How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (11 page)

Figure 2.3. Weekly Caption Contest,
New
Yorker
, 2006.
© Tom Cheney / The New Yorker Collection /
www.cartoonbank.com.

This military language finds its musical counterpart in Jerrold’s advice that “If [your husband] has a book, or would doze by the fire, immediately play the ‘
Battle
of
Prague
,’ with all the cannon accompaniments” (D. W. Jerrold 194). And that remark itself makes explicit the theory behind Mrs. Caudle’s twenty-eighth curtain lecture, entitled “In which Mr Caudle, in self-defence, takes a book,” which climaxes when Mrs. Caudle notices what object her husband is using to screen himself from her tirade: “Why, what have you got there, Mr Caudle ? A book? What! If you ar’n’t allowed to sleep you’ll read? Well, now it is come to something! If that isn’t insulting a wife to bring a book to bed, I don’t know what wedlock is. But you sha’n’t read, Caudle; no you sha’n’t; not while I’ve strength to get up and put out a candle” (Jerrold and Keene 147). To the extent that it asserts the reader’s separateness, “bringing a book to bed” insults the married state.

Symmetry in content, then, but hardly in tone. You’ve probably noticed that these scenes of women blocking their husbands’ reading are played for laughs, while the reverse tends to be cast in a darker light—and not only because the former draw on a tradition of jokes about shrewish wives, the latter from gothic representations of male violence. The heroic narrative in which texts allow women to wrest their selfhood from male bullies finds its match in a more satirical tradition that sees the text as a shield from the demands of women who (as we’ll see in chapter 7) destroy books to line pie plates or cut out dress patterns. Whether
a wife or servant hardly matters: in stories like Ella D’Arcy’s “Irremediable” or Gissing’s “The Prize Lodger,” the mutual avoidance of couples within a single social class gives way to an educated man’s mésalliance with a vulgar girl who “hated books, and were he ever so ill-advised as to open one in her presence, immediately began to talk,” or an ex-landlady who storms away when her husband opens a newspaper at the breakfast table (D’Arcy 114; Gissing, “The Prize Lodger” 152). Elias Canetti would update the theme with a housekeeper’s (later wife’s) hatred for her husband’s library—a library that she sees, quite rightly, as a drain on the fortune that should be spent on her (Canetti).

Like televised sports in the twentieth century, newspapers (for the masses) and books (for the elite) provided men with a refuge from their wives. In
Vanity
Fair
, the “study sacred to the master of the house” is focalized from the perspective of the wife outside its door: “George as a boy had been horsewhipped in this room many times; his mother sitting sick on the stair listening to cuts of the whip” (231). In Oliphant’s
Kirsteen
, too, the paterfamilias “roused himself quickly with sharp impatience; though the doze was habitual he was full of resentment at any suspicion of it. He was reading in his room; this was the version of the matter which he expected to be recognized in the family . . . But he was not reading, though he pretended still to be buried in the paper” (40, 83).
⁸

Books could stake out a claim not only to space within the household, but also to time and money. When Charles Darwin drew up a balance sheet to help him decide whether to marry, one of the entries in the “no” column concerned time and money for reading: “
Loss
of
time
—cannot read in the evenings—fatness and idleness—anxiety and responsibility—less money for books.” At a time when the celibacy of Oxbridge fellows made the choice between reading and marrying quite concrete, women could be imagined at once as a drain on the time and money that could otherwise be spent on books, and also as a decorative item analogous to them: in the “marry” column, we find “Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House.—Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music” (Darwin).

Anne Brontë’s
The
Tenant
of
Wildfell
Hall
begins by pairing a husband’s insistence on reading newspapers with his refusal to let his wife read novels: “he never reads anything but newspapers and sporting magazines; and when he sees me occupied with a book he won’t let me rest till I close it . . . When he came in and found me quietly occupied with my book, too busy to lift my head on his entrance, he merely muttered an expression of suppressed disapprobation.” Even the husband’s reading, however, is quickly unmasked as a front: “The paper he set before him, and pretended to be deeply absorbed in its contents . . . When he had done yawning over his paper . . . he spent the remainder of the morning
and the whole of the afternoon in fidgeting about . . . sometimes lounging on the sofa with a book that he could not force himself to read.” Finally, more surprisingly, the narrator turns that accusation in upon herself. After the husband throws a book at his favorite dog, “I went on reading, or pretending to read, at least—I cannot say there was much communication between my eyes and my brain.” By the time she confesses that “what the book was, that lay on the table before me, I cannot tell, for I never looked at it,” the heroine becomes as indistinguishable from her husband as from his hypocritical lover who “employed herself in turning over the pages of the book, and, really or apparently, perusing its contents” (A. Brontë 164–69, 201, 43).
⁹
The dichotomy reappears in Sarah Grand’s
The
Heavenly
Twins
(1893), where another sensualist husband tries to prevent his wife from reading, but her own “eye would traverse page after page without transferring a single record to her brain” (52). Even if we begin by associating mental acts with wives and eye service with husbands, the latter end up infecting the former: no stable ground from which to distinguish true reading from false.

