SOURCE: “Introduction: Why Read Chapbooks,” in Guy of Warwick and Other Chapbook Romances, edited by John Simons, University of Exeter Press, 1998, pp. 1-18.

[In the following excerpt, Simons discusses how broadsides were created and produced and illustrates how they slowly changed the social aspirations of English commoners.]

[Chapbooks were] the flimsy and often poorly printed booklets which were a major source of literature for the English poor in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century.¹ There is a full discussion of the nature and form of chapbooks below as well as some analysis of their history and readership, but here I wish to set out some of the reasons for being interested in such apparently ephemeral objects and to comment on some aspects of the relationship between work on popular literature and culture and more mainline literary-historical studies.

Chapbook readers left few records of their tastes or opinions. They were, for the most part, in dire economic necessity and therefore did not have the leisure to record their thoughts, or else they were children and did not have the power.² To read chapbooks is, therefore, to enter a one-sided conversation with the past. We can listen to the chapbooks as they speak to their long-dead readers, but we cannot easily hear the readers speaking back. It is true that many people who were probably chapbook readers did leave autobiographical writings, but these tend to relate narratives of personal and political development. Only very rarely are details of aesthetic response recorded. Chapbooks thus force us into the reconstitution of the mentality of groups who left few relevant traces of themselves. When we read chapbooks we must constantly ask ourselves what pleasure they offered to a reader whose access to print was limited and what sense the picture of the world they offer would have made to him or her.

Such reconstructive studies are necessary if we are going to maintain any feeling for historical continuity. Only such a feeling will enable us to remember and understand the lives of people whose access to privileged forms of communication was limited or non-existent. They provide a salutary reminder that poverty of information is not necessarily a recent phenomenon and that it visits its ill effects on future generations just as surely as do years of bad nutrition. Such studies are also necessary if many contemporary students of English Literature are to be enabled to position themselves autobiographically in the continuum of their studies. A very large number of those who now work at all levels of the higher education system—as teachers, researchers or undergraduates—have personal and family histories which offer them little or no stake in the high culture which forms the core of their academic work. It is at least desirable that they should have some access to the artefacts which produced their ancestors' world-view rather than that of their ancestors' masters.

Chapbooks offer an exemplary body of texts for this purpose and they allow us to begin to grasp the textures of the world of the pre-industrial rural and urban poor as it appears through their common reading. Most people who begin to look at chapbooks seriously appear to find that they also offer some pleasures to the modern reader. These little paper objects were valued and loved by those who bought them both in childhood and maturity. Anyone handling them today cannot fail to be moved by the disjunction between their size and fragility and the status they appear to have held in the poor reader's mind. More than anything else it is this disjunction between monetary and affective value that speaks eloquently of the struggles of ordinary people to gain some pleasure and education from reading in a world which must, for most of them, have offered few opportunities for hope or self-realisation.

THE FORM AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS OF CHAPBOOKS

Before discussing in detail the chapbooks edited below, I will describe exactly what a chapbook is. There will then be a brief exploration of some of the salient features of the history of this kind of book, which formed a body of reading matter enjoyed across the social spectrum in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Chapbooks also crossed the Atlantic and were read both in the American colonies and in the early years of the United States.³ Yet chapbooks are hardly known outside of specialist bibliographical studies.

This volume is not designed as a full history of chapbooks, but it is worth mentioning that they are not exclusive to Anglophone cultures or to those countries (like Wales) where chapbooks in the native language flourished alongside chapbooks in English. Texts which share many features in common with the chapbooks edited here can be identified from the early modern period to the nineteenth century in Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain and, most famously, in France through the series commonly known as the bibliothèque bleue.⁴ In the twentieth century, texts which may fairly be described as chapbooks were produced in Judaeo-Spanish and are still available in the folhetos of modern Brazil and the productions associated with the town of Onitsha in Nigeria.⁵

The heyday of the English chapbook was the eighteenth century. There are frequent allusions to chapbooks in commentaries on the literature and popular culture of this period, but few people have troubled to acquaint themselves fully with their form and content, and such longer studies as do exist have mainly concentrated on bibliographical and commercial history.⁶ Anyone familiar with writing on the eighteenth century will generally find chapbooks mentioned as cheap, small books, containing highly traditional materials, and read by the poorest strata of society and by the children of the gentry. The term chapbook is also frequently and inaccurately applied to any small book, even, it seems, to those parts of longer texts which were published in serial form. The chapbook reader is often depicted as an individual of low sophistication, low intellect and meagre literacy.⁷ The purpose of these initial remarks is to correct some of these misconceptions and to sketch out the conditions of production and readership which determined the chapbook's distinctive form.

