How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (30 page)

More surprisingly, some within the Evangelical press itself echoed freethinkers’ accusations of unfair competition. Missionaries, in fact, were the first to identify books as the locus of two problems that some twenty-first-century commentators imagine unique to digital media: whether content can be distributed more effectively through gift, sale, or rental, and what role social networks should play in that transmission. Even the native colporteurs paid by mission societies to hawk pamphlets complained that charitable English ladies who distributed tracts for free were undercutting their customer base: information overload was compounded by what can only be called distributor overload (Manning). Hawkers present themselves, too, as torn between the desire to give tracts away and the duty to charge a price: the same colporteurs who describe subsidizing tracts out of their own pockets are also capable of self-consciously resisting the temptation, like one who confesses the urge “to return the 50 centimes, and thus enable this good woman to free herself from her debts, paying for the New Testament out [of my?] own funds; but knowing by experience that the Lord regards [* illegible] sacrifice that is made for His name, I felt that I ought not to [deprive?] this female of a great blessing which is in store for her” (
Fifty-Sixth Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society
18). This model invested paying for a book with as much significance as reading it: where the secular press represents the book’s imbrication in the market compromising its textual value (think back to Ranthorpe, Mr. Brownlow, or David forgetting how much his books cost), the Evangelical press takes the commercial transaction as a guarantor for a more than commercial value.

Distributors of tracts and bibles faced a double bind, as worried that recipients would value the book for the wrong reasons as that they would refuse to value it at all. Or more precisely—since in times and places where paper is scarce, no book lacks market value—they worried that its pages would be perceived either as something more than a carrier of text,
or something less. As something more, because Protestants’ eagerness to distribute bibles could be interpreted as idolatry. Instead of “Behold the Book, fall ye down and worship it,” Alexander Duff insisted, converts must learn to “behold your God revealing himself through the medium of his written word; fall ye down and worship him” (quoted in Viswanathan 51). But also as something less, because the fear that natives would exalt what should be a “medium” to a “fetish” or subject it to “pharasaical idolatry” coexisted with Duff’s equally sharp anxiety that free books might decompose into wastepaper: that pages of the Bible could be spotted wrapping goods in the bazaar, or worse (Viswanathan 51). Even Protestant missionaries acknowledged that “many a tract and many a Bible portion is torn or used for window-panes” (“Foreign Missions at Home” 231). One describes residents of a New York boardinghouse blaming him for wanting to “‘leave some waste paper,’ as they denominate tracts and Bibles” (“The Sailors and Their Hardships on Shore” 99).
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More surprisingly, distributors themselves could play on the equation of tracts with rubbish, as when Canon Christopher was witnessed “carrying to the General Post-office in St Aldate’s a large waste-paper basket full of tracts addressed to Members of the University” (Reynolds and Thomas 233).

In 1879, the assistant secretary of the British and Foreign Bible Society enjoined his listeners to

ask any Missionary from India or China what he thinks of flooding those empires with Scriptures, regardless of the power of the people to read and understand, and he will reply that the Bible distributed after this fashion will be sure to be dishonoured, will be collected for waste paper, or at best be valued as a charm, and a true thirst for God’s Word be postponed. So has it been in lands nearer home. (C. Reed 235)

According to one report of the Christian Vernacular Education Society in Allahbad, too, “It was objected at the Conference that to give 50 per cent discount in North India, where tracts and Scriptures are large and cheap, might lead to their sale as waste paper. This, it must be admitted, is no imaginary danger. One-third was recommended on Scriptures and other religious books, with 25 per cent on school books and picture books. In Madras the sale of Scriptures as waste paper is largely guarded against by printing them on pages of so small a size that they are almost useless for bazaar purposes” (Brodhead 33). Paradoxically, books that are too valuable face the greatest risk of destruction. A contributor to the
Missionary
Register
complained that the average native accepted a bible for no better reason than “that he may store it up as a curiosity; sell it for a few pice; or use it for waste paper.”
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“Storing up,” “wasting,” “selling”: abuses of the book are easier to name than the proper use—reading—which, in
missionary publications as much as in Trollope’s novels, dwindles to a vanishing point.

