Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (28 page)

Even before most of these innovations had filtered through to book production generally, books were becoming more widely available. By the early 1830s it was estimated that there were more than a thousand circulating libraries in the country, although it is likely that this figure excludes those that stocked penny-dreadfuls: probably the lowest level of library that was recognized was the type that catered for those aristocrats of the working classes, the artisans. Libraries for the respectable working classes were being opened with a range of financial support, especially from the various evangelical societies. In 1832 each National School received £5 to spend on books, funded by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, which had a Committee of General Literature. The Religious Tract Society also set up library grants, and by 1849 was proud to have supplied between 5,000 and 6,000 libraries with a hundred volumes each, although they were mostly moral tracts. With these libraries, it was possible for much of the working class to turn their backs on the Mechanics’ Institutes, which they felt had betrayed them - they were being run by the upper middle classes, and the places were increasingly filled by white-collar workers of the lower middle classes. Instead, artisans turned to libraries like Edwinstowe’s Artisans’ Library, in Nottingham, which had an enrolment fee of 1
s.
, and a weekly subscription of 1
d.
It had opened in 1838, and by 1846 it held 500 volumes, including works by Scott, Byron, Goldsmith and Shakespeare, as well as the
Penny Cyclopaedia
and a number of periodicals.
⁵⁰

For the middle class’s own reading, it was Mudie’s Circulating Library that represented the ideal. In 1828, in its first editorial, the
Athenaeum
had stated flatly that ‘no Englishman in the middle class of life
buys
a book’.
⁵¹
G. H. Lewes, George Eliot’s long-term companion, wrote of a wealthy friend who had gone to a library to borrow
Romola
, but all the copies were on loan to other members, and, she told Lewes, ‘I drove away disappointed.’ This was in 1872, when a cheap edition of the book
was available for 2
s.
6
d.
; but, to her, novels were not objects to be bought. Many publishers accepted this.
Tinsley’s
magazine, which was owned by the publisher Richard Bentley, wrote that it was a ‘well-known fact’ that no one bought novels.
⁵²

This was in part because a curious double situation was in operation with regard to book prices. After a drop in prices in the early part of the century, the main publishers formed a Booksellers Committee, which had but one purpose: to control prices. Although it never managed to assert its authority over the cut-price book market, or the railway libraries (see below), for much of the century these publishers had a death-grip on new fiction. So, while the average price of books dropped from 16
s.
to 8
s.
4
¹
/
₂
d.
between 1828 and 1853, the price of a new three-volume novel, which became the standard format for fiction,
*
remained at 31
s.
6
d.
(1
¹
/
₂
guineas) throughout the century.

This was where Charles Edward Mudie came in. Originally he ran a stationery shop, and in 1842, as was common, he began to lend books from it. His subscription rates were, for middle-class borrowers, quite reasonable: 1 guinea a year.
†
By comparison, Bull’s Library charged 6 guineas a year; Saunders and Otley up to 8 guineas; Churton’s from 4 to 10. The three-volume novel - or the triple-decker, as it became known - was ideal for this system of borrowing. The subscriber was entitled to borrow a
volume
, not a
novel
, for his or her guinea, which meant that with every novel Mudie could lend out three parts to three paying subscribers simultaneously. But it wasn’t only in price that Mudie was ahead of the competition. He also stressed quality, matching the new evangelical mood of much of the middle class. He refused to have any Minerva Press-type books, and instead stocked poetry, history, biography, travel and adventure, religious and moral tracts, scientific works, and, of course,

the latest fiction. He stressed that his ‘select’ library excluded all immoral books: anything that had Mudie’s stamp on the cover was suitable for family reading.

In 1852 Mudie’s moved to larger premises, in New Oxford Street, and advertised a ‘Constant Succession of the Best New Books’. Soon the operation was so large that simply by buying multiple copies of a new book, and advertising that purchase, Mudie’s could frequently create a book’s success - as when it ordered 2,500 copies of George Eliot’s first full-length novel,
Adam Bede
, in 1859.
*
By 1858 the library was purchasing 100,000 new books a year; three years later this had nearly doubled, to 180,000.

