University of Virginia Library

From Aldine to Everyman: Cheap Reprint Series of the English Classics 1830-1906
by
Richard D. Altick

A PROMINENT BOOKSELLER," REPORTED AN English book trade journal at the end of the last century, "lately affirmed that the dead are today taking the bread out of the mouths of the living at a rate unparalleled in the history of literature. Even the popular novelist, he said, feels the competition of those who 'rule our spirits from their urn.'"[1]

Not that Marie Corelli, Hall Caine, Rider Haggard, and the other best-selling writers of the 1890's were in any danger of starvation. Financially speaking, the profession of authorship had never before been as rewarding. But it was also true that the flood of reprinted classics, which had been steadily mounting for several decades, had reached a new peak. The full history of this important branch of Victorian publishing, a task writer a leader-writer in the Times Literary Supplement a decade ago urged some "industrious bibliographer" to undertake,[2] will not be attempted here. Instead, we shall be concerned mainly with two aspects of cheap-reprint publishing: its relation to the contemporary social and cultural background, and the way in which it illustrates in microcosm some of the theories and practices of the Victorian book trade generally.

From one viewpoint, Victorian England was not a very fertile ground on which to sow reprints of the national classics. In some educated quarters, the work of English writers was still looked upon, as it had been in Elizabethan times, as a second-class literature. This

attitude is implied in a letter Sir Alexander Grant wrote from Bombay to F. T. Palgrave in 1862, discussing the possibility of adopting Palgrave's Golden Treasury as a classbook for Indian students: "I hope you won't think this a degradation. English poetry is to these people what Homer is to us."[3] Down almost to the end of the century, the old universities were officially unaware of English literature as a subject for serious study. Again, their lofty or complex style, their far-ranging allusiveness, and the sophistication of their thought placed many English classics beyond the grasp of readers with limited education. The mass audience of Victorian times was ill-equipped to understand, let alone find pleasure in, books that had been addressed to the intellectual élite of preceding centuries. In that era, as in any other, it was contemporary writers, speaking their audience's own language, and reflecting their audience's own preoccupations, who had the greatest appeal. Finally, the anti-imaginative bias of evangelicalism and utilitarianism was everywhere felt, especially in the first half of the century. Reading belles lettres, it was alleged, was both sinful and wasteful of time that could be put to far better advantage in "practical" pursuits.

But even more numerous and stronger counter-forces were at work. One was a backwash of romanticism: the growing charm of the antique, exemplified in the bibliophily of men like Lamb, Hunt, and the elder Disraeli. The sense that books, and particularly old ones, have a magical glamor spread as the high place of imaginative and emotional experience in men's lives was reaffirmed. Closely associated with this reaction against rationalism and gritty utilitarianism was the increased importance literature acquired as a social institution. As Lionel Trilling has pointed out, literature "came to be the medium and the repository of the ethical values and the feelings that had once been peculiar to religion. And literature became even more. Carlyle, under the influence of Goethe, formulated the notion of the Man of Letters not only as a priest but as a hero and a seer and thus made him co-equal with the political leader and the rival of the scientist. In short, literature took upon itself the very greatest responsibilities and arrogated to itself the most effective powers."[4]

Furthermore, as democracy slowly spread, the age-old notion that literature was the concern only of the cultural and social aristocracy faded. As early as 1819, Francis Jeffrey announced that "the fame of a poet is popular, or nothing. He does not address himself, like the man of science, to the learned, or those who desire to learn, but to all mankind;

and his purpose being to delight and be praised, necessarily extends to all who can receive pleasure, or join in applause."[5] Literature of both the past and the present gradually came to be looked upon as part of the cultural heritage of all the people.

As the limitations of the utilitarian philosophy became more apparent, the Victorians became uncomfortably aware that in their society humanistic values had been more and more neglected; and in an attempt to redress the balance, their journalists and public men joined to praise books as the great medium of cultural enrichment. The countless essays and speeches they composed on "The Blessedness of Books," "Little Books with Large Aims," "What a Single Book May Do for a Youth," and similar topics were part of a continuous campaign to encourage the habit of serious, profitable reading among the multitude. With opportunities for formal education severely limited, the idea of self-help was part of the Victorian creed; hence books were revered as fireside universities. Polite literature was prized not so much for its capacity to give pleasure as for its extra-literary, or non-aesthetic, values. It was through reading masterpieces of literature that the student could, for instance, enhance his understanding of history. Such an approach was used by F. D. Maurice in his lectures on English literature at King's College in the forties,[6] and by the author of the articles on literature in Cassell's influential Popular Educator.

These were some of the reasons why non-contemporary English literature was constantly brought to the attention of ordinary readers, through excerpts and appreciative comment, in the pages of early mass-circulation periodicals like the Penny Magazine and Chambers's Journal. Indeed, all the way down to the era of George Newnes's Tit-Bits, some of the most popular cheap weeklies unapologetically used extracts from classic English literature as fillers. Middle-class newspapers gave generous space to reviews of current books and other literary topics. Literature was a favorite subject for the mechanics' institute lectures which had so prominent a part in middle-class cultural life in early-and mid-Victorian England. And, with the adoption of Mundella's code in 1883, elementary schools began to require pupils in the upper standards to read, parse, and memorize selected English classics. Full-length works, or substantial parts thereof, replaced the old "beauties" anthologies which for many decades had represented virtually the only chance children had to gain a glimpse of the standard classics, at least in the schoolroom.

