The following is an excerpt from an article called "Britain Off Duty" by Mark Abrams which appeared in World Off Duty: The Contact Holiday Book, published by Contact Publications Limited in August 1947. It analyses the recreational habits of the British public as revealed in the findings of the White Paper on the National Income (1947), along with a survey of 6,000 Girls' Club members by The National Association of Girls' Clubs.
According to the White Paper on the National Income we spent in 1946 £51 millions on newspapers and £26 millions on magazines. Most of this reading matter is consumed on a family basis, and if we relate the expenditure to the 13,500,000 families in the United Kingdom it works out at 1s 6d per family per week for newspapers and 9d per family per week for magazines. The former sum is sufficient to provide the average family with two papers on Sunday and two papers on all other days. The magazine figure of 9d per family per week provides, in fact, something more than general family reading. The six popular family weeklies, Radio Times, Picture Post, John Bull, Illustrated, Everybody’s and Leader, have a combined weekly circulation of just over 10,000,000 and between them account for 2d out of the 9d. The other 7d goes largely on the popular women’s weeklies, such as Woman, Woman’s Own, Woman’s Weekly, Miracle, Home Chat, and on the magazines of the middle class—Listener, New Statesman, Punch, Economist, etc. If we translate the weekly 9d into typical figures, it comes out at one family periodical at 3d available usually for either another general magazine or another woman’s magazine. During 1946 we spent, according to the White Paper, £27 millions on the purchase of books. Not all these books were for leisure reading; the figure includes school texts, technical books, reference books and similar utilitarian publications. If we take £25 millions as the total expenditure on recreational books, we are probably taking an outside figure. On this basis, for leisure purposes the average adult spends 14s per annum on the purchase of books. Buying books, however, is not a working class habit; most books are bought by the middle class and the average adult in this group probably spends as much as 30s per annum on books. According to the big booksellers, most book buying is done by middle class women; it is heavily concentrated on fiction and its critical mentors tend to be the Sunday Times and the BBC. Their impact is shown in the following list of 1946’s best-sellers—Bright Day (Priestley), Cass Timberlaine (Sinclair Lewis), Private Angelo (Eric Linklater), Lord Hornblower (C. S. Forester), Then and Now (Somerset Maugham), That Lady (Kate O’Brien), A Woman of the Pharisees (Mauriac), The Cruise of the ‘Breadwinner’ (H. E. Bates). In short, most of this middle class bought reading is about or a little above the level of the serialised fiction in such American magazines as Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. But not all reading is done by buying books. The middle class woman reader heavily supplements her buying with books borrowed from the subscription libraries. What she borrows follows closely the best seller list with a little time lag and with some excursions into the ‘book of the film’. Working class reading is based mainly on the public libraries and on the 2d a book libraries. Again the patrons are mainly women and their reading is concentrated on fiction. Their favourite authors (or rather authoresses) are the writers whose work is and was serialised in the popular British women’s magazines—Ruby M. Ayres, Ethel M. Dell, E. W. Savi, Leonora Starr, Berta Ruck, Barbara Cartland, Netta Muskett, Denise Robins. The working class girls covered by the Girls’ Clubs survey already referred to were asked what sort of books they liked reading. According to the report, in every age group, love and adventure take first or second place. In every age group from fourteen to eighteen . . . love stories claim the first place. Crime usually takes third place. The content and quality of popular British fiction at all income levels is determined primarily by the fact that it is directed at women readers, and, in the words of one successful woman novelist, women, by and large, want reading to leave them ‘pleased, rested, interested, amused, inspired to a more living faith in the beauty of human affection’. |
