How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2 page)

No cheaper cue for our sympathies, no surer predictor of the plot: a character who sells his father-in-law’s library can’t be trusted not to buy a mistress; a character who wants his books bound in leather will marry the blonde; a character who manhandles books will abuse children. The great nineteenth-century novels of individual development domesticate Heine’s 1821 prediction that “when they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” In liberal democracies, the traditional state prosecution of books whose content is judged treasonous gives way to homegrown persecution of persons whose reading is judged antisocial. After Julien Sorel’s father catches his attention by knocking a book out of his hands, the book is drowned; when Hugh Trevor’s master beats him for being “deeply engaged in my book,” the book is burnt (Holcroft 41). The public hangman burned books in place of their author, but domestic tyrants made books a proxy for the readers under their control. When John Reed reduces books to projectiles or Tom Tulliver asks why a bankrupt’s books shouldn’t be auctioned off along with his chairs, their refusal to treat the book as a protected category signals their blindness to what’s special about Jane or Maggie.

One of the dark red volumes of the first edition of the
New
Oxford
English
Dictionary
defines “book” as

In sense b every volume is a ‘book’; whilst in sense c one ‘book’ may occupy several volumes; and on the other hand one large volume may contain several ‘books,’ i.e. literary works originally published as distinct books.

The minute the contributor pictures the material container, the textual contents empty out: the example imagined is “entirely blank.” Charles Chestnutt’s 1904 story “Baxter’s Procrustes” makes that zero-sum logic a plot twist, imagining a club of book-collectors tricked into accepting a blank book for their collection. “The true collector loves wide margins, and the Procrustes, being all margin, merely touches the vanishing point of the perspective” (830). A thumbed-to-death “reading copy” stands opposite an illegible collectible clean not only of smudges and underlinings, but of print.

You’ll have noticed my contortions attempting to distinguish “text”—a string of words—from “book” or “book-object”: a physical thing. In an everyday language incapable of even deciding what preposition should link the two—the text “of” a book, the text “in” a book?—one term appears sometimes as contained within the other, sometimes as antithetical to it.
³
If “book” really connoted materiality, there would be no need to affix the pleonastic “object”; if “text” really provided an adequate term for a linguistic structure, I would refer to what you’re now reading as “this text.” Only the ambiguity of sentence openings prevented me from generalizing the distinction between the Bible (a text) and the bible (an object) to Books and books.
⁴

The Victorians cathected the text in proportion as they disowned the book. More specifically, they identified themselves as text-lovers in proportion
as they distinguished themselves from book-lovers. To take in a text is to tune out its raw materials: a newspaper isn’t called a “rag” if the speaker thinks it worth reading. More surprisingly, in 1818 William Hazlitt could ridicule a book by pointing out the
high
cost of the paper it was printed on: “Mr. Campbell always seems to me to be thinking how his poetry will look when it comes to be hot-pressed on superfine wove paper” (295). Whenever a review mentions the price or appearance of a book, we know that its textual contents will be either ridiculed or dismissed as beneath contempt. Even in the digital age, to name the ingredients of a book is to insult it—as when an MIT professor refers to “tree flakes encased in dead cow” or a Microsoft researcher to “sooty marks on shredded trees.”
⁵

Conversely, the best texts eclipse the book. When Amazon launched its first e-reader, Jeff Bezos boasted that the Kindle emulated the way in which “the physical book is so elegant that the artifact itself disappears into the background. The paper, glue, ink and stitching that make up the book vanish, and what remains is the author’s world.”
⁶
A successful e-reader, by this logic, would illustrate Marian Evans’s contention that “on certain red-letter days of our existence, it happens to us to discover among the
spawn
of the press, a book which, as we read, seems to undergo a sort of transfiguration before us. We no longer hold heavily in our hands an octavo of some hundred pages, over which the eye laboriously travels, hardly able to drag along with it the restive mind; but we seem to be in companionship with a spirit, who is transfusing himself into our souls” (G. Eliot, “J. A. Froude’s
The
Nemesis
of
Faith
” 265). The double etymology of “liber” points to the book’s Janus-faced potential: some medieval commentators traced it to the word for the “bark” on which texts were inscribed, others to the action (“liberare”) that texts were expected to perform.
⁷
Grounded in a material substance or linked with a lofty abstraction, the same object bound by its medium is credited with the power to free its users.

The following pages reconstruct nineteenth-century understandings of, and feelings toward, the uses of printed matter. In particular, they excavate the often contentious relation among three operations: reading (doing something with the words), handling (doing something with the object), and circulating (doing something to, or with, other persons by means of the book—whether cementing or severing relationships, whether by giving and receiving books or by withholding and rejecting
them). Often pictured as competing, in practice these three modes almost always overlapped. Impossible to read without handling (even if certain genres took pains to suppress any
mention
of handling), or to get one’s hands on a book without its having passed through someone else’s hands (even if other genres imagined books as found objects). We might posit, then, that what look like antonyms are in fact subsets: handling without reading is easier to imagine than reading without handling, circulating without reading than reading without circulating. Yet the opposite asymmetry occupies an even more prominent place in certain Victorian literary genres—notably the bildungsroman and the memoir—which represented reading as systematically as they avoided any mention of the social transactions in which the book was enlisted or the material properties with which it was invested. The fact that a few instances of these genres continue to be reprinted and reread, while genres that acknowledged handling now look like repositories of jokes gone flat, and genres that theorized circulation look like depositories for dated didacticism, suggests how much twenty-first century culture values the first use over the second and third.

