Chapter Three

The Difference Between Fact and Fiction

My point of departure is a question posed by Roger Chartier. Discussing the roguery tales of the Bibliothèque bleue, he wondered how these popular chapbooks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were actually read. The only evidence of reader response here is textual: these stories combined elements of documentary and parody. That, Chartier concluded, suggests that they were read simultaneously as fiction and nonfiction:

Belief in what is read is thus accompanied by a laugh that gives it the lie; the readers’ acceptance is solicited, but a certain distance shows literature for what it is. There is a subtle equilibrium between the fable presented as such and realistic effects. This delicate balance permits multiple readings that fluctuate between a persuasion by literal interpretation and an awareness of and amusement at the parody. Is it impossible to read with both belief and disbelief? To accept the veracity of the narrative and still refuse to be duped into thinking it authentic? And can we not characterize as “popular” this relation with texts that ask to be taken as real even as they show themselves to be illusory? This was perhaps the most fundamental expectation of the readers of the “blue” volumes. It is also the reason for the success of the literature of roguery, which gave written expression to fragments of social experience even as it parodically denied them. Thus the reader could simultaneously know and forget that fiction was fiction.¹

This is an ingenious theory, but one could just as easily argue the opposite, and David Hall does: for him the Bibliothèque bleue and romances of that genre represent “a paradigm of the literature of escapism” in which “there is nothing of everyday reality.”² So how were they read: as fact, fiction, or both? More importantly, how can these hypotheses be tested? This chapter does not directly address the reading experiences of seventeenth-century French peasants. Rather, it points toward a method of answering such questions by examining British plebeian readers since the eighteenth century.

Cinderella as Documentary

Hanoverian Britain had its counterpart of the Bibliothèque bleue—chapbooks offering romances, fairy tales, and other fantastic stories.³ And a few of their readers, in memoirs, helpfully explained how they read them. As a boy, the poet John Clare (b. 1793) consumed 6d. romances of Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk, “and great was the pleasure, pain, or surprise increased by allowing them authenticity, for I firmly believed every page I read and considered I possessed in these the chief learning and literature of the country.”⁴ He also had a neighbor who

believes every thing that he sees in print as true and has a cupboard full of penny books the king and the cobler Seven Sleepers accounts of People being buried so many days and then dug up alive Of bells in churches ringing in the middle of the night Of spirits warning men when they was to die etc each of the relations attested to by the overseers churchwardens etc of the parish where the strange relations happened always a century back where none lives to contradict it such things as these have had personal existences with his memory on as firm footings as the bible history itself.⁵

As he wrote in his poem, “St. Martin’s Eve,” peasants implicitly accepted the tale of Bluebeard as fact:

Yet simple souls their faith it knows no stint

Things least to be believed are most preferred

All counterfeits as from truth’s sacred mint

Are readily believed if once set down in print.⁶

Why were even the most fantastic chapbooks commonly read as true? Consider the factor of intertextuality. If readers’ responses to one text are shaped by other texts, then the second question any historian of reading must ask is: What else were they reading? In this case, three books in particular stand out: the Bible of course, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Robinson Crusoe. In the memoirs of common readers they are frequently discussed together, and men from humble backgrounds, such as miners’ MP Thomas Burt (b. 1837), remembered reading Pilgrim’s Progress or Robinson Crusoe as literal truth.⁷

By way of explanation, it is sometimes suggested that the credibility of a story can be enhanced simply by setting it in print. One old illiterate carter, listening to a reading of reports from the Banbury Guardian on Joseph Arch’s efforts to organize an agricultural laborers’ union, certainly felt that print had more truth value than oral communication:

The best things be in books, Joe. Look at the letters you rades me out o’ the Banbury Guardian. Who’d think there was any sense in Jeff Southerton to hear him talk? But when he writes a letter to Guardian about the waages or the schoolin’ he has somewh’t to say. He’s wrong, but there’s a pinch o’ sense in it. And they lines you says to me, nobody couldn’t talk like that. It’s the pen, you see.⁸

But if print inherently enhances credibility, why do more educated readers read it more skeptically? Something else is at work here. Fiction is a frame, a fairly sophisticated literary convention that must be learned. We are not born with this strategy of reading. In their first encounters with literature, the initial assumption of uneducated readers is that the stories must be true. That is the frame we all start with. A joiner’s son in an early nineteenth-century Scottish village recalled that phenomenon when he read his first novel, David Moir’s The Life of Mansie Wauch (1828):

I literally devoured it. … A new world seemed to dawn upon me, and Mansie and the other characters in the book have always been historical characters with me, just as real as Caius Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, or Napoleon Buonaparte. … So innocent, so unsophisticated—I may as well say so green—was I, that I believed every word it contained. I never saw a novel before. I did not know the meaning of the word fiction. My little mind was in a state of unhesitating receptivity, and so deep an impression did this work of Dr. Moir make upon its fresh incipient tablet that even now I can hardly divest myself of that impression. It is with an effort that I can realise these characters are airy, mythical creations of his exuberant fancy.⁹

It requires some training to distinguish fact from fiction, and still more training to distinguish fiction from lies. (A failure to draw the latter distinction accounts for much of the early evangelical hostility to the novel.)¹⁰ But if all readers start with the assumption that all stories are true, how do they learn that some stories are not? That happens when one encounters two texts that cannot both be true. If there is a fundamental incompatibility between (say) Genesis and The Origin of Species, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Native Son, what your parents say and what the television says, then you must select one of the two as more “realistic.” But if a reader is exposed only to a limited range of texts, which basically agree with each other, then there is no basis for concluding that any of them are fiction. And the best-sellers of Hanoverian Britain—chapbook romances, the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Robinson Crusoe—all told essentially the same story. They were all thrilling tales of adventure, about amazing journeys and terrific struggles, and memorable heroes who, with the help of God, miraculously prevail. The similarities should hardly surprise us. Bunyan, Defoe, and the chapbook tales all drew heavily on biblical themes and imagery. Though Bunyan denounced chapbooks as a sinful distraction, the fact that he freely borrowed their age-old formulas contributed to the astonishing popularity of Pilgrim’s Progress. Robinson Crusoe was frequently reprinted as a chapbook, abridged to as few as eight pages, and illustrated with the same kind of crude woodcuts.¹¹

Common readers could therefore read all these texts in the same way: as ripping yarns, but also as gospel truth. As a boy, stonemason Hugh Miller (b. 1802) first learned to appreciate the pleasures of literature in the “most delightful of all narratives—the story of Joseph. Was there ever such a discovery made before! I actually found out for myself, that the art of reading is the art of finding stories in books, and from that moment reading became one of the most delightful of my amusements.” Once Miller had learned to read Scripture as a story, he soon found similar and equally gripping tales in chapbooks of Jack the Giant Killer, Sinbad the Sailor, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. And then, he recalled, from fairy tales “I passed on, without being conscious of break or line of division, to books on which the learned are content to write commentaries and dissertations, but which I found to be quite as nice children’s books as any of the others”: Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey. “With what power, and at how early an age, true genius impresses!” Miller exclaimed, yet he recognized that Homer’s genius had certain clear affinities with penny dreadfuls: “I saw, even at this immature period, that no other writer could cast a javelin with half the force of Homer. The missiles went whizzing athwart his pages, and I could see the momentary gleam of the steel, ere it buried itself deep in brass and bull-hide,” he recalled. “I next succeeded in discovering for myself a child’s book, of not less interest than even the Iliad.” It was Pilgrim’s Progress, with wonderful woodcut illustrations. And from there it was a short step to Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels.¹²