It must be first said that a chapbook was not a cheap book. Chapbooks usually retailed at the price of one old penny (about 0.4p). In 1795 an agricultural labourer in the south of England had a weekly income of about 40p. The bare necessities of life (bread, salt, meat, tea, sugar, butter, soap, candles, thread) sufficient to support a family cost 9s 7[frac12]d (48p).⁸ The risking of even one old penny in this state of misery might be seen as an extravagant gesture, and to the vast majority of English labourers chapbooks were certainly not cheap: indeed they may be seen as a luxury quite beyond reach. However, there is evidence that in better times labourers did buy and read chapbooks.⁹ There is also plenty of evidence that chapbook readers were to be found at other levels of English society, and when, for example, gentlemen like James Boswell or Sir Walter Scott (who in 1808 was offered a thousand guineas for one poem) made their important collections of chapbooks, we may truly say that, to them, they were cheap.¹⁰

A chapbook is best defined strictly and briefly thus: a single sheet of paper printed on both sides and then folded so as to make a book of twelve leaves or twenty-four pages.¹¹ It is possible to find chapbooks which have thirty-six pages and also slimmer ones of, for example, eight pages, but the commonest form was the twenty-four pager and anyone reading chapbooks will probably encounter more of this sort than any other. Whatever the number of pages, chapbooks have the following features in common: they were sold unopened (a large number of specimens that have survived are still in this state unless they have been bound up as parts of collections), they often include one or more woodcuts or wood engravings, and they are usually fragile and printed on poor quality paper. It is tempting to lump together a whole host of other small books under the blanket term of chapbooks, but this is misleading. Chapbooks have a very specific history of production and distribution, and it is this which enables us to understand them as a genuine form of literary and intellectual culture.

When the virtual monopoly on printing which had been enjoyed by London since the incorporation of the Stationers' Company in 1557 came to an end in 1695, presses began to spring up across the country. Many provincial printers tried their hand at the chapbook form—one can find chapbooks from Kendal, Whitehaven, Wigan, and Falkirk for example—but there were certain centres which gained and retained their prominence throughout the period. London, Newcastle, York, Glasgow (especially in the nineteenth century) and Banbury (represented by the work of John Cheney and the somewhat artistic productions of the Rusher family) were the most important of these.¹² A web of travelling pedlars known as chapmen spread from these regional centres where, particularly in London, printshops were supported by fully stocked warehouses. It was largely through this web that the chapbooks were carried all over the British Isles and reached the rural communities with which they are most commonly associated.¹³ Thus the regions could be served with a range of chapbooks which not only linked them to national culture (for example, through chapbook texts of novels like Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders) but also satisfied local tastes (for example, the range of religious chapbooks produced at York or the highly colourful Scottish chapbooks of Dougal Graham, ‘the bellman of Glasgow’).¹⁴ In this way, chapbooks provided one of the links which enabled national consciousness to grow within a culture which was still tolerant of regional difference. It has been very properly said that ‘the importance of the printing press in unifying Great Britain and in shaping its inhabitants' view of themselves' has not been fully understood.¹⁵

Economic hardships made it unlikely that chapbooks would have formed a regular purchase in labouring households even in better times. However, we know from the autobiographical writings of such as John Clare, Samuel Bamford and Thomas Holcroft that chapbooks were a fairly familiar commodity among the rural poor.¹⁶ It should be remembered that in pre-industrial societies (or in societies where industrialisation has not severely impacted on the details of daily life and culture) the lack of means to possess or read a text does not by any means preclude access to writing. Events where readings to village communities formed a common entertainment are well recorded for early modern France and Italy, and the bookseller James Lackington hinted at similar pastimes in eighteenth-century England when he wrote of:

The poorer sort of farmers and even the poor country people in general, who before that spent their evenings in relating stories of witches, ghosts, hobgoblins etc., now shorten the winter nights by hearing their sons and daughters read tales, romances etc.¹⁷

Even so, it is probably safest to assume that the regular purchase and collection of chapbooks was available only to those members of rural communities who lived in relative comfort (say on 10s a week) and that these families played the part of culture brokers. They mediated between the national life based in literacy and the oral tradition which formed the fine texture of understanding and belief in the mass of the population.¹⁸ There are plainly many things to be said against this simple model, but it is difficult to see how the hard facts of economic life in pre-industrial England square easily with any other interpretation. We should certainly not assume that chapbooks were ephemera which could be read and discarded. If only a smallish number has survived, this may well be due to the process of ‘reading to bits’ and also the lack of affection for these traditional texts which set in when the mass production of genuinely cheap books and periodicals, often in penny and twopenny issues, drove them from the urban market at least in the 1830s and 1840s.

We also know that, while the labourers read chapbooks in their cottages, the children of the gentry also avidly consumed them in the great houses. Through these children, the many servants who laboured to support landowners, rural merchants and industrialists may also have had access to them. Sir Richard Steele, James Boswell, Sir Walter Scott and George Borrow all read chapbooks as children, and in Boswell's case collected them in maturity. Thackeray bought and enjoyed chapbooks on his tour of Ireland.¹⁹ One of the most intractable problems of chapbook scholarship is that the best and most extensive bases of evidence for chapbook readership comes not from the rural poor, who plainly did provide a huge and diverse market for them, but from the gentry. This need not disturb us too much if we remember that it was possible to be able to read and to have access to chapbooks even if you were only supported by a relatively low economic base and a restricted set of cultural opportunities. To have been able to write, however, especially to have been able to write with the kind of leisure that is implied by the ability to make records of personal literary taste, was an entirely different order of accomplishment. Put bluntly, it was a luxury which was even further beyond the reach of the English poor than the penny chapbook.

