How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (13 page)

Figure 2.7. “The Honeymoon,” Punch, 17 May 1884, 230.

Figure 2.8. “A Perfect Wretch,” Punch, 1 January 1851, 42.

This isn’t to say that the novels which embed reader-unresponse necessarily imagine provoking it themselves. At one extreme, Thackeray’s descriptions of nonreading derive much of their shock value from breaking frame: thus a clubman “lies asleep upon one of the sofas. What is he reading? Hah! ‘Pendennis,’ No. VII.—hum, let us pass on” (
Sketches
and
Travels
in
London
43). The narrator of
The
Newcomes
instructs us to picture the page in front of us being read first by a woman in her husband’s presence and then by a man trapped in a compartment with his wife:

Figure 2.9. “The Waning of the Honeymoon,” Punch, 1 August 1896, 54.

I think of a lovely reader laying down the page and looking over at her unconscious husband, asleep, perhaps, after dinner. Yes, Madam, a closet he hath; and you, who pry into everything, shall never have the key of it. I think of some honest Othello pausing over this very sentence in a railroad carriage, and stealthily gazing at Desdemona opposite to him, innocently administering sandwiches to their little boy—I am trying to turn off the sentence with a joke, you see. (151)

Such passages are as self-referential as any in
Don
Quixote
or its imitators—with the difference that the commonality between character and addressee depends not on their shared reading (as it does in the passages I quoted earlier from
Madame
Bovary
), but on the contrary in their shared failure to read. At the opposite extreme, Trollope avoids the second person in his descriptions of nonreading—an absence all the more striking given that his descriptions of marital unhappiness are elsewhere in
The
Small
House
punctuated by a refrain of “Who does not know . . . ” His point is less that we must be paying as little attention to the description of Crosbie’s marital battles as Crosbie is paying to the battles reported in the
Times
, than on the contrary that the dullness of the newspaper provides a foil to the interest of the novel.
¹⁵

Since
Don
Quixote
at least, writers and critics alike have assumed that one defining feature of the novel lies in its investment in the act of reading. No other genre, this story goes, so inventively represents the act on which its own realization depends; none so ambivalently explores the pleasures and dangers of the absorption, the virtuality, and the selfhood (alias selfishness) that reading in general and fiction reading in particular exemplify. What, then, to make of novelistic representations of unread books—or, conversely, of the breakdown of narration at moments where we expect reading to happen?

One answer might be that such moments add up to an antiquixotic paradigm: a strand of realism that shares classic quixotism’s obsession with the book, but that values bibliographic or social surfaces over linguistic or psychological depths. Where the novel from its beginnings has tended to imagine reading as heroically antisocial, Trollope makes it reductively other-directed. As pseudoreading replaces overreading, the old fear that fiction might prompt solipsism—as in a 1795 article in the
Sylph
that pictures mothers “crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread”
¹⁶
—finds its obverse in Trollope’s understanding of silent reading as an interpersonal act. The
Sylph
assumes that novels bring readers closer to the consciousness of imagined characters or virtual authors only at the price of distancing them from others in their own world. But where that zero-sum logic imagines engagement as a limited resource—the more feeling we give textually mediated characters, the less is left over for our immediate surroundings—Trollope assumes the problem to be a shortage of excuses for
dis
attending. When Diderot described
Clarissa
as “a gospel brought onto earth to sunder husband from wife, father from son, brother from sister,” he
measured the novel’s power against the strength of the social ties that it could override.
¹⁷
Trollope merely substitutes means for end.

Silent reading asserts not just one’s own selfhood—as when Sarah Ellis warns that “the habit of silent and solitary reading has the inevitable effect, in a family, of opening different trains of thought and feelings, which tend rather to separate than to unite” (252)—but also, more aggressively, its right to be respected by others. Yet the more widely a book is “recognized” (and in
Kirsteen
Oliphant seems to mean both senses of that word) as a bid for what Goffman would later call “civil inattention,” the ruder reading becomes. The impropriety of reading in the presence of one’s spouse brings home the more general etiquette under which (as one guide rules in 1893) “a gentleman or lady may look over a book of engravings or a collection of photographs with propriety, but it is impolite to read in company” (Woodburn 219). In Elizabeth Sewell’s Tractarian novel
Gertrude
, a girl asked to help her mother with some sewing immediately picks up a novel: “‘Well, I will see about it presently,’ replied Jane; and she went to fetch her book, and then, seating herself by the drawing-room window, forgot her mother’s wishes” (7). (The mother who reads Miss Braddon instead of washing the supper dishes finds her match in a daughter who engages in leisure activities instead of contributing to the domestic economy.) Any Brontë reader will recognize the name and the window seat: the only difference lies in the value attached to solipsism by a didactic bildungsroman or an “antichristian composition.”

What the bildungsroman codes as selfhood, didactic texts parse as selfishness. An 1894 conduct book trying to illustrate consideration for others can find no clearer example than that of a girl refraining from reading. “You are sitting, let us suppose, by a sleeping invalid, the third volume of your novel with its thrilling dénouement is on the mantel-piece just out of your reach. Your boots creak, or your dress rustles, you dare not stir; there you have to sit, perhaps in growing dusk, and you dare not light a candle. These are the kinds of little self-denials that really touch us” (quoted in K. Flint,
The
Woman
Reader
93). Where we think of absorption as a virtue—to check Facebook is to succumb to laziness, to read a novel cover to cover is to find a stable self—Victorian conduct literature, and fiction, valued the willingness to be distracted. Another Elizabeth Sewell novel praises its heroine for “fetching her work directly she knew that it ought to be had; preparing for a walk as soon as the proper time arrived;
giving
up
an
interesting
book
whenever a superior duty claimed her attention”; the measure of her moral improvement is that “Margaret put aside her novel, though she had reached the most interesting part of the third volume” (
Margaret
Percival
1:240, 52; my emphasis).

