78
LESLIE
FIEDLER
the cheap novel, the "penny-dreadful,"
is
the newspaper novel: steJ'C»o
typed on newsprint, copiously illustrated and appearing in weekly or
monthly penny installments--the author never more than a chapter
or two ahead of his readers.
Technology, however, could only make possible mass-production
of fiction; mass-distribution depended ultimately on the creation of
a mass audience, and this was the work not of engineers but mis–
sionaries. The spread of literacy
in
the time of Lippard was carried
on chiefly in institutions established by the Evangelical churches and
various philanthropic organizations dedicated to the "cultural en–
richment" of the laborer: Charity Schools, Sunday Schools, Me–
chanics Institutes. Once readers were present in large numbers and
the price of books had been brought within their reach, the ingenuity
of the businessman (particularly in England) soon created new ways
of getting books into more and more hands.
In the age of Lippard and Reynolds and Sue this meant the
circulating library, as it had since the eighteenth century, and espe–
cially the railway station bookstall, which was new. The stagecoach
had proved a notably inappropriate mode of conveyance for reading,
combining a maximum of disruptive motion with a minimum of
light; but the railway carriage provided lighting conditions which
made it quite possible to read, as well as a kind of conifort so con–
ducive to ennui as to make
not
reading almost impossible. The period,
therefore, saw the emergence of a new view of reading, still alive in
our
time~reading
as the form of relaxation or escape appropriate to
the trip into the country, or the start of a holiday, reading as a happy
state between waking and sleeping.
The use of movies and stereo music on transcontinental and
transoceanic air flights perhaps marks the beginning of the end of
this period, but bookstands remain to this very moment a conspicuous
adornment of all depots and
airports.
And the same sort of people
still line up before them, as departure time approaches, grabbing a
handful of books which must be cheap enough to be thrown away
or left behind, and which must guarantee somehow total irrespon–
sibility. Such readers, to be sure, are now-as they were then-not
typically workingmen at all, but middle-class people, even students,
slummings as it were, temporarily taking a holiday from the "serious
literature" on their library shelves at home. Yet a large part of the
