Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  The main change to travel, however, was the number of people now on the move. Even with the difficulties of stagecoach travel, the British had managed to get around their island. Once the railways arrived, numbers soared. In 1838, after the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway opened along its entire length, eleven times as many people travelled by train as had previously used the stagecoach route. Between 1836 and 1848, eight terminuses opened in London alone to handle rising demand. In 1842, with a bit over 3,200 kilometres of rail established, 24.5 million passengers travelled by train; by 1846, by which time there was nearly 16,000 kilometres of track, passenger numbers had reached 43.8 million annually. The rise in the number of travellers seemed unstoppable: numbers breached 250 million in 1865, topped 500 million comfortably in 1875, and by 1890 were around the 900 million mark.55

  Just before the arrival of the railways, the bookselling business had been convulsed by the collapse of several of the major publishing houses, which led to difficulties in acquiring - or continuing - credit, and a consequent business slump. In order to improve their situation, several publishers hit on the idea of ‘libraries’, a series of books in uniform bindings that could be purchased slowly over time. From 1827, Constable’s Miscellany, the Library of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, Murray’s Family Library and others began to appear. These were wideranging in subject matter, educational, practical, and aimed at ‘those who think, conduct themselves respectably, and are anxious to improve their circumstances by judicious means’ - the expectation was now a readership of artisans, shop assistants and clerks.56

  Then, simultaneously with the first two decades of railway travel, perhaps as a way of recouping investments more quickly for these financially unsteady booksellers, part-publication of novels became a popular means of reaching readers. Dickens and The Pickwick Papers are the heroes of this story, but there had been a few attempts at this method of publication before Dickens: Colburn’s Modern Novelists series was published in 1s. parts, with Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham appearing as issues 1 to 6. But Pelham had been written as a novel, before being taken apart and reissued in parts for serialization; Dickens had planned Pickwick specifically to appear in parts, and its episodic nature showed the format to best advantage. After a slow start, about 40,000 copies were sold each month in 1836, creating an entirely new income stream for publishers and authors. First they could part-publish, with income from the sales of each 32-page section, and from the ‘Advertiser’ supplement that successful part-publication could support: The Pickwick Advertiser ran to twenty-four pages per part. This was then followed by publication as a three-volume novel (at the standard price of 31s. 6d., which meant these books were for library sale).57 Part-publication was not opening up the market to new readers, just making the financial demands on the old middle-class readers slightly easier: after all, twenty-one parts at 1s. apiece meant that readers were paying 1 guinea per book - hardly a bargain, and affordable to many only because payment was spread out over nearly two years. Where new readers were perhaps being gained was at the lower end of the market. There the penny-bloods were issued in a similar fashion to the new middle-class system of part-publication, but these books cost between 1/2d. and 2d. a part, instead of 1s. The Romancist [sic] and Novelist’s Library, from about 1840, issued out-of-copyright novels in 2d. weekly parts, and then bound them together for the tobacco-shop libraries. By 1845 as many as half a million part copies may have been sold this way every week.58 Perhaps the most successful part-publication came originally from the newspapers. Reynolds’s Miscellany had been started in 1845 by G. W. M. Reynolds, who had edited the London Journal previously. He copied Euge`ne Sue’s Les Myste`res de Paris to produce first The Mysteries of London (1845-8); he wrote the first two series, two other writers finished it off, and it was said to have sold 1 million copies in a decade. The Mysteries of the Courts of London followed in 1848-56; this was over four series, took 624 numbers to publish and at 4.5 million words is surely worth considering as the longest ‘novel’ in English.

