‘You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town without coming upon a small newsagent's shop.’ So begins ‘Boys' weeklies’, George Orwell's celebrated essay on the ideological freight of juvenile fiction. ‘Probably the contents of these shops is the best available indication of what the mass of the English people really feels and thinks.’ Films were not such a good guide, because the industry was almost a monopoly, and while bestselling novels revealed something of popular attitudes, they were ‘aimed almost exclusively at people above the £4-a-week level’ – at the lower middle class and above.Footnote 1 The differences in the genres and publication formats aimed at the working class and those pitched at the better-off meant that working-class reading habits were genuinely foreign to most readers of the literary magazine Horizon, which published Orwell's essay at the beginning of 1940. Framing his description of boys' papers with a vignette of the flyblown shops that sold them was not just the sort of opening move favoured by slumming or adventuring writers of the 1930s, though there was doubtless an element of that.Footnote 2
Yet Orwell was far from the first person to undertake this sort of investigation. British intellectuals had been pondering the cultural and political implications of newsagents' wares since widespread literacy and an urban market for mass culture became conspicuous in the mid-nineteenth century. The possibility that reading tastes might illuminate more general patterns of life and culture meant that reading could fall within the purview of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social research. Popular reading was, for instance, the subject of a probing investigation by Florence Bell, a practitioner of the sort of social research that Ross McKibbin has called ‘an unselfconscious cultural anthropology’. Writing about Bell's study of industrial workers in the Edwardian period, McKibbin has argued that as her more impressionistic brand of social research was displaced by disciplined adherence to the questions on the survey card and by concentration on economic and structural matters, ‘the ways in which one could “know” the working class’ narrowed severely.Footnote 3 And, indeed, later studies of popular reading – especially that of the working class, sometimes that of working-class women in particular, sometimes that of children of different classes – were undertaken outside the main centres of formal social investigation: in teacher training colleges, in projects conducted by the unruly social-research collective for Mass-Observation – and by literary figures such as Orwell.
Many of the accounts of popular reading published between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century were written by men and women of letters who were professionally curious about unfamiliar reaches of the literary landscape. Wilkie Collins's 1858 essay ‘The unknown public’ set a pattern that many subsequent essayists would follow – or, in the case of the working-class writer Thomas Wright, critique.Footnote 4 For a novelist, studying the literary tastes of the poor could serve as a substitute for slumming as well as a complement to it. Even some studies by social reformers were written in a literary-critical mode. The social worker Helen Bosanquet, another of McKibbin's ‘anthropologists’, wrote an acutely perceptive essay on the subject by working from the texts of ‘cheap literature’ rather than interviews.Footnote 5 Reading what working-class people read could be another way of ‘knowing’ the working class.
This article examines this way of knowing the working class in modern Britain, asking different questions of a body of writings that scholars of literacy and mass culture have used extensively.Footnote 6 While there were other kinds of investigation into reading habits, such as market research by publishers, the literary-critical and social-research strands are especially significant because of the larger problems of class and culture that they addressed. I argue that those using social-research methods tended to focus on reading as a practice and to consider it in the context of family life and social structures, while critics working outwards from the texts were typically concerned with matters of taste, tone, and ideology. The subject of popular reading thus opens up the question of the scope of literary criticism and social research in modern Britain. Much of the substantial and sophisticated historiography on that question focuses on English and sociology as disciplines.Footnote 7 Yet universities did not dominate British intellectual life in the Victorian period or the first half of the twentieth century. Examining the methods and assumptions of students of popular reading makes it possible to see the knowledge claims of literary criticism and social research at work in less formal theatres of intellectual activity.
I
Beginning in the 1830s, the registrar general of births, deaths, and marriages published tables of literacy rates extrapolated from the parish registers that every bride and groom had to sign or mark for their marriage to be valid. In the earliest tables, 67 per cent of grooms and 51 per cent of brides in England and Wales were able to write their names. In successive decades, the percentage of signatures increased steadily and the gap between men and women closed. By the beginning of the First World War nearly every person who got married met this minimal criterion of literacy.Footnote 8 As David Vincent and others have shown, instruction within the family and in often precarious private day schools drove this change: something like mass literacy was already achieved before extensive church or state schooling systems were established.Footnote 9 The Education Act of 1870, which required local authorities to fund and administer schools where voluntary or church provision of elementary education was inadequate, did not suddenly open ‘the floodgates of literacy’.Footnote 10
Public libraries, the state's other contribution to the infrastructure of literacy, spread unsteadily but irreversibly after 1850.Footnote 11 The stupendously detailed returns that libraries provided to parliament in 1876 and 1877 make it clear that the majority of borrowers were labourers, artisans, clerks, and retail workers (and that men far outnumbered women).Footnote 12 The greatest demand was for fiction. Although the extent to which public libraries should stock anything other than sober non-fiction remained a matter for debate, most librarians accepted that supplying novels was a legitimate aspect of libraries' mission.Footnote 13 However, huge amounts of popular fiction never reached public libraries or commercial circulating libraries because it was published in serial form in cheap weekly papers and seldom reappeared in hard covers.