I remarked above that it is too often said that popular literature, and especially popular literature which has the low status ascribed to chapbooks, is designed to appeal to a reader of low sophistication and low intellect. Part of my purpose in producing this edition is to counter this highly prejudiced view. It is true that chapbooks do not speak to a world thronged by readers who were conversant with high literary culture or the finer points of literary discrimination. At the same time, the chapbooks themselves do not suggest a reader of low literacy. The texts presented here do not, to my mind, make concessions where literacy is concerned. They make the occasional blunder which may amuse a contemporary reader but which is understandable to anyone who can comprehend that a reasonable level of intelligence may readily combine with poor education.

Anyone who could read a Moll Flanders chapbook was certainly sufficiently literate to read Moll Flanders. What he or she may well not have been able to do was BUY Moll Flanders in any but its penny form. Chapbooks do not speak of a world of intellectual limitation but of a world of economic hardship and lack of opportunity. Working-class autobiography of the nineteenth century is a record of the consistently heroic effort to gain access to the products of the official literate culture. We should not be too quick to assume, especially when considering a world where hard work from childhood onwards left little room for education (even if this were an available option), that lack of money implies anything more than poverty and all the waste of human intellectual and sensual resources that poverty brings with it.

THE CONCERNS OF CHAPBOOKS

Although chapbooks are most readily associated with highly traditional materials, this view does not do anything like justice to their range of interests. Indeed a chapbook collector could have assembled a library in miniature which comprehended almost the entire range of polite knowledge. In order to give some meaningful contexts to the chapbook romances edited below it will be helpful to review briefly the sorts of chapbook which their readers might also have owned and enjoyed.

Chapbooks were often of practical as well as recreational interest, so we may begin with mentioning the various almanacs and prognostications which were found in this form from the late seventeenth century onwards. Almanacs offered obvious guides to life in rural surroundings, but their purely practical uses were supplemented by more exotic books of prophecies. The most celebrated were probably those of Mother Shipton and Mother Bunch, with Nixon's Cheshire Prophecies coming a close third. These chapbooks blended folkloric material with obscure prophecy and biographies of the prophets.²⁰ It is hard to say how far such texts were used in a genuinely practical manner. They were certainly just the sort of work which gave chapbooks their bad reputation in the official culture where more reputable astrologers such as Partridge had long been the butt of fashionable jokes and had themselves passed into chapbook form. I suspect that many chapbook readers would have seen this kind of text as entertaining and absurd but containing much useful material and being of some historical interest.

More obviously practical were various guides to divination: the interpretation of dreams, the significance of the placement of moles on the face and body, physiognomy and palmistry. These sorts of popular sciences were the common currency of travelling fairs and would have been very familiar to rural readers who may have tried various sorts of divination for themselves—especially where the choice of a marriage partner was concerned. Indeed the key and Bible ceremony was a common popular practice (corresponding with the more polite sortes Virgilianae) and David Vincent has written an account of a Guy of Warwick chapbook being used in a divination ceremony where a Bible was lacking.²¹ In addition to exploring the various supernatural forms of choosing a partner, chapbook readers could learn how to cement a relationship by reference to chapbooks which taught them how to write letters. This kind of chapbook, where a series of letters shows both the progress of a relationship and various other types of family situation, is particularly interesting for two reasons. The first is that such chapbooks do tend to have the force of miniature epistolary novels: the examples I have seen seem to lose sight of their practical purpose and become engrossed in the progress of the courtship which they are mapping. The second is that Samuel Richardson, the great exponent of the epistolary form in the mideighteenth century, served his apprenticeship with a chapbook printer and may have found his initial stimulation in his experience of producing chapbooks. It is probably no coincidence that Mr Colbrond, the tormentor of Richardson's heroine Pamela, shares his name with one of the major enemies of Guy of Warwick, a most durable chapbook hero whose adventures are edited in two versions below.²² We see here just how dangerous it is to build watertight compartments between the different levels of cultural production, for just as it is certain that all late eighteenth-century adults are likely to have used opium for medicinal or recreational purposes at some point in their life, it is also certain that all polite adults are likely to have read chapbooks during their childhood and would have known very well the source of Richardson's villain.

Religious chapbooks were also common, though here we must exercise some care in distinguishing chapbooks from tracts. In the 1790s the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge produced, through the work of Hannah More and others, tracts in forms which very precisely mimicked those of the chapbook.²³ Indeed, antiquarian booksellers who offer chapbooks for sale are frequently in possession of collections of these tracts rather than of chapbooks proper. This tractarian marketing ploy was so successful that there is the real probability that it forced chapbooks into a decline from which they never fully recovered (in the south of England at least). There were, however, also genuine chapbooks with a religious content. I have already mentioned the religious chapbooks which circulated in Yorkshire, but chapbooks which told biblical or quasi-biblical stories were well known and must have supplemented Bible reading and provided useful examples which could be easily recalled and discussed.

