22b 
The History of the Book in Britain, 1801–1914
22b LESLIE HOWSAM
Print was the principal medium of written communication in Britain during the 19th and early 20th centuries. In that era of rapid population increase and concentrated industrial, urban, and imperial expansion, MS circulation was minimal and broadcasting lay in the future. Along with periodicals and newspapers, books and pamphlets constituted the material culture of print in a rapidly changing society. Much of that change was painful, and for many the experience of reading was a source of comfort or consolation; for others it was an opportunity to acquire useful knowledge or adhere to a system of belief. Men and women of all social ranks were readers, writers, and publishers, but a passion for the acquisition of literacy was particularly conspicuous in the working class. William Lovett (1800–1877) characterized his ‘life and struggles’ in terms of ‘the pursuit of bread, knowledge and freedom’. In printing offices and booksellers’ shops, and on the streets where vendors cried their wares, ideas and arguments jostled together. Evangelical religious enthusiasm, liberal political economy, and radical egalitarianism were only the most prominent of many competing ideologies. Pious people of the middle class eschewed the theatre and frivolous amusements, but enjoyed respectable novels read aloud in the family circle, while conduct books taught young people how to behave in polite society. Meanwhile, more secular spirits sought to break free of the prevailing culture’s unofficial censorship by seeking out cheap, sometimes disreputable, editions of works of science and politics as well as of fiction and poetry.
Literacy measured by the ability to sign one’s name (which normally implied at least minimal skills with reading) sat at about 50 per cent in 1801 and had risen to almost 100 per cent by 1914. Percentages, however, are of less interest than the way in which people used their literacy: for maintaining relationships with family at a time of increasing social mobility; for engaging with the natural world, with employers and colleagues in factories and other workplaces; and for engaging with religion or politics. The balance of work and leisure changed too, as the economic misery of the Napoleonic wars (until 1815) and their aftermath (until about 1850) gave way to a period of relative prosperity. Governments mandated a reduction in working hours for adults as well as educational provision for children. Both policies affected the practices of writing and publishing books, as well as the experience of reading.
The spread of reading and the dissemination of print can be credited both to broad socio-economic forces and to specific technological and cultural changes. Religious and political ideals competed vigorously and prosperity increased unevenly. At the same time, the mechanical capacity of printing and bookbinding equipment improved, along with readers’ ability to illuminate their books or journals by something stronger than candlelight. As a society, Britain had been moderately pious, but people’s reading of bibles and tracts increased significantly as a result of the evangelical publishing activities of the British and Foreign Bible Society and the Religious Tract Society. Strict sabbatarianism gave rise to Sunday newspapers and to programmes of respectable reading for boys and girls. Similarly, the secular utilitarian ideologies of free trade and political economy, espoused by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), were widely promoted in its Penny Magazine and other publications. At the other end of the political spectrum, radical political ideas circulating in the first two decades of the 19th century grew out of a profoundly literate working-class culture, steeped in the notion of human rights expounded by Paine in Rights of Man. Despite the variety of ideologies in the politics of reading, all these people and organizations shared two things: they believed in the power of print to create change, and they were deeply suspicious of merely entertaining literature.
The book trade was based in the growing urban centres of Britain, primarily in London and Edinburgh. Indeed, there were strong business and personal relationships between publishers in the two cities. Yet printing, bookselling, and circulating libraries all flourished in Wales, and in Scottish and English provincial cities and towns as well. In the comfortable middle class, as among the struggling labourers, books were the mass medium through which culture was constructed. Children learned from print both directly and indirectly (see 17). Women readers, and indeed writers, found in books and periodicals a respectable place from which to approach the wider world, despite the social constraints that operated throughout most of the period. Men and boys could explore their masculinity and women and girls their femininity, and Britons of both sexes and all classes could use print to position themselves in relation to the imperial and colonial possessions that their nation claimed.
From the consumers’ and producers’ points of view, the economics of the book in Britain went through a dramatic transformation (see 12). Identified in the first half of the 19th century as a luxury commodity (short press runs offered at high prices), the book became a commonplace cultural product (manufactured on an industrial scale and priced for middle- and working-class budgets). This distinction is complicated, however, by two major exceptions. Commercial circulating libraries (of which Mudie’s was the largest) purchased the expensive volumes and rented them to readers at a manageable rate; and various publishers circumvented the high cost of a complete book by making it available to readers on a week-by-week or monthly basis. Bible and tract societies saw social utility in collecting penny subscriptions until a book was paid for, and Dickens’s first publishers, Chapman & Hall, discovered the benefits of selling books in numbers, or parts. They could always be collected up and repackaged as a new edition—or various editions—after the author had finished the tale and the first cohort of readers had followed in his or her wake.
