The English Common Reader
The English Common Reader
A Social History
of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900
SECOND EDITION
BY RICHARD D. ALTICK
WITH A FOREWORD BY JONATHAN ROSE
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials. ANSI Z39.49-1992.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
For Helen, Anne, and Elizabeth
Contents
PREFACE xix
INTRODUCTION 1
5. RELIGION 99
APPENDIXES
APPENDIX
B. BEST-SELLERS 381
viii Contents
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY 399
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY 413
INDEX
INDEX 431
Foreword
1
Richard D. Altick, "English Publishing and the Mass Audience in 1852," in Writers, Read
ers, and Occasions: Selected Essays on Victorian Literature and Life (Columbus, 1989), p. 141.
2
Robert Darnton, "What Is the History of Books?" in The Kiss of Lamourette (New York,
1990), esp. pp. 107-13.
Foreword xi
3
history of everything from literary biography to newspaper crime
reports4 to cheap editions of the classics. There was a fascinating
literary critique of a Victorian tobacco trade journal, as well as an
innovative and still useful sociological profile of authors in mod
ern Britain.5 D. F. McKenzie, in his 1985 Panizzi Lectures, would
urge bibliographers to extend their attention to nonprint media
such as the cinema,6 but here too Altick was out in front. Seven
years earlier, in The Shows ofLondon—what was in effect a com
panion volume to The English Common Reader—he had compiled
the first systematic history of the ancestors of television: the pop
ular museums, exhibitions, waxworks, sideshows, and dioramas
that entertained the masses before moving pictures. By 1985 he
was exploring the interaction of print and image at yet another
border crossing: Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Brit
ain, 1760-1900.
Altick has lately returned to popular print and its readers in a
history of the first decade of Punch, a project he characterized as
an indulgence in "serious fun."7 Arguably, that has been the mo
tive behind all his research. The intrinsic joy of literary detective
work, which he described so grippingly in The Scholar Adventur
ers (1950), impelled him to take on one groundbreaking project
after another. Like a backyard engineer, he was continually in
venting wonderful things, even if his neighbors did not immedi
ately appreciate their possibilities. As recently as 1988 he gently
complained that academics were not following up the work he had
begun in The English Common Reader.
But in fact, by then the climate was beginning to change. As an
interdisciplinary pursuit that engaged historians, librarians, and
literary scholars alike, book history was at last taking off. Eliza
3
Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and
America (New York, 1965).
4
Richard D. Altick, Victorian Studies in Scarlet (New York, 1970), and Deadly Encounters:
Two Victorian Sensations (Philadelphia, 1986).
5
"From Aldine to Everyman: Cheap Reprint Series of the English Classics, 1830-1906"
(1958), "Cope's Tobacco Plant: An Episode in Victorian Journalism" (1951), and "The Sociology
ofAuthorship: The Social Origins, Education, and Occupations of 1,100 British Writers, 1800
1935" (1962) have all been republished in Altick, Writers, Readers, and Occasions.
6
D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London, 1986).
7
Richard D. Altick, Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841-1851 (Columbus,
1997), p. xv.
xii Foreword
beth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change and
Robert Darnton's The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing
History of the Encyclopedie, 1775-1800 had both appeared in
1979, and both had done much to make the field visible in the
academic world. Scholars were now beginning to explore common
readers in other societies and other historical periods: Jeffrey
Brooks in When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular
Literature, 1861-1917 (1985), James Smith Allen in In the Public
Eye: A History ofReading in Modern France (1991), Martyn Lyons
and Lucy Taska in Australian Readers Remember: An Oral His
tory of Reading, 1890-1930 (1992), Ronald J. Zboray in A Fictive
People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American
Reading Public (1993), to give only a few prominent examples.
The English Common Reader directly inspired the foundation of
the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing
in 1991. Within six years, SHARP would attract a thousand mem
bers in twenty countries.8
Although book historians are now exploring every link in Darn-
ton's communications circuit, one could argue that all their re
searches into authorship, printing, publishing, distribution, and
literary property lead ultimately to the reader. No book can play
any meaningful role in history until somebody reads it, and we
cannot know what influence a given book has unless we can some
how enter the minds of its readers. This promises to become one
of the most important questions confronting historians of the near
future. It will certainly not be easy to answer. Altick emphatically
disclaimed any attempt to explore reading tastes or readers' re
sponses, if only because the documents for such a study were
mostly unknown to scholars in 1957. Since then, however, we
have recovered the primary sources that Altick lacked: the mem
oirs and diaries of ordinary people, school records, library bor
rowing registers, marginalia, social surveys, oral interviews, let
ters to the editor (especially those the editor chose not to publish),
as well as a Reading Experience Database sponsored by the Brit
8
For an overview of the recent and remarkable growth of the field, see Jonathan Rose,
T h e History of Books: Revised and Enlarged," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Cen
tury (1998).
Foreword xiii
fifties onward, popular papers like the Family Herald and the
London Journal had circulations reaching into six figures. Such
statistics are indispensable indications of popular taste and of the
steady expansion of the audience for printed matter. But even if
we collect as many figures as we can, we are still left with only a
superficial impression of our subject. To describe and measure the
spread of reading by such means is relatively easy. To account for
it, and to fix it against the panoramic background of nineteenth-
century English history, is a more complex task.
For the mass reading public had its roots deep in the total his
tory of the period. Far from being an isolated phenomenon, it was
the resultant of many forces, most of which—political, religious,
economic, technological—seem onfirstglance to have little bearing
on the growth of the reading habit. But once we have exposed the
hidden tendrils of association, we discover that few major tenden
cies in nineteenth-century English social life were without their
effect. Some stimulated the taste for reading; some inhibited it;
some, paradoxically, did both. Hence, to understand how the com
mon Englishman came to be a reader, we must first review the
dominant social and political attitudes of the time and recall how
they often masqueraded as religious piety. We must explore the
prejudices, inherited from earlier centuries and intensified by the
panic of the French Revolution, which stood in the way of decent
education and cheap literature for the common people and which
strewed the path of innovations like mechanics* institutes and free
libraries with disheartening obstacles.
The history of the mass reading audience is, in fact, the history
of English democracy seen from a new angle. In 1840 Carlyle wrote
to John Sterling, "Books are written by martyr-men, not for rich
men alone but for all men. If we consider it, every human being
has, by the nature of the case, a right to hear what other wise hu
man beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a
very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!"7 The struggle for
political democracy, it is true, normally did not stress the right of
the common man to read, though, at the time Carlyle wrote, the
moral-force Chartists, led by William Lovett, had adopted this as
one of their great principles. The ordinary man had more immedi
ate necessities to contend for, such as steady employment, better
7
New Utters of Carlyle ed. Alexander Carlyle (1904), I, 212.
4 The English Common Header
wages and working conditions, the right to organize unions, and
parliamentary representation. But beneath the surface the issue
was there, all the same* It was increasingly crucial because under
the conditions of industrial life the ability to read was acquiring
an importance it had never had before. The popular cultural tradi
tion, which had brought amusement and emotional outlets to pre
vious generations, had largely been erased. The long hours and the
monotony of work in factory and shop, the dismal surroundings in
which people were condemned to spend such leisure as they had,
the regimentation of industrial society with its consequent crush
ing of individuality, made it imperative that the English millions
should have some new way of escape and relaxation, some new and
plentiful means of engaging their minds and imaginations. Books
and periodicals were the obvious answer. But the goal was no
easier to win than that of political and economic justice—and for
the same reasons.
The many threads which in sum constitute the history of the
English common reader are therefore woven deep in the fabric of
nineteenth-century annals. And just as the various attitudes and
movements of the age fatefully molded the audience for print that
eventually emerged, so did that public, in turn, affect the progress
of the age itself. Is it possible, for instance, to understand how the
balance of political power shifted from a small oligarchy to a popu
lar electorate without reviewing the spread of reading? Behind the
Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867, which were formal landmarks in the
political transformation of England, lay the press and its steadily
enlarging public. Despite the high prices necessitated by taxation
—itself a political issue of great moment—the newspaper press,
shaking off the venality that had been its shame under Pitt, be
came a forthright, independent mouthpiece of middle-class opinion
and eventually brought about the transfer of power to that class
during the early Victorian era. At the same time the philippics of
Cobbett in his Political Register and the brutal parodies of William
Hone, which aroused the workingman from his political apathy,
paved the way for a radical press that endured persecution and
suppression to undermine, in turn, the foundations of middle-class
rule. The hard-hitting political commentary of mass-circulation
weekly newspapers conducted by men like Edward Lloyd and
G. W* M> Reynolds helped build up the pressure which, after the
Introduction 5
middle of the century, forced the governing class to concede more
and more power to the artisan and laborer.
No less important was the effect the spread of reading had upon
the social habits of the Victorian era. Never before in English his
tory had so many people read so much. In the middle class, the
reading circle was the most familiar and beloved of domestic insti
tutions; and as cheap printed matter became more accessible,
hardly a family in Britain was without its little shelf of books and
its sheaf of current periodicals, whether church papers or the latest
hair-raising episodes concocted by Holy well Street hacks. Though
in the first half of the century there was deep (and not wholly
idle) apprehension that making the "lower ranks" of society liter
ate would breed all sorts of disorder and debauchery, in the long
run the proliferation of reading matter proved to have been the oil
that was needed to quiet the troubled waters. If the common man
did not necessarily become wiser after he had an abundant supply
of printed matter at his command, he was certainly kept amused.
The comparative tranquillity of Victorian society after mid-cen-
tury was due in no small part to the growth of the popular press.
Above all, the democratizing of reading led to a far-reaching
revolution in English culture. No longer were books and periodi
cals written chiefly for the comfortable few; more and more, as the
century progressed, it was the ill-educated mass audience with
pennies in its pocket that called the tune to which writers and
editors danced. In 1858 Wilkie Collins, announcing his personal
discovery of "the unknown public" which bought huge quantities
of cheap fiction papers, wrote: "The Unknown Public is, in a lit
erary sense, hardly beginning, as yet, to learn to read. The mem
bers of it are evidently, in the mass, from no fault of theirs, still
ignorant of almost everything which is generally known and un
derstood among readers whom circumstances have placed, socially
and intellectually, in the rank above them. . • . The future of Eng
lishfictionmay rest with this Unknown Public, which is now wait
ing to be taught the difference between a good book and a bad. It
is probably a question of time only. The largest audience for peri
odical literature, in this age of periodicals, must obey the universal
law of progress, and must, sooner or later, learn to discriminate.
When that period comes, the readers who rank by millions, will
be the readers who give the widest reputations, who return the
6 The English Common Reader
richest rewards, and who will, therefore, command the service of
the best writers of their time. A great, an unparalleled prospect
awaits, perhaps, the coming generation of English novelists. To
the penny journals of the present time belongs the credit of having
discovered a new public. When that public shall discover its need
of a great writer, the great writer will have such an audience as
has never yet been known."8
This is the voice of prophecy indeed, though most people will
feel that it is tinged with what, in the event, has proved an un
warranted optimism. The impact of the mass public upon mod
ern English literature—taking the term in the widest possible
sense—is incalculable. Though a great deal has been said on the
subject between Collins* day and our own, no truly serious study
has yet been made of it. The widely held opinion that the coming
of the democratic audience vulgarized literature may well be cor
rect, but to test it is no part of our design. For (and this sentence
ideally should be printed in bold red letters, to forestall unfounded
expectations) this volume is not intended to be an examination of
nineteenth-century literary taste, or of the effect the new mass
public had upon the practice of contemporary writers. Inevitably,
the problem of taste will be touched upon now and again, in con
nection with other topics. But our present design is not to analyze
the popular literature of the period as such. Instead, one of the
main purposes of this book is to provide some of the information
that obviously must be taken into account before anyone can
safely interpret the popular taste of an age—information, that is,
on the social composition, educational experience, and general
character of the public whose taste is to undergo scrutiny. The
lack of such knowledge inevitably makes discussion of the au
dience* formative influence upon literature little more than idle
speculation.
Since the term "reading public*' has always been used elasti
cally, attention must be called to the qualifying word "mass" in
the subtitle. The reading public studied in this book is the one
composed of what the Victorians were fond of calling "the mil
lion." It is not the relatively small, intellectually and socially su
perior audience for which most of the great nineteenth-century
authors wrote—the readers of the quarterly reviews, the people
8
Collins, 'The Unknown Public," P- 3«&
Introduction 7
whom writers like Macaulay, the Bront&s, Meredith, George
Eliot, and John Stuart Mill had in mind. Here we are concerned
primarily with the experience of that overwhelmingly more nu
merous portion of the English people who became day-by-day
readers for the first time in this period, as literacy spread and
printed matter became cheaper. The "common reader" studied in
these pages may be a member of the working class, or he may be
long to the ever expanding bourgeoisie. In preceding centuries, as
the opening chapters will show, some hand-workers and some
members of the lower-middle class had been readers; but not until
the nineteenth century did the appetite for print permeate both
classes to the extent that it became a major social phenomenon.
One or two biases on the part of the author may as well be ad
mitted at the outset. One is that genuine democracy resides not
alone in the possession of certain social, political, and economic
advantages but in the unqualified freedom of all men and women
to enjoy the fruits of a country's culture, among which books have
a place of high, if not supreme, importance. This is a concept
which, though it was increasingly voiced in the course of the nine
teenth century, especially by those thinkers who like Carlyle were
most devoted to the idea of human dignity, was not widely ac
cepted until near our own time. And as the currents of antidemo
cratic thought surge through the mid-twentieth-century world,
that concept is again being denied, at least by implication.
Twenty-five years ago an American journalist, R. L. Duffus, put
the matter so eloquently and succinctly that a direct quotation
may well serve to express the credo underlying this volume:
"It may be that only a small minority are capable of that ex
hilarating and strenuous pursuit of truth and beauty which great
literature demands. It may be that even those who strive for 'cul
ture' for snobbish and unworthy reasons are not much more nu
merous, and that underneath these layers of the truly cultured and
their pathetic imitators lies a barbaric mass which can never be
deeply penetrated by civilization. If these things are true, the cul
tural missionary, whether in literature, in the arts, or in the sci
ences, might as well pack his trunk and sail for home. I do not
think they are true.
"Undoubtedly there will always be variations in the ability to
appreciate, just as there are variations in the ability to create.
8 The English Common Header
Great readers will not be as scarce as great writers, but they will
be a chosen company. There are ideas so subtle that the demo
cratic mass is shut off from them. But I do not believe these ideas
are as numerous as is sometimes assumed. I believe that the failure
of the democratic majority to accept intellectual and aesthetic
ideals is due rather to a lack of will to do so than to a lack of abil
ity. And I believe that the lack of will is due to false and imperfect
systems of education and to other conditions in the environment
which can be altered. The culturability of mankind—if I may in
vent a word—ought not to be judged by its response to stimuli
which until yesterday were enjoyed almost wholly by a leisure
class. Only an abysmal ignorance of human nature can account for
such assumptions/'9
Of course not all men want to read; not all men, for that matter,
have any conscious interest in achieving or preserving political
democracy. Nothing that education can do, probably, will ever
induce some people to become habitual readers. On the other
hand, it is a basic assumption of this book that among the masses
of people in the nineteenth century there were, just as there are
today, hundreds of thousands and indeed millions whom force of
circumstance alone barred from the stimulating and solacing in
fluences of books.
1477-1800
Eighteenth Century
15
10 The English Common Reader
all the whole divided into tenne coulde never reade englishe yet,"3
an obscure statement which may possibly be interpreted as im
plying a literacy rate of 50 per cent or so. In 1547, on the other
hand, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, observed that
"not the hundredth part of the realme" could read.4 One modern
estimate is that in Shakespeare's London between a third and a
half of the people were literate.5 It is at least certain that the grow
ing commercial life of the nation required men of the merchant
class to read and write English in order to transact business, keep
records, and interpret legal documents. Some guilds set literacy as
a condition of membership. Even women were becoming literate,
and servants as well, if their circumstances required and per
mitted it.6 Indeed, a recent historian has asserted that in Eliza
bethan times "there was a higher level of literacy among women
than at any other time until the later nineteenth century."7
Opportunities for education, at least to the extent of learning to
read the vernacular, increased in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen
turies and were available to a fairly wide diversity of classes. A
youth from even the lowest stratum of freemen had always had the
chance of following Chaucer's clerk to the university as a mendi
cant student. The ideal of extending education to the "poor" was
affirmed in the foundation statutes of the grammar schodls. The
phrase pauperes et indigentes scholares in such statutes, it appears,
was not simply designed to insure to the school the legal privileges
of a charitable institution but means that boys of relatively
humble station (say the equivalent of the modern lower-middle
class) really were enrolled in some numbers.
No longer, in any event, was education limited, as it had been in
the Middle Ages, to those destined for the religious life. Even if the
prospects were that they would take up their father's occupation,
the children of small tradesmen, farm laborers, and domestic
servants had some opportunity to learn to read English. For them,
s
Quoted by Adamson, "Literacy in England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,"
p. 45.
* Bennett, English Books and Readers, p. 28.
6
Albert C. Baugh, A History of the English Language (New York, 1935), p. 246.
e
Bennett, "The Author and His Public," pp. 18-19.
7
A. L. Rowse, The England of Elizabeth: The Structure of Society (1950), p. 503.
From Caxton to the Eighteenth Century 17
by Henry VHFs time, were provided petty schools, ABC schools,
and song schools for the training of choirboys.8
These schools were all under the control of the church, and it
used to be thought that Henry VIIFs expropriation of ecclesiasti
cal property, some of the income from which had been earmarked
for teaching purposes, dealt a severe blow to English education.
Today, however, it is believed that the dissolution of the churchly
establishments did not interfere too much, at least in the long run,
with the spread of learning. In time, new schools sprang up to re
place those that were wiped out. A favorite practice among those
who profited by the nation's prosperity was to endow grammar
(that is, classical) schools. Almost every town of any size had at
least one such school; in 1600 there were about 360 of them.9 In
addition, many noblemen and other large landowners founded and
supported schools for the children of the neighborhood. Some of
these were limited to elementary instruction; others, like the one
at Stratford-on-Avon which Sir Hugh Clopton re-endowed in
1553, provided an excellent Latin education.
Therefore, since there was as yet little sign of the social exclu
siveness that later was to reserve grammar-school and university
education largely for children of noble or gentle birth, it was pos
sible for bright boys from the artisan and tradesman class to ac
quire a thorough schooling. This is suggested by the number of
Elizabethan writers who sprang from that station. To mention
only a few: Peele was the son of a salter; Marlowe, of a cobbler;
Munday, of a draper; Chettle, of a dyer; Herrick, of a goldsmith;
Gabriel Harvey, of a ropemaker; Donne, of an ironmonger.10
A classical education was, however, the lot of only a minority of
those who went to school at all. More numerous were the boys who
received an abbreviated education in primary or petty schools.
These schools were open not only to those destined to go on to the
Latin curriculum but also to those who would begin their appren
ticeship immediately after learning to read. While parish clergy
* Material on Tudor and Stuart schools has been derived from Adamson's article
(n. 3 above); Curtis, History of Education in Great Britain, chap, ii; Wright, Middte-Clas*
Culture in Elizabethan England, chap, iii; Bowse, The England of Elizabeth, chap, xii; and
general histories of the period. These draw upon specialized earlier studies of the subject,
notably those by A. F. Leach.
9
Rowse, p. 496.
10
Wright, pp. 17-18.
18 The English Common Reader
30
The Eighteenth Century SI
upon for the present discussion of Wesleyanism and reading: Richard Green, The Works of
John and Charles Wesley: A Bibliography (1906); Bready, England: Before and after
Wesley; T. B. Shepherd, Methodism and the Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1940);
Whiteley, Wesley's England; Warner, The Wesleyan Movement in the Industrial Revolution.
16 1<s
Shepherd, p. 63. Bready, p. 220.
17
On Wesley's Milton, see Oscar Sherwin, "Milton for the Masses,** Modern Language
quarterly, XII (1951), 267-85.
The Eighteenth Century 37
ideas and highlight Wesleyan ones, but* more importantly, to
bring Milton, Bunyan, and other writers down to the level of com
mon understanding. He had no illusions as to the capacities of his
followers, who were poorly educated and had little if any prior
experience in reading.18 In his own voluminous writings, he tried to
adopt a style suitable to the limitations of his audience. He was
the inveterate enemy of what he termed "the superfluity of
words"; his ideal was to clothe thoughts "in the plainest dress:
simply and nakedly expressed, in the most clear, easy and intel
ligible manner/' 19
Thus the growth of Wesleyanism was a noteworthy milestone in
the spread of reading among the masses. The new sect preached
the spiritual necessity of reading; it circulated books and leaflets in
great quantities; and it fostered a style of writing that was espe
cially fitted for the novice reader. But the example of the book-
reading Methodists was not followed by their unconverted neigh
bors. Actually, the association of serious reading with what the
non-Methodist world took to be sheer fanaticism may well have
slowed the general spread of interest in books. There has always
been a popular belief that more than casual attention to books is
either a symptom or a cause of madness, and the fact that Wes-
ley's followers were addicted to the printed page did nothing to
allay the suspicion.
Furthermore, even within its own circle, Wesleyanism did not
add perceptibly to the audience for general literature. Despite
Wesley's own relatively liberal attitude toward belles-lettres (he
was a widely read man, who interlarded his sermons and tracts
with countless allusions and quotations) the movement as a whole
disapproved of any but religious and moralistic reading. The long
list of books James Lackington and a fellow apprentice, both of
them fanatical Methodists, collected in their adolescent zeal for
reading reveals the narrowness of Wesleyan interests. I t included
many of Bunyan's works; the exegetical volumes of approved di
18
A clue to the state of literacy among Wesley's followers (and thus, inferentially, of
the working class in general) is found in the fact that he compiled and published two ele
mentary tools for the new reader: a Short English Grammar in 9 pages and a Complete [I]
English Dictionary in 144 pages—the latter being intended, in Wesley's words, "to assist
persons of common sense and no learning to understand the best English authors" (Green,
pp. 55, 80-81; the quotation from Wesley is given in Quinlan, Victorian Prelude* p, 29).
19
Quoted in Shepherd, p. 84.
88 The English Common Reader
vines; and such items, sufficiently described by their titles, as Di
vine Breathings of a Devout Soul, Collings' Divine Cordial for the
Soul, Heaven Taken by Storm, Young's Short and Sure Guide to
Salvation, Baxter's Call to the Unconverted, and the same author's
Shove for a Heavy-arsed Christian. Only "a few of a better sort" of
books were included in what Lackington and his friend considered
at the time to be "a very good library": Gay's Fables, Pomfret's
Poems, Paradise Lost, Hobbes's Homer, and Walker's Epictetus.20
Therefore such little reading as the common non-Wesleyan
people of the countryside did was confined to the immemorial fare
of the cottage shelf: the Bible and Prayer Book, perhaps a history
of England published in numbers, an almanac or two, chapbooks,
and sixpenny romances. The peasant father of the poet John Clare,
though barely able to read, doted on such penny treasures as
Nixon's Prophesies, Mother Bunches Fairy Tales, and Mother Ship-
ton's Legcun/, and late in the century Clare himself learned to read
from chapbooks like Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack
and the Beanstalk?1 The popularity of these little books was not
confined, of course, to the lower classes. They were the beloved
pabulum of children belonging to the educated class as well;
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Lamb pored over them in
childhood.22
More sophisticated reading matter was seldom encountered in
the ordinary course of a country life. Thomas Holer oft, for in
stance, a stable boy at Newmarket in the 1760's, having learned to
read from the Bible and two chapbooks, saw almost no books for
six or seven years thereafter and kept his skill alive principally by
reading the ballads pasted on the walls of cottages and alehouses.
Then, having turned shoemaker, he had for shopmate a youth who
divided his leisure between cock-feeding and reading. His friend
lent him Gulliver's Travels and the Spectator, and Holcroft's lit
erary education began.2*
10
Lackington, Memoir*, pp. 98-99.
41
Sketches in the Life of John Clare, ed. Edmund Blunden (1931), pp. 46, 51-52.
* See J. L. Lowes, Ths Road to Xanadu (Boston, 1027), pp. 459-61, and the Appendix
(**The Popularity of Elizabethan Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century") in Earl R.
Wasserman, Elizabethan Poetry in the Eighteenth Century (Urbana, HI, 1947). These are
meaty discussions of chapbook literature in the late eighteenth century.
** William Hazlitt, Life of Thomas Holcroft, Works, ed. P. P. Howe (1932), III, 4-5,
The Eighteenth Century 30
To boys who had access to so few books, the ones they did meet
with were extraordinarily precious. On his way to find a job at
Kew, William Cobbett, the fourteen-year-old son of a farmer-inn-
keeper, saw in a Richmond bookseller's window a copy of A Tale
of a Tub. It cost him 3d., his entire capital, and in the shade of a
haystack in a corner of Kew Gardens he began to read. "The
book," he recalled, "was so different from any thing that I had
ever read before: it was something so new to my mind, that,
though I could not at all understand some of it, it delighted me
beyond description; and it produced what I have always consid
ered a sort of birth of intellect. I read on till it was dark, without
any thought about supper or bed. When I could see no longer, I
put my little book in my pocket, and tumbled down by the side of
the stack, where I slept till the birds in Kew Gardens awaked me
in the morning; when I started to Kew, reading my little book/'14
The burden of evidence, then, hardly supports the statement
made in the 1790's by James Lackington, who had turned from
shoemaking to bookselling, that even "the poorer sort of farmers,
and even the poor country people in general, . . . shorten the
winter nights by hearing their sons and daughters read tales, ro
mances, etc. and on entering their houses, you may see Tom Jones,
Roderic Random, and other entertaining books, stuck up on their
bacon-racks, &c. If John goes to town with a load of hay, he is
charged to be sure not to forget to bring home 'Peregrine Pickle's
Adventures;' and when Dolly is sent to market to sell her eggs, she
is commissioned to purchase *The History of Pamela Andrews/ In
short," Lackington concluded, "all ranks and degrees now BEAD/' 25
This passage, often quoted to prove the extent to which reading
was democratized in the late eighteenth century, is, to put it
mildly, debatable. One need not contest Lackington's assertion
that countrypeople listened to someone reading on winter nights,
though the statement should be heavily qualified; only a minority
of rural families had a single literate in their midst, and few of
those that did could obtain books. Tom Jones, Roderick Random,
Peregrine Pickle, and Pamela must have been rare sights indeed in
humble English cottages. To be ruthlessly prosaic about it, any
one of those novels would have cost several times as much as Dolly
got for her basket of eggs, unless she was lucky enough to find a
u
Quoted in Cole, Life of Cobbett, p. 17. * Memoirs, p. 257.
40 The English Common Reader
secondhand copy. As for the sweepingfinale,"all ranks and degrees
now BEAD," that is sheer fantasy.
Lackington would have been on slightly safer ground had he
chosen his illustration from city rather than country life. Thanks
to the greater provision of schools in the towns, the more pressing
need for literacy under urban conditions, and the easier availabil
ity of printed matter, people on the social level of artisans and
domestic servants could read, though even in this class literates
may have been in the minority. Numerous visitors to London
were impressed by the spectacle of artisans reading newspapers.
About 1730 Montesquieu saw a slater having his paper delivered
to him on the roof where he was working; twenty years later an
other French traveler recorded that *'workmen habitually begin
the day by going to the coffee-houses in order to read the latest
news"; and in 1775 Dr. Thomas Campbell, an Irishman, found it
worthy of note that while he was in the Chapter Coffee House "a
whitesmith in his apron & some of his saws under his arm, came in,
sat down & called for his glass of punch & the paper, both of which
he used with as much ease as a Lord."26 Although the available
records suggest that newspapers were the favorite reading matter
of artisans themselves, their wives took up books—especially, as
we shall note later on, novels. In the 1780's a German visitor to
London wrote that his landlady, a tailor's widow, "reads her Mil
ton; and tells me, that her late husband first fell in love with her,
on this very account; because she read Milton with such proper
emphasis. This single instance perhaps would prove but little; but
I have conversed with several people of the lower class, who all
knew their national authors, and who all have read many, if not
all of them."27
But, as Lackington said in another place, the barriers in the way
of liberal indulgence in the taste for reading were formidable. Not
merely were books themselves scarce except as the circulating li
brary supplied them; shops in which to browse and people to give
advice both were hard for the common reader to find. Lackington
and a friend, journeymen cobblers at Bristol in the late sixties,
* Montesquieu, "Notes sur l'Angleterre," (Euvres ComplMes, ed. JMouard Laboulaye
(Paris, 1879), VII, 189; M. de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I
and II, quoted in Dobbs, Education and Social Movements, p. 102; Dr. Campbell's Diary of a
Visit to England in 1775, ed. J. L. Clifford (Cambridge, 1947), p. 58.
27
Carl R Moritz, Travels in England (1924), p. 43,
The Eighteenth Century 41
must have had counterparts enough among the literate young men
of their class: they wanted to read books, " b u t / ' wrote Lackington
long afterward, "so ignorant were we on the subject, that neither
of us knew what books were fit for our perusal, nor what to enquire
for, as we had scarce ever heard or seen even any title"pages,except
a few of the religious sort, which at that time we had no relish for.
. . . [Hence] we were ashamed to go into the booksellers' shops;
and . . . there are thousands now in England in the very same situ
ation: many, very many have come to my shop, who have dis
covered an enquiring mind, but were totally at a loss what to ask
for, and who had no friend to direct them." 28
Taking the English people as a whole, therefore, the available
information scarcely substantiates the eighteenth century's well-
known complacence over its "diffusion of learning." "General lit
erature," Dr. Johnson observed in 1779, "now pervades the nation
through all its ranks"; every house, he said, was "supplied with a
closet of knowledge."29 Such remarks were made, we must remem
ber, in a very restricted social context. To Johnson and his con
temporaries the ranks of civilized society ended with the middle
class; below it lay the broad, unregarded expanses of the working
class, which no correct Englishman could conceive as sharing in the
nation's culture. Charles Knight, the Victorian pioneer of cheap
literature, deflated the balloon of post-Augustan self-satisfaction
quite justly when he observed that "There appears to have been a
sort of tacit agreement amongst all who spoke of public enlighten
ment in the days of George III to put out of view the great body of
'the nation' who paid for their bread by their weekly wages."30
read by many persons who had neither the time nor the endurance
to read a whole book but who found casual interest in the news, the
advertisements, and the capsule literary material.
IV. Edmund Burke is reported to have esti
mated that about 1790 the English reading public included some
80,000 persons.45 All that can be said of his guess is that it is inter
esting. To judge from the size of editions and the relative infre
quency with which new editions of a popular book were called for,
the book-buying audience in eighteenth-century England was very
small. The most famous instance of "best-sellerism," apart from
the sales of pamphlets with sensational immediate interest, was the
reception given to the novels of the period 1740-53. How large,
then, was the buyers' market for newly published books of great
appeal?
The population of England in 1750, as has been said, was be
tween six and seven million. Pamela (1740) sold five editions (size
unknown) in a year, Joseph Andrews (1742) three editions, totaling
6,500 copies, in thirteen months. Roderick Random (1748) circu
lated 5,000 in tli£ first year. The second printing of Clarissa Har-
lowe (1749), 3,000 copies, lasted about two years. In three years
Smollett's translation of Gil Bias (1748) went through three edi
tions totaling 6,000 copies. Fielding's Amelia (1751) sold out its
first edition of 5,000 copies in a week or less—an amazing perform
ance which Dr. Johnson improved somewhat when he told Mrs.
Piozzi that it was "perhaps the only book, which being printed off
betimes one morning, a new edition was called for before night"—
but the second edition lasted indefinitely. The first edition of Sir
Charles Grandison (1753) was 4,000 copies; the third, called for
within four months, amounted to 2,500.46
45
Preface to the first volume of the Penny Magazine (1832). Efforts to locate the state
ment in Burke's own writings or speeches have been fruitless.
46
Figures for Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison are from Alan D.
MeKillop, Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist (Chapel Hill, 1936), pp. 43,154, 215 n.;
for Joseph Andrews and Amelia, from Wilbur L. Cross, The History of Henry Fielding
(New Haven, 1918), 1,316,352,355; II, 304; for Roderick Random and Gil Bias, from Lewis
M. Knapp, "Smollett's Works as Printed by William Strahan," Library, Ser. 4, XIII
(1982), 284-85. Most of the figures in this passage are well authenticated, something which
cannot be said for many of the sales and circulation figures that will occur in other parts
of this book. It is probably advisable at this point to emphasize that data on book and
periodical sales have to be gathered from a wide variety of sources, whose reliability is in
many cases dubious. Whether or not they are literally true, however, they are interesting
50 The English Common Reader
Thus single editions of the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and
Smollett seldom exceeded 4,000 copies, and four or five editions,
totaling less than 9,000 copies, were all the market could absorb of
even the most talked-of novel in a single year. The novel-reading
audience expanded steadily in the wake of the first masters, but its
growth was reflected by the proliferation of individual novels and
the increased patronage of the circulating libraries rather than by
any increase in the sales of specific titles. The second edition of
Smollett's Count Fathom (1771) was 1,000 copies.47 Only when an
author's star was in the ascendant did a publisher venture to order
2,000 copies in a first edition, as was the case with Fanny Burney's
Cecilia. The usual first printing of a novel at this time, Fanny's
sister was told, was 500.48 The first printing for a work of non
fiction normally ranged from 500 to 1,000 or at the most 2,000.
