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 allslightly insane’ . But I still identify with and applaud Holden’s thought that when hefinished 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 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 publisher who began renting out books (including his own) from an Edinburgh shop in 1726. Within 50 years, the business model was commonplace. Subscribers could take out an annual subscription and read dozens of books for the price of one. They could feed their appetite for the equivalent of our ‘box set’; an apt analogy, since novels were published in sets of three volumes known as ‘triple deckers’ . Libraries encouraged this practice because they could lend the volumes one by one, with strict rules about borrowing times so that other members could partake of the ‘next episode’ without delay. When some libraries became publishers themselves, they could even use the revenue generated by the first volume of a popular novel to print the second. Their customers were male, since the man of the house took out the subscription for the family. Catalogues included something for everyone, including offerings for ‘Juvenile Readers’ . But women were the main consumers of novels, and it was understood that fiction was written for women, and often written by women, even if anonymously or pseudonymously.

The preferred trajectory of a fictional narrative in its mid-Victorian heyday was towards a happy ending, with sympathetic characters and a fine moral that would ‘teach and delight’ the reader, a worthy concept harking back to Horace’s Ars Poetica. We can safely say that Jane Austen complied with this prescription, and many other and lesser authors followed her example, to create similarly ‘aspirational’ stories which centred on the pursuit of love and marriage among the middle and upper classes. The popular fiction of the period was aimed at the emerging bourgeois woman who was neither too busy with housework to read, nor too occupied with the hectic social calendar of the aristocracy.

The largest lender was Mudie’s Select Library, established in London in 1852. This was a business that dominated the landscape for half a century and helped prompt the dramatic events portrayed in my recent book, Zola and the Victorians (2015). This is a still-resonant story of censorship and hypocrisy that brings to life the trials of a largely forgotten literary martyr, English publisher Henry Vizetelly.

Charles Edward Mudie by Frederick Waddy, 1872, from Waddy’s Cartoon Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Men of the Day (1873).

Charles Edward Mudie (1818–1890) started out as a stationer and publisher in the non-fiction book trade, then opened his first lending library in 1842, situated in premises near the British Museum in London. He soon branched out into fiction, which offered a greater financial return, and began to exert an influence over publishers by insisting that the novels he chose for hire were suitable for his readership. Teach and delight, he preached, and he further stipulated that ‘nothing of objectionable character’ must disgrace his shelves. Imagine that Disney was the only film studio in Hollywood: not impossible if you recall the McCarthy era. Mudie’s high moral tone had a powerful effect both on the publishing world and on story choices made by aspiring writers. They had little choice. A listing in Mudie’s catalogue was deemed to be the best possible advertisement for a book; and if they refused to stock your novel, you were effectively blacklisted.

Mudie was not a puritanical campaigner, burning with reforming fire; rather, he was an astute entrepreneur and early adopter of the now familiar concept of brand identity. He understood that his customers were protective of their women, and he sold them a promise that a Mudie’s novel would never offend their gentle sensibilities, or put unfortunate ideas into their heads. To further cater to the core audience, Mudie’s library locations became social venues for women, offering genteel surroundings for the discerning book lover; a gathering place where she might meet her friends while making her selection.

‘Going to Mudie’s, London Society, vol.16, no.95, November 1869.

A century later, in 1961, in the case of Regina v Penguin Books Ltd, the prosecutor would stand before a jury in the Old Bailey holding aloft the novel that was the subject of the obscenity trial: D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). In a memorable climax to his summing up, he posed the question, ‘Is this a book you would allow your wife or servant to read?’ That last (and thankfully losing) battle cry of the super-correct was an echo of Mudie’s customers’ sentiments. Unsurprisingly, mid-century Victorians had crafted and supported the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, which stated that no publication should be written ‘for the purpose of corrupting the morals of youth and of a nature to shock the common feelings of decency in any well-regulated mind’ . Repression and censorship were dressed up as ‘protecting morals’ , both those of the nation’s youth and also, by implication, impressionable women. Thankfully, the jury in 1961 found the prosecutor’s priggish question amusing, and proceeded to acquit Penguin of obscenity.

By the 1880s, Mudie – along with his chief competitor, W.H. Smith, who dominated the railway-station bookselling and lending franchises – had effectively controlled the fiction market for 40 years. In 1883, George Moore, an Anglo-Irish author and progressive campaigner, came to London. The son and heir of landed gentry from the west coast of Ireland, at the age of 18 he had rebelled against his strict Catholic father and gone to Paris to pursue a career as an artist. After little success with the paintbrush, he picked up a pen. Inspired by the bohemian French authors he had befriended, he began to write novels, styling himself as ‘the English ricochet of Zola’ . When he returned to London to see his work published, he was positioned on a collision course with Mudie.

