University of Virginia Library

III

In 1852 publishers generally had not accommodated their policies to the various realities I have just mentioned. I am not speaking of those few firms which were busily cashing in on the development of a mass public by issuing yellow-backs, penny bloods, and other popular-priced literature. I refer to the old-line firms, the stalwarts of Paternoster Row, whose conservatism was something of a scandal in their own time, and who looked down their patrician noses at the upstart Cassells, Routledges, Reynoldses, Lloyds, and the rest. They were still firmly committed to the policy which had dominated the trade in the days of Byron. They continued to assume that the only public worth publishing for was the public that bought books at the prevailing prices or subscribed to the circulating libraries. In 1852 Gladstone told Parliament that hardly five percent of the books published in England every year sold more than 500 copies.[38] If his estimate is anywhere near correct, it means that, in the face of an enormously expanded interest in reading, most publishers remained content with selling as many copies of a given title as were normally sold in Pope's day.

This means, in turn, that the editorial decisions in the old-established houses were based upon the anticipated reaction of that same small public of well-heeled buyers who had governed decisions in the past. The whole economic rationale of publishing was still what it had been a hundred years before: to make this small initial clientele pay for the cost of publishing a book. There was, of course, this difference: whereas earlier the

clientele had been composed of individual purchasers, in Victorian times it was largely represented by the circulating libraries. This circumstance worked to the advantage of the publisher, and to the disadvantage of every man who wanted books for his own shelves. The publisher could, and, it is notorious, did rely upon Mudie and his confrères to take a substantial part of the initial edition of any work intended for the general reader, and the library operators, who in any event got a large discount, were not disposed to quibble about prices. So the publisher could afford to be quite indifferent to the fact that he was pricing his wares out of the reach of the ordinary purchaser. If the book subsequently had a success in a cheap reprint, well and good; that meant so much extra profit for the publisher. But, in contrast to the situation in the middle of the twentieth century, the reprint audience did not figure in the original calculations which attended the editorial decision. The silent guest at the table around which such decisions were made, therefore, was not so much the individual reader (whether a man with a guinea and a half to spend, or only two shillings) but his surrogate, Mr. Mudie. And though Mudie had immense influence on what was published, there is no proof that he was an infallibly shrewd diviner of current taste. He did not have to be; so long as the circulating library was the chief means by which the public got to read newly published books, he had the power, at least as much as did the publishers, to decide what it should be given to read. He may have been wrong quite frequently (his strong views on morality in literature are so well known as to need no comment), but there was little the public could do about it. Under these circumstances, the tastes of the audience influenced editorial decisions only at second hand.

Now and again there were protests against this state of affairs—both against the strangle-hold of the libraries and against the whole resulting policy of small original editions at high prices. In 1854, for instance, a writer in the Times urged that "instead of commencing with editions of a guinea, and gradually coming down in the course of years to cheap editions of 5s., all good books on their first appearance shall appeal to the needy multitude, while the requirements of the fortunate and lazier few are postponed to a more convenient season."[39] If that reversal of traditional policy had come about, the whole basis of editorial decisions, and therefore eventually the whole nature of contemporary literature, would have been considerably altered. It is fascinating to speculate what would have happened to the reading public, and to literature in general,

if the firms which published most of the age's great writers—the Smith Elders, the Chapman and Halls, the Macmillans and Murrays and Longmans—had seriously attempted a policy of cheap original editions. What concessions would they have asked their writers to make in order to appeal to the much larger audience they then would have had? Would Macaulay and Carlyle and Thackeray and the rest have written any differently if they had had in view an immediate audience of hundreds of thousands instead of tens of thousands?[40]

As it was, however, the reading of the masses was allowed to be chiefly the concern of the handful of publishers who had discovered that publishing in cheap form and large volume, however lacking in respectability it might be, was not necessarily ruinous. But because in the nature of things they could not pay large prices to authors for original work, they were limited to the productions of hacks, or to copyright works which other publishers were willing to part with, or to translations, or, finally, to American works, which were unprotected by international copyright. It is quite true that the cheap publishers occasionally made available at three-and-six or even at a shilling books of serious content and genuine literary merit, but these were almost lost in the flood of vapid or sensational trash. Under such circumstances, the word "cheap" did not have an exclusively economic reference; it had an aesthetic, and often a moral, one as well. In this way the publishing situation contributed to the division of the total reading public into two worlds, the small one of the intellectual élite, who could pay either the publisher or Mudie for what they wanted, and the infinitely greater one of those who perforce had to want what they could pay for.

