Mary Hammond

“The great fiction bore”: free libraries and the construction of a reading public in England, 1880-1914

The Public Libraries Act (England and Wales) was passed in 1850 at a time when democracy was being hotly debated but only one person in forty was eligible to vote, and compulsory elementary education for all was still twenty years in the future. This essay explores how the public library came to act as a legitimating body for the performance of class and gender through reading practices. It argues that the social and political history surrounding the library movement in England is crucial to an understanding of how, though founded on the Arnoldian principle of culture as social panacea, it had come by the First World War to function on the principle of cultural capital as social signifier.

The multimedia afterlives of Victorian novels: The Readers Library photoplay editions in the 1920s

While much critical attention has recently been devoted to theatre and film adaptations of nineteenth-century literary texts, one important aspect of the recycling of these narratives which has left useful material traces has hitherto tended to be overlooked. The ‘Photoplay’ edition or ‘film tie-in’ book became popular in Western Europe and the US from about 1912, and provides a rich source of evidence for the multimedia afterlives of Victorian texts. This paper examines one successful example of the phenomenon in the 1920s, arguing that it not only provides scholars with potential new evidence for the ways in which readers and audiences engaged with texts in a dawning multi-media age, but that it can also help to test the usefulness of recent adaptation methodologies for understanding long-past performance events.

Introduction From Palmyra to Print: The Book in South Asia

Zadie Smith famously begins On Beauty, her novel of 2005, with a parody of — or at least an act of homage towards — an opening passage by E. M. Forster. To be exact, she echoes the first sentence of Howard’s End, referring not however to ‘Helen’s letters to her sister’ but to ‘Jerome’s e-mails to his father’. When introducing the long history of textual transmission in South Asia, one is tempted to pull off an equivalent trick. Predictably enough perhaps, the Forsterian preamble one longs to rework is that to A Passage to India. Here is what one might write: Even apart from the city of Bhubaneswar — and that is forty miles inland — the state of Orissa presents much that is extraordinary. Edged and washed by the Bay of Bengal, it spreads out like some ample sari in sun, and the satin scintillates as it glides. Its streets are colourful and democratic. Its ancient temples are legion. At Puri the bee-hive-shaped towers of the Temple of Jagannath soar irresistibly into the sky whilst, fifty miles distant, the sculptured figures round the chariot-shaped Temple of the Sun at Koranak instruct as they cavort. The chariot wheels turn in their stasis. The stonework glows like honey. The guides are as informative as they are obliging.

‘Amid the Dear Old Horrors’: Memory, London, and Literary Labour in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

In 1912, an anthology called The Charm of London was published in Britain by Chatto and Windus. Compiled by Alfred H. Hyatt, it included several romantic watercolours of city views and short contributions from a range of authors from Dickens and Tennyson to George Gissing and Walter Besant. It is an upbeat, self-congratulatory volume; all of the contributors are either full of praise for Britain’s capital or, at the very worst, charmed by its idiosyncrasies.

Hall Caine and the melodrama on page, stage and screen

The Victorian novelist Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine became a household name during a spectacular career that spanned more than forty years. But despite a wealth of critical interest in nineteenth-century popular fiction by both literary and theater historians, there have been surprisingly few attempts to reassess Caines novels, and even fewer which revisit his popular dramas. Hammond discusses the importance of Caines many dramatic interpretations, using his work to map out some neglected areas of cross-reference between literature, theatre, and film which might open up new avenues of enquiry.