These ‘penny weeklies’ were a byword for popular fiction. The London Journal and the Family Herald had circulations in the hundreds of thousands and were the ones most often mentioned by middle-class investigators, but there were scores of other journals, many of them ephemeral. Sometimes, their publishers sold self-contained ‘novelettes’ as complements to the weeklies.Footnote 14 Urban workers got this reading matter from bookstalls, from newsagents and tobacconists, and from other traders enmeshed in the quotidian patterns of working-class commerce. In 1868, the publisher Alexander Macmillan lamented that in country towns the book trade had become ‘so profitless that it is generally the appendage to a toyshop’.Footnote 15 Neighbourhood shops remained important suppliers of fiction well into the twentieth century. From 1930, more and more shopkeepers incorporated modest circulating libraries into their businesses, charging their customers two pence a week and not demanding a deposit or annual fee.Footnote 16 ‘Shops trading as libraries only rarely pay’, Ronald F. Batty advised in 1938 in How to run a twopenny library; but as ‘a sideline to another business’, a library could be a valuable source of additional income and a way of bringing customers back into the shop regularly.Footnote 17
The spread of ‘twopenny libraries’ meant that working-class readers could read bestselling books shortly after they were first published, something only middle-class readers could do previously.Footnote 18 After 1935, Penguin's affordable but respectable paperbacks further blurred distinctions between what working-class people read and what middle-class people did – for non-fiction, anyway.Footnote 19 Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, British publishers continued to produce large amounts of fiction that was read almost exclusively by working-class people. After the First World War, the big publishing combines launched new fiction papers targeting an expanded market of younger female workers.Footnote 20Peg's Paper and other ‘story papers’ carried short fiction as well as serials and 10,000-word fictions described variously as ‘long complete’ stories and ‘novels’.Footnote 21 These were genres remote from the literary culture presupposed by critics in the weightier newspapers, the Times Literary Supplement, and the political weekly magazines – and by the assertively middlebrow John o’ London's Weekly.Footnote 22 Contemporaries still found it plausible to suggest that working-class readers inhabited a literary world discrete from that of the privileged and barely known to them.
This had been the central conceit of Collins's ‘Unknown public’ essay, which conjured implicitly with the idea of the rich and the poor as two estranged ‘nations’, as a character in Benjamin Disraeli's novel Sybil of 1845 puts it. Writing in 1858 in Charles Dickens's weekly Household Worlds, Collins asked rhetorically whether ‘the subscribers to this journal, the customers at the eminent publishing-houses, the members of book-clubs and circulating libraries, and the purchasers and borrowers of newspapers and reviews' added up to ‘the great bulk of the reading public of England’. Once, Collins wrote, he would have said yes. More recently, while making the flâneur's rounds of London streets, ‘especially in the second and third rate neighbourhoods’, he happened upon cheap quarto publications that he started to see everywhere: ‘in fruit-shops, in oyster-shops, in lolly-pop shops’. These publications catered to a massive, unfathomable, ‘Unknown Public’. Working from a small sample of penny journals, Collins established that the stories in them were crudely written and full of laughable misapprehensions of the way the world worked. But in time he expected this new reading public to graduate to the work of good novelists presently read only by the middle class. A hopeful sign was the decision of one penny weekly to serialize Walter Scott's Kenilworth. Collins was on the verge of his own run of success as a novelist when he wrote this article, and he was probably being more self-interested than meliorist in imagining a future in which a popular novelist's readership numbered in the millions, as the unknown public became a known market.Footnote 23
Collins's article became a template for commentary on working-class reading. His theme of a vast reading public unknown to the readers and writers of hardcover books and his use of visits to newsagents and other small shops as research were imitated by many subsequent writers. Other commentators also followed Collins in describing the act of buying penny papers, or spreading a sample of them out for the purpose of review, and – most importantly – in inferring the tastes of the public from the periodicals sold to it. Margaret Oliphant, the novelist and self-described ‘general utility woman’ on Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, published an article there that featured all these devices in the same month as Collins's ‘Unknown public’ appeared in Household Words.Footnote 24 The following decade, a writer in Macmillan's Magazine reprised Collins's suggestion that the extent of penny fiction made a mockery of literary figures' belief that they had
a good general idea of what is English literature. They think of Tennyson and Dickens as the most popular of our living authors. It is a fond delusion … The works of Mr. Pierce Egan are sold by the half million … But how many educated men and women in this country know of the existence of Mr. Pierce Egan?Footnote 25
In 1881, the novelist James Payn explicitly referred to Collins's article and repeated his experiment: ‘notwithstanding its gigantic dimensions, the Unknown Public remains practically as unknown as ever’. Its reading matter had to be sought out ‘in the back streets, in small dark shops, in the company of cheap tobacco, hardbake, and (at the proper season) valentines'.Footnote 26
The serials and short fiction they carried were the main attraction, but middle-class investigators were also intrigued by the ‘answers to correspondents’ pages. Readers' willingness to ask editors for advice about their love lives and for information about topics from Roman history to remedies for swollen noses to the intricacies of the law of bigamy – and editors' willingness to pronounce on all these subjects – amazed Oliphant, Collins, and Alexander Strahan.Footnote 27 Oliphant found in the answers pages a distinctive literary culture: ‘this odd reciprocity between writers and readers, this multitudinous movement on the part of the audience to originate as well as to receive their own amusement’.Footnote 28
Vice and violence provided some of the amusement. It was customary to deplore the explicit accounts in the Police News. True-crime chapbooks were one of the evils that B. G. Johns examined in a long survey of street literature in the Edinburgh Review in 1887 that fed into contemporary morals campaigns.Footnote 29 However, while the fiction in penny journals was crammed with morally questionable acts, many commentators were more relaxed about it than Johns was. Edward G. Salmon, writing in 1886 on ‘What the working classes read’, concluded that penny fiction in Britain was ‘more silly than vicious’, unlike its Paris and New York counterparts.Footnote 30 Describing the ‘moral texture of the stories that appear in the penny journals’, the Macmillan's writer declared that the reputation for crime and debauchery that penny fiction had once had was no longer warranted. Quite the reverse: ‘The honest beer-swilling Briton of the lower order loves to make moral reflections when he finds himself in doubtful company.’Footnote 31 When Lady Bell discovered how popular Mrs Henry Wood's temperance novel of 1860, East Lynne, remained in Edwardian Middlesbrough, she judged that the secret of its success among working-class readers was most likely its ‘admirable compound of the goody and the sensational’.Footnote 32
Mrs Henry Wood enjoyed a cross-class readership, as did Dickens, Mary Braddon, and other popular Victorian novelists. The affinities between the plots and styles of penny fiction and those of the three-volume novels that many middle-class readers borrowed from circulating libraries often escaped the notice of popular literature's critics. They also repeatedly underestimated the level of literacy that popular fiction demanded. Critics evidently assumed that because prose was lurid and clumsy it must have been read by those with only the most rudimentary schooling, even as the quoted passages bristled with Latinate words.Footnote 33 The vulgarity of the prose was usually taken to be self-evident, and quoting selections provided much sport for critics of popular writing.