It would be absurd, of course, to argue that the masses of people read what they did just because it was forced upon them by publishing conditions beyond their control, and because there was nothing better for them to read at a price they could pay. They bought hundreds of thousands of copies of cheap papers every week simply because they liked what they found therein, and most of them, even if the whole rich store of current book publications had been laid before them at sixpence or a shilling a title, would have kept on reading Reynolds' Miscellany and

the News of the World to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Nevertheless, it would be unrealistic to assume that in a mass audience of this size, in an era when self-improvement was so much in the air, there were not many people who were ready and eager for reading-matter of a better sort and who suffered from what was in effect a literary disfranchisement.

Such people had little opportunity to make their wants known even when they were conscious of them. The self-appointed spokesmen for the common reader were almost wholly unconcerned with the literary improvement of popular reading-matter. This is well illustrated by the whole tone of the testimony before the committee of Commons which was appointed in 1851, as the result of pressure from a few liberal members, to look into the advisability of abolishing the newspaper stamp. Opposition to the proposal was based chiefly upon the historic identification of the cheap press with radicalism. The task of the men who agitated for a removal of the penny newspaper duty was to show that the reading tastes of the masses had improved so far that there was now no danger of a revival of the "scurrilous" and "immoral" publications, such as the Penny Satirist and Cleave's Penny Gazette, which had enjoyed favor a decade or so before.

A star witness before the committee was Abel Heywood, the leading wholesale newsagent of Manchester, who analyzed his business in this way: The more respectable of the mass-circulation periodicals had a weekly sale of from 9,000 (for the Family Herald and the London Journal) down to 600 (for Eliza Cook's Journal and Household Words). Two principal weekly newspapers, the News of the World and the Weekly Times, sold 3,500 and 4,000 respectively. At the bottom of the scale came the frankly sensational number-publications, the equivalents of today's pulps. G. W. M. Reynolds' Court of London sold 1,500 a week, while the current Lloyd penny dreadfuls—Three-Fingered Jack, The Adventures of Captain Hawk, Mazeppa, Love and Mystery, almost twenty different titles in all—sold in the aggregate 3,400. As a not wholly irrelevant footnote, it must be added that Heywood sold penny numbers of Shakespeare at a rate of 150 a week.[41]

Heywood, who spoke with the authority of long experience in his trade and the prejudice of a veteran backer of popular causes, construed his own figures as showing that there had been a remarkable improvement in popular taste, and other witnesses testified to the same effect. The papers whose circulation had most benefited by the growth of the

reading habit in recent years were those of a "good tendency"; the immoral and seditious ones had been driven from the market. This was, they maintained, proof of a sort of literary inversion of Gresham's law: good reading-matter, if given half a chance, would inevitably drive out bad.[42]

But their definition of "good reading-matter" was determined not by any literary or cultural standards but by existing political and social conditions. When the great concern was whether cheap publications would or would not contribute to a fresh unsettling of the populace, the specifically literary qualities of the Family Herald and the London Journal were of no relevance. The criterion of acceptable popular reading-matter was, to put it bluntly, innocuousness. The ideal of the advocates of a cheap press was simply that the humble reader should be enabled to purchase a few hours of innocent recreation, without being troubled by any thoughts dangerous to his own moral welfare or the peace of the nation. There was no thought of trying to improve the general cultural tone of the people's reading; enough if it were "safe."

With attention centered upon the mass reading public from this angle, it was only natural that the need for issuing works of true literary merit in cheap form in order to encourage the elevation of popular taste, and the actual existence of a market for such publications, should have been largely neglected. During the decade with which we are concerned, however, there were several signs which gave promise that the man of some intellectual ambition but little pocket-money, whose tastes were not irrevocably fixed upon the sensational newspaper and the shilling shocker, was slowly making his presence felt.