Johnson's Dictionary had an edition of 2,000, Rasselas 1,500, and
the collected Rambler 1,250. (Ten editions of the Rambler, all of
the same size, were sold between 1750 and 1784.) In 1776-77 the
three editions of Gibbon's Decline and Fall (Volume I) that were
required in fourteen months totaled 3,500 copies.49
If we are to believe the group of London booksellers who ad
dressed a "humble representation" to Parliament in 1774, an or
dinary edition of a work of standard literature lasted for years,
even a lifetime. After its initial popularity had worn off, a 12mo
edition of a novel like Clarissa, Pamela, Grandison, or Tom Jones
might remain in stock for four to six years. Johnson's folio Diction
ary lasted eight years, the octavo edition half as long; unsold
copies of various editions of Shakespeare gathered dust for periods
ranging from six to forty-eight years. Two separate editions of The
Faerie Queene lasted sixteen and eighteen years.50
as approximations, suggesting the order of magnitude in which various epochs thought. No
attempt usually is made in the text to indicate the author's own evaluation of the figures
given, but all such data are duly documented for the reader's convenience. See further
the prefatory comments to Appendixes B and C.
47
Knapp, p. 288.
*» Fanny Burney, Early Diary, ed. A. R. Ellis (1907), II, 307.
4
* R. A. Austen Leigh, "William Strahan and His Ledgers," Library, Ser. 4, III (1923),
280, 283-84; Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson, pp. 254-55. On pp. 250-55 Collins
collects other sales figures for the period.
60
Publishers' Circular, August 1, 15, 1889, pp. 884-85, 938-39. The pamphlet upon
which this two-part article is based is an important document for eighteenth-century
hook-trade economics.
The Eighteenth Century 51
In this document, the London publishers were trying to prove
that current prices were as reasonable as anyone could expect.
Since, they argued, turnover was slow even at such prices, they
could not possibly issue still cheaper editions to compete with the
Edinburgh publishers who were doing just that. The question is:
Were books really cheap in this period?
Down to about 1780, book prices were fairly constant. Full-
length quartos and folios sold at between 10$. and l%s.; octavos
were 5s. or 6$. Books in small octavo or l£mo—essays and novels,
for instance—were %$., &?.6d., or 3$. The first four volumes of
Tristram Shandy cost %$.6d. each, the last five, %s. During the
seventies novels were issued in three forms: bound at 3$. per vol
ume, in paper wrappers at %s.6d., and in sheets for country librar
ies at %s. Pamphlets of less than fifty pages were 6d., but if longer,
Is. or isM*1
General commodity prices and wages rose during the century,
but so slowly that one can make approximate generalizations for
the whole period before 1790. Shopmen out of their apprenticeship
earned from 4#. to 16#. a week, plus board; the average wage was
around 8$. Clerks in merchants' offices earned about £ l a week.
Ushers in schools received 4s. to 8s. a week and board, London
journeymen from 15s. to 20$. In the country, wages varied, as al
ways, with the region, but they were uniformly below those pre
vailing in London. Craftworkers earned 10s. or l£s. a week in the
west and north, only 6s.6d. in the east.52
Books, therefore, except for pirated works and, especially after
1774, reprints of standard authors, could seldom be purchased ex
cept by the relatively well-to-do. If a man in the lower bracket of
the white-neckcloth class—an usher at a school, for instance, or a
merchant's clerk—had a taste for owning books, he would have
had to choose between buying a newly published quarto volume
and a good pair of breeches (each cost from 10$. to 12$.), or be
tween a volume of essays and a month's supply of tea and sugar"
61
See the Publishers' Circular as just cited for prices of scores of titles; also Plant, The
English Book Trade, p. 245; Chapman, "Authors and Booksellers," pp. 318-19; J. M. S.
Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800 (1932), pp. 10-12; and Sutherland,
A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry, p. 46.
51
Wages and commodity prices in this passage are from Cole and Postgate, The Com
mon People, pp. 71-84, and Elizabeth W. Gilboy, Wages in Eighteenth Century England
(Cambridge, Mass., 1934), passim.
52 The English Common Reader
for his family of six (2s.(kiL). If a man bought a shilling pamphlet
he sacrificed a month's supply of candles. A woman in one of the
London trades during the 1770*s could have bought a three-vol-
ume novel in paper covers only with the proceeds of a week's work.
To purchase the Spectator in a dozen little 12mo volumes (16s.)
would have cost an Oxfordshire carpenter eight days' toil; to ac
quire the 1743 version of the Dunciad at 7s.6d. would have taken
almost a full two weeks' salary of a ten-pound-a-year school
usher.
If the prices of new books were high before 1780, they were pro
hibitive afterward to all but the rich. Quartos jumped from 10$. or
12s* to a guinea; Boswell's Life of Johnson, for instance, cost
£2 %s. the two-volume set. Octavos likewise doubled in price, and
l£mos rose from 3s. to 4#.63 Publishers generally preferred to issue
sumptuous books in small editions, at high prices, rather than to
produce more modest volumes in larger quantity. Benjamin
Franklin was only one of many who complained of the practice: so
lavish was the use of white space between lines, wide margins, and
other wasteful devices that to him "the selling of paper seems
now [1785] the object, and printing on it only the pretence." 84 The
Gentleman's Magazine in 1794 remarked, "Science [i.e., learning in
general] now seldom makes her appearance without the expensive
foppery of gilding, lettering, and unnecessary engravings, hot
pressing and an extent of margin as extravagant as a court lady's
train. The inferior orders of society can scarce get a sight of her.
. . ."55 Ironically, as a climax to a century that prided itself on its
unprecedented diffusion of learning, newly published books were
priced completely out of the ordinary man's reach. Books of older
authors, for a reason we shall come to in a moment, were some
what cheaper.
Down to 1774, the prosperity of the pirates is the best evidence
we have that the demand for books was greater than the supply
provided by the regular booksellers. Defoe's Jure divino, for in
stance, originally issued in folio at 10s., soon reappeared in an
M
[Charles Knight?], "The Market of Literature," p. 4. The figures given in this article
for book prices and the size of editions in various epochs have been closely substantiated
by modern research.
•* Franklin to Benjamin Vaughan, April 21, 1785; Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed.
A. H. Smyth (New York, 1906), IX, 305.
66
Gentleman's Magazine, LXIV (1794), 47.
The Eighteenth Century 5$
unauthorized octavo at 5s., which in turn was undercut by a chap
book at Qd. In 1729 the 6s&d* quarto of the Dunciad variorum was
pirated at 2s.56 There were innumerable other examples of such
practices—the bibliographies of eighteenth-century authors are
full of unauthorized Irish and Scottish reprints—and to some ex
tent it satisfied the poor man's hunger for books. But it was always
a risky business, enlivened by litigation, and the supply of cheap
ened books could never be relied upon.
The pirates justified themselves by asserting that the regular
booksellers were attempting to enforce a concept of copyright that
had sanction neither in morality nor in law. Since Elizabethan
times it had been a working fiction in common law, never reduced
to formal statute, that a copyright could remain the property of a
bookseller in perpetuity. The Copyright Act of 1709, however,
limited copyright in books already published to twenty-one years,
and in future books to a maximum of twenty-eight. When rival
publishers issued editions of works whose copyright had expired
under this act, the owners nevertheless sought, and usually ob
tained, restraining injunctions. Once a work was in copyright, the
courts said, it remained so forever, the Act of 1709 notwithstand
ing. Thus protected, the copyright holders could charge as much as
the market would stand.
Repeated injunctions, however, failed to discourage the pirates,
a sure sign that their business paid despite the expense of constant
lawsuits. By mid-century the pirates in Scotland, where there was
an insistent demand for cheap books and, thanks to low labor
costs, easy means of fulfilling it, became especially troublesome to
the organized London trade. Among the chief offenders was Alex
ander Donaldson, the "bold Robin Hood" to whom Bagwell's
uncle drank a genial health in 1763.&7 In 1774 Donaldson appealed
to the House of Lords a Chancery decision forbidding him to pub
lish or sell Thomson's Seasons* a book which, under the law, had
moved into the public domain. In one of the most momentous deci
sions in book-trade history (Donaldson v. Beckett) the concept of
perpetual copyright was finally killed; copyright, the Lords held,
ended when the Act of 1709 said it did. Now, for the first time, any
M
Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry, pp. 46-47.
67
BosweWs London Journal, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York, 1950), pp. 312-13.
54 The English Common Reader
book whose copyright had expired could be reprinted as cheaply as
a publisher was able, without fear of legal complications. The con
sequences to the mass reading public are almost incalculable.58
The first noteworthy result of the 1774 decision was the launch
ing by John Bell, "the most resourceful and inventive bookseller of
his generation/'59 of the famous series of Poets of Great Britain
Complete from Chaucer to Churchill (109 volumes, 1776-98?) at
ls.6d. a volume, and Bell's British Theatre (21 volumes, 1776-78?)
in 6d. weekly parts. Beginning in 1791, both of these series were
reissued, along with Bell's Shakespeare (originally published in
1774), at Is.dd. a volume, or 6dL on coarse paper. In the closing
years of the century John Cooke issued his editions of the British
poets, prose writers, and dramatists in 6d. weekly numbers, and
John Harrison, who in the 1780's had had great success with his
Novelist's Magazine (a "select library" of fiction, published in
weekly parts), competed with his own series of British classics.60
These were the first memorable cheap reprint series. The delight
with which they were received by impecunious booklovers is al
most legendary. Cooke's editions especially won the affection of
young students who could afford hardly more than a weekly six
pence for good reading. William Hone, John Clare, Henry Kirke
White, Thomas Carter, Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt all left
records of their purchases.61 "How I loved those little sixpenny
numbers containing whole poets!" Hunt exclaimed late in life. "I
doated on their size; I doated on their type, on their ornaments, on
their wrappers containing lists of other poets, and on the engrav
ings from Kirk. I bought them over and over again, and used to
get up select sets, which disappeared like buttered crumpets; for I
could resist neither giving them away, nor possessing them. When
the master tormented me, when I used to hate and loathe the
sight of Homer, and Demosthenes, and Cicero, I would comfort
M
This account of the death of perpetual copyright is derived chiefly from A. S. Collins,
"Some Aspects of Copyright from 1700 to 1780," Library, Ser. 4, VII (19*6), 67-81.
M
Stanley Morison, John Bell (17^-1881) (Cambridge, 1930), p. 88. This is the stand
ard source on Bell.
60
On Harrison, see Thomas Bees and John Britton, Reminiscences of Literary London
from 1779 to 1853 (New York, 1896), pp. 21-28.
« F. W. Hackwood, William Hone: His Life and Times (1912), p. 47; J. W. and Anne
Tibbie, John Clare: A Life (New York, 1932), p. 175; Remains of Henry Kirke White
(10th ed., 1823), I, 6; Carter, Memoirs of a Working Man* p. 97 n.
The Eighteenth Century 55
myself with thinking of the sixpence in my pocket, with which I
should go out to Paternoster-row, when the school was over, and
buy another number of an English poet."62
Hazlitt remembered Cooke's Tom Jones with particular affec
tion: "I had hitherto read only in schoolbooks, and a tiresome ec
clesiastical history (with the exception of Mrs. Radcliffe's Romance
of the Forest): but this had a different relish with it,—*sweet in the
mouth/ though not 'bitter in the belly/ . « . My heart had pal
pitated at the thoughts of a boarding-school ball, or gala-day at
Midsummer or Christmas: but the world I had found out in
Cooke's edition of the British Novelists was to me a dance through
life, a perpetual gala-day."63
There is apparently no evidence of how large the Cooke, Bell,
and Harrison editions were; but copies passed from hand to hand,
making converts to good literature wherever they went, well down
into the Victorian era. Almost a full century after they appeared,
Augustine Birrell wrote: "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.
Cooke made an immense fortune, and deserved to do so. He be
lieved both in genius and his country. He gave people cheap books,
and they bought them gladly/'64
These reprint series simply adapted to new conditions, with the
immense advantage of having the whole public domain of litera
ture to draw from, the old principle of number-publication. As
early as 1692 Richard Bentley—"Novel Bentley" as the book
seller John Dunton called him, not foreseeing that there was to be
a much more famous one in Victoria's reign—published a collec
tion of fifty "modern novels" in serial form. In the 1720*8 another
fiction series, the Monthly Amusement, offered a novel complete in
each shilling number.86 These numbers, however, lacked the dis
tinctive characteristic of their descendants in that each contained
a complete work. As the century progressed, number-publishing
w
Autobiography (New York, 1855), I, 91-0S.
«* The Plain Speaker, Works, ed. Howe, XII, 2«fc-23.
« Augustine Birrell, "Books Old and New," Essays about Men, Women, and Books
(New York, 1899), p. 143.
* John Carter, "The Typography of the Cheap Keprint Series," Typography, No. 7
(1988), p. 37.
56 The English Common Reader
tended more and more to slice large works into instalments at Qd.
or l£d. each.66
History-on-the~instalment~plan had a special vogue in mid-cen-
tury. What Hume took to be their "quackish air**67 went un
noticed by the 10,000, or possibly 20,000, readers who bought the
6d. weekly numbers of Smollett's History of England. According
to a story circulated long afterward, this startling sale was due in
great part to the promotional scheme employed by the publishers,
who tipped every parish clerk in the kingdom a half-crown to
scatter their prospectuses in the pews.68
Favorite among the works selected for issue in this form were
annotated and illustrated Bibles, histories of England and London,
Foxe's Book of Martyrs, lives of Christ, and the writings of Flavius
Josephus. Some of these were not especially light reading, but
number-publications were probably bought quite as much for their
pictures as for their text. The horrifying illustrations in the Book
of Martyrs cost many an impressionable English child his sleep.
Some number-publishers, like Alexander Hogg late in the century,
were masters of the inflated title page, by which they guaranteed
the wonders to come in subsequent instalments. "In announcing
the embellishments of these publications, language failed; and the
terms, 'beautiful/ 'elegant,' 'superb,' and even 'magnificent,* be
came too poor to express their extreme merit.**69 The number-men,
indeed, were remarkable in their time for their command of tricks
of the trade. When the sale of a certain work showed signs of falling
off, they promptly renamed it and started it, refreshed, on a new
career. However easygoing their business ethics, the number-pub-
lishers introduced reading matter into many homes which had
66
B y 1734 the custom was s o widespread that i t earned a blast from a writer i n t h e
Grub Street Journal: " Y o u have Bayle's Dictionary, and Rapin's History from t w o places.
T h e Bible can't escape, I bought, t h e other D a y , three Pennyworth of t h e Gospel, made
e a s y and familiar t o Porters, Carmen, and Chimney-Sweepers. . . . W h a t a n A g e of Wit
and Learning is this! I n which so m a n y Persons in the lowest Stations of Life, are more in
t e n t upon cultivating their Minds, than upon feeding and cloathing their Bodies" (quoted
in Gentleman's Magazine, I V [1734], 489).
67
D a v i d Hume, Letters, ed. J . Y . T . Greig (Oxford, 1932), I , 359.
68
This story, along with the figure of £0,000 weekly sales, seems n o t t o h a v e been traced
before 1827, when it appeared i n Goodhugh's English Gentleman's Library Manual. Smol
lett himself, i n a letter written while t h e History was being issued i n 6d. numbers, p u t its
circulation at over 10,000 (Lewis M . Knapp, Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Manners
[Princeton, 1949], pp. 187, 192).
69
Timperley, Encyclopaedia of Literary and Typographical Anecdote, x>. 838.
The Eighteenth Century 57
never before had it. Among those who could already read, they
stimulated the habit, and among those who could not, they pro
vided incentive to do so. Looking back from the dawn of the true
age of popular literature in the 1830's (and somewhat careless of
his metaphors), Timperley, the encyclopedist of the English print
ing and publishing trade, observed: "However it may be customary
to kick the ladder down when we find we no longer want it, these
sort of publications must be confessed to have greatly contributed
to lay the foundation of that literary taste and thirst for knowl
edge, which now pervades all classes."70
was more than compensated for by the business he did with the
bargain-hunting public. Within a short time he was the most
lavish buyer of remainders in London. At one time, he boasted, he
had in stock 10,000 copies of Watts's Psalms, and an equal num
ber of his Hymns; at a single afternoon's auction he bought £5,000
worth of books.
Lackington earned the increased hostility of the orthodox book
sellers, and the further gratitude of readers, by cutting prices on
new books, thus initiating the "underselling" practice that was to
breed animosity in the trade for the next hundred years. These
steps, as well as his dealing in secondhand books sent up from the
country, resulted in well-deserved prosperity. In 1791 and 1792,
he says in his engagingly candid memoirs, he had an annual turn
over of 100,000 volumes and a profit of £4,000 and £5,000.71
Lackington's "Temple of the Muses'* in Finsbury Square was
one of the sights of London. A large block of houses had been
turned into a shop, the whole surmounted by a dome and flagpole.
Over the main entrance appeared the sign, whose proud claim no
one evidently challenged, CHEAPEST BOOKSELLERS IN THE WOBLD.
Reportedly, the interior was so spacious that a coach-and-six could
be driven clear around it. In the center was a counter behind which
the clerks waited on the fine ladies and country gentlemen who
clustered about. At one side, a staircase led to the "Lounging
Rooms" and to a series of circular galleries under the dome.
Around each of these galleries ran crowded shelves; the higher the
shelves, the shabbier the bindings, and the lower the price,72
Nothing like the "Temple of the Muses," with its cut prices,
its strict cash-and-carry policy, and its disdain of haggling, had
ever been seen in the book world. Lackington's own statement
may be colored by the self-satisfaction that informs all his writing,
but it is probably not far from the truth: "Thousands . . . have
been effectually prevented from purchasing (though anxious so to
do) whose circumstances in life would not permit them to pay the
full price, and thus were totally excluded from the advantage of
improving their understandings, and enjoying a rational enter
tainment. And you may be assured, that it affords me the most
pleasing satisfaction, independent of the emoluments which have
71
All the foregoing material is from Lackington, Memoirs, pp. 220-39, 279, 285.
" Charles Knight, Shadows of the Old Booksellers (New York, 1927), pp. 251-52.
The Eighteenth Centunj 59
1791-1800
67
68 The English Common Reader
boys would be sent to school with logs of wood tied to their ankles,
just as though they were wild jackasses, which I suppose they
were, only worse." Another old man said that he "heard stories
about the boys being 'strapped* all the way to school by their
parents."3 The interesting aspect of this is not the young ragamuf
fins3 quite understandable reluctance to spend six or seven hours
of their only free day learning the catechism and the lessons of
diligence, sobriety, and humility, but the attitude of their parents.
The popular hunger for education had revived since the days of
the S.P.C.K. charity schools. The new conditions of industrial
labor, as well as a faint sifting down to the working class of the
age's reverence for intellectual enlightenment, put a premium on
literacy. The Sunday-school movement would not have prospered
as it did had there not been some enthusiasm for it on the part of
the parents, who, after all, did not have to enter the classrooms
themselves.
We must not overestimate the number of literates whom the
Sunday schools produced; it is ingenuous to assume, as is often
done, that since they were set up to teach poor children to read,
they therefore did so. Even supposing that most of the pupils were
abrim with eagerness (which was certainly not the case), no high
degree of literacy can be imparted in onee-a-week classes. Neverthe
less, the Sunday schools did swell the total of the nation's literates,
both directly and by sharpening popular interest in reading, so
that there was considerable home study on the part of adults.
Children who acquired some rudimentary skill in the art often
shared it with their elders.
Many people, however, looked upon the Sunday-school move
ment with deep apprehension. The conservative opposition to edu
cation for the poor had lost none of its vigor. When Hannah More,
converted from successful London dramatist to pious Evangelical,
set up her little Sunday schools in the Mendip hills, she faced bitter
antagonism from the local farmers. Unimpressed by her plea that
by spreading literacy she meant simply to extend an appreciation
3
J. Henry Harris, Robert Raikes: The Man and Hi* Work (1895?), pp. 38, 40. This
book contains vivid evidence of the unacademic atmosphere that pervaded the early
Sunday schools. Much additional material can be found in the various reports of parlia
mentary inquiries into popular education, especially that of 1834; in Jones, The Charity
School Movement, pp. 142-54, and Mathews, Methodism and the Education of the People,
chap. ii.
The Time of Crisis, 1791-1800 69
I CENTURY
81
8$ The English Common Header
social structure. Unfortunately no uniform system of nomencla
ture or of census classification prevailed throughout the century,
so that a consistent statistical summary is not possible. The great
est disagreement was on the difference between the lower-middle
and the lower classes, and especially on the social level to which
skilled artisans belonged. As the economist Leone Levi pointed
out in 1884, mechanics and skilled artisans were "as far removed
from common labourers and miners as clerks and curates are from
those who have reached the highest places in the liberal professions
or wealthy merchants and bankers, all of whom pass under the
category of the middle classes/'4 Some authorities ranked them in
the lower class; others gave them the relative dignity of place at
the bottom of the middle class. In any case, the rule of thumb
favored during most of the century was that the "working class,"
taking the lower-middle and lower classes together, constituted at
least three-quarters of the total population. In 1814 Patrick
Colquhoun estimated that out of about 17 million people in the
United Kingdom (hence including Ireland), 1,5 million belonged
to the upper and "respectable" middle classes, while £.8 million
were of the shopkeeper-small farmer class, and 11.9 million were
mechanics, artisans, menial servants, paupers, and vagrants. (In
that period, just before Waterloo, slightly less than a million addi
tional men and their dependents were credited to "Army and
Navy/') 5 I*1 1867 the economist Dudley Baxter, classifying 9.8
million actual recipients of income in England and Wales (and
omitting, therefore, some 11 million dependents), numbered the
upper and middle classes at 200,000, the lower-middle class at
1.85 million, and the working class (including 1.1 million skilled
laborers) at 7.78 million.6
Whatever classification was used, one fact was undeniable.
There was a great increase in the amorphous stratum between the
old-established middle class (merchants and bankers, large em
ployers of labor, superior members of professions) and the working
class proper—the ranks of unskilled labor. This increase, brought
4
Levi, Wages and Earnings of the Working Classes, p. 25.
6
Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Wealth* Power, and Resources of the British
Empire (1814), pp. 106-107. For two different detailed charts based on Colquhoun's
estimates, attributed to 1801 and 1814, respectively, see Cole and Postgate, The Common
People, 1938 ed., p. 70, and 1947 ed., p. 63.
* Cole and Postgate (1938 ed., used hereafter unless otherwise noted), p. 347.
The Social Background 83
about by the changing economic basis of English life, has special
significance in the history of the reading public. It was principally
from among skilled ^workers, small shopkeepers, clerks, and the
better grade of domestic servants that the new mass audience for
printed matter was recruited during the first half of the century.
These were the people who chiefly benefited from the spread of
elementary education and whose occupations required not only
that they be literate but that they keep their reading faculty in
repair. And because these people shared more in the century's
prosperity than did the unskilled laborers, they were in a some
what better position to buy cheap books and periodicals as these
became available.
The growth of two occupational groups is particularly note
worthy. By 1861 the total of domestic servants of both sexes was
more than a million—a few thousands more than the total em
ployed in the textile industry.7 Whatever newspapers and other
periodicals a household took in would, in the normal course of
events, filter down to the servants' quarters. In estimating the
number of hands through which a given copy of a middle-class
paper, or even a cheap book, might pass, one must not forget that
the Victorian household contained not only a sizable family but
also one or more servants with whom the paper wound up its
travels.
The segment of the middle class proper which grew with unusual
speed was that of physicians, teachers, civil servants, and other
professional or white-collar workers. In 1851, the census placed
357,000 persons in that class; ten years later there were 482,000,
and in 1881 the total was 647,000—an increase of 80 per cent in
only thirty years.8 These people, because of the special require
ments of their daily work as well as the general cultural tradition
of the professional class, constituted an important audience for
reading matter.
As the century began, most of the English people, despite the
spread of the enclosure system and the growth of factory industry,
still were engaged in farming or in cottage crafts. But the peasant,
the yeoman, and the handicraftsman steadily were being trans
7
Porter, pp. 31, 42.
8
Robert Giffen, "Further Notes on the Progress of the Working Classes in the Last Half
Century/' Journal of the Statistical Society, XLDC (1886), 90.
84 The English Common Reader
his way through life. Hawkers came to his door occasionally with
broadsides, tracts, and number-publications; but, with agricultur
al wages consistently the lowest in the nation, there was little
money to buy them. In a certain Kentish farming parish in the
1830's, only four out of fifty-one families possessed any books
besides the Bible, Testament, and prayer and hymn books, and
only seven parents "ever opened a book after the labours of the
day were closed."1S Nor was this parish unusual. Again and again
in the records of the time we find evidence of how little printed
matter—perhaps no more than a copy or two of a cheap magazine
—regularly came to a country village. Not until the cheap periodi
cal press made efficient use of railway transportation and local
distributors, and rural education received much-needed aid
under the Forster Act of 1870, did the majority of country-dwellers
acquire much interest in reading.
99
100 The English Common Reader
have a few stray tracts or pious songs on the premises, there was
a psychological incentive to do so. Some people were content to
have the words spelled out to them by the scholar of the family,
but many more wanted to be able to read on their own account.
In addition, tracts offered a means by which the reading faculty,
once learned, could be exercised and improved. Until the develop
ment of cheap secular periodicals the productions of the Religious
Tract Society, the S.P.C.K., and their sister agencies kept literacy
alive among large numbers of the poor who otherwise had little
contact with the printed word.
But thefloodof tracts had other effects which were far less con
ducive to the spread of interest in reading. The most serious mis
take made by Hannah More and her generations of disciples was
to underestimate the independence and intelligence of the humbly
born Englishman. Their assumption was that he was a dull beast
who, if he were treated with some kindness, could be relied upon
to follow the bidding of his superiors. They did not reckon on the
possibility that he had a mind of his own, a stubborn will, and a
strong sense of his own dignity even in the midst of degradation.
Because of this, tracts and the bearers of tracts often rubbed him
the wrong way.
The tract people made it plain that they were out to substitute
good reading matter for bad. They conducted an endless war
against "dangerous" publications which the common reader not
only considered harmless but, more important, truly enjoyed.
Hannah More rejoiced that one of her co-workers, Lady Howard,
had succeeded in ending the sale of impious literature at six shops
where the Cheap Repository Tracts were being sold. "This is doing
the thing effectually," she wrote, "for though it is easy to furnish
shops with our tracts, it requires great influence to expel the poison
of the old sort.'*21 But the reader often resented this high-handed
attempt to interfere with his freedom of choice, especially when
the new product seemed in many ways less exciting than the old.
He accepted narrative tracts and read them, if nothing better was
to be had; but as often as not, when the choice could be made, his
penny went for old-fashioned chapbooks and, a little later, instal
ments of sensational tales.
Again, as Charles Knight observed, "the besetting weakness of
11
William Roberts, Memoirs of Hannah Afore (fcd e<L, 1834), II, 457.
Religion 105
the learned and aristocratic, from the very first moment that they
began to prattle about bestowing the blessings of education," was
that they "insisted upon maintaining the habit of talking to think
ing beings, and for the most part to very acute thinking beings, in
the language of the nursery/' 22 The language of the tracts may
have been adapted well enough to the capacities of their semi
literate readers, but there were plenty who knew they were being
talked down to, and reacted accordingly.
Sir John Herschel, who shared his townsman Charles Knight's
shrewdness in this matter, defined the case against the tract very
well when he remarked in 1833, "The story told, or the lively or
friendly style assumed, is manifestly and palpably only a cloak for
the instruction intended to be conveyed—a sort of gilding of what
they cannot well help fancying must be a pill, when they see so
much and such obvious pains taken to wrap it up." 23 For this air
of condescension in religious literature went deeper than mere
language; it was inseparable from the social message the tracts
embodied. "Beautiful is the order of Society," wrote Hannah
More, "when each, according to his place—pays willing honour to
his superiors—when servants are prompt to obey their masters,
and masters deal kindly with their servants;—when high, low,
rich and poor—when landlord and tenant, master and workman,
minister and people, . . . sit down each satisfied with his own
place."24
This attitude—the sociology of a Dr. Isaac Watts—may have
been appropriate at some other juncture in history, but it was
grievously unsuited to a period of intensifying democratic ferment.
The common people, especially those who came under the influ
ence of radical journalists after 1815, were quick to realize that the
sugar-coating of religious and moral counsel concealed a massive
dose of social sedation. This was true particularly of the popular
literature emanating from the Anglican church, which was in
creasingly looked upon as the religious arm of the hated Tory
government. I t is probably significant that when Hannah More,
"the old Bishop in petticoats," as Cobbett called her, was induced
to return to the battle of the books in 1817, to combat a new home
22
Passages of a Working Life, I , 243-43.
23
"Address," p . 14.
24
Quoted in Hodgen, Workers' Education, p. 80.
106 The English Common Reader
grown Jacobinism in the person of that same Cobbett, she did not
sign her name to her productions.25 It had become a liability to the
cause.
The personal advice offered in many tracts was scarcely better
calculated to win the assent of humble readers. Injunctions to
ceaseless diligence had a bitterly ironic ring when there was no
work to be had; recommendations of frugality were irrelevant
when there was no money to save; admonitions to leave one's fate
in the hands of an all-wise ruling class were ill timed when des
perate workingmen were being mowed down by the rifles of the
soldiery or sentenced to transportation for forming trade unions.
The contrast between the writers' bland assurance that all would
be well and the actual state of affairs as social tensions mounted
was too blatant to be ignored.
Nor was it only the contents of the tracts and their characteris
tic tone which aroused the enmity of many people. The very
methods the societies employed, their indifference to human feel
ings, often defeated their own purposes. When a depression struck
Paisley in 18S7, throwing thousands of children and adults out of
work, Bibles were rushed to the relief of the starving. The British
and Foreign Bible Society prided itself on distributing its Bibles
and Testaments to the poor in the city slums "in anticipation of
the visitation of cholera."26 The absence of sound epidemiological
knowledge at the time spared the recipients the bitterness of re
flecting that it was their water supply, more than their souls, that
needed disinfecting; but even so, the provision of pious reading
matter must have struck many as a feeble substitute for some sort
of drastic practical action to put down the disease.
While the Mrs. Jellybys and Pardiggles whom Dickens acidly
caricatured may not have been entirely typical of their class, they
were not exceptional. The Bible Society had a scheme whereby
thousands of eager ladies, pencils and subscription pads in hand,
invaded the homes of the poor, trying to persuade them to pay a
penny a week toward the purchase of a family Bible. Not until the
full sum was paid was the book delivered. Thus, the theory went,
the poor could be taught thrift as well as piety. The Religious
Tract Society's volunteer workers made their rounds at weekly or
"Roberts, IV, 11.
"Brown* I, 136,179.
Religion 107
fortnightly intervals, picking up one tract at each house and leav
ing another—and at the same time collecting a small fee for the
loan.27 The recurrent appearance of these amateur missionaries in
the midst of squalid wretchedness, armed with a fresh tract, in
quiring about the spiritual as well as the physical welfare of the
household, and offering wholesome admonitions, aroused wide
spread resentment. Well might the St. Albans slum-dweller, in
Bleak House, berate Mrs. Pardiggle: "Is my daughter a-washin?
Yes, she is a-washin. Look at the water. Smell it! That's wot we
drinks. How do you like it, and what do you think of gin, instead!
An't my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty—it's nat'rally dirty, and it's
nat'rally on wholesome; and we've hadfivedirty and onwholesome
children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them,
and for us besides. Have I read the little book wot you left? No, I
an't read the little book wot you left. There an't nobody here as
knows how to read it; and if there wos, it wouldn't be suitable to
me. It's a book fit for a babby, and I'm not a babby. If you was
to leave me a doll, I shouldn't nuss it."28
Inevitably the whole idea of reading was associated in many
poor people's minds with the tract-distributors, and as a result the
printed word became a symbol of their class's degradation. Tracts
were inseparable from charity, and charity, as practiced in Vic
torian times, involved the rubbing in of class distinctions. Working
people thought of reading matter in terms of the sort that came
with the kettles of free soup in bad times, or the Bibles for which
canvassers importuned them to spend a penny a week when their
children were too ragged to go to school. The tract-bearers*
motives were too obvious to be mistaken. Beneath the veneer of
altruism could be seen all too plainly the image of class interest.
Tracts were supposed to keep one from thinking wicked Chartist
thoughts, to make one content with his empty stomach and
stench-filled hovel. A young London pickpocket whom Henry
Mayhew interviewed at mid-century said, "They bring tracts to
the lodging-houses—pipes are lighted with them;29 tracts won't
27
Quinlan , pp . 125 , 130 .
28
Dickens , Bleak House, chap . viii.
29
Cobbett hinted, plausibly enough, at another practical use to which the common
people put the Religious Tract Society's printed messages; a use which, in his own words,
it "would be hardly decent to describe*" (Political Register, July 21, 1821, p. 62).