In the midcentury tract
Susan
Osgood’s Prize
(of which my own copy is inscribed as a Sunday-school reward), the heroine’s fascination with a
copy of Edgeworth’s
Simple
Susan
given to her as a school prize instills two irreconcilable desires: to find herself in her namesake and to lose herself in the book. When her sister asks her to fill the kettle, “Susan was still busy over the picture, and was wondering which part of the story it described; she did not move at first. ‘Now, Susan, dear,’ said her grandmother, kindly, ‘be brisk, I see you are not a “Simple Susan” yet.’” The desire to read exemplifies the desire to ignore others: Susan “had been put out when her father called her from her book, to weed his flower beds.” Conversely, we know that the lessons of
Simple
Susan
have been absorbed once Susan Osgood refrains from reading it: “The little book looked tempting on the table by Grannie, but Susan could not get to it yet. There was ‘washing up’ to be done” (Prosser 20, 29, 22). The logic is mechanical but irrefutable: if reading makes you a bad wife or mother or daughter (or, as we’ll see in chapters 4 and 6, an even worse servant), then not reading must make you a good one.

Or, at least, not reading in the wrong place, at the wrong pace. Getting to the middle volume and stopping right there offers a bibliographic equivalent to the withdrawal method: just as sex becomes acceptable when interrupted, so reading is sanitized by discontinuity. If pacing one’s reading by volume breaks implies self-restraint and even “self-denial,” conversely the narrative momentum that overspills its material containers can be equated with selfishness and even aggression. The conduct book doesn’t specify exactly what you risk doing to the invalid if you open a third volume the minute you close the second, but a discussion of page turning published two decades earlier provides a hint. In 1873, James Greenwood opened his article “Penny Awfuls” by invoking Harrison Ainsworth’s Newgate novel
Jack
Sheppard
(1839), whose highwayman hero was widely blamed for corrupting its readers. From the belief that texts
about
stealing cause boys to steal, however, Greenwood goes on to identify the stealing
of
books as the first step in a life of crime. Later in his article, a young thief testifies that his brother was first corrupted by reading
Tyburn
Dick
—or rather, by
not
being able to read it. After gazing at a page spread displayed in the shop window, whose conclusion is cut off by the page break, both boys lie awake “wonderin’ and wonderin’ what was over
leaf
.’” The brother “wasn’t a swearin’ boy, take him altogether, but this time he did let out, he was so savage at not being able to turn over.” Not content with word crimes, the brother steals a hammer to buy the desired number, the informant steals an inkstand to pay for the next, and a pattern is set (J. Greenwood 166).

Middle-class girls’ reading might appear to pose a very different moral threat from working-class boys’ literacy. What cuts across that divide between political and domestic registers, however, is a new awareness of the book as something more (and less) than a container. In both cases,
the traditional model of imitative reading—in which a text
about
a crime (whether adultery or theft) is reproduced by its readers’ real behavior—is upstaged by the possibility that the book itself might occasion antisocial behavior. Copies of
Jack
Sheppard
lead boys not to imitate Jack Sheppard in stealing silver spoons, but to steal copies of
Jack
Sheppard
. Appropriation of the text (as in Michel de Certeau’s metaphor of “reading as poaching”) gives way to appropriation of the book (Certeau).

More specifically, the linear form of the book becomes more threatening than its thematic content. For the traditional worry that the content of a text can corrupt its readers, Greenwood and the conduct book both substitute the fear that the material obstacles to narrative continuity—whether a page break or a volume break—can either test or overstrain the reader’s self-control. Threatening an invalid’s health or murdering a master: a multitude of sins can be blamed on the hunger to “turn over,” or to see “what was over leaf.” To surface on bibliographical cue is to deny oneself, while to be absorbed in the text is to kill the other.

Trollope’s interest in faked reading makes it striking how devoid his fictional world remains of fake books: no dummy spines, no sofa-table albums. Nowhere does his moral code invoke the glib antimaterialism of Gaskell’s contrast between the Thorntons’ sofa table “with smartly-bound books arranged at regular intervals round the circumference of its polished surface, like spokes of a wheel,” and the Hales’ house where “books, not cared for on account of their binding solely, lay on one table, as if recently put down” (Jewsbury 13; Gaskell,
North
and
South
79, 112). Nor should Eliot’s quip about tulip petals be confused with the joke structuring a novel like Trollope’s
Cousin
Henry
, whose plot revolves around a will slipped between the pages of a volume of sermons that no one ever thinks to take from the shelf.
¹⁸
By representing the newspaper aggressively unfurled, and by turning “laid open” into a synonym for “unread,” Trollope and Eliot reverse the trope of the closed book. Their language figures illegibility not in terms of outwardly visible signs like dust or uncut pages (remember Gaskell’s description of “the great, large handsome Bible, all grand and golden, with its leaves adhering together from the bookbinder’s press”) but on the contrary in terms of the impossibility of distinguishing—even or especially on “closer view”—“reading” from “pretending to read” (
Mary
Barton
369).