A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  The reading public emerges as a force in and on literature in the eighteenth century, with urbanisation and growing prosperity. At the same time, an interesting characteristic developed: the emergence of new, smaller reading publics within the whole. There was in this period an ever-growing mass of middle-class, leisured women who could read, even if they could not write proficiently, or were not encouraged to – there were few opportunities for them to exercise their skills in the outside world. They represented a reading public relatively unexploited until this date. Attractive reading matter for the woman reader of the time arrived in the form of fiction. Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–48) – runaway bestsellers in the mid-eighteenth century – were clearly targeted at women like the heroines themselves: young, decent, middle-class, virtuous, waiting for marriage, or already married. Richardson's great adversary, and the satiriser of his fiction, Henry Fielding, just as clearly targeted young men with the bawdy tale of Tom Jones (1749). Young men were another section of the diversifying reading public, with its own particular tastes and preferences.

  Fiction for women, by women, about women took root in this period. It was significant in all sorts of ways. The modern critic Elaine Showalter calls the novels written at this time and later ‘a literature of their own’: a way in which women could converse at a time when their access to the outside world, and their opportunities to assemble (other than in church, and in church-related activities), were limited. The novel was one of the foundation stones of what would later evolve as feminism. (Chapter 29 takes up this point.)

  There was, however, a major drawback: the educational deficit. To rise above the levels of literacy prescribed for most of their sex, women needed an unusually well-stocked library of books in the house, and parents or guardians interested in their intellect. The Brontës (Chapter 19) and Jane Austen (Chapter 16) had that good luck, as did a few women readers of literature. Most did not. Even in the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf's tract for the intellectual liberation of women, A Room of One's Own (1929), opens with the description of her being denied entrance to a library at the University of Cambridge. She is not, a Fellow informs her, a fellow. It's a symbolic scene. She does not belong in the reading world of men (‘yet’, one should add). The first two women's colleges at Cambridge were opened in the late nineteenth century and it was not until well after Woolf's death that the college on whose steps she was standing admitted women students.

  George Eliot (real name Mary Anne Evans) was allowed, as a little girl, the free run of the library of a nearby country house, where her father was a land agent. She had no more than a sound school education. By a heroic course of self-instruction, and with the help of friends, she taught herself German and began her writing career as a translator of complicated works of theology and philosophy. She became one of the first women ‘higher journalists’ of her time. Few, of either sex, ranked higher. When, in her late thirties, she turned to fiction (using a male pseudonym) with Adam Bede (1859), she was already a self-made woman – an ‘autodidact’ and a ‘blue stocking’, as women who dared to educate themselves were called. Few could do what she did. Eliot saw the kind of fiction that the bulk of her sex consumed and did not like it one bit: ‘silly novels by lady novelists’, she called it. There were, of course, silly novels for men as well. But men's access to the treasure house of very un-silly literature was less restricted than women's. The situation changed, slowly. In modern times, Iris Murdoch, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison and A.S. Byatt, have all been university teachers, the cleverest going. Their reading public tends to be well educated, and with as many, or more, women readers as men. In this respect, the reading public has evened out.

  At any point in history, and from whatever angle we look at it, however, the ‘reading public’ is not monolithic like a football crowd. In our own day, it is more like a kind of mosaic – a lot of small reading publics, loosely strung together. This point can be illustrated by dropping into any large bookshop. Wander through and you will find different ‘category areas’ (genres) with different kinds of books. Customers know what they like, and whether they want to choose within Teen Fiction or Classic Fiction or Gay and Erotic Fiction or Romantic Fiction or Horror or Crime Fiction or Children's Literature.

  Somewhere – usually in some unfrequented corner – there will be a section devoted to Poetry. It will not, for a certainty, attract the same potential consumers as are sniffing interestedly around the bestsellers heaped mountainously on front-of-shop display tables. Poetry has always been literature's poor sister. ‘Fit audience though few’, was Milton's description of his reading public. So little interested was he in sales that he parted with the manuscript of Paradise Lost for £10; a pittance, even in the seventeenth century. Ironically – and thanks to higher education – Milton now has a vast readership. Paradise Lost is a year-in, year-out bestseller and will be as long as it is a studied text. Oscar Wilde sensibly moved from writing verse, his first love, to hugely popular stage comedy. He followed the money. ‘Why should I write for posterity?’ he is said to have quipped. ‘What has posterity ever done for me?’ Many poets stick with their ‘fit audience though few’. Bestselling poetry is a contradiction in terms, unless we count balladeers such as Bob Dylan and David Bowie.

  The book industry undertakes rigorous and expensive market research to know as much as it can about ‘reader preferences’. As a general rule, science fiction is consumed by young college-educated males, who buy large numbers of books and are ‘brandaddicted’. They keep in touch with their genre, and with fellow genre followers, through web fanzines.

  A slightly different type of reader will congregate around graphic fiction (a modern form of comic books), although its constituency too will be overwhelmingly young(ish). On the fantasy fringe of science fiction – where zombies and vampires roam – women readers enjoy new authors such as Stephenie Meyer. Horror, another fringe territory, has some reader overlap with science fiction and graphic novels, although its followers are predominantly older. Male action novels (in the past, westerns, now more often war stories) appeal to men who are usually past the age of military service and have never ridden a horse. Crime too attracts the older reader both male and female, with queens of crime such as Agatha Christie nowadays superseded by harder-boiled practitioners such as Patricia Cornwell.

