It is worth noting here, that in attracting 100,000 readers to issues of The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens was reaching an unprecedented portion of his country's audience. While no formal records of literacy rates were kept at the time, Francis Jeffrey {Lord Jeffrey}, the eminent jurist and founder of the Edinburgh Review, wrote in an 1844 issue of that magazine that there might be 300,000 readers among the middle class in England {out of a total population of about 2 million}, with perhaps another 30,000 in the upper classes. And even if the total readership was 500,000, as some commentators have suggested, Dickens was still selling his work to somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter of the literate public of a nation. Compare those figures with modern-day America, where 200 million or so working, literate adults constitute the potential "book-buying public," and where a sale of 75,000 to 100,000 copies-one-twentieth of one percent-is often enough to put an author high up on the list of New York Times bestsellers.
( Les Standiford )
[ The Man Who Invented ]
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