Cheap Popular Literature—Conditions of Cheapness—Popular Literature of Elizabeth's reign—Who were the readers.  
The history of Cheap Popular Literature is a long and instructive chapter of the history of the condition of the People. Before the invention of printing there was little literature that could be called popular, and none that could be called cheap. But in the very earliest stages of the press all books would be comparatively cheap, and all literature to a certain extent popular. Our first printer, as we regard his works, had a most especial eye to the largest number of readers. We have no record of the price of his books beyond the fact that one of them was sold for 6s. 8d., a price equal to that of a quarter of wheat. But the subjects of his books, for the most part, show that he thought it his especial business to simplify knowledge, and to furnish reading for amusement. We can scarcely call any of his books learned. What there is of science in them was of a popular sort, and illustrated by diagrams. The histories were those of our old {180} legendary chronicles, as attractive even as the romances of chivalry which accompanied them. His poetry was chiefly that of one of the great minds whose essential attribute is that of universality. Caxton went to the largest number of readers that his age presented to him.
It is a remarkable characteristic of the first century of printing, not only in this country, but wherever a press was erected, that the highest and most constant efforts of the new art were addressed to the diffusion of the old stores of knowledge, rather than to an enlargement of the stores. The early professors of the art on the continent, in Germany, Italy, and France, were scholars who knew the importance of securing the world's inheritance of the knowledge of Greece and Rome from any further destruction, such as the scattered manuscripts of the ancient poets, orators, and historians had experienced, through neglect and ignorance. The press would put them fairly beyond the reach of any new waste. But after the first half-century of printing, when these manuscripts had been copied in type, and the public libraries and the princes and nobles of Europe had been supplied, a fresh want arose out of the satisfaction of the former want. Men of letters, who did not belong to the class of the rich, anxiously demanded copies of the ancient classics; and their demands were not made in vain. The Alduses, and Stephenses, and Plantins, did not hold it good to keep books dear for the advancement of letters; they anxiously desired {181} to make them cheap, and they produced, therefore, not expensive folios only, as their predecessors had done, but neat and compactly printed octavos and duodecimos, for the general market. The instant that they did this, the foundations of literature were widened and deepened. They probably at first over-rated the demand; indeed, we know they did so, and they suffered in consequence. But the time was sure to come when their labours would be rewarded; and, at any rate, they were at once placed beyond a servile dependence upon patrons. When they had their customers in every great city and university, they did not wait for the approving nod of a pope or a cardinal before they began to print.
A new demand very soon followed upon the first demand for cheap copies of the ancient classics, and this was even more completely the demand of the people. The doctrines of the Reformation had proclaimed the Bible as the best spiritual guide and teacher, and the people would have Bibles. The first English Bible was bought up and burnt; those who bought the Bibles contributed capital for making new Bibles, and those who burnt the Bibles advertised them. The first printers of the Bible were, however, cautious; they did not see the number of readers upon which they were to rely for a sale. In 1540 Grafton printed but 500 copies of his complete edition of the Scriptures; and yet, so great was the rush to this new supply of the most important knowledge, that we have {182} existing 326 editions of the English Bible, or parts of the Bible, printed between 1526 and 1600.
The early English printers did not attempt what the continental ones were doing for the ancient classics. Down to 1540 no Greek book had appeared from an English press. Oxford had only printed a part of Cicero's Epistles; Cambridge, no ancient writer whatever: only three or four old Roman writers had been reprinted, at that period, throughout England. But a great deal was done for public instruction by the course which our early printers took; for, as one of them says, "Divers famous clerks and learned men translated and made many noble works into our English tongue, whereby there was much more plenty and abundance of English used than there was in times past." The English nobility were, probably, for more than the first half-century of English printing, the great encouragers of our press: they required translations and abridgments of the classics, versions of French and Italian romances, old chronicles, and helps to devout exercises. Caxton and his successors abundantly supplied these wants; and the impulse to most of their exertions was given by the growing demand for literary amusement on the part of the great. Caxton, as we have seen, speaking of his 'Boke of Eneydos,' says, "This present book is not for a rude uplandish man to labour therein, nor read it." But a great change was working in Europe; the "rude uplandish man," if he gave promise of talent, was sent to school. The priests {183} strove with the laity for the education of the people; and not only in Protestant but in Catholic countries, were schools and universities everywhere founded. Here, again, was a new source of employment for the press—A, B, C's, or Abseys, Primers, Catechisms, Grammars, Dictionaries, were multiplied in every direction. Books became, also, during this period, the tools of professional men. There were not many works of medicine, but a great many of law; and even the people required instruction in the ordinances they were called upon to obey, which they received in the form of proclamations.
