Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (25 page)

That these magazines were in the selling business was clear. There were few advertisements in
La Belle Assemblée
itself, but instead there was a regularly issued ‘Monthly Compendium of Literary, Fashionable, and Domestic Advertisements; Forming the commercial and Supplementary Part of La Belle Assemblee’. This was promoted to retailers as a more enduring form of advertising than magazines that were thrown away after a month.
*
But the commercial value of the market had not yet been fully understood: by 1846 there were only four magazines solely devoted to women, while forty-eight women’s magazines were founded between 1880 and 1900 alone.
¹¹¹
By this time their commercial value was entirely clear to their proprietors.
Queen’s
magazine (1861-1967) had such demand for small ads that in 1868 it had spun off
Exchange and Mart
to cope with the volume - a magazine that dispensed with expensive editorial material, and was instead made up entirely of advertisements (and successful enough that, with a few title changes, it continues today, albeit online). The
Lady
(1885), another magazine that has survived until today (with a few gaps and reorganizations), has done so precisely because its finances are - and always were - based on personal ads.
¹¹²

These were all upper-class magazines. It was the
Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine
that created a new form: a middle-class family magazine that used elements of the upper-class fashion magazine to produce something that was, for the first time, aimed specifically at the middle-class woman of the family. Samuel Beeton, its editor, declared, ‘We took the field in the belief that there was room for a cheap serial combining practical utility, instruction and amusement.’ He saw it as an instrument of public education, to ‘teach women to work much and spend little’ and to practise ‘wholesome thrift as will disinduce us to spend our time or money without an adequate return either in gain or enjoyment’. It presented itself to its intended market as ‘a fund of practical information and advice tending to promote habits of industry and usefulness, without which no home can be rendered virtuous or happy’.
¹¹³
Initially it cost 2
d.
, although this was shortly raised to 6
d.
- a sixth of the price of
La Belle Assemblée
- which became the standard price for women’s magazines for
the next few decades. It also had special issues, for which the price was raised again, but it was careful to promise value for money:

N
OTICE
, The S
HILLING
E
DITION
comprises, besides the content of the magazine, an 8-page Supplement containing illustrations of the C
HEMISE
R
USSE
, New Stitches in Pont Russe, Six engravings of the Newest and most Fashionable Mode of Making Dresses, Hanging Sleeve, Muslin Fichu, Young Lady’s Coiffure, Work-Basket Cover, Braiding Patterns, Parasol Cover in Venetian Embroidery, Knitted Square for Counterpanes, Braided Slipper, etc, with full d[i]rections for working and making the same. Also a Fashion Plate of large size and a Photograph of the late Prince Consort.

Now it was presenting itself in a very interesting way, showing what it claimed to be the newest and most fashionable upper-class modes, and yet at the same time telling its middle-class audience that these goods were within their reach, via paper patterns and the new home sewing machines, which made ‘dressing in accordance with the latest fashions…easy and not too expensive’. The
Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine
ran a whole series of articles on sewing machines, and in other issues it gave away paper patterns that showed how to make ‘the original articles furnished by the first Parisian houses’.
¹¹⁴
Such paper patterns were used to promote numerous women’s magazines for the rest of the century. Pearson’s
Home Notes
in 1895 reminded consumers that ‘The price of
Dressmaking at Home
[another Pearson magazine] is only 1
d.
a month, an absurdly low rate when it is remembered that…it contains every month a paper pattern of a new and fashionable garment.’
¹¹⁵

This derisory cover price of 1
d.
at the end of the century shows how the finances of magazines had altered. They were no longer reliant on circulation: it was advertising that made money. The cover price was merely a token contribution, as the
Gentlewoman
was happy to admit: ‘Advertisements are indispensable because every copy costs the proprietors nearly double the price for which it is sold.’ Nevertheless, magazines told their readers that they should be pleased to see so many advertisements, which now might take up half the available space, as they gave ‘a useful directory for ladies’. By the 1870s
The Times
carried approximately 2,500 advertisements in each issue, at an average fee of 8
s.
per ad, clearing a healthy £1,000 a day; the
Telegraph
had fewer advertisements, about 1,500 an issue, and as the second-ranking news
paper it charged less, but they still brought in about £500 a day.
¹¹⁶
The penny weeklies, no matter that their readers often earned less in a day than
The Times
charged in advertising fees, also relied heavily on revenue from advertisements. At mid-century,
Reynolds’s
and
Lloyd’s
gave about 11 or 12 per cent of their content over to advertisements; by 1870,
Reynolds’s
was still at about 14 per cent, while ads in
Lloyd’s
had soared to nearly 25 per cent of the overall content. There were two reasons for this:
Reynolds’s
radical past still weighed against it with advertisers, and furthermore it gave space to products that other newspapers would not touch - in the 1850s and 1860s over half of the space it sold was for patent medicines that promoted the ‘removal of female obstructions’, or ‘spermatorrhoea’ - that is, abortifacients.
¹¹⁷
Lloyd’s
, considered to have a more respectable readership, had more advertisements than any other penny paper; even though it charged more, it was still forced to turn away advertisers for lack of space. By 1886, nearly 37 per cent of its content was entirely devoted to advertisements.
¹¹⁸

