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PARTISAN REVIEW
is high time to seek a remedy." Squeezed between rapacious sta–
tioners and grudging patrons, this writer and his fellows nevertheless
provided the reading public with an ample supply of cheap books.
The early part of Elizabeth's reign also saw a substantial advance in
public education, though after 1580 it ceased in a time of inflation,
unemployment, and heavy defense expenditure. Admissions to the
two universities slumped and did not recover until well into the next
century, nor were there in England the same inducements to literacy
as in Sweden, where communion and the right to marry were
withheld from the illiterate. By 1750 Sweden had universal literacy;
here in New England, by 1660, sixty percent of men and thirty per–
cent of women were literate ; but in England at that date very few
women could read, and even in 1750 only thirty-six percent could
sign their names in marriage registers . So difficult is it to create and
maintain a reading public . For a long time that English public was
relatively small , mostly men - and mostly in cities, especially Lon–
don . It is hardly surprising that the market was competitive from the
outset, and that Grub Street was in existence
avant la lettre.
We know
of Robert Greene's resentment at the intrusion of a nonuniversity
man, Shakespeare , into the literary world ; and Henslowe's diary
testifies to the small size of the scraps that had to be fought for . By
Pope's time the polite, reading world was larger, though the reading
public as a whole had perhaps not greatly increased; Grub Street
now had a particular locality - it was a slum at Moorfield, and Pope
made it a myth.
The Dunciad
rightly observes that "Dulness and
Poverty" are the causes of bad writing; and Martin Scriblerus, com–
menting on the poem, remarks that its author "lived in those days
when (after providence had permitted the Invention of Printing as a
scourge for the sins of the learned) paper also became so cheap, and
printers so numerous, that a deluge of authors cover'd the land:
Whereby not only the peace of the honest unwriting subject was daily
molested, but unmerciful demands were made of his applause , yea
of his money by such as would neither earn the one nor deserve the
other. . .." And Pope fables that the wretched inhabitants of Grub
Street, formerly confined to the City, proceed westward to take over
the polite world; instead of learning moving westward, as of old , its
opposite, "Dulness" does so, producing a new anticreation , an un–
creating Word.
The public rearranges itself from time to time; at one moment
there will be a sufficient audience for Addison, and later for
Johnson's periodicals, and for Richardson's
Clarissa:
an educated