This, in brief, was the background against which the rise of the cheap classic reprint series took place. Historically, the first important inexpensive reprints, made possible by the momentous decision in Donaldson v. Beckett (1774), which killed the legal fiction of perpetual copyright, were those of John Bell, John Cooke, and James Harrison, each of whom produced two or more series devoted to out-of-copyright poets, prose writers, and dramatists. The delight they brought to impecunious book-lovers in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth was celebrated by Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Henry Kirke White, and William Hone, among others. Of Cooke in particular, Augustine Birrell wrote a century later: "You never see on a stall one of Cooke's books but it is soiled by honest usage, its odour . . . speaks of the thousand thumbs that have turned over its pages with delight. . . . He believed both in genius and his country. He gave people cheap books, and they bought them gladly."[7]

Between 1790 and 1830 there was a scattering of relatively cheap series, appealing to a class of readers who could not afford the better-remembered, but higher-priced, collections of Alexander Chalmers (English Poets and British Essayists), Robert Anderson (British Poets), Robert Lynam (British Essayists), Mrs. Inchbald (British Theatre), Mrs. Barbauld (British Novelists), and Sir Walter Scott (Ballantyne's Novelist's Library). The bookseller John Sharpe brought out a long series of English poets, another of the eighteenth-century essayists, and a third of the dramatists. John Fowler Dove's miniature (24mo.) reprints of the English classics, ranging from The Compleat Angler to Pope's Poetical Works, ran to well over 100 titles. The Chiswick printer Charles Whittingham, producer of a typographically distinguished 100-volume set of the British poets for the carriage trade, served the humbler public with his Cabinet Library and Novelists Library (or, as it was also called, Whittingham's Pocket Novelists). The price range of all these series was rather wide—in the case of Whittingham's, from 2s. to 4s. 6d. per volume. The cheapest series of all during this period seems to have been that of John Limbird, publisher of the 2d. weekly Mirror of Literature, who brought out a series of British novels, with prices running from 6d. to 3s. 6d., and another of miscellaneous British classics, from 8d. a volume upward. In addition to reprints dignified by a series title, individual cheap editions of classic authors were also issued by various publishers, nearly all of whom were despised by the genteel firms of Paternoster Row. Conspicuous among them was Thomas Tegg, the energetic scavenger of

remainders and expired copyrights, whose products were memorable for their low prices, miserly format, and slovenly, not to say slashed, texts.

The period 1827-32 saw the first important burst of interest in cheap books among "respectable" publishers. The appearance of Constable's Miscellany, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge's twin Libraries of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, Murray's Family Library, Cadell's reissue of Scott's novels at 5s., and Colburn and Bentley's Standard Novels touched off a virtual mania in the trade. No firm was without at least one hastily contrived "library" in its bid for the shillings of the suddenly-discovered mass reading public, whose size was now as much exaggerated as it had previously been underestimated. Cheap reprints of literary classics inevitably figured in the boom. In 1830 appeared the first volumes of the Aldine Edition of the British Poets, the result of the collaboration of the bookseller William Pickering and the printer Charles Whittingham. The most memorable classic-reprint series of the period, it held an honorable place in an increasingly competitive field down into the present century. For these reasons, it is convenient and fitting to settle upon the year 1830 as the beginning of the era when publishers developed cheap classic libraries as an integral—not merely incidental—part of their lists.

The two following sections of this article are based upon a list I have compiled, from all available sources, of cheap reprint series of English classics from 1830 to 1906. At the outset, the criteria of eligibility I have used should be made clear: (1) No hard-and-fast test of "cheapness" has been adopted; but series designed chiefly for the specialist or scholar (such as the Fuller Worthies Library and W. E. Henley's Tudor Translations), or published at a price that was clearly beyond the reach of any but the well-to-do, have been omitted. (2) What is a "classic"? Since value judgments are irrelevant to our present purposes, perhaps the best definition is the one implied in the statement, attributed to the publisher Stanley Unwin, that "it takes two generations to make a classic."[8] Obviously some books become established classics even within the lifetime of their authors, as did the novels of Scott and Dickens and the poetry of Byron and Tennyson, so that the demarcation between classics and recent books of evidently lasting popularity is vague indeed. But since a line must be drawn somewhere, series composed mainly of nineteenth-century titles have

been excluded, except for series late in the century, by which time works surviving from the generation of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Lamb had achieved, by any definition, the status of classic. (3) Series expressly designed for schoolroom use have been excluded. (4) Series which were virtually abortive, running to only a few titles and then vanishing, have also been omitted.

The remarkable thing is that even with these severe restrictions, the list of cheap classic reprint series for the period 1830-1906 runs to between ninety and one hundred. Even if we make liberal allowance for series which appear more than once, under different names—for the bibliographer, a source of exasperation which will be commented on in a little while—the number would in any event exceed seventy-five: an average of one new classic reprint series for every year in the period covered.