By the turn of the century,
Newspaper Press Directory
was available, an indispensable reference guide for retailers planning to advertise, directing them to, say,
Myra’s Journal
, which, it said, had ‘a valuable advertising medium…a large circulation’, while it warned that
Home Notes
had ‘crowded advertising columns’.
¹¹⁹
A magazine for brides,
Orange Blossoms
, advertised its own advertising columns in another directory,
The Advertisers Guardian
:

It is obvious that a Journal of this character, circulating among wealthy people at a time when they are purchasing almost every necessity and luxury of life, must appeal with special force to Advertisers.
Wedding-dresses, breakfasts, cakes, presents, equipages, house-letting, house-furnishing, dressmaking, hotels, tours, and insurance,
as well as all the businesses which deal in personal and domestic comforts and necessities, find in ORANGE BLOSSOMS a
special
as well as a
general
medium.
¹²⁰

The commodification of these magazines had become increasingly overt.
Queen’s
had for some time run a column called ‘The Work-Table’ (that is, the sewing table); in the 1890s it renamed it more bluntly ‘What to Work and What to Buy’.
¹²¹
‘Making’ a home had now turned into purchasing a lifestyle.

*
Contemporary accounts preferred the lower figure; K. H. Connell in his
The Population of Ireland: 1750-1845
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1950), thinks the higher number more likely.

†
This Robert Raikes should not be confused with his son Robert (1736-1811), who succeeded him as publisher of a later acquisition, the
Gloucester Journal
, but is better known as the founder of the Sunday-school movement.

*
This was a big step forward. Until these postal reforms, the London post boys were obliged to wait until the government offices chose to deliver their mailbags each day before setting out.

*
For more about Astley’s, see pp. 313ff.

*
John Hill (
c.
1714-75) was a cleric, herbalist, doctor, writer and actor. Dr Johnson praised him with faint damns - ‘Dr Hill was…a very curious observer; and if he had been contented to tell the world no more than he knew, he might have been a very considerable man.’ Hill can, however, be said to have been right in at least one instance: in 1759 his
Cautions Against the Immoderate Use of Snuff
linked tobacco use to cancer.
³⁰

†
His
Lilliputian Magazine: or the Young Gentleman & Lady’s Golden Library, being An Attempt to mend the world, to render the Society of Man More Amiable, & to establish the Plainness, Simplicity, Virtue & Wisdom of the Golden Age, so much Celebrated by the Poets and Historians
appeared in 1751 (although it survived for only three issues) and contained rhymes, riddles, the musical score for a country dance, a recipe for mince pie and stories with morals.
³²

*
This was not the nineteenth-century penny-post reform of Rowland Hill (for that, see pp. 484-5), but an earlier attempt, initially confined to London and its suburbs. In 1794 the number of carriers was increased, as were deliveries, to six a day, with the suburbs now expecting three deliveries a day. Letters were sent, as the name implied, at a cost of 1
d.
, although this did not survive long. The ‘Houses’ referred to ‘in all parts of the Town’ were the 125 receiving offices in London and the 135 in the suburbs that were run by the Post Office. In the 1790s the penny post spread to Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol and Exeter, and then to Glasgow and ultimately Ireland, eventually covering 356 towns and 1,475 villages in England and Wales.
³⁶

*
These types of book have a very poor survival rate generally: only five copies of this particular book are extant, and were it not for this one printer’s account book noting his print runs we would today have not the faintest idea of its enormous influence.
⁴⁶

*
The phrase ‘Crim.-con.’ immediately conveyed to its readers the primary interest of the newspaper - criminal conversation was the legal phrase for adultery. A wife’s lover was, in law, seen to be trespassing on the husband’s property, that is, his wife: ‘Against an adulterer the husband had an action at common law, commonly known as an action of criminal conversation. In form it was generally trespass…on the theory that “a wife is not, as regards her husband, a free agent or separate person.”’
⁶¹
The creation of the Divorce Court in 1857 made crim.-con. an anachronism.

