Dickens and Victorian Print Cultures

Robert L. Patten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351944441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This volume places Dickens at the centre of a dynamic and expanding Victorian print world and tells the story of his career against a background of options available to him. The collection describes a world animated by outpourings of print materials: books, serials, newspapers, periodicals, libraries, paintings and prints, parodies and plagiarisms, censorship, advertising, as well as theatre and other entertainment, and celebrity. It also shows this period as driven by a growing and more literate population, and undergirded by a general conviction that writing was a crucial component of governance and civic culture. The extensive introduction and selected articles anchor Dickens's attempts to establish better conditions for writers regarding copyright protection, pay, status, recognition, and effectiveness in altering public policy. They speak about Dickens's life as playwright, journalist, novelist, editor, magazine publisher, theatrical producer, actor, lecturer, reader of his own works, supporter of charities for impoverished authors and fallen women, exponent of a morality of Christian compassion and domestic affections sometimes put into question by his own actions, proponent and critic of British nationalism, and champion of education for all. This selection of essays and articles from previously published accounts by internationally renowned scholars is of interest to all students and professionals who are fascinated by the composition, manufacture, finance, formats, pictorializations, sales, advertising and influence of Dickens's writing.

Part I

Books and Authors

1

From Few and Expensive to Many and Cheap: The British Book Market 1800–1890

Simon Eliot

The 1800s and 1890s

Imagine yourself as an enthusiastic reader of novels in 1800 wanting to buy the latest fashionable novel. What would it look like, and how much would it cost you? Early nineteenth-century novels were often published in two, three, or more volumes; commonly in duodecimo size – smaller than most modern octavo novels. The type would usually be large with generous spacing between the lines and wide margins (this was a way of bulking out a novel to fill three volumes). Because there was no such thing as standard publisher’s binding until the 1830s, most novels would have been issued in temporary bindings of grey cardboard – with a printed paper label on the spine – on the assumption that those who bought them would wish to bind them in their own library style.

Each volume would be priced between 5s and 6s, so a three-volume (or “three-decker” as it became known) novel would cost a buyer between 15s and 18s. As this was at a time when a skilled builder would be earning a weekly average of 21s, a printer 27s, and a teacher about 17s (Mitchell 1988: 153), the buying of a new novel for most of the population was an unaffordable luxury.

By 1821, Constable, the publisher of Sir Walter Scott, had traded on his popularity by bumping up the price of each volume to 10s 6d, thus pricing a three-decker novel at 31s 6d: more than the average weekly wage for most of the nineteenth century. If you could not afford a first edition, you might have to wait a long time for something cheaper. Jane Austen’s novels, published in multivolumes between 1811 and 1817, only emerged in cheaper editions published by Richard Bentley in his “Standard Authors” series in 1833.

A novel-buyer in the last decade of the nineteenth century had more choice. After 1894, the three-decker first edition of the novel disappeared and was replaced by a single volume selling at 6s. This volume would be in standard publisher’s cloth, possibly with a colored designed stamped on it. A few months later, a second edition at around 2s 6d would appear, and within a couple of years, it might be available as a paperback at 6d. With an increase in real incomes between the 1860s and the 1890s, 6d was a price that most readers could afford.

The novel is but one example of the transformation in form, price, and readership that all sorts of printed text underwent during the period covered by this chapter. Take newspapers as another example. In 1803, The Times had a circulation of fewer than 2,000 and cost a reader 6d an issue: a few pages in length, composed entirely of letter-press, with no illustrations, and with its front page devoted exclusively to advertisements. In contrast, by the later 1880s, W. T. Stead’s evening Pall Mall Gazette was splashing news across its front page with banner headlines and cartoons – and all for Id. In 1896, Lord Northcliffe launched The Daily Mail at a halfpenny for eight sheets, and sold 397,215 copies on its first day. By World War I, it was the first newspaper in the UK to sell over 1 million copies a day.

A final example comes from what one might call “the ownership of printed images.” Around 1800, unless you were comfortably off, it was unlikely that you would own many, or any, pictures with which to decorate your walls. Picture-producing technology was slow, difficult, and therefore expensive. Magazines and newspapers did not include illustrations. If you were an artisan or a clerk, or anyone earning less than they did, you might have access to a few crude, small, monochromatic woodcuts – and that would be all. By the 1890s, there was a plethora of systems for producing and reproducing cheap images, including wood-engraving, lithography, and halftones from photographs. Wood-engraving had its greatest impact in the middle of the period and made possible periodicals that to a significant extent were carried by their illustrations, such as Punch (1841) and the Illustrated London News (1842).

