THE LITERARY TASTES OF SHOP AND FACTORY GIRLS.
NOT to do as he would be done by, is frequently a first duty of him who would serve his neighbour. Careful, delicate experiments, vivid sympathy, and great unselfishness alone help men and women really to discover in other classes the value of words and the force of actions equivalent to those which are habitually made use of in their own. We are all now beginning to understand that those whom we used to call " the poor" have precedence and peerages of their own, and that innumerable are the grades of society below the point at which Society ceases to distinguish them. Still, we feel discon- certed at times, and, in dealing with these gradations, quite as insecure as the provincial Mayor we all have known, suddenly called upon to grapple with the problems involved in unknown distinctions of Lady Smith ; Ann, Lady Smith ; or Lady Ann Smith. For instance, the finest and most subtle difference of position ever perceived by the present writer was in a little cul-de-sac of a provincial town, where two women, one by con- scious superiority, the other by irritated sneer, pointed out that the former had a knocker to her door : how much was meant by that little bit of broken iron ! Again, ideas com- monly accepted by us, receive uprooting when we find one of our Peer's daughters waiting in the dark passage of a London lodging-house, whilst her guide, a little urchin of the neigh- bourhood, shouts up : " 'Ere's a person come to see the lady of the two-pair back."
We have got so far as this, and understand that, whether going up or down, experience acquired in one class does not of itself enable you to understand another. But in spite of all the talk about best books and about free libraries, and other most important matters, we do not think much has been said about what, paradoxically, may be called the value of the trivial tale. It is, for most of us, untrodden ground. There are guides to be had ; but the scrubby, dwarfed vegetation does not look inviting, and it is quite true that we should never wish to travel in that land except—but here is the point —that it lies between us and the spot where an increasing number of travellers are landed from the fleet of Elementary Education. There are three roads from that shore,—one through an arid desert, where these new-comers must die of thirst; one through a malarious swamp, though to them the easiest and most attractive route ; and then the perfectly direct, accessible, and healthy route which every one is busily engaged in trying to show. Men can find it, if they will, though they stand in need of personal aid and literary guidance.*
• We are glad to see that Working Men and Free Libraries (W. Reeves), by the Litaarian of Toynbee Free Students' Library, has jest been published. But men are thought of oftener than women ; and girls of the working classes have not attracted much attention in this way, though women, in conjunction with various Societies, Guilds, Unions, and the like, have tried to do something to divert the new stream of working-girl readers from the worst parts of newspapers, cheap so-called " Society " journals, and penny novelettes, which reach them in swarms. It might be thought that the sale of bad literature would maintain itself without propagandist efforts ; but it was recently said by a worker of experience that respectable women-heads of departments in large shops, and the steadier employees, have often had hard work to keep the hawker of evil even from giving away his or her poisonous wares. There is here a necessity for the aid of bright and capable women. How often good work is left to bad workers—good, kind, badly dressed, easily shocked, unmethodical, unattractive souls—when intelligence and attractiveness buries its talents, and never thinks of attempting the work which only it can do ! There are plenty of educated young girls of leisure who need not attempt even to combat evil further than by providing the good, but in this way could be of immense service. There are numerous uneducated but shrewd, intelligent girls of working classes— differing, even under the same heads, entirely from each other—girls in business, girls in mills and factories, girls, too, in service, who read eagerly and continuously, and very sorely need help if they are not to read worse than trash. Women, and women only, can help them, can understand and provide for them. The Sunday-school library is for them outgrown. The free library, save for purposes of fiction, is too great. These girls want kind friends—whose trouble they repay almost at once—and trivial tales. It is a study in itself to understand their needs. The literary mind likes something either sub- stantially serious or diaphanously light, enjoys symmetry of construction, charm of style, and allusive references which connect the initiated one with another ; writers and readers of a certain type are like country-house parties taking up catch- words, understanding but never defining the joke lit by the friction of many wits. The general reader is a strange coin- pound,—liking best light literature, but, if called upon by fashion, able to exert himself to more or less genuine interest in history or theology, as distorted in " the novel of the season." But our working-girl reader does not quite share the characteristics of either. A good deal of work in providing reading for her has been done, privately and col- lectively, so that we do not speak without book, but rather upon the suggestion of those who in various parts of England have tried the experiment of libraries for girls. They appear always to be most popular where their object is remembered, and it is certain that if the librarian begins with sinking to the lowest innocent level of trash, many readers will end