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From the very beginnings of publishing as a profit-making enterprise, the publisher's estimate of the size of a book's potential audience, its willingness to pay the price he will ask, and above all its current tastes, has been the major consideration in his decision whether or not to send the manuscript on to the type-setter. The whole history of literature in the past few centuries is, in a sense, the aggregate history of such decisions. But we know very little about how publishers of various periods regarded their market. What was their conception of its numerical size? of its social composition and educational level? of its ability to pay the asking prices of books? of the manifold elements in the cultural and social background of the age which influenced the book-buying habit?
Today publishers have at their disposal the results of hundreds, indeed thousands, of studies, made chiefly by library-science students and market analysis specialists, of twentieth-century reading habits and the conditions which influence them. The latest results of this continuing survey are constantly drawn upon by the publishers of mass-circulation periodicals and paper-bound books. To that degree the contemporary reading public, as delineated by modern techniques of opinion- and behavior-sampling, exerts a direct and relatively measurable influence upon what is published. Elsewhere in the trade, it is true, that influence is less direct, but it is still potent, for modern commercial publishers stake their very existence, fully as much as do the makers of detergents or deep-freeze units, upon an accurate estimate of the potential market for their product and its current likes and dislikes.
When some future scholar sets out to assess the influence of the audience upon what was published in our own age, he will have a vast body
With y we shall have little to do here, except to remark that the evidence that comes down to us on the point is scanty. Shrewd though some of the Victorian publishers were, few of them, at least until the later decades of the century, seem to have bothered very much about the reading public as a whole. Most of them, with the conspicuous exception of the newcomers in the trade who unabashedly angled for the pennies and shillings of the masses, were untouched by the revolution that was going on about them. Such ideas as they had about the new audience were clouded by indifference, prejudice, and misinformation. The Victorians were statistics-conscious, even statistics-mad; they had a passion for collecting and codifying data on all sorts of other subjects—education, sanitary conditions, crime, wages, trade—but they seem never to have thought of making a thorough study of the contemporary reading public and of the place of the reading habit in the whole social scene.
In this paper our business is with x. We are only beginning to understand what the Victorian audience was really like; only now are we beginning to subject to the test of original research the facile assumptions that have been so long current.[1] In the pages that follow, I shall make a retrospective audience survey for an English publisher of the year 1852. My purpose is not to measure the publishers' actual awareness of the swiftly changing audience—a task for which, as I say, our present knowledge is inadequate—but to suggest how research, aided by the perspective of a hundred years, allows us to see the mid-Victorian reading public as it might have appeared to a publisher as market-conscious as his modern counterpart.
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