Some of the main cultural reasons for the proliferation of cheap classics after 1830 have already been mentioned. In addition, a powerful economic factor encouraged publishers to launch such series: the simple circumstance that most standard classics are in the public domain and therefore are cheaper to reprint than works still in copyright. As the literacy rate increased and the reading habit became more widespread, the demand for cheap books grew. For various reasons, among them the tyranny of the circulating-library system and the higher prices authors were getting for their work, books by contemporary writers were expensive and, despite the developing practice of issuing 6s. reprints of successful works some time after first publication, they remained so until the 1890's. Thus the hunger for cheap reading matter was met, in part, by printing non-copyright works. In 1894 Augustine Birrell observed that "you may buy twenty books by dead men at the price of one work by a living man."[9]

The prices charged for volumes by "dead men" more or less followed the broad tendencies in the publishing trade as a whole. Technological improvements—the use of steam-driven presses; the cheapening of paper by the introduction of paper-making machines, the substitution of esparto and chemical woodpulp for expensive rags, and the reduction and eventual repeal of the paper tax; the invention of machine-made casings to replace hand-sewed bindings—made the production of cheap books more and more rewarding. The low profit per copy was compensated for by the enlarged quantity sold.

Down into the fifties and sixties, the usual price of a classic reprint was between 3s.6d. and 5s.. The lower figure was that charged, for instance, for a volume in Bohn's Standard Library and British Classics

(series begun in 1846 and 1853 respectively); the higher was the price of most of the other Bohn libraries, which in the aggregate comprised one of the century's two or three most famous reprint lists. Into this price range fell also the other leading series of the period—Routledge's British Poets, Bell and Daldy's reissue of the old Aldine Poets, Warne's Popular Poets and Chandos Library, Nelson's Illustrated Series of the Poets, Nimmo's Cheap Edition of the Poets, and Macmillan's Globe Library. But already, because the 3s.6d. price for non-copyright reprints compared unfavorably with the shilling or two charged for "railway library" reprints of copyright works, certain firms experimented with lower prices. The highly diversified Cottage Library of Milner and Sowerby, a firm originally of Halifax but later of Paternoster Row, sold for a shilling a volume. Robert Bell's Annotated Series of the English Poets came out at 2s.6d. in 1854-57 and was reissued in 1864 in monthly volumes, 1s. in paper and 1s.6d. in cloth. In the sixties Griffin's Universal Library and Warne's Chandos Classics sold at 2s. or less.

This trend toward lower prices was hastened by two spectacular free-for-alls in the reprint trade. One was occasioned by the Waverley novels, the "Author's Edition" of which, issued in 1829, had initiated the 5s. or 6s. copyright reprint. Cadell's "People's Edition," issued in weekly numbers (i.e., parts of volumes) in 1844, sold over 7,000,000 numbers of the novels alone, and 674,000 of the poems. After Cadell's death in 1849, his Scott copyrights were bought by the firm of A. and C. Black, who felt that there still was life left in the fabulous old property. For the "Railway Edition" in 1858-60 the price per volume was reduced to 1s.6d., and in 1862-63 it was further cut, to a straight shilling. At this point the novels began to fall out of copyright, and other firms scrambled to pick them up. One publisher, John Camden Hotten, brought out 6d. monthly volumes, each containing a complete novel. Black responded with a competitively priced series, which had the extra attraction of Scott's own revisions and notes—material that was still in copyright. But within a few years (1873) even this sensationally low price was halved when John Dicks, a reprint publisher whose activities deserve more study than the extant records permit, brought out complete Waverley novels at 3d. [10]

There was also the episode of the shilling Shakespeares. In 1864, the year of the poet's tercentenary, John Dicks brought out the plays at two for a penny, and sold about 150,000 copies. Collecting them into a 2s. cloth-bound volume, he sold 50,000 more. Then, hearing that Hotten was planning a complete Shakespeare to sell at 1s., Dicks cut

the price of his own edition in half, substituting wrappers for cloth, and sold 700,000 copies in the next three or four years. For his shilling the Shakespeare lover got 1,020 pages of closely packed text and thirty-seven woodcuts. In 1868 both Routledge and Warne issued editions at the same price.[11]

In the seventies, the increased demand created by the schools, further economies in production, and, we may suppose, the example of the irrepressible Dicks, who had followed up his shilling Shakespeare with a 473-page illustrated Byron at 7d., a Thomson at 6d., and about a dozen other classic authors at similar reductions, pushed prices down still further. The Aldine Poets were reissued at 1s.6d., and in response Bell's Annotated Edition was cut to 1s.3d. Later in the decade the Moxon Library Poets, originally priced at 5s., were taken over by Ward, Lock and Co., and, renamed the Standard Poets, sold at 1s.6d. in paper and 2s. in cloth.