By 1860 Mudie needed larger premises once more, and, as with Lackington in the previous century, the new building he erected on the
same site was designed to reflect both the proprietor’s worldly success and his view of a bookshop or library as a ‘Temple of the Muses’. The new Mudie’s had a classical façade with, inside, semicircular desks for exchanging books set in the middle of a large round hall - not coincidentally, closely resembling the British Museum’s famous round Reading Room. Mudie’s also had branches in the City, in Birmingham and in Manchester, plus an enormous mail-order business: it supplied book clubs and provincial libraries, although for some reason that has not come down to history it refused to supply Smith’s railway bookstalls, which was the reason Smith’s started its own library (which survived until 1961). For 2 guineas a year, Mudie’s subscribers within twenty miles of London could send in a list and have three volumes a week delivered the same day their orders were received. For those who lived further away, there was a country department that at its peak shipped 1,000 boxes holding up to 100 books each to subscribers anywhere in the world: by 1860 there were regular dispatches to Germany, Russia, China and Egypt, as well as the more expected colonial destinations like India and South Africa.

Mudie’s had become a behemoth that swallowed everything in its path, buying up part of Bentley’s publishing house, and so overwhelming the market that books had to be produced to suit the company’s institutional likes and dislikes. A comparison of orders for one title,
Leah: A Woman of Fashion
, a novel by Mrs Annie Edwards, published in 1875, shows the strength of its buying power. Smith’s ordered 25 copies, Day’s Library and Cawthorn’s each ordered 13 copies, while Mitchell’s Library wanted 6; Mudie’s asked for 125, or five times as many copies as its nearest competitor. Not surprisingly, the company used this clout to beat down the publishers on price. In 1873 Mudie wrote to Richard Bentley, ‘I wish to do what I can for “Burgoyne” [
The Life and Correspondence of Field Marshal Sir John Burgoyne
, who had lost the Battle of Saratoga during the American War of Independence] and if you will let me have 520 as 480 [that is, 520 copies for the price of 480, or a further 77 per cent discount on top of his standard trading terms] in the terms proposed I will place it near the top of my list…and give it a leading position in a few special advertisements.’ He promised another publisher that he would ‘go on
advertising
the book if I can have say
50 or 100 at 18.
’ For a book that retailed at 31s. 6
d.
, he expected a 43 per cent reduction.
⁵³

But by this time Mudie and the publishers who supported him were operating in a curious bubble. While they sailed serenely on with their 31
s.
6
d.
novels, a major upheaval was taking place. It was triggered, most unexpectedly, by the development of the railway. Today we carry books or magazines to read on all forms of transport, but this was not always the case. Our current assumption that ‘travel’ means ‘reading’ arrived only with the railways. Until then, reading while travelling was all but impossible. In the early days, the windows of many conveyances were not glazed, but covered with oiled silk or other fabrics that had been treated to make them water-resistant; not unnaturally, therefore, the apertures were small, to keep out the wind and the rain. When glazed windows arrived, the design was not reconsidered, and coach windows remained small, which made the interiors often gloomy and frequently just dark. The motion of the horses, and the lack of springs and upholstery did not conduce to reading. Nor did the human interaction that was created by a small number of people travelling long distances together, dining in the same inns, sleeping in the same confined space: sociability was impossible to avoid. In trains, by contrast, people travelled together for hours rather than days at a time, and even this was broken up by frequent dispersals at each station; the carriages were lit by oil - and later gas - lamps; and the ride was smooth enough to make it possible to read without becoming ill. In the firstclass carriages the seats had fairly large head-rest divisions, behind which one could retreat from one’s fellow passengers. The link between railway travel and reading was made from the first; the
Quarterly Review
in 1830, the year of the first scheduled passenger train, in a line intended to stress the smoothness of the journey, noted that train travel was ‘so easy that a passenger might read a newspaper with perfect comfort’.
⁵⁴

