How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (26 page)

In shifting their gaze from the meeting of minds to the manipulation of things, early twenty-first-century book historians not only draw on the bibliographical tradition but mimic the turn of late twentieth-century historians of science toward the object world—as in Sherry Turkle’s interest in prostheses or Bruno Latour’s case study of a driverless train (Turkle; Latour,
Aramis
).
¹⁶
What Turkle says of objects in general holds particularly true of books: “Behind the reticence to examine objects as centerpieces of emotional life was perhaps the sense that one was studying materialism, disparaged as excess, or collecting, disparaged as hobbyism, or fetishism, disparaged as perversion . . . So highly valued was canonical abstract thinking, that even when concrete approaches were recognized, they were often relegated to the status of inferior ways of knowing, or as steps on the road to abstract thinking” (Turkle 6).

The it-narrative, I’ve suggested, bequeaths a powerful set of conventions to the bildungsroman—even if a formal gimmick in the first becomes an ethical commitment in the second. Another place to look for the legacy of the genre, however, is in
non
fiction discussions of the book, both in their own time and after. The habit of slotting books into roles normally occupied by human beings soon spilled out from it-narratives into the religious press at large. Like the Number of
Godey’s
describing its
“visits,” RTS magazines such as
The
Visitor
(1833),
The
Weekly
Visitor
(1836), and
The
Monthly
Messenger
(1844) figure themselves as persons paying social calls, not as objects being bought and sold.
¹⁷
Termed “silent messengers,” “silent monitors,” or “silent preachers,” tracts are also characterized as “preachers which penetrate where no voice of man could reach”—even at the risk that such speaking objects can too easily be confused with the “dumb idols” that they are designed to displace (Jones 43, 238, 594, 174, 360, 32). Even in the secular press, in fact, Charles Knight’s
The
struggles
of
a
book
against
excessive
taxation
(1850) casts the book as an agent whose desire is to circulate as widely as possible.

Such metaphors don’t only draw on the conventions of the it-narrative: they reach back to a much older and less localized tradition of comparing books to friends, which stretches from Petrarch right through to Groucho Marx’s remark that “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend; inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read” (Emerson and Lubbock 35). Here as in the jokes we saw in the introduction, books become the pivot between a figure of speech and its bathetic literalization. But Marx also draws on an equally old metaphor of book as animal (think of the religious tract “exposed to sale with as little remorse as cattle in Smithfield”) that in turn invokes the metonymic derivation of books from skins. The tenth-century anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry known as the Exeter Book poses a question in the first person (essentially, who am I?), to which the answer appears to be “a book,” but Bruce Holsinger argues that the answer can also be construed as “an animal,” the animal whose slaughtered corpse provides the parchment (622).
¹⁸
Here as in the it-narrative, suffering is what gives voice to the book-object: the “I” becomes a book only once it’s been killed and flayed. More specifically, the marks of wear and tear are what remind handlers of the book’s animal origins: as one scholar notes, “handling a parchment page even hundreds of years after it has been rendered into a writing surface, the reader is often well aware of its history as flesh: one can see hair follicles, tiny veins, discolorations where the living skin carried scars or blemishes” (Kearney,
The
Incarnate
Text
7).

As we saw in relation to sumptuary codes, anthropomorphism hinges on a sartorial metaphor that makes the printed sheets to the body what the (cloth or leather) binding is to clothing—a metaphor taken to its logical conclusion in the Sikh tradition, whose holy book is covered with light cloth in summer and heavy cloth in winter (G. S. Mann). In an 1851 description of a railway bookstall, “here and there crouched some old friends, who looked very strange indeed in the midst of such questionable society—like well-dressed gentlemen compelled to take part in the general doings of Rag-fair” (“The Literature of the Rail” 7). Earlier, Hester Piozzi had praised “our Leather-coated Friends upon the Shelves; who
give good Advice, and yet are never arrogant or assuming” (H. J. Jackson,
Romantic
Readers
121). Dickens draws at once on the trope of binding as clothing and on the logic that anthropomorphizes battered or abused books when he prefaces the Cheap Edition of 1847 with the hope that the book will

become, in his new guise, a permanent inmate of many English homes, where, in his old shape, he was only known as a guest, or hardly known at all:
to
be
well
thumbed
and
soiled
in
a
plain
suit
that will bear a great deal. (Dickens,
Prospectus
for
the
Cheap
Edition
of
the
Works
of
Mr. Charles Dickens
; my emphasis)