In the eighties, houses like Routledge and Cassell, by then the titans of the reprint trade, waged an all-out price war. Routledge's Universal Library, edited by Henry Morley, began in 1883 at a shilling a volume. Two years later Cassell hired Morley to edit the firm's new National Library, issued weekly at 3d. in paper and 6d. in cloth. This proved the most popular classic series yet produced, and in quick retaliation Routledge brought out their World Library at the same price. The bitterness of the rivalry between these houses can be judged from a squabble they conducted in the correspondence columns of the London Times for March 20, 22, and 23, 1886. Cassell vigorously objected to Routledge's issuing, in their World Library, the same titles that had been announced for Cassell's National Library; Routledge retorted that they had been forced to do so by similar "illegitimate competition" on the part of Cassell. Morley managed to smooth the ruffled feathers of both his employers, but among other questions left unanswered was that of the ethics involved in an editor's managing two rival series at once.[12]

The gradual but steady reduction in price during the second half of the century is exemplified by the fact that Sampson Low's Choice Editions of Choice Books, originally published in the late 1850's at 5s. a volume, were reprinted in the seventies at 2s.6d., and again in the nineties at 1s. (There was also a progressive shrinkage in size, from "small quarto" to "small octavo" to "royal 16mo.") By the end of the century, one or two shillings or a half-crown was the standard price for a full-length pocket classic bound in cloth. The enterprising W. T. Stead, to be sure, undercut even the 3d. National and World Libraries with his Masterpiece Library (1895), composed of weekly leaflets in two series, the Penny Novelists and Penny Poets. But this venture, though initially successful, was short-lived and set no precedent.

Our modern era of cheap-reprint publishing may be dated from 1906, the year with which the present study ends. It was then that J. M. Dent, who had gained experience as the publisher of the Temple Shakespeare, the Temple Dramatists, and the Temple Classics, fulfilled a long-standing ambition by issuing Everyman's Library at 1s. a volume: not one title at a time, but fifty. The frenzied editorial and production activity and financial maneuvering necessary to issue a classic library on so grandiose a scale—a "small army" of "British Museum foragers" and introduction-writers was employed, extended credit was wheedled from papermakers—is a vividly recorded episode in British book trade history.[13] But the larger significance of the Everyman series (and in this connection, the World's Classics, begun a few years earlier by Grant Richards but soon transferred to Henry Frowde, must also receive honorable mention) is twofold: it reintroduced into reprint publishing the concern for attractive format which had been largely neglected since the days of Whittingham and the Chiswick Press, and it boldly departed from the conventionalized lists of classics, reprinting for the first time scores upon scores of good books which had never before been available in inexpensive editions.

The practices adopted in producing and marketing the cheap classic series often throw interesting light upon contemporary publishing theory and book-buying habits. The "library" idea—selling a frequently miscellaneous list of books under a generic title—reflects three familiar merchandising premises, now known as "package psychology,"

"brand name psychology," and "snob appeal" respectively. The first assumes that when a buyer owns a few volumes in a given series (the "package"), he is likely to want to acquire the rest. The second assumes that a reader who is already pleased with one or two books belonging to such-and-such a "library" will regard the name of that series as a guarantee of excellence. The third depends on the connotation of "library," a term which in the nineteenth century was frequently preceded by "gentleman's." Possession of a shelf or two of books prominently labeled "library" gave a man a pleasant feeling of added status, however humble his actual circumstances.

Closely associated with the series concept—they developed side by side in the eighteenth century—is the practice of publishing a book in instalments. From the publisher's standpoint, number- or part-issue not only has the advantages just attributed to the series but in addition, by spreading the book's cost to the purchaser over a period of time, makes it seem lower than it actually is. Many classic reprint series during the first two-thirds of the century—Cassell's various illustrated editions of literary masterpieces offer examples from the 1860's—were initially issued in weekly or monthly numbers at a few pennies each, with the completed volume becoming available immediately upon the end of the part-issue. This, of course, was exactly the procedure followed in the case of well-known Victorian novelists, from The Pickwick Papers on into the early seventies.

Frequently, too, the principle of publishing at stated intervals was applied to complete volumes, without the preliminary step of issuing in several separate numbers. Thus book publishers exploited the habit of regular purchase which became increasingly prevalent as cheap periodicals won the allegiance of the mass public. If a reader was used to buying a favorite paper each Saturday, why should he not acquire the custom of buying the latest issue in a certain reprint series at the same time? This was the reasoning behind the weekly or monthly issue of series like Walter Scott's Camelot Classics and Canterbury Poets, Routledge's Universal Library, and Cassell's National Library. Like the yellow-backs that had won immense popularity a generation earlier, the classic reprint series of the nineties, priced at 3d., and 1s., used the newsagents' stalls to reach a large public that never ventured inside a regular bookshop. Then as now (at least in certain outlets) classic reprints were displayed alongside soft-bound copyright reprints and mass-circulation weeklies.

In their anxiety to squeeze every possible farthing of profit from the plates and sheets of their classic titles, publishers used almost every conceivable merchandising device. Frequently an old series whose component

titles had not originally appeared at regular intervals—the Aldine Poets, Bell's English Poets, and Kent's (later Cassell's) Miniature Library of Poets are cases in point—was reissued in periodic volumes, fortnightly or monthly. Sometimes, as was true of Moxon's Old Dramatists, a series previously issued in complete volumes was reintroduced in numbers. Almost every successful series was reissued, sometimes more than once, in cheaper format. Occasionally the process was reversed, and a cheap series (for instance, Bell and Daldy's Pocket Volumes) was transmuted into a more expensive one (the Elzevir Series) "so as to be more suitable for Presents and School Prizes."[14]

Some series had relatively brief lives, at least in the catalogues of their original publishers. They strutted their brief moment on the stage, heralded by blaring publicity, and then were heard no more. In 1866, for example, Frederick Warne proclaimed the debut of the Clydesdale Classics, "Marvels of Standard Cheap Literature, without a parallel as yet in English Publishing"; their first number, a Pilgrim's Progress, offered eighty pages of original colored designs, new type, and fine paper—all for 6d. "One Hundred Thousand of this elegant Pocket Edition is all that can be produced this year," Warne advertised.[15] But the supply must have exceeded the demand, for nothing more is recorded of the series.

