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POPULAR READING AND SOCIAL INVESTIGATION IN BRITAIN, 1850s–1940s*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2014

CHRISTOPHER HILLIARD
CHRISTOPHER HILLIARD*
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
*
Department of History, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia[email protected]
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Abstract

‘What do the masses read?’ After popular literacy and an urban market for mass culture became conspicuous in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century, dozens of literary figures and social researchers took it upon themselves to answer this question. Middle-class inquirers sought in newsagents' wares a vicarious connection with the culture and values of the readers of popular fiction. Many of these investigators, from Wilkie Collins in the 1850s to George Orwell in the 1930s, practised a form of literary criticism that doubled as social criticism. Other students of popular reading – Florence Bell in her study of early twentieth-century Middlesbrough and Mass-Observation in its surveys of reading during the Second World War – worked at the margins of British traditions of social research. Critics working from the texts of popular fiction tended to concentrate on questions of style and ideology; those doing fieldwork focused on reading as a social practice. Examining the corpus of studies of popular literacy from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century opens up the question of the scope of literary criticism and social research in modern Britain.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 247 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank participants in the Cambridge modern cultural history seminar and the Oxford modern British history seminar – and especially Jon Lawrence, Ross McKibbin, Peter Mandler, and Gillian Sutherland. Alastair Blanshard, Barbara Caine, Marco Duranti, Andrew Fitzmaurice, John Gagné, Julia Horne, Miranda Johnson, Glenda Sluga, and Philip Waller read an earlier version of this article. Their criticisms and suggestions improved it a great deal, as did the insights of the anonymous referees for the Historical Journal. I am grateful to Jennie Taylor and Emma Grant for research assistance. This research was supported by a fellowship from the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project 1093097).

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30 Salmon, ‘What the working classes read’, p. 114. A writer in the Spectator in 1863 had concluded that British penny fiction, unlike ‘the popular order of French fiction’, was ‘at least, free from a demoralizing tendency’. Anon., ‘Penny novels’, Spectator, 28 Mar. 1863, pp. 1806–8, at p. 1808. See also Bosanquet, ‘Cheap literature’, p. 681; Bell, Lady, At the works: a study of a manufacturing town (1907; repr., London, 1985), p. 168Google Scholar.

31 Anon., ‘Penny novels’ (Macmillan's), pp. 97, 101.

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33 For instance, [Johns], ‘Literature of the streets’, p. 51.

34 [Millar], ‘Penny fiction’, p. 810.

35 Anon., ‘Penny novels’ (Macmillan's), p. 102.

36 Hitchman, ‘Penny fiction’, p. 163. See also [Millar], ‘Penny fiction’, pp. 807–8.

37 [Millar], ‘Penny fiction’, p. 805; Hitchman, Francis, ‘The penny press’, Macmillan's Magazine, 43 (1881), pp. 385–98Google Scholar, at p. 390.

38 Anon., ‘Penny novels’ (Spectator), p. 1807; [Johns], ‘Literature of the streets’, p. 50; Strahan, ‘Our very cheap literature’, p. 449; anon., ‘Penny novels’ (Macmillan's), p. 104; Hitchman, ‘Penny press’, p. 395.

39 Bosanquet, ‘Cheap literature’, p. 677.

40 Ibid., 674. See also ‘What the people read: ii. – a waitress’, Academy, 16 Oct. 1807, p. 303. On the cultural resonance of the ‘shop girl’, see Sanders, Lise Shapiro, Consuming fantasies: labor, leisure, and the London shopgirl, 1880–1920 (Columbus, OH, 2006)Google Scholar.

41 Haslam, Press and the people, p. 6.

42 Gattie, Walter Montagu, ‘What English people read’, Fortnightly Review, n.s., 46 (Sept. 1889), pp. 307–21Google Scholar, at p. 308; and see the woman quoted in Bell, At the works, p. 160.

43 Haslam, Press and the people, p. 17.

44 Hitchman, ‘Penny press’, p. 385.

45 [Johns], ‘Literature of the streets’, p. 65.

46 Geo. Humphery, R., ‘The reading of the working classes’, Nineteenth Century, 33 (1893), pp. 690–701Google Scholar, at pp. 692–3, 694. For more on Humphery and his library, see Humphery, G. R., ‘The duty of governments to provide the people with easily accessible books’, Library, 1 (1889), pp. 293–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 294.

