The Railways: Nation, Network and People

by Simon Bradley

The railway bookstall thus became something of a cultural battleground. Unlike the ordinary bookshop, market stall or pedlar’s tray, it could be licensed, supervised and controlled, and it played a part too in public perceptions of the soundness of the host company. But the railways themselves were slow to catch on. It took until 1841 for the first recorded bookstall to be set up, at the Fenchurch Street terminus of what was then the London & Blackwall Railway. Before the coming of the stalls, newspapers were simply hawked up and down the platforms. Early interventions from railway management in the running of bookstalls arose from the need to find fresh employment for railwaymen disabled in company service, or sometimes for widows of those fatally injured. The illiterate were not always excluded, so that some stallholders had no idea whether their wares were improving, harmless or disreputable. Nor did the earliest stalls always do a good job with their stock, which was set out ‘in amicable jumble with beer-bottles, sandwiches, and jars of sweets’, as one writer recalled in 1893. That the merchandise was on display for all to see, from bishop to barrow-boy, also brought home the horrid fact that many readers preferred material with a strong flavour of tripe. As Punch later put it: I bought from the stall at Victoria A horrible sixpenny story, a Book of a kind It pained me to find For sale at our English emporia.