Chapter XXVI: Popular Culture in the Crucible

Translation into fact of ideals not less than transformations seen in
the People's Palace, Whitechapel, and in the free libraries,
originated by the Ewart Act, affecting as they do all contemporary
life. The working of these in town and country. Proved connection
between popular education and morality; what books free libraries like
best. Analogous work for upper classes done by Mudie's, and by the
London Library. Their progress traced. Help rendered by these to
public servants and literary producers. Carlyle, Thackeray, etc.
Eclectic and educating influences of these shown in detail. The new
public and the new magazines. General review of influences at work.
Great services of minor poets and prophets of the period.

Not only transformations, but translations of ideals into fact, mark our age. A popular novelist gave a fancy sketch of a palace in which art, pleasure, and instruction should meet together to gladden the lives of the London poor. Almost as soon as could have been done by the genius of Aladdin's Lamp, the People's Palace shoots up in the Mile End Road.

In 1841 Thomas Carlyle sighed for the day when a 'people's library' should be as much a part of every town as Her Majesty's jail, or in his own grim words--Her Majesty's gallows. The reign was still young when the philosopher's vision began to take shape and substance. In every centre of population from the Tyne to the Thames, from the Thames to the Tamar, a place where, without payment, upon no other conditions save those of reasonably clean hands, and silence, the working man is as well off for newspapers and books as a Bishop at the Athenaeum Club, has changed the Victorian landscape. These buildings, comely to look at, comfortable to enter, have competed with the later board schools in transforming the appearance of London suburb and provincial town. Where Knightsbridge merges into Chelsea first, and Fulham afterwards, there, during the early days of the reign, desolate fields and miry ways used to stretch their unlovely length. After dusk there were few lamps to light; the roads were not more safe than Hounslow Heath had been some generations earlier. To-day this district is covered by a mass of buildings in red brick or stone, of aspect rather more academic than the new quarter of Victorian Oxford. Among these are the free libraries, built, partly out of the public rates, partly out of private funds. If it chance to be Saturday night, hundreds of working men, decently clad, with parcels under their arms will be seen passing to and fro near these buildings. They are not going to the public house. The packages they carry do not imply a negotiation with the pawnbroker. The men are, in fact, returning to the library the books which, taken out some days earlier, have given them their reading during the week after the day's work has been done. Certain processes supplementary to these studies have still to be performed. Even in our age of improvement, the reference library kept by an artizan at his fireside is not extensive. Nothing quickens the intellectual appetite like its earliest gratification. As our student has travelled through the volumes which have occupied him, he has become aware of allusions for the full understanding of which fresh information is required. He has, therefore, while going along, made notes of points to look up. This, therefore, is one of his errands to-night.

No professional visitor to the British Museum sets more systematically to work than our day labourer in the Fulham or Pimlico district. Before his visit this evening to the place of silence and of books he has, perhaps, had recourse to a member of the University Settlement in his neighbourhood, or possibly even to his own employer if the employer happens to be better read than the employed. The local librarian presently to be consulted needs to combine patience and method with something like omniscience. The note book is produced by our working man in which the points for enquiry have been jotted down. In a few minutes the official has placed the researcher on the right track. Before his studies are ended that night he will have hunted up facts and figures enough to furnish forth a leading article for a journalist, or a speech in Committee for a Member of Parliament.

Not only in the industrial suburbs of the capital, but throughout the Kingdom, this is the sort of thing which takes place at least on one evening in every week. It is one among the many agencies which, nowadays, make the humblest reader so terrible a critic, and which cause a working man's meeting to be not less intolerant of mere rhetoric than the House of Commons itself.

Like everything else which during our age has been brought towards perfection, the free library movement existed among us in germ from the earliest days, before indeed the books themselves were known. When Lancashire monasteries had ceased to be gratuitous places of literary study, their manuscripts and parchments were housed in the Chetham Library, with its old oriel windows at Manchester; in the Guildhall Library at London, certainly coeval with Whittington; in the libraries of Bristol or Liverpool which compete with London in antiquity, and with which the Protector Somerset is said to have made somewhat too free.

