How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
Read How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain Online
Authors: Leah Price
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
in Victorian Britain
Leah Price
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2013
Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-15954-6
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows
Price, Leah.
How to do things with books in Victorian Britain / Leah Price.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-11417-0 (acid-free paper)1. Books and reading—Great Britain—History—19th century.2. Books—Great Britain—Psychological aspects—History—19th century.3. Books—Social aspects—Great Britain—History—19th century.4. Book industries and trade—Great Britain—History—19th century.5. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism.6. Books and reading in literature. 7. Books in literature.I. Title.
Z1003.5.G7P75 2012
028'.9094109034—dc23
2011037436
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in New Century Schoolbook
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Reader’s Block
Anthony Trollope and the Repellent Book
David
Copperfield
and the Absorbent Book
It-Narrative and the Book as Agent
The Book as Burden: Junk Mail and Religious Tracts
The Book as Go-Between: Domestic Servants and Forced Reading
The Book as Waste: Henry Mayhew and the Fall of Paper Recycling
2.1. “How to Make a Chatelaine a Real Blessing to Mothers,”
Punch
, 1849
2.2. James Gillray, “Matrimonial Harmonics,” 1805
2.3. Weekly Caption Contest,
New
Yorker
, 2006
2.4. “An Appeal Case,”
Punch
, 1891
2.5. “Emancipation,”
Punch
, 1891
2.6. “Married for Money,”
Punch
, 1859
2.7. “The Honeymoon,”
Punch
, 1884
2.8. “A Perfect Wretch,”
Punch
, 1851
2.9. “The Waning of the Honeymoon,”
Punch
, 1896
3.1. “Our Housekeeping,”
David
Copperfield
, 1850
4.1. “A New Page in My History,”
The
Story
of
a
Pocket
Bible
, 1855
5.1. Darnton’s Communications Circuit
5.2. Adams and Barker’s Life Cycle of a Book
5.3. Hannah More, “The Sunday School,” 1798
6.1. Religious Tracts, Cambridge University Library
6.2. “A Soft Answer,”
Punch
, 1895
6.3. “One Thing at a Time,”
Making
the
Best
of
It
, n.d.
6.4. Book Disinfecting Apparatus, Thomas Greenwood, Public Libraries, 1890
6.5. “Singular Letter from the Regent of Spain,”
Punch
, 1843
Many readers helped me write. Thanks especially to Srinivas Aravamudan, Margaret Beetham, Peter de Bolla, Larry Buell, Amanda Claybaugh, Nancy Cott, Patricia Crain, Nicholas Dames, Robert Darnton, Ian Duncan, Drew Faust, William Flesch, John Forrester, Elaine Freedgood, Debra Gettelman, Lisa Gitelman, Simon Goldhill, David Hall, Susan Halpert, Richard Hardack, Barbara Hochman, Isabel Hofmeyr, Hansun Hsiung, Virginia Jackson, Melissa Jenkins, Jane Kamensky, Sol Kim-Bentley, Michèle Lamont, Michael Ledger-Lomas, Yoon Sun Lee, Spencer Lenfield, Lauren Lepow, Seth Lerer, Deidre Lynch, Alison MacKeen, Peter Mandler, Jane Mansbridge, Sharon Marcus, Maia McAleavey, Deborah Nord, Geoff Nunberg, Alexander Parker, Clare Pettitt, John Plotz, Christopher Prendergast, Peter Pruyn, Harriet Ritvo, Catherine Robson, Jan Schramm, Jason Scott-Warren, James Secord, Sharmila Sen, Stuart Shieber, James Simpson, Diana Sorensen, Peter Stallybrass, William St Clair, Christopher Stray, Michael Suarez, Ramie Targoff, Pam Thurschwell, Katie Trumpener, Judy Vichniac, David Vincent, Michael Warner, Hanne Winarsky, and Ruth Yeazell. Thanks, too, to King’s College, Cambridge, the Radcliffe Institute, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Earlier versions of material from chapters 2, 4, and 7 appeared in
Reading Victorian Feeling
, edited by Rachel Ablow (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 47–68;
Representations
108 (Fall 2009): 120–38; and
Bookish
Histories
, edited by Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 148–68. Thanks to all three for permission to reprint.
Ann Blair has been the best possible coconspirator in all things book-historical. Natalka Freeland’s friendship remains as strong as her misreadings. Nir Eyal’s love and example teach me daily how to do things with words and without.
Upon coming into his master’s fortune, Dickens’s illiterate dustman Mr. Boffin immediately hires a ballad-seller to entertain him by reading aloud. Only one detail remains to be checked: “You are provided with the needful implement—a book, sir?”
‘Bought him at a sale,’ said Mr. Boffin. ‘Eight wollumes. Red and gold.
Purple ribbon in every wollume, to keep the place where you leave off.
Do you know him?’
‘The book’s name, sir?’ inquired Silas.
