A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900

A Return to the Common Reader

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A Return to the Common Reader Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900

Edited by Beth Palmer University of Surrey, UK Adelene Buckland University of East Anglia, UK

© Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland and the contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A return to the common reader: print culture and novel, 1850–1900. 1. Books and reading – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 2. Authors and readers – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 3. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism. I. Palmer, Beth, 1982– II. Buckland, Adelene. 028.9’0941’09034–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A return to the common reader: print culture and the novel, 1850–1900 / edited by Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Books and reading—Great Britain—History—19th century. 2. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Authors and readers—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Palmer, Beth (Beth Lilian), 1982– II. Buckland, Adelene. Z1003.5.G7R48 2011 028’.9094109034—dc22 ISBN 9781409400271 (hbk) ISBN 9780754698777 (ebk)

2010044272 II

Contents List of Figures   List of Tables   List of Contributors   Foreword   Preface   Introduction   Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland

vii ix xi xiii xv 1

Part 1 Publishers, Authors, Critics, Readers 1 2 3 4 5

The Advantage of Fiction: The Novel and the ‘Success’ of the Victorian Periodical   Laurel Brake

9

Dorothy’s Literature Class: Late-Victorian Women Autodidacts and Penny Fiction Weeklies   Kate Macdonald

23

Ouida: How Conceptions of the Popular Reader Contributed to the Making of a Popular Novelist   Jane Jordan

37

‘Those Who Idle over Novels’: Victorian Critics and Post-Romantic Readers   Debra Gettelman

55

‘Gossip’ and ‘Twaddle’: Nineteenth-century Common Readers Make Sense of Jane Austen   Katie Halsey

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Part 2 Scenes of Reading 6

Reading in Gaol   Jenny Hartley

7

Attempts to (Re)shape Common Reading Habits: Bible Reading on the Nineteenth-century Convict Ship   Rosalind Crone

103

‘Quite Incapable of Appreciating Books Written for Educated Readers’: the Mid-nineteenth-century British Soldier   Sharon Murphy

121

8

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vi

9

‘A Journey Round the Bookshelves’: Reading in the Royal Colonial Institute   Beth Palmer

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Fiction and the Australian Reading Public, 1888–1914   Tim Dolin

Select Works Cited   Index  

133 151 175 183

List of Figures 6.1 Dormitory in Coldbath Fields Prison, from Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes from Prison Life, 1862.

88

6.2

A pile of three books on the shelf of a cell at Brixton, from Mayhew and Binny, op. cit.

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6.3

Favourite prison authors, from the Report of the Departmental Committee on the Supply of Books to Prisoners in HM Prisons and to the Inmates of HM Borstal Institutions, 1911.

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List of Tables 8.1

Books Borrowed From Military Libraries and Reading Rooms. [Source: J.H. Lefroy’s Report on the Regimental and Garrison Schools of the Army, and on Military Libraries and Reading Rooms (London, 1859), p. 59] 126

10.1 Lambton Mechanics’ Institute, NSW: 20 Most Popular Novelists (by borrowers and loans), 1909. [Source: Australian Common Reader database (www.australiancommonreader.com)] 10.2

Collie Mechanics’ Institute, WA: 20 Most Popular Novelists (by borrowers and loans), 1908–1909. [Source: Australian Common Reader database]

10.3 Maitland Institute, SA: 20 Most Popular Novelists (by borrowers and loans), 1909. [Source: Australian Common Reader database] 10.4

159

159

160

Rosedale, VIC: Most Popular Novelists (by borrowers and loans), 1905–1908; 1911–1912. [Source: Australian Common Reader database]

161

Port Germein, SA: Most Popular Novelists (by borrowers and loans), 1892–1908. [Source: Australian Common Reader database]

162

Expenditure and Receipts (in ₤ s. d.), Albany and Collie Mechanics’ Institutes, 1908. [Source: Western Australian Official Year Book, 1908. Perth, WA: Government Printer, 1909]

163

10.7

Occupational Profiles of Collie Borrowers, 1908–1909. [Source: Australian Common Reader database]

165

10.8

Collie, WA, 1908–1909: Top 25 Loans Showing Publisher. Titles in bold = no UK publication. [Source: Australian Common Reader database]

167

Collie, WA, 1908–1909: Top 40 authors by total loans and country of origin. [Source: Australian Common Reader database]

170

10.5

10.6

10.9

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List of Contributors Laurel Brake is Professor Emerita of Literature and Print Culture at Birkbeck, University of London. She co-edited, with Marysa Demoor, the print and digital DNCJ (Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism) (2009), and directed the Nineteenth-century Serials Edition (2008, www.ncse.ac.uk). Books on the press include The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century, co-edited with Marysa Demoor (2009), Encounters in the Victorian Press, co-edited with Julie Codell (2005), Print in Transition (2001), and Subjugated Knowledges (1994). Recent articles include those on Scottish periodicals, W.T. Stead, and 1890s journals. Adelene Buckland was a Research Associate of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group and a Bye-Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge between 2007 and 2010, and is now a Lecturer in Literature at the University of East Anglia. She has published widely on Victorian narrative and the earth sciences, and is the author of Novel Science: Fiction and the Geological Imagination (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2011). Rosalind Crone is Lecturer in History at the Open University (UK). From 2006 to 2009, she was research fellow on the AHRC-funded project, the Reading Experience Database, 1450–1945. She has published a number of articles and papers on Victorian popular culture, the history of reading, and crime, and is currently preparing a monograph entitled Violent Entertainments in NineteenthCentury London. Tim Dolin is Professor of British and Australian Literature at Curtin University of Technology, Perth. His published works include a book on George Eliot, published by Oxford University Press in 2005, and articles on Thomas Hardy and Wilkie Collins. He has also edited and introduced a number of editions of mid-Victorian novels. Debra Gettelman is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and has published articles on Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. She is working on a book about the imaginative independence of novel readers in Victorian literary culture. Katie Halsey is a Lecturer in the literature of the long eighteenth century at the University of Stirling. She has published a large number of articles on Jane Austen, the history of reading, and literature and print culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries more broadly. She is the co-editor of The concept and practice of conversation in the long eighteenth century (2007) and is currently

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writing a monograph on Jane Austen’s readers. With Rosalind Crone and Shafquat Towheed, she is also the editor of The History of Reading in the Routledge Readers in Literature series (2010). Jenny Hartley is Professor of English Literature at Roehampton University. Reading Groups, her survey of UK reading groups, was published by OUP in 2001. She co-directs the AHRC KTF Prison Reading Groups project, and is the author of Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women (Methuen, 2008). Jane Jordan is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Kingston University. Jane co-founded the Victorian Popular Fiction Association in 2009, and is the author of two biographies of neglected nineteenth-century women, Josephine Butler (John Murray, 2001; Continuum, 2007), and Kitty O’Shea; An Irish Affair (Sutton Publishing, 2005 and 2007) and co-editor of the five-volume collection, Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns (Routledge, 2003). Kate Macdonald is a lecturer in the Department of English, Ghent University, Belgium, where she teaches poetry and British literary history. She has published many articles and chapters on aspects of Victorian and Edwardian periodicals and publishing history, and two books on John Buchan. She is the editor of The Masculine Middlebrow: What Mr Miniver Read, 1880s to 1950s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Sharon Murphy is a graduate of University College Dublin and of the University of Dublin, Trinity College. She is the author of Maria Edgeworth and Romance (Four Courts, 2004), as well as a number of published essays. Her current project on the reading of the nineteenth-century British soldier was facilitated by her appointment to a two-year Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Dublin in 2005. She is an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of English at St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra. Beth Palmer is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey. She has written a monograph, Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture (Oxford University Press, 2011), and an undergraduate guide to Victorian literature (2010). Her latest research examines the relationship between the theatre and the popular novel in the nineteenth century.

Foreword These remarks, written by Richard D. Altick, were delivered by his daughter Elizabeth on the occasion of the Print Culture and the Novel 1850–1900 conference, held 20 January 2007 at Oxford University. It is seldom that a literary scholar has the privilege of watching the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of his books marked by a symposium such as this. I wish I could be there in person, but I am glad to be represented by my daughter, who brings you my thanks for the honor you have accorded me. When I wrote The English Common Reader more than half a century ago, I hadn’t the slightest notion that I was helping found what has proved a prosperous field of scholarly inquiry. But so it has proved, with this meeting and the existence of a lively organization dedicated to furthering its interests, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. In retrospect, it appears that the favorable initial response the book enjoyed diverted my career from that of an orthodox literary scholar to one with a strong collateral interest in Victorian social history. Here again I proved to be breaking new ground, and with a similar effect. My discussion in The Shows of London of that distinctive form of nineteenth-century entertainment, the wrap-around panorama, led to the formation of another lively interest group, an international organization with members from Switzerland to China. So it seems that I have left something of a trail behind me, and that, like this meeting, is a cause for personal celebration.

Richard D. Altick passed away 7 February 2008, at the age of 92. In a codicil to his will, he described ‘a professional career that was personally more fulfilling than anyone can realize, not least because of its sheer unlikelihood’. He noted that the satisfaction it afforded him ‘sustained, indeed incomparably enriched, my long years of retirement’. We are indebted to Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland for further brightening his last year by envisioning and organizing the conference. The honour both delighted and gratified our father. It is fitting that the event emanated from graduate students like those to whom he devoted much of his long teaching career and who benefitted from his many books. Anne Altick Hawthorn Elizabeth R. Altick

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Preface This project has been a long time in the making, and a great many people have given up their time and resources to help us along the way. We would like to begin by thanking Josephine McDonagh, without whose help and encouragement the conference we held in celebration of the 50-year anniversary of Richard Altick’s groundbreaking English Common Reader (1957) in 2007 would never have got off the ground. We owe to her much of the conceptual shape of that conference, which was the seed of this collection of essays. We ran the conference while we were still graduate students at the University of Oxford, both funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. We received generous financial support from ProQuest and from the British Association of Victorian Studies for that conference, and ran a digital exhibition of materials from the John Johnson Collection. For her unstintingly generous help with that exhibition we would like to thank Julie-Anne Lambert, who gave us much of her time and expertise to guide us around the archives. The English Faculty at the University of Oxford was unfailingly helpful throughout the process. We would also like to thank Elizabeth Altick for flying over and attending the conference in a wet and windy January, and for her patience and support as we have slowly put together the book that has emerged from it. There are several people to mention whose support has been crucial to this project: Catherine Delafield, Jessica DeSpain, Ian Henderson and Shih-Wen Sue Chen all contributed substantively to our ideas for the book. We finished the book when we were both working on postdoctoral projects at the University of Leeds and with the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group, and we would like to thank our colleagues at these institutions for giving us the stimulating intellectual environments and research time that made it possible for us to get this, and other projects, finished. All the contributors deserve our thanks, for their excellent contributions and for their patience over the years it has taken to lick the project into shape. Several of the essays also require acknowledgements: The early research for Kate Macdonald’s chapter on Dorothy magazine was funded by the FWO project ‘British nineteenthcentury periodicals and their addenda’, at the Department of English, Ghent University. Our editor, Ann Donahue, has been positive and encouraging from the start. But most of all, we would like to thank the late Richard Altick, for the work that has inspired not only this collection but also the work of historians and literary critics for the last five decades, and for his generous acknowledgement of this project. We hope that this book might make at least a tiny contribution to the fields of study Altick defined. Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland University of Surrey and University of East Anglia

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Introduction Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland

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 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 unprecedented levels. —Richard Altick

It is rare that a book retains its place on student reading lists for over half a century. Richard Altick’s 1957 work The English Common Reader has done just that. Plotting meticulously researched data on the book trade and its consumers ‘against a panoramic background of nineteenth-century English history’, Common Reader was the first book to conceptualize in detail the rise of mass literacy in the nineteenth century and to imagine the experiences of ordinary readers. In 50 years it has never gone out of print, emerging as the seminal text for a whole range of intellectual projects that have come to dominate humanistic studies. To Altick the now-booming fields of Victorian literature, book history, the history and sociology of reading, the study of print culture, and cultural studies continue to owe an irredeemable debt. From 1945 until his retirement as Regent’s Professor in 1982, Altick was a widely admired teacher at Ohio State University and an equally esteemed intellectual heavyweight: his long publishing career began with his account of inspirational archival discoveries in The Scholar Adventurers (1950), soon followed by the landmark text The English Common Reader. Altick was passionate about the nineteenth century; one of his scholarly hallmarks was his ability to engage with the diversity of cultural forms Victorian culture produced, from sensational murders to Robert Browning’s poetry to life writing. The Shows of London (1978), perhaps as widely cited as The English Common Reader, provided a history of public entertainments in London from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries that is still the most comprehensive guide to exhibitions and shows in the metropolis, underpinning dozens of later studies. His last book, Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900, 2nd edn (Columbus, OH, 1998), p. 3. All further references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.  R.K. Webb [Untitled review of The English Common Reader], Victorian Studies 1/3 (1958), pp. 286–8 (p. 287). 



A Return to the Common Reader

Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution 1841–1851 (1997), demonstrates again Altick’s hallmark attention to the material, visual, and verbal forms of Victorian cultural life, as much in its popular and ephemeral forms as in its more canonical incarnations. It is a truism to say that without Altick’s work, Victorian studies would have an entirely different, not to say weaker, complexion. It is another truism to say that Altick was ahead of his time. It was not until the 1970s that History of the Book, prefigured and inspired by the Common Reader, began to emerge as a field in its own right. But in that decade, Altick’s interest in the modes of production and dissemination of books took off with John Sutherland’s Victorian Novelists and their Publishers (1976) and Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent for Change (1979). In the 1980s the study of literary production, inflected by waves of Marxist and feminist critical theory, asked how the conditions of production and publication determined the plots and forms of Victorian literature: Under the influence of D.F. McKenzie and Robert Darnton, bibliographic studies were liberated from their traditionally descriptive and taxonomic shackles by a new and exciting determination ‘to show that form affects meaning’. For these scholars, as they developed new ways of thinking about the relationship between the material conditions of book production, literary form, and the reading experience, Altick’s Common Reader was very often an Ur-text. Work on the history of the periodical press, on publishing houses and their relationships with canonical authors, on serial forms of publication, on reception history, and on such institutions as the circulating library or the literary and philosophical society have become central to our understanding of the Victorian literary experience. In turn, Altick’s work has been central to the insights made by a host of subsequent scholars in all these fields. A study of book consumption, and specifically of the readers of literary texts, took longer to take off. Partly the problem was methodological: No matter the problems a researcher might face in mining the records of publishing houses, authorpublisher correspondence, or the records of literary institutions to reconstruct modes of book production in the nineteenth century, still those records existed, sometimes in published form. What records might exist containing traces of the reading experience? The privacy and isolation of so many acts of reading, the paucity of written evidence left behind by all readerships, let alone by servants or factory workers, for instance, and the partiality of individual readers’ accounts contributed  D.F. McKenzie, ‘The Book as an Expressive Form’, The Panizzi Lectures, 1985: Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London, 1986), p. 4. N.N. Feltes, for example, in his Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (1989), saw the capitalist conditions in which novels were produced as ultimately decisive of the way in which Victorian plots were constructed.  Robert Darnton, ‘What is the history of books?’, Daedalus 111/3 (1982), pp. 65–83, repr. in David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (eds.), The Book History Reader (London, 2001), pp. 9–26 (p. 11).

Introduction



to make the reader one of the least developed areas of research in the wider field of book history and the sociology of texts. Unlike sales or circulation figures, the private reading experience remains tantalizingly unquantifiable, glimpsed in snatches of life writing or behind tables of statistics. Narratological and structuralist studies of texts created useful theoretical constructions of the place of the ‘implied reader’ or the ‘ideal reader’ in literary texts, but hard empirical evidence for the responses of actual readers proved much more difficult to locate. Only in the 1990s did scholars really begin to build on Altick’s attempts to individualize conceptions of the Victorian ‘common reader’. As might be expected, working-class and female readers enjoyed particularly sustained attention, partly due to the hyperbolic rhetoric of many Victorian commentators on the dangers reading presented to the susceptible masses. These studies were eminently useful, as they questioned Altick’s definition of the ‘common reader’, revealing hidden complexities in that formulation: defining gendered readers with different kinds of experience, and locating different kinds of ‘common readers’ across class and social barriers. And most recently, not only Altick’s ‘common reader’ but also these broad social categories of readership have increasingly come under scrutiny as new webbased tools, most notably including the Reading Experience Database, have become able to register the particular experiences of readers in even subtler formulation. See, for instance, Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Aspen 5 and 6 (1967); Wolfgang Iser, ‘Interaction between text and reader’, in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, 1980), pp. 106–19; The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, 1978); Stanley Fish, ‘Interpreting the Variorum’, repr. in The Book History Reader, p. 457.  For more here, see Kelly J. Mays, ‘The disease of reading and Victorian periodicals’, in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. by John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 165–94. Kate Flint’s The Woman Reader 1837–1901 (Oxford, 1993), David Vincent’s Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (London, 1982), and Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT, 2001), for example, made use of an expanded range of sources, such as diaries or working-class autobiographies, to fill the gaps. Flint’s The Woman Reader was of huge importance in this field, expanding upon Sally Mitchell’s The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women’s Reading 1835–1880 (Bowling Green, 1981). Jennifer Phegley’s Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (Columbus, OH, 2004) and Women Reading William Blake (Basingstoke, 2007), a collection edited by Helen P. Bruder, are two examples of the diverse routes taken to expand on and particularize Flint’s work. See also David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914 (Cambridge, 1993) and The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000), and Alan Rauch, The Victorians, Morality and the March of Intellect (Durham, 2001).  One example that is concerned with a range of readerships is James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmoor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge, 1996). See also Robin Myers and Michael Harris, Serials and their Readers, 1620–1914 (Winchester, 1993) and Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore, 1989). 



A Return to the Common Reader

It is on this work that this collection builds, interrogating exactly who or what we mean when we talk of the ‘common reader’ by using new, original, or overlooked sources to reconstruct and re-examine different reading experiences, possibilities, venues, and resources. We do not focus on broad identity-based definitions of readers founded on class or gender, but use prison records, letters and diaries, government reports, colonial archives, and records from convict carriers to show a diverse range of ‘common readers’ engaging in an equally diverse range of reading activities. These readers read – aloud or in silence – in kitchens and barracks and convict ships. They avoided and endorsed official interpretations of authoritatively sanctioned texts by turns, made choices about their reading matter and had choices made on their behalf, smuggled fiction in and out of prisons, and displayed demands and preferences for printed matter that actively shaped the production of new books and new print forms. Throughout the collection, we chart the struggles of authors and publishers to respond to the complex and ever-changing demands of the elusive readers they courted – readers who swapped texts and read them at times and in places for which they were not designed; we chart the struggles of penny papers to cultivate wholesome intellectual fare amid a clamour for salacious fiction; we see political reformers and publishers and librarians attempting to regulate reading practices, proscribing the consumption of reading matter for very particular groups of prisoners, convicts, soldiers, miners, clergymen, and colonial subjects; and we see several different modes of relationship between authors, publishers, and their readers. Some of our readers smuggled fiction into secret spaces, some subverted or reconfigured official interpretations of Biblical or didactic texts, and some found modes of social and economic improvement in literary compliance. Some even reconfigured their political or national identities around the act of reading. With its sharp focus on a wide range of different kinds of documentary evidence, then, this collection works to further disaggregate the concept of Altick’s ‘common reader’, to begin to build a much more nuanced picture of the many ‘common readers’ and their different activities than currently exists. But our contributors also reveal with surprising regularity that there is one thing that these many ‘common readers’ had in common. Prisoner or politician, miner or aristocrat, reformer or rebel – nineteenth-century readers sought out fiction, and plenty of it. An explosion of fiction-carrying publications and serialized modes of novel production meant, of course, that the novel traversed the book and the periodical in this period. Essays published over a course of years in a range of magazines and periodicals, often penned by a single author, were often repackaged in book form, but the novel was unique in that it was often written with both periodical and book publication in mind. More than any other genre the novel aroused questions about the impact of the ‘mass market’ consumption of texts on standards of morality. In the early part of the century many expensive quarterlies marked their seriousness by the exclusion of fiction. Even in periodicals containing fiction after 1850, reviews of fiction were largely absent. Booksellers and lenders like W.H. Smith and Charles Edward Mudie made their fortunes, in part, by setting clear moral

Introduction



parameters for the fiction they would circulate. The novel was the literary form that represented the problems, difficulties, opportunities, anxieties, and desires associated with reading in its most acute form in the nineteenth century. As such, it is the form that can reveal most to us about the conditions and concepts of reading that operated in the Victorian period. As many of our contributors show, if there was one consistency across all these diverse individual readers, it was that many of them shared a passion for fiction that was not only marked by social, economic, and material circumstance, but that could often (but not always) produce social, economic, and material changes in book publishing and even in the wider world. In the opening essay of the collection, for instance, Laurel Brake inverts the commonly held assumption, present in Altick’s work, that the periodical ‘carried’ fiction and offered novelists an outlet through which to gain readership. Instead, she argues that ‘the widespread incorporation of the novel into mainstream periodicals in the 1850s and after helped assure the proliferation and economic viability of the periodical press’ (p. 11). So popular was fiction with readers that it played a part in bringing magazine costs down: by including fiction, upmarket weeklies like Macmillan’s could guarantee enough sales to make up their deficits. The novel, it seems, was the first – and often the last – port of call for readers who might never pick up another kind of book. If there was any such thing as a ‘common reader’, then, it was a many-headed, but fiction-loving, beast. Altick’s portrayal of the ‘English common reader’ is thus fruitfully complicated by this collection, as is his narrative of a triumphant march toward liberty from censors and publishers who resisted the impulses of free trade. As Tim Dolin points out in the last essay of this collection, for Altick, as an American in a Cold War climate, books uniformly represented social advancement, the conquest of civilization. Altick was unequivocally critical of ‘penny dreadfuls’ and ‘shilling shockers’, the cheap and garish fictional forms designed to appeal to the semiliterate masses, and he documents the rise of a better quality of fiction and its accessibility to a ‘common reader’ who was not necessarily educated or professional, but had integrity nonetheless. Subsequent studies have been keen to emphasize the choices that ordinary readers may have made about the kinds of texts they read or the ways in which they read them, and many of our contributors reiterate or expand upon this important point. Sometimes this supports Altick’s thesis: good readers, no matter how many choices were made for them by their social or economic superiors, had an independent intellectual life in which they made and remade texts and ideas to suit themselves, and better fiction emerged to meet the market demands such readers created. Sometimes it works against Altick’s argument: readers got their hands on cheap, salacious fiction despite the restrictions imposed upon them, and they were not necessarily, or always, better or worse or cleverer or idler because of it. Other possibilities abound: Some readers may have passively accepted some of the messages embedded in texts, or accepted the literary choices made for them by external parties; ‘bad’ fiction may have been produced in response to the growing demands of ever more active



A Return to the Common Reader

readers, and in some cases there may have been little or no connection between the behaviour of readers, the choices they made or didn’t make over their reading material, and the publishing of new fiction. Since 1957, of course, the very notion of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ literature, or good and bad readers, has been irreversibly complicated. Drawing on half a century of work inspired by Altick, and continuing to engage with his ideas, this collection makes the case for the complexity and individuality of relations between authors, readers, and publishers, and for the importance of the kind of detailed scholarly research for which Altick was so well known. Using an unusually wide range of archival sources, our contributors detail the particularity of a host of reading experiences before they venture any generalizations on the history of nineteenthcentury reading. Indebted as we are to Altick, the greatest compliment we can pay him is to use his insights and his rigorous attention to detail to create a more vibrant, more nuanced, and more eclectic picture of the readers and print forms he helped teach us to admire.

Part 1 Publishers, Authors, Critics, Readers

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Chapter 1

The Advantage of Fiction: The Novel and the ‘Success’ of the Victorian Periodical Laurel Brake

The English Common Reader and the Field of Print Culture Fifty years ago, when Richard Altick published The English Common Reader, he shaped a critical map of a vast field that had been recognized by few scholars in English. The notion of the ‘common’ reader signalled an apparent distinction between the consumers of literature – the object of study in departments of English – and ‘common’ readers of the ‘popular’ press, a working class readership associated with cheap and sensationalist literature huddled at one end of the spectrum, reading papers that insulted the intellect and left ink on one’s hands. If that distinction is slowly collapsing, its demise was fuelled by Altick’s remarkable achievement. The text alone is prodigious, but the rich back matter – the ‘Chronology of the Mass Reading Public’, the list of best sellers with cumulative sales figures, circulation figures for periodicals and newspapers, an extensive bibliography, and a detailed index including topics such as ‘pocket-sized books’ as well as ‘reading’, which he was putting on the map – made Altick’s volume unique in its breadth of achievement to date. All of those accustomed to working on the press know how difficult it is to manage the profligacy of serial publications, to extricate oneself from the number, and to step back to interpret and map meaning. The English Common Reader is that rare thing, a combination of vast and visibly detailed knowledge and shaped argument. Since 1957 few such books on nineteenth-century publishing by a single author have appeared, and scholars understandably favour studies of single titles or categories of print, or multi-authored books with their range of expertise to ‘cover’ a broad subject such as New Journalism, for example. Most recently, William St Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004) is one of the exceptions with respect to its scope, its ambitiousness, and its detailed appendices and a bibliography for our time, and he begins by presenting his study as a necessary supplement to Altick. But the context in which The Reading Nation is published is a measure of our distance from the scholarly  William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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community and discourse of the mid-1950s, which was before Victorian (and Romantic) interdisciplinary ‘area’ studies, before Victorian Studies and Victorian Periodical Studies, before the linguistic turn and its passport to popular culture with its nomenclature of ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ to supplement ‘literature’ and the novel, and before the new perspectives on publishing history and bibliography that D.F. McKenzie and the History of the Book offer. Most of these have turned to The English Common Reader, seeking information (a privileged term now), the map, and interpretation, and remarkably still do, as a reference point for further work. There is nothing else like it, or to replace it. Its reprint history supports this reading. The 50th anniversary of its publication and the appearance of St Clair’s book, with its list of desiderata, specifically in respect to archive work, in themselves justify study of Altick’s legacy. Moreover, the field Altick’s book fuelled, that of nineteenth-century print culture, is on the verge of a significant transformation of access to archival materials that sharply distinguishes the present from the mid1950s. For the last half-century, to augment geographically specific access we have relied on historically determined forms of media, reference works, transport, and funding. These include: microfilm, that enabling but frustrating portable medium; pioneering search mechanisms produced in the period such as the Wellesley Index, Alvin Sullivan’s English Literary Magazines, and the prodigious and still growing Waterloo Directory; and transport, such as air travel (‘cheap’/ affordable with respect to cash but also to time), which has enabled researchers physically to reach their objects of study. And in the last decade we have gained electronic access to fragments of the nineteenth-century press through projects such as ILEJ (Internet Library of Early Journals), the British Library Pilot Periodicals Project, the electronic edition of the Times, the Modernist Journals Project at Brown University, Jerome McGann’s NINES, Harper’s, the Library of Congress’s Making of America, PAO (Periodicals Archive Online), formerly Periodicals Contents Index, and SciPer. ‘Research’, as an activity associated with the professionalization of the academy, has also proliferated in this half century, along with enhanced funding opportunities associated with it. More scholars have had more access to the archive by these varied means in the last 50 years. However, I think that we are in the last moments before changes in access and searchability affect our methodology in this field profoundly. In the near future, the fruition of a number of ongoing electronic projects dedicated to the publication of nineteenth-century newspaper and periodical titles will potentially multiply access to runs of titles prodigiously. In 2008–2010 alone, a clutch of digital materials has become available. These include the British Library’s publication of some 70 titles in British newspapers 1800–1900, ProQuest’s British Periodicals, the Thomson Gale/British Library partnership in the periodical tranche of ‘Nineteenth-Century Collections Online’, and smaller projects, such as ncse (an edition of a cluster of six nineteenth-century serials) and the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism. The origins of these expensive projects are various – some are research council or foundation funded (the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Joint

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Information Systems Committee (JISC), Mellon, or Leverhulme), some emanate from great national libraries (the British Library and the Library of Congress), and some from the commercial sector. Many of them involve partnerships among these groups, but the significance of this cross-sector cooperation is that access to this immensely enhanced historical resource may be restricted by price. Clearly, this needs to be addressed. Nevertheless, while such issues of dissemination and variable distribution will mean that scholars and students may still have to travel to resource-rich centres, the likelihood is that more of them will have access to more, and searchable, titles. Computer software has some way to go to accommodate the nuanced theorizing of text by scholars of print culture, but once stable and sustainable electronic texts of periodical and newspaper runs, in facsimile, and with accessible optical character recognition (ocr) are created and disseminated, they are there for scholars to work on. ‘The Convergence of the Twain’: Fiction and the Press In a critical history of nineteenth-century literature published in 1896, George Saintsbury identified the ‘rise’ of the novel and that of the periodical as the salient developments of the century. Altick puts it slightly differently, but his comparison of the expansion of book production more generally with that of the periodical press is analogous and the judgment similar: the growth of the periodical press emerges from both accounts as the greater, and it becomes the privileged term. However, Altick gingerly entertains the notion of overlap between book/novel and press production on one count only, viewing the miscellany and the individual novel part as ‘blood brothers’ (‘It is almost hopeless to draw a firm line between the penny part-issue of an individual novel and the cheap miscellany; they were both serials’). Saintsbury goes further by positively deploying the efflorescence, popularity, and visibility of the ‘triumph’ of the novel rhetorically to enhance his claim for the superior status of periodicals. Rather than perpetuate Saintsbury’s notion of a contrast, a binary, and contestation between the novel and the periodical, or Altick’s notion of limited overlap between them, I want to explore a model in which they are inextricably coupled. Particularly after 1850 I see their relation as symbiotic, productively mutual, and interdependent. Rather than claiming credit for the greater importance of periodicals on the basis that they ‘carried’ literature, as Saintsbury and other scholars do (and of course the periodicals carried much else), I want to suggest that the widespread incorporation of the novel into mainstream periodicals in the 1850s and after helped assure the proliferation and economic viability of the periodical press. Consumers of popular culture, attracted to fiction, supplemented those arguably graver readers of the miscellany of articles on history, philosophy, and science to make journals viable and sustainable; the greater inclusion of fiction, its  Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 291.

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appropriation, crucially broadened readership, and arguably advertising as well. Basically, I am arguing that the novel ‘made’ the periodical press in these 50 years, as much as the press fostered and ‘carried’ the novel (as well as other literature), legitimizing it in the admixture of a ‘miscellany’ context. From the onset of the three-volume novel as the publication format of choice for first editions of new novels in the early nineteenth century, fiction had a problem. Its modes of publication and distribution were at considerable odds with its large and ever-increasing, even popular audience. The arrangements for the format and distribution of new fiction favoured the few wealthy individuals who could afford to purchase new titles at one and a half guineas, the circulating libraries who comprised the principal destination of the expensive and multiple volumes, and readers who could afford to belong to libraries. If publishers were content to sell primarily to circulating libraries, some authors, such as Dickens, who had his eye on a wider market, were not. Dickens deployed two formats in the 1830s, neither of which were new in themselves, to circumvent the high price of three volumes and to get his new fiction to readers directly, at prices (from 2s, 6d, to 6d) that the middle classes could afford. One was part issue, in which fiction was issued in standalone serial parts at regular intervals (weekly or monthly), often with frontispiece illustrations, normally for 6d or a shilling. The second was serialization in miscellanies or serials, similarly weekly or monthly and also relatively cheap; at 2s, 6d initially, magazines were more expensive than part issues, befitting their breadth of contents, but by 1860 they were similarly priced, and the shilling monthlies were a great bargain for new serial writing. Moreover, instead of hazarding the market as a standalone title, dependent on author or illustrator recognition by the purchaser, magazine fiction was guaranteed by the ‘brand’ of the journal and accompanied by other copy, verbal and possibly visual. There was less risk all round for the reader/consumer, the author, and the publisher. Thus, I am arguing that magazine serialization was an excellent ‘fit’ for the contents of new fiction with its potentially wide appeal. For the periodicals’ part, as the power of fiction to attract readers demonstrably grew in the nineteenth century, so desire for news and information of all sorts fuelled the growth of the press. The inclusion of fiction in commodity forms of journalism (magazines, reviews, and eventually newspapers) is similar to other strategies in the industry of the period to expand readership. The appropriation of fiction into the wide maw of the press is comparable to claims to cover as wide a geographic area as possible for news contents as well as distribution, or publishing at multiple intervals to reach different consumer groups (early and late editions), or including closing prices, law reports, racing news, and/or theatre reviews to attract different niche audiences. This is not to mention the advertising revenue, again increasingly important and increasingly linked to circulation. On balance, not only are the advantages to the press of including fiction many, and basic to  See Laurel Brake, Print in Transition (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 47–51 for a detailed comparison of part issue and magazine serialization.

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journalism, but also its inclusion may be seen as typical of the operation of the industry of the day. Evidence of the power of fiction for the press by the end of the century, the advantage of fiction for drawing readers, may be seen in W.T. Stead’s practice as an editor. In 1893–1894, and again in 1904, Stead, who nurtured throughout his life, personally and as a journalist and editor, a longstanding prejudice against the novel (and the theatre), was simply unable to resist the lure of serialized fiction as a necessary ingredient of his two ‘daily paper’ projects of cheap newspapers for the people. It is a measure of the popularity of the novel that Stead’s resistance was overcome. Claiming in November 1893 that in England ‘no first-class newspaper demeans its columns by the publication of a novel in instalments’, Stead is critically eloquent and revelatory in his reasoning in reaching a contrary conclusion: There are millions of human beings, especially among the young and among women, who will never read anything unless it is served up to them in the form of fiction. As a newspaper only deals with fictions of another sort and religiously abstains from publishing fiction that is honestly labelled as such, it fails to secure as readers those whose only literary diet is romance.

What we hear in Stead’s anguished explanation for the inclusion of fiction in his newspaper is a late example of the deep reluctance of Nonconformists to give readers what they want, noted by Altick in The English Common Reader. But make no mistake, this is not only an antipathy based on the inappropriateness of fiction in a newspaper, but a suspicion of the nature of the novel as a genre – its capacity for dubious moral content and for fancy, and its dearth of practicality. Stead preferred to admit serialized fiction to his publications in a new, self-styled form, which he dubbed ‘journalistic’ fiction, which was to be based (daily, weekly, or monthly) on breaking news. But this reluctant embrace of the novel, late in the nineteenth century, is also reflected in Altick, in the attitudes of public librarians in 1897 to readers and borrowers of novels, whom they termed ‘fiction vampires’, novels being a genre which, by the 1890s, to their dismay, accounted for between 65 and 90 per cent of borrowing. From 1884, the year of Walter Besant’s lecture to the Royal Institution asserting the art of fiction and the subsequent debate that provoked Henry James’s famous article, through the symposia of the early 1890s in the New Review on ‘Candour in English Fiction’ (January 1890), ‘The Science of Fiction’ (April Quoted in Frederic Whyte, The Life of W.T. Stead, 2 vols (London: Cape, 1925), II, p. 332.  Stead himself wrote at least two novellas of journalistic fiction, which comprised his early Review of Review Annuals (London, 1892 and 1893). These were entitled From the Old World to the New and Two and Two Makes Four.  Altick, pp. 239, 231.  See Mark Spilka, ‘Henry James and Walter Besant: “The Art of Fiction” Controversy’, Novel 6.2 (1973), pp. 101–19. 

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1891), and ‘The Science of Criticism’ (May 1891), the status of fiction and the constraints upon it in Britain were interrogated by novelists and critics including Moore, Besant, Lynn Linton, Hardy, James, Lang, and Gosse. Besant, a vehement defender of the novel, laments its status (‘Fiction is not an art of the first rank’), while Moore and Hardy think its quality in England suffered from censorship. That is, there is ample evidence to show that despite the overwhelming popularity of the English novel among readers in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and indeed perhaps because of it, refusal to recognize it as literature, or worthy of the time and attention of serious readers, remained among many of the older and established educated as late as the 1890s, and among some of the powerful publishers and distributors. James found a chapter missing from his novel when it appeared in Harper’s, Moore had difficulty publishing his fiction because of its alleged immorality, and Mr Mudie and W.H. Smith continued to ‘select’ the fiction they distributed in their respective circulating library and shops. One indication of this in the journals is that while fiction proliferates in periodicals between 1850 and 1900, often in unexpected environments, reviews of fiction in the same periodicals are not normally commensurate in number, length, or prominence either with the fiction that is carried or that which is advertised. Nor do some of the most well-known critics of the day, such as Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and Pater, bother much, if at all, with reviewing English novels. Renowned reviewers of novels who championed the genre were relatively few, and those who signed their reviews even fewer. Geraldine Jewsbury, George Henry Lewes, E.S. Dallas, R.H. Hutton, and Margaret Oliphant stand out retrospectively as critics engaged with the novel over time, although most of their reviews appeared without signature. The profile of fiction in the periodicals, then, is not univocal. There are eloquent absences as well as a kind of racy presence, as fiction elbows its unruly way into the columns of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, for example, renamed in the 1854 new series Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, signalling its capitulation to the regular publication of serial fiction; or into a new and weighty review in 1865, the Fortnightly, whose first decade included the serialization of Trollope’s The Belton Estate from the outset, and two other titles; and novels by Meredith, T.A. Trollope, and Frances Trollope. A similar mixture of resistance and embrace of the novel is true of Oxbridge in the nineteenth century. If English literature gradually made its way into the syllabuses and degrees of Oxford and Cambridge toward the end of the century, it was a slow coach and late comer, not least because of the status of the popular and contemporary novel, written in the vernacular language, and the association of its See their comments in George Moore, Literature at Nurse: or, Circulating Morals (London: Vizetelly, 1885), and Thomas Hardy, ‘Candour in English Fiction’, Review of Reviews (January 1, 1890), pp. 15–21, respectively.  See Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 109–10 for Harper’s letter to James on this occasion. See Moore’s own indignant account in Literature at Nurse. 

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consumption with two specific groups – women and students with no education in classics. With the model of classics so firmly established in academic study of the day, medieval and early modern authors and texts were favoured in the new syllabuses in English, and contemporary or even modern literature was normally excluded. In our own period, when the novel sits comfortably at the table of English studies, it is important to recall that its generic respectability (which was doubtful and uneven) throughout the nineteenth century, for many of those in authority, was not unlike that of journalism. Is it possible that Saintsbury plumped for periodicals in his history of English literature because the mainstream press was more defendable than the novel? Despite resistance to recognition of the literary status of the English novel among some critics, editors, Utilitarians, Evangelicals, Anglicans, and Nonconformists after 1850, the novel became a necessary ingredient of a large number of periodicals in the second half of the century. This was the result of a gradual gathering of momentum of fiction from the preceding decades. The growth of popular fiction in the 1840s, the impact of the first railway novels and bookstalls from around 1848, and the cluster of quality writing by Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and Gaskell all contributed to the increased claims of the novel for recognition. Sally Ledger has recently argued that the prominent place of serial fiction in Household Words in the 1850s was pioneering in the middle-class weekly press, while Lorna Huett’s work on the format of Household Words suggests its similarities to the penny press, which in the weekly London Journal had been featuring serial fiction throughout the forties. Earlier still, the impact of fiction on the press in the first half of the century is also notable. The absence of novels in the ‘great’ quarterlies (a necessary absence given their infrequency) – the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review, and the Westminster Review – helped define them as ‘weighty’, while the presence of fiction in Blackwood’s helped establish its comparatively ‘lighter’ note and distinctive character in its early years, as a monthly magazine (not a review) that published original fiction anonymously and serially. Other monthlies, such as the New Monthly Magazine and later Tait’s, reviewed literature and published original essays and articles, but not novels. Fraser’s (founded in 1830 and a scion of Blackwood’s) followed Maga’s example to an extent, with an emphasis on wit, satire, and the comic, but it decried the poor quality of fiction of the day in spoof, and cutting occasional reviews of Colburn’s and Bentley’s new novels, accompanied by virulent denunciation of the puffing practices of those two publishers. Serial fiction only began to appear with some regularity in Fraser’s in 1837, including Thackeray’s early novel Catherine in 1839–1840 and two novels by Kingsley in 1848 and 1852. Bentley’s Miscellany, founded in 1837 to compete in the same market niche as Blackwood’s and Fraser’s with its congregated wits, featured serial fiction more than the others (for example, Oliver Twist). Initially dominating the contents of Bentley’s, serialized instalments, often of short fiction, were only gradually balanced by other kinds of literary contents in the 1840s. By July 1856, four serial fiction instalments appeared in a single number of 100 pages. This tension between

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the novel and other forms of prose in the typically miscellaneous nineteenthcentury magazine (even more pronounced in the newspaper) indicates to me a persistent aspiration for a general rather than specialized press, and an attempt to bring different reading constituencies together in single titles – including women and men, political economists and novel readers, men of science and poetry. While there was increasing specialization in the nineteenth-century periodical press, the contents of many of the journals echoed the eclecticism of their adverts. There is one aspect of the circulation of fiction that the nineteenth-century press before 1850 managed differently than most publishers of novels in volume form, and that is signature. For 60 years Blackwood’s imposed anonymity (or pseudonymity) on all contributors to Maga to foster coherence under the brand name of the journal itself. This also prevented celebrity authors of novels from outshining the nameless contributors of the other contents of the monthly. But both Fraser’s and Bentley’s deployed pseudonyms, initials, and outright signature in fiction, as well as other articles, and encouraged readers to piece together attributions to identifiable author-figures. In addition to inclusion of serial instalments, there were other modes of editorial content through which periodicals identified with the novel: through serious and frequent reviewing of fiction, as evident in the Spectator;10 generous attention to fiction news and gossip; allocation of nuanced locations for fiction reviews;11 cultivation of women readers in order to justify more fiction content;12 and later in the century, papers which were ‘dedicated’ to fiction, fiction papers such as the upmarket Belgravia, and the popular titles which Michael Ashley treats in The Age of the Storytellers, of which the Argosy is one.13 The Advantage of Fiction I want to discuss the ‘advantage[s]’ of fiction for the periodical press after 1850 from three perspectives – content and its relation to readership, publishers, and authors. Advantages for readers of magazine fiction appear in all three categories. See Fig. 1, in which an ordinary novel receives a full-page review. See the Athenaeum, for example in 1884–1885, in which novels might be reviewed

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in a variety of weighted locations: longer reviews in ‘Literature’, shorter in ‘Novels of the Week’, or just listed. See Laurel Brake, ‘Vernon Lee and the Pater Circle’, in Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, ed. by Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 40–57 (p. 50) on Athenaeum reviews of novels by Vernon Lee, Mary Ward, and Walter Pater. 12 As the new editor of Cornhill Magazine in 1860, Thackeray explicitly targeted and addressed ‘family’ readers in his early manifestos and statements of his intentions for the journal, which was to be lavish in its inclusion of fiction, but also prohibited articles on topics thought to alienate family readers. 13 Michael Ashley, The Age of the Storytellers: Popular Fiction Magazines, 1880– 1950 (New Castle, Delaware, and London: Oak Knoll and the British Library, 2006).

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The benefits for the periodicals themselves, the first perspective that I adumbrate here, are largely extrapolated from the material culture of serial parts over time. The incorporation of fiction helped both specialized and ‘general’ periodicals survive by broadening their appeal to include readers outside of their original remit of coverage and mode of address, such as expository articles on politics or religion, or by enhancing the breadth of a wider, miscellany title. In this way, the political front and middle of the Spectator were supplemented by its serious reviews of fiction, the original fiction in Good Words might reflect its religious remit and entertain as well, while the evaluative reviews of new fiction in the Athenaeum and serial fiction in Chambers’s spiced up the fare of these general weeklies. Then too, in the nineteenth century, fiction mapped onto a new audience of great potential for monthlies, weeklies, and dailies: Women were a relatively untapped and increasingly literate consumer group, whom editors and publishers alike were keen to cultivate. A preponderance of women readers might influence the nature of the entire contents of a journal, as well as expand its advertising base to include female desire. Moreover, the publication of fiction or reviews of fiction within journals attracted advertisements from publishers of novels in other formats (such as three-volume or cheap editions); the address of the advertisers to readers of these journals as readers and consumers of fiction reinforced the association of the papers with fiction and the readers’ interest in it. Thus the publishers’ advertised lists of new novels took their place for the readers alongside of literary gossip and lists of new publications in the letterpress as welcome information. Indeed, journals that did not themselves publish fiction (for example, weeklies such as the Athenaeum, the Spectator, and Saturday Review) after 1860 enhanced their association with this burgeoning market which, for them, included readers, publishers, and circulating libraries, in a number of ways: the Athenaeum provided breadth of coverage of new novels in relatively short reviews, but also literary gossip and announcements; the Spectator, whose literary editor was particularly interested in the novel, regularly published longer notices of one or two titles, as well as regular shorter reviews, while Saturday Review relied on spleen in its reviews to claim a notoriety that attracted purchasers. All were rewarded with a generous amount of advertising from publishers of fiction and the circulating libraries which normally were the primary distributors of new fiction in its firstedition, volume format. In addition, by publishing serial fiction, periodicals directly benefited from the bulk buying of the circulation libraries, as the inclusion of serial fiction in their pages increased the demand for the journal titles in the libraries, resulting in higher monthly circulation figures for the periodicals. Although the price of mainstream, middle-class periodicals came down dramatically for the individual consumer in 1859–1860, it was cheaper still to read the magazine instalments through annual circulating library subscriptions. That readers did so is shown by Mudie’s adverts for the sale of its remainder copies of stock, which includes old issues of journals a few months late.

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The popularity of fiction by mid-century and its capacity to attract substantial numbers of new readers revitalized the monthly periodical form not only generically as described above, but also economically by putting itself within the reach of readers with lower disposable income, from deeper down into the middle classes. By building on older examples of magazines that serialized fiction, such as the New Monthly Magazine, Blackwood’s, and Fraser’s, and making fiction a more prominent part of their contents, the upmarket shilling monthlies were able to shift the standard price of monthly issues from 2s, 6d, to 1s, a reduction of 150 per cent. First Macmillan’s Magazine and then Cornhill Magazine, launched in November 1859 and January 1860, made up in sales from the greater number of purchasers and advertisers what they lost in reducing the cover price. The unit price had a sound economic basis that contributed to its success – ‘value for money’. Cornhill, in particular, offered the reader ‘more’ fiction for the 1s cost of a single monthly part-issue instalment (which would include part x of y novel, with an illustration and an advertiser), by packing into the early numbers three serials per issue, by prominent novelists, one of whom edited the magazine, plus sumptuous illustration and a number of articles on a range of topics. Macmillan’s offered fiction plus other types of quality copy for this greatly reduced price. The publication of serial fiction in the magazine also increased the quantity and proportion of original material in some of the older periodical titles. Because the publication of ‘original papers’ was a signifier of quality in a sector much given to scissors-and-paste journalism, the presence of original fiction could foster the status of periodicals. If it was additionally attributed to authors of renown by signature or other means of association, it could reinforce or even establish the link of the periodical with literature and creativity, helping to offset the association of a journal title with hack and jobbing journalism, the negative binary of Art. Alternatively, the publication of multiple instalments of serial fiction in a single issue of a journal such as Cornhill propelled aspects of the periodical press toward a mass market by fuelling the growth after 1859–1860 of ‘fiction papers’, an entirely new, if narrower, genre of periodicals that built on the London Journal and Household Words, in a different, higher market niche: examples include Belgravia and Argosy. The multiplication of such dedicated fiction magazines at all levels of readership is limned by Michael Ashley’s The Age of the Storytellers: Popular Fiction Magazines, 1880–1950, an annotated dictionary of 106 popular examples, which not only buoyed up the number of titles in the periodical sector and increased the number of periodical readers, but also shifted the primary format of the consumption of new fiction from part-issue and circulating library volumes to magazine and, eventually, newspaper instalments.14 See Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000), especially chapter 1, for a detailed discussion of the trajectory of magazine serialization of fiction. Law divides the phenomenon of serialized fiction into weekly miscellanies and monthly magazines, suggesting that after 1870 weeklies overtook monthlies, ‘which had already passed their peak of popularity’ (p. 26). Ashley’s account of the new generation of 14

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Reviews of fiction in the periodicals served the interests of periodicals and their editors, and publishers alike. Whatever their verdicts on the titles noticed, reviews of fiction attracted curious readers to the journals, thus enhancing circulation, and circulated the names of new fiction to potential borrowers or purchasers, benefiting authors, publishers, and the commercial libraries. Moreover, publishers often excerpted reviews from the magazines and reinserted them into the magazines in their adverts of their new lists to boost a title, thus enhancing the authority of the magazine cited and circulating its name, thereby covertly rewarding the magazine for reviewing its new titles. What about the advantages of serial fiction from the perspective of the publishers? A number of publishers of novels and books more generally invested in periodical titles after 1850. Macmillan’s Magazine and Cornhill were house journals of Macmillan and Smith Elder, respectively; the additional window for publication of fiction served a variety of functions. It helped publishers recruit authors, both unknown and famous, by attracting them initially to good terms and conditions of periodical publication, which was then used as a platform to sign authors up to further book and periodical contracts. The link between serial publication in the house journal and in volume form by the publisher is common, and the process could also go in both directions. Having published one novel successfully in either or both formats, the publisher is better positioned to claim and benefit from publication of the next title. Thus because in 1857 the publisher of Macmillan’s Magazine (1959ff) had issued and reprinted Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Macmillan was able to initiate the first number of the Magazine in 1859 with Hughes’s sequel, Tom Brown in Oxford. Magazine serialization also helped longer-term sales by covertly advertising the serialized text, through exposing and trailing it repeatedly before its later appearance in successive volume formats. It also opened the novel parts to pre– volume publication reviews, which may have brought the title for the first time to the attention of certain readers, who might then seek out the journal or simply remember it for future reference. Reviews and instalments created title recognition, familiarity with characters and text, and even engagement with plot events, all of which might foster sales of the first edition to readers and the circulating libraries and reader demand for the title in the libraries. Publication of novel instalments as part of journal contents was also less of an economic risk for the publisher than standalone publication in part-issue or volume form, especially for new, unknown, or anonymous authors. Such embedded publication of fiction is carried by other articles, even other fiction, as fiction magazines (over 50 per cent of whose contents are fiction) from 1880–1950 does not bear this out, with the preponderance of his primary list being monthlies rather than weeklies, by a large majority. For a discussion of the phenomenon of serialized fiction in magazines in the eighteenth century, see Robert Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines 1740– 1815: with a catalogue of 1375 magazine novels and novelettes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962), especially chapter 5, ‘Original Fiction in the Miscellanies’.

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well as the brand name of the journal, and helps overcome these disadvantages in the marketplace. Embedded serialization also protects the publisher against unpopular work, which may be more obtrusively withdrawn, curtailed, or improved. This dilution of risk had a particular advantage for women writers of fiction. The anonymity and security of serial publication in some journals helped publishers employ women novelists, some of whom were at least initially reluctant to enter the public sphere in their own person and preferred to appear in a mediated environment in which both their names and their association with regular, paid work could be obscured. George Eliot is only one example of such a writer. In her book, First Person Anonymous (2004), Alexis Easley has argued that nineteenth-century women novelists moved in and out of anonymity, selecting it for their more controversial material, and Jennifer Phegley’s Educating the Proper Woman Reader (2004) convincingly shows the potential danger of exposure to the public for women fiction writers and editors of the period, in the case of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Another manner in which publishers of periodicals after 1860 benefited from the popularity of fiction was to employ famous novelists – notably Thackeray, Trollope, and Braddon – to edit their journals. Thackeray’s name as editor of George Smith’s new journal was advertised far in advance of the appearance of the journal, and before a name had been decided upon. The novelist was the known brand, and Smith used Thackeray’s writing to fill the early numbers of Cornhill, in which the novelist editor published not only a serialized novel but also his ‘Roundabout Papers’. Trollope edited Saint Paul’s for James Virtue, and Braddon Belgravia for John Maxwell. House journals such as Macmillan’s and Cornhill served as regular, free advertising vehicles for their publishers, appearing monthly in tandem with the monthly issue of the new titles in the publishers’ lists. So, the serialized fiction by which readers were lured to the house journals provided publishers with increasing access to consumers’ exposure to the adverts for their general lists as well as their fiction, carried for free in the ‘Advertisers’ of the shilling monthlies. Authors of new fiction had a significantly larger market for their novels, with less risk than initial volume publication, and if they were publishing anonymously, they were able to contribute other pieces – fiction or non-fiction – to the same or other serials. Weaker instalments or whole serials might be ‘carried’ by the brand name of the periodical, or later more well-known, named contributors, and new writers, such as Thackeray in the 1830s and ’40s, or George Eliot in the 1850s, or Walter Pater in the 1860s could learn their craft anonymously, and in the cases of Thackeray and Eliot, earn their living and enter the profession. Authors were also paid at least twice for their novels, for serial as well as volume publication. Indirectly, they benefited from the pre–volume publication publicity afforded by magazine or miscellany serialization, insofar as it boosted subsequent sales on which royalties might depend. The proliferation of the periodical press in this period was deeply implicated in the larger book trade, but it especially benefited from the explosion of the

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nineteenth-century novel in a particular set of social, industrial, and technological circumstances – the consumer demand across the classes, increase in the variety of formats of its publication, and the high price of new fiction, as Altick documents, as well as the removal of the tax on paper, changes in press technology, and the capacity to make and print images quickly, relatively cheaply, and easily, illustration being another of the significant sustaining features of periodicals in the period. Once the three-volume model of novel publication faltered in the mid-1890s, and cheap, shorter, single-volume formats for new fiction gradually encroached, the demise of serial publication of novels in magazines was inevitable. Already, from 1891, the Strand made a speciality of publishing short stories and, as serialized novels in the magazines waned, one-off fiction was to take its place more decorously among the article-length units of periodical publications. The transformation in the 1890s of the publishing arrangements for new fiction prevailing since Scott and Dickens, arrangements on which a system of mutual benefit to magazines, publishers, authors, and distributors had rested, resulted in nothing less than the transformation of the English novel itself, now to become slimmer, more tightly plotted, and compact. Serials, too, had to find new lures for the public, and the intensification of celebrity stories, investigative campaigns, sensation, illustration, and other elements of new journalism were brought to fruition in the mass market media, typified in 1896 by the admixture of Harmsworth’s Daily Mail. Although the link between the press and the novel remained – in reviewing, adverts, interviews, and celebrity feature articles – the new journalism magazines and newspapers moved to other kinds of popular copy (including short fiction) to appeal to an even larger reading public, while new English novels were first read in single-volume form through direct purchase or from free public libraries, and eventually even the likes of Braddon, Moore, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf were studied in schools and universities.

