ABSTRACT
The mass media of the twentieth century had a major impact on the publishing industry. The industry which developed in nineteenth-century Britain, building on the foundations of the early modern book trade, was critically dependent on a mass market. The mass market was created by the growth of both literacy and prosperity. By 1900, Britain was close to having achieved universal adult literacy, and, despite the inevitable consequences of economic cycles, was fundamentally a wealthy country in which leisure time was a part of most people’s lives. The commercialisation of leisure, a process which began in the eighteenth century, was a noticeable feature of the second half of Queen Victoria’s reign. Cheap rail travel, the growth of popular entertainments such as the music halls, and the professionalisation and commercialisation of many sports (especially football and boxing), opened up new horizons, both literally and metaphorically, to millions of people. The new journalism of the late nineteenth century, and the emergence of a genuinely popular newspaper press (see above, pp. 148-50), was a manifestation of a similar phenomenon. In the book publishing industry, the proliferation both of cheap reprint series and of primary and secondary educational textbooks were consequences of the same pattern of simultaneous growth of incomes and leisure.