Bulk quotation was one of the main ways critics conveyed the flavour of penny fiction; the others were plot summaries and lists of stock devices. One critic freely admitted that in summarizing the plots of serials and novelettes he was having fun with easy targets, and others were obviously conscious of the satirical quality of their accounts.Footnote 34 But the mere act of summarizing such stories was almost unavoidably comic. An extravagant plot sounds necessarily ridiculous in summary form; less dramatic stories that have other artistic flaws do not sound so awful when summarized. Listing stock devices also generated humour at the expense of penny fiction. One report offered a catalogue of scenes depicted in woodcuts in the London Journal:
ladies elope with lovers in the dead of night; post-chaises are driven at the gallop in thunder, lightning, and rain over lonely moors; women are stabbing women and offering to shoot men; men hurl each other down trap doors; dead men are carried to the doctor; ladies are oppressed with awful secrets, and faint before the altar at the sight of gentlemen; houses are on fire; duels are a standing institution; mask balls are the order of the day and night; ladies are carried away by force; horses are ever in readiness; there is much drinking, eternal embraces, and ever and everywhere we see hair flying wild and dishevelled in the wind.Footnote 35
This is only the second half. Listing clichés works exponentially: one is bad, five in a row are preposterously bad. Of course, the very fact of identifying stock devices made the point that this fiction was formulaic. ‘When one has been read, all have been read’, complained Francis Hitchman in 1890. ‘Lady Laura's hair is brown, and her eyes are blue in one story; Lady Constance in another has black hair and violet eyes, but each goes through the same adventures, each is made love to by an unprincipled adventurer – Captain Hawke in one story, Major Falcon in another.’Footnote 36
Penny fiction's preponderance of titled characters was the subject of much mirthful and scornful comment.Footnote 37 Again and again, critics emphasized that penny novelists set their stories in high society even though they evidently had little personal knowledge of upper-class life.Footnote 38 Helen Bosanquet found a description of a heroine's ball gown that she could not visualize despite its costuming jargon (‘paillettes’, ‘cabochons’, ‘décolleté’, ‘accordion pleated’). The prose also confounded the illustrator, who ‘evidently despaired of reproducing the dress in question, and merely indicates evening dress in general by a long train and low neck’. However confused the description was, it ‘could hardly fail to stir the feminine longings of the girl reader’. The ‘representation of “society” in these stories', Bosanquet observed, ‘is for the most part purely conventional’, and a description served its purpose simply by suggesting ‘an atmosphere of luxury’.Footnote 39
Savouring that atmosphere, Bosanquet surmised, provided ‘mental distraction’ from weariness and boredom: ‘the shop-girl soothes away the irritation of the long day's toil by soaring with a heroine (in whom she finds a glorified self) into a heaven of luxury and sentimentality’.Footnote 40 As the extraordinary phrase ‘glorified self’ indicates, Bosanquet was writing about projection as well as distraction, fantasy as an activity as well as a genre. James Haslam, writing like Bosanquet at the beginning of the twentieth century, saw ‘society’ fiction as a means of escape from the realities of labour. Surveying newsagents in the ‘crowded, proletarian districts’ of Manchester, Haslam came across a romance stocked with earls, billiard rooms, and hunting that had ‘not a single item in it akin to the real lives of these Ancoats inhabitants. I expect that its power over them was because its scenes, its people, and its language carried them away from the dirt and grime and profanity to which they were daily accustomed.’Footnote 41 That working-class people read ‘to be taken out of themselves’ was a commonplace observation long before there was a word for it.Footnote 42
What would later be called escapism troubled different observers for different reasons. For Haslam, it was an understandable squandering of the gift of literacy.Footnote 43 Other critics thought that escapism was positively dangerous, ‘destructive to anything like masculine vigour of thought’.Footnote 44 It encouraged a distorted understanding of the world and a working-class person's place in it.Footnote 45 George R. Humphery, who claimed authority from twenty years' involvement with ‘a library connected with a factory’ in Wigan, wrote that ‘ “penny dreadful” trash … fills their heads with unattainable ideas, and hopes that can never be realized. The effect of this is seen in the exalted opinions the young people entertain of themselves, even to the disuse of ordinary politeness.’Footnote 46 This idea had precedents in evangelical and nonconformist tracts about the dangers of novel-reading.Footnote 47 However, to make this judgement about particular kinds of ‘cheap’ fiction was not to endorse the more capacious evangelical distrust of reading. Wholesale condemnations of fiction certainly appeared in the non-religious press, especially earlier in the nineteenth century, but they were not a significant presence in the surveys of reading discussed here.Footnote 48 Even the charge that penny fiction skewed working-class people's sense of their part in the ‘whole drama of life’ was mild compared with earlier fears that literacy would lead to political radicalization.Footnote 49
Those who investigated working-class people's newspaper-reading were more apt to diagnose apathy and ignorance. After canvassing shopkeepers and ‘artisans and general manual workers’ in Lancashire in 1904, John Garrett Leigh was appalled at how politically uninformed they were. ‘When we read a political speech’, he said, ‘we’ – the known public – ‘are apt to wonder what influence it will have in the country. Will it be believed that not one in a hundred of this vast community read a morning paper, even a halfpenny morning?’ Leigh professed astonishment at how few working men had ‘troubled to make themselves conversant with, say, the fiscal question’.Footnote 50 Haunting Leigh's essay and other discussions of popular reading and education was the extension of the franchise in 1867 and 1884.Footnote 51 Leigh reiterated concerns Liberals harboured about the ‘leap in the dark’ of the Conservatives' Reform Bill of 1867 – that it had despotic implications because it would enfranchise a class that, ‘from its position … and … its ignorance, was more under the dominion of the upper classes of society’.Footnote 52 Leigh thought it undeniable that ‘great persons in politics have an influence far outweighing the influence of the causes which they espouse’. Working men did not make the effort to ‘understand political questions. It is sufficient for them that this or that leader thinks this or that … the elementary equipment of reading is being utilized in a manner which makes us almost wish that the masses could not read’.Footnote 53