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Chapter 2

Dorothy’s Literature Class: Late-Victorian Women Autodidacts and Penny Fiction Weeklies Kate Macdonald

In The English Common Reader Richard Altick aims to offer information and sources that could be used to ‘interpret the popular taste of an age’. To examine the ‘popular taste of an age’ we need to look at the popular reading material of its readers, while being aware that the traditional view of the Victorian periodical as a passive resource has broadened to acknowledge that Victorian periodicals were ‘a (or perhaps the) constitutive medium of a Victorian culture which is now seen as interactive’. It should be noted that this chapter focuses on low-priced and nonelite reading materials. Altick warns that awareness of literacy levels is crucial in understanding who was reading what in nineteenth-century Britain. ‘Here we are concerned primarily with the experience of that overwhelmingly more numerous portion of the English people who became day-to-day readers for the first time in this period, as literacy spread and printed matter became cheaper.’ The march of technology enabled printing to become cheaper and faster, along with improved distribution of that ‘printed matter’. Periodicals flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century as they had never done before, and in the fin de siècle, literacy was becoming as close to universal in the British population as it had ever been. It was a time of very broad reader choice, and considerable effort was made by periodical publishers to lure the Victorian common reader towards their own productions.

R.D. Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago, 1957), p. 6. Deborah Mutch, English Socialist Periodicals, 1880–1900: A Reference Source

 

(London, 2005), p. xvi.  Lyn Pykett, ‘Reading the periodical press: text and content’, in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (New York, 1990), pp. 3–18, 7.  Altick, p. 7.  Ibid., p. 171.  Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media, ed. by Louise Henson, Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jonathan R. Topham (Aldershot, 2004), p. 21.

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Although Altick admits that ‘only a few selected periodicals … have been gone through systematically’ for his study, he describes ‘the hardy penny leaflets’, which he deems to sit ‘at the bottom of the scale’ in cheap fiction publishing, as ‘usually running to thirty-two pages and enclosed in a garish wrapper. Some of these leaflets were penny bloods, pure and simple, but in response to a renewed clamour in the press against cheap thrillers, some forms made a brave show of promoting more wholesome literature for the masses’. While Diana Dixon maintains that a penny was likely to have been within the reach of rural children for a weekly newspaper, Margaret Beetham notes that a penny may have been too much for the working class and the real poor to pay, even if their literacy levels had been sufficient. This indicates that the penny weekly fiction papers were probably read by the lower middle and the middle classes.10 ‘The penny, which, as in the Penny Post or the Penny Bank, was so often treated by Victorian propagandists as something universally affordable, was in fact a substantial sum to spend on something of casual interest’, but ‘[in 1902 Seebohm] Rowntree specifically referred to an inability to buy a halfpenny newspaper as an example of real privation’.11 At 32 pages, such a penny paper would have been printed at a very economic multiple of pages. This reading material was well-nigh ubiquitous for the masses’ choice,12 and its content covered a wider range of potential readers and their interests than had hitherto been thought of. All age groups were catered for, and women were a particular target of the fin de siècle publishers, in all social degrees.13 At the lower end of the scale, the reading choices for the domestic or family market (who would have been the beneficiaries of Altick’s ‘clamour in the press’) were either non-sensation fiction or miscellanies. In this chapter I want to build on Altick’s work on Victorian periodicals by examining how one late nineteenth-century weekly paper engaged in the education and self-improvement of its (largely women) readers, and how it attempted different means to extend their knowledge of reading and literature, through competitions, literature classes, and reading lists. This investigation will add to our understanding of what these readers responded to, what did not attract them, what levels of educational attainment they were assumed, by the editors, to have, and what these appear to have been in reality. Virginia Berridge shows how content analysis of Altick, p. 8. Ibid., p. 314.  Diana Dixon, ‘Children and the press, 1866–1914’, in The Press in English Society  

from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, ed. by Michael Harris and Alan Lee (London, 1986), pp. 133–48, 135. 10 Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine 1800–1914 (London, 1996), p. 121. 11 Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford, 1985), pp. 31, 48. 12 Agnes Repplier, ‘English Railway Fiction’, in Points of View (Cambridge, MA, 1891), pp. 209–39. 13 Beetham, p. 122.

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newspapers can collect information about their readers for historical research.14 Drawing on the methodology underlying content analysis, I attempt to identify this periodical’s ‘senders’ (the editors and publishers), its ‘message’ (what was published), and its ‘audience’ (the readers).15 I consider how the Dorothy positioned its readers, and how the editorial and authorial voices within the Dorothy mediated between their readers and the knowledge they wished to impart.16 There is very little published on didactic self-improvement movements for women in late-Victorian periodicals, and the readers at the lower end of the literacy scale have largely been ignored. The Victorian debate over reading has received an enormous amount of attention, in its day and in the late twentieth century.17 The reading habits and reading opportunities for the lower and working classes are discussed in terms of the books they read18 and their efforts at self-improvement.19 Periodicals for women are discussed most comprehensively by Margaret Beetham.20 Didactic instruction, particularly for women, was well established in Victorian periodicals: in mid-century, the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine ran essay competitions where the editor judged and criticized the entries.21 Jennifer Phegley notes that by teaching its women readers to read literary texts ‘properly’, the Cornhill Magazine encouraged them to ‘follow particular codes of conduct that would assure the cultural dominance of the middle-class within the British nation’.22 However, these readers, though female, were not ‘common readers’. Kate Kelman’s work on didacticism in an Edinburgh reading society is also restricted, by definition, to the middle-class mid-Victorian lady.23 Clare Gill’s work on the socialist reading schemes of John Trevor and The Labour Prophet in the 1890s looks at working-class readers in detail,24 but even here the periodical in question was of a relatively high quality, aiming itself at ‘rational’, focused Virginia Berridge, ‘Content analysis and historical research on newspapers’, in The Press in English Society, pp. 201–18. 15 R.P. Weber, Basic Content Analysis (Beverly Hills & London, 1985), p. 9. 16 Pykett, ‘Reading the periodical press’, p. 15. 17 For an excellent survey see Kelly J. Mays, ‘The disease of reading and Victorian periodicals’, in Literature in the Marketplace, ed. by John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 165–94. 18 Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–1850: A Study of the Literature produced for the Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England (London, 1963). 19 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (London, 2001). 20 Beetham. 21 Ibid., p. 64. 22 Jennifer Phegley, ‘Clearing away the Briars and Brambles”: The education and professionalization of the Cornhill Magazine’s women readers, 1860–65’, Victorian Periodicals Review 33/1 (2000), pp. 22–43, 24. 23 Kate Kelman, ‘“Self Culture”: The educative reading pursuits of the Ladies of Edinburgh, 1865–1885’, Victorian Periodicals Review 36/1 (2003), pp. 59–75. 24 Clare Gill, ‘Reading “the religion of socialism”: Olive Schreiner, the Labour Church and the construction of left-wing reading communities in the 1890s’, conference 14

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autodidacts, rather than being the ‘desultory’, casual reading of leisure typical of the penny press.25 Margaret Beetham notes the strong association between selfimprovement and commercial potential in magazines for women and girls at the end of the century, but these periodicals, working through ‘the ideological project of education and control’, were aimed at a more highly educated readership than the readers of the Dorothy.26 Very little work has been done on the readers of the very lowest grades of publication, even at their most flourishing in the fin de siècle, except in genre publishing.27 The periodical under consideration here is the Dorothy, a penny fiction weekly published in London from 1889 until 1899, when it became a supplement to another weekly penny paper.28 The Dorothy cost only a penny, but described itself as a magazine for girls and ladies. It relied on the continued subscriptions and purchases of its readers for its existence, and consequently maintained a high level of reader-editorial dialogue in its pages, constantly engaging the attention and money of its purchasers. Most of the Dorothy’s content consisted of a ‘complete story’, between three and twelve pages long, advertised as being for the family. ‘Unhealthy sensationalism will, on the one hand, be carefully avoided, and dull mediocrity on the other. The brightly humorous or the touching and pathetic story will find a place in its pages; and it will be the Editor’s constant care to so conduct the Dorothy Novelette that it will be received without hesitation into the home and family circle.’29 The high percentage of fiction content (for its first year it was usually above 80 per cent, and rarely fell below around 60 per cent) was gradually eroded by increasing numbers of self-improvement features and articles, exacerbated by the absorption of its own fashion supplement in July 1890. Many of these non-fiction features showed a close concern for the literacy and numerousness of the Dorothy’s readers. They covered a wide spectrum of abilities, and relied on participatory journalism and reader response. The Dorothy printed English composition exercises, poetry competitions, sewing instruction in the form of dialogues, a literature class, book reviews, word-search and counting competitions, and accepted short stories and tales from its readers for publication. paper given at ‘Reading the Evidence: Evidence of Reading’, Institute of English Studies, London, July 2008. 25 Mays, ‘The disease of reading’, p. 181. 26 Beetham, p. 138. 27 S See, for example, E.S. Turner, Boys will be Boys. (London, 1948); John Springhall, ‘Disseminating impure literature: the “penny dreadful” publishing business since 1860’, The Economic History Review 47/3 (1994), pp. 567–84; Christopher Pittard, Victorian Detective Fiction: an introduction, http://www.crimeculture.com/Contents/VictorianCrime. html (accessed 15 October 2008). 28 Kate Macdonald and Marysa Demoor, ‘The Dorothy and its supplements: a late-Victorian novelette (1889–1899)’, Publishing History 61(Spring 2007), pp. 71–101. The Dorothy was launched as the Dorothy Novelette, 1899–1890, changed its name to Dorothy’s Home Journal for Ladies, 1890–1892, and ended its life as Dorothy’s Home Journal 1893–1899. 29 The Dorothy Novelette 1/1 (16 September 1889), p. 16.

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But internal evidence shows that while some participation succeeded (evidenced by an increase in the number of pages given to answers to readers’ questions), other initiatives were overestimated or ill-judged. Internal evidence also gives direct evidence for readership. By printing the names and addresses of the competition winners every month, the Dorothy ensured that its readers would buy that issue. These lists make the Dorothy an untapped resource for readership studies in determining the geographical spread of these readers. In issue 25, in 1890, for example, the bias towards winners in Wales and the west of England is striking.30 With careful use of census data and contemporary maps it should also be possible to establish more precisely the reading habits of socioeconomic groups in different parts of the country, and whether these can, for instance, be mapped onto clusters of newsagents and other magazine outlets.31 This adheres to Lyn Pykett’s dictum that ‘The reconstruction of the reader … must be accompanied by attempts to gain knowledge of the actual as well as the implied readers of periodicals’.32 ‘The label “ladies” reassured readers that the work would be concerned with matters of the home and would not be improper or controversial’.33 Yet the lists of competition winners also show us, for example, that men read the Dorothy as well as women, which confirms the practice of ‘family’ or non-sensational periodicals being coded as ‘women’s’. The Dorothy’s tone was always friendly, the voice and face of an older woman who understood her readers’ interests and concerns, reflecting a late-Victorian trend in publishing. ‘The new periodical typically represented itself as the readers’ friend rather than mentor, cultivating an intimate rather than authoritative tone’.34 Who the editors, and writers, of the Dorothy were is unknown: no business or other records have been found to shed light on its day-to-day running or production. It is probable, but by no means certain, that it had at least one woman editor,35 The winners for issue 25, 3 March 1890, for example, came from Cardiff, London, Neath, Aldershot, Aylesbury, Bath, Bristol, Cambridge, Cottingham, Conway, Dowlais, Eton, Gosport, Mold, Newport, Pontypridd, Southampton, and Wrexham. 31 The work of Andrew Hobbs in ‘The reading world of a provincial town: Preston, 1854–1900’, conference paper given at ‘Reading the Evidence: Evidence of Reading’, Institute of English Studies, London, July 2008, is particularly relevant here, showing how mapping can associate readers with the location of their reading material. 32 Pykett, ‘Reading the periodical press’, p. 15. 33 Ellen Gruber Garvey, ‘Foreword’, in Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910, eds. Sharon M. Harris and Ellen Gruber Garvey (Boston, 2004), pp. xi–xxiii, xi. Although this book covers the American publishing industry, the point used here is valid for the British experience. 34 Beetham, p. 124. 35 See for example D.J. Trela, ‘Introduction: nineteenth-century women and periodicals’, Victorian Periodicals Review 29/2 (1996), pp. 89–94, 90; and also Evelyn March-Philips’s view that ‘It is a deplorable fact that almost all these [women’s weekly journals] are edited by men’, in ‘Women’s Newspapers’, The Fortnightly Review OS 62, NS 56 (1894), pp. 661–70. 30

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and certain that women wrote for it.36 The custom of anonymity for editorial and authorial contributions to Victorian periodicals means that women editors and authors could remain invisible, making their later identification difficult.37 The Dorothy began its life in September 1889, asking its readers to send in coupons cut from each issue in return for a chance to win ‘gifts’ of cheap jewellery and ornaments, in a thinly disguised lottery, the ‘prize competition’. This inducement attempted to retain readers from one issue to the next (since they would naturally buy the next issue to see if they had won a ‘gift’), and to encourage others to participate. In July 1890 the Dorothy announced that the ‘competition’ had been discontinued, and printed a letter from the Treasury informing the proprietors that the scheme was an illegal lottery and subject to the law if continued.38 In that same issue the ‘prize competition’ was brazenly turned into a competition of English composition exercises, ‘for the best brief sketches in order of merit of the plot of any one of Dorothy’s stories comprised in the Numbers 1 to 20’.39 This volte-face introduced a new, pedagogic element into what was still an unashamed touting of the Dorothy, since readers were now being urged to send in names of newsagents and potential subscribers to the editor, as well as their English compositions, along with their coupons.40 A further competition series began in 1892, with a guinea being offered each month for ‘the best short complete Love Story, length one page of Dorothy’,41 but this did not continue for more than a few months. The Dorothy’s poetry competitions are also evidence of its readers’ keenness for creative writing, with the incentive of the publication of the prize-winning entries. The judge’s report had a patronizing tone, quite at variance with the warm encouragement in other addresses to the readers: ‘Knowing that the art of writing good verse is not the possession of many, I was agreeably surprised by the shoals of letters received from all parts of Great Britain, very many of them containing lines of more than average merit’.42 This damns with faint praise, suggesting more about the editor’s expectations than about the quality of the entries. Interestingly, the winner of the 1891 competition was E. Nesbit with her poem ‘Dorothy’.

36 The Dorothy advertised itself as being ‘written by women for women’ (Dorothy’s Home Journal for Ladies 1/43 [7 July 1890], Fashion Supplement, p. 3). 37 Catherine A. Judd, ‘Male pseudonyms and female authority in Victorian England’, in Literature in the Marketplace, ed. by John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 250–68. 38 ‘Her Majesty’s Government v. “Dorothy”’, Dorothy’s Home Journal for Ladies 1/43 (7 July 1890), p. 3. 39 ‘Special Prize Competitions’, Dorothy’s Home Journal for Ladies 1/43 (7 July 1890), p. 3. 40 Dorothy’s Home Journal for Ladies 1/43 (7 July 1890), pp. 3, 16. 41 ‘A Guinea Prize Monthly’, Dorothy’s Home Journal for Ladies 5/137 (25 April 1892), p. 511. 42 ‘Award of Prizes’, Dorothy’s Home Journal for Ladies 4/100 (19 July 1891), p. 351.

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She was already a known writer at this point,43 and later sold a story to the Dorothy in 1892. But the title of her poem smacks of cynical opportunism, or perhaps a self-promoting deal made between herself and the editor in order to have a firstprize winner of a reasonable calibre. The runners-up, Ivy Higginson, of Jersey, and Elizabeth Cameron, of Portsea, had their addresses printed as well as their names and poems, while Nesbit, the professional writer, did not.44 In late 1892 ‘Dorothy’s Literature Class’ began. Every girl should have a fair knowledge of the literature of her own country, and this is most frequently obtained after schooldays are over by joining some special class for the purpose. But those who live ‘remote from towns’ often find it impossible to do this, and it is especially on their behalf that Dorothy intends starting a Literary Class, which she hopes will prove a means of pleasure and profit to the members during the coming winter. The books required for this competition are Tennyson [sic], Kingsley’s Westward Ho, Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, The Autocrat by O W Holmes, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Merchant of Venice. As a good many girls will not have all these works in their possession already, we offer three copies of either of these books for the best three sets of riddles sent in by November the 18th. For the next three best sets we will give a bound volume of Dorothy, and to the senders of the next three best sets we will give a Dorothy Mirror. Ten riddles form a set. Envelopes to be endorsed Riddles, and to contain two coupons.45

The ‘Literature Class’ was actually a glorified word-search competition, the likes of which had been running in the Dorothy since 1890. The promised ‘pleasure’ was clearly generated by a didactic hope that the readers would be so attracted by the texts that they were asked to read through, to find the ‘search passages’ printed every fortnight, that they would continue to read the entire work. Their ‘profit’ would be the experience of an improving read, and exposure to these selected works of literature. However, the monetary investment required was not inconsiderable, which calls into question the perceived economic status of the Dorothy’s readers, who were able to pay a penny a week for the magazine, but were here also asked to spend what could amount to as much as six shillings on books.46 They could, of course, have borrowed some or all of the texts from Julia Briggs, A Woman of Passion. The Life of E. Nesbit 1858–1924 (London, 1989). Dorothy’s Home Journal for Ladies 4/100 (19 July 1891), p. 351. 45 ‘Dorothy’s Literature Class’, Dorothy’s Home Journal 7/166 (14 November 1892), 43 44

p. 238. Notice that Hans Andersen and O.W. Holmes are not British writers, as Longfellow was not, though they were widely read in Britain, suggesting that actual nationality was less important than their status as writers in the corpus of ‘English literature’. 46 The six-penny edition of Westward Ho! was suggested (Dorothy’s Home Journal 7/169 [5 December 1892], p. 306), and the ten-penny edition of Sartor Resartus (Dorothy’s Home Journal 8/185 [25 March 1893], p. 59).

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libraries, but they would have needed the books for two months at a time: a practical drawback. In some reading lists, prices and editions were given for some of the books, indicating that readers were expected to buy the books, rather than borrow. In addition, the prizes for the competition were also books, to the value of £2/2, £1/1, or 10/6, the titles to be chosen by the winners.47 These are not small sums, and give a strong indication of the prize inducements considered necessary by the editor. Coupons were also still the currency for joining the ‘club’, as the Literature Class was synonymously called. Entering the competition required coupons, as did sending the competition entries: the Dorothy had to be bought each week for the duration of the competition to enable each participant to enter.48 The first search passages of text were published three weeks after the competition was announced. Each competitor had to search for the passages, one in each of the six set texts, and list the first three words following each passage on a postcard, to be sent to the Dorothy by a set day in the month, thus preventing too much collaboration. Three competitions were held in total, with three different sets of texts, meaning that participants had to search for 400 separate passages. The passages given were not particularly easy to find, and readers unfamiliar with the texts would probably have had to read each book several times over to find all the passages. As an incentive to sustained study through rereading it was a remarkably ingenious scheme, and was clearly popular since it ran for over a year. Combined with the commercial opportunism that had already been a characteristic of the Dorothy’s relationship with its readers, the Literature Class would have been a thorough reading experience, perhaps even a prototype correspondence book club, although no discussion of the texts was invited. The readers would also have gained a sense that they were truly part of a reading community, and that they were adding to their own education. The content of the search passages suggests that they had been chosen for their meaning and message as well as for suitability as a search object. Extracts from Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, Tennyson, and Hans Andersen had the same feel as the romantic fiction in the Dorothy’s principal content of ‘complete stories’, whereas the quotations from Oliver Wendell Holmes and Thomas Carlyle were didactic messages on female conduct. The extracts from Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley were a contrast here, since they contained messages with feminist overtones, but could also be read as didactic instruction. Care was taken to alter the levels of difficulty in the searching process: in the initial lists authors were given for each passage, and in some cases, for instance with Paradise Lost, the books involved were given as well. In the last list for each set of searches no authors were given at all, following the logic that by then, the participants would have searched the set texts at least five times already, and could be expected to start recognizing unlabelled passages.

‘Dorothy’s Literature Class’, Dorothy’s Home Journal 7/169 (5 December 1892),

47

p. 306.

Ibid.

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After the third ‘competition’, in mid-1894, a fourth was trailed for months but never materialized. In October 1894 the Dorothy had clearly given up on the Literature Class. We have much pleasure in recommending the National Home Reading Union to those of our readers who wish to keep up their studies. The books chosen for this year are varied, and the study of them would do much to encourage a sound taste for literature.49

By recommending the National Home Reading Union to its readers the Dorothy was confirming their suitability for continued self-education: there may have been a sense of graduation or attainment by successfully following the course. To ‘keep up their studies’ had been an aim of the Literature Class from its inception, and it is possible that the class had used or had been modelled on the Union’s own materials. Variety was more important to the Dorothy than a long-running feature, since its constantly changing non-fiction material resembled a low-literacy ‘miscellany’ periodical more than the structured contents of a magazine for the middle classes like, for instance, The Ladies’ Treasury or Sylvia’s Journal. The Dorothy continually added new items to its features, often very short indeed. A Literary Tableaux Vivants competition interrupted the Literature Class in July 1893, where ‘word pictures’ of the scenes described in ‘well-known English poems’ were presented, and the readers were asked to send the names of poet and poem to win prizes.50 This was followed by a Historical Tableau competition, which abandoned literary sources completely and merely presented descriptions of well-known scenes from history.51 The evident popularity of this, the Tableaux Vivants, and the Literature Class suggests that the Dorothy’s readers had a strong enthusiasm for demonstrating their knowledge, and their education in British history and literature. These were the most organized of the Dorothy’s many didactic experiments. Missing word games, buried proverb searches, and literacy and numeracy exercises, all presented as competitions, also allowed readers to combine light amusement with the possibility of demonstrating their intellectual prowess with a didactic subtext that suggested that ‘the character of lower-class mentality was consistently described with reference to an upper-class norm’.52 The Dorothy’s role in mediation between its readers and the knowledge it wished them to have was representative of the ‘increasingly numerous and diverse readers and a field of print commodities that was itself constantly increasing in both quantity and diversity’.53 As well as giving reading lists for the Literature ‘A Reading Association’, Dorothy’s Home Journal 11/266 (13 October 1894), p. 114. ‘Special Competition’, Dorothy’s Home Journal 8/200 (8 July 1893), p. 371. 51 ‘Historical Tableau Competition’, Dorothy’s Home Journal 9/222 (9 December 49

50

1893), p. 748. 52 Mays, ‘The disease of reading’, p. 179. 53 Ibid., p. 167.

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Class, it published occasional book reviews and took care to trumpet the new publications of its own staff or contributors.54 Other instruction was also carried out in fictionalized dialogue, continuing the tradition demonstrated earlier, for instance in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, of an older and experienced manager advising an inexperienced girl.55 The Dorothy’s monthly Fashion Supplement was a manual of instruction offering practical advice and information, a strong contrast to the fictional fantasies it printed in its weekly pages. Home decoration and beautifying was most frequently addressed, but was closely followed by discussion of clothes, hairstyles, and hats and how to make them. ‘Practical Dressmaking’ began in June 1890 with a straightforward feature giving instructions for an illustrated garment pattern, then changed to a dialogue between ‘Cecil’, an experienced dressmaker, and her younger cousins. This began as a story, where cousin Cecil arrived to stay with Jess and Maude. The girls had little money, and the village dressmaker had too many clients to do anything for them. Cecil, who made her own dresses, gave practical starter advice about fabric types and where to buy it. The dialogue was written in a good style, believable as a narrated episode but clear as a practical lesson. As each episode developed, the level of difficulty with the garments increased, so the ‘girls’ moved from a simple ‘improved umbrella skirt’ to ‘blouses’, an ‘Eton Jacket’, an ‘Empire vest’ and a ‘coat bodice’.56 This feature, which continued off and on for several years, is a remarkable example of mediation between reader and knowledge in the Dorothy, telling us a great deal about how the Dorothy positioned its readers. The readers’ need for and interest in clothes is the first assumption, and the fictionalized situation of Jess and Maude may be taken as representative of the readers. They can also be expected to have been actively interested in sewing, since the Dorothy carried advertisements for sewing machines, fabric warehouses, and haberdashery in almost every issue. Cecil addressed the practical constraints of acquiring fabric in the country by advocating mail order, and advised how much fabric to buy, and of what weight. These readers were not novices in sewing, since it was assumed that they would be competent with simple stitching, but techniques specific to tailoring were not expected of them. They were not expected to be practiced in working with paper patterns, as Jess and Maude were taken through fairly detailed descriptions of how to make facings, how to set a sleeve, and how and when to deal with the linings, but they were not patronized. Earlier articles The Dorothy’s palmistry correspondent, Emily Martin, was also a contributor of fiction (in issues 222, 322, and 341), and had published 13 additional ‘novels’ elsewhere. The book publication of one of these novels was reviewed in the Dorothy in issue 197, June 1893, possibly by the author herself, since she had begun a book reviews column in issue 171, January 1893. 55 Beetham, p. 69. 56 ‘Practical dress-making: chapter 2. The improved umbrella skirt’, Dorothy’s Home Journal for Ladies 5/132 (21 March 1892), pp. 446–7; ‘Practical dress-making: Blouses’, 5/137 (25 April 1892), p. 525; ‘The Eton Jacket’, 5/139 (9 May 1892), p. 558; ‘The Empire vest’, 5/142 (30 May 1892), p. 606; ‘Coat bodice’, 5/144 (13 June 1892), p. 639. 54

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in this series merely printed the garment pattern in miniature, and gave truncated instructions, similar to the abbreviated discourse familiar on modern sewing patterns. By developing the method of discourse to produce a narrated instruction, adding characters’ names, their dialogue, and small details from the characters’ lives, the dressmaking feature assumed the appearance of the fiction that constituted so much of the Dorothy’s content, but maintained a clarity in expression and explanation that was not often achieved by the fiction itself. These articles were the work of a very competent writer, who also knew how to sew. Throughout, the reader is addressed as an intelligent pupil, with a subtle assumption of confidence in her understanding, but it is indicative that by following the model of instruction through discourse, a pedagogical dialogue familiar since Plato, the readers of the Dorothy were instructed with respect, not patronage. A comparison can be made with the Dorothy’s cookery articles, which were scanty and terse, consisting of notes for dishes to be cooked, with lists of ingredients without measurements, and no explanation of methods. Dressmaking was clearly presented with more care, but the Dorothy’s advertisements, again, may also be a clue to what it was expected that the readers would be interested in: adverts for cookery equipment were comparatively rare compared to those for sewing materials, and both were greatly outnumbered by adverts for beauty products and corsetry. As with all Victorian periodicals, the ‘Answers to Queries’ section, or, in this case, ‘Dorothy’s Letter-Box’, gives a remarkable profile of that newspaper’s readers. The question of the original enquiries’ authenticity is not at issue, since it is highly probable that the editors invented a substantial proportion of the questions, certainly at the beginning of the Dorothy’s life. It is more significant that, in inventing questions to be answered, the editor was suggesting the kinds of questions expected from the readers. Victorian editors and writers did not know with any great certainty who their readers were, they merely made educated guesses.57 The answers to questions in ‘Dorothy’s Letter-Box’ gave a clear statement from the editors, as well as from any genuine enquiries, as to the principal concerns of their readers. In June 1890 the concerns were grouped tidily into sections, consisting of ‘The Health and Toilet’, handwriting analysis as a guide to character, etiquette, and ‘Dress and Fashion’ and ‘Cookery’. Four years later, the subject areas for questions had developed into feature sections of their own, with ‘Fashion’s Fads’, ‘Cookery Wrinkles’, ‘Health and Toilet’, and ‘Household Hints’. The Dorothy’s own insurance scheme was prominent, as were the multitudinous competitions, and a handicrafts club called Dorothy’s Home League, which made useful articles for the poor. This also included an element of competition, with prizes for the best ‘fancy article suitable for selling at a bazaar’, ‘any similar article the materials of which have not cost more than 1s’, ‘a child’s frock’, ‘a child’s pinafore’, a ‘pair of knitted socks or stockings’, or ‘a pincushion’. ‘All the contributions sent in will 57 Joel H. Wiener, ‘Sources for the Study of Newspapers’, Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (London & New York, 1990), pp. 155–65, p. 160.

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be given to one or other of the devoted bands of women who have given up their whole lives to working among the poor and destitute of the great cities, who will bestow those which are suitable for the purpose where they are most needed.’58 Were these common readers? The overwhelming dominance of womenfocused romance fiction in the ‘complete’ stories published in the Dorothy for almost 10 years59 shows that its readers were clearly predominantly female, but the evidence in the lists of competition winners shows that men and boys were participating as readers as well. The readers’ socioeconomic class range may be assumed to be between those who could afford a penny a week for the paper, or knew someone who did, and those who could afford the time and materials to knit and sew for the poor in a virtuously intended competition. Their geographical location can be inferred from the many lists of competition winners and their home addresses. Their working lives are reflected in the questions answered and advice given, and in occasional notes suggesting that some of the women readers had a daily commute to work by train.60 Similar inferences can be found by mining the pages of this periodical for a weekly update on its readers’ interests. What the Dorothy and its named and unnamed contributors thought of its readers is more complex. We can read the editor’s assumptions about the readers’ literacy levels, and we can deduce the actual levels of literacy in those who participated in literature-based competitions, as well as those who only did the word searches. The quantity of the fiction offered in the Dorothy, its content, its messages and style tell us about the Dorothy readers’ appetite for romance, and their need for confirmation and reassurance. The editors continued to supply this material to their readers for commercial reasons, primarily, but on considering the efforts made by the Dorothy to raise its readers’ levels of literary appreciation, contrasted with the colossal amounts of formulaic romance fiction that the readers bought the Dorothy for, an interesting parallel can be seen. The Dorothy published approximately 640 stories in its 10-year life. Assuming that a reader bought and read the Dorothy faithfully for every issue, for 10 years, she would have ingested a great deal of the same type and quality of fiction, read at leisure purely for her amusement. If she had also participated faithfully in the Literature Class, which ran for approximately 16 months between 1892 and 1894, she would have searched for 400 passages in 18 works of literature, reading each work approximately 20 times each. Her reading for the Literature Class would also have been driven by the slight lure of winning a prize, receiving praise, and having her name in print as a hard-working student. There is a qualitative as well as a quantitative difference between the two sets of supposed reading ‘Dorothy’s Home League’, Dorothy’s Home Journal 8/200 (8 July 1893), p. 371. Kate Macdonald, ‘The lost authors of the fin de siècle: ten years of a Victorian

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weekly fiction magazine’, in Victorian Antifeminism Inside Out: Rereading Domestic Women Writers, ed. by Tamara S. Wagner (New York, 2009), pp. 297–316. 60 Janet, ‘Women’s dominion: Good manners’, Dorothy’s Home Journal 4/80 (23 March 1891), pp. 28–9.

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experiences, but there is also an indication that the Dorothy did, at one point in its life, attempt to improve the reading experiences of its purchasers by exposing them, in a calculated and pedagogically cunning way, to literature of considerably higher quality, in every way possible, than the literature it sold them every week for 10 years. It is also possible that, having been so self-educated, the Dorothy may have lost some of its original readers by their departure to a higher grade of weekly periodical. It would be going too far to say that the Dorothy’s proprietors were redressing the balance, but it seems clear that in this penny fiction weekly, some effort was being made to encourage its readers to explore better fiction than the kind they bought it for.

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Chapter 3

Ouida: How Conceptions of the Popular Reader Contributed to the Making of a Popular Novelist Jane Jordan

Ouida’s career began in the early 1860s, a decade defined by cultural anxieties about the consequences of the rapid expansion of the middle class and the emerging constituencies of reader within the mass reading public that were its outcome (identified by R.D. Altick in his seminal study, The English Common Reader). There were, too, recent technological developments in book production, which provided the ‘common reader’ with cheap, disposable fiction. Ouida’s early novels, to a degree, were directed towards this market: military tales first serialized in New Monthly Magazine and the British Army & Navy Review, which generally concern themselves with the betrayal of male friendship. In the most famous of these, Under Two Flags (1867), the hero, Bertie Cecil of the Household Cavalry, heir to Viscount Royallieu, takes upon himself his younger brother’s disgrace (the matter of a forged cheque) and leaves England to serve, valiantly, under an adopted identity, with the Chasseurs d’Afrique in Algiers. The first of this group of novels, Held in Bondage, was published in 1863. Within six years she published five more and one collection of short stories. Although not exactly sensation novels, her early work does share many elements of the sensation genre which so concerned reviewers writing in the eminent journals, which sought to shape the aesthetic taste of the nation, such as the Athenaeum and Saturday Review. Reviews of her 1860s novels are certainly preoccupied with the apparently invidious effects of the democratization of literature then in progress and with the increasingly literate but as yet ‘Unknown Public’ with whom she found favour. Repeatedly, concern was expressed about the sheer numbers of readers she attracted (‘the drams offered to the public by Ouida are swallowed by tens of thousands at the present day’).

R.D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).  Vincent E.H. Murray, ‘Ouida’s Novels’, Contemporary Review XXII (November 1873), pp. 921–35, p. 921 (although this essay dates from 1873, the four novels under discussion were all written in the 1860s). 

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The 1860s was a decade in which the people were further enfranchised by the Second Reform Act (1867), and then better educated by the 1870 Education Act, but the effect upon literature of these measures was widely distrusted. Novelists like Ouida were believed to pander to this new electorate: there is a certain flow about her style which makes it ‘easy reading for totally uncritical minds. She supplies the temporary demand for amusement on the easiest terms’. The Pall Mall Gazette spoke for many when it stated that ‘the taste for Ouida’s novels confirms what we know from other sources of the curious ignorance and vacuity of mind of the English middle classes of the period’. As early as 1858, Wilkie Collins had identified the ‘Unknown Public’ and their favoured reading material, the penny serial, but he was confident that it was only a matter of time before these unknown millions ‘must obey the universal law of progress, and sooner or later learn to discriminate’. In France, this sentiment was shared by George Sand and by her publisher Michel Lévy, who took the risk of producing handsome editions of new novels for much less than a third of the price of English three-deckers, convinced as he was that the common reader would inevitably develop a taste for literature of a higher quality, and would come to appreciate better quality production. Sand herself went so far as to prophesy that within 50 years there would no longer be a market for middling, second-rate or commonplace literature, which is ‘what the ignorant require for catching the first gleam’: ‘The middling in literature will be unable to find a publisher, because they will be unable to find a market’. Two decades on, however, concern was expressed that the ‘Unknown Public’, ‘notwithstanding its gigantic dimensions … remains practically as unknown as ever’. James Payn, one of Chatto & Windus’s authors, observed in an article in the Nineteenth Century that the literate working and lower middle classes showed few signs of progressing to better literature, holding determinedly to their diet of penny fiction, ‘their tripe and onions – their nameless authors’, inoffensive but dull serializations which would never make it into book form. Mystified at the lack of ambition in these readers, Payn could only conclude that penny fiction retained its popularity ‘for the unknown millions and for no one else’ because it never made them feel stupid. Likewise, Thomas Wright, also writing in the Nineteenth Century, noted that while the unknown public ‘make occasional incursions beyond [penny Saturday Review XXIII (13 April 1867), p. 476. Pall Mall Gazette VI (21 September 1867), p. 11.  Wilkie Collins, ‘The Unknown Public’, Household Words XVIII (1858), pp. 217–24 



(quoted in James Payn, ‘Penny Fiction’, Nineteenth Century IX [January 1881], pp. 145–54, p. 153).  Sand’s remarks are cited in Matthew Arnold, ‘Copyright’, Fortnightly Review XXVII (1 March 1880), pp. 319–34, p. 320.  James Payn, ‘Penny Fiction’, p. 145.  Ibid., p. 148.  Ibid., p. 152.

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fiction] … they have not, as novel readers, got beyond preferring poor novels to none at all’.10 Despite the many attempts on the part of newspapers and reviews to improve the literary palate of new classes of reader, it was the conclusion of at least one writer that publishers, librarians and authors could not be held responsible for the ‘chaff of contemporary writing’ which was dominating the market. Rather, it was readers themselves who were to blame: ‘the popular taste favours ephemeral literature, produced very rapidly, and designed to fit the fashion of the hour, to afford a momentary excitement, or to gratify some immediate curiosity’. The public ‘do not want anything that will give them the trouble to think’.11 The damning conclusion of W.M. Gattie, writing in the Fortnightly Review on ‘What English People Read’, was that having ‘extended the literary franchise [those writers] who would succeed must learn to pander to the new electorate’.12 It was the belief of many reviewers that Ouida’s novels did just that. As a consequence of Ouida’s permanent move to Italy in 1871, however, her work underwent a significant change, in both subject matter and style: her socially realistic treatment of the impoverished lives, and the loves, of the Italian peasantry, and her poetic evocation of the Italian countryside won the admiration of Ruskin and Henry James.13 It was a change appreciated by the London reviews.14 The Times favourably compared Pascarel (1873) with George Eliot’s Romola, and judged it ‘a great improvement on some former novels’; while the Athenaeum acknowledged of Two Little Wooden Shoes (1874) that ‘the writer’s power is considerable … far superior to the monstrosities she used to produce’.15 An indication of the artistic reputation she was acquiring is the interview with Ouida commissioned by Edmund Yates for his paper, World.16 In the article ‘Ouida at 10 Thomas Wright, ‘Concerning the Unknown Public’, Nineteenth Century XIII (February 1883), pp. 279–96, p. 290. 11 Walter Montague Gattie, ‘What English People Read’, Fortnightly Review LII (1889), pp. 307–21, p. 308. 12 Ibid., p. 321. 13 James, who was acquainted with Ouida, wrote to Ouida’s first biographer, Elizabeth Lee, ‘The best and most sincere thing about her I seemed to make out was … her original genuine perception of the beauty, the distinctions and quality of Italy’ (BL, Add. 41340, f. 125, 10 February 1913). Ruskin’s high estimation of Ouida’s A Village Commune will be referred to later in the chapter. 14 The abruptness of the change in subject matter and in style was treated comically by Punch, which published a protracted parody of Ouida’s novels between 9 March and 11 May 1878. While the first eight chapters are clearly modelled on two of her most popular novels from the 1860s, Strathmore (1865) and Under Two Flags (1867), chapter IX opens with a parody of Ouida’s Italian novels, Two Little Wooden Shoes (1874) and Ariadnê (1877): ‘Chère et très spirituelle Madame’, writes her editor, ‘[but] we want to ask, “Why this change of style?”’ (‘Strapmore! A Romance by Weeder’, Punch [6 April 1878], p. 154). 15 The Times (18 April 1873), p. 4; Athenaeum (7 February 1874), p. 2415. 16 This, in itself, was an honour: Yates’s celebrities consist for the main part of princes, dukes, earls and lords, as well as eminent public men such as Darwin, Newman and

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Villa Farinola’, which appeared in 1876 in the series ‘Celebrities at Home’, Ouida, in describing her eleventh-century mansion outside Florence, distanced herself from the commercial aspects of her writing life (‘No writer or artist in this world ever found a more poetic dwelling-place’).17 Able to write ‘rapidly and without fatigue, mental or bodily’, it was her habit to work in the open air from April to October, and in the winter months ‘at a Venetian writing-table of cinque-cento work that would enrapture the souls of the virtuosi who haunt Christie’s’.18 ‘Ouida at Villa Farinola’ concludes with the assurance that the author ‘is not insensible of the popularity she possesses, nor is she ungrateful for the many testimonies to that popularity which she receives’. Her most pleasing compliment ‘was when Bulwer-Lytton told her that he had read every line that she ever wrote; and amongst her valued papers is a letter of eight pages … upon Folle Farine [her novel of 1870], which he considered one of the triumphs of modern English romance’.19 Lord Lytton’s eight-page letter has not survived, but Ouida’s reply, which she posted on 19 September 1871 from the Belgian town of Spa, en route to Italy, is preserved in Lytton’s papers. The article may have exaggerated his praise for Folle-Farine (the letter mentions her ‘receiv[ing] censure’ with humility and gratitude), but he plainly did tell her that the novel ‘aroused [his] sympathy’, and she was honoured by his giving ‘so much thought and analysis’ to her work.20 The point to be made here is that in the ‘Celebrities at Home’ article, Ouida speaks of Lytton acknowledging the achievement of a younger writer whom he regards as a fellow artist, not a second-rate ‘lady-novelist’, nor, merely, a ‘popular’ novelist. The 1876 profile in World can be seen to mark the high point of Ouida’s professional career in terms of her literary reputation. Yet within a year that status was undermined when all her copyrights were bought up by the recently established publishing house of Chatto & Windus, a young firm specifically attuned to the marketing potential of ‘popular’ literature and with a very businesslike awareness of the different constituencies of reader that emerged in the latter half of the century. (As Anthony Trollope observed, there were now so many gradations of reader that ‘The popular British novel … can be neither too cheap or too dear Manning, Leighton, and Wagner; of the three women that feature besides Ouida only one other is a professional writer, the sensation novelist Mary E. Braddon. (The other female subjects are Princess Eugenie and Sarah Bernhardt.) In her correspondence with the widow of former Punch editor Shirley Brooks, Ouida confides that Yates asked her to write the article herself. See University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, Wolff Uncat., Ouida to Mrs Shirley Brooks, n.d. [c. late September 1876]. 17 ‘Ouida at Villa Farinola’, reprinted in Celebrities at Home, 3 vols (London: Office of the World, 1877), I, pp. 239–40. 18 Ibid., pp. 241, 242. 19 Ibid., p. 247. Lord Lytton had since died, in January 1873, but he had visited the young novelist in June 1871 when she was occupying a suite of rooms at the Langham Hotel in London prior to her move to Italy, and provided her with letters of introduction to acquaintances in Florence. 20 Hertfordshire County Council, D/EK C12, Ouida to Lord Lytton, 19 September 1871.

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for the market’.)21 Chatto had bought up Joseph Camden Hotten’s business in 1873, and his first move in establishing his firm under his own name was to lure the best-selling Wilkie Collins away from his long-standing publisher, Richard Bentley. Chatto first bought up Collins’s copyrights from Bentley for the sum of £2,000, and then commissioned Collins’s new novel of 1875, The Law and the Lady. In 1874 he had tried the identical manoeuvre with Ouida, but she stayed faithful to Chapman & Hall.22 At this time, though, Chapman was in a precarious financial situation, and, as a result, appears to have acted extremely deviously. In June 1874 he rather unexpectedly drew up a contract with Ouida to purchase outright the copyrights to all 11 of her titles for the overall sum of £1,500, and in December bought up the copyright of Held in Bondage, which had been published by the Tinsley Brothers in 1863. Behind her back, these were then sold on to Chatto. By the autumn of 1876 Chapman had also made over to Chatto the copyrights of Ouida’s four most recent novels, which included Signa (1875) and In a Winter City (1876). Ouida was informed of this last transaction, although there is evidence that Chapman misled her about the transfer, telling her that Chatto was simply his ‘agent’.23 Within a year, from Italy, Ouida commissioned her solicitors, Allen & Co., to investigate the legality of Chapman’s selling the rights to her work to another publisher. Perhaps surprisingly, she was advised that since she, the author, had apparently ‘expressed no disapproval’ at the time, and had ‘received her money’, there were really no grounds upon which to dispute the sale from a legal point of view.24 However, the legal investigation did provide transparency. Chapman’s covert dealings were exposed: Chatto & Windus had paid him between £400 and £500 on each copyright, giving Chapman the considerable profit of between £250 and £350 on each – money which Ouida later sought to retrieve. It also came to light that Chatto & Windus had bought from Chapman & Hall the joint rights to bring out Ouida’s new novel, Ariadnê, for a further £1,000, and ‘made a very good

Anthony Trollope, ‘Novel-Reading’, Nineteenth Century V (January 1879), pp. 24–43, p. 24. 22 Ouida’s first communication with Andrew Chatto reminds him that in 1874, ‘I refused your advantageous offer solely from a sense of loyalty to Chapman & Hall and unwillingness to leave an old and friendly Firm for one new and untried’ (New York Public Library, Berg Collection, n.d. [c. November 1877]). For detailed accounts of the Chatto takeover, see Celia G. Philips, ‘Ouida and Her Publishers: 1874–1880’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 81 (Summer 1978), pp. 210–15, and Jane Jordan, ‘The Writings of “Ouida” (Marie Louise de la Ramée, 1839–1908)’, unpublished PhD Thesis, University of London, 1995, pp. 22–35. 23 It is in her first letter to Andrew Chatto, prior to his meetings with her in Florence in December 1877, that Ouida explains that ‘Mr Chapman stated you were only acting as his agents and I only learned subsequently you had purchased [the copyrights]’ (NYPL, Berg Collection, n.d. [c. November 1877]). 24 Princeton University Library, Parrish Collection, Allen & Co. to Ouida, 14 June 1877. 21

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bargain of it’.25 Extraordinarily, the frontispiece of the 1877 first edition of this novel bears the names of both publishing houses. Chatto’s determined efforts to secure the exclusive rights to publish Ouida in future were justified by the brilliant review of Ariadnê printed in Yates’s World, which described it as standing ‘on an altogether loftier level than anything previously attempted by the author’. While unable to resist the observation that Ouida’s latest novel was apparently ‘so great that it has been found necessary to divide the burden of its introduction into the world between two publishing firms’, the reviewer called it a ‘complete and crowning triumph of the skill of the writer … In an aesthetic age like the present, the artistic element in the book will be generally a commendation. It is as a work of art that Ariadnê must be judged; and as such we may almost venture to pronounce it without fault or flaw in its beauty’.26 Yet its status as a work of art was undermined by the unorthodox, hybrid manner in which it was published, a process indicative of the lasting effect upon Ouida’s literary status of her association with Chatto & Windus. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the transference of the rights to publish Ouida’s novels was the conception of her work in wholly commercial terms for a seemingly undiscerning readership. Allen & Co. concluded that Ouida’s former publishers, Chapman & Hall, were not at fault; rather, they had ‘worked the series well & most judiciously & having bought at their own risk a class of property by which they often lose considerably would feel justified in making all they could out of it … the lump sum was doubtless more convenient than the slower returns from the sale of the work’.27 Celia G. Philips concludes from her analysis of the Chatto takeover that, ‘as a middle-class woman with no financial resources, [Ouida] was painfully vulnerable in the business world of that “gentleman’s” trade, and neither Frederick Chapman nor Andrew Chatto resisted the temptation to exploit her’.28 25 Ibid., undated document from Allen & Co. [c. June 1877]. As Philips notes, Chapman & Hall had originally paid Ouida £800 for the rights to the first edition (‘Ouida and Her Publishers’, p. 214). Unable to persuade her to part with the copyright at this stage, which they had priced at a further £300 and had clearly intended to sell on to Chatto & Windus, Chapman & Hall struck a deal with Chatto which ensured profits for both firms. 26 World (23 May 1877), p. 500. 27 PU, Parrish Collection, Allen & Co. to Ouida, 7 June 1877 (emphasis added). 28 Philips, ‘Ouida and her Publishers’, p. 215. Certainly, if anyone was guilty of sharp practice it was Chapman. More recent work on the Chatto archives reveals that while Chatto was undoubtedly a canny negotiator he was by no means guilty of ‘an elaborate conspiracy to delude and cheat’ his authors. Simon Eliot argues convincingly that in paying Walter Besant and James Rice a meagrely lump sum of £200 to cover the reprint rights of six of their jointly written novels originally published by other publishers (that is, about half the amount he was prepared to pay Chapman on each of Ouida’s novels), it was not Chatto, but Rice who was at fault for accepting the deal (Rice was only interested in the money to be made from serialization and first editions, having little understanding of the potential value of the cheap edition market); see ‘Unequal Partnerships: Besant, Rice and Chatto 1876–82’, Publishing History XXVI (1989), pp. 73–109, p. 82. Andrew Nash has endorsed

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Ouida was an extremely marketable product: at 38 years of age she had a backlist of 10 novels, two novellas and two collections of short stories. That is, she had reliably produced a novel a year for the last 10 years. Chatto was anxious to appease her and to begin negotiations for future contracts. He went in person to Florence and had two business meetings with her at her villa at Scandicci in December 1877, at which he not only offered to reimburse Ouida the sum of £800 to cover her last four (previously undervalued) copyrights, but backed off at once when Ouida remonstrated with him that his exporting 50 copies of each of her works to the Fall Trade Sale in America (this in itself was a pretty fast move on Chatto’s part) was in contravention of her long-standing arrangement with the US publisher J.B. Lippincott: ‘All American rights being mine this is a grave invasion of them’.29 In future, Ouida’s independent relations with three non-British publishing houses were to be respected by Chatto who, like Chapman before him, agreed to send out advance proofs to Lippincott in Philadelphia, Tauchnitz in Leipzig, and Hachette in Paris, for which editions Ouida reserved exclusive rights and received the sole income.30 Chatto also took care to assure the book-buying public that he was reissuing Ouida titles that had originally been published by Chapman & Hall with no significant change in quality of production. Indeed, if one compares the title page of Ouida’s last novel exclusively associated with the firm of Chapman & Hall, In A Winter City (1876), with the 5s edition of her works published by Chatto, the lengths to which Chatto has gone to reproduce detail after detail is clear to see – in the whole layout of the page, in precisely the same use of various typefaces and fonts, and, perhaps most significantly, in the retention of Ouida’s pseudo-aristocratic logo designed by Chapman, bearing her Chatto’s own defence of his dealings with another of his authors, Robert Buchanan, with whom, again, his priority was to secure a complete backlist of cheap editions. See ‘Robert Buchanan and Chatto & Windus: Reputation, Authorship and Fiction as Capital in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Publishing History XLVI (1999), pp. 5–33. 29 NYPL, Berg Collection, Ouida to Andrew Chatto, n.d. [c. November 1877]. Lippincott had informed Ouida of the situation on 13 October 1877; on 27 October, Ouida’s solicitor, James Anderson Rose, threatened Chatto with legal action. Lippincott had a gentleman’s agreement with Ouida by which he paid her £300 per annum for the right to publish the first American editions of her works. There was, of course, no protection for British authors until the signing of the Symonds-Platt International Copyright Agreement of 1891, and the number of pirated editions of Ouida’s novels on the American market eventually forced Lippincott to reduce his annual payments from £300 to £75. See Charles A. Madison, Book Publishing in America (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966), p. 36. 30 Not until 1883, when negotiating the contract for her novel Princess Napraxine, did Ouida offer to cede the US rights to Chatto in return for better terms, perhaps because Lippincott’s payments had dropped so significantly of late. Joseph B. Lippincott died in 1886, and the firm was taken over by his three sons; thereafter, the special arrangement with Ouida appears to have terminated. When negotiating a contract with Macmillan in 1903 for what was to be her last novel, Helianthus, Ouida offered the American rights for a downpayment of £100 (BL, Macmilllan Papers, Ouida to Frederick Macmillan, 24 April 1903).