Related to religious chapbooks, especially to those of Hannah More, are the radical political tracts which were produced by Thomas Spence, also in the 1790s.²⁴ Spence was plainly concerned with the issue of literacy and actually attempted the publication of a phonetic Bible to be sold in penny instalments. Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, by far the most influential radical work of its time, also appeared in chapbook form.²⁵ By 1805 the publisher Thomas Harris had also begun to appropriate the forms of the children's chapbook in order to produce political satire.²⁶ The relationship between Blake's illuminated books, chapbooks and late eighteenth-century London radicalism should also be recognised and gives another important insight into the role which chapbooks had in mediating between different levels of cultural activity.²⁷

One of the most difficult kinds of chapbook to place is that which contains a collection of songs. These collections are usually known as ‘Garlands’ and formed a very large part of the output of chapbook printers, particularly in London and Newcastle.²⁸ Frequently such texts do not run to the full twenty-four pages, but in all other respects they are true chapbooks in that they satisfy the formal criteria I outlined above. They are probably best seen as offering a parallel (and better value) form to the broadside ballads which are especially associated with the printers in the Seven Dials area of London and which would also have been available from chapmen.²⁹ Many Irish chapbooks, for example those printed by Walter Kelly of Waterford or William Gogarty of Limerick, are collections of songs in the Garland format.³⁰ Chapbook readers would certainly have been familiar with Garlands and probably bought them to supplement their collections, but the material contained in them is certainly different from that in other kinds of chapbook as it obeys formal conventions which are sometimes far removed from the traditional world of village culture.

Current affairs were frequently explored through broadside ballads, especially those which dealt with violent crime, accidents or the execution of notorious murderers. Chapbooks too reflected eighteenth-century society's obsession with crime. This obsession comprehended crime's potential as a subject both for exciting and romantic stories and for edifying narratives of penitence and punishment. The lives of pirates and famous highwaymen are represented in the chapbook stock and there are also chapbooks which provide awful warnings of the dangers of filial disobedience, avarice and inebriation—especially in combination. This kind of chapbook offered not only pious examples but also genuinely entertaining narratives, and must surely have been read as much for the enjoyment of prose fiction as for the guidance which they presented. Indeed this dual function can be readily recognised in the early eighteenth-century novel. Defoe plainly drew on the genre of Newgate biography for Moll Flanders and on sailors' memoirs for Robinson Crusoe, and it is no surprise to find that both of these texts were commonly produced in chapbook form. It is interesting to speculate, there being little formal difference between the biographies of genuine rogues and that of the fictional Moll Flanders, whether or not chapbook readers—who almost certainly would not have heard of Defoe—would have read these texts as pure fiction or whether they happily, or anxiously, assumed that they had a solid, if colourful, factual basis.

With rogue biographies we are approaching fiction proper and we may pass over chapbooks with a historical content and jest books (a hardy Tudor form which survived well into the eighteenth century through the chapbooks) and encounter fiction proper. I have already mentioned chapbooks of Defoe's novels, and there were also chapbook versions of work by Fielding. However, the core of chapbook fiction divides into three sections. The first contains romances, which form the subject of this edition and will be dealt with in detail below. The second consists of short self-contained anecdotes based on the life of a particular hero. The third is based on a range of traditional narrative. The second category usually has its sources in late medieval and Renaissance writing and concentrates on the lives of well-known figures such as Faustus, Fortunatus, Dick Whittington (though Whittington chapbooks arguably belong to the genre of historical biography), Reynard the Fox, or Robin Hood. The third category contains some of the most interesting and charming narratives and is most frequently cited by readers who were remembering their childhood experience of chapbooks. In this category we find Jack the Giant Killer, Thomas Hickathrift and Tom Thumb. In these fascinating stories can be seen many strata of the history of English narrative. Elements drawn from Middle English romance jostle with apparently polite commentary and material which appears to derive from an oral tradition of story telling. We can usually assign definite early printed sources to parts of most of these texts, but there remains a residue that tantalisingly reminds us of the voices which once breathed through a now entirely dead culture.

It will be seen from the latter part of this very brief, highly descriptive and by no means exhaustive account of the range of chapbooks that, where fiction is concerned, it is extremely hard to draw a line which defines authoritatively where a text as record of historic fact ends and a text as record of imaginative creation begins. The lack of named authorship which is a feature of most chapbooks (the Scottish writers Dougal Graham and James Hogg are extremely rare examples of known chapbook authors) leaves the reader bereft of the usual markers which enable him or her confidently to place books into the various categories which make the modern mind feel comfortable. Such taxonomic anarchy is, to some extent, a general characteristic of pre-industrial literature, but it is magnified by chapbooks which teach us just how much highly literate readers depend on extra-textual prompting in the act of interpretation. The notion that we might fully be able to understand a text solely through the encounter with its words and its rhetorical and syntactic devices becomes even more of a critical chimera.