In the early decades of the 19th century the rate of publication rose, from a few hundred titles annually at the beginning, to 3,000 or 4,000 by the mid-1840s. New technologies (see 11) meant new economies of scale for the book trade, and entrepreneurs also took advantage of changes in the banking and insurance sectors. In 1814, The Times first used a steam press to print the newspaper, and although the use of steam for book printing was not commonplace until later, the new technology was perceived as a watershed. In the 1840s there arose a ‘passionate argument about the future of publishing and bookselling’ (Raven, 321). The debates revolved around intellectual property and taxes on knowledge, often pitting the interests of publishers against those of authors and of readers. The Copyright Act of 1842 extended protection of an author’s rights to 42 years (or seven years after his or her death, whichever was greater). Yet it was publishers and star authors, more than readers or the majority of writers, who benefited most from the change. Further legislation concerned international copyright, but British authors remained unprotected in the colonial and American markets for most of the century. The British government derived income from the book trade by means of the stamp tax. Increasingly, this was seen to stifle the freedom of the press and the circulation of knowledge. The last stamp tax was repealed in 1855 and the excise tax on paper in 1861.
The economics of the book in the second half of the 19th century have been succinctly characterized: ‘the period from 1846 to 1916 saw a fourfold increase in production and a halving of book prices’ (Weedon, 57). By 1914 there were some 10,000 titles a year being published, and prices for books had plummeted from the luxury level into the range of modest family budgets. The circulating libraries, which had benefited from the three-decker format when prices were high, now forced it out of the market. The publishing business, which for most of the 19th century had been one where powerful individual literary entrepreneurs were succeeded by their sons and nephews, now began to be reorganized as limited-liability companies.
As in other parts of the industrialized world, most of the technologies of book production in Britain advanced dramatically between 1800 and 1914. Paper made by hand from rags gave way to paper made by machine, and, later, from esparto grass and, eventually, wood pulp as raw material (see 10). The craft of setting movable type by hand, which had changed little since William Caxton’s time, was supplemented by making stereotype (from the 1820s) and later electrotype (from the 1890s) plates that captured whole pages at once. Yet composition itself was not mechanized until the introduction of Linotype in the 1870s and Monotype in the 1890s. Hand presses remained ubiquitous in local printing offices and for small jobs for many years, but the larger printers adopted steam presses by the 1830s and 1840s. Twyman has characterized the transformation of illustrations (first from copper and later from steel engravings, then electrotype) as a complex and multilayered process (see 18). At the end of the century, photography was in use and colour was enriching printed pages for the first time. The practice of supplying expensive books in flimsy paper covers or boards, so that they could be rebound for the purchaser’s private collection, began to give way to edition binding in the 1830s (see 19). Leather was used only for bibles and special works, while the use of book cloth for a whole edition could be made attractive with colour and design. Over the course of the century, the cost of labour as a proportion in the cost of producing a book increased, while that of raw materials decreased.
