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The Englishman and his Books. By Amy Cruse. (Harrap. 78. Gd.)

ONE cannot altogether judge men and women by their friends, nor even by their books, though the element of choice enters more largely into one's library than one's society. All the same, it is impossible to judge a generation without knowing something about the books upon which

ordinary people spent their money and their time. •

Mrs. Cruse in her charming new volume tells us what men and women and children were reading in the fifty years before Victoria regulated the home life of the middle glasses. At first we are quite puzzled by the books spread out before us, the novels, the tracts, the poetry, the history, the children's stories by which we find ourselves surrounded ! The numbers astound us ! We are apt to fancy that in those days books were good and few and were studied attentively. No doubt a few were superlatively good, but the vast majority were no better than the ruck of them are now, and were read as quickly and forgotten if possibls sooner. Miss Mitford, of Our Village, tells us that about twenty-four books, mostly novels, came in and out of her father's house every month when she was young. Lending libraries were everywhere. Charles Lamb, talking of his sister's reading, says " our common table " is " daily fed " with new books. He is, of course, exaggerating, but novels were in everyone's hands. Catherine Morland, brought up

in a country rectory seven miles from Salisbury, had read any number before she was eighteen. Mrs. Radcliffe's school, which Miss Austen helped, to kill, piled tale upon tale of

mystery and horror as fait as the press could produce them, while equally weak reactionary fiction was advertised as

" simple naratives founded on 'events within the bounds of

possibillity." All- and sundry were greatly enjoyed, and even vanity could not restrain the young ladies of the period

from open indulgence in the evanescent emotions they pro- duced. Fanny Kemble was not ashamed to be seen with

This phrase, which'' was first applied to Gandhi by Professor Rushbrook Williams, refers to the practice (which Was a nuisance in early. John Company days) whereby a-creditor at art obstinate debtor's door, an aggrieved person at the door of -hie. oppressor, sat fasting until death or redress rzleased him. "a headache, a sideache, a heartache, and red, swollen eyes " after a morning spent with a new novel.

It is startling to learn how large the book sales were in those days. Did the publishers make fortunes ? The Dairyman's Daughter, an evangelical romance by a Bedford- shire clergyman, sold two million copies ! It was a short and no doubt a cheap book, but Mrs. Bennett's The Beggar Girl and Her Benefactors, in seven volumes, price thirty-six shillings, sold two thousand copies on the day of issue ! The evangelicals in their heyday produced an incalculable amount of printed matter ! Pioneers in the science of propa- ganda, their tracts started from Clapham, " the holy village," as Sydney Smith called it, and went all over the kingdom— given away by the thousand, even, it was said, thrown from stage coaches and the early railway trains, they had an immense effect upon the country at large, before they were finally swept off the scene by satire, the common destructor of all such literary refuse. The children's books produced by the Clapham sect and their followers were not destroyed. They are with us still ; they were too good to perish. Meta- phorically speaking, the children themselves picked them out of the flames !- Reading aloud was a favourite pastime in those days. Whole families listened to reading with the same pleasure that they-now " listen in." We all knew that Dr. Dowdier expur- gated Shakespeare. to suit this pleasant custom, but many of us had forgotten that he performed the same operation upon Gibbons' Decline and Fall, diligently rinsing out the scepticism and impropriety till the book could be read in the family circle without " raising a blush on the cheek of modest innocence or planting a pang in the heart of the devout Christian."

Anxious parents saw with dismay the new passion for novel reading and for Byron's poetry. One such we know was Zachary Macaulay, but he was too kind-hearted to ask his children to give them up- As well as "piles of trashy, sen- sational novels- from the circulating library," they read aloud Pepys, Addison, Horace Walpole, Dr. Johnson, Richardson, Miss Burney and Miss Austen.

To imagine that the young women of the day were bread and butter :misses is absurd. It was Victoria who set the fashion for them, when her own children were growing up. Mackworth Praed's " belle " of the county ball could talk:— , . " Of polities or prayers

Qf. Southey's prose, or Wordsworth's sonnets Of dsnglers, or of dancing bears, Of battles, or the last new bonnets."

Lockhart's heroine was more of a blue-stocking.

The popularity of lectures coincided with the custom of reading aloud. Sydney. Smith's discourses upon moral philo- sophy held up the traffic in Grafton Street and Albemarl: Street. Only early-comers could get seats in the great hall. There was, of course, more wit than philosophy about them ; in fact, they were, as he himself said, " the most successful swindle of the season," but the fashionable crowd, who de- lighted in being thus " swindled " was a very well-read crowd.

Men sneered at " Ladies' Albums " and " Drawing-room Annuals " as " Toyshop Literature " only fit for slight presents, tut the editors of these pretty books managed to bribe or persuade some great contributors. Hood's " I remember, I remember " appeared in Friendship's Offering in 1828, and Macaulay's " Armada " in the same annual for 1833. They had more time then than we have now for what Margaret Gray, the seventeen-year-old daughter of devout evangelical parents, called " ornamental reading." Wise readers, however, will not be too busy to run through Mrs. Cruse's 280 odd pages of uninterrupted entertainment.