29
Jun, 2019
What were Australian’s Reading in the Victorian Era?
Whilst reading The Guardian Australia our library team came across a very interesting article. The Australian National University has conducted a study analysing the borrowing habits from a selection of Australian libraries between 1861 and 1928.
They have a created a entire database where you can filter Australian reading habits by age, occupation, gender, and library. The data found that males were the predominant borrowers, mining the biggest occupation, and that fiction vastly outweighed non-fiction in borrowing choices. Quite a few of the popular titles are still in circulation in own libraries today – though you will find most in our classics section now.
A selection of the some most popular authors:
Joseph Hocking
Edward Phillips Oppenheim
Henry Rider Haggard
Charles Dickens
Silas Kitto Hocking
Ellen Wood
Marie Corelli
Abbie S. Swan
Arthur Conan Doyle
Winston Churchill
Mark Twain
Samuel Crockett
Visit the database to find out how your reading habits compared to those of 150 years ago!