A Companion to the History of the Book (54 page)

Another source of cheap and plentiful text that had been available from the beginning of our period was the printed play: a small, commonly board-covered book priced at 6d and containing a recent or current play performed on the London stage and elsewhere. There were many series of these produced by such publishers as John Duncombe, John Cumberland, and T. Dolby. One suspects that many of these texts, often with short lines and clear indication of who is speaking at any given time, might well have been easier to read for those whose grip on literacy was still quite loose. That having been said, one should not underestimate the instinct for domestic performance (just think of the number of plays performed in the Austen or Dickens households) – and not just for drama: “Duncombe’s Acting Editions” frequently carried on their back pages advertisements for “Music for the Million” – that is, scores selling for 3d each.

Most literary fashions gradually percolate down the social strata, but the illustrated monthly part reversed the trend and what was a down-market form was, from the late 1830s, taken over by Dickens and his publishers – most notably Chapman and Hall and Bradbury and Evans – who, almost single-handedly, made it a respectable mode of publication: eighteen monthly parts at Is a part with a final double number at 2s. Each issue was surrounded by pages of advertisements, the sale of space for which boosted the income from each part. The level of Dickens’s success can be measured by the fact that a number of his novels were almost immediately dramatized for the London stage (sometimes even before they had completed serialization) (Patten 1978: 90–1) and that various manufactures “merchandised” his characters: “Pickwick” cigars and figurines were but two examples.

Where Dickens led other distinguished authors (such as Thackeray, George Eliot, and Trollope), and many less distinguished, followed. Working-class fiction began to imitate the inimitable, and many novels were produced in Id weekly parts that ran for as long as readers were prepared to buy them. G. W. M. Reynolds’s
The Mysteries of the Court of London
published by George Vickers, for instance, ran from 1849 to 1856 and contained, it has been estimated, no fewer than 4.5 million words (James 1974: 47, 109). Reynolds was a journalist and publisher as well as a novelist, and produced such popular papers as
Reynolds’s Miscellany,
a detail which again illustrates the close connection between fiction and periodical publication.

John Dicks became G. W. M. Reynolds’s managing clerk and printer and publisher of the
Miscellany
in 1847. Dicks had a long and remarkable career in cheap publishing, which included publishing
Dicks’ Penny Standard Plays
weekly from the 1860s and twice weekly from 1882. He moved into the canon by producing
Dicks’ Shakspere’s Works
at the rate of two plays for a Id; he then produced a complete works for 2s, which was followed in due course by a 1s edition; together, these two editions sold over 750,000 copies. In the late 1860s,
Dicks’ English Novels
appeared, each a complete novel in paperback selling at 6d, and this more than sixty-five years before Penguin Books. Dicks did not neglect periodical publication:
Reynolds’s Miscellany
was combined with Dicks’s own
Bow Bells
in 1869. Niche markets we also catered for:
Builder’s World was
launched in 1876 and the
Boy’s Herald
in 1877 (Dicks 2004).

With the death of Dickens in 1870, monthly part-fiction began to die, but the need to keep novels cheap led to a growing tendency to serialize within the pages of middle-class magazines and newspapers: commonly before a novel was published as an expensive three-decker it would be serialized in a monthly magazine over a year. This pattern was another that had been rehearsed in the down-market publications of the 1840s when Id weeklies, such as
The Sunday Times
(although the title suggested a newspaper), devoted almost all of its pages to three or four serialized novels illustrated by wood-engravings.

As we have seen with
Boxiana,
part-publication was not exclusively for fiction. All forms of lengthy text could be chopped up and re-marketed as parts building to a greater whole. In the early nineteenth century, Thomas Kelly sold, among many other things, a history of the French Revolution, a life of Christ, and a history of England all in parts, or “numbers,” as they were frequently called; he also published a Bible in no fewer than 173 parts (Altick 1957: 264–5). Between 1833 and 1844, Charles Knight, publisher to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, produced a
Penny Cyclopaedia
in weekly Id parts, finally amounting to twenty-seven volumes.

