The Railways Read online

  Cultural disdain of Gissing’s kind was not new: it echoed arguments over the quality of available reading matter and the direction of popular taste in the earliest decades of railway travel, especially in the matter of books. Here, too, production costs were falling, partly thanks to bigger print runs, partly from mechanisation of the binding process, so that the unit costs of books of comparable types fell by more than half during Victoria’s reign.

  These changes also promised much to the promoters of moralised and moralising literature. In the eighteenth century this usually had a religious flavour. Streams of more secular or ecumenical material joined the out-flow early in the century following: anthologies, uniform ‘Library’ series, cheap reprints of fiction and wedges of earnestly factual matter aimed at the self-improver and self-educator, such as the dense fortnightly instalments from the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Debate went back and forth higher up the social scale as to the utility or wisdom of spreading information among the lower ranks in this way, but this was beside the point: once mass production had begun, there was no effective means of stopping the circulation of reading material.

  The railway bookstall thus became something of a cultural battleground. Unlike the ordinary bookshop, market stall or pedlar’s tray, it could be licensed, supervised and controlled, and it played a part too in public perceptions of the soundness of the host company. But the railways themselves were slow to catch on. It took until 1841 for the first recorded bookstall to be set up, at the Fenchurch Street terminus of what was then the London & Blackwall Railway. Before the coming of the stalls, newspapers were simply hawked up and down the platforms. Early interventions from railway management in the running of bookstalls arose from the need to find fresh employment for railwaymen disabled in company service, or sometimes for widows of those fatally injured. The illiterate were not always excluded, so that some stallholders had no idea whether their wares were improving, harmless or disreputable. Nor did the earliest stalls always do a good job with their stock, which was set out ‘in amicable jumble with beer-bottles, sandwiches, and jars of sweets’, as one writer recalled in 1893. That the merchandise was on display for all to see, from bishop to barrow-boy, also brought home the horrid fact that many readers preferred material with a strong flavour of tripe. As Punch later put it:

  I bought from the stall at Victoria

  A horrible sixpenny story, a

  Book of a kind

  It pained me to find

  For sale at our English emporia.

  Letters of protest started to appear in the papers. Meanwhile, the business was on the eve of reform.

  A well-remembered article in The Times in Great Exhibition year catches the point of transition. Its author, Samuel Phillips, describes seeing two young women and a boy travelling first class, all engrossed for three hours by a green-covered volume of Eugène Sue, the French author of shock-horror novels of the underworld. Phillips remembers having seen a pile of such stuff at a station bookstall (just as perverse as if the refreshment rooms should be selling poison, he thought). He then tours the London termini, finding mostly ‘unmitigated rubbish’. But Euston proves an exception: rubbish is unavailable there at any price, and the writer’s request for something ‘highly coloured’ is answered by the offer of Kugler’s eminently worthy History of Painting.

  The names of the men who had made the difference at Euston are still familiar: William Henry Smith (1792–1865) and his son and partner, also William Henry (whence their company’s original title, W. H. Smith & Son). As it turns out, The Times’s man was friendly with the younger Smith – indeed, newspaper and newsagent were doing very nicely by one another at this period, Smiths paying an annual kickback of £4,000 in return for receiving The Times’s earliest copies for onward distribution. Phillips’s piece probably therefore exaggerated the differences between the Euston offerings and the rest. (For example, Matthew Arnold spotted his impeccably serious new poem Empedocles on Etna on offer at Derby station bookstall in 1853, before Smiths took over there.) Even so, the story of the Smiths’ rise is remarkable enough. Smith Snr had set up as a newspaper distributor in coaching days, achieving a near-monopoly of the trade out of London and switching his business to the railways as the network grew. In 1848 the partnership arranged with Mark Huish, the London & North Western Railway’s formidable general manager, an exclusive lease on all the bookstalls along that line. A better choice of printed matter replaced the jumbled comestibles, and young men experienced in the book trade were recruited to replace any unsuitable employees. The stock was likewise purged of unrespectable material, for which reason Phillips called the younger W. H. Smith ‘the North-Western missionary’. The company’s reward was to discover or perhaps to help create a market in genuinely superior reading: Smiths’ hot books of 1851 reportedly included Tennyson’s latest, In Memoriam, books and pamphlets on current theological controversies, and the scientific tracts popular with skilled working men. ‘Cheap literature is a paying literature, if judiciously managed’: The Times’s conclusion shared the optimistic and expansive spirit of the Great Exhibition itself.

