The large majority of our fellow-citizens care as much about literature as they care about aeroplanes or the programme of the Legislature. They do not ignore it; they are not quite indifferent to it. But their interest in it is faint and perfunctory; or, if their interest happens to be violent, it is spasmodic. Ask the two hundred thousand persons whose enthusiasm made the vogue of a popular novel ten years ago what they think of that novel now, and you will gather that they have utterly forgotten it, and that they would no more dream of reading it again than of reading Bishop Stubbs’s Select Charters. Probably if they did read it again they would not enjoy it–not because the said novel is a whit worse now than it was ten years ago; not because their taste has improved–but because they have not had sufficient practice to be able to rely on their taste as a means of permanent pleasure. They simply don’t know from one day to the next what will please them.

—Arnold Bennett: Literary taste (1909)