These unfortunate masses!  When first the schoolmaster began to be abroad, how tenderly we took care of the improvement of their minds, and how zealously exerted ourselves to make literature a universal dominie, graciously enlightening the neophyte on every subject under heaven!  Does anybody remember now the Societies for the Diffusion of Knowledge--the Penny Magazines and Cyclopædias through which the streams of useful information fell benignly upon the lower orders?--how we laboured to bring ourselves down to the capacity of that unknown intelligence, the working man!--how we benevolently volunteered to amuse him in a profitable and edifying way, by histories and descriptions of the ingenious crafts, and nice accounts of how they make pins, and laces, and china, or how a steam-engine is put together!  What a delightful ideal dwelt then in our inexperienced thoughts!  Would any have supposed that this intellectual creation, austerely brought up upon facts and figures, could ever own a guilty longing for stories, or verses, or other such amusements of a frivolous race?  The idea was insulting to all our hopes and exertions; and when, by-and-by, the horrid numerals of a statistical account disclosed to us the fatal certainty that the multitude, like ourselves, loved amusement better than instruction--that working men, too, preferred Guy Mannering to the Novum Organum, and that Byron was more to the purpose than Bacon even in the library of a mechanics' institute--the chill of disappointed expectation consequent upon the discovery is not to be described.  So the penny cyclopædias dropped one by one into oblivion, and nobody missed them; and lo, rushing into the empty space, the mushroom growth of a sudden impulse, rapid and multitudinous to meet the occasion, came springing up a host of penny magazines--spontaneous and natural publications, which professed no artificial mission, and aimed at no class-improvement, but were the simple supply of an existing demand--wares such as the customer wanted, and the market was suitable for.  The Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge placed a wooden image of the most severe and edifying demeanour as the representative of literature to the multitude; but the multitude has avenged itself--here is the flesh and blood which has mounted upon the pedestal of useful information.  Let us look at this natural index of the taste of the masses, and learn by their own assistance what that is which satisfies them best.

     There are few words so difficult to define as that term literature, which is in everybody's mouth.  To confine its meaning to that which we call literature, is about as exclusive and limited a notion as it is to confine that other term society to the fashionable world, which claims the name in sublime disdain of all competitors.  Almost as numerous as the distinct "circles" which, upward to the highest haut monde, and downwards to the genteelest coterie of a village, each calls itself by the all-comprehending name, are the widespread oligarchies and democracies of that Republic of Letters, which, like most other republics, claims throughout its ranks a noisy equality, pleasantly varied by the arrogance of individual despotisms.  Let us not delude ourselves with the idea that literature is fully represented by that small central body of its forces of whom everybody knows every individual name.  Nay, not everybody--only everybody who is anybody--not the everybody who reads the London Journal and the Family Herald.  That eminent group, with which we at least do ourselves the credit to claim acquaintance, are only the chance oligarchs who stand up head and shoulders above the mass of their co-aspirants--whom, by virtue of that accident of stature, other countries see over our cliffs and channels, whom above a certain level of society it is impossible to avoid seeing--nay, even necessary and inevitable to know something of--and whose works are forming the last ring in that big old tree called English literature.  But it matters very little to the people in the valley whether a man stands on the top of the hill or only on the side of it--nay, for all their purposes, the lowest slope, being nearest, is the best; and so in the underground, quite out of sight and ken of the heroes, spreads thick and darkly an undiscriminated multitude--undiscriminated by the critics, by the authorities, by the general vision, but widely visible to individual eyes, to admiring coteries, and multitudinous lower classes, who buy, and read, and praise, and encourage, and, under the veil of their own obscurity, bestow a certain singular low-lying Jack-o'-lantern celebrity, which nobody out of these regions is aware of, and which is the oddest travestie and paraphrase of fame.  Some of these are religious writers, who perhaps of all others address the largest and most mixed community; some are eccentrics, moving in queer corners of their own, with a snug little audience close about them, and a little set of doctrines, arguments, and quarrels, "haill o' my ain, and nane o' my neighbours," which grow into the most magnificent grandiloquence of proportions by dint of being contemplated without intermission and very close at hand; and some are neither eccentric nor religious, neither witty nor eloquent, neither political nor philanthropical, but simply and solely the weekly amusers of that multitudinous public which opens its own mind to us, all unawares and unconsciously, by means of those penny papers--not one of which says a syllable about the manners or likings of its audience, in the way of description, but which, every one, help us to the geography of that strange region where such things as themselves can grow and flourish.

