THIRTY OR FORTY YEARS AGO, in the United States at least, we confidently used the terms “highbrow,” “middlebrow,” and “lowbrow” to describe not only reading matter but all sorts of cultural artifacts; and we generally assumed that the terms described quality or value as well as defining the social and intellectual class of people who chose one instead of the others. When it came to the study of British literature, we learned that the novel and the popular novel were (in the beginning) one and the same: that when the fictional prose narrative became a recognized literary form in English it was distinguished by its commercial character and its wide readership. Novels were the reading of the middle classes and particularly of women, tainted both by gender and by the disrepute attached by writing with an eye on public reception rather than artistic integrity. By the 1840s, however, novels had become a vehicle for serious thought. For a very short time, best-selling authors were also great writers. A serious novelist could speak with a voice of cultural authority–and also earn a substantial income. There were, of course, light and ephemeral fictions (and whole classes of sub-literature such as penny dreadfuls and cheap romances), but in the middle of the nineteenth century, we once learned, it was generally assumed that a book read by a great many people was probably worth reading.

That situation did not last long. George Eliot has typically been called the last British writer of enduring importance who was also a bestseller. Shifts in class and education made the difference. The 1851 census described 357,000 people as middle class. A mere thirty years later the number had nearly doubled, to 647,000. There was an even more dramatic expansion in the lower-middle class (clerical, technical; supervisory; artisans, small shopkeepers). Alfred Austin wrote in 1879 that “High Art” was impossible in a democracy because commercial success was “in the hands of a clever, pushing, semi-educated middle-class” (231).

Many of these assumptions came into question during the later 1950s and the 1960s (partly as men of working-class origins came into the academy). Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, first published in 1957, has as its subtitle Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments. In the same year, on the other side of the Atlantic, the University of Chicago Press brought out The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 by Richard D. Altick. Margaret Dalziel's Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago (1957) is subtitled An Unexplored Tract of Literary History. Louis James's Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–50 was initially published in 1963. By the time I started casting around for a dissertation topic in the late 1960s, Fiction With a Purpose: Major and Minor Nineteenth-Century Novels, by Robert A. Colby, had also appeared.

Thus I began to work on women's reading with a sense that “popular” and “literary” were not just synonyms for “trashy” and “important”; with a knowledge that neither social class nor moral values were as simple as they might seem; with an awareness of the economic dimensions to writing, publishing, and reading; and with a vague inkling of something like psychic value that lay as much within the reader as in the text. I believed that the study of popular fiction was driven by an interest in questions about what people read if they were not educated men who made the rules about what you ought to read and how to read it. I also knew (or thought I knew) thirty-five years ago that penny periodicals and their exaggerated fictions were read by working women and men, artisans, shopkeepers, clerks, and (secretly) by young people of all classes, while “popular fiction” was found in three-volume library novels and, after the 1860s, in shilling monthly magazines. Revisiting the territory now, to look at recent work on class and on popular fiction, I find that our confident clarity has grown vastly muddled, with tentacles spreading in all directions, and at the same time that there is still a great deal of significant work to be done.

The issue of class has been partly submerged by gender or race, a meeting sometimes as awkward as any other three-way intersection without a traffic signal. Arlene Young, in Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel, focuses on the lower-middle-class characters in literature evidently written by and for middle-class people. The traditional middle class, she argues, recognized the threat to its own dominance in the growing size and influence of those she defines as “urban white-collar workers” (10); thus the novels represented lower-middle-class men as insignificant, narrow, lackluster–and feminized. Like conventional Victorian women, they are “diminutive, obsessed with dress and appearance” (62) and naturally domesticated. “These conventions,” she argues, “were developed by the middle class as a means of controlling and containing other classes, but are subsequently manipulated, mainly by women and lower-middle-class male writers, as a form of resistance to middle-class patriarchal dominance” (2). Though her description of the feminized lower-middle-class male works quite well for many of the novels she selects as examples, the messiness of the intersection is revealed in the sentence just quoted, where the “middle class” that controls and contains other classes is entirely male. Her fourth chapter, “Bachelor Girls and Working Women: Women and Independence in Oliphant, Levy, Allen and Gissing” exposes a problem in defining women's class. Although she has argued that male clerks were threatening figures kept in their place by caricature, she writes that opening “white-collar work to women … provided new opportunities” and “symbolic liberation” (128). Yet while asserting that “most of the women who were willing and able to do low-level white-collar work were middle-class” (129) she ignores her own distinction between middle-class and lower-middle-class social formations; she also (like the novelists) overlooks the fact that most women clerks earned wages entirely inadequate to “independence.” A typist's pay typically started at ten shillings a week, and even if it doubled to £50 a year before she was replaced by a younger and cheaper woman, that £50 was barely more than half the salary paid by the London School Board in the 1890s for beginning teachers. The nature of the fantasy explored by authors such as Grant Allen is therefore compromised by failure to recognize its fantastic dimension.

