The Special Collection: Popular Fiction: The readership and literary cultures collection

How it all Began: the Popular Culture and Literary Taste Special Collection

The material artefacts at the heart of the Popular Culture and Literary Taste Special Collection can be found on Level 2 of the Adsetts Library in their own specially designed and built pod – they are of course books, some thousand books of which the majority are novels or short stories in early editions published between 1900 and 1950. Nearly all were once best-sellers, and borrowed, bought and read by thousands of readers in the first half of the twentieth century. The Lord Mayor of Sheffield, Dr Sylvia Dunkley, kindly opened the Collection in November 2012 – and can be seen below with some of the novels on the shelves of the pod (the photos also include many people who helped develop the collection in one way or another – I am there too but managed to have my back turned to the camera). Present were invited guests from the University and other Universities, but also from the public – including some twenty volunteer-readers who had offered to help read, discuss, and record their contemporary responses to these best-sellers from the past, some now almost completely forgotten. Why were these books originally popular? Did they retain their excitement and narrative interest for a modern reader? Had they dated to the point of unreadability? Should they be reprinted or studied? Were their social assumptions typical of their day or perhaps wildly unconventional? Were they likely to have influenced social or political attitudes (for example, to the suffragettes, to divorce, to pacifism, to the First World War, to fighting Fascism, to the founding of the Welfare State)? A decade later and many of that original group of volunteers (including Sylvia Dunkley), together with some more recent recruits, still meet once a month at Hallam City Campus to discuss and review a particular author or popular fiction topic.

The original idea was to read as many as possible of the original thousand novels and to post reviews on the Reading 1900-1950 web/blog site over a two-year period, so that a modern response was publicly available for the books and kinds of book in the collection. Between July 2012 and 2014, the volunteer readers and librarian and academics from Sheffield Hallam did indeed read the majority of the fiction catalogued in the Special Collection and report back on it in a monthly reading group. One of the most novel (as it were!) aspects of the project was that unlike most reading groups we did not all read the same novel, but every member a different novel. This was partly for the practical reason that we only had one copy of each novel in the Special Collection! This might sound as if we would have no common ground to share via a common text, but in fact it has worked very well, and I think made the process more enjoyable, and intellectually productive, as well as expanding the number of novels we have read and reviewed. Each month everyone reported back on their novel, and I think we all felt a great but enjoyable responsibility to give the best impression to the rest of the group about the book we had read. We also often got an overview of a good portion of a novelist’s career, or of different writers’ approaches to the same topic or genre. I think we all feel we have learnt a great deal about the history of popular fiction in our decade of shared reading experiences.

After 2014, when the project formally concluded, the group of volunteer readers and academics all agreed that the project was too valuable (and too much part of our lives) to terminate. Instead, we have continued to meet every month (well, we sometimes take August off), to review novels, to keep the web/blog-site going and to have a special and longer summer meeting at which we explore a topic in some depth and also decide collectively on the next year’s twelve topics. We did introduce some changes after 2014 – in particular, we expanded our scope by adding new authors to those in the original Special Collection, and therefore members also generously agreed to source their own books (either by buying copies or by borrowing from the excellent Sheffield Public Library store at the Manor – in itself a valuable index of popular fiction from this period). Here are the covers of some of the varied fiction we’ve read in recent years.

The project took the shape it did because a number of interests converged at the right time. A group of Hallam librarians, as well as academics and doctoral students from English and History discovered their shared interests in popular fiction – that is in fiction read by large numbers of people, and usually commercially successful, yet not necessarily still in print now. We began to give conference papers on this topic and to publish books and articles. But we also felt we would like the ‘ordinary reader’ (if any reader is ordinary) to be involved in rediscovering the heritage of popular fiction. Fortuitously, at around that point the national university research bodies in the UK began for the first time to consider not just the quality of research being done in each British university department, but also what actual real-world effects it had. This effect was termed ‘impact’, and was defined as follows:

An effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment, or quality of life beyond academia’ (REF impact - Research England (ukri.org))

This was an opportunity for this Hallam group and the volunteer readers, since our work could show that research could be shared with members of local communities and indeed that reading outside the academy had often in the past as well as the present had great personal value and indeed influence on a wide public, including on entertainment trends, social attitudes and political issues. We also realised quite soon after the Special Collection was opened and the reading project set up, that current Hallam students might be interested too (we had plenty of excellent literature modules, but none that compared ‘literature’ with ‘popular fiction’ – though it is not always completely clear which is which, or how inevitable such labelling is). Soon we had some new modules up and running which included options to work on popular fiction from the Special Collection, and in some of these, as in the volunteer reading group, each student could choose to write a blog each about a different novel of their choice, so that it became a more individual task. We are continuing along those lines at present by incorporating the Popular Culture and Literary Taste Special Collection as a possible project into the Level 5 Ideas into Action module, and into the Level 6 Literature Project. If you would like to see what we have achieved and what we are currently working on you can look at (or follow) our blog: Reading 1900-1950 | The special collection of popular fiction at Sheffield Hallam University (wordpress.com)

I really enjoyed working on the Special Collection and have only one regret - the name which is far too much of a mouthful! I really, really wish we’d called it the ‘Popular Fiction 1900-1950 Special Collection’!

Chris Hopkins

Emeritus Professor of English.