Snobbery With Violence Read online

  By 1880, Matthew Arnold felt himself constrained to apply the description ‘cheap, hideous and ignoble of aspect’ to ‘the tawdry novels which flare in the bookshelves of our railway stations, and which seem designed, as so much else that is produced for the use of our middle-class seems designed, for people with a low standard of life’.

  The occurrence of the word ‘class’ is to be noted in all three of these attacks. One might wonder if there was not at the root of the writers’ irritation a sense of outrage that people able to afford books, and therefore a cut above the plebeian masses, had neglected to show discrimination proper to their social standing.

  What every critic failed in some measure to understand was that the production of books – their writing, printing and selling – had become a commercial operation, subject to commercial laws and pressures, and that their character was no longer likely to be determinable by enlightened arbiters. In literature, as in all else that was bought and sold, it was now needful to conform to the ethos of the market place, the principle that the customer was always right.

  Later, in 1889, Arnold showed himself aware of what had happened and of what it portended. He wrote:

  If literature is to be judged by a plebiscite, and if the plebiscite recognizes its power, it will certainly by degrees cease to support reputations which give it no pleasure and which it cannot comprehend.

  Which then, were the reputations that were to command the support of the ‘plebiscite’, by which Arnold meant that growing section of society placed between an aristocracy too contemptuous of culture to read books and a proletariat too impecunious to buy them? Who but the authors of the ‘novel of sensation’, the vendors of excitement, the ‘preachers to the nerves’? The Quarterly’s definition was wide enough to catch a Mrs Gaskell, a Thackeray and a whole parsonage of Brontës, but such was the accommodating nature of the English puritan tradition. What it was doubtless intended to indict in particular was fiction that pandered to the ‘non-serious’ public by offering vicarious experience in contrived and self-resolving situations – a sort of literary fairground ride. This was the reading matter that subsequently would be categorized as ‘escapist’ literature. It was fated never to become quite respectable, and although by the turn of the century the tradition of regarding all but expressly educative or morally improving books as time-wasters was virtually dead, censure was still reserved for those novels of sensation whose theme was crime and for which the handy terms ‘thriller’ or ‘shocker’ had been coined.

  Like most things that excite disapproval, the thriller was popular. It was to become addictive, even if it could not yet be so described at the time when Dickens, emulating his friend Wilkie Collins, began work on The Mystery of Edwin Drood. This unfinished essay in detective fiction followed Collins’s The Moonstone on a road away from the Gothic fantasy world that had served to scare the readers of a line of authors from Walpole to Sheridan le Fanu. The development was towards sensationalism relevant to contemporary life and its line had been indicated as early as the 1840s by Edgar Allen Poe’s brief excursion from his graveyard to create the Dupin trilogy and earn thereby the title of Father of the Detective Story.

  An increasing number of writers after 1870, the year of Dickens’s death, turned their ingenuity and energy to the construction of crime stories. The market widened steadily. It seemed almost as if human waywardness were a newly invented commodity, like oilcloth or soda-water, and that the public could not have enough of it.

  Then, in 1887, a Scottish doctor practising in Southsea scored a modest success with a book he had written in hope of adding a few pounds to his income. Subsequently serialized in the Strand magazine, the tale was called A Study in Scarlet and featured an eccentric private detective of phenomenal intellect who lodged in an unfashionable London street with a companion whose loyalty and stoutness of heart were matched only by the ordinariness of his opinions and the thickness of his comprehension. The Holmes–Watson combination was a formula that succeeded almost at once and its inventor, Arthur Conan Doyle, was to expand it in the next forty years into a myth that seized the imagination of the world.

  So much analysis, speculation, commentary and spoof biography have been produced by the worshippers at the Baker Street shrine as to convey the impression that Doyle was the sole patentee not only of Sherlock Holmes but of gaslight, the hansom cab, telegraphy, Scotland Yard, perhaps even of Victorian London itself, fogs and all. Is this a tribute to the man’s gift for imparting a sense of period and of atmosphere? Dickens had a greater descriptive skill, for he was a very much more accomplished writer, and yet one is reluctant, somehow, to give his pictures absolute credence, perhaps because they are frightening. The London of Holmes commends itself at once and unconditionally. It is quaint enough to make nostalgic appeal. It is exceedingly well-ordered: those telegraphic offices are never closed, no cab is ever otherwise than within instant hail. Its population is unfailingly obliging: half-a-crown will secure from the nearest stranger the immediate execution of whatever task or errand one cares to name. It is a city whose every crime is soluble and whose vices are sealed within narrow and defined areas. It is a cosy place. It is, for as long as a hawk-eyed man broods in Baker Street, a safe place. It does not exist. It never did. But Doyle managed to build it in the minds of his readers.

