Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  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 10s. 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

  The Luddenden Library in Yorkshire was a hybrid: its members owned shares in the library, which made it a proprietary library,* but they also met regularly for social purposes, which made it a club.20 (Their meetings, at the Lord Nelson inn, were for a time attended by Branwell Brontë.) The sociability aspect was one that clubs would have said was their raison d’être, and Charles Shillito in 1788 gave his jaundiced view of how this might work out in practice in his poem about ‘the cottage Book-club, on the village green’:

  The Squire calls ‘order’ - order soon ensues:

  And the first bus’ness of the club is - news.

  Who shines with ill got wealth, who droops with debt;

  Who sleeps on roses, and who treads on thorns,

  Who keeps his hounds, and who retains his horns [that is, has been cuckolded];

  What upstart lives in affluence and ease,

  That, t’other day, cried cabbages and pease;

  What noble lord, esteem’d so wise and good,

  Has met a certain lady in the wood…

  And now the [punch] bowl goes round, with quicken’d speed,

  That leaves no vacant time to think or read.

  While curling clouds are puff ‘d throughout the room,

  Till all are buried in one smoky tomb…

  Thus, meeting to dispute, to fight, to plead,

  To smoke, to drink, - do anything but read -

  The club - with stagg’ring steps, yet light of heart,

  Their taste for learning shewn, and punch - depart.21

  There is no way of knowing how many of these clubs existed, or how closely they resembled Shillito’s version, if at all. The Monthly Magazine in 1821 estimated about 600 regular clubs, with another 260 which did not dispose of their purchases at the end of each year. The standard club seems to have averaged around a dozen or so members; this gave, at a rough estimate, about 7,500 subscribers. With families at home sharing their reading, this suggests anything from 15,000 to 25,000 people with access to club books.22

  Clubs, however, were primarily social institutions, and one had to be on good terms with the other members to join in the first place. More commercial ways of accessing books had been in existence since coffee houses first stocked books to be read on the premises. Soon many coffee houses began to extend their operations, lending out, for a fee, books that previously had been read in situ, and becoming in practice circulating libraries. Tom’s Coffee House possibly lent out its books - some of the copies in the British Library have lists of names written in them, which suggest they were being lent out in turn. Other shops quickly saw the merit in this system, including most prominently - and sensibly - booksellers themselves. As early as 1718 the St Ives Post-Boy had had an advertisement for George Barton, a bookseller in Huntingdon, who offered ‘plays, or any other books to be let out to read by the week’. Within a couple of years, these sorts of advertisement were common, showing that circulating libraries were functioning in Bristol, Birmingham and probably Bath and Norwich. By 1770 at least twenty-three towns are known to have had shops where a bookseller or other shopkeeper kept a library of books which, for a fee, were lent out to be read at home.23 This stock could range from a couple of dozen volumes in villages to several thousand in some cities.

  Subscription libraries first began to develop in commercial and industrial towns; the earliest one was in Liverpool, in 1758, then within twenty years Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Carlisle, Halifax, Hull, Leeds, Macclesfield, Sheffield, Warrington and Whitby all followed suit.24 London, by contrast, did not have a single subscription library until 1785. Even then, the London Library Society, according to The Picture of London, for 1804, was ‘a disgrace to the metropolis’ when it was compared to ‘those which exist at Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham, and other places’. It was ‘paltry’ and ‘wretchedly contemptible, and unworthy even of the small degree of patronage’ it had managed to obtain.25 Shortly after this was written that library seems to have folded. Yet at the same time the subscription libraries in the industrial and trading cities were flourishing: a library in Birmingham in 1770 had over 3,000 titles, and 459 members (32 of whom were women); the Bristol Library Society, established in 1773, when it opened held 942 titles for its 137 members (4 of them women), who paid a subscription of 1 guinea a year. Liverpool, which had started everything off, had had 109 members in its first year; by 1760 it had 140 (including 6 women), and by 1800 membership had reached 950, with ‘many ladies’. The 1760 catalogue listed occupations next to some members’ names, and this gives a rare insight into the type of people who were joining these new institutions. In Liverpool there were 47 merchants ofunnamedbusinesses, as well as a silk merchant, a wine merchant, a sugar merchant, 2 brewers, 2 brokers, 4 attorneys, 4 drapers, a pottery manufacturer, a hosier, a chandler, a grocer, a sail-maker, a rope-maker, a cooper, a cabinet-maker, a painter, a druggist, a mercer, 6 surgeons, 2 doctors, a physician, a customs officer, a teacher, a schoolmaster, a lady innkeeper, 2 clergymen, one ‘esquire’ and 4 ‘gentlemen’ - a fairly wide social range. The subscribers to the Bristol Library Society were also recorded, although without occupations, and among the names of the members appear the poets Coleridge, Southey, Robert Lovell and, later on, Walter Savage Landor; the politician and writer Edmund Burke; the chemists Thomas Beddoes and Humphry Davy; the educator (and father of the novelist Maria) Richard Edgeworth; and John Hallam, dean of Bristol and grandfather of Tennyson’s friend Henry Hallam.26