When radical weaver Samuel Bamford (b. 1788) first discovered Pilgrim’s Progress, it impressed him as a thrilling illustrated romance: woodcuts of Christian’s fight with Apollyon and his escape from Giant Despair encouraged “the exercise of my feeling and my imagination.” Then the New Testament became “my story book, and I read it all through and through, but more for the interest the marvellous passages excited, than from any religious impression which they created.” At a bookshop he picked up stories about witches, Robin Hood, Jack the Giant Killer, St. George and the Dragon, and the History of the Seven Champions, all with the same kind of deliciously garish woodcuts he had found in Bunyan. Since these stories followed the same narrative conventions, there was no reason to doubt them. “For my part I implicitly believed them all, and when told by my father or others that they were ‘trash’ and ‘nonsense,’ and ‘could not be true,’ I, innocently enough, contrasted their probability with that of other wondrous things which I had read in books that ‘it were a sin to disbelieve.’”¹³

Soldier’s son Joseph Barker (b. 1806) likewise first read the Bible “chiefly as a work of history, and was very greatly delighted with many of its stories. … One effect was to lead me to regard miracles as nothing improbable.” Consequently, his response to Pilgrim’s Progress was exactly the same: “My impression was, that the whole was literal and true—that there was, somewhere in the world, a real city of destruction and a new Jerusalem, and that from the one to the other there was a path through some part of the country, just such a path-way as that which Bunyan represents his pilgrim as treading.” Ghost stories, highwayman stories, fairy tales, Paradise Lost, and Daniel Defoe were all equally credible. “I was naturally a firm believer in all that was gravely spoken or printed,” he recalled. “I doubted nothing that I found in books. … I had no idea at the time I read Robinson Crusoe, that there were such things as novels, works of fiction, in existence.”¹⁴ Another reader of Bunyan and Defoe claimed that we “believed every fact we read as readily as if there had not been such a thing as fiction in the world: and for anything which we knew there was not; for we had never heard of people making books which were not true.” “Tell a boy in his teens that [Pilgrim’s Progress] is a fiction, and he will not readily believe you,”¹⁵ testified one Chartist weaver. “The great allegory is a great fact.”¹⁶ Another called it “The book of my boyhood. … [I] could not but believe the pilgrimage to be a real one, and often wished my mother to set out, with me and my sister, upon the journey.”¹⁷

The notion that there can be different versions of one story—suggesting that no version is absolutely true—is again an acquired literary convention. Growing up in Colchester with access to few books besides an illustrated Bible and some children’s chapbooks, laborer’s son Thomas Carter (b. 1792) had no opportunity to learn that. Therefore, he not only read Revelations literally: he assumed that the books of Kings and Chronicles were

unconnected narratives of two distinct series of events; and also, that the four Gospels were consecutive portions of the history of Jesus Christ, so that I supposed there had been four crucifixions, four resurrections, and the like. I was, indeed, sometimes perplexed by the apparently repeated occurrence of events so nearly resembling each other; nor could I perceive the exact design or bearing of these events; but I knew no one of whom I could ask for the needed explanations.

Later, apprenticed to a woollen-draper, he was allowed the run of his master’s library and discovered Thomson’s Seasons, which he read more closely than any other book except the Bible: “I did not then know that the poet’s business is rather to present pictures of what ought to be than of what really is; and therefore I regarded Thomson’s beautiful and impressive descriptions of rural life and manners as being strictly in accordance with existing realities.”¹⁸

Those who only had access to a limited range of books, all of which offered the same view of reality, had no reason to doubt any of them. Welsh scholar Robert Roberts, born to a Denbighshire tenant farmer in 1834, recalled that his father had a substantial library, mainly of religious books. Except for a Latin dictionary, all were in Welsh. They included some poetry, a couple of history books, and a geography text; but the only fiction Roberts read as a boy was an abridged Welsh-language Robinson Crusoe. The family took in a couple of Welsh magazines, but because there were no newspapers published in that part of North Wales, his neighbors never discussed politics. “None of them knew much of the Reform Bill, or who the Prime Minister was,” though they intensely analyzed clergymen’s sermons. And what they read unambiguously reinforced their belief in the miraculous:

Methodist books of that date swarmed with marvels; supernatural appearances, warnings, singing in the air, sudden judgments on rulers and persecutors; God’s miracles and the devil’s miracles abounded everywhere. The Lives of the Saints is not more full of such wonders than the Mirror of the Times, the Methodist Church History. And for people who read the Old Testament histories so much, what more natural than to expect miracles everywhere? … To disbelieve supernaturalism was then thought utter infidelity; it was flying in the face of Providence—an obstinate hardening of the mind against all evidence.¹⁹

Flora Thompson recalled that, in the 1880s, the older generation in her Oxfordshire village still “looked upon ‘the Word’ as their one unfailing guide in life’s difficulties. It was their story book, their treasury of words and sayings, and, for those who could appreciate it, their one book of poetry.” But now, for the first time, weekly newspapers were offering a competing source of information, and younger people who read these were inclined to question the Bible. It would be too simple, however, to say that they had become more critical and discerning readers: rather, there had been a transference of credulity from the word of God to the word of journalists. Many villagers were prepared to admit that the “tale of Jonah and the whale, for instance, took a good deal of swallowing. But the newspaper everybody believed in. ‘I seed it in the paper, so it must be true’ was a saying calculated to clinch any argument.”²⁰ When a reader first encountered something that did not square with Scripture, he might embrace it as a surrogate Bible rather than treat both texts skeptically. That was the response of some working-class radicals to Darwin and, later, Marx. V. S. Pritchett had an uncle, an atheist cabinetmaker, who taught himself to read from The Anatomy of Melancholy, even acquiring a few Latin and Greek words from the notes. “Look it up in Burton, lad,” became his inevitable response to any question. “Burton was Uncle Arthur’s emancipation,” wrote Pritchett, “it set him free of the tyranny of the Bible in chapel-going circles.” Whenever his pious relatives quoted Scripture at each other, he could trump them with something from The Anatomy of Melancholy.²¹

Even into the early twentieth century, many older working people had not learned a different method of reading. Thomas Jones (b. 1870) recalled that his mother, a Rhymney straw-hat maker, “was fifty before she read a novel and to her dying day she had not completely grasped the nature of fiction or of drama.” When she read Tom Jones “She believed every word of it and could not conceive how a man could sit down and invent the story of Squire Allworthy and Sophia and Tom out of his head.”²² The Yorkshire villagers Fred Kitchen (b. 1891) lived and worked with, especially the less literate, attached the same kind of sanctity to all standard literature:

The most remarkable thing was the number of books each family possessed. There was not a cottage in the village but had a row of books on the dresser, well-bound books in embossed covers, many of them wearing the tissue-paper in which they left the shop. Though these were mostly school prizes, they were held in great reverence by the parents, and no one was allowed to open a book with unwashed hands. Perhaps they carried their regard for books to an extreme, but it was a fact that the less able they were to read a book themselves the greater was their desire to know of its contents. Thus it was that the “good reader” child read aloud to the family, not once but often, and it would be useless to tell them that these stories were fiction. To them Tom and Maggie Tulliver became real flesh and blood people, and so were Silas Marner and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom.²³