The patronymic of the man who was the father of the free library as it is known in England to-day is preserved in the second name of Mr Gladstone. Mr Ewart belonged to an old Kirkcudbright family. He had been at Eton with Dr Pusey and Speaker Denison. In the spring of 1843 he obtained a Committee of the House of Commons to enquire into the conditions of popular reading throughout the United Kingdom. Disraeli, Monckton Milnes, Cardwell, Kershaw, were among the more famous names that the Committee included. Less than ten years after this, the Ewart Act, based on the Committee report was the law of the land.

In the early autumn of 1852, the new legislation was celebrated in a very practical manner by the opening of the free library at Manchester; the town which had been the birthplace of the movement.

Sir John Potter, the father of the present Mr T. B. Potter, took the chair. On the platform among the speakers were John Bright, Bulwer Lytton, Sir James Stephen, the future Lord Houghton, Dickens and Thackeray; Charles Dickens made a speech in his happiest, and therefore incomparable, vein, on the Manchester School, an expression then in many mouths. The success of the experiment first illustrated on the Irwell was gradual. The provinces led the way which at last the capital followed. So late as 1886, only two parishes out of the sixty-seven within the metropolitan area had adopted the Acts. By August 1891 this number had risen to thirty. Other London districts have since followed.[87] With time the result has been more than satisfactory. In the manner already seen it has affected the life and appearance of every town in the country, and has certainly provided a machinery without which as a supplement the educational apparatus of free schools would do little.

To-day, therefore, in any large district, London or provincial, it is the exception for the Free Libraries Act not to be operative. That the power to read and the taste for reading does not always make good citizens, is of course true enough. On the other hand the close connection between ignorance and crime is instructively shown by a few historic statistics cited by Mr T. Greenwood, in his valuable volume on _Public Libraries_. These figures are to the following effect.

In 1856 the number of young persons committed for indictable offences was 14,000. In 1866, when the State had, by the action of the Privy Council, since 1833 assumed educational responsibility, and cheap literature of the better sort had, thanks to Charles Knight, and his many public-spirited imitators, become general, the number was decreased to 10,000. When School Boards were fully at work, there was a yet further reduction to 7,000; and this though the population had risen from 19 to 27 millions. Passing to a later date, out of 164,000 persons in prison between the years 1880-90, 60,000 were entirely uneducated. Nor is it less suggestive that since the teaching of the people was seriously taken in hand by the State in 1870, no new prison has been built; while several buildings which were prisons have been changed into public libraries, or, as in the case of Milbank, have been converted into a fine art gallery.

An objection is sometimes raised against the multiplication of free libraries on the ground that they promote exclusively the perusal of the most worthless fiction among the class least likely to be proof against the social dangers of this class of writing. No novel, perhaps, is so entirely mischievous as not to be preferable to the occupations from which for a few hours, it may withdraw the illiterate reader. In truth however a very careful examination of the facts by enquiries made at representative free libraries throughout the country justify the statement that novels form a stepping stone to books of a more seriously improving kind.

The same statistics show the demand for fiction already to be on the decrease. Thus, in the case of the Newcastle-on-Tyne library; during a recent twelvemonth, of the books issued to readers 65.69 were fiction. The next year the proportion was 64.28. A year later it was 61.81. In 1896 the figures were 55.22. The latest enquiries show this decline in the demand for fiction to be steadily going forward. Further, the category of fiction is stretched by free libraries to include not only the coloured paper boards containing the latest sensational romance of the day, but all the masterpieces of Fielding, nearly all the writings of Defoe, the _Arcadia_ of Sir Philip Sidney, the _Tristram Shandy_ of Lawrence Sterne, the _Don Quixote_ of Cervantes, and the Dialogues of Lucian.

The remarkably elastic connotation with which the word fiction is thus invested, may make one doubt whether a case might not be established even for novel reading. As a fact the works most in demand at any typical London library, _e.g._, that of Chelsea, are not novels at all. Here the favourites seem to be Herbert Spencer's _First Principles_, thrice asked for on the day this library was visited, his _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, twice asked for. Aristotle's _Ethics_, the works of Spinoza, Martineau's _Types of Ethical Theory_, Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, J. S. Mill's _Logic_, Professor Sayce's _Vindications of Revealed Religion by the Light of Ancient Monuments_, all Sir Charles Dilke's works of travel, Carlyle, Froude; _Cassell's Popular Educator_, Todhunter's _Euclid_ are in greater demand than any fictions. However many copies of these there might be, none, it is thought, would be often out of hand.

