Which raises the question, Just how influential were these reprint series in stimulating an
interest in English masterpieces among the expanding reading public? In a period when cheap
weeklies like the Family Herald and Tit-Bits
achieved individual circulations of from 500,000 to a million, what place had older works of
established literary merit in the reading diet of the multitude? One view of the matter was
reported at the beginning of this article. But what were the facts?
We have the boasts of certain reprint publishers, for whatever they may be worth. Of
Macmillan's Globe Edition, "upwards of 140,000 volumes" were sold to the end of 1870;
presumably this figure includes the sales of the first and most famous member of the series,
the Shakespeare, which had found 95,000 buyers since publication in December, 1864.[25] Between the spring of 1870 and May,
1872, Moxon's sold 150,000 volumes of their Popular Poets.[26] Over a quarter-million copies of the Miniature Library of the
Poets were disposed of in the period 1879-1884, according to the publishers, William Kent and
Co.[27] In 1884 Warne and Co.
advertised that their Chandos Classics, then numbering over 100 titles, had sold 3,500,000
volumes since publication had begun in 1868.[28] Through what seems to have been either unaccountable dereliction or heroic
restraint on the part of their advertising writer, this figure remained unchanged for several
years. In 1894, however, Warne revised their copy, and the total to date for the Chandos
Classics was announced as six million.[29] The Canterbury Poets were reported to have sold "about a million volumes"
within ten years of their beginning in 1884.[30] Ward and Lock's Minerva Library
sold over 150,000 between
1889 and 1894.
[31] For some years
after first publication in 1894-96, the Temple Shakespeare, a forty-volume series, sold
250,000 volumes annually (and the total between 1894 and 1934 was five million).
[32] Of W. T. Stead's Penny Poets,
almost five million copies were published in a year, a figure exceeded by Stead's condensed
Popular Novels, which were said to have sold "about six and a half million."
[33]
These are staggering totals indeed; but in estimating their significance, one must remember
several things. One is that since most of the series mentioned included some copyright works,
or at least works whose copyright had only recently lapsed, the figures are not a good
indication of the current appetite for older literature. Another is that the figures are for
the total sale of a whole series, which might comprise twenty, fifty, or a hundred volumes.
The average sale per title would, of course, be only a fraction of the total. Unfortunately,
with one or two exceptions, such as the Globe one-volume Shakespeare, sales figures for
individual titles in the various series are unavailable.[33a] A further consideration is that the totals often, if not always, include export
sales. Of the annual total for the Temple Shakespeare, for example, 100,000 copies went to
America;[34] and the Empire itself
provided a large audience for books published in the British Isles.
Although the books we are concerned with here were designed for the general trade, not for
classroom use, they were in great demand as school prizes. And, as the advertisements also
show, they were among the items most favored for family Christmas giving, or for a decorous
exchange of presents between swain and sweetheart. The extent to which school prizes or
sentimental gifts were actually read, let alone understood, is, however, something else again.
As George Gissing observed, "Hardly will a prudent statistician venture to declare that one in
every score of those who actually read sterling books do so with comprehension of their
author. These dainty series of noble and delightful works, which have so seemingly wide an
acceptance, think you they vouch for true appreciation in all who buy them? Remember those who
purchase to follow the fashion, to impose upon their
neighbor, or even to
flatter themselves; think of those who wish to make cheap presents, and those who are merely
pleased by the outer aspect of the volume."
[35]
Gissing's pessimism was widely shared throughout the Victorian period; more widely than ever
at the end of the epoch, when the reading preferences of the masses had been fully expressed
at public libraries and newsagents', and the verdict was overwhelmingly in favor of light
novels and penny papers. "The constant flow of new editions of Great Authors," observed a
writer in the Academy in 1903, "is deceptive. They are regarded as part
of the necessary furniture of the house—not of the mind; and having been duly and
dutifully bought they are taught to know their place on the appointed shelf. They are taken as
read. . . . There are few men now who, when a new book is published, read an old one."[36]
In such views — and examples could be multiplied from the annals of the
nineteenth-century reading public—there is more than a hint of snobbery. The phenomenon
of a semi-literate reading audience numbering in the millions stirred the residual social
prejudices of the class who wrote for, and read, the leading literary journals, and it was
only to be expected that they would exaggerate the situation they deplored. On the other hand,
there were sturdy believers in the common man's capacity for literary culture and his active
interest in acquiring it. The best-known of these was Charles Dickens, who told the Birmingham
Society of Artists in 1853, "I believe there are in Birmingham at this moment many working men
infinitely better versed in Shakespeare and in Milton than the average of fine gentlemen in
the days of bought-and-sold dedications and dear books."[37] Every public man who had faith in mechanics' institutes and free
libraries as disseminators of culture among the middle and lower classes, everyone who
advocated the repeal of the newspaper tax, the amendment of the copyright law, and other
schemes connected with spreading the blessings of cheap print, asserted that the multitude was
ready and eager for good literature.[38]
As events proved, there was just as much exaggeration on this side of the issue. The bright
words of hope uttered at mid-century, when the "taxes on knowledge" and the absence of free
libraries were alleged to be the only barriers to the development of a broadly cultured
populace, were seldom echoed a generation later. It was indisputable that the widening of
educational opportunity had not been accompanied by the same degree of literary enlightenment.
