Altick 1957

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Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader. University of Chicago Press, 1957. Print.

Intro

  • 1 "the place of reading in an industrial and increasingly democratic society"
  • "a revolutionary social concept: that of the democracy of print"
    • prefiguring (influencing?) Eisenstein
  • 2-3 methodological limitations of anecdotal evidence and records of bestsellers (but they have their uses too) -- the history of reading is rootedness in "the total history of the period" including political, religious, economic, and technological
  • 3 "The history of the mass reading audience is, in fact, the history of English democracy seen from a new angle "
  • 4 industrialization making reading more impt for purposes of escape (and the erasure of the "popular cultural tradition," tho I'm skeptical about the cleanness of that line, if only based on evidence from hardy novels)
  • 5 using Collins 1858 "the future of English fiction may well rest with this Unknown Public"
  • 7 common reader belongs to working class or expanding bourgeoisie

Ch 4 Social Background

  • 81 The development of the mass reading public, in fact, was completely dependent upon the progress of a social revolution [in terms of population increase and the “occupational and geographical distribution” changes of that population]
  • 83-4 marked change in shift from agricultural yeomanry to commerce and industry: 40% commerce/trade/manufacture, 19% in agriculture in 1841; 68% vs 10% in 1891
  • 84 In the first half of the century English society was shaken as it had not been since the end of the Middle Ages.
  • 85 …the C19 witnessed on every hand a sharpening of class consciousness [because of this massive shift in hierarchical social structure]
  • reading dependent on leisure, which was not in high supply for most
  • 88-9 the “coming of railroad travel” “resulted in an unquestionable increase in reading”
  • 90 Not until the cheap periodical press made efficient use of railway transportation and local distributors, and rural education received much-needed aid under the Forster Act of 1870, did the majority of country-dwellers acquire much interest in reading.
  • 91-3 factors against the “common man” being able to read: domestic hurly-burly and poor housing; poor lighting until late in the century; exhaustion
  • 96 Torn away from the old cultural tradition [and as he says on 95 from their individuality and personal pride in work by industrialization], battered and adrift in a feelingless world, the millions of common people needed decent recreation more urgently than any generation before them.
  • With a few noteworthy exceptions like [Sir John] Herschel and Dickens, contemporary social critics and reformers failed to understand, or at least sympathize with, this imperative need on the [97] part of the physically and spiritually imprisoned.

Ch 5 Religion

  • 99 Elie Halevy observed that "the fundamental paradox of English society" in the C19 "is precisely the partial junction and combination of these two forces [evangelicalism and utilitarianism] theoretically so hostile." Not the least of their similarities was a curiously ambivalent attitude toward reading. At one and the same time, the evangelicals on the religious side and the utilitarians on the secular did much to popularize reading (for certain purposes) and equally much to discourage it.
  • growth of reading with the emphasis on the direct connection with the Bible in evangelicalism
    • this also resulted in the growth of a Biblical and didactic literature industry (100)
  • 101 in the first half-century of existence (1804-54) [the British and Foreign Bible Society] issued over two and a half million copies of Bibles and testaments, nearly all of which were for domestic use[.]
    • think of Mrs Pardiggle and the brickmaker's family in Bleak House (1853) - on 106 Altick says she and Mrs. Jellyby were "not exceptional" in their class
  • 102 but whether those who received them could read is quite another matter (cf. Mayhew)
  • 103 religious literature in C19 England was "a ubiquitous part of the social landscape."
  • 104 the problem with these proselytizers, in the words of Charles Knight (Passages of a Working Life, I, 242-3):
...the besetting weakness of [105] the learned and aristocratic, from the very first moment that they begin to prattle about bestowing the virtues of education [was that they] insisted upon maintaining the habit of talking to thinking beings, and for the most part to very acute thinking beings, in the language of the nursery.
  • 109 Evangelicals equally skeptical of imaginative literature as they were convinced of the efficacy of cheaply printed and distributed scripture
  • 112 [quoting The Christian Observer VII (1808), 326-34, reviewing Bowdler's Shakespeare] "It is scarcely possible for a young person of fervid genius to read Shakespeare without a dangerous elevation of fancy."
  • 117 some variation in stringent anti-imaginative literature in different denominations -- the titular Evangelicals more liberal than dissenters; Ruskin's puritanical parents enjoyed Humphrey Clinker
  • 126 Throughout the century, the concern for wholesomeness in literature resulted in the production of the "extract," a strained broth concocted from the original work. It was recognized that many books of earlier times could not be read in their complete form without peril to the soul; yet those same classics undeniably had sound qualities which should not be withheld from the virtuous.
  • 127 for ex, Shakespeare: "Down through the century 'Proverbs from Sh' and 'Select Beauties of Sh' were fixtures in middle-class libraries, and alongside them were similar nosegays from other authors[.]"
  • 128 influence of Sabbatarianism on "forcing" people to read on Sundays