Classic literature assumed an air of reality for Kitchen as well, perhaps because so much of it echoed his experience as a farm laborer. “Life has been made rich because when ploughing up a nest of field-mice I could recite Robert Burns’s Ode to a Field-mouse,” he wrote. Unearthing a cow’s skull, “I was immediately transported to the churchyard scene in Hamlet.” At the workmen’s Christmas ball at the great house, “In my childish fancy I likened it to the courtyard at Torquilstone in Ivanhoe.” Omar Khayyam spoke directly to his station in life—“Unable to piece life together into any satisfactory shape, [I] intend henceforth ‘to make jest of that which makes as much of me.’” He “enjoyed the company of Tom and Maggie Tulliver on the corn-bin. … Having no distractions such as football results, horse-racing, wars, and politics to drive them away, they just dug themselves in, and now I couldn’t turn them out if I tried.”²⁴

Audience Participation

Of course, as common readers read more widely, they generally learned to read more critically. If John Clare’s neighbors believed everything in print, eventually John Clare knew better. Yet when he was confronted with a new medium of expression, Clare could revert to an amazing credulity. Attending a performance of The Merchant of Venice, he was so gripped by Portia’s judgment that he leapt from the box and assaulted Shylock.²⁵ That was a common reaction among working-class audiences as late as 1900, when farmworker William Miles did a stint with a traveling theater company. When the melodrama Grip of Iron called for him to be strangled on stage, “Pandemonium broke out at times, as the audience was (for the moment) convinced that I was being cruelly murdered. They became so perturbed and restless that, on occasion, the progress of the play had to stop to allow the hostile feelings to die down.”²⁶ In one Pirandellian performance a local amateur, playing the villain in a melodrama, resisted furiously when arrested by a stage policeman, precipitating an actual brawl that was warmly encourged by the audience and had to be broken up by genuine policemen.²⁷ “Well, it was all real life to me, y’know,” remembered a devotee of melodramas at the Britannia in Hoxton Street, where fans would accost actors after the show and make no distinction between the player and the part:

I’ve seen ’em offer ’em a drink, you know—“Have a drink, my dear, do you good after all that hard work—bloody scoundrel, knocking you about like he did.” They would talk as if it had actually happened. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re alive. I thought you was dead.” And the men used to say to the villain, you know: “Why didn’t you ’it ’im on the head with a ’ammer?”²⁸

In the theater as well, fiction is a convention that must be learned. By 1900, thanks to compulsory education and cheap reading matter, even relatively unsophisticated readers knew not to believe everything they saw in print. Their grandparents read Jack and the Beanstalk and Pilgrim’s Progress as documentaries not because print is inherently credible, but because there is something powerfully compelling in a new and unfamiliar medium of communication. Its dazzling and novel capacities for transmitting information may so impress an audience that they must learn all over again how it can be manipulated. The stage was a new medium for many Victorian working people: those who had migrated from rural areas, where there were no theaters, and those who grew up in Nonconformist households, where plays were regarded as sinful. The audience had to learn, first, that the theater is make-believe, but even when they gave their intellectual assent to that proposition, they might still view the drama through the same frame that they viewed real life, and respond accordingly. They had yet to master the very different frame that governed the theater—the prohibition against talking during performances, the stricter prohibition against audience participation, the fiction of the “fourth wall,” and so forth.²⁹ In 1815, Methodist artisan Christopher Thomson prevailed upon his fearful mother to permit him to see King John in Hull’s Theatre Royal:

It was an event to be remembered; the mass of gorgeous decorations—the myriads of iris-tinted rays, glancing their diamond fires from the costly chandeliers—the spirit-stirring strains from the orchestra—the piles of human faces, each as comfortable as smiles and laughter could make them—that babel of noises from the “gods” overhead, their bawling for the “Downfall of Paris,” “Rule Britannia,” “Play up, Nosey,” “The Bay of Biscay O”—their whistles, stamping, barking, and mewing, were all commingled—such a scene I had never before witnessed; yet so absorbing as to render suspense a stranger.

When the curtain went up on John and his court, Thomson was astounded, completely unprepared for the conventions of the theater. What he then experienced was part political rally, part religious rapture, part time travel, and thoroughly real:

So enwrapped was I in the business that, at the fall of “the drop” at the end of the first act I felt bewildered, and almost doubted my existence, I was so struck “By the very cunning of the scene.” I had read of the chivalric daring of bold knights, and of the subduing charms of “fair ladies” with their loves; but now I was in company with them. It might be a dream, but what if it was? it was a waking one! the only fear was, would it be as “Baseless, as the fabric of a vision,” and so throw me back again upon the every-day world? I had read of “Magna Charta,” without knowing its importance, but still believing it to be a something worth the fighting for—now I was in sight of that very Runny-meade, and moving with “A braver choice of dauntless spirits” ready to grapple with the pale heart, and wring from him anew that deathless germ of liberty. … As the scene moved onward, I was every thing by turns; now ready to “hang a calf-skin” over the recreant Austria, or rave with Constance for her “absent child.” By the time the fourth act came on, all my fear of the play ending was gone. I thought of nothing but the story. … I sat absorbed in that new mode of visiting the inner-soul by such strange realities. Let those, who swim upon the surface stream of life, echo the purist’s cry of the irreligious play-house if they choose; it would be sheer hypocrisy were I to join the puritanic shout. Many a time have I felt my soul light up with pure and holy fire at the altar of our Shakespeare.

Reading that, one can understand why so many radicals were convinced that Shakespeare would emancipate the working classes—and why the early Methodists feared that drama would subvert religious orthodoxy.³⁰ It also helps to explain the rowdy audience participation in Victorian lower-class theaters. On one occasion, when an actor died an elaborately melodramatic death, his proletarian fans loudly chanted “Die again!” (He did.)³¹ The spectators at a turn-of-the-century Richard III in Shoreditch brought to the climactic battle scene the same frame that they would bring to a prize fight (“Go it, Harry!” “Go it, Dick!”).³²

After 1900, at least some working-class theatergoers had learned to see through the clanking stage machinery of melodrama. One Glasgow mason “could never take seriously” East Lynne: “I seemed to see only the humorous side of the proceedings, and instead of joining with the audience in shedding tears over the sufferings of the heroine I would notice, perhaps, that the heavy villain entering the drawing room of the mansion had forgotten to remove his silk hat.”³³ A London observer noted the gradual and uneven transformation of the audience:

“Look out!” an overwrought galleryite would shout, “’e’s going to stab yer with a knife.” Or when the poisoned cup was offered to the handsome hero, the action of the play would be delayed by voices anxiously bidding him not to drink it. “Shut up, Fathead!” some grumpy old chap would say to the nearest possessor of one of those voices; “‘ow can the play go on if he don’t get drugged? Besides, the ’ero’s bahnd to win in the end, ain’t he?”³⁴