Series with longer lives often were transferred from firm to firm. Sometimes they retained their baptismal name, as did the Aldine Poets, acquired after Pickering's death in 1854 by Bell and Daldy and later inherited (1873) by their successors, George Bell and Sons. Still others suffered a name-change every time they passed to a new house, and a few appeared simultaneously, under different names, in the catalogues of two or more firms—the result of the practice, not infrequent in that era, of a "publisher-jobber [selling] other firms' sheets over his own imprint."[16] Even libraries retained by the original publisher were not exempt from rechristening whenever sales needed a boost. The firms that purveyed serial shockers to the pavement market often did the same thing when they started a fresh issue of an old favorite, and the practice is hardly extinct today, when individual soft-bound reprints sometimes bear titles different from those under which the hard-cover edition appeared.[17]

Renamed series and series that led double or triple lives under the

auspices of different firms are the bibliographer's despair. As he attempts to establish their provenance and history from the published records of the trade, he feels as if he were reviewing a stage army: the same lists of titles turn up again and again under different series designations. For example, unless the firm's archives were painstakingly examined, it would be an almost hopeless task to disentangle and properly label the various series of reprints which the Edinburgh house of Nimmo advertised over two or three decades. Nimmo seems to have made a specialty of buying up odds and ends; and he displayed remarkable energy and ingenuity in dressing his wares in new bindings and marshaling them under new series titles. There is a striking family resemblance between his Cheap Edition of the Poets, Red Line Editions (later retitled Popular Edition of the Works of the Poets), and Crown Library, all published in the sixties. Nimmo's Library Edition of the British Poets was a reissue of George Gilfillan's British Poets, an expensive series originally published by Nimmo's townsman, J. Nichol. In 1870 the sheets of this edition were remaindered to a third owner, Cassell, who sent them forth again in 6d. parts as Cassell's Library Edition, and in cloth-bound volumes as Cassell's Three-and-Sixpenny Edition.[18]

Or take the case of Moxon's Popular Poets, first issued about 1870 at 3s. 6d., then presented in more expensive formats as Moxon's Royal Poets (7s. 6d.) and Moxon's Library Poets (5s.) As if membership in three separate series were not enough, the collection was subsequently acquired by Ward, Lock, who reissued it in cheaper form as Ward, Lock's Standard Poets, and in turn by Collins, who converted it into the Grosvenor Poets.

After coping with genealogies like these, one is grateful for the comparative simplicity of concurrent series within a single house. There is no problem, for instance, with Warne's five series of the 1860's and '70's: the Chandos Classics, which eventually extended to over 120 titles, were a cheaper edition of works printed earlier in the Chandos Library of prose writers and the Chandos Poets; and the Lansdowne and Arundel Poets were simply alternate formats, the one cheap, the

other expensive, for certain titles in the Chandos Poets. In 1882 Warne published Longfellow's Poems in no fewer than four series—the Chandos Poets, the Chandos Classics, the Arundel Poets, and the Lansdowne Poets. Warne, indeed, was one of the most resourceful of all Victorian publishers when it came to getting the maximum mileage out of his stock of standard authors. In addition to the series already named, in the eighties he offered a dozen or so titles (all of them long familiar to readers of his advertisements) in the Imperial Poets, and at the same time a virtually identical list in the Albion Poets. The latter genus was divided into several species according to binding: 3s. 6d. cloth gilt, 5s. imitation half-roxburghe, 7s. 6d. limp French morocco, 10s. 6d. full calf.

This diversification of binding styles, either under a single series heading or under a new name for each style, was common Victorian practice. Many, if not most, series were offered in both paper and cloth, and some also were available in at least one kind of leather. In an age when middle-class taste favored highly ornate household objects, more than a few publishers regarded the printed sheets of a classic work primarily as something around which to sew or glue a pretty binding. Nimmo, for instance, devised new bindings every season; between 1870 and 1873 his Popular Edition of the Works of the Poets could be had in (among others) "Cloth Extra, Gold and Colours," "Morocco Extra, with novel prismatic effect and floral silk centre," and "entirely new cloth binding, with beautifully illuminated imitation ivory tablet on side."

Elaborate bindings and lavish internal "embellishments" of course tended to remove such books from the cheap-reprint category. But even among reprints whose price was unquestionably low, the quality of physical makeup varied widely. The Aldine Poets set a high standard of typography and general design that was seldom equalled until the advent of J. M. Dent and his Temple and Everyman series. It would be hard to say which series, of the several scores published, marked the nadir of cheap book production. The 6d. plays and novels of John Dicks would be a strong contender for the distinction, but numerous other series would be in the running. Strenuously small (and often badly worn) type; thin margins, sometimes crowded with legends advertising tea, baking powder, or patent medicines; poor paper; paper wrappers; flimsy sewing—these were too often the result of the pressure to cut prices. Whatever aesthetic satisfaction the impecunious reader derived from his purchase came from the text alone, not from the volume's appearance.

