How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (23 page)

The failure of Hannah’s own bible to narrate reminds us that these books about books are, more specifically, cheap tracts about expensive bibles.
The
Story
of
a
Red
Velvet
Bible
is covered with paper, not velvet; the Pocket Bible that considers itself too good for a servant to read narrates nothing better than a tract serialized in a penny weekly—a publication whose implied reader shares Hannah’s class position, even if its implied buyer is likelier to resemble her master. (A run of this periodical is found in one of the few surviving servants’ libraries, at Cragside in Northumberland [Stimpson 7].) Even more paradoxically, the aspirational book vehicles a text that slums. Composed by middle-class (or adult) writers mimicking the voice of uneducated (or not yet educated) readers, the language of tracts talks down; the material forms that it represents are both more durable and more upmarket than those it inhabits. Bibliographical “externals” short-circuit linguistic content: the form of the object undermines the circularity on which the text’s feeble humor depends.

The
History
of
a
Religious
Tract
—a tract about a tract—forms one exception to this rule. Another, which turns the conventions of Evangelical
it-narrative to secular and even commercial ends, is “The Life and Adventures of a Number of Godey’s Lady’s Book. Addressed Particularly to Borrowers, Having Been Taken Down in Short-Hand from a Narration Made by Itself, When the Unfortunate Creature Was in a Dilapidated State, from the Treatment Received at the Hands of Cruel Oppressors.”
⁶
Here, the autobiography of a number of
Godey’s
appears in—a number of
Godey’s
; what’s more, the conditions under which
Godey’s
is bought and borrowed form its subject. “You must not suppose that I was always the wretched, coverless, soiled, dog’s-eared and torn object you see,” the narrative begins. “I was an intellectual individual. I knew it; I surveyed my own cover with a proper degree of pride, a little abated, however, by the reflection that I could be bought and sold for twenty-five cents.” Unlike the Pocket Bible and the Religious Tract, however, the Number of
Godey’
s is not complaining about the fact of being put up for sale. On the contrary, its ambition is to fetch an even higher price: “I felt I was worth, at least, a dollar; and to dispose of me for less was a poor reward for all my wit and wisdom” (425). The question here is not (as in the Smithfield metaphor) whether books should be conceptualized as something more or less than commodities, but—more technically—whether the transaction through which they change hands should consist of buying, renting, or borrowing. “When in the course of human events,” the narrator declaims, “it becomes necessary for people to borrow boot-jacks, salt, or cucumbers, let boot-jacks, salt, or cucumbers be loaned. But let indignant subscribers to the ‘Lady’s Book’ declare their independence of borrowers” (427).

That commercial message drives the complaints that structure its “Life and Adventures”: “One visit would lose me a leaf, another a plate . . . My music got enamoured of a piano at my fifth stopping-place, and shamefully deserted me forever. The great gap you see on one of my pages was occasioned by the scissors of a young lady, who clipped out a beautiful poem, by Mrs. Neal, for her scrap-book . . . One careful housewife, to complete my degradation, after she had read my contents, used me as a duster” (426). Where the Pocket Bible’s reluctance to circulate contradicts its Evangelical mission, the equivalent structure makes perfect sense in a magazine story designed to boost sales. After parting mournfully from an honest schoolmaster, “never to look on his face again,” the Number of
Godey’s
complains that the thoughtless girls whom he teaches demand to have his copy passed along to them, on pain of being fired by their fathers. A dialogue between two of his pupils drives the point home:

“What! Injure a man because he hesitated to suffer you to use his property as freely as though it were your own?”

“But, it is only a book.”

“Very true, and that yonder is only a bonnet. How would you like to have that passing from head to head, when it came from the milliner, being borrowed in turn by all the girls of the village.”

“Yes, but a bonnet is a necessity.”