By then, however, a still newer medium had arrested the popular imagination. In the cinema, working-class audiences commonly engaged in a running dialogue with the characters on the screen, carrying over the habit from theatrical melodrama. Silent movie titles would be read aloud (and, in the Jewish East End, translated) by a chorus of children’s voices, an effective lesson in literacy for their elders.³⁵ “Only the screen was silent,” wrote one immigrant’s son.³⁶ Viewers would vocally warn Tom Mix about the machinations of baddies and alert Pearl White to the approach of runaway locomotives.³⁷ As the proletarian novelist Jack Common noted, “Films were still far too real for anybody to be cynical about them. It was the utterly convincing reality of these scenes which compelled us to behave as though we were at the point of joining in upon them.”³⁸ Stoker’s son Emlyn Williams (b. 1905) found the images on the screen more authentic than his neighbors in Connah’s Quay, Flintshire:

It occupied the foreground of my life, vibrant and clear, while fuzzy in the background was the Quay; moreover, while the phantoms were all the more real for being mute, reality was sterile with sound. Avidly, stone-deafly, I watched the quick gay exchanges between Mabel Normand and Wallace Reid, the staccato protests of Anna Q. Nilsson; their vocal inaccessibility, combined with their physical nearness, was perfection. The magic was rendered invincible for me, too, by my indifference to machinery: I heard the whirring and felt the rays play on the screen, but never consciously knew that I was under the spell of photographs off a spool. And when [my brother] told me he had been inside the station and seen a metal box which a porter assured him contained “the pictures from the Hip”, I did not believe him: Norma Talmadge, Milton Sills, Dorothy Gish, William Farnum all in the Quay lying about in tins? … Shutting my eyes I thought, I am about to watch people who are going to be there, in strange rooms, strange clothes, and I pledge myself to watch every ornament on every wall and every earring and necklace, because each will prove that this is a reality which will last me till Saturday and then start again. And when I moped along High Street to collect the margarine from the Maypole, all the faces were grey compared to the shadows I had watched; they looked like prisoners of war.

Since 1913 films had opened with the censor’s certificate, and one might assume that this would signal to any audience that what they were about to see was less than the unvarnished truth. But again, only the relatively sophisticated will be sensitive to these clues. As Williams recalled, “I never wondered what a censor was, it was merely a fatherly message: ‘Yes, your film is here, enjoy it.’”³⁹

This pattern would repeat itself as new media followed in succession. In America under the New Deal, opinion polls revealed that radio enjoyed a much higher level of public confidence than the newspaper press. Compare the enormous prestige of Edward R. Murrow with the manipulative, lying print journalists of The Front Page and Citizen Kane, and consider the national panic ignited by Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds radio hoax of 1938.⁴⁰ That, at any rate, is a media theory offered by someone who had to be told not to believe everything on television, and who now must warn his students that the Internet is not an impeccable source.

Blood, Iron, and Scripture

Of course, the same processes of textual interpretation could work in the opposite direction. Readers might at first assume that everything should be read as fact, but once they mastered the concept of fiction, they could apply that frame to books that were supposed to be read as truth. Thomas Thompson (b. 1880), from a family of Lancashire weavers, grew up with tales of Robin Hood and the Black Hole of Calcutta, as well as an abridged Faerie Queene and Pilgrim’s Progress. So when a clergyman asked him why he read the Bible, he innocently replied “that I liked the battle stories.” That answer got him in serious trouble,⁴¹ but any good Sunday school teacher knew that the action heroes of the Old Testament could be as rousing as Charles Kingsley.⁴² In school, farm laborer Richard Hillyer (b. c. 1900) enjoyed Scripture in the same spirit as Black Beauty, Treasure Island, The Pickwick Papers, and Masterman Ready:

If you liked books at all the Bible was as exciting as any, it was so full of turbulence and strangeness. You could feel the heat of the desert, and hear the camel bells, as the caravans passed over the wild roads to ancient cities. And the people were so much larger than the people in other books, filled with more urgent desires, so grand and yet so simple. There was Abraham, wandering with his tent, and flocks and herds, through the timeless past in search of the future. David and Jonathan, bound in that deathless friendship. Saul, mad and broken, leaning on his spear and waiting for the welcome stroke that would end his shame. Above all there was David, old and tired, sick of kingship and its troubles, hearing of the death of the evil son he loved so greatly, and turning to seek a hiding place for the grief he could not contain, “O my son Absolom, my son, my son Absolom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absolom, my son, my son!” Words like that did things to me. It seemed as if my heart would break with David’s.⁴³

John Paton (b. 1886) was raised in the Aberdeen slums on a diet of penny dreadfuls (“good healthy stuff for an imaginative boy”) and he found similar thrills in the Bible, at least in the earlier episodes. “I revelled in the same way in the bloodier scenes of the Old Testament while the moralities of the New made no contact in my mind,” he remembered. “In this I was typical of most of my mates. We throve on a diet of blood and iron.”⁴⁴ One shop boy in Victorian London bought an illustrated Bible at a stall for 3d. and then skipped the dull parts to “pick out chapters here and there that told of wonderful and magical things, like there are in the Arabian Nights and just as hard to believe in.”⁴⁵ Memoirs of Bible reading frequently focus on the gaudy illustrations,⁴⁶ which suggest that it could be read as a dime novel. As children, miller James Saunders (b. 1844) and his sister enjoyed an old family History of the Bible, though “our attention was more taken by the pictures than the actual text. They may have been crude and original, but they were impressive, and we took our ideas accordingly.” They particularly wondered how the whale managed to swallow Jonah, who was “dressed in suitable English costume.”⁴⁷ Jack Common recalled that his grandmother once gave him an illustrated Bible, implying that he was in need of spiritual improvement, and that he astonished his family

when I actually read the thing, right through, cover to cover, as if it was Chips or Hereward the Wake .… They all looked upon the clever little horror with some distaste and askance .… Yet it was no stunt I was guilty of .… Here on a wet Saturday morning was this handsome volume, leather-bound, of clear bold type and frequent illustrations—I’d look at the pictures. They were gaudy and full of action, quite a lot of them. Look at the priests of Dagon with their blood-splashed knives; Jael creeping into the tent of Sisera; Egyptian chariots overwhelmed by the Red Sea; Judas gloating over his pieces of silver like a carroty-headed Quilp; the stars grouping themselves in the sky for St. John on his flat roof at Patmos. You simply had to read all of these matters; and if the narrative didn’t always come up to the quality of the illustrations, when it did, you had a story which stayed in your imagination and gave it something to glow with.

It was some time before Common realized that the real hero of the story was Jesus, not one of the kings or warriors.⁴⁸ For compositor’s son T. A. Jackson, illustrations by Gustave Doré and Felix Philippoteaux elicited a penny-dreadful frisson:

Especially the battle-pictures and those of storm and wreck. There was one of Joshua’s army storming a hill-fortress—with the great iron-studded door crashing down before the onrush of mighty men with huge-headed axes—that never failed to thrill. There was Ahab slain in his chariot by the man who “drew a bow at venture,” and Jezebel hurled down from her window to the avenging Jehu—who “drove furiously”—and his hungry hounds. There was Ehud the left-hander who slew Eglon in his summer-parlour. That always struck me as very nice work. I liked the fine realist detail that Eglon was so bulged in the belly that his fat “closed over the haft of the knife” as Ehud drove it in.