Patricia Ingham's The Language of Gender and Class covers much the same period, many of the same issues, and some of the same novels as Young's book, though Ingham's focus is on discourse rather than images. Proposing as a general thesis that “the interlocked coding of class and gender in the novel untwines in the course of the nineteenth century” (20), she locates an intersection between middle-class women and (in this case) working-class men in the earlier part of the period by arguing that Shirley, North and South, and Hard Times solve the problem of class hostility and working-class misery by displacing “the conflict of class and class onto that between the sexes” through the “compassionate sympathy felt by the true woman for individual workers” (29). The most striking argument emerges in her analysis of narrative voice. Elizabeth Gaskell, for example, is known for her ability to use dialect without making fun of her characters, but in North and South, as Ingham demonstrates, Margaret Hale and even the narrator occupy “the wrong side of the class divide by the casual use of a few dialect terms in contexts where the workmen and their families might use them” (63).

Neither Ingham nor Young is interested in questions of market, audience, sales, readership, or form of publication; both examine issues of class in a limited number of examples drawn from mainstream literature. Questions of definition seem even less clear in recent work on women's popular fiction. In Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels, Pamela K. Gilbert provides close readings of two texts by each of three authors, the two texts representing, she argues, different subgenres of each author's work: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and The Doctor's Wife; Rhoda Broughton's Not Wisely But Too Well and A Beginner; Ouida's Under Two Flags and Folle-Farine. Her energetic and provocative readings are, however, interspersed with oddly free-floating assertions. When she writes that “the emphasis on the blurring of class boundaries in reading is an important feature of the popular novel” (70), it remains unclear who is doing the emphasizing or for whom the “blurring of class boundaries” is important. And were critics in the mid-Victorian period really “especially vigilant in their surveillance of the classed borders of fiction” (84)? Were they any more so than earlier critics of the Newgate novel and its blood-and-thunder penny-issue derivatives? It also seems odd that Gilbert has not used the Wellesley Index to identify authors of many articles which she lists as “Anonymous.” When essays in major periodicals are taken as representing public discourse, is it not worth knowing that they were written by people as distinct and distinctive as Barry Cornwall, Leslie Stephen, Alfred Austin, Eliza Lynn Linton, and the Roman Catholic priest William Barry?

Of all the very-popular-but-slightly-disreputable Victorian authors barely mentioned a generation ago, Mary Elizabeth Braddon has generated the largest amount of critical traffic in recent years, perhaps because Lady Audley's Secret has been available in paperback ever since the Dover edition of 1974. Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context, a collection of essays edited by Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie, includes a variety of work that is most often revealing when it provides sharp specifics instead of large claims. Katherine Montwieler's “Marketing Sensation: Lady Audley's Secret and Consumer Culture,” for example, pinpoints the class differences in material objects by comparing the decor of Audley Court to the home of shabby-genteel Mrs. Vincent and the attempts at decoration in Phoebe Marks's dwelling. In “Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Australia: Queen of the Colonies,” Toni Johnson-Woods suggests that the extraordinary popularity of Braddon compared to other British imports in Australian weekly magazines rested not only on her compendium of details about current British “fashions, furnishings and fads that appealed to colonial women” (not to mention a brother who became premier of Tasmania and helped write the Australian constitution) but also on her skill in creating fiction which “captured some of the emerging Australian ideals” (113). Her enumeration of them is documented with intriguing arguments about the “social chaos of the goldfields,” the ability of colonial women to marry up, and the social power of Braddon's servant characters.

The book's most important essay is by Graham Law and Jennifer Carnell, whose argument is based in part on the information generated by Law for his Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Casting doubt on the easy elision of 1860s sensation fiction with lower-class reading which is so often made by others who write about Braddon (including several in this volume), “‘Our Author’: Braddon in the Provincial Weeklies” persuasively argues that “In the 1860s there is a sharp cleavage in Braddon's fiction between those novels aimed at the popular market for penny and shilling dreadfuls and those issued in the middle-brow monthlies and for the circulating libraries” (140). It was not, Law believes, the famous early books such as Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd which had broad class readership but the books after 1873, when syndication made it possible for Braddon to enjoy the income from weekly publication in the provinces “without compromising [a book's] status for the libraries or the reviewers” (140).