  Visitors to seaside and spa towns found circulating libraries particularly useful: these centres of social life lent books, held registers of lodgings for rent or servants for hire, sold tickets for balls, theatres and concerts, and often kept visitors books, which one was expected to sign on arrival.27 This last was a shrewd commercial move. The visitor went once to the shop to sign the register, and then returned regularly to leaf through the pages and see who else was in town. Many of these seaside and spa shops were small, or open only in the season, but many other towns had circulating libraries that were substantial: John Bell in London had a catalogue with 8,000 titles; Sibbald’s, in Edinburgh, had 6,000 titles by 1786; while in Leicester Ann Ireland stocked 2,500.28

  The cost of an annual subscription to a circulating library depended on the number of books it stocked, its location and the type of reader it was hoping to attract: in the last quarter of the eighteenth century Francis Noble in London charged 12s. a year, which was financially viable for a small shopkeeper, or an artisan in good employment, or for those in poorly paid but genteel occupations - teachers, governesses, clergy.29 For those below this level, financial or social, there were libraries that charged between 1d. and 3d. per loan, which, said Fanny Burney, meant that ‘
every butcher and baker, cobler [sic], and tinker, throughout the three kingdoms’ could afford to read.30 The tinkers might have been stretched, but at that price subscribers could include both the petty tradesmen that she named, and even their employees. In 1838 a survey of three Westminster parishes found thirty-eight libraries of this kind, generally operating from tobacconists or stationery shops, or barbers’ premises.

  The survey categorized the contents of ten of these:

  166 volumes of ‘Novels by Walter Scott, and Novels in imitation of him; Galt, &c.’;

  41 volumes of ‘Novels by Theodore Hook, Lytton Bulwer [sic] &c.’;

  115 volumes of ‘Novels by Captain Marryat, Cooper, Washington Irving, &c.’;

  136 volumes of ‘Voyages, Travels, History, and Biography’;

  49 volumes of ‘Novels by Miss Edgeworth, and Moral and Religious Novels’;

  27 ‘Works of a Good Character, Dr Johnson, Goldsmith, &c.’;

  76 volumes of ‘Romances, Castle of Otranto, &c.’;

  439 volumes of ‘Fashionable Novels, well known’;

  1,008 volumes of ‘Novels of the lowest character, being chiefly imitations of Fashionable Novels, containing no good, although probably nothing decidedly bad’;

  86 volumes of ‘Miscellaneous Old Books, Newgate Calendar, &c.’;

  39 volumes of ‘Lord Byron’s Works, Smollett’s do., Fielding’s do., Gil Blas, &c.’;

  10 volumes of ‘Books decidedly bad’.31

  Taking as a rough assumption that each book was in three volumes, this meant that these tiny circulating libraries catering to the poor each held perhaps as few as twenty books. It is noticeable that the ‘Moral and Religious Novels’ and ‘Works of a Good Character’ formed a distinct minority, while there was a healthy supply of novels ‘containing no good’. Many of these books would have been supplied from one place: William Lane’s Minerva Press, which specialized in those ‘Romances, Castle of Otranto’-type novels, as well as probably many of the ‘Novels of the lowest character’.

  Lane, the son of a poulterer, had begun as a bookseller, selling books out of his father’s shop - yet another example of bookselling as an incidental activity. In about 1784 he struck out on his own, as a producer as well as a seller of books. He set up a press in that year, calling it the Minerva Press, and began to operate what was to modern eyes a chain of circulating libraries (although no one thought of using that term). He arranged for would-be booksellers to receive a small library of his own publications, together with a catalogue and instructions on how to operate. His stock-in-trade as a publisher was romantic fiction which mixed Gothic horror with extreme sentiment - domestic sensationalism perhaps best describes the mood. Later the press moved on to historical fiction, much of it translated from French novels, and ‘silverfork’ novels - novels depicting the aristocracy and high life. Within a decade of its founding, the Minerva Press was producing about 30 per cent of all the novels published in London, which Lane then sold to other booksellers, as well as supplying the subscription libraries he controlled.32

  These libraries survived long after Lane himself, who died in 1814, missing out on the newest trend in cheap fiction. From the late 1830s the ‘blood-and-thunders’ or ‘penny-bloods’ became staples of the type of shop surveyed above (the phrase ‘penny-dreadful’ itself became popular only in the 1860s). They were small eight-page booklets with paper covers, which always carried a gory woodcut on the front, and they revolved entirely around violent crime, Gothic horror and sex. The first ones were produced by Edward Lloyd (1815-90), the founder of Lloyd’s Weekly (see p. 140ff.). Born the son of a farmer, he educated himself via the Mechanics’ Institute and began his bookselling career by publishing Dickens plagiarisms: The Post-Humorous Notes of the Pickwickian Club (in 112 numbers), and The Memoirs of Nickelas Nicklebery.33 By 1836 he had his first four penny-bloods on sale: The Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen; The Gem of Romance, or Tales of Intense Interest; The History of Pirates of all Nations; and The Calendar of Horrors.34 Lloyd was based in Salisbury Square in London, and so the 200-odd books he produced, and many others in the same genre, quickly gained the dismissive appellation ‘Salisbury Square fiction’.

