How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (16 page)

In the other direction, Brontë prefigures the Trollopian narrator’s perception of the book as a buffer between men and women. At first, Jane recognizes her kinship with the Riverses by listening to them read aloud—from the outside of the window this time, in a mirror image of her silent perusal of Bewick’s illustrations. Soon, however, she begins to describe their holding of books as an antisocial gesture: “St. John had a book in his hand—it was his unsocial custom to read at meals—.” Later, St. John cuts short an awkward conversation on the excuse of asking her to tell him the location of a particular book:

I showed him the volume on the shelf: he took it down, and withdrawing to his accustomed window recess, he began to read it.

Now, I did not like this, reader. (438)
¹¹

By juxtaposing a direct address to the novel’s reader with her dislike for another character’s reading, the narrator makes visible the tension between reading as a bridge linking an author with an unknown audience, and reading as a barrier separating members of a single household.

St. John’s “window recess” pays back Jane’s long-ago window seat: St. John likes me, the implication goes, as little as I ever liked John Reed. Or, more crudely: when I read, it’s interiority; when you read, it’s hostility. Absorption can connote selfhood as easily as selfishness: Dickens and Brontë code as a psychological good what the conduct books quoted in the previous chapter cast as a moral evil. Even the sociable reading exemplified by Diana and Mary voicing Schiller—a use of books that, far from sundering characters sitting at the same table, draws in the outsider crouched on the wrong side of the glass—can never be more than a temporary recuperation of stories that will always be dragged back to their print origins. In her own window seat, Jane reflected that in Bewick “each picture told a story . . . as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings . . . taken from old fairy tales and older ballads; or (as at a later period I discovered) from the pages of
Pamela
, and
Henry, Earl of Moreland
” (15). The comparison reduces print to a way station between the visual and the oral. Moving from “letter-press” to picture to voice, the novel runs a technological time line in reverse—with the twist that Bessie’s stories turn out themselves to be traceable back to print, coming full circle to the medium that Jane initially dismisses. Their bibliographical provenance is identified only offstage, in parentheses, in the future.

In
David
Copperfield
, a different set of punctuation marks elides editorial backstory. They occur immediately before the boot-tree incident:

My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs to which I had access (for it adjoined my own), and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time—they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii . . . I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of voyages and travels—I forget what, now—that were on those shelves; . . . When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed reading as if for life. (60)

This passage must rank as one of Dickens’s most memorable, and memorized. The final phrase continues to turn up Micawberishly today in venues as varied as a commencement speech, a movie review, a philosopher’s memoir, and the acknowledgments to an academic monograph. Sometimes
it’s bowdlerized by the omission of the “as if”; sometimes intensifiers are added, as when an autodidact’s memoir riffs that “I see myself in the far away time and cottage reading, as I may truly say in my case, for dear life” (Rose,
The
Intellectual
Life
3); sometimes a single noun serves to conjure it up, as in Sartre’s memory of posing with a book (before he even knew how to read) in the solitude of a lumber room (
cabinet
de
debarras
) (Sartre 36).
¹²
Even earlier, Amelia Edwards’s otherwise Jane Eyre–inflected
Barbara’s History
borrowed this passage almost verbatim, changing nothing but gender. After its young heroine wanders into a lumber room empty except for old boxes, “in one, the
smallest
and
least
promising
of all, I found a dusty treasure. This treasure consisted of some three or four dozen wormeaten, faded volumes, tied up in lots of four or six, and overlaid with blotches of white mould.” To the list of books that follows, the narrator adds: “Other books I had as well—
books
better
suited
to
my
age
and
capacity; but these, being common property, were kept in the school-room
, and consisted for the most part of moral tales and travels, which, read more than once, grow stale and wearisome. Fortunate was it that I found this
second
life
in my books; for I was a very lonely little girl, with a heart full of unbestowed affection, and a nature quickly swayed to smiles or tears. The personages of my fictitious world became
as
real
to
me
as
those
by
whom
I
was
surrounded
in
my
daily
life
. They linked me with humanity.
They
were
my
friends, my instructors, my companions
” (Edwards; my emphasis).

The catchphrase’s ubiquity suggests that “reading [as if] for life” provides convenient shorthand for a post-Romantic paradigm that makes reading the recourse of the poor, the lonely, the marginalized, the physically or socially powerless. The books inside the “smallest and least promising of all” boxes find their match in the smallest and least promising of children. Adults have little place in this model, except (at best) to remember their own past reading or (at worst) to punish children for reading in the present.
David
Copperfield
celebrates the model of selfhood that the newspaper in Trollope’s fiction so cruelly parodies: whether from the inside or the outside, the book is imagined as a shield against others who inhabit the same domestic space. Just as the books that constitute Edwards’s metaphorical “friends” and “companions” crowd out human friends and companions, so the virtual “company” provided by literary characters isolates the reader from the human beings around him—from the “boys at play” as much as from “[every]body else in our house.” Although David’s “fancy” can take in the wildest counterfactuals, the one possibility to which his imagination never stretches is that his taste for reading might be shared.

Shared by relatives living in the same house, but also shared by the mass audience to which printed books are marketed. When Forster
quotes this passage, he points out that in translating his “autobiographical fragment” into the novel, Dickens made one silent change: “his omission of the name of a cheap series of novelists then in course of publication, by means of which his father had become happily the owner of so large a lump of literary treasure in his small collection of books.” The metaphorical “price” for which the captain sells his life can be named, but the price of the “cheap series” can’t. Or even its title: David’s “—I forget what, now—” strips paratext away from text as aggressively as Jane’s “(as at a later period I discovered)” distances chapbooks from storytelling. Both sets of punctuation marks quarantine the provenance from which (and for how much) stories make their way into the child’s consciousness. Both children must wait until adulthood to discover that their own imaginative investments are shared with tens of thousands of other owners of mass-produced reprints.

