How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (17 page)

In
Jane
Eyre
, an oral source can be named in full but printed origins only in retrospect; in
Copperfield
, too, the child remains as innocent of where stories come from as where babies do. As usual, Trollope provides a bathetic contrast to this Bounderbyesque self-mythologizing. Directly after the de rigueur reminiscence of his father knocking him down with “the great folio Bible which he always used,” his
Autobiography
mentions a dozen rereadings of the only books found in the house, “the two first volumes of Cooper’s novel, called “The Prairie”, a relic—probably a dishonest relic—of some subscription to Hookham’s library” (15). It’s characteristic that what Trollope remembers is the commercial transaction—legitimate or not—by which the book reached his young self. In his novel
Ayala’s Angel
, conversely, the narrator measures its young heroine’s economic fall by the loss of access to new novels—cut off not by a puritanical guardian or wicked stepmother, but by the unavailability of the subscription fee. Before the crash, “that Mudie’s unnumbered volumes should come into the house as they were wanted had been almost as much of a provision of nature as water, gas, and hot rolls for breakfast” (10). As the bathetic specificity of breakfast rolls replaces the bread to which texts are usually compared, the adults who traditionally block children’s access to books give way to adults who bankroll it.

One early imitation of
Jane
Eyre
even more explicitly calls the bildungsroman’s bluff: where, it asks, do those persecuted heroes and heroines
get
the books that so richly furnish their imaginations? When the Rochester figure asks the governess whether she is fond of Shakespeare, her answer is not a literary critique but simply the confession that she has never been able to lay her hands on a volume:

“Never read Shakspeare!” he repeated in an accent of surprise. “Had you assured me this morning you could read and enjoy that Greek poem I handed you down, I should have been less astonished.”

“But, sir, I have always been at school. And school girls have no opportunity of obtaining such works. At a school I was at in England, Miss Fenton’s, there were some volumes of Shakspeare in the governess’s private parlor, but I never saw any thing of them but their backs.”

“Have you no home—no parents?”

“None.”

“Have you never read Byron?”

“Oh no.”

“Nor any novels?”

“No books of that kind.”

He looked at me with a half smile, standing with his back against a tree. “Your later years have been spent in France, I understood my sister to say; did you never get any French novels?”

“Indeed no. Mademoiselle Barlieu would have been in fits at the bare thought. And since I left them I have been too fully occupied to read for recreation.” (Wood 100)

The few Victorian novels that have entered our canon associate wealth with anti-intellectualism, poverty with a love for literature. In making books the refuge of the powerless, these bildungsromans forget that access to books requires a minimum of economic power: enough money to “obtain such works,” along with (as the last line quoted from Wood acknowledges) enough money to afford the time in which to read them. The bildungsroman’s association of reading with childhood, Wood reminds us, masks a reality in which adults had more access to books than children, and heads of households than dependents. Indeed, a second 1860s rewriting of
Jane
Eyre
, Emma Worboise’s novel
Thornycroft
Hall
, associates reading instead with evil minor characters, in particular a cousin (the counterpart to the Reed children) “who keeps novels under her pillow and in a pocket,” “who covers them with schoolbook covers.” Where Jane calls John Reed a dunce, Worboise’s orphan accuses her rich cousins of excessive reading: “Who took The Secret Marriage to
church
, and read it all through the sermon?” she taunts them (104). By casting books as objects that need to be bought or borrowed, Wood and Worboise question the bildungsroman’s assumption that reading is free, in both senses.

Situating Shakespeare in the schoolmistress’s parlor rather than in a remote attic, Wood reminds us that the books on which a schoolgirl is likeliest to get her hands are . . . schoolbooks. In contrast, a Dickens novel teeming with schoolmasters still manages to cast adults as blocking figures, rather than enforcers or even enablers of the child’s alphabetization. More specifically, by pitting fond memories of pleasure reading against textbooks used as projectiles,
David
Copperfield
represses the extent to which (as Catherine Robson has argued) literary memorization forms at once the result and the mechanism of adult violence against children (Robson). The record of nonfictional sources like diaries and schoolbooks (though not of retrospective autobiographies modeled generically after the bildungsroman) suggests that nineteenth-century children were likelier to be either punished for
not
having memorized assigned texts, or punished
by
being given lines to memorize, than to be beaten for internalizing forbidden pleasure reading. As Henry Tilney gently reminds Catherine Morland, “even you yourself, who do not altogether seem particularly friendly to very severe, very intense application, may perhaps be brought to acknowledge that it is very well worth-while to be tormented for two or three years of one’s life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. Consider—if reading had not been taught, Mrs. Radcliffe would have written in vain” (Austen,
Northanger
Abbey
80). Reading can “spell” work, in both senses: James’s office worker fishes a novel out from under her paperwork to mark the lunch hour, but Thackeray’s schoolboy slips a romance under his Latin grammar.

If textual “abstraction” becomes most visible when violently broken in upon by the book-object, so childhood absorption can be benchmarked most effectively against adult interruption. In an essay titled “On Fiction as an Educator” that appeared in
Blackwoods
at the end of 1870, the children’s magazine editor Anne Mozley argues that every adult who looks back to “some particular book as an event in his inner history” knows that this book can never be among those supplied by teachers: “He will surely find that the book thus influential came to him by a sort of chance, through no act of authority or intention.” On the contrary, even though a “snug and retired . . . window-seat” forms the best venue for children’s reading, the book can work its effect only against a backdrop of hostile “observers.”