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monogram in the manner of a heraldic shield.31 Chatto’s priority was to reassure the customer that the quality of the product remained true. In Ouida, Chatto did recognize that he was getting an author of superior weight to his general run of ‘pleasant magazine writers’, as Ouida called them (popular novelists such as Walter Besant, James Payn, Charles Gibbon and William Black).32 As a mark of distinction, Chatto produced her novels not in his ‘Piccadilly Novels’ (his most prestigious series, dominated by Wilkie Collins, but including lesser writers like Justin McCarthy), but in an exclusive ‘Uniform Collection’ in handsome red cloth with gilt lettering on the spine, good quality paper and print, priced at five shillings, a price maintained until the 1890s.33 Reassured, no doubt, by this rather special treatment, Ouida agreed to have her new novels published by Chatto, but tensions remained unresolved between her perception of herself as an artist, embracing her own construction of her ideal reader, cultured and cosmopolitan, and her publisher’s aggressive marketing of her work for the mass reading public that he saw as the key to a novelist’s success. Chatto’s non-fiction titles give an unambiguous indication of the very wide middle-class market at which he was aiming. In 1874 and 1875 Chatto reissued one of Hotten’s titles, C.J. Richardson’s The Englishman’s House; a practical guide for selecting or building a house, and in 1881 brought out The Suburban Homes of London by William Spencer Clarke.34 He published instructional guides to metropolitan and European art galleries, and studies such as The Reader’s Handbook of Allusions, References, Plots and Stories had, within the firm’s first decade, proliferated into a whole range of helpful ‘Dictionaries’ (priced at 7s, 6d.). 31 Even Chatto’s address was almost identical to Chapman’s. Both their premises were on Piccadilly, Chatto moving from his original address, 74–5 Piccadilly (the original site of John Camden Hotten’s publishing house), to 214 Piccadilly in 1880. 32 On 30 November 1879, Ouida apologized to Chatto for a comment she made earlier about her own Moths being advertised underneath Charles Gibbon’s new novel, Queen of the Meadow (‘I do not like being advertised under inferior novelists’ [c. early October 1879]): ‘I did not mean any slight to the works you publish, but such writers as Mr Payne (sic), Gibbon, etc., tho’ pleasant magazine writers, have no claim to that sort of European celebrity which I have won’ (NYPL, Berg Collection). Payn, Gibbon, Besant, and Black were all prolific novelists and, with the exception of Besant, all were former journalists: James Payn was former editor of Chambers’s Journal (1859–74), editor of Cornhill Magazine (1883–94), reader for Smith, Elder, and a close adviser to Chatto. 33 At the end of the century the ‘Uniform Edition’ of Ouida’s works was finally available for the same price as the reduced ‘Piccadilly Novels’, 3s, 6d. The Uniform Edition was sufficiently handsome for Ouida to request that presentation copies be sent to acquaintances like the German ambassador in Rome and the American sculptor and art critic William Wetmore Story, also resident in Rome (see NYPL, Berg Collection, Ouida to Andrew Chatto, 1 April 1882 and n.d. [c. mid-March 1881]). 34 At 7s, 6d., The Suburban Homes of London is described as ‘A Residential Guide to Favourite London Localities, their Society, Celebrities, and Associations. With Notes on their Rental, Rates, and House Accommodation’; a helpful map was included.

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The popularity of series like Walford’s Shilling Peerage35 attest to the social inclinations of Chatto’s readership, as do the titles Chatto astutely apportioned to his various ‘Library’ collections, which offered literary sophistication at knockdown prices. With titles graded according to price, it was left to the readers to decide which kind of ‘Library’ collection was within their means. The Golden (literary classics), Mayfair (non-fiction), and Wanderer (travel) Libraries were priced, respectively, at 2s; 2s, 6d; and 3s, 6d. By the early 1890s four more ‘Library’ collections had been added (some a disparate ragbag of high and low literature), but emphasis was now given to ‘convenience’ literature. The earlier use of gentrified titles for these series was discontinued in favour of a more literal approach: thus we see Popular Shilling Books (written by Chatto regulars like Justin McCarthy), The Pocket Library (2s classics like Robinson Crusoe or White’s Natural History of Selborne), and 1s, 6d. Handy Novels (a series designed to undercut or at least compete with those available at W.H. Smith’s Railway Bookstalls), as well as the 2s, 6d. My Library (which ranged from Shakespeare to Charles Reade). Initially the most expensive of Chatto’s collections was the 6s. Piccadilly Library, so named after the firm’s fashionable address and illustrated by well-known artists (the young Harry Furniss, Luke Fildes, George Du Maurier, and Sydney Hall, artist for the Graphic), but within a few years it was almost halved in price, to increase the customer base of the one-volume edition and to bring it in line with the cheaper collections now available. For the novel reader who did not baulk at the advertising slogan, ‘Cheap Editions of Popular Novels’, Chatto also offered a 2s edition, smaller in size, with brightly illustrated covers. The standard back cover of such an illustrated edition featured an advertisement for Pear’s Soap, and inside the front and back covers, besides Chatto’s catalogue, were appended further advertisements for a variety of products. The 1882 cheap edition of Ouida’s A Village Commune, interestingly, carries a two-page advertisement for W.H. Smith’s 2s ‘Select Library of Fiction’, obtainable at any railway bookstall (‘Capital Novels, well worth double the price asked of them’), which gives some idea of the competition Chatto was facing. Besides the book listings for Chatto and W.H. Smith there are advertisements for household goods such as Clarke’s World Famed Blood Mixture, Jewsbury & Brown’s Celebrated Oriental Toothpaste, Page Woodcock’s Wind Pills, and Keating’s Worm Tablets. The advertisements probably went some way to financing the 2s edition, and they do seem superabundant, so that the cheap, disposable novel itself appears to be merely a vehicle for advertising other products. Altick has called the yellow-back ‘the most inspired publishing invention of the era’, arguing that it suited ‘every taste but the crudest and most cultivated’.36 This was Chatto’s catalogue dated September 1893, appended to his new Piccadilly edition of Ouida’s Strathmore of that year, lists six such guides, including Walford’s Shilling House of Commons (‘Containing a List of all Members of the New Parliament, their Addresses, Clubs, etc.’). 36 Altick, p. 299. 35

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not the way in which Ouida was expecting her highly literate and cosmopolitan readers to be consuming her work. The illustrated editions of Ouida’s novels were first produced in May 1879. ‘Surely it is a mistake?’ she asked Chatto when she first saw the series advertised: ‘Believe me they horrify all save the very vulgarest public’.37 She advised him that on the Continent ‘I hear many persons [i.e., British residents in or visitors to Florence or Rome] say that the dignity of the works wd have been much better sustained had you issued the 2s. editions in plain covers as I wished. Many readers shun the pictured boards’.38 She was less restrained in her 1885 article, ‘The Tendencies of English Fiction’, declaring that ‘every person of taste’ was disgusted by the appearance of the latest cheap editions, with their ‘hideous coloured-paper covers, and flaunting colours, to attract the mobs in railway stations’.39 While one sympathizes with her position, comments like these reveal how out of touch Ouida was with the increasingly commercial tendencies of English fiction which classified all novels as ‘popular’, and which made such novels available, and attractive, to new classes of reader. The success of Chatto’s publishing strategy is itself an indication of the range of popular taste in the latter half of the nineteenth century; it also serves to demonstrate how complex an entity the common reader had become. The real significance of the Chatto takeover of Ouida’s titles was, certainly, in his choice of author, but also in his timing. In Chatto’s intention to supply an ever-widening readership with affordable literature, he was central to the wider movement to abolish the overpriced three-decker and the system of circulating libraries which maintained its status and provided it with a market, a movement in which Ouida herself would play a significant part, though from a different perspective. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s she published several essays on the book trade, essays which return again and again to the fact that the three-volume first edition was artificial both in price (31s, 6d.) and size, and recommended that it should be replaced by a cheap single-volume first edition affordable by all. The very term ‘Library Edition’ underwent a revolution at this period, a revolution involving all major publishing houses, but particularly Chatto & Windus, who wrested the term previously designating the 31s, 6d. first edition available from Mudie’s. The term ‘Library Edition’ became increasingly associated with the sixshilling editions destined for the middle-class suburban villa. Take, for example, NYPL, Berg Collection, Ouida to Chatto & Windus, 7 May 1879. Ibid., 1 May 1883. 39 Ouida, ‘The Tendencies of English Fiction’, North American Review CXLI 37 38

(September 1885), pp. 213–25, p. 224. Of course, she was not alone in her snobbish attitude towards illustrated covers: Arnold’s article, referred to earlier, which Ouida would most likely have read, talks of the yellow-backs in similar terms: ‘A cheap literature hideous and ignoble of aspect, like the tawdry novels which flare in the bookshelves of our railwaystations, and which seem designed … for people with a low standard of life, is not what is wanted’ (Matthew Arnold, ‘Copyright’, p. 328).

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Chatto’s standard one-volume ‘Piccadilly Novels’ for which nothing was spared in terms of production: according to the advertisements, the novels in this series were ‘carefully printed on creamy paper, and tastefully bound in cloth for the Library’, that is, dressed appropriately to sit in the home of the aspiring middleclass reader. Chatto’s catalogue was, in the early days, prefaced with an extract from Ruskin’s essay ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ (1865), in which the English are condemned for spending more on their horses and wine cellars than their libraries. This, however, suggests a rather different constituency of reader than the ‘common reader’, and throughout the late nineteenth century there was a prolonged debate over whether this new readership should be content to borrow, or had a right to buy, new fiction.40 By 1880 Matthew Arnold was acknowledging new readerships, asking why the less well-off were denied new fiction and acknowledging the ascendancy of a cultured and moneyed middle class, readers he called ‘genuine’, by which he meant that they wanted to possess rather than borrow new books. To Arnold’s mind, the eccentrically priced three-volume ‘Library Edition’ threatened the march of social progress, since such a limited access to literature as that provided by the circulating libraries ‘leads to reading imperfectly and without discrimination, to glancing at books and not going through them’.41 This was an observation also made by Ouida in her 1885 essay, ‘The Tendencies of English Fiction’. She, too, objected to the culture of skim-reading (‘hasty and undigested reading of as many volumes as it is possible to obtain in a short space of time’), which the library system encouraged.42 Ouida, a woman of Anglo-French parentage who felt an affinity with the Latin races, and who always regarded herself as ‘so very little English’, took this somewhat further.43 The current disregard of literature was a national affliction: ‘The English public, as a rule, does not read; it skims a little, that is all. Setting aside certain aesthetic cliques, one may say that England does not read in any scholarly sense of the word. Innumerable book-boxes enter English houses, it is true; but the contents of them are as jumbled up in the minds of the

Ironically, this extract from Ruskin, which takes up a whole page in the original catalogue appended to the single-volume cheap edition, was, within a few years, omitted in order to attain maximum advertising space for Chatto’s ever-increasing stock. ‘Chatto & Windus’s List of Books’, issued in September 1884 and appended to the five-shilling edition of Ouida’s Frescoes, not only omits Ruskin’s prefatory statement but uses a much smaller and more functional typeface; there is no room for extracts from reviews, and the pages are divided into two columns; now as many as 30 books could be listed per page, whereas in the earlier catalogues no more than four or six titles were displayed on each page. 41 Matthew Arnold, ‘Copyright’, p. 327. 42 Ouida, ‘The Tendencies of English Fiction’, p. 216. 43 Ouida’s remark about her sense of alienation from English society and culture was made in a letter to Marie Corelli, 4 April 1890 (Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, DR 777/55). 40

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household as the divers volumes are in the box’. The nub of the problem was just this: ‘nobody in England ever buys a book if he can borrow it’.44 The collaboration between Chatto and Ouida was a contradictory one. The publisher was motivated by the commercial potential of cheap literature for an ever-widening readership, while the novelist’s aim was to appeal to the cultured or aspiring reader, well-read and well-travelled, Arnold’s ‘genuine’ reader. Both argued for the greater democratization of literature, and on one point at least, Ouida was prepared to go further than Chatto, calling for an even cheaper singlevolume edition: the standard price of six shillings she regarded ‘too dear to be suitable for private purchase’.45 Where they differed was in their definition of the ‘common reader’: Chatto dressed his different wares for an extremely diverse readership; Ouida intended her novels for a more exclusive audience. Ariadnê, which opens in the Villa Borghese in Rome, addresses a cultured readership with an awareness of classical antiquity, one familiar with continental travel, or at least one which aspires to such familiarity. The reader is frequently instructed to seek out particular paintings or sculptures in churches or galleries like the Borghese, to get free of the prescribed tours offered by Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy or Baedeker’s Central Italy and Rome, and to look at and study classical art for himself. However, even though Ouida called for a more reasonably priced first edition, her sympathies did not extend to those readers who could only afford a shilling volume: ‘Very cheap editions are the only forms on which the Briton spends his money; he likes something which he can leave behind him in the train without too much regret’.46 Particular conflict arose from Chatto’s most significant innovation: the speed with which he issued his cheap single-volume editions. Whereas established publishing houses like Chapman & Hall, as Ouida reminded Chatto, ‘always agreed to let one year entirely elapse’ after the publication of the three-volume Library Edition, Chatto wanted to get cheap reprints out as soon as possible, recognizing how many different, rather than competing, markets were emerging.47 As Alexis Weedon has observed, ‘careful price structuring and timing of the release of each edition was crucial for them to sustain revenue and reap the full economic potential Ouida, ‘The Tendencies of English Fiction’, p. 224. It would be safe to assume that Ouida had read Ruskin’s essay in its entirety: he, too, urges the point that ‘No book is worth anything … until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it … We call ourselves a rich nation, and we are filthy and foolish enough to thumb each other’s books out of circulating libraries!’, reprinted in John Ruskin, Unto His Last and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 275. 45 Ouida, ‘Unwritten Literary Laws’, Fortnightly Review LXVI (November 1899), 803–14, reprinted in Ouida, Critical Studies (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1900), p. 182. 46 Ouida, ‘Literature and the English Book Trade’, North American Review 160 (February 1895), pp. 157–65, p. 161. 47 NYPL, Berg Collection, Ouida to Chatto & Windus, n.d. [c. November 1877]. 44

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of the work’.48 Single-volume editions of Ouida’s new novels were issued within months of their first issue. We can see an example of this in Chatto’s catalogue for November 1878. Ouida’s novel Friendship was first published in three volumes in June 1878. Within five months the five-shilling, one-volume edition was advertised as being ‘In the press’. As Ouida would protest, such practice made a ‘new novel look like an old one’ to her faithful readership.49 The issue came to a head with the publication of Ouida’s Moths, a novel which, however scandalous, deals impressively with issues such as conjugal rights and marital rape. The setting of the novel may be exotic, but in dealing with the heroine’s sense of being enslaved in marriage, and with her legal incapacity to extricate herself from her marriage, it engages very seriously with contemporary debates concerning anomalies in legislation relating to marital separation and divorce.50 First published in February 1880, Moths was reviewed in all the major newspapers and journals in its first two months. On 2 June, Ouida advised Chatto to print the first line of The Times’s review in his advertisements (‘We doubt whether “Ouida” has ever written a more clever novel than “Moths”…’).51 In reply, Chatto explained that he would no longer be advertising the three-volume edition, adding that, a bare four months after publication, the type had been ‘broken up’. On the strength of the reviews, Ouida had expected a second print-run of Moths: Mudie, so she had heard, regretted ‘he had not enough Moths to supply the incessant demand for it’.52 Ouida complained to Chapman, her former publisher, that Chatto ‘hurr[ies] each work in to the cheap edition so rapidly that it is a wonder the Libraries take any of the 3 vol form’.53 She advised Chatto that his haste to issue cheap editions of new novels was having a detrimental effect on the sale of the three-volume edition – that it led to libraries like Mudie’s reducing their orders of new novels: ‘I hear continued complaints from English people that the libraries supply them so ill with new books because the libraries know the cheap editions will be so soon out & people wait for them’.54 Chatto took a very different line. He maintained that it was Mudie’s threat to withdraw Moths from circulation on moral grounds that had decided him to press Alexis Weedon, Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market 1836–1916 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 141. See chapter 6 for Weedon’s discussion of Andrew Chatto’s dealings with Ouida and Wilkie Collins. 49 NYPL, Berg Collection, Ouida to Chatto & Windus, 7 June 1880. 50 The same year that Moths was published, Elizabeth Wolstoneholme Elmy argued in her pamphlet, ‘The Criminal Law in Relation to Women’, that unless it was recognized that rape could be committed within marriage, every English wife was degraded ‘to the legal position of the purchased slave of the harem’, and reduced ‘to a bodily slavery for which the earth offers no parallel’. See Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 1989), p. 184. 51 The Times (Saturday, 27 March 1880), p. 12. 52 NYPL, Berg Collection, Ouida to Chatto & Windus, 7 June 1880. 53 UTA, HRHRC, Wilde Papers, Ouida to Frederick Chapman, 26 July 1884. 54 NYPL, Berg Collection, Ouida to Andrew Chatto, 1 May 1883. 48

50

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on with the single-volume edition (for which, incidentally, Chatto sent Ouida an unprompted payment of £250).55 Whether Mudie really meant to send back his stock of Moths (and there is evidence that lesser libraries did refuse to take it),56 reviewers at home and across the Atlantic objected strongly to what was seen as the novel’s coarse and unwholesome subject matter. The Academy deemed the novel ‘unclean’, the Literary World found it ‘unspeakable’ and even ‘dangerous’,57 the North American Review declared it the ‘chief rival’ of Zola’s Nana, and two years later, American readers of the Literary News voted Ouida and Zola the leading novelists ‘having the worst influence’.58 Seen in the context of reviews of novels by Zola himself, and by George Moore and Hardy, these responses might now stimulate serious interest in the novel, rather than aversion. The time was not right, and the standing of Chatto’s publishing house was not right, for such literature to be given serious attention. The conflict between Ouida’s artistic integrity and Andrew Chatto’s commercialization of popular literature (and their correspondingly polarized conceptions of Ouida’s readership) is perhaps best demonstrated in his marketing of the work that followed Moths, Ouida’s A Village Commune, which was published in January 1881. It was a new venture. She had first announced her intentions to Chatto in early June 1880, accurately describing the work as ‘a satirical political 55 Ouida would later describe Chatto & Windus as ‘kind & honourable businessmen’ (UTA, HRHRC, Cornhill Magazine Misc., Ouida to J. Anderson Rose, 9 September 1881). When forced to accept Chatto’s much-reduced terms for her 1884 novel, Princess Napraxine, Ouida suggested that he might see his way to letting her have an extra £200 ‘on receipt of MS; this latter addition to be at yr option & left to yr honour shd “Wanda” [due out the following month] be the success I anticipate’ (NYPL, Ouida to Andrew Chatto, 15 April 1883). Ouida’s reliance here upon Chatto’s sense of honour (in their later, more tortuous negotiations she leaves nothing to chance) suggests that, at least up until the early 1880s, Chatto was flexible in his dealings with this author and made financial reparation where it was due. 56 It was reported that the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution went further than that and ordered the immediate withdrawal of all Ouida titles from its shelves (‘News and Notes’, Literary World (9 October 1880), p. 357. Mary Hammond’s recent work on the free libraries concludes that such decisions were fairly arbitrary: Leeds and Whitechapel stocked Ouida’s entire backlist and continued to take new titles, whereas Winchester refused to stock any of her novels despite calls to do so from local residents. See Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 47. Weedon refers to further correspondence in the Chatto & Windus archives at Reading University Library which takes Mudie’s threat very seriously (Victorian Publishing, p. 151). 57 Academy XVII (13 March 1880), p. 113; Literary World XI (13 March 1880), p. 90. In an earlier issue, the Literary World said of Ouida that her ‘almost uniform topic is one form or another of social immorality’ and concluded that they were unable to recommend any of her novels (Literary World, ‘World Biographies’, 28 February 1880, pp. 75–6). 58 North American Review (July 1880); Literary News (16 January 1882). Both are quoted in Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines 1865–1885 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Library Press, 1938), p. 252.

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sketch, cast in the form of a story to interest the general reader’.59 A Village Commune exposes the despotic treatment of the Italian peasantry by certain provincial communes under whose authority a pervasive system of petty rules, surveillance, corrupt taxation, and inhumane punishment was allowed to establish itself unchecked: an Italy of which ‘Travellers, and even foreign residents, do not, as a rule, know anything’.60 Ouida defended her vivid (yet never ‘over-coloured’) portrayal of the social and legal injustices suffered by the rural poor, saying that she wanted her readers ‘to get these facts that I have narrated well into their minds’, and to ‘look into these million humble homes, darkened and naked, and see these children without food, these men without hope’: ‘the sort of people that the world sometimes will deign to read about if George Sand or George Eliot write of them, but who, outside a story-book, are absolutely uninteresting and insignificant’.61 Ouida specifically asked that the new work resemble Chatto’s edition of W.H. Mallock’s sociopolitical commentary, New Republic; or, Culture, Faith, and Philosophy in an English Country House.62 But when Chatto asked to view the manuscript before agreeing on a price (she had ‘never done such a thing’ since Chapman first commissioned a novel from her back in 1865), Ouida softened her earlier statement, saying that she had perhaps ‘used the word “political” wrongly’: it was in fact ‘a story of the genre of Umilta’ (her Italian peasant love story, first published in Lippincott’s Magazine, January 1880), ‘but cast in such a form as to demonstrate the sufferings of the Italian poor’.63 Chatto continued to drag his feet, eventually making her an offer of just £350 for the two-volume work, copyright included. This was less than a third of the payment she usually received for a three-volume novel.64 When sending the manuscript to London, Ouida reminded Chatto of her requirements regarding the appearance of A Village Commune, insisting that she wished it to look ‘different … from my other books’.65 However, in London the NYPL, Berg Collection, Ouida to Chatto & Windus, 7 June 1880. Ouida, A Village Commune, 3rd edn (London: Chatto & Windus, 1882), p. 352. 61 Ibid., pp. 12, 325, 366. Ouida added an appendix to A Village Commune in which 59 60

she states that she is nowhere guilty of exaggeration. Ruskin, for one, was convinced that she spoke the truth, and he urged the public to study Ouida’s ‘photographic story’. See John Ruskin, Art of England: Lectures Given in Oxford (Orpington: George Allen, 1883), p. 30. 62 NYPL, Berg Collection, Ouida to Andrew Chatto, 7 June 1880. She wanted a squarish book, printed ‘precisely like New Republic with initial letters to each chapter’ (Ibid., 3 September 1880). 63 Ibid., 23 June 1880. 64 It is not known whether Chatto acceded to her demand that the £350 was to be excusive of the copyright. Ouida forwarded the completed MS in instalments during the first week of September 1880, not yet having signed a contract for the new work (Ibid., 2 September 1880). To put Chatto’s offer in context, he had just paid Ouida £300 for the rights to publish Pipistrello & Other Stories, a collection of short stories that had already appeared in one of his papers, Gentleman’s Magazine. 65 Ibid., 3 September 1880.

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new work was being marketed like any other popular novel. With the title not yet confirmed, Chatto went ahead and placed advertisements in his Gentleman’s Magazine for Ouida’s new ‘Novel’. ‘It is not one’, cautioned Ouida, ‘and its effect will be quite spoilt if you call it so’.66 A month later, on 14 November, she wrote again, ‘I must request that A Village Commune be not announced as a “new novel”. It is contrary to my stipulations & most injurious to the work’. She made the point again at the New Year: ‘It detracts from the purpose and seriousness of the work’.67 Of course, she was right. While her friend the Irish MP Sir George Bawyer (Bawyer’s sisters resided in Florence) gave it a generous review in The Times (‘it may be hoped that this letting in of light by a popular novelist, even should the glare be somewhat theatrical, may have its effect’), other reviews expressed an understandable impatience: ‘in the name of common-sense’, thundered the Spectator, ‘why did she not write a pamphlet, entitled “Municipal Government”, instead of hoaxing the public with a pretended novel?’68 But the hoaxing of the public was to continue. By the following year, 1882, having already issued A Village Commune in the 5s ‘Uniform Edition’ of Ouida’s works, Chatto now made it available in the 2s ‘Cheap Edition’ with illustrated boards, and commissioned an attractive cover featuring the hero and heroine walking arm-in-arm, watermill in the background, the vulnerability of the heroine suggested by the protective presence of a large white Maremma dog in the foreground. To all appearances, Chatto was offering solely a peasant love story, rather than a serious exposure of the wretchedness of rural life in Tuscany.69 While Ouida was powerless to affect Chatto’s aggressive marketing strategies, their disagreements over his editions of Moths and A Village Commune did prompt her to go public with her protests against the commercialization of book production in Britain and, consequently, the commodification of readerships. Given her protests over the rapid supercession of the three-volume Library Edition of Moths, it can be seen that Ouida was not entirely consistent in her position, but, a year after the publication of A Village Commune, she addressed a brief article on ‘English Novels’ to the editor of The Times in which she again argued for the termination of the three-volume form in favour of a single, moderately priced volume.70 Ibid., 2 October 1880. Ibid., 14 November 1880; Ibid., n.d. [c. January 1881]. On New Year’s Day she

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enclosed adverts from the Spectator, begging Chatto, ‘Pray do not advertise V.C. amongst novels. It will take from the prestige of the book’ (Ibid., n.d. [c. January 1881]). Not only did Chatto ignore her requests regarding the advertisements of the new work, but he inserted a list of ‘New Novels’ in the frontispiece of the first edition which would have suggested to anyone opening the first volume that it, too, was a new novel. 68 The Times (Tuesday, 19 April 1881), p. 9; Spectator (16 June 1881), p. 931. 69 Indeed, the illustrated cover to A Village Commune is barely distinguishable from that commissioned for Ouida’s 1891 collection of short stories, Santa Barbara and Other Stories, which again features a fetching contadina in simple white blouse, tight stomacher and striped skirt, embraced by her lover. 70 See Ouida, ‘English Novels’, The Times (2 June 1882), p. 3.

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This was a point she expanded in her later article, ‘Unwritten Literary Laws’, where she pointed out the artificial disparity in price between the first and second editions of new novels (at 31s, 6d. and 5s, or 6s, respectively): ‘If the second price be sufficient to pay the expense of production, why not start with it?’71 This and later articles were written in the context of Ouida’s protracted dispute with Chatto over declining fees paid out in the mid-1880s.72 Clearly, she shared common ground with her publisher: both were in agreement that the three-volume format was far too expensive, and should be done away with, but where author and publisher departed was over Chatto’s commercial intention in his pressing ahead to offer lower middle class readers the opportunity to possess an affordable ‘Library’ rather than borrow one, and over the question of what form the replacement should take. Ouida held to the French model and recommended a single-volume first edition, decently priced, decently produced, setting her sights on the cultivated upper echelons of readers. She wanted dignity: ‘A plain grey or other light paper cover with my monogram in black in the centre wd be far more effective & more suitable to the works’, while Chatto was more alive to the commercial advantages of their notoriety.73 The important factor in all this, however, is the confidence with which Chatto mounted his challenge to the library system and the energy with which he promoted an ever-widening range of affordable one-volume editions. In this he was shown to be justified: as Altick has noted, Mudie’s attempt in 1894 to commit British publishing houses to wait a full year before bringing out cheaper one-volume editions met with a unanimous rejection, and as a result the threevolume Library Edition was no longer sustainable.74 Chatto sought to cater for all emerging classes of reader and he priced, and dressed, his wares to suit the widest range possible. As Weedon makes clear, ‘Chatto’s publishing practices were to become the rule’.75 These rapidly changing market conditions were the context in which Ouida’s works were published, and her literary achievement was undervalued accordingly. It was simply unjust, and inaccurate, for the author of the essay ‘Concerning the Unknown Public’, published in Nineteenth Century (1883), patronizingly to observe that ‘Ouida’s writing is essentially the acme of penny serial style … [her Ouida, ‘Unwritten Literary Laws’, p. 183. Chatto’s standard agreement with Ouida (£1,300 for a new novel, copyright

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included) underwent a marked decrease in the 1880s: the £1,000 contract for Wanda (1883) included all rights to subsequent cheap editions; that for Othmar (1885) included cheap rights and serial rights, and was paid in monthly instalments of £50 instead of the customary £100; Ouida’s 1889 novel Guilderoy was priced at just £900 (see Jane Jordan, ‘The Writings of “Ouida”: Marie Louise de la Ramée, 1839–1908’, pp. 41–8). 73 NYPL, Berg Collection, Ouida to Andrew Chatto, 7 May 1879. This advice she repeated in ‘Unwritten Literary Laws’, suggesting ‘pale smooth grey or cream-coloured paper, so easily obtainable, with the title of the book clearly printed on its flank’ (‘Unwritten Literary Laws’, p. 182). 74 Altick, p. 312. 75 Weedon, p. 155.

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novels] do the State some service in that they materially help to bridge the gulf between the generally inane fictions of the penny serials and the better classes of fiction’ and (by implication) between classes of readerships also.76 The year after this article was published in Nineteenth Century (1883), Chatto & Windus issued a decoratively bound anthology of extracts from Ouida’s novels, aptly titled Wisdom, Wit and Pathos, a volume that testified to her literary standing.77 Ouida was no George Eliot, although she herself professed to believe otherwise, but neither was she second-rate. Chatto’s yellow-backs were just that, and Ouida was absolutely right to argue that they were not a medium ‘suitable to [her] works’. Her novels were marketed, priced and packaged like popular fiction for a popular reader, and the literary establishment judged her accordingly.

Thomas Wright, ‘Concerning the Unknown Public’, p. 290. It was also, primarily, a commercial venture, similar to the selection of extracts

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from Charles Reade’s work, Readiana, published by Chatto & Windus in 1883.

Chapter 4

‘Those Who Idle over Novels’: Victorian Critics and Post-Romantic Readers Debra Gettelman

The inscrutable nature of another person’s subjective experience of a book, particularly when that book is a novel, has long been seen by observers as an intractable condition of reading. The question of what goes on in a novel reader’s mind presented a source of anxiety to early critics of the genre and, more recently, has been regarded as a challenge to book historians. Richard Altick’s comprehensive The English Common Reader (1957) refers to the subjective reading experiences of the nineteenth century’s mass reading public largely to comment on their elusiveness within the empirical record. Nineteenth-century reformers and parliamentary committees, Altick notes, made almost no attempt to document the working person’s ‘inner life’ as a whole, beyond basic morality and religion. Altick’s work is, nonetheless, dedicated on a broad level to recovering the ‘spirit’ that motivated working-class readers. His work helped to make possible important recent studies which have finely documented, particularly through examining readers’ diaries and autobiographies, some of the subjective reading experiences common to particular groups of Victorian readers. The increasing availability of archives of nineteenth-century periodicals in recent years has also, I want to propose, made apparent at least how preoccupied contemporary observers of novel reading were with this very question about the nature of another person’s subjective experience of reading. Victorian literary commentators in the second half of the nineteenth century devoted a massive amount of print to speculating about, alleging, prescribing, appraising and – I will argue in this essay – ultimately privileging the private subjectivity involved in novel reading. This essay aims to recast our understanding of how and why Victorian critics writing about novels and novel reading for middle-class periodicals in the 1860s and 1870s were repeatedly classifying the subjective experiences readers might have while reading fiction. The subjectivity I am referring to includes a catalogue of ‘The ever-elusive holy grail of the historian of reading, the mental experience of the individual reader’, as Heather Jackson puts it in Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven, 2005), p. 251.  Richard Altick, The English Common Reader, 2nd edn (Chicago, 1998), p. 94. Further references are given as page numbers after quotations in the text.  See especially Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, 2001); and Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford, 1993). 

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mental activities which especially call upon the reader’s capacity for imagination, activities that Victorian literary observers depict as the direct result of reading a novel. The mental acts that interested critics of the novel at this moment range from identifying one’s feelings with those of a heroine during the act of reading (as Trollope frequently comments on) to learning from novels that, as Thomas Arnold writes in an 1866 article, ‘Recent Novel Writing’: ‘There are things which mere practical energy cannot accomplish, and which no amount of money can buy – spiritual powers – faculties of observation, imagination, memory, description’. The commercial success of the sensation novel in the early 1860s, following the publication of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), occasioned what was arguably the most vigorous critical discussion of the purpose and practice of novel reading to occur in nineteenth-century Britain. The branch of scholarship that has examined these vivid critiques of sensation fiction has described extensively how Victorian critics characterized novel reading on several levels in terms of somatic consumption. Beyond the debate about sensation fiction, as Nicolas Dames has recently shown, physiological psychology and the cognitive forms of modern mechanized culture helped to shape nineteenth-century theories of novel reading. I propose that the literary psychology of the time – how Victorian observers conceived of the individual, psychological processes and effects of reading fiction – also bears signs of a more literary influence. Mid-nineteenth-century commentators on novel reading frequently use the vocabulary of Romantic writers, who suggested the act of reading poetry should be accompanied by ‘reflection’, ‘rumination’ and ‘imagination’. This phenomenon only began to seem appealing in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century prescriptions about reading poetry, according to David Perkins. Dreaming over a book was famously invoked as a danger in earlier, eighteenth-century accounts of novel reading. Writing in the post Thomas Arnold, ‘Recent Novel Writing’, Macmillan’s 13 (January 1866), p. 208. Studies of the sensation novel within the context of its publication and readership

 

include Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers (New York, 1982); Matthew Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (Oxford, 2009); and Deborah Wynne, The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine (Basingstoke, 2001).  See in particular Kelly Mays, ‘The disease of reading and Victorian periodicals’, in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. by John Jordan and Robert Patten (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 165–94; and Janice Radway, ‘Reading is not eating: mass-produced literature and the theoretical, methodological, and political consequences of a metaphor’, Book Research Quarterly 2/3 (Fall 1986), pp. 7–29.  See Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford, 2007).  David Perkins, ‘Romantic Reading as Revery’, European Romantic Review 4 (1994), p. 194. Further references are given after quotations in the text.  See Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835 (Cambridge, 1999).

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Romantic period, Victorian critics, too, repeatedly depict not only the pleasures but the aesthetic benefits of reverie-like responses while reading a literary work. We have come to think of later Victorian writing about novel reading as focused on – and expressing anxieties about – the uncritical reading practices and mental passivity critics ascribed to the increasing number of women and less educated readers. I argue that nineteenth-century rhetoric about ‘those who idle over novels’ (in James Fitzjames Stephen’s words) also marked Victorian theorizing about how readers should exercise their imaginations through reading.10 Rather than moving decidedly away from the reader’s subjective experience as the novel gained in literary prestige, as has long been thought, these critics were interested in encouraging readers to indulge in daydream-like responses precisely to grasp the aesthetic merits of a novel. This new understanding ultimately complicates our critical assumptions about active and passive reading and the late nineteenthcentury elevation of the novel as an art form. Reading, in a Literary Sense When reviewers of new fiction and other literary commentators in the 1860s and 1870s suggest that the reader’s private subjectivity is a preeminent aspect of the reading experience, they are valuing an aspect of novel reading that had traditionally been censured. Beginning with the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, critics had been preoccupied with the imaginative exercise novel reading might inspire in readers. Novel reading was maligned for the daydreaming it was said both to resemble and encourage. Anxiety about what was going through the minds of the novel’s largely female readership – and an assumption that, whatever else it was, it was sexual in nature – is one reason why the image of being prompted by reading novels to imagine on one’s own was evoked frequently in eighteenth-century conduct books and periodicals to signify novel reading’s dangers.11 Rhetorically invoking the term ‘daydreaming’ to belittle the novel reader’s allegedly idle or quixotic habits persists at least as a critical convention throughout the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, however, poets and literary commentators who were theorizing the reading of poetry suggested that exercising independent imagination is a legitimate and central pleasure of reading literature. Romantic writers idealized literary reading both for the ways it simulated the poet’s state of creative reverie and as a means of stimulating the reader’s own reveries. ‘O Reader! had you in your mind / Such stores as silent thought can bring, / O gentle Reader! you would find / A tale in everything’, Wordsworth writes in ‘Simon Lee’ (ll. 65–8). At the time, claims about fiction were, of course, regarded as a separate James Fitzjames Stephen, ‘The Relation of Novels to Life’ (1855); excerpted in Victorian Criticism of the Novel, ed. by Edwin Eigner and George Worth (Cambridge, 1985), p. 118. 11 Jacqueline Pearson has written about ‘the period’s constant elision of textuality and sexuality’ in Women’s Reading, p. 87. 10

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and competing matter from theories of reading poetry: Coleridge famously put down novel reading as ‘a sort of beggarly daydreaming’.12 Yet Perkins describes as a somewhat broad assumption the view of Romantic writers that ‘a creative, associative activity of mind is necessary and normal in the reading of all literature, whatever its stylistic features’ (186). I want to suggest that the Romantic-era idealization of the ways that reading poetry could stimulate the reader’s imagination had a lasting effect on the reading public and ultimately on theories of novel reading. Such theories were, I argue, one factor in a shift that becomes visible by the 1840s, when Victorian novelists discovered first-hand that having an opportunity to exercise one’s own creativity in substantive ways had become an expectation of novel readers. As I have argued elsewhere, we know from the letters of George Eliot, for example, that Victorian readers avidly speculated about what might happen next in the time between serial instalments, and they even petitioned realist authors to write the endings that they wanted.13 Though every novel requires the reader, to some extent, to fill in imaginatively what a novel omits, Victorian novelists in the middle of the century became preoccupied with their readers’ creativity, particularly with the ways in which it was often misdirected. Critical interest in the reader’s subjective mind heightened in the 1860s, when concerns about the cognitive effects of the sensation novel and the practices of an increasing class of less educated readers appear to have spurred literary observers to make explicit claims about the proper readerly use of the imagination. While it is no secret that sensation novels suffered many critical attacks, we have yet to reconcile this treatment of the sensation novel with the broader reception history of nineteenth-century fiction. Detractors of sensation fiction discussed the putative mindlessness of such novels, but they also starkly folded into their attacks a defence of the important work accomplished by the reader’s imagination in the act of reading. In what follows, I first examine three reasons why a number of Victorian observers of reading found it useful to focus on the productive nature and uses of the reader’s subjectivity. Thanks in large part to the work of twentieth-century reader response theorists, we now think of the subjective presence of the reader as inevitably part of the encounter between reader and text. I am suggesting three pressures that contributed to Victorian literary critics’ explicitly emphasizing this dynamic of novel reading in a way that critics of the novel had not before: sensation fiction stimulated the wrong kinds of readerly activity; many different and new classes of people were reading the same novels; and the novel was beginning to be seen as an elevated aesthetic form, which has perhaps the greatest effect on why later Victorian critics privilege the novel reader’s subjective experience of a book.

12 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. by W. Jackson Bate and James Engell (Princeton, 1983), p. 48. 13 Debra Gettelman, ‘Reading ahead in George Eliot’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 39 (Fall 2005), pp. 25–47.

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First, we know that Victorian observers were focused on readers’ minds, but we have attended largely to their complaints about increasingly mindless reading. Just as we are familiar with eighteenth-century depictions of novel reading as inducing too much imaginative activity, scholars have tended to emphasize how nineteenth-century commentators depicted reading in general as resulting in too little mental activity. The commonly cited reason is widespread fear about the increasing mental passivity made possible by modern culture and the effect of less elevated reading tastes on the broader reading public. Altick notes that ‘virtually all observers agreed that as reading became a more and more passive habit, universal atrophy of the mind would result’ (370). Concerns about the diminishing of specific mental acts did stem from several conditions of reading in the mid-nineteenth century, including the sheer mass of print available, which particularly appeared to preclude thoughtful reflection. In an article suggestively titled ‘Overfeeding’, C.H. Butterworth notes that the immediate effect of this abundance is to make meditation on one’s reading impossible: ‘Books of travel, science, poetry, history, fiction, succeed and overwhelm one another with such alarming rapidity, that the man who stops for a moment to take breath and reflect, is lost’.14 But Victorian critics invoke the language of mindless and empty reading at times to cover up more troubling ways in which the reader is actively engaged in the reading process. Sensation fiction, as we know, was imagined to cause activity in the reader’s body, to touch readers’ nerves and appeal to their reflexes, rather than inspire their reflections. We also know that critics used physiological metaphors not only to describe the aesthetic effects of a novel, but to bemoan the supposed tendency of Victorian novel readers, particularly women and workers, to read in a way that seemed to be devoid of thought. For example, the critic Alfred Austin refers to ‘novel-drinking’, a term meant to underscore the narcotic, dulling effect of reading formulaic novels.15 Yet such images also call attention to the way novels heighten the actual physical activity of reading, which they frequently describe as literally ‘rapid’. One reviewer, writing an article for Tinsley’s Magazine in 1867 which purports to be a letter from an aunt to her niece, who is addicted to novels from Mudie’s circulating library, describes tongue-in-cheek how ‘Box after box arrives, and you proceed to the exhaustion of its contents, latterly with a feverish rapidity which I have noticed has been productive of one favorable result. You do not play at being like the heroines of certain novels any longer. [They] are pushed so rapidly off the stage that you do not have time to study them with a view to imitation’.16 As this reviewer’s allusion to quixotic reading suggests, vigorous assertions of the emptiness or absence of C.H. Butterworth, ‘Overfeeding’, Victoria Magazine 14 (November to April 1870), p. 501; quoted in Mays, ‘The disease of reading’, p. 170. 15 Alfred Austin, ‘The Vice of Reading’, Temple Bar Magazine 42 (September 1874), pp. 253. Further references are given as page numbers after quotations in the text. 16 ‘Aunt Anastasia on modern novels’, Tinsley’s Magazine 1 (1867); excerpted in Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction, 1855–1890, I: Sensationalism and the Sensation Debate, ed. by Andrew Maunder (London, 2004), pp. 161–2. 14

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the novel reader’s mind can also belie a real concern over the possibility that such a mind is not idle but overly active in the same way as worried eighteenth-century observers. As Kate Flint has shown, Victorian medical theories portray women as having a greater capacity for sympathetic identification with fictional narratives or characters – whether because of their maternal capacities or the presumed influence of the reproductive organs on the nervous system – so that, of the sexes, they are deemed the more emotionally responsive and susceptible readers.17 A second pressure which helped to bring the reader’s subjective experience to the forefront of critical language in the 1860s and 1870s is that critics who did describe the subjective nature of reading practices were doing so at a time when many different groups of people – everyone from the prime minister to the scullery maid, to use Anthony Trollope’s words – were reading the same novels. What went on in the reader’s mind, I propose, became useful as a possible and hard-to-arguewith basis of distinction between classes of readers. This shift in value, from the book itself to the manner in which it is read, is one Roger Chartier identifies in his criticism of the ancien regime, when advances in printing facilitated the wide circulation of books. ‘Whereas the simple possession of a book had for a long time signified a cultural division in itself’, Chartier writes, ‘with the conquests of printing it is, rather, specific reading attitudes and typographical objects which progressively take on this function’.18 Reviews of new fiction and articles about reading habits that appeared in periodicals directed at a middle-class readership throughout these decades often classified readers into groups based on how they read novels. At the end of Collins’s now well-known 1858 article about the expansion of the reading audience in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘The Unknown Public’, Collins suggests that what ultimately separates the reading public into two classes of readers is not their knowledge of what literature to read, but their understanding of how it should be read. The mass reading audience, he observes, has yet to become attentive to ‘the delicacies and subtleties of literary art’. The article was published in Household Words and addressed to an audience of what Collins calls the ‘Known Public’, or the public who already know how to read. But at odds with such a clearly articulated distinction between readerships is a surprising lack of clarity about what constitutes good and bad reading practices, which suggests that the real emphasis is on the distinction itself. ‘The Unknown Public is, in a literary sense, hardly beginning, as yet, to learn to read’, Collins writes. ‘An immense public has been discovered: the next thing to be done is, in a literary sense, to teach that public how to read’.19 ‘In a literary sense’: wellknown as Collins’s observation about knowing ‘how to read’ has become, he goes no further in spelling out what special practices distinguish reading ‘in a literary sense’ from reading in a literal sense. Flint, The Woman Reader, p. 567. Roger Chartier, ‘Labourers and Voyagers: from the text to the reader’, in The Book

17 18

History Reader, ed. by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (New York, 2002), p. 53. 19 Wilkie Collins, ‘The Unknown Public’, Household Words (21 August 1858), p. 222.

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In other words, one reason discussions about intangible reading habits occurred so frequently, as in Collins’s article about working-class readers, was that these habits stood in for and functioned as a way of stratifying essentialist categories of readers. Much of our current understanding of how Victorian readers and critics discussed subjective reading practices has come through excellent studies of the ‘new readers’ of the nineteenth century, women and workers. Kate Flint has shown authoritatively how ‘the perennial expectation’ evident in advice manuals, medical works and contemporary reviews throughout the nineteenth century was that women readers would identify uncritically with a novel’s heroine. Because of such portrayals, Victorian depictions of intangible reading habits are, of course, now largely known for the prejudices and anxieties they reveal, among the Victorian intellectual establishment, about both the increasing number of new readers and a decreasing sense of control over what they read. As Flint notes about this widespread assumption about how women read, ‘Novel-reading was warned against because of its capacity to raise false expectations, and engender dissatisfaction with one’s present mode of life’.20 Flint’s own language suggests the extent to which the critical rhetoric about the process of reading described powerful novels acting on passive, susceptible readers: novels actively ‘raise false expectations’ and ‘engender dissatisfaction’, rather than readers developing ambitions as an active response to reading. Indeed, I want suggest that descriptions of reading with less agency proved useful as a way of distinguishing readers who had less social agency. Newly literate, working-class readers were assumed to pay attention, for example, only to narrative. The author of an article on ‘Penny Novels’ suggested that the genre’s working-class audience was so narrowly focused on following sensational events that no other mental activities could take place: ‘The readers not being in the habit of reflecting on what they read, no abiding impression is produced on their minds by romantic and grotesque representations of love and marriage, and of human life in all its forms’.21 A third, related use literary commentators found for descriptions of subjective reading habits was not only to distinguish a good reader from a bad one, but to reinforce distinctions within the genre of fiction. Mid-Victorian novel critics were seeking to shield taste for the ‘literary’ from the encroachment of the ‘popular’ by making literary distinctions based not on a work’s intrinsic qualities, but on the reading experiences the work generated. In a now well-known review of The Woman in White from 1862, Margaret Oliphant suggests that the novel’s literary merit can literally be felt in the ‘pure sensation’ one experiences in reading it: ‘The scenes we have quoted owe their startling force entirely to the elaborate skill and cunning of the workman’.22 Such aesthetic distinctions echo a fundamental Romantic concern: in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth refers to ‘frantic novels’ to suggest that their very popularity has made this new kind of poetry – poetry which Flint, The Woman Reader, p. 74. ‘Penny Novels’, Littell’s Living Age 77, p. 185. 22 Margaret Oliphant, ‘Sensation Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 91 (May 20 21

1862), p. 573.

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excites, rather than dulls the reader’s mind – all the more necessary. In the decades when these boundaries were more blurred, when a literary author could write a popular sensation novel, critics were eager to find ways to establish what Oliphant, writing again in Blackwood’s five years later, calls ‘as distinct a separation as the printer’s skill can indicate between the lower and the higher ground in fiction’. Oliphant knows that a book’s status partly lies in whether it is read, and she declares it ‘a shame to the women who read’ the lower class of fiction: ‘Their patronage of such books is in reality an adoption and acceptance of them’.23 The uses to which a particular book can be put determine its value for Austin, who writes in ‘The Vice of Reading’: ‘Books which neither confer information which is worth having, nor lift the spiritual part of us up to loftier regions, nor, by judicious diversion, refreshen the mind for further serious efforts, are bad books, and the reading of such is invariably idleness, and not unoften the most dangerous kind of idleness’ (251). Though Austin suggests that ‘idleness’ in reading can be clearly separated from a book’s worth, as the next section proposes, the aesthetic value ascribed to novels in the latter half of the nineteenth century was increasingly dependent on something that looked much like idleness while reading. Rumination is Indispensable I have been suggesting that Victorian critics use the novel reader’s subjective experience in ways that express anxiety about a changing literary landscape. They also characterize readerly subjectivity in terms which suggest the lasting influence of an earlier literary moment. Critics of novels and novel reading in the 1860s and 1870s also became increasingly interested in the subjective experience of reading because they knew that novel readers in the post-Romantic era often viewed fiction as a venue in which to exercise their own creative capacities. Wordsworth had declared that the dulling cognitive effects of modern urban culture created a need for poetry that would stimulate the reader’s mind and inspire a state of reverie. Altick argues that as industrial culture flourished in the Victorian era, one need in particular brought millions of working-class readers to the printed word: ‘the deep-seated desire for imaginative and emotional release’, which found a rare outlet within this increasingly industrialized culture in the activity of reading, particularly novel reading. ‘Whatever they read … the English common people of the nineteenth century were, like human beings in all ages, dreamers of dreams. However drab, weary, and monotonous their lives, somewhere in their oppressed souls persisted an unquenchable desire for a happier gift from life than unremitting toil and poverty’, he writes (97). The English Common Reader suggests that, beyond a few exceptions such as Dickens, most social critics at the time either did not recognize or did not value the imaginative experience working people found in reading: how they wanted, through fiction, to reflect on and generate their own 23 Margaret Oliphant, ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 102 (September 1867), p. 275.

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visions. In fact, the elevation of the novel as an art form in the latter nineteenth century has long been thought of as a dismissal of such ordinary readers, whose emotional responses to fiction supposedly precluded aesthetic judgment. But at the other, higher end of the literary spectrum, observers of novel reading were portraying the reader’s subjectivity and imagination as valuable. They rejected readerly affect, but not the formal intervention of readerly subjectivity. Critics writing in the 1860s and 1870s repeatedly suggest that the aesthetic merits of a novel depend on readerly mediation, reflection and rumination, mental states that formally mirror the daydreaming that had traditionally worried novel reading’s critics. I first want to underscore that Victorian critical rhetoric in these decades in particular speaks to the formal and not just the affective nature of novel readers’ subjective experiences. One often-invoked term of critique, ‘desultory’ reading, was often used in the same context as ‘idleness’, but the concern about desultory reading departed from eighteenth-century concerns about the affect stirred in the idle reader’s mind, to focus instead on whether the form reading took made thoughtfulness possible. ‘Conversation’, thoughtfulness, and ‘prior consideration’, Austin writes, ‘are not to be provided by desultory reading’ (255). The concern was about reading in a scattered fashion, which to critics implied a lack of depth as well as purpose: ‘a book butterfly’, as the Earl of Iddesleigh, Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh, put it in an 1885 address to students. Lord Iddesleigh emphasizes, however, that the problem is not the miscellaneous form of reading per se, ‘which will be good for the relaxation of the mind after severe study’, but rather when a lighter, shallower manner of reading is practiced at an inappropriate time and replaces closer attention.24 Criticisms about desultory reading shared with the frequent characterizations of reading that was too physically rapid a sense that readers were not staying enough in one place, and attending to one thing, which is what one does by privately meditating during the course of reading. Alluded to at a strikingly increased rate in periodicals in the 1860s and the two decades after, so-called desultory activity had much to do with a distinctively Victorian concern with productivity.25 Between the increasing number of male novel readers and the utilitarian spirit of the period, Victorian criticism of novel reading frequently invokes its emasculating cognitive effects. Thomas Arnold, who argues in favor of the subjective qualities that ‘the energetic and quick-witted man of business, and not only he, but his wife, and sons, and daughters’ can learn from fiction, as I referred to earlier, also suggests how familiar complaints were about certain insidious mental effects of fiction. He writes in a tellingly breezy, shorthand 24 Stafford Henry Northcote, Earl of Iddesleigh, The Pleasures, Dangers, and the Uses of Desultory Reading (London, 1885), pp. 15, 20. 25 A simple search for ‘desultory’ in the online collection British Periodicals, which contains the full text of roughly 500 periodicals published between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, shows a threefold increase in the number of articles that use the term in the 1860s compared with the first decade of the nineteenth century, and a steep decline in its use after the 1890s.

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manner about ‘great mischiefs … such as the emasculation of mind arising from an indulgence, not followed up by practice, in exciting and stimulating food – vain day-dreams and longings for the unattainable – divorce from and disrelish for the hard world of fact – and many others’.26 James Fitzjames Stephen’s disparagement of ‘those who idle over novels’ is, in fact, an expression of concern about young men who are not being industrious, rather than a critique directed at fiction. ‘It may perhaps be regretted that novels should form so large a part of the reading of young men, though it is doubtful in any case whether they are an unmixed evil’, he writes. ‘Those who idle over novels would, in their absence, idle over something else’.27 One notable exception to the largely negative later Victorian portrayal of unproductive reading, Stephen Arata has argued, is that both William Morris and Robert Louis Stevenson figure ‘reading as idleness’, or approaching a book in a state of diffused attention, as an act of defiance against increasingly industrialized, bureaucratized assumptions about reading in the period.28 I am suggesting that the positive valence of what might appear to be idle reading was even more present in the period. Victorian literary critics, who similarly sought to distinguish a more aesthetic mode of reading fiction, did so by invoking an earlier, Romantic model of reading poetry. One way later Victorian observers of novel reading indicate that a reverielike response to a novel differs from worryingly idle reading is how the language used to describe reading reflection conveys a sense of agency, even if it is an almost Wordsworthian ‘wise passiveness’. The work of reader response theorists like Wolfgang Iser, who called attention to the awareness literary authors have of the reader’s part in constructing the meaning of a literary work, has, I think, caused modern scholarship on reading to focus on what is positive about a sense of activity. Yet, as we have seen, in the Victorian period, reading too actively, too rapidly, being too mentally stimulated, was as likely to be portrayed as the debilitating state of being in thrall to fiction, the state that one critic termed a ‘mental debauch’.29 Romantic reading, on the other hand, privileged a kind of readerly subjectivity that had a fundamentally passive character. The Romantic theory of reading was associationist, Perkins notes, so that it was assumed that during the reading process, ‘the associations come of themselves, without intention or volition’ (189).. Victorian critics continued to be attentive to the fact that readerly participation and agency could take the form of dreaming, and they carried on a wide-ranging and sustained debate about the specific forms in which nineteenth-century readers should exercise their imaginations through reading. A constellation of terms throughout periodical writings on novels in the later nineteenth century describe various forms of private meditation, imagining and 28 29 26

Arnold, ‘Recent Novel Writing’, p. 208. Stephen, ‘The Relation of Novels to Life’, p. 118. Stephen Arata, ‘On not paying attention’, Victorian Studies 46 (Winter 2004), p. 204. ‘Reading as a Means of Culture’, Sharpe’s London Magazine 31, no. 46 (1867), p. 317. Further references are given as page numbers after quotations in the text. 27

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reflection that occur while reading a novel. What I want to emphasize is that critics were especially interested in the formal relation of such meditation to reading: how paying attention to private associations and feelings exists temporally in relation to reading the words on the page. The two formal relationships they describe most often, pausing to meditate and using one’s imagination simultaneously while attending to the words on the page, underscore that what these critics value is that the reader’s imagination interrupts and intervenes in the reading process (as opposed, for instance, to meditating after reading). In these two forms of reflection, the reader’s own imagination comes between and breaks up the novel’s pages, detaching the reader from pure absorption in the text. The first form of what I will call interrupted reading that critics often describe involves literal interruptions, pauses in attending to the words on the page. Temporally interrupted reading in another form was, of course, familiar to Victorian novel readers: much Victorian fiction was published serially, not to mention interposed within periodicals with a variety of other genres. In practice, as Linda Hughes and Michael Lund have suggested, novel reading in the nineteenth century naturally included pauses between serial instalments in which meditation on the work could occur.30 These theories about punctuating reading with deliberate reflection fittingly appeared in popular periodicals. But critics also began prescribing reflective pauses in earnest in the 1860s and 1870s because the construction of rapidly plotted sensation fiction offered conspicuously few opportunities for meditation. Critics of sensation fiction portrayed such novels as written in a way, in general, that did not invite the reader’s participation. Thus a reviewer of Collins’s Armadale (1866) writes of the novel’s construction: ‘The way in which the story is put together is certainly ingenious, but … it appeals to our curiosity, not to our imagination, or our feeling, or reason’.31 Historian Alison Winter has also shown how readers of The Woman in White commonly described the nervous reaction the novel induced as having, by design, ‘bypassed … reflection’.32 One anonymous reviewer, writing of ‘Mrs. Wood and Miss Braddon’, analyzed just how sensation fiction systematically foreclosed thought. ‘At every turn of events that suggests reflection each lady punctually and exclusively supplies her reader with the commonplace appointed for the occasion’.33 This reviewer intimates an assumption that a reader might otherwise expect a novel to ‘suggest’ moments to pause and reflect, that narrative would be constructed, ideally, to include its own built-in pauses which arrest the forward march of otherwise mindless reading. At the same time that literary critics were carping about readers’ riveted attention to The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret, some were also advising readers See Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville,

30

1991).

