Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  If there were no really good murders, Catnach and his colleagues were just as happy to make up the confessions to lesser crimes, and they even, from time to time, manufactured deaths themselves. In 1828 the Royal Brunswick Theatre, in east London, collapsed. It was during the day, when a rehearsal was in progress, rather than at night with a full auditorium, so only fifteen people were killed. One of Catnach’s patterers remembered it well: ‘Oh yes sir!…It was a rare good thing for all the running and standing patterers in and about ten miles of London. Every day we all killed more and more people…One day there was twenty persons killed, the next day thirty or forty, until it got at last to be worked up to about a hundred, and all killed. Then we killed all sorts of people, Duke of Wellington, and all the Dukes and Duchesses, Bishops, swell nobs and snobs we could think of at the moment.’43

  In 1821 a new series in monthly parts appeared: Pierce Egan’s Life in London, or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis, with etchings and woodcuts by George Cruikshank and his brother Robert. This was the first appearance of the characters Tom and Jerry (the ancestors of the cartoon animals of the twentieth century), and each monthly part cost 1s. Within twelve hours of publication, at least according to Egan himself, Catnach had a pirate edition printed and out being hawked on the streets, selling for only 2d.; he quickly followed this with a ‘whole sheet’, that is, a broadside, called Life in London, which had twelve woodcuts that were crude copies of the original Cruikshank illustrations (but reversed, which meant that Catnach’s cutters simply copied the original illustrations rapidly, not even taking the time to flip them).

  This was the same Pierce Egan who had started the profession of sporting journalist (p. 152), and it may be that he brought from the newspapers an audience of admirers. But the success of Life in London cannot be attributed solely to that, for there was very swiftly a vogue for books on London life, and for all the fashionable accoutrements that Egan’s characters wore or mentioned - ‘tailors, bootmakers, and hatters, recommended nothing but Corinthian shapes, and Tom and Jerry patterns’. The main popularizer, though, was the theatre: ‘Mr Barrymore’ produced a play ‘in hot haste’ at the Royal Amphitheatre a scant four weeks after the first number appeared; the theatre manager Charles Dibdin the younger had his own version on stage at the Olympic Theatre two months later; then the Adelphi advertised ‘Mr Moncrieff ’s* adaptation a fortnight after that:

  On Monday, Nov. 26th, 1821, will be presented for the first time, on a scale of unprecedented extent (having been many weeks in preparation under the superintendence of several of the most celebrated Artists, both in the Ups and Downs of Life, who have all kindly come forward to assist the Proprietors in their endeavours to render the Piece a complete out-and-outer), an entirely new Classic, Comic, Operatic, Didactic, Aristophanic, Localic, Analytic, Panoramic, Camera-Obscura-ic Extravaganza Burletta of Fun, Frolic, Fashion and Flash, in three acts, called ‘TOM AND JERRY: OR LIFE IN LONDON.’ Replete with Prime Chaunts, Rum Glees, and Kiddy Catches, founded on Pierce Egan’s well-known and highly popular work of the same name, by a celebrated extravagant erratic Author. The music selected and modified by him from the most eminent composers, ancient and modern, and every Air furnished with an attendant train of Graces. The costumes and scenery supervised by Mr I. R. Cruikshank, from the Drawings by himself and his brother, Mr George Cruikshank, the celebrated Artists of the original Work.44

  Catnach’s speed in cashing in on Egan’s success was remarkable, but he was used to producing material quickly: he claimed that his A Full True and Particular Account of the Murder of Mr Weare by John Thurtell and His Companions had sold 250,000 copies, which he had managed to print in just one week. This appeared even before the trial itself took place. Afterwards, Catnach needed only another eight days to print 500,000 broadsides reporting on the proceedings. In 1828 he capped

  even that, claiming to have printed and sold 1,166,000 copies of the Last Dying Speech and Confession of William Corder.*46

