Readers and Writers: The role of the audience in the work of

he notion of the reading public underwent substantial changes during the period Hazlitt and Coleridge were writing. Three major shifts can be identified; firstly, the revolutions in America and particularly in France provided a momentum of democratising change and radical thought in England which made the notion of „the people‟ a politically charged and intensely debated one. Secondly the reading public was growing at an unprecedented rate due to advances in print media and the introduction of circulating libraries. Finally, the connected increase in the number of journals led to the rise of the professional reader, the critic. These three changes will be explored in turn, in order to explore the ways in which two writers represent the reader in this period. It is my contention that the rapidity of the changes to the reading public in this period resulted in a highly contested and ambiguous representation of the reader, which was continually being reassessed and redefined by both Hazlitt and Coleridge. A great democratising impulse in England, which drew hope and inspiration from the American and French Revolutions was contested by an increasingly repressive government during the Romantic period. One side of the debate is summarised by Jon Cook who describes „a discourse, variously derived from Burke, Malthus and their followers, which identified „the people‟ as the chief threat to social order‟ 1 . Burke, for example, wrote in