‘Belles Lettres’, Westminster Review 30 (July 1866), p. 270. Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago,

31 32

1998), p. 324. 33 ‘Mrs. Wood and Miss Braddon’, Littell’s Living Age 77 (14 April 1863), p. 99.

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that to appreciate a book fully, one must at intervals put it down altogether. I want to focus briefly on an 1867 article on ‘Reading as a Means of Culture’, published in Sharpe’s London Magazine, which dwells on how to achieve a Romanticsounding ‘true end of reading’: ‘self-culture, the improvement of all the higher powers of our nature’ (316). The author does not call his suggestions for reading Romantic; in fact, he invokes the conventional, belittling description of reading in an inattentive, passive state as like ‘dreaming or reverie, in which images float before the mind without any act of volition to retain them’ (317). But he goes on to express ideas about how the mind is formed in childhood and the supreme pleasure of reverie which nearly paraphrase ‘Tintern Abbey’ (‘he transfers to his mind a distinct and full image of the admired object, which, in the absence of that object, he can gaze upon, in his contemplations, with the same interest that he could upon the object itself, if it were present to the bodily eye’; 319). Intermittent ‘contemplations’ turn out to be how one reads as a means of self-culture. ‘While what you read remains a mere undigested mass in the memory, it is of but little worth. Rumination is indispensable’, he writes, and goes on to quote an American colleague’s formula for ‘ruminating’ as one reads: I then studied the author in the following manner: After reading the first sentence, I meditated on it, developing the author’s thoughts as well as I was able, and reducing the whole, as nearly as possible, to a single distinct concise expression. I then read the second sentence and did the same. I next compared the two sentences together, meditating on them … A third rule was to pass nothing unexamined, nothing without reflection, whether in poetry or fiction, history or travels, politics, philosophy, or religion. (321)

Leave it to a Victorian writer to regularize the process of having a reverie here and there as one reads a book. For that is, in spirit, what he is suggesting: though the motivation is to understand an author’s meaning, the means of doing so emphasize the reader’s subjective powers of mind: ‘meditating’, ‘reflection’, ‘rumination’. This is not an analytical vocabulary, but one of musing, pondering in a deep and even personal way. Indeed, elsewhere in the article he explicitly advises interrupting the author’s descriptions with the stock of the reader’s own mind: ‘Sometimes examine what you read in the light of your own observation’ (320). This same method applies to gaining a true understanding of fiction and poetry, whose aesthetic merits, according to the article’s author, are to be grasped through equally subjective, even imaginative means. ‘Just so far, then, as reading contributes to self-culture … ’, he writes, ‘our imaginations can rove freely among the forms of thought among which [the great minds of the world] expatiated with delight’ (316). In the second form of interrupted reading we find in Victorian criticism, the reader’s faculty of imagination intervenes throughout the course of novel reading. Rather than breaking up the temporal sequence of reading, the reader’s imagination is said to come between the words on the page and their shape in the reader’s mind. What critics repeatedly describe is judging a novel based on how hospitably it seems to issue an invitation for the reader to join in imagining the fictional world.

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For example, shortly after The Woman in White began its serial run and set off the reading public’s obsession with sensation fiction, an article in the January 1860 issue of Fraser’s described the reader’s experience of an entirely different genre of fiction. ‘British Novelists – Richardson, Miss Austen, Scott’ surveys British prose fiction from Bunyan to Scott. Like David Masson, whom the article mentions, the author is engaged in mapping a tradition of the best British realist fiction, in this case using one criterion in particular: Nothing indeed is ever felt in the highest spirit of art, which is altogether real. Something must always be left for the reader’s imagination to supply; and imitation ceases to please when it assumes reality and rejects the aid of that imagination which is the surest way of obtaining sympathy. … The imagination does the work to which it is invited, and it does it best when most left to itself. Those novels are most like reality in which there is the least direct description of the external material objects among which the characters live and move, and in which a happy touch or natural allusion from time to time directs attention to the circumstances of time and place which it is desirable to place before the mind’s eye of the reader.34

The imagination a reader brings to a novel exists quite separately from the work itself here, in a relationship of ‘aid[ing]’ and ‘supply[ing]’ ideally minimal literal descriptions. As such, readerly imagination plays a mediating role in the process of getting from the description on the page to the living shape the fictional world assumes in ‘the mind’s eye of the reader’. Though psychologists at the time depict the imagination as liable to run riot once it is inspired, this writer explains why inviting such intervention signifies a novel’s aesthetic merit. Literary critics at the time were becoming increasingly rigorous about distinguishing novels that attain ‘the highest spirit of art’ from those that do not. But as this author and others along with him make clear, that aesthetic ‘spirit’ has to be brought out of a novel and brought to life before its value can be fully appreciated. ‘For the full enjoyment of fiction’, another critic had instructed in 1853, ‘the imagination must be in a productive mood; the figures then start into life, and the various aspects of nature flit through the mind, forming a background to the living scene’.35 What these two forms of readerly subjectivity, imaginative pauses and an intervening imagination, ultimately share is a sense of partial detachment from the text that was intrinsically valuable in the eyes of Victorian literary commentators. Over-identification, or a lack of emotional distance, and not imagination or subjectivity itself, was the problem critics most associated with readers of popular fiction. ‘Purely affective’ reading, Ann Cvetkovich has argued, was the real

34 ‘British novelists – Richardson, Miss Austen, Scott’, Fraser’s Magazine 61 (January 1860), p. 21. 35 Prospective Review 9 (30 April 1853), pp. 222–47; excerpted in Eigner and Worth, Victorian Criticism, p. 87.

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target of sensation novel criticism.36 The benefit of interrupted reading was that it interposes, between the reader and the words on the page, a consciousness of having one’s own active imagination, an awareness of self that might prevent too intense an identification with the heroine. The reviewer Julia Wedgwood, writing in The Contemporary in 1886, compliments the serene but also fanciful way, in the sense of consciously filling the reading experience with fancy, in which her parents’ generation approached fiction. ‘To them it was the diversion of an idle hour, the repository of their light-fancies’.37 Detaching oneself from a text in order to reflect on it was also a reading habit that marked both the reader and the book as part of an elevated class. Pierre Bourdieu suggests that the act of withdrawal in the form of aesthetic detachment is fundamental to what he calls the ‘sacred character, separate and separating, of high culture’.38 Figured as a kind of withdrawal from a fast-paced plot, rather than a further engagement in it, reading that was interrupted by the reader’s own imagination ultimately enabled one to appreciate a novel on more than just an emotional level. For as we know, commentators on Victorian fiction, from George Henry Lewes to Henry James to Q.D. Leavis, were deeply concerned about reading that was dominated by emotional rather than aesthetic pleasure. Readerly affect may have been dismissed so that aesthetic merit could be perceived, but that very goal caused critics to embrace the reader’s imaginative intervention – which had long been criticized as mere readerly daydreaming – as a formal part of reading. Arguing for greater exercise of the reader’s independent and free imagination, Victorian literary observers helped to bring about an important shift in perceptions about the subjectivity we now accept as inevitably, if elusively, involved in novel reading.

Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick, 1992), p. 21. 37 Julia Wedgwood, untitled, Contemporary 59 (1886), p. 593; quoted in Kenneth Graham, English Criticism of the Novel, 1865–1900 (Oxford, 1965), p. 10. 38 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1984), p. 34. 36

Chapter 5

‘Gossip’ and ‘Twaddle’: Nineteenth-century Common Readers Make Sense of Jane Austen Katie Halsey

In one of her essays on Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf suggested that much of our knowledge of Austen’s life and works was dependent on ‘a little gossip, a few letters, and her books’, while Henry James dismissed early twentieth-century writing about Austen as the ‘pleasant twaddle of magazines’. I have used their terms – ‘gossip’ and ‘twaddle’ – to signal that I will be using material that has historically been ignored by literary critics, in the belief that the responses of ‘common readers’ of Austen have something to tell us about Austen’s works that we cannot discover through traditional pure literary–critical analysis alone. The term ‘common reader’ is problematic. In 1957, Richard Altick used the phrase to discuss a class distinction between readers. Readership historians since Altick have tended to follow his lead, thinking of ‘common readers’ as workingclass readers. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, however, the term ‘common reader’ did not necessarily have class implications, being used instead to discuss levels of readerly expertise. Set against a background of the increasing professionalization of reading as a practice, in the nineteenthcentury periodical press, the term ‘common reader’ is most often used simply to differentiate between ‘ordinary’ or ‘general’ readers and academics or professional literary critics. It is a loaded term, forming part of a long-running debate about the competence of the British reading public to make judgements about the texts they read. When Virginia Woolf wrote her great defence of the general reader, Virginia Woolf, ‘Jane Austen’, in Collected Essays, 4 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1966–67), I, pp. 144–54 (p. 144).  Henry James, The Question of Our Speech: The Lesson of Balzac: Two Lectures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), p. 63.  Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).  See, for example, Anon, ‘Different Classes of Readers’, Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation, 1 (1852), p. 15; Anon, ‘General Readers, by One of Them’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 53 (1885–86), pp. 450–57; Rev. F. Farrar, ‘Learning to Read’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 21 (1869–70), pp. 445–8; Anon, ‘The Uses of Fiction’, Tinsley’s Magazine, 6 (1870), pp. 180–85; Anon, ‘Easy Spelling and Hard Reading’, 

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The Common Reader, in 1925, she assumed her own readers would understand the phrase as signifying a non-professional or non-academic reader, and her appropriation of the term was a defence of intellectual freedom. She writes: The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions … To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions – there we have none.

Throughout this chapter, I will follow Jonathan Rose, who suggested in 1992 that the ‘common reader’ should be ‘defined as any reader who did not read books for a living’, taking the term, as Woolf did, to mean any reader who is not a professional literary critic or academic. Although I will occasionally mention the responses of critics, in order to provide background or context, the bulk of the chapter is devoted to the ‘common reader’. And there is, in this chapter, no class aspect to my analysis. Over the last 10 years, the related scholarly fields of reception studies and the history of reading have become increasingly popular and influential within both literary studies and history. Scholars from a variety of disciplines, including classics, English literature, comparative literature, cultural studies and history, have all begun to embrace the notion that a text’s reception across different historical eras might have something important to say about that text. Bharat Tandon argues, for example, in Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation (2003), that ‘a history of readings can … yield a series of responses to something

Household Words, 1 (30 March–21 September 1850), pp. 561–2; Anon, ‘On Fiction as an Educator’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 108 (October 1870), pp. 449–59; Anon, ‘The Office of Literature’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 53 (1885–1886), pp. 361–3; Anon, ‘Some Thoughts About Novels’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 55 (1886–87), pp. 358–65; ‘F.M.’, ‘Popular Literature’, The Englishwoman’s Magazine and Christian Mother’s Miscellany, n.s. 7 (1852), pp. 25–7; Kate Magnus, ‘Concerning the Difficulty of Reading’, Good Words, 45 (1905), pp. 369–70; F.T. Palgrave, ‘On Readers in 1760 and 1860’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1 (1859–60), pp. 487–9; E. Kay Robinson, ‘Reading Without Tears’, Good Words, 40 (1899), pp. 235–9; Rev. H.G. Robinson, ‘On the Use of English Classical Literature in the Work of Education’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 2 (1860), pp. 425–34 and A.F. Webling, ‘On Browsing in a Library’, Temple-Bar, 129 (1904), pp. 466–74.  Virginia Woolf, ‘How should one read a Book?’ in Collected Essays, 4 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1966–67), II, pp. 1–11 (p. 1).  Jonathan Rose, ‘Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences’, Journal of History of Ideas, 53 (1992), pp. 47–70 (p. 47).  See Virginia Woolf, ‘The Common Reader’ in The Common Reader, 2 vols (London: Vintage, 2003; first published 1925), I, pp. 1–2.

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that the original text might be argued to have been doing’. And the reception of texts has also become a valuable site of enquiry in and of itself. The testimony of actual readers (rather than the ‘inscribed’, ‘intended’, ‘implied’, ‘ideal’, or ‘hypothetical’ readers of reader-response theory) has therefore become a valuable, though methodologically contested, field of enquiry. In Austen studies, such works as Deirdre Shauna Lynch’s edited collection Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (2000), Kathryn Sutherland’s Jane Austen’s Textual Lives (2005) and Claire Harman’s Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (2008) suggest that critics have become increasingly interested in the reception of Austen’s work, and in the related question of the different ways in which her reputation and persona have been constructed and deployed. In this chapter, I will consider the responses of real historical readers to Jane Austen and her works, focussing primarily on three kinds of response: the desire to forge a personal relationship with author and characters, the desire to use Austen as a moral guide, and the use of Austen’s novels as consolation or cure. The evidence considered will be the first-person reading experiences recorded in diaries, letters, autobiographies, memoirs and marginal annotations from about 1790 (when Austen first showed her work to her family and closest friends) onwards. When considering first-person, or other kinds of ‘anecdotal’ testimony, such as diaries, letters and autobiographies, there are a number of caveats that it is always necessary to bear in mind. First, the act of reading is freighted with complex cultural resonances, and the act of writing about reading reflects this cultural complexity. As Hans Robert Jauss puts it, ‘the reader of a new work has to perceive it not only within the narrow horizon of his literary expectations but also within the wider horizon of his experience of life’. Reading is a fiercely personal and individual practice, but it does not take place within a vacuum. Reading experiences are influenced by both text and context. Secondly, the firstperson testimony of readers, though it appears more transparent and ‘truthful’ than fiction, is nonetheless not necessarily so. All written testimony is to some extent defined and constrained by the written form in which it appears; the act of writing a diary, letter, autobiography or memoir is also an act of mediation between the actual experience of reading and the reader’s account of it. Thirdly, readers have different reasons for recording their reading experiences, which cannot always be retrieved across historical time. Memories can be faulty. Selfdelusion is common. Anyone who writes down his or her thoughts also knows that writing is inherently vulnerable to being seen by other eyes. Fourthly, as Simon Eliot puts it, ‘any reading recorded in an historically recoverable way is, almost by definition, an exceptional recording of an uncharacteristic event by  Bharat Tandon, Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation (London: Anthem Press, 2003), p. 36.  Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’, trans. Elizabeth Benzinger, New Literary History, 2 (1970): pp. 7–37 (p. 14).

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an untypical person’.10 In other words, the majority of reading experiences by ordinary people go unmarked, and are thus irretrievable by the historian. Generalizing about the ‘common reader’ is therefore always tricky, because that reader is the very one who leaves no trace of his or her reading. Our sample of evidence, then, is always likely to be skewed towards the atypical. Nonetheless, historians of reading recognize that first-person accounts of reading represent our best chance of retrieving information about the reception of texts among the readers of the past, when combined with other sources,11 subjected to careful interpretation and placed within a historical, social and cultural context if at all possible. These accounts are a rich resource to the careful scholar, telling us much about reading habits and practices in different historical periods. They provide suggestive information about why certain books and authors go in and out of fashion, and tell us much about what readers expect from different types of literature at particular historical moments and about the different kinds of reading in which they engage. Comparative analysis of records of reading over time allows us to identify the continuities and changes in reading over several generations. And the accounts of ordinary readers insistently remind us that real readers do not respond like ‘ideal’ or ‘hypothetical’ ones; their testimonies vividly foreground their physical and material concerns, as well as the multitude of extra-textual matters that affect the reading experience. The responses of readers to Jane Austen’s works are thus a valuable source of information to the historian of reading, as well as to the Austen scholar. We can begin to get a sense of how readers over two centuries have responded not only to the novels, but also to factors outside the text, such as Austen’s reputation, the critical opinions of her writing, and, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, her translation into other media, such as film and television. In Austen’s case, extra-textual factors, such as the careful control of her reputation by her family biographers, and the opinions of critics and reviewers, have been carefully documented,12 offering the historian of reading the opportunity to construct Simon Eliot, ‘The Reading Experience Database; or, What are we to do about the history of reading?’, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/redback.htm [accessed 12 August 2009]. 11 Traditionally, historians of reading have used sources such as library and booksellers’ records, publication and sales data and information about literacy rates, in combination with first-hand evidence. Recent work suggests that careful use of other sources, such as prison records, trial transcripts and social surveys can also shed light on the history of reading. See, for example, Rosalind Crone, ‘The dimensions of literacy in Victorian England: a reappraisal’, Journal of Victorian Culture (forthcoming); Rosalind Crone, Katie Halsey, and Shafquat Towheed, ‘Examining the evidence of reading: three examples from the Reading Experience Database, 1450–1945’, in Reading in History: New Methodologies from the Anglo-American Tradition, ed. Bonnie Gunzenhauser (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010) pp. 29–45. 12 See, in particular, Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: from Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 1–117, and Claire Harman, Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen conquered the world (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2009). 10

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the ‘horizon of expectations’ of Austen’s readers in ways that are not always possible with less-studied writers.13 Extra Textual Factors Jane Austen’s Reputation From the time of her death, Jane Austen’s reputation was carefully controlled and constructed by the Austen family through the censorship and suppression of her manuscripts and the biographies written by family members. Cassandra Austen inherited all of her sister Jane’s letters and unpublished writings under the terms of Austen’s will. Cassandra censored or destroyed many of the letters, in her turn passing on those that remained to other family members, mainly her two nieces, Anna Lefroy and Fanny Knight. The extant letters were not published until 1884, when Austen’s great-nephew, Lord Brabourne, produced an edition that included only about two-thirds of the letters now known to have survived at that time. Brabourne frequently omitted names, places and many of Austen’s crueller and wittier comments. Austen’s juvenile and unfinished manuscript writings were not published in full until the early twentieth century, although heavily edited scraps were reproduced in her nephew’s memoir of 1870, and in the second (expanded) edition of 1871. As Kathryn Sutherland points out, had they been made available to the public in their original state, these brilliant but rough, crude and frequently absurd ‘effusions of fancy’ would have given readers a very different idea of Jane Austen from the one her family sought to present.14 Austen’s brother Henry and her nephew James Edward wrote the only biographies of the writer to appear until the end of the nineteenth century, and they took pains to stress Austen’s modesty, domesticity, kindness, humility, lack of professional ambition and innate sense of polish and neatness. In July 1817, her brothers wrote the obituary for the local papers: On Friday the 18th inst. died in this city, Miss Jane Austen, youngest [sic] daughter of the late Rev. George Austen, Rector of Steventon, in this county, and the Authoress of Emma, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Her manners were most gentle, her affections ardent, her candour was not to be surpassed, and she lived and died as became a humble Christian.15

Although Jauss, who coined the phrase, uses the term ‘horizon of expectations’ primarily in relation to the literary expectations of the reader, which are dictated by such issues as genre and form, I, like William St Clair, take the term to encompass social, cultural, legal and economic factors also. See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 268–92. 14 See Sutherland, pp. 203–14. 15 Hampshire Chronicle and Courier, 22 July 1817. 13

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Though it mentions Austen’s authorship, the obituary emphasizes primarily gentleness, familial affection, candour, humility and Christianity, attributes that would feature prominently in Henry Austen’s ‘Biographical Notice of the Author,’ which was published with the first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in December of 1817, and revised and extended in 1832. This was the first biography of Jane Austen, and all later biographers and many contemporary critics and reviewers of Austen’s work made it the basis of their own depictions of her life and character. The ‘Biographical Notice’ largely created the persona that the name ‘Jane Austen’ represented throughout the nineteenth century: feminine, domesticated, modest; an amateur rather than professional writer who was happy to remain within the domestic sphere. This image proved popular with Austen’s early critics, who approved the version of femininity constructed by Henry Austen and made Austen into the publicly acceptable face of the woman writer in the early nineteenth century. It was this image of Jane Austen that Elizabeth Barrett Browning had in mind when she wrote to Mary Russell Mitford: I think, for instance, that you, as your Miss Austen did & as Mrs Radcliffe did, care more for the respect paid to you on mere social grounds, than you care for any acknowledgement of your power as a writer & on literary grounds. I think that you have a sort of satisfaction in saying ‘People do not talk literature to me’ or ‘people like me for myself better than they do for my books.’ I think moreover, that you have a tendency to laugh to scorn … the pain of that wrestling for merited distinction under which so many great hearts have groaned aloud.16

Barrett Browning found it hard to understand why Mary Mitford took Jane Austen’s work so seriously. To Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Austen’s novels were polished comedies of manners, with nothing of the heart involved in them, lacking depth, passion, or what she called ‘true poetry’.17 Because she believed in the image of Austen as a happy, gifted and contented amateur writer, she also believed that Austen had never undergone ‘the pain of that wrestling for merited distinction’ which to her was the mark of true greatness in a writer. Austen thus could not qualify for literary greatness in Barrett Browning’s mind. When Austen’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, published his Memoir of Jane Austen (1870), he drew heavily on the ‘Biographical Notice’ and his book further Victorianized Austen’s image, making her into a version of Coventry Patmore’s famous ‘angel in the house’. Austen-Leigh’s book enjoyed considerable success, going almost immediately into a second edition and garnering several reviews in the periodical press. Many of these quoted extensively from the Memoir, thus disseminating Austen-Leigh’s description of his aunt’s character to The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1836–54, 3 vols, eds Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan (Waco, Texas: Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, The Browning Institute, Wedgestone Press, and Wellesley College, 1983), II, p. 161. 17 Raymond and Sullivan, II, p. 99. 16

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many readers who had not read his biography. For a large number of readers, the version of Jane Austen with which they were presented by the ‘Biographical Notice’, the Memoir and the articles and reviews which took them as their guide formed part of their horizon of expectations when reading Austen’s works. The Influence of Critical Opinion We know that the critical evaluations of Austen’s work that appeared sporadically over the nineteenth century affected the ways in which readers approached her works. On 1 July 1876, Lady Charlotte Schreiber wrote in her diary: I have been studiously reading four of Miss Austen’s novels, incited thereto by Macaulay’s praise, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Mansfield Park. I like the first least of all; I think I like the last the best, but I cannot quite make up my mind to whether I am alive to their very great merit. For the epoch at which they appeared, some sixty years ago, they are very remarkable.18

Lady Charlotte’s brief account suggests both her desire to concur with informed critical opinion – she approaches Austen’s works ‘studiously’, aiming to be ‘alive to their great merit’ – and her cautious individual resistance. Similarly, Charlotte Brontë read G.H. Lewes’s appraisal of Jane Austen in Fraser’s Magazine of December 1847, in which he claimed that ‘Fielding and Miss Austen are the greatest novelists in our language’ and that ‘we would rather have written Pride and Prejudice, or Tom Jones, than any of the Waverley novels’.19 Brontë was encouraged by it to read Pride and Prejudice. She, like Lady Charlotte Schreiber, disagreed with critical opinion, writing to him: What induced you to say that you would rather have written ‘Pride & Prejudice’ or ‘Tom Jones’ than any of the Waverley novels? I had not seen ‘Pride & Prejudice’ till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses. These observations will probably irritate you, but I shall run the risk.20

Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extracts from her Journal 1853–1891, ed. the Earl of Bessborough (London: John Murray, 1952), p. 134. 19 [G.H. Lewes] ‘Recent Novels: French and English’, Fraser’s Magazine, 36 (December 1847), p. 687. 20 Charlotte Brontë to G.H. Lewes, 12 January 1848, in T.J. Wise and J.A. Symington, The Brontës: Their Friendships, Lives and Correspondence, 4 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1932), II, p. 178. 18

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Brontë’s reaction to Pride and Prejudice is revealing in a number of interesting ways. Like Lady Charlotte Schreiber, she ‘studied’ Austen’s book, reading it carefully in order to try to ascertain why the critic (Lewes) had liked it so much. Although Austen’s works were by no means canonical in the 1840s, in the reviews by Macaulay and Lewes read by Schreiber and Brontë, they were held up as examples for any aspiring novelist. Brontë’s resistance to Austen’s writing should therefore be seen in this context; her dismissal of Austen’s ‘cultivation’ and ‘elegance’ and her characterization of Austen’s work as ‘commonplace’, ‘confined’, and ‘fenced in’ is also a defence of the originality of her own style, and a manifestation of her irritation at the implicit suggestion that she should take Austen as a model. I would argue that the critical evaluations of Austen’s work that presented her as an exemplary writer, and the biographical accounts that presented her as an exemplary female, complicated Charlotte Brontë’s reactions, and those of other female writers and readers, to Austen’s writing. Brontë’s rejection is not only of Austen’s mode of representation, but what Brontë saw as her way of life. And her response is the direct result not simply of her own reading of Pride and Prejudice, but of the way Austen was presented to her. Responses of Readers ‘We See and Know Herself’: Personal Relationships with the Author and Her Characters Unlike Charlotte Brontë, many of Austen’s readers did not reject the character of ‘Jane Austen’ with which they were presented. Indeed, they longed to know more. Austen’s first four novels were published anonymously, and from their first appearance, their very anonymity sparked the desire in their readers to know more about the author. The earliest responses outside Austen’s circle of family and close friends frequently speculated on the novels’ authorship. In 1813, for example, Annabella Milbanke (the future Lady Byron) guessed that Pride and Prejudice was by ‘a sister of Charlotte Smith’s’,21 while Sarah Harriet Burney suggested ‘Mrs Dorset’, and longed to have her conjecture confirmed: Yes I have read the book you speak of, ‘Pride & Prejudice’, and I could quite rave about it! How well you define one of its characterestics [sic] when you say of it, that it breaths [sic] a spirit of ‘careless originality’. – It is charming. – Nothing was ever better conducted than the fable; nothing can be more piquant than its dialogues; more distinct than its characters. Do, I entreat, tell me by whom it is written; and tell me, if your health will allow you, soon. I die to know. Some say it is by Mrs Dorset, who wrote that clever little bijou, ‘the Peacock at 21 Ethel Colburne Milne, The Life and Letters of Anne Isabella, Lady Noel Byron (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), p. 55.

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Home’. Is it so? Pray, pray tell me. I have the three vols now in the house, and know not how to part with them. I have only just finished, and could begin them all over again with pleasure.22

Though Burney’s letter-writing style is characteristically breathless and exaggerated, we can see here, in the repetition (‘pray, pray tell me’) and hyperbole (‘I die to know’) a real excitement and desire for information about the authorship of the novel. Once Austen’s name was known (her authorship was an open secret by 1814, and acknowledged explicitly by her family in the obituary of 1817), readers’ responses begin to show a desire for detailed biographical information about the author. When Mary Russell Mitford, who was to be a lifetime devotee of Austen’s works, discovered in 1815 that her mother had known Jane Austen as a girl, she immediately shared this information with her fellow fan, Sir William Elford, and her sense of glee at her discovery is evident throughout the letter. Though the tone of this letter is one of slightly malicious gossip, it nonetheless demonstrates a very real interest in and desire to know more about the character of the author: A propos to novels, I have discovered that our great favourite, Miss Austen, is my countrywoman, that mamma knew her intimately, and that she herself is an old maid (I beg her pardon – I mean a young lady) with whom mamma before her marriage was acquainted. Mamma says that she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers ….23

The letter goes on to report a description by another source, an acquaintance of both Mitford’s and Austen’s, which described Austen as ‘like a poker whom everyone is afraid of’. Mitford had clearly taken the trouble to ask her acquaintances for any information about Jane Austen, and delighted in sharing the results of her detective work. Henry Austen’s ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’, which appeared with the posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion of December 1817, was clearly composed to some extent to satisfy the public’s ‘simple curiosity’ about the author.24 At the request of the publisher, Henry expanded and revised the ‘Biographical Notice’ for Bentley’s 1833 edition of the six novels, and by 1870, when James Edward Austen-Leigh wrote his Memoir of Jane Austen, he explicitly stated in his introductory remarks that he was dredging up his

Sarah Harriet Burney to Elizabeth Carrick, 6 December 1813, in The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, ed. Lorna J. Clark (London and Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, c.1997), p. 176. 23 Mary Russell Mitford to Sir William Elford, 13 February 1815, in The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, 2 vols, ed. A.G. L’Estrange (London: Richard Bentley, 1870), I, pp. 305–6. 24 [Henry Austen] ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ in Persuasion, ed. Janet Todd and Antje Blank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 326–32 (p. 326). 22

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memories of his aunt in order ‘to satisfy the enquiries of a generation of readers who have been born since she died’.25 Perhaps because of the relative paucity of information about Austen’s life, her early reviewers frequently described Austen as being like one of her characters, and encouraged their readers to see her the same way. The anonymous writer for the Retrospective Review of 1823 writes, for example: Into one particular character [Anne Elliot], indeed, she has breathed her whole soul and being; and in this we please ourselves with thinking, we see and know herself. And what is this character? – A mind beautifully framed, graceful, imaginative, and feminine, but penetrating, sagacious, and profound. A soul harmonious, gentle, and most sweetly attuned, – susceptible of all that is beautiful in nature, pure in morals, sublime in religion … A heart large and expansive … A bosom capacious of universal love, but through which there flowed a deeper stream of domestic and holy affections … Feelings generous and candid … Modest in hope, sober in joy, gay in innocence … a fragile, delicate, feeble, and most feminine woman … O lost too soon to us!26

This startlingly eulogistic description of Austen takes it for granted that readers will better appreciate literary works if they can picture their author, and panders to the public desire for knowledge of Austen’s character. Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s much later article of 1871, in which she suggests, ‘Anne Elliot must have been Jane Austen herself’, and, that being so, ‘it is impossible not to love her’, uses the same device.27 G.H. Lewes, too, writing in 1859 for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, conflated Austen with one of her fictional characters: ‘We may picture her as something like her own sprightly, natural, but by no means perfect Elizabeth Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, one of the few heroines one would seriously like to marry’.28 To have known Austen, these critics suggest, would be to have loved her, in the same way that her readers love her heroes and heroines. Knowing more about an author is, of course, not the same thing as knowing the author, but the responses of Austen’s readers (and some of her critics) demonstrate an interesting elision between the two kinds of knowledge. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, possibly the most consistent and defining feature of readers’ responses to Austen’s novels is an immediate sense of secret kinship with the author, a sense that author and reader are bound together in sympathy and friendship. To Mary Mitford and Sir William Elford in 1815, she James Edward Austen-Leigh, Memoir of Jane Austen, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), p. 1. 26 Anon, Review of The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, Retrospective Review, 7 (1823), pp. 120–83 (pp. 133–5). 27 A.I.T. [Anne Thackeray Ritchie], ‘Jane Austen’, Cornhill Magazine, 24 (1871), pp. 158–74 (p. 166). 28 [G.H. Lewes], ‘The Novels of Jane Austen’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 86 (1859), pp. 99–113 (p. 101). 25

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was ‘our’ Miss Austen;29 to Anne Thackeray Ritchie in 1871, she was an ‘unknown friend’;30 to Henry James in 1905, she was, slightly mockingly, ‘everybody’s dear Jane’;31 and to Rudyard Kipling in 1924, she belonged to all the people of England as ‘England’s Jane’.32 Katherine Mansfield pinpointed the peculiar quality of intimacy felt by Austen’s readers when she suggested that ‘every admirer of the novels’ feels he or she has become the ‘secret friend’ of the author.33 ‘Familiar Old Friends’: Relationships with Austen’s Characters As well as the desire and tendency to feel that they knew Austen herself, another thread in the responses to Austen’s novels is the sense that her characters, like their creator, are ‘familiar old friends’, and ‘like living people out of our own acquaintance’.34 According to family tradition, Austen herself spoke (and wrote) of her characters as if they were real people, and her readers have frequently followed her example, writing of them as if they were friends, acquaintances or family members, and running the gamut of emotions towards them. Fanny Price probably provokes the most antipathy, and has done from her first appearance. Austen’s niece Anna ‘could not bear Fanny’,35 and a brief foray into the discussion lists on the Internet-based Republic of Pemberley (http://www.pemberley.com) suggests that many of Austen’s current readers share Anna’s opinion. Among Austen’s other heroines, Emma Woodhouse generates a feeling of fellowship. Although Austen herself thought that in Emma Woodhouse she was creating a heroine who ‘no-one but myself will much like’,36 Cardinal Newman wrote of Emma that ‘I feel kind to her whenever I think of her’.37 Early readers of the novels, according to the responses collected by Austen herself, frequently commented on the fact that they felt they knew the characters intimately. Lady Gordon described how many of Austen’s early readers felt:

29 Mary Russell Mitford to Sir William Elford, 13 September 1817, in The Letters of Mary Russell Mitford, ed. R. Brimley Johnson (London: John Lane, 1925), p. 146. 30 Ritchie, p. 159. 31 James, The Question of Our Speech, p. 63. 32 Rudyard Kipling, ‘Jane’s Marriage’ (epitaph to ‘The Janeites’), in Debits and Credits (London: Macmillan, 1926). 33 Katherine Mansfield, Novels and Novelists (London: Constable & Co., 1930), p. 304. 34 Ritchie, p. 164. 35 ‘Opinions of Mansfield Park’ in The Works of Jane Austen, 6 vols, ed. R.W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), VI, Minor Works, pp. 431–5. 36 Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen: a Family Record, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 209. 37 John Henry Newman to Mrs John Mozley, 10 January 1837, in Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman during his time in the English Church, 2 vols, ed. A. Mozley (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1891), II, p. 223.

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In most novels you are amused for the time with a set of Ideal People whom you never think of afterwards or whom you in the least expect to meet in common life, whereas in Miss A-s works, & especially in M.P. you actually live with them, you fancy yourself one of the family; & the scenes are so exactly descriptive, so perfectly natural, that there is scarcely an Incident or conversation, or a person that you are not inclined to imagine you have at one time or other in your Life been a witness to, born a part in, & been acquainted with.38

In Philip Inman’s case, Austen’s world was entirely divorced from his own experience as a young labourer. Nonetheless, it was one that he longed to know: The world of which she wrote, in which elegant gentlemen of fortune courted gentle, punctiliously correct ladies in refined drawing rooms, was a remote fairytale country to me. Some day, I thought, perhaps I would get to know a world in which voices were always soft and modulated and in which lively and witty conversation was more important than ‘brass’.39

Gwen Raverat’s memoir, Period Piece, published in the same year as Inman’s, describes how she felt a profound sense, not only of familiarity, but of blood kinship with Austen’s characters: Every time I re-read Emma I see more clearly that we must be somehow related to the Knightleys of Donwell Abbey; both dear Mr Knightley and Mr John Knightley seem so familiar and cousinly. Surely no-one, who had not Darwin or Wedgwood blood in their veins, could be as cross as Mr John Knightley … it is obvious, too, that there is some strain of the Woodhouses of Hartfield in us.40

This is written whimsically, but it is perhaps not surprising that Gwen Raverat, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, conceives of relationships (even with literary characters) in terms of the ‘blood in their veins’ and inherited familial features. G.H. Lewes’s belief that one can fall in love with a fictional character is almost a commonplace in responses to Austen’s novels, though in recent times it is, of course, more often re-gendered as a tendency to fall in love with the heroes, rather than the heroines, of her books. The episodes of Darcy-mania that followed the BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice were only partly a response to Colin Firth’s appearance in a wet shirt; generations of Austen’s readers had already been predisposed to think of her characters as if they were genuine flesh-and-blood people. The phenomenon reaches its zenith (or perhaps nadir) in the rapidly expanding subgenre of timetravel novels and films in which the female protagonist travels back in time to

Lady Gordon’s opinion, in ‘Opinions of Mansfield Park’. Philip Inman, No Going Back (London: Williams and Norgate, 1952), pp. 35–47,

38 39

quoted in Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 49–50. 40 Gwen Raverat, Period Piece (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), p. 122.

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meet and fall in love with Mr Darcy.41 These (sometimes bizarre) twenty-firstcentury texts bear tribute to the lasting desire for close personal relationships with Austen’s characters that can be traced back through two centuries. Historically, readers record identifying with Austen’s characters, falling in love with them, and seeing their friends, neighbours, families and even themselves in the characters. Austen as Moral Guide Readers’ accounts of reading Austen’s work frequently demonstrate the desire to relate Austen’s novels to their own lives, and even to make her a kind of practical or moral guide. In the following extract from Mary Russell Mitford’s autobiography, we see the way in which Austen is deployed in this way: Her exquisite story of Persuasion absolutely haunted me. Whenever it rained (and it did rain every day that I staid at Bath, except one), I thought of Anne Elliott [sic] meeting Captain Wentworth, when driven by a shower to take refuge in a shoe-shop.42 Whenever I got out of breath in climbing up-hill (which, considering that one dear friend lived in Lansdown Crescent, and another on Beechen Cliff, happened also pretty often), I thought of that same charming Anne Elliott, and of that ascent from the lower town to the upper, during which all her tribulations ceased. And when at last, I incurred the unromantic calamity of a blister on the heel, even that grievance became classical by the recollection of the similar catastrophe, which, in consequence of her peregrinations with the Admiral, had befallen dear Mrs. Croft.43

In this passage, Mitford’s gentle self-mockery disguises the serious claims she is making for the consolatory powers of Austen’s fiction, but it does not entirely hide them. The comic effect of Mitford’s anecdote lies partly in the fact that her narrator’s troubles, unlike Anne Elliot’s, are not those of the heart, but those of the body. The bathetic juxtapositions (‘unromantic calamity’, the ‘catastrophe’ of a blistered heel, the ‘classical’ blister) emphasize the difference between the travails of Mitford’s younger self and those of Anne Elliot. And yet, the solace provided by the thought of Persuasion to Mitford is genuine, even if the author is selfmocking. We learn from Kipling’s short story ‘The Janeites’ that ‘there’s no one to

41 Two examples of this genre in different media are Alexandra Potter’s Me and Mr Darcy (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2007) and the ITV mini-series Lost in Austen (2008), written by Guy Andrews and directed by Dan Zeff. 42 Anne does not, in fact, take refuge in a shoe shop, but in a confectioner’s: Molland’s (at 2 Milsom St). There is, however, a discussion about the relative thickness of Mrs Clay’s and Anne’s boots in the passage to which Mitford is referring, which may explain the slight misrecollection. 43 Mary Russell Mitford, Recollections of a Literary Life; or, Books, Places and People, 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), II, p. 197.

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touch Jane when you’re in a tight place’.44 Austen’s power to console her readers when much more seriously unhappy than Mary Mitford, with her blistered heel, is made clear in many readers’ responses. ‘Amidst languor and depression’, in the early months of 1816, Sarah Harriet Burney still found that Emma, lent to her by her friend, the publisher Henry Colburn, ‘forced from me a smile, & afforded me much amusement’.45 Christopher Kent records the testimony of a former student of the Oxford tutor H.F. Brett-Smith, who had served as an advisor on reading matter for wounded soldiers: ‘For the severely shell-shocked, he selected Jane Austen’.46 Kipling knew Austen’s powers at first hand; he read her novels aloud to his wife and family in January 1917 when they were mourning the death of their soldier son John in the First World War. The novels provided comfort and ‘delight’, according to Mrs Kipling’s diary. Similarly, an anonymous Mass Observation survey participant ‘could read nothing but Jane Austen’s Emma when war broke out’.47 More famously, Sir Winston Churchill, ill in bed in 1943, was cured by a combination of Jane Austen and antibiotics: The days passed in much discomfort. Fever flickered in and out. I lived on my theme of the war, and it was like being transported out of oneself. The doctors tried to keep the work away from my bedside, but I defied them. They all kept on saying, ‘Don’t work, don’t worry,’ to such an extent that I decided to read a novel. I had long ago read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and now I thought I would have Pride and Prejudice. Sarah read it to me beautifully from the foot of the bed. I had always thought it would be better than its rival. What calm lives they had, those people! No worries about the French Revolution, or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars. Only manners controlling natural passion as far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances. All this seemed to go very well with M and B.48

The phenomenon of Austen’s consolatory power is now so widely recognized that it is by now almost a cliché, familiar across continents and cultures. In Vikram Seth’s panoramic novel of Indian life, A Suitable Boy, for example, the heroine, Lata, turns to Jane Austen for comfort and answers when depressed by her inability to choose between her suitors.49 And there is even an entire book dedicated to the Kipling, ‘The Janeites’, p. 173. Sarah Harriet Burney to Henry Colburn, undated letter of 1816, in The Letters of

44 45

Sarah Harriet Burney, p. 199. 46 Christopher Kent, ‘Learning History with, and from, Jane Austen’, in Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan, ed. J. David Grey (Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1989), p. 59. 47 Mass Observation Survey File Report 1332, July 1942, Books and the Public. http://www.massobservation.amdigital.co.uk, accessed 31 August 2009. 48 Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Volume V: Closing the Ring, ed. John Kegan (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1985; first published 1951), p. 377. ‘M and B’ refers to the suppliers of the antibiotics, May & Baker. 49 Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy (London: Phoenix, 1993).

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idea of Austen as consolation and guide: Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club (2004) takes as its premise the idea that reading Austen is the solution to the problems of her readers. The book ends with this statement: We’d let Austen into our lives, and now we were all either married or dating. Could [Patrick] O’Brian have done this? How? When we needed to cook aboard ship, play a musical instrument, travel to Spain dressed like a bear, Patrick O’Brian would be our man. Till then, we’d just wait. In three or four years it would be time to read Austen again.50

In these works of fiction, the authors both describe and perpetuate the idea that we see in the historical records of reading experiences, that reading Austen is an effective ‘cure’ for individual ills. Conclusion The existing recorded evidence from Austen’s readers that I have presented here tends to be from middle-class, gentry or aristocratic readers, and it may be that her working-class readers searched for, and found, different things in Austen’s work. What is certain is that nonprofessional readers make sense of, and make use of, Jane Austen in ways that the literary academy usually dismisses as irrelevant to the study of literature. But it is surely foolhardy to try to understand the influence of literature on its readers without thinking seriously about what those readers are looking for, and what they find, when they engage with literary works. Although both professional and nonprofessional readers of the nineteenth century seem to have engaged with Austen’s works in similar ways, literary critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been trained away from precisely those aspects of reading identified in this chapter – the interest in the character of the author, the identification of and with the characters, the belief in literature as a force for good or consolation in life. Wimsatt and Beardsley’s ‘affective fallacy’, Barthes’s ‘death of the author’ and even Wilde’s notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ cast long shadows over literary criticism, but it is affective response, interest in the author, and a desire for consolation and moral guidance that keep Austen’s novels, and the related Austen film industry, triumphantly alive. Surely it is time to take these issues seriously once again, and to remember why it is that Austen, and her characters, have always been to her readers ‘as well remembered as if they had been living friends’.51

Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 249. Austen-Leigh, Memoir, p. 79, on Austen’s own relationship to Richardson’s

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characters: ‘Every circumstance narrated in Sir Charles Grandison, all that was ever said or done in the cedar parlour, was familiar to her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were as well remembered as if they had been living friends.’

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Part 2 Scenes of Reading

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Chapter 6

Reading in Gaol Jenny Hartley

My starting point is Richard Altick’s famous statement: ‘No longer was it possible for people to avoid reading matter’. But what, I thought, if you were in prison? Could prisoners read? Could they choose what they read, and if so, what did they choose? Even today, when prisoners regularly have access to television, radio and CDs, reading and books have a surprisingly important role to play. So how was it for prisoners 150 years ago? What did reading mean to them? As well as going inside prison, I also want to put the prison inside the frame of nineteenth-century reading discourse. In particular, the issue of novel reading in prison shows contemporary debates about the role of reading at their starkest. Here the novel is caught in the crossfire, a bone hotly contested and squabbled over by its supporters and its critics. In this story of reading in gaol, the prisoners get away with the bone as the novel conquers all. Or rather story does: this is partly a story about story. Let us begin by looking at what was read in prisons, and by tracing some of the shifts in thinking and practice about the place of the novel. Beside this we can place some of the accounts which individual prisoners have left about their reading. We have the experience of fictional prisoners too, to give us the perspective of the novelist on the reader in the cell. The tenacity of the novel proclaims itself in the way in which, even when despised and excluded, it finds ways to win through in the end. First, then, what evidence is there about reading in prison? Here we have some visual clues to help us. Henry Mayhew and John Binny’s comprehensive 1862 survey, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes from Prison Life, has an illustration entitled ‘Dormitory at Coldbath Fields Prison’(Fig. 6.1), which clearly shows the prominent figure in the foreground engrossed in his book. Throughout the room, at least eight other men seem to be reading. The obvious conclusion is that these prisoners were, undoubtedly, readers. We can see that they had access to the three essential Ls: light, literacy and leisure. Here both gaslight and natural light seem to be on offer. But when we turn to Mayhew’s description of this same scene, all is not so straightforward. ‘We had expected to see some of the prisoners sitting up in their hammocks reading; but, although it was broad day-light, not one had a book in his  My own experience of running reading groups in men’s and women’s prisons in the UK over a number of years has provided ample testimony of this. It is often the non-readers who surprise themselves the most.

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Fig. 6.1 Dormitory in Coldbath Fields Prison, from Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes from Prison Life, 1862. hand – the men being, probably, too tired with their day’s work to care for anything but rest.’ Were they reading or not? Mayhew and Binny’s book, the title page informs us, has ‘Numerous Illustrations from Photographs’; these photographs were then converted into engravings. The camera which never lies seems to have come with a photographer at a different time from Mayhew. And when the camera appeared, so did the books. Data about reading habits is notoriously unreliable, and particularly problematic behind bars. Some evidence is encouraging. We have, for example, the governor of Reading Prison recording in his journal on 16 March 1845: ‘I went through the male prison at 7.30 pm and looked in upon every prisoner through the inspection slides, ninety-seven in number, and found them all reading but twelve’. But was the governor finding what the prisoners knew he wanted to see, and had they all heard him coming? Almost certainly yes, would be the answer of another contemporary prison observer, Charles Dickens. At the end of David Copperfield (1849–1850), David and Traddles are shown around the new model prison by the governor, Mr Creakle. Number 27 and number 28 are the model prisoners: Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life, with Numerous Illustrations from Photographs (1862; London: Frank Cass & Co, 1968), p. 327.  Quoted in Janet Fyfe, Books Behind Bars: The Role of Books, Reading and Libraries in British Prison Reform 1701–1911 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), p. 62. 

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‘There was such a rush of heads immediately, to see Number Twenty Seven reading his Hymn Book, that the little hole was blocked up, six or seven heads deep’. The prisoner is unlocked and invited out to be admired ‘in all his purity … and whom should Traddles and I then behold, to our amazement, in this converted number Twenty Seven, but Uriah Heep’! Then Number Twenty Eight comes out too, and is identified as Steerforth’s corrupt manservant, Littimer. Dickens is giving us a timely reminder that caution is called for when dealing with prisoner evidence and behaviour. A degree of scepticism is necessary. Nevertheless, we can draw some conclusions from contemporary observation. For example, about the necessary light: those prisoners whom the governor saw with their Bibles in the March evening must have had artificial light. But this was not always so, or there might not always be enough. There was gaslight in the dormitory but not the cells at Coldbath Fields; Holloway had small gas-jets which were lit at dusk and extinguished at nine o’clock; at Tothill Fields, cells on the ‘dark side’ of the prison did not admit enough light to read by, and at Dartmoor the cells had candlelight. The prison day offered specific reading opportunities. At Tothill Fields in the 1860s, for instance, prisoners were allowed to read their library books during meal times and after supper for half an hour before being locked up for the night at six o’clock. By the end of the nineteenth century, prisoners could read for an average of about three hours a day on weekdays, with more time on Sundays. Opinions divided as to prisoner literacy, with commentators tending to find evidence to substantiate their theories. Dickens always drew a relationship between ignorance and crime, as Michael Slater points out: ‘the connection between crime and the absence of provision for meaningful education among the poorest classes was something that Dickens always felt strongly about and often alluded to, both in his journalism and in his fiction’. In an article for The Examiner in 1848, Dickens used the statistics presented in a recently published report on ‘persons taken into custody by the Metropolitan Police’ to excoriating effect: The proportion of total ignorance, among the men, is as thirteen thousand out of forty-one thousand; only one hundred and fifty out of that forty-one thousand can read and write well; and no more knowledge than the mere ability to blunder over a book like a little child, or to read and write imperfectly, is possessed by the rest. This state of mental confusion is what has been

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Trevor Blount (1850; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 924.  Mayhew and Binny, p. 323.  Ibid., p. 543.  Susan Willis Fletcher, Twelve Months in an English Prison (Boston: Lee and Shepherd, 1884), p. 322.  Philip Priestley, Victorian Prison Lives, English Prison Biography 1839–1914 (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 29. 

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commonly called ‘education’ in England for a good many years. And that illused word might, quite as reasonably, be employed to express a teapot.

Others took the fact that ‘of the first 1,000 convicts on the registry of Pentonville [in 1842] 845 had attended some sort of school as children, for periods averaging about four years’ as proof of reasonable literacy levels,10 but Dickens had firsthand evidence to the contrary. He was appalled by the ignorance of the inmates at Urania Cottage, the home for fallen women which he set up in 1847 with the financial support of Angela Burdett Coutts. Most of the young women in the home would have been labelled as able to read and write ‘imperfectly’, and to Dickens this meant virtual illiteracy. He insisted that the routine of the home include two hours of lessons each morning, in order to instil the basics of the three Rs.11 His faith in the benefits of literacy was not always shared by the chaplains who would be responsible for its provision in prisons. ‘It is not the Want of Education,’ wrote one of them, ‘but the Absence of Principle, which leads to the Commission of Crime.’12 Generally speaking, however, prisoner literacy rates did improve during the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the time of the report commissioned by the Home Office in 1910 and delivered in 1911 – Winston Churchill was the Home Secretary and guiding light – there is optimism about the near universal literacy. ‘Actual illiterates are now few,’ the report writers claim, with demand in the libraries being ‘about as varied as that which is catered for by the circulating library of a provincial town’.13 It is important to remember that during the whole of the second half of the nineteenth century English prisons were under the regime of the silent system. This meant total silence, the ‘rigid rule’ as Felicia Skene described it in her account of her work as a prison visitor.14 No communication at all was permitted between prisoners, and very little between prisoners and anyone else. Jabez Balfour was in prison from 1895 to 1904; by the end of his sentence he noted that the system had relaxed a little, by which he meant that the well-conducted were allowed 40 minutes’ association on Sunday afternoons. Before that the silence had been almost total. ‘I was at Wormwood Scrubs for close on seven months, and I hardly exchanged twelve words with a fellow prisoner during the whole of that time.’15 In such conditions, reading became all the more important, Charles Dickens, ‘Ignorance and Crime’, The Examiner, 22 April 1848, reprinted in Dickens’ Journalism, 4 vols, ed. Michael Slater (London: J.M. Dent, 1996), II, pp. 93–4. 10 Quoted by Priestley, p. 107. 11 See Jenny Hartley, Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women (London: Methuen, 2008), pp. 91–2. 12 Reverend John Ousby, quoted in Priestley, p. 108. 13 Report of the Departmental Committee on the Supply of Books to Prisoners in HM Prisons and to the Inmates of HM Borstal Institutions (London: HMSO, 1911), p. 6. 14 Francis Scougal [Felicia Skene], Scenes from a Silent World, or Prisons and their Inmates (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1889), p. 84. 15 Jabez Spencer Balfour, My Prison Life (London: Chapman and Hall, 1907), p. 46. 