  It was probably better material than these broadsides that the popular novelist Charles Lever was complaining about when he wrote, ‘Our cheap literature and our copious writing - like our low priced cottons and our cheap pen knives - will ultimately disparage our wares, both at home and abroad.’47 Yet the plenitude of literature of all types came not solely from the discovery of the financial possibilities inherent in the

  William Corder (1804-28) had had an illegitimate child with Maria Marten, his brother’s mistress, before he murdered her in what became known as the notorious Red Barn case. He then married an unsuspecting schoolmistress, and when accused of the crime claimed that Marten had shot herself, overlooking the fact that she had also been stabbed and smothered. Corder was, unusually, not only hanged, but drawn and quartered, and then flayed; his skin was used to cover a book about the crime. This grisly relic is today in Moyse’s Hall Museum, in Bury St Edmunds, together with Corder’s death mask and part of his scalp. His head was on exhibition at Bartholomew Fair in the year of his death, and it was claimed that it earned its owner £100 in the three days of the fair.45

  mass market: it came, too, from the ability to capture that market by applying innovatory technology to production. Many of the technological developments that were discussed in Chapter 4, from papermaking to typesetting and printing, were easily assimilated into book production. There were also other changes, that were relevant to book production alone. The first of these was the development of the stereotype plate. The first stereotypes, or stereos, had been used in Holland as early as the sixteenth century, but they were not introduced in Britain until 1727. The process was very simple: the text was set in metal type, just as it always had been, then a cast of plaster of Paris (or, later, papier mâché) was made of the entire assembly of pages to be printed in a single impression, after which a metal plate, or stereotype, was made from the cast. Now, instead of thousands of small metal letters held together by metal bars secured with string, a single plate for each side of a sheet could be used for printing. Once the publisher was ready to reprint the book, the plate was taken out of storage and reused: storage itself was much easier, and by keeping the stereos, reprints were produced at a fraction of the cost of resetting type from scratch. However, the Stationers Company, the guild that oversaw book publishing, in overseeing its monopoly cared less about reducing costs and much more about ensuring a constant flow of work for compositors. Thus in the eighteenth century it instituted a rule that only a set number of impressions could be made from any plates before the type had to be destroyed, which defeated the purpose of stereos. By 1840, with the monopoly long gone, print runs had now risen sufficiently that stereos suddenly became a commercial possibility. By 1843, three years after stereos came into general use, Clowes, the largest printer in the country (and one that survives today), was storing stereo plates for 2,500 books.48

  With papermaking, typesetting and printing to a greater or lesser extent mechanized, the binding of the books, which had to all intents and purposes remained a hand craft, was creating a bottleneck. Unlike printing, binding had numerous small stages, not one big one: the printed pages had to be folded into sections, the folded sections gathered together in the correct order and then sewn into what was called a book-block, which was then trimmed, blocked, pressed and glued; the spine had to be rounded, and the cloth or leather cut and glued on to the boards, which had previously been cut; then head and tail bands might be added, and endpapers had to be pasted down and lettering applied to the spine. In the early days, the only way to keep up with mechanized printing was to hire more people to do each job in the bindery: in 1830 fewer than 600 journeymen bookbinders worked in London; by 1862 that number had more than doubled, to 1,545; and by 1861 it was 7,754 (by which time there was also binding machinery in place).

  Most of the developments in the mechanization of binding came in small
steps: in the early part of the century a machine for cutting the edges of the gathered sections was developed; then nothing much happened until 1828, when a rolling machine to press the blocks was developed. Then there was another gap until 1843, when machines for embossing the cloth appeared. A flurry of further mechanized processes followed, and by 1851 bookbinding involved so much machinery that it was classed with manufacturing in the catalogue of the Great Exhibition. By the end of the century, a folding machine folded 12,000 sixteen-page sections an hour, a sewing machine sewed 3,600 sections an hour (a skilled woman expected to sew 2,000 or 3,000 sections every day), gathering machines brought together the sections, producing 7,800 book-blocks an hour, and a book-back gluing machine, manned by a single person, did the work that had previously required five people - and, as a final touch, it economized on the glue. All of this meant that more books could now be sold for less money. In 1843 it had cost £180 to produce 6,000 copies of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, or just over 7d. a copy. In 1852, publishers expected to pay production costs of slightly more than 5d. per volume, and by the end of the century that price had fallen further, to 3d. per volume.49

