ABSTRACT
An article on 'The Manufacture of Novels' in the Spectator for 31 October 1901 noted how the novel-reading public was continuing to grow, helped by the abolition of the three-volume novel. Novel reading had become 'the habitual recreation of the middle class . . . representatives of the same social stratum which a generation back perused with avidity the adventures of Jack Shephard are now devout readers of Miss Marie Corelli and Mr. Hall Caine.' These two late-Victorian romantic novelists published a succession of best-sellers, full of drama mixed with religiosity. 1 Hall Caine's The Christian (1897) sold 50,000 copies in a month, Marie Corelli's The Master Christian (1900) 260,000 in a few years. But best-sellers in the new century began to give less emphasis to religion or morality - novels such as Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), Edgar Wallace's The Four Just Men (1905), and Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks (1907). The popular preference in fiction was measured by a 1907 survey of the numbers of books held by twenty-one of the largest public libraries. 2 In all of them books by the leading Victorian popular novelists - Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood, Ouida, Marie Corelli, and a few others - far outnumbered those by such 'serious' novelists as George Meredith, Henry James, or Joseph Conrad. The public library service was expanding rapidly about the turn of the century. Library authorities in England increased from 107 in 1886 to 438 by 1918. Public library stock grew from just over 1,800,000 volumes in 1885 to over 9,350,000 in 1914.