  There was not much merit in the books, even if one ignored the lurid subject matter. Lloyd paid his writers by the page, and it has been suggested that this might be why there was such a heavy reliance on dialogue - short lines filled the pages much more quickly, as did constant repetition. In Amy: or, Love and Madness, E. P. Hingston produced the following:

  ‘I need no assistance, dear father. But where is Archy gone?’

  ‘He has followed your brother Frank.’

  ‘And Frank, you said -’

  ‘Has gone in pursuit of Ernest.’

  Amy looked at her father inquiringly, and demanded, -

  ‘Are you sure that Archy has gone in company with Frank?’

  ‘It is my belief that he has,’ returned Mr Heyton.

  A smile of satisfaction passed over the face of the maiden, as she ejaculated -

  ‘I am glad of that - very glad of that!’

  ‘Of what, Amy - of what are you glad?’

  ‘That Archy has accompanied Frank; said you not so, dear father?’

  ‘He has, child.’

  ‘And they have gone to seek Ernest.’

  ‘They have.’

  ‘That is fortunate; oh! that is very fortunate.’

  As one modern historian has noted, such material was cheap and quick to produce, and the readership, many of whom were probably only partly literate, may have found the constant repetition helpful.35

  There is no question that these books were popular, and that this was a lucrative field. Many other booksellers, not based in the same geographical location, also produced Salisbury Square fiction. T. Paine was one: in 1840 he began to issue Angela the Orphan: or, the Bandit Monk of Italy, advertised as ‘The most successful Romance every published’ and claiming sales of 14,000 copies a week.36 Other titles in the genre included Ada, the Betrayed, or, the Murderer at the Old Smithy; The Apparition, Crimes of the Aristocracy; The Death Ship, or, The Pirate’s Bride; and Varney, The Vampyre (this one was also known by the alternative title of The Feast of Blood)37 - and they were fantastically successful. Between 1830 and 1850 there were said to be at least ninety publishers of penny-fiction, which would mean that for every one publisher of ‘respectable’ works there were ten who published what that Westminster survey had called ‘Books decidedly bad’.38

  These books embraced a wide range of styles. One of the most omnipresent throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the chapbook. A chapbook was a 24-page booklet, with a paper cover illustrated with a woodcut. In the eighteenth century many chapbooks had retold traditional or folk stories: Jack the Giant Killer, Tom Thumb, Robin Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk. By the nineteenth century, many of these tales had been displaced into children’s books, and chapbooks instead veered towards more sensational stories, together with songs, jokes and retellings of myths and legends, or famous events, such as Dick Turpin’s ride, or the lives of criminals like Jack Sheppard, a perennial favourite. The cover illustration was generic, and rarely linked to the story - a Turk with a scimitar raised might illustrate the story of Dick Turpin and then pop up again on The Irish Assassin, while a Roman centurion graced a medieval story from Italy, the tale of Hero and Leander and the story of Valentine and Orson. At the end of each story the remainder of the space was filled in with similar randomness: a fearsome recounting of the horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta could be followed by an account of a practical joke, or ‘The Comical Sayings of Paddy from Cork, with his Coat Buttoned Behind’ might be inserted after the account of a grisly murder.39 Over the two centuries there were as many as 250 printers of chapbooks in London, and as many again in the provinces. William Dicey, who had founded the Northampton Mercury with Robert Raikes, had begun to print chapbooks as well, moving to London around 1730, when he formally joined his business int
erests with his sister’s Bow Printing Office; by 1739 the Diceys were the largest producer of chapbooks in London.40 These chapbooks were sold by street vendors, who also carried broadsides, single printed sheets with accounts of crimes, deathbed confessions of criminals, patriotic songs, jokes, verses or satirical squibs, which cost only 1/2d. - half the price of a chapbook. (The vendors also sang through the songs on the broadside for any customers unacquainted with the tunes, and were therefore

  known as patterers: those who walked the streets were running patterers; those with a fixed pitch were standing patterers.)

  Reality, or even accurate reporting, in broadsides was less important than gory details: the crimes of the ‘burkers’ Williams and Bishop in 1831 were described on a broadside that used the woodblocks illustrating the original burkers, Burke and Hare themselves, whose trial in 1828 had been of all-consuming interest. Another broadside, The Trial and Execution of the Burkers for Murdering a Poor Italian Boy, showed three murderers being executed, despite the fact that only two were, while the third was reprieved.41 This last broadside was published by James Catnach, one of the most successful chapbook and broadside publishers of the century. He employed a stable of writers, known from his location as the Seven Bards of the Seven Dials, who turned out reams of rapes, extortions, murders and deaths. Death was best for business, with highest sales coming from ‘public executions…to which was usually attached the all-important and necessary “Sorrowful Lamentations”, or “Copy of Affectionate Verses”, which according to the established custom, the criminal composed in the condemned cell the night before his execution’. These confessions were in fact usually written by Catnach’s ‘bards’, then rapidly printed up, adorned with a stock image that was supposed to represent the condemned - and always advertised as ‘an exact likeness of the murderer, taken at the bar of the Old Bailey by an eminent artist’ - and distributed to the patterers.42