Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1665 page)

CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE. — I.

THE UNKNOWN PUBLIC.

Do the customers at publishing houses, the members of book-clubs and circulating libraries, and the purchasers and borrowers of newspapers and reviews, compose altogether the great bulk of the reading public of England? There was a time when, if anybody had put this question to me, I, for one, should certainly have answered Yes.

I know better now. So far from composing the bulk of English readers, the public just mentioned represents nothing more than the minority.

This startling discovery dawned upon me gradually. I made my first approaches toward it in walking about London, more especially in the second and third rate neighbourhoods. At such times, whenever I passed a small stationer’s or small tobacconist’s shop, I became mechanically conscious of certain publications which invariably occupied the windows. These publications all appeared to be of the same small quarto size: they seemed to consist merely of a few unbound pages; each one of them had a picture on the upper half of the front leaf, and a quantity of small print on the under. I noticed just as much as this, for some time, and no more. None of the gentlemen who profess to guide my taste in literary matters had ever directed my attention toward these mysterious publications. My favorite Review is, as I firmly believe, at this very day, unconscious of their existence. My enterprising librarian — who forces all sorts of books on my attention that I don’t want to read, because he has bought whole editions of them a great bargain — has never yet tried me with the limp, unbound picture-quarto of the small shops. Day after day, and week after week, the mysterious publications haunted my walks, go where I might; and still I was too careless to stop and notice them in detail. I left London, and traveled about England. The neglected publications followed me. There they were in every town, large or small. I saw them in fruit-shops, in oyster-shops, in cigar-shops, in lozenge-shops. Villages even — picturesque, strong-smelling villages — were not free from them. Wherever the speculative daring of one man could open a shop, and the human appetites and necessities of his fellow-mortals could keep it from shutting up again, there, as it appeared to me, the unbound picture-quarto instantly entered, set itself up obtrusively in the window, and insisted on being looked at by everybody. “Buy me, borrow me, stare at me, steal me. Oh, inattentive stranger, do anything but pass me by!”

Under this sort of compulsion, it was not long before I began to stop at shop-windows and look attentively at these all-pervading specimen of what was to me a new species of literary production. I made acquaintance with one of them among the deserts of West Cornwall; with another in a populous thoroughfare of Whitechapel; with a third in a dreary little lost town at the north of Scotland. I went into a lovely county of South Wales; the modest railway had not penetrated to it, but the audacious picture-quarto had found it out. Who could resist this perpetual, this inevitable, this magnificently unlimited appeal to notice and patronage? From looking in at the windows of the shops, I got on to entering the shops themselves — to buying specimens of this locust-flight of small publications — to making strict examination of them from the first page to the last — and finally, to instituting inquiries about them in all sorts of well-informed quarters. The result has been the discovery of an Unknown Public; a public to be counted by millions; the mysterious, the unfathomable, the universal public of the penny-novel-journals.*

* It may be as well to explain that I use this awkward compound word in order to mark the distinction between a penny journal and a penny newspaper. The “journal” is what I am now writing about. The “newspaper” is an entirely different subject, with which this article has no connection.

I have five of these journals now before me, represented by one sample copy, bought haphazard, of each. There are many more; but these five represent the successful and well-established members of the literary family. The eldest of them is a stout lad of fifteen years’ standing; the youngest is an infant of three months old. All five are sold at the same price of one penny; all five are published regularly once a week; all five contain about the same quantity of matter. The weekly circulation of the most successful of the five is now publicly advertised (and, as I am informed, without exaggeration) at half a million. Taking the other four as attaining altogether to a circulation of another half-million (which is probably much under the right estimate) we have a sale of a million weekly for five penny journals. Reckoning only three readers to each copy sold, the result is
a public of three millions
— a public unknown to the literary world; unknown, as disciples, to the whole body of professed critics; unknown, as customers, at the great libraries and the great publishing houses; unknown, as an audience, to the distinguished English writers of our own time. A reading public of three millions which lies right out of the pale of literary civilisation is a phenomenon worth examining — a mystery which the sharpest man among us may not find it easy to solve.

In the first place, who are the three millions — the Unknown Public — as I have ventured to call them?

The known reading public — the minority already referred to — are easily discovered and classified. There is the religious public, with booksellers and literature of its own, which includes reviews and newspapers as well as books. There is the public which reads for information, and devotes itself to Histories, Biographies, Essays, Treatises, Voyages and Travels. There is the public which reads for amusement, and patronizes the Circulating Libraries and the railway bookstalls. There is, lastly, the public which reads nothing but newspapers. We all know where to lay our hands on the people who represent these various classes. We see the books they like on their tables. We meet them out at dinner, and hear them talk of their favorite authors. We know, if we are at all conversant with literary matters, even the very districts of London in which certain classes of people live who are to be depended upon beforehand as the picked readers for certain kinds of books. But what do we know of the enormous, outlawed majority — of the lost literary tribes — of the prodigious, the overwhelming three millions? Absolutely nothing.

I myself — and I say it to my sorrow — have a very large circle of acquaintance. Ever since I undertook the interesting task of exploring the Unknown Public, I have been trying to discover among my dear friends and my bitter enemies (both alike on my visiting-list), a subscriber to a penny-novel-journal — and I have never yet succeeded in the attempt. I have heard theories started as to the probable existence of penny-novel-journals in kitchen dressers, in the back parlors of Easy-shaving Shops, in the greasy seclusion of the boxes at the small Chop-houses. But I have never yet met with any man, woman or child who could answer the inquiry: “Do you subscribe to a penny journal?” plainly in the affirmative, and who could produce the periodical in question. I have learned, years ago, to despair of ever meeting with a single woman, after a certain age, who has not had an offer of marriage. I have given up long since all idea of ever discovering a man who has himself seen a ghost, as distinguished from that other inevitable man who has had a bosom friend who has unquestionably seen one. These are two among many other aspirations of a wasted life which I have definitely resigned. I have now to add one more to the number of my vanished illusions.

