University of Virginia Library

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

the March of Mind was one of the most publicized phenomena of the period stretching from the 1820's to mid-century. But it was only around the fifties that the familiar phrase of "literature for the millions" ceased to be mere hyperbole and came to have a basis in sober fact. The spread of elementary education had raised the literacy rate. Popular interest in reading, generated initially by the radical press of the Reform Bill and Chartist periods, had been exploited by the proprietors of cheap sensational weekly newspapers, men like Lloyd and Reynolds, who also produced enormous quantities of melodramatic fiction in penny numbers—the famous "penny bloods." On the more decorous side, the activities of the religious denominations in spreading tracts and other edifying reading-matter broadcast among the population encouraged the reading habit.

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

not, of course, a reliable indication of the number who could read. Undoubtedly many men and women who could not sign their names could nevertheless master simple reading-matter. On the other hand, many who could scrawl their signatures, as a purely mechanical accomplishment, could not read at all. The two considerations may cancel each other out; in any case, evidence from other sources suggests that while a literacy rate of somewhere around 60% may be a bit low for the fifties, it is not too far off the mark. We may, therefore, write off 40% of the total adult population as not conceivably forming any market for printed matter. In addition, we must eliminate the by no means inconsiderable number of people who were on the sheer fringes of literacy and who therefore would be no more likely to buy a book or a paper than would their brethren who were in total darkness. On the other hand, we should throw in perhaps a half-million youths under twenty who might buy adult reading-matter. All these calculations are so speculative that a final figure is nothing more than a guess crowning a precarious pile of other guesses, but for the sake of hanging up some sort of goal for the ambitious Victorian publisher to strive for, let us say that, omitting the market for juvenile literature and school texts, the gross potential British reading public in 1852 was between five and six million.

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

a million and a half, a figure that includes both home and colonial distribution.[5]

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

book, at the original published price, could run as high as 50,000, and within a very few years, as was the case with W. H. Russell's two-volume account of the Crimean War, published in 1855-56, it could go as high as 200,000.[9] Reckoning four or five readers per copy, that again gives us an audience of, at the very most, a million—for books only of the very greatest immediate appeal. The normal book-buying audience was, of course, infinitely smaller, probably somewhere in the high tens of thousands; and of this number only a small proportion could be expected to buy a given title except in the case of a best-seller. For the ordinary book, an edition of from 500 to 1,000 copies sufficed.

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

circulations that greatly surpassed the record set by the Penny Magazine, which had sold 200,000 for a brief time in the early 1830's.[14] The Family Herald was in process of more than doubling its circulation, from 125,000 in 1849 to 300,000 in 1855.[15] The London Journal was approaching a circulation of 450,000, and Reynolds' Miscellany 200,000.[16] Chambers's Journal, one of the earliest successful cheap periodicals, was selling between 60,000 and 70,000.[17] In addition, there were the threepenny weekly newspapers, which were sold both to the readers of the mass-circulation periodicals and to a large class of readers who looked at nothing else. The Illustrated London News sold 140,000 a week, while the News of the World and Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper each sold in the neighborhood of 110,000 copies, and several other popular papers circulated between 40,000 and 75,000 weekly.[18] It was on the basis of such sales figures as these, reckoning three readers to a copy, that Wilkie Collins decided that the "unknown public"—the public unknown, that is, to the book publishers, the public "which lies right out of the pale of literary civilisation"—amounted to three million persons.[19] The estimate on the whole is sound, and if anything, considering the size of the typical Victorian family, conservative. All in all, there is no doubt whatever that in the 1850's Britain had an audience for printed matter immensely larger than it had ever known before.