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A year later, another classic reprint series made headlines for a different reason. The appendix of the Marlowe volume in the Mermaid series, edited by young Have-lock Ellis, referred to certain blasphemous opinions attributed to the dramatist. The resultant uproar "in various quarters" (even Swinburne and John Addington Symonds were shocked) caused Henry Vizetelly, the publisher, to prepare a new edition in which the objectionable passages were suppressed, as well as cancels for insertion in unsold copies of the original edition. A little later, after Vizetelly's imprisonment for selling translations of Zola, and his subsequent death, the series was acquired by Fisher Unwin, who dismissed Ellis from the editorship, removed his name from the volumes, and incurred his life-long contempt. See Ellis' My Life (1939), pp. 208-210, and PC, April 1, 1887, p. 357.

[13]

See The House of Dent, 1888-1938 (1938), passim; Ernest Rhys, Everyman Remembers (1931), pp. 230-242; Rhys, Wales England Wed (1940), pp. 163-169; Frank Swinnerton, Swinnerton: An Autobiography (1936), pp. 65-85.

[14]

PC, March 15, 1864, p. 152.

[15]

Bookseller, Oct. 31, 1866, p. 992.

[16]

Michael Sadleir, ". . . Bibliographical Study of Books of the XIXth Century," The Bibliographical Society 1892-1942: Studies in Retrospect (1945), p. 154.

[17]

Occasionally a series bore a name obviously designed to capitalize on the success of another. The existence in 1874 of a Cottager's Library (W. Nicholson and Sons, Wakefield) and of a Cottars' Library (William Walker and Sons, Otley, York-shire) is a tribute to the fame of Milner and Sowerby's Cottage Library, which for over twenty years had enjoyed a large sale in the provinces. When the successful Camelot series, owned by the Walter Scott Publishing Company of London and Felling-on-Tyne, was renamed the Scott Library early in 1892, it may or may not have been sheer accident that a Stott Library was undertaken within a few months.

[18]

PC, Sept. 1, 1868, p. 509, and July 1, 1870, p. 389.

[19]

Series in 32mo. included the Cottage Library, Bell and Daldy's Pocket Volumes, the Miniature Cabinet Library, the Miniature Library of the Poets, the Pocket English Classics, and Tegg's Cabinet Series. A magnifying glass may not always have been needed to read them, as it frankly was in the case of William Pickering's 24mo. Diamond Classics (1820), but it often would have helped.

[20]

Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, ed. Thornton Hunt (1862), II, 217-221.

[21]

Some Reminiscences (1906), II, 406.

[22]

Life of Henry Morley (1898), p. 335. Cf. the obituary of Morley in the Athenaeum, May 19, 1894, pp. 645-646.

[23]

Punch, CVI (1894), 251. Reproduced by permission of Punch.

[24]

Life of Henry Morley, p. 357.

[25]

PC, Nov. 15 and Dec. 17, 1870, pp. 756, 1024.

[26]

PC, May 1, 1872, p. 284.

[27]

PC, Sept. 1, 1884, p. 823. —The Victorian merchandising mind is shown at work in an ingenious device offered in connection with Kent's Miniature Library edition of Shakespeare, issued in a set of thirty-six volumes. For 3s. 6d. extra, one could buy a French morocco pocket book, complete with patent clasp, pencil, and compartment into which he could fit either a conventional engagement book or a miniature volume of Shakespeare. (PC, July 15, 1882, p. 617.)

[28]

PC, July 1, 1884, p. 613.

[29]

PC, April 21, 1894, p. 428.

[30]

PC, March 3, 1894, p. 232.

[31]

PC, Aug. 11, 1894, p. 131.

[32]

The House of Dent, pp. 63, 273.

[33]

Frederic Whyte, Life of W. T. Stead (1925), II, 229; Newsagents' Chronicle, Nov. 7, 1896, p. 30.

[33a]

The sales of many titles in Milner and Sowerby's Cottage Library, 1837-1895, are reported from the firm's own records in Herbert E. Wroot, "A Pioneer in Cheap Literature," Bookman (London), XI (1897), 169-175.

[34]

Joseph Shaylor, "Reprints and Their Readers," Cornhill Magazine, n.s. XVIII (1905), 541.

[35]

Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Modern Library edition), p. 59.

[36]

"Taken as Read," Academy, LXIV (1903), 319-320.

[37]

Collected Papers (Nonesuch edition), II, 403.

[38]

This sentiment was most lavishly expressed, perhaps, in the testimony before two Parliamentary committees of inquiry, those on public libraries (1849) and the abolition of the newspaper stamp (1851). George Dawson, a mechanics' institute lecturer, told the former committee (Qq. 1368-1375) that poetry "is a great deal read" by the working class, "and of course the result is, very much poetry is written by working people. Anybody connected with a newspaper knows what an enormous flood of poetry the working classes send in the course of a year." "The higher class of poetry," he continued, was "very much read by the working people. . . . Shakespeare is known by heart, almost," and Milton also was "much read." But it would be idle to assume that these assertions were true of any but a tiny minority of the working class.

[39]

Edward G. Salmon, "What the Working Classes Read," Nineteenth Century, XX (1886), 116.

[40]

William Laird Clowes, "The Cheapening of Useful Books," Fortnightly Review, n.s. LXX (1901), 93. The whole article (pp. 88-98), like Shaylor's, cited in note 34, sketches the main tendencies in reprint publishing during the nineteenth century and surveys the situation at the beginning of the twentieth.

[41]

Curwen, History of Booksellers, p. 247. For the history of the Cyclopaedia, see a centenary article, "'Pantheon of English Writers'," Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 12 and 19, 1942, pp. 612, 624.

[42]

PC, Feb. 1, 1887, p. 126. A full bibliographical record of the series is found in A Bibliographical Catalogue of Macmillan and Co.'s Publications from 1843 to 1889 (1891); see index, pp. 610-611.

[43]

PC, July 1, 1886, p. 725.

[44]

Phyllis Bartlett, "Hardy's Shelley," Keats-Shelley Journal, IV (1955), 15.

[45]

Ellis, My Life, p. 208.

[46]

Burt, An Autobiography (1924), pp. 143-144.

[47]

Hammerton, Books and Myself (1944), p. 72.