Victorian Reading

By EDMUND BLUNDEN " Yea :.how dignified and worthy, full of privilege and happiness, Standeth in majestic independence the self-ennobled Author ! "

Tim quotation is from one of Miss Cruse's gallery of Victorians, Martin Tupper ; though it is not written in " rough halting hexameters " as she declares. Let me consider my copy of the Proverbial Philosophy a moment. It was given to Stephen

Spring Rice by Augusta Frere in 1851, and the giver has written in it a sonnet beginning " Congenial thoughts that dwell within this book Shall still maintain us near."

The recipient has read and marked the 500 pages of ethicosity.

The title page (1850) bears the words, Twentieth Thousand.

Fifteen years later, the score was up to 115,000 but by that time the American sales were over 500,000. This was one of the Books of the Victorians.

But under which King, Victorian ? " Who bought

Tupper ? A Saturday Reviewer of 1867 reported that only two young ladies, under twenty, had been observed to possess the Proverbial Philosophy. No doubt the parodists got themselves copies now and then. The Athenaeum had recommended the

work as vastly superior to Solomon's proverbs in comic effects : but even so, the sale was large. Perhaps the same

purchasers carried off the endless copies of the Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars, that Christian Soldier. Perhaps, if we knew all, many of them were the 10,000 who purchased the Idylls of the King within the first six weeks, and their presence was felt in the advance orders for 40,000 copies of The Holy Grail. If Miss Cruse is right, they helped The Angel in the House to a sale of a quarter of a million ; it seems a big total for Patmore, " high above .Tupper, but there were certain qualities that the two writers had in common."

Not every Victorian, it is certain, regarded Tennyson, or Tupper, or Dickens, or Macaulay, or the author of Aurora Leigh as the flower of all the ages. Irreverence, now in terms of plain criticism, now in loud laughter, would vex the spirits

of the righteous.

Comrades, you may pass the rosy. With permission of the chair, I shall leave you for a little, for I'd like to take the air.

Whether 'twas the sauce at dinner, or that glass of ginger-beer, Or these strong cheroots, I know not, but I feel a little queer."

And the Bon Gaultier Ballads were in a fifteenth edition by 1889. Whatever individual tastes the Victorians had, they obvio Isly believed in books and buying them. Who can turn over the advertisements bound into the old numbers of the Quarterly, or Edinburgh Review, without admiration for that great race of readers ? Literary digestion has surely never

been sounder. No need, in those days, for the garnish of " indescribably the greatest," ." could not put it down," " has captured five continents " and the like : the pages merely stack up their announcements, New Work by Mr. Ruskin, Cheaper Edition of W. M. Thackeray, Popular Works, Now Ready, and the Victorian reader proceeds on his stately way.

" This book," says the author under review, " aims at telling, not what great books were written between 1837 and 1887, but what works, great or small, were read by the subjects of Queen Victoria . . " With a good deal of the ensuing story, many are still. to some extent acquainted. Miss Cruse has illustrated the familiar facts—that the.Pickwick Club and Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Heir of Redclyffe and Hiawatha broke records—with selections from contemporary information, as personal as she could find it. She has gone to the autobiographies and memoirs, the diaries and corre- spondence of the age ; and very- sensibly too she has noted

The Victorians and their Boolii. By Amy Cruse. (Allen and Unwin. 12s. 6d.) the talk about books which occurs in novels. The result is a valuable and curious collection of Victorianisms frequently

leading to a general notion of their characteristics as reading people. Here one may find Dickens (perhaps not " the ordinary reader " - wished for, but where was he ?) reading Bells and Pomegranates (" Browning's plan has thrown me into a perfect passion of sorrow ") ; here Carlyle writes to Tennyson, " Your Dora reminds me of the Book of Ruth," and Darwin thinks " Silas Marner a charming little story." Mrs. Panton " burns with indignation over the really abominable articles on my sex which culminated in The Girl of the Period."

Charlotte Bronto thinks !' the Stones of Venice nobly laid and chiselled. How grandly the quarry of vast marbles is dis- closed ! " Joseph Chamberlain reports that Progress and Poverty is " being eagerly read by the working classes " (1883).

One of Miss Cruse's chapters (she arranges her work not so much chronologically as in subjects) deals with the remarkable conquest of English readers in the nineteenth century by American writers. " During the first year or two of the Victorian age," she avers, the works of Cooper and of Washington Irving were the only American books widely

read in England." This sent me to the third volume of W. P. Frith's Reminiscences, which opens with a passage based

on the popularity of " Sam Slick, the Clockmaker " towards 1840. In another direction, probably Prescott was the next American to capture English readers by the thousand.

Longfellow, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Wetherell, Susan Coolidge, then the American wits, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, then Holmes, Lowell, Whitman form the pantheon sketched by Miss Cruse. Melville had his constant friends this side, but never quite spread his attraction ; Thoreau seems to have been summarily rejected.

But could Miss Cruse omit C. G. Leland without a pang—

the only begetter of Hans Breitmann ? Perhaps his English admirers were not quite numerous enough—but Breitmann is himself a host. One wonders nowadays, in spite of the frequent successes of American fiction republished here, in spite of Mr. Eliot, in spite of Mr. Hemingway, what has happened to the former potent sway of American literary figures over English libraries. Miss Cruse speaks of that as " an earnest of far greater things to come." When ?

In the compilation of such a work as The Victorians and their Books, with its range from the vestry to the

nursery, from the Reform Club to the Grimeville Mechanics Institute, inevitably some books and some topics slip by. Henry James squeaks in, but where is G. P. R. ? The real

Victorian James claimed a public which the author of The Bostonians would have shuddered at ; perhaps not, for such a judge of fiction as Leigh Hunt " hailed every fresh publication" of the earlier writer, and had his 'work cut out to do so, for fresh publicatiOns appeared faster than Nat Gould's.

From James the fancy turns, on Tennysonian lines, to Johns ; but Miss Cruse's Victoriani seem unaware of hirn, and his

Flowers of the Field, and indeed of all that class of readable naturalists who characterize the period 1837-1887. Frank Buckland, and J. G. (" Common Objects ") Wood,' and Ann Pratt were' proiiders of books to the Victorians by order of Nature. Then that period 'had its Orie'ntal enthusiasms, trained Once by Byron and by the author of Hajii Baba. Brilliantly shone, for a time, the' star of Eliot Warburton (of The Crescent and the Cross), whom- Lytton Called the " seductive enchanter " ; but Kinglake and Eothen came at Once and triumphed. To note such memories, which are not in Miss Cruse's pages,' is Inerely to say that she 'has had to draw her limits somewhere;