Middle-class Victorian readers paid a premium for the right to get rid of books after reading them. David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch—all the great realist novels were originally rented more often than bought. Their earliest readers saw them as disposable single-use items that you didn’t want cluttering up your shelves once their brief life expectancy had elapsed, any more than you’d keep yesterday’s newspaper. One 1845 journalist declared that ‘few are the works of fiction, as long and wearisome experience teaches, that you wish to select and purchase and place upon your shelves, as deserving of a second and a third perusal.’ A year later, Balzac described a character who abandons his old mistress for a younger one, ‘without saying goodbye, as one throws away a novel after reading it.’

Leah Price, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (2019)