Contemporary Reviews, Adaptations, and Imitations
August 21, 1858 – Wilkie Collins: “The Unknown Public”
Contemporary Context
Wilkie Collins published “The Unknown Public” in Household Words on August 21, 1858–one year before The Woman in White appeared in print.
Household Words was a predominantly middle-class periodical, and many of its readers subscribed to the magazine in large part because of the fiction it contained. In “The Unknown Public,” Collins addresses this audience both as enthusiastic novel-readers and as people who led lives that were quite separate from working-class cultures at the time.
As he narrates his experience of exploring the small shops that sell penny novels to the poor, he includes details that establish a distance between his own—and, by extension, his readers’—experiences of literature.[1] At present, Collins insists, the vast “Unknown Public” of working-class readers is composed of people who “[look] to quantity rather than quality” in their fiction, purchasing highly-spiced but low-quality novels in preference to some of the gems of (middle-class) literature.
In this essay, Collins adopts a tone that is as condescending as it is flippant. His classism means that we should take his descriptions with a grain of salt rather than interpreting them as pure historical fact. However, this essay still highlights his awareness that many working-class readers loved to read novels. Unlike some middle-class commentators who sought to stem working-class engagement with to fiction at all cost, Collins describes the “Unknown Public” as an audience that may in time become far more “known” and far more influential—one that will someday “command the service of the best writers of their time.”
THE UNKNOWN PUBLIC.
Do the subscribers to this journal, the customers at the eminent publishing-houses, the members of book-clubs and circulating libraries, and the purchasers and borrowers of newspapers and reviews, compose altogether the great bulk of the reading public of England? There was a time when, if anybody had put this question to me, I, for one, should certainly have answered, Yes.
I know better now. I know that the public just now mentioned, viewed as an audience for literature, is nothing more than a minority.
This discovery (which I venture to consider equally new and surprising) dawned upon me gradually. I made my first approaches towards it, in walking about London, more especially in the second and third rate neighbourhoods. At such times, whenever I passed a small stationer’s or small tobacconist’s-shop, I became conscious, mechanically as it were, of certain publications which invariably occupied the windows. These publications all appeared to be of the same small quarto size; they seemed to consist merely of a few unbound pages; each one of them had a picture on the upper half of the front leaf, and a quantity of small print on the under. I noticed just as much as this, for some time, and no more. None of the gentlemen who