Reception history of Jane Austen
The people who read Austen saw themselves as clever readers. They were the cultured few. This became a well-known theme of Austen criticism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. George Henry Lewes was a philosopher and literary critic. He spoke about this theme in a series of articles in the 1840s and 1850s. "The Novels of Jane Austen" was put in print in Blackwood's Magazine in 1859. In there, Lewes praised Austen's books for "the economy of  easy adaptation of means to ends, with no aid (help) from superfluous elements". He also compared her to Shakespeare. He argued that Austen was not good at making up plots. However, he still enjoyed the dramatic quality of her works. He said: "The reader's pulse never throbs, his curiosity is never intense (very strong); but his interest never wanes (stops) for a moment. The action begins; the people speak, feel, and act; everything that is said, felt, or done tends towards the entanglement or disentanglement of the plot; and we are almost made actors as well as spectators (viewers) of the little drama."