47 For much the same argument as Humphery's in a religious periodical, see ‘S’, ‘What is the harm of novel-reading?’, Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, 1855, pp. 932–4.

48 See Wynne, Deborah, ‘Readers and reading practices’, in Parrinder, Patrick, gen. ed., The Oxford history of the novel in English, iii: The nineteenth-century novel, 1820–1880, ed. Kucich, John and Taylor, Jenny Bourne (Oxford, 2012), pp. 22–36Google Scholar, at pp. 27–9.

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50 Leigh, ‘What do the masses read?’, pp. 166, 168, 176. See also Salmon, ‘What the working classes read’, pp. 109–12.

51 Hitchman, ‘Penny fiction’, p. 150; Salmon, ‘What the working classes read’, p. 108.

52 House of Lords Debates, vol. 188, 22 July 1867, col. 1824. The speaker was the earl of Morley.

53 Leigh, ‘What do the masses read?’, p. 176.

54 Besant, Walter, ‘The amusements of the people’, Contemporary Review, 45 (Mar. 1884), pp. 342–53Google Scholar, at pp. 343–4; [Johns], ‘Literature of the streets’, pp. 60–1; Gattie, ‘What English people read’, p. 308.

55 Whibley, Charles, ‘The sins of education’, Blackwood's Magazine, 165 (1899), pp. 503–13Google Scholar, at p. 503; [Oliphant], ‘Byways of literature’, p. 203; Hitchman, ‘Penny fiction’, pp. 150–1. Hitchman was a biographer of Benjamin Disraeli and editor of several posthumous volumes of his writings.

56 On Millar see McDonald, Peter D., British literary culture and publishing practice, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 50Google Scholar; Finkelstein, House of Blackwood, p. 111.

57 [Millar], ‘Penny fiction’, pp. 801–2. Payn, too, complained about boys reading on the job and not watching where they were going. Payn, ‘Penny fiction’, p. 145.

58 [Millar], Penny fiction’, p. 811. For a case study of the dangers of reading Ibsen, see Malvery, Olive Christian (Mrs. Mackirdy, Archibald), The soul market: with which is included ‘The heart of kings’ (London, 1906), pp. 292–3Google Scholar.

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60 Wright, ‘Concerning the unknown public’, pp. 279–80, 281, 283. For similar attributions, see [Johns], ‘Literature of the streets’, pp. 53–4 (‘shopgirls, maidservants, and other such half-educated and weakly inflammable young persons’); Salmon, ‘What the working classes read’, p. 114; [Millar], ‘Penny fiction’, p. 803.

61 Wright, ‘Concerning the unknown public’, pp. 282–3. Hence, for instance, the inclusion of sheet music in several penny fiction journals. Ibid., p. 284. See also Sanders, Consuming fantasies, pp. 142–4.

62 Wright, ‘Concerning the unknown public’, pp. 281, 288–9; anon., ‘Penny novels’ (Macmillan's), p. 97.

63 Wright, ‘Concerning the unknown public’, pp. 285–8. On the autodidact canon, see Rose, Intellectual life, esp. chs. 3–4.

64 Anon., ‘Penny novels’, (Macmillan's), p. 103; anon., ‘Penny novels’ (Spectator), p. 1807; Collins, ‘Unknown public’, p. 222. [Oliphant], ‘Byways of literature’, p. 209, also drew attention to the serialization of Kenilworth.

65 Wright, ‘Concerning the unknown public’, pp. 288, 291, 292–3. There is a glimpse of the street trade in books in Mayhew, Henry, London labour and the London poor: a cyclopaedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work (4 vols., London, 1861), i, pp. 293–6Google Scholar.

66 A recent example of a historical study focused on new books is James, Popular culture and working-class taste; the key study of the autodidact tradition is Rose, Intellectual life.

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69 Bell, At the works, pp. 147–8, 150, 154, 157, 161.

70 Ibid., 148–9, 150, 159. The Middlesbrough subscriber to the International Library of Famous Literature could stand for many intellectually ambitious working-class men. See Waller, Writers, readers, and reputations, p. 64.

71 Savage, Identities and social change, pp. 100–1 (though Savage is not talking about Bell); Wells, A. F., The local social survey in Great Britain (London, 1935)Google Scholar.