Studies of genre fiction as a subspecies of popular fiction have sometimes also made use of information–or speculation–about social class; Braddon has long appeared alongside Poe, Dickens, and Collins in histories of the detective story. Stephen Knight's summary in Crime Fiction 1800–2000 of two hundred years and some six hundred titles provides a useful chronology, a forty-three-page bibliography, and an informative prehistory of crime fiction beginning not even with the Newgate Calendar but with a title from 1591. His chapters on the nineteenth century supply a useful corrective to some of the conventional statements about innovation in the 1860s and refine ideas about genre, popularity, form, and theme. But on the whole this is history washed clean not only of literary theorizing but also of class in either sense of the word: no discussion of popularity, readership, form of publication– and no social reading of crime fiction. Ronald R. Thomas's Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, at the other extreme, is an intellectually complex work about the relationship between science, authority, criminology, detective fiction, and truth. He generates contexts by accumulating specifics: “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” he writes, “was published in the same decade in which Lombroso and Munsterberg would experiment with the lie detector and Sir Francis Galton would author his landmark book on fingerprinting as an infallible identification technique. Holmes's first appearance also came two years before the appearance of Havelock Ellis's The Criminal (1890), the first systematic English work on criminal anthropology” (35). Thomas is nevertheless too cagey to provide only simple demonstrations of hegemony. “The narratives in question did not simply or consistently reassure,” he maintains, “they sometimes challenged the emerging culture of surveillance … the detective story may act less like an enforcer of legitimate cultural authority and more like a force of resistance” (6). This allows him to offer competing readings of some texts now frequently taught to undergraduates and to offer up complexity rather than choosing one reading or another.

Simon Joyce writes about crime (and some crime fiction) in a social context that is more attentive to class issues. In Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London, he asserts that by the century's end the correlations among class, slums, and crime–assumed by novelists and social commentators alike in the early Victorian years–had bifurcated: Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People of London (1889) could still map the criminal districts, but in fiction “criminals are likely to emanate not only from outside the city itself, but also from the privileged classes” (7), though, oddly, he mentions Dr. Jekyll and Dorian Gray but ignores the upper-middle-class female villains of earlier sensation novels. On the other hand, he does pay attention to questions of audience when he notes that the serial version of Douglas Jerrold's St. Giles and St. James in Douglas Jerrold's Shilling Magazine had a happy ending for “St. Giles” as well as for “St. James”; the revisions for book publication, he speculates, “might have been tailored to a wealthier audience” (48). He complicates the reception argument even more in his analysis of Oliver Twist, discussing its original appearance in Bentley's Miscellany, the responses of contemporary reviewers, the multiple melodramatic stage versions and penny plagiarisms (some of which had overt political aims), and what he calls the “repressed context” (70) of their reception in the period marked by the first and last Chartist conventions, the rioting and strikes of the hungry forties, and the rise of the industrial novel. He thus argues that Oliver Twist is neither an overtly subversive text nor one in which transgression is contained and neutralized, but rather a source of scenes and messages which are complicated, ambiguous, and available to readers' interpretations.

Detection has been the most-studied variety of popular fiction, probably because some examples of the genre are respectable, at least as recreation, even for intellectuals. High praise, then, to Annette R. Federico, whose Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture treats an author often seen as a prime example of debased lower-middle-class taste. (Paperback reprints of twenty-four Corelli books can still be found through a website devoted to occult literature and alternative medicine.) Yet though most reviewers ridiculed her work, Corelli's admirers included not only Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales but also William Gladstone. In 1895 The Sorrows of Satan had an initial sale, according to Federico, “greater than any previous English novel”–25,000 copies in the first week (7). One hostile reviewer who judged Corelli by her presumed readers wrote that they were “members of her own sex, in middle-class society, and from the working classes–shop girls and young men of the large towns” (64). Federico's goal is to identify and test questions about writing for a mass readership: in accounting for the wide success of a particular author at a specific historical moment, she examines both the standard critical assumptions and the texts of best-selling works that call some of these assumptions into question.

