‘A bolt is shot back somewhere in the breast’ (Matthew Arnold, ‘The Buried Life’): A Methodology for Literary Reading in the Twenty-First Century

Drawing on research by scholars based in the ‘Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society’ at the University of Liverpool, this chapter analyses the psychological and neurological effects of reading Victorian literature on people who would not normally be involved in reading literature at all. These new readers include people in drug and rehabilitation centres, prisons, hospitals, drop-in medical centres, dementia care homes, facilities for looked-after children, schools, and libraries. The chapter combines qualitative and quantitative research methods, and provides rare empirical insights into some of the private processes of reading. In so doing, it indicates that ‘old’ literature can cross boundaries, both appealing to and even helping to create ‘new’ readers, for whom the experience can be life changing.