It is often said that the traditional nature of chapbooks supported a cultural conservatism which hindered the potential of the rural poor to offer a radical critique of the world in which they found themselves. This opinion is one that derives largely from comment on the French bibliothèque bleue, but it is possible to extrapolate from this range of scholarship in order to speak of chapbooks. The first thing to be said about this view is that there is no evidence whatsoever that the chapbooks enshrined any conscious ideological project to keep the poor in happy ignorance. If anything, polite thinkers worried that traditions of rural life prevented the country people from cultivating the attitudes which would enable efficient work and the disciplines necessary for industrial progress. Secondly, poverty and suffering are not things of which you remain ignorant as you are experiencing them, especially when examples of luxury and ease are daily visible. The history of rural England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may be read as marked as much by popular protest of an often violent kind as by the peaceful continuation of the seasonal rituals of Merry England which were increasingly under attack by the twin forces of the Protestant settlement and the rationalism of the Enlightenment.³¹ Thirdly, just because the forms and expression of a culture appear to have deeply traditional affiliations, that does not mean that the function of those expressions cannot be absolutely modern in its particular applications.

What this signifies is that pre-industrial people were not the slaves of their traditions any more than modern people are the slaves of their clothes. Tradition provides a vocabulary and a structure, but it provides rather than precludes ways of understanding the challenges of changing social conditions. Chapbooks do not offer a uniform world-view. Rather they show how readers who were cut off from access to the mainstream of learning were able to make some strides towards it. Chapbooks offered poor readers a range of literate experiences. However, we should not patronise them by assuming that they could not make sense of them in any but an uncritical way. We might also remember that the conservative world-view which is frequently associated with rural tradition may be, for the most part, a construct of modern scholarship.

CHAPBOOKS AND THE ROMANCE TRADITION

Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of chapbooks is their preservation of texts whose history can be traced back to the thirteenth century if not further in extremely faithful, truncated versions. The readers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were, apparently, finding plenty to entertain them in narratives which were first read in the regional courts of England in the high Middle Ages. In order to understand how this came about it is worth standing back for a moment and considering the history of the transmission of Middle English romances. This history includes the growth, during the sixteenth century, of a new corpus of romance which drew both on the domestic tradition and on the fashionable narratives of the massive cycles of Spanish and Portuguese chivalric adventure stories.

Between 1200 and 1500 the romance of chivalry was probably the genre of secular narrative that was most extensively produced and read.³² Romances could take many forms and were derived from many sources. In the earlier part of this long period they were almost always in some form of verse—couplets, stanzaic, tail-rhyme, or alliterative long line—and can usually, but by no means always, be traced to originals in Anglo-Norman or Old French. In the later period prose became more common and the influence of the Vulgate cycle of Arthurian narratives and the fashionable French prose romances which were imported from the court of Burgundy can readily be seen.³³ There have been attempts to claim some of the romances, especially some of the cruder or knockabout couplet and tail-rhyme specimens, as popular. However, there can be little doubt that in the social conditions which prevailed, such lengthy texts, preoccupied as they were with the details and ethic of chivalric adventure, could only have been accessible to readers who were themselves courtly or who were in close contact with courtly society. There is clear evidence for a courtly readership, and if the major codices of romance are not among the most de luxe productions, they are still of sufficient size and extent to suggest patrons who were very far removed economically from the mass of the English people.

Romances were among the first books to be printed in English, but as printing became more common and books cheaper it is noticeable that the printers who catered for the more courtly end of the publishing market gradually ceased to produce versions of these old texts. However, the growth of printing enabled a growth in literacy and, by the later sixteenth century, there is no doubt that, in London at least, a readership with a broader base had developed. This consisted mainly of citizens who were engaged in trade and manufacture and their families. It is at about this time that we also begin to see books which are dedicated not to wealthy individuals but to craft guilds. There is little doubt that authors were beginning in a truly modern fashion to depend for their success not on the good word and munificence of a few powerful individuals but on market forces.

The printers who catered for this new audience included among their productions modernised versions of the old romances which had dropped from favour with the courtly audience. This audience had now turned to Europe, especially to Italy and France, for its cultural models. At the same time, a group of citizen writers, such as Richard Johnson, Thomas Deloney and Henry Robarts, was also producing entirely new romances which drew extensively on the narrative structures of the Middle English texts and incorporated many of their incidents.³⁴ These texts, among which we can clearly discern the origins of the novel, included adventures in which merchants and craftsmen played the leading roles. These citizen heroes went through the same trials as the medieval knights, but now in order to explore the ethics of Protestantism and commerce, rather than those of Roman Catholicism and chivalry.

