A PROMINENT BOOKSELLER," REPORTED AN English book trade journal at the end of the last
century, "lately affirmed that the dead are today taking the bread out of the mouths of the
living at a rate unparalleled in the history of literature. Even the popular novelist, he
said, feels the competition of those who 'rule our spirits from their urn.'"[1]
Not that Marie Corelli, Hall Caine, Rider Haggard, and the other best-selling writers of the
1890's were in any danger of starvation. Financially speaking, the profession of authorship
had never before been as rewarding. But it was also true that the flood of reprinted classics,
which had been steadily mounting for several decades, had reached a new peak. The full history
of this important branch of Victorian publishing, a task writer a leader-writer in the Times Literary Supplement a decade ago urged some "industrious
bibliographer" to undertake,[2] will
not be attempted here. Instead, we shall be concerned mainly with two aspects of cheap-reprint
publishing: its relation to the contemporary social and cultural background, and the way in
which it illustrates in microcosm some of the theories and practices of the Victorian book
trade generally.
From one viewpoint, Victorian England was not a very fertile ground on which to sow reprints
of the national classics. In some educated quarters, the work of English writers was still
looked upon, as it had been in Elizabethan times, as a second-class literature. This
attitude is implied in a letter Sir Alexander Grant wrote from Bombay to F. T.
Palgrave in 1862, discussing the possibility of adopting Palgrave's
Golden
Treasury as a classbook for Indian students: "I hope you won't think this a degradation.
English poetry is to these people what Homer is to us."
[3] Down almost to the end of the century, the old universities were
officially unaware of English literature as a subject for serious study. Again, their lofty or
complex style, their far-ranging allusiveness, and the sophistication of their thought placed
many English classics beyond the grasp of readers with limited education. The mass audience of
Victorian times was ill-equipped to understand, let alone find pleasure in, books that had
been addressed to the intellectual élite of preceding centuries. In that era, as in any
other, it was contemporary writers, speaking their audience's own language, and reflecting
their audience's own preoccupations, who had the greatest appeal. Finally, the
anti-imaginative bias of evangelicalism and utilitarianism was everywhere felt, especially in
the first half of the century. Reading belles lettres, it was alleged, was both sinful and
wasteful of time that could be put to far better advantage in "practical" pursuits.
But even more numerous and stronger counter-forces were at work. One was a backwash of
romanticism: the growing charm of the antique, exemplified in the bibliophily of men like
Lamb, Hunt, and the elder Disraeli. The sense that books, and particularly old ones, have a
magical glamor spread as the high place of imaginative and emotional experience in men's lives
was reaffirmed. Closely associated with this reaction against rationalism and gritty
utilitarianism was the increased importance literature acquired as a social institution. As
Lionel Trilling has pointed out, literature "came to be the medium and the repository of the
ethical values and the feelings that had once been peculiar to religion. And literature became
even more. Carlyle, under the influence of Goethe, formulated the notion of the Man of Letters
not only as a priest but as a hero and a seer and thus made him co-equal with the political
leader and the rival of the scientist. In short, literature took upon itself the very greatest
responsibilities and arrogated to itself the most effective powers."[4]
Furthermore, as democracy slowly spread, the age-old notion that literature was the concern
only of the cultural and social aristocracy faded. As early as 1819, Francis Jeffrey announced
that "the fame of a poet is popular, or nothing. He does not address himself, like the man of
science, to the learned, or those who desire to learn, but to all mankind;
and his purpose being to delight and be praised, necessarily extends to all who can receive
pleasure, or join in applause."
[5]
Literature of both the past and the present gradually came to be looked upon as part of the
cultural heritage of all the people.
As the limitations of the utilitarian philosophy became more apparent, the Victorians became
uncomfortably aware that in their society humanistic values had been more and more neglected;
and in an attempt to redress the balance, their journalists and public men joined to praise
books as the great medium of cultural enrichment. The countless essays and speeches they
composed on "The Blessedness of Books," "Little Books with Large Aims," "What a Single Book
May Do for a Youth," and similar topics were part of a continuous campaign to encourage the
habit of serious, profitable reading among the multitude. With opportunities for formal
education severely limited, the idea of self-help was part of the Victorian creed; hence books
were revered as fireside universities. Polite literature was prized not so much for its
capacity to give pleasure as for its extra-literary, or non-aesthetic, values. It was through
reading masterpieces of literature that the student could, for instance, enhance his
understanding of history. Such an approach was used by F. D. Maurice in his lectures on
English literature at King's College in the forties,[6] and by the author of the articles on literature in Cassell's
influential Popular Educator.
