JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ELH Ever since circulating libraries first became commercially successful during the second half of the eighteenth century, social and literary critics have analyzed them primarily as institutions for distributing books. The dominant view has been that circulating libraries vulgarized literature, by pandering fiction to women, servants, and other people who had previously been excluded from reading by the high cost of books or by illiteracy. For instance, near the end of The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt argues, as many eighteenth-century critics did, that during the last quarter of the eighteenth century "the pressures toward literary degradation which were exerted by the booksellers and circulating library operators in their efforts to meet the reading public's uncritical demand for easy vicarious indulgence in sentiment and romance" caused "a purely quantitative assertion of dominance" by female authors and readers, and by the gothic romance genre.' Recently, Paul Kaufman and Jan Fergus have qualified such complaints on documentary grounds.2 As their studies show, extant circulating-library catalogs and business records do not verify the assumption that circulating libraries distributed "mainly" fiction, or that they were patronized "mainly" by women, or by "new," "lowerclass" readers in general. Although the evidence does suggest that circulating libraries dealt substantially in contemporary fiction, and that they were patronized disproportionately by women and by lower-class readers, documents ultimately suggest, as Fergus argues, that "popular novels should be less easily dismissed as hack work directed at a new audience more naive and less educated than traditional readers; these novels and their writers bear closer examination." Kaufman makes a similar case "In Defense of Fair Readers."3 But even though Fergus and Kaufman present their evidence in contradiction of the traditional dismissal of "popular novels" as a sub-literature for silly women and servants, their arguments ironi-ELH 62 (1995) 603-629