POWER AND PREJUDICE ‘CIRCULATING MORALS’ IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND The nineteenth-century circulating libraries wielded enormous power over the type of books that were published, effectively acting as self-appointed censors, as Eileen Horne explains ‘It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read. ’ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) I recently found a tattered copy of The Catcher in the Rye on a bench in Hyde Park. Maybe it was accidentally left behind, or perhaps it was a gift from the book fairies. Either way, I scooped it up and re-read it, almost 40 years after my first pass. I was both grateful for the boon and relieved to no longer be that adolescent who once so identified with the angst of the book’s hero, Holden Caulfield. How differently I now perceive lines that I once underlined in pen, such as ‘Mothers are all slightly insane’ . But I still identify with and applaud Holden’s thought that when he finished a good book he wished the author was ‘a terrific friend’ who ‘you could call up whenever you felt like it’ . That will never change. Where did you get the book you’re reading now? Amazon? Waterstones? A Kindle download? Loaned from a friend? Plucked from a holiday bookshelf as the welcome cast-off of a previous occupant? Or have you borrowed it from The London Library? Whatever your source, be it begged, borrowed or stolen, and presented in electronic or paper form, there is no shortage of routes to a good book. I have never given this privilege a
second thought, but such access and choice were unimaginable two hundred years ago, especially for the average middle-class woman like myself. If I had been living in early nineteenth-century Britain, my father or my husband would have owned books, of course, and unlike my grandmother a couple of generations before me, I would almost certainly have had the education to be able to read them: by 1850, half the British female population was literate. My choices might include the family Bible, the ‘lives and letters’ of various great men, light literature and
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22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Charles Edward Mudie opened his first lending library in 1842, and began to exert an influence over publishers by insisting that the novels he chose for hire were suitable for his readership
cookery books (although Mrs Beeton’s classic wouldn’t be published until 1861). Depending on a man’s resources and interests, the house might contain a selection of history books, some English verse, and a few finely bound volumes in French, which would serve as an emblem of the owner’s education even if he never opened them. Less innocent material would be locked away in his desk or placed on a high shelf. There one might find one of the spoof librettos of the day, such as that favourite ode to flagellation, Lady Bumtickler’s Revels. Like the scandalous relative locked away in an attic or the sensuous table leg covered by a long cloth, anything outside the bounds of what was considered acceptable had to be hidden. Those who defined ‘acceptable’ in this era were determined to stay in control. Literacy was rising, while high printing costs made owning books prohibitively expensive: the price of one novel was equivalent to an average middle-class man’s weekly salary. Although Samuel Richardson is generally credited with inventing the novel a century earlier, Victorian newspaper serialisations, combined with the popular appetite for fiction, were increasing demand. The stage was set for the rise of the circulating library. This was not a new concept. Specialist lenders had offered books for hire since the early part of the eighteenth century, with credit for the original concept given to Allan Ramsay (1684–1758), a Scottish author and