108 The English Common Reader
fill your belly. Tracts is no good, except to a person that has a
home; at the lodging-houses they're laughed at." 30
The intended audience for religious literature was not, of course,
limited to the hungry; the well fed were equally affected by the
century-long torrent of print. From the time that a special print
ing of the Cheap Repository Tracts was ordered for distribution
among the children of Evangelical families, the middle class, where
evangelicalism was most at home, formed an insatiable market for
the edifying tales and the serious didactic and inspirational works
that flowed from pious pens.31 Few are the nineteenth-century
autobiographies which fail to contain, among the lists of their
authors' early reading, a substantial proportion of religious works,
biographical, historical, homiletical, exegetical, reflective. Reli
gious literature formed the largest single category of books pub
lished in Britain. Charles Knight, analyzing the London Catalogue
of Books for the period 1816-51, found that of 45,260 titles pub
lished in those years, 10,300, or more than a fifth, were "works on
divinity," as against 3,500 works of fiction, 3,400 of drama and
poetry, and 2,450 of science.32 As late as the 1880's, in the annual
classification of new books prepared by the Publishers9 Circular,
works of "theology, sermons, biblical, etc/' were more numerous
than any other class. In 1880, 975 such works were published, as
compared with 580 novels, 187 books of poetry and drama, 479 in
arts and science, and 363 in history and biography.33 These figures
refer to what are known today as "tradebooks," and do not in
clude reprints and pamphlets (such as individual sermons and
tracts), or material published by firms which did not contribute
their lists to current book-trade bibliography.
as a prolific ultra-Protestant writer, that she was more than a little inclined t o hysteria.
I t is a relief therefore t o h a v e her assurance that, despite her woeful childhood, she had
"grown u p t o b e one of the healthiest of h u m a n beings, and with a n inexhaustible flow of
ever mirthful spirits."
41
Methodist Magazine, X L I I (1819), 606-609.
42
An organ of the nonconformists, not, as its
it title might suggest, of t h e L o w Church
iglicans..
Anglicans
43
Quinlan, p . 115. " H a m m o n d , The Age of the Chartists, p. £58.
Religion 115
on the history of the reading public, for, by boycotting the play
house, the evangelicals effectively removed one source of competi
tion to books. For want of anything else to do in the evenings, they
had to stay home and pass their leisure hours in reading.
signed for the middle-class audience. But then, as evangelical attitudes (or what we call,
more generally, "Victorian prudery") affected more and more readers, and as Dickens'
generation of fiction-writers took over, the eighteenth-century novel lost ground. In 1866
Alexander Macmillan considered bringing out a "Globe Series" of novels. "The difficulty/*
he wrote his friend James MacLehose, "is the selection. You begin with Richardson,
Fielding, Smollett, Sterne. But what are you to do with their dirt? Modern taste won't
stand it. I don't particularly think they ought to stand it. Still less would they stand cas
tration" (Charles L. Graves, Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan [1910], p. 249). The
project was dropped; and in the multiplying classic-reprint series down to the end of the
Victorian era the great novelists Macmillan mentions seldom appeared.
51
Mathews, Methodism and the Education of the People, p. 173; Wesleyan Methodist
Magazine, LXXVIII (1855), 12-13.
** Barker, Life, pp. 110-11,116.
118 The English Common Reader
gives us what is possibly the most detailed account of a young
Wesleyan's reading, in this case between 1825 and 1840. Showing
as it does how relatively broad a selection of reading matter was
available in a Methodist household and school, and how poignant
ly a youth could be torn between attitudes received from the church
and his own literary inclinations, it is a useful corrective to facile
generalizations concerning the place of reading in nonconformist
life.
Gregory's father, a Methodist circuit-rider in northern York
shire, shared with his wife a strong appetite for reading. In addi
tion to the works of Maria Edgeworth and Hannah More, the
child's earliest books included Mrs. Sherwood's The Fairchild
Family, which, looking back after many years, he praised for its
"unforced humour, and its wholesome tenderness." In this house
hold the great event of the month was the arrival of a package
from "City Road," the London headquarters of Wesleyanism,
containing the Youth's Instructor and the Methodist Magazine.
From both periodicals, Gregory's mother and sister immediately
read all the poetry aloud and memorized it: Wordsworth, Scott,
Byron, and many other contemporary figures—Bernard Barton,
Felicia Hemans, Bishop Heber, Milman, Croly, Bowring, the
Howitts—most of it extracted from the then popular annuals. The
child's imagination also was constantly stirred (with no ill eflFects
that he could later remember) by the denominational magazines'
tales of travel and lives of missionaries. Even in bleak Yorkshire
there was no lack of exotic atmosphere and adventuresome narra
tives so long as Methodist periodicals kept arriving from City
Road.
The Gregorys' successive homes during their years of itineracy
were well supplied with books. When a circulating library was
nearby, the mother would subscribe, "for elegant and entertaining
literature seemed to her, and became to some of her children, as
one of the necessaries of life." At one time, too, the Methodist
Book Room being in difficulties, many ministers and laymen con
tracted to buy five pounds' worth of books each. The books the
Gregorys acquired by this means included Coke's History of the
West Indies, Gambold's Poems, and Clarke's Wesley Family (a
particular favorite, which "supplied the preacher's family with
delightful reading for many 'evenings at home' " ) . By a friend's
Religion 110
bequest the household also obtained a set of the Lady's Magazine,
which, "though morally unexceptionable, and, indeed, in most
respects, high-toned, improving, and refined, . . . was spiritually
and practically unhelpful and unhealthful, having about it the
feverish flush of a sort of subtropical sentimentalism. Thus was
generated a taste for a kind of literary confectionery which could
not nourish a robust fibre either of the mind or heart." Even
worse were two novels published in instalments, which Gregory's
sisters persuaded their mother to buy from vendors who came to
the door—Fatherless Fanny and The Mysterious Marriage. "The
new-fangled novels were like the deceitful bakemeats of some
huxtering heathen, smuggled into a Levite's tent."
When he was eight years old, Gregory—who at the time had
been busily reading the Apocrypha, The Arabian Nights, Jane Por-
ter's The Scottish Chiefs, and Mrs. Barbauld's Evenings at Home—
was sent to a Methodist school, Woodhouse Grove, near Leeds.
The library there, he says, "was not an ill-assorted collection, al
though to a great extent a stud of 'gift-horses.' " Fiction was
excluded (note the difference, in this respect, between the policy
of a Methodist school and that of a Methodist preacher in his own
household), but the works of non-fiction "contained a vast amount
of literary pemmican, well-pounded and well-packed, not dried to
hardness, and sufficiently seasoned to be palatable, and not desti
tute of 'officinal properties.'" Among the books Gregory delighted
in were Mavor's Universal History, Cook's Voyages, Robertson's
histories of Scotland and America, Bryant's Analysis of Ancient
Mythology, and Hill's Miniature Portraits; or> Brief Biography.
Standard English literature was represented by the Spectator and
Hume's History of England; among books of travel, Bruce's Abys
sinia and Mungo Park's Interior of Africa were noteworthy;
among biographies, the lives of Colonel Gardiner and Colonel
Blackader. Rasselas, however, Gregory found a dull book, "with
its stilted style, its soporific cadences, and its tedious moralising,"
and Fenelon's Telemachus he decided was "very tiresome."
Gregory had the opportunity also to read books borrowed from
his schoolmates, and the variety of these books, especially when
we remember that they came chiefly from the family libraries of
Methodist ministers, is remarkable: narratives of the Bounty and
of Arctic expeditions; Anson's Voyages; Buffon's Natural History;
120 The English Common Reader
Pope's Homer; translations of Orlando Furioso and The Lusiads;
"an exquisite selection of most graceful classic poetry, which well
sustained its title of Calliope99; Hudibras; Dryden's translations
of Virgil and Ovid; Ossian; and "some volumes of Elegant
Extracts/'
Inescapably, young Gregory's life witnessed an agonizing con
flict between Christ and Apollo. "The literary fever did eat into the
heart of my spiritual constitution. I became vain in my 'imagina
tions,* and 'my foolish heart was darkened.' Surely I 'walked in a
vain show' of heathenish and worldly phantasy." Between his
eighth and twelfth years he had been seduced by three tempters,
the classics ("my fancy . . . became completely hellenised and
therefore heathenised"), romanticism—the lyrics of Goldsmith,
Prior, Pope, and the romantic narratives of Ariosto and Spenser—
and contemporary hack fiction, which he had discovered in circu
lating libraries during his school vacations—The Farmer's Daugh
ter of Essex, The Gipsy Countess, and The Cottage on the Cliff. "The
effect which all this had upon my spiritual life is but too easily
described," he says. " I gradually lost all interest in 'the things that
are not seen' but 'eternal.' " He sacrificed his Bible-reading to por
ing over more worldly books. In such a condition, he was ripe for
the spiritual crisis and the eventual conversion he underwent in
early adolescence. For the first nine months of his "new-born life,"
he kept "aloof from the over-mastering fascinations of secular lit
erature. . . . 'The primrose-path of dalliance' with the Graces and
the Muses was Bye-path Meadow to my as yet unsteady feet."
Accordingly, he read nothing but the Bible and exegetical works.
But after the crisis was past and Gregory was firmly in command
of his Christian character, he had no hard feelings toward the lit
erary companions of his childhood. Seductive though they had
been in some ways, in others he is frank to admit they were good
for him. From the sentimental stuff he read he had acquired "a not
ignoble sensibility," and from the Greek and Roman writers "an
intense admiration and eager emulation of . . . the public and social
virtues: such as patriotism and fidelity in friendship." Now that he
was sure of his ground, he felt strong enough to return to secular
reading. In his nineteenth year, just before he became a candidate
for the ministry, he devoted himself to Shakespeare and Words
worth. At the same time he read The Spirit of the Age, and "the
Religion 121
spell of Hazlitt's eloquence conjured up within me the old poetic
passion/' A year or two later, he discovered the poetry of Bryant
and Willis, "which acted on my mind like a balmy breath from the
transatlantic shores," and Channing's essay on Milton, which
made a deep impression on an extraordinary number of contem
porary readers.
Then his health broke down, and, forbidden to do any serious
reading, this earnest probationer for the ministry turned to The
Vicar of Wakefield, Scott's novels, the then popular tales of Samuel
Warren, and Blaclcwood's, Fraser's, and the Quarterly Review. The
next year, his health regained, he spent his holidays at his father's
cottage reading Heber's life of Jeremy Taylor, Beattie's Minstrel,
Mason's Life of Gray ("a most delectable book"), and the poetry
of Byron and Shelley, despite "the flippant irreligion and the
cynic immorality of the former, and the rabid and blaspheming
God-hate of the latter": because, says Gregory, "I could not but
acknowledge both as masters of the English tongue."*3
This case history of a future minister's reading down to his
twenty-first year is not, perhaps, typical; but on the other hand it
cannot be unique. It indicates that there resided in at least certain
areas of nineteenth-century evangelical religion, with all its anxie
ties about overindulgence in worldly literature, a greater tolerance
and respect for letters than is ordinarily credited to it.
Gregory's remarks on the contents of the Methodist Magazine
and the volumes sent from the Book Room remind us, further
more, that the reading matter produced under religious auspices in
the early nineteenth century was not quite as arid and heavy as we
are prone to imagine. There was, to be sure, far too much piety and
moral didacticism. Even the researcher, occupational^ inured to
bone-dry, dreary reading, soon abandons his foray into the deso
late wastes of evangelical print. But what is desert to him was a
land flowing with milk and honey to those who were barred from
great areas of secular literature. In it, they found at least some of
the basic satisfactions that any reader desires.
For the disapproval of fiction never extended to narratives spe
cially written to convey some useful moral or religious lesson. The
Cheap Repository Tracts and the shoal of leaflets that followed in
their wake, the little stories in children's magazines and Sunday
53
Gregory, Autobiographical Recollections, passim.
122 The English Common Reader
school reward books, and the tales of such unimpeachably ortho
dox writers as Mrs. Sherwood and Miss Edgeworth all depended
for their appeal upon a story element, no matter how far this was
subordinated to their message.
The contents of the popular religious periodicals reflected their
editors* awareness of the human craving for wonder and romance.
Long before fiction itself was admitted to their pages, "true fact"
material offered a substitute of a sort. For instance, in a single
volume (1812) of the Methodist Magazine, under the heading "The
Works of God Displayed" (an important section of the magazine
for many years), appeared pieces on Jonah and the whale, on the
unicorn, and on the "hippopotamus amphibia, or river horse"—
disquisitions with obvious didactic purpose but capable neverthe
less of removing the mind many leagues from the grime of Bir
mingham or London. In another regular section of the magazine,
"The Providence of God Asserted," were printed short "factual"
narratives: "Dreadful Death of a Profane Man in the County of
Bucks," "Preservation of the Moravian Brethren in North Amer
ica from a General Massacre," "A Singular Dream, and Its Conse
quences," "Conversion and Preservation of a Poor Woman," "Aw
ful Death of a Profane Man at Dublin." If the pious reader were
prevented from reading sensational fiction or historical romance,
his craving for the emotions of pity, horror, and fear was to some
extent met by such accounts. And if it was the music and imagery
of poetry he desired, these too were supplied by the generous ex
tracts the Methodist Magazine printed from approved poets like
Heber and Montgomery, Wordsworth and Bernard Barton.
The same rewards were found in thousands of the books that
circulated among the various evangelical denominations. A mod
ern writer, E. E. Kellett, has observed that "instead of novels, our
grandfathers had a large and fascinating literature of their own,
which, if this generation would consent to read it, might drive out
the detective novel." The countless religious biographies were not
merely interesting, they often were out-and-out thrillers. "If you
wanted a touch of the antique, you read the Tracts of John Eliot,
the Apostle of the Red Indians, or George Fox's Journals; if you
were martially inclined, there was Doddridge's Colonel Gardiner,
or Catherine Marsh's Captain Hedley Vicars "u It will not do,
** A$ I Remember, pp. 117-18.
Religion 123
therefore, to think of the evangelical reader as suffering emotional
and imaginative deprivation in direct proportion to his abstinence
from secular literature. Like his Puritan ancestor, he found intense
excitement in much of his reading, though it was an excitement
bred for the most part by substance rather than by style.
141
142 The English Common Reader
Their native reason, however crude and untutored, could be de
pended upon to accept the truths of religion and society as laid
before them by the superior classes, and the storms that were roil
ing the waters of English life would end.
Not only would a little schooling safeguard men's minds against
thoughts of rebellion; it would improve their morals and manners
and eliminate the frightening threat of a rabble's replacing the
well-behaved, dependable "lower orders" of sturdy English tradi
tion. "An instructed and intelligent people," Adam Smith had
written, ". . . are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant
and stupid one/*2 All backers of education for the masses were con
vinced that ignorance and illiteracy were responsible for most
crimes. Strong drink, it was admitted, was a contributory factor,
but drunkenness, so prevalent among the masses at the beginning
of the century, was a result of ignorance; the rational man never
took too much. Such notions could be bulwarked with statistics:
one of the favorite occupations of the newly founded London Sta
tistical Society in the 1840*8 was to demonstrate, in elaborate
charts, the relationship between ignorance and the crime rate. 3
The more schools in a locality, the fewer felons. When enough
schools were built, most of the prisons in England could be closed.
This was not a rhetorical flourish; it was the sober conviction of the
friends of mass education, as their writings show.4
In addition, popular education was felt to be indispensable in an
age of commerce and industry. A reasonable bit of elementary
schooling made better workers: it increased production, reduced
* Ibid., II, 269.
* See the earlier volumes of the Journal of the Statistical Society, passim,
4
The old refrain was a long time dying. In 1897, T. H. S. Escott, one of the leading ex
ponents of late Victorian smugness, pointed out that since the Education Act of 1870 "no
new prison has been built; while several buildings which were prisons have been changed
into public libraries'* (Social Transformations of the Victorian Age, p. 367). In contrast to
the visionary pronouncements earlier in the century, this at least had the advantage of
stating an accomplished fact. The liberals' faith in education as a deterrent of crime was
not universally shared, however. As Peacock's Dr. Folliott said {Crotchet Castle, chap,
xvii), "Robbery perhaps comes of poverty, but scientific principles of robbery come of
education/* Some critics of the "education craze" early in the century seriously main-
tamed that with the spread of the ability to write, the masses would turn into a race of
forgers; for a single instance of this view, see John Weyland, A Letter to a Country Gentle
man on the Education of the Lower Orders (1808), p. 52. This apprehension was found among
the humble themselves. As late as the 1870's, a workman, told that he must send his boy
to the board school, replied, "What, educate that kid? Not if I know it. Why, there's one
forger in the family now" (Rogers, Labour, Life, and Literature, pp. 52-53).
Elementary Education and Literacy 143
Deprived of contact with secular fiction, the child seized upon any
other book, however moralized or ponderous, that promised a
story. But the attractiveness and influence of these libraries was
greatly exaggerated by those eager to put the best possible face
upon the societies' activities. There is considerable difference be
tween drawing books from a library and actually reading them.
In 1845 an inspector of schools noted that it was "a rare occurrence
to find a child in any degree acquainted with the subject-matter of
the book which has been for some weeks probably in its posses-
sion."26
In private-venture schools, whose proprietors were free to use
whatever reading material they could obtain, practice varied
widely. In the humblest—the dame schools and the so-called com
mon day schools—the Bible, spelling book, and primer were sup
plemented only by whatever stray printed matter the children
themselves brought in. In the town of Salf ord, in 1837, only five of
the sixty-five dame schools surveyed by the Manchester Statistical
Society were "tolerably well provided" with reading material.27
Although the various educational societies offered penny leaflets,
dames and masters refused to adopt them because of the strong
aversion the pupils' parents had to any contact with charity.28
Elementary schools for middle-class children in the first third of
the century used reading collections of the "elegant extracts" type.
As a Scottish educator told the Select Committee on Education in
1834, these were "the worst that can be imagined" for the purpose
they were intended to serve. "They consist of extracts from all our
best authors, selected because they are fine specimens of style, and
upon subjects generally beyond the conception of children, and it
is that in a great measure, which has led to the fact of the children
so often reading without comprehending. A dissertation on virtue,
or beauty, or taste, a speech of Cicero, Demosthenes or Lord
Chatham, a passage from Milton, Shakespeare, or Young, are
things beyond the comprehension of children of eight or ten years
old."29
56
Kay, p. 306.
*7 Central Society of Education Publications, I (1837), 296.
18
Journal of the Statistical Society, I (18S8), 19$, 457-58. This volume of the Journal
contains a mass of valuable information on the various kinds of schools in Westminster: the
books used, the side-occupations of the teachers, the physical accommodations, etc.
29
Select Committee on the State of Education, Q. 525.
154 The English Common Reader
The same witness praised the "Kildare Place" reader produced
by the Irish educational authorities, which, "without pretending
to give very choice specimens of composition, presents amusing
stories in plain language, and all of a good moral tendency, and
curious facts in natural history/' 30 This reader, one of an even
tually large series of Irish schoolbooks, was widely adopted in
English voluntary schools once the ban on non-scriptural reading
lessons was relaxed, and many imitators appeared. All were "cal
culated to improve the minds and characters of young persons, to
promote the cultivation of a humble, contented, and domestic
spirit, and to lead to the more intelligent perusal of the sacred
Scriptures." In the interests of this ambitious program, each lesson
in the first reading book adopted by the British and Foreign
School Society normally included a text from Scripture, "a brief
poetical extract adapted to improve the taste and excite the affec
tions," and "a portion of useful knowledge."31 The cheapness of
these readers and their superiority to the old "elegant extracts"
insured their popularity. But by the sixties their shortcomings
troubled many inspectors, who complained bitterly of their failure
to appeal to the child's imagination and emotions.32
Not only must the material a child reads be suited to his years
and natural tastes, but, even more important, his schooling in gen
eral must include sufficient information to give meaning to what he
reads. Even on the elementary level, he must be enabled to recog
nize common allusions. This is obviously impossible when infor
mation is conveyed, as it was in the nineteenth-century school, in
frozen blocks, and through the dreary catechetical method; and
when it is limited to personages and events in the Bible, the
geography of the Holy Land, and certain rudimentary aspects of
natural science.33 Not until after mid-century were materials relat
30
Ibid.
31
Binns, A Century of Education, pp. 160-61.
31
Adamson, English Education, p. 215.
33
A typical question i n arithmetic was: "Of Jacob's four wives* Leah h a d six sons,
Rachel had two, Billah had two, and Zillah had also two. H o w many sons had Jacob?"
(Central Society of Education Publications, II [1838], 358). In 1835, Brougham shared with
t h e House of Lords his amazement a t t h e accomplishments of t h e pupils i n t h e (Lan
casterian) Borough Road School. T h e y dispatched in their heads such problems as "What
is t h e interest of £ 5 3 5 7sAd, for fifteen seconds?** and drew from memory outline maps
of Palestine and Syria, marking all t h e bays, harbors, and creeks, and adding both their
modern and ancient names. "Now all this,** said Brougham without a trace of irony,
Elementary Education and Literacy 155
ing to the broader world—great legends, characters of mythology,
basic facts of geography and history, facts, even, that would assist
in reading the newspaper—introduced to the attention of lower-
and lower-middle-class children. Until then, their intellectual hori
zons were rigidly confined by religious and utilitarian prejudices.
A little education was all that the common pupil should have, and
it was so circumscribed and penurious that only the unusual child,
upon emerging from the valley of the shadow of education, would
have much taste for reading.
"is real, substantial, useful knowledge, fitted alike to exercise and to unfold the faculties of
the mind, and to lay up a store of learning at once the solace of the vacant moments, and
the helpmate of the working hours in after years. . . . When those children leave the school
they will be governed by such worthy principles, and stimulated by such generous appe
tites, as will make their pursuits honest and their recreations rational, and effectually guard
them from the perils of improvidence, dissipation, and vice" (Hansard, Ser. 3, XXVII
[1835], cols. 1322-23). Quite plainly Brougham and his confreres considered mental
arithmetic and reconstruction of Palestinian geography to be at least as good means of
occupying leisure as reading books—and probably much better.
156 The English Common Reader
the assumptions upon which popular education had operated since
the century began. Was teaching the masses to read and write a
good in itself? Was it true, as the familiar axiom had it, that
"ignorance of reading and writing is productive of, or accompanied
by, a great amount of crime/' and that therefore the ability to read
and write would diminish crime? And now that so many more
people had the vote, would literacy guarantee that they would
perform their duty as citizens honestly and intelligently? Hodgson
thought not- The great question, he submitted, was what the chil
dren were taught to do with their literacy once they had it. Read
ing and writing were instrumentalities only, and it was up to the
nation, and the nation's educators, to review the ends they might
serve.34
But Hodgson's refreshingly skeptical remarks went unheeded.
The current preoccupation was not with the quality of popular
education, nor with a new evaluation of the purposes of mass
literacy, but with quantity. Recurrent surveys showed that hun
dreds of thousands of English school-age children were totally
uncared for. To provide facilities for them was the first order of
business, one that was to require many years of work. Meanwhile,
the nature of elementary schooling was little changed. What ap
peared to be a new departure, the "payment by results" plan,
merely gave the schools' most hallowed defects a new lease on life.
"Payment by results" was the scheme, instituted in the Revised
Code of 1862, whereby inflexible, nation-wide standards of accom
plishment were set up for all elementary schools receiving govern
mental subsidy. It was the invention of Robert Lowe, who was
execrated in his own time as bitterly as utilitarian schoolmen like
Brougham had been denounced by Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Lowe was, indeed, a reincarnation of the early nineteenth-century
educationist. His ideal of popular instruction was this: "The lower
classes ought to be educated to discharge the duties cast upon
them. They should also be educated that they may appreciate and
defer to a higher cultivation when they meet it, and the higher
classes ought to be educated in a very different manner, in order
that they may exhibit it to the lower classes that higher education
to which, if it were shown to them, they would bow down and
34
W. B. Hodgson, "Exaggerated Estimates of Beading and Writing," Transactions of
the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (1867), pp. 393-405.
Elementary Education and Literacy 157
35
defer." The curious reasoning is Lowe's own; the spirit is Hannah
More's, or Joseph Lancaster's.
The immediate occasion of the Revised Code was the clamor for
economy. In 1861 Palmerston's government budgeted approxi
mately £26,000,000 for the army and navy, £813,441 for educa
tion. Educational grants had, therefore, to be cut to the bone.36
No money could be wasted on ineffective education. The proof of
the pudding henceforth was to be in the tasting; each school would
have to show it had used its yearly budget to maximum advantage
before it could expect any more money. "Hitherto," said Lowe,
"we have been living under a system of bounties and protection;
now we propose to have a little free trade." 37
And so bureaucracy, which then controlled the education of
about two-thirds of all the children who were in school, prescribed
the subjects each child was to take during a given year, the lesson
books he was to study, and, most important of all, the nature of
the examination to which he was to be subjected at the excruciat
ing annual day of judgment, when every failure, per pupil, per
subject, lost the school %s.8d. from the next year's grant. The re
sult was that a new premium was put upon rote memory, for
throughout the year every effort was bent toward grinding into the
child the sentences or the facts that the inspector might demand of
him. The best child (assuming he was not struck mute on examina
tion day) was the one who had memorized the whole book.
The atmosphere produced in the schoolroom by the eternal ne
cessity of working for the next year's government allowance was
such as to breed lifelong antipathy to education. "Children hated
their schooldays, left them behind as soon as possible, soon forgot
what they had learnt, and when they became the parents of the
next generation . . . in all too many cases could neither contribute
culture to their own children in the home nor readily modify the
attitude which they had learnt towards their teachers in their own
a
* Quoted (imperfectly?) in Curtis, History of Education, p. 148, from Lowe's pamphlet,
Primary and Classical Education (1867), which has not been available. For a concise sum
mary of Lowe*8 part in formulating educational policy, see Asa Briggs, Victorian People
(Chicago, 1955), pp. 254-58.
••They were. By 1865 the new system enabled the government to reduce its aid to
schools to £636,000 (Porter, The Progress of the Nation, pp. 134, 648, 658-59).
"Quoted in Curtis, pp. 149-50.
158 The English Common Reader
most children from the working class left school after two or three
years, and toward the end of the century the maximum period of
attendance was only six or seven years. Throughout the era the
usual leaving age for lower-middle-class pupils was thirteen or
fourteen. But if they had remained longer they would merely have
undergone further stretching of their powers of memory; no at
tempt would have been made to arouse their critical or creative
intelligence. What little the customary pattern of popular educa
tion accomplished, it accomplished in the first short years. And
from our point of view, that achievement resided in their learning,
some of them, how to read.
the various educational agencies as testimony to their accomplishments. The latter are
open to suspicion, since, as a contemporary put it, "without intending it, societies are from
their constitution braggarts, and the committees are generally too anxious, as advocates,
to make the best of their statements, to be very rigid in examining the details upon which
they are founded. Reports are drawn up as advertisements; failures are judiciously passed
over, and by that very circumstance the good accomplished is given in an exaggerated
and therefore an untrue form** (Walter F. Hook, On the Means of Rendering More Efficient
the Education of the People [10th ed., 1846], p. 7).
•• Mathews, Methodism and the Education of the People, p. 53.
70
Central Society of Education Publications, I (1837), 340-44.
71
Kay, Education of the Poor, p. 309.
Elementary Education and Literacy 169
at least three years at a day school, and could read the Bible, but
has 'quite forgotten how it's done now/ "72
At the same time, investigators for the Central Society of Edu
cation were collecting case histories of boys between thirteen and
seventeen years of age who, despite their sojourn in a voluntary
school, were either totally unable to read or were able only to spell
out "penny books about Jack the Giant Killer, and . . . Robinson
Crusoe."73 In 1851 a self-styled "old educationist" told a parlia
mentary committee of inquiry, "I have often observed that boys
at the National [and] British schools, and others, are taught appar
ently to read, and after a few years appear to have forgotten al
most the whole of what they were taught, so as not to be able to
read." The reason, he said, was that they had learned only how to
spell their way through a chapter of the New Testament, and
"nothing was afterwards put into their hands that had sufficient
novelty to induce them to keep up the habit of reading till they
had overcome the mechanical difficulty, and found a pleasure in
the art."74 This observation later was expanded, in a speech in the
House of Commons, to the statement that "of adults who were
unable to read more than one-half were in that condition, not from
never having been to school, but because, after leaving school, they
had met with nothing to tempt them to the exercise of the faculty
they had acquired, and that faculty had died from pure inani-
tion."75
The criteria then employed to test literacy are of little help in
trying to estimate the extent of the public that was able to read.
In the schools, a pupil was judged literate if he were able to stam
mer his way through a few verses of Scripture or a few questions
and answers in the catechism. For census purposes, the test was
ability to sign the marriage register. It is generally assumed, and
justly so, that the ability to write was less common than that of
reading, that the former presupposes the latter, and that literacy
percentages thus obtained must be substantially increased if abil
72
Journal of the Statistical Society, I I (1839) , 6 8 n .
73
Central Society of Education Publications, I I (1838) , 3 6 5 - 6 7 , 3 8 8 - 9 7 .
74
Newspaper Stamp Committee, Q. 3240.
76
Hansard, Ser. 3, CXXXVII (1855), col. 1144.
170 The English Common Reader
ity to read alone is in question. On the other hand, numbers of men
and women who could sign their names, and therefore were en
rolled among the literate, probably could write nothing else.
Whether or not they could read, there is no way of telling.76
Hence the Victorian literacy figures that come down to us are,
for one reason or another, very unsatisfactory evidence of how
many people were able to read. The first nation-wide report, made
in 1840 and based on ability to sign the marriage register, was that
67 per cent of the males and 51 per cent of the females were liter-
ate. 77 Generalizing from a variety of local tabulations made in the
thirties and forties, a recent student has concluded that between
two-thirds and three-quarters of the working class were literate. 78
The census of 1851 placed the rate for the whole nation at 69.3 per
cent for males and 54.8 per cent for females. But even if these
figures happen to be a reasonably accurate reflection of the number
able to read, they tell us nothing of the quality of literacy. There
was a large fringe area of the population which, though technically
literate, could barely spell out the simplest kind of writing.
The revelations of the 1851 census did much to intensify the
campaign for wider educational opportunity, and surveys made in
connection with that campaign during the next two decades
proved that England still was plagued with widespread illiteracy.
In 1867, a house-to-house canvass of a working-class district in
Manchester revealed that barely more than half of the adults
could read, and in another district of the same city a quarter of the
"youthful population" were similarly illiterate. The rate of school
attendance was still low—35 per cent of the children in one area of
Manchester had never been to any sort of day school—and Sun-
day-school attendance had decreased.79 In the nation at large, it
76
Victorians who were disturbed b y what they considered the unrealistically low literacy
rate obtained b y this method took refuge in the supposition t h a t some brides and grooms,
though fully able t o sign their names, were so nervous that they preferred to scrawl a cross
instead; or that when a literate m a n took an illiterate bride, he chivalrously wrote his X
instead of his name t o save her embarrassment—a gesture that doubtless augured well for
a blissful married existence (W. L. Sargant, "On the Progress of Elementary Education/*
Journal of the Statistical Society, X X X [1867], 86-87).
77
Second Annual Report of the Registrar-General (1840), p. 5. T h e report covers the year
ending June 30, 1839.
78
W e b b , "Working Class Readers in E a r l y Victorian E n g l a n d , " p . 349. W e b b ' s article
collects a wealth of source material on literacy in this period.
79
Ashton, Economic and Social Investigations in Manchester, pp. 6 5 - 6 6 .
Elementary Education and Literacy 171
was estimated that between £50,000 and two million children of
school age were not in the,classroom.80
The climax of the agitation for a national system of schools came
with the passage in 1870 of W. E. Forster's education bill. The
Forster Act is usually spoken of as a great landmark in the history
of the reading public, because, by establishing governmental re
sponsibility for education wherever voluntary effort was insuf
ficient, it made schooling easier to obtain (and less easy to avoid)
than ever before in England's history. Yet the act's importance
can easily be exaggerated.81 This is clearly shown by the decennial
figures for literacy in England and Wales :82
MALES FEMALES
Percentage Percentage
of Percentage of Percentage
Literates Gain Literates Gain
1841 67.3 ... 51.1
1851 69.3 2.0 54.8 3.7
1861 75.4 6.1 65.3 10.5
1871 80.6 5.2 73.2 7.9
1881 86.5 5.9 82.3 ».l
1891 93.6 7.1 92.7 10.4
1900 97.2 3.6 96.8 4.1
In the two decades before the Forster Act, the literacy rate for
males had increased by 11.3 percentage points and that for females
by 18.4 points. In the next two decades (the census of 1891 was the
first to reflect fully the results of broader educational opportunity)
the increase was 13.0 and 19.5, respectively. Hence the Forster Act
did not significantly hasten the spread of literacy. What it did do
was to insure that the rate at which literacy had increased in
80
Adamson, p. 347. "The truth was," says Adamson, "that nobody knew.**
81
Even so good a historian as G. M. Trevelyan is misleading on the subject. Compul
sory education, he says, "has produced a vast population able to read but unable to dis
tinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals. Conse
quently both literature and journalism have been to a large extent debased since 1870,
because they now cater for millions of half-educated and quarter-educated people, whose
forbears, not being able to read at all, were not the patrons of newspapers or of books'*
(English Social History [Toronto, 1944], p. 582). The truth is that, far from "producing" a
semiliterate audience, the Forster Act and its successors merely enlarged it; and the
"debasement** of literature and journalism began long before 1870. Trevelyan*s use of sta
tistics also is inaccurate. "Between 1870 and 1890," he writes, "the average school attend
ance rose from one and a quarter million to four and a half millions/* But thesefiguresrefer
only to state-aided schools. When private, non-inspected schools are taken into account* the
totals are much higher. In 1858, more than a decade before the Forster Act, over 2.5 million
children were enrolled in public and private schools together (Newcastle Commission,
I, 573).
82
From the registrar-general's returns, in Porter, The Progress of the Nation* p. 147.