  Other major lines licensed their stalls to the firm, culminating with the Great Western in 1863. In Scotland, the Smiths’ business model was imitated by the Edinburgh bookseller John Menzies, starting with the ‘stances’ (the old Scots usage) at Perth and Stirling in 1857 and achieving a monopoly on lines north of the border within four years, as well as a wholesale and distribution trade to parallel Smiths’ – a duopoly that ended only in 1998, when Menzies’ retail chain was sold to its old English rival. Across the Irish Sea, Smiths’ business flourished under the management of the English-born Charles Eason, only to be bought out by Eason in 1886. The circumstances of this sale were unusual. Smith Jnr had entered Parliament as the MP for Westminster (having defeated the philosopher and smokers’ champion John Stuart Mill) and was subsequently appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland. A Conservative, Smith was opposed alike to Home Rule and the political influence of Catholicism in Ireland; but his business there also did a brisk trade in Catholic prayer books. Accused of hypocrisy, he responded by selling off the Irish division. So Eason’s, not Smiths’, became the household word for bookselling in Ireland, as it remains today.

  For all The Times’s high-minded enthusiasm in 1851, price trumped quality in the long run. Stallholders soon found that bargain fiction sold best and, since their income included part of the turnover, what sold best found its way to the front. Smith Jnr – a devout man who in youth had hoped to enter the Church and who steadfastly refused to let his stalls trade on Sundays – was reportedly saddened at the appearance of his company’s display at Rugby station, where the essays, poetry and science had been thrust out of sight behind the white of newsprint and the yellow covers of cut-price novels.

  Those blocks of yellow were a sign of how the commodity of copyright fiction had changed since The Times’s visit in 1851. The old publishing model had fallen apart in the 1840s, when a price war over reprints pushed down the charge to the customer to as low as a shilling. That was the price of Murray’s ‘Reading for the Rail’ series, advertised in 1852 as ‘cheap books in large readable type’. Another of the victors was the house of George Routledge, whose green-covered Railway Library series likewise made a pitch to fill the empty hours spent in carriages and waiting rooms. Beginning with one of Fenimore Cooper’s novels, the series eventually achieved 1,000 titles, non-fiction included, with an especially strong showing by the melodramatic historical tales and society novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. This author became a staple of Routledge’s list thanks in turn to a cheerful act of piracy: a budget edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, safely beyond the reach of American copyright law. Uncle Tom was the irresistible novel of the age, selling over half a million in one format or another; Routledge himself claimed to have witnessed six passengers all reading his bootlegged editions in a single compartment. So the money came pouring in, of which £20,000 went on the lease of thir
ty-five Bulwer-Lytton copyrights in 1854. The deal was as welcome to the foppish and extravagant novelist as it was profitable to Routledge, for Bulwer-Lytton proved to be Smiths’ most popular novelist in terms of turnover.

  W. H. Smith & Son drew the lesson, entering into alliance with a different publisher, Chapman & Hall, to produce the Select Library of Fiction. These were the first of the so-called ‘yellowback novels’: reprints priced at two shillings or half a crown, with shiny covers on which stimulating illustrations were commonly displayed. Chapman & Hall’s star author was Charles Dickens, and the fast-growing railway market had already spurred the firm to bring out a popular serial edition of their man at 1½d a part. To be taken under Smiths’ wing, and to have their books distributed and displayed by the fastest-growing network within the market, was better still. The yellowbacks and kindred cheap editions did more than bring literature to an increasingly mobile public: they packaged it in instantly recognisable forms within a developing consumer marketplace.

