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DWIGHT MACDONALD
type, Addison estimated that, what with multiple readership
in the coffee houses, the total coverage was close to 60,000.)
But by the middle of the century, a similar magazine,
Johnson's
The Rambler,
never got above 500 and was aband–
oned as a failure. The new public, it would seem, had read
The
Spectator
because there was nothing worse to read. The Grub
Street publishers hastened to fill the gap, Gresham's Law began
to work, and the bad drove the good out of circulation (though
for the opposite reason from the law's original application, for
in currency people circulate the bad because they prefer the
good and therefore hang on to it, while in books they circulate
the bad because they like it better than the good). By 1790, a
bookseller named Lackington was lyrical about the change:
The poorer sort of farmers, and even the poor country people
in general, who before that period spent their winter evenings in
relating stories of witches, ghosts, hobgoblins, etc., now shorten the
winter nights by hearing their sons and daughters read tales,
romances, etc., and on entering their houses you may see
Tom
lones, Roderick Random
and other entertaining books stuck up
in their bacon racks ... In short, all ranks and degrees now READ.
Lyrical, charming, democratically heartening, but few of the
books in the bacon racks were on the level of
Tom lones
and
perhaps the farmers should have stuck to their witches and
hobgoblins. Certainly the effect on literary taste was alarming.
By the end of the century, even such successful writers for the
new public as Johnson, Goldsmith and Fielding were showing
concern as the flood of trash steadily rose.
The mass audience was taking shape and a corresponding
shift in literary criticism was beginning, away from objective
standards and toward a new subjective approach in which the
question was not how good the work is but how popular it
will be. Not that the creator is ever independent of
his
time and
place; the demands of the audience have always largely deter–
mined
his
work. But before 1750, these demands were them-