     Perhaps for mere amusement, the periodical eccentrics of literature, the writers, vehemently inspired with "an object," and continually straining their eyes upon that to the exclusion of all the world beside, are the most inviting; but we will not be tempted aside, in the first place at least, even by the virtuous earnestness of Notes and Queries, or the sublime and absorbed devotion of the Ecclesiologist.  These illustrate a very patent and unquestionable truth--which is, that a very small matter, placed close before an average pair of human eyes, and gazed at zealously and without intermission, will very soon eclipse the very mountains and seas in magnitude, and throw its shadow upon both earth and heaven.  But we find a larger, a less comprehensible, and a more important field in the periodicals printed and published for the amusement of the many, without either object or mission separate from this.  We should be afraid to pretend to know even the titles of all these distinguished serials--still less could we presumptuously venture to assume an acquaintance with the gifted contributors who secure their popularity; but the general aspect of these publications is certainly as different as can be conceived from the penny cyclopædias.  Their useful information is like Falstaff's halfpennyworth of bread; the amount of sack--which, however, is not sack, but that poor creature small-beer--is quite preposterous and intolerable. There are stories to begin with, stories to end with, and stories in the middle.  Two serial tales, continued from week to week, is a moderate allowance for one of those twelve-page broadsheets; and even the little make-weights of history with which some of them ballast their lighter wares, have to be enlivened by an anecdote or a melodramatic scene.  One can perceive pretty well at a glance that it is not instruction which the multitude demands most loudly, and that the popular mind does not by nature incline towards philosophy, even should it be the philosophy of the steam-engine, for the relaxation of its leisure hours.  No; one genuine natural appetite, at least, if nothing more, displays itself most prominently in this "reading for the million."  It is that love of stories which distinguishes all primitive minds, and which has its strongest development in savages and children.  No disparagement to our friends of the multitude.  They, too, share with the children and the savages a certain absolute and first-hand contact with things and facts, which throws out philosophy.  Events great and grievous come upon them as upon their social superiors; but necessity thrusts them on without the lingering which we have time to make over our graves and shipwrecks.  They have to gulp down their sob in the midst of the common work, which, by the compensation of Providence, is the best practical consoler; and with always the first absolute need of nature before them--the necessity to earn their daily bread--live, and are constrained to live a life outside of themselves--not of contemplation, but of activity.  So it comes about that these labouring multitudes stand somewhat in the same position as, perhaps, the very knights of romance held four or five hundred years ago.  It is not that they differ in natural intelligence from the classes above them; it is not that the delf is duller than the porcelain; it is only that we have got so many centuries ahead by dint of our exemption from manual labours and necessities.  They are still among the dragons and the giants, where hard hands and strength of arm are more in demand than thoughts and fancies.  We have gained the thoughtful ways of civilisation, when we smile at Archimage, and find St. George's hideous adversary a fabulous creation.  Our leisure accordingly plays with all fancies, all inventions--all matters of thought and reason; whereas their leisure, brief and rapid, and sharpened with the day's fatigue, loves, above all things, a story, and finds in that just the amount of mental excitation which makes it somehow a semi-intellectual pleasure.  For it is a story, for the story's sake; not a story because it is a good story--a work of genius--a revelation of nature.  The simple practical mind is a great deal more absolute than that. Merit is quite a secondary consideration; it is the narrative which is the thing.  What does a child care for the probabilities of fiction, for the wit of dialogue, or the grace of style?  It is likely they bore him, detaining as they do the current of events with which his interest is linked; and though we will not say quite so much as this for the liking of the multitude, yet the principle is the same.  It is the tale which is wanted; give but that, and the qualities of mind concerned in its production are quite a secondary consideration.  The characters may be the merest puppets of wood; the springs of the machinery may betray themselves at every movement; the language may be absurd, the invention miserable; yet if it is a story, it will give a certain amount of pleasure to the dormant intelligences: nay, intelligences not dormant, bright enough in their own fashion, possibly a great deal cleverer than the story-teller, answer to the natural fascination.

