Don’t Judge a Book By Its Cover

This month’s spotlight on the holdings of the QE II Archives & Special Collections includes a 19th century book catalogue that invites us to consider context, not just content.  

Today, a book’s popularity is often gauged by how many copies of it are sold and how long it spends on bestseller lists. It wasn’t always this way. In fact, the term “popular” is a questionable descriptor for any literature produced before the machine age. After all, there is no “book audience” without literacy, the availability of books, and easy access to them. The notion of popular literature — published work with broad public appeal— has not only evolved greatly over time, so has the criteria for identifying it. Any consideration of popular literature must therefore take into account the technological, social, and economic factors that made it possible.

All publications before the 19th century were essentially niche in nature. In the late medieval period, for example, bespoke private devotional books were in high demand–but only among those who could read them. In the 14th century, Gutenberg’s revolutionary printing press resulted in more widespread access to religious and classical works, as well as prose romances. Broadside ballads, pamphlets, proclamations, and other ephemeral publications were the most widely-read materials in the early age of print. Most of these did not survive their times. Subsequent centuries saw the rise of newspapers and periodicals, and finally, novels. 

Readers of the English language had to wait until the 19th century for automated printing technologies to couple with vastly improved literacy rates before a truly popular literature could be born. It was only under these conditions that it was finally possible to ask the question: “What did people want to read?”

The Development of a Reading Audience

The 19th century was a time of intense social upheaval in England. In the first half of the century, the country’s population increased from roughly 9 million to 18 million, nearly doubling again to over 32 million during the last half of the century (Altick 81). Industrialization prompted mass migration into cities where most working people had shorter workdays and workweeks, better elementary school education and access to Sunday schools and mechanics institutes, as well as practical improvements like better indoor lighting and the availability of reading glasses (Altick 87–93).

With these trends, overall literacy in England, which stood at about 50 per cent in 1801, increased to almost 100 per cent by the end of the 1800s (Altick 95). In response, writers and publishers steadily increased the amount and variety of affordable reading materials as they looked for ways to both shape and take advantage of a vastly increased readership.

Soon these dynamics— an emerging readership and the development of new markets for publishing— began to play out in the context of two powerful social movements: evangelical religion and utilitarianism, each of them aiming for “the betterment of mankind.” Evangelical leaders hoped to impose Christian morality on the population, while proponents of utilitarianism sought to impose a secular program that would propagate scientific and practical knowledge. Both the religious and secular camps invested heavily in the printed word.

At the same time, purely commercial publishers grasped that many people just wanted to read for pleasure and not always for what was thought to be “good for them.”  These publishers began to seize on the mass market potential of fiction. 

No matter their ideological or commercial aims, all publishers took full advantage of the new printing technologies ushered in by the Industrial Revolution: machine-made paper, steam-press printing, stereotyping, typesetting machines, case binding, chromolithography (which brought colour to mass market publication), and later, toward the end of the century, electrotype plates and photography. 

Improving Access and Affordability

Publishing in the early 19th century catered almost exclusively to upper- and middle-class readers. A typical press run was small, usually a few hundred copies and books were expensive, even for middle-class buyers. The expense was especially evident when it came to buying novels, which were typically released in three volumes, or as “triple-deckers,” with each volume priced at 10 shillings and 6 pence (Altick 297). Circulating libraries provided the most popular alternative to purchasing expensive volumes.  Readers could pay a yearly subscription and be guaranteed access to a steady stream of triple-decker novels and other reading materials. The most famous of the circulating libraries was Mudie’s, established in the 1840s in London, which charged 1 guinea per year (Altick 296–297). 

Disadvantaged by the high price of books and lending library fees, members of the literate working class still had access to reading materials in a variety of formats, including blue books, usually abridgments of gothic novels sown together between soft blue covers which sold for six pence (32 pages) or 1 shilling (72 pages) (Dalziel 6). Frederick Frank described the gothic blue book as “a primitive paperback or ur-pulp publication, cheaply manufactured, sometimes garishly illustrated, and meant to be thrown away after being ‘read to pieces’”(60).

Cash-strapped readers might also access more affordably-priced political and religious tracts, chapbooks, illegal and radical newspapers, and almanacs. More affordable still were the single sheet and broadside publications that offered sensational coverage on a variety of subjects, including royalty, sex, and the particularly popular topic of crime (Dalziel 7). Broadsides sometimes sold into the hundreds of thousands and occasionally into the millions (Neuburg 143). Hawked on the streets, broadsides were in many ways the forerunners of the modern tabloid newspaper. 