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and books can often be spotted in pictures of prison life in this period: in cells and even on the treadmill.16 What were the prisoners in such illustrations reading? Thanks to Victorian habits of list-making and recordkeeping, we have a good idea what these books were. We know that two of the three books stacked up in the cell to greet the prisoner on his first arrival were a Bible and a prayer book (see Fig. 6.2); the third should have been Hymns Ancient or Modern, or something else religious, but quite often, and rather surprisingly, it turned out to be a bound volume of a weekly magazine called, by a nice irony, the Leisure Hour. The system had some strange quirks in it. How did these books get into prison, and who was in charge of them? These days prison libraries in the United Kingdom are part of the public library system, although they were not run by professional librarians until the 1980s; throughout the nineteenth century they were in the charge of the prison chaplain. The status and content of these libraries were arbitrary, dependent upon whether the chaplain liked reading himself and thought it was beneficial for his flock. A survey by the Inspector of Prisons of library stock in 1839 revealed wild variations, from nil at Newgate to 334 titles at Lancaster Castle County Gaol. Glasgow Prison had had a library, but the chaplain ‘found that the books lent to the prisoners were too difficult for them to decipher, much less to understand’, and anyway no cataloguing was possible while the prison was being whitewashed. The Lancaster catalogue predictably features religious titles (including Death Bed Scenes, four volumes), but also extends to magazines such as The Spectator and the Saturday Magazine. Also listed is a good selection of history, biography, natural history and travel: Eminent Lives of Zoologists, Stories from Switzerland, Discovery and Adventure in the Polar Seas. This is where we start to see evidence of story poking its way in, although Lancaster recorded no actual novels in its catalogue, unless Pilgrim’s Progress is reckoned as such. The catalogue for Millbank, however, did have one novel: Robinson Crusoe.17 Crusoe was leading the way into thorny places: the issue of the novel in prison was to be not only contentious but also instructive, illuminating with particular clarity the polarized attitudes towards reading fiction at this time. While its advocates argued for it as a force for enlightenment, civilization and humanization, vital to the education of the feelings and sympathies – what the twenty-first century might call emotional literacy – its opponents decried it for encouraging immoral thought, self-indulgence and fantasy. If not bad in itself, it would certainly lead to badness in its readers. See, for example, illustration of prisoners reading while resting from the treadwheel at the Clerkenwell House of Correction in 1874, in Sean McConville, ‘The Victorian Prison: England, 1865–1965’, in Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, eds, The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 148. 17 Fourth Report of the Inspectors of Prisons, PP 1893 (210), p. xxi. 16

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Fig. 6.2

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A pile of three books on the shelf of a cell at Brixton, from Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes from Prison Life, 1862.

This is, of course, a familiar and long-raging debate, but rarely can it have impacted quite as forcibly as it did in prison. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Fry (who died in 1845) did more to reform the conditions of women prisoners than anyone else; and she embraced the civilizing powers of reading. She set up schools for women prisoners’ children, and imaginatively established libraries for all those at the remote edges of the reading world, such as shepherds and coastguards. She herself read to prisoners: the image is iconic and currently celebrated on the English five-pound note. Her Friday readings at Newgate were extraordinary public affairs. The American ambassador to London

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was much impressed, according to Fry’s biographer, and ‘wrote home to say that he had now seen the two greatest sights of London – St Paul’s Cathedral, and Mrs Fry reading to the prisoners in Newgate … “Tears flowed freely from eyes which perhaps had never shed such tears till then”’.18 But Fry drew a strong line against novels. Once inside Newgate in 1817, her first move was to ask the women prisoners to vote on a list of 12 rules. Rule Three stipulated: ‘That all novels, plays, and other improper books, be excluded, and that all bad words be avoided; and any default in these particulars be reported to the matron’. The women’s hands shot up in enthusiastic support of the ban.19 Fifty years later, even Henry Mayhew would have agreed that Fry had a point. In London Labour and the London Poor he deplores the early demoralization among boys and girls, and singles out ‘the quantities of penny and halfpenny romances’ as an important source of corruption.20 George Chesterton, on the other hand, who was the governor at Coldbath Fields, firmly believed in the power of free reading. His prime exhibit was John Bishop, one of the murderers of the Italian boy (a famous body-snatching case). After 14 days of solitary confinement, Chesterton claimed, and supplied with a ‘plentiful use of books … that iron-souled miscreant became so meek and subdued … he could hardly be recognised as the same coarse and blustering bully who had so recently entered the prison’.21 Here Chesterton was more in step with those across the English Channel. The French delegate to the International Penitentiary Congress in 1872 reported in glowing terms on the ‘happy moral influence’ which reading ‘exerts upon the prisoners’. They are, he said, ‘generally fond of reading’, and ‘those who contract a taste for it during their imprisonment are generally well behaved’. What they read with greatest pleasure are ‘books of history, voyages, novels, and narratives which have touches of the marvellous, of elevated sentiment and of renowned actions’. Reading books like these, he maintained, ‘effects a salutary revolution in the soul and imagination of the prisoner’ and they ‘serve to awaken in him the love of home’.22 This was in 1872. By then there had been some dramatic developments in English prisons, since the 1839 report which had shown such diverse practice across the country. During the 1840s and ’50s a series of changes meant that prison libraries were developed and expanded; they were seen more as a resource, part of a programme directed towards reform and rehabilitation. One of the pioneers in this movement was Alexander Maconochie, governor of the prison on Norfolk Island, Janet Whitney, Elizabeth Fry, Quaker Heroine (London: Harrap, 1937), pp. 235–6. Jean Hatton, Betsy: The Dramatic Biography of Prison Reformer Elizabeth Fry

18

19

(Oxford: Monarch Books, 2005), p. 179. 20 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols (1861; London: Frank Cass & Co, 1967), IV, p. 221. 21 George Laval Chesterton, Peace, War and Adventure: An Autobiographical Memoir (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1853), p. 287. 22 Edwin Pears, ed., Prisons and Reformatories at Home and Abroad: The Transactions of the International Penitentiary Congress (London: Longmans Green, 1872), pp. 71–2.

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1,000 miles off the coast of Australia. Norfolk Island was a prison within a prison, for those double offenders who had offended within the penal colonies of Australia. Here Maconochie put into practice his radical and exciting ideas. He believed in carrots rather than sticks; education was a priority. He got the men reading the novels of Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen: their value lay, he thought, ‘in providing images of home life’ which were ‘too much wanting in the individual experience of our lower and criminal classes’.23 Not for long, though; when the authorities at home found out about the progressive regimes on Norfolk Island, Maconochie was swiftly removed. But he was not alone. In the 1840s, the new Inspector of Prisons, first in Scotland and then in England, was Frederic Hill, brother of the more famous Rowland Hill, of penny post fame. (Another brother, Matthew Davenport Hill, was also a criminologist and penal reformer.) Hill listened to the prison chaplains who told him that the new separate system (each prisoner was held in solitary confinement; Pentonville was the first to open, in 1842) made it particularly important that prisoners should have ‘amusing books’. Otherwise, said the chaplain at Glasgow prison, ‘I think there is a great danger, when the period of confinement is long, of the mind being shaken and of the intellect evaporating’. The policy at Glasgow was for ‘entertaining books in addition to books of a serious character’; keeping the prisoners cheerful was crucial, according to the chaplain.24 Moreover, reading itself could be a prophylactic. ‘To what extent the simple power of reading fluently is often a protection against the habits of crime’, wrote Hill in his book Crime: Its Amount, Causes and Remedies, could be judged by the experience of a former governor of Edinburgh Gaol. ‘In all his visits to the poor he never met with a single person who was at the same time addicted to crime and in the habit of reading.’25 As Inspector of Prisons, Frederic Hill promoted the spread of the reading habit. He insisted on the necessity of providing artificial light, and often made the point that books should be interesting, otherwise the prisoners would be put off reading altogether. His prison inspection reports are full of practical ideas and very specific suggestions. For example, he recommended Harriet Martineau’s Feats on the Fjord for all libraries in Ross-shire, and ‘places near the sea coast, where there is a belief in witchcraft and supernatural appearances’.26 For Hill, the books which would work best were ‘striking narratives of that which the prisoners believe to have really taken place, or which they feel to be true to nature.’ He approved of biography and travel writing, and thought that fiction was quite appropriate as long as there was ‘a pure moral vein’ running through it. So during his time fiction flourished behind bars, with a few exceptions, such as The Vicar of Wakefield, because of the tricks described in it for ‘defrauding the simple vicar’.27 John Clay, Maconochie’s Experiment (London: John Murray, 2001), p. 100. Fyfe, p. 47. 25 Frederic Hill, Crime, Its Amount, Causes and Remedies (London: John Murray, 23 24

1853), pp. 40–41. 26 Fyfe, p. 79. 27 Ibid., p. 66.

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When Sir Joshua Jebb took over as Chair of the Board of Directors of Convict Prisons in 1850, here was another enthusiast for prison reading. He increased the budget for books (Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, agreed but annotated Jebb’s letter, ‘A good many of them are not good readers, I am afraid’). The chaplains were still in charge of book selection, which would then be approved by Jebb. Novels were fine by him, including a full set of Sir Walter Scott for Pentonville. Jebb seems to have approved and defended almost everything the chaplains asked for, including the request from Portsmouth Gaol for two copies of The Internal Management of Country Banks, even though the comptroller at the Stationery Office, which was now supplying the books, protested. ‘One would naturally suppose that the majority of Convicts already know a great deal too much of the arrangement of Country and other Banks.’28 But then Joshua Jebb died and Edmund Du Cane took over. Major Du Cane was interested in punishment. ‘Hard labour, hard fare and a hard bed’ was his motto.29 This was the philosophy behind the Prison Act of 1865, and the Standing Order which directed the removal from prison libraries of ‘all novels and tales of an uninstructive nature’. At first, some of the chaplains were loud in their approval. De Rienzi at Millbank was one who agreed. ‘Books of a merely entertaining character, such as the ordinary novel, are, in my opinion, out of place in a prison library.’ A year later, though, he had to eat his words; he had to admit that his library should, after all, stock books which prisoners actually want to read. Throughout the 1870s, prison chaplains complained about Du Cane’s ban on ‘all novels and tales of an uninstructive nature’ – and anyway, did that mean all novels? Again and again they came back to the point that persuading prisoners to read at all was just too difficult if they were not allowed what they liked. But Major Du Cane was a man of rigid systems, and prison library books had to fall into line. First the method of selection would be centralized, an elaborate five-tiered system starting with the chaplains and then wending its way through governors, visiting committees, the chaplain inspector and the prison commissioners. Once the book had got into the prison library, its distribution would be made part of a four-stage system. During a prisoner’s first month inside he or she would be permitted only the Bible. For the next month, and only on consideration of good behaviour, the prisoner could borrow an educational book from the library; in the next month, two educational books. After three months the well-behaved prisoner would finally be able to borrow books of recreational value. This meant that most prisoners in local prisons, who were in for less than three months, would never get to the recreational library book stage at all.30

Ibid., p. 85. See Randall McGowen, ‘The Well-Ordered Prison, England 1780–1865’, in The

28 29

Oxford History of the Prison, p. 147; also J.E. Thomas, ‘A Good Man for Gaoler?’ in John Freeman, ed., Prisons Past and Future (London: Heinemann, 1978). 30 Richard Watson, Prison Libraries (London: The Library Association, 1951), p. 13.

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Luckily the chaplains had a secret weapon. The SPCK (Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge) had long been a respected supplier of books to prisons: indeed, it had a pioneering role in providing tracts, Bibles and prayer books to prisons and convict ships throughout the nineteenth century. Surviving catalogues testify to their reach into prison libraries. The chaplains also had ammunition provided by the evangelical Religious Tract Society, who later published the Boys’ Own Paper. In 1852 the Society launched a new penny weekly, the Leisure Hour, which described itself on its masthead as ‘a Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation’.31 With this kind of imprimatur, how could anyone object? This was the magazine (always in bound volumes) which Mayhew saw a woman prisoner at Brixton sitting at her cell-door reading; he was amused to see that the piece she was particularly interested in was headed ‘an Incident in the Life of a French Prisoner’.32 Quite a few prisoners record reading it or finding it waiting for them in their cells. Edward Callow recalled his early days at Millbank, when he was ‘visited by an assistant schoolmaster, who brought me a Bible, Prayer and Hymnbooks, also a volume of the Leisure Hour’.33 Susan Willis Fletcher’s cell at Tothill Fields was supplied with Bible and prayer book, and ‘after two months, if a prisoner has no bad marks against her, she can have a book from the library, – a volume of the Leisure Hour, or some moral and religious book suitable for female prisoners’.34 The 1862 Female Life in Prison lists it among the books in constant circulation.35 So what did the pages of this morally acceptable magazine contain? A sample volume from 1875 (this was midpoint in the magazine’s life; it ceased in the early 1900s) testifies to the high quality and number of illustrations, some of them coloured. Indeed, subjects for articles seem to have been chosen with their visual potential in mind. A collection of ‘Natural History Anecdotes’ has short pieces on ‘Landseer’s Dogs’, ‘A Sensible Dog’, and ‘A Cat-and-Dog Life’; on the opposite page an engraving, ‘Shares!’ showing a child cheerily cutting a loaf of bread to share with her jolly-looking cat and dog. A series on ‘Caricature and Caricaturists’ affords scope for a rich selection of political cartoons by top-class artists such as Gillray and Tenniel. The premium seems to be not so much on preaching as on entertainment and information. The articles give this impression too. Like the illustrations, they are surprisingly varied, from the perhaps predictable features on David Livingstone and Queen Victoria to the more genteel ‘A Lady’s Adventures in the Himalayas’ and ‘The By-paths of Musical History’, but also offering practical I am indebted to Dr Catherine Delafield of Leicester University for tracking The Leisure Hour back to the Religious Tract Society. 32 Mayhew and Binny, p. 195. 33 One-who-has-endured-it [Edward Callow], Five Years’ Penal Servitude (London: R. Bentley, 1877), p. 97. 34 Fletcher, p. 324. 35 F.W. Robinson, Female Life in Prison, by a Prison Matron, 2 vols (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862), II, p. 127. 31

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advice on ‘Cardboard Modelling’ and ‘How to Amuse the Babies’, which includes nursery rhymes and suggestions for toys. However varied its content, though, every number of the Leisure Hour for 1875 invariably starts with a serialized novel. Fiction takes up a quarter of the whole magazine every week. Thus, for example, the first page for January 1875 gives us, headed by a large and lavish illustration, the first part of ‘Cross Currents’. The story opens with ‘a party of English officers just arrived from India … full of life and animal spirits … but their exuberance had never degenerated into the noisy clamour often characteristic of the excitement of those not within the polished indefinable circle of high breeding. They intended to dine, and dine well, if they could’. The intention to dine well would presumably have struck a chord among the prison readership, but what about that ‘polished indefinable circle of high breeding’? The world of this and other serials in the Leisure Hour opens onto a field of gentility, which readers are invited to enter, assured they can belong to it at a tangent. While they read they can be part of that civilized and civilizing atmosphere. Here, unequivocally, is the novel, smuggled into prison at a time when its persona has been ruled non grata by the authorities. It is interesting that the chaplain at Millbank should feel the need specifically to defend the Leisure Hour, and justify its exemption from the Du Cane antifiction ban, on the grounds that ‘no reading of a general nature [could] be more wholesome or instructive’ than the fiction in the Leisure Hour.36 And as the next 30 years were to show, there was to be no shutting fiction out. By the beginning of the twentieth century and the report commissioned by Winston Churchill to investigate the supply of books, the list of favourite prison authors was totally dominated by novelists (See Fig. 6.3). So much for the triumph of the novel behind bars. What about the evidence from the prisoners themselves? It is not surprising that the men who wanted to write their memoirs are the ones who testify to the ‘inestimable blessings’ of the prison library.37 This is the evidence from a particular sub-category of anonymous authorship, the prison autobiography, by authors such as One-who-has-just-left-prison, One-whohas-suffered-it, One-who-has-endured-it, and my own favourite, the connoisseur One-who-has-tried-them. These memoirs are mines of information about reading practices, with reminiscences of, for example, the volunteer scripture reader who would read to those unable to read, ‘a very agreeable and well-informed man with a cheerful face’.38 More literate prisoners would also read to others, or tell stories. In 1862 the hack journalist and novelist Frederick Robinson ghosted for a woman prison officer (or matron, as they were called then) to produce Female Life in Prison by a Prison Matron. This is a well-informed book which Robinson could not have written without inside information; it is clear from this account that the chaplain and his Fyfe, p. 194. One-who-has-endured-it, p. 100. 38 Ibid. 36 37

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Fig. 6.3

Favourite prison authors, from the Report of the Departmental Committee on the Supply of Books to Prisoners in HM Prisons and to the Inmates of HM Borstal Institutions, 1911.

library did not always get much support from other prison staff. The prison officer briefing Robinson about prison life is more concerned with the annoying habits of prisoners in defacing books. But she does describe how one woman prisoner read and re-read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, till she must have known by heart every incident of that famous work. She was partial to telling the story to those women who were unable to read; and she would relate with such animation the villainies and atrocities of Legree, that considerable virtuous indignation would be aroused in the breasts of her listeners.

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‘What an awful wretch that man must have been!’ was the remark made on that personage, by a woman suffering a long sentence for the cold-blooded murder of her child.39

Many prison memoirists had worked as library orderlies, still one of the best jobs inside prison. Jabez Balfour, for instance, served about 10 years for embezzlement right at the end of the nineteenth century (a former MP, he protested his innocence, but he had done a bunk to South America, which never looks good). He was in a variety of prisons, and judged that during his time the library stock had improved considerably, particularly in terms of the novels on offer. But as late as the mid-1890s, Oliver Twist was still tabooed as ‘unduly stimulating’.40 The swing towards the novel did not manifest itself in some prisons until the end of the nineteenth century. As library orderly, Balfour had to deal with the requests the prisoners chalked on their slates for him: ‘“Note me for a book about pirates”. “I want plenty of murders.” “No history” … “No female novelists.” “Plenty of female pictures.” … “If you give me any religious tales I’ll tell the Rabbi.” “I asked for the last volume of Good Words a fortnight ago; think of that, Mr Lewis, and blush.”’41 Here was one area where prisoners could exercise choice, hence the energy they devoted to it. No one had cause to recognize this better than Oscar Wilde, sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in 1895. As soon as he was allowed to ask for books he fired off long lists of requests. His first plan was to return to the books he had loved at Oxford (much Greek and Latin), eager, according to his biographer Richard Ellmann, ‘to give his reading a certain solemnity’.42 But also on his list is a request for a cheap edition of Dickens’s works, with the comment from Wilde: ‘The Library here contains no example of any of Thackeray’s or Dickens’s novels. I feel sure that a complete set of their works would be as great a boon to many amongst the other prisoners as it would certainly be to myself.’43 From the endorsement in the margin we can see that the governor, Major Nelson, agreed, and this was important. The previous governor at Reading loved to punish, Wilde told Frank Harris, ‘and he punishes by taking my books away from me’. But now he was replaced by Major Nelson, who began his reforms by saying to Wilde: ‘The Home Office has allowed you some books. Perhaps you would like to read this one; I have just been reading it myself.’ Wilde, writes Ellmann, ‘melted into tears. He was afterwards to praise Nelson as “the most Christlike man I ever met”’.44 What is telling here, I think, is the gestural power of books. Nelson offers Wilde the book he has been reading himself, building a reading group of two. 41 42 43 44 39 40

Robinson, II, 127–8. Balfour, p. 342. Ibid., p. 346 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), p. 476. Ibid., p. 477. Ibid., p. 476.

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Book sharing was extremely important to Wilde in prison, one of his very few consolations. He was taken first to Pentonville, where he was allowed a visitor only once every three months. Robert Sherard was one of the first to visit him, and they soon began to talk about books. It was Wilde’s way of filling the gap left by other things too painful to talk about. More positively, it created common ground, and the pretence of being in the same life, on the same page. There was book talk again with Robbie Ross when he visited Wilde at Reading: Ross was concerned by Wilde’s refusal to talk about his prison life and thought it ominous.45 But the lengthy letters Wilde wrote to Ross vividly demonstrate the positive function of book talk. Pages of money worries and anxieties about his wife abruptly pull to a halt with ‘Now to other points’; then follow pages of lively literary chat and criticism, with comments such as: ‘Rossetti’s letters are dreadful. Obviously forgeries by his brother’.46 The bibliotherapy does its work and the writer’s emotional temperature soars. Rossetti’s letters may be ‘dreadful’; the book talk they generate is the prize. Wilde was not the only prisoner to find solace in literature he disliked. John Mitchel was an Irish Nationalist sentenced to 14 years’ transportation in 1848. On board a succession of convict ships, he had no friends to whom he could send his comments about his reading, so he confided at length to his journal. Mitchel was a highly critical reader, mainly because he was so anti-British. But what really struck him was how such ‘astounding rubbish’ as the Saturday Review (lent to him by the chaplain) could affect him so powerfully. ‘Fossil balderdash’, ‘stratified debris’, he calls it, and he asks himself: ‘If I despise it so sovereignly, cannot I shut it up and lay it on the shelf?’ He concludes that ‘the value of any book is not in the mere thoughts it presents to you, expressed in black-on-white, but rather in those it suggests, occasions, begets in you, far outside the intentions and conceptions of the writer, and even outside the subject of his writing’. What is on the pages of this ‘paltry magazine’, perhaps ‘some poor woodcut’, he finds to his surprise, has the power to connect him to his past as nothing else can, and place by his side ‘companions old and dear’.47 The fictional reader in the cell seems to have fared less well. Dickens, the great novelist of the prison, gives us no image of consolatory prison reading. The young David Copperfield, it is true, reads ‘as if for life’ in his solitary cell of a bedroom during the reign of the Murdstones, but those in real prisons find no way out through books. Towards the end of Little Dorrit (1855–57), Arthur Clennam is imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea. A thoughtful man and a reader, Clennam finds prison an uncongenial reading environment. ‘One day when he might have been some ten or twelve weeks in jail … he had been trying to read, and had not

Ibid., pp. 458, 469. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, eds, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

45 46

(London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 789. 47 John Mitchel, Jail Journal (1876; Washington, DC: Woodstock Books, 1996), p. 122.

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been able to release even the imaginary people of the book from the Marshalsea’;48 the fictional characters need space which the imprisoned reader cannot give them. It is the spoken word which offers more solace, whether it be the soothing words of his daughter Amy for William Dorrit, or the wifely support of Mrs Micawber’s ‘I never will desert Mr Micawber’! The words that cheer in the prisons of David Copperfield and Little Dorrit are often those that are sung in convivial company. And best of all seem to be the words which the prisoner writes himself and hears read out to a friendly, admiring audience. Captain Hopkins never tires of reading out Mr Micawber’s grandiloquent petition: I remember a certain luscious roll he gave to such phrases as ‘The people’s representatives in Parliament assembled,’ ‘Your petitioners therefore humbly approach your honourable house,’ ‘His gracious Majesty’s unfortunate subjects,’ as if the words were something real in his mouth, and delicious to taste; Mr Micawber, meanwhile, listening with a little of an author’s vanity, and contemplating (not severely) the spikes on the opposite wall.49

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Mr Micawber himself would be a cheering companion behind bars. Stuart Wood recalled crying himself to sleep at Reading Prison with the library copy of David Copperfield ‘hugged close’.50 Not welcome throughout most of the nineteenth century – outlawed by Elizabeth Fry, championed by Frederic Hill, then banned by Edmund Du Cane in the 1860s – by the end of the century there had been a huge shift in opinion towards the novel. The Home Office Report of 1911 embraced it as a liberalizing force. The men and women on Churchill’s Committee were more sympathetic than their predecessors. They were more inclined to identify with prisoners’ needs, and to be impressed by what they saw on their visits. Prisoners’ main desire is naturally for relaxation and entertainment. After a fairly hard day’s work this is not surprising, either in prison or out of it. What is somewhat surprising is the extent to which the works of the best English novelists are either spontaneously asked for by prisoners, or accepted and read with pleasure when recommended by the chaplain. There is always a considerable number who read Scott, Dickens, and other standard writers, and even prefer them to other books.51

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith (1857; Oxford: Oxford University Press, World’s Classics, 1999), p. 614. 49 Dickens, David Copperfield, p. 225. 50 Stuart Wood, Shades of the Prison House (London: Williams and Norgate, 1932), p. 32. 51 Report of the Departmental Committee on the Supply of Books to Prisoners in HM Prisons, p. 6. 48

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The Committee went on to recommend a diet rich in novels, with a light hand on any censorship. There were, they thought, ‘comparatively few unsuitable books’, although they did spot one or two. Occasionally both ‘Raffles’ and ‘Robbery Under Arms’ have figured in chaplains’ demand lists, and the chaplain in each case has supported his selection on the ground that the evildoer comes to a bad end; all too unmindful, it seems to us, of the singular picturesqueness of his antecedent career of successful crime.52

On the library shelves the Committee found ‘a few “trashy” novels’ which they condemned as unsuitable; they were also concerned about ‘morbidly introspective’ books. On the whole they recommended a bias towards adventure and the bracing outdoors: Marryat, Fenimore Cooper, and Haggard. But even this forwardlooking and liberal committee could not carry the vote for the novel unanimously. A dissenting murmur made itself heard in the ‘Brief History’ at the end by the Reverend C.B. Simpson, committee member and Chaplain Inspector to HM Prisons. Simpson seems to think the others have gone too far towards pleasure. ‘The question whether mere distraction and amusement is the chief object to be aimed at, or whether the welfare of the prisoners is not best achieved by the exclusion from the libraries of all enervating and frivolous literature, is of very great importance.’53 But he was in a minority of one. Finally, then, the novel had arrived. But it had never really been away. There had always been a long tradition of secret stores or supply routes: prison hospitals were known to be good pickings for fiction, or men would swap books with one another illegally. Story had also smuggled itself in through those volumes of the Leisure Hour, and its tales of fashionable life. And it had survived as a contraband currency, sometimes sneaking in under the noses and through the medium of the very people who did the banning. The Bible readings of Elizabeth Fry’s which had the greatest impact were often the parables, the story of the lost sheep, or the story of the prodigal son. Henry Mayhew heard the schoolmaster reading stories to prisoners in their cells and the chaplain using yet more parables, sometimes reducing his audience to tears. Or how about the rabbi who included novels in his stock of ‘devotional literature’? He managed to make a good case for some of the longest novels in print, Daniel Deronda and The Count of Monte Cristo.54

52 Report of the Departmental Committee on the Supply of Books to Prisoners in HM Prisons, p. 15. 53 Report of the Departmental Committee on the Supply of Books to Prisoners in HM Prisons, p. 31. 54 Balfour, p. 347.

Chapter 7

Attempts to (Re)shape Common Reading Habits: Bible Reading on the Nineteenth-century Convict Ship Rosalind Crone

For the most part, studies of the nineteenth-century common reader have revolved around the positive element of ‘choice’. The question for scholars continues to be, what did ordinary men, women and children, in the midst of an unprecedented proliferation of cheap print and rising literacy rates, choose to read? Evidence collected from diaries, memoirs, library borrowing records, literary clubs, correspondence columns in newspapers and journals, and educational institutions has highlighted the diversity of taste which, combined with the presence of a buoyant and innovative publishing industry, has also emphasized the limits of the many efforts by legislators, reformers and moralists to control the literary diet of the common reader. More specific studies on the reading of incarcerated criminals during the nineteenth century have followed a similar path. Scholars have been eager to demonstrate the wide range of reading material consumed by inmates, both officially sanctioned and illicit. Attention has largely focused on the agency of the criminal, on his or her ability to exert some choice or control even within a tightly regulated and supervised system, and also on alternative literacies and forms of textuality at his or her disposal as a means of expression. Although these studies are valuable, not only are they in danger of distorting our conception of nineteenth-century penal institutions, but they also have failed to give due weight to the larger framework in which such activities operated and have ignored the important impact of specific reading and educational programmes offered to inmates both on the prisoners themselves and on wider society. The nineteenth-century criminal justice system was an arena in which debates about the diet of the common reader became most intense. The decentralized penal Janet Fyfe, Books Behind Bars: the Role of Books, Reading and Libraries in British Prison Reform 1701–1911 (Westport, 1992); Bill Bell, ‘Bound for Botany Bay; or, what did the nineteenth-century convict read?’, in Robin Myers, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote (eds), Against the Law: Crime, Sharp Practice and the Control of Print (London, 2004), pp. 151–75, and Jenny Hartley’s chapter (6) in this volume. 

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system, which allowed local authorities and even individual officials to determine much of the policy pursued in each institution, encouraged the diversity in reading content and habits which previous scholars have tended to focus on. But the content of the different libraries at the disposal of incarcerated criminals across the country also provoked passionate arguments about the damaging or pernicious effects that particular texts, from novels to political debates to national histories, could have on the depraved inmates and on the working class more generally. During the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, many gaol chaplains in English prisons drew attention to the improper use of the skills of literacy by those in the lower classes who had learnt them. The Rev. Joseph Kingsmill at Pentonville wrote that those ‘convicts who could read with intelligence were readers only of the light and trifling productions of the day. Their minds were, therefore, like an unweeded garden, in which the useless predominated.’ Some collected evidence in the form of statements of individual prisoners to highlight the detrimental impact of cheap literature, especially exciting novels and penny bloods, and to directly link these publications aimed at the semi- and newly literate to the perceived rising crime rate. Whether deliberately or not, the inmates’ narratives centred on the impact that pernicious reading had upon their lives, the experience of reading unwholesome novels described as the turning point which led the convicted men and women into lives of crime. R.A., confined at Chester Castle Gaol, explained to the Rev. H.S. Joseph that although he had been sent to an excellent school, after leaving ‘I perused a vast number of novels and romances. I hardly ever went out of doors. I lived in a land of dreams. I was put out to various occupations but nothing could please my fancy; at last … I got entangled with bad associates’. Unsurprisingly, the Newgate Novels, Jack Sheppard, by William Harrison Ainsworth, and Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens, came under sustained attack for their apparent romanticized portrayals of crime. Surveys conducted in London and the North West on juvenile offenders showed how such works, bought and borrowed by boys and read in homes and low-lodging houses, could encourage young, impressionable males into a life of crime. In the heated debate that emerged in the penal system about the suitability of various texts for prisoners, only one book satisfied the criteria presented by all: the Bible. Penal reformers and officials believed that God’s word offered the best chance of teaching morality and protecting social harmony. Moreover, gaol chaplains, among others, presented very powerful arguments that the root of all crime lay in religious ignorance. Those convicted of crime had read exciting novels, frequented the beer-house, were idle and avoided employment, which encouraged Joseph Kingsmill, Chapters on Prisons and Prisoners, and the Prevention of Crime (London, 1854), p. 39.  H.S. Joseph, Memoirs of Convicted Prisoners, Accompanied by Remarks on the Causes and Prevention of Crime (London, 1853), pp. 46–7.  Edmund Edward Antrobus, The Prison and the School (London, 1853), the Rev. John Clay’s survey at Preston Gaol, the results of which were published in the report of the Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles (Parl. Papers, 1852, VII), Appendix no. 3. 

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their thieving and violence because they had not read and understood the Bible. So as the state very gradually moved towards centralization, and particular practices and systems were made uniform in prisons, hulks and convict ships, the place of the Bible in these disciplinary institutions became enshrined in law. If any one text was commonly read by all prisoners within the nineteenth-century penal system, it was the Bible. Thus, in order to understand the place of the novel in nineteenth-century penal institutions (and, incidentally, in wider society where evangelical and utilitarian groups fought hard to limit its presence in the diet of the common reader), we first need a firm acquaintance with the official discourse which was profoundly suspicious of this genre, among others, and to explore in depth the range of educational programmes which were directly positioned against the reading of light and entertaining literature. And the way in which the Bible was read and received deserves our serious attention. This chapter will focus on the role of Bible reading on convict ships during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. The tight focus on just one of several different types of penal institutions should help to concentrate our attention on the development of particular policies and their close relationship to and formative role in wider debates about the morality and welfare of the population. Also, the voyage to Australia marked a distinctive stage in the punishment of a large minority sentenced to transportation. Although many continued their punishment in the penal colonies, confined in barracks and labouring on public works in chain gangs, freedom, through pardons and the ticket of leave system, was increasingly within the reach of all, and so the moral health of the fledgling society became an important concern. Furthermore, restricted space on board ships demanded particular methods of discipline and employment for the convicts. Religious instruction provided the ideal solution to both of these issues. As this chapter will show, over the course of the nineteenth century distinct systems of instruction evolved and became standardized. While early efforts focused on the power of the reading experience, this soon became tied up with concerns about education and the possession and use of elementary skills. All eyes turned to the convict ship, among other penal institutions, for what it could reveal about the efficacy of compulsory education. Despite some disagreement among historians, it is probable that, in the initial decision in 1786 to send convicts to the distant shores of Australia, the prospect of founding a viable colony which would provide rich natural resources and become an important naval port was far from the minds of both legislators and penal administrators. The punishment of transportation was still in high favour among large sections of the population. As the great and the good were terrified of releasing depraved, recidivist offenders back onto the streets, exile provided an Mollie Gillen, ‘The Botany Bay decision, 1786: convicts, not empire’, English Historical Review, 97 (1982), pp. 740–66; Ged Martin (ed.), The Founding of Australia: the Argument about Australia’s Origins (Sydney, 1978); Alan Frost, Convicts and Empire: a Naval Question (Melbourne, 1980); Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (Melbourne, 1968). 

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almost perfect solution. A great sense of urgency also pervaded discussions: the sudden cessation of transportation after the loss of the American colonies meant that those so sentenced were confined in the crowded, unsuitable hulks designed to be only transitory, and attempts to relieve this backlog, including experiments with potential African colonies, had been disastrous failures. And so when the first ships were dispatched to Botany Bay, little thought was given to the prisoners, their future in the colony or even the future of the colony. The vessels which carried them soon became known as ‘hell ships’. For the duration of the voyage, convicts were confined in chains in unventilated cabins below the decks. Death rates were high, and those who made it to the colonies typically disembarked in an emaciated and hardened condition, the diseases which they brought with them threatening the lives of those already settled. Over the course of the next two decades, it became clear that this situation was wholly unsuitable. With the expense that the system of transportation incurred, the need to exploit the Australian colonies to their full potential was recognized by all. Regular, healthy human cargo was required both to maintain a viable penal colony and to take advantage of the natural resources and important naval base on offer. Therefore, in 1815, new regulations were introduced by the Transport Commissioners which were primarily designed to decrease mortality and improve the health and safety of all on board the transport ships. In particular, the regulations included the compulsory appointment of naval surgeons who would take responsibility for the welfare of the convicts. Strict hygiene regimes and tight controls over convicts’ rations were imposed by these surgeon-superintendents. As a result, the gross death rate radically dropped between 1811 and 1815 from 1 in 31 to 1 in 122. And so it was that the new economic function of transportation could be realized. From at least 1815 until the 1840s, convicts became a crucial labour supply for the Australian colonies. The method by which men and women were selected for embarkation demonstrates the extent to which punishment had become intertwined with economics. A detailed examination of the indents of male and female convicts sent to New South Wales between 1817 and 1840 by Stephen Nicholas, Peter Shergold and Deborah Oxley has shown that the majority were not hardened recidivist criminals, as previously thought, but mostly first-time offenders found guilty of petty theft; that around 80 per cent were aged between 16 and 25, and thus suitable for hard work as well as settlement; and that the proportion of those identified as skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers roughly matched the percentages for each skill class of the British workforce in the 1841 census. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: a History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868 (London, 1987), p. 150; A.G.L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies: a Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and Other Parts of the British Empire (London, 1966), p. 120.  Hughes, The Fatal Shore, p. 150.  Stephen Nicholas (ed.), Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past (Cambridge, 1988). 

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If the British government was consciously pursuing an emigration policy aimed at populating a strategic colony, penal administrators and legislators could not escape the fact that the men and women marked for transportation, although fairly representative of the working class, had been convicted of a range of crimes against their country. Would these convicts continue on the same evil path on arrival in Australia? Increasingly, for those who had served out their sentences or even avoided further incarceration in Australia, the buoyant labour market and higher wages would have reduced the need to resort to crime. We know from a number of important studies of patterns of criminality in nineteenth-century Britain that crime was mostly resorted to as a means of survival, a way in which to supplement meagre incomes and to cope with periods of unemployment. However, early nineteenthcentury contemporaries believed that crime, although located generally amongst the working or ‘dangerous’ classes, specifically resulted from the polluting urban environment, the laziness of the indignant poor and, perhaps most of all, religious ignorance. New penal theory, largely inspired by the evangelical revival, became dominated by the notion of ‘reform’.10 Rising crime rates, many argued, could be curbed by transforming prisons into moral schools where depraved inmates would be remoulded into Christian, industrious and docile members of the community. The early nineteenth-century convict ship offered endless potential. New instructions issued to surgeon-superintendents in 1815 included a long clause which directed the officers to ‘use every possible means to promote a religious and moral disposition in the convicts’. Although the regulations left surgeon-superintendents with a significant amount of discretion in the way in which they chose to realize this goal, their method was in large part determined by the tools with which they were supplied. For each ship, the government provided the following books for distribution among the convicts: for every eight men or women, 1 New Testament, 2 Common Prayer Books, and 2 Psalters; and for every 16 convicts, 1 Bible. On arrival in Australia, the books were to be given to the governor of the colony, who would then present them to convicts who had evinced ‘exemplary conduct’ during the voyage.11 For example, see V.A.C. Gatrell, ‘The decline of theft and violence in Victorian and Edwardian England’, in Gatrell, Lenman and Parker (eds), Crime and the Law: the Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1800 (London, 1980); V.A.C. Gatrell, ‘Crime, authority and the policeman-state’, in F.M.L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1996), III; Jennifer Davis, ‘The London garrotting panic of 1862: a moral panic and the creation of a criminal class in mid-Victorian England’, in Gatrell, Crime and the Law, p. 213; Jennifer Davis, ‘Jennings Buildings and the Royal Borough: the construction of an underclass in mid-Victorian England’, in David Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones (eds), Metropolis London: Histories and Representations Since 1800 (London, 1989). 10 William James Forsythe, The Reform of Prisoners, 1830–1900 (New York, 1987), pp. 15–24. 11 Report from the Select Committee on the State of Gaols and the best method of providing for the Reformation of Offenders (Parl. Papers, 1819, VII), Appendix S: Instructions to Surgeons and Superintendents, p. 558. 

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Even though these limited supplies of books were often supplemented by the efforts of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Religious Tract Society and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, the quantities and intended distribution patterns provide some important clues as to the system of reformation that was intended. Great faith was placed in the power of the ‘reading experience’, which was meant to be as much a communal activity as a private one. As the possession of the reading skill among convicts was far from universal, plenty of books were supplied to each mess so that those who were able would read the Bibles and tracts aloud to their messmates. In addition, surgeon-superintendents were expected to read to the prisoners and expound upon the relevant Biblical passages. While it was also hoped that the availability of reading material, and perhaps instruction, might encourage some illiterate convicts to acquire the skill of reading for the purpose of reading the Bible in the colonies, systematic elementary instruction was mostly reserved for the juvenile passengers. Following in the tradition of the contemporary Sunday Schools, regular instruction for boys and girls was seen as a useful method of keeping the youths under control while also instilling habits of discipline and morality.12 With any new system, and especially with a set of regulations containing as many loopholes as the 1815 legislation, there were significant teething problems in operations on the ground. For several years, scandals resulting from the persistence of old abuses continued to come under the public spotlight. Some surgeonsuperintendents were unashamed of exploiting the power that accompanied their appointments. And despite the very strict instructions to prevent relations between female convicts and sailors, at least one ship, the Janus, sailing from Cork to Port Jackson in 1820, arrived with a large number of pregnant women.13 But these surgeon-superintendents often faced disciplinary proceedings, and by the 1820s the great majority of surgeons made sure that religious books were distributed and regular services were held, even if they remained very doubtful of the reformative effects on individuals and at times turned a blind eye to the irreligious rowdiness that some convicts insisted upon. Moreover, over the next 15 years, increased pay and better conditions, combined with direct encouragement from the government to experiment with reformatory methods, served to professionalize the appointment. A number of surgeon-superintendents began to take multiple convict ships to Australia. And some of these men published detailed accounts of their experiences. Perhaps the most vocal proponent of religious instruction for convicts during these early years was Thomas Reid, who accompanied two ships, one of male Ibid. Allan M. Grocott, Convicts, Clergymen and Churches: Attitudes of Convicts and Ex-

12 13

Convicts towards the Churches and Clergy in New South Wales from 1788–1851 (Sydney, 1980), pp. 38–57; Kay Daniels, Convict Women (St Leonards, 1998), pp. 59–60; Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, pp. 122–6; Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 22–7.

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convicts and one of female convicts, to Australia in 1817 and 1820, respectively. On both, Reid sought to impose a moral and religious system, ‘if possible by conciliation and persuasion; or, that failing, by any such coercive means as might be prudently adopted on such an occasion’. Reading was central to his programme. To the male convicts, he read sermons aloud as often as possible, and believed that ‘the wholesome, moral arguments of Dr Blair, and other divines whose writings I made use of, carried a degree of lasting convictions to the minds of the prisoners’. He also found that a large number of the men perused the Bibles, Testaments and tracts he distributed with ‘earnestness and attention’.14 Despite this apparent success, even before he embarked upon the voyage with the female convicts, Reid tightened various aspects of the regime he had constructed for the men, revising his list of rules and regulations to place more weight on the compulsory element of his moral system. His concerns were, perhaps, predictable. After all, contemporaries believed that the reformation of female convicts was harder to bring about than that of men because their criminality was ultimately more transgressive.15 Gathering the women together at the commencement of their journey, Reid warned them that their behaviour during the voyage ‘will, in a great measure, decide your future destiny’. In accordance with the regulations for surgeon-superintendents, misdeeds of the convicts would be recorded in a journal to be handed over to the governor of the colony on arrival. Misreading counted as a misdeed. Reid explained that he would distribute copies of the Bible amongst them, and that ‘the use each of you shall be observed to make of it will be strictly recorded in the journal’. Thus, ‘any one convicted of disturbing others whilst engaged in reading the Holy Scriptures, or other religious exercise, will incur special animadversion’.16 Although flirtations with sailors convinced Reid that the women required extra supervision, he was impressed by the flooded cheeks and loud sobs exhibited in response to passages he read aloud and the commitment some women displayed in learning by heart moral and religious texts. On 8 June Reid wrote of his delight in observing that in every part of the ship to which the prisoners are allowed access, I have the gratifying opportunity of seeing some one of them reading a portion of Scripture, or some religious tract, to a group of her companions collected round to hear the consoling doctrines of the gospel.17

On arrival in Van Diemen’s Land and Sydney, Reid was pleased to note that not one of the women was sent off the ship with a bad report of character and conduct.18 14 Thomas Reid, Two Voyages to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (London, 1822), pp. 40, 62. 15 Daniels, Convict Women, pp. viii, 59; Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly, p. 22. 16 Ibid., pp. 99, 111–16. 17 Ibid., pp. 137, 156, 161. 18 Ibid., p. 237.

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But despite such positive assertions, Reid’s subsequent stay in the penal colony suggested that the reformation effected on board the convict ship did not prove to be lasting. He observed the extent to which the women succumbed to the evil temptations on offer in the overwhelmingly male colony. Thus his conclusions echoed the disenchantment which other surgeon-superintendents, such as Peter Cunningham, also felt about the potential of religious instruction and Bible reading to transform the characters of the convicts: If the scope of transportation be, what it ought to be – the reformation of the offender; it has, with the greater number of males, been unsuccessful; and with regard to females, it has very rarely indeed been attained.19

At the same time, Reid recognized the special circumstances of the penal colony of New South Wales, with its concentration of depravity. The reform project should not be abandoned, he argued, but extended into a period of incarceration in Australia, during which convicts would be required to prove their reformation to officials. Over time, policymakers began to express similar concerns about the state of society in the penal colonies. Until the 1830s, free migration to Australia had been little more than a trickle. In 1830, nearly 90 per cent of Australia’s population of 70,000 (excluding Aborigines) either had been transported or were the offspring of transportees.20 Although transportation was necessary to provide labour to the penal colonies, it was also expensive and, in the long run, unsustainable. But attracting free immigrants and their families posed many problems. The passage was expensive and the Australian colonies were stigmatized by their large, and potentially unruly, convict populations. Two solutions were offered. The first was to provide assisted passages to suitably qualified labouring families, namely, couples under the age of 35 who were able to submit certificates which gave proof of their good characters, in order to stimulate immigration.21 The second was to increase efforts in reforming the convict population both in the national penitentiaries and on convict ships. New instructions issued to surgeon-superintendents from 1832 onwards not only greatly expanded their role and power on board transports, but also intensified the focus on reform.22 At the same time, rising crime rates again focused attention on the causes of crime. Members of the new statistical movement insisted that it could be found in the lack of education among the working class. Throughout the 1830s and Ibid., p. 320. See also Peter Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales, ed. by David S. Macmillan (Sydney, 1966; first edn 1827), pp. 306–27, especially p. 308. 20 Stephen Nicholas and Peter Shergold, ‘Convicts as migrants’, in Nicholas, Convict Workers, p. 43. 21 Select Committee on Transportation (Parl. Papers, 1837, XIX) [Hereafter SC (1837)], evidence of Thomas Galloway, RN, p. 179. 22 Instructions to Surgeons and Masters of Convict Vessels during Voyages to Foreign Settlements (Parl. Papers, 1834, XLVII). 19

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1840s, statisticians became obsessed with proving that the majority of crime was committed by those with the least degree of proficiency in the elementary skills. Through the efforts of G.R. Porter, from 1834, the collection of rates of literacy among prisoners became compulsory and was attached to the yearly judicial statistics.23 Convict ships were not exempt. During the 1830s, some surgeonsuperintendents began to separate convicts into different classes on the basis of their educational attainments rather than accounts of their previous character, as they believed this test might prove more reliable.24 And in the new regulations of 1832, surgeon-superintendents were directed to record the numbers of prisoners on each ship, by age cohort, who could read, who could read and write and who could do neither.25 But the results proved to be more complicated than expected, and certainly did not posit a simple relationship between more education and less crime. In comparison with the marriage registers, and taking into account wider contemporary definitions of literacy, which included reading literacy and writing literacy (hence the separate testing of the skills in penal institutions), prisoners and, more particularly, convicts often proved to be more literate than expected. In hindsight, given what we know about the nature of criminality in nineteenth-century Britain, and evidence of the representativeness of convicts selected for embarkation to Australia, we should not be surprised at this finding.26 For statisticians and penal officials, this result focused their attention on the type of instruction that these depraved men and women had formerly received. Education, in its fullest sense, meant both instruction in elementary skills and instruction in the use of those skills, in order to form character. Thus, according to R.W. Rawson, even those convicts who were recorded as being able to read and write imperfectly ‘had not received that amount of instruction which would be worthy of the title of education … [and which] could have had any permanent good influence upon their minds’.27

M.J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in early Victorian Britain: the Foundations of Empirical Social Research (Hassocks, 1975); Piers Beirne, Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of ‘homo criminalis’ (Albany, 1993), pp. 128–33. 24 SC (1837), evidence of Morgan Price, p. 269. 25 Instructions to Surgeons and Masters of Convict Vessels, pp. 4–6. 26 In Convict Workers, both Stephen Nicholas and Deborah Oxley found that male and female convicts sent to Australia were more literate than the working-class populations left at home. Nicholas et al., ‘Convicts as workers’, pp. 74–8; Oxley, ‘Female convicts’, pp. 93–4. 27 Rawson W. Rawson, ‘An enquiry into the condition of criminal offenders in England and Wales with respect to education’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 3 (January 1841), p. 334. See also G.R. Porter, ‘On the connexion between crime and ignorance, as exhibited in criminal calendars’, Transactions of the Statistical Society, 1 (1837), pp. 97–103; Joseph Fletcher, ‘Moral and educational statistics of England and Wales’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 10 (1847), pp. 193–242; and Joseph Fletcher, ‘Moral and educational statistics of England and Wales’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 12 (1849), pp. 151–76. 23

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Hence, surgeon-superintendents were also directed to collect data on the previous schooling of their charges. Moreover, in the midst of this debate, which reformers and statisticians hoped would lead to the imposition of a national system of compulsory education, surgeon-superintendents were instructed, as part of their reformatory programmes, to organize all the convicts into schools for elementary instruction on the voyage to Australia.28 Thus education would now be used to (re)shape the literary diet of the common reader, which would, in turn, contribute to the moral health and well-being of society. The precise method of instruction was, again, left to the discretion of the surgeon-superintendent, but the continuation of supplies of Bibles, Testaments, Psalters and Common Prayer Books from the government, and additional Bibles, Testaments and religious tracts from charitable religious societies, did much to determine its character. So, too, did received ‘wisdom’, or, in other words, the examples set by schools already established in Britain, including the Sunday Schools and public schools run by the National and British and Foreign School Societies. In sum, convict ships, like gaols in England, with captive populations whose activities were tightly regulated and supervised, and whose reformation could prove the value of education to the government, had the potential to serve as a trial run for a system of compulsory education.29 Although not all surgeon-superintendents took this task seriously, not enough attention has been paid by historians to those who did. The most famous was Colin Arrott Browning, who viewed his appointment as a specialized career, accompanied nine convict ships to Australia between 1831 and 1850 and wrote two exceptionally detailed accounts of his experiences, the first, England’s Exiles (1842), designed to serve as an instruction manual, specifically for ‘officers engaging in the service’, and also, more generally, for those responsible for emigrant ships, gaols or houses of correction and manufactories.30 Browning’s motives and character have been questioned by historians, but his efforts meant that he gained the respect of penal administrators in Australia and England. Moreover, England’s Exiles and The Convict Ship (1844), subsequently published as one volume in 1847, provide an extraordinary illustration of a system of education that many contemporaries envisaged. On each voyage, after all prisoners had embarked, baggage had been stowed and personal details recorded, Browning would summon the convicts to the quarterdeck of the ship, where he would deliver his first address:

Instructions to Surgeons and Masters of Convict Vessels, pp. 4–6. For experiments in gaols in England, see Rosalind Crone, ‘The great Reading

28 29

experiment: debates about the role of education in the nineteenth-century gaol’ (forthcoming). 30 Colin Arrott Browning, The convict ship, and England’s exiles: in two parts, 2nd edn (London, 1847), p. v. See also Andrew Henderson, Scraps and Facts of Convict Ships (1845), written with the same aim in mind.

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This day commences a new era in your existence. The moment you set your feet on the decks you now occupy, you come under the operation, and I trust will speedily come under the influence, of a system which contemplates you as intellectual and moral beings ….31

Although the men and women under his supervision had ‘trampled’ on the laws of their country and ‘rendered themselves a burthen and curse’, Browning saw them as ‘prisoners of hope’.32 A multiplicity of meanings seem to be contained within these words. At least one historian has sought to link Browning’s declarations, and his refusal to use physical punishments such as flogging, to the type of disciplinary regime described by Michel Foucault.33 In essence, though, Browning, like other penal reformers in Britain, sought to impress upon the convicts the value of the second chance they were being offered. The convicts were, after all, ‘victims of the darkest ignorance of Scripture truth’.34 Incidentally, the convicts on the transports were probably not as unfamiliar with the Bible as Browning, other surgeon-superintendents and even some historians have claimed.35 Even though Browning’s statistics on the previous education of convicts on board each ship showed that very few had attended either Sunday School or another type of ‘school’ (most probably defined by Browning as churchrun), nearly every life story that he collected from the prisoners referred to some prior acquaintance with or reading of the Bible. For instance, J.S. not only went to Mr J’s Sabbath-school, but was also encouraged to read the Bible at home: My dear mother used to direct my mind to the Scriptures, and especially to the book of Proverbs. She was acquainted with the family of a Mr L—, and she used to send me to their house when I had got off anything by heart from the Bible, when Mr S.L—, now a minister at C—, used to hear me, and give me very good advice, which, if I had but taken, how happy I might have been!36

Nineteenth-century surveys similarly highlight at least the presence of the Bible in the homes of the urban and rural poor.37 It is difficult to assess whether the Browning, The Convict Ship, p. 252. Ibid., pp. 6–7, 270. 33 Kim Humphrey, ‘A new era of existence: convict transportation and the authority of 31 32

the surgeon in colonial Australia’, Labour History, 59 (1990), pp. 59–72. 34 Browning, The Convict Ship, pp. 5–6. 35 For example, Grocott, Convicts, Clergymen and Churches. 36 Browning, The Convict Ship, pp. 91 (quote), 238–45 (statistics), 35, 70–71, 105, 116, 123, 145 (statements of other prisoners). 37 For example, see: F. Liardet, ‘State of the peasantry in the county of Kent’, Central Society of Education, Third Publication of 1839 (reprint, New York, 1969); C.R. Weld, ‘Report on the condition of the working classes in the inner ward of St George’s Parish, Hanover Square’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 6 (1843), pp. 17–27, especially p. 19; David Vincent, ‘Reading in the working class home’, in John Walton and James Walvin (eds), Leisure in Britain, 1780–1939 (Manchester, 1983), pp. 208–26.

