In this sensible, careful, and nuanced study, Jan Fergus challenges and corrects some of our received wisdom about the rise of the novel in England. Neither the primary audience nor the primary producers of novels were female; men and boys read “women's novels” and even The Lady's Magazine; the main reading public for novels wasn’t the middling sort but the gentry and professionals; and novels weren’t the most popular form of fiction in eighteenth-century England. Fergus's conclusions are striking and should make us reconsider the assumptions we bring to bear on our histories of eighteenth-century English novels, our readings of those works, and our accounts of the print culture to which they belong. But these conclusions are only part of the appeal of Fergus's work. Provincial Readers is an outstanding model of archival research well and smartly sifted, as fascinating in its details as in its adjustments of still-current scholarly assumptions. These assumptions, Fergus argues, have taken more seriously the claims of eighteenth-century moralists than the practices of eighteenth-century readers. Now we have some facts about the latter on which to build.

Fergus's archives are the account books of two booksellers, covering some 3,300 customers in five Midlands towns in the second half of the eighteenth century. The records of the Clay family's shops in Daventry, Rugby, Lutterworth, and Warwick cover the 1740s through the 1770s, and the records of Timothy Stevens of Cirencester cover the years 1780–1807. Neither set of records is complete, and they can tell only a small part of the story, but they seem to be unique in their sustained length. And they’re all we have. Out of this material, Fergus has assembled a compelling series of explorations of the practices of provincial consumers of print. This both complements and challenges William St. Clair's important study, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004). In contrast to St. Clair, who approaches the print marketplace from the perspective of publishers’ records to show what was available to readers, Fergus focuses on what readers actually bought. Here the choices and agency of readers are front and center, and this perspective implicitly argues that approaching book history from the side of supply will only go so far to answer questions about readers’ actual demands.

In her five chapters, Fergus teases out a series of rich and fascinating implications from her archive. The first two chapters explore who bought and borrowed novels and how they read them, the next two focus on schoolboy readers and their reading practices, and the last considers magazines and serial publications, using a broad archive of subscription histories from the 1740s through the 1770s (700 subscribers to eighty-seven periodicals, totaling almost 1,300 subscriptions; Fergus concludes that this booming audience for magazines doesn’t seem to have translated into an expanded audience for novels). The well-organized tables make for great browsing on their own, and Fergus complements her discussions of the data with nicely assembled case histories of particular readers like Jane Williamson, Mary and Frances Westley, and John Latimer—the latter a Norwich butcher who borrowed fifty-eight novels and twenty-five other works from Clay's circulating library. Fergus's data suggest that the importance of middle-class women in the market for novels has been overstated: men consumed more fiction than women, and the gentry more than the nascent middle class. Therefore, Fergus argues, we should be asking how men as well as women were constructed by novels, and even by domestic and sentimental works we consider “female.” In general, Fergus's analyses stress the often surprisingly free agency of readers, and her discussions of practices such as “desultory” reading—browsing in multivolume works—offer intriguing and illuminating examples of a reader-centered history of the book.

Fergus's arguments against overly gendered conceptions of reading inform the two chapters on the purchases and reading practices of schoolboys from the Rugby School and Daventry Dissenting Academy. These boys freely crossed gender boundaries and as eagerly read works like Goody Two-Shoes (1765), which features a girl protagonist, as Robinson Crusoe (1719) or other Newberry editions of popular works. In the book's one sustained critical reading, Fergus suggests that Goody Two-Shoes may have helped schoolboys cope with a school culture she describes as “licensed war” (127), offering them the pleasures of adopting fluid identities, reintroducing the feminine into their lives, and experiencing in their reading values—cooperation, mutual help, community—absent from their brutal world. The greatest strength of this book is its sensitivity to the freedoms and surprising choices of readers; in this one case, I’d suggest that Fergus's account of the monolithic violence of the school may be overstated, and the account of reading as a compensatory practice perhaps too flat. I have no doubt that some boys at some times read to learn how to cope with a vicious environment, but Fergus's light touch when considering reading practices, so effective in the other chapters, here becomes somewhat more heavily weighted to sociological determinants.

Fergus ends her study on a note I recognize and share, as others surely will too. She comments on “the vain fiction” with which she began, a desire “to recreate fully from bookseller's records these lost readers’ scenes of reading” (244). Provincial Readers is the fullest and most convincing case study of who read what in eighteenth-century England. But even as Fergus offers an account of the readerly side of the print market, she notes the limits of this kind of work. We now know much better who read and what they read. But to know how they read, to recover what happened in those scenes of reading, all we can have are our own acts of reading. Fergus's work offers a carefully researched and richly nuanced context in which to perform our own readings, allowing us perhaps to sense in these readings an echo of the experience of those historical readers.