Best-Sellers

Abstract

There may have been no such thing as ‘blockbusters’ before the arrival of paperbacks, but from the time that there were first books there were best-sellers. Among the books which Claude Cockburn considered in Bestseller: The Books that Everyone Read 1900–1939 (1972) was Ian Hay’s Great War comedy about Kitchener’s Army, The First Hundred Thousand, first published in 1915. Best-sellers are, in Cockburn’s view, a rich source of information about attitudes and prejudices, and from The First Hundred Thousand we can discover views about war prevalent during the First World War. Although with hindsight we may regard it as pathetically naïve, Hay’s book reveals that the middle-class saw an international war with ‘the Boche’ as a blessed escape from the class war at home. The author’s spokesman, Major Wagstaffe, suggests that the War is a tonic for the country, which will lead to the miraculous cessation of class conflict altogether. (Similar sentiments were propounded in children’s fiction of the time, such as H. Strang’s Fighting With French.) However, whereas the political notions of a period are often made explicit like this in popular fiction, Cockburn found that ‘the situation on the “private sector”, including the status of women, is often taken more or less for granted, as being part of a settled order of things requiring no exposition’ (Cockburn, 1972: 14).