It is not only what are called the industrial classes whose literary resources have been expanded and transformed during the Victorian age. Libraries for a different class of readers have of late years increased throughout the Kingdom, in the provinces not less than in the capital. Mudie's is, in the most literal sense of the epithet, a national agency. Its headquarters are in London. There is no town or village book club in the country, which is not fed from its metropolitan shelves. Mudie's Library was founded by the late C. E. Mudie, in 1842, two years after the St James's Square London Library. If light literature were alone in demand, this library would not flourish as during more than half a century it has done. Without it, many of the candidates for the Indian, the Home Civil Services and other such examinations would be unable to get up their books. A theologian like Canon Liddon turns new light on old truths. A pious and picturesque impressionist like Dean Arthur Stanley presents the scenes and incidents of sacred story as he has himself seen or imagined them. A Darwin propounds a fresh theory for the origin of life; a Froude rehabilitates a Tudor; a Freeman refutes a Froude; a Livingstone explores a Dark Continent; a Stanley recovers a reluctant Livingstone or an indignant Emin. A Green illustrates the growth of an English people; a Lecky supplements the work of a Buckle or makes the eighteenth century real as the nineteenth.

Mudie's is the channel through which these streams of culture are conveyed to the majority of English readers; for, highly educated as the Victorian age may be, it is with books that its economies begin To buy volumes that can be borrowed or hired, is accounted wanton extravagance. A work which requires more study, which holds public attention longer than a novel, must obviously be most profitable to the circulating librarian. Nor would self-interest let him be a distributor of fiction alone or even primarily.

The increase of novel readers as of novel writers is indeed the great literary feature of the day. Not less characteristic of the time are the new periodicals which have created a fresh public for themselves. The sixpenny magazines count their circulation by millions, and are borrowed from the library as well as bought by their readers. But it is the standard works, as shown by the instances already specified that give to Mudie's its deserved epithet of 'Select.'

Rather more grave in its contents, and didactic in its origin and purpose, the London Library, in St James's Square has during more than half a century been a most productive agent in the culture not less of the whole upper middle classes than in the equipment for their tasks of writing men and women.[88] On the Mid-summer Day of 1840, with Lord Eliot in the chair there was held at the Freemasons' Tavern a meeting, the object of which was to provide literary workers and others at their homes with those books for which they then had to go to the reading room of the British Museum. The result was the formation of a Committee of the leading literary persons of the period, the drawing up of rules and of a list of desiderated books, the acquisition of premises in Pall Mall. Towards the end of December in the same year, the new institution was opened in its first home in Pall Mall with, on a smaller scale, the same kind of accommodations that it possesses to-day in St James's Square. As the earliest prospectus reminded the public, no less a person than Edward Gibbon had first lamented the lack of any lending library befitting the dignity of an Imperial capital in London.

When, in the May of 1841, this library was first in working order, its stock was some 3,000 volumes. A year later these figures had risen to 13,000. Since then, at an outlay of some L50,000, its contents have been increased to nearly 200,000. Situated in the heart of clubland, the Library has done for the education of clubmen, including penmen of every degree, all that Mudie's can have done for the instruction of families. Not that the London Library is without claim to be considered a domestic institution. Its reading room is frequented by as many lady journalists of the new school verifying references for their articles, as by male writers of an older type. There are few households where its books are not to be found. Carlyle and Thackeray are only two of the many well-known men who have been helped by it in suffusing historic descriptions with local or personal colour. It was to ascertain the exact hues of George Washington's waistcoat[89] that Thackeray consulted the late librarian Robert Harrison as to the classical authorities.

Nor are there many writers of recent years in the English tongue, who have not been indebted to London Librarians from the days of Cochrane, the first of the line, to those of Hagberg Wright, his latest successor,[90] for seasonable hints as to what authorities most usefully to consult.

