My Missus

John Sutherland

• Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914-1950 by Joseph McAleer
  Oxford, 284 pp, £35.00, December 1992, ISBN 0 19 820329 2
• American Star: A Love Story by Jackie Collins
  Heinemann, 568 pp, £14.99, March 1993, ISBN 0 434 14093 7

A hundred and fifty years ago William Thackeray observed – after a trawl through London bookstalls – that middle-class litterateurs like himself knew (and cared) less about working-class literature than about Lapland. In a much quoted essay twenty years later, Wilkie Collins, after a similar expedition, coined the phrase ‘the Unknown Public’. It was something of a misnomer since the public was well enough known. It was their ‘entertaining literature’ that was the mystery. English society put such a moral premium on advanced literacy that it was shameful for a middle-class person to be caught buying a penny dreadful or a mill-girl romance in anything other than a spirit of intrepid anthropological duty. One glimpses the same nervousness today: the eagerness with which left copies of the Sun are seized on in railway carriages by passengers who could never bring themselves to be seen buying a copy; the eyes studiously averted from the top shelf while buying the Spectator or Private Eye.