DescriptionThis dissertation argues that nineteenth-century British writers, in responding to the rise of mass literacy through conventions for addressing reading audiences, turned to literary form to imagine the public as a democratic concept. Associated above all with the diminutive appeal to the “dear reader,” these conventions are—when not bypassed as a gratuitous curiosity—often cast as a reactionary effort to contain the rise of a mass reading public in a singular, gentle figure. “Broadly Speaking” uncovers the remarkable range of devices for addressing readers in the periodical and the novel, including direct forms such as dear reader, networks of paratext, gothic frame tales and other structures for soliciting readers as interlocutors, and journalistic manifestos, among others. Focusing on the spatial dynamics organized by these conventions, I show how writers called on their ubiquity and pliability to situate audiences within an expanding reading public—a social body so sprawling that it was increasingly imagined in abstract terms. Because conventions of address appeal to unseen, uncountable readers, they proved uniquely able to implicate reading audiences in this shift towards abstraction. An abstractly drawn public is necessarily an inclusive public: across the diversity of these conventions, writers moved from evoking delimited and face-to-face relationships with readers to a theoretically egalitarian and limitless readership. In doing so, they used literary form to imagine a democratic public that accounted for all by counting none.