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inhabitants of these homes regularly or even occasionally dipped into the contents of the sacred book, though we do know that even in the home it was often used as a means of teaching children to read.38 Again, this evidence should further challenge the weight often placed on the novel and entertaining literature in studies of the common reader. Just as in the prison, it may well be true that the book that the great majority of men, women and children had some experience of was the Bible. Yet even those prisoners on board Browning’s convict ships who encountered the Bible in their youth had not fully understood its importance and had been led astray. Education on board the ship was designed to remind the few of the comfort provided by the gospels, and for all to repair the ‘severe moral and intellectual disabilities suffered’ in earlier life in preparation for a new life in the colonies.39 With England’s coastline still in sight, Browning separated the convicts into schools according to their ability, each consisting of 9 or 10 pupils and organized along the lines of the monitorial system which had become popular as a method for dealing with the large classes of children in the National Schools in England. Teachers for each school were selected from among the most literate prisoners, and a general inspector was appointed to oversee instruction and ensure efficiency. Schooling was the primary activity for prisoners throughout the voyage. Browning’s routine dictated that the prisoners meet for instruction between 10:00 and 12:00 in the morning and 2:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon every weekday, and on Saturday mornings. As was common in contemporary English elementary schools, reading was to be taught first. Progression to the other elements was tightly controlled: as Browning explained to the convicts, ‘when the proper time arrives – that is, when you shall have learned to read well, you will be allowed the additional privilege of learning to write and to cipher’.40 The premium placed on reading literacy reflected Browning’s belief that the prime, and perhaps sole, use of instruction for the convicts was the attainment of skills which would enable them to read the Bible. On forming the convicts into schools, he explained ‘that it is not merely the power of reading, for its own sake, which I am so extremely anxious you should all possess, but the power to read fit and profitable books, and nothing else!’.41 Although Browning mentioned the use of texts on geography and history, purely secular instruction found no place in his system of education. For instance, the lectures Browning offered on selected evenings covering geography, astronomy and natural philosophy were all directed towards enlarging the prisoners’ ‘views of the perfections and character of God’.42 Time outside of formal lessons was spent either in doing chores or in perusal of the Scriptures or religious tracts kept in the library on board. As Browning explained to his charges at the very 38 David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England, 1750–1914 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 66–70. 39 Forsythe, The Reform of Prisoners, pp. 54–5; Browning, The Convict Ship, pp. 254–7. 40 Ibid., pp. 285, 335. 41 Ibid., p. 322. 42 Ibid., p. 330.

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commencement of their journey, their principal exercises during the voyage were to ‘read the Scriptures and hear them read; to search them diligently; to commit them to memory; to store your minds and your hearts with their precepts and doctrines’.43 However, this almost exclusive diet of Bible reading still needed to be controlled. As other penal officials had also realized, allocating Bibles without providing proper direction for their consumption could be dangerous. George Holford, one of the founders of Millbank penitentiary, expressed concern that without guidance, the prisoner was likely to view the Bible ‘merely as a storybook, to choose out such parts as shall afford him entertainment, and even to dwell upon those chapters or expressions which, in his ignorance, and with his bad dispositions, he may misinterpret into something like a sanction or precedent for his own acts of vice or folly’.44 Browning, therefore, placed his prisoners on a particular course of reading which was designed to encourage conversion and provide a thorough understanding of the duties of Christians. Of the Old Testament, the convicts were presented with parts of Genesis and Exodus, then Psalms and Proverbs, followed by portions of Job, the most doctrinal chapters of Isaiah, selections from Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and a considerable part of Daniel. Reading from the New Testament comprised the whole of the Gospels by St Matthew and St John, with portions from St Luke and St Mark, the whole of the Acts of the Apostles, and several of the Epistles, especially Romans and Hebrews.45 The prescribed books provided much of the material for instruction in the schools each day. Even time spent alone with books was tightly supervised. Although the Bibles were distributed to the prisoners on arrival in New South Wales as prizes, while on board the transport their use was strictly supervised by the schoolmasters and librarian. Writing in books, even to emphasize particular passages or make notes on the meanings of verses, a practice highly regarded in the top literary circles in England, was forbidden. Marginalia by common readers was perceived to be graffiti. Moreover, prisoners were discouraged from roaming freely through their books. They were given lessons to prepare for their formal classes, and time was also occupied in memorizing the Biblical verses chosen by Browning for recitation on Sunday afternoons – for example, the Sermon on the Mount, The Ten Commandments, and the events at the Last Supper.46 These selections immediately appear appropriate. However, the passages chosen for services and group readings described in his daily journal from his voyage on the Earl Grey in late 1842 provide further evidence of Browning’s finely tuned system. The course constructed for the prisoners did include Biblical stories, but their significance was carefully explained to the men, and these excerpts were balanced with clear directions on the central tenets of Christianity. Ibid., p. 281. George Holford, Account of the General Penitentiary at Millbank (London,

43 44

1828), p. 160. 45 Browning, The Convict Ship, pp. 362–3. 46 Ibid., pp. 243–4.

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On 25 September, the first Sunday on board the ship, Browning opened with Matthew’s account of the Immaculate Conception and the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, and also used a chapter in Ezekiel to explain his duties as a watchman over the convicts.47 During October and November, he progressed through the story of Creation to the floods experienced by Noah in Genesis.48 A fortuitous storm on 1 November, which terrified the convicts and wrecked several other convict vessels, provided a unique opportunity to highlight the power of God by reading aloud and expounding from Chapters 36 and 37 of the book of Job.49 During the same months, Browning concurrently read passages from the New Testament, beginning with the books of Luke and Matthew, focusing on their accounts of life of Jesus, which included a number of parables.50 This was immediately followed by Peter’s Second Epistle, providing a warning to scoffers to be ready for the second coming, and on 27 November with an account of the crucifixion.51 The theme of forgiveness and salvation was emphasized during the next week with Paul’s Epistle to Philemon and through the account of the healing by Jesus at Bethesda with particular stress upon the 24th verse, ‘He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life’.52 In just over two months, the prisoners had learnt that God had created the world and that he had the power to condemn sinners, but that he had also sent his son to die for the sins of his people and present them with eternal life. By this stage on the voyage of the Earl Grey, many prisoners had apparently received God’s word and converted. The remaining two months were thus dedicated to consolidating their faith and providing lessons on the duties of Christians. The lies of Ananias and Sapphira and the account of those ‘lewd fellows of the baser sort’ who hindered the work of God in the Acts of the Apostles proved instructive.53 Within a couple weeks of disembarkation at Hobart Town, the convicts were exposed to texts which warned that their belief in God must be total and that hypocrites would be discovered;54 which described how the character of professed followers of Christ could be sustained55; and that condemned sin but also emphasized forgiveness of Matt. 1.18 – Ch. 2; Ezekiel 38. Gen. 1–9. 49 Browning, The Convict Ship, pp. 44–7. Storms (and deaths of other prisoners), and 47 48

their use by surgeons and chaplains for religious instruction, were common occurrences on convict ships. For example, see Reid, Two Voyages to New South Wales, pp. 159–60; John Haslem, Convict Ships (London, 1819), p. 21; Charles Cozens, Adventures of a Guardsman (London, 1848), pp. 100–101. 50 Luke 1–4; Matt. 35. 51 2 Peter 2; John 19. 52 Epistle of Paul to Philemon, John 5. 53 Acts 5 and 17. 54 Exod. 32:26; Acts 19:1–9, 20; Josh. 24:14–28; Eph. 5:11; 1 Cor. 14:25. 55 2 Cor. 6 and 7:1.

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others and spreading the word of God.56 Just about all the passages selected were complemented by a particular tract, John Angell James’s Young Man from Home (1840), which demonstrated precisely how such texts related to situations or events that men might be faced with in life.57 According to Browning, the tract had been of such interest to the prisoners that the only copy on board the ship had ‘literally worn out’. During the last week of the voyage, passages were read aloud each night so that all might benefit from the advice it contained.58 When the Earl Grey landed at Hobart Town on 14 January 1843, an examination of the schools demonstrated that of the 261 convicts, 200 were able to read the Scriptures fluently and 60 were able to read them with tolerable ease. Only one man remained uneducated. Apart from two prisoners, all were presented with a Bible or Testament as a reward for their efforts. Furthermore, Browning claimed that while all the convicts showed evidence of moral improvement, 114 openly claimed to have been converted to the Christian faith.59 As evidence of this achievement, Browning included many letters from prisoners written during the voyage and after time spent in the colonies which gave an account of their conversion. Almost all claimed that the experience of reading the Bible provided the turning point in their lives. They also typically used stock narratives to tell their tales: a description of their wicked deeds which had led them away from good influences, a brief account of their capture and sentencing, followed by their moment of revelation, which had been produced by a specific text that they heard read or had been directed to read. The use of specific formulae as a means of expression, particularly within such cultural circumstances, should not necessarily encourage us to doubt the sincerity of the individuals involved. But for contemporaries and historians, this, combined with evidence of resistance in alternative forms of literacy or uses of official texts, and the mechanics of a criminal justice system which had begun to offer rewards in the form of reduced sentences, this was (is) exactly what happened. Binaries have often been used in descriptions of the effects of reform projects, with prisoners divided into opposing categories, those who converted and those who did not, and within the category of converts, those who were sincere and those who were hypocrites. Much has been made of fairly specific accounts of male convicts who tore pages from their Bibles to make decks of cards and of female convicts who used the paper provided by religious tracts to curl their hair.60 Of those who did read the books provided, a large number, perhaps the majority, have been described as hypocrites. As early as 1827, Peter Cunningham, 56 Lev. 19:17; 1 Tim. 5:20; Gal. 6:1; Matt. 18:15–20; Luke 17:3–4; James 5:19–20; 1 Cor. 5:4; 2 Cor. 2:7. 57 John Angell James, The Young Man from Home (London, 1891). 58 Browning, The Convict Ship, p. 165. 59 Ibid., pp. 194, 196, 238–45 (consistent ratio on board ships). 60 Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales, p. 319; Grocott, Convicts, Clergymen and Churches, p. 49.

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after four voyages to Australia as a surgeon-superintendent, wrote at length about the hypocrites he had encountered on the convict ships.61 On his first appointment, Cunningham was very surprised to find Scripture readers and readers of religious tracts multiplying around him. A party formed for the purpose of reading and expounding the Scriptures, selecting the berth contiguous to the hospital for their devotions. But Cunningham soon uncovered the hypocrisy of each man and, one by one, members of the group dropped away until only an old fence remained, who continued Bible-reading until the end of the voyage, drawling out the words of Scripture with deep sectarian drone, and casting at me ever and anon, as I passed, that sort of significant glance which seemed to whisper, “Don’t you see how religious I am!”62

Similarly, Thomas Galloway, a surgeon who had accompanied five transports between 1830 and 1837, explained to the Select Committee on Transportation that ‘I have very often known [convicts] to simulate [improvement] for the purpose of getting indulgences’. Of the many convicts who had appeared to be reformed on arrival in Sydney Cove from one ship, Galloway found, on return to the colony, that 12 or 14 had been hanged and between 40 and 50 had been put on road gangs for new offences.63 R.V. Reynolds, chaplain at Wakefield penitentiary and one of Browning’s champions, claimed that the problem lay in the lack of instruction prisoners received after disembarking. In particular, those sentenced to a period of hard labour on arrival in Van Diemen’s Land were often sent to remote areas where there was a deficiency of religious instructors.64 Efforts may have been further hindered by the practice, as observed by James Backhouse on a visit to Van Diemen’s Land, of storing prisoners’ newly awarded Bibles in the ordnance store in Hobart rather than allowing the men to take them on assignment.65 However, such considerations did not deter clergyman John Mereweather, who, during his visit to Van Diemen’s Land in the early 1850s, observed that although the convicts were better educated, they were ‘good for nothing as far as general usefulness is concerned. They are wonderful talkers, hate hard work, can quote Scripture enough to dazzle the clergyman, are clever at forgery and petty larceny … are wonderfully plausible and soft in their manners, and corrupt everything about them.’66

Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales, pp. 306–14. Ibid., p. 307. 63 SC 1837, evidence of Thomas Galloway, p. 184, Thomas Forster, Account of a 61 62

Voyage in a Convict Ship (London, 1850). 64 R.V. Reynolds, The Outcasts of England (London, 1850), p. 107. 65 James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies (London, 1843), appendix, pp. lvi–lvii. 66 John D. Mereweather, Diary of a Working Clergyman in Australia and Tasmania, Kept During the Years 1850–1853 (London, 1859), p. 59.

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On the basis of this, historians have interpreted the reading programmes on convict ships as evidence of a culture clash and have highlighted the ultimate failure of the ruling classes to impose their values on those below.67 The culture clash is undeniable, but at the same time we need to be wary of constructing the nature of that clash from the specific concerns expressed by the nineteenth-century authorities. Actions and attitudes of convicts did not necessarily demonstrate consent or resistance to the doctrines suggested to or imposed on them. Even the various uses so-called hypocrites put the Bible to should emphasize the fact that the reading experience is much more complicated in the range of responses it can generate, especially when it is confined to the intensive perusal of portions of one text, and even more so in extreme conditions, such as exile to the opposite side of the world. And this was something that contemporaries had a glimpse of during the 1830s, when an uprising in Kent focused attention on the potential outcomes of Bible reading for working-class communities and individuals. In 1838, at Hernhill, a group of mostly educated farm labourers rose up against the local militia under the direction of a man called William Courtenay, who claimed to be the Messiah. Frederick Liardet’s survey of the locality for the Central Society of Education in the wake of the disturbance called into question the centrality of Bible reading in educational efforts directed towards the lower classes. The prominence of Bibles within people’s homes, and the use of the Bible as a means for teaching the skills of literacy by encouraging memorization, were held to be in large part responsible for the Hernhill Uprising. Liardet argued that the Bible was not only an inadequate safeguard against insurrection, but also narrowed the mind and encouraged fallacious ideas.68 Where did this debate leave the schools in operation on the convict ships? In a vulnerable position would be the answer. Far from combating the damage caused by reading novels and other pernicious texts, an exclusive diet of controlled Bible reading offered no clear-cut solutions. Moreover, as the Bible came under attack as a medium of instruction, and rote learning, the monitorial system and sequential instruction in the skills were criticized as inappropriate methods of education, both Browning’s schools and others established by surgeonsuperintendents during the 1840s and 1850s began to look anachronistic. In addition, the weight placed on the importance of reading literacy did little to address concerns raised by the moral statisticians about ‘education’. And the complicated results of the experiment gave substantial fuel to the arguments of a new generation of penal administrators who were arguing for a return to Bell, ‘Bound for Botany Bay’; Grocott, Convicts, Clergymen and Churches, pp. 38–57; Humphrey, ‘A new era of existence’, pp. 68–73; Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, pp. 122–6. 68 Vincent, ‘Reading in the working class home’, pp. 208–21; Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, pp. 85–6; Barry Reay, ‘The context and meaning of popular literacy: some evidence from nineteenth-century rural England’, Past & Present, 131 (1991), pp. 89–129. 67

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punishment for offenders as a means of deterrence, especially as the system of transportation had begun to wind down after the loss of New South Wales in 1840. If anything, the convict ships helped to expose the need to revise the type of elementary education offered to the working class, but, in the difficulty of connecting the effects of education and the commission of crime, perhaps also helped to delay the imposition of a national system of compulsory education, in the main because policymakers and reformers continued to debate the suitability of particular texts for the diet of the common reader.

Chapter 8

‘Quite Incapable of Appreciating Books Written for Educated Readers’: the Mid-nineteenth-century British Soldier Sharon Murphy

Lieutenant Colonel J.H. Lefroy was appointed as Inspector General of Army Schools in Britain in 1857 and, within two years, published a report that provides a crucial insight into the reading habits of Her Majesty’s forces during the early Victorian period. Entitled Report on the Regimental and Garrison Schools of the Army, and on Military Libraries and Reading Rooms (1859), the 80-page report is primarily concerned with the state of education in the army, as its name suggests, but its analysis of military libraries and reading rooms reveals both the types of books that were supplied to soldiers at an official level and the way in which the reading of these works was viewed by those responsible for providing such facilities to the men. The overwhelming emphasis of the report is that the libraries and reading rooms are beneficial for soldiers; at the very least, Lefroy remarks, they offer a further means of persuading ‘young soldiers’ to ‘withdraw from the temptations of the town’. That said, though, Lefroy’s report reveals that he entertains a very particular anxiety in relation to the libraries and reading rooms: that is, they are inculcating a desire for inappropriate reading among the men. This emphasis is variously marked throughout the report, as we shall see, and so close study of Lefroy’s report further facilitates our understanding of prevailing attitudes to literacy – and, especially, to fiction – at this period. Lefroy begins his report by tracing the history of the army’s military libraries and reading rooms, noting that their formation ‘was an indirect result of the  John Henry Lefroy (1817–1890) had a long and distinguished military career, eventually retiring from the army with the honorary rank of major general in 1870. He served as Governor and Commander-in-chief of Bermuda between 1871 and 1877, and as Governor of Tasmania for a brief period between 1880 and 1881; he was ultimately made a KCMG in 1877. Lefroy had a lifelong interest in science and meteorology, and his many publications include works on meteorology, botany, terrestrial magnetism, artillery, military history, numismatics, and the Bermudas. See the online edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16343 [accessed 24 April 2007].  J.H. Lefroy, Brevet Colonel, Royal Artillery, Report on the Regimental and Garrison Schools of the Army, and on Military Libraries and Reading Rooms (London, 1859), p. 59. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

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remarks of the Inspectors of Prisons in Great Britain, in their second report, 1837, on the imprisonment of military offenders’ (51). In this report, the Inspectors of Prisons observe that the ‘dark cells’ to which military offenders were typically consigned had ‘the effect of hardening and brutalizing those … confined in them … It may be also proper to remark, that in a light cell the salutary effect of reading and instruction may be expected’. Crucially, the inspectors reveal that their preoccupation with the possible reading and instruction of military offenders arises directly from their conviction that too much emphasis is at present placed by the army upon punishing ‘bad soldiers’; much more must be done, they stress, to ‘reward’ and ‘encourage’ the ‘good soldier’ who is often overlooked among the troops: Nothing would have a greater influence in encouraging good habits, and in supplanting bad ones; in raising the tone of discipline, and the general character of the soldiery, than the consulting [of] the comforts and interests of the good soldier, and the conferring upon him those marks of distinction upon which the men greatly pride themselves, and which, however intrinsically slight, are, in the soldier’s esteem, of the very highest value, and a source of the very greatest gratification.

It was as a result of these observations that Her Majesty’s Treasury took steps towards the foundation of Garrison Libraries in August 1838, granting funds for the establishment of such institutions at 50 large and 100 smaller military stations (51). Significantly, the General Order that established the libraries and reading rooms notes it was ‘a measure from which the most beneficial results are to be expected. The object of these institutions … is to encourage the soldiery to employ their leisure hours in a manner that shall combine amusement with the attainment of useful knowledge, and teach them the value of sober, regular, and moral habits’. The link that is being made here between reading and the regulation of behaviour recalls Gary Kelly’s suggestion that reading was perceived as an Inspectors of Prisons, Great Britain: Second Report (1837), pp. 56, 65. The perception of the need to encourage the ‘good soldier’ ultimately resulted in the army’s decision to award Good Conduct Badges and pay to exemplary troops. As Byron Farewell observes, an army private ‘who could keep his name out of the regimental defaulter’s book for two years was given the good conduct badge, worn on the sleeve before the elbow, and an extra penny per day. After six years of good conduct, he received twopence per day and a second badge. An additional penny a day was added for the next three badges, awarded after twelve years, eighteen years, and twenty-eight years. Noncommissioned officers were not eligible for the extra pay’. See Byron Farewell, The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Land Warfare: An Illustrated World View (New York and London, 2001), p. 359.  Lefroy notes that the Treasury granted £20 to each of the larger stations and £10 each to the smaller (p. 51).  Quoted in T.A. Bowyer-Bower, ‘The Development of Educational Ideas and Curricula in the Army during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, unpublished thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the Degree of Master of Education, May 1954, p. 71. 

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activity that worked ‘through the subjectivity of the reader, transforming the individual from within’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and his further contention that the conviction thus grew that readers would have to be carefully supervised to control the ideological consequences of this process. One significant result of this thinking, Kelly remarks, was that it caused ‘women, children, the lower classes, and the peoples Britain seemed destined to protect and “civilize”’ to be ‘treated in the same way or made figures for each other as intellectual inferiors, social dependents, and moral wards of a professional middle class figured as a professional European or British man’. Two of the rules that were laid down in relation to the military libraries and reading rooms implicitly envisage the facilitation of such a dependent relationship between soldiers and those in authority, for they anticipate that the provision of the libraries and reading rooms will enable the public rewarding of ‘good’ soldiers and the punishment of ‘bad’ troops. ‘Books are not to be lent from a Library except to men of exemplary character’, rule seven observes, ‘and the indulgence of being thus entrusted with Books belonging to the Library by special Order of their Commanding Officer is to be regarded by their Comrades as an additional and distinguished mark of their trustworthiness’. Rule eight remarks, however, ‘Whenever a Soldier may have subjected himself to Punishment, he shall, while under such punishment, be deprived of his right of admission to the Reading Room’. ‘A Library and Reading Room ha[d] been established for the use of the Noncommissioned Officers and Soldiers at each of the Principal Barracks throughout the United Kingdom and the Colonies’, according to the Queen’s Regulations of 1844 and, again, ‘The object of these Institutions [was] to encourage the Soldiers to employ their leisure hours in a manner that shall combine amusement with the attainment of useful knowledge, and teach them the value of sober, regular, and moral habits’. The continuing emphasis placed here upon the fact that the libraries were intended to edify as well as amuse soldiers is clearly significant, as is their further recognition that the institutions were explicitly intended for the use of noncommissioned officers and soldiers; in other words, for men ‘principally’ drawn from the working classes’. This latter point is stressed again in a ‘Circular Memorandum issued to the Army at Home and  

Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 183–4. Quoted in Bowyer-Bower, ‘The Development of Educational Ideas’, pp. 72–3. The Queen’s Regulations and Orders for the Army, 3rd edn (London, 1844), p. 253. Peter Burroughs points out that the army ‘was unable to broaden its appeal or its social composition’ during the nineteenth century, remaining ‘principally dependent on the unskilled, casual labourer’; Richard Holmes for his part remarks, ‘The British army was – with a few notable exceptions – a body of poor men officered by rather richer ones’. See Peter Burroughs, ‘An Unreformed Army? 1815–1868’, in David Chandler and Ian Beckett (eds), The Oxford History of the British Army (Oxford and New York, 1996), p. 169, and Richard Holmes, Sahib: The British Soldier in India, 1750–1914 (London, 2005), p. 221. 



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Abroad’ in December 1852, which notes the decision of the Secretary-at-War and the General Commanding-in-Chief ‘to allow the Officers of the Army to participate in the advantages afforded to the Troops’ by the libraries: They will be pleased to bear in mind, that these libraries have been formed at the public expense, for the express benefit of the Soldiers of the Army; and that though it is now proposed to extend the use of them by allowing the Books to circulate amongst the Officers also, that concession has been made with the clear understanding, that it shall in no case be allowed to interfere with the free use of the Books by the Non-Commissioned Officers and Men … .10

The army’s determination to provide its noncommissioned officers and soldiers with books is worthy of note for several reasons, and not least because it marks a significant change in terms of its long-held attitude to the literacy of such soldiers. As T.A. Bowyer-Bower points out in his study of the development of educational ideas in the army in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, individual regiments began to establish libraries on an informal basis from the late 1790s, but the formation of such institutions was something that was firmly resisted at an official level. ‘As late as 1823’, he observes, ‘the Chaplain General … was instructed in the matter of providing a reading library for the troops at Portsmouth, that “His Royal Highness [the Duke of York]11 will on no account sanction so unnecessary and so objectionable an institution”’.12 The ‘suspicion’ with which the King’s and then the Queen’s army viewed literacy arose from many factors, including the perception that ‘books tended “to make soldiers question the wisdom of their officers, and fit them for being ringleaders in any discontent”’.13 This view of the effects of literacy among soldiers ‘long hampered attempts to foster schooling’ in

10 Addenda to the Queen’s Regulations and Orders for the Army, From the First of July, 1844, to the Thirty First of March, 1854 (London, 1854), p. 213. 11 Frederick Augustus (1763–1827), the second son of King George III, became Duke of York at 21, and was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in 1798; he resigned over a corruption scandal involving his mistress in 1809, but was reinstated in 1811. See Stephen Pope (ed.), The Cassell Dictionary of the Napoleonic Wars (London, 1999), p. 525. 12 Bowyer-Bower, ‘The development of educational ideas and curricula in the Army’, pp. 65–6. Bowyer-Bower observes that a Garrison Library was founded at Gibraltar in 1793, and that possibly ‘the earliest example … of a library of a general recreational nature was [set up] in 1825 … by the 80th of Foot (or Staffordshire Volunteers) in Malta’ (pp. 66, 70). The latter library had over 1,000 volumes, ‘comprising two hundred on History, Voyages and Travel, one hundred on religious subjects, two hundred and fifty covering Biography and Belles Lettres and four hundred novels’ (pp. 70–71). 13 This was the view of Henry Marshall (1775–1851), military surgeon, author, statistician and reformer. Quoted in Peter Stanley, White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India, 1825–1875 (London, 1998), p. 43.

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the army, and also frustrated the efforts of enlightened individuals who tried to provide books to soldiers at an informal level.14 It is perhaps because of this that Lefroy manifests such singular pride when recounting what the army has accomplished by the time of his report in 1859; there are, he notes, ‘158 military libraries in 140 garrisons, exclusive of India’, as well as 56 libraries for Infantry and Cavalry at stations abroad, including locations such as Cape Town, Auckland, and Corfu (52–4). There are also 20 libraries for Artillery and Engineers in Britain, as well as 10 more at foreign stations, including Bermuda, the Cape of Good Hope, and St. Helena (55–6). All of these institutions are under the general control of the Commanding Officers on the spot, he observes, but they are managed on a daily basis by committees of subscribers; this is because experience has shown that the ‘most effectual way’ of ensuring the success of the libraries or reading rooms ‘is to allow [soldiers] a voice in their management’ (56, 61). Lefroy further observes that admission to the libraries is by subscription, with the rate being four pence a month for a private and usually somewhat more for a noncommissioned officer. Subscription to the libraries is hugely improved by allowing men to become subscribers at any time: ‘the number of subscribers at Shorncliffe rose in consequence from 13 to 23 per cent of the troops [and] a similar result has occurred in many other garrisons’ (58).15 Lefroy’s report upon the military libraries and reading rooms is manifestly informed by many different sentiments – the determination of an army officer to write a good report, for instance, or by his sense of military as well as patriotic pride – but it is marked primarily by his anxiety that the wrong types of books are being read by the men who frequent the institutions. This has, in the first place, been made clear to him by the reclassification of the works held in the libraries, for this has revealed that ‘Works of entertainment and fiction’ constitutes the biggest class of reading being made available to the men (see Table 8.1). The call for returns from 30 of the libraries has also underlined the popularity of ‘Works of entertainment and fiction’; the titles were classed under four headings – ‘Books in constant demand’; ‘Books in frequent demand’; ‘Books occasionally, Ibid. It must be stressed that we are speaking of the literacy of rank-and-file soldiers here; ‘writing was something that British officers were increasingly expected to do as part of their job’ by the 1750s, as Linda Colley points out, and, ‘As British imperial ambition widened, the ceaseless hunger for intelligence meant that junior officers too, and occasionally even their men, were expected to observe alien surroundings and encounters closely, and commit their observations to paper’. See Linda Colley, Captives (New York, 2002), pp. 278–80. 15 An 1862 report on the libraries and reading rooms reveals that Lefroy may have been more optimistic than realistic here. An analysis of returns from 136 Commanding Officers and barrack masters demonstrated that, of a total of 69,336 men, 6,073 attended libraries or reading rooms daily; that is ‘no more than 8.76 per cent of the force’. See Report of a Committee appointed by the Secretary of State for War to inquire into a report on the Present State and on the improvement of Libraries, Reading Rooms, and Day Rooms (London, 1862), p. 733. 14

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Table 8.1

Books Borrowed From Military Libraries and Reading Rooms

Genre Books of reference Biography Works of naval and military history or narrative Voyages and Travels Works of entertainment and fiction Poetry General literature Works of zoology, botany and natural history Works on serious and sacred subjects Tracts Total

Numbers of Works 37 243 290 463 581 104 409 85 208 38 2579

Source: J.H. Lefroy’s Report on the Regimental and Garrison Schools of the Army, and on Military Libraries and Reading Rooms (London, 1859), p. 59.

but not often called for’; and ‘Books seldom or never read’ – and the result ‘consigned the biggest part of all these libraries to the third and fourth classes’ (57). This circumstance has proved that novels, tales, and light periodicals are almost the only books which soldiers at present appreciate. The writings of Miss Jane Austin [sic], Mrs. Bray, Bulwer-Lytton, Cooper, Dickens, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Ferrier, Fielding, James, Lever, Lover, Marryat, Miss Jane Porter, Scott, Smollett, invariably appear with figures indicating the highest degree of popularity, to which may be added those of Peter Parley and other superior children’s books, Chambers’ Journal, and the Penny Magazine; books of travels, military works (except the historical records of regiments), and works of general literature, with comparatively few exceptions, repose undisturbed on the shelves (57).

Lefroy’s anxiety relating to the preferred reading of soldiers has also been reinforced by an analysis of ‘a list of 264 works which have been demanded since 1st January 1858, to replace copies certified to be worn out by fair use’, which ‘confirms [the] conclusion’ that works of fiction are particularly valued by soldiers’ (57). ‘We find among them’, Lefroy remarks, ‘Class A, Books of reference – 0’, ‘Class B, Biography – 8’, ‘Class C, Naval and military works – 17’, ‘Class D, Voyages and Travels – 16’, ‘Class E, Books of entertainment and fiction – 205’, ‘Class F, Poetry – 10’, ‘Class G, General literature – 7’, ‘Class H, Natural History – 1’, and ‘Class I, Religious Works – 0’. Lefroy helpfully attaches an appendix to his report, which lists under several headings the titles of the books that have been worn out and replaced at the various libraries. This appendix is extensive, and so it is not my intention to treat it in great detail here. What I do want to note, though, is that the list provides an

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invaluable insight into the types of books that were being supplied at an official level to military readers at this period and, even more significantly, perhaps, which of these were actually preferred by the men. So, for example, we find lives of military and naval figures such as Napoleon, Nelson, and Wellington listed under the heading of Class B (Biography), and titles such as ‘Advice to the British Soldier’, ‘Soldiers and Sailors’, and ‘Military Sketch Book’ under Class C (Naval and Military Works). Voyages and Travels titles include ‘Anson’s Voyages’, ‘Cook’s Voyages’, ‘Irish Tourist’, and ‘Hall’s Voyages in Siberia’, while Class F (Poetry) includes the Canterbury Tales as well as the works of Cowper, Burns, and Byron. No fewer than 205 titles are listed under the heading of ‘Books of entertainment and fiction’ and, as we might expect, these include a wide selection of novels by popular male authors. There are, for instance, 19 titles by Sir Walter Scott mentioned, including Waverley (1814), The Antiquary (1816), The Black Dwarf (1816), Rob Roy (1818), The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), Ivanhoe (1820), and Anne of Geierstein (1829). Seventeen titles each are listed for James Fenimore Cooper and G.P.R. James, with the latter’s works including Richelieu (1829), King’s Highway (1840), and Agincourt (1844), and the former’s The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), and The Deerslayer (1841), as well as Lionel Lincoln (1825) and Red Rover (1827). Fourteen of Captain Marryat’s works appear on the list, including Frank Mildmay, or the Naval Officer (1829), Peter Simple (1834), and Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), while Pelham (1828), Eugene Aram (1832), The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), and Zanoni (1842) are among the nine works mentioned by Bulwer-Lytton. Seven of Charles Dickens’s works appear on the list, and these include Sketches by Boz (1835), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), Martin Chuzzelwit (1844), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), and A Christmas Carol (1843). An entry for ‘Fielding’s Works (Complete)’ also appears. While it is hardly a surprise to discover that the works of such highly popular male writers featured in the military libraries and reading rooms at this period, it is, perhaps, slightly more interesting to learn that works by late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century female authors were also represented on the shelves of these institutions. Titles mentioned include Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791); Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793); Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1796); Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and Tales of Fashionable Life (1809, 1812); Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803), The Scottish Chiefs: A Romance (1810), and The Pastor’s Fireside (1817);16 Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1804); Mary Brunton’s Discipline (1814); and Susan Ferrier’s Inheritance (1824), as well as Pride and Prejudice (1811), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and Northanger Abbey (1818) by Jane Austen.

16 Anna Maria Porter’s The Hungarian Brothers (1807) is also mistakenly attributed to Jane Porter.

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A wide variety of other works also feature on the list, including old favourites such as the Arabian Nights,17 Gil Blas,18 Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Works with an explicitly military or naval theme are also represented, and include Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug (1839), Peter Parley’s Tales of the Sea (c. 1830), and various publications by the Reverend George Robert Gleig, including The Hussar (1837) and Chelsea Hospital (1838).19 Cheap publications which were explicitly aimed at and did so much to create the lower-class readership in the early nineteenth century also feature on the list, and include the Penny Magazine, the Saturday Magazine, Chambers’s Journal, and Chambers’s Miscellany.20 While we may be impressed to discover that the mid-nineteenth-century soldier was reading such a wide range of works, including fiction, Lefroy was obviously very concerned at the thought that such were the types of books that were flying off the shelves of military reading rooms and libraries. To account for what he plainly perceives as an unpalatable circumstance, he raises the issue of the poor level of education of the average soldier, intimating that he is typically incapable of comprehending the ‘good’ books on offer within these institutions: The bulk of subscribers to military libraries are quite incapable of appreciating books written for educated readers; the knowledge predisposed is far beyond their acquirements. Much even of the language is unknown to them. I have been

The ‘heterogeneous material’ that makes up the work now commonly known as The Thousand and One Nights was first introduced to the western world by Antoine Galland, a French Orientalist. His Mille et une Nuits (1704–1717) formed the basis for the first English translation that appeared during 1706–1708 and, until Henry Torrens’s 1838 literal translation, for successive English editions. See N.J. Dawood, introduction to Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, trans. N.J. Dawood (1954; London, 1973), pp. 8–9. 18 Alain René Lesage’s picaresque novel was originally published in four volumes in the early eighteenth century (1715, 1724, 1735), and there were several English translations – and imitations – of this highly popular work. 19 The life of George Robert Gleig (1796–1888) was extremely colourful, including military service with the 85th Regiment in Spain during the Peninsular Wars and in North America. Gleig entered the church after the Napoleonic Wars, and was appointed Chaplain General of the army in 1844 and, two years later, as the Inspector General of Military Schools. He resigned the latter office in 1857, which led to Lefroy’s appointment to this post. Gleig was also a prolific author throughout his life, publishing novels, accounts of his military service, and articles on church affairs, as well as contributing articles to literary journals. See the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http:///www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/10811 [accessed 24 April 2007]. 20 On how such cheap publications ‘helped to create the new working-class reading public’ at this time, see Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–1850: A Study of the Literature Produced for the Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England (London; New York; Toronto, 1963), pp. 10–11; also Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900, 2nd edn (Columbus, OH, 1998), especially pp. 268–80. 17

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repeatedly struck with the limited vocabulary of their own language possessed by uneducated soldiers, and the number of words there are in common use of whose meaning they have no idea or a false one. (58)21

Lefroy also suggests that the peculiar conditions of military life are such that soldiers are unable to apply themselves to a course of serious study: ‘a soldier’s opportunities of reading are too desultory to incline him to begin large works, and it is curious to observe how entirely thrown away for the most part are such classics as Napier’s History of the Peninsular War, the Wellington Despatches, and others of the solid and standard character’ (58). This latter point, he continues, accounts for what is a common complaint among the troops, that there is too little variety in the libraries, they find the same books everywhere, and have ‘read them all.’ The all here means that limited number of books which they will read. There is reason to hope that the classification of the catalogue will tend to encourage a wider range of choice, and it cannot be doubted that light reading will by degrees infuse a desire for knowledge and lead the way to reading of a more improving character, as it has been found to do in the free libraries established of late years in Liverpool and other commercial centres (58).22

Lefroy’s remarks here are significant for many reasons, and not least because they are curiously reflective of the several anxieties that informed what Richard D. Altick called the ‘vexatious “fiction question”’ at this period. As Altick pointed out in his seminal study of the mass reading public in the nineteenth century, the democratization of reading was viewed with considerable anxiety by the upper classes, who typically associated working-class readers with ‘low-grade fiction’ and believed it was their peculiar duty to persuade such readers to redirect their attention to works that were improving or instructive. It was in this context that the introduction of fiction was strongly resisted by so many of the early nineteenthcentury reading clubs and mechanics’ institutes’ libraries, for instance, and even by the free public libraries which were celebrated as one of the great achievements of the Victorian period.23 Even where fiction was admitted, William St Clair has 21 It is notoriously difficult to establish literacy rates at this period. Stanley suggests, though, that ‘Up to sixty per cent of Queen’s soldiers appear to have been functionally literate’. See Stanley, White Mutiny, p. 43. 22 Lefroy’s observation here recalls Jonathan Rose’s argument that the majority of working-class readers ‘faced an absolute poverty of reading matter. That is, the literature available to them could not fill up their leisure time, even if they read it all. There was no room for selectivity. … Under those conditions, one inevitably read much that was not age-appropriate, far above or below one’s comprehension level’. See Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven and London, 2001), pp. 372–3. 23 Altick, The English Common Reader, pp. 64, 213–39. More recent treatments of fiction/the novel and the nineteenth-century reader include Gary Kelly, ‘Romantic Fiction’, in Stuart Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge, 1993),

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recently suggested, ‘the breakthrough [often] occurred with the Waverley novels, and the line held there for some time’.24 Lefroy’s hope that ‘light reading’ would eventually lead soldiers to more improving works thus reflects a desire that was held by many in relation to lower-class reading at this time, but it is also illustrative of the overwhelmingly conservative attitude that Her Majesty’s Army for a long time adopted in relation to the reading – and education – of her soldiers. As we noted earlier, the establishment of military libraries and reading rooms was a reactive measure on the part of the army; the 1837 report on prisons indirectly raised the issue of the reading soldier in its consideration of military offenders, and it was because of this that the army began to organize such facilities for its troops. It should be remarked here that the attitude of Her Majesty’s Army to the provision of books and libraries for its soldiers – good or otherwise – was in marked distinction to that adopted by the East India Company, which Lefroy’s report (grudgingly) allows, ‘So early as the year 1823 … took steps for the establishment of libraries at their principal military stations, and they are now very general. The Queen’s as well as the Company’s troops have free access to them’ (52). In point of fact, the East India Company actually took steps towards the establishment of lending libraries for soldiers in India as early as 1819, when it generated a list of the types of books that could or should be provided to its men. This list is interesting, as I have shown in detail elsewhere, firstly, because it affords a prominent place to fiction at a very early moment in the nineteenth century and, secondly, because it is illustrative of the overwhelmingly positive – or pragmatic – attitude that the Honourable Company took to the literacy – and education – of its troops.25 As historians remark, although the East India Company was like the regular army in that it drew the majority of its rank-and-file soldiers from the British and Irish working classes,26 it was unlike pp. 196–215; Peter Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic era: consolidation and dispersal’ in Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (gen. eds), The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, Vol. II: 1800–1829 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 15–103; and William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004). 24 St Clair, The Reading Nation, p. 261. Fiction, of course, was a staple of circulating libraries from the late eighteenth century, a circumstance that was lamented by contemporaries who feared the social effects of these institutions, and there is strong evidence to suggest that the status of fiction steadily improved during the 1820s. On this, see Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era’, especially pp. 18–35. For details of holdings of fiction in circulating and subscription libraries between 1800 and 1829, see P.D. Garside, J.E. Belanger, and S.A. Ragaz, British Fiction, 1800–1829: A Database of Production, Circulation & Reception, designer A.A. Mandal. http://www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk: sources. 25 Sharon Murphy, ’Imperial Reading?: the East India Company’s Lending Libraries for Soldiers in India, c. 1819–1834’ in Book History 12 (2009): pp. 74–99. 26 Holmes remarks, ‘In the period 1795–1810, 42 per cent of soldiers were Irish; 21 per cent Scottish and the remainder were English and Welsh. By 1830, 42.2 per cent of the army was Irish and 13.6 per cent Scots’. See Holmes, Sahib, pp. 233–4.

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the King’s and then the Queen’s army in that it appears actively to have sought out literate recruits, and persistently to have placed a high premium upon promoting literacy among its troops. By the early 1820s, for instance, ‘the establishments of [its] European regiments included … a school master, a reading master and writing master, later joined by two assistant school masters, a librarian and (for soldier’s children) a school mistress’.27 The latter is again in marked distinction to the King’s and then the Queen’s army, which waited until the late 1840s and early 1850s before offering similar educational opportunities to its men.28 Although Her Majesty’s Army was slower than the East India Company in providing libraries and educational facilities to its soldiers, the report we have been considering shows that by the 1850s the existence and requirements of the military reader were being viewed as a real concern by those in authority. Soldiers are reading, Lefroy’s report stresses, and so more care will have to be taken to ensure that they are reading improving or instructive books. In order that this may be accomplished, Lefroy emphasizes that two things are particularly needful, and that both of these will call for particular foresight and forbearance on the part of Commanding Officers. In the first place, he stresses, the types of reading that are attractive to soldiers will at least initially have to be supplied to the libraries and reading rooms, and these include: Newspapers, [which] properly speaking … are not at present furnished to any reading rooms, and consequently a powerful attraction is wanting. Applications for them are very numerous, nor can we ever hope to combat successfully the temptations of the canteen and public-house while they are withheld. As the present library regulations … sanction their introduction under private arrangements, leaving it to the commanding officer to see that nothing of an improper tendency gains admission, there is no objection of principle to their being furnished … . (60–61).29

Lefroy’s further point is that more care will have to be given to the physical environment of the military libraries and reading rooms, for it cannot be hoped that they will encourage men away from canteens and public houses unless they are properly supplied and attractively furnished. To illustrate the point he is making, Lefroy refers to a visit he made to the Royal Barracks in Dublin in March 1857, where he found the reading room to be ‘entirely naked and deserted, its sole Stanley, White Mutiny, p. 44. Ibid. 29 Lefroy’s remarks are illustrative of the fact that upper-class suspicion of newspapers 27 28

lasted well into the Victorian period. On the restrictive measures imposed on the early nineteenth-century British newspaper and periodical industries, see James, Fiction for the Working Man, especially pp. 12–22; also St Clair, The Reading Nation, pp. 309–12. The writers of the 1862 report also stressed that the supply of newspapers and periodicals was ‘a very important element in the success’ of military libraries and reading rooms, insisting that the supply of same should equal the very considerable demand (Report of a Committee, p. 733).

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attraction the periodicals sent from the Stationery Office, and a few newspapers contributed by private individuals’ (58–9). The introduction of some furniture, games, and a wider selection of reading material to this reading room had an immediate positive effect, Lefroy remarks: ‘during the ensuing winter the room was crowded, as many as sixty soldiers sometimes frequenting it in the course of the day, and … an average attendance of about twenty was secured even in the summer months’ (59). Again, Lefroy is keen to emphasize the regulating effects of the transformation of this reading room, stressing that it positively affected the soldiers’ behaviour. Most soldiers attended the room in the evenings between six and nine, he observes, and ‘it is needless to add that these are the hours at which it is most desirable to withdraw the young soldier from the temptations of the town’ (59). This is not an isolated case, Lefroy further remarks, as the same thing happened at the Portsmouth barracks. Lefroy’s 1859 report upon the military libraries, reading rooms, and schools marks a significant moment in the development of educational thought within the British army, and is reflective of the increasing emphasis that was placed upon the literacy and education of soldiers during the Victorian period. In common with later parliamentary reports on the army’s schools, libraries, and reading rooms, the report makes a crucial link between the reading of soldiers and their subsequent behaviour, and manifests the hope that the provision of appropriate books to soldiers will result in more tractable men.30 Significantly, though, Lefroy’s report is also marked by a very particular anxiety: namely, that the vast majority of readers in the army inevitably prefer reading ‘novels, tales, and light periodicals’, and are actually ‘incapable’ of appreciating books written for educated readers. This fear, as we have seen, is manifestly informed by Lefroy’s awareness of the lower-class origins of most of the noncommissioned officers and men in the army, but it is also curiously reflective of prevailing attitudes to literacy during the nineteenth century; in particular, of the suspicion with which the reading of fiction was viewed for much of this period. As such, close study of Lefroy’s 1859 report crucially illuminates the reading habits of very particular common readers, that is, mid-nineteenth-century British soldiers, and demonstrates how those in authority in Her Majesty’s Army viewed the reading of such men.

30 We have mentioned the 1862 report; later reports include 1865, 1866, and 1868 Reports of the Council of Military Education on Army Schools, Libraries and Recreation Rooms and the Report of the Director-General of Military Education on Army Schools, Libraries and Recreation Rooms of 1872: See Sharon Murphy, ‘Powerful Instruments of Civilization’: Military Libraries and Reading Rooms in the British Army between c. 1860 and 1870 (unpublished paper).

Chapter 9

‘A Journey Round the Bookshelves’: Reading in the Royal Colonial Institute Beth Palmer

The non-government organization now known as the Royal Commonwealth Society began its existence as the Colonial Society in 1868. With a charter from Queen Victoria it became the Royal Colonial Institute (hereafter RCI) in 1870. Presided over by the Prince of Wales and comprised of a range of high-profile men involved in trade and politics, its membership reached 3,000 by the late 1880s. James Anthony Froude, the historian and author of Oceana, or England and her Colonies (1886), the writer Anthony Trollope and the journalist Justin McCarthy were amongst those who gave papers at regular meetings. Baden-Powell, Gladstone and Tennyson attended events and dinners, as did prominent imperialists such as J.R. Seeley, author of The Expansion of England (1883). The Institute aimed to promote union between Britain and its colonies through education and debate. Its objects were To provide a place of meeting for all Gentlemen connected to the Colonies and British India and others taking an interest in Colonial and Indian affairs; to establish a Reading Room and Library, in which recent and authentic intelligence upon Colonial and Indian subjects will be constantly available … to afford opportunities for the reading of Papers, and for holding Discussions upon Colonial and Indian subjects generally; and to undertake scientific, literary, and statistical investigations in connection with the British Empire.

The Institute did not manage all of this but it did create a meeting place in which papers were read and meetings attended, which also housed a library and reading room. The creation of a colonial library was the RCI’s most important educative project. The collection began slowly, but by 1900 they had over 43,000 periodicals, pamphlets and volumes pertaining to the Colonies and India. It continued to grow throughout the twentieth century and was sold in 1993 to Cambridge University, which now holds the vast collection. Many of these publications are official historical records like Blue Books and Staff and Civil Lists. But the RCI’s first librarian, James Boosé, also made sure that in its earliest

 Journal of the Royal Colonial Institute 1 (1890): p. 1. Stated in every subsequent first page of every volume of proceedings.

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days the fellows of the RCI had access to a wide range of literary and periodical productions from across the empire. This article asks questions about who read the texts in this library in the last decades of the Victorian period and how they were read. I assert that the RCI aimed to select those books that would reinforce its own mission for its readers, that is, those books that reinforced the greatness of empire, the civilizing power of the colonizer and the ‘otherness’ of colonized peoples. However, I go on to argue that the library’s collection also offered some strategies of resistance to such imperial characterizations. There were texts in the library that did not fit with this glorifying attitude and some readers whose reading selections, habits and experiences cut across imperialist ideology. This article pieces together evidence from the RCI archive, including minutes of the library committee meetings, suggestions books, catalogues and shelving guides, in an attempt to reconstruct reading practices that shed light on the transmission and resistance of imperialist ideologies. Of necessity this piece will utilize the notions of the implied reader and of ‘reading communities’ put forward by Stanley Fish. It will, though, attempt to delineate the relationship between the implied reader and the actual historical reader as closely as possible with the archival resources available. Constructing a Collection, a Catalogue, and a Way of Reading the Empire The RCI began its meetings in 1869 in rented rooms, and it was their initially modest collection of texts that persuaded committee members to take larger premises on the Strand in London. The society expanded quickly over the following two decades, characterized, as some have argued, by the ‘New Imperialism’. During these years Queen Victoria was given the title ‘Empress of India’, and the Zulu War, the Afghan War and the invasion of Egypt kept foreign and colonial events in the press. By 1885 the RCI had expanded again and was ready to move out of its now cramped rooms and into its new establishment on Northumberland Avenue, and again the library was the most pressing consideration for undertaking the move. As John Mackenzie puts it, ‘the growing society was very much influenced by the materials it collected’. By the end of its first year in existence, the RCI had already secured regular donations of official publications from colonial governors and asked members for donations, although it took longer for any kind of acquisitions policy to be brought into place. The library committee met for the first time on 27 January 1880 and dealt with a yearly grant that only ran to £25. By 1885 the library was given £100 per annum, and by 1890 it had increased to £150. In these years, then, the fellows and readers using the RCI’s library would have been unable to miss its dynamic expansion from 1880 onwards. Stanley Fish, ‘Interpreting the Variorum’, Critical Inquiry 2:3 (1976): pp. 465–86. John M. Mackenzie, ‘The Royal Commonwealth Society Library’, in Cambridge

 

University Library: The Great Collections, ed. Peter Fox, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 167.

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Boosé wanted the collection to inform a reader not just about the empire but about its greatness and about Britain’s central and superior position in relation to its colonies. He writes in his memoirs: ‘It can very truly be stated that a journey round the bookshelves reveals the greatness of the British Empire, and brings home in a better way than can perhaps be done elsewhere the vast amount of literature that has been written about the British Possessions.’ He writes that ‘from almost the first, [I] directed my special attention to the formation of a Library which would facilitate the acquisition of knowledge regarding the Empire and tend to stimulate patriotic enquiries.’ Here he obviously has a conception of the reader as a gentleman at the centre of empire seeking information that will reinforce his ‘patriotic’ conception of Britain as an efficiently civilizing force over its colonies. So the library is a place in which the character of empire is in many ways predefined for readers: it is great, it is unified and the British gentleman is at its heart. Indeed, Boosé and succeeding librarians felt that their library would be of practical use to those running the empire or living in the colonies. Collecting information about climate, policy, emigration, indigenous plants and animals and the like in one place meant the library would serve as a base for research. To some degree, at least, Boosé achieved his aims for the library, as is testified by a letter written to the librarian by the author and journalist J. Ellis Baxter: … although I thought that I was particularly well-informed about the grandeur and meaning of the British Empire, I must say that I was amazed when I entered your Institute. The enormous collection of Colonial literature, and especially your newspaper reading-room, made upon me an absolutely overwhelming impression. From maps and statistics one can grasp the extent and the resources of the British Empire. But one cannot realise its meaning as a civilising force. The sight of hundreds and hundreds of well got up dailies and weeklies from every part of the British Empire, displayed in your Institute, enables one best to focus at a glance the Empire’s true significance as an instrument of civilisation. There are newspapers from the ends of the world … testifying to the vigour and the vitality of the English race all over the world.

So Boosé has provided a library in which the reader might research the ‘civilizing force’ of empire, and also one in which existing conceptions of empire are reimagined and aggrandized. It is particularly the display of ‘hundreds and hundreds of dailies and weeklies’ which best focuses Baxter’s mind on the hitherto unimaginable cultural significance of the empire. For him, literature, newspapers and periodicals somehow symbolize British civilization, at least a late nineteenth-century masculine version of civilization. It is not just the literature that achieves this effect, but its extent and the way in which it is arranged. The material arrangements of the library (its spaces, catalogues and rules) worked to  James Boosé, Memory Serving: Being Reminiscences of Fifty Years of the Royal Colonial Institute (London: Selwyn and Blount, 1928), pp. 21, 22, 11.  Quoted in Boosé, p. 21.

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shape the ways in which readers reacted to its texts. The catalogue in particular was vital in creating narratives and connections which encouraged its readers to read in certain ways. The RCI’s catalogues published in the Victorian period (1881, 1886, 1894, and a supplement in 1901) all conform to roughly the same organizational principles. They categorize the books according to which of the colonies they refer to; the main headings are: ‘The Australasian Colonies’, ‘British North America’, ‘The African Groups of Colonies’, ‘The East Indies, and the various British Possessions of the Eastern Seas’, ‘The West Indies’, ‘The Mediterranean and other Outlying Possessions’, and ‘The British Colonies generally, comprising their history, government, trade, resources, and such subjects as Imperial Federation, Emigration, &c.’. Reading these headings creates an idea of the extent of Britain’s colonial territories as it simultaneously demonstrates the scope of the library’s holdings. Possession is a key term in the language of the RCI catalogues. Setting the catalogue out in this way puts Britain’s relationship with these territories at the centre of the library’s concerns. The various territories are not positioned to encourage cross-reference or cross-fertilization between them. They are positioned with the reader at the (British) centre of the globe. Added to this sense of British centrality is the impression given by the library’s catalogue that British voyagers had ‘discovered’, or even created, the majority of the lands represented in the library’s collection. The very first section of the 1886 and 1894 catalogues is ‘The Collections of Voyages’. Under this heading can be found texts such as a three-volume edition of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, published 1598–1600 (a prized possession of the library), and folios including Churchill’s Collection of Voyages and Travels (1732), the Harleian Collection of Voyages and Travels (1745), and the five volumes of Captain James Burney’s Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean (1770–71). The catalogue’s second heading, ‘Other Voyages and Circumnavigations’, then lists those less valuable texts that cover numerous later explorations, such as Through the Dark Continent by H.M. Stanley or Explorations in Australia by John Forrest. Ruth Craggs argues that narratives of explorations and British manliness were given prominence in the library’s collection. It is indeed fair to say that the early acquisitions noted in the committee minutes are heavily weighted towards exploration narratives and they were willing to pay a premium for early editions of these works. Chronologically it made some sense to put these voyages at the  For more on the way in which this dialectic of colonial relations has had longlasting consequences, see Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; 2nd edn, 2005), and Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).  Ruth Craggs, ‘Situating the Imperial Archive: the Royal Empire Society Library, 1868–1945’, Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008): pp. 48–67 (p. 53).