Or, reciprocally, humans’ clothing can be assimilated to books’ binding, when the same journalist who compares dog-earers to wife-beaters adds that “he is no true lover of books who suffers his volumes to remain in yellow paper and blue boards. Would he like to see his wife, the very apple of his eye, go about a dowdy?” (Watkins 101). To compare binding to clothing is to endow books with a human body, but not necessarily a human soul.

It’s a mark at once of respect for the Bible and dismissal of social inferiors that missionaries often make the book the grammatical subject and the reader the object, rather than the other way around. “Moreover, the book goes where missionaries and other workers do not; where under present circumstances, for lack of numbers or for other reasons, they cannot go. Be it that the book remains unread, that it is used by the women for putting their silks in . . . ” (Watkins121). In choosing not to say “be it that no one reads the book,” the writer avoids naming the natives. More playfully, the tract writer Legh Richmond writes to his daughter: “I wish very much to know how you are behaving since I saw you; what character will your pen and your needle give of you when I ask them? And what will your book say? Your playthings, perhaps, will whisper that you have been very fond of them” (Pugh 55). The trope that we’ve seen already of the book rising to testify against its owner sharpens here into the fantasy that conversation with books might altogether replace conversation with the daughter.

Tracts are imagined not only talking but walking: in China in 1814, “such is the political state of the country at present, that we are not permitted to enter it, and publish, by the living voice, the glad tidings of salvation. Tracts may, however, penetrate silently even to the chamber of the emperor. They easily put on a Chinese coat, and may
walk
without
fear
through
the
length
and
breadth
of
land
” (Jones 474; emphasis mine). The young hero of another RTS publication, coming across a bible in his new home, “recognised [it] in a moment by its binding; and a feeling of joy came over him, as if an old friend had met him” (Millington 52).
The promise of the
Girl’s Own Paper
(published by the RTS from 1880 onward) to be “to its readers a guardian, instructor, companion, and friend” (report of the Committee, 1880, quoted in S. G. Green 128) borrows doubly from the logic of the it-narrative: in anthropomorphizing the book and in relocating agency from persons to objects. More specifically, reviewers trying to describe the material attributes of books find a ready-made vocabulary in the it-narrative—or, at least, this seems like the most plausible explanation for the pronouns in a 1846 review of a volume newly reissued in a tenpenny binding, where the
Baptist
Magazine
remarks archly that now “he appears in clothing which will facilitate his reception into good company, and conduce to his preservation from the casualties of the way” (quoted in Fyfe,
Science
and
Salvation
159). In fact, one midcentury
History
of
the
British
and
Foreign
Bible
Society
describes a Protestant Bible hidden in a cradle rocked by a young girl (Zemka 112).

To make books narratable was—and is—to make them human. The metaphor of books as “witnesses” rising in judgment against their owners reappears in secular guise in the 2009 printing of the standard textbook on bibliography: “analytical bibliography considers books,” it declares, “as witnesses to the processes that brought them into being” (Williams and Abbott 10). The metaphor of the book as a living being who ages and dies persists, too, in scholarly titles like “The Biography of a Book” (the first chapter of Robert Darnton’s
The
Business
of
Enlightenment
) and in Cathy Davidson’s play on italics in “The Life and Times of
Charlotte
Temple
: The Biography of a Book.”
¹⁹
The master trope of book history has always been personification. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s
Printing
Press
as
an
Agent
of
Change
, Jerome McGann’s “socialization of texts,” and Paul Duguid’s
Social
Life
of
Information
anthropomorphize books as thoroughly as any it-narrative does. All three draw on the long tradition of users ventriloquizing books, like the inscription in one early modern copy of
The
Treasury
of
Amadis
of
France
that reads “Dale Havers oweth me / he is my veri tenet [owner] / and I this booke confesse to be / quicunque me invenit [whoever finds me]” (Sherman 17). Outside of the object narrative’s covers, no book speaks for itself. But the speech produced in (and by) its pages may provide one model for the stories that get told about books and their users.