*
Any newspaper with ‘Police Gazette’ in its title meant that much of its content was crime reporting. In
Our Mutual Friend
, Dickens had Betty Higden, a pedlar, explain how the boy she looked after read the papers to her, to her great contentment, because ‘He do the Police in different voices.’ T. S. Eliot used the line in
The Waste Land
, until Ezra Pound advised him to cut it out.

*
Within eight years, it would be a legal obligation for the railways to carry post at the Post Office’s request, supplying a mail carriage ‘fitted up as the Postmaster-General…shall direct, for the purpose of sorting letters therein’.
⁶⁸

*
Although the tax was abolished, newspapers could choose to continue to pay a lesser sum - usually 1d. - for a stamp, which meant that the paper could still be sent post-free. Many newspapers found this worthwhile, and stamped papers appeared until the pennypost reforms of 1840.

*
In the mid-1980s, there were still Linotype machines in daily use.

*
Not all newspapers needed this level of mechanization, however. The
Middlesex Chronicle
, as late as 1900, had a circulation of only 3,000. It did not trouble to acquire a steam press until 1857, and even then it continued to print flat sheets that it supplied to newsagents for them to fold.
⁸³

*
The Press Association continued to keep abreast of changing technology: in 1905 it introduced a telephone football-results service; it added cricket and racing shortly afterwards.

*
Among other reasons, it bribed newsvendors to sell it ahead of the competition.
⁹¹

*
In fact, irritatingly for the historian, it is these supplements that were thrown away, and ‘complete’ runs of the magazine often have few, if any, of the compendiums.

N
EWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES
fed an appetite - an appetite that had long been rationed by the price of books. For most of recorded history, books were costly, and were not seen as things that most people owned. In the eighteenth century, however, that began to change. James Lackington, who later made his fortune by selling books inexpensively, had been apprenticed to a shoemaker in 1761. ‘My master’s whole library consisted of a school-size Bible, Watt’s Psalms and Hymns, Foot’s Tract on Baptism, Culpeper’s Herbal, the History of the Gentle Craft, and an imperfect volume of Receipts in Physic, Surgery, &c., and the Ready Reckoner,’
*
he recalled. But Lackington’s master was old-fashioned. For many, as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century, books had become common enough that they were borrowed and lent freely, and by a wider range of the population than might have been expected. John Cannon, a butcher’s son, read a copy of Josephus’s
History of the Jewish War
that was owned by a local gardener.
¹
Yet others did not find it easy to locate new reading material. In
Northanger Abbey
(begun by Jane Austen in 1798, although not published until 1818), Catherine Morland, the daughter of an upper-class clergyman, says that her mother ‘very often reads
Sir Charles Grandison
herself, but new books do not fall in
our way’.
²
(Samuel Richardson’s
Sir Charles Grandison
was an enormously popular novel, but it had been published half a century before, in 1753-4.)

These two opposing situations existed at the same time: in part the availability of books depended very much on the type of book that was desired. It was possible to buy books cheaply, as the local gardener would have done, either secondhand or as low-priced, mass-produced chapbooks (of which more below, p. 176). But new novels, poetry, travel books - all these were expensive and of the moment. These books were part of the luxury market, catering to the fashionable world. Booksellers were now beginning to move their shops away from specialist areas, such as Paternoster Row and St Paul’s Churchyard in London, where they had clustered together for more than a century, to the West End shopping areas where browsers could stop in and ‘lounge’. The type of people who were buying these new books were the kind of whom Richardson himself had written when he claimed that a woman had confided to him that ‘in this foolish town, we are obliged to read every foolish book that fashion renders prevalent in conversation’.
³

Because they were fashion items, many if not most books were published in that centre of fashion, London, and then shipped to the country, either to stock shops there or, more often, as special orders. In 1760 Harvey Berrow of Worcester advertised that ‘All Sorts of Books, Pamphlets, Acts of Parliament, The several Magazines, And All Other Periodical Publications, Are continued to be sold by H. Berrow, Goose Lane, Worcester; Who procures them from London as soon as possible after they are bespoke, which is the usual Method with Country Booksellers, whose Orders are supply’d Weekly from thence.’
⁴
In Fanny Burney’s novel
Cecilia
(1782), Cecilia visits her London bookseller to ‘look over and order into the country such new publications as seemed to promise her any pleasure’.
⁵

