“The most significant impact has been upon my students. I used to shy away from encouraging essay and dissertation topics that involved extensive use of the press, knowing from experience that results were too hard-won and unpredictable for all but the most determined. But the situation has now changed. I can see real opportunities for a revival in reception studies and work on public reputations. One undergraduate last term, for example, tracked the early weeks of the newspaper reception of Darwin's Origin of Species, the first time this had been attempted for half a century. I used to spend much of my time showing students how to find things; now there is more time for them to think.”

“[It] gives us an invaluable new perspective on the way Victorian Britain came to understand itself as a community of citizens, consumers and commentators. It is hard to imagine any researcher with nineteenth-century interests to whom it does not offer important insights on their subject: and it is dangerously addictive!”