This book, alas, began more than forty years ago. I was married and had two children, and my fellowship at St. John's College, Cambridge, was due to run out in little more than a year. I had then been working endlessly, but not very satisfactorily, on a book about the effects of the alphabet and printing. The only published result of those labors is the article in collaboration with Jack Goody entitled “The Consequences of Literacy” eventually published in Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1963).

Turning thoughts of my future in other directions, I suddenly came up with the notion of no fewer than three books. The first was a reworking of my fellowship dissertation for St. John's College, “The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel”: This was eventually published in 1957 as The Rise of the Novel. The second was a book about Conrad. Ever since as a boy I had cycled from Dover to Bishopsbourne to see the house where Conrad died, I'd always somehow assumed that one day I would write a book about him. That proved to be a tall order, but I published the first volume, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, in 1979. I then decided that since the myth book – I thought – was more or less complete in my mind, I would try that before doing the second volume on Conrad.