  And here we have the real achievement of Conan Doyle. He successfully transplanted from the big, solid, slow-paced novel of social relationships to his own piquant and immediately enthralling crime fiction that element of illusory reassurance, that echo of the reader’s private wishes and opinions, which is the germ of every bestseller. He was an outstanding example of the sort of author who was destined first to capture, then to be imprisoned by, the mass readership of the new century. Long after he had tired of his own creation, public insistence upon repeat performance was too strong to be denied. Not even Doyle’s desperate attempt to kill off his hero – a precursor of the ‘writing out’ of characters in television series – persuaded the public to abate its appetite for Holmesian adventure and allow Doyle to concentrate on work he considered much more important. In any case, where Holmes was, there was the money also, and Doyle’s generosity in the causes he espoused was dependent on it. So despite failing enthusiasm, evidenced by carelessness of style and increasing artificiality of plot, new stories continued to be published right up to 1927, three years before his death.

  Conan Doyle opened his literary career as a Victorian, prepared to take just enough time off from serious matters to earn an extra guinea or two by means of a relatively frivolous device. At its close, he was rich, and enormously respected by a generation that already used Victorianism as a term of scorn. He was openly imitated by a large proportion of crime fiction’s great catering corps of the 1920s. The device had made his fortune and his reputation, and Doyle reflected that it had mastered him in the process. He lived long enough to have the comfort of seeing himself in the company of plenty of other writers for whom success was also a sort of servitude.

  “EXCUSE ME—DO YOU HAPPEN TO HAVE COME ACROSS A PORTION OF THE EVENING GAZETTE CONTAINING THE THIRD INSTALMENT OF ‘THIRTEEN CROOKS’?”

  CHAPTER 2

  Mr Smith, Mr Boot and others

  The 1870 Education Act that formally decreed schooling for all is still widely believed to have been akin to vaccination. It ‘did away’ with illiteracy just as vaccination ‘did away’ with smallpox.

  In fact a great number of people other than those who had received the privilege of formal education was able to read in the eighteenth, let alone the nineteenth century. By the 1830s, a popular political pamphlet could achieve a sale of 200,000 and a broadsheet one of more than a million, or about a fifteenth part of the whole population. A publication reaching a similar proportion today would be judged to have done very well. It is probable that at least three quarters of all adults were able to read without much difficulty a hundred years ago and that by the end of the century the proportion was about ninety-f
ive per cent.

  As literacy became more nearly universal, the question of what was being read, and by whom, is of increasingly greater importance than a simple ability percentage. By 1920, virtually everybody could read. There existed, in great variety and at prices as low as mechanical processes could make them, a prodigious amount of reading matter. Whatever proved to be in demand could easily be produced and reproduced. Channels of distribution were wide, numerous and efficiently organized. Paper was cheap. The last of the State taxes on the printed word had long since been removed. Government’s recovery from its ancient phobia in respect of the political danger of over-informed masses had been further evidenced by the 1919 Public Libraries Act. Northcliffe was consolidating his newspaper revolution in preparation for the imminent wars of circulation. The commercial lending library was as commonly to be found as a post office.

  Reading, clearly, was no longer the privilege of a few but an established habit of the majority of the population.

  Newspapers were for the greatest number the main source of reading, sometimes the only source. The million and a half who took a daily paper in 1900 had swelled to more than two millions by 1914. Four years of war, during which even such evasive and doctored accounts of events as censorship allowed were avidly received, gave stimulus that proved permanent in effect. In 1920, there were five million daily readers and thirteen million readers of the Sunday press. The former were chiefly middle class people living in urban areas, while working class allegiance lay substantially with Sunday papers, in particular the News of the World.

  Periodicals had been expanding in number, scope, and circulation at a rate no less impressive than that of the growth of newspaper sales. Northcliffe alone owned more than a hundred when he died in 1922. Discounting the technical and specialist journals, the children’s comics and the juvenile weeklies, there was still a great mass of periodical reading matter in the 1920s and 1930s designed to entertain rather than inform. That this implies a recipe common also to the bulk of newspaper publication is not surprising: the same people owned both.

  Book publishing had kept pace with the expansion of newspapers and periodicals since the mid-nineteenth century. Some two and a half thousand titles were issued each year in the 1850s and this number increased to just over six thousand in 1901. The next twelve years saw the doubling of the annual book issue. There was a recession during the 1914–18 war, but by the early 1920s the figure was back to more than twelve and a half thousand, only a quarter of which were reprints. Expansion was to continue until the second world war and to reach an annual total of more than seventeen thousand.

  This meant that a buyer or borrower of books in the 1920s and 1930s could choose from between 180 and 210 brand new titles every week. A contemporary of Jane Austen would have been offered a selection from about ten.

  Who were the customers for all these books, or rather for the fiction that formed a sizable proportion of them?

