Continued dearness of Books—Useful Knowledge Society—Modern Epoch of Cheapness—Demand and Supply—The Printing-machine—The Paper-machine—Revival of Woodcutting.  
From the time when Hume's 'History' was published at 5s. a volume, there appears to have been a steady advance in the price of books to the end of the century. In the eleven years from 1792 to 1802, there was an average publication of 372 new books per year. The number of new books had quadrupled upon the average of those published from 1701 to 1756. But the duodecimo had been increased in price from 2s. 6d. to 4s.; the octavo from 5s. or 6s. to 10s.; the quarto from 12s. to 1l. 1s. From 1800 to 1827 there were published, according to the London Catalogue, 19,860 books, including reprints; for which reprints deducting one-fifth, there were 15,888 new books, being an annual average of 588. Books were still rising in price. The duodecimo mounted up to 6s., or became a small octavo at 10s. 6d.; the octavo was raised from 10s. to 12s.. or 14s.; the quarto was very frequently two guineas. Some of this rise of price was unquestionably due to the general rise in the value of labour, and to the higher price of paper. But more is to be ascribed to the determination of the great publishers not sufficiently to open their eyes {239} to the extension of the number of readers, and the absolute certainty, therefore, that a system of extravagantly high prices was an unnatural, bigoted, and unprofitable system. They paid most liberally for copyright, and they looked only to an exclusive sale for their remuneration. They did not apply the same system to periodical works. The two great Reviews, the 'Edinburgh' and the 'Quarterly,' were as cheap, if not cheaper, having regard to their literary merit, than the cheapest books of the previous century. They were certain of their profit through that union of excellence and cheapness which could not fail to create a large demand. The publishers generally had not the same reliance upon the increase of readers of other popular works of original excellence. It has only been within the last twenty years that their unalloyed confidence in a narrow market has been first shaken, and then overthrown.
In looking back upon the changes of a quarter of a century, it is impossible, even for the writer, who was identified with this great movement in Popular Literature, to forbear speaking of what was accomplished by 'The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.' One who has written contemporary history in a broad and liberal spirit says—"The institution of this Society was an important feature of its times, and one of the honours belonging to the reign of George IV. It did not succeed in all its professed objects: it did not give to the operative classes of Great Britain a {240} library of the elements of all sciences—it omitted some of the most important of the sciences, and, with regard to some others, presented anything rather than the elements. It did not fully penetrate the masses that most needed aid. But it established the principle and precedent of cheap publication (cheapness including goodness), stimulated the demand for sound information, and the power and inclination to supply that demand; and marked a great ?ra in the history of popular enlightenment."[30] The Society originated with Mr. Brougham, in 1826. He gathered around him some of the leading statesmen, lawyers, and philanthropists of his day. Men eminent in letters and in science joined the association. And yet its success was so doubtful in the eyes of those who had been accustomed to consider high price as a necessary condition of excellence, that one of the greatest publishing houses refused to bring out the treatises without a guarantee. The Society wisely went upon the principle, originally, of leaving all the trade arrangements to its publishers. It placed its 'Library of Useful Knowledge,' its 'Farmer's Series,' its 'Maps,' in the hands of Messrs. Baldwin, paying the literary and artistical expenses, and receiving a rent upon the copies sold. Mr. Knight originated the 'British Almanac' and its 'Companion,' 'The Library of Entertaining Knowledge,' 'The Penny Magazine,' and 'The Penny Cyclop?dia;' and he bore the entire expense and risk of {241} these works, as he did also for 'The Gallery of Portraits,' and 'The Journal of Education,' paying upon all a rent when the sale reached a certain number of copies.[31] It is sufficient to mention these facts to show that the operations connected with this Society were not upon an insignificant scale, or not fruitful of large results; and that they were essentially commercial operations. The cry that was raised against this Society, by those who were interested in the publication of dear books, was that of "monopoly." That cuckoo cry was repeated on every side. Fashionable publishers shouted it; the old conventional school of authors echoed it. Those who wrote for the Society were called, in derision, "compilers." Scribblers who never verified a quotation ridiculed patient industry as dulness.
