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.
* * * * *
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.
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