  By the 1840s the ‘collected’ works of an author or authors joined together with the ‘library’ style of publishing, and dozens of examples appeared: Pickering’s Alden Poets and Diamond Classics, Bentley’s Standard Novels, Colburn’s Modern Novelists, Blackwood’s Standard Novels, Burns’s Fireside Library, Hamilton’s Biblical Cabinet, Murray’s Home and Colonial Library. But the publishers were still not producing inexpensive volumes: in the 1840s most still cost between 6s. and 8s. each. It was not until 1847 that things suddenly altered: Chapman and Hall produced a ‘Cheap Edition’ of Martin Chuzzlewit (originally published in 1844) in thirty-two weekly parts at 11/2d. per week; readers thus ended up with a novel that had cost them only 4s. Oliver Twist, a shorter book, cost just 2s. 6d. for its entire run. For those with less patience and more cash the bookseller also produced monthly parts for 7d. - that is, for a penny more than the weekly part-issue, readers could find out three weeks early what was going to happen to Oliver next. Cheap editions opened up worlds of possibility to many; how much could be squeezed out of one book was also a revelation to publishers. A book was no longer a one-off event. Oliver Twist had appeared in parts in 1837-8; then it had appeared in three volumes in 1838; then it was reissued in ten parts in 1846; then it appeared once more, as a one-volume edition, in 1846. At one point Chapman and Hall had the Library Edition, the People’s Edition, the Cheap Edition and the Charles Dickens Edition of Dickens’s works all in print simultaneously.59

  Of course, Dickens was Dickens: most authors could not hope to achieve a hundredth part of his success. But the new formats had given publishers a glimpse of a huge market that was ravenous for books, and the realization, as Wedgwood had had three-quarters of a century before, that very large profits could be made on very small margins. By 1847 Simms, McIntyre was pricing its Parlour Library at 1s. or 1s. 6d. per volume; by the autumn of that year Bentley had produced 109 Standard Novels at the rather higher 5s. per volume. But the real breakthrough came with Routledge’s Railway Library, which began to appear in 1848, with its first novel, The Pilot, by James Fenimore Cooper, priced, as all the Railway Library volumes were to be, at 1s.60 (There was no US-UK copyright agreement, and piracy across the Atlantic was rife; in the UK, anyone who wanted could reprint US authors, and vice versa, without paying the author a penny.)

  As well as reprinting material not covered by copyright, George Routledge did something that had the other publishers laughing at him: he bought up old copyrights of books that had long been available. This seemed like throwing money away. But these other publishers had not noticed the change in reading habits that was under way. In the first decade of the railways, newspapers had been sold at major railway stations on an ad-hoc basis. For example, at Lime Street station in Liverpool in 1839, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway gave two men and four children the right to patrol the platforms, selling whatever they could carry. In 1841 William Marshall made a deal with the London and Blackwall Railway to open a bookstall at Fenchurch Street station in London; another stall was then opened at Euston station, under the aegis of the London and North-Western Railway. But the railway companies were busy with other things, and did not have time to go into the matter: very soon the stall at Euston, rented for a flat fee of £60 per annum, was making £1,200 a year. At that point the railways sat up and took notice, and the London and North-Western decided to put the contract up for tender. W. H. Smith, the son of the newsagent and distributor of Chapter 4, offered £1,500 for the rights to sell books and newspapers from all the London and North-Western’s stations, and he began trading in 1848, the year Routledge gave birth to his Railway Library. Smith did not have a monopoly - for the next fifteen years the West Midlands and South Wales stations’ bookstalls were run by the son of the original lessee of the Fenchurch Street station bookstall - but by 1851 Smith had 35 station bookstalls, and by 1880 that had leapt to 450. In 1902 the company had 777 bookstalls, with another 463 it rather casually referred to as ‘sub-stalls�
��.61 By 1849, the year after Smith began trading, his Paddington station stall routinely stocked 1,000 books; travellers paid 1d. to read them in the shop while they waited for their trains, or for a slightly higher fee they could take the books with them on the train, ‘returning’ them to the W. H. Smith bookstall at their destinations.62