The publishing industry (although this phrase is an anachronism: publishers were called booksellers well into the nineteenth century)
*
had expanded greatly after the collapse of the Licensing Act at the end of the seventeenth century. In 1700 there were probably about 200 booksellers operating in 50 of the larger towns.
⁷
When Samuel Richardson
published
Pamela
, in 1740-41, there were double the number of booksellers’ shops, but spread more thinly now, in about 200 towns; by the 1790s, both the number of shops and their geographical reach had risen dramatically, to 1,000 shops in 300 towns.
⁸
These shops, in general, tended to sell many things besides books: William Owen, a bookseller, advertised on his trade card, ‘William Owen, Bookseller, Near Temple Bar, Fleet Street. Imports German Spa Water from ye Pouhon Spring also Seltzer & Pyrmont in their utmost Perfection Bath, Bristol & other English Waters fresh every Week’.
⁹
The importance of this trade was such that the illustration on his card was of bottles, not books. Fifty years later the commercial inability of booksellers to survive solely by selling books was still the norm: Burgess’s Circulating Library in Ramsgate advertised that it had

all sorts of Books, Stationary [
sic
], Perfumery, and Patent Medicines; Maps, Charts, Prints, and Drawing Books; Camel Hair Pencils, and Colours for Drawing; Music, also Musical Instruments for Sale or Hire; great Choice of Pocket Books and Etwees; best Plated Goods of the newest Fashion, Jewellery, Cutlery, and Hardware in general; Trinkets and Toys; very neat Tunbridge Ware; an assortment of Ladies and Gentlemens [
sic
] whips, Canes and Sticks, neatly mounted; also Common Walking Sticks, and Cane Strings; Sarsnet, Oiled Silk and Linen Umbrellas and Bathing Caps; Silk and other Purses; Purse Runners and Tassels; Hose, Gloves, and Fans; and many other Articles which are sold at reasonable Prices.
*
¹⁰

The main problem was the price. Books were still sold on the old system, that it was better to sell a few things at a high profit than many thousands at a lower one. And, unlike many consumer goods at this time, books were becoming more expensive, not less. In the 1770s a complete set of Shakespeare, edited by Samuel Johnson and completed by George Steevens, cost £3, while
Bell’s Shakespeare
, which was published as a ‘cheap’ edition, cost a still hefty 15
s.
A new novel at the same period cost 3
s.
; during the French wars this shot up to 10
s.
6
d.
per volume. As most novels were in two or, more often, three volumes, a new novel might cost as much as a guinea and a half. In the 1810s and
1820s, prices continued to climb: Byron’s
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
cost from 12
s.
to as much as £1 16
s.
6
d.
*
A teacher earned £12 a year on average; a curate (not, it must be admitted, a particularly remunerative occupation, but a genteel one, nonetheless) might earn £20 a year - the price of twelve novels. Even a 15
s. Bell’s Shakespeare
would swallow his entire income for two weeks. It was impossible for anyone earning less than £50 a year to purchase new books, and in 1780 there were only 150,000 families whose income ranged from £50 to £400 - not a large pool of purchasers.
¹¹

It is not surprising, therefore, that book sales were small. Some members of the upper classes thought that books should remain expensive, not because they wanted to keep these luxury goods for themselves, but to prevent the lower classes from becoming infected with dangerous ideas. William Godwin’s
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
(1793) was every bit as radical as Thomas Paine’s incendiary works, but Paine was prosecuted for his book and Godwin was not. In the 1790s Paine’s
The Rights of Man
was sold for 6
d.
, while
Political Justice
cost £1 16
s.
on first publication, and then appeared in a cheaper 16
s.
edition - which was still too expensive for most of the population.
†
The ruling caste felt no need to hide their conviction that ideas which were dangerous for the working class were innocuous when confined to the elite: it was a perfectly conventional assumption of the time. The Attorney General wrote to another author of radical works in the year Godwin’s book was published: ‘Continue if you please to publish your reply to Mr Burke in an octavo form [a luxury format], so as to confine it probably to that class of readers who may consider it coolly: so soon as it is published cheaply for dissemination among the populace it will be my duty to prosecute.’
¹³

The result of this pricing practice meant that even non-seditious
books were limited in circulation. Henry Fielding’s
Amelia
(1752), a great success, sold out its first edition of 5,000 copies in a week; the second edition, however, ‘lasted indefinitely’. Thus it appears that there were about 5,000 people in the country who wanted, or could afford, a copy.
Childe Harold
probably sold around 13,000 copies in the first three years, which made it almost unimaginably successful. Most popular novels had print runs of about 4,000 copies, and few sold more than 10,000 copies in total: by contrast, Dr Johnson’s periodical the
Rambler
sold about 12,000 copies when it was bound up together.
¹⁴