As has been already seen, in the theory and practice of the culture now popularized in England, there is a growing tendency on the part of science and art to trench upon the ground formerly occupied by literature. The fashionable vocabulary of culture is itself an instance of this. Metaphors from the palette, the scalpel, the crucible, the retort, are applied to indicate the commonest and oldest literary phenomena. Or we hear of loaded epithets, of dynamic diction, of sonatas in sentences, of fugues in periods, and of new stratifications in style. Amid all our improvements we are a little mixed, and have still to decide where the province of the writer ends and that of his brother in some other art begins. This is a transient, as it is a transitional phase. It may perhaps confuse posterity which will scarcely recognize as the same language the lectures of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the orations of Lord Leighton, the art criticisms of Steele or Addison in _The Spectator_, of Walter H. Pater, of J. A. Symonds, in _The Cornhill Magazine_, or one of the monthly Reviews.

The survey of the agencies now at work upon different social levels, shows that even thus the education which comes of reading, competes at some disadvantage with the instruction that is the result of lectures in class rooms, of demonstrations in scientific 'theatres,' of days and nights spent in museums of sculpture or in galleries of paintings.

During the second or third decades of the present reign, the literary system of the country, as shown in the introductory chapter to this work, was dominated by the presence of a few illustrious men, who naturally became models for imitation to a host of workers. During their lives, Dickens and Thackeray both founded schools. The former was, through the weekly magazines he edited, the founder of newspaper descriptive writing, especially of the picturesque Parliamentary narrative recently brought to so high a point of perfection by clever writers now alive. The entire company of satirical essayists in the weekly press, was first inspired by Thackeray. Each master was surrounded by personal admirers and literary imitators in a degree unapproached by any of his contemporaries or successors. The author of _The Newcomes_ was outlived[91] by the accomplished writer of that series which began with _Pelham_ in 1828 and neared its end with _The Parisians_ almost fifty years later.

While the anniversaries of the Queen's accession were few in number, Lytton by the side of Dickens, as a popular master of the pen, filled something like the place which Thackeray had occupied before him. During most of his time, another man of letters belonging like Lytton to the titled classes divided with Lytton the social patronage of literary beginners. No man of his day did so much as Lytton to help younger men with the booksellers, as in his old-fashioned phrase he was apt to call the publishers. He had indeed a rival or a colleague in these good offices in Lord Stanhope, then Lord Mahon, the historian, as also in Mr Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, the timely friend of Coventry Patmore, and the rescuer from great troubles of a forgotten but deserving poet David Gray.

When as yet journalism as a profession was not fully organized, and young authors still looked first to the pillars of Paternoster Row, an introduction to Lord Lytton or to Lord Stanhope was the surest stepping stone to print. In this way Antonio Gallenga, then an obscure refugee, with associations of the dagger and bowl about him, having won the good word of Lytton, found a publisher for his _History of Piedmont_. This in its turn opened to him the office of the _Times_. Here he made his name not only as among the most brilliant, best informed and versatile of newspaper writers but, together with William Howard Russell, as a founder of that school of graphic newspaper narrative since represented by Archibald Forbes, Edward Dicey, B. H. Becker, G. A. Henty, George Augustus Sala, and John O'Shea.

The development of the press has changed most of the conditions of literary life. For very many Englishmen of all classes, the periodical, daily, weekly, or monthly, is practically an exclusive synonym for literature itself. This fact of course has reacted upon the whole class of professional writers. The most commercially successful of men and women of letters are, as, since the days of Sir Walter Scott, they have been, authors of some novel which hits the taste of the moment, and fixes the interest of the town. When George Eliot wedded in her writings the artistic to the scientific spirit, she invented a combination unknown till then; she opened a gold mine for herself and the more dexterous of her disciples. Dickens and Thackeray both realized high prices for the labour of their pen. Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade were not far behind. But the men of this class were either original creators of literary types that will take their place with the characters of Shakespeare, and Cervantes, or else were masters in the manufacture of exciting and dramatic plots.

Lord Lytton knew a little of everything, science included. He was indeed not only a marvel of varied productiveness but a consummate student, summing up in his own person all the intellectual interests and tendencies of his time. During his most industrious period, before he had attained Cabinet rank in politics, and before Carlyle's deeper studies of Fichte and Goethe had familiarized the English public with modes of German thought, Bulwer did more than anyone of his day to educate the average reader on lines, and in subjects, which now seem commonplace, but of which, when the dandy who dashed off _Falkland_, as Byron dashed off _Beppo_, had matured into the student who travailed with _Rienzi_, Englishmen knew nothing.