  The 1860s saw a new genre emerge from the ranks of fiction. It was a genre that contemporaries associated both with the demand for railway reading and with the acceleration of habits and experiences that the railway itself was thought to have fostered. These ‘sensation’ novels are epitomised by Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1860), Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861) and by a book already mentioned in another connection, Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1862). The genre took over the best nerve-jangling conventions from the historical and ‘Gothic’ schools – legal conspiracies, false identities, secret passages, lunacy, poisoning – and transposed them to an explicitly contemporary world. This allowed an exhilarating acceleration of pace, with characters dashing about by train and messages flying still faster by the electric telegraph. There is no better example of this agitation than the mileage covered by the hero of Lady Audley as he whizzes along the tracks from the London termini, to Hull, to Liverpool, to Southampton, to rural Yorkshire or Essex; sometimes against the clock, or at night, or to follow a last-minute change of plan. Once, he happens to meet on the platform the bewitching Lady Audley herself – whose ‘secret’ encompasses insanity, actual and attempted murder and the desertion of her own child; he helps to install her in a compartment with unmistakable displaced eroticism, ‘spreading her furs over her knees, and arranging the huge velvet mantle in which her slender little figure was almost hidden’. She is still speaking as the train begins to move, leaving him with a last glimpse of her ‘bright defiant smile’. The railways feature too as a material agent as evidence mounts up against the Lady, in the shape of a bonnet box with ‘scraps of railway labels and addresses pasted on it’. As in Dickens’s writings, railways also figure in the text as quasi-metaphorical invaders of consciousness: another character faints after the sight of a shocking announcement in The Times induces the effect of ‘a great noise as of half-a-dozen furious steam engines tearing and grinding in his ears’.

  Sensation novels were often regarded with suspicion by higher-minded critics. The Quarterly Review’s Henry Mansel deplored the creation of a reading public of over-stimulated addicts, fed by railway bookstalls and circulating libraries. An essay of 1880 by Matthew Arnold swiped at ‘cheap literature, hideous and ignoble of aspect, like the tawdry novels which flare in the book-shelves of our railway stations’. Ungrateful beneficiaries of these formats included the novelist Ouida, who in 1885 lamented the advance of ‘hideous coloured-paper covers, and flaunting colours’ at railway bookstalls. Meanwhile her publishers Chatto & Windus were shifting barrowloads of Ouida’s own excitable novels of high life in bright two-shilling editions, each with an advertisement for Pears’ soap on the back. A few steps downmarket in price and content were the ‘rack-marketed’ proto-pulp books of the 1880s and 1890s, written for immediate issue under pictorial covers, including detective yarns and the new genres of cowboy stories and science fiction. So it is surprising to find that Henry James, a writer whose depth and seriousness put him at the opposite pole, should have understood the importance of visual appeal, and could even look fondly on it: his ‘Essay on London’ of 1888 found W. H. Smith & Son’s stalls at Euston or Paddington ‘a focus of warmth and light in the vast smoky cavern; it gives the idea that literature is a thing of splendor, of a dazzling essence, of infinite gas-lit red and gold. A glamour hangs over the glittering booth, and a tantalizing air of clever new things.’

  Gaudy colours should not be confused with scandalous contents. Smiths’ railway contracts forbade the sale of obscene, indecent or offensive material, a provision that reflected a consensus among the educated classes. Outright pornography belonged to the nether world, but there was much else that was disreputable without being obscene or illegal; crime was often the focus, and titles such as the Illustrated Police News were refused by Smiths. In the mid-Victorian decades, political and religious questions as much as moral or sexual ones might determine where acceptable limits lay: had our traveller of 1862 requested a copy of the National Reformer, a radical new paper edited by the atheist and republican MP Charles Bradlaugh, he would have come away from Smiths’ stall empty-handed. Distributors and retailers were also wary of anything that might prove libellous, given that the courts had yet to settle the boundaries of liability for damages. But literary history remembers a different episode of exclusion, in a manner which fingered Smiths as an example of high Victorian prudishness: the fuss in 1894 over Esther Waters, by the Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore.

