In an 1812 review of George Crabbe's Tales, Francis Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, estimated that ‘In this country, there probably are not less than two hundred thousand persons who read for amusement or instruction among the middling classes of society. In the higher classes, there are not as many as twenty thousand.’ In total, these groups represented less than two per cent of the British population at the time: the 1811 census counted 12,552,144 individuals. Crabbe's potential audience seems a vanishingly small proportion by modern standards, but Jeffrey's estimate is not an inaccurate representation of the quantity of people with the leisure time, education and financial resources necessary to access new literature in the 1810s. For Byron's The Corsair, one of the most successful poems of the age, John Murray printed 29,500 copies of standalone editions. However, for most verse volumes, one or two small runs of a thousand copies was the standard. Neither were novels more ubiquitous. William St Clair has claimed that ‘[d]uring the romantic period the “Author of Waverley” sold more novels than all the other novelists of the time put together’, but he also estimates that only around half a million copies of Scott novels were printed prior to the commencement of cheap editions in the late 1820s. Taking St Clair at his word, doubling this figure to a million and assuming that his Romantic period is thirty years long would indicate that around 35,000 new copies of contemporary novels appeared each year, or approximately one for every 360 people in Britain. Other sources do imply higher count. The British Fiction 1800–1829 database lists 2,272 titles; assuming an average print run of a thousand would give a figure around twice that which St Clair indicates. However, even taking this higher figure and factoring in the importance of circulating and subscription libraries in fiction consumption, it would still seem to be the case that new novels were rather restricted pleasures.

By 1832, the year of the Reform Bill, the situation had changed radically. The preface to the first volume of Charles Knight's Penny Magazine – sold for a tiny fraction of the cost of the Edinburgh and its ilk – testifies to a massive expansion of the reading public. ‘In the present year,’ Knight writes, ‘it has been shown by the sale of the “Penny Magazine,” that there are two hundred thousand purchasers of one periodical work.