How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (36 page)

In suggesting that
Little
Servant
Maids
represents books being handled in ways different from those that it invites itself, I don’t mean to gloss over the inconsistencies in its own cues about who is expected to buy and who to read. The age of its implied readers remains in doubt, and, with it, the question of whether the book is made to be given in the school or in the home which is also a workplace. (Remember Yonge’s reference to books from which “children and servants” will benefit.) As often as the
text addresses servants, some narratorial asides suggest that this role lies in its readers’ future:

If servants generally would follow this good rule, how much of what is disagreeable and inconvenient would be spared to their masters and mistresses, and from how much temptation, and often misery, they would save themselves. Many children who read this tale will be too young or too inexperienced to feel the full importance of this observation, but let them bear it in mind and act upon it, and some day or other they will be aware of its value. (Adams,
Little
Servant
Maids
49)

On the other hand, any such speculations about the implied reader (and by extension, the implied giver) are complicated by the confusion of age with social class diagnosed by Charlotte Yonge, echoing the bricklayer in
Bleak
House
.

The
Leisure
Hour
’s assumption that the influence of “parents” is interchangeable with that of “employers” nostalgically invokes the early modern model in which (as Lawrence Stone and Bruce Robbins have described) families treated their own children as sources of labor and hired servants as objects of paternalistic care: how-to manuals for servants, in fact, were known as “babies’ books” (Robbins 150). In exhortations of “children should remember” and references to “the children who read her history,” the referent sometimes seems to be a young girl already in service, as when the text acknowledges that, by definition, anyone whose hands it reaches is likely to differ from its untaught protagonist:

Jessy had had few advantages of education; probably much fewer than any of the children who read her history. They most of them have been taught “to do their duty in the state to which it has pleased God to call them”; and such conduct as this untaught girl’s would in them be inexcusable. They all know and feel that it would be very wrong to leave a place without giving notice; but let such children ask themselves if they have not been guilty of conduct which was as wrong in them as Jessy’s was in her. (Adams,
Little
Servant
Maids
86–87)

The reference to “the advantages of education” reveals the ambivalence at the heart of
Little
Servant
Maids
: the saintly old servant who is taught to read by her mistress’s kind son is first impressed when a charity-schoolgirl entering her service arrives bearing a bible and prayer book that have been given to her as a school-leaving present, but then dismayed when the girl glosses her possession of these fine objects as a “right” rather than a gift (Adams,
Little
Servant
Maids
185).

Here as in
The
Story
of
a
Pocket
Bible
, the content of the text tugs in the opposite direction from its material form. Reading a bible or tract under the wrong circumstances can cancel out its message, as when
The
Pawnbrokers’ Gazette
reports that “one of the very poorest and most wretched class of prostitutes” tries to pawn “a very large and handsome illustrated Book of Common Prayer”; suspecting it was “improperly come by,” the pawnbroker refuses to advance money on the volume and reports the prostitute to the police, but she testifies that when “a perfect gentleman” in a “house of ill repute” discovered that he had no money on him, “he said that sooner than be dishonorable, he would give her the book in question, which was worth two guineas, and no doubt some pawnbroker would lend her 10s. on it.”
¹³

When tracts represent the reading of characters from the same social class as their own implied reader, it’s often hedged with qualifications about the exact circumstances under which that reading is acceptable. Just as the decision of the servant in
The
Story
of
a
Pocket
Bible
to buy her own cheaper bible cancels out her earlier sin of reading the book she’s supposed to dust, so Hannah More makes clear that her working-class characters don’t steal their reading time from working hours: “As her mother hated the sight of a book, Hester was forced to learn out of sight. It was no disobedience to do this, as long as she wasted no part of that time which it was her duty to spend in useful labour . . . Hester would not neglect the washing-tub or the spinning-wheel, even to get on with her catechism, but she thought it fair to think over her questions while she was washing and spinning” (More,
Tales
104).
¹⁴

More makes what we now call “multitasking” exemplify the housewifely virtue of efficiency. Yet the dangers of that activity are illustrated in a later tract where “Jane has left off her business of sweeping and dusting the room, and is looking at the books which were placed on the table. Very likely it may be some good book which will do her no harm. Perhaps it has pictures in it of pleasant places far off; but whatever it may be, it would seem better if Jane finished her work first, for if her mistress finds the room not ready, she will see that the maid has been idling. Perhaps Jane has never heard the rhyme: ‘One thing at a time, and that done well / Is a very good rule as many may tell’” (“One Thing at a Time” 194). The illustration shows a broom stuck through the back of a chair and a duster thrown carelessly down upon the seat, while Jane stands absorbed in the book she is holding.

For male servants as much as for middle-class girls, reading is stigmatized when it occasions oblivion to others, especially to superiors: we know that the eponymous pageboy in Adams’s tract
John
Hartley, and How He Got on in Life
has gone to the bad when “he often suffered [the cook] to call to him before he would stir, and then he would look up from a newspaper he might perhaps be reading, cast his eyes over it again before laying it leisurely down” (128). Conversely, reading is praised when it involves interpersonal exchanges, whether in the form of giving books to others or reading aloud to them, as when the same tract describes John burning his fellow servant Alice’s licentious books and offering instead to read his sister’s school-leaving prize aloud to the other servants:

Figure 6.3. “One Thing at a Time,”
Making
the
Best
of
It
, n.d.
Little
Wide-Awake: an Anthology of Victorian Children’s Books and Periodicals in the Collection of Anne and Fernand G. Renier
(Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1967), 194.