Jesus, in contrast, looked crashingly dull: “He was always so stiff, starched, and perfectly proper. I could imagine myself as David slinging stones at Goliath, or Samson tearing a lion into strips as I might tear an old rag, or Peter cutting off the ear of the ‘servant of the high priest’. … These were all living men; but Jesus? No! He never came to life for me, and never has.”⁴⁹

Even an unillustrated Bible could be read in a highly visual, cinematic fashion, as if it had been written with Cecil B. DeMille in mind. What fascinated was not the tedious ceremonials of Leviticus, but the special effects of Ezekial’s vision or the Apocalypse.⁵⁰ Robert Story, an early nineteenth-century shepherd-poet, described the experience:

The unconsumed bush burned before me—the successive plagues that visited Egypt were present in all their horror and blood—I saw the Red Sea divide and “stand on an heap,” while the favoured race “passed through on dry ground”—I saw the leading cloud darken before them, the “flame of fire” by night crimson the sand of the desert—and I heard the Law from Mount Sinai

“Mid thunder dint, and flashing levin,

And shadows, clouds, and darkness, given!”⁵¹

When young, Frederick Rogers read not only the Bible as a thriller (“the men and women of the sacred books were as familiar to me as the men and women of Alexander Dumas”) but also Pilgrim’s Progress: “There is a dark street yet in East London along which I have run with beating heart lest I should meet any of the evil things Bunyan so vividly described.”⁵² As a child William Heaton (b. 1805), the Yorkshire weaver-poet, “rambled with Christian from his home in the wilderness to the Celestial City; mused over his hair-breadth escapes, and his conflict with giant Despair,” enjoying it exactly as he enjoyed Robinson Crusoe and Roderick Random.⁵³ “I made no distinction between Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon and Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel—or between Pilgrim’s Progress and Sexton Blake,” recalled upholsterer’s son Herbert Hodge (b. 1901). “All four were simply exciting stories.”⁵⁴ In homes where fiction was banned, Bunyan could unintentionally offer the wonderful revelation that literature could appeal to the imagination.⁵⁵ Elizabeth Rignall (b. 1894), a London painter’s daughter, was not permitted to read anything else on Sundays, so she treated Pilgrim’s Progress as a horror comic. Irresistibly drawn to the lurid color illustration of the horned Apollyon, “and stretched out at full length on the sofa with the book open before me I would proceed, week after week, to frighten the life out of myself.”⁵⁶ At age ten Harry West (b. 1880), the son of a circus escape artist, read Pilgrim’s Progress merely as “a great heroic adventure.” Only later did he appreciate it as a religious allegory, and still later—after his exposure to Freud and Jung—he came to “discover it as one of the greatest, most potent works on practical psychology extant.”⁵⁷

Pilgrim’s Progress was by far the most widely stocked work of fiction in mid-nineteenth century prison libraries (followed by Robinson Crusoe) and one of the most frequently requested by prisoners.⁵⁸ Though Bunyan was disseminated by the governing classes to make the working classes more deferential, he often had exactly the opposite effect, inspiring radicals like Samuel Bamford.⁵⁹ There was even a Chartist Political Pilgrim’s Progress (1839), serialized in the Northern Liberator, in which the hero journeys from the City of Plunder to the City of Reform.⁶⁰ Chartist John James Bezer preferred to read it in the original, as a political fable:

My own dear Bunyan! if it hadn’t been for you, I should have gone mad, I think, before I was ten years old! Even as it was, the other books and teaching I was bored with [in Sunday school], had such a terrible influence on me, that somehow or other, I was always nourishing the idea that “Giant Despair” had got hold of me, and that I should never get out of his “Doubting Castle.” Yet I read, ay, and fed with such delight as I cannot now describe—though I think I could then. Glorious Bunyan, you too were a “Rebel,” and I love you doubly for that. I read you in Newgate,—so I could, I understand, if I had been taken care of in Bedford jail,—your books are in the library of even your Bedford jail. Hurrah for progress!⁶¹

Emrys Daniel Hughes, son of a Welsh miner, first treated Pilgrim’s Progress as an illustrated adventure story. When he was jailed during the First World War for refusing conscription, he reread it, and discovered a very different book:

Lord Hategood could easily have been in the Government. I had talked with Mr. Worldly Wiseman and had been in the Slough of Despond and knew all the jurymen who had been on the jury at the trial of Hopeful at Vanity Fair. And Vanity Fair would of course have been all for the War. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was one of the great books that showed great understanding of the life of man, of his setting out on a long and dangerous journey, his meeting with all sorts of difficulties and temptations on the way and his spirit in keeping on and the winning through ultimately to final victory and to the end of the quest.⁶²

For the founding fathers of the Labour Party, it was a revolutionary manifesto “to create a new heaven and a new earth,” to quote G. H. Roberts.⁶³ Robert Blatchford, who had practically memorized Pilgrim’s Progress by age ten, always found its political message supremely relevant: “Mr. Pliable we all know; he still votes for the old Parties. Mr. Worldly Wiseman writes books and articles against Socialism. Mr. Facing-both-ways is never absent from the House, and I think Mr. By-ends is become the guiding spirit of the British Press.”⁶⁴

In much the same way, Scripture supplied a fund of imagery, allusions, parables, and quotations for the first generation of Labour Party orators—and for agitators further to the left. “My first impressions of Labour came from Genesis; my idea of morality from the ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ and my spiritual leadership from Jesus” proclaimed Marxist James Clunie (b. 1889), son of a Plymouth Brethren lay preacher.⁶⁵ Jailed for suffragette disruptions, millworker Annie Kenney (b. 1879) rediscovered the Bible, “and I interpreted it quite differently in prison to the way I had interpreted it outside. It is a beautiful book, full of hope; the poetry of it is charming, and the wisdom and philosophy truly helpful to the struggling soul.”⁶⁶ Her brother Rowland and Robert Blatchford were both militant secularists who enjoyed Scripture as belles-lettres. “My hunger for word-music found satisfaction in many passages the sense of which I ruthlessly denounced,” Rowland recalled, “but as time went on I began to enjoy the sensuousness of the language and to smile at the meaning.”⁶⁷

Despite the disapproval of her comrade Palme Dutt, Helen Crawfurd (b. 1877) found Communist propaganda in Scripture, which was certainly more palatable than Marx to the Scottish working women she addressed. According to her un-authorized version, “The Lamb dumb before her shearers, represented the uncritical exploited working class.” In the Book of Esther, Queen Vashti, who would not parade before her king, was “my first suffragette.” For the Book of Revelation she read Revolution, and the Children of Israel who danced before the Golden Calf were obviously the running dogs of the capitalists. She modeled herself on Isaiah, and took her favorite Biblical text from St. John: “The man that says he loves God, whom he hath not seen, and loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, the same is a liar and the truth is not in him.” And when she had studied the Psalms long enough, she somehow discerned there the materialist conception of history: “I saw the Psalmist David as a shepherd on the hills, making his poems from the material things surrounding him, such as ‘the green pastures, the still waters.’”⁶⁸

New Crusoes

The Bible and Bunyan, then, were both read through the same set of inter-changeable frames: literal, fictional, allegorical, spiritual, political. Much the same was true of the one book that could match their readership. When adolescent schoolboys (mostly middle-class) were asked to name their favorite books in an 1888 survey, Robinson Crusoe was the clear winner, with its derivative Swiss Family Robinson in second place.⁶⁹ One bibliographer has located 974 English-language editions of Crusoe published through 1919.⁷⁰ That does not include all the desert island tales that were variations on the same theme, such as Swiss Family Robinson and R. M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island: at least 505 of them appeared between 1788 and 1910.⁷¹

