The Hamlet Project

I’ve been reading Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend in which one of the characters asks another to read The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to him. The character is illiterate but moneyed and his first attempt at enriching himself is this particular history. it takes a long time to read someone a whole history so quite a lot happens in the book before they finish and move on to another one.
But interestingly, the character, even when he moves on from this history, stays with histories. He clearly feels that they are the most edifying books of all.