Leigh went further than most, but other commentators expressed disappointment at the world mass literacy had made. The underwhelming quality of working-class reading was in part a consequence of the failure of the state and civil society to complement elementary education with more libraries and further opportunities for learning, several writers suggested.Footnote 54 Disappointment with mass literacy was articulated with particular bitterness by Liberal-inclining writers like Leigh and Haslam: and it was complemented by told-you-so crowing by critics connected with the Conservative party (such as Hitchman) or writing in Tory journals such as Blackwood's.Footnote 55 J. H. Millar, a Scottish barrister active in literary circles, began his 1898 article in Blackwood's with the pronouncement: ‘There are few phenomena so pregnant with instruction for the cool-headed and impartial student of history as the regularity with which the sanguine predictions of Liberal thinkers have been falsified.’Footnote 56 The Education Act was, like the French Revolution and Free Trade, a study in disappointing consequences. Continuing in this boisterously Tory style, Millar remarked: ‘Our “horny-handed” friend, as he sits over his evening pipe and glass of ale, is diligently perusing, not “The Wealth of Nations”, nor “A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive”, but the selections of “Autolycus” or “Major Mughunter” for the forthcoming spring or autumn handicap.’ The message-boy was reading a yarn about pirates ‘when he comes into collision with your waistcoat’. The seamstress, ‘shop girl’, or domestic servant was reading Betrayed at the Altar or Betrothed to a Brigand.Footnote 57 Still, they could be reading worse, like Ibsen or Ruskin. Penny fiction celebrated marriage and ‘getting on’. Concluding with a throwaway anticipation of Orwell's argument, Millar declared that as long as these remained ‘the secret or avowed ideals of what are called, for convenience’ sake, the working classes, so long will any dangerous and far-reaching scheme of communism remain an impossibility’.Footnote 58
II
Millar followed Collins not only by arguing ‘by inference’ from papers acquired from back-street shops, but also in exercising the class confidence of the Victorian intellectual. Both the interpretative procedure and the underlying social presumption of inferring a mass of readers from a handful of publications that some of them bought were the targets of a forceful critique in 1883 by Thomas Wright. Born in Liverpool in 1839, Wright was a skilled metalworker and an autodidact. After settling in London, he established himself as a social commentator, writing vignettes of working-class life as well as essays on the franchise question, the ‘intelligent artisan’, and labour and leisure for the reformist Contemporary Review and other publications.Footnote 59 ‘Concerning the unknown public’, which appeared in the Nineteenth Century, traded on Wright's direct experience of working-class life. ‘I speak of what I know,’ he insisted, ‘of what I have seen and heard’. Collins, Payn, and unnamed lesser critics who tackled the subject had no such experience. Instead, they had to rely on the ‘internal evidence afforded by the contents of the serials’ – to ‘reason inductively from the known reading to the unknown readers’. Induction devolved into speculation, for instance in Payn's conclusion that ‘the unknown public is practically synonymous with the domestic-servant class’.Footnote 60
Wright was confident that the main demographics of penny fiction were, instead, young women working in retail and in ‘genteel’ female handicrafts such as millinery; young women who did not have to work; and the wives of ‘clerks, shopkeepers, and well-to-do artisans’. Men too read these papers – ‘Penny fiction journals are no uncommon sight in the workshop world’ – but they read them only because ‘their women folk’ had brought them home. Collectively, these groups formed a public that was financially better off and had more formal schooling than the proletarian readerships envisaged by most Victorian commentators on penny journals.Footnote 61
Wright's deeper argument was that there was in fact no ‘working-class’ literary taste. ‘Underlying the whole body of the reasoning is a vitiating assumption … that the penny journals constitute the sole reading of the unknown public.’ Yet working-class people did have access to books published in volume form. Men and women alike sought out reading matter from friends, from lending libraries attached to the firms they worked for, and from sellers of second-hand books. In these ways, they got hold of contemporary novels as well as classics. Until recently, Wright reported, Mary Braddon had been the unknown public's favourite living novelist – even though, as another commentator had remarked, she was not well represented in the penny papers.Footnote 62 Wright himself had been an enthusiastic reader of penny fiction in his youth. The verse epigraphs to the chapters of John Frederick Smith's stories in the London Journal gave Wright his first taste of poetry, and at the same time he was reading penny fiction he was also reading his way through the autodidact canon: Pilgrim's progress, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's travels, Scott's novels. ‘In thus mixing my reading’, Wright went on, ‘I was a representative member of the unknown public as its characteristics remain even unto this day.’Footnote 63
The failure of middle-class observers to recognize the extent of working-class access to books as well as periodicals meant that they drew the wrong conclusions from the oft-repeated story of the serialization of Scott's Kenilworth. No ‘article upon the unknown public would … be considered complete without some reference’ to this episode. In the decade after Collins had mentioned the Kenilworth story as a sign of progress, two anonymous critics took the fact that the journal's circulation fell after the first few instalments of Scott's novel appeared as evidence of how hard it would be to improve the standards of popular reading.Footnote 64 But by the time Kenilworth was serialized, Wright pointed out, it had passed through many cheap editions and was in every book-hawker's barrow. ‘It was to be found in thousands of homes of the artisan class, and from such homes was freely lent to friends and neighbours.’ They stopped buying the London Journal not because Kenilworth was not to their taste, but because it was not new to them. There was thus a continuum between working-class reading and middle-class reading: the existence of penny fiction did not mean that there was a coherent and insular penny-fiction public, as inference from the texts might suggest.Footnote 65
