The nineteenth century in Europe: new readers, new technology

Detail

The nineteenth century widened the reading public. Three new groups came in — children, women and workers. At the same time new machines made printing faster and cheaper. More readers pulled in more technology; more technology pulled in more readers.

Children as a new reading public

• Primary education became compulsory in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Schools needed books. So textbooks became a big and steady market for printers.
• A children's press was set up in France in 1857. Its whole job was to publish new works and old fairy tales only for children.
• Children were now seen as a separate audience. Books for them were edited to remove what adults thought was unsuitable.
• Grimm Brothers (Jacob and Wilhelm), in Germany, spent years collecting peasant folk tales. They published an edited collection in 1812.
• The first volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen ("Children's and Household Tales") came out on 20 December 1812; the work appeared in two volumes, 1812–15 [3].
• The collection holds about 200 stories, most taken from oral sources — people telling tales aloud, not from books [3].
• The brothers revised and enlarged it seven times between 1819 and 1857 — proof that a printed "folk" text is not fixed [3].

• The Library of Congress holds copies of Grimm's tales in its collections [4].

• Key NCERT idea: rural tales that were rustic or "unsuitable" for children were changed or dropped when printed. So print preserved old oral tales but also altered them. What survives is the editor's version, not the villager's version.

Women as readers and writers

• Women became important readers, especially of novels. Publishers noticed and aimed products at them.
• Penny magazines (very cheap magazines) were written specially for women.
• Manuals teaching proper behaviour and housekeeping — conduct books — were printed for them too.
• Women also became writers. Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and George Eliot are the NCERT names.
• Their writing defined a new type of woman — a person with will, strength of personality, determination and the power to think.

• Note: George Eliot was a pen-name; women writers often used male names to be taken seriously.

• Middle-class women in Europe now had more leisure hours. Reading filled them. Print gave women a public voice they did not have in politics.

Workers and the lending library

• Lending libraries had existed in England from the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century their role changed.
• They became places to educate white-collar workers, artisans and lower-middle-class people — groups with little money to buy books.
• Earlier, working hours were very long and workers had no leisure to read or write.
• From the mid-nineteenth century working days got shorter. Some libraries were opened by rich people partly to keep workers away from drink and to make them "respectable".
• With free hours, self-educated working-class people wrote for themselves:
• political tracts — short printed arguments on rights, wages, reform;

• autobiographies — their own life stories.

• Maxim Gorky's My Childhood and My University record this kind of hard struggle to gain education.

Printing technology: faster machines

• Richard M. Hoe of New York perfected a power-driven cylindrical press by the mid-nineteenth century.
• A large central cylinder carried the type and printed on paper fed by four impression cylinders.
• Output: 8,000 sheets per hour in 2,000 revolutions of the cylinder [2].
• Hoe threw out the old flat-bed press and put the type on a revolving cylinder instead. The machine became the Hoe rotary press, nicknamed the "lightning" press, and was patented in 1847 [2].
• Hoe lived 1812–1886; he joined his father Robert Hoe's New York press-making firm, R. Hoe and Company, in 1827 and later headed it [2].

• Why it mattered: newspapers must be printed in a few night hours and sold the same morning. Speed = mass circulation.

• Offset press, developed in the late nineteenth century, could print up to six colours at a time. Colour illustration became cheap.

• From the turn of the twentieth century (c. 1900), electrically operated presses replaced hand-powered ones and speeded up work again.
• Many smaller improvements added up:
• better methods of feeding paper into the machine;
• better quality plates (the metal surfaces that carry the image);
• automatic paper reels — paper fed as a continuous roll, not sheet by sheet;
• photoelectric controls of the colour register — light sensors that keep each colour lined up exactly on the page.

Marketing: selling books to a bigger public

• Serialised novels: from the 1830s publishers printed novels in instalments in periodicals. Readers bought the next issue to know what happened. This created a regular, addicted buying public and gave the writer a fixed income.
• Shilling Series in the 1920s — a cheap series of popular works priced so ordinary buyers could afford them.
• The dust jacket (the removable paper cover with art on it) was a twentieth-century innovation — a shop-window advertisement wrapped around the book.
• Great Depression of the 1930s: book sales fell as incomes fell. Publishers responded by bringing out cheap paperback editions to keep sales alive.
• Pattern to remember: every time the market shrank or a new group appeared, publishers changed the price and packaging, not just the content.

Prelims Hooks

• Children's press founded in France — 1857.
• Grimm Brothers' edited collection of peasant folk tales published — 1812; first volume appeared 20 December 1812, work completed in two volumes 1812–15 [3].
• Grimm collection contains about 200 tales, revised seven times between 1819 and 1857 [3].
• Richard M. Hoe (New York) — power-driven cylindrical press, mid-nineteenth century, 8,000 sheets per hour; his rotary or "lightning" press was patented in 1847 [2].
• Offset press (late nineteenth century) — printed up to six colours at a time.
• Electrically operated presses — from about 1900.
• Lending libraries in England — from the seventeenth century; became tools to educate artisans and the lower middle class in the nineteenth century.
• Maxim Gorky — My Childhood and My University, autobiographies of working-class struggle.
• Shilling Series — 1920s; dust jacket — twentieth century; cheap paperbacks — 1930s Great Depression.
• Women novelists named by NCERT: Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot.

Mains Points

• Print did not simply record culture; it reshaped it. The Grimm tales were collected from village storytellers but edited before printing — rustic parts were cut to suit middle-class children. Useful example for any answer on how a "national" or "folk" tradition is partly a printed construction [3].
• Technology and audience grew together. Compulsory schooling and shorter working days created readers; Hoe's cylinder press (8,000 sheets/hour) and the offset press supplied them cheaply [2]. Neither alone explains the nineteenth-century reading revolution — argue the two-way link.
• Print widened social access but also disciplined it. Lending libraries taught workers to read, yet were also meant to make them "respectable" and sober. Same tool, two purposes — control and empowerment.
• Women's entry into print had a double effect. Publishers treated women as a market (penny magazines, conduct manuals telling them how to behave), while women writers used print to create heroines with will and the power to think. Good link to the later Indian story of women's writing and reform-era debates.