The culture of book production was transformed along with the technology. During the first quarter of the 19th century, the bible and tract societies were among the few publishers interested in keeping the price of books low. Their concern was with saving souls, while a few other specialists in cheap books churned out reprints of the classics for the school and popular working-class markets. The leading London firms, meanwhile, provided luxurious volumes for the leisured upper-class reader and used copyright law to protect their investment in works. The firms included the Rivington, Longman, and Murray families as well as Richard Bentley and others in London. Blackwood & Sons, the Chambers brothers, and William Strahan operated in Edinburgh. These booksellers—the term was still in use whether or not the firm engaged in the retail trade—were conservative men of business to whom the luxury price of two guineas for a work in quarto seemed appropriate. Charles Knight likened their strategy to that of fishmongers who destroyed their stock in the late afternoon, rather than reducing its price after servants had purchased enough for the gentry’s midday meals. Like reprinting in cheap editions, this policy would have allowed the fish merchants to take advantage of a second class of customers, poorer families preparing supper, without any risk to the market earlier in the day. Similarly, the top London and Edinburgh publishers were slow to recognize that the market for reprinted works of literature in cheap editions would not spoil that for fresh originals in good bindings at high prices. Exacerbating the effects of this commercial outlook, the price of paper was high during the Napoleonic wars, and printing and bookbinding (see 19) remained labour-intensive crafts. Even stereotype was only practical for those few works that would be very widely circulated. These included not only spiritual and educational books, but the novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott, whose influence on book prices was profound. His popular novels, beginning with Kenilworth in 1821, were the first to achieve the exorbitantly high price of 31s. 6d. and to expand to three volumes. A noticeable but brief dip in booktrade fortunes occurred in 1826 when the firm of Constable went bankrupt despite owning the profitable copyrights to Scott’s works as well as publishing the Edinburgh Review and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
During the 1830s and 1840s, the book trade’s leaders maintained their conservative approach, but experiments in social engineering by means of print culture were nevertheless under way. Railway books and booksellers appeared later, along with trains and stations. Under Knight’s leadership, the SDUK published series of works in both ‘useful’ and ‘entertaining’ knowledge, issued in affordably priced part-issue format, rather than full-scale volumes. Later, they developed their periodical, the Penny Magazine; in Crotchet Castle (1831), Thomas Love Peacock captured the SDUK’s timeliness when he caricatured it as the ‘Steam Intellect Society’. Knight campaigned vigorously for the stamp duty on paper to be repealed. The tax, determined by the Stamp Act, was also the focus of working-class political activity, which flourished in the 1830s as a campaign for the publication and sale of The Poor Man’s Guardian and other unstamped periodicals. It was in 1836 that the formidable partnership of Chapman & Hall as publishers and Dickens as author initiated The Pickwick Papers and hit upon the idea of part-issue. The combination of a negligible unit price and a cliffhanger ending proved irresistible. This format became part of the infrastructure of publishing and remained so until the 1870s, when magazine serialization and one-volume reprints took over.
Dickens’s huge income from authorship in mid-century was scarcely typical; also unusual were the complex business, literary, and indeed social relationships with his publishers that Patten has recorded. Most authors had to be content with a modest one-off payment for the copyright, so that if their work became popular it was the publisher who benefited. The usual alternative method of payment, a system of half-profits, was equally unsatisfactory for authors. There were numerous instances of unfair accounting practices by publishers that occasioned vociferous objections, both from individual writers and from the Society of Authors. The system of paying a percentage royalty, popular in the US, was slow to be adopted in Britain. Meanwhile, publishers acquired works for their list not only in the form of new MSS by unknown (and untried) authors, but by purchasing stereotype plates and producing reprints. By the 1860s, the practice of reprinting was finally reducing the price of books. Publishers issued 6s. editions of works they had originally published at much higher prices. Sometimes this happened quickly, but in other cases so slowly that the crusade for cheap literature continued to flourish.
The railway boom of the 1840s and 1850s transformed the distribution of books and periodicals and affected patterns of publishing and of reading. W. H. Smith and other booksellers profited from the railway novel that could be purchased at a station stall and that could be consumed comfortably on a train journey. The leading publisher here was Routledge. Their shilling Railway Library editions, known as yellow backs, were bound in coloured paper and furnished with an illustration on the upper cover and advertisements on the lower. Smith and Routledge, however, never competed directly with the major publishers that had survived from the 18th century into the Victorian age. Macmillan & Co. was different. Founded in 1843 at Cambridge, it moved to London in 1858 and became a leading publisher with a general list that included history, literature and criticism, and science (with periodicals such as Nature), as well as heavyweight new books and cheap reprints of older ones. Alexander Macmillan once told a correspondent, ‘I don’t think that paying things need be done in a slovenly way’, a remark that combined his commercial ambitions with his literary and bibliophilic ones (Freeman Archive 1/7, fo. 495). Although his ‘tobacco parliaments’ were at the very centre of London’s literary culture, Macmillan was also one of the Victorian publishers most active in reaching out to customers and colleagues throughout the British world, establishing offices not only in the colonies but in North America.
The book culture at the turn of the 20th century was very different from the mid-Victorian trade. The three-decker novel format came to an end, while the penny dreadful flourished. A Society of Authors was founded in 1883 to protect its members’ literary property. Authors’ literary agents began to undertake the filtering services previously handled by publishers’ readers. A Net Book Agreement in 1890 ensured that price competition would not damage the infrastructure of the trade. New firms and new series appeared: John Lane founded the Bodley Head in 1894, establishing ambitious aesthetic standards for the book trade; and J. M. Dent initiated Everyman’s Library in 1906. Everyman offered Edwardian readers many of the works, as standards or classics, that had been seen as risky a few decades earlier. Philological and literary scholars combined forces to initiate the New (later Oxford) English Dictionary, while other men of letters joined together to produce and publish the Dictionary of National Biography under the auspices of George Murray Smith in 1900.
