What is literature for? We should start owning our reading and asking more serious questions about what place literary education has in our collective life today. People are reading more during the pandemic. But it is wrong to think we are reading simply to escape a grim reality. Reading is more radical than we give it credit for. It always has been. What we do with its power is another matter. Everyone seems to agree that reading is good for us, but we no longer, if we ever did, agree why and to what end. As an academic subject, English literature has always imagined itself as being good for people. In the 19th century, the poet and impassioned inspector of schools Matthew Arnold was in no doubt about the civilising benefits of literary culture for the anarchic masses. Before English first became a degree subject in Cambridge in 1919, literature courses were developed in the colonies as a way of instilling a sense of Britishness within its subject populations. The postwar, Cambridge critic FR Leavis trained a generation of teachers committed to creating responsible readers for a new age of educational opportunity.