Measuring by what has survived, we call the nineteenth century the age of the novel; but if we counted instead what was produced, the Victorians might look more like the people of the tract. One historian calculates that in the first seven years of its existence the Religious Tract Society (foundedby an interdenominational group of Evangelicals in 1799) had distributed two million titles; between 1840 and 1849 that number went up to twenty-three million. . . . Tracts are to the mid-Victorian novel what romance was to its predecessors: the inscribed genre against which it defines itself. ]— Leah Price, How to do things with books in Victorian Britain

The History of Protestant Religious Tracts and Societies for their Dissemination

Political and Social Commentary

Individual Authors

Relations to Victorian Literature


Last modified 14 May 2014