Ch 6 The Utilitarian Spirit

  • 129 Utilitarianism, the philosophy begotten by C18 French rationalism upon C18 English materialism, is associated most immediately with the coterie dominated by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill [John Stuart's father]. But just as the spirit of evangelicalism permeated English society far beyond the denominational boundaries, so utilitarianism spread out from its originating group until it was the part of the atmosphere every C19 Englishman breathed.
    • "less a set of tenets than a state of mind"
  • 130 Radical or conservative, laissez faire liberal or Owenite, evangelical or skeptic, everyone seemed to share this faith in a [the printing press] machine that could usher in the social millennium just as surely as the power of steam was transforming the outward face of English life. Each party, naturally, had its special brand of Truth to disseminate through print. The utilitarians' own goal was "the diffusion of useful knowledge"
    • defined as "information...necessary to multiply and spread the blessings of machinery" (i.e., "employable facts" about mechanics and chemistry) and a set of economic and political principles - those ideas coming from Smith, Bentham, Mill et al that "by safeguarding the free operation of those laws could the nation be spared future social anarchy and economic catastrophe." (131)
  • 132 "desultory reading" frowned upon, reading with a fixed end in mind encouraged in utilitarian publications and newspapers
  • 136 early utilitarianism, incl. Bentham, against imaginative literature, but starting in the 1830s [he quotes a review of Alfred Tennyson's Poems] a shift: "literature, and poetry in particular, was judged above all in terms of its didactic power, its moral usefulness"
  • 138 The Chadbands and Gradgrinds clung to their control of the machinery which provided the masses with "suitable" reading matter. But slowly, and with the utmost caution, middle-class Victorians came to liberalize their notions of the role books have in life, even the life of wage-earners.
  • 139 Meanwhile, another tendency helped temper the utilitarian attitude toward books: the emotionalizing of the very idea of literature. With men like Lamb and Leigh Hunt, books (especially old ones) aroused emotions almost as fervent as those with which Wordsworth regarded nature.
  • Thus, either because of their joy-bringing contents or because of some extrinsic appeal - rarity, physical beauty, the sentimental associations of certain copies - books, as objects, came to have a magical glamour about them.
    • link to Price 2012 and Deirdre Lynch
    • can this also be said to be linked to the modern sensibility that reframed "ruins" as "ruins" in the way we now understand them?
    • he traces this trend especially to Leigh Hunt
  • 140 Despite the eventual recognition of amusement as a valid motive for reading, the evangelical-utilitarian temper of the age insisted that books were, first of all, a means of self-improvement.

