How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (38 page)

One magazine responded to Martineau’s
Manchester
Strike
(1832) not by assessing its appeal to the review’s own readers, but rather by imagining those middle-class magazine-readers distributing it to their employees: “If the masters knew their own interest, this little work would be circulated by tens of thousands among their labourers; and the philanthropist who feels the deplorable state of society in Manchester, could not spend a year better than in devoting himself to the circulation of its ideas and pictures” (“Review of Illustrations of Political Economy”). Neither the reader of the book review nor the buyer of the book is imagined to be the end user of the
Illustrations
: their role is to distribute the text, not to read it. Even more strikingly, the legitimate reader is asked, not to introspect about his or her own response to the stories, but rather to speculate about someone else’s—defined either in contradistinction to his (as when the impressionable servant stands directly opposite the dispassionate judge) or by analogy with it (as when the reviewer both predicts and ventriloquizes the taste of his own readers). Once choosing replaced reading as the expression of working-class selfhood, “placing [books] in the hands of those who are under his influence” replaced reading as the mark of upper-class virtue. And when both vie for the power to decide what the weaker party will read, it’s hardly surprising that conflict should result.

When Yonge repeats the warning to mistresses that their books can fall into the hands of servants, she draws the opposite conclusion from this fact than Charlotte Adams or the Chatterley prosecution do: “As for servants, it really is needless to try to select books for them, considering the cheapness of novels, and their easy access to all we have in the house”
(“Children’s Literature: Part III” 451). More specifically, although I have found no evidence that she read
Little
Servant
Maids
, Yonge is careful to decouple the acknowledgment that servants can touch any book from the prediction that they will dirty every book:

I believe it is a great mistake to have a special library of “books adapted for servants.” There is nothing they so dislike, or that is so unlike themselves, as the model Thomases and Marias in books, except, perhaps, that literature in which little nursery-maids convert all the children, while the nurse drinks wine in the pantry, and hides her lady’s jewels in their boxes. Remember that the servants
can
, if they choose, read any book of yours they like, and that many of them have been well educated. Tell them, therefore, freely what you think is pleasant reading and give them a turn of a book from your box, if it is suitable. They are no more likely to soil it than you are. (C. Yonge,
P’s and Q’s, or, the Question of Putting Upon
199)

The warning against model Thomases and Marias fits neatly enough with Yonge’s critique of “class-literature’s” pigeonholing of readers. What’s more surprisingly is that the author of didactic literature often seen herself as a conservative goody-goody rubs her middle-class readers’ noses in the power of books to cut across social barriers—whether by dragging masters down to the level of servants (middle-class readers are now the ones accused of soiling their own books), by invoking principles of fairness (“turn” taking), or by reminding masters that a shared domestic space implies shared access to texts (“remember that the servants
can
, if they choose, read any book of yours they like”). This last could, of course, sound like a reactionary threat (servants can also, if they choose, spit into whatever food of yours they like), which the tacked-on “if it is suitable” can hardly defuse by invoking mistresses’ superior judgment at the eleventh hour.

When Yonge remarks in another set of hints for district visitors that “whatever
wholesomely
interests our own households may well be sent into the club-room,” working-class readers become a proxy through which aspersions are cast on the purity of her own middle-class readers’ tastes (C. M. Yonge,
What
Books
to
Lend
and
What
to
Give
9). The implication that her readers’ own interests may not bear scrutiny humbles their pride as thoroughly as (and more deliberately than) the unlucky tract-distributor who, by mistake, “handed the tract” ‘To An Unfortunate female’ . . . to a respectable lady” (Jones 174).
¹⁸
Brontë plays on the same problem of address when Jane Eyre, handed a “thin pamphlet sewn in a cover” containing “‘An account of the awfully sudden death of Martha G——, a naughty child addicted to falsehood and deceit,’” offers to make the book over to Mrs. Reed’s own daughter.
Vanity
Fair
makes the vertical
logic of tract distribution even more explicit when Lady Southdown backs down from her plan to thrust a tract on the wealthy Miss Crawley, deciding that Miss Crawley’s downtrodden companion and servants can take her place as the unlucky recipients:

“Emily, my love, get ready a packet of books for Miss Crawley. Put up ‘A Voice from the Flames,’ ‘A Trumpet-warning to Jericho,’ and the ‘Fleshpots Broken; or, the Converted Cannibal.’”