  Smith, a devout man (he was known to many as the North-Western Missionary), wanted to run a profitable business, but at the same time he wanted to reform the reading matter of the travelling public, just as Mudie did. Bookstalls had until now mostly carried guidebooks, timetables and the sort of fiction that the Westminster survey would most probably have called ‘Novels of the lowest character’. They also stocked what was later described as pornography, which might have been what we think of as pornography, or might simply have been penny-dreadfuls. Whatever it was, this immoral trash, as Smith saw it, was quickly swept away, and replaced with books from Routledge’s Railway Library; soon Smith was ordering 1,000 Railway Library books at a time - and it must be remembered that only twenty years before, total sales of 5,000 copies for a novel was considered a howling success. As Punch understood, the North-Western Railway ‘promise[d]…to become one of the greatest engines of literature’, with a train ‘decidedly the best vehicle going for circulating a library’.63 No one was laughing at Routledge any longer. Instead, the other booksellers all jumped aboard: by 1851 Bentley’s also had a Railway Library (although it folded after three years), Longman’s had a Traveller’s Library, while John Murray produced Murray’s Railway Reading and Literature for Rail, which consisted of ‘cheap and healthy literature…containing works of sound information and innocent amusement’. Both Murray’s and Longman’s libraries were made up entirely of non-fiction works, because, contrary to expectations, W. H. Smith, the North-Western Missionary, had been absolutely right about what his customers desired: nothing less than Murray’s ‘sound information and innocent amusement’, or at least pleasant family fiction. Murray’s Railway Reading included Selections from the Writings of Lord Byron (the selections from this worryingly libertine poet rather reassuringly made by ‘a Clergyman’), a History of the Guillotine (which was lifted from an article in the Quarterly Review), Layard’s Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh, A Journey to Katmandu (the capital of Nepaul) [sic], and then a few books that were a little less worthy - like The Chace, the Turf, and the Road by ‘Nimrod’ (again lifted from the Quarterly) - not to overlook the wonderfully entitled Stokers and Pokers, a history of the London and North-Western Railway.64

  George Routledge took his most famous leap in the dark in 1854: he paid Bulwer-Lytton £20,000 for the rights to nineteen of his old novels for the next ten years. He was warned that the market had been saturated, that everyone who had wanted to read Bulwer-Lytton had done so already. He stubbornly went ahead, producing a ‘complete’ Bulwer-Lytton Library in twenty volumes for £3 11s. 6d., or 3s. 6d. per volume. At first it seemed like the doom-mongers were right: sales were slow. Then, against all expectations, the books began to sell. Routledge then reissued the novels, this time in his Railway Edition format, at 1s. 6d. each, and sold 46,000 copies. In 1859 yet another format change saw him shift a further 35,000 copies. By 1857 Routledge had made so much money on Bulwer-Lytton that he renewed the agreement annually at £1,000 a year. Bulwer-Lytton was the Railway Library’s most successful author for two decades.65

  The range of subject matter that became available over the next decade was extraordinary: now that the price did not limit the purchase of books to the prosperous classes, the market seemed ever expandable, and people were eager to sample almost any type of book. Cheap literature was suddenly everywhere: an edition of Shakespeare could be bought for 1s., an illustrated collected verse of Byron for 7d.66 Matthew Arnold claimed to have seen a copy of his Empedocles on Etna on sale at Derby station in 1854;* in 1857 Volumes 3 and 4 of Macaulay’s History of England were ‘cried up and down the platform at York like a second edition of The Times’.†68 As Trollope wrote in

  1855, ‘A man’s seat in a railway carriage is now, or may be, his study.’69

  But more than literature and contemporary fiction were promoted by the railways: all kinds of new books were ushered in by the transport revolution. In 1845 the novelist Charles Lever produced a collection of stories called Tales of the trains, being some chapters of railroad romance, by Tilbury Tramp, queen’s messenger; four years later Leigh Hunt’s A Book for a Corner, or, Selections in Prose and Verse and Readings for Railways, or Anecdotes and other Short Stories, Reflections, Maxims, Characteristics, Passages of Wit, Humour, and Poetry (this is one title) appeared; the ‘corner’ referred to was the corner seat of a railway carriage. Soon after this came The Railway Anecdote Book, which first appeared in 1850 and was successful enough to go through at least another two editions, as well as an illustrated version.