  Romance is largely consumed by women in midlife and later years. Oddly, the recent boom in e-books was led by this particular reading public. Reasons suggest themselves. Mothers, for example, tend to be more housebound and bookshops (unlike supermarkets) are unfriendly to prams.

  Nowadays bookstores have EPoS systems – Electric Point of Sales devices – from which buying data is analysed and feeds back as stock delivery. If customers are buying a particular book fast, more copies will be supplied to fill the empty spaces on the shelves. The glove is fashioned to fit the hand. Even your particular hand, if you use electronic bookshops. Buy or browse regularly on Amazon, and it will profile you. Advertisements to suit your taste will pop up on your screen. We all have different preferences, as we have different fingerprints. The reading public is now ‘profiled’ by the book industry in more detail, and more accurately, than at any time in literary history. That, however, does not mean that it can predict what readers will want – merely that their wants, once expressed, can be met more rapidly and efficiently.

  Taken as a whole, the reading public has always wanted more reading matter than it can comfortably afford. Over most of its history, literature, in book form, was an expensive luxury. Two innovations brought literature within reach of ordinary people, making it more affordable and giving the public access to vastly more of it.

  The first was the library system. Jane Austen's two voracious readers, Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe (in Northanger Abbey, 1818), get their ‘horrid’ gothic novels from the local ‘circulating library’ in Bath, where one book could circulate among many customers. Librarians today estimate that
a hardback novel is good for 150 loans. Lending fees could be reduced equivalently. In the mid-nineteenth century there emerged large metropolitan commercial libraries (called ‘leviathans’) serving the Victorian reading public. In the first half of the twentieth century every town and city also had cornershop ‘tuppenny’ libraries, where popular novels would sit alongside cigarettes, sweets and newspapers. In the 1950s, in the UK, every municipal council was obliged, by law, to supply books to the local population via a ‘comprehensive’ public library service. It was free.

  The other innovation was the cheap book, a result of mechanical improvements in the printing press and, in the nineteenth century, the manufacture of low-cost, vegetable-based paper. Most influential in modern times has been the paperback revolution, which took off in the USA in the 1960s. In the twenty-first century we have electronic supply (e-books), and every internet-connected screen opens the door to an Aladdin's Cave.

  If, today, the reading public gets far more to choose from, and gets much more of what it wants, is that a good thing? Not everyone thinks so. Some have claimed that ‘more means worse’. There are those – I am one – who think that out of quantity comes quality. The larger the reading public, the healthier. And the bigger the pudding, the more plentiful the plums within it.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Giant

  DICKENS

  Few people would disagree with the idea that Charles Dickens (1812–70) is the finest British novelist ever to have put pen to paper. ‘A no-brainer’, we might say. ‘The Inimitable’, as he nicknamed himself (even he thought he was peerlessly superb), would have flashed an angry look at the impertinence of even thinking, let alone asking, such a question.

  What other novelist has had his image on both a banknote and a postage stamp? What other novelist has had his work so often adapted for large and small screen? What other Victorian novelist still sells a million copies of his works every year? In the 2012 celebration of the 200th anniversary of his birth, both the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury declared that Dickens was a writer of Shakespearean stature. Who will argue with them?

  But what precisely is it in Dickens's novels which merits the supreme and universal praise he receives? It's a tricky question, requiring a whole range of answers. And over the years those answers have changed. If, for example, you had asked one of Dickens's contemporaries, who had just finished reading The Pickwick Papers, ‘Why do you think “Boz” (Dickens's pen-name in his early fiction) is great?’ he or she might well have said, ‘He makes me laugh more than any other writer I have ever come across’. If, eight years later, you had asked one of Dickens's contemporaries, ‘What is there in The Old Curiosity Shop that makes the author so great?’ they might well have replied – thinking of the famously sad death of Little Nell – ‘Because I have never wept so much at a novel. Dickens moves me as no other writer has done’.

  Readers in the nineteenth century reacted, by and large, rather differently from us. They did not feel any obligation to hold back their emotions. We like to think we are made of sterner stuff, or that we are more sophisticated readers of literature. Hence Oscar Wilde's much recycled wisecrack, ‘One would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell’. Perhaps we chuckle at the funnier scenes in Dickens's fiction (describing Mr Micawber's perennial struggle with the debt collector, for example); our eyes may moisten a little at the sadder scenes (the long-lingering death of Paul Dombey, for example); but we generally keep a tight control on our emotions. It makes us more objective and rational in our literary judgements. Does it make us better readers? Arguably not.

  We are not Victorians, but there are five good arguments why modern readers should also see that Dickens is the greatest ever novelist.

