University of Virginia Library

II

So much for the quantitative extent of the 1852 market. But what of the economic considerations which play so vital a part in consumer analysis? In 1852 books were not quite the luxury items they had been for most of the century, but they were not, on the other hand, as readily obtainable as the reformers wished. Three years earlier one such friend of the people, the lecturer George Dawson, had told a committee of Parliament, "The fact is, we give the people in this country an appetite to read, and supply them with nothing. For the last many years in England everybody has been educating the people, but they have forgotten to find them any books. In plain language, you have made them hungry, but you have given them nothing to eat; it is almost a misfortune to a man to have a great taste for reading, and not to have the power of satisfying it."[20] The circulation figures I have just cited would seem to discredit Dawson so far as cheap periodicals are concerned, but on the score of books he was right. Original editions were priced beyond the reach of all but the distinctly prosperous. The sacrosanct three-decker novel held obstinately firm at a guinea-and-a-half, and other types of newly published literature were priced more or less to match. For the ordinary London clerk, say, who was lucky to make the thirty bob a week of which John Davidson was to sing later in the century, to buy a newly published novel would have meant the sacrifice of a week's salary. Some of the best novelists of the age, Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, for instance, were bringing out their newest fictions in monthly parts at a shilling apiece, and while this practice did bring the total cost of a new novel down to, say, twenty shillings, it still left the purchaser with the expense of binding up the parts. Its principal advantage was that it spread the cost over a year or two, thus making new novels available to the man who had one shilling to spend every month, but seldom twenty or thirty at a time.

However, many successful works of both fiction and non-fiction were reprinted, within a few years or even a few months of original publication, in five- or six-shilling editions. Lower in the price scale was the extensive class of railway novels or yellow-backs, the forms which are now so admirably displayed in the showcase of Mr. Sadleir's affectionate bibliography.[21] In 1852 this genre was just five years old, having originated in the Parlour Library of Simms and McIntyre, whose volumes were priced at a shilling or a shilling sixpence. The immediate success of this series had forced Bentley and Colburn, the proprietors of five-shilling reprint "libraries," to come down to 2s. 6d. and had inspired other firms, notably that of Routledge, to compete with their own reprints at one or two shillings.[22] Though this represented the greatest movement toward cheap books since the exciting false dawn between 1828 and 1832, only current literature as a rule was published in this form, and many valuable publishers' properties—valuable both commercially and from the point of view of literature—were not made available for cheap reprints. Reprints of standard classics, best exemplified in this period by the proliferating Bohn Libraries, were 5s. or 3s.6d.

These prices are list. But the year 1852 witnessed a development which for the next four decades would make the advertised prices somewhat misleading. For many years an association of publishers and certain booksellers had enforced what we today call, somewhat euphemistically, a fair-trade practices agreement, by which anyone selling the books of those publishers under the list price was boycotted. In 1852, however, the publisher John Chapman, with the powerful assistance of most of the celebrated authors of the day as well as of the Times, the Athenaeum, and Mr. Gladstone, forced the Booksellers' Association to submit their case for literary protectionism to a board of arbitration headed by Lord Campbell. The decision was that the principle of free trade, by then so firmly established in other phases of Britain's economic life, should be observed in the book trade as well.[23] As a result, down to the nineties, one could, with a little shopping about, buy a new book at a reduction of two or three pence on the shilling.[24] Hence books were not quite as expensive as the advertised prices would indicate.

But how many people could afford to buy books even at this discount? It may well be that the amazing success of Uncle Tom's Cabin and the great leaps of periodical circulation were due in part to the favorable economic conditions prevailing in the early fifties. Employment was high, money was plentiful, and prices were generally low. Thus the economic barrier to book-buying was less formidable than it had been in the hungry forties or was to be in the later fifties and sixties. But it was still sufficiently high to bar great segments of the population. In 1852 about 110,000 persons had a taxable income of more than £150 a year, but of these, 75%, or about 83,000, received less than £400,[25] and one suspects that for most of them the purchase of an occasional five-shilling reprint, more frequently of a shilling railway novel, and of one or two cheap periodicals or Sunday newspapers a week would have been the extent of their spending for reading-matter. (There were no penny daily papers until after the abolition of the stamp tax in 1855.) Those who simply had to have new books about the house found it more economical to spend a guinea for a year's privileges at Mudie's than to buy books outright. In a household whose weekly income ranged from three to eight pounds little money remained after the necessities had been provided for: not even when beef was selling at 8d. a pound. Furthermore, most of the population were worse off than those who had a taxable income. The average family of a skilled artisan had an annual income of only £90, or 34s. a week,[26] and the hundreds of thousands of working-class families could count on far less than that. The average weekly wage in Lancashire and Cheshire was only 9s.6d. a week.[27] For the great bulk of the population, then, book-buying was out of the question except for the very cheap part-issues of Salisbury Square fiction or the shilling yellow-back; what reading was done, was done in cheap periodicals, whether of the Reynolds' Miscellany or Family Herald type, and weekly newspapers, which cost only 2d. or 3d. As a very general conclusion, we may conjecture that the market for ordinary trade books, at the prices then prevailing, was limited to the 27,000 or so families with an annual income of more than £400, and that for the one-or two-shilling reprints, the cheapest books published, to the 110,000 families with more than £150 a year. All the rest of the readers in Britain in 1852 formed a market for cheap periodicals alone.