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beginning of the catalogue, that is, the books that discuss the discovery of a particular place are listed before those that present its more recent history. But this positioning also gives the catalogue’s browser a sense that these countries did not exist before their ‘discovery’ and settlement by Western explorers. Once again, the RCI library was encouraging its readers to think of the world Anglocentrically. This ordering potentially also encouraged ordinary readers in the RCI library to think of themselves as re-creating the famous voyages of Hakluyt or Livingstone in their journeys around the bookshelves, and the library was a space in which those imaginings might take place. The dearth of records of particular reading experiences in the library is problematic, but we might compare the experience of a young boy reading the same narratives of exploration at school in Wales in the 1870s and 1880s. When Thomas Jones later wrote about his reading he recalled that these texts ‘took a Rhymney boy away into the realms of wonder over the seas to the Malay Archipelago, to Abyssinia, to the sources of the Nile and the Albert Nyanza, to the curiosities of natural history, piloted by James Bruce, Samuel Baker and Frank Buckland’. If reading these authors could have such an imaginative impact on a young boy of the working class, we might imagine how much more particularized and compelling that impact might have been on readers who were about to embark on their own colonial adventures. The important place of these ‘real-life’ exploration narratives in the catalogue also perhaps enlightens us as to why the library acquired many contemporary fictional adventure and exploration fiction stories, such as H. Rider Haggard’s Jess (1887) or Rolf Boldrewood’s The Squatter’s Dream: A Story of Australian Life (1890). Both genres may have helped RCI library readers to mentally picture themselves in difficult and foreign situations. While we cannot assume that these narratives of exploration and manliness were necessarily the most popular part of the library’s collection because of their preeminent place in the catalogue, one could argue that the arrangement, because it defies geographical and alphabetical systems, had some influence on its readers. Once the RCI reader had been impressed with Britain’s centrality and supremacy, he could then move on to utilize the library’s texts. Indeed, Boosé’s memoir claims that ‘The library is becoming well known to literary workers, and many important works on subjects of Colonial and Imperial interest have been written within its walls.’ Many of the texts in its catalogues were bought for practical purposes: to enlighten travellers as to what types of climate they might expect in certain countries, or to recommend various methods of farming, building, hunting, mining, or exploration. Texts such as Sir Charles Todd’s Handy Guide to the Cape of Good Hope (1887), A. Vecht’s Pork Industry of New Zealand (1893), and many other such publications announce their matter-of-fact practicality in their titles. The list of purchases for January 1887 includes India Revisited by Edwin Arbold,  Reading Experience Database . First accessed 07.06.08.  Boosé, p. 21.

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West Indies by A. Trollope and Second Expedition to Africa by Dr Livingstone, all of which could be read as informative guides, as well as more attractive reads than those of more select interest like Vecht’s Pork Industry. Also acquired in 1887 were Australian Life by Mrs Campbell Praed and Our Maories by Lady Martin. Texts like these essentially aimed to prepare women for the difficulties and rewards of trying to establish an English domestic setting abroad.10 Handbooks such as Mrs C.P. Traill’s Female Emigrants’ Guide to Canada (1854) gave even more explicit advice on how to deal with issues such as the ‘servant problem’ in the colonies. Both the practical how-to guides and the more discursively informative texts by better-known authors seem to have been popular in readers’ suggestions, as reflected in the library committee’s decisions regarding new book purchases. A reference book could legitimately tell a reader not just what to do, but also what to think about a particular region or culture. While we may not have specific evidence for reading experiences of particular books within the library, the Reading Experience Database again gives us some clues as to the utility other readers found in their copies of books held by the RCI library. For example, Albert Battiscombe read William Kelly’s Victoria in 1853 and 1858 aboard his ship to Australia. He calls it ‘very interesting tho rather coarse … showing the march of improvement made by the colony … in town and country, cities and digging.’11 Battiscombe here finds the text interesting (and potentially rather useful for someone about to alight in Australia), but its factual character does not prevent it from being found ‘coarse’. The reader’s emphasis on the coarseness of the text in contradistinction to the ‘march of improvement’ in its subject denotes an optimistic and discerning reader, perhaps not dissimilar to those would-be colonists researching their subjects in the RCI library. Some evidence that RCI readers found the library’s practical and informative texts useful can be gleaned from the fact that two of them are recorded as missing in the library committee minutes in 1881: Colonization and Colonies by Herman Merivale (1861), borrowed by H. de B. Holleiys Esq., and Jamaica and the Colonial Office by G. Price (1866), borrowed by Stuart J. Davies Esq. This is the only time that individual missing books were recorded, so it would not be wise to draw general conclusions, but these two books were thought useful enough to 10 RCI archive, Cambridge University Library, Uncat. Library and Museum Committee minutes book, 25 January 1887. Immediately underneath this list of texts to be purchased in the minutes book is the phrase ‘Suggestions entered into the library suggestions book were dealt with.’ We can presume, I think, that this means that at least some of the texts ordered were those that readers had asked for via the library suggestions book. Unfortunately, while a general library suggestions book survives, the acquisitions suggestions book does not, so we cannot know exactly which readers suggested which kinds of books. The library committee minutes reveal lists of books recommended for purchase and purchased throughout the 1880s until, in the 1890s, the lists become too long and they merely state the total spent on new books. 11 Reading Experience Database . First accessed 01.06.08.

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be worth taking. Whether they were not returned because their utility made them indispensable or whether the fellows forgot they existed, we obviously cannot know. It would seem, though, that the library and its texts were being used for research – at least by some of its members, a significant proportion of whom worked for the Colonial Service.12 The 1894 catalogue and the 1901 supplement added to the voyages and colonial possessions sections with ‘Colonial Botany and Flora’; ‘Colonial Poems’; ‘Transactions of Societies &c.’; ‘Handbooks, Almanacs, &c.’; ‘Parliamentary Publications’; ‘Newspapers, Magazines and Periodicals’; ‘Library Catalogues’; ‘Photographs and Sketches’; and ‘Charts, Maps, Surveys’. This further categorization was necessary due to the increasing scale of the collection, but it also made it easier for the reader to utilize the catalogue to access specific and practical information speedily. By the end of the century, an RCI reader would not need to be a gentleman of leisure able to spend hours in the comfort of the library. Instead, the reader could use the library as a quick, accessible point of access for colonial queries. Continuing to grow increasingly quickly throughout the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the ‘Newspapers, Magazines and Periodicals’ section was the largest section in the catalogue by the end of the Victorian period. Periodical publications allowed the RCI reader access to the most up-to-date information regarding Britain’s colonies. As with the stories of voyages and explorations, many of these texts reinforced the RCI’s ideas of Britain as a civilizing imperial force. The RCI was very happy to subscribe to those magazines promulgating a pro-imperial agenda similar to their own. So The Imperial & Colonial Magazine & Review was obtained for the library as soon as it began publication in 1900. Its editors, like many members of the RCI, supported those who ‘maintain, strengthen, and unaggressively … develop the vast political system which girdles the globe, and under the British flag proclaims the freedom, the equality, and the common rights of all its citizens’.13 An article in the first issue by Charles Dilke (author of the expansionist polemic Greater Britain), ‘The Century in Our Colonies’, celebrates the acquisitions to British territory over the past 100 years and bemoans lost opportunities for expansion. ‘Efficiency and Empire’ by Arnold White in the same issue praises the British introduction of railways, timetables and administrative systems to all areas of its empire. Similarly, the British Empire League presented its magazine, the British Empire Review, to the RCI when it began in 1899. Again, the librarian happily accepted a magazine whose interests collided so neatly with his library’s own. The British Empire League had come out of the disbanded Imperial Federation League, whose membership overlapped somewhat with the RCI’s. It, even more than the RCI, emphasized imperial unity simply and positively. The ‘Federation Song’, ‘We Are and Will Be One’, is printed in the inside cover of the magazine. See Craggs, p. 63. ‘Introduction’, The Imperial & Colonial Magazine & Review 1 (1900),

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It ventriloquizes Queen Victoria’s voice, asking her ‘children’ to gather around her ‘neath Britain’s flag unfurled’.14 The song was followed by a cartoon entitled ‘Greeting’, which uses the distribution of the journal from the heart of London (St Paul’s and Tower Bridge feature in the background) as a symbol for a unified, expansive and peaceful empire. Dressed in stereotypical costumes, subjects from around the world have been brought metaphorically to the heart of empire through their readership of this publication. Thomas Richards has pointed out a latecentury tendency in fictive narratives such as Kipling’s Kim to act out ‘fantasies about an empire united not by force but by information’, and the British Empire Review seems to be wholeheartedly participating in just such a fantasy here.15 The RCI’s library was motivated by the same ideas: that access to and exchange of information about empire through pamphlets, volumes and periodicals could help to solidify the fantasy of a unified British Empire. The RCI’s own journal, the Journal of the Royal Colonial Institute, ran monthly from December to July (the months in which meetings were held) from 1890 until it was transformed into United Empire in 1909. The journal published the papers and discussions held in the meetings and also gave news on the organization, reviewed recent library acquisitions and featured advertisements for products deemed necessary for colonial life. Most articles published in this setting echoed the RCI’s characterization of the British colonizer as a civilizing and celebrated force. For example, Flora Shaw, the editor of the Colonial section of the Times, unashamedly toed the line on the greatness of empire when she was the first woman to have her paper on colonial expansion published in the journal in 1894.16 These periodicals also offered the RCI’s readers tips about reading. The AngloColonial’s book review section reinforces notions of British supremacy. It extols Charles Dilke’s Greater Britain and approves of the author’s answer to the secret of Britain’s colonial expansion: ‘the supremacy of race’.17 While it does occasionally review books written by non-westerners, such as ‘Travels of a Hindoo to various Parts of Bengal and Upper India’ by Bholonauth Chunder, the text is given a cursory treatment, unlike the lengthy adulation bestowed on Dilke’s book. The reviewer briefly states ‘Chunder Sahib has a good deal to say concerning British atrocities after the Mutiny, and relates things not complimentary to our boasted Western Christianity’, but does not go into details and does not recommend further perusal.18 The periodical texts within the RCI’s library, like the arrangement of its ‘We Are and Will Be One’, British Empire Review 1 (1899), pp. 7–8 (p. 8). Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire

14 15

(London and New York: Verso, 1993), p. 1. 16 This was despite the fact that Shaw had fostered a reputation for stirring controversy with an article on the General Gordon debacle, featured on the front page of the Pall Mall Gazette on 28 June 1887, which pointedly questioned British justice. 17 ‘Books of the Time’, The Anglo-Colonial: A Monthly Magazine and Review for the Colonies 1 (1869), pp. 74–81 (p. 74). 18 ‘Books on the Colonies’, The Anglo-Colonial 2 (February 1869), pp. 210–20 (p. 219).

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catalogue, seem to be advancing once again an Anglocentric mode of reading in which texts by British writers need to be read with greater care, interest and belief in their veracity than those texts by indigenous writers. John Mackenzie, in Propaganda and Empire (1984), situates the RCI and its periodicals as un-complicated propaganda for imperial expansion. He argues that the RCI was one of the means by which a committed elite could ‘influence politicians and academics, journalists and other opinion-formers’.19 As we have seen, this perspective is well testified by the arrangement of the RCI library’s catalogue and the periodical texts to be found on its shelves. However, I think that Boosé’s inclusive acquisitions policy, particularly in the early years of the library when he was attempting to build up the collection, meant that variant narratives of empire could creep into the library’s holdings.20 Boosé not only invited donations from official colonial offices and societies but fondly remembers a time when ‘I was ever on the look out for anything – book, pamphlet, magazine article or any other publication – relating to any portion of the Empire’. This lack of discrimination sets up an alternative idea of the library’s acquisitions policy to that of ‘facilitat[ing] the acquisition of knowledge regarding the Empire and tend[ing] to stimulate patriotic enquiries’ that we saw earlier.21 As the library increased in size, a proportion of which increase was indiscriminately acquired, it became more and more difficult for it to represent a stable ideology of empire. The catalogue marked an attempt by the RCI to stabilize the meaning of its collection and to offer the reader distinct ways in which its texts might be read. However, the rest of this article goes on to argue that the reader in the RCI library was also contradictorily invited to read against the grain of the RCI’s imperialist ideology. The way in which the library was organized, as well some of its texts themselves, offered strategies for doing so. Borrowing Laura Ann Stoler’s definition of colonial archives, we might see the RCI library as offering ‘cross sections of contested knowledge’ to its nineteenth-century readers and to us.22

19 John M. Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 148. 20 During the 20 years from 1889 to 1909 that Boosé was the official librarian of the RCI, he increased its holdings from 10,000 to 70,000 items. See Donald H. Simpson, ‘An Internationally Famous Library’, in Royal Commonwealth Society Centenary 1868– 1968 (London: Royal Commonwealth Society, 1968), pp. 55–9. 21 Boosé, pp. 12, 11. John M. Mackenzie agrees ‘nothing was beneath contempt: all forms of “puffs”, propaganda and travel accounts were grist to the mill of the librarians and the readers they served’. ‘The Royal Commonwealth Society Library’, p. 173. 22 Laura Ann Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governments: On the Content in the Form’, in Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, ed. by Francis X. Blouin, Jr, and William G. Rosenberg (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 267–79 (p. 267).

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Pleasure, Fiction, and Alternate Readings of Empire An important means of accessing these contested ways of reading the library and its ideology of empire is to recognize the RCI’s social, as well as its educative, role. While fictional texts of colonial life have often been read as equally ideologically freighted as educational texts, and pleasure seen to be as powerful a means of ideological transmission as any, analyzing the social functions of the library itself (as well as those texts read for pleasure within it) uncovers some alternate readings of empire to the RCI’s aggrandizing Anglocentric narrative.23 The social function of the RCI became increasingly significant to its ethos (and to its fundraising), and Boosé called the annual parties held from 1874 onwards ‘one of the chief events of the London season’.24 By the time the library was moved to the RCI’s permanent address in Northumberland Avenue, the reading rooms were essentially used as part of a gentleman’s club. The library’s elegant decor became one of the selling points used to attract new members. Its ‘writing-desks, its leather armchairs and couch, and … decorative ceiling’ all added to the feel of the library as a space of comfort and relaxation as well as one of research.25 As early as June 1869, A.R. Roche (the then secretary) wrote to the Colonial Secretary of Hobart Town and Tasmania thanking him for the 25 views of subjects connected with the area and proudly announcing that they had been hung in the reading room.26 When a carpenter tried to fob off the RCI library with cheap stained wood rather than the elegant walnut which they had asked for, the committee refused to pay him until the walnut bookshelves were installed.27 It seems that the library committee wanted to create the atmosphere of a gentlemanly drawing room, reinforcing the self-importance and status of those gentlemen situated at the heart of empire. The literature it held (the library started a subscription with W.H. Smith’s in 1888 and transferred it to Mudie’s in 1895) also made the library a space where a reader might peruse a novel for pleasure.28

23 See, for example, Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, gender and nation in Anglo-Australian popular fiction, 1875– 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and James Donald, ‘How English is it? Popular Literature and National Culture’, New Formations (1998): pp. 31–47. 24 Boosé, p. 39. 25 Simpson, p. 59. 26 RCI archive, Uncat. Letter book, 1868–73, Letter dated 11 June 1869. 27 RCI archive, Uncat. Library Committee Meeting minutes, 1 May 1888. 28 Craggs takes her analysis of the library into the twentieth century and shows that when the library was re-developed in 1936, principles of comfort and display were subordinated to those of utility. She writes that steel shelves were preferred to the usual wooden ones, and unlike the rest of the building, which was designed for the comfort of members, in the library there were to be no easy chairs, as these were ‘conducive to somnolence’. Craggs, p. 58.

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However, some of the readers seem to have been too noisy and lively for this gentlemanly mode of reading where muted opulence echoed the quiet selfassurance of the British gentleman. We know that by April 20 1899 the library was a thronging part of the Institute, as attested by the multiple signatures supporting the proposal in the suggestions book that the premises should be expanded. The ‘crowded state of the library and newspaper rooms’ is particularly frequently noted. By 1909 it was still not quiet enough for one curmudgeonly reader, who asked ‘that notices requesting “Silence” be hung in the library’.29 This suggests that the library was not a quiet sanctuary for serious study, rather that the readers maintained a more convivial atmosphere in which texts were discussed as they were read and alternative readings might be offered simultaneously. The ‘Guide to Shelving of Books’ (1900) tells us that the number of books the library contained had overflowed from any one single setting by the turn of the century. The Ladies Room, Smoking Room, Law Library, and Students’ Room, Library Gallery and Companions’ Room were all locations in which texts on varieties of colonial topics could be located. Once again, several of these locations suggest a communal atmosphere rather than one of isolated scholarship in which ideas might be discussed and opinions contested. The newspaper room was a very important part of the library for many users. The RCI provided a meeting place for its fellows living in the colonies when they returned to England, and its newspapers provided a link back to whichever part of the world the fellows or visitors had travelled from. Suggestions to the librarian recommend various newspapers from the Rangoon Times to the Liverpool and Manchester dailies, and by 1900 the library held hundreds of local and national newspapers from all over the world. In acceding to these requests, the library committee acquired subscriptions to newspapers from all parts of the political spectrum. The RCI reading rooms provided a space in which alternative accounts of the same events could be read and disputed over. For example, the library held 21 periodicals and newspapers published in the Cape Colony in its 1894 catalogue, including titles like Free Press, South African Review, and the Cape Church Monthly. Two of the titles were published in Afrikaans. Only seven years before the Boer War began, at a time of tension throughout the Cape Colony, Afrikaans publications writing unfavourably of the British would have been stacked side by side in the newspaper reading rooms and would have been freely available for readers to peruse and compare. The RCI library did, perhaps surprisingly, subscribe to magazines whose ideological standpoint was in opposition to their own, and which provided library users with alternate perspectives on the RCI’s imperialist concerns. The Aborigines’ Friend, published by the Aborigines’ Protection Society, was one of those. The journal reports the society’s meetings and its achievements each year. The 1896 number takes a particularly strident tone about ‘The Troubles in 29 RCI archive, Uncat. Library Suggestions book, entries dated 29 April 1899 and 26 August 1909.

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Matebeleland’ and argues that ‘Fresh and equitable arrangements need to be made now’ to rectify the ‘evils’ done by the British government.30 Plummer’s Magazine: A Jamaica Literary Magazine, although not donated to the RCI library until 1913, questioned the cultural as well as the political hegemony of the British. Edited by the Jamaican Oscar Plummer and published in Kingston, its first issue attempts to kick-start a cultural and creative revival amongst black Jamaicans. It prints poems on local subjects and encourages its readers to write similar pieces. An article on ‘Journalism in Jamaica’ argues for the difficulty of writing a history of local journalism due to the fact that the printed periodical records remain in the private hands of white landowners. Again, the writer attempts to complicate white narratives and enrich local knowledge. In a feature entitled ‘The Opinion of Jamaicans’, Plummer puts his own editorial opinion very strongly in saying: ‘The worst that ought to be said of us, is, that we are apt scholars, – for the origin of all the evils we have, came from them. White men were sent to rule us, and they delighted in evil and debauchery of all kinds.’31 Here the supposedly civilizing nature of imperial power is inverted and white men spread evil instead of knowledge. Some of the materials in the RCI library, then, explicitly militate against the idea of the positive and civilizing mission of imperialism, so glibly promoted elsewhere in the magazines held by the library. Texts like Plummer’s Magazine also invite their readers to think about whether reading itself could be an act of resistance to cultural imperialism. Finally, and most importantly, I want to make a case that fiction was perhaps the most significant factor in offering the RCI reader ways of reading against the grain of imperialism. The library held hundreds of novels like Rolf Boldrewood’s that seem to reinforce rather than trouble racial stereotypes, or those sensational and adventure stories that echo the narratives of exploration discussed above, such as H. Rider Haggard’s Jess, Charles Reade’s It is Never Too Late to Mend: a story of the Australian Gold Rush (1889) or W. Clark Russell’s An Ocean Free-Lance from a Privateersman’s Log, 1812 (1881). However, the theorizations of popular colonial fictions by critics like Robert Dixon, James Donald and Joseph Bristow mean that we cannot figure these texts as giving rise to a statically pro-empire reading. As Dixon writes, Popular fictions narrate the nation’s unity by differentiating it externally from other nations and by the inscription of a hierarchy of internal discriminations. The effect of popular fiction is a staging of this system of differentiations with no inherent tendency to work either conservatively (by imposing dominant ideologies) or subversively (by working against them).32

‘The Troubles in Matebeleland’, The Aborigines’ Friend (1896), pp. 1–23 (p. 1). Oscar Plummer, ‘The Opinion of Jamaicans’, Plummer’s Magazine 1 (1913),

30 31

pp. 9–10 (p. 10). 32 Dixon, p. 10.

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Dixon endows the individual reader with the power to interpret while maintaining the popular text’s ability to support ideas of national unity. The RCI library also gave its readers the opportunity to interpret ‘stagings of the system of differentiations’ written from a perspective other than that of the colonial or colonizing male. New Woman fiction is represented by Victoria Cross’s A Girl of the Klondike (1898) and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). (In 1897 these were supplemented with Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland.) Schreiner and Cross complicate the ways in which gender is used as a key factor in the ‘hierarchy of internal discriminations’. Once again, though, the actual contemporary reader in the RCI library is elusive. To attempt to reconstruct the implied RCI reader’s novel-reading experience in more detail, it is significant to note that fiction and nonfiction were not differentiated in the library’s shelving system. The shelving system (as reflected by the catalogue) was designed to keep all texts referring to a specific country within one area, and to organize those texts alphabetically under the author’s surname. This meant that even those seeking practical information might stumble across a more leisured or pleasurable reading experience or one that altered their perspectives on colonial issues. For example, the library carried Samuel Butler’s A First Year in the Canterbury Settlement (1863), a compilation of his letters home and journal entries from a year spent setting up a sheep station in New Zealand. Butler, better known now for his posthumously published attack on religious hypocrisy, The Way of All Flesh (1903), found mild success with this very practical tome proffering advice on land disputations, the best way to build a sheep pen and the hiring of servants. He ends with the encouraging comment: ‘And now, gentle reader, I wish you good luck with your run. If you have tolerably good fortune, in a very short time, you will be a rich man.’33 Next to this practical guide, an RCI reader would have found Butler’s strange utopian novel Erewhon (1872). If hoping for a followup guide to maintaining a sheep farm, the reader was likely to be disappointed by Butler’s satire of Victorian society, couched in the Swiftian device of the discovery of a new country. However, the description of the unspecified country that leads to Erewhon is based on Butler’s experience of New Zealand, and there are definite points of similarity that might have caused a reader some moments of thought if examining one after the other. Both are written in the first person by young men seeking their fortunes in New Zealand; both narratorial voices describe the climate and terrain in similar terms. Indeed, the details of exploration and the hardships of camping overlap; both talk of strapping their blankets around them for warmth, and in A First Year Butler’s first night of camping is made uncomfortable because he does not know to ‘select a spot which gave a hollow for the hip-bone’, whereas in Erewhon they ‘so disposed

33 Samuel Butler, A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1863), p. 162.

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of ourselves that we had a little hollow for our hip-bones’.34 A questioning reader might start to think of the RCI’s much-valued manuscripts of early explorations in less reverent terms when reading how closely fact and fiction might align in the unverified descriptions of previously unknown lands. While some of the details in the Butler texts are similar, the overall reading experience is rather different. In Erewhon the narrator stumbles across what he thinks are the lost tribes of Israel, who treat crimes as if they were illnesses and illness and poverty as if they were crimes. The narrator seems to be a lone voice of reason in a world where conventional morality is turned upside-down. However, Erewhon ends with the hero returning to Britain in order to raise funds for a scheme to exploit and enslave the Erewhonians on Australian sugar plantations. He writes, ‘I will guarantee that I convert the Erewhonians not only into good Christians but into a source of considerable profit to the shareholders’ (242). The morals of the trusted heroic explorer become as skewed as those of the Erewhonians when he realizes he can exploit them for monetary gain. The whole novel is a critique and satire of Victorian society, but its final pages seem particularly biting about the imperial project itself. A reader comes away from this text with a very different message than the one in Butler’s earlier guidebook. The final narratorial recommendation is explicit that the reader remain in Europe if he can; or at any rate, in some country which has been explored and settled, rather than go into places where others have not been before him. Exploring is delightful to look forward to or back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name. (31)

Exploration, as opposed to colonization, is the explicit target here, but the idea that the reader should ‘remain in Europe if he can’ seems to include colonialism in Butler’s critique. Of course, one might argue that these volumes would be found next to one another in any library. The effect of their juxtaposition on a reader in the RCI library, though, would probably have been much more powerful. Fact and fiction, pleasure and function, endorsement and critique of imperialism sit side by side on the shelf and would have made it difficult for a reader to swallow the uncomplicatedly progressive and civilizing idea of empire to be found elsewhere in the library and within the RCI’s purported objectives.35

34 Butler, A First Year, p. 55; Erewhon; or Over The Range (London: Trübner & Co., 1872), p. 18. All further references are to this edition and will be incorporated into the text. 35 Anthony Trollope’s works would also have been subject to this generic confusion on the part of the RCI reader: his nonfictional West Indies and the Spanish Main, North America, Australia and New Zealand and South Africa were shelved alongside his novel Harry Heathcote of Gangoil.

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The RCI and the Common Reader In some senses the RCI was a very exclusive society, and the RCI librarians were keen to exchange their catalogues with other learned and royal societies. But as the Institute established itself throughout the final decades of the century, public libraries and Mechanics’ Institutes also sought copies of the RCI’s annually published proceedings. For example, the RCI secretary wrote to Westminster Free Public Library on 20 April 1883 to grant their request for a copy. On 29 January 1895, applications for the Institute’s journal from the Tait Library in Lambeth and from the Hull Public Library were also acceded to.36 A few months later, in May 1895, the library committee ambitiously resolved that ‘copies of the New Library Catalogue be presented to the chief public libraries of the chief towns in Europe and America’.37 Indeed, the 1895 catalogue reveals the RCI to have been swapping reports and proceedings with institutions like the Self-Help Emigration Society, the Sydney Free Public Library and Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts, and Auckland Public Library, as well as similar public libraries and technical colleges all over the colonies. It is almost impossible to say how many readers may have looked at the catalogue or at the RCI’s proceedings within their own more ‘common’ reading settings in public libraries or Mechanic’s Institutes, or even if any of them ventured to the RCI library in consequence and experienced its bourgeois comforts. Richard Altick makes it clear that generalizing about Mechanics’ Institutes is always problematic due to the varying ways in which they developed from their earliest austere educational precepts (often into institutions more useful to the middle classes).38 If we accept Brian Porter’s thesis that before 1880 the general British public did not know or care much about empire, the number of ‘common’ readers interested in colonial matters may seem very small.39 Indeed, Jonathan Rose agrees that ‘most plebeian memoirs do not mention the Empire’.40 We can assume, though, that the RCI thought that by disseminating their library catalogue and proceedings more widely they would be able to disseminate their imperial ideologies more widely also. However, in the light of what we have seen about the contradictory and conflicted readings of empire that the RCI actually invited within its own library, the efficacy of this strategy seems unlikely. Scholars of working-class reading, like Rose, have shown how working-class readers were 36 RCI archive, Letter book from 22 Dec 1881–9 Aug 1883, letter dated 20 April 1883; Library and Museum Committee (minutes book), minutes of meeting held 29 Jan 1895. 37 RCI archive, Uncat. Library and Museum Committee (minutes book), minutes of meeting held 7 May 1895. 38 Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: a Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 194–5. 39 Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 194–226. 40 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 335.

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very much capable of resisting the imperialist (or other) ideological tendency of particular texts.41 Furthermore, the most read and most requested texts in the majority of Mechanics’ Institutes were novels.42 We have seen above how the most straightforwardly imperialist popular novel ‘stages’ differentiations without an inherent tendency towards the conservative or the subversive. The predominance of novels in the Mechanics’ Institutes, then, might lead us to read the Institutes as sites in which variant readings of the popular and the national were taking place before and after the RCI began sending out their proceedings and catalogues.43 In the final years of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the RCI continued promoting their message about the importance of the colonies to what they hoped was an ever-widening audience by attempting to access young readers. This strategy represented a potentially more successful means of offering particular ideas of empire to readers than utilizing Mechanics’ Institutes. Trevor Reese writes, The society worked hard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to further Empire studies in schools and universities. It prepared bibliographies and syllabuses to assist students and teachers, advocated the creation of university posts specialising in the study of the Empire, published handbooks and pamphlets, and organised educational conferences.44

The RCI’s educative impetus links into a wider trend recognized by Joseph Bristow: between 1870 and 1900, narratives celebrating empire and techniques in teaching reading and writing converged when children were taught to read from imperialist narratives.45 John Mackenzie argues that this educative project was an important part of the RCI’s propagandist strategies. He writes that the RCI … also exerted pressure on the education system to introduce imperial studies. In 1883 letters were sent to the headmasters of public schools and other secondary

For the earliest work on working-class resistance to dominant ideologies, see Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957) and Raymond William’s ‘Culture is Ordinary’, repr. in Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, ed. by Robin Gable (London and New York: Verso, 1989), pp. 3–18. 42 Altick, p. 231. 43 For more on Mechanics’ Institutes and the fiction they held, see Altick, pp. 230–32, and for an international perspective, Martyn Lyons, ‘Mechanics’ Institute Libraries – the Readers Demand Fiction’, A History of the Book in Australia, 1891–1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market, eds John Arnold and Martyn Lyons (St Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 2001), pp. 209–25. 44 Trevor Reese, ‘One Hundred Years of Service’, Royal Commonwealth Society Centenary 1868–1968 – special issue, ed. Harry Miller (London: Royal Commonwealth Society, 1968), pp. 35–41 (p. 39). 45 See Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: Harper Collins, 1991). 41

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schools attempting to persuade them to place colonial history and geography on the school curriculum … Although the schools at first reacted in a non-committal way, such activities began to bear fruit in the 1890s. The Education Code of 1892 incorporated suggestions for instruction on British colonies, and school inspectors were urged to develop studies from the fourth to higher standards.46

The RCI also began commissioning and publishing textbooks for use in schools, and Boosé even succeeded in getting questions on ‘Colonial Literature’ brought into the exams of the Council of the Library Association (although they were subsequently removed). He was appalled that librarian trainees were well read in European literature but ‘they made the most ludicrous mistakes as to the literature of their own Empire.’47 The RCI was then attempting to educate the next generation of common readers (and the guardians and disseminators of knowledge) to recognize the importance of the empire and to safeguard its integrity. Perhaps the clearest indication that this next generation, like the RCI’s readers of the late nineteenth century, often read against the ideological grain was the decisive role they played in dismantling the British Empire in the first half of the twentieth century.

Mackenzie, p. 175. Boosé, p. 25.

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Chapter 10

Fiction and the Australian Reading Public, 1888–1914 Tim Dolin

For a brief moment in the history of the modern West, between about 1880 and 1920, narrative fiction in books, newspapers, and magazines dominated the rapidly growing markets for transnational mass-produced popular entertainment in English, before being challenged successively by cinema, radio, and television. During that same period, bounded, let’s say, by the centenary of British colonization in 1888 and the Great War in 1914, Australia came of age as a nation. This was a time when Australians were proud to identify themselves as ‘independent Australian Britons’, in Alfred Deakin’s rousing phrase, bound to the old country by race, culture, and history. At the same time, in the 1880s and ’90s Australians began writing and reading stories about themselves which cast off the ignominy of their convict past and proclaimed a society of the future: a new-world social experiment – democratic, progressive, and fair (and racially exclusive). An upwelling of chauvinistic cultural nationalism, captured in the populist bushman aesthetics of the Sydney Bulletin, accompanied the long and sometimes precarious process of political nation-making that culminated in the self-governing colonies being formally constituted as a federation of states in 1901. Ironically, though, the Bulletin’s success depended on three factors that Ernest Gellner identified as being essential to modern nations: ‘homogeneity, literacy, and anonymity’. Although it exalted a folk culture of white male settlers and rural labourers battling heroically against a harsh interior, the Bulletin’s predominant readership was the ‘anonymous mass society’ of other modern nations, living in the world cities strung out along the temperate coastlines of southern Australia. The effacement of locality is one of the most salient characteristics of modernity – at bottom, all modern places are alike – and even a place as physically and biologically different as Australia was rapidly delocalized by the spread of European settlement. As early as 1846, when Godfrey Charles Mundy arrived in Sydney as Deputy Adjutant-General for the Colonies, he found a place that looked much like any other large commercial town: ‘It might be Waterford, or  This essay revises the initial findings of this study, originally published in Tim Dolin, ‘The Secret Reading Life of Us’, in Readers, Writers, Publishers: Essays and Poems, ed. by Brian Matthews (Canberra, 2004), pp. 115–34.  Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Malden, MA, 2006), pp. 138, 124.

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Wapping, with a dash of Nova Scotian Halifax’, he remarked. The novel played an important and under-recognized role in this subordination of colonial locality (or localities) to metropolitan uniformity: a process which might be called the Europeanization of Australian space. This did not happen, however, as it might have been expected to happen, through the flourishing of a European Australian fiction, the kind of fiction Frederick Sinnett looked forward to when he argued in 1856 that ‘we want to see [in Australian novels] a picture of universal human life and passion, but represented as modified by Australian externals’, not ‘stories [that] are too Australian’, where, ‘instead of human life, we have only “local manners and customs” portrayed in them’. It happened, rather, through reading. Australians have always proudly declared themselves to be a nation of readers, but theirs is not the experience of other ‘reading nations’. Until more than halfway through the twentieth century, both the production of a national literature and the establishment of a self-supporting market for local popular fiction were systematically, and equitably, stymied by the powerful interests of a globalized colonial book trade controlled from London, Sydney, and Melbourne, for whom it was more profitable to import books into Australia than to publish them there. The economics of the imperial book trade created conditions under which Australian cultural identity was formed through the consumption of culture largely from elsewhere. These were the economics of the cartel. British publishers ‘commanded English-language rights throughout much of Europe until the second world war, and in all colonial and former colonial possessions’, and Australia was ‘the largest market for British book exports continuously from at least 1889 until 1953’. By the 1870s, in fact, the value of British books exported to Australia already far exceeded that of books sent to other dominions and colonies. The ‘systematic practice of dumping cheap books’ on the Australian market was supported by the major local bookseller-publishers (they were booksellers first and foremost), who set up offices in the heart of the imperial trade in Paternoster Row in London; and aggressively promoted by the establishment of British publishing-house branch Godfrey Charles Mundy, Our Antipodes (Canberra, 2006), p. 3. See Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land (London, 1996) and The Road to Botany Bay:

 

An Essay in Spatial History (London, 1987).  Frederick Sinnett, ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia: 1’, Journal of Australasia, 1/1 (1856), pp. 97–105.  See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004).  Richard Nile, The Making of the Australian Literary Imagination (St Lucia, QLD, 2002), p. 37.  Graeme Johanson, A Study of Colonial Editions in Australia, 1843–1972 (Wellington, N.Z., 2000), p. 5.  Simon Nowell-Smith, International Copyright Law and the Publisher in the Reign of Queen Victoria (Oxford, 1968), p. 92.

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offices in Sydney and Melbourne.10 Inside the British cartel, Australia was still referred to as the ‘colonial’ trade as late as the 1960s, and its absolute belief in imperial entitlement – ‘Australia is ours’, the publishing houses believed11 – maintained the impression that ‘the colonial market was largely an Australian market’.12 And the Australian market was largely a fiction market.13 Writing in 1906, Frederick Macmillan remarked that ‘practically speaking the only real demand in Australasia is for works of fiction’.14 Novels and stories were imported into Australia in volume form (in cheap colonial editions and British editions of American novels, destined for sale or, more usually, loan or hire); in the enormous numbers of British newspapers and magazines that flooded in each week; or, via syndication, in the hundreds of metropolitan, regional, and rural Australian newspapers and magazines.15

12 13 10

Nile, p. 37. Ibid., p. 38. Nowell-Smith, p. 100. Johanson, Colonial Editions in Australia, p. 41. Plainly, the Australian book trade was much more complex than this in practice: there is evidence of American imports (new and secondhand), for example. Yet Thomas Farrer, permanent secretary of the British Board of Trade, was clearly out of touch with the basics of the imperial trade when he confessed to the Royal Commission into imperial copyright in 1877 that he had been ‘unable to ascertain what is the nature of the book trade in Australia; whether they buy and read our expensive British editions, or whether they get cheap American reprints, or whether they reprint for themselves’ (Nowell-Smith, p. 91). 14 Johanson argues that Macmillan was mistaken: ‘from 1843 to 1849, of all books advertised for sale in … New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania … only eighteen percent were literary works. In 1904 the lending branch of the New South Wales Public Library stocked only eighteen percent of fiction, and in 1913 the largest Melbourne bookselling company, E.W. Cole, stocked a twenty-five percent proportion of fiction among all its titles. In 1952 ‘less than’ twenty percent of all book imports to Australia were fiction’, pp. 41–2. It is not an argument that holds up, however. Fiction never constituted more than 20 per cent of book production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet Macmillan’s implicit point – that fiction was the mainstay of colonial trade in a firm like his – has weight. Titles in advertisements always ‘tended to be theological, educational or standard English classics’ (Nowell-Smith, p. 91). And bookshops and libraries may have carried only 20 per cent fiction, but Australian library loan records from 1861 to 1908 consistently show the overwhelming popularity of fiction borrowed (see www.australiancommonreader.com). See also Q.D. Leavis: ‘The investigation made in 1924 into the stocks and issues of urban libraries revealed that while they had 63 per cent. of non-fiction works on average to 37 per cent. of fiction, only 22 per cent of non-fiction was issued’. Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London, 1932), p. 4. 15 See Toni Johnson-Woods, Index to Serials in Australian Periodicals and Newspapers: Nineteenth Century, Bibliographica Historica Australiae 10 (Canberra: Mulini Press, 2001). 11

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Australia was undoubtedly a ‘reading nation’ in 1901, therefore, but a nation formed paradoxically by ‘not reading the nation’.16 Its reliance on the importation of print products from Britain artificially prolonged the influence of the culture of empire far beyond the period of colonial dependency. In the social sphere, a ‘growing sense of local agency and capacity over time’ quickly empowered ‘Australian migrants – overwhelmingly but by no means exclusively “British” – to make their own versions of modernity far distant from Old Europe’ by adapting British institutions and practices to the new conditions.17 Unlike the British colonies of occupation – the densely populated tropical regions controlled by monopolistic trading arrangements – the British ‘empire of free trade’ prospered from the flow of capital investment and the rise of steam shipping and railways, which ‘greatly increased demand for cheap food and industrial and precious minerals, and even the labour to produce these commodities’.18 This empire flourished, however, because Britain could confidently rely ‘on the bonds of sentiment, where elsewhere the … magistrate and the military sustained Empire’.19 In other words, monopolistic trading arrangements were encouraged in the cultural sphere in order to sustain the empire of sentiment. Australia simultaneously gained its social autonomy and retained its cultural dependency: it became the nation of independent Australian-Britons. This is not a clear-cut example of the operation of culture and imperialism, however. Certainly the dominant ideologies and social practices of British culture were internalized and reproduced in settler-colonial institutions, social practices, and identities. But was British written culture, and especially the novel, as important a vehicle for their internalization and reproduction as it was in colonies of occupation? Indeed, to what extent can we legitimately describe the British novels and stories being consumed by the Australian reading public in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth as even ‘British’? They were, rather, the characteristic products of the new economic, political, social, and cultural order that was being shaped over those years by the most powerful nations of the West. It was a transnational order, characterized by global monopoly capitalism and aggressive imperial expansion, the rapid development of new communications technologies and industries (electricity, transcontinental telegraphy, and telephony), the rise of an influential professional-managerial class and a vast new class of information workers (clerks and stenographers), new labour movements and feminist movements, and mass consumerism and advertising. The works of fiction that Australians read around the turn of the century, although they were largely (though not exclusively – there was a trade of secondhand books into Sydney) written and produced in Britain for a worldwide English-language 16 See Elizabeth Webby, ‘Not reading the nation: Australian readers of the 1890s’, Australian Literary Studies, 22.3 (2006), pp. 308–18. 17 Deryck M. Schreuder and Stuart Ward, eds, Australia’s Empire (Oxford, 2008), p. 9. 18 Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere (Oxford, 1983), p. 4. 19 Schreuder and Ward, p. 8.

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market, were manufactured as commodities for global Anglophone markets. They were ‘standardized merchandise sold in large volume’ for mass consumption by a readership indifferent to the boundaries of nation-states or the bonds of empire.20 This new generation of readers was, it has been noted, ‘little different from their counterparts in Birmingham, Boston, or the Cape’.21 They belonged to an entirely new sort of reading community, one catered for by the division of the entire English-speaking world into two global trade blocs, Britain and the US, that sold the same global products into many vastly different markets. This was a readership created by universal literacy and increased disposable income. It was Australian, but at the same time ‘the masses’, that large, widely dispersed, anonymous, demographically heterogeneous but behaviourally homogeneous group of people who, it is said, lack self-awareness as masses or binding social ties with one another. Even those cultural theorists attentive to the problems with the term (such as Richard Ohmann) understand mass culture to signal ‘the homogenization, the overriding of local and subcultural divisions’ that accompanied the expansion of print media in the late nineteenth century, and understand it to imply ‘the power of the culture industries to shape audiences and groups of consumers’ by producing, for profit, cultural commodities ‘for millions … to share, in similar or identical form, either simultaneously or nearly so [and] with dependable frequency’.22 Mass culture creates and then caters to an audience that is both habitual (‘sharing common needs and interests’) and passive; and in the process, the argument goes, it erodes local cultural identities and national traditions and values.23 In 1932 Q.D. Leavis likened the passive habits of the mass reading public to an ‘addiction’, a dependency on cheap fiction which spread cultural decay as surely as a dependency on narcotics.24 Indeed, the reading habit, Leavis provocatively argued in Fiction and the Reading Public, ‘is now often a form of the drug habit’: In suburban side-streets and even village shops it is common to find a stock of worn and greasy novels let out at 2d. or 3d. a volume; and it is surprising that a clientèle drawn from the poorest class can afford to change books several times a week, or even daily; but so strong is the reading habit that they do.25

Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late NineteenthCentury France (Berkeley, 1982), p. 3. 21 Martyn Lyons, ‘Reading practices in Australia’, in A History of the Book in Australia, 1891–1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market, ed. by John Arnold and Martyn Lyons (St Lucia, QLD, 2001), pp. 335–58 (p. 336). 22 Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London and New York, 1996), p. 14. 23 Ibid. 24 See Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth Century British Fiction (Bloomington, 1998) and John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (New York, 1993). 25 Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London, 1932), p. 7. 20

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The association of cheap books with the improvidence of the ‘poorest class’ reaches back to a nineteenth-century rhetoric of intemperance,26 and forward to the fear that mass communication technologies – cinema and, even more notably, television, of course – generate huge profits by encouraging forms of inertia and physical dependency. The ‘production of cheap editions’ by powerful commercial interests ‘drove a wedge between the educated and the general public’, Leavis bluntly asserted, making readers of cheap fiction powerless to stop themselves from reading and powerless to improve themselves.27 The informing opposition in this argument is that between consciousness and unconsciousness. The unconscious tendencies of the mass reading public were exploited by a ‘commercial and economic machinery’ that runs on its own, without conscious control. The ‘sudden opening of the fiction market to the general public was a blow to serious reading’, and Leavis’s book was a polemical plea to the ‘conscious minority’ to make a ‘conscious and directed effort’ to resist what Edmund Gosse had called ‘the tyranny of the novel’: to revive the vigorous Englishness of English culture, before the arrival of Woolworth’s and the Hollywood talkies (Leavis 14–18, 49–53) and the corruption of the national cultural spirit by transnational ‘Big Business’.28 The difference between Leavis’s moral panic and Richard Altick’s expansive celebration of ‘the democracy of print’ in The English Common Reader (1957) is a fundamental difference of perspective. Altick’s study closes safely in 1900, and he is able to look back from the distance of more than half a century (when the long-disparaged Victorians were beginning their mid-twentieth-century revival) to a time when the ‘disintegration of the reading public’29 was yet to have its fullest effects. Leavis, on the other hand, writes in the unsteady inter-war years, and laments what she sees happening to English minority culture there and then. Altick, moreover, is an American engaging with the English past in a reopened post-war Europe; Leavis an Englishwoman trying to respond to an increasingly Americanized present. Most importantly, Altick’s study articulates a utopian (and perhaps Cold-War) conviction 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.30

Something of this spirit is recaptured in Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), which examines working-class autobiographies to show how working men and women incorporated the most 28 29 30 26

Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., pp. 270, 161, 270, 17. Ibid., pp. 151–202. Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: a Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago, 1957), p. 7. 27

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elite and difficult works of Western literature and thought into their daily lives, demonstrating that ‘high culture’ was not the exclusive domain of educated elites, and that literary works did not have the effect of internalizing ruling-class ideology or controlling political dissent, as many historicist literary critics and cultural theorists had assumed. On the contrary, these works were appropriated by the lower classes, as Richard Hoggart’s seminal The Uses of Literacy (1957) had also concluded, and spoke to their own political and social interests, helping to transform the society in which they lived. Rose’s is a landmark study, but it has serious shortcomings. It is as distorted, in its own way, as Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public by the selectiveness of its ‘anthropological’ sample (to borrow Leavis’s description of her method of investigation).31 Leavis structured her study on the mere 25 responses she received to a questionnaire she sent to 60 authors of best-sellers.32 Rose’s documentary evidence is vast by comparison, but similarly narrow in that its thesis grows out of an analysis of the experiences of a small community of articulate, self-educated readers. By using surviving personal narratives of reading, Intellectual Life can offer very specific and compelling evidence not only of what readers read, where they read it, and where their books came from, but how they interpreted what they read, what connections they made between their reading and their everyday lives, what intellectual, social, and political effects their reading had, and how their reading changed over time. These autobiographical sources privilege a particular kind of reading and a particular kind of reader, however: the self-conscious or conscientious reader, articulate and attuned to the symbolic value of works and the cultural value of reading as an act. The preeminent reading subjects of reading history, these readers also unbalance and falsify the histories they help to make. Despite the extensive and compelling documentary materials his study brings to light, too, Rose offers no coherent argument about class identity (who are ‘the British working classes’ of the book’s title?) or class formation (how do we gauge the effects of reading on the totality of a social group?). Worst of all, he generalizes from the evidence (as though the recovery of that evidence, long buried, were itself sufficient to overturn prevailing orthodoxies), representing the experience of a tiny working-class elite as the experience of the entire ‘working classes’, and reproducing in the process the great nineteenth-century liberal vision of a superior mass culture. In this respect Rose’s is an unashamedly Arnoldian project, which brings it unexpectedly into alignment with Leavis’s plea for minority culture. Of course, reading history must work with the methodological limitations imposed by the scantiness and patchiness of its surviving evidence. Forgotten authors and titles are not the real victims of Franco Moretti’s ‘slaughterhouse of literature’: in theory they can mostly be recovered, after all.33 For each of those Leavis, p. xv. Leavis, pp. 45, 40. 33 Franco Moretti, ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, MLQ: Modern Language 31 32

Quarterly, 61/1 (2000), pp. 207–27.

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authors or titles, tens or hundreds of thousands of readers disappear from history utterly without trace. To draw conclusions about the reception of a work or works, historians of reading must either extrapolate from the more readily available production and circulation data (as Altick and Leavis both do) or attempt to check and balance information from different sources, as Rose does from ‘memoirs and diaries, school records, social surveys, oral interviews, library registers, letters to newspaper editors, fan mail, and even the proceedings of the Inquisition’.34 Alternatively, where feasible, dispersed quantitative data of reading, such as circulation records from public libraries, are invaluable for guiding the interpretation of holdings records (library catalogues and registers) in neighbouring libraries, and for drawing tentative conclusions about reading patterns in the culture at large. My point is that methodological decisions are important because they help to produce the cultural past that histories of reading purport to record: is it a history of democratic freedom, self-actualization and political agency, or social and cultural degeneration? This is particularly germane to the Australian situation in the 1890s and afterwards, when the democratization of culture was so fundamental to the nationalist rhetoric of social progress, when the imperial control of the fiction industry was so complete, and when cheap books were ‘dumped’ on the Australian market with no regard for its interests or needs.35 Mass-market fiction imported from Britain, but written in Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, and other Englishspeaking countries, was pervasive in Australia at this time. It dominated the colonial editions of the major publishers: the mainstays of Macmillan’s lists in the period, for example, were the Americans Winston Churchill and F. Marion Crawford, the Scot S.R. Crockett, and the English novelists Rosa Carey and Agnes and Egerton Castle.36 It dominated local periodicals: in the 1890s the 6d Australasian (the weekly paper of the Melbourne Argus, read across Australia) published four new serial novels by Australians and 20 by non-Australians (including Crawford, Hall Caine, Crockett, and Stanley Weyman). And it dominated the publicly subsidized subscription libraries which were established in Mechanics’ Institutes and Schools of Arts in most towns and cities in the colonies in the second half of the century. Eighty-three per cent of books borrowed from the Melbourne Athenaeum in 1895, for instance, were novels;37 similar figures were repeated across the country (see www.australiancommonreader.com and Tables 10.1–10.5). Colonial governments aimed to provide education and intellectual stimulus to Australians from all walks of life by underwriting the building of institutes and contributing to the annual running costs of the libraries. But the financial survival of the libraries depended upon the subscriptions of their members. 34 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, 2001), p. 1. 35 Nile, p. 37. 36 Johanson, pp. 290–306. 37 J.P. Wilson, ‘Fiction in public libraries’, Library Association of Australasia Conference Proceedings, 1896 (Adelaide, 1969), pp. 53–5 (p. 53).

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Table 10.1 Lambton Mechanics’ Institute, NSW: 20 Most Popular Novelists (by borrowers and loans), 1909   

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Edward Phillips Oppenheim  Nat Gould  Baroness Orczy  Horace Annesley Vachell  Joseph Hocking  Allen Raine  Archibald Clavering Gunter  Meredith Nicholson  David Graham Phillips  Louis Tracy  George Barr McCutcheon  Arthur Williams Marchmont  William Tufnell Le Queux  Robert William Chambers  Henry Rider Haggard  Ridgwell Cullum  Max Pemberton  William Nathaniel Harben  Harold McGrath  Cyrus Townsend Brady 

Bor.

 61  48  44  42  41  38  37  36  35  34  33  33  32  32  31  30  28  28  27  27

Loans 

128  86  93  53  69  57  54  46  44  51  52  41  59  39  42  40  34  32  33  31

Source: Australian Common Reader database (www.australiancommonreader.com)

Table 10.2

  

1 2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20  

Collie Mechanics’ Institute, WA: 20 Most Popular Novelists (by borrowers and loans), 1908–1909

Joseph Hocking  Samuel Rutherford Crockett  Edward Phillips Oppenheim  Henry Rider Haggard  Nat Gould  Marie Corelli  Ellen Wood  Tom Gallon  Baroness Orczy  Allen Raine  Horace Annesley Vachell  Arthur Williams Marchmont  William Tufnell Le Queux  Silas Kitto Hocking  Max Pemberton  Ralph Connor  Bithia Mary Croker  Winston Churchill  Maxwell Gray  Arthur Conan Doyle 

Bor. 

