How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (27 page)

Maria Jane Jewsbury described hers as “an age of books! Of book making! Book reading! Book reviewing! And book forgetting” (quoted in Newlyn 3). “The difficulty of finding something to read in an age when half the world is engaged in writing books for the other half to read is not one of quantity,” noted one journalist in 1893, “so that the question, ‘What shall I read?’ inevitably suggests the parallel query, ‘What shall I not read?’” (“A Few Words About Reading” 226). In
The
Choice
of
Books
, Frederic Harrison, too, presented the problem in negative terms: “the most useful help to reading is to know what we should not read, what we can keep out from that small cleared spot in the overgrown jungle of ‘information.’” Even the jungle soon gives way to the rubbish heap: “I often think that we forget the other side to this glorious view of literature—the misuse of books, the debilitating waste of brain in aimless, promiscuous, vapid reading, or even, it may be, in the poisonous inhalation of mere literary garbage and bad men’s worst thoughts” (1, 3). For decades, alarmists continued to reprint a chart showing that as many books were published in 1868 alone as in the first half of the eighteenth century (Ackland). Reprints such as this themselves compounded the problem.

Where autodidacts’ autobiographies represent a hunger for books, middle-class commentators more often equated reading with indigestion. As George Craik remarked in his classic compendium of exemplary biographies,
The
Pursuit
of
Knowledge
under
Difficulties
, “If one mind be in danger of starving for want of books, another may be surfeited by too many” (22). A decade later, an article in
Victoria
Magazine
presented those problems as mirror images: “Of the underfed, in these days of education of women, education of ploughboys, education of curates, we are sure to hear enough, but of the sufferings of their scarcely less pitiable antipodes, whose complaint is overfeeding, we are not so likely to be well informed” (Butterworth 500). An 1869 article found “as curious cases of moral delirium, dyspepsia, and decay from the abuse of mental stimulants as there are records of physical injury from gluttony” (“Excessive Reading”). Like food, books had to be carried, stored, preserved, maintained: Ruskin compared knowledge to “at best, the pilgrim’s burden
or the soldier’s panoply, often a weariness to them both” (
The
Works
of
John
Ruskin
66).

Nothing new about any of these images: the caricaturists who represent Brougham thrusting the
Penny
Magazine
down readers’ throats with a broomstick draw on analogies between teaching and force-feeding that stretch back at least to Rabelais and Montaigne, by way of Jeremy Collier’s axiom that “a man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating, as wiser by always reading.”
¹
Newer technologies did replenish the stock of metaphors: references to Brougham’s “steam-intellect society” riff more topically on steam-printing, introduced by the
Times
during the Napoleonic wars. Such figures of speech shouldn’t obscure the fact that the speed and cost of the printing process mattered less than the cost of raw materials. The reduction of paper taxes in 1836 and their abolition in 1861, together with the advent of machine-made paper in the early decades of the century and of esparto grass and wood pulp in its second half, cheapened paper almost as dramatically as digital storage has cheapened in our lifetime. Paper production went from 2,500 tons in 1715 to 75,000 tons in 1851; measured per person, it shot up from 2.5 pounds per year in 1800 to 8.5 in 1860 (Welsh,
George
Eliot
and
Blackmail
38). Between 1841 and 1911, similarly, the number of persons employed by the paper, printing, and publishing trades increased sixfold (Vincent,
The
Rise
of
Mass
Literacy
82). Where once paper was the scarce and valuable resource, now time looked in shorter supply—along with shelf space and room in the wastepaper basket.