Even among those who were financially able to be occasional patrons of the bookshop or the library, however, there were many thousands who

seldom if ever stepped inside either one. In the educational experience of the great majority of the people there had been absolutely nothing to encourage a taste for reading as an adult pastime. Even among the substantial middle class, most men, and even more women, had been to school for only a few years, and while they had learned to perform the mechanical operation of reading, the books they had practised upon, books of dull, pious edification, were not calculated to give them any enduring affection for printed matter in hard covers. No incentive came from the teachers, who were themselves wretchedly uneducated. In the classroom all forces seemingly conspired to breed an everlasting distaste for reading, and anyone who knows what elementary education was like in nineteenth-century England must consider it miraculous that, under the circumstances, the reading habit was as widespread as it was.[28] Nor was this true only of the schools to which the masses of children went. The witnesses before a Parliamentary commission in the early sixties were virtually unanimous in declaring that in the great public schools of the nation no effort whatsoever was made to encourage the boys to read for pleasure or general culture, and that as a result few did.[29] Nor was the situation very much better in the universities. No doubt many readers of the Times and holders of baccalaureate degrees shared the feeling of the forthright Colonel Sibthorp, M.P. for Lincoln, when he confided to Commons in 1850 that "he did not like reading at all, and he hated it when at Oxford."[30] I am persuaded that English educational practices—which were dominated either by the Gradgrind philosophy of the age or by the decayed classical tradition—were more instrumental than any other single element in limiting the size of the nineteenth-century book-reading public. I have no illusions about the educational accomplishments of our own day, but in this respect, at least, I am certain that we do no worse than the Victorians did.

In 1852, it is true, the newspapers contained what appeared to be a hopeful sign. This was the year when the first free library to be established under Ewart's Act was opened at Manchester. The orators there, as at other library dedications in the next few years, exhausted much rhetoric in hailing the public-library movement as a symbol of the spread of the reading habit among the people. But actually the movement was in

no sense a popular one. Ewart's Bill was pushed through Parliament by a small band of reformers, behind whom was no strong force of opinion on the part either of the working class or of the middle class. And once local corporations were empowered to levy a small tax for library buildings, relatively few did so. Never during the rest of the century did public libraries enjoy really popular support. In town after town general apathy and, on the part of the ratepayers, vehement opposition, defeated the efforts of a minority to provide free reading facilities for the public at large.[31]

Conditions of life in the Victorian era were not necessarily conducive to reading. We hear much about the way in which the sacred institution of family readings-aloud encouraged a taste for books, and undoubtedly it did. But even more powerful influences operated on the other side. For the vast majority of people, there was little time to read. Only in the textile industry had the ten-hour day been won; elsewhere the usual work week was seventy-two hours or more. Shop assistants worked eighty-five to ninety hours a week, their places of employment remaining open long into the evening. Women, unless they were well supplied with servants, had hardly any more leisure, and such leisure as they did enjoy was in inverse proportion to the number of children with whom they were blessed. The only day of theoretical rest was Sunday, but a good part of it was spent at church, and in what hours remained, one's choice of reading-matter was severely limited, in most middle-class Victorian households, by the Sabbatarian ban on any but religious books. We need not wonder, as has been pointed out more than once, that the Victorians were so well versed in Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim's Progress: they were two of the least deadly books on the list approved for Sunday reading.