What shame in these tears—the shame that attends all strong emotions—as they are detected by unsympathising, quizzing observers . . . Who cannot contrast the weariness with which he now tosses the last novel aside, with the eager devices of his childhood to elude pursuit and discovery, to get out of earshot, to turn a deaf ear, when the delightful book is in his grasp which is to usher him into another world?
What ingenuity in hiding, behind hedges, in out-houses and garrets—nay, amongst the beams and rafters of the roof, to which neither nurse nor governess, nor mamma herself, has ever penetrated? (Mozley 195, 189)

As Charlotte Yonge put it a year earlier, “happy the child who was allowed to revel in [the true unadulterated fairy tale]—perhaps the happier if under protest” (“Children’s Literature of the Last Century” 306). Augustus Hare remembers how “I used to pick the fragments” of the numbers of the
Pickwick
Papers
that his grandmother read “out of the waste-paper basket, piece them together, and read them too” (135).

Coffee table against lumber room: children unearth and secrete books, adults display and deploy them. Governess’s parlor against child’s bedroom: when Conan Doyle remembers reading the Waverley novels “by surreptitious candle-ends in the dead of the night,” he speculates that “the zest of crime added a new zest to the story” (Doyle 25). Auto-enlightenment commands more glamour than forced reading. Yet Samuel Richardson’s boast that when he read “for Improvement of my Mind,” “even my Candle was of my own purchasing, that I might not in the most trifling Instance make my Master a Sufferer,” updates badly to an era in which the ‘prentice-work of middle-class children has become, precisely, reading (
Letters
229). Once schools assign “pleasure reading,” the flashlight under the covers becomes an adjunct, rather than an interruption, to academic and ultimately economic success.

The rule is not just that, to be authentic, reading must be attributed to school-aged children but located outside of the classroom; it’s also that absorptive reading ends at puberty, after which adults can remember past acts of reading more easily than undertake new ones. (Nothing left to do with books but throw them, display them, or unfurl them in your spouse’s face.) Kate Flint’s survey of Victorian autobiographies concludes that mentions of reading occur much more often before marriage than after (
The
Woman
Reader
208). Even today, Matei Calinescu argues that reading about others’ childhood reading “helps us to remember, and perhaps even to recreate,” a kind of “quasi-hypnotic reading experience” no longer available in the present (96). In
David
Copperfield
, too, the child’s disinterested antisocial reading will give way to the adult narrator’s profitable vocational writing.
¹⁵
In fact, oral storytelling replaces solitary reading at precisely the moment when David is sent away to school.
¹⁶

If David’s and Jane’s relation to books sticks in English professors’ minds as Crosbie’s and Miss Hereford’s doesn’t, one explanation may be that the former numbs literary critics’ discomfort with the instrumentality of our own reading—and, by extension, with our part in socializing younger readers. The frequency with which academics’ memoirs end
before they begin their academic careers suggests that those who read for a living would rather think about reading as if for life. One monograph on reader response published by a university press begins with the stricture that “I shall focus on reading that is done outside the school system, unguided if not completely uninfluenced by it” (Calinescu 92). When the NEA recently surveyed public participation in the arts, its questionnaire, too, excluded reading done within an institutional context: “With the exception of books required for work or school. Did [you] read any books during the LAST 12 MONTHS?”
¹⁷
Institutional or even commercial: like Mr. Brownlow or George de Barnwell, scholars today can combine fondness for traces of reading with hatred for traces of pricing. Alberto Manguel declares that “if a book is second-hand, I leave all its marking intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page,” but that “old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs” (
The
Library
at
Night
17).

Matthew Battles has explained modern intellectuals’ ambivalence toward the research library by comparing the scholarly fantasy of stumbling on books whose significance you are the first to discern with “the rags-to-riches fantasies of the [American] penny dreadfuls—the dream of personal success unaided by unnamed others” (202). In this analysis, the reader’s sense of self depends on his editing out those librarians or teachers—now often female—who provide the material conditions for his self-creation. At the same time as he blocks out others physically present, the reader also blots out the means by which the text has reached his hands. Dickens’s occlusion of the publishing industry prefigures Mozley’s exclusion of parents and teachers (not to mention children’s magazine editors, like her). By reducing mediating figures to blocking figures, both turn a manufactured good into a found object.

This coyness about the book trade in fiction
about
children contrasts sharply with its prominence in fiction
for
them, as Katie Trumpener has shown in rich detail. Some early nineteenth-century children’s books puff other volumes by the same publisher. Others show their characters coveting gorgeously bound books; Fenn’s
Fables
begins, “You must have been good, else your ma-ma would not have bought a new book for you” (quoted in A. Richardson 133). Still others even name the bookseller in whose shop windows their young characters are staring.
¹⁸
Where fiction
about
children is idealist, fiction
for
children is materialist.

Such product placement takes on a darker hue in the Evangelical press, where one symptom of the child’s fallen state is acquisitiveness: he or
she wants to buy books, not to read them. In the prelapsarian model of childhood that the Romantics bequeathed to the bildungsroman, the child internalizes texts while adults wield books; in Evangelical literature addressed to children themselves, on the contrary, virtuous adults understand the text as something to be memorized, while greedy children fixate on the book as a thing to be owned. The preface to Watt’s
Divine
Hymns
(reprinted throughout the nineteenth century) advises parents to make their children memorize the hymns, turning “their very Duty into a Reward, by . . . promising them the Book it self, when they have learnt ten or twenty Songs out of it” (I. Watts ii).
¹⁹
In Mrs. Sherwood’s tract “The Red Book,” too, the father gives the eponymous object to his daughters on condition that they keep it on their dressing tables and read it every time they look in the mirror (M. Sherwood). Remember the Evangelical magazine that contrasts a young character who “puts books into his head” with those members of its own public whose books are “only on your shelves”; it speaks to the reach of this logic, across otherwise unbridgeable ideological divides, that its editor happens to be the clergyman on whom Brontë based Mr. Brocklehurst (“How to Read Tracts”).