How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (31 page)

Resale value, as we’ll see in chapter 7, can preserve as well as destroy. In
London
Labour
and
the
London
Poor
, the pious remark that “Mr. Mayhew is . . . afraid that the distribution of [religious] tracts among the profligate is a pure waste of good wholesome paper and print” is later undercut by the speculation that “could the well-intentioned distributors of such things . . . see what is done with the papers they leave, they would begin to perceive, perhaps, that the enormous sum of money thus expended . . . might be more profitably applied.”
²²
It’s only because used paper is always good for a scatological laugh that Mayhew can leave “what is done” with tracts to the imagination.

One bible distributor whose constituency included the dustmen of the Paddington Dust Wharf District worried about the resale value of her wares: “A Jewess who I saw was very intelligent” tells that author “that if I
gave
my Bibles to the Jews they would, the next moment, sell them.” “I was to tell my friends that she, a Dutch Jewess, told me so in kindness. The Jews knew that they had the truth, and were not like ignorant Christians, bowing down to images of wood and stone and kissing them, &c.”
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The missionary is reassured, however, when “in several of their rooms I saw a picture of Moses holding the two tables of the Law.” The vertical paper bearing an image of a vertical stone becomes continuous with the horizontal pages that the Christian distributes. Yet in a world where paper is put to relentlessly material uses, as in the house of a weaver whom L.N.R. visits where “the holes in the ceiling were pasted up with newspapers,” “bowing down” to the bible is no less dangerous than treating it as one more item to be pawned.

If the bible-publishing industry reduced a priceless text to a commodity, prize books posed the opposite problem: how to deal with objects that should be subject to the laws of the market but on which no end user would spend her own money. Often described as the first category of objects to be marketed specifically for gift giving—Victorian annuals sport titles like
The
New
Year’s Gift
—books were given by middle-class parents not only to their own children but to their social inferiors, whether in the form of austere tracts or showy volumes (Nissenbaum 143). Although the practice itself was hardly new, the spread of schooling (by 1870, 3.5 million pupils were enrolled in English Sunday schools) ensured that “reward books” were increasingly produced and marketed as such (Ledger-Lomas 338; Laqueur 113–18). From 1810 onward, the RTS catalog categorized certain titles as “reward books to the children of Sunday-schools,” where good-conduct tickets could be exchanged for tracts that not only represented characters’ good behavior but also attested to their owners’ (Reynolds 191; Bratton 17).

As the downward spread of schooling expanded the reach of prize giving, reward books became especially prominent in poor households, where they constituted a higher proportion of total books owned. Charlotte Yonge lamented that “the usual habit is to choose gay outsides and pretty pictures, with little heed to the contents, but it should be remembered that the lent book is ephemeral, read in a week and passed on, while the prize remains, is exhibited to relatives and friends, is read over and over, becomes a resource in illness, and forms part of the possessions to be handed on to the next generation.” She adds that “weakness and poverty of thought should be avoided, especially as these books may fall into the hands of clever, ungodly men, and serve to excite their mockery” (
What
Books
to
Lend
and
What
to
Give
10–11). Yonge’s advice emphasizes that books owned by working-class people will pass through more phases of existence than do books designed for their betters. Like the narrator of
The
Story
of
a
Pocket
Bible
, the hypothetical prize book is owned first by a child and then by an adult, first by a believer and next by a scoffer. To target a readership too precisely (as we’ll see in a moment) was to ignore how many times books changed hands.

