A Little History of Literature (17 page)

CHAPTER
17

Books for You

T
HE
C
HANGING
R
EADING
P
UBLIC

Reading has always been an intensely private act. Even in a reading group, members will bring their private responses to the meeting and ‘share them’. They do not share the act of reading itself. Nonetheless what readers buy, beg, borrow or steal
en masse
is a crucial element in the long evolution of literature. The market determines the product. And, in the largest sense, that market (made up of millions of individual readers) constitutes what we can call the ‘reading public’. It is no more predictable in its choices than the voting public, but, like them, it calls the shots. As in any branch of business the customer (reader) is always right. Readers create a demand and authors – along with producers and distributors – respond and supply. Anyone in the book business who doesn't respond to demand will quickly go bust.

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

D
ICKENS

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’.