'indiscriminate reading brought... liberation to Chartist Robert Lowery. A prolonged illness gave him the opportunity to work through a bookseller's entire circulating library and much else besides... Where a prescribed reading list might have reflected the biases of the compiler, improvisational reading offered him a broad "general knowledge of history,... poetry and imaginative literature." The very fact that "I read without any order or method" forced his mind to exercise "A ready power of arranging the information this desultory reading presented". It inspired him to write poetry and fiction.'