Yonge’s stricture on “gay outsides” reminds us, too, that the very tracts that encouraged their wearers to don plain but serviceable clothes were themselves made of cheap paper, expensively bound: unlike for most other books, the outside accounted for a higher share of production costs than the inside (P. Scott 220). In an age where books were expected to critique the consumerism that they had once exemplified, prize books (shoddily written and gaudily bound) posed an even greater embarrassment than tracts (whose production values at least matched the poor quality of their literary style). In fact, the protectiveness toward shabby
books that we saw in the previous chapter finds its mirror image in recipients’ eagerness to rid themselves of fancy presentation copies: Arthur Ransome points out that “sumptuous volumes are always easiest to part with; a ragged, worn old thing, especially if it is small, tugs at our feelings, so that we cannot let it go, whereas a school prize or an elegant present—away with it” (142). Remember Mozley’s declaration that “the book thus influential came to [the child] by a sort of chance, through no act of authority or intention”: to receive a book from a teacher or parent strips reading of its transgressive force.

The problem wasn’t just the production value of prize books, but also their mode of distribution. Books designed as gifts for middle-class children punctured the myth of the self-made reader that we saw in chapter 3. Presented in front of an audience rather than devoured in secret, reward volumes disjoined reading from self-determination. Gender and class alike could determine whether books were chosen by, or forced upon, the reader: one middle-class woman, for example, remembers that her older brothers’ “[book] prizes fell into my keeping, handed to me in disgust” (Hughes 61). And age combines with those two categories to ensure that a grown-up man like the brickmaker in
Bleak
House
should feel particularly infantilized by having his reading matter selected by a “School lady, Visiting lady, Reading lady, Distributing lady”:

Have I read the little book wot you left? No, I an’t read the little book wot you left. There an’t nobody here as knows how to read it; and if there wos, it wouldn’t be suitable to me. It’s a book fit for a babby, and I’m not a babby. If you was to leave me a doll, I shouldn’t nuss it. (132)
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Part of what makes Mrs. Pardiggle disturbing is that she’s anything but (in the words of the previous chapter) a “silent messenger”: far from slipping into places where a human body can’t penetrate, the book she proffers provides an occasion for rather noisily embodied humans to poke into other humans’ houses. Equally significant, however, is that the brickmaker’s parody of the catechistic form of tracts rejects the double degradation of being associated with children and females. No “cottage woman,” Yonge notes, “likes a book manifestly for children lent to themselves”; yet Yonge’s own annotated catalog of books suitable for giving away remarks of one title, “May be useful where children or servants fear a haunted house” (
What
Books
to
Lend
and
What
to
Give
8, 24). “Children” are interchangeable with “servants” not simply because both are ignorant and superstitious—a commonality that results in part from servants’ telling
oral
ghost stories to their masters’ children—but because both depend on others to select and supply
printed
books for them. The involuntary listening to stories echoes the involuntary receiving of books: children “should never be terrified with nonsensical stories of ghosts,”
Ann Taylor writes in
The
Present
of
a
Mother
to
a
Servant
(1816), “unless you wish to render them as unhappy about such things as you may have been, and perhaps still are” (quoted in Steedman 235). The middle-class adult’s past is the servant’s present—when it comes to books as much as to oral traditions. The working-class man who has books thrust upon him stands opposite the middle-class child who seizes his own books independently of any curriculum. On the one hand, Mrs. Pardiggle’s tracts; on the other, the romances in the Copperfields’ lumber room.

Free print reminds us that where booksellers fulfilled the orders of middle-class adults, most readers—whether young, female, or working-class—had to submit to the literary direction of others. The same belongings that allowed financially independent adults to stamp their identity onto bookcases and sofa tables were tainted for middle-class children by association with the teacher or parent, and for working-class adults by association with the district visitor. Tracts, reward volumes, and advertising circulars all contradicted print’s claim to individualize its users.