These were some of the reasons why non-contemporary English literature was constantly
brought to the attention of ordinary readers, through excerpts and appreciative comment, in
the pages of early mass-circulation periodicals like the Penny Magazine
and Chambers's Journal. Indeed, all the way down to the era of George
Newnes's Tit-Bits, some of the most popular cheap weeklies
unapologetically used extracts from classic English literature as fillers. Middle-class
newspapers gave generous space to reviews of current books and other literary topics.
Literature was a favorite subject for the mechanics' institute lectures which had so prominent
a part in middle-class cultural life in early-and mid-Victorian England. And, with the
adoption of Mundella's code in 1883, elementary schools began to require pupils in the upper
standards to read, parse, and memorize selected English classics. Full-length works, or
substantial parts thereof, replaced the old "beauties" anthologies which for many decades had
represented virtually the only chance children had to gain a glimpse of the standard classics,
at least in the schoolroom.
This, in brief, was the background against which the rise of the cheap classic reprint
series took place. Historically, the first important inexpensive reprints, made possible by
the momentous decision in Donaldson v. Beckett (1774), which killed the
legal fiction of perpetual copyright, were those of John Bell, John Cooke, and James Harrison,
each of whom produced two or more series devoted to out-of-copyright poets, prose writers, and
dramatists. The delight they brought to impecunious book-lovers in the last quarter of the
eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth was celebrated by Leigh Hunt,
Hazlitt, Henry Kirke White, and William Hone, among others. Of Cooke in particular, Augustine
Birrell wrote a century later: "You never see on a stall one of Cooke's books but it is soiled
by honest usage, its odour . . . speaks of the thousand thumbs that have turned over its pages
with delight. . . . He believed both in genius and his country. He gave people cheap books,
and they bought them gladly."[7]
Between 1790 and 1830 there was a scattering of relatively cheap series, appealing to a
class of readers who could not afford the better-remembered, but higher-priced, collections of
Alexander Chalmers (English Poets and British Essayists), Robert Anderson (British Poets),
Robert Lynam (British Essayists), Mrs. Inchbald (British Theatre), Mrs. Barbauld (British
Novelists), and Sir Walter Scott (Ballantyne's Novelist's Library). The bookseller John Sharpe
brought out a long series of English poets, another of the eighteenth-century essayists, and a
third of the dramatists. John Fowler Dove's miniature (24mo.) reprints of the English
classics, ranging from The Compleat Angler to Pope's Poetical Works, ran to well over 100 titles. The Chiswick printer Charles Whittingham,
producer of a typographically distinguished 100-volume set of the British poets for the
carriage trade, served the humbler public with his Cabinet Library and Novelists Library (or,
as it was also called, Whittingham's Pocket Novelists). The price range of all these series
was rather wide—in the case of Whittingham's, from 2s. to 4s. 6d. per volume. The cheapest series of all
during this period seems to have been that of John Limbird, publisher of the 2d. weekly Mirror of Literature, who brought out a
series of British novels, with prices running from 6d. to 3s. 6d., and another of miscellaneous British
classics, from 8d. a volume upward. In addition to reprints dignified
by a series title, individual cheap editions of classic authors were also issued by various
publishers, nearly all of whom were despised by the genteel firms of Paternoster Row.
Conspicuous among them was Thomas Tegg, the energetic scavenger of
remainders and expired copyrights, whose products were memorable for their low prices, miserly
format, and slovenly, not to say slashed, texts.
The period 1827-32 saw the first important burst of interest in cheap books among
"respectable" publishers. The appearance of Constable's Miscellany, the Society for the
Diffusion of Useful Knowledge's twin Libraries of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, Murray's
Family Library, Cadell's reissue of Scott's novels at 5s., and Colburn
and Bentley's Standard Novels touched off a virtual mania in the trade. No firm was without at
least one hastily contrived "library" in its bid for the shillings of the suddenly-discovered
mass reading public, whose size was now as much exaggerated as it had previously been
underestimated. Cheap reprints of literary classics inevitably figured in the boom. In 1830
appeared the first volumes of the Aldine Edition of the British Poets, the result of the
collaboration of the bookseller William Pickering and the printer Charles Whittingham. The
most memorable classic-reprint series of the period, it held an honorable place in an
increasingly competitive field down into the present century. For these reasons, it is
convenient and fitting to settle upon the year 1830 as the beginning of the era when
publishers developed cheap classic libraries as an integral—not merely
incidental—part of their lists.
