Reading was woven into the fabric of the Victorian world. Thanks to urban living, cheaper printing, and vastly increased rates of literacy, Victorian society was one of the first societies where you might not have known your neighbours very well, but in which you were surrounded by vast swathes of paper and print – a forest of words. This module not only aims to investigate how the Victorians thought about reading – what they read, how they read it, and how reading itself was thought about and portrayed in literature; but also how we read the Victorians today – who reads them, how and where they are read, how that reading is perceived and constructed, and what insights and benefits our reading of the Victorians in the contemporary moment might gift to us.