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.

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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 conclusions by the accidental propinquity of phenomena that have really nothing whatever to do with it.

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Now in my group of a quarter of a million souls there is not a single shop devoted wholly or principally to the sale of books.  Not one.  You might discover a shop specializing in elephants or radium; but a real bookshop does not exist.  In a town of forty thousand inhabitants there will be a couple of stationers, whose chief pride is that they are “steam printers” or lithographers.  Enter their shops, and you will see a few books.  Tennyson in gilt.  Volumes of the Temple Classics or Everyman.  Hymn-books, Bibles.  The latest cheap Shakespeare.  Of new books no example except the brothers Hocking.  The stationer will tell you that there is no demand for books; but that he can procure anything you specially want by return of post.  He will also tell you that on the whole he makes no profit out of books; what trifle he captures on his meagre sales he loses