A Companion to the History of the Book (55 page)

Additionally, there was a growing market catering to the characteristically Victorian drive for self-improvement. “How-to” books flourished from Mrs. Beeton’s
Household Management
(published in parts 1859–61 by her husband, who had made a considerable profit reprinting Mrs. Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin),
through books of etiquette to conjuring tricks, public speaking, and the right way to play games (such as Longman’s “Badminton” series from 1885). In the m id-nineteenth century, this craving for guidance was also satisfied by periodical publication whether it was the back-page correspondence columns of Id weeklies, such as the
Family Herald
(from 1842) or the
London Journal
(from 1845), or later by weeklies devoted almost exclusively to the genre, such as
Answers to Correspondents
(published by Harmsworth from 1888).

The market for children’s books was also a highly dynamic one. This market shaded into religious publishing, textbooks, and school prize books at one end, but acquired an almost wholly independent nature at the other. As the century progressed, there were more and more works of fiction written specifically for children. As the illustration revolution increased in speed, the opportunities to produce richly illustrated books were not missed: by the 1890s, annuals and comic books were being produced in huge quantities, particularly for the Christmas season.

Less seasonal but equally dynamic was the substantial increase in the publication of information. Not merely encyclopedias of all sorts, but parliamentary reports and papers, exhibition catalogues (most notably the illustrated catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851 printed by Clowes), and railway timetables. The demand for guide books increased hugely. An early provider was Murray with their “Handbook” series which started in 1836 with Holland. The development of lithography made it much easier and cheaper to print maps and music, so the rapid expansion in production of Ordinance Survey maps, school atlases, and sheet music (for choral societies and home entertainment) was to be expected. By the end of our period, two huge publishing projects were underway:
The Dictionary of National Biography,
initiated by the publisher George Smith in 1882 and only later taken over by OUP (in 1917), and
The Oxford English Dictionary,
which was itself issued in parts (called “fascicles”) between 1884 and 1928. Slightly less grand but equally typical of this information revolution were such publications as
Bradshaw’s Railway Companion
(from 1839/40),
Who’s Who
(from 1849),
Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack
(from 1864), and the multitude of street and trade directories which helped contemporaries navigate the growing towns and cities of the period.

The World We Have Lost

The cost of print in the early nineteenth century forced even middle-class families into strategies that now seem quite odd. If you could not own but only borrow a novel or a book of poetry then one way of retaining the text was to copy parts of it out into a commonplace book. These were frequently shown to friends, and texts were swapped between them (and sometimes parodied). Later, as print of all sorts became cheaper, commonplace books gave way to albums and later to autograph books. All these are examples of the very important production of the stationery trade which included diaries, blank forms, and all the material required by commerce, such as letter and ledger books, in an age that saw the typewriter, carbon copy, and filing cabinet only introduced at its end.

Both private and commercial reading and writing were constrained by the nature of available light at a time when the window tax applied (only abolished in 1851) and artificial light was mostly in the form of tallow candles that required attention every few minutes, or expensive oil lamps. By the mid-nineteenth century, gas lighting had improved things markedly for the middle classes, but it was only with the introduction of electric lighting at the end of our period that modern conditions of domestic lighting prevailed.

Much of the material that the average nineteenth-century reader read can now only be found in specialist collections or has been lost altogether. Most losses are accidental but we should not forget that certain types of text, such as pornography, were actively suppressed. Some early Victorians commented on the wide availability of pornography. This was available at all prices from the expensive with scholarly pretensions down to the collections of obscene songs selling for a few pence. John Camden Hotten, a versatile and adventurous general publisher of the 1860s, had a particular line in flagellation literature, though he also seems to have supplied pictures – using the new technologies including photography. Most of Hotten’s pornography was privately printed in small runs (often no more than 300 copies) and sold expensively to interested parties (Eliot 2000). Henry Vizetelly, with probably more principled motives than Hotten, made the mistake of publishing Zola’s naturalistic novels unexpurgated, in translation and at a low price between 1884 and 1888. To the guardians of morality, a low price meant availability to women, children, and the lower orders, all of whom were much more corruptible than middle-class men. Vizetelly was prosecuted twice in 1888–9, on the second occasion being sent to prison for three months, an experience that broke him (Landon 2003).

By the 1890s, books were rather a small part, economically speaking, of the publishing and printing industry. In 1907, books (including blank books) accounted for only 17.1 percent of total value. The two most important sectors were jobbing printing (41.7 percent) and periodical publishing (28.2 percent; Eliot 1994: 105). In that sense, 1800–90 was a dress rehearsal for the twentieth century.

References and Further Reading

Altick, Richard D. (1957)
The English Common Reader.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Barnes, James J. (1964)
Free Trade in Books.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Cross, Nigel (1985)
The Common Writer.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dicks, Guy (2004)
The John Dicks Press.
New York: Guy Dicks.

