Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880‐1914

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880‐1914", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 8, pp. 739-741. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710822031

This is a helpful newcomer in a crowded field. Mary Hammond (of the UK Open University) has read a great deal and engages well with it in the course of her book. Readers will recognize the work of Feltes (Marxist critique of the period) and McDonald (literary culture and publishing practice 1880‐1914), among many others, and wish to test out the plausibility of Hammond's own interpretations of events. She has also drawn on known sources like Sutcliffe (on the Oxford University Press) and Altick (on the English common reader) and set out to re‐frame their ideas in a distinctive way.

She argues for and constructs a critical approach based on the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose work on cultural capital and production is well‐known. Her focus is to shift the ground from the more familiar examination of the period through the narrative structure of the text (for instance, the 19th‐century novel) to the institutions (such as public libraries and the railway bookstalls of W. H. Smith in the 1850s, the publication of World's Classics by the Oxford University Press in the 1880s and beyond, the reviewing climate during the period 1890 and World War One) and the ideologies (class, gender, popular/literary, realism/ romance) of access and circulation and readership. She is keen to discuss the working practices of the producers (authors literary and popular, publishers engaged in popular classics, booksellers like W.H. Smith, reviewers and readers), and draws on archive material (from libraries, publishers, and others) to do it.

A key point here is this – Bourdieu suggests that the positions the players have culturally (typically, Marie Corelli as popular writer of romances, Arnold Bennett as critic as well as literary novelist, W.H. Smith as both entrepreneur and moralist) shape the dispositions that appear in their dispositions (typically, male reviewers being patriarchically critical about female writers, a perceived distinction between male writing as realism and female writing as romance, understandings that borrowing books from Mudie's or the public library was a middle‐class activity, or that writing politically engaged novels meant that they were more transitory). And that these dispositions shape their positions in turn. It makes sense, then, for Hammond to use the ideas of cultural competency, class and gender and art (above all the modernist distinction between literary and popular writing) as a critical device for filtering, interpreting, and structuring her study of reading and literary taste.

She applies it in a short series of case‐studies – the fiction dilemma in the early public libraries (a chapter that originally appeared as an article in the journal Libraries and Culture in 2002), the railway bookstalls and the changing psyche of readers who wanted speed and danger from yellowbacks but also looked for self‐education from cheap classics, Henry Frowde's decision to buy up Grant Richards’ classics and launch the World's Classics series (“education with respectability”), the contrast between Hall Caine and Marie Corelli (from which Hammond constructs an ingenious dichotomy “realism/masculinity/art” and “romance/ femininity/the market”, only to test it and break it down with convincing subtlety later), and a further contrast between Arnold Bennett and Florence Barclay. Bennett, like Wells and Galsworthy, was a literary and critical chameleon, offering a new kind of realism in novels like Clayhanger, resisting modernist critiques of his popularity by Virginia Woolf, and providing dispositional links between himself as author and the characters in his fiction. Barclay on the other hand offers a complex mix of romance and purity, sexuality and patriotism.

The period 1880‐1914 provides an attractive framework for such a study. Some readers will find the book episodic, although this may arise because readers of different types will use the book for different purposes – literary and social historians, those interested in publishing or libraries, others teasing out the cultural theories of Bourdieu. Hammond wears her knowledge lightly and never over‐argues her case nor ties herself up in abstractions: the theory derives naturally from the evidence, the case‐studies demonstrate the overall argument. For experts in the field, the theoretical over‐layering will probably be all that the book adds to current debate, but for the general reader (likely to be in academic libraries) this is a book that offers (as a whole and in constituent chapters) a lot of useful evidence and analysis. The series from Ashgate includes other works of interest, notably Valerie Gray's study of Charles Knight.

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