How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (32 page)

None of this is to say that religious tracts had any monopoly on the attempt to align the identity of characters with the identity of readers. Secular publishers were quicker to recognize, however, that aspiration could trump identification. Yonge’s critique echoes Margaret Oliphant’s observation about cheap literature:

If any one supposes that here, in this special branch of literature provided for the multitude, anything about the said multitude is to be found, a more entire mistake could not be imagined . . . An Alton Locke may find a countess to fall in love with him, but is no hero for the sempstress, who makes her romance out of quite different materials; and whereas we can please ourselves with Mary Barton, our poor neighbors share no such humble taste . . . It is not because their own trials are shadowed—their own sentiments expressed—their own life illustrated by the fictitious representation before them, that our humble friends love their weekly story-telling. When the future historians of this century seek information about the life and manners of our poorer classes, he will find no kind of popular print so entirely destitute of the details he seeks as are those penny miscellanies which are solely read by the poor. (207)

Oliphant herself slots class into the place occupied by age in Dr. Johnson’s famous remark

“Babies do not want . . . to hear about babies; they like to be told of giants and castles, and of somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their little minds.” When in answer [Hester Thrale] would urge the numerous editions and quick sale of Tommy Prudent or Goody Two Shoes: “Remember always (said he) that the parents
buy
the books, and that the children never read them.” (Piozzi 14)

Johnson anticipates Oliphant and Yonge in linking two apparently unrelated phenomena: the coincidence of readers’ status with characters’, and the gap between buyer and end user.

Historical hindsight makes it easier to see a higher-order association: that the structure of arguments about children’s identification with literary characters can be seamlessly slotted into arguments about working-class readers’ identification with literary characters. The missing link, as Dickens’s bricklayer perceives, is that neither audience chooses its own reading. When Charles Knight accused “the learned and the aristocratic” who “prattle about bestowing the blessings of education” of “talking to thinking beings . . . in the language of the nursery” (
Passages
of
a
Working
Life
During
Half
a
Century
243), he was referring not just to the style of tracts but also to their distribution method. Like children’s books, tracts addressed a double audience: the buyer didn’t coincide with the reader. And in both cases, the distributor disciplined rather than fulfilling the end user’s desires.
²⁶

Like the adult who forces books about goody-goody children upon young readers, the tract-distributor who tries to wean servants away from aspirational romances of high life takes the moral value of reading to inhere not just in the content of the text itself (in which case children could just as easily become virtuous by reading about sanctimonious adults) but in the degree of overlap between readers’ and characters’ identity. For twelve-year-olds to read about twenty-year-olds, or maids about marquises, was to engage in aspirational escapism; for bad children to read about good children or godless barrow women to read about pious barrow women counted instead as a spiritual exercise.

Yet a logic that put the “self” back into self-improvement inevitably came into conflict with the secular defense of fiction reading that valued identification precisely as an escape from egotism through the enlargement of the sympathies. “It is the endeavour to hold up a mirror to each variety of reader of his or her way of life,” Yonge continues, “as if there were no interest beyond it, and nothing else could be understood or cared for, that we think narrowing and weakening. If it be true that imagination
is really needful to give the power of doing as we would be done by, surely it is better to have models set before us not immediately within our own range” (“Children’s Literature: Part III” 450).

Yonge shrewdly diagnoses two contradictory assumptions that structure the genre. First, a logical contradiction, because the same readers who are expected to identify across species (in texts featuring talking animals) or even with inanimate objects (in it-narratives) are presumed incapable of crossing the finer lines separating children from adults, men from women, or rich from poor. Second, a moral contradiction, because the metaphor of “hold[ing] up a mirror” points to the narcissism inherent in an act supposed to foster selflessness. “When sympathizing with the heroine let it be with
her
, not with yourself under her name,” warned the children’s writer Mrs. Molesworth. “Nothing is more dwarfing and enervating than to make all you read into a sort of looking-glass” (454).
²⁷

