ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century was the great age of the periodical. Up to 1800, printing had not changed very much since the days of Gutenberg and Caxton: type was set by hand, and the press worked by human muscles, producing small editions for those who could read. There were not very many who could read, but by 1800 elementary education was, even in backward England, increasing the number of readers; while gas lighting, and improved oil lamps on Argand’s principle, with cylindrical wicks and a good air supply so that they did not smoke, meant that study after dark became much easier by the 1820s. This was the era of the evening class and the Mechanics’ Institute. Knowledge is power, and new classes wanted it. Extensive reading replaced the intensive kind, where readers had returned over and over again to a few texts like the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress. There was a big market in prospect for printed matter, a hunger for enlightenment that alarmed the well-off because revolutionary, ‘Jacobinical’, books and pamphlets threatened the social order. But the invention of the steam press made practicable very long print runs that would have taken weeks on hand presses, and thus opened a door to economies of scale and cheap periodical literature. The publication in parts which had been a feature of fine natural histories became the norm for novels like Dickens’ – read breathlessly in instalments, each one (like the Arabian Nights) ending at an exciting moment; and then published after some revisions as a respectable book.