     This principle of mind is just what the societies for the diffusion of knowledge did not find out, and which we fear even the philanthropist of the day, who does popular lectures, persists in ignoring.  People working face to face with the primitive powers--people in whose understanding poverty does not mean a smaller house, or fewer servants, or a difficulty about one's butcher's bill, but means real hunger, cold, and nakedness, are not people to be amused with abstractions.  And it has often occurred to ourselves, that were all these benevolent, noble, right honourable, and distinguished lecturers to be replaced by so many minstrels of the antique strain, yet of a modern fashion--men with stories on their lips, fresh, new, and living--not stories written in books which anybody can read who has a mind--that the effect would be something quite beyond our modern calm and even level of interest.  It has pleased one of our great novelists in recent days to read certain stories of his own to an elegant and refined public, most of whom had read them before, and went to look at the author with purely unexcited and philosophical minds.  We presume the audience had what they wanted, and were satisfied; and so probably had the distinguished writer, reader, and actor, who made this entertainment for their benefit; yet after all, though it is becoming common, it is not the most dignified meeting this between the story-teller and his auditory.  The relations between them are changed for the time, and not agreeably changed.  Somehow it seems a sin against good taste and the reticence of genius, that the writer, with his own voice, should bring out and emphasize those "points" already singled out by popular approbation, which are sure to "bring down the house."  It is altogether different with the actor, whose personal triumph has a certain generous admixture of satisfaction in the growth of another's fame.  One cannot but feel a certain pleasure in knowing that Shakespeare was no more fit for the part of Hamlet than we are, and could only do an awkward ghost when necessity urged him; and we confess we do not see what advantage, save the satisfaction of a perfectly unelevated curiosity, is to be gained by hearing from the lips of its author a well-known tale which we have all read already, and can read again to-morrow without trouble to anybody.  But let the story-teller bring us a tale fresh from his own conception, and unfamiliar to the world, and the circumstances are changed.  It is possible even that this might be the "something new" after which this fatigued capital toils with perseverance so praiseworthy.  Suppose Mr. Thackeray and Mr. Dickens, instead of monthly numbers yellow and green, had a monthly assembly, and gave forth the story to a visible public, moved by all the visible emotions over which these magicians exercise their subtle power,--would not that be an experiment sufficient to reinvigorate with all its pristine force the flagging serial--possibly even by the prompt criticism of the audience to bestow a certain benefit upon the tale?  And even if an attempt on such a great scale were impracticable, what should hinder us from getting our Christmas stories at first hand, before print had yet made them common, or criticism breathed upon their virginal fair fame?  But however that may be, there can be little question that the most practicable mental agent upon the masses, in their present condition of superficial intelligence, is the art of story-telling--whether true lives of true men, or simple fiction, matters little.  A genuine story, rapid, clear, and intelligible, something in modern guise like the old ballad-stories which are the true beginning everywhere of literature for the people, would tell a hundred times better than the prettiest essay ever delivered--better, too, than even an old story of the highest fame, read to the humble audience by their volunteer teacher; for our friends are touchy--as ready to take offence as any knight of the middle ages, and might suspect a covert imputation upon their own knowledge and discrimination, if some one offered to read to them a book which they could read for themselves.  No; give the people stories if you love them--narratives fresh, original, and unprinted--and the people will listen once more as their ancestors listened to "Chevy Chase" and "Otterbourne."