Ch 10 Public Libraries

  • 214 British foundation libraries founded pre-1800 were not "of service to the general reading audience" --- "...even if the libraries had been open without question or qualification to ordinary men and women, they still would have lacked visitors, for virtually all of them were collections of theological or other heavily learned books alone[.]"
  • 1849 Public Libraries Committee of the House of Commons
  • 215 BM: "...For various reasons ordinary citizens of London knew the Museum...was an exhibition hall rather than a library"
  • Admission was difficult; one had to be introduced by a peer, member of Parliament, alderman, judge, rector, or some other eminent man. The hours of opening were short, and on dark days the reading room closed entirely. Until the middle of the C19, when the energetic librarian Antonio Panizzi began to enforce the provision in the copyright law that required copies of all new publications to be deposited in the Museum, relatively little current literature was received.
    • books about C19 BM: GF Barwick, The Reading Room of the British Museum (1929), Arundell Esdaile, The British Museum Library (1946)
  • 216 London Library founded by Carlyle and others in 1841
  • Dev of commercial circulating library: "The heavy tax burden, imposed to carry on the war against Napoleon, and the increased prices of new books had converted many middle- and upper-class families from buying to borrowing"
  • 222 The mechanics' institute libraries...[were] an important means of encouraging reading among the middle class, but...they were of little benefit to the working class for whom they were originally meant.
  • 223-4 Edward Edwards: pioneer of municipal public libraries (and an interestingly tragic figure)
    • established by Parliament after the Public Libraries Committee levied a tax to found them
  • 229 they were subject to a vicious circle: "When the local library, once established, fell short of the bright claims made by advocates of the levy, the community often washed its hands of it."
  • 231-3 the "fiction question" besetting public librarians: give people what they should read or what they want?
  • 238 The coming of the free library had helped democratize reading to the extent that it provided book-holding buildings open without restriction [239] to the public; but it had engendered some totally unanticipated and perennially vexing problems.... The fact remains, however, that by the closing years of the century the annual circulation of all public libraries in the United Kingdom was estimated to be between thirty and forty million volumes.
  • The difficult and long birth of public libraries whilst the commercial circulating libraries were developing much more successfully at the same time. He doesn't connect in Mudie's but I do wonder if it took that model fading away for public libraries to really take hold?

Ch 13 The Book Trade 1851-1900

  • 294 A good case could be made for viewing the 1850s as the great turning point in the history of the English book trade's relations with the public.
  • 295 The circulating libraries bought large quantities of newly published books; the publishers charged prices established in the inflationary 1820s (and gave the libraries big discounts). The publishers found it more profitable ti supply, say, 500 copies of a new book to a few reliable customers, either directly or through jobbers, than to dispose of them one by one through the bookshops. And so prices were kept high, the reader who wished to keep up with the current literature was driven to the libraries, the libraries flourished and bulked larger than ever in the publishers' view of the market.
  • 296 By astute business methods, and above all by achieving a reputation as the watchdog of contemporary literary morals, Mudie did much to encourage reading among the class that could afford a guinea for a year's subscription.
  • 298 Bentley and Colburn led the way with the cheap 6s. reprint, which became more widely used in the middle of the century, but they often delayed the reprint until interest had evaporated: a year or two for Trollope and Eliot, longer for Dickens and Thackeray (3-5 years!)
  • 299 Cheap railways novels (or "yellow backs" as they were called after 1855)...were the most inspired publishing invention of the era. For one or two shillings a volume, the scores of "libraries" that sprang up offered a tremendous selection to suit every taste but the crudest and the most cultivated.
    • Examples: Braddon, Ainsworth, GPR James, Charles Lever
    • there was also non-fiction, e.g., narratives of the Crimean War or the Indian Mutiny
  • 301 the British publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 "touched off the biggest sensation the publishing trade had yet known," selling 150,000 in six months and in Britain and the colonies 1.5 million after a year
  • multiplying retail outlets for books a co-traveler with yellow-back railway novels -- WH Smith and Son
  • 302-3 Cassell starts the trend of "issuing standard and educational works in cheap parts" on a larger scale
  • 306 1860-90 continued the trend of "literacy, leisure, and a little pocket money" from the 50s, with the minor setback of economic depression in mid-70s
  • Introduced from America in the sixties, the high-speed Hoe press was designed primarily for printing newspapers and mass-circulation periodicals, but toward the end of the century it was used, as similar [307] presses are today, to turn out enormous quantities of paper-bound books.
    • Scott's novels were sold in the 1820s at 31s.6d.; with Dicks's edition in the 1860s, it was 3d. a novel
  • 308 In the 1840s cheap reprints of English masterpieces were to be had from only a handful of publishers.... Beginning in 1847, the success of Bohn's Libraries encouraged one firm after another to add series of standard works to their lists [culminating in the 60s and 70s with the shilling Shakespeares and also Pope, Milton, Cowper, Thomson, etc.]
  • 310-1 controversy over copyright royal commission (The Copyright Commission Report of 1878) in 1876-7
  • The somewhat cheaper part-issue of new fiction, though used by Dickens to the end of his career and by Trollope for several of his novels between 1864 and 1871, was virtually extinct by 1880. The major forms of copyright reprints already established in the fifties - the cloth-bound volume at 6s. or 7s., issued usually by the original publisher, and the railway edition of more popular works at 1s. or 2s. - flourished. But many readers who were willing to pay 6s. for a current book resented having to await the publisher's pleasure before it became available at this price.
  • 312-3 the decline of the subscription libraries and the "library novel" in the 80s and 90s due to lowering prices and the demand for directly buying the more widely-available 6s. novel
  • 315ff the innovation in cheap bookmaking by JM Dent starting from the 1890s - "English publishers began to make the classics available to the common reader in a cheap form that was dainty yet sturdy"
    • ending up in Everyman's Library
  • 316 Thus the 1890s saw the ultimate victory of the cheap-book movement.

Ch 15 Periodicals & Newspapers 1851-1900

  • 348 Records of the Commons select committee [Newspaper Stamp Committee] on the "taxes on knowledge" in 1851 is "among the most instructive documents we possess on the mass reading public at mid century"
  • 349 at mid century "The common reader saw a daily newspaper only in his coffeehouse or public house"
    • l/u newspaper tax -- is it 1p on each copy? Yes: one penny per sheet after 1836 (340-1)
  • 354 4 years later (1855) the proposal to abolish the newspaper tax once more reached the floor of the Commons. Introducing the measure, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said that the die-hards who identified the spread of reading with the rise of Demos were still vocal. He had heard from "many quarters" that the measure "will open the floodgates of sedition and blasphemy"
    • Dedlock in Bleak House (1853) uses the same metaphor about industrial capitalists influencing politics
    • this measure was successful
  • In 1861 the only surviving "tax on knowledge," the paper duty, was removed, and for the first time since the reign of Queen Anne the press was completely free of fiscal restrictions. At last daily newspapers came down in price.
    • I hadn't really realized the extent to which the Times's dominance was partly because of lack of competition
  • 357 By 1855 at least a half-dozen weekly newspapers and cheap miscellanies had attained a circulation of more than 100,000.
  • So overburdened were the printers' facilities [after the repeal of the paper duty] that a type famine occurred, during which the old fashioned [long s], disused for more than half a century, was brought back from retirement until the type-founders could catch up with demand.
  • With the introduction of rotary presses and, toward the end of the century, typesetting machines, periodical printing became one of the most highly mechanized of all English mass-production industries.
  • 359 [literary magazines, including Macmillan's and Cornhill with spectacular starts, settled into middling distribution numbers: Temple Bar, Belgravia, St. James's
    • All the Year Round and Household Words were always exceptions for what they were
  • 360 ...The most widely circulated periodicals, apart from the weekly newspapers, were the "family" papers meant for the indifferently educated reader.
    • Family Herald, London Journal, later John Dicks's Bow Bells (which supplemented fiction by Ainsworth with music, needlework, and patterns [361])
  • 362 Another phenomenon of cheap journalism after mid-century was the great prosperity of juvenile papers. Until that time, such children's periodicals as had existed had been produced by the religious societies and distributed mainly through Sunday schools. With the spread of elementary education, commercial interests realized their opportunity[.]
    • Boy's Own Magazine, etc.
    • countered by religious orgs: Boy's Own Paper by Religious Tract Society
  • ...Annuals, important though they are in Regency and early Victorian literary and cultural history, were priced too high to affect the mass audience
  • 364 The pessimism that permeated comment on popular journalism in the 80s and 90s offers an ironic postscript to the bright expectations of the men who struggled for an untaxed press [Cobbett, Knight, the Chamberses, GWM Reynolds]

Ch 16 The Past and the Present

  • 373 The final problem was the availability of good reading matter. Not until the latter part of the century was there a wide selection of books of substantial literary merit priced so low as to compete with other commodities and entertainments for the workingman's little spending money.
  • We have inherited the same two-sided attitude toward the common reader... Behind this whole fatalistic attitude can be detected a survival of venerable social prejudice.
  • 375 [the question remains the same:] How, in the face of looming obstacles, can the reading habit be spread and made to serve both the happiness of the individual and the strength of society?
    • predicated on the idea that reading is unique in its benefits/affordances
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