Authors, readers, and publishers have been seen as the three central constituencies in the culture of books from 1800 to 1914, but the institutions of circulation and preservation—periodicals, booksellers, and libraries both public and private—were essential supporters of their interdependent relationship. The periodical press benefited even more than the book trade from the changes in technology, literacy, and leisure that characterized the period (see 16). North estimates the quantity of text published in periodical form to have been at least 100 times that appearing between the covers of books. Moreover, book and periodical formats became closely interrelated. An alternative to the part-publication of novels was publication in the weekly or monthly issues of a periodical; once a literary work was brought to completion in a periodical, it could be reissued in one or more volumes. Several major publishers maintained their own periodicals, employing their authors on them, in order to manage this policy: W. M. Thackeray, for example, served as editor of the Cornhill Magazine. Conversely, some historians, cultural critics, and other non-fiction authors sought contracts with publishers for volumes of their collected essays, works that had first appeared in periodical form. The periodical has been identified, by Beetham and Brake among others, as a hybrid form that was enormously influential in the print culture of Victorian Britain.
Periodicals arrived through the postal system, or were purchased alongside books or newspapers. Books could also be ordered from the publisher (or the circulating library) to be delivered by post to the country; cities and provincial towns had bookshops, where sellers were entitled to discounts on set prices. In the earlier decades of the 19th century, street vendors supplemented the established shops, particularly for politically radical pamphlets and evangelical tracts. In rural areas, colporteurs carried print from house to house. Especially when the price of new books was exceptionally high, second-hand bookshops and market stalls were a crucial source for working-class and lower-middle-class readers.
Libraries ranged from the small number of great copyright libraries, through the innovative subscription-supported London Library, to modest and well-meaning local institutions as well as private collections large and small. State-funded public lending libraries were slow to develop, despite the support of Edward Edwards and the passage of enabling legislation in 1850. Mechanics’ institutes were furnished with libraries that provided much of the material for the reading lists of working-class autodidacts. In both public and mechanics’ institute libraries, the provision of fiction was discouraged. Meanwhile the commercial circulating libraries, whose existence was so central to the structure of the publishing trade, filled the need for entertainment. By the late 19th century, however, readers and writers were increasingly frustrated by the restrictions imposed by Mudie’s and other circulating libraries, which many perceived as a form of censorship.
The 19th century saw the appearance of a rich body of fiction and poetry that has become part of the English literary canon. Among the principal authors of the day were Austen, Scott, the Brontës, Tennyson, the Rossettis, Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, Gissing, Stevenson, Hardy, and Wilde. In the history of the book, however, these great names take their place among the vast number of unknown writers who contributed to the market for fiction and poetry. Those categories, in turn, exist in relation to religion, history, philosophy, science, and all the other subdivisions of the publishing trade’s vast output. The material is difficult to count and categorize, partly because it so far outpaced that of the 18th century and partly because the sources from which statistical and subject analysis can be drawn were not consistently organized throughout the period.
Religion, not fiction, was still the dominant subject of the early 19th century, although literary writing was already growing fast. Bibles, tracts, and commentaries made up some 20 per cent of the books published between 1814 and 1846. The second- and third-largest categories were almost equal: a catch-all, combining works on geography, travel, history, and biography came in at 17 per cent, while fiction and juvenile literature measured about 16 per cent. A little over half of the latter category, 8.9 per cent or 3,180 entries over 32 years, constituted novels, romances, and tales as distinct from moral tales and books for children. Poetry and drama, however, were a separate category in the booktrade press’s calculations. They were sixth at about 8 per cent, after education (12 per cent) and the jumble of arts, science, mathematics, and illustrated works (9 per cent). Works on medicine and law amounted to 6 per cent and 4 per cent respectively. Another unhelpful combination category was politics, social science, economics, and military and naval (4 per cent—but some works that would now be included under those headings no doubt found themselves in geography, travel, and so forth). Finally, works of logic and philosophy, and belles-lettres amounted to only 1 per cent; a further 3 per cent of works defied categorization as miscellaneous (Eliot, Patterns and Trends, 44–6). These figures must be treated with caution, however, as they are based on counting titles only, and take into account neither the sizes of works (best measured by counting sheets), nor the extent of press runs. In the absence of edition quantities, especially, such numbers can be used only as general markers.