To ask how one use relates to the other two is also to ask how—even whether—books differ from other kinds of object. Where do books fit in a postal system that mandates different pricing for letters than for freight? What about newspapers, catalogs and advertising circulars, or books that contain nonverbal objects (herbaria, scrapbooks, tradesman’s sample books)? When you display a book in your hands or on your shelf, are you implicitly claiming to have read it—and therefore, as often as not, lying? In what operations other than reading can books be enlisted? Is it legitimate to hide behind the newspaper, use an encyclopedia as a doorstop, turn a newspaper into fish wrapping, match the binding of your bible to your dress, fill a study wall with hollowed-out books, decorate a living-room table with intact ones that you have no intention of opening?

Are books likelier to be put to one or another of the three uses if they’re free? What about if they’re bought, borrowed, inherited, received as a gift from an acquaintance or as a giveaway from an organization? (In some quarters, the price of subsidized bibles was raised in order to prevent their being worth reselling for wastepaper; in others, to inherit, stumble upon, or even steal books was considered morally superior to buying them.) Do traces (verbal or nonverbal) left by past users increase or decrease the value of books (commercial or sentimental)? What should be done with printed matter when its contents go out of date?

Under what circumstances is it acceptable to annotate, extra-illustrate, cut up, disbind, rebind, reprint, recycle, or discard books? And when is it permissible to disperse, sell, or export entire library collections? What
should be pulped (and how soon), what should be archived (and how long)? What relation do those persons responsible for interpreting and evaluating texts bear to those responsible for dusting or shelving books? And the formal corollary of that social question: why do Victorian writers develop such a rich language in which to name the manual gestures of holding, turning, and handling, with no matching lexicon to describe the mental act of reading?

Investigating these questions may help us understand the printed “before” against which so many twenty-first-century commentators measure their digital “after.” We can learn, in particular, from the Victorians’ struggle to articulate how far the power of books (for good and evil) depended on their verbal content, their material form, or the social and antisocial practices that they enabled and even prompted. (In the language introduced a moment ago: on their reading, handling, or circulating.) When we use idealized printed texts as a stick with which to beat real digital ones, we flatten the range of uses to which the book was put before digital media came along to compete with it. If we shift our gaze from the library to the kitchen and the privy, an ethnography that juxtaposes reading with handling and circulating can replace the Manichaean contrast
between
print and digital by distinctions
within
the uses of each. Where nostalgists today conflate the practice of disinterested, linear, sustained attention with the object that is the printed book—equating modular, scattershot, instrumental reading in turn with electronic media—secular novelists like Dickens, Eliot, Brontë, and Trollope assumed that absorption in the text required forgetting its medium. The ideal text was, as we say today, platform-independent; the ideal reader, binding-blind and edition-deaf (see Kirschenbaum). Evangelical tracts, in contrast, showed less interest in the words that the book conveyed than in the interpersonal transactions that served to convey it. Web 2.0 has lent new life to a question that Victorian missionaries first formulated: does the distribution of texts compete with, or piggyback onto, social relationships among human beings?

I was trained in the method known as “reception history.” That enterprise shifts literary and intellectual historians’ sights from writers to readers, from upstream arguments about a work’s sources to downstream speculations about those other works that it influenced or spawned. The chapters that follow form a prototype for what might better be dubbed “rejection history.” However much interest books have in being coveted,
bought, hoarded, even stolen, a wide range of Victorian genres devote more attention to the energy expended on refusing to read or own or touch or even refrain from destroying them.

The umbrella term “nonreading” encompasses an array of practices that have little in common except what they are defined against:

“Nonreading” may be too negative a term to encompass one more scenario in which, whether or not a text is worth reading, the book becomes
more
valuable for some other purpose. The book’s material properties trump its textual content when its value (whether for use or for resale) lies in attributes orthogonal to its legibility. This could be for aesthetic reasons, as when a book’s textual content is judged particularly worthless
and
its material properties are judged especially valuable: the gap between the two yawns particularly wide, for example, in the case of coffee-table books and their early-nineteenth-century ancestor, the annual. The reason could be that one of those two axes looks more relevant to a particular situation; material value trumps textual value in times and places where paper is particularly scarce, including among the poor, in
wartime, at moments when the raw materials fall short, or at times and places in which paper is heavily taxed or imports restricted. Or cultures in which the
idea
of the book signifies more than the content of any particular book: during China’s Cultural Revolution, for example, burning formed a sign of hostility not just to a particular text’s political message, but also to the social classes that were literate and inherited cultural goods. Or the moment of nonreading could be determined not by the history of a nation, but by that of a book: the point in its life span when its read-by date has passed and its pages are ripe for cutting, wrapping, and even wiping.