The Protestant overtones of that claim may help explain why tract societies show such ambivalence about bunching readers into market segments. On the one hand, Evangelical groups pioneered niche marketing long before commercial advertisers began to copy them. One of the earliest sets of instructions for tract distribution explains that they should be “adapted to various situations and conditions . . . When an address is particular, and directed to a specified situation, it comes home to the man’s bosom, who sees himself described . . . Hence the propriety and necessity of Tracts for the young and for the aged, for the children of propriety and of affliction” (Bogue 13). According to a later chronicler, tracts were variously crafted “for seamen and soldiers; others for person in particular situations, as prisoners, attendants on pleasure fairs and races, patients in hospitals, the sick, etc. . . . Thirty-two tracts most suitable for the aged are in large type” (Jones 118). Jones’s history is itself divided into sections such as “Books for the Young,” “The Road Labourer,” “The Hospital Patient,” “The Showman.” “Jewish tracts” meant tracts for Jews, not by them. Even Jones’s tables adding up numbers of books sold are broken down by audience:

Emigrants 641,639
Soldiers, sailors etc. 1,622,661
Sabbath-breakers 1,059,590
Prisoners 106,303
Hospitals 60,924
Workhouses 68,836
Railroad men 447,407
Foreigners in England 50,742

The RTS annual reports break grants down into tracts for “Soldiers, sailors, rivermen,” “Patients in hospitals,” “railway labourers,” “foreigners in England,” “fairs,” “races,” and so on. In this sense, tract societies blazed the trail that newspapers would follow in dividing their material into a fashion section for women, a comics page for children, and a sport section for men. The directiveness of tracts, which explicitly addressed particular readers, stood opposite the studious neutrality of the bibles distributed by the BFBS, whose lack of notes or commentary was designed to avoid slotting their implied reader into any particular sectarian identity.

On the other hand, the Religious Tract Society worried that publications targeted too precisely could draw invidious distinctions. Remember the narrator of
The
Story
of
a
Pocket
Bible
“recounting the duties of the various classes of persons to whom I had messages to deliver, and among other things I had something to say to servants. ‘Servants,’ I said, ‘obey in all things your masters.’” (Sargent 38). Yet that narrator’s reluctance to be pulled off the shelf by the duster-wielding servant provides a reminder that what’s presented as a principle of inclusion (servants get to have their very own books, all to themselves) can also signal exclusion (servants are not to share their masters’). In 1851, the prospectus for a new RTS magazine declares explicitly that

Avoiding the pernicious principle of creating a distinct literature for each of the different sections of society, there will be no ostentatious parade of condescension in the choices of topics or the mode of treating them; but animated by feelings of pure catholicity, “THE LEISURE HOUR” will seek to utter sentiments which shall meet an equally quick response in the parlour and the workshop, the hall and the cottage . . . the whole forming a miscellany aiming to be highly attractive in itself, and one which the Christian parent and employer may safely place in the hands of those who are under his influence. (“Prospectus for the Leisure Hour”)

It remains unclear whether the resident of hall and parlor is expected to read the magazine herself, or merely to place it in others’ hands. What is clear is that the influence of texts on their readers is doubled here by the influence of “parents and employers” on children and workers—no matter whether their authority derives from class or age.

Two decades later, a magazine article by Charlotte Yonge identified market segmentation as the most pernicious innovation of modern publishing. Yonge lumps books “for children or the poor” under the category of “what may be called class-literature,” whose development she dates to the beginning of her century. Her neologism registers the historical specificity of a model in which “every one writes books
for
some one: books for children, books for servants, books for poor men, poor women, poor boys, and poor girls. It is not enough to say ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ but the merchant must be edified by the tale of a fraudulent banker, the schoolboy by hearing how seven cherries were stolen, the servants must be told how the wicked cook hid her mistress’s ring in the innocent scullery-maid’s box” (“Children’s Literature: Part III” 450).
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In her book of advice for parish visitors,
What
Books
to
Lend
and
What
to
Give
, Yonge insists more explicitly that “there is no reason against giving details about persons in different stations of the life from that of those who received them, and in fact they are often preferred . . . A book labeled ‘A tale for—’ is apt to carry a note of warning to the perverse spirits of those to whom it is addressed” (12). Her own list of books recommended to read aloud, lend, and distribute in parish work includes a chapter on “drawing-room stories,” that is, representations of life in a higher rank—although a mixed message is conveyed by the very fact that this chapter is separate.