The right price proved frustratingly elusive: low enough to undercut competing secular publications, but high enough to prevent bibles’ being bought for resale as waste. One clergyman in India remarks that “although the price charged is extremely small (less than a halfpenny a copy), yet it is sufficient to prevent the book being sold for waste paper, and it appears, therefore, to be a test of the sincerity of the desire felt by the purchasers to read it” (“Circulation of the Scriptures” 309). In Hyderabad in 1860 the Reverend A. Burn reports, “In the beginning of the year (March last), believing that our objects would be best served by getting our books read at any rate, we lowered all the prices, setting only a value on them sufficient to prevent their being bought for waste paper.” Another missionary gives the following cheerful testimony from Lahore:

I have been delighted with the success the attempt to sell books has met with. I had two men engaged in the work last month, who succeeded in realising 7 rupees, 4 annas, 2 pice for the books sold. We have affixed very low prices, only six pice for a single Gospel; this is no more than the value of the waste paper, which is all we can hope to get. The books, in my opinion, are more valued and read than they were before, and the demand appears to be steadily on the increase. I do not think that they are often bought for the paper and binding now, as the Urdu books are more in demand than the Hindi and Gurmukhi, which would not be the case, if they were purchased for that purpose. (
Fifty-Sixth Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society
120)

In “lands nearer home” (as Reed might have put it), Henry Mayhew notes in 1850 that “‘the gentlemen who manage the Ragged School . . . make [the children] presents of Testaments and Bibles’ (I find by the Reports that they are sold)” (Mayhew,
Voices
of
the
Poor
15).

One missionary in China, a member of the British and Foreign Bible Society named Dyer, attacks what he calls distribution “by free gift,” which too many of his colleagues advocate “because they consider the Gospel should be without charge.” In passing, he alludes to what seem to be standard tricks of the (non)trade, such as blackmailing shopkeepers into buying bibles:

Advantage is taken of a man’s fear of loss, as for instance, the staying in a shop unduly long. The crowd that presses in to see the foreigner may cause the proprietor to purchase, in order to get rid of him, lest any in the crowd should steal. To take advantage of this would, of course, be exceedingly wrong, and the result that might be expected, a bias against, or even hatred of the book.

Just as wrong is “any statement concerning the books which would lead to their being looked upon as a kind of charm.” Yet in a veiled reference to wastepaper, Dyer adds that when books are sold “there is much less fear of any misuse” of them; but distribution “by loan” has advantages of its own, since a missionary visiting to exchange a Bible “portion” for the subsequent installment can ask, “Understandest thou what thou readest?” (118–20). Replacing sale by loan also means replacing a punctual transaction with an ongoing social relationship—a point as important to Victorian missionaries as it is to marketers of digitized music or e-books today.
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The word “waste” haunts every account of Evangelical book distribution. The same
Missionary
Register
article adds that “an indiscriminate distribution of the Scriptures, to everyone who may say he wants a Bible, can be little less than a waste of time, a waste of money and a waste of expectations.” Macaulay denigrated Arabic and Sanskrit texts by estimating that “twenty three thousand volumes, most of them folios or quartos, fill the libraries or rather the
lumber
rooms
of this body. The Committee contrive to get rid of some portion of their vast Oriental stock by giving books away. But they cannot give so fast as they print. About twenty thousand rupees a year are spent in adding fresh
waste
paper
to [this] hoard.” (T. B. Macaulay “Minute on Indian Education” 170; my emphasis). At best good for “waste paper,” these “books are of less value than the paper on which they were printed was when it was blank.” Just as he contrasts education in native languages (which he claims students must be bribed to undergo) against English-medium education (for which students pay), so Macaulay contrasts the Arabic and Sanskrit books—which circulate either as gifts or as waste—with the English-language books that change hands for money. Circulation through the market thus comes to be aligned with secular content: the absence of both taints Eastern literature as much as Christian tracts. “They cannot give so fast as they print”: in the hands of the son of Zachary Macaulay, one of the original backers of the Religious Tract Society, the “free gift” becomes indistinguishable from trash.