  First is that Dickens was, over the course of his long writing career, uniquely inventive. While still in his early twenties, he had a huge success with his first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Like all his novels, it first appeared in instalments; monthly episodes started appearing in April 1836 under the title The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Lesser writers would have written a string of novels along the same Pickwickian lines, but Dickens, the most restless of writers, immediately moved on to a very different kind of novel with Oliver Twist (1837–38). This is a dark, angry and politically-engaged work, quite different from the comic adventures of Mr Samuel Pickwick. Its anger is directed as much towards the British government as the British reading public. This tale of a workhouse boy turned pickpocket turned burglar, is the first of his ‘social problem’ novels in which he attacked abuses of the day. In the fiction that followed, Dickens carved out other new kinds of novel. The first detective in English fiction, for instance, is found in Bleak House, and with him the detective novel was born.

  Dickens pioneered the ‘autobiographical novel’, in which the novelist takes himself as subject, with David Copperfield (1849–50) and Great Expectations (1860–61). We learn more about Dickens the man in those two novels than we do from any of the eighty-or-so biographies that have been written about him.

  As he moved from novel to novel we can see him perfecting his work technically, particularly in his mastery over plot. The serialist's motto (as Dickens's fellow novelist Wilkie Collins put it) was: ‘Make 'em laugh. Make 'em cry. Make 'em wait.’ By the middle of his career, when he was taking immense pains over the construction of his novels, Dickens had become a master of suspense. He knew exactly how to keep the reader waiting, eagerly purchasing the next weekly or monthly issue to find out what happened next. In a late novel, such as Little Dorrit (1855–57), Dickens ‘plays’ the reader expertly, and we enjoy being played with. Dock-workers in the New York harbour, we are told, yelled out to the ship bringing early copies of The Old Curiosity Shop, ‘Is she [Little Nell] dead?’

  Dickens's fiction moves through many authorial moods over the years, generally becoming less comic, something about which his contemporaries complained – they wanted more Pickwick jollities. But as his fiction darkened, Dickens became increasingly fascinated by the power of symbolism, and his work became more ‘poetic’ in that respect. In the late novel Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), for example, the River Thames is the dominant symbol. (All the later novels have one.) It baptises London with its incoming tide and carries away the city's filth (implying its sin) with the outgoing tide. The hero of the novel is drowned and ‘reborn’ (with a different identity) in the river. This poetic dimension in the late novels enriches Dickens's texts but, more importantly, it opened ways for other novelists to follow and explore. Like all the great writers of literature, Dickens did not just write great fiction, he made great fiction, by other hands, possible.

  A second reason for Dickens's greatness is that he was the first novelist not merely to make children the heroes and heroines of his fiction (as in Oliver Twist) but also to make his reader appreciate how vulnerable and easily bruised the child is, and how unlike an adult's is the child's-eye view of the world. When he was still a young man, anticipating that his would not be a long life (it wasn't), he chose his close friend John Forster to be his biographer. To Forster Dickens entrusted a few sheets of paper describing what he called ‘the secret agony of my soul’. These described Dickens's own acute sufferings as a child. His father, an admiralty clerk, could never manage money and ended up in the Marshalsea, a debtors' prison. This was the setting of Little Dorrit, a location familiar to Dickens as an eleven-year-old boy. While his father languished behind bars, he was put to work sticking labels on jars of boot-blacking in a rat-infested factory on the Thames, for just six shillings a week. It was brutal but, more than anything, it was the shame that scorched him. The scars never healed. The cleverest of boys, Dickens never got the education his cleverness deserved. His schooling was grossly disturbed and it finished when he was fifteen. That shame too was a burden. He was routinely dismissed as ‘low’ and ‘vulgar’ by contemporaries, even in his obituary in The Times. Underlying Dickens's central concern with children is the bel
ief that they are not merely little adults but have something that all adults should aspire to repossess. Dickens (who wrote a Life of Christ for his own children) was a firm believer in Jesus's dictum, ‘Except ye become as children ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven’.

  In fact, Dickens's early life was a heroic feat of self-education and self-improvement. He got work as an office clerk, learned shorthand, and was taken on as a journalist reporting on House of Commons debates. He was to become a mirror of his changing age – the third reason we consider him a great writer. No novelist has been more sensitive to his own times than Dickens. Historically his was a period of explosive growth in London. The city was doubling in population every ten years, creating both huge leaps forward and huge municipal crises. Thirteen of Dickens's fourteen major novels are set or largely set in London. The one that isn't – Hard Times (1854) – is a story of strike and strife in the area around Manchester (‘the workshop of the world’, as it was called). Dickens had his finger firmly on the pulse of England. He realised the huge change that the railway network would bring as it spread across the country in the 1840s, replacing the old (and, for Dickens, romantic) stagecoach. Dombey and Son (1848) deals centrally with the horribly disruptive yet wonderfully interconnected new world that the railway brought with it.

  Our fourth point. It was not simply the fact that Dickens's fiction reflected social change. He was the first novelist to appreciate that fiction itself could change the world. It could enlighten, it could expose, it could advocate. A rather surprising example of Dickens the reformer can be found in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit, where he says that in all his fiction he has tried to show the need to ‘improve public sanitation’. It seems an odd thing to say to readers about to embark on a novel like, say, Bleak House. But look for a moment at the famous opening to that novel: