Revision as of 19:00, 2 November 2017

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.
  • cross ref with Price 2000
• 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 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.
  • cross ref with Sutherland 1976 and Roberts on Mudie's
• 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.
  • tied to Evangelicalism ( see above)
• 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.