  Anthologies, however, were hardly a novelty, even if the expected reader was now sitting in the corner of a carriage instead of a corner by the fire. A completely new sort of publication came with the arrival of the timetable. The railway was a contradictory thing: it brought freedom of movement, but, in order to take advantage of that freedom, the traveller had to accept regimentation. In the early days of the railways, many of the upper classes had not recognized this, and instead feared that the new technology would exacerbate an already disturbing tendency towards equality. The Duke of Wellington worried that trains would encourage ‘the lower orders to go uselessly wandering about the country’, and at first the railway companies behaved as if it were their job to prevent this from happening. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway made would-be travellers order their tickets twenty-four hours in advance, giving name, address, place of birth, age, occupation and reason for travel, so that the ‘Station Agent’ could be assured that ‘the applicant desires to travel for a just and lawful cause’. It quickly became clear that - if for no other reason - sheer volume of traffic rendered this system impracticable. Yet the need for organization, even if one was catching a train to go ‘uselessly wandering’, was still necessary. Thomas Cook, the great excursion travel agent, put it poetically to his customers: ‘Railway time is London time, and London time is the sun’s time, and the sun’s time is common time; and Railway time all must keep…’ (my italics).70

  But it was not that simple for those who did not organize travellers for a living to accept ‘railway time’ over ‘God’s time’, as it was sometimes pointedly known. It had long been understood that, as one moved east or west, the time was different; there was, for example, twelve minutes’ difference between London and Liverpool, and thirty minutes between Yarmouth and Penzance. When stagecoaches had been scheduled to take ‘about’ two days, or were advertised as leaving, ‘God willing’, before dark, that did not much matter. When railways reduced days of travelling to mere hours, fixed times became essential. In 1840, after a decade of confusion, the South Western and the Great Western railways announced that their stations would synchronize their clocks with London time. Even then, at Rugby station, which was shared between the London and North Western and the Midland railways, the former kept local time, the latter London time. By 1845 it was generally accepted that all railways had to operate on London time, but there remained stubborn holdouts. The Chester and Holyhead Railway insisted on setting its clocks by the Craig-y-Don gun, fired daily on the estate of the local landowners at ‘noon’, precisely 161/2 minutes after the hour according to Greenwich time.* This was especially annoying to travellers since the line primarily served the Irish Mail, which itself ran on Greenwich time. As late as 1851 there was correspondence in The Times debating the merits of a uniform system, and it was only in 1852 that the South Eastern Railway made an arrangement for the Royal Observatory to transmit the Greenwich signal by telegraph to its stations along the line.†73

  Thus the new leisure and new freedom brought by the railways meant a new regimentation. Thomas Cook, in his Hand Book of 1845, which set out the itinerary for his first commer
cial trip, from Leicester, Nottingham and Derby to Liverpool, felt it necessary to warn his customers, ‘Promptitude on the part of the Railway Company, calls for the same from passengers.’74 Help in achieving this new precision was soon readily available for the anxious traveller. In the 1830s, George Bradshaw, a Quaker map-engraver working in Manchester, had produced Bradshaw’s Maps of Inland Navigation, showing the various canal routes. From there it was but a short step to producing a printed sheet to go with the maps, to list the times of the few trains that could then be linked to the canals. Bradshaw’s Time Tables was a small pamphlet costing 6d., supplemented by a Time Sheet that was only 3d.‡ In 1839 Bradshaw’s Railway Time Tables and assistant to Railway Travelling with Illustrative Maps and Plans appeared, in the teeth of opposition from the railways, which feared that the timetables ‘would make punctuality a sort of obligation’. In some of the more obdurate cases Bradshaw actually had to buy shares in the different railway companies so that as a shareholder he could force them to disclose the information he required. In 1840 his first 1s. booklet appeared: Bradshaw’s Railway Companion, containing The Times of Departure, Fares, &c. of the Railways in England, which included schedules for twelve railway companies.76 From then on, few prosperous homes were without at least one copy - and often ‘the foreign Bradshaw’, as the schedule of Continental trains was known, as well. By 1885 the Advertisers Guardian, used for selling advertising space, listed another six daily, weekly or monthly publications giving schedules.77