  Even before most of these innovations had filtered through to book production generally, books were becoming more widely available. By the early 1830s it was estimated that there were more than a thousand circulating libraries in the country, although it is likely that this figure excludes those that stocked penny-dreadfuls: probably the lowest level of library that was recognized was the type that catered for those aristocrats of the working classes, the artisans. Libraries for the respectable working classes were being opened with a range of financial support, especially from the various evangelical societies. In 1832 each National School received £5 to spend on books, funded by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, which had a Committee of General Literature. The Religious Tract Society also set up library grants, and by 1849 was proud to have supplied between 5,000 and 6,000 libraries with a hundred volumes each, although they were mostly moral tracts. With these libraries, it was possible for much of the working class to turn their backs on the Mechanics’ Institutes, which they felt had betrayed them - they were being run by the upper middle classes, and the places were increasingly filled by white-collar workers of the lower middle classes. Instead, artisans turned to libraries like Edwinstowe’s Artisans’ Library, in Nottingham, which had an enrolment fee of 1s., and a weekly subscription of 1d. It had opened in 1838, and by 1846 it held 500 volumes, including works by Scott, Byron, Goldsmith and Shakespeare, as well as the Penny Cyclopaedia and a number of periodicals.50

  For the middle class’s own reading, it was Mudie’s Circulating Library that represented the ideal. In 1828, in its first editorial, the Athenaeum had stated flatly that ‘no Englishman in the middle class of life buys a book’.51 G. H. Lewes, George Eliot’s long-term companion, wrote of a wealthy friend who had gone to a library to borrow Romola, but all the copies were on loan to other members, and, she told Lewes, ‘I drove away disappointed.’ This was in 1872, when a cheap edition of the book was available for 2s. 6d.; but, to her, novels were not objects to be bought. Many publishers accepted this. Tinsley’s magazine, which was owned by the publisher Richard Bentley, wrote that it was a ‘well-known fact’ that no one bought novels.52

  This was in part because a curious double situation was in operation with regard to book prices. After a drop in prices in the early part of the century, the main publishers formed a Booksellers Committee, which had but one purpose: to control prices. Although it never managed to assert its authority over the cut-price book market, or the railway libraries (see below), for much of the century these publishers had a death-grip on new fiction. So, while the average price of books dropped from 16s. to 8s. 41/2d. between 1828 and 1853, the price of a new three-volume novel, which became the standard format for fiction,* remained at 31s. 6d. (11/2 guineas) throughout the century.

  This was where Charles Edward Mudie came in. Originally he ran a stationery shop, and in 1842, as was common, he began to lend books from it. His subscription rates were, for middle-class borrowers, quite reasonable: 1 guinea a year.† By comparison, Bull’s Library charged 6 guineas a year; Saunders and Otley up to 8 guineas; Churton’s from 4 to 10. The three-volume novel - or the triple-decker, as it became known - was ideal for this system of borrowing. The subscriber was entitled to borrow a volume, not a novel, for his or her guinea, which meant that with every novel Mudie could lend out three parts to three paying subscribers simultaneously. But it wasn’t only in price that Mudie was ahead of the competition. He also stressed quality, matching the new evangelical mood of much of the middle class. He refused to have any Minerva Press-type books, and instead stocked poetry, history, biography, travel and adventure, religious and moral tracts, scientific works, and, of course,

  the latest fiction. He stressed that his ‘select’ library excluded all immoral books: anything that had Mudie’s stamp on the cover was suitable for family reading.

  In 1852 Mudie’s moved to larger premises, in New Oxford Street, and advertised a ‘Constant Succession of the Best New Books’. Soon the operation was so large that simply by buying multiple copies of a new book, and advertising that purchase, Mudie’s could frequently create a book’s success - as when it ordered 2,500 copies of George Eliot’s first full-length novel, Adam Bede, in 1859.* By 1858 the library was purchasing 100,000 new books a year; three years later this had nearly doubled, to 180,000.

