Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (29 page)

By the 1840s the ‘collected’ works of an author or authors joined together with the ‘library’ style of publishing, and dozens of examples appeared: Pickering’s Alden Poets and Diamond Classics, Bentley’s Standard Novels, Colburn’s Modern Novelists, Blackwood’s Standard Novels, Burns’s Fireside Library, Hamilton’s Biblical Cabinet, Murray’s Home and Colonial Library. But the publishers were still not producing inexpensive volumes: in the 1840s most still cost between 6
s.
and 8
s.
each. It was not until 1847 that things suddenly altered: Chapman and Hall produced a ‘Cheap Edition’ of
Martin Chuzzlewit
(originally published in 1844) in thirty-two weekly parts at 1
¹
/
₂
d.
per week; readers thus ended up with a novel that had cost them only 4
s. Oliver Twist
, a shorter book, cost just 2
s.
6
d.
for its entire run. For those with less patience and more cash the bookseller also produced monthly parts for 7
d.
- that is, for a penny more than the weekly part-issue, readers could find out three weeks early what was going to happen to Oliver next. Cheap editions opened up worlds of possibility to many; how much could be squeezed out of one book was also a revelation to publishers. A book was no longer a one-off event.
Oliver Twist
had appeared in parts in 1837-8; then it had appeared in three volumes in 1838; then it was reissued in ten parts in 1846; then it appeared once more, as a one-volume edition,
in 1846. At one point Chapman and Hall had the Library Edition, the People’s Edition, the Cheap Edition and the Charles Dickens Edition of Dickens’s works all in print simultaneously.
⁵⁹

Of course, Dickens was Dickens: most authors could not hope to achieve a hundredth part of his success. But the new formats had given publishers a glimpse of a huge market that was ravenous for books, and the realization, as Wedgwood had had three-quarters of a century before, that very large profits could be made on very small margins. By 1847 Simms, McIntyre was pricing its Parlour Library at 1
s.
or 1
s.
6
d.
per volume; by the autumn of that year Bentley had produced 109 Standard Novels at the rather higher 5
s.
per volume. But the real breakthrough came with Routledge’s Railway Library, which began to appear in 1848, with its first novel,
The Pilot
, by James Fenimore Cooper, priced, as all the Railway Library volumes were to be, at 1
s.
⁶⁰
(There was no US-UK copyright agreement, and piracy across the Atlantic was rife; in the UK, anyone who wanted could reprint US authors, and vice versa, without paying the author a penny.)

As well as reprinting material not covered by copyright, George Routledge did something that had the other publishers laughing at him: he bought up old copyrights of books that had long been available. This seemed like throwing money away. But these other publishers had not noticed the change in reading habits that was under way. In the first decade of the railways, newspapers had been sold at major railway stations on an ad-hoc basis. For example, at Lime Street station in Liverpool in 1839, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway gave two men and four children the right to patrol the platforms, selling whatever they could carry. In 1841 William Marshall made a deal with the London and Blackwall Railway to open a bookstall at Fenchurch Street station in London; another stall was then opened at Euston station, under the aegis of the London and North-Western Railway. But the railway companies were busy with other things, and did not have time to go into the matter: very soon the stall at Euston, rented for a flat fee of £60 per annum, was making £1,200 a year. At that point the railways sat up and took notice, and the London and North-Western decided to put the contract up for tender. W. H. Smith, the son of the newsagent and distributor of Chapter 4, offered £1,500 for the rights to sell books and newspapers from all the London and North-Western’s stations, and he began trading in 1848, the year Routledge gave birth to his Railway
Library. Smith did not have a monopoly - for the next fifteen years the West Midlands and South Wales stations’ bookstalls were run by the son of the original lessee of the Fenchurch Street station bookstall - but by 1851 Smith had 35 station bookstalls, and by 1880 that had leapt to 450. In 1902 the company had 777 bookstalls, with another 463 it rather casually referred to as ‘sub-stalls’.
⁶¹
By 1849, the year after Smith began trading, his Paddington station stall routinely stocked 1,000 books; travellers paid 1
d.
to read them in the shop while they waited for their trains, or for a slightly higher fee they could take the books with them on the train, ‘returning’ them to the W. H. Smith bookstall at their destinations.
⁶²

