Popular taste and public understanding of literature are shaped by many different life experiences and influences, including what happens in schooling. Dr. Julie Blake’s work is part of a body of research that seeks to understand the history of English literary education through its material artefacts and traces of classroom practice (eg Michael 1987, Rubin 2007 and Robson 2015). This history connects in interesting interdisciplinary ways with the history of literature, the reception history of different authors, the history of mass education, Britain’s colonial past and its postcolonial present. In her talk, Blake will share some of the practicalities and possibilities of building a digital “difference engine” for this research, and will discuss how this kind of approach might be developed and applied in other areas of literary history.