How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (12 page)

One explanation for the prominence of conjugal reading in the nineteenth-century novel, then, is that it inverts the logic of courtship fiction. Unsurprisingly, Trollope’s
non
fiction defines the relation of reading to marriage in mimetic terms: that is, his reviews, lectures, and autobiographical writings assume that we go to books in general, and novels in particular, in order to find out how to conduct a courtship.

It is from them that girls learn what is expected from them, and what they are to expect when lovers come; and also from them that young men unconsciously learn what are, or should be, or may be, the charms of love,—though I fancy few young men will think so little of their natural instincts and powers as to believe that I am right in saying so. (Trollope,
An
Autobiography
220)

There are countries in which it has been in accordance with the manners of the upper classes that the girl should be brought to marry the man . . . out of the convent—without having enjoyed any of that freedom of thought which the reading of novels will certainly produce; but we do not know that the marriages so made have been thought to be happier than our own. (Trollope, “Novel-Reading” 42)

But if Trollope’s essays cast the novel as the genre of courtship, his own novels are more interested in what comes after. And a corollary to that shift from romance to realism is that his fiction upstages the texts that help their readers to reach marriage by the books that help their holders to bear it.

In that sense, the deployment of reading to mark a loveless marriage neatly inverts the age-old trope that makes dropping the book a preamble to courtship. (For Paolo and Francesca, the erotic charge comes not from reading, but from stopping.) That time line may help explain why the honeymoon forms such a crucial moment in Trollope’s novels. If they define novel reading (or at least novel holding) as a postmarital activity, this isn’t because of novels’ sexual content (as in those other countries where
girls can read fiction only once marriage has released them from the convent), or closer to home, as in yet another
Punch
cartoon, captioned “Emancipation.” Trollope cares neither about what the choice of reading material suggests about a character’s morals or tastes (as in, for example, in Eliot’s contrast between Dorothea’s high-minded appreciation of Pascal and Rosamond’s middlebrow admiration for simpering verse), nor about the mimetic logic in which a character’s reading of a novel about love either causes, echoes, or foreshadows her falling in love herself, nor even about some intertextual correspondence created by his placing in the hands of his characters a text named and known to his own readers.

When Emma reads opposite Charles at the table, Flaubert names names: the titles of periodicals and the authors of novels. For the space of two more pages, in fact, the narrator reproduces in free indirect discourse the content of the texts in front of her (52–53). In retrospect, the description of the breakfast table at which Emma is reading seems at best a lead-in to, at worst a pretext for, this uneasy mixture of pastiche and parody.

What interests Trollope, in contrast, isn’t the relation between a person and a text so much as the relation, or lack thereof, that two persons can establish only in the presence of a printed third party. (Emma hates her husband because she reads romances, but Glencora reads romances because she hates her husband.) We usually think of the text as providing a connection to a writer who is both personally unknown to the reader and physically absent—even, in many cases, dead. In Trollope’s inversion of that logic, the book offers disconnection from a known person, one who’s all too physically present and all too intimately known.

In that sense, he one-ups the novel that set out to “adapt”
Madame
Bovary
for English audiences, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s
The
Doctor’s Wife
, published in the same year as
The
Small
House
at
Allington
. During her honeymoon, Braddon’s heroine shows less resemblance to Emma than to Alexandrina Crosbie. Where Emma reads without even registering Charles’s proximity, Isabel (as befits a more straitlaced English bride) hesitates to read in her new husband’s presence: “There were no books in the sitting-room of the family hotel; and even if there had been, the honeymoon week seemed to Isabel a ceremonial period. She felt as if she were on a visit, and was not free to read.”
¹²
Like Alexandrina, Isabel wants to get out a book; like Alexandrina, she recognizes that desire as disrespectful to her husband. But there the similarity ends. Where Braddon makes the presence of another human being an impediment to reading, Trollope makes it the reason
to
read. Where Braddon contrasts self-indulgent reading with ceremonial visiting, Trollope parses reading itself as a ceremony.

Figure 2.5. “Emancipation,” Punch, 5 December 1891, 270.

That model fits neither with conduct-book homilies about reading aloud nor with novelistic celebrations of solitary reading: here, reading becomes most social when it’s least sociable. Maud Churton Braby’s 1909 conduct book
Modern
Marriage
and
How
to
Bear
It
decrees that when a man is at his club, “the wife can have a picnic dinner—always a joy to a woman—with a book propped up before her, can let herself go.” In choosing a book as the marker of freedom from the husband’s gaze,
Modern
Marriage
sanitizes the fictional convention that made reading a symptom of marital breakdown. Yet its reasoning bears an equally uncanny resemblance to the 1857 conduct book advising women traveling alone that “civilities should be politely acknowledged; but as a general rule, a book is the safest resource for ‘an unprotected female’ “(quoted in K. Flint,
The
Woman
Reader
100, 105). The oppressively intimate home mimics the excessively public railway carriage: in both cases, the opposite sex is what the book makes bearable.

