Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880-1914

Mary Hammond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351906463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría de la crítica literaria

Between 1880 and 1914, England saw the emergence of an unprecedented range of new literary forms from Modernism to the popular thriller. Not coincidentally, this period also marked the first overt references to an art/market divide through which books took on new significance as markers of taste and class. Though this division has received considerable attention relative to the narrative structures of the period's texts, little attention has been paid to the institutions and ideologies that largely determined a text's accessibility and circulated format and thus its mode of address to specific readerships. Hammond addresses this gap in scholarship, asking the following key questions: How did publishing and distribution practices influence reader choice? Who decided whether or not a book was a 'classic'? In a patriarchal, class-bound literary field, how were the symbolic positions of 'author' and 'reader' affected by the increasing numbers of women who not only bought and borrowed, but also wrote novels? Using hitherto unexamined archive material and focussing in detail on the working practices of publishers and distributors such as Oxford University Press and W.H. Smith and Sons, Hammond combines the methodologies of sociology, literary studies and book history to make an original and important contribution to our understanding of the cultural dynamics and rhetorics of the fin-de-siècle literary field in England.

Chapter 1
‘The Great Fiction Bore’: Free Libraries and Their Users

Gissing and the Common Reader

On Wednesday afternoon, about three o’clock, Nancy walked alone to the library. There, looking at books and photographs in the window, stood Lionel Tarrant. He greeted her as usual, seemed not to remark the hot colour in her cheeks, and stepped with her into the shop. She had meant to choose a novel, but, with Tarrant looking on, felt constrained to exhibit her capacity for severe reading. The choice of grave works was not large, and she found it difficult to command her thoughts even for the perusal of titles; however, she ultimately discovered a book that promised anything but frivolity, Helmholtz’s ‘Lectures on Scientific Subjects’, and at this she clutched.

Two loudly dressed women were at the same time searching the shelves. ‘I wonder whether this is a pretty book?’ said one to the other, taking down a trio of volumes.

‘Oh, it looks as if it might be pretty’, returned her friend, examining the cover. They faced to the person behind the counter.

‘Is this a pretty book?’ one of them enquired loftily.

‘Oh yes, Madam, that’s a very pretty book – very pretty.’

Nancy exchanged glances with her companion and smiled. When they were outside again Tarrant asked:

‘Have you found a pretty book?’

She showed him the title of her choice.

‘Merciful heavens! You mean to read that? The girls of to-day! What mere man is worthy of them? But – I must rise to the occasion. We’ll have a chapter as we rest.’¹

George Gissing’s 1894 novel In the Year of Jubilee, from which the above extract comes, engages overtly and deliberately with a major late-nineteenth-century debate about books, readers and reading. Sparked by rapid social change and above all by an increase in literacy, this debate was intricately bound up with anxieties around gender, class, citizenship and the public and private spheres. It also profoundly affected the outcome of the utilitarian impulse that had motivated William Ewart to force the Public Libraries Act through Parliament in 1850. Initially, the library was a public space which, in Ewart’s own words, ‘might be legally founded by the people, supported by the people, and enjoyed by the people’,² in order to foster self-improvement for the good of the individual – and, by common extrapolation, the nation. But by the time its adoption was widespread the public library had become, more often than not, an architecturally repressive and logistically prohibitive symbol of civic pride patronised overwhelmingly by the lower-middle classes. In fact, it was a space that ended up alienating large sections of the population whom it had been intended to serve.

What I want to do in this chapter, though, is to challenge the familiar notion that there is little of interest to say about English public libraries beyond the fact that their mostly middle-class patrons borrowed mostly fiction, although it is clear from the records that they did. What Gissing’s novel points to – and, I suggest, my research in a range of English public libraries bears out – is that a more subtle relationship between books, readers and public spaces existed behind the statistics.³ I want here to demonstrate the emergence of a public space in England that conflated two conflicting contemporary images. The first is the image of the library as a serious male domain predicated on the principle of social harmony and equality through rational debate. This image had been a crucial factor in the passing of the Libraries Act two years after revolution had shaken Europe, and had largely motivated the spirit of self-help that swept into vogue afterwards. But by the last half of the century a widespread demand for novels necessitated negotiation with a second, equally long-standing but largely incompatible image: that of novel reading as a predominantly feminine and socially ‘low’ activity. This conflation of class and gender stereotypes within the dangerous social melting pot of the public library, set against the background of a prosperous nation anxious about its infrastructure, meant that the activity of reading took on a new dimension. The complex social dynamic that existed in the nineteenth century, I want to suggest, helped to create a new characterisation of reading as a socially specific form of consumption, an answer to the breakdown (perceived and actual) of class, gender and even national boundaries.