172 The English Crnnmm Reader
1851-71 would be maintained. Had the state not intervened at
this point, it is likely that the progress of literacy would have con
siderably slowed in the last quarter of the century, simply because
illiteracy was by that time concentrated in those classes and re
gions that were hardest to provide for under the voluntary system
of education. In short, the Forster Act was responsible for the
mopping-up operation by which the very poor children, living in
slums or in remote country regions, were taught to read.83
In the light of the circumstances reviewed in this chapter, it is
surprising that literacy made the headway it did, especially during
the first half of the century. But the deficiencies of formal educa
tion were somewhat atoned for by certain elements in the social
scene. The political turmoil, stirred and directed by popular jour
nalists; the way in which even menial jobs in commerce and indus
try now required some ability to read; the gradual cheapening of
printed matter attractive to the common reader; and (never to be
underestimated) the introduction of the penny post in 1840, which
gave an immense impetus to personal written communication—
these together were responsible for the growth of a literate popula
tion outside the schoolroom.
83
The fact that in 1900 the literacy rate was approximately 97 per cent must not be
misinterpreted to mean that in that year the nation as a whole was approaching total
literacy. It means simply that 97 per cent of those who married in that year, most of whom
were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, could sign the marriage register. But
these constituted only a fraction of the total population, and side by side with them lived
the older men and women who had been entered in the "illiterate" column at the time of
their own marriages and whose status presumably had not changed in the interval.
CHAPTER 8 | Secondary Education
vate and refine the learners; the fact that French and German chil
dren were carefully instructed in their respective languages; the
example of the classic nations themselves, who certainly studied
their own great writers; these and other similar arguments were
urged upon us with great force. . . . Assuredly it would be a most
valuable result if anything like a real interest in English literature
could be made general in England.
"The true purpose of teaching English literature," the commis
sioners went on, was "not . . . to find material with which to teach
English grammar, but to kindle a living interest in the learner's
mind, to make him feel the force and beauty of which the language
is capable, to refine and elevate his taste. If it could be so taught,
. . . the man would probably return to it when the days of boy
hood were over, and many who would never look again at Horace
or Virgil, would be very likely to continue to read Shakespeare and
Milton throughout their lives."25
More and more it was realized that the lack of literary culture in
the middle-class environment from which the typical secondary-
school boy came had to be remedied in the schools. "In his own
home, perhaps," wrote J. It. Seeley, a leading educationist and his
torian, "he sees no books at all, or feeds only on monstrous ro
mances, or becomes prematurely wise and rancorous and cynical
by perpetual reading of newspapers. I am pleading for a class
which have no intellectual atmosphere around them; in the con
versation to which they listen there is no light or air for the soul's
growth; it is a uniform gloomy element of joyless labour, bewilder
ing detail, broken with scarcely a gleam of purpose or principle."26
Already a subject called "English literature" had been included
in the competitive examinations that were instituted for the In
dian civil service in 1855 and for the home civil service somewhat
later. In the Indian examinations (1871) a satisfactory knowledge
of English literature counted 500 points (as against 1,250 for
mathematics and 1,000 for natural science).27 G. W. Dasent, the
86
Taunton Commission, I, 25-26.
** "English in Schools," Lectures and Essays (1870), p. 237. Sir Walter Besant
said that when he was a child, in the 1840's, "Very few middle-class people . . . had any
books to speak of, except a few shelves filled with dreary divinity or old Greek and Latin
Classics" (Autobiography [New York, 1902], p. 37).
37
For the subjects included in the civil service examinations, and the points assigned to
each, see Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (1860),
p. 310, and (1877). pp. 335-36, 372.
184 The English Common Reader
examiner in this subject for the Indian civil service and for the
Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, told the Taunton Com
mission what he expected of his candidates: "I should take forty or
fifty passages, selected from what I call fair authors—Shakespeare,
Milton, Pope, and some of the later writers, Sir Walter Scott and
Tennyson. I have set this question over and over again. *Here is a
passage. State where it comes from, explain any peculiarities of
English in it, and state the context as far as you are able to do so.5
If you set fifty passages, if the candidates are at all instructed, you
will find that they answer it in various degrees. I remember an
Irishman answering forty-five out offiftyright. I am sure I do not
know how he did it/* However, he added, "if six or ten are an
swered it would be quite enough to show considerable acquaint
ance with English literature." The members of the Commission
rightly were concerned about the importance of cramming in pre
paring for such an examination. Dasent replied that overt evidence
of cramming, for instance the fact that every boy recited verbatim
from the same manual an account of the character of Richard III,
would mean loss of marks. But he added that in his opinion cram
ming was not to be deplored; "I would rather," he said, "have a
boy who is able to learn something by cram, than a boy who is not
able to be taught anything by any process at all/'28
The limited usefulness of such an examination in testing, let
alone promoting, a genuine interest in literature hardly needs to be
pointed out. But the age had an almost superstitious reverence for
such tests, and by 1875 boys leaving secondary schools could
choose from seventeen different examinations, depending on
whether they wished to enter the civil service, the armed forces,
the professions, or the universities.29 In nearly all these examina
tions "English literature" was a set subject, and everywhere the
practice was the same—to test the candidate's memory of certain
facts and his ability to parse and gloss.
Despite the growing importance of these examinations, by the
mid-sixties little attention was yet given to literature as a class
room subject. The Taunton Commission found that very few
schools gave lessons in English literature. In Staffordshire and
18
Taunton Commission, Qq. 18,973-76.
*9 Barclay Phillips in Transactions of the Society for the Promotion of Social Science
(1875), p. 460.
Secondary Education 185
Warwickshire, for example, only one or two schools did so, and in
Norfolk and Northumberland it was said that "English literature
is hardly taught at all."30 In preparing for the examinations, there
fore, students relied almost exclusively on the short manuals, out
lines, and annotated texts published in ever larger quantities for
the cram market. G. L. Craik's Compendious History of English
Literature and its abridgment, A Manual of English Literature;
T. B. Shaw's Student's Manual of English Literature and the same
author's Students9 Specimens of English Literature; Robert Cham
bers' History of the English Language and Literature; Joseph
Payne's Studies in English Poetry; and Austin Dobson's Civil Serv
ice Handbook of English Literature were but a few of the examina
tion helps to crowd the field. Henry Morley 's First Sketch of Eng
lish Literature sold between 30,000 and 40,000 copies in the years
1873-98.31 Between 1871 and 1887 the number of such books in the
publishers' lists grew from about fifteen to forty-four.32 Editions of
English classics, containing all the exegetical material the pupil
was likely to be examined upon, were published by the hundreds.
In 1887 Low's Educational Catalogue listed some 280 school edi
tions, exclusive of Shakespeare's plays, which were the most
favored of all for examination purposes.
After the Taunton Commission had exposed the schools' negli
gence, literature quickly became an almost universal class subject.
The practical reason of course was the pressure of the so-called
"external" examinations; but the theoretical justification was that
the study of literature was indispensable to an understanding of
the English language. One witness before the Taunton Commis
sion, the Right Honorable Earl of Harrowby, K.G., described with
admiration the way in which students at a Liverpool school "took
passages from Milton, read them backwards and forwards, and
put them into other order, and they were obliged to parse them
and explain them. The same faculties were exercised there in con
struing Milton as in construing Latin, only there was an interest in
the one and there was no interest in the other." The noble lord
urged that "English reading of the highest order ought to enter
into every part of every English education" for the rather mys
30
Taunton Commission, I, 135-87.
31
Henry S. Solly, Life of Henri/ Morley (1898), p. 305.
32
See Low's Educational Catalogue for 1871 and 1887.
18C Tfie English Common Reader
and After
188
The Mechanics' Institutes and After 189
other branches of science, they would make better workers. The
more ingenious among them might even prove to be new Ark-
wrights and Stephensons, who would apply their new knowledge to
making revolutionary labor-saving, wealth-producing inventions.
But the benefits expected from mechanics* institutes went far be
yond this. A knowledge of science, Brougham insisted, "would
strengthen [the mechanic's] religious belief, it would make him a
better and a happier, as well as a wiser man, if he soared a little
into those regions of purer science where happily neither doubt can
cloud, nor passion ruffle our serene path." 3 Mechanics' institutes
would therefore be still another bulwark against irreligion. Equally
would they combat the spread of objectionable political notions;
"by means of lectures and popular discussions, those narrow con
ceptions, superstitious notions, and vain fears, which so generally
prevail among the lower classes of society, might be gradually re
moved, and a variety of useful hints and rational views suggested,
promotive of domestic convenience and comfort." And, of course,
the institutes would help police the nation. "A taste for rational
enjoyments," lectures and books rather than gin parlors and bear
pits, would be cultivated among the common run of men; "habits
of order, punctuality, and politeness, would be engendered."4
"The spectacle of hundreds of industrious individuals, who have
finished the labours of the day, congregating together in a spacious
apartment, listening with mute admiration to the sublime truths
of philosophy, is truly worthy of a great and enlightened people."5
So wrote one of Brougham's fellow pamphleteers in 1825. The
vision in the minds of the mechanics' institute promoters was lofty
and, according to their lights, disinterested. Granting their utili
tarian assumptions, they were idealists working for a happier so
ciety.
The movement was inspired by the work of Dr. George Birk
beck, who at the very beginning of the century had organized and
taught classes in applied science for Glasgow artisans. After Birk
3
"Address to the Members of the Manchester Mechanics' Institution," Speeches
(Edinburgh, 1838), III, 164. (The whole speech [pp. 155-78] is a good place to study the
motives behind the mechanics* institute movement.) This faith in useful knowledge as a
pathway to religious belief and moral perfection* expressed by Peel, led to Newman's
eloquent counterblast in his "Tamworth Reading Room.'*
4
Hudson, Advlt Education, p. 55.
s
James Scott Walker, An Essay on the Education of the People (1825), p. 45.
190 Tlie English Common Reader
beck moved to London in 1804, his work was continued by others,
in both Glasgow and Edinburgh. In 1823, J. C. Robertson, editor
of the Mechanics' Magazine, and Thomas Hodgskin, the socialist,
proposed to found a London Mechanics' Institution for similar
purposes. Immediately Brougham and his disciples, scenting a rich
opportunity, moved in, and Dr. Birkbeck, one of the circle, was
installed as first president. With some 1,500 subscribers, the insti
tution got under way in March, 1824.6 The first lecture was the
talk of the London season. Francis Place, writing to Sir Francis
Burdett, expressed his satisfaction at the spectacle of "800 to 900
clean, respectable-looking mechanics paying most marked atten
tion" to a lecture on chemistry.7 Four months later Brougham re
ported that "scarcely three days ever elapse without my receiving
a communication of the establishment of some new mechanics* in-
stitution." 8 In the October Edinburgh Review he published an ar
ticle explaining, with his customary brisk optimism, the enormous
potentialities of the new movement.9 An expanded version, issued
in pamphlet form as Practical Observations upon the Education of
the People, quickly ran through many editions and carried the mes
sage to all of cultivated Britain. Soon the mechanics* institute was
as familiar a part of the social and cultural landscape as the Na
tional school. By 1850 there were 702 such organizations in the
United Kingdom, of which 610, with a membership of 102,000,
were in England alone.10 But by that time most of them had lost
all but a superficial resemblance to the institutes envisaged by
Brougham.
At first, the mechanics came willingly, even eagerly. This was a
novelty; it was well advertised; it promised to equip them to earn
better wages; and above all it appealed to the sense widespread
among them that, in this age of the March of Mind, ignorance was
not only a handicap but a stigma. From the beginning, however,
• Among numerous narratives of the antecedents of the movement (to 1824) are those
in Hammond, The Age of the Chartists, pp. 322-23, Hudson, pp. 26-53, and an article in
Chambers's Papers for ike People (Philadelphia, 1851), III, 197-201 (cited hereafter as
"Papers for the People' *).
7
Graham Wallas, Life of Francis Place (New York, 1919), pp, 112-13.
g
Quoted in Papers for the People, p. 201.
• "Scientific Education of the People," Edinburgh Review, XLI (1824), 96-122.
10
Hudson, p. vL
The Mechanics' Institutes and After 191
Many of these handicaps might still have been overcome had the
art of popularization been understood. Its necessity was recog
nized, but few lecturers yet had the knack of it. Lectures were gen
erally presented on the academy or even the university level, and
if many of the audience fell sound asleep, it was not only because
of muscular fatigue.
What working people wanted after twelve or more hours in fac
tory or mill was diversion. "After working at wheels all day," one
lecturer is quoted as saying, "they ought not to be made to study
wheels at night/' 17 Yet that was precisely what they were ex
pected to do. Their lives were to be devoted to their occupations
even in their precious after-hours. For what other recreation but
the study of wheels had the same social usefulness and at the same
time was as safe? Though there were a great many other topics in
the world besides the natural sciences and their application to
English industry, they were deemed inappropriate for study by
men destined to be lifelong hewers of wood and drawers of water.
In 1825 a clergyman flatly warned the members of the newly
formed Aberdeen Mechanics' Institution that "Belles Lettres, Po
litical Economy, and even History, were dangerous studies."18 Al
though the proponents of the institutes wished to encourage dis
cussion of political and economic matters, so that under proper
guidance the honest workingmen would be persuaded of the truth
of middle-class doctrines, the conservative opposition was so
strong that in many places there was an absolute ban on "contro
versial" topics. The study of polite literature was forbidden for
obvious reasons. To divert workingmen with poetry, drama, and
above all novels not only would put a quietus to the cause of sci
entific instruction but would encourage the very habits of idleness
and extravagant dreaming that the institutes were designed to
wipe out.19
17
Newspaper Stamp Committee, Q. 1073.
18
Quoted in Hudson, p. 59.
19
Another serious obstacle in the way of the common workman's participation in the
mechanics' institutes was the subscription fee, which ranged from 5*. to 20*. a year. In
some institutes there were different grades of membership; for example, 2*. per quarter for
admission to classes, 3*. for admission to lectures and the use of the library, and 4s. for
classes, lectures, and library privileges together. In a period when wages were low and un
employment frequent and protracted, such fees were out of the question for those below
the master-artisan class (Hudson, pp. 222-36; Hole, p. 86).
The Mechanics' Institutes and After 195
Faced with this demand for general literature, the promoters had
either to sacrifice their principles or see the establishments collapse
for lack of interest. To the extent that they chose the former course
and relaxed the ban upon non-utilitarian books, they contributed
significantly to the spread of reading among the middle class.
The people who ran the institute libraries never yielded an inch
without a struggle that rocked the whole community. Often their
intransigence in the face of a strong cry for a more liberal policy
caused outright secessions, and when the fallen angels formed their
own libraries they showed their true colors by immediately buying
** See, for example, Walker, Essay on the Education of the People, pp. 44-47.
u
Quoted in Papers for the People, p. 214.
The Mechanics1 Institutes and After 197
gift books, turned out of people's shelves, and are never used, and
old magazines of different kinds, so that, out of 1,000 volumes,
perhaps there may be only 400 or 500 useful ones. The rest are,
many of them, only annual registers and old religious magazines
that are never taken down from the shelves."32 Even when the
books were supplied fresh from the booksellers, their inappropri*
ateness was sometimes appalling. In 1846 a wealthy lady, having
decided to donate sets of books to a number of English and Scot
tish institute libraries, asked Bishop Whately what titles might be
suitable. He responded with a list of books that were as weighty as
his own theological and philosophical works (some of which he in
cluded), and she passed it on to the Edinburgh bookseller George
Wilson. "Hurrah!" wrote Wilson to his English correspondent,
Daniel Macmillan. "Take your share of happiness in the business,
my good friend. Who knows what service they may render to the
unwashed immortals/'33 However profitable the business was to
Wilson and Macmillan, we may well wonder how great the service
rendered really was. But when the libraries were so largely depend
ent upon philanthropy for their books, they had to take what they
could get.
Hence, while the middle-class reader in village and town had
more books available to him than ever before, the selection was far
from adequate. The greater part of a typical institute library slum
bered undisturbed on the dusty shelves, while the minority of
truly popular books were read to tatters. There was little money
for additional purchases, and when purchases were made, although
the clients' tastes were consulted more freely now that the "re
spectable" part of the population had taken over the institutes,
strong prejudices remained against the acquisition and circulation
of certain types of books. Mudie*s standards were quite easygoing
by comparison. Thus the mechanics' institute libraries, all except
the very largest, did more to whet the common reader's appetite
than to satisfy it.34
This was, of course, a great gain, for as the demand grew, other
ways of meeting it appeared. Frequently, in the recollections of
men who belonged to the institutes, we encounter warm praise of
«/W&,Q. 1212.
" Thomas Hughes, Memoir of Danitl Macmillan (1882), p. 109.
" Public Libraries Committee, Qq. 1952-56.
SOO The English Common Reader
213
214 The English Common Reader
ever, the emptiest of boasts. None of these libraries was of service
to the general reading audience. Seldom had their founders pro
vided for maintaining their buildings or for adding to the collec
tions. As was true also of endowed schools, the stipulation in the
libraries' foundation instruments that they be freely open to the
public was interpreted in contemporary, not modern, terms: the
words "free" and "public" have undergone considerable semantic
liberalization in the age of democracy. And regardless of how the
provisions were interpreted, in practice they were freely violated.
But even if the libraries had been open without question or qualifi
cation to ordinary men and women, they still would have lacked
visitors, for virtually all of them were collections of theological or
other heavily learned works alone, of value to relatively few
readers, and as they acquired few recent works even in this limited
field, the collections came more and more to possess merely anti
quarian interest.2
The true measure of the old foundation libraries' uselessness was
exposed when their curators were summoned from their dusty
leisure in 1849 to testify before the Public Libraries Committee of
the House of Commons. The Chetham librarian was subjected to a
particularly searching examination, because his library unques
tionably was required to be open to all comers, and because, unlike
most, it had money to increase its holdings. His testimony did not
noticeably gratify the committee. Of the 19,500 volumes in the
library, he said, most were folios; "the managers have always
given the preference to old books, and there are but few libraries of
the same extent in the kingdom which have so large a number of
works of the 16th century." There were, he continued, twenty-five
readers a day; but since the managers did not regard the library as
a facility for "the poor," they never considered buying books use
2
The same objections applied to the parochial libraries founded by Dr. Thomas Bray
and his Scottish coadjutor, Rev. James Kirkwood, early in the eighteenth century. These
collections were very numerous; Bray himself and "The Associates of Dr. Bray/* an
organization formed to carry on his work after his death in 1730, founded at least 140,
and KirkwcKxTs zeal was responsible for at least 77. But as they were all small and con
fined to works of divinity* only the local clergy and amateur theologians benefited from
them. By the middle of the nineteenth century nearly all had "fallen into desuetude/'
neglected, destroyed, or dispersed into private hands or secondhand bookshops. In addition
to the above sources, especially Edward Edwards' testimony before the Public Libraries
Committee, Qq. 3326-40, see T. W. Shore, "Old Parochial Libraries of England and
Wales/' Transactions of the Library Association (1879 for 1878), pp. 51-53 and Appendix.
Public Libraries 215
ful to that class. He complained that even despite this studied re
buff, frivolous readers did demand admittance: "there are too
many people who come merely to amuse themselves; they ask for
the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review, or the Gentleman's
Magazine." In his view the proper function of his library was "for
the purposes of students and persons pursuing some kind of litera
ture as a pursuit [sic]."8
Tenison's Library, the 1849 committee discovered, was of even
less service to the general public. It had been taken over by the
members of the St. Martin's Subscription Reading Society, who
gathered there to read newspapers and modern "popular litera
ture" and to play chess. The old books were in deplorable condi
tion; the dust of more than a century was heavy on them, and heat
from the gas lighting had ruined their bindings. Little wonder that
only one "studious person" had applied in the past eighteen
months to come regularly to read Tenison's books, and that after
three or four days he "left in despair."4
There was, of course, the British Museum—the "national" li
brary. But for various reasons ordinary citizens of London knew
the Museum (if they were acquainted with it at all) as an exhibi
tion hall rather than as a library. While foreigners were still im
pressed, as the German traveler Moritz had been in the eighteenth
century, by the representatives of "the very lowest classes of the
people"5 who wandered among the Museum's exhibits by way of
asserting their rights as free Englishmen, the reading room was
anything but "public." Admission was difficult; one had to be in
troduced by a peer, member of Parliament, alderman, judge,
rector, or some other eminent man. The hours of opening were
short, and on dark days the reading room closed entirely. Until the
middle of the nineteenth century, when the energetic librarian
Antonio Panizzi began to enforce the provision in the copyright
law that required copies of all new publications to be deposited in
the Museum, relatively little current literature was received. Even
despite these handicaps, the reading room attracted more and
more clients; "for every reader in 1799 there were nearly a hundred
•Public Libraries Committee, Qq. 1060-1176.
4
Ibid., Qq. 875-924.
6
Carl P. Moritz, Travels in England (1924), p. 68.
216 The English Common Reader
be) will stop in during the evening and read it. . . .* "u But this
good gray argument was worn out; it had been entered in one fight
too many. It was actually harmful to the cause, because the liquor
interests, whom one would expect to have been at ease after the
false alarms of many decades, took it seriously, and in many com
munities they led the fight against the adoption of the acts.
Another major argument had worn equally thin by the eighties.
This was the plea of utility, of economy. As applied to free librar
ies, it was put into definitive form by W. Stanley Jevons in an ar
ticle in 1881, but one hears familiar echoes of Joseph Lancaster
expounding the virtues of his assembly-line education: "The main
raison d'Mre of Free Public Libraries, as indeed of public museums,
art-galleries, parks, halls, public clocks, and many other kinds of
public works, is the enormous increase of utility which is thereby
acquired for the community at a trifling cost. . . . [The turnover of
books in a public library] is a striking case of . . . the principle of
the multiplication of utility. . . . One natural result of the extensive
circulation of public books is the very low cost at which the people
is thus supplied with literature." Even if libraries cost many times
more than they did, Jevons went on, they would be worth every
penny, because prisons, courts, and poorhouses inevitably cost
even more. Expenditure for public library purposes, therefore, "is
likely, after the lapse of years, to come back fully in the reduction
of poor-rates and Government expenditure on crime. We are fully
warranted in looking upon Free Libraries as an engine for operat
ing upon the poorer portions of the population/'45
In addition to developing a more settled, sober, law-abiding
populace, free libraries, it was argued, were indispensable to the
progress of the English economy. "Education is spreading her
pinions, and civilisation is marching with rapid strides in the foot
steps of science and mechanics through the whole globe. We must
remember that other nations are progressing as well as ours, and,
therefore, if we are to keep pace in the march . . . our artizans
must individually be taught, because, just as the mountain is com
posed of atoms and the ocean of drops, so an educated people, a
mass of educated mechanics, will have a much better chance in the
great race of competition which is taking place, than if we suffer
44
Greenwood, Public Libraries, p. 35.
46
"The Rationale of Free Public libraries," pp. 385ff.Italics in the original.
Pvblic Libraries £81
46
them to remain in ignorance." The words are those of a Liverpool
alderman, declaiming over a library cornerstone in 1857, but they
might just as well have been spoken by Brougham at the opening
of a mechanics' institute in 1827.
What one misses in all this is any sense of the intellectual and
spiritual enrichment—or the simple relaxation—that an individual
man or woman, boy or girl, may derive from reading, quite apart
from any benefit that may accrue to the community. The Vic
torians' silence on this matter in their library propaganda is quite
understandable, for an institution to be supported by public funds
must be justified first of all in terms of the common good. Although
the principle that a community might tax itself to provide facilities
for recreation had been fairly well accepted in the case of parks and
museums, for example, it was still generally denied when libraries
were in question. The old religious and utilitarian prejudices
against reading for entertainment still persisted; if the nation were
to subsidize the reading habit, it should do so only for serious pur
poses. Sharing this feeling as they did, the proponents of free li
braries were ill equipped to face what became, if not the gravest, at
least the best-publicized charge against libraries once they were
established: namely, that far from encouraging habits of study and
self-improvement, they catered to the popular passion for light
reading—above all, for fiction.
The "fiction question" which had agitated the mechanics' insti
tute libraries now was inherited, still generating heat, by their suc
cessors, at a time when cheap papers were diligently encouraging
the masses' taste for light reading. Wherever free libraries were
opened, the volume of patronage bore a direct relationship to the
amount of fiction available. At Sheffield in the period 1856-67,
prose fiction accounted for almost half of the combined circulation
of the consulting and lending departments. At Liverpool in 1867
68, out of 565,000 books called for, 189,800 were fiction.47 But this
was nothing compared with what was to come: by the 1890's most
free libraries reported that between 65 per cent and 90 per cent of
the books circulated were classified as fiction.48
45
Peter Cowell, Liverpool Public Libraries (Liverpool, 1903), pp. 58-59.
47
Edwards , Free Town Libraries, p p . 122 , 135.
48
Greenwood, Public Libraries, pp. 548-57. This volume and Edwards' Free Tovm
Libraries contain many statistics on the various classes of books issued by leading libraries,
832 Tlte English Common Header
Exposed as it was, year after year, in printed library reports and
then in the newspapers, this state of affairs could not fail to attract
attention. The prevalent view was summarized in the Publishers9
Circular in 1878: "Free libraries, which should only be provided
for the poor and helpless, not for those who can help themselves,
should be resorted to for education and instruction, and should be
gin at elementary works, long antecedent to works of imaginative
fiction. If the ratepayers ure to provide imaginative fiction, or the
luxuries of the mind, for slightly poorer classes, why should they
not also provide free games, free plays, panem et circenses, free
cakes and nuts for the boys? Is not the picture of a stalwart, well-
dressed lounging youth of the middle classes reading and dreaming
over Mr. Smiles' 'Self-Help' in a free library, after having spent
his humble ninepence on penny ices and a cigar, somewhat of a
satire?" 49 The writer, too eager for a touch of irony, dulled his
point somewhat by placing Self-Help in the hands of the negligent
youth, because it was universally agreed that what loungers read
when they came to the public library was not the wholesome works
of Dr. Smiles but sensational or sentimental fiction. The evil re
sults of devotion to "light literature" were well established in na
tional legend; reading extracts from the correspondence on the
subject in the London Evening Standard in January, 1891, one feels
the date line could just as well be "1791" or "1831." Whenever he
entered a public library, one man wrote, "I have found, as a rule,
every chair occupied—and by whom? In nine cases out of ten by
loafing office boys or clerks, who were using their masters' time for
devouring all the most trivial literary trash they could get. . . .
Many are the crimes brought about by the disordered imagination
of a reader of sensational, and often immoral, rubbish, whilst
many a home is neglected and uncared for owing to the all-
absorbed novel-reading wife." Another correspondent alluded to a
young man he knew at Brighton, "who could not be got to work.
as well as lists of the titles of individual books that were most in demand. In vain did the
librarians point out that under some systems of classification "fiction" included not only
novels but poetry and drama as well. Although the popular assumption that "fiction"
meant novels alone seriously hurt the library cause, the profession did little at the time
to amend its terminology so that its annual reports would give a fairer picture of what
people read.
49
Publishers" Circular, January 18,1878, p. 2. During the eighties and nineties, however,
this periodical became a friend of the libraries.
Public Lilrraries 283
ville's father, finding the ragged book in his son's possession, was
dubious of its propriety, but "the genius of Burns subdued him.
He took that old volume from me, and read it again and again, his
grave countenance relaxing, and the muscles of his face curling into
a smile, and the smile widening to a broad laugh at certain pas
sages, which having read to himself, he would read aloud, that we
might all laugh." Still, he could not wholly approve, and seeing
that his son insisted upon reading verse, the hard-working man
spent half a week's wages on a book of Gospel Sonnets, which, his
son says, "were received and read, but there was something want
ing either in me or in them."21
In the autobiography of the geologist Hugh Miller, another
Scotsman, we read of a "literary cabinetmaker" who had between
eighty and a hundred books, chiefly of poetry, and who had won
local celebrity by composing a thirty-line poem on the Hill of
Cromarty; and of a carpenter who was "deeply read in books of all
kinds, from the plays of Farquhar to the sermons of Flavel; and as
both his father and grandfather . . . had also been readers and col
lectors of books, he possessed a whole pressful of tattered, hard
working volumes, some of them very curious ones; and to me he
liberally extended, what literary men always value, 'the full free
dom of the press/ " Miller's chief benefactor at Cromarty was one
Francie, a retired clerk and supercargo, whose books included, in
addition to some black-letter volumes on astrology, the planetary
properties of vegetables, and folk medicine, a generous number of
the British essayists, a handful of travels and voyages; and trans
lations from German poetry and drama.22
As a young man Thomas Cooper had a friend named Henry
Whillock, a grocer's assistant. The two youths spent Sundays to
gether, studying astrology and divination, but later turning to the
English essayists and Langhorne's Plutarch.2* Later in the century,
Thomas Burt knew a whole coterie of fellow colliers with bookish
tastes: Sam Bailey, a specialist in science, Frank Bell, who "first
introduced me to Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and other Ameri
can humorists," and Joe Fairbairn, whose interests ran to poetry.
Burt and Fairbairn were drawn together by a common enthusiasm
11
Somerville, pp. 12, 43-44.
** Miller, My Schools and Schoolmasters (Boston, 1869), pp. 48-53.
" Cooper, Life, pp. 47-49.
Tlie Self-made Reader 249
for P. J. Bailey's then famous poem Festus, and soon Fairbairn was
teaching Burt to appreciate Wordsworth. The eventual result,
many years later, was that Burt, who had risen to a seat in Parlia
ment, often recited passages from Wordsworth to a knot of audi
tors gathered in a corridor near the House of Commons library.24
Occasionally, too, humane master artisans opened their shelves
to their book-hungry apprentices. Thomas Carter's master, a
woolen draper and tailor, gave him free run of his little collection,
which included the most popular poetry, histories, and essays of
the eighteenth century.25 In like fashion Thomas Cooper's appetite
for literature was fed by the shoemaker to whom he was appren
ticed, a man who "spoke passionately" of Byron's poetry and lent
Cooper his copy of Burns. Clark, the master, had gone often to the
theater when he lived in London, and his frequent talk about
Shakespeare on the stage sent Cooper back to the dramatist's
pages with new understanding.26
In 1833 the Factory Commissioners heard that books were
brought into the very factories and mills. Boys, they were told,
sometimes read while waiting for their duties to begin, or while a
machine was being repaired, and "the girls often bring books to
the factories to read . . . not much else except religious books, ex
cept it be a song now and then. I never found any indecent book
among them." Though the practice was ordinarily frowned upon
—it was equivalent to a soldier poring over a pocket novel on the
drill field—an occasional overseer, anxious to dissipate the growing
public impression that all English factories were "dark, satanic
mills," confided that "if the work is right we never notice it. I
have read many a volume through when I was a spinner."27 Since,
however, he was now on the side of management, his evidence is
not quite as credible as it might otherwise be. Life in a big noisy
factory, regulated as it was on the model of a prison or barracks,
was hardly conducive to reading during working hours. But in
small establishments, especially where the master himself was a
reader, books were tolerated and even encouraged. In some milli
24
Burt, pp. 124, 146, £74.
36
Carter, Memoirs, pp. 74-75.
* Cooper, pp. 42-43.
17
First Report of the Centred Board of His Majesty's Commissioners for Inquiring into
the Employment of Children in Factories (1833), C. 1, p. 87; D. 2, pp. I l l , 126,134.
£50 The English Common Reader
ners' and tailors* shops it was customary for one worker to read
aloud to the others, who made up out of their own pockets the
money he or she thereby lost.
William Chambers, an Edinburgh bookseller's apprentice in the
1820's, earned a hot roll every morning by appearing at a bakeshop
at five o'clock to read to the baker and his two sons while they
kneaded their dough. "The baker was not particular as to subject.
All he stipulated for was something droll and laughable." So
Chambers chose the novels of Smollett and Fielding, which gave
his floury listeners "unqualified satisfaction." After two and a half
hours of such entertainment, Chambers would descend from his
perch on a folded sack at the window, dust his clothes, take his
roll, and go merrily off to work.28
An anecdote told by Somerville reveals that literature some
times could be found even in the blacksmith's shop. The same
James Wilson who had introduced him to the delights of Burns
happened into a village smithy and found a copy of Anson's Voy
ages, which the smith had borrowed to read in snatches while his
iron was heating.29 Wilson relayed the news to Somerville, who,
though extremely shy, determined to see that book. "The struggle
I had with the desire to go to the owner of Anson's Voyages
to borrow the book to read, and the shame of the thought that
a boy like me, who only wore corduroy clothes, nailed shoes with
thick soles, and a highland bonnet, should presume to go to the
house of those who had a back door and a front door, was a war of
thoughts that allowed me no peace for several weeks." But he
overcame his shyness, was lent the book, and read it during the
dinner recess in the turnip field where he was working. When his
fellow hoers came back, he told them of Anson's marvelous adven
tures, and from then on they brought their dinners to the field in
order to hear him read to them.30
So long as employers or overseers looked the other way, a youth
28
Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, p p . 94-95.
29
Blacksmith shops were n£>t t h e m o s t likely places in the world for literary recreation,
b u t t h e one where the s m i t h read A n s o n was n o t unique. Will Crooks, t h e Labour politician
w h o grew up in t h e L o n d o n dock area in t h e sixties, recorded t h a t w h e n h e w a s a
blacksmith's helper, aged a b o u t twelve, h e often recited Shakespeare t o his fellow workers
(George H a w , From Workshop to Westminster: The Life Story of Will Crooks, M.P. [1917],
p. 22).
80
Somerville, pp. 45-47.
The Self-made Reader £51
in almost any occupation could contrive to read a bit while nomi
nally earning his wages. At the beginning of the century, Samuel
Bamford, later a radical weaver-poet, was a combination office boy
and porter in a Manchester calico-printing works. In the ware
house he fixed up a snuggery where, when his duties allowed, he
repaired to read a wide variety of history and biography—as well
as Cobbett's Political Register.*1 Several decades later another
humble poet, Joseph Skipsey, who had gone to work as a little
boy, learned to write by chalking on the mine trapdoor he tended.
