Geoffrey Hill’s “common reader” is a figure from an epoch, perhaps already passed, of mass literacy; before that, one would presumably have to have referred to a common auditor, a person who could hear verses recited, commit them to memory and recite them in turn. Even as memorization and recitation became specialized skills, they remained premised on a general capacity without which a recitation could find no audience besides other specialists: without the general ability to take a poem to heart, to carry part of it away within oneself, a recitation before non-specialists would be a recitation without reception, an empty mouthing of words.

The word “common” has in this context the sense of “non-specialist”: the common reader, like the common auditor, is the bearer of the general capacity of which the specialist’s competence is a more developed case. Accordingly, the image of the common reader changes as the image of the specialist changes, as the focus of specialization shifts.

Virginia Woolf’s common reader is above all not a critic: he “never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument”, but this mimesis of the critical function of totalisation must not be mistaken for the real thing. It is adequate for purposes of “affection, laughter and argument”, but lacks the authority of knowledge. Woolf follows this characterisation with one of her signature swerves from condescension to empathetic acknowledgement: the common reader’s critical mimesis, defective though it may be, nevertheless has - on the authority of Dr Johnson, no less - “some say in the final distribution of poetical honours”.

The common reader here is not directly honoured, but gifted with the power to bestow honours, and hence to complete their “final distribution”, which would remain incomplete if only the specialist critic had his say. It appears that critical totalisation, the construction of a thorough and authoritative knowledge about a subject, depends on the common reader’s “rickety and ramshackle fabric” of association to supplement the “the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning”, which by themselves cannot arrive at a just distribution of honours. The critic must have periodic recourse to the “common sense of readers” to counteract the tendency of critical learning to circumscribe sense, to recognise only the specialized senses of words and things.

What should be noted here is that both specialist and non-specialist are drawn from a subset of the general population: the literate, those who have books in their homes and read them. This was not a majority at the time of Woolf’s writing. The non-specialist reader, who reads for the pleasure of “affection, laughter and argument”, represents a competence as well as a capacity; and the capacity, which is generic insofar as no predicate specializes it, is nevertheless only realized by those who have acquired the competence.