By the middle of the seventeenth century these texts too were being replaced, as far as polite and middle class readers were concerned, by the books which form the earliest examples of English Literature as this term is generally understood by modern readers. They did, however, continue to be printed in cheap forms and it was these that eventually metamorphosed into the chapbook, which appears by the 1670s. Thus, chapbooks continued to transmit a tradition of narrative which, by the turn of the eighteenth century, was already at least five hundred years old. This extraordinary fact should, if it does nothing else, alert us to the dangers of unduly rigorous periodisation. What it particularly teaches us is that the division of the continuum of English Literature into discrete historical moments is possible only when we view it from a single perspective: that of the educated or privileged reader who engaged with the texts which we now value as the most typical and best of their time. But even this simple model does not hold true. If it did, Bowles, Campbell and Tom Moore would be very familiar to us while Coleridge, Wordsworth and Keats would be represented only by a poem or two in the larger anthologies. It would appear that to maintain the coherence of literary criticism as a practice which confronts literary history we need also to maintain the convenient fiction that the readers of the past admired the same texts which we now canonise. By this means we can make the past legible as an unbroken preamble to our present.

The fact is, however, that literary history, like all other types of history, has the property of being seen to move at different speeds depending on what aspects of it are being studied and from what notional vantage point.³⁵ What is really fascinating is how it comes about that whole bodies of texts make the transition from one readership to another and how the very same internal structures can offer to different readerships in different social conditions convincing and entertaining pictures of both the material and the mental world. Early nineteenth-century weavers could, plainly, not have understood a chivalric romance in the same way that fourteenth-century courtiers did even though the core narrative was identical. It is amazing that they understood it at all, but we must assume that they did for otherwise we could not explain the apparent popularity of traditional romances drawing on medieval or Elizabethan originals within the chapbook corpus.

One explanation of the transmission of romance is purely economic. As polite audiences developed new tastes the texts they once valued became available to printers in a more humble sector of the market. This process even affects the mechanism of the printing industry itself and it can be seen that by the seventeenth century when prestigious printers had shifted almost exclusively to roman and italic founts (‘white letter’) those who produced cheaper books remained faithful to the Gothic ‘black letter’ and often used second-hand type which shows increasing signs of wear.³⁶ Thus, we can trace the transmission of romance from the expensive hand-produced manuscript through the equally expensive incunabulum, thence to mass-produced books of various qualities and prices, and so to the chapbook. At each phase in this shift we can identify an audience which is gradually shifting downwards in educational opportunity and purchasing power.

This account of the process seems to work (though in the later period we have to discount children who, for the purposes of this argument, have to be classed with the poor even if they came from rich households) but it cannot explain how the texts themselves continued to be viable as they shifted through time and audience. Of course, texts underwent substantial revision—notably modernisation of language and abridgement of content—during these transitions, but the core of their narratives remained the same. This shows us very clearly that readers do not use texts as they would maps. In other words, the ‘meanings’ and pleasures of texts are not to be found in the reader's attempt to treat them as if they were interpretations of an imagined world. Rather, chapbook romances show us how readers constantly adjusted the relationship between themselves and the imagined world manifested to them in narrative so as to discover credible pictures of human life in the printed page. These pictures provided, on the one hand, a contrast to their own experience and, on the other, could have been used to stimulate an internal commentary and debate on the values which that experience enshrined.

I strongly disagree with arguments that try to claim that the romances were a form of literature that enabled poor readers to escape from the humdrum or miserable circumstances in which they found themselves. Escapism seems to me a peculiarly modern conception and one which speaks of luxury and leisure. It is quite different from that imaginative stimulation in which contrasting manners and values are explored in order to enrich or extend the reader's inner life. I believe that chapbooks offered just this kind of stimulation. The fourteenth-century courtier may have read romance because of his or her interest in the nice questions of chivalric and religious duty and amorous procedure which it set for the heroes and heroines. The sixteenth-century citizen enjoyed the same romance text for its power to demonstrate the virtues of patriotism and industry by its location of commercial values in the very narrative space from which pure chivalric adventure had been displaced.³⁷ But eighteenth-century villagers or early nineteenth-century craft workers found imaginative stimulation, contrast, and, perhaps above all, the precious sense that by reading such texts they were participating in the world of literary and education to which they were only marginally connected. The history of working-class self-improvement in the later nineteenth century shows that this connection was an object of undoubted and hard-fought aspiration.

Notes

1. The only example of chapbook texts currently available is John Ashton's Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1882; repr. London, n.d. 1991?). This gives texts of some chapbooks but is largely of antiquarian rather than scholarly interest and consists mainly of plot summaries and reproductions of woodcuts. R. H. Cunningham, Amusing Prose Chap-books (London, 1889) gives fuller texts and V. E. Neuburg, The Penny Histories (London, 1968) contains seven facsimiles.

2. The issue of children as chapbook readers is by no means fully addressed in this volume but it is a vital area of chapbook research.