Farther from home, Bill Bell’s study of ships bound for Australia shows reading serving both as a social cement and as a guarantor of privacy. Sociable, because passengers read aloud, exchanged books, and produced and circulated manuscript newspapers; but also antisocial, as when Elizabeth Monaghan welcomed a storm because without the possibility of going on deck “I can be so much more alone, get a book and shut myself up in my cabin quite cosy.” The book can be used to mark territory even in its owner’s absence: as a newsletter for passengers instructs, “When the cushions at the after part of the saloon are arranged in a particular inviting
manner and a book or glove is placed thereon, it may be surmised that the occupant of the couch is absent temporarily and that if another were to take possession it would be an intrusion” (136).

Public spaces like the ship and railway dramatize problems of privacy about whose domestic equivalents the novel has more to say than the conduct book. In fact, the tension between domestic and public reading etiquettes becomes one of the central themes of the professional press that springs up in the wake of the Public Libraries Act of 1850. The growing opposition between books marketed for collective reading at home and for individual use in public—on the one hand, the “Railway Libraries” founded in the 1840s and the Tauchnitz series of English-language books marketed to travelers on the Continent; on the other, series with names like “Parlour Library” and magazines called
Household
Words
or
Family
Paper
—simplified a reality in which members of the same family might read different books side by side in the parlor, while the same newspapers that commuters used to carve out privacy were sold by the cries of newsboys, read aloud, and passed around from hand to hand (Davies 49).

Even if the mid-Victorian novel exchanged guilt about solipsistic reading for cynicism about rhetorical reading, therefore, the presence of parallel scenes in conduct books makes clear that this isn’t the only genre or the only moment where cultural consumption looks like an avoidance tactic, any more than reading constitutes the only way to achieve that effect. On the one hand, the scene of a man fending off his wife with a paper would be cyclically redeployed in other genres and even other media. By the end of the century, the conjugal newspaper had figured so regularly in
Punch
that even a political cartoon could allude to the device in the confidence that readers would recognize it at a second remove. In the twentieth century, pre-Code Hollywood learned to cut between the husband unfurling his newspaper at breakfast to ward off his chattering wife and the wife, abandoned, staring blankly at a book in her solitary bed (as, for example, in Clarence Brown’s 1936
Wife
vs. Secretary
). In the twenty-first, the railway novels that represented commuters hiding behind newspapers have given way to in-flight catalogs depicting husbands cocooned in an audiovisual equivalent to Anderson’s “lair of the skull” (Anderson 35).
¹³

Figure 2.6. “Married for Money—The Honeymoon,” Punch, 1 January 1859.

On the other hand, reading is not the only way for novelistic characters to carve out private space: Jeff Nunokawa argues, in the opposite direction, that George Eliot deploys “the sexual as the primal scene of social withdrawal” (“Eros and Isolation” 839). Needlework can be rhymed with book holding as easily as newspaper reading with novel reading: in Trollope’s
The
Eustace
Diamonds
, “Lord Fawn took up a book. Lady Fawn busied herself in her knitting” (66). Like a book, a piece of needlework can be looked down to or up from; both can connote either obliviousness to others or awareness of others from whom one needs to hide. The mother in another novel enjoins her daughter not “to get into a habit of thinking, musing, and meditating, . . . sitting in a listless way with a book upon your knees which you are not reading, or a piece of embroidery between your fingers, which is continually being pulled out to correct false stitches” (Millington 395). Elsewhere, Trollope makes aggressive reading interchangeable with conspicuous sleeping: in
He
Knew
He
Was
Right
, for example, Colonel Osborne hides from his fellow traveler on the train by alternately “burying himself behind a newspaper” and pretending to sleep (219). When a Brontë character sleeps, she dreams; when a Trollope character sleeps, he shams.

In alternately flirting with and swerving from the question of what exactly it is that characters are reading, these fictions extend the traditional understanding of the novel itself as a placeholder or a blank. The reading
in
novels borrows its emptiness from the reading
of
novels. Put differently, novels project onto the newspaper their own task of reconciling what Coleridge called “indulgence of sloth and hatred of vacancy” (1:48–49).
¹⁴
Trollope himself (again, in a lecture rather than a work of fiction) complained of novel-readers’ “listless, vague, half-sleepy interest over the doings of these unreal personages” (Anthony Trollope, “The Higher Education of Women” 85). Yet reading differs from sleeping or
sex—to state the obvious—in that it’s also the activity on which those representations depend.