Though some series were designed for parlor display and thus were of a size that would catch the eye, the majority were in small octavo or 12mo., or even as tiny as 32mo.—true "pocket books."[19] Not only were these smaller sizes, requiring less paper and binding material per volume, more economical to produce; they were best adapted to the living habits of the period. Popular books had to be portable, for an ever-increasing amount of reading was done in railway carriages and buses, and they had to be small enough to find room in the cramped households of the lower-middle and working classes, who were coming more and more to constitute the bulk of the reading audience. The day of the folio and quarto was over.

The quantity and quality of text in these series varied as greatly as did the format. Some series provided complete texts of the works described on the title-page, while others provided only selections or truncated texts, a fact that was often suppressed in advertisements and on title-pages. A buyer of Spenser's "works" in one volume, for example, was not likely to acquire the whole of the Spenser canon thereby. A reprint publisher especially notorious for his cavalier handling of texts was Thomas Tegg, who, according to some of his contemporaries, included only as much of a given classic in a volume as the paper set aside for the job permitted. Tegg was scarcely unique in this respect. While they may not have been so completely lacking in concern for textual accuracy and completeness as to give rise to trade legends, most publishers were content to reprint whatever version of a masterpiece came to hand, however corrupt or fragmentary the text might be. Even if accuracy had been prized as highly in Victorian times as it is today—at least among scholars—the economics of the cheap reprinting business made careful scrutiny of the printer's copy, and subsequently of proofs, a dispensable luxury. Editorial supervision in the modern sense was rare, except in the interests of bowdlerization. Money laid out to oblige Mrs. Grundy was a thoroughly justifiable business expense.

The contents of the various series, if subjected to close statistical analysis, would provide an interesting, if not always dependable, index of Victorian literary taste and of the comparative reputations of classic authors in Victorian times. The relative frequency with which various standard works were reprinted, as well as the decline in availability of

certain classics and the rise of others, can be documented by studying the advertisements in the trade journals and the lists of reprints-in-series in the Reference Catalogue and Appendix B of the cumulated volumes of the English Catalogue. But one cannot assume that the reprint libraries were an unerringly faithful barometer of the literary climate, the publishers readily responding to changes in the critical and popular standings of classic authors. Practical considerations, such as the publishers' desire to get their full money's worth out of their investment in plates and stock, may well have caused certain old standbys, such as Dryden, Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson, and Cowper, to overstay their welcome. Accessibility, in short, must not be equated with popularity. The fact that Author A was represented in 75 percent of the reprint series current at a certain date, while Author B was in only 10 percent, does not prove that Author A actually stood that much higher in contemporary esteem. Thus it is quite posssible that by artificially prolonging the dominance of certain classic writers in the reprint libraries, publishers not only impeded the normal fluctuations of taste but left us a record of popular preference which is easily misinterpreted. (Future historians of a classic author's reputation in the nineteenth century, take note.) However, until much more information on the inner workings of the English book trade is available, the problem of how far the reprint publisher was responsive to public taste, and how far he influenced it, must remain a matter for speculation.

The selection of titles for a classic reprint series and the preparation of introductory matter often gave employment to well-known men of letters, just as they do today. Robert Bell consulted Leigh Hunt when planning his Annotated Edition of the English Poets; it was Hunt who encouraged Bell to stray from the beaten path and include some little-known poets in his collection.[20] After Bell and Daldy acquired the Aldine Poets, they called upon men like Lord Houghton, W. M. Rossetti, Buxton Forman, and Edward Dowden to prepare new titles for the series. The individual volumes in Macmillan's Globe Edition, one of the few relatively authoritative series, were edited by men of the stature of David Masson, F. T. Palgrave, and A. W. Ward. William Michael Rossetti was the general editor of Moxon's Popular Poets during the brief period before Ward and Lock took over the series. He specifically states in his autobiography that revision or emendation of the text was not part of his job.[21] The Camelot and Canterbury series, issued by Walter Scott, a wealthy Newcastle dock and railway

contractor and colliery owner who turned publisher in his late fifties, were edited in part by the self-taught collier-poet Joseph Skipsey, the novelist William Sharp, and Ernest Rhys. But perhaps the brightest galaxy of "name" editors was the one associated with Kegan Paul's Parchment Library, begun in 1880. It included Dowden, Edmund Gosse, Andrew Lang, Richard Garnett, Mark Pattison, Austin Dobson, and George Saintsbury.

Until Ernest Rhys became the living symbol of Everyman's Library, the single figure most conspicuously associated with cheap classic reprints in the public mind was the critic and lecturer, Henry Morley. His son-in-law and biographer, Henry Solly, implies that his fame as editor of various reprint series somewhat embarrassed his family. "There seemed real danger," wrote Solly, "that he would be remembered after his death only in connection with his services for the diffusion of cheap literature"—a fear which proved not unfounded.[22] Punch praised him thus, in lines whose sentiment is more to be admired than their execution:

Comment in trade journals suggests that the National Library, which Morley edited for Cassell, had the greatest success of any classic-reprint series down to that time. As Solly said, "At a cost not exceeding the gas or water rate, a constant supply of good literature could be 'laid on' to any house in town or country, and a circulation varying

from 50,000 to 100,000 copies for each volume attests the popular appreciation of the enterprise. Letters, which Professor Morley greatly prized, came from the far West in America, and from other lands on the borders of civilization, expressing gratitude for these cheap and handy volumes, which seemed almost as ubiquitous as Palmer's biscuits."[24]

Which raises the question, Just how influential were these reprint series in stimulating an interest in English masterpieces among the expanding reading public? In a period when cheap weeklies like the Family Herald and Tit-Bits achieved individual circulations of from 500,000 to a million, what place had older works of established literary merit in the reading diet of the multitude? One view of the matter was reported at the beginning of this article. But what were the facts?

