Katharine Kerr October 8th, 2006
An interesting review appeared in the (London) Times Literary Supplement of a mighty tome indeed: WRITERS, READERS, AND REPUTATIONS, Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918, by Philip Waller, Oxford University Press, 1,181 pages (!). Waller is a man of prodigious reading — he’s been plowing his way through the popular literature of this period, bestselling writers who are long forgotten: Nat Gould, whose books sold over 6 million copies; Charles Garvice, Hall Crane, Florence Barclay, Pearl Craigie — the list goes on and on. During Waller’s chosen period there was an explosion of popular books and reading, which he links to the spread of literacy, especially the passage in 1870 of the “Elementary Education Act” in the UK, which insured that all children would be taught to read and figure at the very least. In the USA, of course, educating all free-born children had been a goal even earlier. After the Civil War, ex-slaves were more than eager to learn to read — like the working class poor in the UK, they saw literacy as a way out of poverty.
Waller points out that reading as entertainment went hand in hand with reading as self-improvement. For every book on the many Victorian lists of “best books”, there were a hundred titles that were considered trashy, cheap, vulgar, you name it — just like our books, in other words. :-) But these were the books that the newly literate read in great quantities.
I wonder if we can say that this is the period that gave birth to true genre, that is, popular fiction that falls into certain well-defined patterns of narrative and theme. Fantasy writers like to point out that many medieval and earlier words contain fantastic elements, but as we’ve discussed elsewhere, in works like BEOWULF or The ILIAD such elements are not “fantasy” but part of a world-view that we no longer share.  Certainly there were popular entertainments in earlier eras — Hellinistic Greek adventure/romances come to mind. But these flourished in societies where literacy was the privilege of the few, not the many, and where books, copied by hand, were expensive.
Nat Gould’s novels of racetrack life sold for sixpence. You could get a Dickens for 2 shillings. Money was worth more, then, but these prices are comparable to $6 paperbacks or 11 pound trade paperbacks. Then as now books could be passed around and read by more than one person, too.
Before radio and the movies, if you wanted a story, you had to read it This is sometimes hard to imagine now. Everyone talks about TV and Movies and the Internet killing off literature, but I’m beginning to think that literature will survive just fine, that there will always be a large group of people who love to read it and will pay for the books they want.  Not even the best TV drama can really compete with a really great work of fiction. The rewards and joys are different twixt the two media.
It’s the flood of popular writing, the genres, that might well dry up because it answers needs that TV, Movies, and the like can also fill. Consider how modern special effects in film create the “sense of wonder” that written SF used to strive for. In some cases, at least, the non-book entertainments are more entertaining than the written.