Part-publication was not restricted to cheap works. In the 1820s, the firm of A. J. Valpy of Took’s Court, Chancery Lane, later absorbed into Longmans, undertook the republication of the “Delphin” edition of Greek and Roman classics. These were issued in monthly paperback parts of 627 pages (exactly forty-two printed sheets) at the price of 21s per part; it was assumed that owners would collect them and bind them up into complete volumes at a later date. So confident was Valpy of this that monthly parts might end in mid-sentence only to be completed in the following part. The whole enterprise was planned for ten years and 120 parts. Despite its length, high price, and unwieldy publication process, Valpy attracted over 900 subscribers to his edition which would cost each at least 120 guineas.

Lending and Selling

Another means of cheapening access to texts was to loan rather than sell them. In the early nineteenth century, newspapers such as
The Times
could be hired out for an hour or so for a penny: W. H. Smith began as a “newswalk” in the late eighteenth century, one of whose functions was to hire out periodicals (Wilson 1985). This was made possible by the rag-based paper – which was much tougher than modern newsprint – on which periodicals were printed. However, economically, the lending of books was the more important, and in this trade the circulating libraries were predominant. Circulating libraries emerged as a significant force in the eighteenth century, but it was the inflated book prices of the early nineteenth century, in particular the three-decker novel, that made them essential to many middle-class readers. These libraries charged an annual fee – usually 2–4 guineas – for the right to borrow one volume at a time. Higher subscriptions allowed more volumes to be borrowed. It was in 1842 that the largest and most successful circulating library, Mudie’s, was founded. Mudie’s scale and efficient organization (he even used standard, lead-lined boxes – a sort of containerization – to distribute books abroad) allowed him to charge the low annual fee of one guinea and yet distribute books throughout Britain and its empire (Griest 1970). Others followed suit: W. H. Smith in the 1860s, the Boots Booklovers Library from 1898, and The Times Book Club from 1905.

Although the Public Libraries Act (13 and 14 Vict. C.65) was passed in 1850, the rate at which these free institutions were established was very low until the 1880s. Even then, many of the libraries on offer were daunting places where you could not browse the shelves but had to use a printed catalogue to order what you wanted from a librarian behind a counter (Kelly 1977).

By the 1880s, many of the circulating libraries were facing a problem: they were no longer being given long enough to circulate three-decker editions before the publisher produced much cheaper second editions (often at 3s 6d or less). The only way circulating libraries could counter this was to sell these no-longer-circulating titles off at a substantial discount. The great libraries would sell job lots to smaller or more local circulating libraries and they, after circulating them for a time, would sell them on to even cheaper or smaller libraries until they were sold off to individuals or ended up on the open-air book barrows in such places as Farringdon Road in London.

As recorded by the trade journals, many new booksellers moved from selling new to selling second-hand books because the investment was much less and titles stocked had already been market-tested. The sellers of new books faced many problems, including the fact that, from the 1850s to the 1890s, and in accordance with the free-trade principles of the time, there was no form of retail price maintenance which meant that cash buyers would expect up to a 25 percent discount (Barnes 1964). “Underselling,” as discounting was called, meant that booksellers’ profits were squeezed. However, in 1891, under the guidance of the publisher Frederick Macmillan, the net book system (which protected a standard price below which a book would not be discounted) was established, this becoming the Net Book Agreement by 1901 which survived intact until the 1990s.

Things were made more difficult by the fact that those of the middle class who did not buy for ready money might expect a long line of credit, perhaps up to six months or more. Many booksellers failed because of cash-flow problems. Even those who survived rarely did so on books alone. Specialist bookshops were rare, and most would sell more profitable and fast-moving lines, such as newspapers, stationery, fancy goods, and patent medicines (one of the reasons why so many cheaper books contain advertisements for medical goods).

