Reception history of Jane Austen
Austen had a great number of readers who liked and respected her in the nineteenth century. According to critic Ian Watt, they liked her " to ordinary (usual) social experience". However, Austen's works were not exactly what her Romantic and Victorian British audience liked. They wished for "powerful emotion [be] authenticated by an egregious display of sound and color in the writing". Victorian critics and audiences liked the work of writers like Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Compared to them, Austen's works seemed narrow and quiet. Austen's works were put in print again beginning in late 1832 or early 1833. Richard Bentley printed them in the Standard Novels series, and remained in print for a long time after that. However, they were not bestsellers. Southam describes her "reading public between 1821 and 1870" as "minute beside the known audience for Dickens and his contemporaries".