Readers' class may be easier to infer in the case of periodicals, since not only price but also advertisements, advice columns, and letters or other communications that are (or purport to be) from actual readers help supply grounds for judgment. Though all of these features can be managed and sometimes created by editors, successful commercial magazines depend on sales and must have some relationship to readers' interests. In A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman's Magazine, 1800–1914, Margaret Beetham is very sharp in both her analysis and her gathering of data. Where Young argues that novelists denigrated lower-middle-class men by placing them in the domestic sphere, Beetham points out that “the middle class woman was distinguished from the middle class man by her exclusion from ‘work’ ”–thus leisure, in a discourse intended for women, “united rather than divided the middle class and the aristocracy” (30). Furthermore, the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, which claimed 60,000 readers by 1860 and gave advice on budgets ranging from £60 per year up to £1,000, printed, in addition to its food, fashion, and fiction, articles “advocating divorce reform and married women's property rights” (65). And even with such periodicals, the question is never simple. The Queen, in Beetham's terms, “constructed a readership of ‘ladies’ rather than ‘domestic women’” yet it was “almost certainly read by those for whom such a style of life was an aspiration or even a fantasy” (90–91), to say nothing of another (unmentioned) group: the dressmakers and tradeswomen for whom magazines with fashion plates and gossip about new fads served as professional resources.

Two additional books–both of them long in the making and based on research into sources not previously tapped–call into question all of our confident assumptions about who read what. Graham Law's Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press draws on records from Tillotsons' Fiction Bureau and other agencies that developed mechanisms for syndication. New novels were sold in weekly parts and published first–before they came out in volumes– by papers in major provincial cities such as Nottingham, Liverpool, Aberdeen, Dublin, Sheffield, Manchester, and Birmingham, as well as in Australia and North America. As long as multiple papers subscribed, each one could afford the draw of a popular novelist. In addition to giving extra revenue to authors, syndication provided journals in the U.S. with advance sheets so they could publish ahead of the pirates that would jump in once volumes were available.

Law's data about circulation, publication dates, pay, and so forth must now be considered when making generalizations about popularity, class, and literary form. Provincial readers of cheap weekly newspapers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century saw many books that were never published in volumes, but they were also the initial readers of novels not only by sensationalists such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon but also by Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith. This information complicates our assumptions about penny-weekly fiction; it also suggests that we need to rethink matters of form. Most of us are used to reminding our students about the consequences of monthly serialization as opposed to publication in volumes; Law, however, proposes that by the last twenty years of the century the weekly serial also exerted specific pressures on the shape of mainstream fiction.

Finally, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose occupies an opposite pole from the kind of literary studies that Rose castigates for drawing large conclusions from a theory-based close reading of four or five novels: it is an historian's volume crammed with new information. Rose has read most of the “nearly two thousand documents, published and unpublished” in the bibliography of memoirs compiled by David Vincent, John Burnett, and David Mayall as The Autobiography of the Working Class (1989) in addition to using “oral history, educational records, library records, sociological surveys, and opinion polls” (2). His comments on the strengths, weaknesses, and biases in various kinds of data are in themselves of value for graduate students in literature, who too often depend on a half-dozen primary sources excerpted in recent collections, and although Rose's polemics may be overheated they are necessary reading. “The question of whether Dickens, Conrad, or penny dreadfuls reinforced or subverted patriarchy, imperialism, or class hierarchies,” Rose writes, “has become an obsession in academic literature departments and cultural studies programs”. The “failure” of this effort, he believes, “is methodological: with some exceptions, it ignores actual readers…. critics repeatedly commit what might be called the receptive fallacy: they try to discern the messages a text transmits to an audience by examining the text rather than the audience” (4).

There is something to think about on virtually every page. When in 1906 the newly elected Labour MPs were asked about books and authors that influenced them, the six names most frequently cited were (in order) Ruskin, Dickens, the Bible, Carlyle, Henry George, and Walter Scott. Carlyle found admirers from both the left and the right, as working women used him to support their own ambitions and mental independence, while some socialists (including Robert Blatchford, editor of the Clarion) formed their style and ideology in reaction against Carlyle's. And, turning to boys' literature and the imperialism of writers such as Henty as well as the weekly papers, Rose asserts that “even after a half-century of unrelenting indoctrination, most working people knew little of the Empire and cared less” (322).

