_PENNY FICTION._


It is now nearly a quarter of a century ago since a popular novelist
revealed to the world in a well-known periodical the existence of the
'Unknown Public;' and a very curious revelation it was. He showed us
that the few thousands of persons who had hitherto imagined themselves
to be the public--so far, at least, as their being the arbiters of
popularity in respect to writers of fiction was concerned--were in fact
nothing of the kind; that the subscribers to the circulating libraries,
the members of book clubs, the purchasers of magazines and railway
novels, might indeed have their favourites, but that these last were
'nowhere,' as respected the number of their backers, in comparison with
novelists whose names and works appear in penny journals and nowhere
else.

This class of literature was of considerable dimensions even in the days
when Mr. Wilkie Collins first called attention to it; but the luxuriance
of its growth has since become tropical. His observations are drawn from
some half a dozen specimens of it only, whereas I now hold in my
hand--or rather in both hands--nearly half a hundred of them. The
population of readers must be dense indeed in more than one sense that
can support such a crop.

Doubtless the individual circulation of none of these serials is equal
to that of the most successful of them at the date of their first