3. The best general treatments of the topic remain those of H. B. Weiss, A Book about Chapbooks (Trenton, 1942) and V. E. Neuburg, A Chapbook Bibliography (London, 1964). On America see H. B. Weiss, ‘American Chapbooks 1722-1842’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 49 (1945), pp. 491-8 and 587-98, W. L. Joyce et al. (eds), Printing and Society in Early America (Worcester, Mass., 1983), and V. E. Neuburg, ‘Chapbooks in America’, in C. N. Davidson (ed.), Reading in America (Baltimore, 1989).

4. See, for example, P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978), D. E. Farrell, ‘The Origins of Russian Popular Prints and their Social Milieu in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Popular Culture, 17 (1983), pp. 9-47, W. E. A. Axon, ‘Some Twentieth-Century Italian Chapbooks’, The Library, new series, 5 (1904), pp. 239-55, F. J. Norton and E. M. Wilson (eds), Two Spanish Verse Chapbooks (Cambridge, 1969), R. Darnton and D. Roche (eds), Revolution in Print (Berkeley, 1989), D. T. Pottinger, The French Book Trade in the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), R. Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton, 1987), and R. Mandrou, De La Culture Populaire au dixhuitième Siécle (Paris, repr. 1985). R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk (Oxford, 1994) is a valuable study of popular literacy during the German Reformation.

5. See G. Armistead and J. Silvermann (eds), The Judaeo-Spanish Chapbooks of Yacob Abraham Yona (Berkeley, 1971). On folhetos see P. Burke, ‘Chivalry in the New World’, in S. Anglo (ed.), Chivalry in the Renaissance (Woodbridge, 1990), pp. 252-62, and W. Rowe and V. Schelling, Memory and Modernity (London, 1991), pp. 85-94. On Nigerian chapbooks see B. Lindfors, ‘Heroes and Hero-Worship in Nigerian Chapbooks’, Journal of Popular Culture, 1 (1967), pp. 1-22, and E. N. Obiechina, Onitsha Market Literature (London, 1972).

6. A few scholars have recently looked at the wider implications of popular reading. See M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (Cambridge, 1981), a fascinating and invaluable study based on Samuel Pepys's collection of chapbooks and other popular texts. See also D. Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture 1750-1914, (Cambridge, 1989), T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550-1640 (Cambridge, 1991), J. Friedman, Miracles and the Pulp Press during the English Revolution (London, 1993), P. Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790-1860 (Oxford, 1991) and B. E. Maidment, Reading Popular Prints, 1790-1870 (Manchester, 1996).

7. For a discussion of the transmission of polite literature into chapbook form see P. Rogers, Literature and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (Brighton, 1985) and ‘Classics and Chapbooks’, in I. Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester, 1982), pp. 27-46. On serial publication see E. W. Pitcher, ‘The Serial Publication and Collecting of Pamphlets, 1790-1815’, The Library, 5th series, 30 (1975), pp. 322-9. J. P. Hunter, Before Novels (London, 1990) gives a good account of studies in the growth of literacy 1600-1800 on pp. 61-85. Hunter suggests that by 1800 60-70 per cent of adult men in England and Wales were literate with a rate of 88 per cent for Scotland. Female literacy was probably between 40-50 per cent. Literacy was higher in towns than in the country and highest in London, the south-east and the north. In 1832 The Penny Magazine first appeared and the preface to the first volume estimated a sale of two hundred thousand copies and a million readers.

8. Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750-1850 (London, 1986), pp. ix-x.

9. See Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture and Bread, Knowledge and Freedom.

10. See D. Vincent, ‘The Decline of the Oral Tradition in Popular Culture’ in R. D. Storch (ed.), Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1982), pp. 20-47, and D. Harker, Fakesong (Milton Keynes, 1985), pp. 40-41.

11. See P. Stockham, Chapbooks (London, 1976) and A. R. Thompson, ‘Chapbook Printers’, Bibliotheck, 6 (1972), pp. 76-83.

12. See, for example, V. E. Neuburg, ‘The Diceys and the Chapbook Trade’, The Library, 5th series, 24 (1969), pp. 219-31, F. M. Thompson, Newcastle Chapbooks (Newcastle, 1969), P. G. Isaac, Halfpenny Chapbooks by William Davison (Newcastle, 1971), S. Roscoe and A. Brimmel, James Lumsden and Son of Glasgow (London, 1981), F. W. Ratcliffe, ‘Chapbooks with Scottish Imprints in the Robert White Collection’, Bibliotheck, 4 (1964), pp. 88-174, E. Pearson, Banbury Chapbooks (Welwyn Garden City, 1970), P. Renold, ‘William Rusher: A Sketch of his Life’, Cake and Cockhorse, 11 (1991), pp. 218-28, P. Ward, Cambridge Street Literature (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 33-9.

13. The most detailed study of chapmen is M. Spufford, The Great Reclothing of Rural England (London, 1984). See also R. Leitch, ‘Here chapman billies tak their stand’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquarians of Scotland, 128 (1990), pp. 173-88 and P. Rogers, ‘Defoe's Tour (1742) and the Chapbook Trade’, The Library, 6th series, 6 (1984), pp. 275-9.