How was Defoe’s documentary fiction actually read? “Now we are bound to see it as profoundly imperialist, both in Robinson’s relations to Friday, and in the stimulus it gave young Englishmen to go out and join in the adventure of the British Empire,” asserts Martin Green, expressing the current critical consensus. Nevertheless, he admits it was first received as a denunciation of Spanish imperialism. Though it may appear indisputably racist today, “Yet it has been read with enthusiasm by non-Englishmen. It was translated into every language, from Ashanti to Zulu, and we hear more of the inspiration it gave coloured readers than of their revolt against it.” Crusoe’s story “was for 150 years a charter of freedom, freeing men from the constraints of social and vocational tradition, from feudalism and hierarchy. … As baker, builder, tanner, etc., he plays every social role. He carries further the breakdown of the apprentice-dominated society we label ‘feudal’. Crusoe’s island is ‘open to the talents’; it is the opposite of immemorial village culture; it breaks the spell of ancestor-worship.”⁷²

An even more equalitarian reading of the book is possible. Crusoe presumes to own and trade human beings, though he knows from experience the life of a slave. For that sin he is banished to an island where division of labor has been completely abolished, where he receives exactly the value of his own work—a punishment that exactly fits the crime, and an ideal form of rehabilitation. The shipwreck teaches him that money is worthless, that usefulness is the only measure of value. Victorians often cited the suppression of cannibalism as a pretext for imperialism; but Crusoe, though disgusted by the practice, assumes an attitude of cultural relativism: “It is certain these People either do not commit this as a Crime; it is not against their own Consciences reproving, or their Light reproaching them.” Far worse, he argues, was the genocide carried out by the Spanish Empire against American natives.⁷³ His attempts to convert Friday to Christianity backfire when the native poses the kind of innocent questions (“Why God no kill the Devil?”) that expose the contradictions in Western theology, and force Crusoe to recognize that heathens are often more moral than Christians.⁷⁴

One more critical warning is in order. A scholar today who sits down with the “definitive” edition of a literary work, and tries to discern how past readers responded to it, must take into account that those readers may not have had anything like the complete text. In the eighteenth century Robinson Crusoe (along with Moll Flanders, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Gulliver’s Travels) was widely distributed in the form of greatly condensed chapbooks. The first abridgement of Crusoe appeared within weeks of its 1719 debut, and a total of 151 chapbook versions would be published over the next century, compared with only fifty-seven complete editions. Two-thirds of the chapbooks were issued by provincial publishers, indicating a broad national distribution.⁷⁵

Clearly, most lower-class eighteenth-century readers could only afford a fraction of Robinson Crusoe. (One mid-century chapbook was a mere eight pages, with Friday appearing only in the final paragraph.) By comparing the abridgements, and seeking out the common denominators, Pat Rogers has isolated what were apparently considered the indispensable elements of the story. Nearly all the chapbooks have an illustration of Crusoe in goatskin, armed, with a wrecked ship in the background. Significantly, he is alone: Friday and the cannibals were evidently regarded as peripheral, but Crusoe’s individualism was essential. Rogers concludes that early readers

responded to the book as a story of survival, as an epic of mastery over the hostile environment, as a parable of conquest over fear, isolation and despair. These messages seem to have come through, however the book was truncated or travestied. It was above all the shipwreck and the early part of Crusoe’s sojourn on the island that drew attention to these aspects of the myth, and this is a part of the narrative that is never sacrificed, however abbreviated the text. Crusoe’s “readability” for a mass audience was variously negotiable, but the sine qua non can be firmly located in this crucial episode.⁷⁶

For Thomas Spence and his followers, Robinson Crusoe had a radically egalitarian message. A Newcastle netmaker and schoolteacher, Spence argued that all land should be owned collectively by the parishes and leased out, with the rental income used to support social services. Defoe’s novel offered him a site on which to construct his utopia. In Spence’s A Supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe (1782), Europeans have peacefully settled (not conquered) Crusoe’s island, established friendly relations with the natives, and intermarried with them. They call themselves Crusonians: the neighboring continent, in the spirit of racial equality, has been named Fridinea. There are few laws, no lawyers, and complete religious freedom. In each parish, public land underwrites the cost of a free public school, a public theater, and a public library stocked with “copies and translations of all the best books in the world.”⁷⁷

Robinson Crusoe made innumerable plebeian readers discontented with their station in life and eager to explore. For John Clare, it “was the first book of any merit I got hold of after I could read,” and it set in motion an early ferment: “New ideas from the perusal of this book was now up in arms, new Crusoes and new Islands of Solitude was continually muttered over in my Journeys to and from school.”⁷⁸ Ebenezer Elliott, the foundryman and future “Corn-Law Rhymer,” yearned to leave the Tory England of the 1790s for America, inspired in part by “Crusoe-notions of self-dependence and isolation.”⁷⁹

Joseph Greenwood (b. c. 1833), the son of domestic handloom weavers, with very little formal schooling, went on to found a mechanics’ institute, the Hebden Bridge Fustian Manufacturing Co-operative Society, the Burnley Self-Help Society, the Bradford Cabinet Makers’ Society, the Leicester Hosiery Society, and his own fustian and dyeing firm, as well as becoming a local councillor and justice of the peace. As for his motivation, the book that figured most importantly in his memoirs was a cheap edition of Robinson Crusoe. “To me Daniel Defoe’s book was a wonderful thing, it opened up a world of adventure, new countries and peoples, full of brightness and change; an unlimited expanse.”⁸⁰ At age twelve, recalled ploughboy John Ward (b. 1866), “I devoured—not read, that’s too tame an expression—Robinson Crusoe, and that book gave me all my spirit of adventure, which has made me strike new ideas before the old ones became antiquated, and landed me into many troubles, travels, and difficulties.” These included agitating against British intervention in the Sudan, organizing a navvies’ trade union, becoming a Labour MP, and building up a personal library of more than 700 volumes.⁸¹

Some landlubbers recalled that it made them want to run away to sea.⁸² In the 1930s one old seaman claimed that nearly all English sailors used to read Robinson Crusoe: “I consider that Defoe sent more boys to sea than any other person who ever lived.”⁸³ It was Thomas Jordan’s (b. 1892) favorite book, read through in one sitting at age eleven. The promise of “faraway places fired my imagination” and ultimately inspired him, the son of an illiterate miner, to leave the pits of his Durham mining village and join the Army. From there he went on to diligent reading on his own and studying with the Workers’ Educational Association.⁸⁴

The language of Crusoe might not be easy for children, but far from being intimidated, they often used it to expand their language skills. “I found it fascinating but difficult,” remembered one handicapped boy (b. 1923). “The descriptions of the first storm at sea impressed me considerably. … I found the relentless detail of Crusoe’s life on the island at once compulsive and maddening, and his constant references to God rather embarrassing. The Friday episodes I found strange and curiously haunting. No doubt I was too young really to appreciate the book, nevertheless even at that age I think I dimly sensed its greatness.”⁸⁵ “The words I didn’t understand I just skipped over, yet managed to get a good idea of what the story was about,” wrote James Murray (b. c. 1894), the son of a Scottish shoemaker. “By the time I was ten or eleven years old I did not need to skip any words in any book because by then I had a good grounding in roots and derivations.” Crusoe so aroused his appetite for literature that, when his schoolteacher asked the class to list all the books they had read, Murray rattled off titles by Ballantyne, Kingston, and Dickens until “I realised the eyes of everyone in the room were on me. Some of the boys and girls had only written one book down, some had written down two, a few had not read any books and were completely stuck.”⁸⁶