. . . By way of compromise, Lady Emily sent in a packet in the evening for [Miss Briggs], containing copies of the “Washerwoman,” and other mild and favourite tracts for Miss B.’s own perusal; and a few for the servants’ hall, viz.: “Crumbs from the Pantry,” “The Frying Pan and the Fire,” and “The Livery of Sin,” of a much stronger kind. (Thackeray,
Vanity
Fair
335)

Lady Southdown, we’ve learned already, “launched packets of tracts among the cottagers and tenants, and would order Gaffer Jones to be converted, as she would order Goody Hicks to take a James’s powder, without appeal, resistance, or benefit of clergy” (333). Like medicine, tracts hover between categories: understood by one party as a gift and the other (whether children or the poor) as a burden, they cure but also disgust. This isn’t to say that the economically powerful figure couldn’t also be emotionally vulnerable: anyone who’s ever leafleted on a street corner—or taught an English class—knows how powerless he or she is to make anyone read anything.

To read about bad readers is comfortable; to be addressed as one of them, less so. In a surprising number of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century essays, a moral failing (the soiling of books, for example) is first attributed to working-class others but then brought home to the conscience of the essay’s own readers. In an essay titled “Cheap Literature” in the middle-class
Contemporary
Review
, for example, Helen Bosanquet wonders whether it is quite fair to judge penny dreadfuls by their effect on readers: “We ourselves should resent having our recreative reading judged by a moral standard.” Even Bosanquet’s attack on cheap novels’ “narrowing and morbid” obsession with marriage is qualified by an afterthought: “Of course, I am aware that the same criticism applied to the majority of novels placed in the hands of girls of the more educated classes.” And after mocking the puffs that penny magazines supply for themselves, she adds, “But might we not say much the same of the readers who make up their Mudie lists with such touching confidence in the verdict of ‘Athenaeum’ and ‘Spectator’?” (680). Another article, “Reading and Readers,” in 1893 similarly declares that “human nature is pretty much the same wherever we go, and the record Mr Hileken of Bethnal Green and I can give would shame that of many a West-End knight and
dame” (191). (G. F. Hileken was the librarian of the Bethnal Green Free Library.) The rueful tone drags the author and his readers down to the level of those they observe.

Even the addressee of a proto-sociological tract rarely maintained complete distance from the styles of reading under discussion. When Florence Bell set out to survey the reading habits of a manufacturing town in 1911, she ended up turning her gaze back on her own readers: “On finding what were the results of the inquiry made respecting reading among the workmen, a similar investigation was attempted among people who were better off, and the result of this inquiry among those whom we may call ‘drawing-room readers’ is curiously instructive” (250). In describing workers’ reading to a middle-class audience, Bell appeals over and over to her readers’ own experience for confirmation. Thus “There are a certain number of born readers among the workpeople in the town described, as there are, happily, in every layer of society . . . But . . . reading, perhaps, is not as prevalent in any class of society as we think” (203–4). Or, on working-class women’s reluctance to take time away from daily tasks for reading: “Is there not some truth in this view? Even among the well-to-do this idea persists a great deal more than one would at the first blush admit” (237).

As novels like
Northanger
Abbey
forced readers to recognize themselves in the romance-reading misses being satirized, so periodicals made the working-class people whose reading habits they investigated into a mirror for their own middle-class public. The common act of reading cut cross moral distinctions in one case, social distinctions in the other. And if reading books “made kitchen and drawing-room kin,” so did distributing them. A Religious Tract Society pamphlet that praises the best tract-distributors for being “as clever as Fagin was at sliding their silent messengers into people’s pockets without attracting notice” erases any distinction between missionaries and common thieves (N. Watts 13). The scene of Evangelical gentlemen “spending hours with the hawkers in order to learn the mysteries of their trade,” too, emblematizes the danger that the books designed to shore up class distinctions ultimately blur them.