As a result, the long-standing search for technologies to make literary production more efficient shifted to the consumption side. Francis Jeffrey replaced speed-writing by speed-reading when he speculated that “if we continue to write and rhyme at the present rate for 200 years longer, there must be a new art of short-hand reading invented—or all reading will be given up in despair” (472). In 1893, Herbert Maxwell contrasted “the number of books that a single bookworm” could consume (9,000, in his generous estimate) with the number produced (20,000 annually added, in a phrase that once again invoked furniture, “to the shelves of the British Museum”)—without even counting “the vastly greater mass of journalistic literature which consumes part of everyone’s time and attention” (1047). It’s true that periodicals multiplied more rapidly than books: Simon Eliot calculates from tax returns that in the first half of the nineteenth century the production of stamped periodicals increased fivefold (
Some
Patterns
and
Trends
in
British
Publishing
78–86). One reason was the abolition of the newspaper tax in 1855. The end of “taxes on knowledge” opened the floodgates not (just) for knowledge but for ephemera.
²
Periodicals were blamed for crowding out more durable works: competition between the two was taken for granted in comparisons like the
calculation that “at the end of the year [the
Times
] is comprised in a book larger than all the classics and all the standard histories of the world put together” (L. Stephen, “Journalism” 60). In 1825, Charles Lamb filled a few column inches of the
Times
by comparing books to Sisyphus’s boulder: “No reading can keep pace with the writing of this age, but we pant and toil after it as fast as we can. I smiled to see an honest lad, who ought to be at trap ball, labouring up hill against this giant load” (C. Lamb, “Readers Against the Grain,” 238).

Newspapers and magazines had only themselves to blame, since their own pages were padded out with hackneyed statistics about the number of newspapers and magazines. Indeed, the
Pall
Mall
Gazette
for 12 January 1886 proposed marking Victoria’s Jubilee by a year in which “the literary soil should be allowed to lie fallow,” with an embargo on the production of new literature—except, of course, for newspapers (quoted in Mays 189). Printed attacks on printed matter always risk self-referentiality, if not quixotism. “We find the ‘Quarterly Review’ anathematising circulating libraries with great force,” notes an 1871 article titled “Circulating Libraries,” but “this is very hard on libraries now-a-days, especially as no inconsiderable number of the ‘Quarterly Review’ is taken in by Mr Mudie” (Friswell 519). Conduct books remarked that trashy reading took time away from outdoor activity, but neglected to count the hours eaten up by their own perusal.

W. H. Wills estimated in 1850 that the daily papers produced in 1848 added up to “1,446,150,000 square feet of printed surface”; a decade later, another journalist observed that “there are persons who will count up the number of acres which a single number of the
Times
would cover if all the copies were spread out flat, or illustrate the number of copies by telling us how long the same weight of coal would serve an ordinary household . . . Every morning, it is said, a mass of print, containing as much matter as a thick octavo volume, is laid on our breakfast-tables” (Wills 238; L. Stephen, “Journalism” 60). The comparison with coal emphasized the material aspect of paper but also lent it a factitious ephemerality: newspapers may count as consumables, but, unlike coal, they don’t consume themselves with use.

As a result, readers had to cope not just with new material being added to the old, but also with the survival of existing books and the reprinting of existing texts. The
Quarterly
’s review of the seventh edition of the
Encyclopedia
Britannica
(1842) complains of “the imperishable nature of books, the cheapness with which they are now produced, and the rapidity and extent of their production.”

Unfortunately for authors there is no epidemic among books, to thin their ranks, and render necessary a new supply; and the fire-proof
inventions of the present day extinguish the hopes that were sometimes realised from the timber boards of our books and the wooden carpentry of our libraries. There is, therefore, no law of mortality by which the number of books is regulated like that of animals. (“The Encyclopedia Britannica” 71)

In a review that also critiques the
Britannica
’s article on fire, the comparison of library collections to animal populations inverts a Promethean logic: far from symbolizing enlightenment, fire appears here as a destroyer of cumbersome knowledge. Libraries expand as geometrically as populations (books beget books), but books lack animals’ fixed life span.
³
In fact, the
Quarterly
itself confesses to contributing to the problem, to which the
Britannica
’s miniaturizing strategies adumbrate a solution:

