In 1906, the journalist W.T. Stead warned in A Plea for the Revival of Reading that Britain faced a reading crisis. People, he complained, no longer read books. Instead, they skimmed newspapers on trains, forgot what they had read by lunchtime and increasingly preferred distraction to sustained attention. His proposed solution? A national revival of reading.

One hundred and twenty years later, 2026 is the UK’s National Year of Reading. After years of concern about declining rates of reading for pleasure, the headlines are dramatic. The Times recently warned: “If humans stop reading, barbarians will live among us again”. Screens, smartphones and short-form video social media platforms like TikTok are regularly presented as the culprits.

So, reading Stead’s pamphlet (1906) today is an uncanny experience. While researching Stead’s journalism for my book The Americanisation of W.T. Stead (2026), I found that many of the arguments we assume belong to the digital age were already being made in Victorian Britain.

Stead begins with a distinction that still lies at the heart of debates about reading: “Millions have never yet found out that books were interesting,” he writes. “They can read, but they do not care for reading”.

This observation chimes with our contemporary moment. The problem is not literacy alone, but reading identity. Someone may possess the technical ability to read without ever coming to think of themselves as a reader. Current reading research makes a similar distinction. There is now broad agreement that developing a love of reading depends not simply on decoding words but on motivation, confidence and finding books that feel relevant.

Stead also rejected the idea that this love of reading could simply be imposed: “The love for the reading of books is an acquired taste,” he argued. Children might have to be compelled to........

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