How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (39 page)

If social commentary invited its middle-class readers to displace their self-criticism onto working-class counterparts, light literature established its own entertainment value by contradictions to tracts. More specifically, by mocking tract-distributors for harassing a captive audience, secular novels and magazines congratulated themselves on being freely chosen and paid for. Although the RTS entitled its internal history
The
Romance
of
Tract
Distribution
—as if the wanderings of books, like foundlings, led providentially toward a happy ending—the secular press more often chose a satiric mode. In 1843, for example, Thackeray reprinted in
Punch
a note from the
Times
:

‘The Agents of the Tract Societies have lately had recourse to a new method of introducing their tracts into Cadiz. The tracts were put into glass bottles,
securely
corked
; and, taking advantage of the tide flowing into the harbour, they were committed to the waves, on whose surface they floated towards the town, where the inhabitants eagerly took them up on their arriving on the shore. The bottles were then uncorked, and the tracts they contain are
supposed
to
have
been
read with much interest.’

Thus far verbatim; but Thackeray goes on to reply in the persona of the “Regent of Spain . . . and of the Regent’s Park,” calling the “manoeuvres of the Dissenting-Tract Smuggler (
Tractistero
dissentero
contrabandistero
)” worse than any Jesuit arts.

Let
Punch
, let Lord Aberdeen, let Great Britain at large, put itself in the position of the poor mariner of Cadiz, and then answer. Tired with the day’s labour, thirsty as the seaman naturally is, he lies perchance, and watches at eve the tide of ocean swelling into the bay. What does he see cresting the wave that rolls towards him? A bottle. Regardless of the wet, he rushes eagerly towards the advancing flask. ‘Sherry, perhaps,’ is his first thought (for ’tis the wine of his country). ‘Rum, I hope,’ he adds, while with beating heart and wringing pantaloons, he puts his bottle-screw into the cork. But, ah! Englishmen! fancy his agonising feelings on withdrawing from the flask a Spanish translation of ‘The Cowboy of Kennington Common,’ or ‘The Little Blind Dustman of Pentonville.’ ([W. Thackeray], “Singular Letter from the Regent of Spain”)

Figure 6.5. “Singular Letter from the Regent of Spain,”
Punch
, 1 December 1843, 268.

The joke doesn’t require much exaggeration. “The Cowboy of Kennington Common” is hardly more alliterative than real RTS titles like
Lucy
the
Light-Bearer
(1871),
Claude
the
Colporteur
(1880), or
The
Book-stall boy of Batherton
(1872). And RTS reports did in fact associate temperance with thirst for the Word:

Eight men went in a punt to convey goods to a ship in the river; while they were on board, the captain asked them whether they would have a glass of rum each, or a book; they all chose a book, and said they did not drink rum. Tracts were given, which were gratefully received. (Jones 599)

The tract society that devised the message in a bottle was punning on the same confusion of word with drink that allowed the magazine to publish miscellanies like
A
Bowl
of
Punch
(1848)—or Lady Southdown, in
Vanity
Fair
, to “pitilessly dose [Miss Crawley’s household] with her tracts
and her medicine” (Thackeray,
Vanity
Fair
351). Even secular reformers could borrow the analogy: although Rowland Hill acknowledged grudgingly that “the wish to correspond with their friends may not be so strong, or so general, as the desire for fermented liquors,” he persisted in predicting the effects on the revenue of the proposed penny post system by extrapolating from taxes on beer and wine (93).

Books competed with drink both for poor people’s time (did one go to the pub or stay at home with a book?) and their money (as when a temperance tract exults that “the variety of useful books they can afford to purchase, at once proclaims how much has been gained since the public house has been abandoned” (Best 13). The same Evangelicals who countered requests for bread with offers of a tract worried that free bibles would be sold or pawned to pay for gin. (Lower resale value gave tracts an advantage over bibles in this respect.) In 1860, one bible-distributor responded to those who “shut the door in my face, and said, ‘We want bread instead of Bibles’” by “invit[ing] her poor neighbors to devote the pence too often squandered in gin to the purchase of the precious Word of God, which is the ‘water of life’ to all who drink its refreshing streams” (Ranyard 69). As a result, philanthropists remained unsure whether to link books with food metaphorically or metonymically: should tracts be piggybacked onto gifts of food and blankets, or substituted for such tangible handouts? In Trollope’s
Castle
Richmond
, the recurring pun that renders as “mail” the Irish characters’ pronunciation of the “meal” provided at soup kitchens during the Famine places debates about the public distribution of food in parallel with debates about the public distribution of letters. Yet if free food and free bibles alike disturbed the workings of the market, how to make sense of the need for advertising circulars and other forms of free print to stimulate consumer appetites?

Whether middle-class triple-deckers or penny serials, novels characteristically represent tracts as filler—a poor substitute either for a different genre of book (usually a novel), or for nonbookish objects like food, drink, or paper money. Thus when a canting character in Rymer’s radical
The
White
Slave
leaves a piece of paper on the heroine’s father’s snowy grave: “Is it a bank note?” “No, this is a religious tract.” Later, an Evangelical lady who has just denied the starving heroine food exclaims: “You would have been supplied with tracts, provided you kept them clean, and returned them” (34).