In fact, the fear of maids’ peeking into their masters’ bookshelves proves surprisingly reversible: if servants can be led astray by their masters’ books, young ladies can also be corrupted by accepting forbidden books from a governess, as in Maria Edgeworth’s “Mademoiselle Panache” (1801) or Sewell’s
Laneton
Parsonage
(1846–48). Just as Jeames’s or Caroline’s act of illicitly borrowing books cancels out the innocuousness of their content, so the badness of the romances described here is doubled by the sinfulness of the process by which they’re acquired—whether lying to parents, hiding the volume, borrowing money to pay
for it, or making oneself vulnerable to blackmail. Accepting a book from a servant thus forms the modern, print-culture equivalent of the older nightmare that your children might listen to ghost stories told by an old nurse (Steedman 50; Trumpener,
Bardic
Nationalism
211). From a servant, or even from other inferiors: in a plot that Mrs. Sherwood constructs to illustrate the dangers of preferring low and vulgar friends to one’s own sisters, the offer of a book is what tempts the culprit to jump the fence separating her family’s property from the neighbor’s (“Intimate Friends” 234).

Conversely, writers signify proper reading not only by naming the book’s title, but also by mentioning how it reached the servant’s hands. A good maid in
The
youth’s magazine or evangelical miscellany
“was very soon lost in her book, Miss Thornton’s present to her when she left home. She had read the Pilgrim’s Progress through. Her father had an old copy, full of quaint pictures; but this was a large and handsome edition, beautifully illustrated” (“The Bunch of Keys” 331). In one model, good books trickle down; in the other, bad books percolate up. In both, their meaning lies as much in how they’re transmitted as in what they represent. Where secular writers cast books as a refuge for the powerless, didactic literature represents access to books as dependent on social relationships, and domestic power struggles playing out in tugs-of-war over books.

I spoke earlier of “cementing or severing relationships . . . by giving and receiving books or by withholding and rejecting them.” It may not have been clear there how little those pairs map onto each other: to withhold a book is not necessarily to sever a relationship any more than to give a book is to cement one. On the contrary, anonymous market transactions in a bookshop often grant freer access to books than does the more intimate censorship carried out by personal acquaintances like parents or masters. Yet the intimacies that sometimes blocked access to books also enabled it. Associated in theory with individual liberation, in practice reading not only reflected but created social dependence. This is not to say that those models were mutually exclusive. One 1824 critic of female bible distributors asked, “is it correct, particularly in females, to go from house to house, and sow seeds of discord between husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants?” (Martin 50). The echo of Diderot (himself echoing Matthew 10:35) makes clear that a tract can corrupt as much as any Richardson novel—as long as its giver stands outside the household.

Autodidacts’ memoirs celebrated literacy as a means for individuals to rise above their social class of origin; middle-class bildungsromans focalized the delicate child narrator withdrawing from an insensitive family; cartoons satirized men hiding from wives or fellow commuters behind a newspaper. Protestant tracts like
Claude
the
Colporteur
made Catholic
countries the site of bookish heroism, turning readers from sedentary goody-goodies into manly risk-takers: like the adults who serve as blocking figures in the bildungsroman, the Catholic authorities make reading narratable.
¹⁹
Yet in Britain—to state the obvious—reading was learned in schools run by the church, then by the state. And even outside of formal education, the provision of something to read depended on complex networks of gift, sale, loan, exchange, even theft. What was true for middle-class adults held even more strongly for those who depended on others’ voices to spell out text, others’ judgment to select titles, others’ money to provide copies, and others’ permission to read them.
²⁰