University of Virginia Library

English Publishing and the Mass Audience in 1852
by
Richard D. Altick [*]

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

of information to work upon, make of it what he will. But the present-day scholar who attempts to answer the same question for the Victorian age must deal with two quantities which are still largely unknown: x, the true nature of the Victorian reading public, and y, the average publisher's conception of it and the degree to which that conception influenced his editorial decisions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Notes