The main change to travel, however, was the number of people now on the move. Even with the difficulties of stagecoach travel, the British had managed to get around their island. Once the railways arrived, numbers soared. In 1838, after the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway opened along its entire length, eleven times as many people travelled by train as had previously used the stagecoach route. Between 1836 and 1848, eight terminuses opened in London alone to handle rising demand. In 1842, with a bit over 3,200 kilometres of rail established, 24.5 million passengers travelled by train; by 1846, by which time there
was nearly 16,000 kilometres of track, passenger numbers had reached 43.8 million annually. The rise in the number of travellers seemed unstoppable: numbers breached 250 million in 1865, topped 500 million comfortably in 1875, and by 1890 were around the 900 million mark.
⁵⁵

Just before the arrival of the railways, the bookselling business had been convulsed by the collapse of several of the major publishing houses, which led to difficulties in acquiring - or continuing - credit, and a consequent business slump. In order to improve their situation, several publishers hit on the idea of ‘libraries’, a series of books in uniform bindings that could be purchased slowly over time. From 1827, Constable’s Miscellany, the Library of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, Murray’s Family Library and others began to appear. These were wideranging in subject matter, educational, practical, and aimed at ‘those who think, conduct themselves respectably, and are anxious to improve their circumstances by judicious means’ - the expectation was now a readership of artisans, shop assistants and clerks.
⁵⁶

Then, simultaneously with the first two decades of railway travel, perhaps as a way of recouping investments more quickly for these financially unsteady booksellers, part-publication of novels became a popular means of reaching readers. Dickens and
The Pickwick Papers
are the heroes of this story, but there had been a few attempts at this method of publication before Dickens: Colburn’s Modern Novelists series was published in 1
s.
parts, with Bulwer-Lytton’s
Pelham
appearing as issues 1 to 6. But
Pelham
had been written as a novel, before being taken apart and reissued in parts for serialization; Dickens had planned
Pickwick
specifically to appear in parts, and its episodic nature showed the format to best advantage. After a slow start, about 40,000 copies were sold each month in 1836, creating an entirely new income stream for publishers and authors. First they could part-publish, with income from the sales of each 32-page section, and from the ‘Advertiser’ supplement that successful part-publication could support:
The Pickwick Advertiser
ran to twenty-four pages per part. This was then followed by publication as a three-volume novel (at the standard price of 31
s.
6
d.
, which meant these books were for library sale).
⁵⁷
Part-publication was not opening up the market to new readers, just making the financial demands on the old middle-class readers slightly easier: after all, twenty-one parts at 1
s.
apiece meant that readers were paying 1 guinea per book - hardly a bargain,
and affordable to many only because payment was spread out over nearly two years. Where new readers were perhaps being gained was at the lower end of the market. There the penny-bloods were issued in a similar fashion to the new middle-class system of part-publication, but these books cost between
¹
/
₂
d.
and 2
d.
a part, instead of 1
s.
The Romancist [
sic
] and Novelist’s Library, from about 1840, issued out-of-copyright novels in 2
d.
weekly parts, and then bound them together for the tobacco-shop libraries. By 1845 as many as half a million part copies may have been sold this way every week.
⁵⁸
Perhaps the most successful part-publication came originally from the newspapers.
Reynolds’s Miscellany
had been started in 1845 by G. W. M. Reynolds, who had edited the
London Journal
previously. He copied Euge`ne Sue’s
Les Myste`res de Paris
to produce first
The Mysteries of London
(1845-8); he wrote the first two series, two other writers finished it off, and it was said to have sold 1 million copies in a decade.
The Mysteries of the Courts of London
followed in 1848-56; this was over four series, took 624 numbers to publish and at 4.5 million words is surely worth considering as the longest ‘novel’ in English.