Loans

130  110  107  102  101  99  96  87  84  83  82  80  80  79  70  68  68  67  66  61

 304  180  205  185  208  178  191  132  110  113  122  142  119  124  98  86  83  88  88  89

Source: Australian Common Reader database (www.australiancommonreader.com)

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Table 10.3 Maitland Institute, SA: 20 Most Popular Novelists (by borrowers and loans), 1909    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Baroness Orczy  John Oxenham  Samuel Rutherford Crockett  William Tufnell Le Queux  Allen Raine  Joseph Hocking  Charles Garvice  Marie Corelli  Louis Tracy  Stanley John Weyman  George MacDonald  Edward Phillips Oppenheim  Silas Kitto Hocking  Rosa Nouchette Carey  Tom Gallon  Rudyard Kipling  William Nathaniel Harben  Frank Thomas Bullen  Katherine Cecil Thurston  Ralph Connor 

Bor.  22  19  18  18  17  16  15  14  14  14  13  12  12  10  10  10  10  10  10  10

Loans  30  34  25  24  28  22  23  19  17  16  23  22  19  19  15  14  13  12  12  11

Source: Australian Common Reader database (www.australiancommonreader.com)

Table 10.6 shows that the Western Australian State Government contributed only £75 to the Mechanics’ Institute in Collie, a small coal-mining and logging town in the southwest of the state, in 1908. Income from members’ fees for the same year amounted to £94, and only income from other sources, including letting fees for the use of the premises, ensured that the Institute came close to (but just failed in) balancing its books. Institutes like Collie gave their subscribers what they wanted, therefore – the latest fiction – to ensure that they would not defect to the commercial circulating libraries springing up in newsagents and shops in every suburb and town across the country.38 A more detailed examination of the social backgrounds and fiction-reading patterns of Australian library subscribers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals the complexity of this national/transnational readership. Collie was declared a municipality in 1901, the year the Mechanics’ Institute was built. The area had been mined since the 1880s, but the town had only been proclaimed in 1897, when the mining operations, underwritten by the State Government, began in earnest and the railway line linked the town to the coast. That year there 38 Martyn Lyons, ‘Mechanics’ Institute libraries – the readers demand fiction’, in Arnold and Lyons, A History of the Book in Australia, pp. 209–25.

Fiction and the Australian Reading Public

Table 10.4

161

Rosedale, VIC: Most Popular Novelists (by borrowers and loans), 1905–1908; 1911–1912

Reed, Myrtle Oxenham, John Oppenheim, E. Phillips Pemberton, Max Fowler, Ellen Thorneycroft Corelli, Marie Crockett, S.R. Hocking, Joseph Carey, Rosa Vachell, Horace Connor, Ralph Weyman, Stanley Crawford, F. Marion Merriman, Henry Seton Forman, Justus Moore, Frankfort Eggleston, George Raine, Allen Barclay, Florence Haggard, Rider Harben, William Croker, Bithia Mary Phillips, David Graham McCutcheon, George Barr Marchmont, A.W. Hope, Anthony Churchill, Winston Lincoln, Joseph Hocking, Silas Bindloss, Harold Benson, E.F. Gallon, Tom Johnston, Mary Le Queux Garland, Hamlin Swan, Annie Besant, Walter Dickens, Charles Montgomery, L.M. Gunter, Archibald Black, William

Loans 119 131 127 112 114 87 122 129 74 81 79 73 68 57 57 76 48 61 83 55 54 74 69 50 54 60 43 59 53 54 53 55 41 41 42 46 56 62 55 43 48

Borrowers 53 50 49 48 44 44 42 40 39 37 37 36 36 35 35 34 34 33 33 32 32 32 31 31 31 30 30 29 29 29 29 28 26 26 26 25 25 24 23 21 18

Source: Australian Common Reader database (www.australiancommonreader.com)

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Table 10.5

Port Germein, SA: Most Popular Novelists (by borrowers and loans), 1892–1908

Hocking, Joseph Haggard, Rider Wood, Ellen Hocking, Silas Corelli, Marie Worboise, Emma Jane Collins, Wilkie Roe, Edward Buchanan, Robert Doyle, A.C. Lyall, Edna Braddon, M.E. Boldrewood, Rolf Russell, William Clark Ouida Henty, G.A. Boothby, Guy Franc, Maud Caine, Hall Linton, Eliza Lynn Crockett, S.R. Reade, Charles Kipling, Rudyard Dickens, Charles Rudd, Steele Eliot, George Hardy, Thomas Grand, Sarah Gissing, George Jerome K. Jerome Hume, Fergus Lawson, Henry

Loans 688 677 651 585 577 451 430 410 409 369 358 356 314 290 278 252 206 206 192 164 152 127 123 122 98 95 85 82 78 73 73 64

Borrowers 139 200 208 150 184 132 137 141 137 148 155 130 132 126 107 122 108 93 92 78 79 74 70 70 58 61 52 61 54 56 54 48

Source: Australian Common Reader database (www.australiancommonreader.com)

Table 10.6

Expenditure and Receipts (in ₤ s. d.), Albany and Collie Mechanics’ Institutes, 1908 No. books

Albany Collie

Albany Collie

4200 1100

Est. value of books 315 297

Total building cost 720 856 Expend. Books, periodicals, papers 29 7 3 43 6 9

Receipts Govt grant

Receipts Donations

Receipts Members’ fees

Receipts Rents

Receipts Other receipts

Receipts Total

35 0 0 75 0 0

0 14 0 30 19 0

41 7 0 94 4 9

3 18 0 182 17 0

3 17 0 28 2 6

84 16 0 411 3 3

Expend. Furniture

Expend. Salaries and wages

Expend. Building additions, repairs 11 1 3

Expend. Insurance

Expend.e All else exp.

Expend. Total

306 500

5 14 3 196 19 1

85 19 11 431 6 7

41 5 0

36 16 8 144 15 9

Source: Western Australian Official Year Book, 1908 (Perth, WA, Government Printer, 1909)

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164

was an influx of migrant labour to work in the new shafts, and by 1901, the town’s population had reached more than 1,000. In 1908 Collie was one of 118 Mechanics’ and Miners’ Institutes active in WA. At that time it held 1,165 books (out of a total of nearly 100,000 across all the Institutes in the state); of those, 1,067 were novels (an unusually high percentage). There were 10,268 recorded loan issues in 1908–1909, of which 8,562 were books (the remainder were periodical loans); of those books, 8,433 were novels (only 129 nonfiction books were borrowed). The fiction issues encompassed 804 titles. About 75 per cent of the total fiction collection was borrowed; a quarter of all books, in other words, were not borrowed at all during the 18 months from July 1908 to December 1909, for which complete circulation data survives. The Collie Institute had 392 members on its books in 1908–1909 (346 men and 46 women), out of a population of about 1,200. (It should be remembered that Worsley, a couple of miles away, was included in the Collie Municipal Council area, and had a larger institute and library.)39 Of the 392 members of the Collie library, 328 actually borrowed books during this period (84 per cent of the membership): 7,280 loan issues were made to men, and 1,282 to women. Women were, on average, bigger readers than men, however: they borrowed an average of 28 books each; men borrowed 21 books each. Because of the high itinerant population in mining communities, it has only been possible to identify the occupations of about 60 per cent of borrowers from electoral rolls. But even given this limited data, occupational information has proven extremely useful for analyzing reading habits against occupational profiles. We know, for example, that by far the largest group of borrowers was, unsurprisingly miners: a category that took in a wide range of skilled trades and unskilled labouring jobs. This may seem unremarkable for a mining town, or indeed for a Mechanics’ Institute, governed and administered by the local town elite and ‘purported to serve the educational and recreational needs of the working class’ and lower middle class.40 By 1900, however, the original ideals of the institutes movement – the mental and moral improvement and rational recreation of its members’41 – had been eroded and ‘in town after town, the “respectable” members of society, with their own [middle-class] prejudices … and standards, committed many institutes to a tone and reputation which alienated the mechanics’.42 This was not the case in Collie, however, as Table 10.7 shows. We can tell from this data what the clergymen borrowed, and the policeman; what the local Member of 1,350 books: Western Australian Official Yearbook (Perth, 1909). P. Rose, W. Birman, and M. White, ‘“Respectable” and “Useful”: The Institute

39 40

movement in Western Australia’, in Pioneering Culture: Mechanics’ Institutes and Schools of Art in Australia, ed. by P.C. Candy and J. Laurent (Adelaide, 1994), pp. 126–59 (p. 128). 41 P. Candy, ‘“The Light of Heaven Itself”: The Contribution of the Institutes to Australia’s Cultural History’, in Pioneering Culture, pp. 1–28 (p. 28). 42 M. Whiting, ‘The Education of Adults in Schools of Arts in Colonial New South Wales’, in Pioneering Culture, pp. 160–82 (p. 178).

Table 10.7

Occupational Profiles of Collie Borrowers, 1908–1909

Occupation

No. Loan

Occupation

No. Loan

Occupation

No. Loan

Occupation

No. Loan

Miner

1650

Millhand

68

Blacksmith

Married woman

756

Engineer

65

Contractor

25

Works inspector

8

22

Law Clerk

Labourer

291

Spinster

65

6

MP for Collie

22

Faller

Mine manager

290

Fitter

5

62

Electrician

22

Barrister

Engine Driver

241

4

Farmer

54

Fireman

22

Railway Employee

4

Chemist Grocer

198

Porter

52

Draper

21

Storekeeper

3

185

Railway guard

50

Watchmaker

20

Road Layer

3

Sleeper hewer

171

Boot dealer

48

Cleaner

20

Engine cleaner

3

Forest ranger

150

Builder

47

Land Agent

19

Estate agent

3

Wheelwright

149

Clergyman

44

Carter

18

Groom

2

Painter

137

School teacher

42

Cordial manufacturer

18

Plumber

2

Hotelkeeper

136

Foreman

41

Shopkeeper

18

Greengrocer

1

Physician

136

Clerk

41

Tailor

17

 

 

Hewer

133

Ironmonger

37

Journalist

14

 

 

Civil Servant

104

Matron

36

Carrier

14

 

 

Butcher

89

Baker

35

Printer

13

 

 

Bank Manager

84

33

Electrical engineer

11

 

 

Carpenter

81

Policeman Salvation Army Officer

31

Accountant

11

 

 

Widow

77

Postmaster

30

Teamster

8

 

 

Source: Australian Common Reader database (www.australiancommonreader.com)

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Parliament read, and the hotelkeepers, grocers, and engine drivers; the law clerk, the doctors, and the postmaster. We can tell what the members of the local union executive read, and mine management. Most importantly, we can tell whether the mine manager read the same books as the miners or not; whether women read different books from men; and whether the clergymen and the publicans shared a favourite author. So what did Collie’s readers borrow? It should be said that virtually all the fiction in the Collie library was also in other Mechanics’ Institute libraries in WA and in other states. This should come as no surprise, given that the library committee had a standing order with a supplier, E.S. Wigg and Son in Perth, for six new titles per month, which would account for the dominance of new fiction in a library that had only been operating for a few years. None of the top 50 novels borrowed in 1908–1909 was first published before 1890, and 45 of them were published after 1900. Of those 45, moreover, 32 were published in 1907, 1908, and 1909 alone.43 Of course, readers could only borrow what was on the shelves, so it is important to know what they chose not to borrow: this included, for example, any of the works of William Shakespeare, Thackeray, Hardy, Kipling, Stevenson, Arnold Bennett, or H.G. Wells. Of the whole of Sir Walter Scott’s fiction, only Ivanhoe was borrowed (five times); of Dickens, only The Old Curiosity Shop (twice) and The Pickwick Papers (once). The favourite George Eliot was (perhaps predictably in an industrial town) Felix Holt; and the favourite Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer. The most popular Australian novelist (if we don’t count Nat Gould) was Steele Rudd: 18 readers borrowed Dad in Politics.44 Seven Little Australians went out only three times; Robbery Under Arms twice; and only the bank manager thought The Bulletin Story Book might be worth a read. Collie’s borrowers read contemporary bestsellers almost exclusively, therefore, but where did they come from? The loans data show that Collie borrowings (and borrowings from other libraries in this period: Tables 10.1–10.5) did not correspond strongly to the circulation patterns inferred from holdings in British public libraries for the same period. Simon Eliot’s study of multiple copies on library shelves in Britain shows the continuing dominance there of Scott, Dickens, Mrs Henry Wood, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, whose popularity was only rivalled by that of Walter Besant, Rider Haggard, and Mark Twain (Eliot). In Collie, Wood and Rider Haggard are both top-10 authors; but neither Scott nor Dickens make it even into the top 50. Moreover, the biggest-selling British author for 1908 and 1909, Marie Corelli, is unplaced in the top 25 loan titles for the period, as Table 10.8 shows. Of the top 10 bestsellers in the United States for each of 1908 and 1909, only five were on the shelves in Collie: John Fox, Jr’s runaway bestselling Trail of the Lonesome Pine, Harold MacGrath’s The Lure of the Mask and The Goose One was published in 1909, 18 in 1908, and 13 in 1907. Sandy’s Selection was borrowed 12 times; On our Selection once; and Back at Our

43 44

Selection four times.

Table 10.8 Title

Collie, WA, 1908–1909: Top 25 Loans Showing Publisher. Titles in bold = no UK publication.

Trampled Cross, The In the Cause of Freedom Doctor of Crow’s Nest, The Weapons of Mystery, The Gambler, The Second Generation, The Shadow Between, The Fair Margaret Betrayal, The Scarlet Clue, the Queen of the Rushes: A Tale of the Welsh Revival Tatterley: The Story of a Dead Man Not Proven Travers: A Story of the San Francisco Earthquake Lady of Delight, The Whispering Smith Stolen Sweets Black Bag, The Ann Boyd King Spruce Soul of Dominic Wildthorne, The Hemlock Avenue Mystery Castle of Dawn, The My Lost Self Trail of the Lonesome Pine, The

Author

Hocking, Joseph Marchmont, Arthur Williams Connor, Ralph Hocking, Joseph Thurston, Katherine Cecil Phillips, David Graham Hocking, Silas Kitto Haggard, Sir Henry Rider Oppenheim, Edward Phillips Hocking, Silas Kitto Raine, Allen Gallon, Tom Askew, Claude and Alice Dean, Sara Meade, L. T. Spearman, Frank Hamilton Le Queux, William Tufnell Vance, Louis Joseph Harben, William Nathaniel Day, Holman Hocking, Joseph Doubleday, Roman Kramer, Harold Morton Marchmont, Arthur Williams Fox, John Jnr

Source: Australian Common Reader database (www.australiancommonreader.com)

Publ. 1907 1907 1906 1890 1905 1907 1908 1907 1904 1904 1906 1907 1908 1908 1907 1908 1908 1908 1906 1908 1908 1908 1908 1908 1908

1st Publ.

Hodder and Stoughton Ward, Lock and Co. Hodder and Stoughton George Routledge and Co. Harper and Bros. Appleton and Co. Frederick Warne Longmans Ward, Lock and Co. Frederick Warne Hutchinson Hutchinson Ward, Lock and Co. F. Stokes and Co. Hodder and Stoughton Charles Scribner’s Sons Eveleigh Nash Grant Richards Harper and Bros. Harper and Bros. Hodder and Stoughton Little, Brown and Co. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Cassell Charles Scribner’s Sons

Bor. 47 47 45 43 43 40 39 39 36 34 34 34 34 33 33 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 31 30

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Girl, and Louis Vance’s The Black Bag (Rex Beach’s The Silver Horde [1909] was added to the collection in 1910). The Fox and the Vance were both in the top 25 loaned titles, but more importantly, 9 of the 21 authors in that list are Americans: David Graham Phillips, Sara Dean, Frank Hamilton Spearman, Vance, William Nathaniel Harben, Holman Day, Roman Doubleday, Harold Morton Kramer, and Fox. The most popular American title, by David Graham Phillips, is one of that author’s muckraking exposés of American high society.45 Significantly, it (and two other titles in the list) were never published by British publishers, and presumably the US edition was not distributed into the Australian market through the British cartel: yet Phillips is on the shelves in nearly all the libraries examined. Interestingly, too, the Collie list includes a Canadian, Ralph Connor – real name Charles William Gordon, a Presbyterian minister who wrote stories combining ‘exciting adventure and moral purity’46 – and an Irishwoman, Katherine Thurston, whose novels of impersonation and mistaken identity were huge bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic.47 These novels were, however, like most American titles, distributed in Australia in British editions, as the publisher data in Table 10.8 shows – a reminder that the dominance of the British imperial book-trade in Australia does not altogether equate with the dominance of British fiction here.48 Of the authors of these most heavily borrowed books, probably only Rider Haggard and E. Phillips Oppenheim are immediately recognizable to modern readers as best-selling authors of the period. And, certainly, few readers now would expect to find 4 novels out of the 10 by two members of the same family: Joseph and Silas Hocking, Methodist ministers of Cornish background who, like Connor, wrote adventure romances of faith and doubt – a sort of boys’ own Robert Elsmere. Q.D. Leavis identified this most important and popular category of best-seller, which evades, at least on the face of it, simple generic classification, in Fiction and the Reading Public. Unlike the crime novel or the love-romance, the fiction of ‘moral passion’ (in Leavis’s words), best exemplified by Marie Corelli, Florence Barclay, or Gene Stratton Porter, is defined by the common ‘power’ it exerts on its readers: a ‘terrific vitality … set to turn the machinery of morality’. This is a fiction ‘genuinely preoccupied with ethical problems, whatever side attractions there may be in the way of unconscious pornography and excuses for day-dreaming.’ These novels provoke ‘vague warm surges of feeling associated with religion and religion substitutes – e.g. life, death, love, good, evil, home, mother, noble, S. Kunitz and H. Haycraft, Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature (New York, 1942), p. 1100. 46 Kunitz and Haycraft, p. 553. 47 Her biggest seller was her first novel, The Masquerader (1904), published as John Chilcote, M.P. in England. 48 Whether it arrived here as one of the hundreds of thousands of secondhand books imported directly from the US, or was distributed in its original bindings through a British publishing house, is unclear. 45

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gallant, purity, honour’.49 One might be tempted to construe from the popularity of nonconformist novelists in Collie the presence of a stern Methodist minister, but the sheer diversity of other loans to those who borrowed the Hockings’ fiction discounts that possibility – and circulation data from other Australian library collections (see accompanying tables) corroborates the universal popularity of the Hockings, and indeed clergyman novelists, among turn-of-the-century readers.50 A list of the most borrowed authors in the Collie library (Table 10.9; grouped by total number of loans, not total number of borrowers) takes us back to more familiar territory: Joseph Hocking is far and away the most popular author, but there are few other surprises: Nat Gould, Mrs Henry Wood, Marie Corelli, S.R. Crockett (another clergyman and one of a number of Scottish romancers who dominated the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century best-seller lists)51, Horace Vachell (author of country house mysteries), and the spy novelists and invasion-scare novelists Oppenheim and Le Queux. All of these authors were British, although the significance of the different regional origins of popular British novelists should also be noted, especially in relation to migration and settlement patterns in Australia. A great deal more could be learned about reading patterns from this circulation data – patterns of women’s reading, for example, or children’s reading. In addition, once comparable data from other libraries has been analyzed, reading patterns might usefully be mapped to other coordinates, such as demographic data, pastoral and industrial conditions and work practices (comparing two coal-mining towns, Collie and Lambton, for example, or a coal-mining town and a small farming community), religious practices, and other salient factors. The level of local detail that becomes available once readers from a neighbourhood can be identified – once we know something about where they lived, whether they were married, what they did for a living, what their status was in the community, when they were born and how they died, and much more, in some cases, from local or parish records and local newspapers – has the potential to transform our understanding of ‘communities of reading’. Literary studies has long been concerned with ‘interpretive communities’ made up ‘of those who share interpretive strategies’,52 but it has had difficulty going beyond ‘the supposed experience of a generalised reader’: it has no real interest in ‘the actual reading experiences and responses of specific individuals to specific works’.53 Reading history, on the other hand, has vigorously taken up that pursuit 51 52 49

Leavis, p. 64. Rosedale MI Collection, MS 9860, Box 4:3. The so-called ‘Kailyard’ school, including Ian Maclaren and J.M. Barrie. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, 1980), p. 14. 53 Susan R. Suleiman, ‘Introduction: Varieties of Audience-Oriented Criticism’, in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. by Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton, NJ, 1980) pp. 3–45 (p. 26). 50

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Table 10.9

Collie, WA, 1908–1909: Top 40 Authors by Total Loans and Country of Origin

Author Hocking, Joseph Gould, Nat Oppenheim, Edward Phillips Wood, Ellen Haggard, Sir Henry Rider Crockett, Samuel Rutherford Corelli, Marie Marchmont, Arthur Williams Gallon, Tom Hocking, Silas Kitto Vachell, Horace Annesley Le Queux, William Tufnell Raine, Allen Orczy, Baroness Pemberton, Sir Max Doyle, Arthur Conan Churchill, Winston Gray, Maxwell Connor, Ralph Croker, Bithia Mary Jacobs, William Wymark Phillips, David Graham Nicholson, Meredith Merriman, Henry Seton Meade, L. T. Hope, Anthony Reade, Charles Boothby, Guy Newell Lyall, Edna Barr, Robert Thurston, Katherine Cecil Becke, George Lewis Johnston, Mary Begbie, Harold Phillpotts, Eden London, Jack Moore, Frank Frankfort Marsh, Richard Jepson, Edgar Alfred

Total Loans 304 208 205 191 185 180 178 142 132 124 122 119 113 110 98 89 88 88 86 83 78 76 76 73 71 71 70 70 69 68 67 65 61 60 60 59 59 55 54

Country UK UK/Australia UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK USA UK Canada UK UK USA USA UK UK UK UK UK UK USA Ireland Australia USA UK UK USA Ireland UK UK

Source: Australian Common Reader database (www.australiancommonreader.com)

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of individual readers and reading communities, but has never quite resolved the tension between the two – the subjective reading experience of the individual reader and the collective social action implied in the activities of a reading community.54 In part, this is because of a tendency to conceive reading communities as local forms of resistance to the strategies of power of hegemonic imperial or commercial cultural interests – an example of everyday tactics, in Michel de Certeau’s sense.55 What reading historians typically try to reconstruct is the localized culture as mentalité, in Roger Chartier’s term, with its own specific forms of sociability and modes of thought.56 While I agree that the history of reading must be something more than the history of what is read, to borrow Chartier’s dictum (one that surely arises out of the very paucity of reading data), we still badly need histories of what was read where in the past, as well as what readers there chose not to read; and those data can tell us a great deal about local cultures and their intersections with national and transnational cultural experiences. Reading communities, after all, are both social networks (a book club, workplace, or university class) and formations based on genre: readers who have in common only their readership of a certain category of book (communities of crime fiction readers or science-fiction buffs, or whatever).57 Quantitative reading data derived from library circulation records (such as that collected in the developing Australian Common Reader archive at www.australiancommonreader. com) reveals in sometimes surprising ways how these two kinds of communities were juxtaposed. We know that the local school teacher in Collie read Sesame and Lilies; that a mining engineer borrowed everything of Carlyle’s he could find (three volumes of The French Revolution, The Life of John Sterling, and Past and Present); that The Origin of Species was read by a miner, a grocer, and a coal hewer; and that both volumes of Macaulay’s History of England were checked out to an engine driver. We know, too, what the four mine managers, W.D. Bedlington, Fred Howie, George Leitch, and John Evans, Sr., all read. Together, they borrowed nearly 300 books over that 18-month period (although more than half of those were borrowed by Bedlington alone). But more importantly, we can learn that more than half of the 71 books Bedlington borrowed were also borrowed by Mary Hartley, a local housewife, and that these include – apart from the ubiquitous Hockings – novels we now think of as rather boyish. Mrs Hartley was a great fan of Rider For Lyons, for example, personal narratives of reading ‘reveal broad similarities and patterns of behaviour, together with all that is unique about one reader’s experience, and the social, cultural, and professional background which forms its essential context’. Lyons, ‘Reading Practices in Australia,’ p. 341. 55 The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). This motive lies behind Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York, 2002). 56 Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Ithaca, NY, 1988), pp. 2–3. 57 See Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill, 1997). 54

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Haggard and the sub-Dickensian cockney low-life romances of Tom Gallon (unless she borrowed for her husband); and Bedlington read plenty of novels we now think of as written for women: books by Mrs Henry Wood, for instance, and Marie Corelli. Clearly we must question certain assumptions about class, gender, and genre when we begin thinking about the framing experiences and assumptions of a local community of readers in Australia: their material and social environment, local institutional contexts, and habitus, and the ways these might be linked to the works themselves through generic codes, narrative conventions, material and institutional conditions, and cultural values passing back and forth between those two worlds. We can only reach some understanding of this process of exchange by analyzing in a more comprehensive way – with reference to the known reading habits of thousands of people in different parts of Australia – who read what, when, and where. What may be insignificant at the level of individual readers and individual works becomes highly significant, I would suggest, at the level of reading communities and genres – the place where individual readers enter into a complex network of relations with other readers, and where the ‘individual work enters into a complex network of relations with other works’.58 This kind of quantitative evidence valuably addresses the relationship between genres, places, and what John Frow calls ‘regimes of reading’: the shared competencies, norms, and values that govern how we read and the kinds of value we attach to books (a concept similar to Stanley Fish’s ‘interpretive communities’). ‘Just as texts are never one-of-a-kind but are always the partial repetitions of a kind,’ Frow argues, ‘so reading is never simply an individual act, although it is always that.’ There are regularities in the ways we ‘read and look and listen … that are shaped by our experience and our education’.59 Chief among those are ‘material, representational and symbolic activities which find their hallmark in the way individuals invest in places and thereby empower themselves collectively by virtue of that investment’.60 Literary and (especially) sub-literary genres are extremely durable, encoding particular norms of temporal existence, material habitation, and spatial orientation. It may even be argued that genres are marked according to their particular symbolic uses of space (think only of the Western, the invasion-scare novel, or the noir thriller). If genres are, in Fredric Jameson’s words, ‘institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact’, their effect is also to reinforce specific kinds of spatial and temporal experience. In the mass marketplace, where genre entered the ‘brand-name system’ of the Maria Corti, Advances in Semiotics, trans. Margherita Bogat and Allen Mandelbaum (Bloomington; London, 1978), p. 115. 59 John Frow, Genre (London; New York, 2006), p. 139. 60 David Harvey, ‘From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Post-Modernity’, in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. by Jon Bird et al. (London, 1993), pp. 3–29 (pp. 23–4). 58

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market economy so as to differentiate and target cultural markets, that process of reinforcement was intensified.61 All of which raises the question: would we describe Collie’s borrowers as a readership, a regional culture, members of a new nation, or a market? Undoubtedly, they are the targeted consumers of particular kinds of cultural products, and occupy a space in a transnational cultural field where national and imperial identities are suppressed. What they read is without aesthetic value (it is unoriginal, unliterary), without ‘national, symbolic value’ and without imperial meaning: its publishers merely seek maximum investment profitability and need to find the largest, and least differentiated, market possible.62 But more than this, originality defines a national culture, and can only be associated with writing – with literary production. Nations come into being as representations, as narratives: ‘the power to narrate’ is the power to identify oneself.63 Is it possible, then, to speak meaningfully about a reading culture – an inarticulate reading culture, indifferent to the Australianness or Englishness of the fiction it reads – as a national culture? Or is it only by selfnarration, by independent, individual self-expression, that we can assert our separate sovereignty? Nations gain meaning from the stories they tell; but they also gain meaning from the stories they read. For a long time, Australia’s cultural dependency on Britain bred a particularly tenacious form of colonial alienation and inferiority, known popularly after 1950 as the ‘cultural cringe’ and later in art-historical discourse as the ‘provincialism problem’, which characterized us as stubborn custodians of our localism – antipodeans – defending ‘the possibility and validity of “making good, original art right here”’ whilst reluctantly recognizing ‘that the generative innovations in art, and the criteria for standards of ‘quality’, ‘originality’, ‘interest’, ‘forcefulness’, and so on, are determined externally’.64 More recently, however, Australian cultural cringe has been reinvented as ‘positive unoriginality’: a culture which does not privilege writing over reading, which favours a postmodern aesthetic of appropriation and pastiche, and which leapfrogs over the obstacle of a national culture to the open markets of the global ‘megaculture’. For some cultural historians, this has freed us up to reevaluate our past: to recognize that the ‘precondition’ for European Australian culture has always been ‘its dialogue or negotiation with, its implication in, its appropriation, re-combination, indigenization or hybridization of, international cultures – even at the most mundane and local level, always in

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY, 1981), pp. 106, 107. 62 Sarah Corse, Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 130, 10. 63 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1993), p. xiii. 64 A.A. Phillips, The Australian Tradition: Studies in Colonial Culture (Melbourne, 1958). Bernard Smith, The Antipodean Manifesto: Essays in Art and History (Melbourne, 1975); Terry Smith, Transformations in Australian Art (St Leonards, NSW, 2002), p. 114. 61

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a context structured by local and national dynamics’.65 Those are acts of reading, and reading has a history, as Robert Darnton wrote in The Kiss of Lamourette, and it has historical consequences: ‘there is indeed a recognisable correspondence’, William St Clair concluded in his magisterial study, The Reading Nation, ‘between historic reading patterns and consequent mentalities. The correlation is far from exact, but over the whole print era, the links, both general and particular, between texts, books, reading, and wider consequences appear to be secure’.66 European Australia formed itself out of reading – out of borrowed materials: the materials of imperial culture and, increasingly after 1880, mass-market culture.

65 David Carter, ‘Good Readers and Good Citizens: Literature, Media and the Nation’, Australian Literary Studies 19 (1999), pp. 136–51, p. 149. 66 Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (London, 1990); St Clair, p. 433.

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Gaskell, Elizabeth, The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, ed. by Joanne Shattock, 10 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005). Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). Hammerton, John, Books and Myself: Memoirs of an Editor (London: Macdonald, 1944). Harman, Claire, Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen conquered the world (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2009). Harris, Michael and Alan Lee (eds), The Press in English society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth centuries (London: Associated University Presses, 1986). Harris, Sharon M. (ed.), Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004). Hatton, Jean, Betsy: The Dramatic Biography of Prison Reformer Elizabeth Fry (Oxford: Monarch Books, 2005). Henson, Louise et al. (eds), Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004). Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957). Holmes, Richard, Sahib: The British Soldier in India, 1750–1914 (London: HarperCollins, 2005). Hughes, Linda K. and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991). Hughes, Robert, The Fatal Shore: a History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868 (London: Collins Harvill, 1987). Hunt, Peter, ‘Necessary Misreadings: Directions in Narrative Theory for Children’s Literature’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 18 (1985), 107–21. Iser, Wolfgang, The Act of Reading: a theory of aesthetic response (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). Jackson, H.J., Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). James, Henry, ‘The Art of Fiction’, Longman’s Magazine 4 (September 1884), 502–21. James, Louis, Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–1850. A Study of the Literature produced for the Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). Jauss, Hans Robert, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’, trans. Elizabeth Benzinger, New Literary History 2 (1970), 7–37. Johanson, Graeme, A Study of Colonial Editions in Australia, 1843–1972 (Wellington, NZ: Elibank Press, 2000). Johnson-Woods, Toni, Index to Serials in Australian Periodicals and Newspapers: Nineteenth Century (Canberra: Mulini Press, 2001).

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Jordan, John O. and Robert L. Patten (eds), Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Joseph, H.S., Memoirs of Convicted Prisoners, Accompanied by Remarks on the Causes and Prevention of Crime (London: Wertheim & Co., 1853). Joshi, Priya, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Kelly, Gary, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Kelman, Kate, ‘“Self-Culture”: The educative reading pursuits of the Ladies of Edinburgh, 1865–85’, Victorian Periodicals Review 36.1 (2003), 59–75. King, Andrew, The London Journal, 1845–83 (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). Kunitz, S. and H. Haycraft, Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature (New York: Wilson, 1942). Law, Graham, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000). Leavis, Q.D., Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto, 1932). Lefroy, J.H., Brevet Colonel, Royal Artillery, Report on the Regimental and Garrison Schools of the Army, and on Military Libraries and Reading Rooms (London, 1859). Lyons, Martyn and John Arnold (eds), A History of the Book in Australia, 1891– 1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2001). Macdonald, Kate and Marysa Demoor, ‘The Dorothy and its supplements: a lateVictorian novelette (1889–1899)’, Publishing History 61 (Spring 2007), 71–101. McKenzie, D.F., The Panizzi Lectures, 1985: Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: The British Library, 1986). Mackenzie, John M., Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). ———, ‘The Royal Commonwealth Society Library,’ in Cambridge University Library: The Great Collections, ed. by Peter Fox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Maddy, Yulisa Amadu and Donnarae MacCann, African Images in Juvenile Literature: Commentaries on Neocolonialist Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996). Matthews, Brian (ed.), Readers, Writers, Publishers: Essays and Poems (Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2004). Maunder, Andrew (ed.), Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction, 1855–1890, I: Sensationalism and the Sensation Debate (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004). Maxwell, Catherine and Patricia Pulham (eds), Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2006). Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols (London: Frank Cass, 1967).

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——— and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life, with Numerous Illustrations from Photographs (London: Frank Cass, 1968). Mayo, Robert, The English Novel in the Magazines (Evanston, IL and London: Northwestern University Press and Oxford University Press, 1962). Mitchel, John, Jail Journal (Washington, DC: Woodstock Books, 1996). Mitford, Mary Russell, Recollections of a Literary Life; or, Books, Places and People, 3 vols (London, 1852). Moretti, Franco, ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61:1 (2000), 207–27. Mundy, Godfrey Charles, Our Antipodes (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2006). Mutch, Deborah, English Socialist Periodicals, 1880–1900; A Reference Source (London: Ashgate, 2005). Myers, Robin, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote (eds), Against the Law: Crime, Sharp Practice and the Control of Print (London: British Library, 2004). Nicholas, Stephen (ed.), Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Nile, Richard, The Making of the Australian Literary Imagination (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2002). Noble, Marianne, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Nowell-Smith, Simon, International Copyright Law and the Publisher in the Reign of Queen Victoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). Nussbaum, Felicity, The Autobiographical Self: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth Century England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Ohmann, Richard, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (The Haymarket Series, London; New York: Verso, 1996). [Oliphant, Margaret], ‘Sensation Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 91 (May 1862), 564–84. Ouida, ‘Literature and the English Book Trade’, North American Review 160 (February 1895), 157–65. Pears, Edwin (ed.), Prison and Reformatories at Home and Abroad: The Transactions of the International Penitentiary Congress (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1872). Pearson, Jacqueline, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Perkins, Frederic B., The Best Reading: Hints on the Selection of Books; on the Formation of Libraries, Public and Private; on Courses of Reading, etc. (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1877). Phegley, Jennifer, ‘“Clearing away the Briars and Brambles”: The education and professionalisation of the Cornhill Magazine’s women readers, 1860–65’, Victorian Periodicals Review 33.1 (2000), 22–43. ———, Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2004).

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Pope, Stephen (ed.), The Cassell Dictionary of the Napoleonic Wars (London: Cassell, 1999). Porter, Bernard, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Priestley, Phillip, Victorian Prison Lives, English Prison Biography 1830–1914 (London: Methuen, 1985). Quayle, Eric, The Collector’s Book of Boys’ Stories (London: Studio Vista, 1973). Radway, Janice A., A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). ———, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, 2nd edn (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Raven, James, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Reading Experience Database, 1450–1945, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/. Reay, Barry, ‘The Context and Meaning of Popular Literacy: Some Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Rural England’, Past & Present 131 (1991), 89–129. Richards, Thomas, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London and New York: Verso, 1993). Robinson, Frederick W., Female Life in Prison, by a Prison Matron (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862). Rose, Jonathan, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). ———, ‘Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences’, Journal of the History of Ideas 53.1 (1992), 47–70. Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993). Saintsbury, George, A History of Nineteenth-Century English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1896). Schreuder, Deryck M. and Stuart Ward, (eds), Australia’s Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Scougal, Francis [Felicia Skene], Scenes from a Silent World, or Prisons and their Inmates (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1889). Shattock, Joanne, Politics and Reviewers: the ‘Edinburgh’ and the ‘Quarterly’ in the Early Victorian Age (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1989). ——— and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982). Simpson, Donald H., ‘An Internationally Famous Library’, in Royal Commonwealth Society Centenary 1868–1968 (London: Royal Commonwealth Society, 1968), pp. 55–9. Sinnett, Frederick, ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia: 1’, Journal of Australasia 1:1 (1856), 97–105. Spilka, Mark, ‘Henry James and Walter Besant: “The Art of Fiction” Controversy’, Novel 6.2 (1973), 101–19.

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St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Stanley, Peter, White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India, 1825–1875 (London: Hurst & Company, 1998). Suleiman, Susan R. and Inge Crosman (eds), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). Tandon, Bharat, Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation (London: Anthem, 2003). Tompkins, Jane, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fictions, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Towsey, Mark R.M.,“‘Patron of Infidelity”: Scottish Readers Respond to David Hume, c. 1750–c. 1820’, Book History 11 (2008), 89–123. Trela, D.J., ‘Introduction: Nineteenth-Century Women and Periodicals’, Victorian Periodicals Review 29.2 (1996), 89–94. Trollope, Anthony, ‘Novel-Reading’, Nineteenth Century 5 (January 1879): 24–43. Vicinus, Martha (ed.), A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (London: Methuen, 1980). Vincent, David, Literacy and Popular Culture: England, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Wagner, Tamara S., Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: re-reading nineteenthcentury women writers (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2009). Watson, Richard, Prison Libraries (London: The Library Association, 1951). Whyte, Frederic, The Life of W.T. Stead, 2 vols (London: Cape, 1925). Wilde, Oscar, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000). Williams, Raymond, ‘Culture is Ordinary’, reprinted in Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, ed. by Robin Gable (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 3–18. Williams, Rosalind H., Dream Worlds, Mass Consumption in Late NineteenthCentury France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Wilson, J.P., ‘Fiction in Public Libraries’, Library Association of Australasia Conference Proceedings, 1896 (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1969), 53–55. Wise, T.J. and J.A. Symington, The Brontës: Their Friendships, Lives and Correspondence, 4 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1932). Woolf, Virginia, ‘How Should One Read a book?’, in Collected Essays, 4 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1966–1967), II, pp. 1–11. Wynne, Deborah, The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).

Index advertisements of fiction 12, 17–20, 44–7, 49, 52, 153–4 in magazines 32–3, 45, 140 aesthetic tastes and values 37, 42, 57–9, 61–4, 66–8, 173 Altick, Richard career of 1–2, 5–6 The English Common Reader 1–6, 9–11, 13, 23–4, 37, 45, 53, 55, 59, 62, 69, 87, 129, 147–8, 156, 176 anonymity 15–16, 20, 28, 76, 151 Argosy magazine 16, 18 army, encouragement of reading for soldiers in the 122–4, 126–8 Arnold, Matthew 14, 46–8, 157 Athenaeum 16, 17, 37, 39 Austen, Jane fiction by 67, 73 readers of 71–2, 75–83, 94 reputation of 71, 73–4 Australia as a ‘reading nation’ 152, 154–5, 158, 160, 173 Australian Common Reader Archive 171 author-publisher correspondence 42, 46, 48–53 autobiography, as evidence of reading experiences 3, 55, 71, 81, 97, 156–7 Barthes, Roland 3, 83 Beetham, Margaret 24–6, 32, 175 Belgravia magazine 16, 18, 20 Bentley, Richard 15, 41, 77 Bentley’s Miscellany 15, 17 Besant, Walter 13–14, 42, 44, 161, 166 bestsellers 166, 168 bible-reading 89, 91, 95–6, 102, 104–5, 107–10, 112–15, 117–19 biography, as suitable reading material 91, 94, 124, 126–7 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 15–16, 18, 61–2, 70, 78

booksellers 5, 14, 72, 152 bookstalls 15, 45 Boosé, James 133, 135, 137, 141–2, 149 borrowing records 103, 122, 138, 153, 158–71, 173–4 Bourdieu, Pierre 68 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 20–21, 40, 56, 65, 162, 166 branding and brand names 12, 16, 20, 172, Brontë, Charlotte 15, 30, 75–7 Browning, Colin Arrott 112–16, 118–19 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 40, 126–7 Butler, Samuel 145–6, 176 catalogues, functions of 136–9, 141 celebrity 16, 21, 44 Chambers’s Journal 14, 17, 44, 126, 128 Chapman & Hall 41–4, 48–9, 51 Chartier, Roger 60, 171, 176 Chatto & Windus marketing strategies 43–5, 52, 54 conflicts with Ouida 41–2, 46, 48–53 cheap editions 5, 17, 21, 24, 37, 43, 45–6, 48–9, 52–3, 99, 104, 128, 152–3, 155–6, 158 circulating libraries 2, 12, 14, 17–19, 46–8, 59, 90, 130, 160 circulation of texts 16, 19, 60, 96, 164, 166, 169, 171 class, perceptions of as determining reading levels and practices 3–4, 9, 15, 17–18, 21, 24–5, 31, 34, 37–9, 46–7, 53–4, 55, 58–62, 69, 104, 107, 119–20, 128–32, 147–8, 155–7, 164 Collins, Wilkie 38, 41, 44, 49, 56, 60–61, 65, 162 colonial adventure fiction 102, 137, 144, 168 colonial book trade 152–3, 158 colonial magazines 139–41, 143

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Colonial Society, see Royal Colonial Institute Common Prayer Book 91, 96, 107, 112 ‘common’ readers 3–5, 9, 23, 34, 37–8, 46–8, 69–70, 103, 105, 112, 114–15, 120, 132, 147, 149 communications technologies 154, 156 competitions, for readers, 24–6, 28, 30–31, 33–4 consolation, reading as 81–3 consumption, the study of, 2–6 convict ships, reading aboard 96, 100, 105, 107–9, 112–17 Cooper, James Fenimore 102, 126–7 Corelli, Marie 47, 159–61, 166, 168–9, 172 Cornhill Magazine 16, 18–20, 25, 44 crime narratives 102, 104, 171 criticism of the novel form 14–15, 55–62, 63–8 Darnton, Robert 2, 174 daydreaming, reading as 57–8, 63, 68, 168 De Rienzi, Thomas 95 Dickens, Charles 12 , 15, 21, 62, 88–90, 99–101, 104, 126–7, 161–2, 166 didacticism 25, 29, 30–31 Dorothy, the 26–35 Edgeworth, Maria 94, 126–7 editorship 13, 16, 20, 25–8, 33–4, 139, 144 education 38, 110–13, 121, 133, 148–9 reading as 24, 30–31, 89, 90–91, 94, 103, 105, 114, 119–20, 124, 130–32, 142, 158, 164 levels of in fiction readers 128 Eliot, George 20, 39, 51, 54, 58, 162, 166 Eliot, Simon 42, 71–2, 166 English Common Reader, The see Altick, Richard and ‘common’ readers Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine 25, 32 evangelicalism, influence on reading 15, 96, 105, 107 exploration narratives 91, 136–8, 144–6 Fielding, James 75, 126–7 Fish, Stanley 3, 134, 169, 172 Flint, Kate 3, 55, 60–61

Fortnightly Review 14, 27, 38–9 Fraser’s Magazine 16, 18, 67, 75 Fry, Elizabeth 92–3, 101–2 Gale, Thomson 10 ‘Nineteenth-Century Collections Online’ 10 Gaskell, Elizabeth 151 ‘general reader’ 51, 69 Good Words 17, 99 Gosse, Edmund 14, 156 Haggard, H. Rider 102, 137, 144, 159, 161–2, 166, 168, 170, 172 Hardy, Thomas 14, 50, 162, 166 Harper’s Magazine 10, 14 Hill, Frederic 94, 101 History of the Book 2–4, 10, 55 Household Words 15, 18, 38, 60, 70 ‘ideal reader’ 3, 44, 71–2 idle reading 62–4 illiteracy 90, 108 illustrated covers 45–6 illustration 12, 18, 21, 87–8, 91–2, 96–7 imagination in reading, function of 56–9, 62–8, 93, 137 ‘implied reader’ 3, 27, 71, 134, 145 instalments, reading in 13, 15–20, 58, 65 interrupted reading 65–6, 68 Iser, Wolfgang, 3, 64 James, Henry 13–14, 39, 68, 69, 79 James, Louis 25, 128 Jauss, Hans Robert 71, 73 Jewsbury, Geraldine 14 journalism, and its relation to fiction, 12–14, 18–21 ‘journalistic fiction’ 13 Kinglsey, Charles 15, 30 Kipling, Rudyard 79, 81–2, 140, 160, 162, 166 Ladies’ Treasury, The 31 Lambton Mechanics’ Institute 159, 169 Lancaster Castle County Gaol 91 Lawrence, D.H. 21

Index Leavis, Q.D. 68, 155–8, 168 Fiction and the Reading Public 155–8, 168 Le Queux, William 169 Ledger, Sally 15 Lefroy, Lieutenant Colonel J.H. 121–32 Report on the Regimental and Garrison Schools of the Army, and on Military Libraries and Reading Rooms 121–32 Leisure Hour 91, 96–7, 102 Lever, Charles 126 Lévy, Michel 38 Lewes, George Henry 14, 68, 75–6, 78, 80 Liardet, Frederick 119 Library of Congress 10 Making of America 10 Linton, Eliza Lynn 14 Lippincott, J.B. 43 Lippincott’s Magazine 51 Literary World, The 50 Livingstone, David 137, 138 London Journal 15, 18 Lover, Samuel 126 Lund, Michael 65 Lynch, Deirdre Shauna 71 Macaulay, Thomas 76, 171 History of England 171 McCarthy, Justin 44, 133 McGann, Jerome 10 MacGrath, Harold 166 The Lure of the Mask 166 The Goose Girl 166–70 Mackenzie, D.F. 2, 10, Mackenzie, John 134, 141, 148 Propaganda and Empire 141 Macmillan’s Magazine 18, 19 Maconochie, Alexander 93–4 Maga 15 Maitland Institute 160 Mallock, W.H. 51 New Republic 51 Mansfield, Katherine 79 Marryat, Frederick 102, 126, 127 Frank Mildmay, or the Naval Officer 127 Mr Midshipman Easy 127 Peter Simple 127 Marshalsea Prison 100

185

Martin, Lady 138 Our Maories 138 Martineau, Harriet 94 Feats on the Fjord 94 Masson, David 67 Maurier, George du 45 Maxwell, John 20 Belgravia 20 Mayhew, Henry 87–8, 92, 93, 96 The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes from Prison Life 87–8, 92 London Labour and the London Poor 93 Mechanics’ Institutes 147, 158–74 Melbourne Athenaeum 158 Merivale, Herman 138 Colonization and Colonies 138 Milbanke, Annabella 76 Millbank Prison 91, 95, 96, 115 Milton, John 30 Paradise Lost 30 Mitchel, John 100 Mitford, Mary Russell 74, 77, 78–9, 81–2 Recollections of a Literary Life 81–2 Modernist Journals Project 10 Moore, George 14, 21, 50 Moretti, Franco 157 Morris, William 64 Mudie, 17, 49–50, 53 Mudie’s Circulating Library 14, 49, 142 Mundy, Godfrey Charles 151 Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy 48 Napier, William Francis Patrick 129 History of the War in the Peninsular 129 Napoleon 127 National Home Reading Union 31 National School Society 112 Nelson, Horatio 127 Nelson, Major 99 Nesbit, E. 28 ‘Dorothy’ 28 New Monthly Magazine 15, 18, 37 Newgate novels 104 Newgate Prison 91, 93 Newman, Cardinal 79 Nicholas, Stephen 106 NINES 10

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Nineteenth Century 38, 53–4 ‘Concerning the Unknown Public’ 53–4 ‘Nineteenth-Century Collections Online’ 10 Norfolk Island 93–4 North American Review, The 50 O’Brian, Patrick 83 Ohmann, Richard 155 Oliphant, Margaret 14, 61, 62 Opie, Amelia 127 Adeline Mowbray 127 Oppenheim, E. Phillips 168, 169 Ouida 37–54 Ariadnê 39–40, 46 Folle Farine 39 Held in Bondage 37 In a Winter City 41 Moths 49–50, 52 Pascarel 39 Signa 41 ‘Tendencies of English Fiction, the’ 47 Two Little Wooden Shoes 39 Under Two Flags 37 ‘Unwritten Literary Laws’ 53 Village Commune, A 45, 50–53 Wisdom, Wit and Pathos 54 Oxley, Deborah 106 Pall Mall Gazette 38 Parley, Peter 126, 128 Tales of the Sea 128 Pater, Walter 20 Paternoster Row 152 Payn, James 38, 44 Penny Magazine 126, 128 Pentonville Gaol 95, 100, 104 Periodicals Archive Online 10 Periodicals Contents Index 10 Perkins, David 56, 58, 64 Phegley, Jennifer 20, 25 Educating the Proper Woman Reader 20 Philips, Celia G. 42 Phillips, David Graham 168 Plummer’s Magazine 144 Port Germein 162 Porter, Brian 147

Porter, G.R. 111 Porter, Gene Stratton 168 Porter, Jane 126, 127 The Pastor’s Fireside 127 The Scottish Chiefs: A Romance 127 Thaddeus of Warsaw 127 Portsmouth Prison 95 Praed, Mrs Campbell 138 Australian Life 138 Price, G. 138 Jamaica and the Colonial Office 138 Prison Act, 1865 95 Proquest 10 British Periodicals 10 Pykett, Lyn 27 Quarterly Review 15 Radcliffe, Ann 74, 127 The Italian 127 Raverat, Gwen 80 Rawson, R.W. 111 Reade, Charles 45, 144 It is Never Too Late to Mend 144 Reading Experience Database 3, 138 Reading Gaol 88, 99, 100 Reese, Trevor 148 Reid, Thomas 108–110 Religious Tract Society 96, 108 Retrospective Review 78 Reynolds, R.V, 118 Richards, Thomas 140 Richardson, C.J. 44 The Englishman’s House 44 Richardson, Samuel 67 Ritchie, Anne Thackeray 78, 79 Robinson, Frederick 97 Female Life in a Prison by a Prison Matron 97 Roche, A.R. 142 Rose, Jonathan 70, 147, 156–8 The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes 156–8 Rosedale VIC 161 Ross, Robbie 100 Rossetti, D.G. 100 Rowntree, Seebohm 24 Royal Colonial Institute 133–49 Royal Commonwealth Society 133

Index Rudd, Steele 166 Dad in Politics 166 Ruskin, John 39, 45 Sesame and Lilies 45 Russell, W. Clark 144 An Ocean Free-Lance from a Privateersman’s Log, 1812 144 St Clair, William 9, 130, 174 The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period 9, 174 St Paul’s Cathedral 89 Saintsbury, George 11 Sand, George 38, 51 Saturday Magazine 87, 128 Saturday Review 17, 37, 100 Schools of Arts 158 Schreiber, Lady Charlotte 75–6 Schreiner, Olive 145 Story of an African Farm, The 145 Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland 145 Science and the Periodical 10 Scott, Walter 21, 67, 95, 126, 127, 166 Waverley Novels 75, 127, 130 Seeley, J.R. 133 Expansion of England, The 133 Self-Help Emigration Society 147 Seth, Vikram 82 A Suitable Boy 82 Shakespeare, William 29, 45, 166 Hamlet 29 Merchant of Venice 29 Sharpe’s London Magazine 66 ‘Reading as a means of culture’ 66 Shaw, Flora 140 Sherard, Robert 100 Shergold, Peter 106 Sinnett, Frederick 152 Skene, Felicia 90 Slater, Michael 89 Smith, Charlotte 76, 127 The Old Manor House 127 Smith, George 20 Smith, W.H. 14, 45, 142 Smollett, Tobias 126 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge 96, 108

187

Spearman, Frank Hamilton 168 Spectator 16, 17, 52, 91 Stanley, H.M. 136 Through the Dark Continent 136 Stead, W.T. 13 Stephen, James Fitzjames 57, 64 Stevenson, Robert Louis 64 Stoler, Laura Ann 141 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 99 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 99 Strand, The 21 Sullivan, Alvin 10 English Literary Magazine 10 Sutherland, John 2 Victorian Novelists and their Publishers 2 Sutherland, Kathryn 71, 73 Jane Austen’s Textual Lives 71 Sydney Free Public Library 147 Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts 147 Sylvia’s Journal 31 Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 15 Tandon, Bharat 70 Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation 70 Tauchnitz 43 Taylor, Philip Meadows 128 Confessions of a Thug 128 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 29, 30, 133 Thackeray, William Makepeace 15, 20, 166 Catherine 15 ‘Roundabout Papers’ 20 Thurston, Katherine 168 Times, The 10, 38, 49, 52 Tinsley brothers 41 Tinsley’s Magazine 59 Todd, Charles 137 Handy Guide to the Cape of Good Hope 137 Tothill Fields 89, 96 Traill, Mrs C.P. 137 Female Emigrants’ Guide to Canada 137 Trollope, Anthony 14, 20, 40, 56, 60, 133 The Belton Estate 14 editing Saint Paul’s 20 West Indies 137 Trollope, Frances 14

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Trollope, T.A. 14 Twain, Mark 166 Tom Sawyer 166 Unknown Public, the 37, 38, 60 Vance, Louis 168 The Black Bag 168 Vecht, A. 137 Pork Industry of New Zealand 137, 138 Victoria, Queen 133, 134, 140 Virtue, James 20 Saint Paul’s 20 Wakefield Prison 118 Walford’s Shilling Peerage 45 Waterloo Directory 10 Wedgwood, Julia 68 Weedon, Alexis 48, 53 Wellesley Index 10 Wellington, Duke of (Arthur Wellesley) 127, 129 Wells, H.G. 166 Westminster Free Public Library 147

Westminster Review 15 Weyman, Stanley 159 White, Gilbert 45 Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne 45 Wilde, Oscar 83, 99–100 Wimsatt, W.K. 83 Winter, Alison 65 Wood, Ellen 65, 166, 169, 172 Wood, Stuart 101 Woolf, Virginia 21, 69–70 The Common Reader 70 Wordsworth, William 57, 61–2, 64 Lyrical Ballads 61–2 ‘Simon Lee’ 57 ‘Tintern Abbey’ 66 World 39, 40, 42 Wormwood Scrubs 90 Wright, Thomas 38 Yates, Edmund 39, 42 Zola, Emile Nana 50