Monro's anthology is an especially resonant artefact on which to conclude this inquiry. In an attitude common in his time but relatively rare in ours, Monro valued the materiality of texts, with their stunningly various ways of making meaning and asserting value. If, for us, a kind of sceptical humanism informs our continuing investments in imaginative literature, few of us would assert that the early twentieth century's highly segmented, commercial print culture is a monument of that humanism, or celebrate its variegated residue of cheap, material texts as one of the great achievements in human history. And yet this commercial culture made literature available to virtually everyone in the west in the years covered in this study. (I define ‘literature’ as writing of value – value asserted, contested, argued over.) Indeed, at the turn of the twentieth century, modern print artefacts not only gave virtually everyone who wanted it access to literature: they gave virtually everyone who wanted one a voice in arguments about literature, as we have seen in the dialogue over Tess of the D'Urbervilles in John O'London's Weekly. They also gave thousands the ability to publish, even if there were cultural authorities at the ready to police the boundaries of ‘literature’ from the likes of writers drawn from the new reading public. As we have seen, this created a landscape of anxiety about value, but it also validated – in local but meaningful ways – the value-making gestures of previously silent people, providing a new way for the newly literate to make their lives meaningful, as David Graeber would have it.

As I suggested in the Introduction, it was modernism that scorned and ultimately rendered invisible the work of these newly literate knowledge workers and the professionals who served them. This book has been in large part an effort to understand how value and meaning took material form in the local ecosystems they worked, and how those spheres functioned within the larger ecosystem of early twentieth-century print culture. In the course of this effort I have also been discovering my beliefs concerning the best ways forward in what is (unfortunately, I think) known as ‘modernist studies’. These beliefs are neither new nor unique to me, though they do place me in a decidedly minority position within the field.