Dooley, Allan C. (1992)
Author and Printer in Victorian England.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Eliot, Simon (1994)
Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing
1800–1919. London: Bibliographical Society.

— (2000) “’Hotten, Rotten, Forgotten’?: An Apologia for a General Publisher.”
Book History,
3: 61–93.

— (2002) “’To You in your Vast Business’: Some Features of the Quantitative History of Macmil-lan.” In Elizabeth James (ed.),
Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition,
pp. 11–51. London: Macmillan.

— (2006) “What Price Poetry? Selling Wordsworth, Tennyson and Longfellow in Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-century Britain.”
Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America,
100 (3).

Feather, John (1994)
Publishing, Piracy and Politics.
London: Mansell.

Griest, Guinevere L. (1970)
Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hepburn, James (1968)
The Author’s Empty Purse.
London: Oxford University Press.

James, Louis (1974)
Fiction for the Working Man.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Kelly, Thomas (1977)
History of Public Libraries in Great Britain 1845–1975.
London: Library Association.

Landon, Richard (2003) “A Man under Fire: Henry Vizetelly and the Question of Obscenity in Victorian England.” In
Vizetelly
Compan(ies),
pp. 107–22. Toronto: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.

Mitchell, B. R. (1988)
British Historical Statistics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Neuburg, Victor E. (1977)
Popular Literature: A History and Guide.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Patten, Robert L. (1978)
Charles Dickens and his Publishers.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rose, Jonathan (2001)
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.
New Haven: Yale University Press.

St. Clair, William (2004)
The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sutcliffe, Peter (1978)
The Oxford University Press: An Informal History.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Sutherland, J. A. (1976)
Victorian Novelists and Publishers.
London: Athlone.

Vincent, David (1989)
Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1150–1914.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wilson, Charles (1985)
First with the News: The History of W. H. Smith 1192–1912.
London: Jonathan Cape.

22

A Continent of Texts: Europe 1800–1890

Jean-Yves Mollier and Marie-Françoise Cachin

If one compares the production of books in Europe at the end of the twentieth century with that of a hundred years earlier, one gets the erroneous impression that things began to accelerate after 1918. If we look the other way around, and compare the 1850s–1890s with the 1750s–1790s, the difference is obvious. The explosion of book production and of all kinds of print production actually took place in the nineteenth century, and more precisely after 1850, after what has long been called the “industrial revolution.” It did not occur in all the countries of continental Europe at the same time or at the same speed, and to understand each country’s specific rhythm, it is necessary to take into account the growth of literacy. Thus, northern and western Europe stand in contrast to the eastern and southern parts of the continent where illiteracy was still high until the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet popular literature had penetrated deeply even in the countries around the Mediterranean – Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece – before 1900. Poland, Romania, and even Russia also experienced some of the effects of that enormous transformation taking place all over the continent.

At that time, people were aware of a rapid change in their habits or, to put it another way, of witnessing a kind of “cultural revolution,” a silent but violent one, in all that concerned the written word (Mollier 1993). As early as 1740–60, at a time when Richardson’s
Pamela,
Goethe’s
Werther,
or Rousseau’s
ha Nouvelle Héloïse
had brought torrents of tears to readers’ eyes, strong criticism had been leveled in Germany at
die hesewut,
the reading craze that seemed to have taken hold of part of the population (Wittmann 1997). Robert Darnton, commenting upon the extraordinary success of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel, the greatest bestseller of the ancien régime, finds it impossible to overestimate the violence of this passion for reading (Darnton 1985: 134). In countries dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, as well as in those in which Protestantism ruled, reading was considered something that distracted Christians from their duties. Yet an important change had occurred during the period variously known as the
Lumières, Aufklãrung,
Enlightenment, or
llluminismo:
alongside the philosophical movement, a pre-Romantic literary current seems to have encouraged people to buy or borrow books and to rid themselves of all kinds of censorship that might have inhibited the spread of new ideas.

Less than a century later, around 1830, the French writer Charles Nodier worried about the development of book publishing and estimated that the books produced in France in a year could encircle the world. In 1839, Augustin Sainte-Beuve, one of the most highly esteemed critics of his time, stigmatized the birth of “industrial literature” (Sainte-Beuve 1839). With the appearance of serialized novels, writing had acquired a new nature and literature a new function. Published in periodicals and magazines before being gathered into volumes, fiction, it was said, penetrated all areas of life, from the cottage to the castle kitchen. As early as 1848 in London, thanks to W. H. Smith, and 1853 in Paris, thanks to Louis Hachette, railway stations would overflow with new books, a flood that nothing could stop. France would endeavor to contain it with the “Riancey amendment” (a form of tax on fiction) voted in July 1850, and Austria, some Italian states, and Portugal would reinforce censorship.

