lling--usually the latter) no novelist could live by his pen. Remove
the superior stolid comfortable, and the circulating libraries would
expire. And exactly when the circulating libraries breathed their last
sigh the publishers of fiction would sympathetically give up the ghost. If
you happen to be a literary artist, it makes you think--the reflection
that when you dine you eat the bread unwillingly furnished by the enemies
of art and of progress!

THE POTENTIAL PUBLIC

[_18 Feb. '09_]

I want to dig a little deeper through the strata of the public. Below the
actual fiction-reading public which I have described there is a much
vaster potential public. It exists in London, and it exists also in the
provinces. I will describe it as I have found it in the industrial
midlands and north. Should the picture seem black, let me say that my
picture of a similar public in London would be even blacker. In all
essential qualities I consider the lower middle-class which regards, say,
Manchester as its centre, to be superior to the lower middle-class which
regards Charing Cross as its centre.

* * * * *

All around Manchester there are groups of municipalities which lie so
close to one another that each group makes one town. Take a medium group
comprising a quarter of a million inhabitants, with units ranging from
sixty down to sixteen thousand. I am not going to darken my picture with a
background of the manual workers, the immense majority of whom never read
anything that costs more than a penny--unless it be "Gale's Special." I
will deal only with the comparatively enlightened crust--employers,
clerks, officials, and professional men, and their families--which has
formed on the top of the mass, with an average income of possibly two
hundred per annum per family. This crust is the elite of the group. It
represents its highest culture, and in bulk it is the "lower middle-class"
of Tory journalism. In London some of the glitter of the class above it is
rubbed on to it by contact. One is apt to think that because there are
bookshops in the Strand and large circulating libraries in Oxford Street,
and these thoroughfares are thronged with the lower middle-class,
therefore the lower middle-class buys or hires books. In my industrial
group the institutions and machinery perfected by the upper class for
itself do not exist at all, and one may watch the lower without danger of
being led to false