By the 1890s, readers had access to a range of high-quality, large-scale images, some in color and many derived from cheap sources, such as magazines, newspapers, and advertisements. Your walls, if you chose, could be plastered with printed images. But it was not just interior walls. The explosion of printed ephemera (all those items printed for an occasion and then thrown away: advertising posters, tickets, invitations, visiting cards, labels, forms, handbills, programs, and so on) meant that by the end of the period the average person would be swimming in a sea of print: with inadequate or non-existent planning laws, virtually every vertical surface would be plastered with printed sheets and the streets would be littered with ephemera.

Communications and Literacy

One feature of the broader industrial revolution that was to have an immense impact on textual culture was the development of the railway system in Britain. Within a generation (roughly 1830–60) the country acquired a fast, all-weather goods and people transport system that could carry bulky materials (such as printing machines, paper, or type) easily and cheaply to virtually any town in the country. It ensured that newspapers and magazines were transported in a matter of hours (rather than days or weeks by horse-drawn vehicle or by sea) to almost any part of mainland UK. Train travel was much smoother and better lit than coach travel, and this created a new environment in which reading and writing could be done comfortably – and not just on long journeys. Once the main routes were established, intermediate stations became available which made it possible for the middle class to move out of the densely populated cities and commute to work. Commuters needed newspapers and magazines that could be read in the space of their daily return journeys. For longer trips, the “railway novel” or “yellowback” was marketed: selling at 2s or less with a racy illustration on a (usually) yellow background, it was the airport lounge novel of its day. To cater to this new demand, railway bookstalls were established, many originally by individual entrepreneurs, though by the mid-century most of these were being run by W. H. Smith in England (who did not move into high street shops until the 1900s), John Menzies in Scotland, and Easons in Ireland (Wilson 1985).

Another influential change was the growth in literacy through the period. Roughly speaking, in 1800 in England and Wales (literacy rates in Scotland were a few percent higher in most decades) about 60 percent of males and 45 percent of females could read. By 1841, this had risen to 67 percent and 51 percent respectively; by 1871, 81 percent and 73 percent; and by 1891, 94 percent and 93 percent. These rates were not uniform either geographically or socially so these averages hide differences. For instance, by 1800 it was safe to assume the almost everyone in the middle classes and above could read; and literacy levels were always higher in urban areas than rural ones. Nevertheless, such overall increases were impressive, particularly when one couples them to a rising population: in 1801, the population of England, Scotland, and Wales was just over 10 million; in 1851, over 20 million; and by 1891 over 33 million (Mitchell 1988: 11–12).

Then, as now, reading skill varied and thus it is important not to underestimate the importance of oral culture, in particular listening to books and newspapers being read aloud. Even those near the bottom of society and themselves not literate might be related to, or might know, someone who was literate and who might provide access to the printed word by reading to them (Vincent 1989).

Literary Property and its Consequences

There were a number of additional copyright acts during our period, the most of important of which was in 1842 which extended copyright to 42 years or seven years after the author’s death, whichever was the longer. Additionally, it re-enforced the law on the legal deposit of any new printed work at the British Museum Library. At first this was not vigorously enforced, but in the mid-1850s the Principal Librarian of the Library, Antonio Panizzi, began to threaten publishers with legal sanctions – and the books flowed in. Since that time the legal deposit collection of the Library has been a much better and more accurate, if not comprehensive, record of British publishing.

Copyright legislation had other consequences. In creating defensible literary rights, it gave authors the potential to make serious money out of their writing. Driven by hope, the volume of manuscripts submitted to publishers increased enormously, one of the factors that encouraged many to introduce a filter system in the form of the publisher’s reader. Readers such as Geraldine Jewsbury for Bentley and John Morley for Macmillan had a significant impact on their employer’s list and thus helped to define the publishing house.