14. See Rogers, ‘Classics and Chapbooks’, C. A. Federer, Yorkshire Chapbooks (London, 1899), G. MacGregor (ed.), The Collected Writings of Dougal Graham, 2 vols (Glasgow, 1883), W. Harvey, Scottish Chapbook Literature (Dundee, 1903).

15. Colley, Britons (London, 1992), p. 40. See also R. A. Houston, Scottish Literacy and the National Identity (Cambridge, 1985).

16. John Clare, Autobiographical Fragments, ed. E. Robinson (Oxford, 1986), pp. 56-7, Samuel Bamford, Early Days (London, 1849), Thomas Holcroft, Hugh Trevor, ed. S. Deanes (Oxford, 1973), p. 41. See also G. Deacon, John Clare and the Folk Tradition (London, 1983).

17. Cited by R. Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 253. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1963) records cases of labourers reading to their colleagues. See also D. Worrall, Radical Culture (London, 1992).

18. Burke, ‘The “Discovery” of Popular Culture’, in R. Samuel (ed.), People's History and Socialist Theory (London, 1981), pp. 216-21. Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man (London, 1963) argues convincingly for the formation of a new urban literate culture which ‘was not a continuation of the old popular cultures which expressed themselves in broadsheets, chapbooks and popular drama’ (p. 1). From the 1820s onwards this new culture, specifically urban in character, was provided with a host of cheap books and periodicals such as The Penny Magazine (see note 7 above). These new publications covered much of the same ground as chapbooks but often with a more explicitly educational purpose. However, even The Penny Magazine drew attention to the fact that ‘some of the unexampled success of this little work is to be ascribed to the liberal employment of illustrations, by means of Wood-cuts’ (Preface to issue 1).

19. See, for example, R. Steele, The Tatler, no. 95, J. Boswell, Boswell's London Journal, ed. W. A. Pottle (London, 1950), p. 299, George Borrow, Lavengro (Oxford, 1982), p. 67, J. C. Corson, ‘Scott's Boyhood Collection of Chapbooks’, Bibliotheck, 3 (1962), pp. 202-18, W. M. Thackeray, The Irish Sketch Book, 2 vols (London, 1843), I, p. 7 and II, pp. 273-4.

20. Ashton, Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century, gives examples of these. See also D. Valenze, ‘Prophecy and Popular Literature in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 29 (1978), pp. 75-92 and B. Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press (London, 1979).

21. Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, p. 177.

22. Simons, ‘Romance in the Eighteenth-Century Chapbook’ in J. Simons (ed.), From Medieval to Medievalism (London, 1992), pp. 122-43, p. 130.

23. See V. E. Neuburg, Popular Literature (Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 249-64.

24. On Spence see M. Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture (Oxford, 1994), pp. 86-95.

25. Ibid., p. 94

26. Ibid., pp. 222-5

27. On Blake and chapbooks see G. Summerfield, Fantasy and Reason: Children's Literature in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1983) and P. Ackroyd, Blake (London, 1995), pp. 24-5.

28. See Thompson, Newcastle Chapbooks.

29. For surveys of these genres and many examples see C. Hindley, Curiosities of Street Literature (Welwyn Garden City, 1969), L. Shepard, The History of Street Literature (Newton Abott, 1973), L. James, Print and the People (Harmondsworth, 1978), L. Shepard, The Broadside Ballad (Wakefield, 1978), C. M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick, 1986).

30. On these printers see J. Simons, ‘Irish Chapbooks in the Huntington Library’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 57 (1995), pp. 359-65

31. See D. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells (London, 1989), E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Harmondsworth, 1991), R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1994), Hunter, Before Novels, pp. 138-64. Hunter points out (p. 147) that John Locke was so traumatised by the folk stories told him by his childhood nurse that he was scared of the dark and the hobgoblins that lurked there throughout his life.

32. The most recent general survey is that of W. R. J. Barron, English Medieval Romance (London, 1987).

33. See G. Doutrepont, Les Mises en Prose des Epopées et Romans Chevaleresques (Brussels, 1939), N. F. Blake, ‘William Caxton's Chivalric Romances and the Burgundian Renaissance in England’, Essays and Studies, 57 (1976), pp 1-10, and N. F. Blake, ‘Lord Berners: A Survey’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 2 (1971), pp. 119-32.

34. Simons, ‘Medieval Chivalric Romance and Elizabethan Popular Literature’ (Exeter University unpubl. Ph.D., 1982).

35. See F. Braudel, The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols (London, 1975).

36. Mish, ‘Black Letter as a Social Discriminant’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 68 (1953), pp. 627-30.

37. See J. Simons, ‘Open and Closed Books: a Semiotic Approach to the History of Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular Romance’, in C. Bloom (ed.), Jacobean Poetry and Prose (London, 1988), pp. 8-24 and J. Simons, ‘Transforming the Romance: Some Observations on Early Modern Popular Narrative’, in W. Gortschacher and H. Klein (eds), Narrative Strategies in Early English Fiction (Lewiston, 1995), pp. 273-88.