How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (3 page)

As late as 1711, Pope could gibe of a miscellany published by Bernard Lintot (and containing works of his own):

Lintot’s for gen’ral Use are fit,
For some Folks read, but all Folks ——.

(Pope 280)

The couplet aligns the gap between the many books that are handled and the few that are read with the gap between the few who read books and the many who use them. To reconstruct the hermeneutics of handling is also to situate the book within a larger social world. Since the nineteenth century, activists and scholars alike have assumed that the place to look for the illiterate classes’ relation to printed matter was reading aloud—that is, those moments where the information contained in newspapers overleaps their written medium. Pope directs our attention instead to the converse: those moments where the medium outlives its content.

By the following century, what Pope represents as a subset has become a contrary. At the very moment when the poor are learning to read, the rich are unlearning how to handle—are forgetting, as paper ceases to be taxed and new manufacturing methods substitute cheap wood pulp for expensive linen, how to assess the reuse potential and resale value of pages. Servants continued to eyeball how much animal gelatin had been used to “size” a page (determining whether liquids like ink, and later grease, would sink in or bead up); they knew, therefore, which pages were suitable for sealing food and which for absorbing dirt. Masters, in contrast, now noticed only whether the text was absorbing. Although all folks still ——, not all folks associated that activity with print: memoirists now described Queen Victoria visiting Cambridge “and saying, as she looked over the bridge: ‘What are all those pieces of paper floating down the river?’ To which, with great presence of mind, [Dr. Whewell, the master of Trinity College] replied: ‘These, ma’am, are notices that bathing is forbidden’” (Raverat 34).

Figure I.1. “The Turf,”
Punch
, 18 March 1882, 122.

Between reading and wiping, a range of uses stretches: the social breadth to which Pope’s “gen’ral” alludes is matched by (though not always mapped onto) an equally wide spectrum of practices. If reading can serve different agendas—to save a soul, to form an identity, to do a job, to place a bet, to snub a spouse—handling figures in even more disparate activities.
⁸
Just as bibliographers have taught us that the changes among successive editions do not necessarily constitute decay, so the Victorian novel can teach us to distinguish absence of reading from absence of use.

Not all uses, however, were created equal. The Victorians plotted the book/text distinction onto every axis imaginable: temporal (new books get read, old books handled), sexual (the text as the province of male thinkers, the book as raw material for women’s curlpapers or pie plate liners), generic (the text as the object of piety, the book as the butt of jokes), ethical (the text as an aid to selfhood, the book as a spur to selfishness), social (the text as the business of intellectuals, the book of filthy rich bibliophiles or literally dirty rag-collectors), even disciplinary (the text as the purview of Skimpoleanly aesthetic sensitivities, the book of Gradgrindianly empirical plodders). All that cuts across these otherwise ill-assorted word-pairs is value: in each case, the text is aligned with whichever term happens to be considered superior. A higher-order instance of that logic is that the text is associated with moderation, the book with
extremes. In social terms, the professional middle classes’ rejection of materialism left the book-object in the hands of effete gentry (the owners of country-house libraries as selfish hoarders), rich vulgarians (Manchester manufacturers’ wives who chose books to match their color schemes), or poor illiterates (costermongers who priced a book by the absorbency of its pages). And in historical terms, book fetishism looked forward (to new technologies for facsimile reproduction and nouveaux riches furnishing their houses with bran-new bindings) as well as backward (to country-house collectors ignoring the post-1850 public libraries, or superstitious old women eating the pages of their bibles). What was true for users also held for things. Just as the very rich and the very poor, the excessively scholarly and insufficiently literate, were both imagined to be either above or below reading, so books were faulted as too cheap or too expensive. Terms like “penny dreadful” and “shilling shocker” took a low price as metonymic for literary worthlessness; more counterintuitively, mentions of perfumed or hot-pressed paper did the same with high.

My study starts where Curtius’s foundational survey of “the use of writing and the book in figurative language” leaves off: in intellectual terms, at the end of the Enlightenment; in technological, as the handpress era closed (Curtius). It ends with the midcentury legal and technological developments that cheapened paper, shortening its life cycle and narrowing its affordances. The boundaries of my subject, therefore, are at once technological, legal, and literary- (or sometimes intellectual-) historical. Changes in printing and papermaking technology; innovations in distribution systems; institutional changes in schooling, both sacred and secular; legal changes to copyright and to taxes on knowledge—even if these add up to a coherent narrative, they map less neatly onto the time line of literary history, itself complicated by gaps between production and reception. (No argument about the books the Victorians read can confine itself to texts composed by Victorians.)

The proper nouns that appear in this book’s table of contents form a grudging concession to the unspoken rule that literary-critical monographs must title each chapter after a different author (or in books about a single author, a different text). Although it fits badly with anonymous texts and worse with those (even thicker on the ground in this study) whose authors are named but whose names command no recognition, the convention humors our own protocols of reception—as well as of selection and rejection. With the exception of professional reviewers, people
reading such books often skip straight from the introduction to whichever chapter discusses a text or author that the reader himself happens to be reading or writing about.

In that spirit, some itineraries. Because chapter 1 intertwines an introduction to Victorian debates about media with a survey of (and polemic about) the relation of book history to literary-critical theory and practice, readers interested in methodology should begin at the beginning. Those more interested in the primary texts, however, can easily enough cut straight to the more accessible and more detailed case studies of chapter 2. Husband-wife relations come to the fore there, parent-child in chapter 3, master-servant in chapters 4 through 6. Scholars of reading aloud (and silent listening) may want to skip ahead to chapter 6; bibles figure most prominently in chapters 4, 5, and 6; newspapers in chapters 2, 6, and 7.