From the time when the Society commenced a real "superintendence" of works for the people—when it assisted, by diligent revision and friendly inquiry, the services of its editors—the old vague generalities of popular knowledge were exploded; and the scissars-and-paste school of authorship had to seek for other occupations than Paternoster-row could once furnish. Accuracy was forced upon elementary books as the rule and not the exception. Books professedly "entertaining" were to be founded upon exact information, and their authorities invariably indicated. No doubt this superintendence in some degree interfered with the {242} free course of original composition, and imparted somewhat of the utilitarian character to everything produced. But it was the only course by which a new aspect could be given to cheap literature, by showing that the great principles of excellence were common to all books, whether for the learned or the uninformed. In seventeen years the Society accomplished its main objects. There were considerable gains connected with it, and there were great losses. These are evanescent. The good which it did remains. It supplied the new demand for knowledge in a way that had never before been contemplated; it supplied it at the cheapest rate then possible; it broke down the distinctions between knowledge for the few and knowledge for the many; it created a popular taste for art; it sent its light into the strongholds of ignorance and superstition, by superseding, for a time, a large amount of weekly trash, and destroying, for ever, the astrological and indecent almanacs. But, beyond its own productions, it raised the standard of all popular literature. It has had worthy co-labourers and successors. It ceased its work when others were in the field, honestly and successfully carrying forward what it had begun. He who writes this will ever think it an honour that he long worked in fellowship with Henry Brougham; and that he was a partaker, for some years, in the councils of an association of men more or less eminent, whose objects were never of a selfish, partial, or temporary nature. He has sate at those councils {243} with five cabinet ministers, who felt most deeply that the education of the people, in its largest sense, was as much their business as the imposition of taxes. Where is that spirit now?
The modern epoch of cheap literature may be held to have commenced, however partially, in 1827, when Constable issued his 'Miscellany,' and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge their 'Library of Useful Knowledge.' In a few years followed 'The Library of Entertaining Knowledge,' Mr. Murray's 'Family Library,' and Lardner's 'Cabinet Cyclop?dia.' These books were properly published under a tentative system. Not one of them rushed to that extreme cheapness which is indicated by quantity alone. They each had to feel their way to a demand proportioned to the expense of their production. That production was necessarily expensive. The cheapness consisted in the employment of the best writers to produce books of original merit at a price that was essentially low, by comparison with the ordinary rate at which books for the few were sold. Though Constable, in his grand style, talked of millions of buyers, he charged his little volumes 3s. 6d. each. He was right. The millions were not ready to buy such books at a shilling, nor even at sixpence. They are not ready now. 'The Library of Useful Knowledge' was charged at the rate of 3d. a sheet. Taking mere quantity of paper and printing into account, some of the penny journals of the present day are six times as cheap. {244} 'The Library of Entertaining Knowledge' was 4s. 6d. a volume. The copyright of each volume ordinarily cost 200l., and the woodcuts as much, and even more. 'The Family Library,' at 5s., was, no doubt, equally costly. The same costliness applies to Lardner's 'Cyclop?dia,' published at 6s. In these new undertakings, conceived in a totally different spirit from anything which had preceded them, there were large expenses which have been surprisingly reduced by scientific discovery and extended competition at the present day. There were about twenty woodcutters in London in 1827, who were real artists, paid at artists' prices. Woodcutting is now a manufacture. Paper, then, paid the high rate of duty, and was 50 per cent. dearer. Steam-printing was not universal, and was only applied to common works. Each of these series was offered to the very numerous body of those who, having become better educated than the same classes in a previous generation, were desirous of real improvement. They had a certain success, but a variable one. Every experiment of this sort has shown that such collections of separate and independent works cannot rely upon a sale as a series. They come to be bought, each work by itself, according to its attractions for individual purchasers. Thence all those irregularities of sale, and consequent accumulations of stock, which press heavily upon the profits of those volumes which are successful. The republication of the 'Waverley Novels' in 5s. volumes was {245} an exception to this rule. They constituted an integral work. Their sale was vast, although the total cost was 12l. Scott and his publisher saw the immense field that was before them, in giving their books to the world at a price that would carry them into thousands of households, instead of limiting them to the circulating libraries. They originally appeared in seventy-four volumes, at an aggregate cost of 34l. 10s. Had they remained in