How to explain the contradiction between these two tropes—one in which the most passionate and disinterested reading is attributed to women (a subset of the more general Victorian celebration of reading as a weapon of the weak, described in the next chapter), and another in which women are reduced either to blocking figures for men’s reading or to philistines who value a book for its material properties—whether matching its binding to their dress and decor in the upper ranks, or disbinding its pages for dress patterns and pie wrapping in the lower? One hypothesis might be that women are associated with whichever activity is morally inferior—whether solipsistic overengagement with the text or social display of the book—and that the first, Bovaryesque scenario is reproduced even by feminist celebrations of women’s authentic, individualistic reading. The culture’s oscillation between feminizing the book and the text might also suggest, however, that women are imagined not as inferior to men but rather as higher variance. In relation to printed matter as much as to sex, that is, women gravitate toward either extreme: either the epitome of textual authenticity or the exemplar of bookish superficiality, either Madonna or whore.

Those value judgments may in turn reflect a socio-historical turning point in women’s relation to reading. For most of British history, men’s literacy rate outstripped women’s; in the nineteenth century, however, the latter began to climb more steeply than the former, until around 1900 literacy was actually more diffused among women (Vincent
The
Rise
of
Mass
Literacy
12–13; McKitterick,
The
Cambridge
History
of
the
Book
in
Britain
43; Colclough and Vincent 293–94). The feminization of literacy did not just depart sharply from historical precedent. It also made
Britain an anomaly on the international scene, since outside of a few rich countries, men were far more literate than women, as remains the case in developing countries today (Griswold 40). That pattern makes economic sense: investment in boys’ education promises payoff in the form of high wages, while teaching girls to read withdraws their labor in the present. It’s harder to explain either why this demographics changed in late nineteenth-century Britain, much less why cultural perceptions of reading anticipated that reversal by more than a century. Once Cervantes’s hero reappeared in drag in
The
Female
Quixote
, women became associated less with illiteracy than with excessive reading—even if terms like “illiteracy” could be turned into metaphors to stigmatize the reading of the wrong books by the wrong persons. Today, women across Europe buy and borrow books more often than men, just as the very young and the very old read more than the middle-aged. Once a sign of economic power, reading is now the province of those whose time lacks market value.

Once the feminization of reading in the present-day West is recognized as an anomaly in both time and space, it becomes harder to explain by essentialist assumptions about women’s greater capacity for empathy or imagination. Instead, the dependent variable seems to be status: associated with men when it’s rare and therefore prestigious, literacy is feminized in societies (like ours) where ubiquity breeds contempt. Outside the West, reading is associated with mobility—both social and geographical; in modern societies, however, it becomes the refuge of those trapped in interior spaces: prisoners, children, housewives. As Charlotte Yonge observed in 1869, “There are so many hours of a girl’s life when she must sit still, that a book is her natural resource” (“Children’s Literature: Part III” 454).

A workplace as much as a leisure pastime, reading could also be used to define the relation
between
those two spheres, whether by filling the commute that separates them (you read on the subway to unwind before you get home) or by marking the telegraph girl’s private time and space (official papers on the desk, lunchtime reading in the drawer). Among the “infinité de ces petites usages de convention” that one French contemporary credited the English with developing “pour se dispenser de parler,” books moved fluidly across public and private spheres (Bulwer-Lytton,
England
and
the
English
23). The same objects that shield husbands from wives can screen commuters from strangers, parents from crying children, children from demanding parents, clubmen from one another—or even masters from servants, as when a conduct book warns servants not to take a master’s “appearance” of reading at face value:

Figure 2.4. “An Appeal Case. House of Lords,” Punch, 14 February 1891, 82.

I know many ladies who have repented having spoken familiarly to their servants, finding that the girls have misunderstood their kindness, and sometimes have gone so far as to begin talking about their own affairs in the drawing-room. One lady who was thus annoyed, told me that she always took up a book and appeared to read, before she rang the bell, hoping thus to keep the girl from stopping to talk when she came up. (Motherly 16)

Yet even if marriage is not the only bond that books can buffer, its privileged status nonetheless makes it an especially effective test case: the strongest tie requires the sharpest solvent. A 2008
New
York
Times
article describing two Buddhist monks who replace “sexual touching” by synchronized breathing and synchronized reading gains its shock value from the traditional assumption that the book provides the last refuge for bodies that are otherwise fused.
¹⁰
A fortiori, at the moment when separateness has very recently been disavowed—that is, the honeymoon—the book’s power springs into clearest relief. Mary Gladstone writes that her mother “used to tell us, long afterwards, that it was something of a shock to both sisters when, after marriage, any little waiting time, as the railway station, which during their engagement would have been spent in love-making, was now spent in reading—both husbands carrying the inevitable little classics in their pockets. Out it would come and quickly engross the owner” (Windscheffel 56). (In fairness to Gladstone, it should be added that he read aloud to his wife not only during their courtship and honeymoon, but also during their marriage [Windscheffel 65].) Alexandrina’s hunch about the meaning of newlyweds’ reading is confirmed
as late as 1904 in Sturgis’s
Belchamber
, where a matchmaking mother pesters an eligible bachelor to recommend books for her daughter; the ploy works, but any hope of marital happiness disappears once we see the two reading on their wedding night. “Cissy sank deep in a big armchair, and appeared to be immersed in a novel she had brought with her. Sainty tried to read too, but his attention wandered; his eyes fell first on his companion, . . . the hands flashing with new rings that held the gaudy book-cover like a shield between her face and him” (Sturgis 188, 219, 20).
¹¹
If oblivion to one’s family can serve as a gauge for interest in a text, concentration on a book can just as well provide a yardstick for hatred of one’s family.