Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (27 page)

There is no question that these books were popular, and that this was a lucrative field. Many other booksellers, not based in the same geographical location, also produced Salisbury Square fiction. T. Paine was one: in 1840 he began to issue
Angela the Orphan: or, the Bandit Monk of Italy
, advertised as ‘The most successful Romance every published’ and claiming sales of 14,000 copies a week.
³⁶
Other titles in the genre included
Ada, the Betrayed, or, the Murderer at the Old Smithy; The
Apparition, Crimes of the Aristocracy; The Death Ship, or, The Pirate’s Bride
; and
Varney, The Vampyre
(this one was also known by the alternative title of
The Feast of Blood
)
³⁷
- and they were fantastically successful. Between 1830 and 1850 there were said to be at least ninety publishers of penny-fiction, which would mean that for every one publisher of ‘respectable’ works there were ten who published what that Westminster survey had called ‘Books decidedly bad’.
³⁸

These books embraced a wide range of styles. One of the most omnipresent throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the chapbook. A chapbook was a 24-page booklet, with a paper cover illustrated with a woodcut. In the eighteenth century many chapbooks had retold traditional or folk stories: Jack the Giant Killer, Tom Thumb, Robin Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk. By the nineteenth century, many of these tales had been displaced into children’s books, and chapbooks instead veered towards more sensational stories, together with songs, jokes and retellings of myths and legends, or famous events, such as Dick Turpin’s ride, or the lives of criminals like Jack Sheppard, a perennial favourite. The cover illustration was generic, and rarely linked to the story - a Turk with a scimitar raised might illustrate the story of Dick Turpin and then pop up again on
The Irish Assassin
, while a Roman centurion graced a medieval story from Italy, the tale of Hero and Leander and the story of Valentine and Orson. At the end of each story the remainder of the space was filled in with similar randomness: a fearsome recounting of the horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta could be followed by an account of a practical joke, or ‘The Comical Sayings of Paddy from Cork, with his Coat Buttoned Behind’ might be inserted after the account of a grisly murder.
³⁹
Over the two centuries there were as many as 250 printers of chapbooks in London, and as many again in the provinces. William Dicey, who had founded the
Northampton Mercury
with Robert Raikes, had begun to print chapbooks as well, moving to London around 1730, when he formally joined his business interests with his sister’s Bow Printing Office; by 1739 the Diceys were the largest producer of chapbooks in London.
⁴⁰
These chapbooks were sold by street vendors, who also carried broadsides, single printed sheets with accounts of crimes, deathbed confessions of criminals, patriotic songs, jokes, verses or satirical squibs, which cost only
¹
/
₂
d.
- half the price of a chapbook. (The vendors also sang through the songs on the broadside for any customers unacquainted with the tunes, and were therefore

known as patterers: those who walked the streets were running patterers; those with a fixed pitch were standing patterers.)

Reality, or even accurate reporting, in broadsides was less important than gory details: the crimes of the ‘burkers’ Williams and Bishop in 1831 were described on a broadside that used the woodblocks illustrating the original burkers, Burke and Hare themselves, whose trial in 1828 had been of all-consuming interest. Another broadside,
The Trial and Execution of the Burkers for Murdering a Poor Italian Boy
, showed three murderers being executed, despite the fact that only two were, while the third was reprieved.
⁴¹
This last broadside was published by James Catnach, one of the most successful chapbook and broadside publishers of the century. He employed a stable of writers, known from his location as the Seven Bards of the Seven Dials, who turned out reams of rapes, extortions, murders and deaths. Death was best for business, with highest sales coming from ‘public executions…to which was usually attached the all-important and necessary “Sorrowful Lamentations”, or “Copy of Affectionate Verses”, which according to the established custom, the
criminal composed in the condemned cell the night before his execution’. These confessions were in fact usually written by Catnach’s ‘bards’, then rapidly printed up, adorned with a stock image that was supposed to represent the condemned - and always advertised as ‘an exact likeness of the murderer, taken at the bar of the Old Bailey by an eminent artist’ - and distributed to the patterers.
⁴²