  They were, in general, the same people who bought a daily newspaper and one or more of the sort of magazine that contained, in short story serial form, a ‘good read’. They had an income high enough and of sufficient regularity for a shilling or two a week to be spared for subscription to a circulating library or to hire their reading from a ‘chain’ or lending library – apart from the occasional outright purchase of a novel to read on a journey or holiday. They were people who read with facility and by habit, whose hours of employment were not unduly long, and whose jobs did not leave them too tired physically to feel the need for combating boredom. They read for pleasure rather than for education, and to kill time, not ignorance (with which, in any case, they were not conscious of being burdened). There were many railway travellers among them, many passengers on buses and tubes, contributing to the 27% growth of London’s outer ring of suburbs between 1921 and 1931. They doubtless included a fair number of the million-and-a-half wage and salary earners with entitlement in the 1920s to holidays with pay – a right which some ten million others were not to win until after 1938 and the Holidays with Pay Act. But the majority of these readers were not commuters or wage earners. They were women – the middle-class wives and mothers and daughters whose task it commonly was to select and bring home a fresh supply of the family’s reading matter.

  According to Mrs Q. D. Leavis, whose Fiction and the Reading Public was published in 1932, ‘shops existing solely to sell books are rare outside the university towns of Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh, certain parts of London and a few big cities. Serious book-buying has not increased in proportion to literacy; the bulk of the public does not buy many books but borrows or hires them.’ Emphasizing that the subscription libraries – notably Mudie’s, Boots and W. H. Smith’s – stocked chiefly novels, she found it significant ‘that the proportion of fiction to non-fiction borrowed is overwhelmingly great, that women rather than men change the books (that is, determine the family reading), and that many subscribers call daily to change their novels.’ In suburban and even rural areas, added Mrs Leavis with characteristic asperity, ‘it is common to find a stock of worn and greasy novels let out at 2d or 3d a volume’. ‘Tuppenny dram-shops’, she called these establishments, noting that a typical advertisement in one of them specified the following authors: ‘Sapper’, Sax Rohmer, Zane Grey, Edgar Wallace, William Le Queux, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Rider Haggard, and a group of seven women ‘romantic’ authors headed by Ethel M. Dell and Ruby M. Ayres.

  The Boots Booklovers’ Library was begun in 1899, at the instigation of the first wife of the manufacturing chemist, Jesse Boot. More than two hundred of the firm’s branches were equipped with library facilities by 1909. In the mid-1930s, when circulating libraries were at the peak of their popularity, there were book sections in four hundred and fifty branch shops. From the beginning, the Boots Library was operated on a ‘loss leader’ principle. Shelves were always at the back of the shop and as subscribers passed through to change their books they became potential customers at the chemists’ counters. The subscription was kept deliberately low. Originally half a guinea a year, it increased only slowly to thirty shillings. The service was being used by between a quarter and half a million people in the 1930s, despite competition from the new chain libraries, and it has been claimed that the library was buying for its 340 branches one and a quarter million books a year at one period. It was the last nation-wide circulating library to succumb to the social and economic changes after the second world war: final closure came in February 1966.

  Aiming as it did to attract maximum custom, Boots Library invariably placed emphasis on fiction, and this included a large proportion of crime novels. A similar policy was pursued – though not in their case purely as a device to encourage cash sales – by W. H. Smith and Son. Library facilities existed at most branches of Smith’s by 1920. A review thirteen years later showed that more than three hundred shops and three hundred and seventy five bookstalls had a library service. The larger branches had over a thousand subscribers apiece; the majority of the others had between one and three hundred. No one seems to have kept a complete register of the numbers of borrowers, but the total must have been well in excess of a hundred thousand around that time.

  After 1933, Smith’s added what it called its ‘Country and Small Branch Service’. This brought into the organization all the smaller or remote shops and stalls, and supplied them by post with books from a central library stock at the firm’s London headquarters. In addition, a special subscription service was offered, on a group basis, to staff associations, clubs, certain banks, the Civil Service Clerical Association, teachers and local government officials. That this development was thought worth while underlines the essentially middle-class character of the circulating library public.

  In the mid-1930s, a small branch of Smith’s had between two and four hundred books on its shelves. The medium-sized shop offered from four to nine hundred volumes. There were a hundred and sixty branches in which the stock stood at a thousand volumes and over. The space needed
was considerable, and it was this factor, more perhaps than any other, which figured in the decision to end the service in 1962, by which time the expanding and much more profitable business of selling gramophone records had taken precedence.

  There was issued in the autumn of 1939 a list of popular fiction available through the W. H. Smith library service. Its hundred and fifty pages contained some thirteen thousand five hundred titles. About a half were romance, a quarter were adventure stories, and a quarter were crime novels. These figures lend weight to the contention that the subscription libraries were customers for something like three-fifths of all copies of ‘sensation’ fiction that were being produced. The multitude of suburban and provincial lending libraries bought much of the remainder. It did not greatly matter, from the point of view of publishers and writers of escapist literature, that the rate-supported municipal and county libraries remained comparatively unaccommodating in this field even after the legislation that made them available – in theory, anyway – to ninety-six per cent of the population by 1926. A big ready-made market existed and, provided that an author’s work matched this or that approved formula, it was bound to sell.

  The novelist Howard Spring declared in his introduction to a collection of detective stories, for instance, that ‘the present intense outpouring is something unique in letters. There never has been in the whole history of writing anything approaching a similar output of invention on one subject; and whereas most writing is a supply which humbly hopes to create demand, all this detective writing is a clear case of a demand creating a supply.’