Two significant events occurred in the periodical field. In 1850 Dickens began his twopenny Household Words, which immediately attracted an audience for which the half-crown monthlies were too expensive and the popular weekly papers too frivolous and crude. Both of the two major predecessors of Household Words among the cheap weeklies had failed to satisfy this audience. The Penny Magazine, whose connection with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge limited its contents to instructional articles and discouraged the introduction of fiction, had gone under in 1845. Chambers's Journal, although it did print fiction, and for that reason still had favor among a certain clientele, was studiously following its original policy of cultivating inoffensiveness to the point of what contemporary observers called "namby-pambyness." Household Words, under Dickens' vigorous direction, escaped both pitfalls: it printed plenty of fiction, and it was not afraid, in its serious articles, to speak out

on current issues. Furthermore, its contributors included many highly competent writers. The gratitude with which it was received is measured by its circulation, which ran as high as 40,000 weekly.[43]

But that figure, exciting as it was for the time, was eclipsed when George Smith launched the Cornhill Magazine early in 1860, with a staff of contributors that reads today like a Who's Who of Victorian literature. No less than 120,000 men and women bought the first issue, and though the initial circulation did not hold up, during the first two years the Cornhill's average monthly sale, at a shilling, was 84,000 copies.[44]

The success of these two innovations in periodical literature, at prices within the reach of at least all middle-class readers, was evidence of a steadily expanding market for serious reading-matter. In the book trade, additional evidence was supplied by the spectacular prosperity of John Cassell's publishing enterprises. Beginning in 1852 with his Popular Educator, a sort of high-school-at-home course, Cassell adapted the old technique of number-publishing to new conditions and brought out in instalments scores of excellent standard works in history, literature, and other fields. It is significant that the man who made the discovery that supplying the people with truly solid books could become a big and lucrative business had no background in publishing at all; he had entered the trade only three or four years earlier, after a career as a temperance lecturer and packer of tea and coffee. Seemingly it took a rank outsider to succeed where old professionals like Charles Knight had failed.[45]

Another indication of the growth of serious taste among those who were still neglected by the great publishers is the success of the Bohn Libraries, which provided at prices that were moderate for the early fifties, but still not low enough, hundreds upon hundreds of standard works available otherwise, if at all, in impossibly expensive editions. Other

publishers experimented with series of English classics at competing prices.[46] And that there was a similar market lower down in society for standard literature is shown by the prosperity of the 32mo. Cottage Library of Milner and Sowerby, a provincial firm which, in its first years at least, sold its output mainly at country fairs. The Cottage Library books were not handsome, but they offered a great deal of reading-matter for a shilling, and the list, which appealed to every conceivable taste, eventually climbed to over five hundred titles.[47]

These were straws in the wind, and eventually they would be heeded by the great publishers who in 1852 held aloof from contact with the mass audience. Cheaper and better books did become available to the additional millions who were made literate by the extension of education during the second half of the century. But by that time the great opportunity had passed. In 1852 the habits and tastes of the new mass audience were not yet crystallized. The people were wretchedly educated, to be sure, and their tastes were crude; but they could still have been taught to like better things. The accidents of publishing, however, as much as any other single factor, caused the new audience to associate the reading habit with a certain type of reading-matter, a type deplored by all contemporary observers and no less by those at a distance of a century. This in turn—increasingly so as the mass audience began to influence editorial decisions—set the permanent course of publishing for the millions, with its implied dismal assumptions regarding the level of popular taste, and so a vicious circle was created, which has never been broken. Perhaps it is too late now to break it. But while we browse in the files of old periodicals and read the Victorians' ceaseless complaints of the unutterable vulgarity of "the million's" reading tastes—complaints so feelingful and comprehensive that our own seem but tired echoes—we may perhaps speculate whether, under happier circumstances, the history of English popular culture might not have taken a different turn. If a few influential publishers had had more vision, more willingness to experiment, more

missionary spirit; if somehow the art of sound popularization had been learned while there was still time; if the railway bookstalls and the hole-in-the-wall newsvendors had had Penguins and Pocket Books in stock—

But the realities of the Victorian situation were quite another thing.