Smith, a devout man (he was known to many as the North-Western Missionary), wanted to run a profitable business, but at the same time he wanted to reform the reading matter of the travelling public, just as Mudie did. Bookstalls had until now mostly carried guidebooks, timetables and the sort of fiction that the Westminster survey would most probably have called ‘Novels of the lowest character’. They also stocked what was later described as pornography, which might have been what we think of as pornography, or might simply have been penny-dreadfuls. Whatever it was, this immoral trash, as Smith saw it, was quickly swept away, and replaced with books from Routledge’s Railway Library; soon Smith was ordering 1,000 Railway Library books at a time - and it must be remembered that only twenty years before, total sales of 5,000 copies for a novel was considered a howling success. As
Punch
understood, the North-Western Railway ‘promise[d]…to become one of the greatest engines of literature’, with a train ‘decidedly the best vehicle going for circulating a library’.
⁶³
No one was laughing at Routledge any longer. Instead, the other booksellers all jumped aboard: by 1851 Bentley’s also had a Railway Library (although it folded after three years), Longman’s had a Traveller’s Library, while John Murray produced Murray’s Railway Reading and Literature for Rail, which consisted of ‘cheap and healthy literature…containing works of sound information and innocent amusement’. Both Murray’s and Longman’s libraries were made up entirely of non-fiction works, because, contrary to expectations, W. H. Smith, the North-Western Missionary, had been absolutely right about what his customers desired: nothing less than Murray’s ‘sound information and innocent amusement’, or at least pleasant family fiction. Murray’s Railway Reading included
Selections from the Writings of
Lord Byron
(the selections from this worryingly libertine poet rather reassuringly made by ‘a Clergyman’), a
History of the Guillotine
(which was lifted from an article in the
Quarterly Review
), Layard’s
Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh
,
A Journey to Katmandu (the capital of Nepaul)
[
sic
], and then a few books that were a little less worthy - like
The Chace, the Turf, and the Road
by ‘Nimrod’ (again lifted from the
Quarterly
) - not to overlook the wonderfully entitled
Stokers and Pokers
, a history of the London and North-Western Railway.
⁶⁴

George Routledge took his most famous leap in the dark in 1854: he paid Bulwer-Lytton £20,000 for the rights to nineteen of his old novels for the next ten years. He was warned that the market had been saturated, that everyone who had wanted to read Bulwer-Lytton had done so already. He stubbornly went ahead, producing a ‘complete’ Bulwer-Lytton Library in twenty volumes for £3 11
s.
6
d.
, or 3
s.
6
d.
per volume. At first it seemed like the doom-mongers were right: sales were slow. Then, against all expectations, the books began to sell. Routledge then reissued the novels, this time in his Railway Edition format, at 1
s.
6
d.
each, and sold 46,000 copies. In 1859 yet another format change saw him shift a further 35,000 copies. By 1857 Routledge had made so much money on Bulwer-Lytton that he renewed the agreement annually at £1,000 a year. Bulwer-Lytton was the Railway Library’s most successful author for two decades.
⁶⁵

The range of subject matter that became available over the next decade was extraordinary: now that the price did not limit the purchase of books to the prosperous classes, the market seemed ever expandable, and people were eager to sample almost any type of book. Cheap literature was suddenly everywhere: an edition of Shakespeare could be bought for 1
s.
, an illustrated collected verse of Byron for 7
d.
⁶⁶
Matthew Arnold claimed to have seen a copy of his
Empedocles on Etna
on sale at Derby station in 1854;
*
in 1857 Volumes 3 and 4 of Macaulay’s
History of England
were ‘cried up and down the platform at York like a second edition of
The Times
’.
†
⁶⁸
As Trollope wrote in

1855, ‘A man’s seat in a railway carriage is now, or may be, his study.’
⁶⁹

But more than literature and contemporary fiction were promoted by the railways: all kinds of new books were ushered in by the transport revolution. In 1845 the novelist Charles Lever produced a collection of stories called
Tales of the trains, being some chapters of railroad romance, by Tilbury Tramp, queen’s messenger
; four years later Leigh Hunt’s
A Book for a Corner, or, Selections in Prose and Verse and Readings for Railways, or Anecdotes and other Short Stories, Reflections, Maxims, Characteristics, Passages of Wit, Humour, and Poetry
(this is one title) appeared; the ‘corner’ referred to was the corner seat of a railway carriage. Soon after this came
The Railway Anecdote Book
, which first appeared in 1850 and was successful enough to go through at least another two editions, as well as an illustrated version.

