This was the culture—with its eager disputations around the booksellers’ stalls, in the taverns, workshops, and coffee-houses—which Shelley saluted in his “Song to the Men of England” and within which the genius of Dickens matured. But it is a mistake to see it as a single, undifferentiated “reading public”. We may say that there were several different “publics” impinging upon and overlapping each other, but nevertheless organised according to different principles.