Robinson Crusoe, it has been argued, appealed to a new middle-class reading public. Freed from manual labor, they found thrills and some nostalgia in the story of a man who could provide for all his survival needs with his own hands.⁸⁷ That may be true, but laborers also identified with the story—because they were still doing that kind of work. The son of a Welsh blacksmith, Michael Gareth Llewelyn (b. 1888) understood the “appeal in the story which describes the fashioning of a home out of a primitive environment.”⁸⁸ In 1951 postal worker Spike Mays was studying English literature at Newbattle Abbey College with Edwin Muir, who criticized Defoe for going on at such length about carpentry. Himself a good handyman, Mays

felt bound to go to Defoe’s defence, saying it was all very well for Edwin to condemn a man who could use tools and write about men who could use them; that it would be more convincing if Edwin could use them. To my certain knowledge he could not knock a wire nail into a hunk of balsa wood without bending the nail, hammering his finger-nails, and splintering almost unsplinterable wood. Moreover, when he as a writer made some mistake, he had but to reach for an eraser and could then start again from scratch. Not so the chiseller. I invited Edwin’s attention to the fireplace. Carved from one great tree was a massive grape vine, twelve feet wide and four feet high, bearing fruit and leaves. I asked Edwin to examine its detail, to note the curling fronds, the minute veins of the leaves and the beauty of the nodal joints. I reminded him that the Neapolitan carver had no eraser. One scratch, and his work was ruined. Edwin came and put his arm around me, … took … me to his study, and poured us sherry.⁸⁹

At the close of the nineteenth century, on a farm in the Derbyshire Peak District, Robinson Crusoe was read aloud every winter, and never palled on the audience. As Alison Uttley remembered, it was even more popular than Pilgrim’s Progress:

Christian on his journey met giants and evil men, but Robinson Crusoe fought against the elements, the wind and rain, lightning and tempest, droughts and floods. He lived a life they could understand, catching the food he ate, sowing and reaping corn, making bread, taming beasts, planting and fencing, and each one translated the tale into terms of his own experiences on the farm, and each shared that life of loneliness they knew. … The family shared the life of Robinson Crusoe, hoping and fearing with him, experiencing his sorrows, his repentance, his setbacks, rejoicing when he found a set of tools in the ship’s cabin, troubled when he built the boat that he couldn’t move. They were thankful about the cask of rum, for it was their own remedy for colds and chills. … The deep religious feeling was their own simple belief. He read the Bible as they read it, seeking solace and help in times of trial. It was their own life, translated to another island, but still an island like their own farmland, enclosed by the woods, a self-contained community, a sanctuary.

For those who had missed the chance to emigrate to America or Australia, Crusoe offered a vicarious escape. Laborers could buy cocoanuts at the village fair, or dream of venturing out each morning to shoot game with a fowling piece, as Crusoe did. Uttley herself concocted new stories around Defoe’s novel, until she leapt effortlessly over the boundaries of sex and “became Robinson Crusoe himself, and acted his life and adventures unceasingly, so that she was … a shipwrecked man on a desert island alone in a vast ocean. … Crusoe was there, living his life on her own.”

In a hierarchical and conformist society that offered little freedom for the laboring classes, Crusoe was read as a fable of individualism. It showed what one workingman could do without landlords, clergymen, or capitalists. According to Uttley, Crusoe’s reflections on the worthlessness of gold on a desert island spoke with particular force to an audience of rural laborers: “That was a powerful thought! That was Bible truth!” The impact of the parable lay in this: it collapsed all social distinctions into one person. Crusoe, as Uttley put it, is “a romantic mixture of poacher and gamekeeper and farmer.”⁹⁰

Pickwickian Realism

Only one other author ever matched the steady and overwhelming popularity of Defoe and Bunyan. Shortly after its opening in 1888, the Belfast Public Library reported that The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield were among its four most requested books.⁹¹ Dickens’s own public readings attracted mobs of working people—at least those who could afford the shilling seats.⁹² And at the Loveclough Printworks Library, Dickens accounted for 10 percent of all loans in 1892–93.⁹³

It has been argued that the sensational novelist G. W. M. Reynolds (1814–79) outsold Dickens in his day, but his books had no staying power. By the early twentieth century, when Dickens was the most widely stocked novelist in twenty Welsh miners’ libraries, only one of those collections had anything by Reynolds on the shelves.⁹⁴ Their relative impact on readers is apparent in working-class memoirs, where Dickens is a dominating presence and Reynolds is scarcely mentioned. A typical paean was offered by a London leather-bag maker (b. 1880): “Two names were held in great respect in our home, and were familiar in our mouths as household words, namely, Charles Dickens, and William Ewart Gladstone.”⁹⁵ George Acorn, growing up in extreme poverty in London’s East End, scraped together 31⁄ d. to buy a used copy of David Copperfield. His parents punished him when they learned he had wasted so much money on a book, but later he read it to them:

And how we all loved it, and eventually, when we got to “Little Em’ly,” how we all cried together at poor old Peggotty’s distress! The tears united us, deep in misery as we were ourselves. Dickens was a fairy musician to us, filling our minds with a sweeter strain than the constant cry of hunger, or the howling wind which often, taking advantage of the empty grate, penetrated into the room.⁹⁶

True, autobiographers may unconsciously fictionalize, rewriting memories to create an engaging story. Acorn’s account does sound suspiciously Dickensian, and if he was enthralled by David Copperfield, he may well have recast his own life in the same melodramatic mode. But for the historian of reading, it does not really matter if Acorn embellished his biography. The question here is Dickens’s influence on working-class readers. If Acorn thought David Copperfield important enough to place at the center of his memoir, if he used it as a literary model, if he adopted a Dickensian frame in reading and then used the same rules for interpreting experience when he wrote his reminiscences, then that influence was very great and deep.

When a memoirist uses fiction as a model, he is not necessarily drifting farther from the truth—not if the novelist he follows captures reality better than the historian. Most working people had to struggle with the art of recording their lives, and they cited Dickens, more than anyone else, as the man who got it right. They attended a school out of Nicholas Nickleby,⁹⁷ or one like Dr. Blimber’s Academy.⁹⁸ The fate of Mr. Wopsle, they confirmed, accurately illustrated the treatment of inferior actors by the patrons of cheap theaters.⁹⁹ Their first employer was Wackford Squeers (“Dickens did not exaggerate”).¹⁰⁰ They worked alongside Micawber in the mines (“I knew men like him in the pit”).¹⁰¹ They honored the “many Sydney Cartons in the Great War.”¹⁰² They might shudder to recall a Catholic orphanage refectory “as though Mr. Bumble himself had placed his ghostly, icy hands on me.”¹⁰³ “I went through all Oliver’s trials with him,” wrote Grace Foakes, whose father was a docker in Edwardian London. “I cried over him and loved him, for in those early days we lived in such conditions and it was easy for me to identify myself with him. I knew the threat of the workhouse, the threat of prison and bread-and-water. If we misbehaved, all these threats were held against us and we were fearful of being sent there.”¹⁰⁴ As a boy, V. S. Pritchett (b. 1900) read Oliver Twist

in a state of hot horror. It seized me because it was about London and the fears of the London streets. There were big boys at school who could grow up to be the Artful Dodger; many of us could have been Oliver; but the decisive thing must have been that Dickens had the excited mind, the terrors, the comic sense of a boy and one who can never have grown emotionally older than a boy is at the age of ten. One saw people going about the streets of London who could have been any of his characters.