The mental inquisitiveness and activity of a newly enlightened generation, resolved, like Bacon, to take all learning for its province, finds the reflection of some aspect of itself in every page of Bulwer. The polished conceits, the recondite illustrations drawn from every sphere of human thought or achievement, the similes sometimes as far fetched, and obscurely ingenious as those of Sir Piercie Shafton or of Euphues himself, suggest at times the inspiration of an universally-informed, and precociously-gifted youth who displays his cleverness before it is yet quite disciplined, and parades his patchwork learning before it is fully digested.

In all these things Bulwer was essentially the product and the mirror of the new and eclectically educated Victorian age. He had been a young man of great fashion, a good specimen of that social school of which the younger Disraeli at his _Vivian Grey_ period was a bad specimen. A dandy of the older type through life Lytton remained. Tennyson's lines in _Punch_ on the padded man who wore the stays, stuck to him throughout life as did Thackeray's caricatures of Sir Edward Bulwig. People therefore insisted on finding affectations in his manner, and insincerities in his nature.[92] He saw his time in its entirety abroad as well as at home more clearly than most of his contemporaries. The reforming zeal and humanitarian spirit of his age were not expressed more powerfully, if to many persons more intelligibly, by Dickens himself than by Lytton.

All the modern masters of English fiction are in their different ways as much the products of that series of movements comprehended in, or grouped round, the French Revolution of the eighteenth century as Byron himself was in England the immediate progeny of that organic upheaval of thought and faith. The year of the accession produced Carlyle's _History of the French Revolution_. Four years later, the most powerful picture of these episodes presented by any writer of fiction was given to the world by Bulwer in _Zanoni_. To the same era of revolutionary influences belonged _A Tale of Two Cities_, in which Dickens not only illustrated after his own manner the age of Robespierre, but produced a work not inferior in literary art to the _Esmond_ of his great rival. Lytton's genius impelled him to mysticism, as George Eliot's associations inclined her to positivism. Both after their own manner dealt with human problems from what they respectively thought the scientific point of view. Add to this that Lytton remained a student annexing new domains of interest, thought and knowledge to the last; that he showed himself the prophet of the new and better France in _The Parisians_, as he had been the bard of the new England beyond the seas before the curtain fell on the fortunes and the friends of Pisistratus Caxton.

Enough is said to vindicate his place as among the most representative writers of the age, as well as to explain the recent renascence of his writings in France and the growing popularity of his works as attested by the fresh editions issuing from the house of Routledge in England. Macaulay, though never a newspaper man, is in point of manner, the father of the leading article. The terse impressionist style which has much superseded the Macaulayan in the press may be referred to George Borrow, author of _The Bible in Spain_, than whom no one has influenced periodical writers more beneficially; to Kinglake in his _Eothen_; to his literary disciple, Lawrence Oliphant in _Piccadilly_; to the late Grenville Murray, whose 'Roving Englishman' in _All the Year Round_ contains the happiest of travel sketches, and whose Young Brown in the _Cornhill Magazine_ is a miracle of clever writing. Each of these has contributed to make such happy writers of concise prose as Jehu, Junior, in _Vanity Fair_, and Violet Fane, now Lady Currie, in her clever and original novel, _Sophy_. Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold complete a representative list of educators of popular taste during our age. They are, however, heroic instances. Others, with not a tenth of their fame have reached at least as far in their influence, and have brought their refining mission home to the masses with an intimacy not approached by their mightier rivals.

Emerson's writings, his visit to, and lectures in, London in 1847 leavened English thought with the same spiritualizing quality which had long since penetrated the American mind. For one Briton who was inspired by Emerson, hundreds were charmed and humanized by Longfellow first, and by Whittier afterwards. If Longfellow's simple ballads had never been written, the higher offices of poetry, notwithstanding a Tennyson or a Browning, would have remained a mystery hidden from the toiling millions of the Anglo-Saxon world.

The same gentle and gracious offices have been performed by less known and not always respected writers, Martin Tupper of the _Proverbial Philosophy_, and the late Hain Friswell of _The Gentle Life_.