In exposing the blind spots of investigations of the ‘unknown public’, Wright brought out much of the ‘mixedness’ of reading in Victorian Britain – the overlaps between the genres and specific texts favoured by working-class readers and middle-class ones, and the co-existence of old and new books in the reading adventures of people of different classes. Collins, Oliphant, and those who followed them tacitly assumed that new writing was what counted in an assessment of reading habits. So, implicitly, did later commentators, including Orwell. It is common now for historians of reading to focus on the reading of contemporary books, unless their subject is classics-loving autodidacts.Footnote 66 Wright's remarkable essay is a reminder that the history of reading, like the history of technology, is one of ‘use’ as well as ‘innovation’.Footnote 67
III
Wright's personal knowledge was one alternative to ‘inference’; Florence Bell's interviews with readers were a very different one. Bell wrote novels, plays, an enduringly popular French textbook, and numerous essays before somewhat unexpectedly writing At the works (1909), a survey of the community that had grown up around her husband's Middlesbrough factory. She was a member of ‘the Liberal aristocratic intelligentsia’ and prospects for social reform informed At the works as they did most contemporary surveys of industrial life or poverty.Footnote 68 The chapter on reading, however, touched only lightly on the healthiness of working-class tastes and the level of interest in political news in the iron workers' households: its theme was the place of reading in family life, and the contrasts and tensions between interests or literacy levels in couples or across generations. In Bell's Middlesbrough, spouses read aloud to illiterate or short-sighted partners and literate children read to parents and in-laws.Footnote 69
It was a record of conflict, manipulation, and longing as well as support and stimulation. One husband did not like his wife to read because he thought ‘she might “get hold of wrong notions” ’. Another husband could not read because he had a speech impediment and no one had bothered with his education. Now his wife ‘always reads to him in the evenings, and by this means keeps him at home, but he will listen to nothing other than romances’. Another man was
devoted to books, spends all his spare time reading. Is a member of the International Library of Famous Literature, and has a small bookcase full of splendid books which he pores over every night to his intense enjoyment. He also gets books from the Free Library on science, blast-furnaces, etc. His wife cannot read and refuses to learn, although he is most anxious to teach her.Footnote 70
With its door-to-door canvass and its reliance on the interviewer's quick judgement and searching eyes, Bell's study had strong affinities with the local social surveys of Charles Booth, B. Seebohm Rowntree, and others, as well as with the practice of ‘ “household inspection” [that was] institutionalized in … social work’.Footnote 71 Others who combined the roles of professional writer and social investigator, such as Margaret Loane and Stephen Reynolds, reflected on working-class reading practices, though not in anywhere as much detail as Bell.Footnote 72 (And, as Jon Lawrence has noted, later investigators were sensitive to the status cues provided by the books on display in working-class houses, and made a point of noting them in their case notes even though these matters were excluded from the ensuing publications.)Footnote 73 That Bell's investigation of reading has no parallels, so far as I am aware, in other works of British social research from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflects the marginalization of her brand of ‘unselfconscious cultural anthropology’. Bell dedicated At the works to Charles Booth, but the massive survey of London ‘life and labour’ that Booth had directed between 1886 and 1903 did not cover reading practices.Footnote 74 Later social surveys paid attention to reading under the heading of leisure or education, but in institutional and quantitative ways consistent with their interest in the municipal or voluntary provision of services.Footnote 75 Thus, the 1930s follow-up to Booth's survey and the Social survey of Merseyside edited by D. Caradog Jones in 1934 discussed the progress of public libraries in their catchments and provided tables showing how many citizens held library tickets and the number of books borrowed in given years.Footnote 76 One table in the New survey of London life and labour specified what proportion of library issues were works of fiction; Rowntree's second survey of York at the end of the 1930s included a breakdown of the types of books borrowed from the central public library.Footnote 77
The tables and text relating to reading patterns in these social surveys paralleled the sorts of inquiry librarians had been undertaking since the late nineteenth century. Some of this research was published in librarians' professional journals.Footnote 78 Data on reading and borrowing patterns was also tabulated for official purposes, as in the 1876–7 returns to parliament and the annual reports public libraries produced for the borough and county councils that funded them: again, research on reading that was guided by concern with social services.Footnote 79 Like librarians, educationalists had a clear professional interest in studying reading practices. Articles on children's reading based on questionnaires appeared in late Victorian periodicals, but there appears to have been no substantial published study before A. J. Jenkinson's What do boys and girls read? (1940).Footnote 80 When he wrote it, Jenkinson was lecturing at a teacher training college.Footnote 81 Jenkinson argued that teachers should work with rather than against young people's enthusiasm for lurid adventure stories (‘bloods’), creating frameworks in which their pupils had opportunities to graduate from bloods to better and more challenging books. The spine of Jenkinson's book was a questionnaire completed by 2,900 boys and girls aged between twelve and fifteen in twenty-six schools. The sample was slanted towards the middle class and the more academically able, setting it somewhat apart from studies focused on working-class reading (though Jenkinson was alert to the impact of poverty on children's reading, especially of periodicals).Footnote 82 The survey asked what titles the children had read out of school in the past month, what books or magazines they read in ‘private reading’ periods, whether they read poems or plays other than ones assigned as homework, and so on.Footnote 83 The responses to each question furnished data for a chapter. Often, though, the textured discussions that followed the tables and lists were complements to them rather than deductions from them. The pupils' bare answers were the pretexts for reflections that emerged from Jenkinson's experience as a teacher of teachers and his familiarity with the varieties of classroom practice; the titles of the books and periodicals pupils listed were fleshed out into judgements about taste and culture.
