What English People Read?

By Author: Elizabeth
Total Articles: 286
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After the Education Act had provided compulsory teaching of literacy for the first time, the question of 'What English People Read' assumed new significance. In 1889 the Fortnightly Review published a survey bearing this title, blaming the Act for the 'rabble of trash-mongers' that, like Vizetelly, catered to the 'very large number of people [who] find the "troughs of Zolaism" to their liking'. [We have extended the literary franchise', the survey's author observed, 'and those who would succeed must learn to pander to the new electorate'. On this view, the rise of a mass readership had impoverished literary culture. The new audience may have learned to Cartier Replica Watches read, but the logic went it had not yet developed 'taste', so publishers who indulged its undiscerning appetite lowered the quality of English literature.

The rhetoric of suffrage used in the Fortnightly article underlined the seriousness of the issue. With or without the ability to discriminate, an 'electorate' holds power: so even if the mere fact of being able to read like the mere fact of being able to vote did not necessarily connote discernment, the consequences of undiscerning reading like the consequences of undiscerning voting were not easily undone, particularly when the 'new' electorate vastly outnumbered the old. Such pessimism about the effect of the Education Act on literary production was far from unusual. When, for example, Eliza Lynn Linton (1822-1898) compared 'Literature: Then and Now' in 1890, she complained that a 'democratic wave' the language of suffrage again had 'covered the garden of the Hesperides with mud and slime'.10 The nymphs of Greek mythology had failed to protect their grove of golden apples: that is to say, the guardians of literary taste had failed to protect their values from the 'trash-mongers' beloved of the new mass market.