If there were no really good murders, Catnach and his colleagues were just as happy to make up the confessions to lesser crimes, and they even, from time to time, manufactured deaths themselves. In 1828 the Royal Brunswick Theatre, in east London, collapsed. It was during the day, when a rehearsal was in progress, rather than at night with a full auditorium, so only fifteen people were killed. One of Catnach’s patterers remembered it well: ‘Oh yes sir!…It was a rare good thing for all the running and standing patterers in and about ten miles of London. Every day we all killed more and more people…One day there was twenty persons killed, the next day thirty or forty, until it got at last to be worked up to about a hundred, and all killed. Then we killed all sorts of people, Duke of Wellington, and all the Dukes and Duchesses, Bishops, swell nobs and snobs we could think of at the moment.’
⁴³

In 1821 a new series in monthly parts appeared: Pierce Egan’s
Life in London, or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis
, with etchings and woodcuts by George Cruikshank and his brother Robert. This was the first appearance of the characters Tom and Jerry (the ancestors of the cartoon animals of the twentieth century), and each monthly part cost 1
s.
Within twelve hours of publication, at least according to Egan himself, Catnach had a pirate edition printed and out being hawked on the streets, selling for only 2
d.
; he quickly followed this with a ‘whole sheet’, that is, a broadside, called
Life in London
, which had twelve woodcuts that were crude copies of the original Cruikshank illustrations (but reversed, which meant that Catnach’s cutters simply copied the original illustrations rapidly, not even taking the time to flip them).

This was the same Pierce Egan who had started the profession of sporting journalist (p. 152), and it may be that he brought from the newspapers an audience of admirers. But the success of
Life in London
cannot be attributed solely to that, for there was very swiftly a vogue for
books on London life, and for all the fashionable accoutrements that Egan’s characters wore or mentioned - ‘tailors, bootmakers, and hatters, recommended nothing but Corinthian shapes, and Tom and Jerry patterns’. The main popularizer, though, was the theatre: ‘Mr Barrymore’ produced a play ‘in hot haste’ at the Royal Amphitheatre a scant four weeks after the first number appeared; the theatre manager Charles Dibdin the younger had his own version on stage at the Olympic Theatre two months later; then the Adelphi advertised ‘Mr Moncrieff ’s
*
adaptation a fortnight after that:

On Monday, Nov. 26th, 1821, will be presented for the first time, on a scale of unprecedented extent (having been many weeks in preparation under the superintendence of several of the most celebrated Artists, both in the
Ups and Downs
of Life, who have all kindly come forward to assist the Proprietors in their endeavours to render the Piece a complete out-and-outer), an entirely new Classic, Comic, Operatic, Didactic, Aristophanic, Localic, Analytic, Panoramic, Camera-Obscura-ic Extravaganza Burletta of Fun, Frolic, Fashion and Flash, in three acts, called ‘
TOM AND
J
ERRY
:
OR LIFE IN
L
ONDON
.’ Replete with Prime Chaunts, Rum Glees, and Kiddy Catches, founded on Pierce Egan’s well-known and highly popular work of the same name, by a celebrated extravagant erratic Author. The music selected and modified by him from the most eminent composers, ancient and modern, and every Air furnished with an attendant train of Graces. The costumes and scenery supervised by Mr I. R. Cruikshank, from the Drawings by himself and his brother, Mr George Cruikshank, the celebrated Artists of the original Work.
⁴⁴

Catnach’s speed in cashing in on Egan’s success was remarkable, but he was used to producing material quickly: he claimed that his
A Full True and Particular Account of the Murder of Mr Weare by John Thurtell and His Companions
had sold 250,000 copies, which he had managed to print in just one week. This appeared even before the trial itself took place. Afterwards, Catnach needed only another eight days to print 500,000 broadsides reporting on the proceedings. In 1828 he capped

even that, claiming to have printed and sold 1,166,000 copies of the
Last Dying Speech and Confession of William Corder.
*
⁴⁶

It was probably better material than these broadsides that the popular novelist Charles Lever was complaining about when he wrote, ‘Our cheap literature and our copious writing - like our low priced cottons and our cheap pen knives - will ultimately disparage our wares, both at home and abroad.’
⁴⁷
Yet the plenitude of literature of all types came not solely from the discovery of the financial possibilities inherent in the