The tale was a very interesting one, well and powerfully written. It was the history of the work, trials, and temptations of a young woman in
service . . . The time allotted for reading only allowed of half the tale being gone through, and Alice, contrary to her expectation, became so deeply interested in it that she begged John to go on with it after family prayers were over. He, however, said that . . . it was against rules to sit up after their master and mistress had dismissed them for the night. She then begged him to let her have the book to finish to herself upstairs in her room.

“No, Alice,” said the cook; “even you, I think, would not be guilty of such misconduct. Call to mind the order mistress gave you on first coming, ‘never to burn a light in your room longer than was necessary for getting to bed.’”

“Very well,” said Alice, “I give in; I must try and be like good Jane in John’s book, and obey orders.”

. . . The story was finished by John, but it was not once hearing it that satisfied Alice. Again and again she begged him to read to her parts or the whole. (118–20)

Good books crowd out bad, just as the fire into which the latter are cast to burn doubles the candle not used to read the former by. Here as in conduct books and it-narratives, the lesson learned from hearing the good book read aloud is precisely not to read (or, at least, not to read to oneself)—to be able to bear interruption and suspense. But unlike in those middle-class books, what’s set up for imitation is not only a certain rhythm of reading, but also a certain modality of acquiring: what makes the book good is not just its contents, but the fact of its having been given as a school prize. More specifically, given to John’s sister: in a boy’s acceptance of a feminized book, the logic of Molly Hughes’s brother scornfully handing his reward books down to her is reversed.

The immorality of reading at the wrong place and time is limited neither to servants nor even to working-class characters. Hannah’s crime of reading books when she should be dusting them is anticipated by an 1850 didactic fiction in which a middle-class girl’s absorption in a book causes a servant to catch her forgetting her own light housework:

Once or twice she became so interested in the books which she found in the book-case, that the servant came in to set the table for breakfast before she had finished. She found Sally with one knee resting on the book-case, the dusting-cloth on the floor, and she so deeply absorbed in a tale as to have forgotten every thing else. Her father came into the room, walked quietly towards her, and laying his hand on her shoulder, asked what she was reading. She replied, “I have commenced a story which so much interests me, that I am sorry I shall have to stop.” Her father asked her if she would not enjoy it more after her work was finished, advised her to defer reading it till evening, and let him
partake with her of the enjoyment. The anticipation of reading this to her beloved parent was enough for Sally. The book was soon replaced, and the more commonplace business of life reverted to. (
The
Useful
and
the
Beautiful
60–61)

A knee on the bookcase instead of a duster on the books, a dust cloth on the floor instead of a body kneeling: the topsy-turvy logic of the scene is corrected only once the book is put back into the proper place (a shelf), the proper time (the evening), and the proper operation (reading aloud).

When the fear that a book will distract women from their domestic tasks extends beyond servants, it comes to reflect a tension between the self and the social, as much as between work and leisure. Think back to the middle-class women whose novel handling distracts them from cleaning their houses or acknowledging their husbands. A different Jane’s daydreams of “pleasant places far off” are prompted by her idling with books that John Reed reminds her belong to someone else: “You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mama says . . . I’ll teach you to rummage in my book-shelves” (C. Brontë,
Jane
Eyre
17). In fact, the same pastiche of
Jane
Eyre
that asked just how a persecuted dependent would lay her hands on the books needed to furnish her imagination also noticed that language enough to repeat it for a third time, making a daughter of her employer’s family say of the governess: “she has not the run of the house, to go about it as she likes; she has no business in the library” (Wood 100).

No less than the middle-class secular fiction that we saw in chapters 1 and 2, religious tracts equate picking up a book with asserting a self. The difference is that
Little
Servant
Maids
makes the narrator, rather than an unsympathetic character like John Reed, the source for the comment that Caroline “had no business to open these books.” Once “having business to take” or “no business to open” books (note that neither text speaks of whether the servant has “business to read” them) becomes a synecdoche for membership in the middle class, the opening scene of
Jane
Eyre
comes to look like less like a psychological meditation on readerly interiority than like a prefiguration of the narrower social questions that critics like Elizabeth Rigby responded to: the application of John’s claim that dependents have no right to pick up books to subcategories like “orphan,” “servant,” “governess,” and “village schoolmistress.”
¹⁵
Yet whether that individualism is attacked (in the conversion narrative) or endorsed (in the bildungsroman), both genres pit reader against family. The only difference is that as tracts continue to define “family” as an economic unit joining masters with servants, novels place that in tension with the modern sense of a nuclear household where gender and age replace class as sources of difference.

If we took a long historical view, we might expect that as one model of family replaced the other, domestic service would cease to be the locus of anxieties about the transitive powers of shared books. It’s true that after 1850, the library arguably replaced the household as the site where middle-class ladies could funnel subsidized books into the hands of their inferiors—with the difference that library books involved turn taking across classes. And it’s also true that fears that books might become a vector for dirt migrated from housekeeping manuals to library science guides. The dirty thumb of
Little
Servant
Maids
reappears half a century later in Marie Corelli’s remark that