At this time, Émile Zola (1840–1902) was the best-known novelist in France, among the most celebrated in Europe. He had sold over a million copies of his novels at home, and they were published in translation around the world, although not widely in English. Zola was his generation’s Balzac, Dickens or Tolstoy, with an added fillip of Darwin. He was credited as the founder of the school of French Naturalism, a step forward from Flaubert’s ‘realism’ , writing modern fiction with an unflinching style that eschewed Dickens’s family-friendly approach to tragedy and degradation. Zola set forth his aims in scientific terms, concocting ‘experiments’ with characters of different backgrounds, exploring their ‘chemistry’ and their ‘primal natures’ with a fierceness that might be instructive, but could hardly be said to ‘delight’ in the mode of the English novel. But he had such tremendous descriptive powers and fine dramatic ability that his novels were – and still are – gritty and compelling reading.

Moore sought to replicate Zola’s success in England with his first novel, A Modern Lover (1883). Like Zola’s novel His Masterpiece, Moore’s semiautobiographical story follows the amoral adventures of a painter and his friends in bohemian Paris. It was soon blacklisted by Mudie’s. The furious young author wrote to the Pall Mall Gazette, the influential daily paper ‘written by gentlemen for gentlemen’ , in an open letter titled ‘A New Censorship of Literature’ . He criticised the library for the repression of a new voice, blaming it for the ‘emasculation of British fiction’ . Under Mudie’s censorship, Moore wrote, ‘humanity [in British fiction] becomes headless, trunkless, limbless, and is converted into the pulseless, nonvertebrate, jellyfish sort of thing’ . He called for an end to this tyranny of the anodyne.

Thirty years later, another angry young author would pen a tirade so similar that he must have been familiar with Moore’s outcry. Writing to a mentor and friend in 1912, he cursed the ‘blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters … the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulseless lot that make up England today’ . You’ll find this complaint in The Letters of D.H. Lawrence: The Cambridge Edition (vol.1, 2003) in the novelist’s letter to Edward Garnett, prompted by Heinemann’s recent rejection of ‘Paul Morel’ (later published as Sons and Lovers) on the grounds that its ‘want of reticence’ made it unfit for publication in England.

The pulseless brigade similarly cursed Moore’s second novel. A Mummer’s Wife describes a young seamstress’s adulterous affair and subsequent fall from grace into alcoholism and ruin – a kind of bastard child novel of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Zola’s L’Assommoir. After the very public debacle of his first effort, no publisher would touch it – until Moore met Henry Vizetelly, who agreed to release the book in one affordable volume. He also offered to publish a pamphlet Moore had written as an extension of his furious anti-Mudie tirade in the press. It was titled Literature at Nurse – or Circulating Morals and also served as the foreword to A Mummer’s Wife in Vizetelly’s 1885 edition.

‘Light Reading With a Vengeance’, Punch, 27 January 1877.

In a no-holds-barred polemic, Moore characterises Mudie as ‘a tradesman’ , ‘scarcely competent to decide the delicate and difficult artistic questions that authors in their struggles for new ideals must raise’ . He relates how Mudie admitted to him that ‘two ladies in the country’ (and possibly their husbands?) had objected to his first novel, which caused the library to drop it from their inventory. To compound the insult, Mudie had encouraged the aspiring author to write another ‘more suitable’ novel, a suggestion that Moore scorned – although, it has to be said, as the heir to a fortune, he was in a position to question such commercial imperatives, unlike many of his peers. Moore rejected the ‘unknown and irresponsible tribunal’ and the romantic nonsense Mudie seemed to prefer, which he saw as more detrimental to impressionable readers than his ‘realistic’ offering.

In the spirit of Zola, Moore insisted that his writing was rooted in research and truth. He made an interesting argument: realism can be shocking and ugly, but it is not as dangerous as fantasy and escapism for an impressionable readership because fantasy does not accurately represent consequence. When the heroine of A Mummer’s Wife leaves her husband for a travelling singer, she has a rude awakening, realising ‘she had done what she had so often read in novels, but somehow it did not seem at all the same thing’ . In effect, Moore was accusing romantic authors and purveyors of their novels, such as Mudie, as the real ‘authors of immorality’ for misleading women readers, to whom they fed the lie of escapism and a happy ever after.

Moore’s article caused quite a stir, with letters for and against his position filling the London press for weeks. Battle lines were drawn, but Vizetelly’s commercial strategy was a change of approach: he took his publications (including Moore but also numerous translations of ‘modern European classics’ ranging from Tolstoy to Flaubert) out of range of the circulating libraries. He began issuing novels in affordable single volumes which were sold directly to the public. The response was gratifying. Moore’s novels were profitable and well reviewed, and he introduced his friend Zola to the firm. Vizetelly went on to buy the English-language rights to Zola’s complete works, and by 1888, he would boast in an interview that he was selling ‘a thousand copies of Zola a week’ . Then came a terrible backlash, which forms the narrative for my book. Although I am a long-time devotee of Zola, I was unfamiliar with Moore’s writing until I began to research the Vizetelly story, in which he features large. It has been a pleasure to get to know him and, to quote Holden Caulfield, I would love to be able to call him up whenever I felt like it.