A Return to the English Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900 ed. by Beth Palmer, Adelene Buckland

While browsing through boxes of discarded books at an Ohio State University English department book sale in the mid-1990s, I stumbled across a three-volume set of thematically arranged excerpts from Henry Mayhew’s The London Labour and the London Poor reissued in England in the 1960s. What captivated me about the set was not just that it provided a wealth of information about the lives of common people in Victorian England, but that each volume had a personalized bookplate printed with the name Richard Daniel Altick. Even as a new graduate student I knew how important Altick was to Victorian studies and to the research I wanted to do on periodicals and their readers. Purchasing the books, I left with the sense that I held a piece of scholarly history in my hands.

Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland pay tribute to Altick’s remarkable contribution to Victorian book history and periodical studies in A Return to the English Common Reader. As they note in their introduction, “it is rare that a book retains its place on student reading lists for over half a century,” but Altick’s The English Common Reader (1957) “has done just that” (1). Altick’s book laid the groundwork for the study of reading, writing, and publishing that has, perhaps, reached its height in the past decade with the emergence of electronic databases that facilitate the study of the popular press in the nineteenth century. Most of the essays in this collection, however, do not engage directly with the many new periodical databases but use more traditional archival sources, including prison records, diaries, government documents, and the correspondence of authors and publishers to forge arguments about how and what ordinary people read in the nineteenth century. Some of these readers “smuggled fiction into secret places, some subverted or reconfigured official interpretations of biblical or didactic texts. . . . Some even reconfigured their political or national identities around the act of reading” (4). Regardless of who these readers were or what records they left behind, Palmer and Buckland find one common thread among them: an overwhelming desire for fiction.

The explosion of the periodical press and the serialization of the novel cultivated this desire. Although Altick was critical of the penny dreadfuls and shilling shockers that most readers demanded and instead privileged the rise of more accessible and better quality fiction for the masses, many of this volume’s contributors counter Altick by exploring the productive ways in which ordinary people engaged with whatever they were reading. This collection thus complicates the notion of “good” or “bad” readers and “good” or “bad” novels even while it builds on the foundation set by Altick.

In her excellent opening essay, Laurel Brake argues that despite his own views of popular reading material, Altick’s work is largely responsible for dismantling the division between “consumers of literature—the object of study in departments of English—and ‘common’ readers of the ‘popular’ press” (9). Brake acknowledges Altick’s contribution while simultaneously revising his conception of the “rise” of the novel as analogous with the expansion of the periodical press. Brake argues that the process of novel serialization actually made the periodical industry the dominant print cultural form of the century. Despite many reviewers’ complaints about fiction, she claims, the novel was crucial to the proliferation and survival of all periodicals, even those that did not publish fiction (in part because they often did publish fiction reviews). Brake’s essay nicely frames the collection by directly engaging with Altick’s legacy, complicating it, and providing a framework for understanding the other contributors’ essays, which are largely focused on the reading and critical reception of fiction.

In part 1, “Publishers, Authors, Critics, Readers,” Kate Macdonald discusses women’s use of Dorothy’s Home Journal, a late-Victorian penny fiction weekly, for education and self-improvement. Macdonald explores the magazine’s literary reading lists, its inclusion of a word search based on completing the recommended reading and identifying key words from it, and its writing competitions as evidence that it systematically encouraged readers to improve and expand their reading material. Thus, even while publishing cheap fiction, Dorothy’s promoted an aspirational idea of reading that would lift its audience above the “common” realm. Jane Jordan shifts our attention to author-publisher relations in her study of Ouida’s combative correspondence with representatives from the Chapman and Hall and Chatto publishing houses. While Ouida wrote popular sensational fiction, Jordan argues that she purposefully sought to raise the status of her fiction by resisting the publication of cheap editions of her works. Interestingly, Ouida and her publishers agreed that replacing three-volume novels with single-volume editions was important. However, her publishers wanted to do so to broaden and diversify her audience, while Ouida wanted to cultivate more exclusive readers. Either way, the result was the demise of the baggy monster of the multivolume novel.

Both Debra Gettelman and Katie Halsey discuss the impact professional and amateur readers had on the status of fiction and fiction writers. Gettelman focuses on critics’ construction of reading practices as good or bad depending on the ways one read, and on one’s class, as much as on the material one was reading. Working-class readers were assumed to read only for plot, a kind of reading that would supposedly exclude thoughtful analysis, while more elite readers were assumed to pause and reflect on what they read, thereby making the reading process more productive and imaginative. This more advanced kind of reading was, of course, thought to be preferable. Similarly, Halsey compares different levels of readerly expertise to explain the shifting status of Jane Austen. She argues that Austen’s largely amateur audience has promoted the ideal of Austen as a moral guide whose characters provide consoling power, while her professional readers have dismissed this personalized response. These conflicting views continue to affect interpretations of Austen’s work today.

Part 2 explores specific “scenes of reading.” Jenny Hartley and Rosalind Crone both focus on the reading practices of prisoners. Hartley starts with two basic questions: Were prisoners literate, and what access to reading material did prisoners have? She concludes that literacy rates rose steadily among prison populations throughout the century and that fiction, while frowned upon, was the preferred material to pass the time. Hartley points out that much of this fiction reading came from access to didactic fiction and novels of fashionable life serialized in the Leisure Hour, a penny weekly published by the Religious Tract Society and donated to prisons. Likewise, Crone focuses on the privileging of religious texts, particularly the Bible, on convict ships headed to Australia in the early decades of the century. She argues that the Bible was presumed to curb criminal behavior and was therefore used as a part of a highly organized educational campaign to mold prisoners into industrious members of society.

Sharon Murphy examines Lieutenant Colonel J. H. Lefroy’s 1859 report on military libraries to draw conclusions about the reading practices of British soldiers. The debate about appropriate reading material is as prominent in Lefroy’s report as it was in the documents of prison officials and, once again, fiction wins out despite efforts to encourage more serious nonfiction reading. Murphy argues that the concession was made to include more novels and better furnishings in military libraries as a way to keep soldiers out of canteens and public houses. Moving from the midcentury military to the broader colonial enterprise in the last decades of the century, Beth Palmer analyzes records at the Royal Colonial Institute, which was established to “promote the union of Britain and its colonies through education and debate” (133). Palmer argues that the RCI’s categorization of books by colonial areas positioned English readers at the center of the globe, giving the impression that they had discovered “or even created” the territories. Yet, the library also “offered strategies” to “read against the grain of . . . imperialist ideology” by providing a wide array of colonial newspapers and novels that presented alternative views, deliberately inviting open discussion among the gentlemen who frequented the reading room (141).

Finally, Tim Dolin explores fiction preferences in Australia between 1880 and 1914. Echoing the resounding theme of the collection, Dolin argues that while “Australian cultural identity was formed through the consumption of culture largely from elsewhere,” the preferences of readers did not coincide with those in British public libraries (151–52). The records of the Collie Institute Library of Western Australia and responses culled from the Australian Common Reader Database show that readers chose not to borrow books by Shakespeare, Thackeray, Hardy, Kipling, Stevenson, and Wells, and rarely borrowed Scott or Dickens. Instead, working-class Australians preferred contemporary best sellers by Joseph Hocking, Nat Gould, and Edward Phillips Oppenheim. The idea that reading choices shaped individual as well as communal and even national identities is one that permeates A Return to the Common Reader. This collection effectively illustrates that broad generalizations cannot be made about who the “common reader” was or how, what, and why she or he read. Palmer and Buckland have assembled engaging essays that explore an interesting array of potential common readers while reminding us that there is still a great deal of research to be done in this field of study and that Altick is still a guiding force.