Did the 1700s have potboilers and other cheap novels?
By cosmicChair98
When people say “potboilers,” I usually picture the whole industrialisation era—those penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and whatever you could grab for cheap and read fast. But then I’m reading stuff like Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary and he keeps going on about how tacky his fellow Frenchmen are—like they’re all into silly novels—and how the French Academy is basically printing nonsense. And then Rousseau, in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, hits from the other side. He’s like the printing press just caused more division, messed up ordinary people, and stirred up all the riff-raff. So I keep getting stuck on the same thing: what was the book market even like back then? Were there actual vendors selling books around the Seine, or was it more like Drury Lane and places like the Piazza of San Marco? Also, was “popular literature” even a real thing culturally, or just something later people started calling it? And then there’s Simplicius Simplicissimus—was that basically pop lit for the Holy Roman Empire if it got printed so many times? I guess I’m trying to figure out when the shift toward “popular literature” really happens and what that looks like in practice.