With the growth in literacy, the market for other affordable reading materials expanded. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge promoted cheap literature that was neither religious, trivial, radical, nor overly aesthetical in its aims (Dalziel 8). The year 1832 saw the first publication of Charles Knight’s Penny Magazine (Fig. 30) and Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal. Knight’s Penny Magazine included information about practical matters the publisher hoped readers would find interesting while Chambers offered similar educational material but also included sketches and fictional stories. Both the magazine and the journal quickly established enormous circulations, with the Penny Magazine hitting a circulation of over 200,000 within its first year (Dalziel 8). At the same time, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge published the Saturday Magazine (Fig. 31) to compete with Knight’s publication (Dalziel 8). 

Ultimately, both the Saturday Magazine and the Penny Magazine failed to hold the working-class reader’s attention— both ceased publication in the mid-1840s. Meanwhile, Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal continued to publish until the mid-20th century. The lesson was clear: a growing readership wanted to read fiction.  

A Growing Market for Fiction

In 1836, Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers was published in a serialised form. Selling as many as 40,000 copies per part issue, its popularity demonstrated the enormous untapped market for fiction (Altick 279). Not only could novels be sold in serialized penny parts or in magazines, but the individual serials could then be gathered together in different editions to be sold as books (Howsam 183). 

Commercial publishers took notice, and none more keenly than those whose premises congregated around Salisbury Square in London. Foremost among these leaders in marketing and sales was Edward Lloyd (1815–1890), the mastermind behind the “penny periodical” and the “penny dreadful.” These books told tales of terror, violence, sexual aberration, and crime, rooted firmly in the gothic novel.  

Lloyd championed such writers as T.P. Prest, J.F. Smith, and George M. Reynolds, all best-selling authors in their day. Thomas Peckett Prest (1809/10–1859) was born in London. In the 1830s, he began to write and perform songs for saloons and singing clubs. Looking to capitalize on the popularity of Dickens, he took to writing imitations, which included a penny weekly serial The Posthumorous Notes of the Pickwick Club, or, The Penny Pickwick, by “Bos” (1837–1838). The work was extremely popular and is said to have sold more copies than the real Pickwick Papers. Prest followed with other adaptations, including Oliver Twiss (1838), Nickelas Nicklebery (1838), and Pickwick in America! (1839). Early number editions of Ela, the Outcast, Prest’s most popular work, sold as many as 30,000 copies per week. Prest followed it up by writing over 60 “bloods” for Lloyd in the 1840s.

John Frederick Smith (1806–1890) became a bestselling author when he began to write for the London Journal. Smith is credited with increasing the weekly magazine’s circulation to 100,000 copies on the strength of his short story “Marianne, a Tale of the Temple” and then with installments of his novel Stanfield Hall. His next novel, Minnigrey, serialized between 1851 and 1852, is said to have increased sales of the London Journal to 500,000 copies.  One commentator had this to say about Mr. Smith and his imitators:

[their work] contains plenty of vice and not a little crime, but the criminal always comes to grief in the end, and virtue is duly rewarded with wealth and titles and honour. The villains are generally of high birth and repulsive appearance, the lowly personages always of ravishing beauty and unsullied virtue. Innocence and loveliness in a gingham gown are perpetually pursued by vice and debauchery in varnished boots and spotless gloves.  (Hitchman 18). 

No writer of the period was more popular than the prolific George M. Reynolds (1814–1879). Between 1841 and 1856, Reynolds wrote 34 novels that appeared in penny weekly numbers or six penny monthly parts, including The Mysteries of London and the Mysteries of the Court of London. He also wrote a penny weekly journal entitled Reynolds’s Miscellany (Neuburg 170–175). Several sources quote Reynolds as being the best-selling author of the 19th century.

The success of the so-called Salisbury Square publishers and other publishers of sensational literature raised a moral objection among both religious and secular readers, who called for  better literature for the masses (Dalziel 46). Charles Dickens responded to this demand with his weekly publication, Household Words. Other new publications of the period included The London Journal (Fig. 29), Family Herald, Cassells’ Illustrated Family Paper, and Eliza Cook’s Journal. Publishers produced reprints of less sensational novels: William Milner founded the Cottage Library Series and the New Novelist’s Library, both of which offered an alternative to the “penny dreadful” (Neuburg 178). 

Christian publishing also increased. About half the cheap periodicals that appeared between the mid-1840s and mid-1850s were either produced by religious organizations or demonstrated positive religious opinions. Among these were the Christian Ladies Magazine, the Family Treasury of Sunday Reading, and The Leisure Hour, all of which included fiction (Dalziel 11). 

