Pleasures of the herd : readers, reading and class in England 1880-1914

Abstract

This thesis examines the relationships between readers, writers and popular and literary novels in England from 1880 to 1914. It takes as its starting point the shifts in cultural practices in the nineteenth century which contributed to crucial changes in the novel form, including technological advances, increases in literacy, secularization, the rise and fall of the self-help movement and the spread of institutionalised reading. Using Pierre Bourdieu's notions of cultural capital and the literary field the thesis argues that the categorization of the popular novel as a form that negatively classified both reader and author was instrumental in enabling the rise of a literary elite in the early twentieth century. More importantly, it demonstrates that the class implications of the art/market divide began in the institutions which disseminated or withheld literature according to nineteenth-century constructions of national, class and gender identity.

Section One uses archive material from four English public libraries and the railway bookstalls of W.H. Smith and Son. It demonstrates how a burgeoning mass market came to be viewed, catered for and controlled in relation to the public spaces in which the reading public - and particularly women - were assumed to be most at risk from the moral ambiguity thought to be attached to novel-reading. Section Two concentrates on a particular publishing case study, examining archives relating to Oxford University Press's 1905 takeover of the World's Classics series. It shows how a hallowed publishing institution adapted to a new market through the ideologically inflected selection and expurgation of a series of classics aimed at the self-taught which, nonetheless, simultaneously withheld the ultimate prize of legitimate scholarship. Section Three examines four best-selling novelists across the period, arguing that the availability and critical reception of literary forms like realism or romance was informed by the gender and class issues attached to notions of the popular.

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