One thing that did help support bookshops of all sorts was the efficient system of wholesaling that evolved during the period. W. H. Smiths certainly performed the role, but the outstanding service was that offered by Simpkin, Marshall which, apart from being considerable publishers in their own right, and agents for small publishers in the provinces, also offered a centralized book-supply system that flourished until the firm was bombed-out in late December 1940.

Although commonly associated with three-decker novels, Mudie’s catalogues – which by the 1880s were over a thousand pages long and issued annually – actually listed many more two- and one-volume novels. However, eclipsing all novels put together was the nonfiction stock. We should never forget that, even at its height, Victorian fiction accounted for only about a third of the titles listed in the book-trade journals, such as
Publishers’ Circular
(a thin paper edition of which was “printed for the Colonies and Abroad”) and
The Bookseller.
Overwhelmingly, the titles produced during our period were devoted to nonfiction, although it has to be said that few would be characterized by the long print-runs that would mark out a bestselling work of fiction.

Poetry, too, featured more strongly in Mudie’s catalogues than one might have expected. Sir Walter Scott and then Byron sold spectacularly well in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. In the 1850s, Tennyson came to the fore and, as the Romantic poets came out of copyright in the mid-Victorian period, Wordsworth and others were extensively reprinted – few Romantic poets other than Byron sold well during the Romantic period (St. Clair 2004). As there was no copyright arrangement with the US until 1891, American poets such as Longfellow could be reprinted cheaply, and as early as 1862 his works had been issued by at least fifteen publishers. Overall, however, the popularity and profitability of poetry declined through the period and by the end many publishers were expecting poets to help subsidize their own publication. The areas in which poetry continued to flourish in the late nineteenth century were in cheap classic reprint series (sometimes associated with the promotion of the canon as in “Lubbock’s Hundred Best Books” series) – and as school textbooks (Eliot 2006).

Other Bestsellers

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, religion was the predominant subject of published books: this was a substantial category that ranged from Bibles, New Testaments, Psalms, and Common Prayer-books to collections of sermons and Sunday school literature for children. The mass production of sacred texts was not a wholly commercial venture: many charitable organizations, such as the Religious Tract Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society, would subsidize the production and distribution of these texts, though rarely would they be distributed for free (on the Samuel Smiles principle that nothing that was given free would be properly valued). Printers and publishers with traditional Bible-printing privileges (such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and the King’s or Queen’s printer) made substantial profits on this trade, at least until the later nineteenth century when the growing secularization of British society gradually reduced demand. In the short period 1848–50, for instance, OUP, CUP, and the Queen’s printer in England and Scotland produced 4,634,274 Bibles and New Testaments between them (Eliot 1994).

Religious texts were commonly used to teach children to read (hardly surprising as many of the literate from the lower classes had been taught in Sunday schools). As the century progressed, and as the opportunities for schooling were extended socially and geographically, sometimes through charitable efforts but more frequently, in the later nineteenth century, by legislation (for example, Forster’s Education Act of 1870), so the demand for textbooks of all sorts expanded. Public and grammar schools had for centuries generated a demand for Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek teaching texts, but the new syllabuses required a wider range of subjects, including mathematics, history, and English. Textbooks that were widely adopted could generate substantial profits for publishers, particularly as they could be sold steadily to generations of pupils. Commonly, publishers would pay writers a flat fee for producing textbooks and, later, hire them or others to revise the text. Stereoplated or electrotyped, these textbooks had a longevity unmatched by most other books apart from the Bible and Shakespeare. Mac-millan, a major textbook producer founded in Cambridge in 1843, sometimes kept the same titles in print for 40–60 years (Eliot 2002: 24–5). Suitably adapted, such textbooks could be exported to the empire, and that created yet another lucrative market which was exploited by Macmillan, Longman OUP, CUP, Bell, Murray, Cassell, Chambers, Edward Arnold, Sampson Low and Blackwood, among others. This textbook market was reinforced and steered by systems that had at their heart the creation and secure printing of examination papers and the syllabuses that drove them. Great university presses, such as OUP and CUP, carried the status of their institutions and marketed their prestige along with their textbooks.