Why can realist novels represent the book (the second chapter asks) only at the price of reducing reading, quite literally, to an act? And why does representing reading from the inside (as do the texts discussed in the third) entail abstracting the visible book? What models of causation (the fourth asks) have the nineteenth-century bildungsroman and it-narrative bequeathed to twentieth-century bibliographers and twenty-first-century book historians? The fifth chapter turns to the circulation of free and subsidized print—especially junk mail and religious tracts—among owners and borrowers, givers and receivers, readers and handlers, preservers and destroyers. The sixth asks what relationships the Victorians expected particular copies of a book to establish among their users—whether concurrent, as in reading aloud or subscribing to the same periodical, or sequential, as in secondhand books or association copies. Ending with the end of the book’s life, chapter 7 explores the relation between old texts instantiated in new books (reprinting) and new texts transmitted via old books (marginalia, binder’s waste, and paper recycling).

Books don’t simply mediate a meeting of minds between reader and author. They also broker (or buffer) relationships among the bodies of successive and simultaneous readers—or even between one person who holds the book and others before whose gaze, or over whose dead body, she turns its pages. Ambivalence about circulation runs through these different case studies: untouched books figure as prisoners or wallflowers or clotted blood, but books subjected to too many readers are compared to worn-out prostitutes or knackered horses. The same fictions that credit texts with marking minds blame handlers for marking books. Conservative and radical fiction agree in classifying books as a special category of commodity that can be alienated only at the price of disloyalty. Yet one deplores, and the other celebrates, the intimacies and antagonisms that the book establishes between buyer and seller, lender and borrower,
or even between strangers who handle the same piece of paper unbeknownst to one another. Circulation affects not only relations between persons and books, that is, but also between one person and another.

A second tension runs between the book’s powers to unite and to divide. Books can link their successive readers, owners, and handlers, whether across classes (as in tracts distributed by the rich to the poor, or papers that find their way from the study to the kitchen) or even (as in the case of “association copies” bought or inherited) across the line that divides the living from the dead. Books could just as easily, however, separate individuals (like the husbands and wives who hide from one another behind books and newspapers in chapter 2, or the children of chapter 3 who hide behind books, and within texts, from the adults who jolt them back to their surroundings by hitting them with a book), or separate classes (like the masters and servants of chapters 6 and 7, who handle the same book or newspaper but for different purposes and at different moments of its life cycle). It’s worth emphasizing that this distinction between the book as bridge and the book as wedge does
not
map onto the dichotomy between reception and rejection: on the contrary, withholding a book can assert a relationship (think of a parent denying a child access to a book) as easily as bestowing a book can sever it (the bookseller who gives that child the book he requests is disowning any more personal responsibility for the child’s morals).

The tension between commonality and distinction cuts across genres as different as circulating-library triple-deckers representing middle-class couples and didactic tracts written for and about servants. Midcentury middle-class fiction substituted power struggles within the middle-class family (chapters 2 and 3) for more public debates about working-class literacy (chapters 5 and 6). Yet even as the antagonists in these battles of the books shift from master/servant to husband/wife and stepfamily/stepchild, the question of who has “business in the library” (a phrase echoed across these different contexts) continues to determine who stands inside and outside of the “family”—whether in the older sense of an internally stratified economic entity or the newer affective unit divided by age and gender. In both cases, the self-made reader—whether “made” as a middle-class child develops interiority, or as a working-class person climbs the social ladder—may be represented either with empathetic intimacy or with satirical distance, and this generic choice implies an ideological choice between embedding the book within, or counterposing the text to, social structures.

The self-made reader in turn implies a self-propelling text: to acknowledge how books reached one’s hands is to recognize one’s dependence,
in every sense of that now old-fashioned word. Victorian secular fiction deploys two genres of required reading—school textbooks (chapter 3) and religious tracts (chapters 5 and 6)—as foils to its own claim to be freely chosen, even secretly coveted, hoarded, begged, borrowed, or stolen. Tracts are to the mid-Victorian novel what romance was to its predecessors: the inscribed genre against which it defines itself. Institutions like school and church stand opposite the novel’s putative market, imagined as an aggregate of independent (even rebellious) individuals. By representing teachers foisting grammars, dictionaries, and prize books upon middle-class children, and tract-distributors doing the same to working-class men, the novel presents itself as a commodity driven more by demand than by supply. A different novelistic subgenre, the Evangelical it-narrative (chapter 4), substitutes divine providence as the motor driving the circulation of books, a logic borrowed, surprisingly enough, by the resolutely anticlerical Henry Mayhew to structure his account of paper recycling (chapter 7).

The subgenres discussed in Part I grope for ways to discuss the circulation and handling of books while bracketing their textual content. Those comedies of manners that I call “behaviorist” perform that substitution lexically (by substituting manual phrases like “turned the page” or spatial phrases like “sat with a book before him” for the mental verb “read”) as well as thematically (by representing characters going through the motions of reading or even pretending to read). In novels that more dogmatically prize psychological depth, however, the child who internalizes the content of books at the expense of any awareness of their material or commercial properties stands opposite the adults who throw, display, and sell books with no interest in actually reading them. Seen from the inside, a prompt for absorption; from the outside, a prop for avoidance. Does the book compete with human friendships (as when the metaphorical “companions” that populate a man’s library crowd out his wife and children) or enable them (as when the loan of a bible provides a missionary an excuse to enter a home)?