Therefore again we say, as we said a short time ago,—O ye Athenians! what have ye not to answer for in the consequence of your malpractices of old!
The only great success of the day in works of fiction, (for the laurels of Bulwer have been spindled among the rest by the factitious atmosphere of the circulating libraries), is that of Boz. And we attribute, in a great measure, the enormous circulation of his early works, to their having set at defiance the paralysing influence of the monster-misery. Shilling numbers were as the dragon's teeth. They rose up like armed men, and slew the circulating librarians. People were forced to buy them if they wanted to read them; and they were bought. Those who desired to read "Night and Morning," were not forced to purchase it, and it was not bought; and the circulation of the two works consequently remains as 2000 to 35,000 copies.
The state and prospects of authors, however, concerns you less, dear public, than the state and prospects of literature. You are a contemplative body of men, and can see into a millstone as far as most nations. You make leagues and anti-leagues for the sake of your morsel of bread; and teach the million to sing to your own tune; and, weary of keeping your heads above water, tunnel your way below it; nor will you allow the suffering shirtmakers of your metropolis to be put upon, nor Don Carlos, nor Queen Pomaré, nor any other victim of oppression. You applauded Alice Lowe, and shook hands with Courvoisier at the gallows; and it is clear you stand no nonsense, and bear no malice.
Be so good, therefore, as seriously to consider what sort of figure you will cut in the eyes of posterity, if this kind of thing is suffered to go on.
There is not one publisher in the three kingdoms (we throw down the gauntlet) who would give an adequate sum of money for any new historical work. There is not one publisher in the three kingdoms who would give even a moderate sum for a poem. We state the case liberally; for our conviction is, that they would refuse one poor half-crown. So much for the prospects; for, without a premium production is null.
As regards the state of literature, take out your pencils, (you all carry pencils, to calculate either the long odds or the odds on 'Change,) and make out a list of the works published during the last five years, likely to be known, even by name, a hundred years hence! It is some comfort to feel, that by sight they cannot be known—that few of them will survive to disgrace us—that the circulating libraries possess the one merit of wear and tear for the destruction of their filthy generation, like Saturn of old; for it would grieve us to think of even the trunks of the two thousandth century being lined with what lines the brains of our contemporaries. So that in the year of grace two thousand and forty-four, we shall have the Lady Blarney of Kilburn Square (the Grosvenor Square of that epoch,) enquiring of the Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs of Croydon Place (the Belgium Square)—"My dear soul, what could those poor people do to amuse themselves? They had positively no books! After Scott's time till the middle of the nineteenth century not a single novelist; after the death of Byron, not a poet! I believe there was an historian of the name of Hallam, not much heard of; and the other day, at a book-stall, I picked up an odd volume of an odd writer named Carlyle. But it is really curious to consider how utterly the belles-lettres were in abeyance."
To which, of course, Miss C. W. A. S.—(even Dr Panurge could not get through the whole name again!)—"My dear love! they had Blackwood's Magazine, which, like the Koran after the burning of the Alexandrian library, supplied the place of ten millions of volumes!"
But, alas! some Burchell may be sitting by, to exclaim "fudge!" Some groper into archives will bring forth one of those never-to-be-sufficiently-abominated catalogues of Bond and other streets, showing that, on a moderate calculation, twenty books were published per diem, which, at the end of three months, possessed the value of so many bushels of oyster-shells!
And then, pray, what will you have to say for yourselves, O public! from your tombs in Westminster Abbey or your catacombs at Kensal Green? Which among you will dare come forward, with blue lights in his hand and accompanied by a trombone, like the ghost of Ninus in Semiramide, and say—"We warned these people to write for immortality. We told them it was their duty to stick in a few oaks for posterity, as well as their Canada poplars and Scotch firs. It was not our fault that they chose to grow nothing but underwood. It was the fault of the circulating libraries, which, instead of allowing the milk of human genius to set for cream, diluted it with malice prepense, and drenched us with milk and water even to loathing!"