Rose's expertise in book history leads to other observations we should consider: that a great many readers, for example, knew texts such as Robinson Crusoe only in drastically truncated abridgments, and that because the price of new literature in any form was prohibitive for most working people, “the reading tastes of the British working classes consistently lagged a generation behind those of the educated middle classes, a cultural conservatism that often coexisted with political radicalism” (116). It was literature of the previous generation that wound up on twopenny bookstalls and in the readers used by working-class schools, which depended on out-of-copyright material. For the same reason, contemporary American writers were often quite well known. Washington Irving, Rose tells us, appeared “in English school anthologies as early as the 1820s, Longfellow and William Cullen Bryant in 1833” (354).

Of course there are methodological questions which Rose himself recognizes. Memoirs (even unpublished memoirs) are generally written by relatively articulate people, whatever their class background; and people (whether schoolchildren or adults) who answer surveys about their reading tastes quite often want to make a good impression on the person asking questions. Women are, as Rose recognizes, severely under-represented in the surviving materials; the record of books actually borrowed from Welsh miners' libraries, for example, gives far more weight to Ellen Wood (and to a great many of her other books besides East Lynne) than do the surveys and memoirs. There are a lot of loose ends to provoke arguments, but the information Rose provides (and his comments on interpreting it) absolutely demands consideration. The book has dozens of quotations from sources we do not know, and that we cannot know unless we too spend years in archives reading unpublished memoirs. Among them are many wonderful examples of resistant reading that show how “uneducated” people could make meaning out of unpromising material in order to use it for their own purposes.

The most important scholarly books, it seems to me, are those that leave questions open, that suggest projects which have not been done, that point the way to new material. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes is full of such signposts. Someone needs to consider the rejections of modernism assembled from Rose's sources, to read his withering attack on the class prejudices of leading modernists (including Virginia Woolf's condescending introduction to Life as We Have Known It), and then to figure out what to do with this information. Anyone who writes about fictional portraits of the lower-middle class should begin with Rose's chapter, “What Was Leonard Bast Really Like?” Rose points out that self-educated workers are largely ignored in the fiction available to people who do their analysis of class from standard novels; Felix Holt and Alton Locke, he asserts, are the only ones to appear before 1880. But what about the narratives identified by Graham Law that were serialized in weekly newspapers but never reprinted in volumes? Were there stories about self-educated workers, perhaps even written by them? Or does the investment in time necessary to write and sell a piece of long fiction mean that although worker-poets are not terribly difficult to unearth (see, for example, the Chartist material excavated during the 1960s and published in Martha Vicinus's The Industrial Muse, the men represented in The Victorian Working-Class Writer by Owen Ashton and Stephen Roberts, the women painstakingly located during the last decade by Florence Boos), there simply are not any careful novels about working life written by working people?

Scholars have been mining what Michael Wolff called the “Golden Stream” of Victorian periodicals for thirty-five years or more, but as selected titles are increasingly microfilmed and digitized, I am afraid that many others will become more thoroughly buried. The volume edited by Margaret Beetham and Kay Boardman, Victorian Women's Magazines: An Anthology, provides interesting short examples, but its primary use for scholars should be the extensive bibliography listing more than three hundred titles with information about dates and (where available) about frequency, price, and editors. Their introductions provide a basic overview of categories such as the drawing-room journal, the ladies' paper, the general illustrated magazine, and the cheap domestic magazine. The titles alone should provoke projects that might bring new ideas into the discussion about class and gender (and even power). Where is the short fiction about working-class women? Why has no one yet thoroughly mined the Monthly Packet? With all the studies of sensation fiction (I'm not sure that any has yet superseded Winifred Hughes's The Maniac in the Cellar), where are the important books about domestic novels or the genre that was in the U.S. called “local color fiction”?

Rereading the first chapter of P. J. Keating's seminal The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (1971), I am struck by a sentence beginning, “The only late-Victorian industrial novel which deserves a place beside those of Mrs. Gaskell and Disraeli is W. E. Tirebuck's now totally forgotten Miss Grace of All Souls (1895)” (7); Tirebuck is later described as a “genuinely working-class” writer (235). Where did Tirebuck publish? Who read his work? And why has he disappeared yet again? As for Mary Elizabeth Braddon, she has become significant enough in the classroom that it is time for someone to make a rigorous comparison among the fiction written expressly for sensational halfpenny papers, the novels that have become standard examples of sixties sensationalism, and the books initially syndicated in provincial newspapers, in order to analyze the formal, thematic, and ideological issues related to mode of publication and reading audience with an author so fully aware of the commercial aspects of her literature.