The moral ambiguities of both forms of other-directedness catalyzed by books—defining one’s identity by imitation of characters’, or by association with other readers’—find their fullest expression in a novel whose scale, audience, and doctrinal stance (or lack thereof) might appear to place it worlds apart from these cheap tracts. The new copies of the three volumes of
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
that went on sale for a guinea and a half in 1860 presented their readers with representations of books being read, dropped, given, bequeathed, resold, inscribed, and sworn on; they also contribute one installment to Eliot’s lifelong exploration of what will happen to written matter after its owner’s death.
Romola
centers on the question of whether to obey the promise given to a dying father to keep together the library that he spent his life collecting. (The question projected onto Renaissance Florence was a live one at a moment when great aristocratic libraries were being dispersed into public hands and across the Atlantic.) Casaubon hopes that an analogous promise, once again exacted by an older man from a younger woman, will allow notebooks to outlive their owner.
²⁸
In contrast,
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
asks whether to keep or break an oath of vengeance—also sworn
to
a dying father, but in this case sworn, just as crucially,
on
the family bible. The book forms a “chain” both in the sense of connection, and in the sense of constraint, drag, or dead weight.

Three questions, then. When text pulls apart from book—when the words that preach forgiveness take the form of a talisman on which vengeance can be sworn—which will win out? What relation does a text establish among its successive users—either between the dead and those
who inherit their books, or between the current reader and the traces of their predecessors that linger in the form of inscriptions, dog-earing or even dirt? And why should the materiality of the book swim into focus at the moment of its owner’s death—or, conversely, why should looking at books conjure up the thought of their dead owners?

Ranthorpe would appear to find his double in Maggie, who seizes on an
Imitation
of
Christ
with its “corners turned down in many places,” in which “some hand, now for ever quiet, had made at certain passages strong pen and ink marks, long since browned by time” (G. Eliot,
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
303).
²⁹
In fact, her asceticism is associated just as strongly with the book’s material form as with its textual content: even before she reads a word of Thomas à Kempis, Maggie prefers the “little, old, clumsy” copy of
Imitation
of
Christ
, “for which you need only pay sixpence at a book-stall,” to the tastelessly illustrated annuals that only a peddler like Bob Jakin (the auctioneer’s down-market double) would call the “bettermost books” (303, 295).
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When Maggie “read[s] where the quiet hand pointed,” however, she merely replaces one version of bibliophilia by another: the materialism that registers clean pages and lavish bindings by the fetishism that prizes a book for the hands through which it has passed. We flinch when Tom answers Maggie’s lament for the auctioned-off books by asking, “Why should they buy many books when they bought so little furniture?” (252). The juxtaposition of the two nouns sounds as oxymoronic as Jewsbury’s coupling of noun with verb: “a few splendidly bound books
furnished
the heavily carved rosewood table.” Yet the novel’s own homology between inscribed books and initialed linens levels those terms, reducing books to keepsakes (namesakes of Rosamond Vincy’s annual) while elevating housewares to expressions of identity.

The
Mill
on
the
Floss
thus makes association copies—books whose value, like that of a religious relic, derives from the history of their transmission rather than from the text that they contain—a model for the circulation of nontextual possessions.
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In the process, Eliot flattens any distinction between books and humbler objects: chairs, teapots, sheets. Where almost every other Victorian novel—including some by Eliot herself—use sofa-table books to exemplify the evils of the market,
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
turns a specific sector of the book trade into a template for a larger reflection on the embeddedness of objects within human relationships.

No less than her flower-pressing aunts and bible-signing father, Maggie understands the book as a means of preserving memories. And she, too, locates this preservative power not in its printed contents but in the traces that past owners have left of their own presence: “Our dear old Pilgrim’s Progress that you coloured with your little paints . . . I thought
we should never part with that while we lived . . . the end of our lives will have nothing in it like the beginning!” (252).
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Painted woodcuts mirror scribbled flyleaves: the authorial hand that describes the heroine as fair or blonde matters less than the hand-colored illustration that brings to mind a beloved brother.

