Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.

Leah Price

Print publication date: 2012

Print ISBN-13: 9780691114170

Published to Princeton Scholarship Online: October 2017

DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691114170.001.0001

Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM PRINCETON SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.princeton.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Princeton University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HSO for personal use (for details see www.princeton.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 20 January 2019

The Book as Burden: Junk Mail and Religious Tracts

The Book as Burden: Junk Mail and Religious Tracts

Chapter:
(p.139) Chapter 5 The Book as Burden: Junk Mail and Religious Tracts
Source:
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
Author(s):

Leah Price

Publisher:
Princeton University Press
DOI:10.23943/princeton/9780691114170.003.0006

This chapter looks at religious tracts and junk mail. The Victorians pioneered institutions—whether secular (the post) or religious (the tract society)—that allowed printed matter to be distributed at the expense of someone other than its end user. By disjoining owning from choosing, those transactions challenged Enlightenment assumptions about the relation between reading and identity. Where the secular press trusted print to lift individuals out of their social origin, the niche marketing pioneered by Evangelical publishers and commercial advertisers alike vested it instead with the power to mark age, gender, and class. If the content of tracts interpellated new audiences by matching characters' demographic to readers', so did the different material forms that each text took—reprinted on different paper, sold at different price points, distributed in gross and in detail.

Keywords:   religious tracts, junk mail, printed matter, Enlightenment, reading, identity, secular press, niche marketing, Evangelical publishers

Princeton Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
http://princeton.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.23943/princeton/9780691114170.001.0001/upso-9780691114170-chapter-006
princeton.universitypressscholarship.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-04
119422
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:BE25J3L7U33B4OCEADXLSPQVIA6QVMTG
<urn:uuid:a25dde39-0af8-4d93-8af5-c803862a6539>
2019-01-20T22:27:58Z
69.63.134.38
text/html
sha1:EPCM6UZALX7LKK7FGH55K55MY7P2OZV5
<urn:uuid:cf9ce0e5-319c-40f0-ba89-ed009bda1a3a>
http://princeton.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.23943/princeton/9780691114170.001.0001/upso-9780691114170-chapter-006
response
<urn:uuid:495fb82e-fab9-4212-b872-5c77d97d5662>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-04
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-143-87-11.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/