The largest empirical study of reading was undertaken by Mass-Observation during the Second World War. One of the organization's leaders, Tom Harrisson, was an anthropologist and the other, Charles Madge, a surrealist poet. It is tempting to say that Mass-Observation acted out the tensions between these two kinds of endeavour. However, it was Harrisson rather than Madge who drove some of the collective's more literary schemes, and Madge was the one who evolved into a professor of sociology.Footnote 84 Both had a hand in the organization's research on reading, which resulted among other things in ‘Books and the public’, a 200-page report completed in July 1942.Footnote 85
‘Books and the public’ included portions of the imitation espionage reports that Mass-Observers revelled in:
In a Paddington teashop: F45D [female, age forty-five, unskilled working class]. 11·25 waited for cake and coffee – took out red-covered Public Library book ‘The Hanging Sword’, turned to p. 121, chapter heading ‘Suicide by Suggestion’ – read with attention, only stopping to eat or drink – looked at clock, 11·27, resumed reading. Turned page (11·28) to Chap. 13 – heading: ‘Paris Mysteries’.Footnote 86
This sort of research was complemented by methods more amenable to comparison and synthesis: a door-to-door survey of reading habits in Fulham in London and interviews with librarians, newsagents, and their customers in Fulham and other parts of London, chiefly Harlesden, the site of the first twopenny library operated by Ray Smith Ltd.Footnote 87 Thus ordinary ‘respondents’ as well as knowledgeable ‘informants’ were questioned.Footnote 88 Kathleen Box, one of Mass-Observation's small number of paid researchers, did the bulk of this work. Further information came from provincial libraries, and the diaries and questionnaire responses produced by Mass-Observation's self-observing volunteers. The study asked what kinds of books people read, when and where they read them, whether they patronized public or twopenny libraries, how long they kept a book out of the library, how they chose their titles, how long it took them to choose a book, whether they bought books, how many books they owned.
The researchers were interested, above all, in the difference class and gender made to the answers. Men and women proved to have different tastes in books: though both sexes read detective fiction, few men read romances and few women read westerns. As in earlier surveys, many working-class women said that they did not get time to read; a number said that they sought books that they could read while knitting.Footnote 89 The deepest division was between ‘class D’, the unskilled working class, and other social classes. Of class D people, 20 per cent said that they never read a book; only 5 per cent of class C and 1 per cent of middle-class people said that. Twopenny libraries, which were slanted towards a working-class clientele, scarcely carried any ‘serious non-fiction’. The researchers speculated that younger unskilled workers were a market that could be tapped by ‘some suitable system of book retailing at moderate price levels in working class areas’. Such a scheme could be complemented by a publicity campaign to break down ‘the heavy, almost reverential value which many poorer people still feel for a cloth-bound book’.Footnote 90
The report closed with recommendations that publishers or government remedy the shortage of up-to-date sociological studies, books that reproduced modern art, and so on, since demand for ‘serious’ books was increasing.Footnote 91 As well as presenting banks of data, ‘Books and the public’ pressed the case that reading was a good thing and serious reading a better one. But it was much less of an exercise in cultural critique than most discussions of popular reading. That people read to ‘escape’ emerged from quotations from interviewees' accounts of what they looked for in a book (‘No war books for me … I want a book to escape from it for a few hours at least’) and was not made the basis of an indictment.Footnote 92 ‘Books and the public’ also differed profoundly from most other investigations of popular reading by focusing on the behaviours associated with books and their uses and saying little about the books' content.Footnote 93
IV
‘Books and the public’ also contrasted sharply with a lot of other Mass-Observation research. The organization was persistently concerned with the political unconscious of popular culture, and a critical understanding of the way the press shaped public opinion, especially regarding international relations in the later 1930s, was one of its primary political ambitions.Footnote 94 In this, Mass-Observation manifested the contemporary concern, fuelled by the experience of the First World War, the approach of adult suffrage, and the growth of media forms both old and new, with the workings of propaganda and publicity.Footnote 95 It also reflected the currency of anthropological, psychological, and psychoanalytic ways of thinking.Footnote 96 Many intellectuals were familiar with Freudian and anthropological ideas, but so were a good proportion of the rank and file of Mass-Observation's volunteer investigators and guinea pigs.Footnote 97
Psychological and anthropological questions animated Kathleen Box's proposal for a study of popular reading quite different from ‘Books and the public’. The year before that report was completed, Box tried to interest Harrisson in ‘a sort of short “thesis” on contemporary magazine literature of the “popular” type’. It would be valuable to study such fiction ‘from an M-O rather than a literary point of view’: story papers ‘must have an enormous influence in forming opinion and determining [the] shape of wish-pictures and symbols in peoples [sic] minds’. Box's approach was at once self-consciously modern and psychological and premised on the Victorian assumptions of unknown-public thinking. She told Harrisson that people who thought of themselves as ‘educated’ knew ‘very little about the type of literature that is widely read among working class people’.Footnote 98 In a pilot study of wartime reading that she completed at the same time, Box stressed that its focus on book clubs and big London bookshops limited what could be discovered.
