The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses, which catered indulgently to hungry scholars and to noble patrons; and we can see it in another generation separating “Waverley” and “The Corsair,” which everybody knew by heart, from the gorgeous “Annual” (bound in Lord Palmerston’s cast-off waistcoats, hinted Thackeray), which formed a decorative feature of well-appointed English drawing-rooms. The perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable book is to give it away; and the publication, for more than a quarter of a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if proof were needed, of the business principles which underlay the enlightened activity of publishers.
The wave of sentimentality which submerged England when the clear-headed, hard-hearted eighteenth century had done its appointed work, and lay a-dying, the prodigious advance in gentility from the days of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to the days of the Countess of Blessington, found their natural expression in letters. It was a period of emotions which were not too deep for words, and of decorum which measured goodness by conventionalities. Turn where we will, we see a tear in every eye, or a simper of self-complacency on every lip. Moore wept when he beheld a balloon ascension at Tivoli, because he had not seen a balloon since he was a little boy. The excellent Mr. Hall explained in his “Memories of a Long Life” that, owing to Lady Blessington’s anomalous position with Count D’Orsay, “Mrs. Hall never accompanied me to her evenings, though she was a frequent day caller.” Criticism was controlled by politics, and sweetened by gallantry. The Whig and Tory reviewers supported their respective candidates to fame, and softened their masculine sternness to affability when Mrs. Hemans or Miss Landon, “the Sappho of the age,” contributed their glowing numbers to the world. Miss Landon having breathed a poetic sigh in the “Amulet” for 1832, a reviewer in “Fraser’s” magnanimously observed: “This gentle and fair young lady, so undeservedly neglected by critics, we mean to take under our special protection.” Could it ever have lain within the power of any woman, even a poetess, to merit such condescension as this?
Of a society so organized, the Christmas annual was an appropriate and ornamental feature. It was costly,—a guinea or a guinea and a half being the usual subscription. It was richly bound in crimson silk or pea-green levant; Solomon in all his glory was less magnificent. It was as free from stimulus as eau sucrée. It was always genteel, and not infrequently aristocratic,—having been known to rise in happy years to the schoolboy verses of a royal duke. It was made, like Peter Pindar’s razors, to sell, and it was bought to be given away; at which point its career of usefulness was closed. Its languishing steel engravings of Corfu, Ayesha, The Suliote Mother, and The Wounded Brigand, may have beguiled a few heavy moments after dinner; and perhaps little children in frilled pantalets and laced slippers peeped between the gorgeous covers, to marvel at the Sultana’s pearls, or ask in innocence who was the dying Haidee. Death, we may remark, was always a prominent feature of annuals. Their artists and poets vied with one another in the selection of mortuary subjects. Charles Lamb was first “hooked into the ‘Gem’” with some lines on the editor’s dead infant. From a partial list, extending over a dozen years, I cull this funeral wreath:—
The Dying Child. Poem.
The Orphans. Steel engraving.
The Orphan’s Tears. Poem.
The Gypsy’s Grave. Steel engraving.
The Lonely Grave. Poem.
On a Child’s Grave. Poem.
The Dying Mother to her Infant. Poem.
Blithesome reading for the Christmas-tide!
The annual was as orthodox as it was aristocratic. “The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain” was not more edifying. “The Washerwoman of Finchley Common” was less conspicuously virtuous. Here in “The Winter’s Wreath” is a long poem in blank verse, by a nameless clergyman, on “The Efficacy of Religion.” Here in the “Amulet,” Mrs. Hemans, “leading the way as she deserves to do” (I quote from the “Monthly Review”), “clothes in her own pure and fascinating language the invitations which angels whisper into mortal ears.” And here in the “Forget-Me-Not,” Leontine hurls mild defiance at the spirit of doubt:—
Thou sceptic of the hardened brow,
Attend to Nature’s cry!
Her sacred essence breathes the glow
O’er that thou wouldst deny;