Anthologies, however, were hardly a novelty, even if the expected reader was now sitting in the corner of a carriage instead of a corner by the fire. A completely new sort of publication came with the arrival of
the timetable. The railway was a contradictory thing: it brought freedom of movement, but, in order to take advantage of that freedom, the traveller had to accept regimentation. In the early days of the railways, many of the upper classes had not recognized this, and instead feared that the new technology would exacerbate an already disturbing tendency towards equality. The Duke of Wellington worried that trains would encourage ‘the lower orders to go uselessly wandering about the country’, and at first the railway companies behaved as if it were their job to prevent this from happening. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway made would-be travellers order their tickets twenty-four hours in advance, giving name, address, place of birth, age, occupation and reason for travel, so that the ‘Station Agent’ could be assured that ‘the applicant desires to travel for a just and lawful cause’. It quickly became clear that - if for no other reason - sheer volume of traffic rendered this system impracticable. Yet the need for organization, even if one was catching a train to go ‘uselessly wandering’, was still necessary. Thomas Cook, the great excursion travel agent, put it poetically to his customers: ‘Railway time is London time, and London time is the sun’s time, and the sun’s time is common time; and
Railway time all must keep
…’ (my italics).
⁷⁰

But it was not that simple for those who did not organize travellers for a living to accept ‘railway time’ over ‘God’s time’, as it was sometimes pointedly known. It had long been understood that, as one moved east or west, the time was different; there was, for example, twelve minutes’ difference between London and Liverpool, and thirty minutes between Yarmouth and Penzance. When stagecoaches had been scheduled to take ‘about’ two days, or were advertised as leaving, ‘God willing’, before dark, that did not much matter. When railways reduced days of travelling to mere hours, fixed times became essential. In 1840, after a decade of confusion, the South Western and the Great Western railways announced that their stations would synchronize their clocks with London time. Even then, at Rugby station, which was shared between the London and North Western and the Midland railways, the former kept local time, the latter London time. By 1845 it was generally accepted that all railways had to operate on London time, but there remained stubborn holdouts. The Chester and Holyhead Railway insisted on setting its clocks by the Craig-y-Don gun, fired daily on the estate of the local landowners at ‘noon’, precisely 16
¹
/
₂
minutes after the hour according to
Greenwich time.
*
This was especially annoying to travellers since the line primarily served the Irish Mail, which itself ran on Greenwich time. As late as 1851 there was correspondence in
The Times
debating the merits of a uniform system, and it was only in 1852 that the South Eastern Railway made an arrangement for the Royal Observatory to transmit the Greenwich signal by telegraph to its stations along the line.
†
⁷³

Thus the new leisure and new freedom brought by the railways meant a new regimentation. Thomas Cook, in his
Hand Book
of 1845, which set out the itinerary for his first commercial trip, from Leicester, Nottingham and Derby to Liverpool, felt it necessary to warn his customers, ‘Promptitude on the part of the Railway Company, calls for the same from passengers.’
⁷⁴
Help in achieving this new precision was soon readily available for the anxious traveller. In the 1830s, George Bradshaw, a Quaker map-engraver working in Manchester, had produced
Bradshaw’s Maps of Inland Navigation
, showing the various canal routes. From there it was but a short step to producing a printed sheet to go with the maps, to list the times of the few trains that could then be linked to the canals. Bradshaw’s
Time Tables
was a small pamphlet costing 6
d.
, supplemented by a
Time Sheet
that was only 3
d.
‡
In 1839
Bradshaw’s Railway Time Tables and assistant to Railway Travelling with Illustrative Maps and Plans
appeared, in the teeth of opposition from the railways, which feared that the timetables ‘would make punctuality a sort of obligation’. In some of the more obdurate cases Bradshaw actually had to buy shares in the different railway companies so that as a shareholder he could force them to disclose the information he required. In 1840 his first 1
s.
booklet appeared:
Bradshaw’s Railway Companion, containing The Times of Departure, Fares, &c. of the Railways in England
, which included schedules for twelve railway companies.
⁷⁶
From then on, few prosperous homes were
without at least one copy - and often ‘the foreign
Bradshaw
’, as the schedule of Continental trains was known, as well. By 1885 the
Advertisers Guardian
, used for selling advertising space, listed another six daily, weekly or monthly publications giving schedules.
⁷⁷