In fact, what with the pressure of work and the ban on secular reading on Sunday, the only extended leisure many Victorians had for reading was when they made a railway journey. It is no accident that in the early fifties the new class of cheap light literature was referred to as "railway reading", and that the biggest volume of bookselling was beginning to be accomplished at railway termini, where, in 1852, the stalls of W. H. Smith and Son were becoming familiar landmarks.[32] A long slow trip in a second-class carriage was one occasion upon which the earnest Victorian felt that a bit of self-indulgence was justified—indeed it was almost indispensable.

In the railway carriage, too, the traveller might, if he were lucky, find a degree of peace not often enjoyed at home. Throughout the nineteenth century the average British family—by which I mean one of the lower middle class, probably below the income-tax level—was living in quarters far too small for it. The crowding in the homes of the working class was, of course, constantly a matter for Parliamentary remark; a missionary to the natives of Spitalfields told a committee at Westminster in 1849 that "I frequently find as many as seven or eight persons living all in one room; in that room, perhaps, there will be two looms at work, so that the noise and discomfort render it almost impossible that a working man, if he were ever so well inclined to read, could sit down and read quietly."[33] But overcrowded conditions existed among a large section of the middle class as well, because Victorian fertility notoriously had a way of outrunning Victorian income. It was a fortunate reader indeed, in any but the fairly prosperous segment of the population, who could command the solitude he needed whenever he needed it.

Nor may we neglect the effect of Evangelicalism upon the size of the Victorian publisher's potential market. This most influential form of religion, which set the whole tone of life in Victorian times, immensely stimulated the reading habit, because it stressed the spiritually salutary effect of contact with the right kind of moral and religious literature at the same time that it forbade many kinds of non-literary recreation. The perusal of the printed word was as vital a part of one's journey to salvation as was listening to public sermons. The result was a huge increase in the sale of edifying works of every description. But Evangelicalism had revived and even intensified the old Puritan distrust of secular literature, and so thoroughly did this distrust permeate a great proportion of the middle class, and the church-going portion of the lower, that it remained in 1852 a strong deterrent to the reading of ordinary literature, above all fiction.[34] No Victorian publisher of ordinary trade books, in surveying his prospective market, could afford to overlook the existence of multitudes of men and women who may well have been devoted readers, but who would never think of buying the majority of titles he had on his list. These people were in the main the patrons of the specialized religious-book houses and of those general publishers who maintained strong religious

lists.[35] They were, therefore, a special public, and they decreased by just so much the potential audience for general reading-matter.

Much of what has been said thus far has implied a point which I now want particularly to emphasize. In some well-known discussions of English literary trends at the end of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of our own we are told that a great deal of whatever is saddening in post-Victorian literary history can be attributed to the fragmentation of what had been until recently a homogeneous public. In other words, whereas the Victorian man of letters addressed himself to the reading audience at large, his grandson had to be content with addressing a small splinter of that audience—what Arnold called, in another connection, "the saving remnant." Now as a matter of fact, no Victorian writer, no matter how popular, was read by the whole contemporary audience.[36] If any lament is to be made over the change that has occurred in the reading public during the past century, it is that the cultured minority, which normally forms the special audience of the great men of letters, has not grown apace with the growth of the total public, and indeed may have actually shrunk. But the facts forbid us to assume that the extreme social and cultural diversification of the English reading audience began, say, at the time of the Education Act of 1870, and that until then the audience was the ideal homogeneous one recalled, with a kind of wishful hindsight, in some of our literary histories. Dickens and Eliot and Thackeray and Tennyson, and for that matter G. P. R. James and Martin Tupper, wrote for only one or two publics out of the numerous ones already in existence by mid-century. Actually, however convenient the practice may be, it is inaccurate to refer to the "reading public"—singular—in any century after the fifteenth. A few moments' contemplation of the variety of Elizabethan literature, from Spenser, say,

down to the lowliest chapbook, should dispose once and for all of the myth that the reading public began to break down into separate audiences only late in the nineteenth century. What the Victorian age witnessed was not the beginning of multiple publics but simply the spectacular growth in both size and influence of certain publics which had hitherto been either small or not much thought about. In 1858 Wilkie Collins distinguished four separate audiences: ". . . the religious public . . . the public which reads for information . . . the public which reads for amusement, and patronizes the circulating libraries and the railway bookstalls . . . [and] the public which reads nothing but newspapers."[37] All of these, except the last, had existed for centuries. The great difference was that the last two at least had grown prodigiously, while the cultured minority, the stable audience for the sort of writing that wins a man a place in literary history, was cast more and more into the shadows.