  By 1860 Mudie needed larger premises once more, and, as with Lackington in the previous century, the new building he erected on the same site was designed to reflect both the proprietor’s worldly success and his view of a bookshop or library as a ‘Temple of the Muses’. The new Mudie’s had a classical façade with, inside, semicircular desks for exchanging books set in the middle of a large round hall - not coincidentally, closely resembling the British Museum’s famous round Reading Room. Mudie’s also had branches in the City, in Birmingham and in Manchester, plus an enormous mail-order business: it supplied book clubs and provincial libraries, although for some reason that has not come down to history it refused to supply Smith’s railway bookstalls, which was the reason Smith’s started its own library (which survived until 1961). For 2 guineas a year, Mudie’s subscribers within twenty miles of London could send in a list and have three volumes a week delivered the same day their orders were received. For those who lived further away, there was a country department that at its peak shipped 1,000 boxes holding up to 100 books each to subscribers anywhere in the world: by 1860 there were regular dispatches to Germany, Russia, China and Egypt, as well as the more expected colonial destinations like India and South Africa.

  Mudie’s had become a behemoth that swallowed everything in its path, buying up part of Bentley’s publishing house, and so overwhelming the market that books had to be produced to suit the company’s institutional likes and dislikes. A comparison of orders for one title, Leah: A Woman of Fashion, a novel by Mrs Annie Edwards, published in 1875, shows the strength of its buying power. Smith’s ordered 25 copies, Day’s Library and Cawthorn’s each ordered 13 copies, while Mitchell’s Library wanted 6; Mudie’s asked for 125, or five times as many copies as its nearest competitor. Not surprisingly, the company used this clout to beat down the publishers on price. In 1873 Mudie wrote to Richard Bentley, ‘I wish to do what I can for “Burgoyne” [The Life and Correspondence of Field Marshal Sir John Burgoyne, who had lost the Battle of Saratoga during the American War of Independence] and if you will let me have 520 as 480 [that is, 520 copies for the price of 480, or a further 77 per cent discount on top of his standard trading terms] in the terms proposed I will place it near the top of my list…and give it a leading position in a few special advertisements.’ He promised another publisher that he would ‘go on advertising the book if I can have say 50 or 100 at 18.’ For a book that retailed at 31s. 6d., he expected a 43 per cent reduction.53

  But by this time Mudie and the publish
ers who supported him were operating in a curious bubble. While they sailed serenely on with their 31s. 6d. novels, a major upheaval was taking place. It was triggered, most unexpectedly, by the development of the railway. Today we carry books or magazines to read on all forms of transport, but this was not always the case. Our current assumption that ‘travel’ means ‘reading’ arrived only with the railways. Until then, reading while travelling was all but impossible. In the early days, the windows of many conveyances were not glazed, but covered with oiled silk or other fabrics that had been treated to make them water-resistant; not unnaturally, therefore, the apertures were small, to keep out the wind and the rain. When glazed windows arrived, the design was not reconsidered, and coach windows remained small, which made the interiors often gloomy and frequently just dark. The motion of the horses, and the lack of springs and upholstery did not conduce to reading. Nor did the human interaction that was created by a small number of people travelling long distances together, dining in the same inns, sleeping in the same confined space: sociability was impossible to avoid. In trains, by contrast, people travelled together for hours rather than days at a time, and even this was broken up by frequent dispersals at each station; the carriages were lit by oil - and later gas - lamps; and the ride was smooth enough to make it possible to read without becoming ill. In the firstclass carriages the seats had fairly large head-rest divisions, behind which one could retreat from one’s fellow passengers. The link between railway travel and reading was made from the first; the Quarterly Review in 1830, the year of the first scheduled passenger train, in a line intended to stress the smoothness of the journey, noted that train travel was ‘so easy that a passenger might read a newspaper with perfect comfort’.54