their original form, and at their first price, those heroic efforts which lifted a mountain of debt off the shoulders of that great man who, perhaps, more than all men, might have claimed the motto which Burke said should be his—"Nitor in adversum"—those labours which wore him out, would not have been successful. Neither would the success have come so soon had the later publication in twenty-five volumes for 5l. been tried in the first instance. If the 'Waverley Novels' go through new phases of cheapness, it will be because there is now a larger public to buy; and because the first natural price for all works of extraordinary merit, that of authorship, has been already paid largely and liberally. The question of price is then mainly reduced to a question of paper and print. But miserable would it be for a nation whose "chiefest glory is its authors," at a time when the nature of that glory is properly understood, if a passion for premature cheapness, to be measured by mere quantity, were to possess the minds of the people, and to be the expression of the "Vox populi." {246} There was a much larger public always ready to purchase these enchanting fictions than have been, at any time during the last quarter of a century, ready for the purchase of books of information, however agreeably presented. We doubt whether the Family Libraries, and the Libraries of Entertaining Knowledge, and the Cabinet Cyclop?dias, would have sold better at the time of their publication, if they had been produced at half the original price. The experiment was tried, when the number of readers was largely increased, in 'Knight's Weekly Volume'—a series published at one-third the price of Constable's 'Miscellany.' The majority of books in that series were, for the most part, of intrinsic merit; many also carrying the recommendation of popular names as their authors. "Why Mr. Knight did not profit largely by the speculation is a problem yet to be solved," says the writer of a recent paper on 'Literature for the People.' The solution is, that the people did not sufficiently buy them. So far from twenty thousand copies being sold of many volumes, as asserted, there were not twenty volumes, out of the hundred and forty, that reached a sale of ten thousand, and the average sale was scarcely five thousand. They were not cheap enough for the humble, who looked to mere quantity. They were too cheap for the genteel, who were then taught to think that a cheap book must necessarily be a bad book. It is impossible not to remember that, even ten years ago, the majority of publishers, and many of their supporters in the {247} public journals, hated cheap books. The 'Weekly Volumes' were welcomed very generally by those who were anxious for the enlightenment of the people. Societies were set on foot for their circulation. But all experience has shown that no associations for recommending books, and forcing their sale, can be successful. The people, of every grade, will choose for themselves. It is useless to urge an adult, whether male or female, to buy a solid book when an exciting one is longed for. It is worse than useless to give books of improvement away to the poor. They always suspect the motive. Very wisely did a witness before the "select Committee on Newspaper Stamps," 1851, say, "There are classes which you cannot reach, unless you go to them with something which is the nearest thing to what they want." If they want fiction, they will not look at science or history. At the time of the issue of 'The Weekly Volume,' the sale of books at railway stations was unknown; and if it had been known, they scarcely presented sufficient attractions for the travelling readers for amusement. They were published also in too quick succession. It was a plausible theory of the editor, that, if good books, extremely cheap, were issued rapidly enough to form a little library, many such libraries would be formed. Those who have to deal with 'Literature for the People' must bear in mind that time as well as money has to be economised by those who of necessity must labour hard either by hand or head. What may be called furniture books may {248} be bought by the luxurious, to put upon their shelves, and looked at when wanted. The earnest workers buy few books that they are not desirous to read, and to read at once. They bought such a book in 1830, to the extent of 50,000 copies. 'The Results of Machinery,' written by the author of this volume, was addressed to great human interests. It was not professedly amusing; but it was the first attempt to take Political Economy out of its hard and logical track. It is now recorded, as a wonderful instance of the application of cheapness to a dry subject, that Mr. M'Culloch's 'Essay on the Rate of Wages,' is republished at a shilling. It is in no spirit of self-laudation that we presume to think that the vaunted cheapness of 1854 had some previous examples.
In this principle, that the great mass of the people will read as they buy, lies the secret of the enormous success of the weekly sheets of that great epoch of cheapness which began about twenty years ago. It is the principle which is the foundation of the extensive demand, growing year by year, for all periodical literature. It made the essayists. It made the magazines. It made the newspapers. It caused a sale of three hundred thousand weekly sheets in 1834. It is causing a sale of fourteen hundred thousand weekly sheets in 1854. Before we proceed in the examination of this remarkable epoch of popular literature, let us glance at th............