When Dyer declared that “the people are much more likely to value what they have paid for,” he wasn’t simply noticing that owning doesn’t necessarily imply reading; more strongly, he speculated that strategies conducive to the former can discourage the latter. In this hypothesis, giving books away free isn’t just ineffective, but positively harmful. If we took seriously the trope of tract as medicine, we could see Evangelical publishers as the forebears of those twenty-first-century public health researchers who debate whether drugs distributed for a nominal fee are likelier to be effective than those given free (Shiv, Carmon, and Ariely; Cohen and Dupas). In both cases, the debate plays out most sharply with
goods that flow from center to periphery; and in both cases, the belief that a particular category of good is too important to put a price on collides with the observation that end users are more likely to vest trust where they’ve already invested money.

Yet as those researchers have also argued, in the opposite direction, a high resale value can also risk diverting the subsidized goods from the uses for which they were distributed. Christian missionaries in India discovered that the paper of their books and tracts “could be put to a range of practical uses—from wrapping medicines to lining baskets carrying scented oil bottles, and even flying kites” (Ghosh 43).
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Even within Britain, the Cheap Repository Tract Society found hawkers eager to distribute subsidized publications because nontextual uses guaranteed their resale value: as William St Clair points out, “the chapmen’s insistence from the start that the tracts should be printed on soft paper, rather than the smoother book paper favoured by the promoters, suggests that they were well aware of the ignoble fate to which they would soon be consigned” (354). And a tract-writer herself describes a child heaping “a few sticks and cinders on a spark of fire communicated to the torn lead of a Bible; given probably by some compassionate visitor to the wretched woman [her stepmother], who received it for the sake of the accompanying shilling, and then used it as so much waste-paper” (Tonna 161). Subsidized or donated books run a particular risk of nontextual use: compare the outrage that erupted in winter 2009 when the British newspaper
Metro
—itself a free giveaway devoid of market value—reported that old-age pensioners were buying up secondhand books from charity shops because they were cheaper than coal to burn (Erwin).
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The logical extension of Dyer’s argument for distribution by installments was to misdescribe gifts as loans: Howsam shows that although the BFBS was founded on the principle of never giving books away, the cholera epidemic of 1831 prompted the realization that dying people might not be able to pay for books. The compromise solution consisted of cheap copies marked “loan stock,” which were never in fact reclaimed out of fear that they could become a vector for spreading cholera. The BFBS judged it unwise to collect books loaned “among that class of person who from their circumstances & habit of life will be generally found most exposed to the ravages of this and other diseases many of which are highly infectious & likely to prove communicable by books that have been for some time in their possession” (65–66).

Even Dyer acknowledges that the book’s base material properties can paradoxically ensure the transmission of its content: “Be it that the book remains unread, that it is used by the women for putting their silks in. What then? Is it impossible or unlikely that in the course of time some visitor should come in, take up the book, read?” (121) Yet as the Reverend
J. L. Nevius points out in a response to Dyer’s paper, “the promiscuous sale of the Bible, and pressing it upon those who do not want it,” can defeat its own ends: “Mr. Dyer’s paper speaks of the special trials and insults to which Bible agents are exposed from those who hate them and their work. It is well for us to enquire whether much of this abuse may not be a direct consequence of disregarding the specific command of our Saviour: ‘Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn again and rend you’” (Dyer 130). One tract by Mrs. Sherwood responds specifically to that threat, acknowledging that when its Christian heroine gives a book to an Indian swindler trying to propitiate her, “perhaps my reader may be inclined to ask in this place, ‘Was not this well-meaning lady overhasty in not stopping to consider somewhat more the person on whom she was bestowing this precious gift, and was she not putting herself in the case of one who
casts
his
pearls
before
swine?
’” The reader is instructed, however, that a different quotation is more relevant: “
cast
thy
bread
upon
the
waters, and thou shalt find it after many days
” (M. Sherwood 135).
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