He not only read poetry behind the trapdoor but even made his
first attempts at composing it.32 In the late 186O's» but in the
very different setting of a Gravesend draper's shop, an assistant
named Henry Arthur Jones was deep in Paradise Lost when he was
interrupted by a fussy woman intent on buying some ribbon.
When she was not satisfied with the first boxes he got out, he col
lected every box and tray in the shop, spread them on the counter
before her, and saying, "Make your choice, madam/* returned to
his Milton.33 Jones did not go far in the drapery trade, but he be
came a highly successful dramatist.
' Needless to say, reading at work often caused trouble, if not for
others—though Skipsey's literary preoccupations at the mine en
trance might easily have caused an accident—at least for the stu
dent himself. In his early teens, for instance, William Hone, later a
writer and publisher of radical political squibs, lost a job because
the room in which he worked was lined with unlocked bookcases
and he could not resist temptation.34 And when penny dreadfuls
became the favorite reading matter of English boys, it was a
standing complaint among employers that to get work out of office
boys and errand runners was next to impossible. The number of
dismissals caused by too overt or ill-timed an absorption in the
latest instalment of Black Bess or Tyburn Dick must have been
staggering.
Everywhere in the memoirs of lower-class readers are laments
that in their youth good reading matter was hard to come by. The
a
Bamford, Early Days, pp. 280-81.
82
Robert S. Watson, Joseph, Skipsey: His Life and Work (1909), pp. 17-19.
11
Doris Arthur Jones, Life and Letters of Henry Arthur Jones (1930), pp. 32-33.
u
F. W. Hackwood, William Hone (1912), pp. 46-47.
852 The English Common Reader
resources of the home shelf and those of friends or employers were
soon exhausted, and, until mid-century at least, formidable ob
stacles were in the way of the reader whose appetite grew ever
sharper. The next chapters will reveal how slow was the process
that eventually brought book prices down to the reach of the
masses. Even if new books had been reasonably cheap, only the
reader in the larger towns, where there were bookshops, would
have had access to a fair-sized selection. Elsewhere the best he
could hope for was to be within trudging distance of a stationer's
or draper's shop where a few books were sold as a side line. It was
nothing for a boy to walk many miles to buy a book he coveted.
The thirteen-year-old John Clare, rapturous after a chance en
counter with a fragment of Thomson's Seasons, determined to pos
sess the whole of that poem. One Sunday he got I8d. from his
father and made his way to Stamford, the nearest town. "But
when I got there, I was told by a young shop boy in the street (who
had a book in his hand, which I found to be Collins* Odes and
Poems) that the booksellers would not open the shop on a Sun
day/' Disappointed, he walked back home; but during the next
week he paid another boy a penny to take over his chores and re
turned to Stamford, where he got his book and "dumb over the
wall into Burghley Park, and nestled in a lawn at the wall side."
There he had one of the great formative experiences of his life,
poring over Thomson's pages.35
Secondhand shops, "the poor man's browsing ground," were
particularly important sources of supply in the cities, and their
small-scale equivalents were found at country fairs and markets,
which sellers of the printed word had attended ever since the six
teenth century. The great trouble was that many, if not most, of
the books thus made available to the poor reader were ill suited to
his needs and capacities. The father of Jesse Collings, later a leading
Birmingham politician and reformer, brought his son secondhand
books from stalls in Exeter, "a strange medley," the son com
mented in retrospect.36 John Passmore Edwards, the son of a
Cornish carpenter and in later life a millionaire newspaper proprie
tor, bought used copies of Locke's Essay on the Human Understand
36
Sketches in the Life of John Clare, ed. Blunden (1931), pp. 58-59.
38
The Life of the Right Hon. Jesse Collings [Part I by himself, Part I I by Sir John L.
Green] (1920), p. 13.
The Self-made Reader 253
countenance—here's the very book for you, and more shame for
you, and perhaps for me too; but I must sell—I must do business.
If any lady or genTman '11 stand treat to a glass of brandy and
water, 'warm with/ I'll tell more about this 'Rambler*—I'm too
bashful, as it is. Who bids? Fifteen-pence—thank'ee, sir. Sold
again!" By Mayhew's time street auctions had been banished
from London because they obstructed traffic, but they were still
conducted in the provinces.
Secondhand vendors got their wares from the sources one would
expect: the "trade auctions" at which publishers got rid of their
unsold stock (the vendors taking the odds and ends that were left
after the larger dealers and remainder and reprint specialists like
Thomas Tegg had had their pick); general auctions; and individual
sellers. "It is not uncommon," Mayhew reported, "for working
men or tradesmen, if they become 'beaten-down and poor,' to
carry a basket-full of books to a stall-keeper, and say, 'Here, give
me half-a-crown for these/ "39
Thus, while the man who had access to a stock of cheap second
hand books was the most fortunate of all poor readers, his choice
still was restricted. The most easily obtained books were certain
standard classics and books that had been popular a generation or
more earlier. Recent publications, except those which had died on
the publisher's or retailer's hands, were much harder to get at
reduced rates. Until the cheap reprint was extensively developed
in the second half of the century, the impecunious reader who
wanted a library of his own had to content himself chiefly with
volumes that had gathered dust for years or decades on someone
else's shelves.
Before free libraries appeared in towns, some poor readers, as we
saw in the last chapter, borrowed from circulating libraries. In the
late eighteenth century the radical tailor Francis Place obtained a
book at a time from a small shop in Maiden Lane, Covent Gar-
den.40 Somewhat later, when Christopher Thomson of Edwinstowe
taught his innkeeper father to read and write, he was rewarded
lf
London Labour and the London Poor, I, 313-24.
40
Graham Wallas, Life of Francis Place (3d ed.; New York, 1919), pp. 17-18.
Another stratagem by which Place obtained books was somewhat out of the ordinary.
His landlady, an elderly charwoman, surreptitiously **borrowed" books for him from the
rooms she cleaned in the Temple.
The Self-made Reader 255
41
with a subscription to the village library. Thomas Cooper was
unusually fortunate in being able to read the new books and
periodicals his friend at Gainsborough, Mrs. Trevor, obtained for
the local gentry—the latest Scott novel, the poetry of Campbell,
Moore, and Byron, the current numbers of the leading critical re
views and magazines. He considered himself additionally lucky in
discovering a whole forgotten cache of books which a mercer had
long ago left to his fellow townsmen. " I was in ecstasies," he
writes, "to find the dusty, cobwebbed shelves loaded with Hooker,
and Bacon, and Cudworth, and Stillingfleet, and Locke, and
Jeremy Taylor, and Tillotson, and Bates, and Bishop Hall, and
. . . a score of other philosophers and divines,—mingled with Stan-
ley's History of the Philosophers, and its large full-length portraits
—Ogilvy's Embassies to Japan and China, with their large curious
engravings—Speed's and Rapin's folio histories of England—Col-
lier's Church History—Fuller's Holy War—Foxe's Book of Martyrs,
the first edition, in black letter, and with its odd, rude plates—and
countless other curiosities and valuables."42
the very texture of our language." The writers who record having
read Shakespeare give somewhat mixed reports. Samuel Bamford
confessed that "though deeply interested by his historical charac
ters and passages, I never either then or since relished his blank
verse, or that of any other poet." But Thomas Cooper, on the other
hand, remembered that "the wondrous knowledge of the heart
unfolded by Shakespeare, made me shrink into insignificance;
while the sweetness, the marvellous power of expression and gran
deur of his poetry seemed to transport me, at times, out of the
vulgar world of circumstances in which I lived bodily," and Joseph
Barker found Shakespearean plays a great relief from his regimen
of religious books: "He had always a meaning in what he said, and
you could easily see his meaning. . . . I felt quite delighted to read
something that was rational, plain, stirring, and straightfor-
ward."45
Hardly less revered by the common reader was the poet Thom
son, whose Seasons seems to have penetrated where few other
books did. John Clare's delight, nestling behind a wall with his
newly purchased copy, was shared by numerous other young
readers. Thomas Carter found the poem "of great use to me in the
way of preserving me from the depraved tastes and habits of those
with whom my duty compelled me to associate. . . . With the ex
ception of the Bible, I know not that I ever read any other book so
attentively and regularly." Ebenezer Elliott's first attempt at
verse was an imitation of "Thomson's blank-verse thunderstorm."
And William Hone testified that "the just descriptions and noble
sentiments in the Seasons, refined and elevated my mind. I saw
nature with a new-born sight; in its quiet scenery I felt emotions of
peaceful delight unknown to me before—my affections went forth
to fevery living thing; my heart expanded with rapturous joy." 46
The eighteenth-century poets generally were standard fare
among the bookish young down into Victorian times: Goldsmith,
of course, and Cowper; and Pope, Akenside, Gray, the "graveyard
school" of Blair, Collins, and Young, even such now-forgotten
worthies as Denham, Pomfret, and Falconer. These were the poets
who were most frequently reprinted in cheap series and excerpted
as space-fillers in the cheap religious and "instructive" magazines.
^Burt, p. 148; Bamford, p. 209; Cooper, p. 64; Barker, pp. 70-71.
48
Carter, p. 75; Elliott, he. cit.; Hackwood, p. 47.
258 The English Common Reader,
Except for Shakespeare, of the poets before Milton we hear vir
tually nothing; their slowly reviving critical fame did not pene
trate to the common reader until later in the century.
Robinson Crusoe was read (often in an abridgment) almost as
much as Pilgrim's Progress; and the now-forgotten imitation of
Crusoe, Philvp Quarll, is mentioned as often in readers* reminis
cences as Defoe's own book.47 Then there was the whole great fund
of eighteenth-century essays, whose sweet reasonableness and
unexceptionable morality recommended them to every serious
mind, and which were available in relatively cheap reprints and
secondhand sets. The popularity of the eighteenth-century trav
elers and navigators—Anson, Cook, Byron—and even, sometimes,
their Elizabethan sea-dog predecessors was considerable. So too
was that of the historians, especially Smollett and Hume. Gibbon
was somewhat less favored because of his doubtful religious tend
encies; but, as Thomas Burt was able to point out to his father
when the young man brought home the first volume of Bohn's edi
tion, even so orthodox a biblical commentator as Albert Barnes
praised the historian's scholarship and fairness. "Needless to ob
serve," Burt wrote, "Gibbon won the day. . . . With youthful glee
I read till a late hour. I slept but little that night; the book haunt
ed my dreams. I awoke about four on the bright summer Sunday
morning, and went into the fields to read till breakfast-time. The
stately, majestic march of Gibbon's periods had some attraction
for me even then; but the Decline and Fall, it must be admitted,
was hard reading for an unlettered collier lad. Yet I plodded on
until I had finished the book. . . ,"48
Another powerful element in the early experience of nineteenth-
century studious readers was the fund of theological and hortatory
works bequeathed by the Puritan era and the eighteenth-century
religious awakening. The contents of the Gainsborough cache
47
In 1860 excavators for a railway line laid bare the remains of the tile-works Defoe
had once run at Tilbury. When one of Defoe's biographers, who went to the scene, told the
laborers, "These bricks and tile$ were made 160 years since by the same man that made
'Robinson Crusoe*!" he "touched a chord that connected these railway 'navvies' with the
shipwrecked mariner, and that bounded over the intervening period in a single moment.
Every eye brightened, every tongue was ready to ask or give information, and every
fragment became interesting. Porters, Inspector, and station-master soon gathered round
me, wondering at what was deemed an important historical revelation" (William Lee,
Danid Defoe: His Life, and Recently Discovered Writings [1869], I, 32). Ten years later an
obelisk was erected over Defoe's grave with money 1,700 boys and girls gave to a fund
started by a religious paper (Publisher)*' Circular, October 1, 1870, p. 589).
« Burt, pp. 118-19.
The Self-made Reader 259
Thomas Cooper describes were typical of the ponderous, tough
volumes the earnest young student willingly devoured. In addi
tion, all sorts of works of secular instruction found an eager au
dience among those to whom knowledge was precious: books rang
ing from popularized compilations of miscellaneous facts {A Thou
sand Notable Things, The Oddest of All Oddities) through ordinary
tattered schoolbooks strayed from the classroom (Bonnycastle's
Mensuration and Fenning's Arithmetic) to the Cassell self-help
library after the middle of the century.
History and travel to a great extent took the place of the classic
fiction which for various reasons was not as easily available to the
poor reader. I t was only the occasional young man, and usually one
of slightly superior station., who read widely even in the novels
which had gone out of copyright and therefore could often be had
more cheaply. Dickens owed much to his father's little collection
of Smollett, Fielding, Goldsmith, and other standard fiction, pur
chased in one of the several reprint series then current. John Clare,
on the other hand, said that he knew only Tom Jones and The Vic
ar of Wakefieid.49
Perhaps the most significant fact to emerge from the published
records of working-class reading is this: Until the latter half of the
century brought cheap periodicals that printed the new work of
outstanding writers, truly cheap reprints of contemporary litera
ture, and free libraries, the masses had relatively little access to the
best that was written in their own day. Few persons of Thomas
Cooper's social position had his opportunity to keep up with the
latest serious books and periodicals. The village libraries, the
penny-a-day circulating libraries, the mutual improvement so
cieties, the mechanics* institute libraries—all had, for one reason
or another, failed to meet the needs of intellectually ambitious
workmen who could not afford the outright purchase of new books.
Only in the memoirs of men who had grown up after the middle of
the century do we find frequent allusions to contemporary authors.
By then it was possible for a sailor like Ben Tillett to buy, between
voyages, the books of Huxley, Haeckel, Spencer, Darwin, New
man, and Carlyle.50 The story of the cheapening of books is so
important to our theme that it must now be told in some detail.
49
Johnson, Charles Dickens, I, 20-21; J. W. and Anne Tibbie, John Clare: A Life (New
York, 1932), p. 88.
60
Tillett, Memories and Reflections* p. 77.
The Book Trade
CHAPTER 12 \
1800-1850
260
The Book Trade, 1800-1850 261
sold 20,300 copies in its first year at the even steeper price of
Scott's first novel, Waverley (1814), cost 21s., at a time when the
customary price of a three-volume novel was 15s. or 18s., and went
through eight editions (11,500 copies) in seven years. As the public
appetite for Scott's fiction increased, so did the cost of indulging
it. Ivanhoe (1820) was published at the virtually unheard-of figure
of 30s. the set, and Kenilworth> issued the following year, cost
attempting to pull it out, although a fair-sized beam was protruding from his own,** and
another of St. Paul regaining his sight, a pair of balances falling from his eyes (Carter,
Memoirs of a Working Man, pp. 20-21).
16
Knight, Passages of a Working Life, I, 234.
17
Wickwar, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, pp. 67, 103.
18
Pearl, William Cobbett, pp. 92,120, 134-36,143-44, 147-48.
w
Sadleir, XIX Century Fiction, H, 175-76.
The Book Trade, 1S00-1S50 2C7
1851-1900
£94
The Book Trade, 1861-1900 29$
the great sales of a novelist like Dickens. But it could not be denied
that the cost of most original publications was indefensibly high:
the result, critics said, of manyfirms'unhealthy reliance upon the
circulating library for the bulk of their business. They were con
tent with, or at least resigned to, a situation they had themselves
created when they priced original fiction out of the individual pur-
chaser's reach. The publishers countered with a cliche not peculiar
to that era (it is stillflourishinga century later): the public, they
asserted, simply refused to acquire the book-buying habit. Ac
tually, both parties were right; each merely viewed the vicious
circle from a different angle. The circulating libraries bought large
quantities of newly published books; the publishers charged prices
established in the inflationary 1820's (and gave the libraries big
discounts). The publishers found it more profitable to supply, say,
five hundred copies of a new book to a few reliable customers,
either directly or through jobbers, than to dispose of them one by
one through the bookshops. And so prices were kept high, the
reader who wished to keep up with current literature was driven to
the libraries, the librariesflourishedand bulked larger than ever in
publishers' views of their market.
The tyranny of the circulating libraries was symbolized by the
figure of Charles Edward Mudie, who, though he had begun to rent
books from his shop ten years earlier, came to full eminence when
he set up his famous headquarters in New Oxford Street in 1852.2
Compared with his, the older libraries were small, ineffectual oper
ations. He charged only one guinea for a year's subscription, as
against his competitors' two. He advertised extensively; he set up
branch libraries in various parts of London and used eight vans in
a metropolitan pickup and delivery arrangement; he gave country
customers speedy and efficient service, and installed a large export
department. In a word, he turned the circulating library into big
business. But he did not, as is sometimes assumed, monopolize the
trade. Some rivals, to be sure, he drove under: Hookham's, for in
stance, and Booth's in Regent Street, and an upstart firm called
the Library Company, Limited, which offered subscriptions at half
Mudie's rate and ended up in a resounding bankruptcy. Others,
* The present account of Mudie is derived from Curwen, History of Booksellers, pp.
424-80, and Colby, *' Th e Librarian Rules the Roost/ " where references to further ma
terial may be found.
296 The English Common Reader
however, managed not only to survive but to prosper in the face of
Mudie's aggressive methods—Cawthorn and Hutt of Cockspur
Street, Day's of Mount Street, Miles of Islington, and the Grosve
nor Gallery Library.3 And in the early sixties W. H. Smith and
Son, whose proposal to act as Mudie's agents at their railway book
stalls had been turned down, went into the book-lending trade on
their own account and soon did a volume of business which
approached Mudie's.
Hence the figures given of Mudie's book purchases do not repre
sent the total amount of trade between publishers and libraries.
But the scale of Mudie's own buying was impressive enough. In
the ten years 1853-62 he added to his stock about 960,000 volumes,
almost half of which (416,706) were novels; works of history and
biography accounted for £15,743 more, and travel and adventure
125,381.4 He took 2,400 copies of the third and fourth volumes of
Maeaulay's History of England (and had to set aside a special room
for handling them); 2,000 of The Mill on the Floss; 2,500 of Enoch
Arden; and 500 of Adam Bede9 in addition to several reorders.5
By astute business methods, and above all by achieving a repu
tation as the watchdog of contemporary literary morals, Mudie did
much to encourage reading among the class that could afford a
guinea for a year's subscription. He throve upon the role of the
mid-Victorian Mr. Grundy: "What will Mudie say?" was the in
variable question that arose in publishers* offices when a new novel
was under consideration. Mudie paid the piper, and on behalf of
his large clientele he called the tune.
In his own time, however, it was not primarily his enforcement
of Evangelical standards that called forth criticism; in his role of
censor, after all, he had most readers solidly behind him. Rather,
as the leader of circulating-library proprietors he was attacked,
along with the subservient publishers, for discouraging the pur
* On some of Mudie's rivals, see Tinsley, Random Recollections, I, 64-74, and Waugh,
One Hundred Years of Publishing, p. 102.
* "The Circulation of Modern Literature," Spectator, supplement to issue of January S,
1868, p. 17. Considerably more than a third of this total (391,083) was bought in the
period from January, 1858, to October, 1860—a good measure of how Mudie's business
grew during the fifties. The breakdown for this period was 165,445 volumes of fiction,
87,210 of history and biography, 50,572 of travel and adventure, and 87,856 "miscellane
ous*' (Mudie's own figures, in a letter to the Athenaeum, October 6, 1860, p. 451).
* Cruse, The Victorians and Their Reading, pp. 315-16, 330; Curwen, p. 428.
The Book Trade, 1851-1900 297
chase of books by maintaining the price of newly published fiction
at lOs.Gd. a volume and clinging to the anachronistic and wasteful
three-volume form. In 1854 a writer in the Times, after demolish
ing the publishers' stock argument that cheap books could not re
turn a decent profit, struck a note that was to be echoed again and
again in the next decades: "We simply ask, on behalf of all classes,
but especially in the interest of the great masses of the people, that
the old and vicious method of proceeding shall be reversed—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 mul
titude, while the requirements of the fortunate and lazier few are
postponed to a more convenient season."6
Occasionally a publishing firm that was heavily dependent on
library patronage made a halfhearted effort to meet criticism. In
1845-46 Chapman and Hall had experimented, unsuccessfully,
with publishing original fiction in 3s. monthly parts, the novel
being completed in four parts. 7 In the same period, the ultra-con-
servative house of Murray issued the Home and Colonial Library,
a series which, in the words of the firm's historian, "would contain
nothing offensive to morals or good taste, and would appeal . . . to
heads of families, clergymen, school-teachers, and employers of
labour." Priced at %s.6d. a volume, the series was laden with travel
books, a house specialty; among them were Melville's Typee and
Omoo. But in 185£ John Murray III told Gladstone the venture
was a failure.8 Nevertheless, his firm embarked on another venture,
8
Reprinted in Living Age, XLIII (1854), 122; for a later barrage of criticism, see Pub
lishers* Circular, February 1, 1872, pp. 69-70.
7
On these experiments, see E. P. Morton, "News for Bibliophiles," pp. 831-82, and
Sadleir, XIX Century Fiction, II, 132-83, 170-71.
8
"George Paston" [i.e., Emily Morse Symonds], At John Murray's, 18Jt3-1892 (1932),
pp. 39, 114. In 1861 the series was "reissued" at cut rates. The unctuous trade-journal
advertisement heralding this public-spirited gesture is typical of those that sought to dis
guise publishers' efforts to liquidate an unlucky speculation as a contribution to the grand
cause of cheap literature: " . . . a fresh class of readers has arisen, and the establishment of
Literary Institutions, School and Village Clubs, Book-Hawking Societies, Parochial and
Lending Libraries, has become so general, that it appears to the Publisher a good oppor
tunity to disseminate these Volumes, at a rate which shall place them within reach of the
less wealthy classes. By removing the impediment of price, he hopes to throw open these
attractive and useful Works to the Million; so that having hitherto been the delight of the
Parlour and Drawing-room, they may now do equally good service in the Factory and
Workshop—in the Cottage of the Peasant and Log-hut of the Colonist—in the Soldier's
Barrack and the Sailor's Cabin" (Publishers* Circular, November 1, 1861, p. 498).
298 The English Common Reader
the Library of Railway Readings—an attempt to supply the new
race of train-readers with superior literature. The initial volume,
in fact, was a selection of reviews and articles from the Times. It
appears that literature for any but the passengers in first-class car
riages was not the firm's forte. As John Wilson Croker wrote
Murray, "You are not, and cannot be a cheap book-seller. . . . I t
would require a large return of profit to reconcile me to your mak
ing your venerable establishment into a kind of old-clothes shop,
in which worn-out garments are furbished up for second-hand
prices/' 9
This was, however, exactly what some equally dignified firms
now did, though the garments in many cases were scarcely worn
out. Since 1832, the two London houses of Bentley and Colburn
had been virtually alone in issuing 6s. reprints of novels which they
had originally brought out at regular circulating-library prices.
But from the middle of the century onward, the 6s. reprint was
adopted by many houses, so that the middle-class reader who
wished to buy rather than borrow was able to do so—provided he
had enough patience. The interval between the original, high-
priced edition and the first cheap reprint varied considerably. As a
rule, so long as demand for the original edition continued at the li
braries and the booksellers', a reprint was out of the question; and
even when a book was no longer called for at the libraries, reprint
ing was delayed until the unwanted copies found buyers in the
secondhand market. Some more aggressive houses, though, ex
ploited the initial success of a book by issuing a less expensive re
print within a year or two, as happened with George Eliot and
Trollope. In Thackeray's case, the interval was three to five years;
in Dickens', substantially longer. It was this delay, lasting in many
instances until public interest in a book had largely evaporated,
that caused the crusaders for cheap literature to regard the 6s. re
print with very tempered enthusiasm.10
The firms which now unbent sufficiently to issue 6s. reprints
undoubtedly did so in an effort to fill the yawning gap in the price
* "Paston," pp. 106-107.
10
Often it was the author, rather than the publisher, who had to take the initiative in
getting out a cheap reprint. Only when John Stuart Mill, moved by frequent pleas from
workingmen, offered to forego his half-share of the profits, did Longmans agree to issue a
cheap People's Edition of his works (Michael St. John Packe, Life of John Stuart Mill
[1954], p. 448; Mill, Autobiography [New York, 1944], p. 195).
The Book Trade, 1851-1900 299
scale between the 3l$.6d. original edition and the new "railway
novel" at Is. or ls.6d.n In 1846 the Belfast firm of Simms and Mc
Intyre issued the first monthly volume of its Parlour Novelist se
ries at the virtually unheard-of price of %s. in wrappers and %s.(>d.
in cloth. A year later, in April, 1847, the same firm reduced prices
even further with its Parlour Library, which offered monthly vol
umes at 1#. in boards and (a little later) ls.6d. in cloth. The success
of this daring venture was immediate and overwhelming. After
trying for two years to maintain their old price, both Bentley and
Colburn cut their reprint series first to 3$.6d. and then to 2s.6d. In
deliberate imitation of the Parlour Library came George Rout-
ledge's shilling Railway Library, which "bestrode the bookstall
market for decades" and by 1898 piled up a total of 1,300 titles.
Routledge, who had begun as a remainder specialist, soon became
the leading figure in a crowded field.
Cheap railway novels (or "yellow-backs" as they were called
after 1855, when their characteristic binding—glazed colored pa
per laid over boards, with an eye-catching picture on the front and
advertisements on the back—was established) were the most in
spired publishing invention of the era. For one or two shillings a
volume, the scores of "libraries" that sprang up offered a tremen
dous selection to suit every taste but the crudest and the most cul
tivated. G. P. R. James, Marryat, Mayne Reid, Ainsworth, James
Payn, Miss Braddon, Charles Lever, Samuel Lover—the cata
logues of the various series were veritable rosters of Victorian best
sellerdom. The firms that specialized in such books sometimes paid
large prices for reprint rights; Routledge, for instance, contracted
to pay Bulwer-Lytton £2,000 a year for ten years' rights to his
lucrative literary property.
Though most of the yellow-backs were novels or collections of
tales, they also included a good portion of non-fiction, especially
topical books—narratives of the Crimean War, for instance, and
the Indian Mutiny, and the War of Italian Liberation—and the
various sorts of "comicalities" that were the delight of Victorian
readers embarking on a long railway journey or a holiday by the
11
The most detailed studies of the yellow-backs and other cheap fiction series are in
Sadleir, XIX Century Fiction, Vol. II, and in Sadleir*s earlier essay in Carter (ed.)» New
Paths in Book Collecting, pp. 127-61; see also Carter and Sadleir, Victorian Fiction* pp.
10-18. On Routledge's yellow-backs, see Mumby, The House of Routledge, pp. 61-62,
139-41.
300 The English Common Reader
sea. Nor were they all reprints. Some series had a sprinkling of
"originals'* by popular journalists like Augustus Mayhew, Ed
mund Yates, Douglas Jerrold, and G. A. Sala; and one or two
libraries, like Routledge's Library of Original Novels, were devoted
to new works. The latter, however, were not successful. But the
very fact that some books made their first appearance, apart from
serialization, at one or two shillings helped undermine the position
of the publishers who thought only in terms of expensive first edi
tions.
One of the difficulties in yellow-back publishing was that there
were not enough copyrights to go around, for some firms withheld
the reprint rights to their most popular authors, and in any case a
publisher working on a small profit margin could not afford to
spend much money for either original or reprint book rights. There
remained, however, contemporary American literature, which
seemingly was as vast as the continent and as profitable as a Cali
fornia lode, and which until 1891 was largely unprotected under
British law. It was up to the individual publisher's conscience
whether he would follow the gentleman's course of compensating
the American author or the pirate's device of appropriating the
work without any payment whatsoever. Some settled the matter
one way, some the other. Routledge, who was especially fond of
reprinting American books, usually preferred the latter alterna-
tive.12
For various reasons, among them the fact that cheap publishing
was more advanced in the United States than in Britain, the
American author had learned more quickly than his English cousin
how to write for a democratic audience. Thus, when the cheap
series began in the late twenties, and even more when the stream
swelled to a flood in the fifties, no English reprint publisher had to
be at a loss for titles suitable for his market. Had books by such
writers as Cooper, Irving, Willis, Longfellow, and Lowell not been
freely available, the cheap reprint series would have appealed far
less to popular taste, and their expansive influence upon the read
ing audience would have been much smaller.13
The place of the American book in English life was dramatically
12
American publishers faced the same moral issue in the case of English books, which
were equally unprotected under American law—and they solved it in the same ways.
13
Gohdes, American Literature iwl Nineteenth-Century England, chap. i.
The Book Trade, 1801-1900 301
illustrated in 1852, when Uncle Tom's Cabin touched off the big
gest sensation the publishing trade had yet known. In a single
fortnight in October of that year, at least ten different editions
came out. Six months after publication, the book had sold 150,000
copies, and within a year, according to one account, the total sales
in England and the colonies had reached a million and a half.14
Inseparable from the vogue of the yellow-back, for "railway
reading," was another influential trade development of the fifties,
the multiplying of retail outlets, most conspicuously in railway
stations. During the first years of their existence, English railways
had leased their bookstall concessions to injured employees or their
widows, who vended an unappetizing stock of newspapers, maga
zines, beer, sandwiches, and sweets to jaded travelers. As journeys
became longer, thanks to the network of lines left by the specula
tive frenzy of the 1840's, novels were added to the wares for sale.
But these were not only cheap but nasty, predominantly transla
tions from the French; it was said, in fact, that people went to rail
way stations for the books they were ashamed to seek at respect
able shops. In response to widespread criticism, the railways de
cided to lease their stalls to reputable firms. The firm which soon
won a virtual monopoly throughout the country was that of W. H.
Smith and Son, the nation's leading wholesale news agents.
The head of the house at this period was the founder's son, the
very model of a pious businessman—the sort of person who con
sulted the chained Bibles that were installed in railway terminals.15
William Henry Smith was hardly less strict in his literary prin
ciples than Mr. Mudie, and as a result the trash piles quickly van
ished. As travelers passed through city stations and country trans
fer points, they never failed to see the familiar W. H. Smith stalls,
efficiently managed, neatly arranged, and plastered with posters.
No longer was it possible for people to avoid reading matter;
everywhere they went it was displayed—weekly papers at a penny
or twopence, complete books, enticing in their bright picture
covers, at a shilling, and all fresh and crisp from the press. No
14
Ibid., pp. 29-81; Sabin, Dictionary of Books Relating to America, XXIV, 48. The
various figures cited to illustrate the magnitude of the "Uncle Tom mania'* are not always
reconcilable.
u
Later he entered politics and became First Lord of the Admiralty under Disraeli—a
feat of incongruity commemorated by Gilbert and Sullivan in their character of Sir Joseph
Porter.
30% The English Common Reader
wonder that the fifties, which saw the spread of Smith's stalls to
almost every principal railway line in the country, were also the
period when the sales of books and periodicals reached unprece
dented levels.16
At the very time the yellow-back publishers, aided by Smith,
were making books available to millions who previously had been
indifferent to them, another firm was exploiting on a large scale the
old practice of issuing standard and educational works in cheap
parts. This was the house which was presided over, until his death
in 1865, by John Cassell, and which still bears his name today.
Since John CasselFs story has never been satisfactorily told, it
must be pieced together from a number of fragmentary and not
always reliable sources.17 According to a malicious contemporary
account, in his youth he was a drunken carpenter who, on the road
from Manchester to London, discovered his aptitude for lecturing
as a reformed sinner before temperance gatherings. Under the
auspices of his teetotal sponsors (so this story goes), he set up as a
dealer in coffee heavily adulterated with chicory and then drifted
into publishing. Other narratives of his earlier days are silent con
cerning both his affection for the bottle and the purity of his coffee.
It is indisputable, at least, that in the 1840's he had a national
reputation both as a temperance orator and as a dealer in coffee
and tea. Sir Newman Flower, long an official of the Cassell pub
lishing firm, has described how this dual role led to the third one of
publisher. At a time when tea was normally sold in forty-pound
cases, Cassell got the idea of putting it up in shilling packets. To
print labels for the packets, he bought a small press; and this he
used in the evenings to produce the first of the many Cassell pe
riodicals, the Teetotal Tiines (a modest success) and the Standard of
Freedom (a failure—not least because its title was scarcely appro
priate in 1848, the year when Britons were uneasily watching Eu
ropean thrones toppling right and left). These were followed,
16
The fullest source of information on W. H. Smith and Son in the nineteenth century is
Sir Herbert Maxwell, Life and Times of the RU Hon. W. H. Smith (1893), Vol. I, chaps, ii,
iii. A recent article, based on this and other sources, is Robert A. Colby, "That He Who
Rides May R*ad."
17
Henry Vizetelly, Glances Back through Seventy Years (1898), II, 52-53; Sir Newman
Flower, Just As It Happened (1950), pp. 50-59; G. Holden Pike, John Cassell (1894);
Curwen, pp. 267-74; Publishers' Circular, October 15, 1886, p. 1234, and January 13,1894,
pp. 50-53; Le Livre> VI (1885), 164-73.
The Book Trade, 1851-1900 SOS
though presumably not from the same little press, by the Working
Man's Friend, a serious penny publication with a strong temper
ance bias, one of whose features was a continuing prize contest for
essays sent in by working-class readers. In 1851, the year after it
began, its circulation was 50,000. Thus encouraged, Cassell rapidly
branched out into other publishing activities. In 1852 he launched
the first of the almost innumerable part-issues for which his name
was to be a Victorian by-word: Cassell9 s Popular Educator, an en
cyclopedic self-instruction course which sold for a penny a number.
