Fiction and the Reading Public Book

FICTION AND THE READING PUBLIC Q. D. LEAVIS Research Fellow of Girton College Cambridge 1939 CHATTO WINDUS LONDON PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN SECOND IMPRESSION ALL RIGHTS RESERVED For F. R. L. Acknowledgments FIRST I have to acknowledge my debt to the generosity of Girton College in electing me to the Ottilie Hancock research fellowship, without which I should not have been able to carry out this piece of work. And especially to the Vice-Mistress, Miss H. M. R. Murray, who from the outset has encouraged me to persist in the line of research I have chosen. I must also record with gratitude my indebtedness to a number of junior members of Cambridge Uni versity who enthusiastically joined in the work of finding data that bore on the state of contemporary culture. My thanks in this connection are especially due to Mr. A. D. H. Thompson and Mr. W. C. Hunter, then at St. Johns College. The kindness of the novelists who replied to my questionnaire I have mentioned in the body of this book, but I should like to express my recognition of the forbearance and generosity of two of my corre spondents in particular Mrs. Maud Diver and Mr. Edgar Rice Burroughs. vn CONTENTS Introduction Page xiii Part I THE CONTEMPORARY SITUATION I The Book Market 3 II The Middlemen 19 III Author and Reader 33 Part II THE PAST I The Birth of Journalism 83 II The Puritan Conscience 97 III The Growth of the Reading Public 1 18 IV The Disintegration of the Reading Public 151 i. Economic developments making for disintegration 2. Repercussions on the Periodical 3. Levelling down Part III THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BEST SELLER I The Novel 205 II Reading Capacity 215 III Living at the Novelists Expense 235 Appendix A NOTES 274 B The Outline of Popular Fiction 330 Select Bibliography 336 Index 345 ix APPEAL TO THE READER notes to this book have unavoidably been JL placed at the back, but I hope they will be not less consulted than if they had appeared at the foot of the page. The material they contain has been austerely excluded from the text in order to save the reader, as far as possible, from the labour of disentangling the argument from the illustrative data. But I must urge the reader not to be deterred from sandwiching the notes parenthetically into the text, and I think it will be found that the bother of keeping the book open at two places at once which I saw no way of obviating will be repaid. XIRead More