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For the eighteenth century in British letters began with optimism and ended with doubt and even despair; and both were reactions to the same phenomenon: the enormous increase in the audience. “From 1700 to 1800 the reading public expanded from one which had included mainly the aristocracy, clerics and scholars to one which also included clerks, artisans, laborers and farmers....The annual publication of new books quadrupled.”[4] At first almost every one, with the notable exceptions of Pope and Swift, assumed this growth was simply A Good Thing—the Victorians made the same mistake about popular education. The new readers would be elevated by contact with good literature and the result would be a larger but not a qualitatively different public. The initial success of Addison’s and Steele’s Spectator was encouraging. Published as a daily in 1711–1712, it quickly reached 3,000 circulation, about what some of our most respected Little Magazines have achieved in a population many times larger. (A real circulation-manager type, Addison estimated that with multiple readership in the coffee houses, the total coverage was close to 60,000).

But by the middle of the century, a similar magazine, Johnson’s Rambler, never got above 500 and was abandoned as a failure. The new public, it would seem, had read The Spectator because there was nothing worse to read. The Grub Street publishers hastened to fill the gap, Gresham’s Law began to work, and the bad drove the good out of circulation (though for the opposite reason from the law’s original application, for in currency people circulate the bad because they prefer the good and therefore hang on to it, while in books they circulate the bad because they like it better than the good). By 1790, a bookseller named Lackington was lyrical about the change:

The poorer sort of farmers, and even the poor country people in general, who before that period spent their winter evenings in relating stories of witches, ghosts, hobgoblins, etc., now shorten the winter nights by hearing their sons and daughters read tales, romances, etc., and on entering their houses you may see Tom Jones, Roderick Random and other entertaining books stuck up in their bacon racks....In short all ranks and degrees now READ.

Lyrical, charming, democratically heartening, but few of the books in the bacon racks were on the level of Tom Jones and perhaps the farmers should have stuck to their witches and hobgoblins. Certainly the effect on literary taste was alarming. By the end of the century, even such successful writers for the new public as Johnson, Goldsmith and Fielding were showing concern as the flood of trash steadily rose.

The mass audience was taking shape and a corresponding shift in literary criticism was beginning, away from objective standards and toward a new subjective approach in which the question was not how good the work is but how popular it will be. Not that the creator is ever independent of his time and place; the demands of the audience have always largely determined his work. But before 1750, these demands were themselves disciplined by certain standards of excellence which were accepted by both the limited public of informed amateurs and the artists who performed for them. Today, in the United States, the demands of the audience, which has changed from a small body of connoisseurs into a large body of ignoramuses, have become the chief criteria of success. Only the Little Magazines worry about standards. The commercial press, including the Saturday Review and The New York Times Book Review, consider books as commodities, rating them according to audience-response. The newspaper movie columns are extreme examples. There, the humble effort of the “critic”—and indeed one would have to put even “reviewer” in quotes—is merely to tell his readers which films they will probably like. His own tastes are suppressed as irrelevant.

With the prescience of a snob of genius, Alexander Pope wrote The Dunciad a half-century before the