I t had hardly begun before a witness told a parliamentary com
mittee on education that "Mr. John Cassell is doing more at the
present time than any other individual to supply the increasing
demand by the operative classes for useful knowledge, and in sup
plying works peculiarly adapted to their circumstances and condi
tion. His popular mode of education is receiving an extended and
an extraordinary circulation, and is highly estimated by a large
number of the operative classes."18 He achieved, in brief, what the
Useful Knowledge Society had set out to do—to "popularize"
knowledge. The Popular Educator's contribution to Victorian cul
ture is suggested by the number of subsequently distinguished
men who learned from its pages. Thomas Hardy taught himself
German from the Popular Educator; Thomas Burt, the labor politi
cian, used it for English, French, and Latin lessons; and with its
aid the future great philologist, Joseph Wright, atoned for his al
most complete lack of formal education. "The completed book,"
said Wright, "remained my constant companion for years. I
learned an enormous lot from it."19
After the Popular Educator came, also in cheap instalments, the
Illustrated Family Bible (which sold 350,000 copies in six years),
the Illustrated History of England, illustrated volumes of natural
history, Shakespeare, Don Quixote, Dante, Bunyan, Goldsmith—
the profusion was endless. In 1862 the Cambridge meeting of the
British Association heard that Cassell sold between 25,000,000 and
30,000,000 copies of his penny publications annually.20 In addition
18
Report from the Select Committee on Manchester and Salford Education (1852), Q. 2261*.
lf
Flower, p. 55; Burt, Autobiography, p. 120; Elizabeth M. Wright, Life of Joseph
'right (1932), I, 38.
2a
Henry Roberts in Report of the 32nd Meeting of the British Association (1862), p. 174.
304 The English Common Reader
to part-issues of educational and literary works, the firm produced
regular tradebooks, juveniles, and periodicals, the latter including
such familiar appurtenances to Victorian domestic life as CasselVs
Family Magazine, the Quiver, and Little Folks. In the 1890's it had
eight monthly magazines and nearly fifty other serials running
simultaneously.
CasselFs success was due both to a shrewd sense of popular taste
and to the absolute blamelessness of the house's productions. Al
ready associated in the popular mind with tea and temperance, the
name of Cassell on a penny part or a cheap fireside paper was suf
ficient guarantee of its fitness for the strictest household. During
Cassell's lifetime, at least, the pages of his publications were never
sullied by mention of liquor. Since the name was so valuable an
asset, it was exploited in the most extensive advertising cam
paigns yet seen in English publishing. On hoardings, in magazine
advertisements, in posters at railway bookstalls, the magic word
CASSELI/S was kept ceaselessly before the reading public.
In the same year (1852) that saw Mudie opening his Great Hall
in New Oxford Street, W. H. Smith setting up his stalls along the
British railway lines, and Cassell beginning his Popular Educator,
occurred still another event of profound consequence to the devel
opment of the mass public. The underselling practice—retailing
new books below the advertised price—had been plaguing the
trade ever since the days of Lackington. In 18£9, the leading pub
lishers had formally agreed to drive undersellers out of business by
cutting off their supply of books. This boycott had proved fairly
effective for the next two decades, but with the founding in 1848 of
a new Booksellers' Association, dedicated to the same ends, a real
fight began. In 185£ the bookseller John Chapman, never a man to
conform when there was profit or publicity in doing otherwise, ran
afoul of the organization. He aired his case in the Westminster Re
view, and to his support came many of the leading authors of the
day (who, unlike their publishers, felt that their interest lay in the
widest possible circulation of books), the Times and the Athe
naeum, and Gladstone. By clinging to protectionism at a time
when free-trade sentiment was at its peak, publishers gave fresh
substance to the belief that theirs was the most reactionary of
businesses.
The barrage of publicity forced the Booksellers' Association to
The Book Trade, 1851-1000 305
the wall, and in April, 1852, it agreed to submit the issue to the
arbitration of Lord Campbell, Henry Milman (the Dean of St.
Paul's), and George Grote, the historian. William Longman and
John Murray were chosen to present the protectionists' case. But
they were no match for the eloquence of leader-writers in the lib
eral press and Gladstone in Parliament. Lord Campbell's commit
tee quickly decided in favor of free trade in books, and the Book
sellers' Association thereupon was dissolved.21
Hence during the next fifty years an English bookbuyer ex
pected, and in most cases received, a discount of %d. or 3d. on the
shilling. A 6*. reprint could be bought for as low as 4s.6d. cash, a
3s. book for %s.3d., and a 6dL paper-bound volume for 4fd. Only a
few booksellers, especially those having the closest ties with the
publishers, refused to give the discount. No further steps were
taken to regulate retail prices until the nineties, but the publishers
and the more conservative booksellers never ceased to grumble.
Year after year, the trade journals were filled with their com
plaints. Underselling, they maintained, was ruining the book busi
ness. "In country towns," Alexander Macmillan told Gladstone in
1868, "few live by bookselling: the trade has become so profitless
that it is generally the appendage to a toyshop, or a Berlin wool
warehouse and a few trashy novels, selling for a shilling, with flar
ing covers suiting the flashy contents."22
Though Macmillan and his fellow publishers probably exagger
ated the ruinous effect of underselling upon regular bookshops,
there is no question that as the profit margin was reduced, book-
selling as such became a less attractive occupation. The result was
that the old custom of selling books as a side line in shops devoted
chiefly to other commodities became much more widespread. Thus
the tendency promoted by the W. H. Smith bookstalls—the plac
ing of books in the main-traveled roads of Victorian daily life—
received simultaneous impetus from another direction. Whatever
its effect upon the professional booksellers, the discount system en
couraged the reading habit both by reducing actual prices and by
increasing the availability of books.
21
Chapman's manifesto was "The Commerce of Literature," Westminster Review,
N.S., I (1852), 511-54: a valuable document on book-trade economics at the time. See
also Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot and John Chapman (New Haven, 1940), pp. 50-53,
and the columns of the Athenaeum and other papers for 1852.
22
Charles L. Graves, Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan (1910), p. 286.
306 The English Common Reader
thors must conduct their business as best they may, and name
their own prices for the books.'5 In particular, the allegedly unholy
alliance between publishers and libraries was not a matter for pub
lic discussion. "You may rely upon it," Blackwood remarked at
another point in his testimony, "that the publishers and authors
have considered the subject [of the circulating-library system]
thoroughly, and act according to the best of their light/* But it
was left to Herbert Spencer to put into a few blunt words the phi*
losophy to which publishers like Longman and Blackwood still
subscribed in 1876: "Whereas, at present, the poorer class of
readers are inconvenienced by having to wait for a cheap edition a
certain number of years, they shall, by this arrangement [restrict
ing absolute copyright to a year], be advantaged by having a
cheap edition forthwith; which is to say that people with smaller
amounts of money shall have no disadvantages from their smaller
amounts of money. It is communistic practically: it is simply
equalising the advantages of wealth and poverty."32
Although one would expect that such reactionary attitudes as
these would have decisively tipped the balance in favor of the
cheap-book party, the copyright inquiry had no immediate practi
cal results. The situation remained for another decade as it had
been described in the course of the commission's hearings. New
novels, still pegged at 10s.6d. a volume, were accessible to few but
library subscribers and the members of book clubs. The somewhat
cheaper part-issue of new fiction, though used by Dickens to the
end of his career and by Trollope for several of his novels between
1864 and 1871, was virtually extinct by 1880. The major forms of
copyright reprints already established in the fifties—the cloth-
bound volume at 6*. or 7*., issued usually by the original publisher,
and the railway edition of more popular works at Is. or 2$.—
flourished. But many readers who were willing to pay 6s. for a cur
rent book resented having to await the publisher's pleasure before
it became available at this price. There were many more who
would pay 3s. or less, but not 6s. And there were many too who,
like Arnold, found no delight in either the format or the contents
of the yellow-back. It was this swelling band of discontented
readers, whose wants were vigorously championed in the press and
by men like Sir Charles Trevelyan in testimony before the Copy
32
Copyright Commission Report (1878), Qq. 329, 832, 915, 5236.
312 The English Common Reader
right Commission,33 thatfinallyoverthrew the last proud citadel of
high prices—the expensive first edition.
34
The decline and fall of the three-decker can be studied in minute detail in the files of
the Publishers* Circular and the Bookseller, especially for the year 1894.
86
Publishers' Circular, July 28, 1894, p. 80.
38
Ibid., November 1, 1890, p. 1418; May 5, 1894, p. 465.
The Book Trade, 1851-1900 313
novel/' 10,000 reached the public through the libraries.37 The great
difference was that the subscription- and rental-library trade itself
was being re-established on a more popular basis. Mudie's steadily
declined after the nineties, though the firm clung to life until 1937.
In its place sprang up cheaper libraries, the most famous of which
was (and is) the Boots Book-lovers' Library, begun in 1900 in con
nection with the already thriving Boots chain of cash chemists. In
the next thirty years, this library alone is said to have bought an
average of almost one million new books yearly.38 By the middle of
the twentieth century, the two great subscription libraries had al
most 1,000 branches between them, with a total issue of about
fifty million books a year, and the so-called "twopenny" rental li
braries were so numerous that no accurate count was possible. The
largest chain had 120 branches.39
On the whole, the end of the expensive library novel in the mid-
nineties was deplored only by sentimentalists and those who had a
financial stake in its survival.40 Most publishers and authors were
too busy catering to the new buyers' market to shed more than a
perfunctory farewell tear. For the six-shilling novel was being
bought in huge quantities; first editions of works by popular novel
ists were scores of times larger now than they had been when they
were destined principally for a handful of libraries. In 1900, for
instance, Marie Corelli's The Master Christian had a pre-publica-
tion printing of 75,000 copies.41
The whole price structure was revised downward. Now that first
editions cost 5s. or 6s., cloth-bound reprints of recent fiction,
hitherto priced at that figure, came out at &s.6d. or 3s.6d. Paper
bound reprints of copyright works, formerly the specialty of a few
firms like Dicks, were adopted by many of the leading houses.42 In
1889 Macmillan brought out a million-copy edition of Kingsley* s
*7 Ibid., October 8, 1898, p. 423.
u
James Milne, "A Library of To-day," Cornhill Magazine, CL (1934), 444.
39
B. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, English Life and Leisure: A Social Study
(1951), pp. 307-308.
40
See the correspondence columns of the Publishers* Circular in 1894-95 (particularly
Miss Braddon's letter to the press, quoted in the issue of September 28,1895, p. 334), and
Tinsley, Random Recollections, I, 53.
41
Publishers' Circular, August 4, 1900, p. 93.
48
There had been a flurry of sixpenny copyright reprints from "respectable" firms in
1882, but after the first excitement was over they proved not to have caughton.
314 The English Common Reader
ever, did not wholly end the discount practice, even in respect to
books costing over 6s. There were recurrent squabbles, the bitter
est being occasioned in 1906 by the Times Book Club's offering to
its members, at sharp reductions, books which the Publishers* As
sociation maintained were protected under the terms of the 1899
pact.49
Even with the return of price regulation, the fact remained that
the common reader in the last days of Victoria was more amply
supplied with books than ever before. And the new century saw
constant fresh efforts in that direction; in 1907, for instance, Nel
son and Collins simultaneously issued Id. cloth-bound editions of
copyright works, which sold many millions. Reprint series at 6d. or
Is. continued to multiply, and as the second World War began, the
welcome given the Penguin and Pelican series was dramatic new
evidence that the ordinary reader was eager for truly good books if
they were priced within his reach. Though the inflation resulting
from both great wars inescapably affected book prices, in general
the gains achieved during the latter half of the nineteenth century
have lasted to the present time. Through countless vicissitudes,
and against great odds, the cause of cheap books had triumphed;
and, as the Publishers9 Circular remarked editorially in 1886, "in
the social history of the country there can be no chapter more
striking in its importance."50
49
History of "The Times" III, 831-34.
80
Publishers' Circular, October 1, 1886, p. 1055.
Periodicals and Newspapers
CHAPTER 14 2
1800-1850
small sum, could have free access to as many papers as they de
sired. These newsrooms were looked upon, and rightly, as beehives
of seditious activity, but not much could be done to suppress them.
As a modern student has observed, they were "more important
agencies for the dissemination of newspaper information than
either public meetings or Radical Reformist Societies."29 In addi
tion to the communal reading facilities offered by individuals or
organizations devoted to spreading radical opinions, more and
more non-political coffeehouses were begun, all of which attracted
their patrons by a generous selection of newspapers. "Now no
man," remarked a writer in 1829, "or no man who can read (and
how few are there of those who go to coffee-shops who cannot
read), thinks of calling for his cup of coffee without at the same
time asking for a newspaper/' 30
In 1829 newspaper circulation had reached a level previously
unattained except during a few critical moments of the Napoleonic
Wars. The seven London morning papers together circulated 28,000
(an increase of 5,000 in seven years), and the six evening papers
11,000. But the dailies were far overshadowed by the Sunday news
papers, which had an aggregate sale of 110,000 a week.31 The grow
ing popularity of the Sunday press was the chief evidence of the
spread of the newspaper-reading habit in the decade before the
Reform Bill. Taking up where the victims of the Act of 1819 had
left off, the Sunday newspaper (which was duly stamped) became
the principal organ of radical sentiment. At the end of the decade
it was calculated that the radical Sunday papers outsold the con
servative ones at a ratio of almost ten to one.32 I t was not only their
political tone, however, which won them a place in the lives of
those who did not mind encouraging shopkeepers and hawkers to
break the Sabbatarian laws. Besides political news and opinions,
these papers dished up generous helpings of the week's scandal and
crime, garnished with all the titillating or gruesome details, and
some of them devoted substantial space to sporting news. News
papers were becoming more and more interesting to the common
reader.
In summary, the political and social turmoil of the years be
29
Aspinall , p . £7 .
30
Merle, "Weekly Newspapers," p. 476.
31 n
Ibid., pp. 469, 475, 477. Ibid., p. 470.
3S0 The English Common Reader
tween Waterloo and the passage of the first Reform Bill greatly-
enlarged the audience for periodicals. In Great Britain as a whole
during the period 1800-30, the annual sale of newspaper stamps
had virtually doubled, from sixteen million to thirty million,33
while the population had grown half as fast, from ten and a half
million to sixteen million. Furthermore, an individual paper prob
ably passed through more hands than it had earlier. Although the
journalist Gibbons Merle may have exaggerated when he assumed
in 1829 that "every newspaper is read by thirty persons,"34 cer
tainly the increase of subscription reading-rooms and coffeehouses
was responsible for a much greater spread of the reading habit than
is suggested on the face of the stamp returns.
However, in the excitement and apprehension that the appear
ance of the new public generated in the 1820's, it was only natural
that its size and social comprehensiveness should have been exag
gerated. Statements like those uttered by frightened politicians
pushing for the Newspaper Stamp Act of 1819, one of whom
averred that every miner in the northern collieries carried a Black
Dwarf in his hat,38 give the impression that practically everybody
was reading radical papers.36 Actually, of course, only a relatively
small proportion of the total population read any kind of paper,
though the custom of reading the newspaper aloud to a group of
listeners meant that far more people came into indirect contact
with the printed word than would appear from any circulation fig
ures. Although many unskilled laborers joined the reading public
under the influence of the Cobbett-Wooler-Hone-Carlile school of
violent journalism, they fell away for the most part after the
Stamp Act limited its circulation. It was rather from the class of
artisans and small shopkeepers that the periodical-reading public
received most of its permanent recruits at this period.
What was to be done with this startling new force in English
life, whose political potency was being demonstrated as the drama
33
Aspinall, "The Circulation of Newspapers in the Early Nineteenth Century," p. 29 n.
M
Merle, p. 477.
36
Wickwar, p. 57.
38
One estimate of the size of the reading public at this time was that of Sydney Smith:
"Readers are fourfold in number compared with what they were before the beginning of
the French war. . . . There are four or five hundred thousand readers more than there were
thirty years ago, among the lower orders" (Sydney Smith, Letters, ed. Nowell C. Smith
[Oxford, 1953], I, 341, 343).
Periodicals and Newspapers, 1800-1850 331
of Reform Bill agitation swept to its climax? Experience had
shown that it could not be legislated out of existence. But in the
eyes of the conservatives and the more moderate liberals, it posed
a standing threat to the peace of the nation, for it was a force
which every demagogue could manipulate at will. They were con
vinced that if the spread of interest in reading among new sections
of the population endangered English institutions, it did so only
because the new readers had fallen into the wrong hands. Put them
into the right hands, and the reading habit could be transformed
from an instrument of evil into one of unlimited good.
Two things had to be done. One was to open the way for the
establishment of cheap respectable newspapers. Since the hunger
for news had grown to so great proportions, the ordinary man
should be enabled to have his own paper for home consumption.
It was not healthy for him to be forced to read his paper in
a place of public resort, where discussion could so easily get out of
hand and indignation work up a dangerous head of steam. Again,
making cheap newspapers commercially practicable would encour
age men with venture capital (and therefore, presumably, men of
dependable political views) to enter the field, thus driving out the
demagogues. But such a step could not be taken until the "taxes
on knowledge" were reduced or abolished. The 4d. newspaper
duty, the tax on advertisements (Ss.Qd. each), and the paper tax
combined to make cheap journalism a decidedly unattractive field
for the profit-seeking enterpriser.
The other great goal of the reformers was the establishment of
cheap family periodicals. There was no reason why the common
reader's attention should be confined to the news. Too great ab
sorption in problems of the day, especially as those problems were
interpreted by radical journalists, was, to say the least, unwhole
some. What the new reading community needed was papers of
general information and entertainment, papers which would
quietly direct the reader's thinking along lines approved by the
responsible part of the nation. Such cheap general papers as ex
isted were crude, rag-tag-and-bobtail affairs without plan or direc
tion. What an opportunity there was for a venturesome publisher!
"The Lower orders," a correspondent wrote to Archibald Con
stable in 1825, "at present are somewhat in the same situation in
which the higher and middling ranks were at the time when Mr.
332 The English Common Reader
Addison and the other authors of the Spectator, etc., took them in
hand, and contributed so much to their improvement by dealing
out to them constant doses of religious, moral, philosophical, criti
cal, literary sentiment and information, and may be said almost to
have formed the minds of the better orders of the people for suc
cessive generations." He therefore proposed to Constable, who was
then dreaming of reaching the millions through his Miscellany, a
paper that should address the lower orders "in a tone of perfect
confidence and equality—should encourage them in every liberal
and enlightened study—should show them how differences in rank
have arisen in the world, and in what way alone men can rise ad
vantageously from a lower rank to a higher/* and calling them,
"with a voice of authority, to abandon low and brutal vices, and to
go on in the grand course of industry, virtuous contentment, and
the ambition of knowledge and improvement/'37 This was the pro
gram of the day, but it remained for other hands than Con-
stable's to carry it out.
III . Between 1827 and 1832 Britain, as we
have seen, went through its first great cheap-literature craze.
Cheap books—or relatively cheap ones—led the way: Constable's
Miscellany, the Libraries of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge,
Murray's Family Library, Cadell's cut-rate Scott, and the rest.
The assumptions that inspired the production of these series were
also applied to family periodicals. Early in 1832 appeared two
cheap "wholesome" papers whose success had much to do with the
character of journalism for the middle class (not, to be sure, the
class for which they were designed) in the approaching Victorian
era. Chambers9 s Edinburgh Journal was launched on February 4;
Charles Knight's Penny Magazine on March 31.
The aims of the two new ventures were essentially the same. In
his "Address to His Readers" William Chambers promised that
his three-halfpenny weekly would have something of interest and
value for everyone: "Literary and Scientific subjects, including
articles on the Formation and Arrangements of Society; short Es
says on Trade and Commerce; observations on Education in its
different branches . . . ; sketches in Topography and Statistics,
37
Thomas Constable, Archibald Constable and His Literary Correspondents (Edinburgh,
1873), II, 450-51,
Periodicals and Newspapers, 1800-1800 SSS
relative to Agriculture, Gardening, Planting, Sheep-farming, the
making of Roads, Bridges, and Canals; the establishment of Fer
ries, the best means of Conveyance by Land and Water; Increase
of Population; the Uses of Machinery to simplify Human Labour,
Manufactures, &c"—to say nothing of information on emigration,
articles for artisans, young ladies, boys, "men who reflect deeply
on the constitution of man," and so on almost indefinitely.38
The Penny Magazine offered an equally panoramic program of
instruction, with even greater emphasis upon practical knowledge.
In the first volume Knight introduced also many features of less
demonstrably "useful" value—articles on literature, the fine arts,
history, and other topics of cultural interest—but these were
dropped from succeeding volumes with a suddenness that suggests
an enforced change of policy. For the Penny Magazine's, sponsors,
the publications committee of the Society for the Diffusion of Use
ful Knowledge, were, Knight himself later remarked, "as opposed
to works of imagination, as if they had been 'budge doctors of the
Stoic fur/ whose vocation was to despise everything not of direct
utility." 39
It had taken some persuasion to get the society to undertake a
periodical for the lower orders in the first place. Some members felt
that the publication of a penny magazine was beneath the dignity
of such a group; during the preliminary discussions, one "old
gentleman of the Whig school" kept muttering over and over, "It
is very awkward/ 540 Chambers, on the other hand, was a free
agent. Unlike Knight, who could print no fiction, he leavened his
loaf of utilitarian instruction with a weekly short story—"a nice
amusing tale," as he put it, "either original, or selected from the
best modern authors—no ordinary trash about Italian castles, and
daggers, and ghosts in the blue chamber, and similar nonsense, but
something really good."41 This was the great point of difference
between the two periodicals, and it had much to do with the fact
that the Penny Magazine went under in 1845 while Chambers's
** Chambers's Journal, I (1832), 1.
39
Knight, Passages of a Working Life, II, 315. This book contains (II, 179-94) the fullest
available history of the Penny Magazine. Webb, The British Working Class Reader, pp.
77-80, gives a good critical account of both it and Chambers*3 Journal.
« Knight, II, 181.
« Chambers's Journal, I (1832), 1.
834 The English Common Reader
Journal prospered down to the end of the century and beyond—
indeed, to our own time.
Affiliation with the Useful Knowledge Society handicapped the
Penny Magazine in other ways. The fact that Brougham and his
clique were its sponsors disturbed middle-class Tories on two
counts, political and religious.42 Commercial publishers resented
the intrusion into their preserve of a non-profit organization, bent,
they feared, on cornering the cheap-periodical market. Many work-
ing-class readers reacted to the magazine as they did to every
other scheme hatched by the Brougham faction.
Chambers^ Journal again was more fortunate in that it was
frankly a commercial enterprise, and though its underlying pur
pose duplicated that of the Penny Magazine, it had no connection
with controversial parties like Brougham's. Chambers was re
solved that neither Church nor Dissent, neither Tories nor Whigs,
and least of all radicals, would affect its policy. Thus the paper was
welcomed by many who would have rejected one sponsored by,
say, the Church of England or by a group of men notorious for
their liberal sympathies. But this studied independence had its
own unhappy side. Chambers was acutely conscious that he was
walking on eggs; as a man who staked his fortune on the success of
the paper, he could afford to offend no one. This cautiousness led
him to steer away from most, though not all, controversial subjects
and to exercise tireless vigilance over the paper's prose. "Number
less topics and expressions," he said, "which the conductors of
hardly any other periodical work would think objectionable, are
avoided by us, and . . . we hardly ever receive a contribution from
the most practised writers, which does not require purification be
fore we deem it fit for insertion."43 Inevitably, blamelessness
shaded into innocuousness; in his zeal to avoid giving offense on
any side, Chambers kept from the Journal the qualities necessary
to win working-class readers accustomed to the hard-hitting com
mentary of the political press and the melodrama of both the Sun
42
Dr. Arnold of Rugby was one of those who, while deeply in sympathy with the pro
gram to educate the people through a cheap press, felt that the society "should take a more
decided tone on matters of religion." He went so far as to send the magazine some contribu
tions designed to help "Christianize" it. Arnold objected also to the "ramble-scramble"
character of the Penny Magazine, taking the position that the masses would be enlightened
through cheap newspapers rather than miscellanies (A. P. Stanley, Life and Correspondence
of Thomas Arnold (1898), I, 262, 277, 299).
« Chambers's Journal, IV (1835), 1.
Periodicals and Newspapers, 1800-1850 SS5
27])—and its later rivals in the family periodical field, such as the Penny Magazine, re
lieved the monotony of their letterpress with cuts. Grisly illustrations helped sell penny
numbers of sensational fiction, and drawings were a feature of the shoal of short-lived
comic papers that preceded Punch (1841). The systematic illustration of current events,
however, seems not to have been attempted until the early forties.
Periodicals and Newspapers, 1800-1850 345
Exposes of governmental corruption, ministerial obstinacy, the
stupidity or knavery of politicians, the greed of employers, and the
sexual immorality reputedly endemic in the ruling class had a
powerful appeal to multitudes who cared little for their specific
political implications but relished their sensationalism.
Thus the new mass-circulation newspapers never pulled their
punches as they offered fresh evidence of the social, economic, and
political inequities which divided England into the two nations of
Disraeli's phrase. If they caused somewhat less alarm on the higher
levels of society than had their predecessors in the field of working-
class journalism, it was chiefly because the accidents of history had
provided them with respectable company. Many of the com
plaints and proposals they voiced were echoed by the middle-class
faction that had crystallized around the Anti-Corn-Law League.70
Much more objectionable, from the middle-class viewpoint,
were the penny weeklies issued for factory hands, unskilled la
borers, street Arabs, and the like in the early forties. Some of these
tried to combine in four or, at the most, sixteen pages every con
ceivable attraction, as the catch-all title of Bell's Penny Dispatch,
Sporting and Police Gazette, and Newspaper of Romance, and Penny
Sunday Chronicle well illustrates. Others were satisfied to concen
trate upon only one or two features. But the element common to
all of them was crude sensationalism. Some editors, who liked to
live dangerously, gave their readers budgets of crime news while
staying just outside the reach of the newspaper stamp authorities.
Others printed only high-powered stories and serial romances.
Edward Lloyd did both; first he brought out his Penny Sunday
Times and People's Police Gazette, and then he added to it a "Com
panion," or supplement, which contained thrilling tales and noth
ing else. The initial success of this venture led at once to his start
70
Of the cheap weekly newspapers originating in the 1840's, Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper
enjoyed the longest prosperity. Begun in 1842 as a direct imitation of the Illustrated London
News, it ran afoul of the stamp law, and Lloyd was forced to revamp it and to raise its
price from %d, to 3d. Assisted by energetic advertising—Lloyd pressed the queen's coinage
into his service by stamping every penny that came into his till with "Lloyds Weekly
Newspaper" on one side and "Purchase Number One of Lloyd's Last Penny Publication"
on the other (Newspaper Stamp Committee, Q. 971)—the paper's circulation climbed to
350,000 in 1863- To print these enormous editions, Lloyd installed the first Hoe presses in
England. Douglas Jerrold was its editor from 1852 to 1857; according to a contemporary,
he found the paper "in tne gutter and annexed it to literature" (Walter Jerrold, Douglas
JerrM: Dramatist and Wit [nA.], II, 158). While many deplored its radicalism and what
they considered its violent tone, the paper had solid virtues.
346 The English Common Reader
ing a Penny Weekly Miscellany and a Penny Atlas and Weekly Reg
ister of Novel Entertainment
None of these papers lasted more than a few seasons. But by
demonstrating the semiliterate audience's thirst for vicarious ex
citement, they established sensational fiction as a prime requisite in
cheap journalism. General weekly newspapers began to serialize
romances; as early as 1841 the Sunday Times ran Ainsworth's Old
St. PauVs. And even more important, these early experiments
pointed the way for three cheap periodicals which achieved and
long retained immense circulations on the strength of their melo
dramatic fiction: the Family Herald (1842), the London Journal
(1845), and Reynolds9 Miscellany (1846). The popularity of such
papers did not-give-eortspicuous comfort to those who, a few years
earlier, had felt that the welcome given the Penny Magazine and
Chambers9s Journal was a sure sign that the reading tastes of the
masses were improving.
But there was even more deplorable evidence of the depths to
which cheap journalism could descend. From the middle thirties
into the sixties at least, there was a thriving trade in scandalous or
pornographic papers and periodical guides to London low life: the
Town, the Fly, the Star of Venus: or Shew-Up Chronicle, the Lon
don Satirist, Paul Pry, Peeping Tom, the Fast Man, and so on.
What their circulations were, we have no way of knowing. Some
were blackmail sheets; all were so scurrilous and licentious that
even the most liberal-minded apologist for popular taste could not
defend them. Thackeray's comment in 1838, after surveying a
half-crown's worth of such sheets, epitomizes the disgust they
aroused among all but their constant readers: ". . . the schoolmas
ter is abroad, and the prejudices of the people [against wickedness]
disappear. Where we had one scoundrel we may count them now
by hundreds of thousands. We have our penny libraries for de
bauchery as for other useful knowledge; and colleges like palaces
for study—gin-palaces, where each starving Sardanapalus may
revel until he die.5*71 To all who denied the wisdom of spreading
cheap literature among the masses, the existence of these papers—
or, after they disappeared, their evil memory—was more than suf
ficient to strengthen their bleakest convictions.
On the other hand, grounds for optimism could be found in the
71
"Half a Crown's Worth of Cheap Knowledge," Frcuer't Magazine, XVH (1838), 290.
Periodicals and Newspapers, 1800-1850 347
growing popularity of papers which, far from catering to base in
stincts, provided wholesome instruction and harmless entertain
ment. Admittedly, one of their prize exhibits, the Penny Magazine*
succumbed in 1845 to the competition of the weekly newspapers
and the increasing preference for fiction. But its coeval, Chambers9s
Journal, continued to purvey an assortment of banal short stories
and serials, factual articles, thumb-nail biographies, little visits to
famous landmarks, and similar instructive miscellany. Periodicals
like Eliza Cook's Journal, Howitfs Journal, and the People's Jour
nal, offering the same sort of varied diet, along with liberal political
opinions in the case of some, enjoyed substantial prosperity in the
late forties.
On a higher level of literary interest was Dickens* Household
Words, which began its career in 1850 with a (short-lived) circula
tion of 100,000. Though sometimes banal and oversentimental, at
%d. it was a remarkable bargain. The writing and editing were done
by competent professi6nals; controversial issues were treated
forthrightly; general articles were not merely patronizing rehashes
of useful information; and the fiction was something more than the
customary circumspect "family" narrative, whose perfunctory
morality did not wholly conceal a yawning emptiness of ideas.
Household Words was primarily a middle-class paper, with little
appeal to the average working-class reader, and as such it could
not match the circulation of such sheets as the London Journal and
the Family Herald. Its great importance is that through the excel
lence of its contents and the prestige of Dickens* name it helped to
break down further the still powerful upper- and middle-class
prejudice against cheap papers. A modest price, in this instance at
least, could not be construed as a guarantee of shoddy writing and
sensational, salacious, or seditious notions. Instead, every middle-
class reader who wished to keep up with his Dickens was forced to
buy Household Words every week, because Hard Times was serial
ized there alone; and the constant variety of other features, fiction
and non-fiction, which flowed in from well-known and highly
reputable writers made a regular reading of the periodical, however
cheap, a necessity in cultivated households.
This, then, was the situation when the problem of the mass
reading audience, especially as it applied to the cheap periodical
press, engaged the attention of Parliament once more.
Periodicals and Newspapers
CHAPTEE 15 t
1851-1900
5
Newspaper Stamp Committee, Qq. 2481-2551. Curiously, there are some quite wide
discrepancies between these figures and another set Heywood gave to Henry Mayhew
only a year or two earlier (see Dodds, The Age of Paradox, pp. 125-28). The differences
seemingly are too great to be accounted for by the normal fluctuations of popular demand.
Must we suspect that Heywood doctored his figures for the occasion?—For a similar ac
count of periodical sales in Leicester in 1850, see A. Temple Patterson, Radical Leicester
(Leicester, 1954), p. 380.
352 The English Common Reader
With thesefiguresmay be compared the weekly sales of cheap part-
issues of various types of literature:
Lloyd's penny numbers of sensational fiction: six
teen titles then current, total sale 3,400
Reynolds* Mysteries of the Court of London 1,500
Reprint of Southey's Wat Tyler 450
The London Apprentice 400
Shakespeare in penny numbers 150
Spencer, whose occupancy of the witness stand was the most di
verting part of the whole inquiry, let it be known that God in
tended man not to be satisfied with the Bible and Chambers^
Journal. "It is the will of the Almighty," he said, "that a man
should know the things that concern himself; the taxes of the day,
and the laws concern him. . . . The Bible contained news some
thousands of years ago; it contains excellent precepts, but as to the
news part of it, the history of the Kings and the Chronicles of old
times, that may not affect so much a man at this day, yet it gives
him a right to expect to know the events of the present day; and
whatever else a man reads, he will desire to know that/* 10
Four years later (1855) the proposal to abolish the newspaper
tax once more reached the floor of Commons. Introducing the
measure, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said that the die-hards
who identified the spread of reading with the rise of Demos were
still vocal. He had heard from "many quarters" that the measure
"will open the floodgates of sedition and blasphemy, and . . . will
inundate the country with licentious and immoral productions,
. . . will undermine the very foundations of society, and scatter the
seeds of revolution broadcast over the land."11 The Times, on the
other hand, was converted. The duty, it thundered, was "a tax on
knowledge . . . a tax on light, a tax on education, a tax on truth, a
tax on public opinion, a tax on good order and good government,
a tax on society, a tax on the progress of human affairs, and on the
working of human institutions."12 No radical reformer had ever
denounced the newspaper stamp in more comprehensive terms.