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82 Jenkinson, What do boys and girls read?, pp. 7–9, 151. The questionnaires were given only to pupils in the ‘A’ stream of each form (i.e. year or grade). Of the respondents, 57 per cent attended ‘secondary’ – that is, ‘high’ or ‘grammar’ – schools, which could teach pupils up to the age of seventeen or eighteen. The remaining respondents went to ‘central’ or ‘senior’ schools, the predecessors of the post-1944 ‘secondary moderns’, which were middle schools only, with no fifth or sixth forms for pupils past fifteen.

83 Jenkinson, What do boys and girls read?, pp. 11–13.

84 Heimann, Judith M., The most offending soul alive: Tom Harrisson and his remarkable life (Honolulu, HI, 1998)Google Scholar; Charles Madge, untitled autobiography, n.d. (c. 1982), Charles Madge papers, box 2, folder 1, University of Sussex Library.

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86 ‘Books and the public’, p. 18 (emphasis in original). The hanging sword! was a 1933 novel by Andrew Soutar published in Hutchinson's Red Jacket series.

87 Callander, ‘Twopenny library’, p. 88.

88 Halsey, History of sociology in Britain, p. 40; Wells, Local social survey, pp. 50–4.

89 ‘Books and the public’, pp. 70d, 70e, 110.

90 Ibid., pp. 5, 41–2, 43, 70f (i.e. the page after 70e, not the page following page 70).

91 Ibid., p. 197.

92 Ibid., pp. 70e–70f.

93 However, many titles were included, so informed readers could infer class and gender variations in taste from them.

94 See Taylor, Jennie, ‘Pennies from heaven and earth in Mass Observation's Blackpool’, Journal of British Studies, 51 (2012), pp. 132–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jeffery, Tom, Mass-Observation: a short history (1978; repr., Brighton, 1999)Google Scholar.

95 See, for instance, Angell, Norman, The press and the organisation of society (London, 1922)Google Scholar; Trotter, W., Instincts of the herd in peace and war (London, 1916)Google Scholar; Martin, Kingsley, The British public and the General Strike (London, 1926)Google Scholar, ch. 2.

96 Thomson, Mathew, Psychological subjects: identity, culture, and health in twentieth-century Britain (Oxford, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nuttall, Jeremy, Psychological socialism: the Labour party and qualities of mind and character, 1931 to the present (Manchester, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 2.

97 ‘Reasons for Joining Mass-Observation’, Day Surveys 1937, microfilm, reels 3, 5, M-OA (respondents 47, 194, 195, 371, 373, 385, 392, 396, 399, 424, 431, 448, 470, 471, 490, 492, 501, 502, 509, 522, 533, 548, 554, 571).

98 Box to Harrisson, 4 Mar. 1940, TC 20–3-A, M-OA.

99 [Kathleen Box], ‘Wartime reading’, p. 27, 7 Mar. 1940, File Report 47, M-OA.

100 ‘One who has risen’, ‘A letter from Utopia’, Bookseller, 16 Mar. 1934, p. 167.

101 See ‘Cigarette coupons’, Publisher and Bookseller, 18 Nov. 1932, pp. 949–55.

102 Harrisson, Tom, Jennings, Humphrey, and Madge, Charles, ‘Anthropology at home’, New Statesman and Nation, 30 Jan. 1937, p. 155Google Scholar. On Gorer, see Mandler, Peter, ‘Being his own rabbit: Geoffrey Gorer and English culture’, in Griffiths, Clare V. J., Nott, James J., and Whyte, William, eds., Classes, cultures, and politics: essays on British history for Ross McKibbin (Oxford, 2011), pp. 192–208Google Scholar.

103 Orwell to Geoffrey Gorer, [May] 1936, in Orwell and Angus, eds., Collected essays, i, p. 222 (emphasis in original).

104 Orwell to Gorer, 3 Apr. 1940, in Orwell and Angus, eds., Collected essays, i, p. 582; Orwell, ‘Boys' weeklies’, p. 482.

105 Orwell, ‘Boys' weeklies’, pp. 471–2, 480, 483–4. On Orwell's essay, see Marks, Peter, George Orwell the essayist: literature, politics and the periodical culture (London, 2011), pp. 91–4Google Scholar; and, on the story papers, see Boyd, Kelly, Manliness and the boys’ story paper in Britain: a cultural history, 1855–1940 (Basingstoke, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

106 Orwell, ‘Boys' weeklies’, p. 482; compare p. 481. For a matter-of-fact discussion of escapist reading for adults, see Orwell, George, ‘Good bad books’ (1945), in Orwell, and Angus, , eds., Collected essays, iv, pp. 19–22Google Scholar, at pp. 19–20.