In the absence, therefore, of any positive information on the subject, it is only possible to pursue the present investigation by accepting such negative evidence as may help us to guess, with more or less accuracy, at the social position, the habits, the tastes, and the average intelligence of the Unknown Public. Arguing carefully by inference, we may hope, in this matter, to arrive at something like a safe, if not a satisfactory, conclusion.

To begin with, it may be fairly assumed — seeing that the staple commodity of each one of the five journals before me is composed of stories — that the Unknown Public reads for its amusement more than for its information.

Judging by my own experience, I should be inclined to add that the Unknown Public looks to quantity rather than quality in spending its penny a week on literature. In buying my five specimen copies at five different shops, I purposely approached the individual behind the counter on each occasion in the character of a member of the Unknown Public — say, Number Three Million and One — who wished to be guided in laying out a penny entirely by the recommendation of the shop-keeper himself. I expected, by this course of proceeding, to hear a little popular criticism, and to get at what the conditions of success might be, in a branch of literature which was quite new to me. No such result rewarded my efforts in any case. The dialogue between buyer and seller always took some such practical turn as this:

Reader, Number Three Million and One.
“I want to take in one of the penny journals. Which do you recommend?”

Enterprising Publisher.
“Some likes one, and some likes another. They’re all good pennurths. Seen this one?”

“Yes.”

“Seen that one?”

“No.”

“Look what a pennurth!”

“Yes — but about the stories in this one? Are they as good, now, as the stories in that one?”

“Well, you see, some likes one, and some likes another. Sometimes I sells more of one, and sometimes I sells more of another. Take ‘em all the year round, and there an’t a pin, as I knows of, to choose between ‘em. There’s just about as much in one as there is in another. All good pennurths. Bless your soul, just take ‘em up and look for yourself! All good pennurths, choose where you like!”

I never got any further than this, try as I might. And yet I found the shop-keepers, both men and women, ready enough to talk on other topics. On each occasion, so far from receiving any practical hints that I was interrupting business, I found myself sociably delayed in the shop, after I had made my purchase, as if I had been an old acquaintance. I got all sorts of curious information on all sorts of subjects — excepting the good pennurth of print in my pocket. Does the reader know the singular facts in connection with Everton Toffey? It is like eau de Cologne. There is only one genuine receipt for making it in the world. It has been a family inheritance from remote antiquity. You may go here, there, and everywhere, and buy what you think is Everton Toffey (or eau de Cologne); but there is only one place in London, as there is only one place in Cologne, at which you can obtain the genuine article. That information was given me at one penny journal shop. At another, the proprietor explained his new system of Stay-making to me. He offered to provide my wife with something that would support her muscles and not pinch her flesh; and, what was more, he was not the man to ask for his bill afterward, except in the case of giving both of us perfect satisfaction. This man was so talkative and intelligent; he could tell me all about so many other things besides stays, that I took it for granted he could give me the information of which I stood in need. But here, again, I was disappointed. He had a perfect snow-drift of penny journals all over his counter; he snatched them up by handfuls, and gesticulated with them cheerfully; he smacked and patted them, and brushed them all up in a heap, to express to me that “the whole lot would be worked off by the evening”; but he, too, when I brought him to close quarters, only repeated the one inevitable form of words: “A good pennurth; that’s all I can say! Bless your soul, look at any one of them for yourself, and see what a pennurth it is!”

Having, inferentially, arrived at the two conclusions that the Unknown Public reads for amusement, and that it looks to quantity in its reading, rather than to quality, I might have found it difficult to proceed further toward the making of new discoveries but for the existence of a very remarkable aid to inquiry, which is common to all the penny-novel-journals alike.

The peculiar facilities to which I now refer are presented in the Answers to Correspondents. The page containing these is, beyond all comparison, the most interesting page in the penny journals. There is no earthly subject that it is possible to discuss, no private affair that it is possible to conceive, which the inscrutable Unknown Public will not confide to the editor in the form of a question, and which the editor will not set himself seriously and resolutely to answer. Hidden under cover of initials, or Christian names, or conventional signatures — such as Subscriber, Constant Reader, and so forth — the editor’s correspondents seem, many of them, to judge by the published answers to their questions, utterly impervious to the senses of ridicule or shame. Young girls beset by perplexities which are usually supposed to be reserved for a mother’s or an elder sister’s ear, consult the editor. Married women who have committed little frailties, consult the editor. Male jilts in deadly fear of actions for breach of promise of marriage, consult the editor. Ladies whose complexions are on the wane, and who wish to know the best artificial means of restoring them, consult the editor. Gentlemen who want to dye their hair and get rid of their corns consult the editor. Inconceivably dense ignorance, inconceivably petty malice, and inconceivably complacent vanity, all consult the editor, and all, wonderful to relate, get serious answers from him. No mortal position is too difficult for this wonderful man; there is no change of character as general referee which he is not prepared to assume on the instant. Now he is a father, now a mother, now a schoolmaster, now a confessor, now a doctor, now a lawyer, now a young lady’s confidante, now a young gentleman’s bosom friend, now a lecturer on morals, and now an authority in cookery.