Victorian Periodicals Review

Abstract:

Scholars have struggled to recover how lower-class readers responded to the mountains of cheap religious literature produced for them in the nineteenth century. A careful reading of correspondence from tract distributors published in the Tract Magazine, however, uncovers a rich and surprising engagement between poor readers and religious tracts. Some plebeian readers rejected tracts or used them for unintended purposes. Other poor readers used tracts to create and influence communal relationships, establish their own respectability, address their miseries, and collaborate with distributors in crafting their own pious life narratives for a broad audience.