‘I thought you might have know’d him without it,’ said Mr. Boffin slightly disappointed. ‘His name is Decline-And-Fall-Off-The-Rooshan-Empire.’ (Dickens,
Our
Mutual
Friend
59)
Because no one reading this passage shares Mr. Boffin’s illiteracy, and because few readers of late Dickens have not read at least the spines of Gibbon, we smile. But what if the geographical confusion made bibliographical sense? As a waste-dealer familiar with tanners, Mr. Boffin would have heard of “Russia” as a metonymy for a leather produced in that country, calfskin (often dyed red) tanned with birch oil that imparted a characteristic smell. In this hypothesis, the hope that “you might have know’d him” would look perfectly reasonable: cannier than Silas, Mr. Boffin does recognize the book “without,” if not within. “In what I did know,” David Copperfield reflects upon leaving warehouse for school, “I was much farther removed from my companions than in what I did not” (Dickens,
David
Copperfield
218). If we took Russia to refer to container rather than contents, then the dustman’s class position would reflect less a deficiency of interpretive skill than an excess of sensitivity to color, texture, and smell. His ignorance of the history in the book would throw into relief how much he knows about the history of the book. “Bought him at a sale”: Boffin knows not only how the “wollumes” were manufactured, but whether he is their first owner. Once endowed with a life story, even a book judged by “his” cover can elicit affection.
When Silas later arrives to take up his task, it remains unclear whether the “gorging Lord-Mayor’s-Show of wollumes (probably meaning gorgeous, but misled by association of ideas)” will end up on Mrs. Boffin’s side of the room (whose shelves display stuffed birds) or Mr. Boffin’s (lined with cold joints). As binding is to text, so “gorgeous” to “gorging”:
do books resemble decorative outsides or functional insides? Should the volumes that Boffin has “ranged flat, in a row, like a galvanic battery” be treated as an implement or a show?
In short, what meanings do books make even, or especially, when they go unread? And why did Victorian novelists care? That books function both as trophies and as tools, that their use engages bodies as well as minds, and that printed matter connects readers not just with authors but with other owners and handlers—these facts troubled a genre busy puzzling out the proper relation of thoughts to things, in an age where more volumes entered into circulation (or gathered dust on more shelves) than ever before.
It’s not that they hated books. But the great realists did loathe anyone who loved the look of books—who displayed “a great, large handsome Bible, all grand and golden, with its leaves adhering together from the bookbinder’s press,” or whose “splendidly bound books furnished the heavily carved rosewood table” (Gaskell,
North
and
South
79; Jewsbury 13, 37). One wellborn narrator remarks, in the house of a wealthy tradesman, that “the round rosewood table was in a painfully high state of polish; the morocco-bound picture books that lay on it, looked as if they had never been moved or opened since they had been bought; not one leaf even of the music on the piano was dogs-eared or worn” (W. Collins,
Basil
61). Book against text, new money against old money—and secondary characters against protagonist. The opening scene of
Ranthorpe
establishes the hero’s depth by describing what aspects of books he
fails
to notice. “He cared not for rare editions, large paper copies, or sumptuous bindings . . . he cared not even whether they had covers at all” (Lewes 4–5).
A moral test doubles as a political stance: the post-Gutenberg consensus that makes differently priced editions of a text functionally equivalent becomes a proxy for the more controversial demand to value human souls alike, whatever the color of their money or their skin. Or was the problem, on the contrary, that literacy was spreading too widely to remain a reliable marker of rank or gender? To use books no longer proved anything; to refrain from misusing them did. The
Gentleman’s Magazine
’s lament that “too many women value a book solely for its binding” (Watkins 102) is dramatized in a joke about a lady complaining to the librarian: “Look what an atrocious cover it has; haven’t you one bound in saxe-blue to match my costume?” (Coutts 147). In 1851, an Evangelical magazine contrasts the good child who “puts books into his head” with the dunce whose books are “only on your shelves” (“How to Read Tracts”).
Nothing against books, then, but something against the eyeing and pricing of books imagined to compete with internalizing them.
The
Oxford
English
Dictionary
dates to 1847 the use of “reading copy” as a euphemism
for a book so battered that the only value left lies in the words that it contains. “Books are now so dear,” Southey had reported at the dawn of the Regency phenomenon known as “the bibliomania,” “that they are becoming rather fashionable articles of
furniture
more than anything else; they who buy them do not read them, and they who read them do not buy them. I have seen a Wiltshire clothier, who gives his bookseller no other instructions than the
width
of his shelves.”
1
Made to be seen through, books find themselves seen. By 1887, an article titled “Literary Voluptuaries” could declare that “the collector is curious about margins, typography, and casings, but comparatively indifferent to contents” (805). Cover and content, authenticity and appearance: the language of insides and outsides makes any consciousness of the book’s material qualities signify moral shallowness. Leather bindings rub off on their skin-deep owners.
Commission reinforces omission. Not content to ignore the outsides of books, a good reader actively scorns them. “Due attention to the inside of books, and due contempt for the outside,” Chesterfield had pronounced in 1749, “is the proper relation between a man of sense and his books” (1291). One dictionary defined bibliomania as the fact of being “rather seduced by the exterior than the interior” (Dibdin 58). An article titled “Furniture Books” compared loving one’s “handsomely dressed” volumes to “thinking more of the jewels of one’s mistress than of her native charms” (97). Reciprocally, Wilde could shock by comparing a woman wearing a “smart gown” to “an édition de luxe of a bad French novel” (178, 37).
2