This was because, apart from the rich and the fashionable, people did not expect to buy new books. Many people bought books from pedlars and itinerants, who sold low-priced, low-production chapbooks; others, who wanted to own either novels or more serious non-fiction, bought from secondhand dealers. James Weatherley in Manchester was a typical example of this type of bookseller. He began in the book trade around 1817, working for a bookseller who had a shop and also a stall or table in the market. Weatherley minded the stall for him while the bookseller worked in his shop. (This having multiple outlets was not uncommon: George Barton, who had had a bookshop in Huntingdon a century before, had what he called ‘shops’ in Peterborough, St Ives and St Neots, which were clearly stalls: they functioned only on their respective market days.)
¹⁵
Weatherley soon set up his own stall, buying stock from auctions and from people who came to his market stall; he also participated in the trade in secondhand copies, where small dealers bought from the bigger, more established booksellers, who had acquired entire libraries, kept the better items, and passed the dross on to the stallholders. Weatherley eventually managed to save enough to rent a cellar in which to store his books; then he rented another cellar, from which he sold directly to passers-by. He was never successful, and sometimes he was barely a bookseller - when business was particularly bad he sold Eccles cakes and what he referred to as ‘pop’, and, he wrote gloomily, ‘if we had kept on in that line it would have paid better than Bookselling.’ Yet, while being only one step up from an itinerant seller, he had space to display 2,000 books, and there was no suggestion that his stock was larger than that of any of his fellow sellers.
¹⁶

His customers were those who wanted to own books, but could not afford to buy them new. Many others, like Lackington’s shoemaker, had
never become book-buyers at all, yet this did not mean that they were not readers. The easiest way to gain access to books was once more via the coffee houses. Some of the stock of the libraries of three London coffee houses - Tom’s in Devereux Court and George’s in Temple Bar, both near the Inns of Court, and the Bank Coffee House, Threadneedle Street, in the City - was in 1819 acquired by the British Museum. From this small hoard we can obtain a rough outline of the type of books that were bought for coffee-house customers to read. (No other records of coffee-house reading material have survived.) Fifty of the sixty books in the (now) British Library originally belonged to Tom’s (probably fifty-three: three books have ‘Devereux’ written on them); two were marked as belonging to George’s, and one to the Bank Coffee House. As well as the books, there are twenty pamphlets in the collection, all of which belonged to Tom’s. Another sixty-two titles with ‘Tom’s’ marked on them have been traced in other libraries, and we can thus be sure that Tom’s Coffee House had at least 135 books and pamphlets for its customers to read. The range of subjects was not large. Most of the titles were political, some were military, and a few were religious; there was a certain amount of verse, some of that political or satirical too, and a few translations into English - Tasso and Aristotle (and Milton translated into Latin).
¹⁷

What we cannot know from this is whether all these books were owned at one time (although, as they were sold together, it at least seems possible). Nor can we know if Tom’s was representative or exceptional in the number and types of book it stocked. There is not even any consensus on how many coffee houses existed across the country and, of those unnumbered coffee houses, how many had substantial libraries. It has been suggested that as many as 500 coffee-house libraries may have existed in London in the late 1840s
¹⁸
- a high number, giving good access to reading matter for many.

For those who lived out of reach of a handy coffee house, or for those - like women - who did not expect to enter them, there were several other ways of reading books without buying them. The club, as always in the eighteenth century, was an immediate solution for many. Two kinds of club began to operate as reading groups. The first one, rather less common, was a library: a group of people paid an annual subscription to purchase books which were kept indefinitely. The second type of club, by far the more common, charged members an annual
subscription which was used to buy books; then, after they had been read by as many of the club as wanted, either the books were sold off, usually annually, with the proceeds going to buy more books, or they were divided up among the club members, commonly by drawing lots. One club for which good records survive is the Ely Pamphlet Club, which met fortnightly at an inn. This was an average-sized club, made up of twelve members, who paid 10
s.
a year each. Between 1766 and 1776 they acquired 633 pamphlets, plays, journals and political tracts, as well as a few books. The members could borrow new items every fortnight, with priority for titles wanted by more than one member being decided by lottery; they could visit a ‘club room’ (probably a room in the inn) to read whenever they liked; and at the end of each year the reading material was distributed among them.
¹⁹