Practice question · Estimate
If about 20,000 novels were published in nineteenth-century Britain and roughly 200 are canonical, what percentage is the great unread?
Estimate on a scale from 0% (0) to 100% (100).
Hints
- The unread share is everything the canon is not.
- If the canon is one per cent, the rest is the other ninety-nine.
Show the answer
1 (answers within ±2 count)
Why
Ninety-nine per cent. The figure is worth carrying around, because it puts a number on how much of the evidence any generalisation about a period is usually ignoring, and because it explains why the norms a canonical novel deviates from can be invisible to us: we have not read what it was deviating from.
Practise The Sociology of Reading
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