Why an 120-year-old warning about reading feels uncomfortably familiar

By Helena Goodwyn, Assistant Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing, Northumbria University, Newcastle

In 1906, the journalist W.T. Stead warned in A Plea for the Revival of Reading that Britain faced a reading crisis. People, he complained, no longer read books. Instead, they skimmed newspapers on trains, forgot what they had read by lunchtime and increasingly preferred distraction to sustained attention. His proposed solution? A national revival of reading.

One hundred and twenty years later, 2026 is the UK’s National Year of Reading. After years of concern about declining rates…

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