We have before us now an octavo volume, containing about 1150 pages of double columns, and printed on paper so thin that the thickness of the volume (though not beaten) is only two inches, and in so small a type that the quantity of matter that it contains is equal to above TWELVE NUMBERS of this Review, supposed to be all printed in its ordinary type . . . A bookcase might thus contain a large library, and a moderate one might be packed in a traveller’s portmanteau. Books now forwarded by tardy conveyances might be sent by post . . . These processes too might be aided by a stenographic representation of the terminations of many of our long words, and even by a contraction of the words themselves; and in the spirit of these changes authors might be led to think more closely, and to express their thoughts in the shortest and fewest words. (“The Encyclopedia Britannica” 72)

Reprints form the problem, but also the solution. In fantasies of epidemics and fires, the library becomes an image at once for comprehensiveness and for permanence. After comparing the air to “one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered,” Charles Babbage added that “no motion impressed by natural causes, or by human agency, is ever obliterated” (37). The backlist could crush readers: as Jack Goody observed in a different context, “literate society, merely by having no system of elimination, no ‘structural amnesia,’ prevents the individual from participating fully in the total cultural tradition” (58).

Worries about disposal may help explain why Victorian discussions of the book so often take on a ghoulish tinge. Tomes as tombs: Mudie’s Circulating Library justified “selection” (i.e., censorship) on the grounds that “no library could provide space for all the books that might be written, and as bad and stupid novels soon die and are worthless after death—no vault could be found capacious enough to give them decent
burial” (Mudie 451). “Burial” was no figure of speech: short on shelf space and forced to stock multiple copies of novels whose backlist value dropped quickly, Mudie’s resorted to

a charnel-house in this establishment, where literature is, as it were, reduced to its old bones. Thousands of volumes thus read to death are pitched together in one place. But would they not do for the butterman? was our natural query. Too dirty for that. Not for old trunks? Much too greasy for that. What were they good for, then? For manure! Thus, when worn out as food for the mind, they are put to the service of producing food for our bodies!” (Wynter 278)

Burial wasn’t, of course, always so literal. Gladstone’s essay on library design reluctantly envisages movable shelves described by analogy to a “book-cemetery,” “what I will not scruple to call interment”: “The word I have used is dreadful; but also dreadful is the thing. To have our dear old friends stowed away in catacombs, or like wine-bottles in bins: the simile is surely lawful . . . [but] it can hardly be contemplated without a shudder at a process so repulsive applied to the best beloved among inanimate objects” (386–87).

The metaphor of companionship that should be familiar from the previous chapter sounded comforting when Gladstone first deployed its most hackneyed form: “In a room well filled with [books], no one has felt or can feel solitary. Second to none, as friends to the individual.” But once those friends are imagined to be dead, the tone shifts; the body to which the book is compared becomes a wine bottle, the person to which the text is compared a corpse. Once the body replaces the soul as the vehicle of the metaphor, mortal book upstages immortal text—or rather, a book whose inconveniently bulky body remains after the soul has departed. If “the binding of a book is the dress, with which it walks out into the world” and “the paper, type, and ink are the body, in which its soul is domiciled,” then old books deserve to be treated with as much reverence as dead bodies (385).

Or as little, for a fourth analogy is less respectful. “The artist needed for the constructions required [i.e., the movable shelving] will not be so much a librarian as a warehouseman” (396). To compare a librarian with a manual laborer is also to question what sets the book apart from other, nontextual objects. And as chapter 7 will show, it’s at the end of the book’s life that its physical bulk becomes most visible. Once advances in papermaking drove down the cost of production, disposal became a problem for genres as various as religious tracts and blue books. One MP complained: “[I] object to having tons of papers, which are never opened, sent to my lodgings . . . [I can] not exchange them for books, for that would be selling them; [I can] not burn them, for that would be
voted a nuisance” (1865, quoted in Frankel 308). Paradoxically, the resale value of blue books’ raw material made matters worse: Edwin Chadwick campaigned to substitute octavo for folio as the standard format for official papers on the grounds that larger formats—especially useful as wrapping—encouraged waste and overproduction (Frankel 314). Two decades later, a Stationery Office committee would debate how to dispose of unsold stocks of Record Office publications, in language that uncannily echoed contemporaneous arguments about cremation in the
Lancet
: like human bodies, books needed to be disposed of (McKitterick, “Organizing Knowledge in Print” 557).