The course of the early printers was based upon the principle that they could produce books cheaper by the press than by the scribe. This point once established, the next fact would be also clear—that the more impressions they printed the cheaper the book could be afforded. Beyond this great fact there was a difficulty. There would arise in their minds the same doubt which has puzzled all printers and booksellers from the time of Caxton to our times; which is at the bottom of all controversies about dear books and low-priced books at the present hour; and which will continue to perplex the producers of books, even should the entire population beyond infancy become readers, and have the means of purchasing books in some form or other. That question is simply a commercial one, and is perfectly independent of any schemes of public or private generosity for the enlightenment of the people; it is—Given the subject {184} of a book, its mode of treatment, the celebrity or otherwise of its author, its amount of matter—what is the natural limit of its first sale, and the necessary ratio of its published price? If the probable demand be under-rated, there will be a high price, which will restrict the natural demand; and if over-rated, there will be a low price, which will curtail the natural profit. This is scarcely a question for enthusiasts for cheapness to decide, upon the broad assertion that a large sale of low-priced books will be more profitable than a small sale of high-priced books.
In 1825, Archibald Constable, then the great publisher, propounded to the then 'Great Unknown' his plan for revolutionising "the art and traffic of bookselling." He exhibited the annual schedule of assessed taxes, having reckoned the number of persons who paid for each separate article of luxury; and from that document he calculated that, if he produced every year "twelve volumes so good that millions must wish to have them, and so cheap that every butcher's callant may have them, if he please to let me tax him sixpence a week," he should sell them, "not by thousands or tens of thousands, but by hundreds of thousands—ay, by millions." It is recorded that a worthy divine, instructing his bookseller to publish a sermon of his composition, decided that at least twelve thousand should be the number printed, he having calculated that one copy would be required in each parish by the clergyman alone, to {185} say nothing of chance customers. These statistics were ingenious, but they were not safe guides. The callants did not consent to be taxed sixpence a week; and the rectors and curates did not rush to St. Paul's Churchyard to buy up the limited impression of the sermon.
But the Edinburgh publisher, and the rural divine, were nevertheless right in their endeavour to find some principle upon which they could determine the probable demand for a literary work. Constable proposed to himself the union of goodness and cheapness, to create a demand that (still using his own words) would have made him "richer than the possession of all the copyrights of all the quartos that ever were, or will be, hot-pressed." The goodness without the cheapness might have produced little change in the market; the cheapness without the goodness might have been more influential But, with the truest combination of these qualities, there is nothing so easy or so common as to over-rate a demand in the commerce of books. The price of a book aspiring to the greatest popularity can only be settled by an estimate of the probable number of readers at any one time in the community, and by a still more difficult estimate of the sort of reading which is likely to interest the greatest number. The same difficulty arises with regard to every new book, and has always arisen. The amount of the "reading public," with its almost endless subdivisions, arising out of station, or age, or average intelligence, or {186} prevailing taste, is very difficult to be estimated in our own day; and there are not many authentic details ready to our hand upon which we can make an estimate for any past period. We will endeavour, out of these scanty landmarks, to collect some facts relating to the former state and progressive extension of the realms of print.
It is no modern discovery that a book cheap enough for the many amongst reading people to buy, and at the same time a book which the many would have a strong desire to buy, would be more advantageous to the manufacturer of books than a dear book which the few only could buy, and which the few only would desire to buy. There is preserved, in the handwriting of Christopher Barker, in 1582, 'A Note of the offices and other special licences for printing granted by her Majesty, with a conjecture of their valuation.'[18]
This worthy printer to the Queen probably a little under-rated his own gains, when he says that the whole Bible requires so great a cost, that his predecessors kept the realm twelve years without venturing a single edition, but that he had desperately adventured to print four in a year and a half, expending about 3000l., to the certain ruin of his wife and family if he had died in the time. Of these four editions, three were in folio, and one in quarto. The sale of the folios would necessarily be limited by the cost, in the way that the same unhappy patentee complains of as to his Book of {187} Common Prayer, "which few or none do buy except the minister." But how stands the sale of smaller and less expensive books? Mr. Daye prints the Psalms in metre, which book, "being occupied of all sorts of men, women, and children, and requiring no great stock for the furnishing thereof, is therefore gainful." The small Catechism is "also a profitable copy, for that it is general." Mr. Seres prints the Morning and Evening Prayer, with the Collects and the Litany; and where poor Mr. Barker sells one Book of Common Prayer, "he (Seres) furnisheth the whole parishes throughout the realm, which are commonly a hundred to one." But with all his laments and jealousies, Queen Elizabeth's printer, in those anti-commercial days, had hit the sound principle that is at the root of the commerce of books. There is one of the printers, he says, whose patent contains all dictionaries in all tongues, all chronicles and histories whatsoever; and his position is thus described:—"If he print competent numbers of each to maintain his charges, all England, Scotland, and much more, were not able to utter them; and if he should print but a few of each volume, the prices would be exceedingly great, an............