The Nineteenth Century

Children, Women and Workers – A New set of readers in the nineteenth century

•Women became important as readers as well as writers.
•Penny magazines were especially meant for women.
• Manuals teaching proper behaviour and housekeeping.
•When novels began to be written in the nineteenth century, women were seen as important readers.
•Some of the best known novelists were women: Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot.
•Their writings became important in defining a new type of woman: a person with will, strength of personality, determination and the power to think.

•Lending libraries became an instrument for white collar workers, artisans and lower middle class people.
•Workers got time for self improvement and self expression from the mid nineteenth century.
•Self educated working class people wrote for themselves.
•They wrote political tracts and autobiographies in large numbers.

•Press came to be made out of metal.
•Richard M. Hoe of New York had perfected the power-driven cylindrical press.
•In the late nineteenth century, the offset press was developed which could print up to six colours at a time.
•Electrically operated presses accelerated printing operations.
•Improvement in methods of feeding paper.
• Better quality of plates, automatic paper reels and photoelectric controls of the colour register were introduced.
•Nineteenth-century periodicals serialised important novels, which gave birth to a particular way of writing novels.
•In the 1920s in England, popular works were sold in cheap series, called the Shilling Series.
•Dust cover or the book jacket is also a twentieth-century innovation.
• Cheap paperback editions.