Emotions, Sensations, and Victorian Working‐Class Readers

Off the Rails: The Influence of the British Railway on Nineteenth-Century Publishing

“…342-343) One solution to this problem, highlighted by Löfgren (2008), comes from The Rail Traveller's Handy Book from 1862, which suggested that reading while travelling was an "excellent weapon of defence against bores" (p. 343). Indeed, as train travel became increasingly normalized, even women, who, according to Yan (2017) were regularly discouraged from acts of unsupervised reading, were encouraged to have reading material with them while travelling in order to deter unwanted male attention (Rooney, 2018). Publishers and booksellers consequently had a new market waiting for them: travellers of all classes found themselves in need of reading material when travelling by train.…”