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I
I have chosen the year 1852 not just because there is something satisfactorily tidy in going back precisely a century. It was in the fifties, I think, that the reading public could first be called a mass public in anything like modern terms. Admittedly, people as far back as Dr. Johnson's time had been exclaiming over the increase in the number of readers, and
It is significant that in this decade of the 1850's one finds the first recurrent journalistic interest in the new mass market for the printed word. In 1858, for example, Wilkie Collins wrote of his discovery of "The Unknown Public" as dramatically as if he had come upon the sources of the Nile.[2] The mass audience for cheap periodicals he described had, as I have suggested, been in existence for some years before he announced his discovery of it; but the point is that it had by now become large enough and important enough to constitute an interesting and provocative subject for an article in the middle-class press, and that Collins could tell the readers of Household Words, itself a twopenny periodical for the middle classes, that there had come into being a much larger reading public lower down on the social and cultural scale. This was the era when reading first became genuinely democratized.
How large was the greatest possible audience to which a publisher could appeal? By the census of 1851, the total population of England, Scotland, and Wales above the age of twenty was eleven and a half millions—an increase of more than four million adults in thirty years.[3] Of these, 31% of the males and 45% of the females were unable to sign their names to the marriage register.[4] A literacy rate based upon this test is
This optimum audience (to use a notably un-Victorian phrase) and the practising one were, of course, very different things. The only guide we have to the number of people who actually read in 1852 is sales figures, and these must always be handled with caution. For one thing, few of them are authentic beyond question; the great majority come down to us as second-hand reports or as frank guesses. For another, they include quantities of books exported to the colonies and elsewhere. But since there is no way of knowing what reduction should be made on this account, we shall have to follow the usual practice, however mistaken it may be, and let gross sales figures represent home consumption only. It must be understood, therefore, that whatever statistical conclusions are reached on this basis are bound to be on the liberal side.
In 1852 occurred one of those events which periodically, perhaps every generation or so, give publishers and other students of the contemporary literary scene a fresh glimpse of the farthest limits of the reading audience. This was the amazing vogue of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the biggest sensation the English book trade had ever known. In a single fortnight in October, 1852, at least ten different editions came out, and Routledge alone was selling 10,000 copies a day. Some eighteen publishers climbed on the bandwagon; within six months of publication, the book had sold 150,000 copies, and within a year, according to one account, the total sales had reached
If we lop off an arbitrary fraction which represents export sales, and in addition exercise a measure of scholarly conservatism, we are still left with a figure of, say, a million immediate buyers. But it is obvious that a great many of those who purchased whatever edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin was suited to their particular purses seldom if ever bought any other book. These scores, if not hundreds, of thousands of nonce-readers could not by any stretch of the imagination be counted as part of a dependable audience; the figure of a million purchasers represents the ultimate extreme to which the book market could, on a very rare occasion, expand.
The sales of less fantastic best-sellers of the period give us a surer indication of the size to which the market could expand at relatively more frequent intervals, the number of constant book-buyers—the irreducible minimum in the publisher's calculations—being swelled several times over by the interest of those who buy only that occasional book which is all the talk. In Memoriam is said to have sold 60,000 copies within a short time after its publication in 1850.[6] In 1852-53 Dickens' Bleak House, appearing in shilling parts, soon reached 35,000 and climbed to 40,000 before publication was completed.[7] In 1855 the third and fourth volumes of Macaulay's History of England sold 25,000 on the day of publication alone.[8] These figures suggest that the short-term sale of a highly popular
We must remember, though, that there was, and is, an important distinction between the book-buying public and the public which reads books but does not buy them. In 1852 the Edinburgh Review was remarking that although the demand for books had "increased tenfold upon what it was seventy years ago," "few people now buy books." The reason was, of course, that "the mass of the reading world are supplied from the subscription-library or the book-club."[10] Hence multiplying the number of copies sold by four or five to obtain the total number of readers fails to take into account the larger number through whose hands the circulating-library copies passed. Of the number initially printed of Volumes III and IV of Macaulay's History, 2,400 copies went to Mudie's Library alone;[11] and in the decade beginning in 1853, Mudie's were to buy a total of almost a million volumes.[12] Mr. Mudie himself is said to have estimated that every book in his library found "on an average, thirty readers—considerably more, in the majority of instances, as regards novels, and considerably less in the case of scientific and philosophical works."[13] So long, therefore, as a substantial proportion of an edition was sold not to individual buyers but to the libraries and to the more or less informal book clubs which then abounded, especially in the provinces, the size of the actual book-reading public could be but partially reflected by sales figures.
Just as in our own day, the portion of the total reading public which habitually bought periodicals was immensely larger than that which bought books or borrowed them from the subscription libraries. As the century began its second half, the most popular periodicals were achieving
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