“And the ‘Lady’s Book’ becomes a necessity very soon: it is mental food.” (426)

Women read, but men buy: even the goody-goody who refuses to join the twenty-eight women who club together for a single subscription cites the authority of her father, who thinks so highly of
Godey’s
that he has given her permission to take out her own subscription. When the schoolmaster laments that “the copy I have to pay for” is extorted by girls who “spend yearly, on folly, more money than would suffice to support me,” he endorses the very equation between person and thing on which this blackmail depends: the “yearly . . . money” could just as well be the narrator’s name for the annual cost of supporting (that is, subscribing to) itself. The magazine competes with the schoolmaster as an instructor of youth.

The structure of it-narrative is used to reframe a debate about the rights of persons (in this case, publishers) as one about the rights of objects (in this case, magazines). Where the Religious Tract is insulted at being bought, the Number of
Godey’s
is wounded instead by a bibliographic promiscuity that forces it to serve the pleasures of more successive subscribers than it can stand. Beginning its life “dressed by the binder,” the Number ends up with “my cover taken entirely off, leaving me in a distressing state of nudity.” If clothing is both personal and subject to an annual fashion cycle—who would wear a secondhand bonnet?—so are magazines. To pass “from hand to hand” is to be sullied. Like the Religious Tract, the Quire of Paper, the Old Pocket Bible, and the Book, the Number of
Godey’s
feels most vulnerable at those moments where it’s endowed with skin that can be scarred and limbs that can be amputated:

The brown mark on one of my corners came from the hot ashes of a cigar. Every step that I took was marked with fresh indignity and additional mutilation . . . Here I am, prematurely old, and ready to fall to pieces from continued ill treatment. At one house I would find the face of one of my plates, smudged with candy from a child’s fingers; at another, the eyes of a lady in the fashion plate were ornamented with an enormous pair of spectacles. (426)
⁷

Whether the narrator’s wounds are metaphorical (inflicted on the bodies it resembles) or metonymic (inflicted on the bodies it represents), the topic that moves books to speech is the wear and tear to which they have been subjected. “The History of an Old Pocket Bible” begins, “I am at present in a most tattered condition. One of my covers has long since
been missing, and the other hangs only by a single thread. A great part of my leaves are torn out, and the remainder are so doubled down and spoiled as scarcely to be legible. Indeed I daily expect to be cast into the flames” (89). The narrator of
The
History
of
a
Book
introduces its description of the printing process by punning that “I was yet to undergo a great deal of sharp usage” (Carey 141). The eponymous Quire of Paper translates that bruised and battered condition more specifically into a loss of voice.

What horrors I endured when after being borne through several dark apartments, I saw before our eyes a dreadful machine, whirling round with terrible velocity, and roaring with so loud and tremendous a voice for prey that every ear was deafened, and every sound lost near it! Think what my situation must have been, when I discovered that
I
was the kind of
food
this monster craved for, and amongst the number of its devoted victims. All language were weak to describe to you the terror and anguish I felt when I was thrown between its gaping and voracious jaws. (“Adventures of a Quire of Paper” 449)

The physical violence of being mangled is doubled by the psychic violence of being silenced. Yet the indignity of a literal voice’s being drowned out by a machine’s metaphorical “roar” is undermined by the fact that that voice belongs to an equally inanimate object: if the narrator’s “language [is] weak,” what else could we expect from a sheet of paper?

Like the repentant sinners that it depicts, the genre becomes self-conscious only on its deathbed. One of its final instances,
Handed-On: Or, the Story of a Hymn Book
(SPCK, 1893), transposes the it-convention from a formal to a thematic register, shifting away from the first person but recapitulating every other cliché of the genre. Here again, the plot charts the colonial and domestic travels of a volume whose flyleaf is inscribed: “This is a wandering hymnbook. The finder will please mark some line or verse and then pass it on” (30). Here again we find a debate over the value of circulation, beginning with the eponymous book’s being spotted by the side of road:

I shall pick it up, and see what it is, and whether there is any name inside the cover.