     Every single page of our sixpenny-worth of periodicals proves more strongly this natural taste; and now it is about time that we should see what the manner of these stories is. In the first place, they have one particular and marked distinction--they are not of the class of those multitudinous tales which the art of criticism once patronised, and now extinguishes; the fiction feminine, which fills with mild domestic volumes the middle class of this species of literature.  The lowest range, like the highest range, admits no women.  We cannot take it upon us to say what this fact teaches, or if it teaches anything; but it is curious enough as a distinction.  And if any one supposes that here, in this special branch of literature provided for the multitude, anything about the said multitude is to be found, a more entire mistake could not be imagined.  It is only the higher classes who can find a hero in a tailor, or amuse themselves with the details of a workman's household and economy.  An Alton Locke may find a countess to fall in love with him, but is no hero for the sempstress, who makes her romance out of quite different materials; and whereas we can please ourselves with Mary Barton, our poor neighbours share no such humble taste, but luxuriate in ineffable splendours of architecture and upholstery, and love to concern themselves with the romantic fortunes of a Gertrude de Brent and a Gerald St. Maur.  No kindly cottage interior, or home of their own rank, opens to this class of readers that kind of gratification which we are so much disposed to accept as the chief charm of imaginative literature.  It is not because their own trials are shadowed--their own sentiments expressed--their own life illustrated by the fictitious representation before them, that our humble friends love their weekly story-telling. When the future historian of this century seeks information about the life and manners of our poorer classes, he will find no kind of popular print so entirely destitute of the details he seeks as those penny miscellanies which are solely read by the poor, yet are full of tales about the rich.

     When you find instances of heroism, of self denial, of noble truth and virtue, among the poor, as, let us thank Heaven, such instances abound, tell them to the rich.  But let your palette be splendid with all the colours of the rainbow, and fill the treasury of your imagination with the wealth of the Rothschilds and the blood of the Howards, when you wish to fix the interest and gain the attention of the crowd!

     So, at least, says the crowd itself, in its unconscious testimony, through the publications it delights to honour.

     The paper from which we have already quoted [Cassell's Illustrated Paper] has the orthodox allowance of two weekly stories--"to be continued"--and two others, complete in themselves, and professing to be incidents from history.  The amount of ballast is greater than usual, and of a highly instructive character--beginning under the title of "Hopes and Helps for the Young," with a small prelection upon--of all subjects in the world--Public Speaking! and rules for the successful performance of the same.  This is followed by French lessons, and lessons in Natural Philosophy--the art of oratory being, as it appears, as needful and instructive an exercise for the young of these latitudes, as it is to learn that un homme signifies a man, or what is the meaning of centrifugal force.  Then there is an article upon the city and principles of Mormonism, and another upon Ragged Schools, where we are told that the name of the Earl of Shaftesbury

          "Comes like the south wind o'er a bank of violets,
             Stealing and giving odours;"

     For lastly, in this bundle of periodicals, the lively and ingenuous public who patronise the same, come in, head and shoulders, in their own proper persons, to animate the scene.  One cannot but admire and wonder at the aspect of this diffusion of intelligence which is made visible by the lively flutter of pens and flow of correspondence excited by our little group of Magazines for the people; each of these periodicals has some score or two of letters to answer, and devotes its last page to that interesting necessity.  The questions asked are of every possible description, from homely applications for recipes up to delicate petitions for advice, all of which, or almost all of which, the patient and benign oracle amiably replies to.  We are bound to confess that a large amount of these interrogatories refer to love-matters, in which the Penny Press seems an infallible referee; but there is no lack of consultations less sentimental.  Many anxious correspondents beg to know what Mr. Editor thinks of their handwriting?  Some are curious in pronunciation--many concerned about etiquette--there are applications about law, and applications about business--there are questions in history and in natural history--and a miscellaneous crowd besiege the secret and universal adviser, desiring to know how they are to cure their wants, to make their hair curl, to manufacture ink, and to use pomade divine!  Never was oracle so overwhelmed; and where the proprietors of these periodicals find persons of information so universal, seems little short of miraculous. Good advice is not such a rare commodity--most people dispense that con amore; but the man who shall write you a legal opinion one moment, tell you the date of Pliny's death the next, and wind up by particular instructions about the care of your complexion, must be indeed worthy of his confidential position.