That there is a gulph [sic] between the types of books read and what ‘reading’ means to middle class (especially intellectuals) and working class people is evident especially from the types of magazines stocked in the shops in different districts … Much more can be found out about what people like reading from public libraries, twopenny libraries, and grubby little sweet shops, than from Charing Cross Road.Footnote 99
Thus Box replicated the set-up of Wilkie Collins's essay even though there is no sign she had read it. She even mentioned sweets, as Collins and Payn had. In fact, earlier in the 1930s, a confectionery trade journal had talked up the benefits of incorporating a twopenny-library service into a sweet shop.Footnote 100 Publishers' willingness to let confectioners and chemists buy books on ‘trade terms’ aroused a great deal of resentment among traditional booksellers. Their complaint was clearly an economic one, but it also reflected disdain for mixing books with mere commodities.Footnote 101 That sense that there was something distasteful or at least incongruous about selling books alongside confectionery – a sentiment Box shared with the booksellers – was the complement of working-class readers' heavy reverence for the cloth-bound book.
In her proposal for an examination of periodical fiction ‘from an M-O rather than a literary point of view’, Box was thinking along lines very similar to Orwell. Indeed, it is possible that the publication of ‘Boys' weeklies’ was what stopped her from going further with it. Orwell's friend Geoffrey Gorer was, like those involved with Mass-Observation, interested in carrying out ‘anthropology at home’.Footnote 102 Orwell wrote to Gorer in 1936: ‘What you say about trying to study our own customs from an anthropological point of view opens up a lot of fields of thought, but one thing to notice about ourselves is that people's habits etc are formed not only by their upbringing & so forth but also very largely by books.’ It would be interesting, Orwell thought, to study ‘the conventions etc of books’ and the ‘underlying beliefs’ of a bestselling author like Edgar Wallace ‘from an anthropological point of view’.Footnote 103 When ‘Boys' weeklies’ was published nearly four years later, Orwell told Gorer he thought it overlapped with Gorer's own research, and in the essay's conclusion he revisited his earlier remarks to Gorer: ‘Personally I believe that most people are influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial stories, films, and so forth, and that from this point of view the worst books are often the most important, because they are usually read earliest in life.’Footnote 104
Orwell argued that adventure stories led boys destined for factory work, retail, or subordinate office jobs ‘to identify with people in positions of command, above all with people who are never troubled by shortage of money’. The geopolitics of this fiction was that of an age before communism and fascism – of late nineteenth-century imperial expansion. ‘Foreigners’ were comical and readily classifiable. In their easy assumptions of a world ordered by the British empire, and a Britain in the hands of the right sort of men, boys’ fiction was ‘sodden in the worst illusions of 1910’. It was impossible for a citizen to respond critically to the crises of the 1930s using the mental tools of Edwardian Conservatism: hence the urgency of developing a socialist popular culture.Footnote 105
Orwell was more troubled by the ideological distortions of escapist literature than by escapism in itself: Wizard and Gem ‘exist because … boys at certain ages find it necessary to read about Martians, death-rays, grizzly bears and gangsters. They get what they are looking for, but they get it wrapped up in the illusions which their future employers think suitable for them.’Footnote 106 Orwell's essay was a notable exception to the tendency in 1920s and 1930s cultural criticism to condemn escapism as a pervasive modern ill. It was in the interwar period that the word ‘escapism’ was coined.Footnote 107 The anti-social quality of escapism and daydreaming tended to become a subject of inflamed comment when it was associated with groups that aroused social anxieties for other reasons or in some way seemed hard to bring within the pale of conformity – such as younger female workers and consumers in the 1920s.Footnote 108 While, as Michael Saler has shown, the exploration of imaginary worlds became an acceptable part of many middle-class people's lives from the late nineteenth century onwards, there was, as Matt Houlbrook argues, ‘still profound unease about cultural forms that appealed primarily to female or working-class audiences’. Those engrossed by romantic fiction and Hollywood films ‘continued to be depicted as lacking reason, self-control and maturity’. The trial and execution of Edith Thompson for conspiring with her lover to murder her husband gave rise to an intense press inquest into her fantasy life. Newspapers published Thompson's letters to her co-accused, Freddy Bywaters, letters in which she reflected on her own life through the prism of the bestselling novels she read. Her critics relentlessly detailed the cultural pathologies of ‘living in the realm of fantasy’.Footnote 109
The fantasy realm of women's reading was the subject of Frank Thompson's 1940 reflection on the contents of a railway bookstall. Like Orwell and Box, Thompson retraced the steps of nineteenth-century essayists, but his historical reference point was women's suffrage rather than the Education Act. What would a suffragette make of the women's magazines available at bookstalls in 1940? Thompson thought that ‘you could detect an inspired similarity between the style and manner in the articles or stories and in the advertisements’.Footnote 110 Both glamorized the same feminine ideals. Thompson was closely following the Cambridge literary critics Q. D. and F. R. Leavis. The Leavises developed a severe critique of mass culture in interwar Britain, and asserted the pre-eminence of textual analysis as a means of exposing the stratagems of advertising and the entertainment industry.Footnote 111 The ‘inspired similarity’ between advertisements and popular fiction was almost axiomatic in the Leavises' circle – F. R. Leavis spoke of ‘the unremitting, pervasive, masturbatory manipulations of “scientific” Publicity, and, what is the same thing, commercially supplied popular art’.Footnote 112 Without mentioning Q. D. Leavis, Thompson retraced her steps by quoting the same example of fictional prose akin to advertising copy as she did in Fiction and the reading public. He then juxtaposed it with an actual advertisement, which is what Leavis's husband did with the same quotation in the book he wrote for school teachers who wanted to resist the encroachments of mass culture.Footnote 113