All this was to no avail, and books, like newspapers and print in general, increased inexorably. In addition to traditional Bibles, school textbooks were published, as well as innumerable series of practical books and adventure stories, soon followed by the portable dictionaries and encyclopedias of the 1860s–1870s. Soaked through in printing ink, smothered under tons of paper, the men and women of the times reveled in the works of Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Anthony Trollope, Eugène Sue, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to mention only a few of the novelists whose audience was worldwide – one sign among many of the early advent of mass culture in some of these countries before 1900 (Mollier 2004).

A Second Revolution of the Book?

Some specialists have proposed a division of the time separating us from Gutenberg into three distinct periods. After the printing of the 42-line Bible in Mainz in the 1450s, and the preservation for nearly four centuries of the old regime of typography that this created, the use of a steam-powered press to print
The Times
in 1814 could be considered as the beginning of a “second revolution” in the modes of producing books. The third phase would start at the end of the twentieth century with the advent of electronic texts whose ultimate effects no one today can predict (Mercier 2002).

Besides the fact that this division into three periods appears too linear and does not take into account the various economic crises (in 1826, 1831, 1835, 1848 for Britain and France), the phrase
L’Apparition du livre
(The Coming of the Book), used by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (1958) to indicate the change introduced by Gutenberg, is problematic. As has been shown in earlier chapters of this volume, the book in its most characteristic material aspects – the codex – was conceived in the Western world between the end of the first century ad and the fifth. Therefore, one cannot use the word
“apparition”
for the book
stricto sensu
as regards the fifteenth century. The phrase “printing revolution” used by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein in her book
The Printing Revolution
in Early Modern Europe
(Eisenstein 1979, 1983) has also been strongly questioned in recent years (Chartier 1995).

This division also does not take into account the typographical art of China, Korea, and Japan, which developed long before that of Europe, and consequently one should rather speak of three “revolutions of reading” or of “modes of reading” to indicate the three media represented by the
volumen
(roll), the
codex,
and the screen, which, however, leaves out the use of bone, ivory, stone, and clay in high antiquity.

Even if we cannot agree on the terminology, the expression “second revolution of the book” can be accepted as makeshift, enabling us to throw light on the unique nature of the nineteenth century. Coming together with the rapid development of schooling, urbanization, industrialization, and a revolution in the means of communication, the spread of the book took place amidst considerable changes in a number of countries. London, the world capital of print at the end of the eighteenth century, was the center of continuous exchanges with its empire after 1840. Leipzig and Frankfurt yielded ground to London, but Germany – the cradle of the printed book – could still boast a remarkable number of publishing cities, among which were Stuttgart, Munich, and Berlin. In traditionally centralized France, Paris was to take advantage of the weakness of the provinces and concentrate within its walls most of the publishing business after 1830.

Austria-Hungary, Belgium, and Switzerland, all with an early high level of literacy, Italy and (to a lesser degree) Spain and Portugal, all reveal similar phenomena. Printing presses developed, followed by their mechanization and industrialization with the introduction of rotary presses around 1865, and of Linotype and Monotype systems from the 1890s. By that date, large printing companies, such as Thomas Nelson’s in Edinburgh, Paul Dupont ‘s in Paris, or the Brockhaus family’s in Leipzig, employed at least one thousand workers. Printers and specialists in mechanical binding – Mame in Tours, Nelson in Scotland, or Reclam in Leipzig – were industrial manufacturers similar in status to the captains of the textile and steel industries. In fact, the firm of Reclam was the first fully to rationalize the various production processes and resort to a division of labor, the Taylorization of tasks, and economy of scale by making up standardized metal dispensers for books sold at a very low price – 20 pfennigs – installed in railway stations, hospitals, spas, or on transatlantic liners in 1912 (Barbier 1995: 97). With a thousand such dispensers in use in 1914, distributing one million and a half volumes per year, Germany proved its capacity for coping with the “craze for reading” characteristic of readers of Goethe’s works and spreading it to all those who earlier could not have shared in it because they lacked either education or access to printed materials.

As firms manufacturing paper, ink, glue, thread, or books grew larger, so too did the number of points of sale increase throughout the century. Not only were there bookshops in every European city of any importance, but also another network appeared: the railway station bookstalls, based on the model started by W. H. Smith in London in 1848 (Wilson 1985). Partly replacing peddlers, this network was itself in competition with the opening of book departments in the department stores of most big cities from the 1860s onward. Before the end of the century, Europeans could buy their favorite authors through the three networks that today remain the main means of distribution: department stores, railway station bookstalls, and local bookshops. Distribution of successful writers’ novels through the mail and by train was quite different in kind and size from the transmission of small volumes of poetry or plays in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this respect, the expression “second revolution of the book (or the press)” for the period after 1840–5 is quite appropriate.

