’ALEXIS, a popular author in the prime of life, of an affectionate disposition, and fond of home, and the extent and pressing nature of whose work have prevented him from mixing much in society, would be glad to correspond with a young lady not above thirty.  She must be of a pleasing appearance, amiable, intelligent, and domestic.’

If it is with the readers of penny fiction that Alexis has established his popularity, I would like to know how he did it, and who he is.  To discover this last is, however, an impossibility.  These novelists all write anonymously, nor do their works ever appear before the public in another guise.  There is sometimes a melancholy pretence to the contrary put forth in the ‘Answers to Correspondents.’  ‘PHOENIX,’ for example, is informed that ’The story about which he inquires will not be published in book form at the time he mentions.’  But the fact is it will never be so published at all.  It has been written, like all its congeners, for the unknown millions and for no one else.

Some years ago, in a certain great literary organ, it was stated of one of these penny journals (which has not forgotten to advertise the eulogy) that ’its novels, are equal to the best works of fiction to be got at the circulating libraries.’  The critic who so expressed himself must have done so in a moment of hilarity which I 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.