Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome [4]
Another new friend from this period was Carl Hentschel, the ‘Harris’ of the novels. Polish by origin, Hentschel’s father had introduced photolithography to Britain. It was a process that helped to revolutionize the Press, making it far easier and quicker to reproduce illustrations in newspapers and magazines, since the slow and laborious business of hand-engraving the blocks from which they were printed could now be done by mechanical means. Its introduction enabled newspaper editors and their proprietors to include not just line drawings and photographs, but display advertisements of the kind that horrified the more fastidious type of reader, and it coincided with vast changes in the nature and accessibility of the printed word. Whereas books, newspapers and magazines had hitherto been, to a large extent, the preserve of the educated minority, they now braced themselves for the advent of that twentieth-century phenomenon, the mass market. Although the great majority of the population still left school at fourteen, Forster’s Education Act had created an immense new market of potential readers. ‘Never before had there been such reading masses,’ wrote H. G. Wells, while according to Bernard Shaw, ‘The Education Act was producing readers who had never before bought books, nor could have read them if they had.’ Many of these new readers were employed, like George or Mr Pooter, as clerks in banks, insurance offices, estate agents and the like; many of them lived in the new suburbs which – to the horror of the intelligentsia – were spreading out around London and the other great cities, addressed one another as ‘Old Man’, and employed a slang of their own, half-jocular and half-defiant. Uneasily aware of their lack of education, they were often eager to remedy matters through evening classes and the reading of classics in Everyman editions, and tended – if young, and of a radical persuasion – to bicycling, socialism and the wearing of knickerbockers. As Jerome would soon discover, they were looked down upon by writers and social commentators who had enjoyed the benefits of a university education, and regarded the upstart clerks and their spokesmen as bumptious philistines.
As John Carey observed in The Intellectuals and the Masses, ‘the clerks were hardly equipped to appreciate “high” culture, which is why an alternative culture was created for them.’ Alfred Harmsworth,10 the founder of the Daily Mail, took full advantage of the new technologies to cater to a mass readership, while his dependence on advertising enabled him to price his papers at levels even the hard-up could afford, and at the same time undercut sober, old-fashioned rivals. New magazines and periodicals proliferated, many of them – like Tit-Bits, Answers and Comic Cuts – responding to the concerns of the newly literate classes with hints on etiquette, bicycling columns and snippets of self-improvement. Nor was literary fare neglected. Although Tit-Bits – which George Newnes11 founded in 1881 – rejected work by Conrad and Virginia Woolf, it made a point of reprinting excerpts from classic authors; John Carey subversively suggests that ‘As a means of awakening interest in books, arousing curiosity and introducing its readers to new ideas, Tit-Bits must compare very favourably with more acclaimed organs such as T. S. Eliot’s Criterion