In the years 1774-1830 literature became increasingly subject to modes of marketing and consumption that helped consolidate its functions, whether for entertainment or instruction, within a domestic space. One material sign of this was the rise in production of smaller format books, namely more octavos and duodecimos, and fewer quartos, signalling portability and accessibility. Most famously, Wordsworth and Coleridge, both notorious in their deferring of print publication, consider the problem of how to discover the true reader among an amorphous mass readership how to circumvent the levelling properties of print and address the 'clerisy' of readers through the 'living' text. The distinction between writing and reading, with its attendant implications of authentic and inauthentic communication, can also surface as one of genre, with poetry occupying the high ground and the novel relegated to a lesser space shaped by the low expectations of its mass readership and the commodifying strictures of the print industry.

To understand how war found its place in British literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, one might follow William Cowper's lead when, in The Task he organizes the scene of war around the figure of the post-boy. Cowper's post-boy offers but one example of how a war fought on foreign ground and distant seas came home to England. Wartime creates itself out of continual, daily reading: the facts shift from day to day, from excerpt to excerpt, yielding the sense that no single instalment will deliver the truth and yet every snippet is crucial. Military historians remind us that, for infantrymen and cavalrymen, warfare in the age of Napoleon consisted primarily of the tedium of waiting. Registering the agony of those waiting for news of war, one begin to realize how frequently war's pain is transferred from the body of the soldier to those Coleridge calls 'spectators and non-combatants', from battlefield to home.