Pritchett read Thackeray for escape, a taste of “the gentler life of better-off people,” but in Dickens “I saw myself and my life in London.”¹⁰⁵ For the same reason, Percy Wall (b. 1893) loved to hear his father, a railway worker and construction laborer, read to the family from Charles Dickens and Mark Twain: “It seemed that the world they portrayed was more real than the world around us. Here was compensation for the things we missed, if you can be said to miss things of whose existence you are but faintly aware.” The fact that his father had actually seen Dickens on the streets (not unusual for a London workingman of that generation) only reinforced the authenticity of what he read.¹⁰⁶ At age sixteen, Neville Cardus (whose parents were launderers in turn-of-the-century Manchester) read in the Athenaeum that no one was reading Dickens anymore: he then trudged from one public library to another, only to be told that every copy of his novels had been loaned out. His discovery of Dickens in shilling Harmsworth editions did more than erase the boundary between fiction and life: “It was scarcely a case of reading at all; it was almost an experience of a world more alive and dimensional than this world, heightened and set free in every impulse of nature; not subtle and abnormal impulses but such as even a more or less illiterate youth could at once share.” Critics who saw only caricatures in Dickens’s people had thoroughly missed the point: “He simply let me see them more than life-size. David Copperfield so often behaved and thought as I behaved and thought that I frequently lost my own sense of identity in him.”¹⁰⁷

Cumberland tailor’s son Norman Nicholson (b. 1914) had the same answer when asked why he liked Dickens: “Because he’s so real.” He and his schoolmates had no time for the sentimentality of The Old Curiosity Shop, but they were gripped when a scholarship class introduced them to “the darker Dickens”: Great Expectations in the 1s. 6d. Nelson’s Classics edition. While the first wave of modernist critics was dismissing Dickens as a melodramatic caricaturist, working people were reading his novels as documentaries, employing the same frame that their grandparents had applied to Bunyan. Nicholson saw an almost photographic realism in the Phiz illustration in Dombey and Son

which shows old Mrs. Pipchin, in her widow’s weeds, sitting beside little Paul Dombey, and staring into the fire. I had never seen widow’s weeds, of course, but everything else in that illustration, drawn in the 1840s, was as familiar to me, eighty years later, as the flags of my own back yard. The little, high, wooden chair, with rails like the rungs of a ladder, is the chair I sat in at mealtimes when I was Paul Dombey’s age. The fireplace itself, the bars across the grate, the kettle on the coals, the bellows hanging at the side, the brass shovel on the curb, the mirrored over-mantel, the mat, the table swathed in plush, the aspidistra on the wall-bracket—all these I had seen many times in my own house, or Grandpa Sobey’s, or Grandma Nicholson’s or Uncle Jim’s. On a winter tea-time, before the gas was lit, the fitful firelight populated the room with fantasies as weird as any in Dickens. I would pick up my book sometimes and try to read by the glow from the coals, and the world I entered seemed not far removed from the world I had left. It was no more than walking from one room into the next.¹⁰⁸

These readers were not prisoners of the text, uncritically adopting a Dickensian frame of mind. They were more sophisticated than the devotees of chapbooks and Pilgrim’s Progress a century earlier, and when Dickens contradicted their own experience, they were not reluctant to say so. One East End tough doubted that anyone as naive as Oliver Twist could have survived a moment in those mean streets.¹⁰⁹ A circus performer found a laughable ignorance of circus life in Hard Times.¹¹⁰ A laborer’s son, growing up in Camberwell in the early twentieth century, recognized that the local crooks “were far removed from the ‘Bill Sykes’ image created by Dickens, for the most part they were good-looking, smartly dressed men, intelligent conversationalists and witty raconteurs, they regarded prisons as no more than industrial hazards, to be avoided of course if possible, but philosophically accepted as part of the game.”¹¹¹ In the depressed steelworks town of Merthyr Tydfil between the world wars, schoolboys were baffled by A Christmas Carol: “For one thing, we never could understand why it was considered that Bob Cratchit was hard done by—a good job, we all thought he had. And the description of the Christmas party … didn’t sound bad at all—great, it must have been in Dickens’ day!”¹¹²

As a general rule, however, Dickens’s universe was solid enough and familiar enough to provide a common frame of reality for all social classes. In the late Victorian Warwickshire village where M. K. Ashby’s father was a farm laborer, Dickens was so often recited that even

People who were not at all literary, who had not read Fielding or Scott, needed no introduction to Dickens other than the infectious laughter and smiles of his readers. His books were the favourites at the penny readings, and passages from them were read and recited in the “public” and on religious platforms. So all sorts of folk became Dickensians in their degree: the hopeful young like Joseph, farmers, magistrates on the bench, the clergy, all read at least three or four of Dickens’s novels. Even the children read them. Not to have your mind touched by Dickens was to remain a relic of the early nineteenth century, or maybe the eighteenth, as after all quite a number were. Dickens exercised the muscles of laughter and practised the imagination. If the Vicar preached one of his pre-Christian sermons, or a lay preacher’s language was unequal to his message, or a mean mistress locked every cupboard although there was next to nothing in them, or a shopkeeper watched his scales over-sharply, or his local lordship was unbearably patronising, the risable muscles stirred before the frowns. All the tyrants and fools could be transmogrified into Dickens characters, and once you had smiled at your enemy you could think the better how to deal with him. The best of it was that everybody benefited. Lord Willoughby de Broke found a Dickens name for everyone he thought tiresome as easily as did Joseph. Thus Dickens affected the community life. The New Testament taught the principle of forbearance and Dickens supplied the technique of it.¹¹³

Perhaps Dickens’s most important gift to the working classes was the role he played in making them articulate. He provided a fund of allusions, characters, tropes, and situations that could be drawn upon by people who were not trained to express themselves on paper. When the People’s Journal, with its huge circulation among Scottish workers, sponsored Christmas story competitions it was deluged with submissions (about one for every hundred subscribers in 1869) and many of them clearly reflected the influence of Dickens.¹¹⁴ As rules for organizing experience, frames are essential tools for writing stories as well as reading them. For people who had never been taught how to tell their own histories, Dickens supplied the necessary lessons. Lancashire dialect poet Ben Brierley (b. 1825) began his literary career when the manager at his cotton mill sent him to pick up the monthly installments of The Pickwick Papers from the stationers: “I gathered fresh life from his admirable writings,” he recalled, “and even then began to look into the distant future with the hope that at sometime I might be able to track his footsteps, however far I might be behind.”¹¹⁵ How would the daughter of a shoe repairer, or a seaman’s son, or a textile worker know how to begin a memoir? They could all follow David Copperfield and write simply, “I am born.”¹¹⁶ And if one were struggling to describe a Welsh mining town as it actually was, the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities would be precisely right.¹¹⁷