My opening quotation is not just an isolated incidence of the connection between books, taste and class identities. Gissing is not alone in the social construction that he places on reading: the importance of literature as social signifier is everywhere discussed in this period. In 1871 Samuel Smiles declared that ‘A man may usually be known by the books he reads, as well as by the company he keeps’.⁴ In the 1880 polemic Woman’s Work and Worth, W.H. Davenport Adams suggested that if it came to a toss-up between the two types of signifier, books were the most reliable; while ‘it is said that a man or a woman may be known by the company he or she keeps; a truer index to character is the books they read’⁵. H.G. Wells’s vulgar, self-satisfied middle-class character Coote is defined in Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905) by a bookshelf the contents of which, ‘no worse an array ... than any you find in any public library’, represents ‘a compendium of the contemporary British mind’.⁶ E.M. Forster was still using the connection as a literary device in 1910. For Margaret Schlegel, the upper-middle-class heroine of Howards End, class is innate; ‘wide’ and ‘widening’ is the ‘gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man’, and the lower middle classes are simply ‘good chaps who are wrecked trying to cross it’. But it is only through the ‘vague aspirations, the mental dishonesty, the familiarity with the outsides of books’ displayed by bank clerk Leonard Bast that Margaret feels she recognises him as one of these good men, ‘one of the thousands who have lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit’.⁷ Bast’s last conscious thought as he falls dead under a bookcase at the novel’s end is that ‘Books fell over him in a shower. Nothing had sense’ (p. 315). The pouring over himself of what to him have always been – and because of his class can always only be – empty signifiers, solves the novel’s ambivalence about middle classness by turning it into a simple split between knowing and not-knowing the value of literature. This depends absolutely on a notion of the ‘naturalness’ of what we might usefully call the cultural capital invested in books. For Forster, some books are simply ‘better’, ‘higher’, more ‘valuable’ than others, and some people – in his terms the most’ spiritual’ – are simply more naturally able than others to appreciate and benefit from them.

Gissing’s earlier novel posits a slightly more subtle equation between cultural capital and class identity. Its insistence on the performance of class in the public space points to the physical implications of Bourdieu’s notion that class is that which is ‘defined as much by its being-perceived as by its being, by its consumption – which need not be conspicuous in order to be symbolic – as by its position in the relation of production’.⁸ In Gissing’s novel books become the bearers par excellence of cultural capital in Bourdieu’s sense of the term, the public spaces in which the exchanges of capital take place loaded with social significance. For Gissing, choosing the right book in the right way can make or mar a social career.

We are introduced to Nancy as she gazes out of the window of her house, a nondescript dwelling caught, like everything else about her, between gentility and tastelessness:

It is a neighbourhood in decay, a bit of London which does not keep pace with the times. And Nancy hated it. She would have preferred to live even in a poor and grimy street which neighboured the main track of business and pleasure (p. 11).

Thus positioned as outside yet acutely aware of the social scene, Nancy is ‘haunted by an uneasy sense of doubtfulness as to her social position’ (p. 13). Gissing, typically, lays this liminality directly at the door of the social changes he abhorred: Nancy’s father, a self-made small merchant, admits that in giving his daughter an education that he has not the wherewithal to match in lifestyle, he has ‘made her neither one thing nor the other’ (p. 73). This is uncomfortable enough for Nancy when she is at home alone. But it is through the use of public spaces that expose inherent class inferiority that the novel most frequently separates its heroine from the potentially leveling effects of her education. In the pivotal Jubilee Day scene, for example, ‘in spite of her professed disregard for the gathering tumult of popular enthusiasm’ (p. 11), the two halves of Nancy’s social make-up – the vulgarly abandoned shopgirl and the newly-educated, cultured observer – emerge disturbingly as two sides of the same coin:

She had escaped to enjoy herself, and the sense of freedom soon overcame her anxieties. No-one observed her solitary state; she was one of millions walking about the streets because it was Jubilee Day, and every movement packed her more tightly among the tramping populace ... Nancy forgot her identity, lost sight of herself as an individual. She did not think and her emotions differed little from those of any shop-girl let loose. The ‘culture’ to which she laid claim evanesced in this atmosphere of exhalations. Could she have seen her face, its look of vulgar abandonment would have horrified her. (pp. 61–2)

For Gissing, a lower-middle-class woman in the public space is separated from the signifiers of status on which she depends. That means she occupies a void between social stations, in constant danger of slipping, and always in a downward direction. This isolated, fluid, permanently anxious social position is frequently marked by her literary taste, whether genuine (and bad) or aspirational (and disingenuous). In this novel it is signified by Nancy’s symbolic and in this case very conspicuous literary consumption. On the table in the living room in the introductory scene lies ‘a new volume from the circulating library – something about Evolution – but she had no mind to read it; it would have made her too conscious of the insincerity with which she approached such profound subjects (pp. 11–12). Here in a nutshell is her dilemma. As part of the new middle classes, while she consciously rejects the vulgar popular, she cannot wholly shake its unconscious influence. In historical terms the prominent display of her circulating-library volume on evolution is insincerity essential to the maintenance of her position: the minimum guinea per annum membership of a circulating library itself proclaims her social arrival, and the volume’s subject matter implies an innate proclivity for serious scientific reading. But this prominent display also denotes class insecurity, a distrust of what the borrowing of fiction might say about her (just as, on a semantic level, it gives away the social evolution in which she is herself perpetually involved).

The table in her sitting room, the Jubilee day adventure and the library are all, then, ...