Common readers with good taste

British working-class autobiographers generally drew a clear distinction between “improving” literature and “light” or “low” literature; I have yet to find a single one who defended the latter as anything more than a good read. Though George Acorn grew up in poverty in late Victorian East London, he recalled that, even as a boy, he had “some appreciation of style” and a sense of literary hierarchies, “tackling all sorts and conditions of books, from ‘Penny Bloods’ to George Eliot.” He was sophisticated enough to understand that a gifted writer could draw on the conventions of trash literature and work them into a near-classic-in this case Treasure Island, which he discerningly characterized as “the usual penny blood sort of story, with the halo of greatness about it.”

You will recall that Jeeves was always reading an “improving” book. This is from ‘Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences’ by Jonathan Rose.