After long debate, the government's bill was passed, and the stamp
(except for postal purposes) was no more. In 1861 the only surviv
ing "tax on knowledge," the paper duty, was removed, and for the
first time since the reign of Queen Anne the press was completely
free of fiscal restrictions.
At last daily newspapers came down in price. The Daily Tele
graph was reduced to a penny in 1856, followed by the Standard
10
Ibid., Qq. 2384, 2387.
11
Hansard, Ser. 3, CXXXVII (1855), col. 782. For two critiques of the Cobdenite
position on the newspaper stamp, see Fraser's Magazine, XLIV (1851), 339-54, and the
Edinburgh Review, XCVIII (1853), 488-518.
12
Quoted in Hansard as just cited, col. 811.
Periodicals and Newspapers, 1861-1900 355
(1858), and at greater distance by the Daily News, the Daily
Chronicle, the Pall Mall Gazette, the St. James's Gazette, and the
venerable Morning Post. Nor did the cheapening process end there.
In 1868 appeared CasselPs Echo, at the unheard-of price of a half
penny, and thirteen years later the Evening News came out at the
same price.
No longer, therefore, were daily newspapers beyond the reach of
the great body of middle-class buyers. In the sixties the Times,
which in 1850 had sold four times as many copies as the three
other "senior" London dailies put together, was overtaken by its
livelier competitors. While the Times3s sales hovered between
50,000 and 60,000 (rising to the neighborhood of 100,000 on such
occasions as the wedding of the Prince of Wales and the death of
the Prince Consort), the Daily News's circulation reached a steady
150,000 at the time of the'Franco-Prussian War, &nd the Daily
Telegraph, attaining 200,000 in the early seventies, was able to
compliment itself on the largest circulation in the world.13
But events did not substantiate the liberals' contention that it
would be the working classes who would profit most from lowering
the price of daily newspapers. Whether or not they really wanted
daily papers, as had been alleged during the campaign against the
tax, workers did not buy them for some thirty or forty years
after the penny daily came into being. The papers themselves
made no great effort to attract lower-class readers. They remained
what they had always been, papers for the upper and the sub
stantial middle classes, giving most of their space to weightily
reported political news and devoting relatively little attention to
such topics of mass interest as sport and crime. Only in the 1890's,
when the Harmsworth influence began to make itself felt, notably
with the Daily Mail (1896), did the daily newspaper begin to cir
culate widely among workingmen.
Meanwhile, the mass audience remained faithful to the Sunday
papers it had grown up with. In 1880 a writer in the Quarterly Re
view divided these into two categories. The ones he deemed "re
13
On daily journalism in the mid- and late-Victorian periods, see Ensor, England, 1870
19U, pp. 143-45, 310-16; The History of "The Times," Vol. II, chap, xiv, and Vol. Ill ,
chap, iv; and Bourne, English Newspapers, Vol. II, passim. As in the preceding chapter,
documentation for circulation figures will be given in connection with Appendix C.
356 The English Common Reader
spectable" were the Observer, the Sunday Times, which had a well-
balanced menu of general news and comment on drama, sport,
music, and letters, and, despite their radical politics, the News of
the World and the Weekly Times, which enjoyed great favor among
artisans and small tradesmen. The remaining three popular weekly
newspapers were "distinguished chiefly by the violence and even
brutality of their tone": the Weekly Dispatch ("very strong writ
ing . . . somewhat gross personalities"), Lloyd9s Weekly Newspaper
("the staple of the leading articles is discontent . • . with every
thing . . . which is not of the lowest workingman level") and
Reynolds9 Weekly Newspaper ("even worse than Lloyd's").1* These
were, of course, the judgments of a writer in a review never re
markable for its popular sympathies, and the papers condemned
were politically not as reprehensible, or at least as inflammatory,
as the comments suggest; "radical" is an elastic term, and in late
Victorian days it might mean nothing more than fervent Glad
stonianism.
One of the greatest effects of the abolition of the newspaper tax
was to spread the newspaper-reading habit throughout the prov
inces. Immediately after 1855 daily papers were published for the
first time in Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, and other cities. In
Manchester alone, by 1876, the total circulation of daily papers
was around 125,000.15 The impetus thus supplied to local journal
ism resulted in a striking increase in periodical publishing gen
erally. By 1873, 889 periodicals of all descriptions, including news
papers, were being issued in the provinces, in addition to 144 in
Scotland and 59 in Wales.16 The mass-circulation London weekly
newspapers had to meet growing competition from local ones, espe
cially with the introduction of the syndicate system by firms like
Tillotson's of Bolton, which provided stereotypes of serial fiction
on a subscription basis. Starting in 1873, Tillotson's "Fiction Bu
reau" bought serial rights from some of the most popular novelists
of the time, among them Wilkie Collins, Trollope, Miss Braddon,
Mayne Reid, Mrs. Lynn Linton, and Charles Reade. Nearer the
end of the century this agency syndicated work by Hardy, Kip-
u
"The Newspaper Press," Quarterly Review, CL (1880), 498-5S7.
18
Publishers* Circular, April 1,1876, pp. 245-46.
18
Chambers** Journal, Ser. 4, X (1873), 285-87.
Periodicals and Newspapers, 1851-1900 357
17
ling, Bennett, Barrie, Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells. The result
was that the weekly paper, with its agreeable combination of serial
fiction and local news, became more and more appealing to readers
in provincial towns and the countryside.
which, until the sixties, had been inadequately cared for, largely
because of the rush to accommodate the semiliterate millions. This
was the middle-class audience of superior education but relatively
little spending money: the people who disdained cheap weeklies,
with a few exceptions like Household Words, but who could not
spare the two shillings or half-crown at which the principal
monthly magazines were priced. To their rescue came the shilling
monthly. Within three months of each other, in the winter of
1859-60, Macmillan's Magazine and the Cornhill Magazine were
launched. The first number of the latter sold an astounding total,
considering its price, of 120,000 copies. This was one of the most
heartening events in the whole history of English periodicals, for
the Cornhill, with its unmatched array of talent—Trollope (Fram
ley Parsonage), Thackeray (Roundabout Papers), Mrs. Browning,
and Ruskin all contributed to the first volume—was a first-class
magazine. That it could attract so many purchasers seemed proof
that the audience of serious readers had expanded almost apace
with that of the entertainment seekers.
The CornhilVs initial success, however, was short-lived. Many of
its first readers were attracted by its novelty but soon were re
pelled by its quality. They wanted shilling magazines, but they
also wanted more fiction and a lighter literary tone than the Corn-
hill gave them. Hence they transferred their patronage to the nu
merous "popular" monthlies that sprang up in the CornhilVs wake.
But, as William Tinsley, who started Tinsley9 s Magazine in 1867,
wrote, "There were more magazines in the wretched field than
there were blades of grass to support them." 22 Despite an occasion
al spectacular beginning (the Broadway Magazine, for example,
sold 100,000 copies of its first issue in 1867), the leading monthlies
of the class of Temple-Bar, St. James9s, and Belgravia had an aver
age circulation of 15,000 or less. So, at least, reported a writer in
1884.23 The competition grew ever keener, especially when six
penny magazines appeared on the scene.
Hence it appeared that the genuinely serious audience could not
be measured in six figures, as had been mistakenly inferred from
the CornhilVsfirstsuccess. The periodicals that catered to this pub-
lic—the Fortnightly, the Contemporary, the Nineteenth Century—all
22
Tinsley , Random Recollections, I , 3 2 3 - 2 4 .
23
Charles E. Pascoe, "The Story of the English Magazines,'* pp. 372-74.
360 Tlte English Common Reader
had small circulations. The fact that leading reviews of this type
had to be priced at a half-crown is proof enough that a wider mar
ket, which would have permitted a reduction of price, was not yet
in sight.
Meanwhile, the most widely circulated periodicals, apart from
the weekly newspapers, were the "family" papers meant for the
indifferently educated reader.24 Among these, the two which had
led the field in the fifties retained their supremacy down into the
eighties. The staple of both the Family Herald and the London
Journal was short stories and full-length novels. These were al
ways escapist: the masses never read, and evidently never cared to
read, about people in their own walk of life. Instead they avidly
consumed, year after year and decade after decade, fiction dealing
with the aristocracy of wealth or blood, whose lives were crammed
with crises and no little sin. There was a contemporary feeling that
the Family Herald's fiction was a cut above that of the London
Journal. One critic, probably not intending the compliment to be
left-handed, deemed its stories better than the average run of
three-decker novels issued by the fashionable publishers.25 The
London Journal, on the other hand, was partial to tales of a more
emphatically melodramatic sort. Its very name, indeed, became
associated with a certain genre of thrilling story which had been
developed by one of the most prolific and popular of Victorian
writers, J. F. Smith—long a mainstay of the London Journal—and
by such other figures as Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Mrs. Henry
Wood, Pierce Egan the younger, and Charles Reade.
Fiction was not, however, the exclusive preoccupation of these
family papers. They gave much space to "Answers to Correspond
ents/' which dealt with every subject from the date of Frederick
the Great's death to the population of Tasmania, from how to pre
pare a cheap stew to what a girl should do when she was ogled in
church or fell in love with two married men at the same time. One
suspects that many of the queries, especially the ones which today
would be addressed to reference librarians, were concocted in the
editorial office; but to the extent to which the questions were genu
ine, the "Answers to Correspondents" columns provide an instruc
** On the tone and content of the mass-circulation papers in the period 1850-1900, see
the articles listed in the Bibliography under Bosanquet, "Byways of Literature," "Cheap
Literature,** Wilkie Collins, Hitchman, "The Literature of Snippets,** "The Literature of
the Streets," March-Phillipps, Millar, Payn, Pennell, Salmon, Strnhan, Thomas Wright.
25
Hitchman, "The Penny Press," p. 390.
Periodicals and Newspapers, 1851-1900 861
305
366 The English Common Reader
varied'* (A. P. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold [1898], II, 146). One
questions, however, whether Arnold would have been very enthusiastic about Answers,
Tit-Bits, Rare Bits, and the other papers of the Harmsworth-Newnes-Pearson school which
encouraged the reader to follow his counsel.
11
Letter cited in n. 5 above.
13
Letters (Nonesuch ed.), II, 548.
» Chambers*s Journal, Ser. 4, I (1864), 578.
The Past and the Present 871
It was argued, too, that the purposes for which the common
people read and the nature of their reading (so long as it was not
really immoral) were less important than the fact that they read at
all. Half a loaf was better than none; and a man reading was a man
saved from coarser amusements. He might not profit conspicuously
from what he read, but at least while he had a book or paper before
him he did not get drunk, commit a burglary, or beat his wife.
Hence even the masses' addiction to novels was not necessarily a
sign of national decadence.
But inost important of all, the men of hope who followed in Sir
John HerschePs train challenged the assumption that the common
man was irrevocably committed to idle, aimless, and profitless
reading habits. According to Herschel's view, of which Charles
Knight was perhaps the most stubborn advocate despite the in
numerable disillusionments he suffered, it was both illogical and
inhumane to assume that the capacity for improvement which
many Victorians believed to be almost universal in creation had
somehow been omitted from humble men and women. Knight
stoutly claimed to have seen this principle of progress reflected in
the changes of popular reading taste during his own lifetime. "The
scurrilous stage—the indecent stage—the profane stage—the Sedi
tious stage" had been passed. "Let us hope," said Knight, "that
the frivolous stage . . . will in time pass on to a higher taste, and a
sounder mental discipline."14 And, in his incorrigible optimism, he
believed that it would.
Those who shared this faith felt that the task of improving
popular reading taste was one for educators and publishers. It was
foolish to expect much progress so long as the great majority of
children left school without being able or inclined to read anything
more elevated than a penny dreadful. The first job, then, was to
transform the child's early experience of the printed word from a
stupid chore to a pleasure, and at the same time to inculcate the
first germs of taste. But since under even the best conditions only a
small beginning could be made during the child's few years in the
classroom, the second responsibility was to attract adolescents to
good books after their formal education had ended. This could be
done only on Dr. Johnson's principle: "I would let [a boy] at first
read any English book which happens to engage his attention; be-
u
The Old Printer and the Modern Press, p. 300.
372 The English Common Reader
cause you have done a great deal when you have brought him to
have entertainment from a book* He'll get better books after-
wards.*'15 Reading had to be proved palatable before it could be
made nourishing. This, as we have seen, was the ground upon
which some people insisted that light literature should not be
barred from mechanics' institutes and free libraries. It was not an
end in itself, but a means to a higher end.
But it was not enough to cultivate the desire to read good books;
just as important was the necessity for showing the masses of
people how to read. Wilkie Collins, in his perceptive article in
Household Words (1858), pointed out quite correctly that the
queries addressed to the "Answers to Correspondents" sections in
various cheap periodicals reflected a terrible ignorance of "almost
everything which is generally known and understood among
readers whom circumstances have placed, socially and intellectu
ally, in the rank above them."16 Attempts to serialize books like
The Count of Monte Cristo and The Wandering Jew in penny papers
had resulted in serious losses of circulation, because readers were
baffled by foreign titles and references to foreign manners and cus
toms. Not until the common reader acquired a fund of elementary
general knowledge could he read with fair comprehension any
books of some literary merit.
Again, there was the question of guidance. Granted that the
reader had a genuine desire to refine his taste and broaden his un
derstanding: who would tell him what books to seek? Ernest Rhys,
writing of the experience of a popular reprint series which asked
readers to nominate new titles for the series, said that the mixed
quality of the lists received revealed the pathetic need for advice
among the mechanics and tradesmen, miners and peasants who
sent them in.17 The attempts made in this direction late in the
nineteenth century—primers of literature, Sir John Lubbock's
much publicized list of the hundred best books, the lists of the
National Home Reading Union, the very occasional leaflets of sug
gestions distributed by public libraries—were all to the good, but
they fell into the hands of only a few among the millions whom
they conceivably could have benefited.
18
Boswell, Life of Johnson (Hill-Powell ed.), Ill , 385.
M
Collins, "The Unknown Public/* p. 222.
17
Encyclopaedia and Dictionary of Education, ed. Foster Watson (1021), I, 204.
The Past and tlie Present 37S
The final problem was the availability of good reading matter.
Not until the latter part of the century was there a wide selection
of books of substantial literary merit priced so low as to compete
with other commodities and entertainments for the workingman's
little spending money. Even though the lowering of prices was ac
companied by wider distribution, through news agents and drapers
and other channels, this was not enough. As a writer in the Nine
teenth Century in 1886 put it, "If the literature were lying on their
[the workingmen's] 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. Beyond doubt they have be
come possessors of thousands of cheap volumes, but the working
men and women of England do not number thousands, but mil
lions. . . . The working classes read the Sunday newspaper as
largely as they do because it is left at their door. What religious
organisations have done in the distribution of tracts which the
working classes do not read, surely some other organisation might
do for the distribution of works of a wholesome character and of
abiding interest which they would read/' 18
Thus in all the hundreds of pages of discussion that the rise of
the mass public evoked during the Victorian era, there are few, if
any, notions which we do not find echoed in modern commentary.
We have inherited the same two-sided attitude toward the com
mon reader. On the one hand, pessimism: "People in general/* said
Dr. Johnson long before there was a large audience for print, "do
not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse
them." 19 The belief that aversion to serious reading is ineradicably
rooted in the human makeup has been strengthened every time a
scheme for increasing people's interest in print has failed. Equally
convenient "proof*' has been found in the superior popularity of
non-literary pastimes, whether the dancing casino in the 1840's or
the cinema in the 1940's. The experience of the past (and, for that
matter, the present) is read as a sure portent of the future. But
behind this whole fatalistic attitude can be detected a survival of
venerable social prejudice. Even those with an unswerving emo
tional and intellectual commitment to democracy as a political
18
Nineteenth Century, X X (1886), 116.
"BoswdMV, 218.
374 The English Common Reader
principle sometimes betray skepticism when democratic theory is
applied to the problem of the reading audience. The capacities that
qualify a man to vote intelligently are not the same, inf erentially,
as those which qualify him to be a devotee of books.
On the other hand, hope: the belief that the literary enfranchise
ment of the people only awaits discovery of the right formula. A
conscious desire to read may be felt by comparatively few; cer
tainly in the nineteenth century there was no widespread popu-
lar—proletarian—agitation to have books and periodicals made
available to all. The average human being does not press for cul
tural advantages as he does for what he deems his political or so
cial rights. But the capacity tofindknowledge, inspiration, escape,
and sheer delight in reading is latent in far more people than have
ever become confirmed booklovers. And that capacity has nothing
to do with social or economic status. The memoirs of self-educated
men from the nineteenth-century English working class, as well as
the experience, both then and now, of teachers, librarians, and
publishers of inexpensive series of good books, prove that the de
sire and the ability to enrich one's life through reading are not
contingent on occupation, weekly wage, or family background.
Education has enlarged the reading public, and to some extent
enlightened it; but education has only begun the task, and it has,
in fact, taken the wrong path at least as often as the right one.
With the possible exception of newly published titles, publishers
have made good books cheap enough; in neither Britain nor the
United States can there any longer be complaint on that score. If
the audience for books and relatively serious periodicals remains
dishearteningly small, it is because people still have not been suf
ficiently schooled to value and use good literature and because
facilities for distribution still are inadequate. Those who retain the
faith of Herschel and Knight persist in believing that a mass mar
ket for the best literature, a market large enough to reward many
enterprising publishers, can in time be created if every force of
modern education is intelligently used: not only the classroom
teaching of reading and its uses but all the devices of adult educa
tion, including the public library. They find comfort in the fact
that the doom of the reading habit has been falsely prophesied ever
since the invention of the pneumatic tire, which spelled the end of
Tfte Past and the Present 375
379
380 The English Common Reader
1832 Chambers'$ Journal and the Penny Magazine begin.
1833 First state aid (£20,000) for elementary schools.
1834 Select Committee on Education inquiry reveals deplorable state of
schools.
1836 Newspaper tax reduced to Id,
1836-37 Success of Pickwick Papers begins great vogue of fiction in shilling
parts.
1837 Paper duty cut in half.
1839-40 "Moral-force" Chartism crusades for better educational provision.
First official figures on literacy rate: males, 67 per cent, females, 51
per cent.
1840 Penny post introduced.
1840 and after. Great increase in circulation of weekly newspapers and
cheap part-issue fiction. Steam printing machines generally adopted.
1842 Beginning of Mudie's circulating library.
1847 Mclntyre and Simms' Parlour Library: reprints selling for Is.
1848 W. H. Smith and Son take first lease on railway bookstalls.
1849 Public Libraries Committee inquiry.
1850 Ewart's Public Libraries Bill enacted.
1851 Newspaper Stamp Committee inquiry.
1852 "Underselling" practice approved by Lord Campbell's committee.
Uncle Tom's Cabin breaks all best-seller records.
1855 Newspaper tax repealed. First Hoe rotary press in England, installed
for Lloyd's Newspaper.
1857 Cost of paper reduced by use of esparto as ingredient.
1860 First number of CornhUl Magazine sells 120,000 copies.
1861 Paper tax repealed.
1862 "Payment by results" system introduced into schools, with effect of
intensifying pupils* dislike of books.
1870 Forster's Education Act.
1873 University extension courses begin.
1876 "English literature" introduced as a subject in elementary schools;
increased demand for suitable textbooks.
1880 Elementary education made compulsory. Newnes' Tit-Bits starts new
era in cheap journalism.
1880 and after. Popular series of classics issued at 6d. or less. The sixpenny
reprint novel adopted by leading publishers.
1886 Linotype machine introduced.
ca. 1894 End of the three-decker "library" novel.
1896 Harmsworth's Daily Mail makes the daily paper "popular."
APPENDIX B | Best-Sellers
881
382 The English Common Header
1819-22 William Hone and George Cruikshank's "The Political House That
Jack Built": 47 editions in a year, total 100,000 copies. The same
team's *'Queen's Matrimonial Ladder," 44 editions; their "Non Mi
Ricordo," 31 editions. Total of all five Hone-Cniikshank squibs is
sued at this time, about 250,000.2
1821-22 Cobbett's [so-called] Sermons: "English circulation" by the end of the
series, 150,000; by 1828,211,000.3
1823 Catnach's "Full, True, and Particular Account of the Murder of
Weare by Thurtell and His Companions," 250,000. Account of
Thurtell's trial, 500,000.4
1824-26 Cobbett's History of the Protestant ''Reformation" (propaganda for
Catholic Emancipation rather than genuine history): original part-
issue reached at least 40,000 per number. In 1828 the total issue by
Cobbett alone totaled 700,000 copies of individual numbers. Many
subsequent editions by Roman Catholic publishers.5
1828 Catnach's "Confession and Execution of William Corder," l,166,000.8
1834 Bulwer's "A Letter to a Late Cabinet Minister on the Crisis," 30,000
in six weeks; about 60,000 in a later, cheaper reprint. 7
1836-87 Catnach's several "execution papers" relating to the Greenacre-Gale
murder case, total 1,650,000.8
1848-49 Broadsides, etc., issued in connection with the murder of Isaac Jenny
and his son by James Rush, 2,500,000; in connection with the Man
nings' murder of O'Connor, 2,500,000.9
1871 Rev. H. W. Pullen's "The Fight at Dame Europa's School," a 6d.
pamphlet on the Franco-Prussian War, 192,000 copies. (At least
81 separate sequels and replies were issued.)10
1871 Sir George Chesney's "The Battle of Dorking," a jeu tfesprit narrat
ing a successful invasion of England; propaganda for British Army
reorganization, first published in Blackwood's Magazine. Reprint in
pamphlet form sold 110,000 in a few months, and eventually, accord
ing to another account, 400,000. (At least twenty replies appeared.)11
1874 Jon Duan (the most radical of S. O. Beeton's Christmas annuals),
250,000 within three weeks of publication. (Part of the demand may
* Knight, Passages of a Working Life, I, 246; F. W. Hackwood, William Hone: His life
and Times (1912), pp. 194, 228.
3
Pearl, p. 117.
• Hindley, Life and Times of James Catnach (1878), pp. 142-43.
5 a
Pearl, pp. 135-37. Hindley (1878), p. 186.
7
Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton, by his grandson (1913), I, 434 n.
8
Hindley (1878), p. 281.
• Hindley, History of the Catnach Press (1887), p. 92.
» English Catalogue for 1871, pp. 92-94.
11
Ibid., p. 94; Publishers' Circular, October 2, 1871, p. 607 (hereafter cited as "P.C.").
The higherfigureis given by Joseph Shaylor, The Fascination of Books (1912), p. 154.
Best-Sellers 383
be attributed to the fact that W. H. Smith and Son's stalls bore
placards announcing that the firm refused to handle the book.)12
FICTION
SCOTT
1813 Roheby: 10,000 in three months.
1814 Waverley: first edition (1,000) sold in five weeks; total of 6,000 in six
months. 11,000 copies in collected editions of Scott's romances, 1820
29. 40,000 copies in new edition, 1829-ca. 1836.
1815 Guy Mannering: 2,000 sold a day after publication. Total sale to 1820,
10,000; sale 1820-36, 50,000.
1816 The Antiquary: 6,000 in first six days.
1818 Rob Roy: 10,000 in fortnight; total to 1836, over 40,000.13
(Between 1829 and 1849 the Waverley Novels sold 78,270 sets;
Lockhart's Memoirs of Scott [published 1837-38] 26,060; Tales of a
Grandfather, 22,190. The People's Edition of the Works, including
Lockhart's Memoirs, sold 8,518,849 weekly numbers beginning in
1855—a figure not easily translatable into volumes.14 In the 1850's
the novels fell out of copyright, one by one, and many publishers
issued reprints to compete with A. and C. Black's edition, which, as
it contained Scott's latest revised text and his illustrations and notes,
was still copyright. The total sales of Scott after this time cannot
therefore be computed.)
DICKENS (original issues only, except where noted)
1836-37 Pickwick Papers: 40,000 copies per issue at the time Part 15 appeared.16
Total sale to 1863 (in book form alone[?]), 140,000; to 1879, 800,000."
(Chapman and Hall, the original copyright owners, reported in 1892
that despite the competition offered by eleven different publishers
following the lapse of copyright, their own sales of Pickwick Papers
in the past twenty years had amounted to 521,750. The firm had
issued the book in at least ten separate editions, of which the most
popular were the two-shilling editions [250,250 copies, 1865-91],
the Charles Dickens edition [219,750 copies, 1867-91], and the
Household Edition [118,000 copies, 187S-91].17)
1838-39 Nicholas Nickleby: first number sold 50,000, a level sustained through
out the issue. Total sale to 1863 (in book form alone[?]), over 100,000.18
12
H. Montgomery Hyde, Mr. and Mrs. Beeton (1951), p. 152.
"Lockhart, Memoirs of Scott (Boston, 1861), i n , 264; IV, 174-75, 211, 290; V, 74.
14
Curwen, History of Booksellers, p. 138.
16
Johnson, Charles Dickens, 1,149.
M
"The Circulation of Modern Literature," Spectator, supplement to issue for January
3,1863, p. 17 (hereafter cited as "Circ. of Mod. Lit."); Trollope in Nineteenth Century, V
(1879), 33.
17
P.C., July 2,1892, p. 6; August 13,1892.
18
Johnson, Dickens, I, 219, 249; "Circ. of Mod. Lit.," p. 17.
384 The English Common Reader
1840-41 Master Humphrey's Clock: began at 70,000, then slumped badly, but
recovered with, the introduction of The Old Curiosity Shop and reached
100,000 before the issue was concluded.
1843-44 Martin Chuzdewit: no higher than 23,000.
1843 A Christmas Carol: 6,000 sold first day; 15,000 in year.
1844 The Chimes: 20,000 "almost at once."
1845 The Cricket on the Hearth: 30,000-40,000(?)
1846-48 Dombey and Son: about 30,000(?)
1848 The Haunted Man: 18,000 first day.
1849-50 David Copperfield: 25,000.
1852-53 Bleak House: 35,000.
1855 Little Dorrit: began at 35,000 or more.
1864 Our Mutual Friend: Part 1 sold 30,000 in three days.19
1870 The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Part 1, 50,000.20
(In 1871, the "penny edition" of Oliver Twist [weekly numbers, month
ly parts] sold 150,000 in three weeks; David Copperfield sold 83,000 in
an equal period.21 In 1882 it was reported that the total sale of Dickens*
works, in England alone, in the twelve years since his death amounted
to 4,239,000 volumes.22)
AlNSWORTH
1849 Windsor Castle (first issued in 1843): in cheap collected edition,
30,000 "in a short time."23
G. W. M. EEYNOLDS
1852 The Soldier's Wife: first two numbers (Id. each) sold 60,000 on day of
publication.24
1854 The Bronze Soldier: first two numbers (id. each), lOO^OO.26
(Reynolds' sales in book form and penny instalments undoubtedly
were enormous, the aggregate for his scores of romances running into
millions. These, however, are the only specific figures I have seen.)
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
1852 Uncle Tom9s Cabin: probably the greatest short-term sale of any
book published in nineteenth-century England. Ten different editions
in two weeks (Autumn, 1852); within a year, forty editions. Sales,
April-October, 1852, 150,000; total for first year (April, 1852-—April,
1853) including colonial sales, l,500,000.26
*9 Johnson, I, 297, 304, 453, 490, 497, 582, 567; II, 60S, 656, 670, 752, 756, 759, 853,
1014-15.
20
Waugh, One Hundred Years of Publishing, pp. 134-35.
» P.C., July 15,1871, p. 426, and December 9,1872, p. 807.
**Mowbray Morris, "Charles Dickens," Fortnightly Review, N.S., XXXI I (1882), 762.
M
S. M. Ellis, William Harrison Ainsworth (1911), II, 174 n.
** Montague Summers, A Gothic Bibliography (1942), p. 508.
25
Montague Summers in Times Literary Supplement, July 4, 1942, p. 336.
**Sabm, Bibliotheca Americana, XXIV, 48; Gohdes, American Literature in Nineteenth-
Century England, pp. 29-31.
Best-SeUers 385
BULWER-LYTTON
1853 Pelham (first issued 1828): railway edition (Routledge), 46,000 in
five years. Among other cheap editions of this novel, the Railway
Library edition (2a.) sold 35,750 between 1859 and 1898; one at 9s.6d.
sold 21,250 from 1873 to 1893; the Shilling Pocket edition, 20,000 in
one year (1886); and the Sixpenny Edition, 66,000 from 1879 to 1890 P
KINGSLBY
1855 Westward Ho!: 8,000 in two years. A 6VZ. reprint (1889 and later) ran to
500,000 copies.28
READE
1856 It Is Never Too Late To Mend: 65,000 in seven years.29
JAMES GRANT
1856 Romance of War in a cheap reprint: 100,000 to ca. 1882.30
HUGHES
1857 Tom Browns School Days: 11,000 in first 9 months; 28,000 to 1863.31
MRS. HENRY WOOD
1861 East Lynne: 430,000 to 1898.
1862 The Channings: 180,000 to 1898.
1862 Mrs. HaUiburton's Troubles: 120,000 to 1898.
1869 Roland Yorke: 115,000 to 1898.
(These are the four leading Wood titles among some twenty for which
Macmillan's gavefiguresin 1898. The total sales of Mrs. Henry Wood's
fiction, the firm advertised, had then reached "over two and a half
million copies."32 In all likelihood Mrs. Wood was hard pressed by
several other popular female novelists, such as Miss Braddon, but
figures are lacking.)
27
Leavis , Fiction and the Reading Public, p . 306 .
28
M o r g a n , The House of Macmillan, pp. 42-43,136.
w
"Ore. of Mod. Lit.," p. 17.
30
Mumby, The House of Routledge, p. 49.
31
Edward C. Mack and W. H. G. Armytage, Thomas Hughes (1952), p. 90; "Circ. of
Mod. Lit.," p. 17. It is interesting to compare the sales attained during the fifties by
"popular" authors like Dickens, Reynolds, and Reade with those of two other great
novelists whose books appealed to a more limited public. Thackeray sold no more than
7,000 of each monthly part of Vanity Fair (1847-48); 1,500 copies of the completed novel
were sold immediately after publication. At the beginning of 1857, Thackeray estimated
that he had an audience of 15,000 for his new works ("Lewis Melville" (i.e., Lewis S.
Benjamin], William Makepeace Thackeray [Garden City, 1928], pp. 237, 288; Letters and
Private Papers of W. M. Thackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray [Cambridge, Mass., 1945-46], IV,
3). George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) sold 3,350 in its original three-volume form and
11,000 in a cheaper two-volume form within the first year. Of The Mill on the Floss (1860),
6,000 were sold in three volumes within three months of publication. Soon after the orig
inal appearance of Middlemarch (1871), a cheaper edition at 7*.6i. sold 5,250 in three
months (Sadleir, XIX Century Fiction, 1,378; Mrs. Gerald Porter, John Blackwood [New
York, 1898], pp. 52, 384-85).
32
P.C., Christma s number , 1898 , p . 88 .
386 The English Common Reader
"HUG H CONWAY" (Frederick John Fargus)
1883 Called Back: 400,000 to 1898.33
M R S . HUMPHRY WARD
1888 Robert Elsmere: total sale of three editions (31*.6c?., 6s., 2s.6d.) to 1891,
70,500. "Hundreds of thousands" more were sold later in 6d. and 7d.
editions. Mrs. Ward's biographer says, however, that the furor over
the book was much greater in America than in England.34
DUMAUREER
1894 Trilby; 80,000 in three months.35
R. D . BLACKMORE
1897 Lorna Doone (first published 1869): Qd. reprint: advance order,
100,000.36
HALL CAINE
1897 The Christian: 50,000 in a month. 37
M A R I E CORELLI
1900 The Master Christian: 260,000 in a few years.38
POETRY
SCOTT
1805 The Lay of the Last Minstrel: 44,000 copies to 1830, including 11,000
in collected editions of Scott's poetry.
1808 Marmim: 2,000 sold in first month; 50,000 to 1836.
1810 The Lady of the Lake: 20,300 in first year; 50,000 to 1836.39
(Between 1829 and 1849, 41,340 copies of the poetical works were
sold in collected editions.)40
BYRON
1812 Childe Harold, first two cantos: 4,500 in less than six months.
1813 The Bride of Abydos: 6,000 in first month.
1814 The Corsair: 10,000 on day of publication.
1814 Lara: 6,000 in a few weeks.41
KEBLE
1827 The Christian Year: 379,000 to expiration of copyright, 1873.42
a
* Ibid,, November 12,1898, p. 577.
34
Mrs. Humphry Ward, A Writers Recollections (New York, 1918), H , 97; Janet Pen-
rose Trevelyan, Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward (New York, 1923), pp. 64, 73.
86
P.O., October 26, 1895, p. 472.
36
Ibid., October 2, 1897, p. 3 7 1 .
7
» Ibid., January 15, 1898, p. 67.
*8 Shaylor, The Fascination of Boohs, p . 241.
89
Lockhart, Memoirs of Scott, I I , 175, 294; I I I , 100.
40 Curwen, History of Booksellers, p . 138.
41
Samuel Smiles, A Pvblisher and His Friends (1891), ly 215, 222, 223, 230.
<* John Collins Francis, John Francis (1888), II, 193 n.
Bcst-Scllcrs 387
POLLOK
1827 The Course of Time: 12,000 in some 18 months; 78,000 to 1869.43
TUPPER
1838 Proverbial Philosophy: 200,000 to 1866; 50th edition, 1880.44
BARHAM
1840-47 Ingoldsby Legends (3 series): 52,000 to 186S.45
TENNYSON
1850 In Memoriam: 25,000 in first year and a half (?); 60,000 in a somewhat
longer period.
