To amuse and instruct: reading materials and readership in nineteenth century Ontario, Canada

Through the examination of contemporary records, particularly newspapers, magazines, book-trade catalogues, reports of various kinds, and a number of historical accounts of the early settlement of the province, this study demonstrates that, from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth, adults and children with a propensity for reading gained access to an increasingly broad range of secular and pious publications that were produced either indigenously, or, more frequently, emanated from the presses of Great Britain and the United States [continued]…