by being raised to the highest point they are capable of reaching. (Of course they must-be managed by those who like girls and understand books.) These readers know little history, no science, no philology ; they comprehend no literary allusions, can bear no foreign phrases on the pages, have very little imagination (nothing, in going through them, strikes one so much as the sameness of the cheap novelettes), and —to begin with—share one characteristic with their mascu- line relatives, "they have their favourite newspapers, but no favourite books." But they are not like the sheltered, cared-for girls of any classes ; they are not children ; they want to read about grown-up life ; and they like three definite elements in the matter-of-fact tales which they do enjoy,—there must be love-making, there should be domestic economy, and no one who marvels over the success of certain tales can doubt that they like a good deal of religious teaching and allusion. The Bible still supplies the only source of inferential allusion that eau tell. Perhaps American writers for girls understand better than we the exact dif- ference between education and shrewdness, where the latter does and where it does not supply the former. For in- stance, to take minor authors, one of the few known to English upper-class readers, Miss Alcott's works (the Miss Alcott whose Life was reviewed in the Spectator of November 16th) are read by the thousand. We may prefer the late Mrs. J. R. Ewing to any other writer of short and simple stories ; but, even when her works are read aloud, they are dead failures with uncultivated readers. Looking over
the catalogues of some libraries for members of the Girls' Friendly Society,* we are struck by the quantity of unknown and the rarity of well-known names among the authors repre- sented in this Library. Standard writers there are, and, as we hear, most eagerly enjoyed, especially by the shrewd " hands" of the North, but not many. Dickens, Miss Yonge, the Author 'of " John Halifax," George MacDonald, George Eliot, we know; but who is accountable for the rest P Help is wanted : good writers, good librarians, good ireferees, good friends, and, of course, gifts of money and books. There is a fine field of pleasant work for cultivated women of leisure to take up, if they will be content just at first to see lofty ideals of pure literature attained, so far as they are attained, in dirtied copies of trivial tales, and will not set aside the matter-of-fact narrative till something better, gradually better, takes its place. Nothing may seem wanting in great educational schemes, but somehow people may fail to carry them out, not because the need and its satisfaction are not real, but because the very next step from the need has not been unmistakably pointed out. Our English fires of coal burn solidly and brightly enough, but they have often been lit with light rubbish. So, too, minds must be gradually fired with new knowledge. "God screens us evermore from premature truths." There is very little that influences us—even if a self-educating level has been reached, and we now learn from great thinkers—except that for which we are prepared. As the circle of our knowledge widens, we touch many things which are next to us ; but when we are at the beginning of learning, there is little contact with outer things, less power of reception, and almost none of initiatory force. Under these circumstances, the value of a helping hand is great, and, from women especially, the plain statement of any need easily satisfied by kindness and ability should meet with response. It is quite true that all over England their young sisters are eagerly reading trash, and worse than trash, and that they are quite ready to seize opportunities of getting bright and wholesome literature. Wherever women have attempted this kind of work, it has been immediately popular ; and, to make them popular, girls' libraries need the help of just those women who, in dread of becoming "too religious "—or, rather, " too awfully frumpish," as it was put the other day—stand aside and do nothing. Such women would be as much the better for using the energy stored up in them by education, as the work would be better for them. They would be touched and softened by finding out the marvellous power exercised by an every-day worker who likes girls and who likes books. A simple old tale bears a close analogy to what is required just now. It tells how a prisoner was reached by a beetle, that, scenting the wax above him, crept up the high tower, carrying with him a silken thread, fine, but strong enough to bear eventually the rope of rescue. Again and again you may Piing the rope of instruction against a four-square wall of physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual ignorance,—and fail. Attach it by the long, fine silk of attraction ; do not scorn the agency of little things, though your object be very great,—and you succeed. The old lessons have been so long learnt by many of us, that we forget how we learnt them. It is worth while—even at the risk of platitude—to insist on the value of little books to little minds, if by so doing we can stir up capable women to help in attrac- tive ways almost the first generation of their working sisters who have felt the necessity of having books to read. It is a much harder thing to ask a cultivated woman or a clever girl to spend her time over the dissemination of apparent trash than to engage in directly religious or educational efforts, but even this requires brain and will-power of no mean order. The conquest will not be an easy one, but it is indeed worth stooping if lives can be brightened and improved by showing little kindnesses and by lending trivial tales.
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