William Corder (1804-28) had had an illegitimate child with Maria Marten, his brother’s mistress, before he murdered her in what became known as the notorious Red Barn case. He then married an unsuspecting schoolmistress, and when accused of the crime claimed that Marten had shot herself, overlooking the fact that she had also been stabbed and smothered. Corder was, unusually, not only hanged, but drawn and quartered, and then flayed; his skin was used to cover a book about the crime. This grisly relic is today in Moyse’s Hall Museum, in Bury St Edmunds, together with Corder’s death mask and part of his scalp. His head was on exhibition at Bartholomew Fair in the year of his death, and it was claimed that it earned its owner £100 in the three days of the fair.
⁴⁵

mass market: it came, too, from the ability to capture that market by applying innovatory technology to production. Many of the technological developments that were discussed in Chapter 4, from papermaking to typesetting and printing, were easily assimilated into book production. There were also other changes, that were relevant to book production alone. The first of these was the development of the stereotype plate. The first stereotypes, or stereos, had been used in Holland as early as the sixteenth century, but they were not introduced in Britain until 1727. The process was very simple: the text was set in metal type, just as it always had been, then a cast of plaster of Paris (or, later, papier mâché) was made of the entire assembly of pages to be printed in a single impression, after which a metal plate, or stereotype, was made from the cast. Now, instead of thousands of small metal letters held together by metal bars secured with string, a single plate for each side of a sheet could be used for printing. Once the publisher was ready to reprint the book, the plate was taken out of storage and reused: storage itself was much easier, and by keeping the stereos, reprints were produced at a fraction of the cost of resetting type from scratch. However, the Stationers Company, the guild that oversaw book publishing, in overseeing its monopoly cared less about reducing costs and much
more about ensuring a constant flow of work for compositors. Thus in the eighteenth century it instituted a rule that only a set number of impressions could be made from any plates before the type had to be destroyed, which defeated the purpose of stereos. By 1840, with the monopoly long gone, print runs had now risen sufficiently that stereos suddenly became a commercial possibility. By 1843, three years after stereos came into general use, Clowes, the largest printer in the country (and one that survives today), was storing stereo plates for 2,500 books.
⁴⁸

With papermaking, typesetting and printing to a greater or lesser extent mechanized, the binding of the books, which had to all intents and purposes remained a hand craft, was creating a bottleneck. Unlike printing, binding had numerous small stages, not one big one: the printed pages had to be folded into sections, the folded sections gathered together in the correct order and then sewn into what was called a book-block, which was then trimmed, blocked, pressed and glued; the spine had to be rounded, and the cloth or leather cut and glued on to the boards, which had previously been cut; then head and tail bands might be added, and endpapers had to be pasted down and lettering applied to the spine. In the early days, the only way to keep up with mechanized printing was to hire more people to do each job in the bindery: in 1830 fewer than 600 journeymen bookbinders worked in London; by 1862 that number had more than doubled, to 1,545; and by 1861 it was 7,754 (by which time there was also binding machinery in place).

Most of the developments in the mechanization of binding came in small steps: in the early part of the century a machine for cutting the edges of the gathered sections was developed; then nothing much happened until 1828, when a rolling machine to press the blocks was developed. Then there was another gap until 1843, when machines for embossing the cloth appeared. A flurry of further mechanized processes followed, and by 1851 bookbinding involved so much machinery that it was classed with manufacturing in the catalogue of the Great Exhibition. By the end of the century, a folding machine folded 12,000 sixteen-page sections an hour, a sewing machine sewed 3,600 sections an hour (a skilled woman expected to sew 2,000 or 3,000 sections every day), gathering machines brought together the sections, producing 7,800 book-blocks an hour, and a book-back gluing machine, manned by a
single person, did the work that had previously required five people - and, as a final touch, it economized on the glue. All of this meant that more books could now be sold for less money. In 1843 it had cost £180 to produce 6,000 copies of Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
, or just over 7
d.
a copy. In 1852, publishers expected to pay production costs of slightly more than 5
d.
per volume, and by the end of the century that price had fallen further, to 3
d.
per volume.
⁴⁹