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 £50,000, 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.