A hundred and fifty years ago William Thackeray observed - after a trawl through London bookstalls - that middle-class litterateurs like himself knew (and cared) less about working-class literature than about Lapland. In a much quoted essay twenty years later, Wilkie Collins, after a similar expedition, coined the phrase 'the Unknown Public'. It was something of a misnomer since the public was well enough known. It was their 'entertaining literature' that was the mystery. English society put such a moral premium on advanced literacy that it was shameful for a middle-class person to be caught buying a penny dreadful or a mill-girl romance in anything other than a spirit of intrepid anthropological duty. One glimpses the same nervousness today: the eagerness with which left copies of the Sun are seized on in railway carriages by passengers who could never bring themselves to be seen buying a copy; the eyes studiously averted from the top shelf while buying the Spectator or Private Eye.

LRB 13 May 1993 | PDF Download