Another snapshot of the reading public’s preferences in terms of genre and subject is available for the end of the period, 1870–1919. By then, the fiction and juvenile category was highest at 23 per cent, followed by religion (only 16 per cent), geography, travels, history, and biography (down to 12 per cent) and education (11 per cent). The awkward ‘miscellaneous’ now amounted to 19 per cent, with arts, science, mathematics, and illustrated works falling to 8 per cent and poetry and drama rising to 7 per cent. Meanwhile logic, philosophy, and belles-lettres rose to 5 per cent. Medicine and law both sat at 3 per cent, with their declining percentage share being attributed to the rise of other categories rather than to any decline in interest or rate of publication. The portmanteau category of politics, social science, economics, and military and naval also came in at 3 per cent of all the many titles published and recorded by the trade (Eliot, Patterns and Trends, 46–53). Now it was fiction, or more broadly literature, that was the subject of most new books, not religion.
Percentages can be deceptive: they create artificial disconnections between ways of knowing the world that were tightly twisted together. Religion and science, for example, are often regarded as competing ideologies in the mid-19th century, and Darwin’s ideas are seen to counter those of the Bible. A more complex and more interesting perspective is provided by Secord’s scholarly examination of the authorship, production, distribution, and reception of all the variations of a single work of evolutionary science that encompassed and challenged religion (as well as phrenology) and that prepared the minds of readers for Darwin’s ideas.
School books and textbooks were part of the 11 or 12 per cent of the titles reckoned as education, but their numbers accounted for a much larger proportion of the total quantity of volumes in print, because their print runs tended to be substantially larger than those for most other kinds of books. Longmans and others began publishing textbooks in the 1830s; Macmillan, George Bell & Sons, and the Cambridge and Oxford university presses all started to compete with them in the 1860s; changes in education law and financing in 1870, 1882, and 1902 greatly increased the demand. School books were exported to the colonies and to the US. Profit margins were small, but the global English-language market was reliable. Boards of Education in Britain and the colonies ordered about 60,000 copies of the compendia known as ‘readers’ or reading books in a single year, 1860–61 (Weedon, 128).
Scholars from a variety of academic disciplines and cultural commentators of all political stripes have weighed in on the subject of the British reading public between the Napoleonic wars and World War I. Had Britons become irresponsibly frivolous addicts of sensational trash by the end of the century, as Leavis insisted, or were they serious autodidacts devoted to the classics, as J. Rose has maintained? Although a Reading Experience Database is seeking to collect the transitory and precious evidence, there may ultimately be no satisfactory way to measure or to characterize, for a whole nation, so private and intimate a process as reading. Because many books and newspapers were very widely read, however, the communal aspects of the experience and influence of reading are factors that scholars dare not overlook.
The autodidact experience is important in the early 19th century, when educational provision was spotty and unregulated. Working-class autobiographies disclose how difficult it was to find affordable and engaging reading material. Even the poorest homes had copies of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer, The Pilgrim’s Progress and, sometimes, Paradise Lost, although it is not clear how often or how intensively those works were read; probably they formed part of most children’s preparation in the skills of literacy. The possession and reading of other books depended on chance, on the works of history, science, fiction, or philosophy that happened to be available from a second-hand bookseller or in a mechanics’ institute library. Cheap reprints increased the access of humble people to books, but, as St Clair has argued, that access was shaped—and drastically limited—by publishers’ control over intellectual property. In the mid- and late 19th century, cheap editions of the ‘old canon’ of authors were more affordable than contemporary books.
The private press movement: the Kelmscott Press edition of Froissart (1897) in Lord Berners’s translation. Printed after W. Morris’s death in two limited editions of eight and two leaves, the latter on vellum. The red printing, elaborate borders, and initials provide a luxurious display. © Sothebys
As is invariably the case, throughout the period the material book and the cultural experience of reading it were intertwined. In 1800 literacy was restricted, and only a limited range of engaging reading material was available. Yet as the century progressed, new formats and cheaper prices created new markets and found new readers. By the 1860s publishing had become a major enterprise: books and periodicals were taken for granted as a cultural necessity. In 1914 the stereotype plates that had by that time provided millions with access to novels and poetry at modest prices were melted down to make munitions, and the people who had been brought up on them took their universal literacy into the trenches.
Altick
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