In invoking
Crusoe
, the Religious Tract Society’s message in a bottle takes us back to a paper scarcity and a readerly solitude as far as possible from the modern overabundance of both literature and fellow readers. If the RTS’s hawkers and chapmen mimicked the way that romances
were
distributed, its publicity stunt in Cadiz mimicked the way that romances
represent
the distribution of texts. Reciprocally, and obsessively, the Victorian
novel represented the distribution of tracts. The two genres provided one another with mirror images: when characters in tracts read novels or characters in novels reject tracts, the stakes are intellectual-historical (Evangelical fiction opposite the epic of a world without God) as much as formal (both torn between narrative and didactic modes). But also affective: if the novel was the competitor that the tract was trying to beat at its own game, the novel returned the compliment by making the dullness of tracts a foil to its own pleasures.
²¹
And finally, economic: both widely distributed, neither much respected, tract and novel achieved their common ubiquity via opposite routes—one anonymously or even surreptitiously bought and rented, the other forced on readers through face-to-face relationships.

Like Trollope’s or Thackeray’s embedded newspapers and novels, embedded tracts perform an antiquixotic function: everywhere present in the hands of characters, but nowhere read.
²²
Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle emblematize the imbalance between supply and demand. In fact, when the latter “pull[s] out a good book as if it were a constable’s staff,” it’s not enough for every character in
Bleak
House
to refuse to read the tract. Adding insult to injury, characters are dragged in from another novel to second that refusal: “Mr. Jarndyce said he doubted if Robinson Crusoe could have read [the book], though he had had no other on his desolate island” (133). The mounting absurdity of those counterfactuals—if a nineteenth-century genre had already existed, if a copy had made its way to Crusoe’s island—drives home the contrast between two models of transmission: one, viral, that organically diffuses an old romance across economic lines; another, top-down, in which middle-class adults bribe or bully others into owning (if not reading) demographically tailored fictions.
²³

Bleak
House
is one of three mid-Victorian novels that couple Robinson Crusoe’s name with an imaginary tract.
Hard
Times
contrasts Coketown workers’ eagerness to “[take] De Foe to their bosoms” with their reluctance—echoing the bricklayer’s in
Bleak
House
—to read “leaden little books [written] for them, showing how the good grown-up baby invariably got to the Savings-bank, and the bad grown-up baby invariably got transported” (Dickens,
Hard
Times
65). Not until
Crusoe
reappears for a third time in
The
Moonstone
(1868), however, does a nineteenth-century novel stage an all-out battle between an earlier romance and the modern tract. As every reader will remember, the First Period of Collins’s novel takes
Robinson
Crusoe
as its intertext, the Second a tract-distributor as its narrator. Armed with a “little library of works . . . (say a dozen only),” its narrator, Miss Clack, throws tracts in windows, slips them under sofa cushions, stuffs them into flower boxes, sneaks them into the pockets of dressing gowns, and thrusts them into the hands of a
cabdriver. “If I had presented a pistol at his head, this abandoned wretch could hardly have exhibited greater consternation” (W. Collins,
The
Moonstone
214): Miss Clack at once echoes Thackeray’s mock-epic description of Lady Southdown “before she bore down personally upon any individual whom she proposed to subjugate, fir[ing] in a quantity of tracts upon the menaced party (as a charge of the French was always preceded by a furious cannonade),” and anticipates the logic of the journalist who remarks in 1899 that “the gratulations of a successful tract-writer may be only on a par with the boasts of a soldier who knows he has killed 150 of the enemy because he has fired 150 rounds,” and adds: “it may be doubted if as high a proportion of tracts as of Mauser bullets reach their billets” (Thackeray,
Vanity
Fair
335; Ogden). Even Rowland Hill refers to advertisements for books as “random shots”—a metaphor that survives today in our term “mailshot” but was literalized more directly in the 1944 German experiment firing postcards in rifle grenades over France (89; Rickards and Twyman 11). The tone in which Miss Clack’s struggles are chronicled is hardly more comic than a biographer’s description of Canon Christopher: “On one occasion the younger members of his family thought they had prevented such untimely and embarrassing activity—as they conceived it—at a Governor’s garden party in the Isle of Man. All his pockets had been quietly emptied, and those in the secret set out with a light heart. They were presently disillusioned by the sight of Christopher offering tracts. More alert than they had supposed, he had taken the precaution of stuffing a few packets into his elastic-sided boots” (Reynolds and Thomas 233).

The tract, then, is to the Second Period what
Robinson
Crusoe
was to the First. As if to recapitulate the historical shift from chapbook to tract, a romance treated as if it were a bible gives way to a tract that feebly imitates the conventions of fiction. The bibliomancy that allows Betteredge to “[wear] out six stout copies” through the “wholesome application of a bit of ROBINSON CRUSOE” paves the way for Miss Clack’s equally instrumental and equally discontinuous reading habits. Like Betteredge, she understands reading as both aleatory and combinatory, prefacing her quotations with the claim to have “chanced on the following passage” and wresting out of context snippets that “proved to be quite
providentially
applicable to” the recipient.

Miss Clack herself sees Bruff’s reading not as identical to hers, however, but its competitor: when she describes Bruff as “equally capable of reading a novel and of tearing up a tract,” she imagines the two genres fighting over a limited pool of readers’ attention (W. Collins,
The
Moonstone
9, 193, 215). William Wilberforce’s famous declaration that “I would rather go render up my account at the last day, carrying up with
me The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain than bearing the load of [the Waverley novels], full as they are of genius,” reminds us that one virtue of tracts is negative: they fill the time that might otherwise be spent reading novels (Rosman 188).

Novel and tract fight to occupy the same space twice over. In the editorial frame, Franklin Blake rejects the “copious Extracts from precious publications in her possession” that Miss Clack tries to insert into her “Narrative,” forbidding her to slip quotations from tracts into the novel that we are reading: “I am not permitted to improve—I am condemned to narrate.” The converse is more literal: within the “Narrative” Miss Clack tries to slip novels inside tracts. “On the library table I noticed two of the ‘amusing books’ which the infidel doctor had recommended. I instantly covered them from sight with two of my own precious publications” (W. Collins,
The
Moonstone
237, 24).