Shadows of the Old Booksellers (1865) reflects on his profession. Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century (2 vols., 1864–1865), is supposed to be autobiographical but we see the same scanning for a pattern in the events which are important to him, a desire to define changes of which he is a part.
'... In the Professional Class, whilst we find thirty-eight thousand persons connected with Divinity, thirty-four thousand with Law, thirty-eight thousand with Medicine ; whilst we have thirteen thousand artists and fifteen thousand musicians, we have only three thousand five hundred and eighty authors and literary persons, including one hundred and eighty-five female authors. Surely all those who write books, or are contributors to Reviews and Magazines, are not comprised in this enumeration. Certainly not. The author or the journalist, in many cases, has a more definite rank as a clergyman, a lawyer, or a physician. He may be a Lion in fashionable parties, but the writer, qua writer, does not go to court. Female authors were never so abundant, whether as Novelists, or Poetesses, or Biographers. They wisely claim to belong to the Domestic Class—and find their place amongst the Wives, Mothers, and Daughters of. the English households. They have no distinctive place in the Census like "the Shoemaker's Wife."
'It is a hundred and thirty-three years since the first Magazine—The Gentleman's—was produced in England. It is a hundred and fifteen years since the first Review—The Monthly—was started. These were more ambitious publications in point of size than their illustrious predecessors, the Essayists, who rose up to form the taste of an age possessing very little general knowledge; when "Men not professing learning were not ashamed of ignorance; and in the female world any acquaintance with books was distinguished only to be censured." Johnson thus describes the age of Addison and Steele. These periodical writers came to take the patronage of men of letters out of the hands of the' great and the fashionable, to confide it to the people.
'The periodical literature of the present day is almost as wonderful as its newspapers. I have glanced at the extent of this species of literature in 1844, when there were sixty weekly periodical works issued in London, two hundred and twenty-seven monthly, and thirty-eight quarterly; (Vol. ii. p. 278.) To Mitchell's Newspaper Press Directory is now added "A Directory of Magazines, Reviews, and Periodicals." There were in 1863, four hundred and fifty-three Weekly and Monthly Periodicals, and eighty-four Quarterly. Of these five hundred and thirty-seven publications, a hundred and ninety-six are of a decidedly theological character, in which the Church of England is adequately represented, and almost every sect has its peculiar organs.
'It would be impossible for me to present even the most superficial analysis of this list of five hundred and thirty-seven periodical works. Many of them are devoted to special branches of science, art, or industry—such as Civil Engineering, Botany and Gardening, Music, Photography; Magazines for Trades wholesale and retail, and for Artisans of various degrees. We have Law Magazines, and Magazines of Medicine and Surgery, and Nautical Magazines. Magazines for the young present themselves in manifold shapes—of Boys' Journals, and English Girls' Journals, and Child's Own Magazines. We have every variety of Temperance Advocates, and so earnest is proselytism in this direction that we have an Anti-tobacco Journal. The Religious Tract Society has five Penny Periodicals, and the Christian Knowledge Society has also its cheap organs of amusement and instruction. These divide the market with a shoal of Half-penny and Penny Weeklies, which have acquired the name of Kitchen Literature. This name is, with some injustice, exclusively applied to these delights of the Servants'hall; for their unnatural incidents and their slip-slop writing may be traced in the literature for the parlour. Some who are fashionable and popular have arrived at such a pitch of exaggeration, that no form of writing that is plain and simple is judged fit to stir the minds of masculine girls and effeminate lads. In a remarkable French book, published in 1840, "Les Classes Dangereuses," the writer laments over the "immondices" of the popular literature of Paris. In another ten years or more, there were amongst ourselves too many cheap publications which went upon the principle that the Penny Readers would like something low. They found their error, and in the endeavour to be moral contrived for a long while to be preternaturally silly. I rejoice to find it asserted that the aggregate weekly sale of immoral publications is now estimated at no more than nine thousand copies, whilst three years ago their circulation was estimated at fifty-two thousand.* The unnatural style of the penny literature—the three sorts of style "provided for imbecility," described by Johnson as the bombastic, the affected, and the weak,—will gradually give place to attempts to rival the higher ability which now marks the cheap Numbers, and almost equally cheap Monthly Magazines, which are avowedly conducted by writers of the first eminence, or by other editors whose names are no secret in the community of letters.
'I have intimated that some of the faults of taste, which characterise the humblest species of periodical literature, have penetrated into those regions where authorship is better paid for, and may therefore be presumed to be of a higher quality. But there are faults of a less pardonable nature in the writer of fiction, than a total ignorance of the habits of good society, or a total incapacity to touch the subjects, or to reflect the style, that mark the discourse of educated persons. The grosser evils of the attractive reading that may be purchased for a penny in every street of London have spread, as an epidemic spreads from the hovel to the mansion. The current demand for "sensation novels," to be provided for the Circulating Libraries at half a guinea a volume, has been absolutely generated by the weekly sheets that commanded a sale by suiting their contents to the palates which demanded the coarsest dishes highly seasoned. The diseased taste, which appears to be now common to the sanded kitchen and the carpeted. drawing room, has been stimulated by the same class of writers. They have seen that the incessant whirl of the social machine produces an influence upon most domestic circles, which demands a continued excitement in the hours of leisure. The newspaper, exciting as it is, is not enough. In a sensation novel of the genuine sort, are to be found a pleasant distillation of the topics that daily present themselves in the
records of the criminal courts and police offices, all so softened down and made easy to juvenile capacities, that murders, forgeries, burglaries, arson, breach of trust, adulteries, seductions, elopements, appear the common incidents of an English household. It is not the taste for horrors that characterised a former age of sensation novels, when murders and ghosts always went together. Crime is not now an exceptional thing, but the normal condition of common life. The dramatists before Shakspere dabbled in blood. There are violent deaths in abundance even in Shakspere. But he saw how the vulgar element could be raised into grandeur by the poetical; how crime could be taken out of the region of horrors, by being surrounded by those accessories which belong to love and pity. There are writers of novels amongst us who deal with "sensation" incidents in that higher spirit. But the number of those who grossly administer to a corrupt taste seems increasing.'
''England! the time is come when thou shouldst wean
Thy heart from its emasculating food."
...
Thus Charles Knight analyzes the context and significance of the intellectual in 19th century England. The verses he quotes are not the words of an old man. They are those of William Wordsworth, possibly written when that poet was 33 years old.
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