The Unknown Public, that huge body of readers who meddle not with Ruskin, nor with Browning, nor with Herbert Spencer, who have no acquaintance with George Eliot, and to whom even Thackeray and Scott are as recondite as George Meredith and Walter Pater, has been an object of interest and curiosity to its neighbor, the Known Public, ever since Wilkie Collins formally introduced it into good society, more than thirty years ago. This interest is mingled with philanthropy, and is apt to be a little didactic in the expression of its regard. Wilkie Collins, indeed, after the easy-going fashion of his generation, was content to take the Unknown Public as he found it, and to wonder vaguely whether the same man wrote all the stories that were so fearfully and wonderfully alike: “a combination of fierce melodrama and meek domestic sentiment; short dialogues and paragraphs on the French pattern, with English moral reflections of the sort that occur on the top lines of children’s copybooks; descriptions and conversations for the beginning of the number, and a ‘strong situation’ dragged in by the neck and shoulders for the end.” It was in the Answers to Correspondents, however, that the distinguished novelist confesses he took the keenest delight,--in the punctilious reader, who is anxious to know the correct hour at which to visit a newly married couple; in the practical reader, who asks how to make crumpets and liquid blacking; in the sentimental reader, who has received presents from a gentleman to whom she is not engaged, and desires the editor’s sanction for the deed; in the timorous reader, who is afraid of a French invasion and of dragonflies. The scraps of editorial wisdom doled out to these benighted beings were, in Wilkie Collins’s opinion, well worth the journal’s modest price. He was rejoiced to know that “a sensible and honorable man never flirts himself, and ever despises flirts of the other sex.” He was still more pleased to be told, “When you have a sad trick of blushing, on being introduced to a young lady, and when you want to correct the habit, summon to your aid a serene and manly confidence.”
Members of the Known Public who explore the wilds and deeps of penny fiction to-day are less satisfied with what they see, less flippant in their methods of criticism, and less disposed to permit mankind to be amused after its own dull fashion. “Let us raise the tone of these popular journals,” is their cry, “and we shall soon have millions of readers taking rational delight in wholesome literature. Let us publish good stories at a penny apiece,--in fact, it is our plain duty to do so,--and these millions of readers will, with grateful hearts, rise up and call us blessed.” To which Mr. Payn responds mirthfully that the Unknown Public is every whit as sure of what it wants as the Known Public that aspires to teach it, and perhaps even a little surer. “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “The Wandering Jew,” “Ivanhoe,” and “White Lies” were all offered in turn at a penny apiece, and were in turn rejected. That it does occasionally accept better fiction, if it can get it cheap, we have the word of Mr. Wright, who claims to have been for years a member of this mysterious body, and to have an inner knowledge of what it likes and dislikes. “The Woman in White,” “Lady Audley’s Secret,” and “It is Never Too Late to Mend” are, he asserts, familiar names with a certain stratum of the Unknown Public; “Midshipman Easy” is an old friend, and “The Pathfinder” and “The Last of the Mohicans” enjoy a fitful popularity. But its real favorite, its admitted pride and delight, is Ouida. The “genteel young ladies of the counter,” and their hard-working sisterhood of dressmakers and milliners and lodging-house keepers, all accept Ouida as a literary oracle. “They quite agree with herself that she is a woman of genius. They recognize in her the embodiment of their own inexpressible imaginings of aristocratic people and things. They believe in her Byronic characters, and their Arabian-Nights-like wealth and power; in her titanic and delightfully wicked guardsmen; in her erratic or ferocious, but always gorgeous princes, her surpassingly lovely, but more or less immoral grand dames, and her wonderful Bohemians of both sexes. They believe, too, in her sheer ‘fine writing.’ Its jingle is pleasant to their senses, even though they fail to catch its meaning. Ouida’s work is essentially the acme of penny-serial style. The novelists of the penny prints toil after her in vain, but they do toil after her. They aim at the same gorgeousness of effect, though they lack her powers to produce it, to impress it vividly upon readers.”