Where Maggie calls down Tom’s wrath by mourning the auctioning off of her inscribed books, what Mrs. Tulliver regrets is the sale of her trousseau, the “things wi’ my name on ’em” (215). In
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
, books form only the last addition to a long list of inside-out objects whose value derives less from their contents than from their owners’ signature. That category includes the hand-colored
Pilgrim’s Progress
and the family bible whose flyleaves are inscribed but whose printed content goes unread, but it also encompasses the monogrammed teapot too good to be dirtied with tea and the initial-embroidered sheets too fine for a living body to lie between. Like the pristine pot or folded sheets, Mr. Tulliver’s confusion of a “good book” with a “good binding” repeats the Dodsons’ determination to empty containers of their contents—whether Mrs. Glegg’s “brocaded gown that would stand up empty, like a suit of armour,” or the display of pristine jelly-glasses that Mrs. Tulliver invokes in response to Mrs. Deane’s offer of jelly for the invalid: “There’s a dozen o’ cut jelly-glasses upstairs . . . I shall niver put jelly into ’em no more.” Even when Aunt Pullet finally progresses from the “very bright wardrobe, where you may have hastily supposed she would find the new bonnet” but which holds only a key, to the second wardrobe in which the hat is actually hidden, the object inside turns out to be less interesting than its paper covers: “The delicious scent of roseleaves that issued from the wardrobe made the process of taking out sheet after sheet of silver-paper quite pleasant to assist at, though the sight of the bonnet at last was something of an anticlimax” (127, 95, 96).

To judge books by their covers, as Mr. Tulliver does, is to make them an exemplar of, rather than an exception to, that perverse logic. The petals inside the Dodsons’ unread bible form a mirror image of other characters’ obsession with the outside of books: their bindings (in Defoe), flyleaves (in the bible), illustrations (in
Pilgrim’s Progress
), marginalia (in the
Imitation
of
Christ
), and (via an interest in metadata such as the author’s name) their title pages. In the end, the symmetry that levels books (meaningful but impractical) with household goods (insignificant but utilitarian) sharpens into a chiasmus: as the Gospel dwindles to a material surface on which oaths are written or flowers pressed, “well-cured ham at one’s funeral” takes over its sacramental function (G. Eliot,
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
285). By seeking in the book trade a model for its own understanding of the human associations embodied in things,
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
subordinates the one attribute that distinguishes books from
baser commodities—their linguistic content—to the attribute that they share: that is, their mode of circulation. The only difference is that where Tom reduces books to a subset of “furniture,” Eliot lifts your ugly furniture (as
Middlemarch
will put it) into the serene light of science (G. Eliot,
Middlemarch
264).

If you open a one-volume reprint without regard to Eliot’s characteristic alternation of “historical” (narrative) with “doctrinal” (sententiousness), the page that will lie flat is the one containing a description of the “quarto Bible open at the fly-leaf” in which Tom Tulliver will inscribe his oath of vengeance. Maggie herself draws attention to the blasphemy of making a book that preaches forgiveness into a repository for revenge: “‘O father, what?’ said Maggie, sinking down by his knees, pale and trembling. ‘It’s wicked to curse and bear malice.’” (G. Eliot,
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
280). The disagreement between father and daughter is bibliographical as much as theological. Maggie’s conspicuously oral contraction (“it’s wicked to bear malice”) calls attention to the looseness with which she paraphrases the words that we can recognize as originating in the Gospels—even if Mr. Tulliver doesn’t. Maggie understands the bible as a container for truths that remain stable from one copy to another, one edition to another, even print to voice. Mr. Tulliver, on the contrary, treats it as a thing that can be owned, inscribed, held, and sworn on.
³³
In relocating meaning from textual content to paratextual margins,
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
also replaces metaphorical intimacy with a virtual author by metonymic intimacy with other handlers.
³⁴