107 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘escapism’.

108 On the social context see Todd, Selina, Young women, work, and family in England, 1918–1950 (Oxford, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Melman, Women and the popular imagination, ch. 1. On the longer history of thinking of self-absorption as threateningly anti-social, see Laqueur, Thomas W., Solitary sex: a cultural history of masturbation (New York, NY, 2004)Google Scholar, esp., with reference to reading, pp. 302–58.

109 Saler, Michael, As if: modern enchantment and the literary prehistory of virtual reality (New York, NY, 2012)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 1; Houlbrook, Matt, ‘ “A pin to see the peepshow”: culture, fiction and selfhood in Edith Thompson's letters, 1921–1922’, Past and Present, 207 (2010), pp. 215–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 216–17, 247–8.

110 Thompson, Frank, ‘Place aux dames’, Humberside: The Magazine of the Hull Literary Club, 7 (1940), pp. 43–50Google Scholar, at p. 44.

111 Hilliard, Christopher, English as a vocation: the ‘Scrutiny’ movement (Oxford, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 2.

112 Leavis, F. R., ‘A serious artist’, Scrutiny, 1 (1932), pp. 173–9Google Scholar, at p. 175.

113 Thompson, ‘Place aux dames’, p. 44; Leavis, Q. D., Fiction and the reading public (1932; repr., London, 1965), p. 199Google Scholar; Leavis, F. R. and Thompson, Denys, Culture and environment: the training of critical awareness (1933; repr., London, 1950), pp. 54–5Google Scholar. Further into his essay, Frank Thompson quoted the same passage from D. H. Lawrence that Leavis and Denys Thompson used to great effect in their book. Thompson, ‘Place aux dames’, p. 47; Leavis and Thompson, Culture and environment, pp. 55–6.

114 Thompson, ‘Place aux dames’, pp. 49–50. For other comparisons of escapist reading with drug-taking, see the instances cited in McAleer, Popular reading and publishing, p. 98; Cunningham, Valentine, British writers of the thirties (Oxford, 1988), p. 261Google Scholar; Dark, Sidney, The new reading public: a lecture delivered under the auspices of ‘the Society of Bookmen’ (London, 1922), p. 12Google Scholar; ‘Books as dope’, Publishers' Circular, 26 Feb. 1938, p. 274; and the librarian quoted in Rowntree, Poverty and progress, p. 384.

115 Thompson, ‘Place aux dames’, p. 50.

116 Collini, Stefan, ‘On highest authority: the literary critic and other aviators in early twentieth-century Britain’, in Ross, Dorothy, ed., Modernist impulses in the human sciences, 1870–1930 (Baltimore, MD, 1994), pp. 152–70Google Scholar, at pp. 169–70; Collini, Stefan, ‘The completest mode: the literary critic as hero’, in Common reading: critics, historians, publics (Oxford, 2008), pp. 257–67Google Scholar, at pp. 257–8.

117 Anderson, ‘Components of the national culture’, pp. 84–5.

118 Savage, Identities and social change, p. 93. See also Goldman, Lawrence, ‘A peculiarity of the English? the Social Science Association and the absence of sociology in nineteenth-century Britain’, Past and Present, 114 (1987), pp. 132–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

119 Hilliard, English as a vocation, chs. 2, 5, 6; Steele, Tom, The emergence of cultural studies, 1945–1965: cultural politics, adult education, and the English question (London, 1997), pp. 135–41Google Scholar.

120 Hoggart, Richard, ‘Schools of English and contemporary society’ (1963), in Speaking to each other: essays (2 vols., London, 1970)Google Scholar, ii, pp. 255, 257n; Hoggart, Richard, ‘Literature and society’ (1966), in Speaking to each other, ii, p. 31 and nGoogle Scholar.

121 Hoggart, Richard, ‘The bookstall’, Tribune, 29 Oct. 1948, p. 23Google Scholar. Part of this article's opening sentence reappeared in Hoggart, Richard, The uses of literacy: aspects of working-class life, with special references to publications and entertainments (London, 1957), p. 210Google Scholar. Hoggart discusses the impact ‘Boys’ weeklies’ made on him in A sort of clowning (London, 1990), p. 91.

122 See Stefan Collini, ‘Always dying: the idea of the general periodical’, in Common reading, pp. 221–35; Gross, John, The rise and fall of the man of letters: aspects of English literary life since 1800 (1969; Chicago, IL, 1992)Google Scholar.