trust was not produced
by liquor; for 'the best works of fiction to be got at the circulating
libraries' obviously include those of George Eliot, Trollope, Reade,
Black, and Blackmore, while the novels I am discussing are inferior to
the worst. They are as crude and ineffective in their pictures of
domestic life as they are deficient in dramatic incident; they are
vapid, they are dull. Indeed, the total absence of humour, and even of
the least attempt at it, is most remarkable. There is now and then a
description of the playing of some practical joke, such as tying two
Chinamen's tails together, the effect of the relation of which is
melancholy in the extreme, but there is no approach to fun in the whole
penny library. And yet it attracts, it is calculated, four millions of
readers--a fact which makes my mouth water like that of Tantalus.

When Mr. Wilkie Collins wrote of the Unknown Public it is clear he was
still hopeful of them. He thought it 'a question of time' only. 'The
largest audience,' he says, 'for periodical literature in this age of
periodicals must obey the universal law of progress, and sooner or later
learn to discriminate. When that period comes the readers who rank by
millions will be the readers who give the widest reputations, who return
the richest rewards, and who will therefore command the services of the
best writers of their time.' This prophecy has, curiously enough, been
fulfilled in a different direction from that anticipated by him who
uttered it. The penny papers--that is, the provincial penny
newspapers--_do_ now, under the syndicate system, command the services
of our most eminent novel writers; but Penny Fiction proper--that is to
say, the fiction published in the penny literary journals--is just where
it was a quarter of a century ago.

With the opportunity of comparison afforded to its readers one would say
this would be impossible, but as a matter of fact, the opportunity is
_not_ offered. The readers of Penny Fiction do not read newspapers;
political events do not interest them, nor even social events, unless
they are of the class described in the _Police News_, which, I
remark--and the fact is not without significance--does not need to add
fiction to its varied attractions.

But who, it will be asked, _are_ the public who don't read newspapers,
and whose mental calibre is such that they require to be told by a
correspondence editor that 'any number over the two thousand will
cert