[_18 Feb. '09_]
I want to dig a little deeper through the strata of the public. Below the
actual fiction-reading public which I have described there is a much
vaster potential public. It exists in London, and it exists also in the
provinces. I will describe it as I have found it in the industrial
midlands and north. Should the picture seem black, let me say that my
picture of a similar public in London would be even blacker. In all
essential qualities I consider the lower middle-class which regards, say,
Manchester as its centre, to be superior to the lower middle-class which
regards Charing Cross as its centre.
* * * * *
All around Manchester there are groups of municipalities which lie so
close to one another that each group makes one town. Take a medium group
comprising a quarter of a million inhabitants, with units ranging from
sixty down to sixteen thousand. I am not going to darken my picture with a
background of the manual workers, the immense majority of whom never read
anything that costs more than a penny--unless it be "Gale's Special." I
will deal only with the comparatively enlightened crust--employers,
clerks, officials, and professional men, and their families--which has
formed on the top of the mass, with an average income of possibly two
hundred per annum per family. This crust is the élite of the group. It
represents its highest culture, and in bulk it is the "lower middle-class"
of Tory journalism. In London some of the glitter of the class above it is
rubbed on to it by contact. One is apt to think that because there are
bookshops in the Strand and large circulating libraries in Oxford Street,
and these thoroughfares are thronged with the lower middle-class,
therefore the lower middle-class buys or hires books. In my industrial
group the institutions and machinery perfected by the upper class for
itself do not exist at all, and one may watch the lower without danger of
being led to false conclusions by the accidental propinquity of phenomena
that have really nothing whatever to do with it.
* * * * *
Now in my group of a quarter of a million souls there is not a single shop
devoted wholly or principally to the sale of books. Not one. You might
discover a shop specializing in elephants or radium; but a real bookshop
does not exist. In a town of forty thousand inhabitants there will be a
couple of stationers, whose chief pride is that they are "steam printers"
or lithographers. Enter their shops, and you will see a few books.
Tennyson in gilt. Volumes of the Temple Classics or Everyman. Hymn-books,
Bibles. The latest cheap Shakespeare. Of new books no example except the
brothers Hocking. The stationer will tell you that there is no demand for
books; but that he can procure anything you specially want by return of
post. He will also tell you that on the whole he makes no profit out of
books; what trifle he captures on his meagre sales he loses on books
unsold. He may inform you that his rival has entirely ceased to stock
books of any sort, and that he alone stands for letters in the midst of
forty thousand people. In a town of sixty thousand there will be a
largeish stationer's with a small separate book department. Contents
similar to the other shop, with a fair selection of cheap reprints, and
half a dozen of the most notorious new novels, such as novels by Marie
Corelli, Max Pemberton, Mrs. Humphry Ward. That is all. Both the shops
described will have two or three regular book-buying clients, not more
than ten in a total of a hundred thousand. These ten are book-lovers.
They follow the book lists. They buy to the limit of their purses. And in
the cult of literature they keep themselves quite apart from the society
of the town, despising it. The town is simply aware that they are "great
readers."
* * * * *
Another agency for the radiation of light in the average town first
mentioned is the Municipal Free Library. The yearly sum spent on it is
entirely inadequate to keep it up to date. A fraction of its activity is
beneficial, as much to the artisan as to members of the crust. But the
chief result of the penny-in-the-pound rate is to supply women old and
young with outmoded, viciously respectable, viciously sentimental fiction.
A few new novels get into the Library every year. They must, however, be
"innocuous," that is to say, devoid of original ideas. This, of course, is
inevitable in an institution presided over by a committee which has
infinitely less personal interest in books than in politics or the price
of coal. No Municipal Library can hope to be nearer than twenty-five years
to date. Go into the average good home of the crust, in the quietude of
"after-tea," and you will see a youthful miss sitting over something by
Charlotte M. Yonge or Charles Kingsley. And that something is repulsively
foul, greasy, sticky, black. Remember that it reaches from thirty to a
hundred such good homes every year. Can you wonder that it should carry
deposits of jam, egg, butter, coffee, and personal dirt? You cannot. But
you are entitled to wonder why the Municipal Sanitary Inspector does not
inspect it and order it to be destroyed.... That youthful miss in
torpidity over that palimpsest of filth is what the Free Library has to
show as the justification of its existence. I know what I am talking
about.
* * * * *
A third agency is the book-pedlar. There are firms of publishers who never
advertise in any literary weekly or any daily, who never publish anything
new, and who may possibly be unknown to Simpkins themselves. They issue
badly printed, badly bound, showy editions of the eternal Scott and the
eternal Dickens, in many glittering volumes with scores of bleared
illustrations, and they will sell them up and down the provinces by means
of respectably dressed "commission agents," at prices much in excess of
their value, to an ingenuous, ignorant public that has never heard of
Dent and Routledge. The books are found in houses where the sole function
of literature is to flatter the eye. The ability of these subterranean
firms to dispose of deplorable editions to persons who do not want them is
in itself a sharp criticism of the commercial organization of the more
respectable trade.
* * * * *
Let it not be supposed that my group is utterly cut off from the newest
developments in imaginative prose literature. No! What the bookseller, the
book-pedlar, and the Free Library have failed to do, has been accomplished
by Mr. Jesse Boot, incidentally benefactor of the British provinces and
the brain of a large firm of chemists and druggists with branches in
scores, hundreds, of towns. He has several branches in my group. Each
branch has a circulating library, patronized by the class which has only
heard of Mudie, and has not heard of the Grosvenor. Mr. Jesse Boot has had
the singular and beautiful idea of advertising his wares by lending books
to customers and non-customers at a loss of ten thousand a year. His
system is simplicity and it is cheapness. He is generous. If you desire a
book which he has not got in stock he will buy it and lend it to you for
twopence. Thus in the towns of my group the effulgent centre of culture is
the chemist's shop. The sole point of contact with living literature is
the chemist's shop. A wonderful world, this England! Two things have
principally struck me about Mr. Jesse Boot's [Now Sir Jesse Boot] clients.
One is that they are usually women, and the other is that they hire their
books at haphazard, nearly in the dark, with no previous knowledge of what
is good and what is bad.
* * * * *
It is to be added that the tremendous supply of sevenpenny bound volumes
of modern fiction, and of shilling bound volumes of modern belles-lettres
(issued by Nelsons and others), is producing a demand in my group, is, in
fact, making book-buyers where previously there were no book-buyers. These
tomes now rival the works of the brothers Hocking in the stationer's shop.
Their standard is decidedly above the average, owing largely to the fact
that the guide-in-chief of Messrs. Nelsons happens to be a genuine man of
letters. I am told that Messrs. Nelsons alone sell twenty thousand volumes
a week. Yet even they have but scratched the crust. The crust is still
only the raw material of a new book public.
* * * * *
If it is cultivated and manufactured with skill it will surpass
immeasurably in quantity, and quite appreciably in quality, the actual
book public. One may say that the inception of the process has been
passably good. One is inclined to prophesy that within a moderately short
period--say a dozen years--the centre of gravity of the book market will
be rudely shifted. But the event is not yet.