Don’t, Ethel! How can you tell who touched it last, or from what house of illness it may come? said the fashionably dressed lady, who always declared that she was in constant terror of infection from one cause or another, and that she never ventured into the quarters of the city where the poor congregated. (9)

And here again the daughter can imagine the hymnbook as a person only by dint of imagining it as a victim: “Poor little hymn-book!” she
said softly. “Oh, mother, you need not be frightened, for it is . . . a fellow-countryman of ours” (9). In fact, the maid embarrassed to offer her mistress “a dirty old book like this” is proven wrong. Once again, Christianity changes wear and tear from faults to virtues. Another servant (the former nursemaid of the young man whose death precipitates his hymnbook’s travels) balks at passing along the book as its flyleaf requests: “If I did what I liked best I’d ask to have it buried with me” (71, 25). For her as for the young man’s mother, the hymnbook is both metaphor and metonymy for its dead owner: to pass the book along is to accept the sacrifice of the son.

Handed-On
does recuperate the form of the it-narrative, but only as an unrealizable fantasy: its third-person account of a “wandering hymnbook” frames the axiom that “no book can tell the story of its ups and downs in the world, or describe how and why it began to pass from hand to hand” (6). The it-narrative reappears only vestigially, in the person of a character who “wished that a book could tell its own true story—or rather the story of its various owners” (46). In
The
Story
of
a
Pocket
Bible
, that sentiment had been placed in the mouth of the book itself: it’s the bible who, on the last page of its autobiography, overhears its owner say, “O, if this Bible could speak, what a history it would have to tell!” By 1893, not only can a book no longer tell its story, but that story is itself imagined as a placeholder for human stories. Yet the book itself continues to have a story, and its narratability continues to anthropomorphize it: another character asks, “Where is the book that does not or will not possess a story? . . . A book is for me somewhat like a man or woman; I dream and speculate as to the scenes where it has been” (
Handed-On
76). Characters’ consciousness replaces the narrative itself as the place where books are imagined to possess a self.

One explanation for the it-narrative’s turning bookish at the end of the handpress era, then, is that at a moment when mechanization is making books more closely identical to one another, it-narrators must struggle harder to individuate themselves. When the copy of
Crusoe
refers to “one of my brothers in better plight than myself,” it makes each copy part of a family, or at least a litter—not, in any case, identical twins (“Adventures of a Robinson Crusoe” 191). And the Number of
Godey’s
reports that “after having been dressed by the binder, myself with eighty thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine companions were carried over to the publication office” (“The Life and Adventures of a Number of Godey’s Lady’s
Book” 425) before going on to describe being cut out and penciled on: only at the moment of transmission do mass-produced objects acquire a unique life story. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, “
Habent
sua
fata
libelli
: . . . not only books but also copies of books have their fates” (61).

A catch-22: too little handling appears as dangerous as too much, being a wallflower as bad as being raped. Lamb lends the book a “voice” only when it bears the mark of dirty thumbs: “How beautiful to the genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn-out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old ‘Circulating Library’ Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield! How they
speak
of
the
thousand
thumbs
, that have turned over their pages with delight!” (“Detached Thoughts”; my emphasis). The bible that confesses that its “personal appearance had begun to assume that of a veteran in my Master’s service” (even though, it adds sarcastically, “the parental warning given to my young owner, to take care of me, was so far unnecessary that there was no fear of my becoming further worn or soiled by his frequent usage, whether good or bad”) draws on Lamb’s reference to his books, a moment later, as “battered veterans” (Sargent, 2nd ser., 33–34) . Angus Reach writes, in the same vein, that “the books may sometimes be a little greasy, to be sure, the paper stained and thumbed, and the leaves dog-eared. But what of that? We respect a stained dog-eared book. It is a
veteran
who has seen service—not a mere gilt ornament to an unread library” (Reach 248; my emphasis).

Tract-distributors themselves scanned for signs of use more eagerly than any reception historian can. One fictional colporteur testifies that in entering a former Catholic’s house “I found the Bible he had purchased from me lying on the table; it bore marks of frequent usage, for it was quite worn out.” In another house a convert “drew out a New Testament in 12mo., which was all in tatters, so much had it been used” (
Fifty-Sixth Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society
31, 10, 14). In a novel about a Protestant colporteur in France, meanwhile, the hero