We have the boasts of certain reprint publishers, for whatever they may be worth. Of Macmillan's Globe Edition, "upwards of 140,000 volumes" were sold to the end of 1870; presumably this figure includes the sales of the first and most famous member of the series, the Shakespeare, which had found 95,000 buyers since publication in December, 1864.[25] Between the spring of 1870 and May, 1872, Moxon's sold 150,000 volumes of their Popular Poets.[26] Over a quarter-million copies of the Miniature Library of the Poets were disposed of in the period 1879-1884, according to the publishers, William Kent and Co.[27] In 1884 Warne and Co. advertised that their Chandos Classics, then numbering over 100 titles, had sold 3,500,000 volumes since publication had begun in 1868.[28] Through what seems to have been either unaccountable dereliction or heroic restraint on the part of their advertising writer, this figure remained unchanged for several years. In 1894, however, Warne revised their copy, and the total to date for the Chandos Classics was announced as six million.[29] The Canterbury Poets were reported to have sold "about a million volumes" within ten years of their beginning in 1884.[30] Ward and Lock's Minerva Library

sold over 150,000 between 1889 and 1894.[31] For some years after first publication in 1894-96, the Temple Shakespeare, a forty-volume series, sold 250,000 volumes annually (and the total between 1894 and 1934 was five million).[32] Of W. T. Stead's Penny Poets, almost five million copies were published in a year, a figure exceeded by Stead's condensed Popular Novels, which were said to have sold "about six and a half million."[33]

These are staggering totals indeed; but in estimating their significance, one must remember several things. One is that since most of the series mentioned included some copyright works, or at least works whose copyright had only recently lapsed, the figures are not a good indication of the current appetite for older literature. Another is that the figures are for the total sale of a whole series, which might comprise twenty, fifty, or a hundred volumes. The average sale per title would, of course, be only a fraction of the total. Unfortunately, with one or two exceptions, such as the Globe one-volume Shakespeare, sales figures for individual titles in the various series are unavailable.[33a] A further consideration is that the totals often, if not always, include export sales. Of the annual total for the Temple Shakespeare, for example, 100,000 copies went to America;[34] and the Empire itself provided a large audience for books published in the British Isles.

Although the books we are concerned with here were designed for the general trade, not for classroom use, they were in great demand as school prizes. And, as the advertisements also show, they were among the items most favored for family Christmas giving, or for a decorous exchange of presents between swain and sweetheart. The extent to which school prizes or sentimental gifts were actually read, let alone understood, is, however, something else again. As George Gissing observed, "Hardly will a prudent statistician venture to declare that one in every score of those who actually read sterling books do so with comprehension of their author. These dainty series of noble and delightful works, which have so seemingly wide an acceptance, think you they vouch for true appreciation in all who buy them? Remember those who purchase to follow the fashion, to impose upon their

neighbor, or even to flatter themselves; think of those who wish to make cheap presents, and those who are merely pleased by the outer aspect of the volume."[35]

Gissing's pessimism was widely shared throughout the Victorian period; more widely than ever at the end of the epoch, when the reading preferences of the masses had been fully expressed at public libraries and newsagents', and the verdict was overwhelmingly in favor of light novels and penny papers. "The constant flow of new editions of Great Authors," observed a writer in the Academy in 1903, "is deceptive. They are regarded as part of the necessary furniture of the house—not of the mind; and having been duly and dutifully bought they are taught to know their place on the appointed shelf. They are taken as read. . . . There are few men now who, when a new book is published, read an old one."[36]

In such views — and examples could be multiplied from the annals of the nineteenth-century reading public—there is more than a hint of snobbery. The phenomenon of a semi-literate reading audience numbering in the millions stirred the residual social prejudices of the class who wrote for, and read, the leading literary journals, and it was only to be expected that they would exaggerate the situation they deplored. On the other hand, there were sturdy believers in the common man's capacity for literary culture and his active interest in acquiring it. The best-known of these was Charles Dickens, who told the Birmingham Society of Artists in 1853, "I believe there are in Birmingham at this moment many working men infinitely better versed in Shakespeare and in Milton than the average of fine gentlemen in the days of bought-and-sold dedications and dear books."[37] Every public man who had faith in mechanics' institutes and free libraries as disseminators of culture among the middle and lower classes, everyone who advocated the repeal of the newspaper tax, the amendment of the copyright law, and other schemes connected with spreading the blessings of cheap print, asserted that the multitude was ready and eager for good literature.[38]