Where Don Quixote learns that the one thing unmentionable in romances is the price that anyone paid for a night’s lodging, by reading bildungsromans we learn, closer to home, not to ask what books cost. To inherit them is to preserve one’s innocence. Even to steal them, like the young narrator of Stendhal’s
Vie
de
Henry
Brulard
, is better than to buy. The vulgar owning without reading epitomized by sofa-table books and dummy spines finds its antithesis in reading without buying (the child stumbling across a collection of books that are literally priceless), and even reading without owning (remember the hero of
Ranthorpe
freeloading at a bookstall). Twenty-first-century social-scientific surveys give the lie to this logic: according to them, the number of books owned in a household correlates more strongly with a child’s academic success than does the parents’ educational level (Evans et al.). Reading aloud and library patronage are even weaker predictors: better to have books lying around unread than to read books that don’t belong to you.
¹³

In our cultural imaginary, in contrast, reading undoes the book’s commercial taint. A second bookstall scene in
Oliver
Twist
shows engagement with the text making the marketplace disappear.

[Mr. Brownlow] had taken up a book from the stall, and there he stood,
reading
away
, as hard
as
if
he were in his elbow-chair in his own study. It is very possible that he fancied himself there, indeed; for it was plain, from his
abstraction
, that
he
saw
not
the
bookstall
, nor the street, nor the boys; not, in short, anything but the book itself which he was
reading
straight
through
. (Dickens,
Oliver
Twist
74; my emphasis)

“Reading away” literalizes the sense in which reading
takes
Mr. Brownlow away from his surroundings; “reading straight through” literalizes the sense in which the book becomes (if I can borrow the language that
David Copperfield later applies to a play) “like a shining transparency, through which I saw” (271). This time, “as if” reconciles the realities of the market with their banishment from the text. What Mr. Brownlow “fancies” is not the story he’s reading, but rather the position of its reader: he imagines not that the fiction is true, but that he is standing somewhere other than the market.

Just as reading without buying is admired and buying without reading ridiculed, so a room dubbed the “study” but filled with guns and fishing-rods shows vulgarity as clearly as books found in a space not supposed to contain them (a garret, under the bedcovers, outdoors) bespeak good taste. Surprisingly, the scene of standing up at the bookstall makes the market another such space. In “George de Barnwell” (a parody of Bulwer-Lytton in
Punch’s Prize Novels
), the young hero reads in the middle of a grocer’s shop:

Immersed in thought or study, and indifferent to the din around him, sat the boy. A careless guardian was he of the treasures confided to him. The crowd passed in Chepe: he never marked it. The sun shone on Chepe: he only asked that it should illumine the page he read . . . The customer might enter: but his book was all in all to him. (Thackeray, “George de Barnwell” 5)
¹⁴

Here as in
Oliver
Twist
, books’ physical location within a shop highlights their textual power to block commerce out. And here as in Trollope, the book’s power is established only negatively. Where Flaubert would have paraphrased the text being read, in
Oliver
Twist
and “George de Barnwell” its place is taken by a description of the real surroundings from which the text grants oblivion.

The foundlings who give their names to David’s titles—Tom Jones, Roderick Random, Humphrey Clinker—bring their stories to a close by discovering their father’s identity. His own story, though, is set in motion by his discovering the father’s books, themselves doubly orphaned—first by the death of their owner and then by the suppression of their publisher’s name. And if you read this episode side by side with the autobiographical fragment, as Forster did, then it’s hard not to notice that the commercial information suppressed in the case of books belonging to David’s biological father resurfaces in the person of a father surrogate. Many chapters later, David’s humiliation at the bottle warehouse is compounded by his being enlisted to dispose of Mr. Micawber’s library to a tipsy book-dealer. On the one hand, a dead father who keeps books in the family; on the other, a living father figure (Micawber slotted into the place that John Dickens occupies in the memoir) who disperses them into the marketplace. The split between biological and fictive father maps onto the contrast between two bibliographical models: one in which texts
magically (or at least Micawberishly) turn up; another in which books, lumped with spoons and other pieces of portable property that can be sold or pawned, change hands amidst embarrassment, declassment, and drink (Dickens,
David
Copperfield
160–61).

Common sense suggests that children get literacy, and books, from somewhere. But in Dickens’s bibliographical riff on family romance, the reader emerges self-made: the father who bought the books killed, the publisher who reprinted them airbrushed out, the mother who taught reading banished to the past—“I can faintly remember learning the alphabet at her knee” (Dickens,
David
Copperfield
57)—and the only adults left standing likelier to wield a book than to read it. (That even the kindest adults fit this pattern suggests that age trumps morals: the first thing that David notices in the Peggotty household is a tea tray “kept from tumbling down, by a bible” [37].) That tension stands in parallel to the financial contradiction at the center of the novel’s plot—the conflict between the individualist language in which David’s professional rise is imagined, and the belated revelation that the loss of Betsey Trotwood’s fortune was a fiction. As with money, so with books: as David Vincent argues, the self-made reader is as powerful a Victorian myth as the self-made millionaire (Vincent,
Literacy
and
Popular
Culture
259).