  Esther Waters was shocking as much for its themes – illegitimacy, illiteracy, gambling and destitution – as for the subversive sympathy of their handling. Yet the novel was a critical success, and even Mr Gladstone commended it in the Westminster Review. In practice, Smiths would supply a copy of Esther Waters to any customer who ordered one, but the company refused to display such a controversial title for general sale, or to add it to the stocklist of the company’s lending libraries. For it was not necessary to buy a book from Smiths in order to read it: the nineteenth century was the great age of the private circulating library, and Smiths had joined the boom in 1860. Its model was the famous business set up by Charles Edward Mudie, which had operated from New Oxford Street in London since 1852. Mudie’s standard subscription was a guinea per annum, allowing the loan of one volume at a time. This steep fee restricted membership to the genteel classes: Mudie’s list reached a ceiling of 25,000, with branches in provincial cities and elsewhere in London. Material judged morally questionable was excluded, partly to respect subscribers’ sensibilities, partly from Mudie’s personal inclinations as a Nonconformist lay preacher and writer of hymns. W. H. Smith Jnr appears to have hoped that the senior firm would enter into collaboration, but was rebuffed. Smiths then set up a library of its own, with the same basic subscription rate, and a similar tenderness towards the feelings of their more upsettable members.

  Loans from Smiths’ had to be returned to the issuing stall, of which there were already 177 across the network by 1861. Patience was required from readers: shortage of space meant that many titles had to be ordered from catalogues and delivered (by train) for collection the following day – a nuisance for those travelling at short notice, but bearable for local subscribers, who came and went at the stalls as they would at any other shop. This customer profile applied to general sales as well: by 1906, 70 per cent of business at Smiths’ stalls on one representative line came from non-travellers.

  Smiths’ bookstalls and the two major libraries together thus had a healthy share of the market. Its managers were bound by personal inclinations as well as by the terms of their licences to keep the stalls free of offensive matter. That was bad luck for George Moore: a succès de scandale might be all very well in itself, but any writer who was barred lost a wounding proportion of sales.

  The Savoy magazine of 1896 was unlucky too. This was the effective successor to the scandalous quarterly The Yellow Book, with which it shared contributors including the sometimes genuinely obscene artist Aubrey Beards
ley. The conviction of Oscar Wilde in the year before The Savoy was launched put anything with a hint of decadence under the direst suspicion, and Smiths announced after the third issue that the dubious magazine would henceforth be stocked no longer. The Savoy limped on for several more numbers, but the loss of access to the railway market shortened its commercial life.

  In these circumstances, it is poignant to recall that the dénouement of Wilde’s last and finest comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, involves a fateful intersection between railways and fiction-writing. The foundling hero, abandoned as a baby in a handbag in the cloakroom for the Brighton line at Victoria station, learns his true identity only when his former nurse confesses that it was she who had absent-mindedly deposited him there – after which she had gone on her way, pushing the unpublished manuscript of her own three-volume novel (‘of more than usually revolting sentimentality’) in the pram instead.**

  Mudie’s Library, spiritual home of the morally unimpeachable three-volume novel, is mentioned in Wilde’s play too. But the reference was already out of date, and once again it was the railway market that had triggered the change. For Smiths had never much cared for the venerable three-volume format, which took up excessive shelf-space in the library sections of its stalls, and had recently declared against it in letters sent out to key publishing houses. Mudie’s joined Smiths in saying the same thing, for different reasons: increasingly, the shortening gap between first publication and first cheap edition was spoiling the second-hand market for its three-volume cast-offs. So that was the end of the three-volume novel, and Smiths’ staff won a little more space on the lending shelves of their booths.