It’s also worth asking, however, what the personification of the book elides. When tract-distributors imagine volumes walking around China or penetrating where persons can’t, they conveniently forget that books need someone to carry them: that only in the most metaphorical sense do ideas have legs. This isn’t to say that the agent of their transmission is necessarily a person endowed with legs and hands. To Evangelicals, the force that drove books around the world was divine rather than human; and as we’ll see in the final chapter of this book, even a thinker as defiantly
secular as Mayhew could substitute literacy for Protestantism as the motor of a providential narrative in which pages are drawn almost magnetically into readers’ field of vision. Information may not want (as Stewart Brand once claimed) to be free, but some ideological force—whether God or progress—is usually imagined as causing the written word to spread. Nineteenth-century Evangelicals thus anticipate the providentialism of twentieth-century cybertheorists: “in the claim that information will circulate freely once liberated from the book,” Paul Duguid points out, “information is personified and endowed with the desire to transmit itself” (“Material Matters” 74). Between the self-propelling book of it-narrative and the providentially propelled book of master narratives (whether Christian or techno-utopian) lies a vast middle ground in which human agents take responsibility for forcing printed matter into the right hands. It’s to those agents that the next chapter turns.

Anthropocentrism makes orphans’ hunger for books more recognizable than pocket bibles’ quest for owners. Yet as the traditional dearth of text (and paper) gave way to a scarcity of attention (and shelves), books struggled harder to reach the proper audience. Old problems of production gave way to new problems of distribution: the modern genres to which this chapter turns—religious tracts and junk mail—were impelled less by new manufacturing technologies than by new social networks through which printed matter could be exchanged, donated, requested, accepted, or, increasingly, rejected.

Natalie Davis’s foundational essay subtitled
Books
as
Gifts
in
Sixteenth-Century France
took the gift as the paradigmatic interpersonal transaction. Today, we continue to assume that (as Lewis Hyde puts it) “in a market society . . . getting rather than giving is the mark of a substantial person” (xiii). I want to suggest, in contrast, that in the nineteenth century the book came to feel like a burden. Printed matter was foisted upon, more often than given to; receiving a book now connoted powerlessness as often as privilege. That change doesn’t just respond to the increasing abundance of books themselves; too much information and too much paper were compounded by too much contact with fellow handlers. Every reader is cumbered by an excess of books, and every book by an excess of readers—each overwhelmed in turn by the consciousness that others have touched the same book that he or she is now holding, and thereby gain some hold over him or her.

The Victorians pioneered institutions—whether secular (the post) or religious (the tract society)—that allowed printed matter to be distributed at the expense of someone other than its end user. By disjoining owning from choosing, those transactions challenged Enlightenment assumptions about the relation between reading and identity. Where the secular press trusted print to lift individuals out of their social origin, the niche marketing pioneered by Evangelical publishers and commercial advertisers alike vested it instead with the power to mark age, gender, and class. If the content of tracts interpellated new audiences by matching characters’ demographic to readers’, so did the different material forms that each text took—reprinted on different paper, sold at different price points, distributed in gross and in detail. Even a secular novel as expensive as
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
—rented, not given away; proscribed, not prescribed—could present its characters torn between forming their identity by imitation of fictional persons about whom they read, or by communion and competition with fellow readers, along with fellow owners, fellow handlers, and fellow inscribers of books, whether living or dead.