History of Reading News. Vol.XVII No.1 (1993:Fall)
by Jonathan Rose

Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain: 1914-1950, by Joseph McAleer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. 284.

More than a decade has passed since Robert Darnton sketched out the classic life cycle of the book -- from author to publisher to printer to distributor to bookseller to reader. Darnton regretted the tendency of book historians to focus on a single link in the chain, and he urged that "some holistic view of the book as a means of communication seems necessary if book history is to avoid being fragmented into esoteric specializations, cut off from each other by arcane techniques and mutual misunderstanding" (Darnton, 1989, p. 30). That admirable goal, however, demands scholarship of extraordinary breadth: very few historians have succeeded in tracing the progress of a book through the entire "Darnton circuit."

In his very first monograph, Joseph McAleer has achieved just such a tour de force. His subject is the mass reading public and popular fiction in modern Britain, including Mills and Boon romances and the magazines mass-produced by D. C. Thomson and the Religious Tract Society. Q. D. Leavis (1932) and George Orwell (1968) addressed the same body of junk literature, but McAleer's research is far deeper. He has interviewed authors, editors, publishers, and literary agents; measured the influence of wars, depressions, wireless, and the cinema on book sales; studied developments in advertising, printing technology, and market research; and (completing the circuit) shown how feedback from readers and newsagents influenced writers and publishers.

McAleer has scrounged up a wealth of source material on reading in interwar Britain, much of which was previously unknown to other researchers. In addition to statistics from publishers, libraries, and press surveys, he has drawn on Gallup polls, Mass Observation studies, social surveys, and the columns of the Bookseller and Publishers' Circular; and he uses this material to discern not only what readers were reading, but why they were reading it.

Like Orwell and Mrs. Leavis, McAleer concludes that romances, thrillers, and children's magazines were opiates for the masses, quite deliberately communicating conservative social values. Rising production costs after the First World War meant that books had to attract a larger readership to earn a profit. That development, according to McAleer, made publishers unwilling to take a chance on new or challenging authors, and encouraged the production of standardized, commodified, easy-to-digest fiction.

There is no question that Edgar Wallace, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Agatha Christie, Angela Brazil, and authors of their calibre supplied most of the fiction consumed by the British public. But McAleer may be going a bit too far when he decidedly concludes that readers of trash literature "did not graduate to 'high-brow' novels and non-fiction" (p. 244). Many librarians thought otherwise, and I have found a body of autobiographical evidence to support them. Surveys of young readers in Blaina, Wales, in 1942 and Birmingham, England, in 1950, revealed a substantial and continuing demand for the classics (p. 144). McAleer notes that "only" nine percent of readers surveyed in l947 bought Penguin Books (p. 59), but that seems an impressive figure for a single imprint, and Penguin's years of real growth still lay in the future. By focusing on such commercial lending libraries as Boots, Mudie's, and W. H. Smith, McAleer may have slanted the picture in favor of light fiction, which after all was their specialty. The secular trend in publishing, as in other cultural industries, appears to have been a steady increase in the production of rubbish and classics: Mills and Boon sold books by the million, but so did Everyman's Library. To concentrate on the former may create the illusion that it was forcing Jane Eyre out of the market, which it was not.

That quibble aside, McAleer should be applauded for showing the rest of us what can be done with the history of reading. Anyone working in any aspect of the field would learn much from Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain. If Oxford University Press has the foresight to bring it out in paperback, make your students read it as well.

Drew University
Jonathan Rose

REFERENCES

Darnton, R. (1989). What is the history of books? In C. Davidson (Ed.), Reading in America: Literature and social history. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Leavis, Q. D. (1932). Fiction and the reading public. London: Chatto & Windus.

Orwell, G. (1968). Boys' weeklies. In S. Orwell and I. Angus (Eds.), The collected essays, journals and letters of George Orwell (Vol. 1). New York: Harcourt Brace & World.

Jonathan Rose is an associate professor of history at Drew University and president of The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing. Rose is currently writing an intellectual history of the British working class.