     Let nobody suppose we have exhausted the light literature which addresses itself to the multitude--so much the reverse, that we have but touched the main body, the decorous and respectable centre of a world of unknown publications.  We have not tried to make acquaintance with the flying van or rearguards of this multitudinous army, among which a critic of moralities, we doubt not, might find much to call forth his severest objurgations.  In respect to our own sixpenny worth, we can but say that, in the very heart of decorum and propriety, within reach of tire Primate of all England, and influence of a most reverend Chapter, we read without fear for our character, finding nothing to alarm our conscience in the budget; and no one who is minded to repeat the experiment need fear a contrary result.  Reynolds' Miscellany, we confess, looks rather villanous; but even this sublime periodical contained nothing, so far as we could perceive, to offend anybody.  We only vouch for what we have tried; other publications abound of which no such testimony could be given; but these half-dozen are, we have grounds for believing, the most generally known and popular of their class.  Perhaps the nature of our studies might not have reflected any great credit upon us, in the eyes of the dignitaries, who fortunately are not given to looking out of their windows; and perhaps such of our readers as are sufficiently curious to follow our example may prefer to do it privately.  But so far as morals are concerned, these superfine stories, judging from our specimen, may be read before all the world.

     The million, however, has also its virtuous penny papers, which are so much better printed, better got up, and even in their way, better written, than their neighbours, that we fear they are rather intended for the well-behaved boys and girls of "genteel" households, glad of the pictures, and not very particular about the literature, than for the classes which they profess to address.  The multitude also has, like other people, its prigs and bores--monitors so severely instructive, and ignoring so entirely that principle which makes the life and popularity of the others, that their very existence is a wonder--a short-lived wonder, we apprehend.  One of these lies before us now--a small but most pretentious pennyworth, top-heavy with the weight of its title, which is distinctly too great a burden for the little craft to carry.  This is "The Instructor, Literary Review, and Household Oracle, edited by Professor Wallace, M.A., Collegiate Tutor of the University of London, late editor of the Popular Educator, and Author of many Scientific Works, &c."  This production is only in its third number, so that the miracle of its existence is not, after all, so marvellous as we supposed at the first glance: had it lived to see thirty, we should indeed have been astonished; and it illustrates very well one of the usual mistakes of that most limited and superficial class, the mere technical men of science, who abound in these days.  Sugared with an Eastern tale after the manner of Rasselas, this pill of virtue is compounded of articles upon photography, specific gravity, astronomy, chronology, and the radical theory of chemistry--delightfully attractive subjects, calculated to foster quite a little colony of prigs among the mechanics' institutes, where the soil is highly favourable to that interesting development of human nature.