In 1886 a writer in the Nineteenth Century said: "Cheap editions have
brought standard works within their [the workers'] reach, and though the privilege is not
largely availed of, it is not altogether neglected. . . . Lots of working men have studied
with great care one or two of Shakespeare's plays; others know one or two of Dickens's works
almost by heart. . . . At the same time there are working men who will devour every book they
can buy or can secure from friends, and a curious undigested, if not indigestible, mass they
do sometimes get hold of. Hundreds, on the other hand, have never read a line of a book." But
having achieved this precarious balance on the fence, the writer continued: "The chief
difficulty about literature for the working classes is to reach them. If the literature were
lying on their table they would often read, but they seldom sally forth into the highways and
byways of the literary world to discover what they shall purchase."[39] Since it was at this very time that paper-bound classic
reprints were finding wider distribution through newsagents and other channels, one would
expect to hear no more complaint that cheap reprints were difficult to obtain. Yet fifteen
years later—in 1901—another writer, committed to the assumption that "hordes of
men and women . . . are waiting to respond to an offer of really good and really cheap books,"
alleged that the trouble still lay in distribution (more specifically, the high postal rate
charged for books as against the negligible cost of mailing sensational papers) and price. The
solution he put forth was the issue of weekly volumes in a "General Library" subdivided into
series, to be sold by subscription: 104 volumes in two years, total cost £4 in paper,
£6 in cloth.[40]
There was nothing really new in this proposal; but the very fact that it was reiterated
defines the position of the idealist confronted with a situation in whose permanence he
refuses to believe. The hard fact seemed to be that the constant activity in cheap reprint
series for the
past seventy years had not made the common man a devotee of
great literature; no combination of merchandising devices, no amount of cheapening, had
achieved that goal. But men who shared Dickens' and Sir John Herschel's and Wilkie Collins'
faith in the common man's latent hunger for literary experience clung to the familiar
Victorian reliance on "the proper measures." Fortunately for us, that spirit is not lost in
our own time, as the many recent experiments in reprinting books of great worth in soft covers
attest.
However short the cheap reprint series fell of the most optimistic expectations in Victorian
times, they were responsible for a wider popular interest in classic English literature than
would otherwise have prevailed during the era. Concurrently with them, designed especially for
students facing the various examinations for university admission and civil service posts, but
undoubtedly finding an additional market beyond the crammers, were published a score or more
of concise manuals, outlines, and other study-guides of English literature. Chambers's Cyclopaedia of English Literature, originally published (1842-43) in weekly
numbers, and in two volumes (1844), within a few years sold 130,000 copies in England
alone.[41] During the Victorian
period, too, there was a revival, to which the proliferation of cheap classic reprints
undoubtedly contributed, of appreciative literary journalism. In both periodicals and
collected volumes, the bookish commentaries of men like Gosse, Lang, Birrell, Dowden, and
Saintsbury delighted readers who, in another age, would have read Lamb, Hazlitt, and Hunt.
Demand increased for popular biographies of literary figures. Macmillan's English Men of
Letters series, a pioneer in its field, sold over 300,000 copies between 1878, when the first
volumes, priced at 2s. 6d., were published, and
1887, when a reissue in monthly volumes, at 1s. in paper, 1s.6d. in cloth, was begun. Some of the titles were
reprinted from three to six times in the first ten years, while others had only a single
reprinting.[42] The popularity of
the various volumes evidently depended on the contemporary interest in the author treated and
on the reputation of the man who wrote the biography itself.
The great majority of the boys and girls and men and women into whose hands fell copies of
cheap classic reprints did not leave any printed record of their pleasure. Only occasionally
did the mute, inglorious common reader take pen in hand, in the manner of the
Lancashire workman who wrote to Cassell's that the first twenty-three volumes of the
National Library "have done a great deal of good even in my own neighbourhood, for several of
my own friends have given up drinking for the sake of taking and reading your beautiful little
books."
[43] But a systematic
combing of the memoirs of eventually well-known people who grew up in the Victorian period
would reveal how many cultivated and expanded their literary taste by reading these
inexpensive volumes. Thomas Hardy's first copy of Shelley was an edition of
Queen Mab and Other Poems published in the Cottage Library.
[44] Havelock Ellis' interest in the Elizabethan drama,
which was to bear fruit in his editorship of the Mermaid series, was nurtured by his buying,
as a schoolboy at Mitcham in the early 1870's, successive penny numbers of Dicks's Standard
Plays.
[45] Dicks's penny-number
edition of Shakespeare was affectionately remembered by Thomas Burt, the Labour politician:
"No matter that the print was small and the paper poor; no matter that there were neither
theatre nor stage, neither actors nor orchestra. All the more scope was given to fancy and
imagination."
[46] Perhaps the final
word may be that of the journalist Sir John Hammerton, looking back on his early days in
Glasgow, about the time he left school and went to work as a correspondence clerk. In his
reminiscences he exclaimed of Cassell's National Library: "What an Aladdin's cave that proved
to me! Addison, Goldsmith, Bacon, Steele, DeQuincey. . . ., Charles Lamb, Macaulay and many
scores of others whom old Professor Morley introduced to me—what a joy of life I
obtained from these, and how greatly they made life worth living!"
[47]