Other quantitative criteria can be used to prove this point. Let us begin with those so-called “backward” countries, such as Spain and Italy. In the former, about 500 titles were published every year in the 1870s, but the
Bibliografía española
was recording 1,000 titles ten years later and 2,000 in 1905. At the same time, newspaper titles increased from 521 in 1868 to 2,000 in 1913. In Italy, the number of titles rose from 2,000 in 1820 to 8,000 in 1890. In Paris, the increase was even more spectacular: the
Bibliographie de la France
recorded about 6,300 titles in 1840, over 10,000 in 1855, 20,000 in 1880, 28,000 in 1900, and 32,000 in 1913 (Botrel 1988: 229; Botrel et al. 2003). There was the same progression in Germany with 6,200 titles in 1840, 10,000 in 1870, 20,000 in 1894, and over 35,000 in 1913. If in Britain taxes on newspapers inhibited the progress of the press before 1836 and even until 1855, after that date circulation soared for Sunday papers, such as
Lloyd’s Penny Sunday Times,
and daily papers, such as
The Daily News
(Lee 1976). In Britain, the existence for several decades of prestigious publishing houses, such as Longman, Murray, Routledge, and Macmillan, testified to the healthy condition of the trade.

During the period, publishers became progressively more prepared to offer large amounts of money to writers whose works brought a high return of equity to those publishing houses that had invested in the means of reaching the mass reading public. With the arrival of what can be called “publishing capitalism” (Mollier 1988), in Britain as well as in France and Germany, publishers looked for male or female writers capable of reaching the largest possible number of readers: in Britain, Dickens, Trollope, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon; and in Paris, Dumas père, Eugène Sue, Balzac, Paul Féval, Ponson du Terrail, and, later, Zola.

Industrial Literature

In a satirical novel serialized in Paris in 1845, Louis Reybaud’s
Cesar Falempin
published by Michel Levy frères, one of the characters, the manufacturer Granpré, is described as the inventor of the “first steam serial.” In his factory, an army of ghostwriters each work on a particular part of a given chapter or on a precise task. “Each deals with what he knows best, explains the orchestra director and, as Adam Smith says, the serial reaches its highest level of development.” It was quite easy to recognize the most prolific European writer of the time in this caricature, the one who, in the very same year, had been the target of a pamphlet entitled
Fabrique de romans: Maison Alexandre Dumas et Cie
(Manufacture of Novels: Alexandre Dumas & Co.). Six years after the publication of Sainte-Beuve’s article aimed at Honoré de Balzac, Dumas, and all those who had agreed to give their literary works for serialization in the press, a recurring debate denounced the transformation of literature and its accelerating degradation. Considering that the nature of writing changed when the novelist was no longer trying to write a masterpiece in the silence of his study or to give birth painfully to a world he had been carrying within him for a long time, critics reproached genuine men of letters – Balzac, Dumas, and Sue were undoubtedly such men – with transforming themselves into vulgar serial writers paid per line and trying to get the maximum profit from the increasing number of periodicals that were publishing fiction. A similar phenomenon also took place in England. Shortly afterwards, following the
roman à quatre sous
published in sixteen-page issues, France would imitate Britain by inventing the
journaux-romans,
that is, periodicals specializing in mass-market literature.

In London, the novelist Wilkie Collins forged a highly significant phrase to describe the anonymous reader of this kind of prose: “the future of English fiction may rest with this Unknown Public, which is now waiting to be taught the difference between a good book and a bad” (Lyons 2003: 379). He had in mind the three million readers of cheap illustrated weeklies recruited from among the lower classes of society. In that context, the creation of public libraries in 1850 was partly meant to moralize the reading material of the masses, an obsession then pervading all European countries, whether Catholic or Protestant. In Paris, as we have observed, a conservative member of parliament had a bill voted in 1850 to impose a tax on novels, which aimed to discourage the craze for penny novels spreading like an epidemic throughout the country, but which did not succeed in preventing the increase of serial fiction writers. When the first popular penny paper,
he Petit Journal,
was launched in 1863, Millaud, its owner, called on the novelist Ponson du Terrail, the father of the
Rocambole
series, in order to ensure the success of the enterprise. By asking another serial fiction writer, Timothée Trimm – alias Léo Lespès – to edit the paper, he demonstrated how extraordinarily easy it was for fiction to penetrate the press so that it was difficult to know where the frontier between fact and fiction stood. As
le fait divers
(news in brief) began to change the paper’s content profoundly, media culture was born and imposed its law on all those who lived by it (Thérenty and Vailant 2003).