliation’ form various connotations (of style, of quality, of intended purpose, etc.) in the minds of readers and reviewers? (4). The middle of...