As events proved, there was just as much exaggeration on this side of the issue. The bright words of hope uttered at mid-century, when the "taxes on knowledge" and the absence of free libraries were alleged to be the only barriers to the development of a broadly cultured populace, were seldom echoed a generation later. It was indisputable that the widening of educational opportunity had not been accompanied by the same degree of literary enlightenment. In 1886 a writer in the Nineteenth Century said: "Cheap editions have brought standard works within their [the workers'] reach, and though the privilege is not largely availed of, it is not altogether neglected. . . . Lots of working men have studied with great care one or two of Shakespeare's plays; others know one or two of Dickens's works almost by heart. . . . At the same time there are working men who will devour every book they can buy or can secure from friends, and a curious undigested, if not indigestible, mass they do sometimes get hold of. Hundreds, on the other hand, have never read a line of a book." But having achieved this precarious balance on the fence, the writer continued: "The chief difficulty about literature for the working classes is to reach them. If the literature were lying on their table they would often read, but they seldom sally forth into the highways and byways of the literary world to discover what they shall purchase."[39] Since it was at this very time that paper-bound classic reprints were finding wider distribution through newsagents and other channels, one would expect to hear no more complaint that cheap reprints were difficult to obtain. Yet fifteen years later—in 1901—another writer, committed to the assumption that "hordes of men and women . . . are waiting to respond to an offer of really good and really cheap books," alleged that the trouble still lay in distribution (more specifically, the high postal rate charged for books as against the negligible cost of mailing sensational papers) and price. The solution he put forth was the issue of weekly volumes in a "General Library" subdivided into series, to be sold by subscription: 104 volumes in two years, total cost £4 in paper, £6 in cloth.[40]

There was nothing really new in this proposal; but the very fact that it was reiterated defines the position of the idealist confronted with a situation in whose permanence he refuses to believe. The hard fact seemed to be that the constant activity in cheap reprint series for the

past seventy years had not made the common man a devotee of great literature; no combination of merchandising devices, no amount of cheapening, had achieved that goal. But men who shared Dickens' and Sir John Herschel's and Wilkie Collins' faith in the common man's latent hunger for literary experience clung to the familiar Victorian reliance on "the proper measures." Fortunately for us, that spirit is not lost in our own time, as the many recent experiments in reprinting books of great worth in soft covers attest.

However short the cheap reprint series fell of the most optimistic expectations in Victorian times, they were responsible for a wider popular interest in classic English literature than would otherwise have prevailed during the era. Concurrently with them, designed especially for students facing the various examinations for university admission and civil service posts, but undoubtedly finding an additional market beyond the crammers, were published a score or more of concise manuals, outlines, and other study-guides of English literature. Chambers's Cyclopaedia of English Literature, originally published (1842-43) in weekly numbers, and in two volumes (1844), within a few years sold 130,000 copies in England alone.[41] During the Victorian period, too, there was a revival, to which the proliferation of cheap classic reprints undoubtedly contributed, of appreciative literary journalism. In both periodicals and collected volumes, the bookish commentaries of men like Gosse, Lang, Birrell, Dowden, and Saintsbury delighted readers who, in another age, would have read Lamb, Hazlitt, and Hunt. Demand increased for popular biographies of literary figures. Macmillan's English Men of Letters series, a pioneer in its field, sold over 300,000 copies between 1878, when the first volumes, priced at 2s. 6d., were published, and 1887, when a reissue in monthly volumes, at 1s. in paper, 1s.6d. in cloth, was begun. Some of the titles were reprinted from three to six times in the first ten years, while others had only a single reprinting.[42] The popularity of the various volumes evidently depended on the contemporary interest in the author treated and on the reputation of the man who wrote the biography itself.

The great majority of the boys and girls and men and women into whose hands fell copies of cheap classic reprints did not leave any printed record of their pleasure. Only occasionally did the mute, inglorious common reader take pen in hand, in the manner of the

Lancashire workman who wrote to Cassell's that the first twenty-three volumes of the National Library "have done a great deal of good even in my own neighbourhood, for several of my own friends have given up drinking for the sake of taking and reading your beautiful little books."[43] But a systematic combing of the memoirs of eventually well-known people who grew up in the Victorian period would reveal how many cultivated and expanded their literary taste by reading these inexpensive volumes. Thomas Hardy's first copy of Shelley was an edition of Queen Mab and Other Poems published in the Cottage Library.[44] Havelock Ellis' interest in the Elizabethan drama, which was to bear fruit in his editorship of the Mermaid series, was nurtured by his buying, as a schoolboy at Mitcham in the early 1870's, successive penny numbers of Dicks's Standard Plays.[45] Dicks's penny-number edition of Shakespeare was affectionately remembered by Thomas Burt, the Labour politician: "No matter that the print was small and the paper poor; no matter that there were neither theatre nor stage, neither actors nor orchestra. All the more scope was given to fancy and imagination."[46] Perhaps the final word may be that of the journalist Sir John Hammerton, looking back on his early days in Glasgow, about the time he left school and went to work as a correspondence clerk. In his reminiscences he exclaimed of Cassell's National Library: "What an Aladdin's cave that proved to me! Addison, Goldsmith, Bacon, Steele, DeQuincey. . . ., Charles Lamb, Macaulay and many scores of others whom old Professor Morley introduced to me—what a joy of life I obtained from these, and how greatly they made life worth living!"[47]

Notes