With these challenges to sensational literature, by the 1850s George M. Reynolds was writing less salacious material. Similarly, Edward Lloyd went on to have a more conservative career as a newspaper publisher, and the publisher John Dicks began to produce more high-quality lines, including Dicks’ English Novels (Fig. 33) and Dicks’ English Library of Standard Works.

The Establishment of a Mass Market 

The moral backlash notwithstanding, publishing in the 1840s and 1850s brought into strong focus a new readership – readers of fiction. Initially, this market had been satisfied with serialized fiction in periodicals and newspapers and by publication in penny parts, but as the fiction reader’s tastes developed, publishers were met with an increasing demand for new novel-length works at affordable prices (Dalziel 4).

The railway boom helped fuel this appetite in England, transforming the distribution networks for newspapers, periodicals, and books with publishers and retailers intent on exploiting the new market of railway riders. In November 1848, WH Smith and Son opened their first bookstall at Euston station, and by 1850 they had similar stalls along the various British rail lines. They even opened a circulating library that would allow a reader to borrow a book at one railway branch and return it at another (King 122).

Among publishers quick to grasp the opportunities of the railway boom was George Routledge (1812–1888), who essentially built his publishing empire on cheap reprints. The Railway Library was launched in 1848. To avoid payment of copyright, it consisted mostly of American editions. Routledge also understood the value of illustrations. So-called “yellowbacks” with illustrated covers were soon for sale in bookshops and railway stalls.

Routledge promoted collaboration between the artist Walter Crane and the colour printer Edmund Evans, prompting a revolution in children’s literature, particularly picture books or “toy” books. Colour was a main selling point. The subject matter was usually folk tales and rhymes. According to Routledge, toy books required large print orders to keep their price low; he claimed that he could only make a profit on a title if it sold more than 50,000 copies.

Collections of toy books were often subsequently sold as one volume. A good example of a 19th-century picture book or “toy Book” is Routledge’s The Three Bears from 1872.

The availability of cheap print matter and the establishment of public libraries in the last half of the 19th century finally loosened the grip of commercial lending libraries on the publishing world. By the 1890s, Mudie’s was offering triple-decker novels at reduced prices.  It is notable that the necessity to offer lower pricing did not ultimately kill the lending library model of business— Mudie’s continued to operate until the 1930s. New commercial lending libraries also sprung up, including the pharmacy chain Boot’s Book Lovers Library, which began at the end of the century and continued to operate until the 1950s (Altick 312–315). 

As the overall price of books and other print materials decreased, a greater variety of publications became ever more widely available. From the 1860s onward, a book bound in paper could be had for as little as 6 pence (Altick 307). By the end of the century, an abridged version of a novel could be had for as little as 1 penny (Altick 314). The age of mass market popular literature had truly arrived.

For more information, please see the following catalogue: Warner, Patrick. Who Will Brighten Their Grave Faces? 19^th -Century Popular Literature. Memorial University Libraries, 2021. 

Patrick Warner, 

Special Collections Librarian,

Archives & Special Collections

Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University

References

Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader. University of Chicago Press, 1963.

Dalziel, Margaret. Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago. London: Cohen & West, 1957.

Campbell, Charles L. “A Not-So-Distant Mirror: Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction and Pulpit Storytelling.” Theology Today 51 (January 1995): 574–582.

Collison, Robert. The Story of Street Literature. Santa Barbara, CA: Clio Press, 1973.

Howsam, Leslie. Past into Print: The Publishing History of Britain, 1850–1950. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2009.

Frank, Frederick S. The First Gothics. A Critical Guide to the English Gothic Novel. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987.

Hitchman, Francis. “Penny Fiction.” Quarterly Review, July 1890.

Howsam, Leslie. “The History of the Book in Britain, 1801 to 1914.” In The Oxford Companion to the Book, edited by Michael F. Suarez, S.J. Woudhuysen, and H.R. Woudhuysen. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

James, Louis. Fiction for the Working Man. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.

King, Andrew and John Plunkett. Victorian Print Media: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Mclean, Ruari. Victorian Book Design and Colour Printing. University of California Press, 1972.

Medcraft, John. A Bibliography of the Penny Bloods of Edward Lloyd. Dundee, privately printed by J.A. Birkbeck. 1945.

Neuburg, Victor E. Popular Literature. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1977.

Other Works Consulted

Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton University Press, 2012.

Shepard, Leslie. History of Street Literature. Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1973.