     We have not touched upon a half, or indeed a tenth part, of that reading for the million which has become so multitudinous. We have not even attempted to notice the countless swarms of serial stories, separate publications issued like the magazines in weekly numbers, printed on the worst paper, with the worst type and poorest illustrations of which the arts are capable, which, we believe, are about as popular as the periodicals themselves;--these are bought by the very poorest classes, but they are by no means cheap literature, though the weekly pennyworth, we presume, persuades these humble readers into supposing so--nor the penny papers, which, though bought by everybody, undoubtedly address themselves to the multitude.  But, upon the whole, it is not with a very lofty opinion of the multitude that we turn from our inspection of their peculiar literature.  The apologists and the assailants of this large portion of the community have equally ignored the fact, that it is a varied and fluctuating mass, as uncertain and changeable as any other class of the community, acted upon by peculiar and not very favourable circumstances, but acting with the same fickleness, short-sightedness, and inconsistency which rule over everybody else, that forms the lower order and basis of our commonweal.  They are not to be kept in perpetual lecturedom any more than we are; they are not inspired by a heroical antipathy to their betters, nor possessed with an incurable political fever like model Chartists in novels; neither do they surpass their neighbours in honesty, sincerity, and single-mindedness, as some of us would have the world to suppose.  Circumstances alone distinguish them, as it is circumstances which distinguish the other extreme of society. Some of these we have already pointed out.  A life which has to be lived in the face of hard practical difficulties, and under the constant pressure of manual toil--an acquaintance with the world necessarily limited and narrow, and destitute of those experiences which force many men, no wiser by nature, into a more just estimate of themselves--education which, in most cases, cannot choose but be superficial, and which, striving with vain emulation over the widest area, drops the quality of depth altogether; all these accidents of their condition give colour to the character of the masses, and are faithfully reflected in the literature they patronise.  For these reasons it is that political nostrums, warranted, by one arbitrary Act of Parliament, to cure everything, find ready acceptance among them.  Their limited opportunities of observation have a constant effect of youth upon the whole class, and confer upon them all a certain class inconsequence and want of logic, which everybody must have perceived one time or another--a propensity to blame somebody for every grievance or hardship they experience, and to expect perfectly unreasonable results from every exercise of that power which they do not possess;--all these impatient qualities of mind forbid patient reading, or a modest complexion of literature; and we find, accordingly, that the merest and slightest amusement overbalances, to the most prodigious extent, everything else attempted by this reading for the million.  As a general principle, they have no leisure to concern themselves with those problems of common life which all the philosophers in the world cannot solve, nor to consider those hard conditions of existence under which they and we and all the race labour on towards the restoration of all things.  It is much easier to conclude that something arbitrary can mend all, and to escape out of the real difficulties into those fictitious regions of delight, where every difficulty is made to be smoothed away--those superlative and dazzling regions of wealth and eminence, where, to the hard-labouring and poverty-pinched, it is hard to explain where the shadows lie.

     Whether the existing literature of the multitude is improbable, we will not take upon us to say; but certainly no one ever will improve it efficiently without taking into full account all the class-characteristics which have helped it into being.  Once we were deeply impressed with the idea that to reach this class most effectually, one needed to enter into their own life, and make them aware of one's thorough acquaintance and familiarity not from a "superior" elevation, but on the same level with the everyday circumstances of their existence.  Now our opinion is changed; we trust we have too much candour of mind to hold by our theory in the face of so many demonstrations to the contrary.  No; let us change our tactics.  The masses find no heroes among themselves; it is easy to do a little vapouring on the subject of aristocracy, and maintain against all the masters and all the rulers, natural antagonists of this perennial youth of civilisation, the innate superiority of the working man.  But somehow a much more subtle evidence remains against him.  No hero labouring with his own hands, no household maintaining its humble honour on the week's wages, no serving maiden, fair in her homely duties, conciliates in their own chosen medium of story-telling the favour of the multitude.  The workman is no hero to the shop-girl, nor the poor seamstress to the workman--so the real hero dashes forward in his cab, and the true heroine tells her footman where the carriage is to meet her--and the one has five thousand a-year, and unlimited possibilities, while the other is troubled with the shadow of a coronet--and they talk of Shakespeare and the musical glasses, and see no end of fine society; and the penny magazine which contains their history circulates so widely that it has to go to press three weeks before the day of publication--and so, with a triumphant demonstration not to be disputed, we learn the likings of the multitude.

Blackwood's Aug. 1858 (vol. 84): 200-216.