In practice, most published writings did not sell well enough to make much, if any, money. In any case, many authors still sold their copyrights outright to a publisher so that, even if the book were a success, they had no further pecuniary interest in it. Until the late nineteenth century when the royalty system was introduced from the USA, most writers who did not sell outright had some sort of “half-profits” arrangement in which profits – if the publisher declared any – were split 50:50. Despite this, a small number of writers made substantial sums, and a significant minority made a living. This led to various attempts to “professionalize” authorship, the most successful of which saw the creation of the Society of Authors (SoA) in 1884. Partly in response, the Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland was founded in 1895, and the Publishers’ Association in 1896.

The fact that by the end of the period literary property could be chopped up into a multitude of subsidiary rights that could be sold off separately (UK book rights, European, translation rights, serial rights, secondary serial rights, and so on) encouraged the emergence of the literary agent who, usually for a 10 percent fee, would undertake to represent the author in all these negotiations. Sir Walter Besant, prime mover of the SoA, was also one of the first novelists to use a professional literary agent: A. P. Watt from 1882.

Patterns of Production

The number of copies of stamped newspapers rose from 16 million in 1801 to over 78 million by 1849; the number of book titles published in the decade went up from roughly 14,550 in the 1800s to around 60,812 in the 1890s (Eliot 1994: 117, 147). Book titles do not represent numbers of copies, and many of these titles would be produced in print-runs of no more than 500–1,000. However, a popular novel in 1800 might have a combined print-run in its early years of up to 12,000. By the 1890s, a similarly popular novel might see 100,000 copies and more produced in its first five years in different editions.

Between 1800 and 1830, the annual pattern of production was a traditional one: there was a substantial bulge of new titles in spring; production dipped during the summer months and rose slightly in autumn. By the 1840s, this had changed: the spring season was still visible but now a new season emerged that ran from October to December: Christmas. This Christmas season got progressively larger as the century progressed. The emergence of Christmas as a major commercial festival is confirmed by the circulation of the first modern Christmas card (by Henry Cole in 1843) and the series of Christmas books, starting with A Christmas Carol (1843), produced by that most commercially responsive of great authors, Dickens. By late in the century, cards and postcards were a significant feature of our printed culture: in 1850, more than 500,000 Valentines were sent; and at Christmas 1877, 4.5 million cards went through the post (Vincent 1989). In the early decades, the majority of titles listed in the trade journals were at high (above 10s) or at medium price (between 3s 6d and 10s); by the 1890s, more than two-thirds of titles listed were priced at under 3s 6d.

One factor that affected the price of texts in the earlier part of the century was the series of taxes and duties applied to paper, newspapers, advertisements, and so on – the so-called “taxes on knowledge.” These were at their height between 1800 and the 1830s at a time when the need to control and limit information (particularly to the lower classes) seemed most pressing in the shadow of the French Revolution. In the early 1800s, the tax on newspapers was 4d per copy; in 1836, this was reduced to Id and was finally abolished in 1855. Paper duty was finally repealed in 1861.

Cheap Books and Part-works

One form of printing that carried on through most of our period did not need cheapening because it was already at rock-bottom prices. These were traditional cheap publications designed for the literate or semi-literate poor. The chapbooks (so called because they were sold in markets – “chepe” is the Old English for market – not bookshops) had been around since the seventeenth century but came into their own in the eighteenth century. They were small, paperbound pamphlets, usually 6 × 4 inches (15 × 10 cm), and with about 24 pages containing retellings of traditional and fairy stories, such as Robin Hood, Guy of Warwick, or the Seven Champions of Christendom. These usually sold for a Id, as did an early nineteenth-century innovation in popular literature: the broadside ballad. This consisted of a long sheet of paper printed on one side and containing a sensational story, a description of an execution, or a song, or both illustrated by crude and frequently reused woodcuts – a real multi-media experience. Broadside ballads tended to favor stories of violent murders and executions, the most popular titles selling 1–2 million copies over a number of years and produced by such publishers as John Pitts and James Catnach (Neuburg 1977: 138–40).

Flowing into this flood of popular print was another tributary that shared so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I BOOKS AND AUTHORS
• PART II SERIALIZATION
• PART III ILLUSTRATION
• PART IV CIRCULATION
• PART V READERS
• PART VI DICKENS AS EDITOR
• PART VII CONTEMPORANEITY
• PART VIII SOCIAL, CULTURAL AND POLITICAL IMPACT
• PART IX CODA
• Name Index