1859 Idylls of the King (first four books): first edition, 40,000; 10,000 sold
in first week.
1864 Enoch Arden: first edition, 60,000, of which 40,000 sold in a few weeks.
Tennyson's most popular volume.
1869 Idylls of the King (new books): pre-publication orders, 40,000.
(Between 1885 and 1888, Tennyson's collected editions sold about
15,000 copies a year; in the next three years, they averaged 19,000.)46
MACAULAY
1862 Lays of Ancient Rome (first published in 1842): cheap edition sold
46,000 within a year.47
LONGFELLOW
Two of the chief firms that published Longfellow's poems—Routledge
and Warne—together sold over 1,126,900 copies of Longfellow's
various volumes to 1900. More than seventy different publishers had
at least one Longfellow volume on their lists. In the fifties there
were ninety-four editions or issues; in each of the four succeeding
decades, between thirty-six and fifty-five.48
43
Margaret Oliphant, Annals of a Publishing House (New York, 1897), II, 94; P.C.,
January 16,1869, p. 8.
44
Derek Hudson, Martin Tupper: His Rise and Fall (1949), p. 40.
46
"Ore. of Mod. Lit," p. 17.
46
The first figure for In Memoriam is based on the assumption that since both the
first edition (June, 1850) and the fifth (November, 1851) consisted of 5,000 copies, the inter
vening editions were at least as large (Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., Tennyson and the Reviewers
[Cambridge, Mass., 1952], pp. 146, 156). For the other figures cited here, see Sir Charles
Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (1949), pp. 248, 819,351 (cf. P.O., December 31,1864, p. 882),
383, 524.
47
"Circ . of M o d . Lit.,' 5 p . 17 .
48
Clarence Gohdes, "Longfellow and His Authorized British Publishers/* PMLA, LV
(1940), 1179; the same, American Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, pp. 106-107.
Compared with the sales of giants like Tennyson and Longfellow, those of Browning
were minuscule. The original edition (1868-69) of The Ring and the Book, Volumes 1 and 2,
included 3,000 copies and lasted until 1882; that of Volumes 3 and 4 (2,000) until 1872.
Balaustion's Adventure (1871) sold out the first edition of 2,500 in five months: "a good
sale for the likes of me," remarked Browning (Louise Greer, Browning and America [Chapel
Hill, 1952], p. 129; W. C. DeVane, A Browning Handbook [2d ed.; New York, 1955],
p. 357).
388 The English Common Reader
JUVENILE LITERATURE
1833 Favell Lee Sevan's Peep of Day: 250,000 to 1867.61
1850 "Elizabeth Wetherell's" (i.e., Susan Warner's) The Wide, Wide World:
80,000 sold by Routledge alone.62
1851 Capt. Mayne Reid's The Scalp Hunters: "over a million copies" sold
in Great Britain alone to 1890.63
MISCELLANEOUS
1821-22 Cobbett's Cottage Economy: "pretty nearly 50,000" by 1828.78
1830 Charles Knight's The Results of Machinery: 50,000 in unspecified
time.79
1833-44 Penny Cyclopaedia: 75,000 per penny number at beginning, declining
to 20,000 at the end of issue.80
1833-35 Chambers'* Information for the People: 170,000 sets by 1872.81
1845-47 Chambers^ Miscellany: average sale in penny weekly parts, 80,000.82
1859 Smiles's Self-Help: 20,000 in the first year; 55,000 to 1863; 258,000
to 1905.83
1860 Essays and Reviews: 20,000 in two years.84
1878 Herbert Spencer's Education (first published 1860): 7,000 of the regular
edition, 42,000 of the 2*.6<Z. edition, 1878-1900.86
1881 Henry George's Progress and Poverty (6d. edition issued in 1882):
total sale to 1885, 60,000.86
1882 Carlyle's Sartor ResaHus (first published in book form in England,
1838), 6d. edition: 70,000.87
78
Pearl, William Cobbett, p. 121.
79
Knight , The Old Printer and the Modern Press, p . 248 .
80
Knight, Passages of a Working Life, II, 203.
81
Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, p. 286.
82
Chambers, Story of a Long and Busy Life, pp. 93-94; Newspaper Stamp Committee,
Q. 1346.
83
Smiles, Autobiography, p . 223; "Circ. of Mod. Lit.,*' p. 17.
*<"Circ. of Mod. Lit.," p. 17.
85
Judges (ed.), Pioneers of English Education, p. 161 n.
80
Lynd, England in the Eighteen-Eighties, p. 143.
87
Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and R. W. Emerson, ed. C. E. Norton (Boston,
1884), I, 15 n.
Periodical and Newspaper
APPENDIX C t
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INDEX
Index
431
432 The English Common Reader
Belgravia, 359 Book clubs, 61, 218-19, 294, 311
Beljame, Alexandra, 9 Book prices
Bell, Andrew, 144,145 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 19
Bell, John, and his classic reprints, 54, 55, 23
260, 267 eighteenth century, 51-54
Bell & Daldy, 285 nineteenth century, 260-317 passim
Belles-lettres Book trade
in eighteenth-century academies, 44 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 19
in nineteenth-century schools, 174-75 24
Bell's Life in London, 342, 343 eighteenth century, 40-41, 49-59
Bell's Penny Dispatch, 345 nineteenth century, 252-54, 260-317
Bell's Weekly Dispatch, 342, 343 passim
BelVs Weekly Messenger, 349, 392 Booksellers' Association, 304-5
Bennet, John, 241 Booth's Circulating Library, 217, 295
Bennett, Arnold, 357 Boots Book-lovers* Library, 318
Bentham, Jeremy, 129,131,133,148,164 n. Borough Road School, 146, 154 n.
Benthamism; see Utilitarianism Boswell, James, 47 n., 53
Bentley, Richard (late seventeenth cen Life of Johnson, 52, 388
tury), 55 Bow Bells, 361
Bentley, Richard (nineteenth century), Bowdler, Thomas, 112, 127
298, 299; see also Colburn & Bentley Bowring, Sir John, 118, 136
Bentley s Miscellany, 393 Boy's Journal, 862
Bernard, Sir Thomas, 146 Boy's Own Journal, 862
Besant, Sir Walter, 183 n., 361 Boys Own Magazine, 362, 395
Bethune, John, 241-42 Boy's Own Paper, 102, 362, 395
Bevan, Favell Lee, 388 Boy's Penny Magazine, 862
Bible, 21, 24-25, 28, 33, 56 n., 99-107 Braddon, Mary, 237, 299, 818 n., 314, 356,
passim, 116, 144, 152, 153, 154, 159, 385
246, 255, 265, 283, 354 Bray, Dr. Thomas, and his libraries, 214 n.
Bindings, 278 Bride of Abydos, The, 386
Biographies, best-selling, 388 Brighton Workingmen's Institute, 197
Bird, Robert Montgomery, 291 Bristol Public Library, 228, 237
Birkbeck, George, 189-90 British Almanac, 270
Birmingham and Midland Institute, 204 British Critic, 392
Birmingham Society of Artists, 243 British and Foreign Bible Society, 100-106
Birrell, Augustine, 55 passim
Black, A. & C , 307, 383 British and Foreign School Society, 145,
Black, Adam, 195 146, 152, 154
Black, William, 314 British Museum Library, 215-16
Black Arrow, The, 362 n. British Workman, 395
Black Beauty, 389 Broadbelt, Samuel, 246
Black Bess, 292 Broadway Magazine, 359, 395
Black Book, The, 266 Bronze Soldier, The, 384
Black Dwarf, The, 326, 328, 330, 392 Brotherton, Joseph, 224
Black Monk, The, 289 Brougham, Henry, 10, 97,129 n., 131, 139,
Blackmore, R. D., 814, 386 145,154 n., 166,188-91, 221, 223, 269
Blackwood, John, 310-11 72 passim, 282, 321, 334, 367
Blackwood's Magazine, 121, 275, 319, 382, Brown, Hannah, 288
392, 393 Brown, Samuel, and his libraries, 10,221-22
Blair, Robert, 257 Browne, Charlotte Elizabeth, 112-14
Bleak House, 384 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 359
quoted, 107 Browning, Oscar, 180
Bogue, David, 285 Browning, Robert, 2, 276, 387 n.
Bohn, Henry Charles, and his libraries, Brace's Abyssinia, 119
285-86, 308 Bryant, John Frederick, 241
Bolingbroke, Lord, 43 Bryant, William Cullen, 121
Index 433
Bryant's Analysis of Ancient Mythology, Chambers, William, 250, 280, 319, 332-37
119 passim, 393 n.
Bryce, James, 211 Chambers, R. & W. (firm), 161, 308
Bryce Commission, 187 Chambers brothers, 10, 161, 282 n.; see also
Buffon's Natural History, 119 Chambers, Robert; Chambers, Wil
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 179-80,197, 217, liam; Chambers, R. & W.
290,299, 314, S88, 340, 382,385 Chambers s Cyclopaedia of English Litera
Bunyan, John, 36, 37, 246, 255; see also ture, 389
Pilgrim*s Progress Chambers^ Information for the People, 280,
Burdett, Sir Francis, 190 390
Burke, Edmund, 49 Chambers s Journal, 189, 226 n., 287, 242,
Reflections on the French Revolution, 69 280, 332-39, 347, 351, 852, 353, 364 n.,
On the Sublime and the Beautiful, 253 370, 393, 394
Burney, Fanny, Cecilia, 50 Chambers's Miscellany, 226 n., 280, 390
Burns, Robert, 61, 207, 241, 247-48, 249, Chambers s Papers for the People, 193, 280
250, 253 81, 282 n., 351
Burt, Thomas, 91, 200, 245, 248-49, 255, Chambers s Pocket Miscellany, 280
256, 258, 303 Chambers's Repository of. . . Tracts, 280
Butler, Samuel, Hudibras, 120 Chandos Classics, 21*3
Byron, Lord, 111, 116, 117, 118, 121, 161, Channing, William Ellery, essay on Milton,
180, 181, 197, 200, 218, 247, 249, 253, 121, 256
255, 309, 386 Channings, The1, 385
Byron, Admiral John, 258 Chapbooks, 27-29, 38, 74-75, 104, 287-88
Chapman, John, 804
Cadell, Thomas, 273-74, 307, 832 Chapman & Hall, 279, 297,307,383
Caine, Hall, 314, 386 Charity schools, eighteenth century, 82-35
Call to the Unconverted, A, 38 Chartism, 8, 206-8, 209, 341
Called Back, $86 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 15, 162 n.; see also
Camden's Britannia, 21 Canterbury Tales
Campbell, Lord, 305 Cheap Magazine, 320
Campbell, Johnny, 103 Cheap Repository Tracts, 75-76, 100, 104,
Campbell, Thomas (poet), 161,181, 255 108, 122, 219
Campbell, Dr. Thomas, 40 Chesney, Sir George, 382
Canterbury Tales, The, 288, 336 Chetham, Humphrey, and his library, 213,
Carlile, Eichard, 130, 327, 393 214-15
Carlyle, Thomas, 3, 93, 128,166, 181, 182, Chettle, Henry, 17
186, 216, 234, £tf, 259, 271, 272, 284, Childe Harold, 386
390 Chimes, The, 384.
Carnegie, Andrew, 227 Christian, The, 386
Carroll, Lewis, 389 Christian Herald, 361, 395
Carter, Thomas, 54, 246, 249, 255, 256, 257 Christian Observer, 110-12, 115, 116, 117
Cassell, John, 302-4, 351, 353 Christian Socialist, 351
Cassell & Co., 302-4, 309, 355 Christian World, 361
CasselVs Family Paper, 357, 39k Christian Year, The, 386
CasselVs Illustrated History of England, 303, Christian s Penny Magazine, 338
388 Christmas Carol, A, 384
CasselVs Popular Educator, 243, 303, 389 Christmas carols, price of (1520), 21
Castle of Otranto, The, 218, 258, 291 Christmas numbers of periodicals, 863
Catnach, James, 29, 287-SS, 343, 382 Circulating libraries
Cawthorn and Hutt Library, 296 eighteenth century, 50, 59-64, 65
Caxton, William, 15, 283, 315 nineteenth century, 118,123-24, 217-18,
Caxton Novels, 807 254-55, 261, 263, 280, 295-98, 311
Cecilia, 50 13
Central Society of Education, 169 Civil service examinations, 183-84
Chambers, Robert, 185, 280 Clare, John, 38, 54, 150, 241, 252, 259
History of the Rebellion, 269 Clarendon, Lord, 180
434 The English Common Reader
Clarendon Commission, 180-82 Contemporary Review, 359
Clarissa Harlowe, £9 Conway, Hugh; see Fargus, Frederick John
Clark and Glover edition of Shakespeare, Cooke, John, and his classic reprints, 54,
243-44 55, 260, 267
Clarke, Charles Cowden, 204 Cook's Voyages, 119, 218, 220, 258
Clarke's Wesley Family, 118 Cooper, James Fenimore, 217, 237, 291
Class structure in nineteenth-century Eng Cooper, Thomas, 149, 207, 218, 248, 249,
land, 81-85 255, 256, 257, 259
Classical education; see Grammar schools Cooper's Journal, 207
Classics, English, reprints of, 51, 54-55, Copyright, 53-54, 300, 310-11
117 n., 160-61,185, 2h$, 257, 260, 264, Copyright Act of 1709, 53
267, 285-86, 308-9, 315-16, 366 Copyright Commission (1876-77), 310-11
Cleave, John, 289, 398 Corder, William, 288, 382
Clement, William, 343 Corelli, Marie, 318, 386
Clements, John, 289 Cornhill Magazine, 359, 39$
Clowes, William, 277 Corsair, The, 180, 386
Cobbett, William, 4, 39, 105-6, 107 n., 191, Cost of producing books, 262
197, 251, 266, 274 n., 275, 324-26, Cottage on the Cliff, The, 120
328, 352, 381, 382, 389, 890, 392 Cottage Economy, 266, 390
Cobden, Richard, 348, 349 Cottage Gardener, 351
Coffeehouses Cottager and Artisan, 102
eighteenth century, 47, 48, 65 Count Fathom, 50
nineteenth century, 322, 329, 342 Country, reading in the
Coke's History of the West Indies, 118 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 18,
Colburn, Henry, 298, 299; see also Colburn 24,29
& Bentley eighteenth century, 38-40, 48, 74
Colburn & Bentley, 273, 274 nineteenth century, 89-90, 220-21, 246,
Coleridge, Edward, 180 324, 349, 356-57
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 2, 38, 100, 146, Courier, 323
156, 207, 253, 367, 368, 369, 370 Course of Time, The, 387
Collier's Church History, 255 Court Magazine, 319
Collings, Jesse, 252 Coverdale's Great Bible, 21, 24
Collings' Divine Cordial for the Soul, 38 Cowper, William, 160,161 n., 181, 200, 253,
Collins, A. S., 9, 97 257
Collins, John Churton, 186, 211 Cox, Captain, 23
Collins, Wilkie, 5-6, 97, 108 n., 356, 357, Crabbe, George, 117
361, 372 Craik, George Lillie, 185, 282, 283
Collins, William, 257 The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficu I
Odes and Poems, 252 ties, 242, 244 n.
Collins, William, & Sons, 317 Crawford, F. Marion, 314
Colportage, 103 Cricket on the Hearth, The, 381
Colquhoun, Patrick, 82 Crime and education, 141
Combe, William, 279 news of, 329, 343-45
Comenius, J. A., 42 novels of, 289-90
Commercial Magazine, 319 Critical Review, 319, 392
Commodity prices Croker, John Wilson, 298, 387
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 21, Croly, George, 118
22-23 Crooks, Will, 250 n.
eighteenth century, 51-52 Crotchet Castle, quoted, 272-73
nineteenth century, 276, 286, 306 Cruikshank, George, 382
Common Objects of the Country, 389 Cudworth, Ralph, 255
Compleat Angler, The, 267 Cunningham, J., 289
Condell, Henry, 28
Constable, Archibald, 10, 195, 267-69, Daily Chronicle, 290, 355
273-74, 331-32 Daily Mail, 355, 396
Constable's Miscellany, 268-69, 273, 332 Daily News, 355, 395
Index 435
Daily Telegraph 354, 355, 395
Dumas, Alexandra, 315
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The, Echo, 91 n., 355
Deloney, Thomas, 27
Edinburgh Cabinet Library, 273
Democracy and reading; see Reading, and Edinburgh Mechanics* Subscription Li
democracy brary, 195
Doddridge, Philip, 43
Egan, Pierce, Jr., 290, 360
Donaldson, Alexander, 53
Elementary education
Donaldson v. Beckett, 53-54
sixteenth century, 16-18
Donne, John, 17
eighteenth century, 31-85, 65
256
155-57
253
166-67, 170-71
168-65
Falconer, William, 257
298, 385 n.
Family Friend, 351
Engels, Friedrich, 95
Farmer's Daughter, The, 120
Euphues, 21
eighteenth century, 45, 55, 61-65
123-24
price of, in nineteenth century
expurgation, 126-27
original editions, 263, 279-80, 297, 300,
ture, 115-23
reprints of, 266, 273-74, 289, 291, 298
tracts, production and distribution of, Fielding, Henry, 43, 49-50, 111, 116,
100-103
117 n., 218, 250, 259
Examiner, 392
Fox, George, 122
Eyesight, 93
Francis, John, 357
Index 437
Franklin, Benjamin, 52, 60, 267, 284
Graphic, 363 n., 395
in education, 157
Grosvenor Gallery Library, 296
Gardiner, Stephen, 16
Halevy, fiUe, 24
Gauntlet, 393
Half-Penny Magazine, 388
Fables, 38
Hall, John Vine, tracts of, 101
892
Hamlet, price of, 22
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, quoted, 134,175, 233 n.
50,258 Hardy, Thomas (novelist), 303, 356, 361,
Gift-books, 362
363 n.
Gil Bias, 11, 218
Hardy, Thomas (politician), 72
Gloucester Journal, 67
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 349
be tt), 389
Herschel, Sir John, 35,96,105,137,139,371
Grammar schools Hervey's Meditations, 265
eighteenth century, 42
Heywood, Abel, 350-52
Smollett's, 56
Illustrated Times, 357, 394
Speed's, 255
Illustrations, 56, 265 n., 307, 385, 843-44
History of the Wars of the French Revolution, in mechanics* institutes, 194-204 passim
in public libraries, 231-84
264
Hobbes's Homer, 38
passim, 174-76
and industrialism
Hogg, James, 241, 275
Hokroft, Thomas, 38
Holinshed's Chronicles, SI
It Is Never Too Late To Mend, 385
Ivanhoe, 263
372, 394
49, 50,116,117, 207, 217, 253,371,373
England, 90-92
Jones, Griffith, 32
Hudibras, 120
best-selling, 388-89
Index 439
Kidnapped, 862 n. foundation, 213-15, 224
"Kildare Place" reading books, 154 in mechanics' institutes, 195-200, 223
King, Gregory, 23 n. parochial, 214 n.
King's College, 209 proprietary, 60-61, 216
Kingsley, Charles, 89, 93, 126 n., 164, 176 public, 132, 198
77, 182, 208, 218, 234, 241, 244 n., antecedents, 213-15
318-U, 361, 385 circulation of books, 239, 865
Kipling, Rudyard, 356-57 "fiction question" in, 281-85
Kippis, Andrew, 44 handicaps, 227-29
Kirkman, Francis, 59 inadequacy of other agencies (1800
Kirkwood, James, 214 n. 1850), 216-23
Kitto, John, 265 opposition to, 225-27, 229, 231-35
Klopstock's Messiah, 253 parliamentary inquiry and Ewart Act,
Knight, Charles, 1 n., 41, 104-5, 108, 173, 223-26
200, 223, 246, 260, 269, 270, 271, 281 physical accommodations and atmos
88, 286, 292, 315, 832-36 passim, phere, 228-29, 237-38
358 n., 870, 371, 390, 393 n. rationale of, 229-31
Knight's Weekly Volumes, 283, 286-87 social distribution of patrons, 236-39
Knox, Vicesimus, 174-75, 176 school, 152-53, 219-20
Koenig, Frederick, 262 village, 219-21, 223, 226 n.
Library Association, 238
Lackington, James, 37-38, 39-41, 57-59, Library Company, Ltd., 295
62, 65, 260, 280 Library of Entertaining Knowledge, 270
Lady of the Lake, The, 262-63, 386 73, 276, 332
Lady's Magazine, 47 n., 119, 319 Library of Original Novels, 800
Lamb, Charles, 2, 38, 138 n., 139, 160, Library of Railway Readings, 298
161 n., 283, 291, 323, 369 Library of Useful Knowledge, £00-73, 332
Lamplighter, The, 2J>6 Libri, Guglielmo, 224
Lancaster, Joseph, 144, 145, 152 Licensing Act (1662), 20
Lane, William, 62 Life of George Stephenson, 388
Lanes Manners and Customs of Modern Life of Johnson, 52, 388
Egyptians, 270 Life in London (Egan), 279
Langhorne's Plutarch, 248 Lighting, domestic, 92-93
Lara, 386 Lily's Grammar, 20
I^irdner's Cabinet Library, 273 Liinbird, John, 266-67, 320-21
Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, 202, 380 Mirror of Literature, 266,320-21,385,303
Lays of Ancient Rome, 315, 387 Liuton, Mrs. Lynn, 356
Leavis, Q. P. , 127 Linton, W. J., 207
Lectures, in mechanics' institutes, 201-4 Literacy
Leeds Grammar School, 178 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 15-19
Leeds Literary Institution, 195 eighteenth century, 30, 35, 37 n., 64, 65,
Leeds Mechanics' Institute, 195 68
Leeds Mutual Improvement Society, 206 n. nineteenth century, 102, 103-4, 144, 148,
Legacy to Parsons, 197, 352 149, 158 n.
Leighton, Archibald, 278 statistics, 167-72
Leisure, 85-89, 365 twentieth century, 365-66
Leisure Hour, 102, 361 Literary culture and reading; see Reading,
Leslie, Charles, 35 and literary culture
"Letter to a Late Cabinet Minister, A," 382 Literary and philosophical societies, 60,. 201
Lever, Charles, 180, 279, 299 Literature, English
Jjevi, Leone, 82 in mechanics' institutes, 194-204 passim
Lewes, George Henry, 282 in other adult-education projects, 209-12
Lewis, Monk, 288-89 in schools
Libraries eighteenth century, 43-45
circulating; see Circulating libraries nineteenth century, 153-51?, 159-61,
factory, *l'Z 163-05, 173-87 -passim
440 The English Common Reader
Literature at Nurse, 812
Macmillan, Alexander, 117 n., 305
345, 352
nineteenth century, 318-19, 359
Jjondon Chronicle, 46
Manchester Athenaeum, 202
202
299, 314, 315
Longman, Brown, Green & Longman, Mason, William, Life of Gray, 121
Lubbock, Sir John (later Lord Avcbury), Mayor of Casterbridge, The, 363 n.
140, 872
Mechanics' institutes
Lusiads, The, 120
history of, 189-92, 205
21
libraries in, 195-200, 201
Lydgatc, John, 15
newsrooms in, 200-201
Macaulay, Thomas B., 41,59,115,116,134, Melville, Herman, Typee and Omoo, 297
388
Merchant Taylors' School, 181
Peele, George, 17
71
Penguin Books, 817
277-78, 306
Christmas numbers, 363
Partridge's Anglicus, 20
see also Newspapers; Number-publica-
Passages of a Working Life, 281
tions
Pathway, The, 351
Pestalozzi, J. H., 164 n.
Patmore, Coventry, 160
Phillips, Sir Richard, 47 n.
Paulding, James Kirke, 291
Pickering, William, 273
Index 443
Pictorial History of England, 200, 282-83
Public schools, 179-82, 187
265
357, 369
381-82
Quarterly Review, 121, 215, 318-19, 355,
381, 392
Queechy, 246, 389
eighteenth century, 30
Rambler, 50, 253-54
Prices; see Book prices; Commodity prices; Reading, and social attitudes
Newspapers; Periodicals and industrialism, 4, 81-98 pass-im,
Priestley, Joseph, 43, 44
141-43, 198, 280-31, 249, 375
Public libraries; see Libraries, public and politics, 4, 69-77 passim, 201, 367;
Public Libraries Committee (1927), 224 n. 98, 132-40, 159-60, 182-83, 186,
171, 189
Rob Roy, 383
Reasoner, 351
Robin Hood, 21
Record, 125
Robinson Crusoe, 63,159,160,169,220,246,
Recreation (non-literary pastimes), 86,
258, 265
Referee, 369
Rollin, Charles, 43
Reformed Parliament, 25
Romandst, and Novelist's Library, The, 291
Rehearsal, The, 35
Root and Branch petition (1640), 26
Religious Tract Society, 97-107 passim, Ruskin, John, 115, 116, 127, 128, 200, 234,
of English classics; see Classics, English, Ryle, John Charles, tracts of, 101
reprints of
of novels; see Fiction, reprints of
Republican, 327, 328
Sabbatarianism, 88, 127-28, 329
Index 445
nineteenth century, 260-317 passim, Shaw, T. B., Student's Manual of English
381-90 Literature, 185
see also Editions, size of She, 315
Salisbury Square fiction; see Sensational Sheffield Mechanics' and Apprentices'
literature Library, 197
Salt, Henry, 187 Shelley, Percy, 121,197,207, 258, 291
Sartor Resartus, 243, 390 Shepheardes Calender, The, 21
Saturday Magazine, 352 Sheridan, R. B., The Rivals, 64
Saunders, John, 288, 386 Sherwood, Mary, 9, 116, 118, 122
Scalp Hunters, The, 388 Shirley, John, 15
School libraries; see Libraries, school Short History of the English People, A, 388
Scotland, reading in, 9-10, 53, 59, 63, Shove for a Heavy-arsed Christian, A, 38
221 n., 246-50 passim Shrewsbury School, 181
Scott, Sir Walter, 2, 88, 111, 116,117, 118, Sibthorp, Colonel Charles, 226, 227, 234
120, 125, 160, 161 n., 180, 182, 184, Sidney, Sir Philip, 133, 207
197, 2dO, 217, 220, 239, 253, 255, 260, Arcadia, 21, 22, 45
262-63, 267-68, 273-74, 307, 315, 382, Silberling index, 275 n.
383, 386 Simms & Mclntyre, 299
Scottish Chiefs, The, 119, 218 Sims, G. R., 369
Seasons, The, 53, 161, 252, 257 Sir Charles Qrandison, 1*9
Secondary education Size of reading public
sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, 16-17, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, 15, 23,
42-45 30,49
nineteenth century nineteenth century, 81 n., 380
anti-intellectualism in, 187 see also Literacy; Social distribution of
classical emphasis in, 178-79 reading public
English literature in, 176-87 passim Skipsey, Joseph, 251
and external examinations, 183-84 Smiles, Samuel, 198 n., 221, 232, 242, 388,
girls*, 176-77 390
length of attendance, 173 Smith, Adam, 131, 141, 142
public schools, 179-82, 187 Smith, Elder & Co., 362
technical schools, 187 Smith, J. F., 360
utilitarian bias in, 174-76 Smith, Sarah (Hesba Stretton), 389
Secondhand book trade Smith, Sydney, 330 n.
eighteenth century, 58-59 Smith, William Henry, 301-2
nineteenth century, 252-54 Smith, W. H., & Son, 296, 301-2, 312, 323,
Seeley, J. R., 183, 186 383
Self-Help, 232, 390 Smollett, Tobias, A9-50, 56, 111, 116,
Self-improvement, 205-7, 212, 240-59 117 n., 218, 250, 258, 259
passim, 287 Social attitudes
Select Committee on Education (1834), 151 and education
Sensational literature, 287-93, 308, 321, eighteenth century, 31-34, 64, 68-69,
329, 343-46, 351, 352, 360 73
Sentimental novels, 45, 290 nineteenth century, 141-44; 156-57,
Serialization of fiction, 279, 346,356-57 189-93 passim
Servants and reading, 62, 83, 85-86, 272-73 and reading; see Reading, and social
Sewell, Anna, 389 attitudes
Sewell, Elizabeth, Tales and Stories, 389 Social distribution of reading public
Shaftesbury, Earl of, 125 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 15-19,
Shakespeare, 21,28,43,50, 54,59,112,116, 23-24, 28-29
117, 120,126-27,153,159,160 n., 176, eighteenth century, 35, 40, 41, 62, 65,
180-85 passim, 197, 203-10 passim, 71-72
218,220,240-58 passim, 281, 283, 309, nineteenth century, 6-7, 82-83, 275-77,
315-16, 352 330, 336-38
Sharpe, John, 267 see also Class structure in nineteenth
446 The English Common Reader
century England; Education; Lit Stow, David, 164 n.
eracy Stowe, Harriet Beecher; see Uncle Tom1*
Social habits Cabin
and education, 141, 149 n., 155
Strand Magazine, 864 n., 396
and reading; see Heading, and social Street auctions of books, 253-54
Society for the Diffusion of Pure Litera Sue, Eugene, 292, 315
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowl Sunday at Home, 102, 226 n.
352
Sunday schools, 67-69, 73, 146, 148, 168,
Soldier's Wife, The, 88k Sunday Times, 342, 343, 346, 356
Spectacles, 93
Taifs Magazine, 200, 319
Spence, Thomas, 71
Taunton Commission, 182-84
Index 447
Thomason, George, 26, 388 Vicar of Wakefield, The, 59, 121, 160, 197,
Thomson, Christopher, 200, 254, 337 259, 266, 291
Thomson, James, 43, 253 Victoria, Queen, Leaves frorA a Journal, 388
The Seasons, 53, 161, 252, 257 Village libraries; see Libraries, village
Througk the Looking Glass, 389 Vizetelly, Henry, 357
Thurtell, John, 288, 382 Voice of the People, 393
Tillett, Ben, 245, 259
Tillotson, John, 255
Wade, John, 266
Tiilotson's Fiction Bureau, 356-57
Timbs, John, 320 Wages and income
Times, A8, 262,297, 298, 304, 307, 323, 348, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
22-23
354, 355, 366, 392, 39k, 395
eighteenth century, 51-52
Times Book Club, 317
nineteenth century, 262, 275-77, 286,306
Timperley, Charles H., 57
Tinsley, William, 359 Walker's Epictetus, 38
Tinsley's Magazine, 359 Walpole, Horace, The Castle ofOtranto, 218,
Tit-Bits, 363, 370 n., 396 253, 291
Tom Brown's School Days, 385 War from the Landing at Gallipoli, The, 388
Tom Jones, 39, 55, 114, 259 "War of the Unstamped Press," 339-40
Tooke, Home, 72 Ward, Artemus, 248
Toplady, Augustus, 246 Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 386
Town and Country Magazine, 1*7 n. Ward, Lock & Co., 160, 389
Tracts, 75-77, 100-108 Warne, Frederick, & Co., 387
output of, 101-2 Warner, H. L., 181
Travel books, best-selling, 388 Warner, Susan (Elizabeth Wetherell), 388,
Treasure Island, 362 n. 389
Trevelyan, Sir Charles, 311 Warren, Samuel, 120,197
Trevelyan, G. M., 171 n. Warrington Academy, 43, 45
Trevelyan, G. O., 115 Washbourne, B., 102 n.
Trilby, 386 Wat Tyler, $52
Tristram Shandy, 11, 51 Watchman, 2
Trollope, Anthony, 124-25, 126 n., 276, Watt, Isaac, 58, 246
279, 298, 307 n., 310, 311, 356, 359, Waverley, 263, 383
361, 366 Waverley novels, 116, 220, 226 n., 274,307,
True-Born Englishman, The, 71 383
True Half-Penny Magazine, 338 Webster's Dictionary, 389
Tupper, Martin, 387 Weekly Budget, 395
Twain, Mark, 248 Weekly Chronicle, 343
Typesetting, 307, 357 Weekly Dispatch, 356, 394
Weekly Police Gazette, 393
Uncle Tom's Cabin, 226 n., 301, 38^ Weekly Times, 343, 351, 356, 394
"Underselling," 58, 304-5, 316-17 Welcome Guest, 395
Uniformity, Act of (1662), 42 Wells, H. G., 98, 244 n., 357
Universal Magazine, 319, 392 Wesley, Charles, 246
University extension, 210-11 Wesley, John, 35-37
Utilitarianism, 26, 98, 163-64, 242 Wesleyan Book Room, 36, 100, 117
in mechanics' institutes, 188-94 Wesleyan Methodist Magazine; see Method
opposition to "frivolous" reading, 132-36 ist Magazine
relaxation of opposition, 136HfcO Wesleyanism, 35-38, 64, 76, 114, 117-22,
in secondary education, 174-76, 179 126, 141, 219
use of printed word, 131-82 Westminster Review, 216, 223, 304
veneration of the press, 129-31 Westward Ho!, 234, 385
Wetherell, Elizabeth; see Warner, Susan
Vanity Fair, 385 n. Weyman, Stanley, 361
Varney the Vampire, 289, 290 Whately, Richard, 199
Verne, Jules, 237, 362 Whillock, Henry, 248
448 The English Common Reader
White, Gilbert, Naiurai History of Selborne, 156, 161, 162 n., 181, 182, 207, 249,
Wide, Wide World, The, 246, $88 Working Men's College, 209-10
thology, 269
Wright, Louis B., 26
Window tax, 92
reading interests of Young, Edward, 36, 43, 153, 162 n., 253,
257
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