The English Common Reader

"It’s an astonishing book, published in 1957. Altick is so different from what came before because he wants to find out what was actually available to be read in the 19th century. He has lists of sales figures and best sellers, and books produced for the poor. He’s very much a direct predecessor of what I tried to do. Because he lived in the United States and did his work in the immediate post-war period, all his information comes from printed books. So he would go through autobiographies of Victorian authors and pick out what they said about the number of copies they sold. He didn’t have the opportunity to do any kind of formal archival work among publishers’ records, and didn’t have much sense of the book industry being an economic system. Nor did he have any general economic theory to apply to the information that he collected and provided. The book is so sparkling and so full of information that it’s been treated as the standard book since it was first written. But no scholars came forward and said this was a terrific book and let’s add to it, let’s compile proper factual information based on sales and production from archives and from the other sources Altick didn’t have the opportunity to look at, but we have. The result is that students are still relying on the pioneering work of Altick more than half a century later. I think it did challenge conventional wisdom. One of the books of the 1930s was by the English literary critic QD Leavis, wife of FR Leavis, called Fiction and the Reading Public , in which she gives a potted history of an imagined readership, the “general reader”, who read novels in the 18th and 19th centuries. What distinguished Altick from QD Leavis was that Altick actually had some numbers, albeit scattered, and was interested not just in the tiny, leisured elite who had the time and money to read new books as they came out. But the main point I would make about Altick is that his challenge to what literary studies could be, and their potential contribution to answering bigger questions about the way culture is formed, was not taken up until recently. In the Treasury, the last thing you wanted your work described as was “anecdotal” – it was always a put-down. Anecdotal evidence is something that you turn to when you haven’t been able to find a more formal, actively searched for and preferably quantified kind of evidence. It’s very much a last resort. This is because it is difficult to know how far an anecdote can be trusted, how far a story is representative of something more general, and how far it is just a pleasing story that people like hearing. I tried in my book to get beyond the collection of anecdotes and strive for completeness of availability, at least of material books, noting the many gaps. That does not, of course, take us to reading, or the results of reading, but is, I would say, an indispensable step, before tackling the more difficult questions. And these more difficult questions are still present, even if shied away from, in all studies that do not look beyond the text."