The ‘emphasis laid upon “glamour” ’ in the fiction in Oracle, Miracle, and Red Letter, Thompson wrote, contrasted with the questions and answers in the correspondence pages: ‘the raw material for half-a-dozen obscure and squalid tragedies’. That contrast, ‘I suppose, is the explanation of this curious aspect of contemporary life’. ‘Presumably, these magazines find their sale among girls working in factories and living in overcrowded working-class homes.’ The stories provided narcotic dreams that ‘will help you through to the end of your days without thinking too much about realities’. Even the providers of the drug of mass culture – a conventional metaphor in the 1920s and 1930s – were concerned about the appropriate dosage: Thompson noticed that the answers to correspondents delivered ‘ominous and unambiguous warnings to readers who seem to apply their reading too nearly to their own lives’, perhaps fearful of creating more Edith Thompsons.Footnote 114 He finished his essay by pointing out that ‘most of the girl readers of these papers ten years ago were writing bright little essays on “My Holiday,” doing arts and crafts, and being the promising bright-eyed younger generation’. The unfulfilled promise of literacy was a common theme of earlier discussions, but it was seldom expressed poignantly like this. Thompson had nowhere else to go: ‘There is a nasty flaw somewhere, but it is no part of this article to point in its direction.’Footnote 115
V
The persistence of the what-do-the-masses-read genre over a century probably owes less to literary influence – there is no indication that Thompson or Orwell or Box knew Collins's ‘Unknown public’ essay – than to the position of newsagents' and other back-street shops: institutions embedded in working-class communities that were simultaneously open to outsiders, and which appeared to offer outsiders a window into plebeian culture. For Orwell and Bosanquet, writing about the contents of those shops was an adjunct to more intimate engagement with working-class life; for dozens of other writers, periodicals bought from those shops offered a vicarious connection with the world of their readers. Working from periodicals on sale at a bookstall or tobacconist's led to accounts that emphasized style and ideology, in contrast with interview-based accounts such as Bell's and Mass-Observation's, which focused on reading as social practice. Bell and Mass-Observation were indebted to British traditions of social research; observers who worked by inference, from Collins to Thompson, practised forms of literary cum cultural criticism, or literary qua cultural criticism.
Literary criticism was able to claim a wider remit in the public culture of twentieth-century Britain than it did in many other countries.Footnote 116 In a sweeping and brilliant interpretation of British intellectual history published in 1968, Perry Anderson argued that the absence of ‘totalizing’ sociological or Marxist critiques of modernity created an ‘objective vacuum at the centre of the culture’. That vacuum, and the inability of analytical philosophy to fill it, explained the authority of literary critics acting as cultural critics.Footnote 117 Of the many criticisms to be made of this position, the most immediately relevant is by Mike Savage: that although sociology was not entrenched in universities until after mid-century, there was a strong synthesizing sociological strand in British thought.Footnote 118 But its empirical reach was limited, and the non-academic research traditions associated with social work and the local social survey movement excluded many ‘cultural’ topics from their field of vision. The fact that the most extensive research on popular reading in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century was undertaken by Mass-Observation may be taken either as an exception to the generalization that reading practices occupied a marginal place in British social research or as a confirmation of it.
Both academic and non-academic forms of literary criticism remained open to the consideration of popular reading and its implications. The self-consciously rigorous criticism established in universities in the 1920s, in particular that of I. A. Richards and the Leavises and their collaborators, provided a framework for thinking about popular reading and mass culture at large. The Leavises professed an encompassing and ‘anthropological’ understanding of cultural life, though in practice their engagement with the work of anthropologists was limited. The Leavises' framework undergirded Richard Hoggart's vision of ‘cultural studies’, which he did so much to establish as the founder of Birmingham University's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.Footnote 119 As he outlined his ambitions for the centre, Hoggart paid tribute to both the Leavises. But he also identified the determinedly non-academic Orwell as a forerunner of cultural studies.Footnote 120 ‘Boys' weeklies’ made a deep impression on Hoggart at the beginning of his teaching career and an early essay sketching the ideas on reading and popular culture that he would develop in The uses of literacy (1957) was a tacit homage to Orwell entitled ‘The bookstall’.Footnote 121
Orwell's writings on popular culture appeared in periodicals that staked a claim to a territory of non-specialist intelligence similar to that of the great Victorian journals of opinion, where so many earlier reports on the unknown public had been published.Footnote 122 An older generalist mode of ‘contemporary cultural studies’ persisted at the same time as academic literary critics asserted their capacity to interpret large swathes of British life. Literary critics of both varieties drew inspiration or validation from anthropology and psychology as they explored a subject on the fringes of social-scientific research.
