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Cast as a means of rehabilitation—an opportunity for working-class men to practice self-recognition and other-directed empathy in the safely distant imaginative spaces usually reserved for middle-class omen—Changing Lives through Literature reminded me how powerful a hold certain Victorian values retain on twenty-first-century Americans (including, as these pages betray, on me).

Protestant missionaries described their goal as spreading literacy; on the ground, however, they often seemed more concerned with limiting bibliolatry.

The Renaissance scholar James Kearney has described Christianity as “a religion of the book that was always made uneasy by the materiality of the text.”

Carlo Ginzburg has argued that the first humanist printings of the classics set aside sensory data in the process of devaluing all those aspects of documents that vary from one copy to another (95)

No looking, listening, touching, tasting, smelling: the sensory deprivation of the post-1850 public library, where food was banned along with talking or even reading

In “The Street Companion; or The Young Man’s Guide and the Old Man’s Comfort in the Choice of Shoes,” De Quincey parodies bibliophilia by the mad-lib-like expedient of replacing the word “book” with “shoes.”

In “The Street Companion; or The Young Man’s Guide and the Old Man’s Comfort in the Choice of Shoes,” De Quincey parodies bibliophilia by the mad-lib-like expedient of replacing the word “book” with “shoes.”

"... with all the other missing children"

"Better to let it pass"