How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (43 page)

The intertwining of preservation with destruction is not unique to paper: Sumerian clay tablets, for example, often survived thanks to accidents like fire, which baked them into greater durability. Movable type sharpened that paradox, however, for redundancy forms at once an effect of, and a counterweight to, the fragility of printed paper. Texts survive in proportion as books decay. Bibliographers all know that preservation varies inversely with use: not only do small books circulate most widely and reach libraries most rarely, but the genres that get the most handling (such as almanacs) are the hardest for modern scholars to lay their hands on. This paradox is hardly unique to books (printed labels that survive in collections of ephemera usually do so because they were surplus to requirements and sent direct from the manufacturer) or even to print: Jane Kamensky has pointed out that a similar logic governs the survival of clothing: ceremonial articles and those made for infants are preserved in disproportionate numbers (personal conversation). As Thomas Adams and Nicolas Barker note, “popularity tends to operate positively on the text and negatively on the book” (Adams and Barker 33): the more readings a work undergoes, the more reprintings are likely to be produced, but the less likely any given copy is to survive. To which a second paradox could be added: the better preserved a book, the less evidence we tend to have about the ways in which it’s been used: the survival of the book itself, in other words, stands in direct conflict with survival of traces of its readers.

William Sherman reminds us that “printed images and texts were part of a dynamic ecology of use and reuse, leading to transformation and
destruction as well as to preservation”: the more heavily a book was used, the more vulnerable it was to decay (6). The proof is Jan Stock’s argument that for popular prints produced in Renaissance Antwerp, “the larger the quantity of impressions made and the larger the number of people they reached, the smaller was the chance of the material being preserved.” That so few have survived can be explained, Stock argues, “not through indifference, but because they served their purpose”: “cherished to destruction,” they may have been “attached to the inside of a travelling case . . . cut up and pasted to a wall as decoration . . . recycled as lining for a book cover or as the flyleaf in a register of archives . . . In the Antwerp city archives, a sixteenth-century woodcut advertising the work of a pin-maker was fortuitously preserved, because it spent centuries serving as wrapping paper for the wax seal attached to a document” (quoted in Sherman 6). In the opposite direction, however, books’ “serviceability may partly explain why so few of them have survived. We find printed paper being used . . . for stuffing cracks in chimneys and windows, . . . and as spills to light a fire or a pipe” (Cressy 93).

In Mayhew’s own time, the battle lines were clearly drawn between those who saw circulation as life-giving and those who understood it to be life-shortening—or, more specifically, who credited or blamed the library either with putting books into circulation, or with withdrawing them from use. (From it-narratives’ characterization of pristine books as “banished” or “imprisoned,” it’s only one step to imagine them being buried alive.) Because bibliographic debates draw on the language of saving and exchange, it comes as no surprise that economists were among the most prominent participants in early debates about free-library funding: Jevons, for example, acknowledged that free-library books wore out faster than those in private collections, but insisted “how infinitely better it is that they should perish in the full accomplishment of their mission, instead of falling a prey to the butter-man, the waste-dealer, the entomological book-worm, or the other enemies of books which Mr. Blades has so well described and anathematized” (Jevons 30). The image of books as heroes “perish[ing] in the full accomplishment of their mission” makes a valiant attempt to translate ephemerality into a martial language.

Such mock-heroics can do little, however, to counter the less high-flown imagery of a 1871 article on circulating libraries which observes that if unpopular books have a short life span (because no one reprints them), popular books die for the opposite reason: too “torn, dirtied, and ‘read-to-death’” to serve even as food wrapping, “they will not carry butter; nor will they ‘to the trunk-makers.’ Their purpose is—for manure!” (Friswell 522). Friswell’s two possible destinations for a no longer readable book—butter wrapping and manure—remind us that paper ended its life as an aid to ingestion and excretion. And as it accumulated traces
of its successive users’ hands, or intestines, the book reneged on its traditional mission of transcending the body.

The secondhand bookstall provides an emblem of mortality: asked by Mayhew why he has no new works, one bookstall-keeper answers that “they haven’t become cheap enough yet for the streets, but that they would come to it in time . . . Yes, indeed, you all come to such as me at last. Why, last night I heard a song all about the stateliest buildings coming at last to the ivy, and I thought, as I listened, it was the same with authors. The best that the best can do is the book-stall’s food at last. And no harm, for he’s in the best of company, with Shakespeare, and all the great people” (1:296).

The metaphor of paper’s life cycle makes books look less like the timeless works that they contain than like the mortal beings who read them. This may explain in turn why paper seems to change hands only at the latter’s death. “I think we should all be tired” (as Mayhew says) if I repeated a full catalog of examples from the scrap heap of
London
Labour
, but here are two:

“I’ve had Bibles—the backs are taken off in the waste trade, or it wouldn’t be fair weight—testaments, Prayer-books, Companions to the Altar, and Sermons and religious works . . . perhaps a godly old man dies, and those that follow him care nothing for hymn-books, and so they come to such as me, for they’re so cheap now they’re not to be sold second-hand, I fancy.” (2:113)

And a second informant:

“[I’ve had] Manuscripts, but only if they’re rather old; well, 20 or 30 years or so; I call that old. Letters on every possible subject, but not, in my experience, any very modern ones. An old man dies, you see, and his papers are sold off, letters and all; that’s the way; get rid of all the old rubbish, as soon as the old boy’s pointing his toes to the sky. What’s old letters worth, when the writers are dead and buried?”

Yet what sounds like a rhetorical question turns out to have an answer: “Why, perhaps 1 1/2
d.
a pound, and it’s a rattling big letter that will weigh half-an-ounce. O, it’s a rattling queer trade, but there’s many worse” (2:114). Ghoulishness isn’t enough to explain the ease with which Mayhew’s informants slip from “old manuscripts” to “old men,” from dead letters to dead bodies, from valuing letters at one-thirty-second of a penny to terming their authors “an old boy pointing his toes to the sky.”

It’s unclear why paper should survive at the expense of its owners, especially in a class where the selling and pawning of goods during an illness or to pay for a funeral leaves little scope for inheritance. (Unlike rich bibliophiles, the poor don’t bequeath their books to libraries.) Yet
Mayhew is hardly alone in this association of ideas. Even those Victorian genres that most strenuously celebrated the diffusion of knowledge, whether Useful or Christian, associated circulation with death—both of the book and of its owners.

It-narratives hinge on misfortunes: the deathbed scene during which a bible is willed to a spendthrift, the bankruptcy after which it ends up in a secondhand bookstall, the drinking binge during which it’s exchanged for a single dram. This generic convention doesn’t contradict what we know about the transmission of nineteenth-century books: closer to home, many of the holdings of our own research libraries are available to scholars today only thanks to the death of their donors. (Once one of many objects whose usefulness outlived their first owner, books are now one of only a few consumer goods that even—or especially—rich persons and institutions buy secondhand.) And that association of ideas shouldn’t be entirely foreign to book historians, for whom probate inventories have provided a crucial source.

Even the prospectus for a book fumigator concludes (like Jevons) that contagion is a lesser evil than isolation: “When we have foregone or disinfected our books, . . . killed our cats, declined to use a cab, adopted respirators, and sternly refused to shake hands with our friends, and adopted all the other precautions which are recommended against our microscopical bugbears, will it be worth while to go on living? Happily for our peace of mind the majority of us prefer to take our risk” (T. Greenwood 494). This paean to circulation is confirmed by the history of the volume in which it appears: most of the copies now in circulation on secondhand bookselling Web sites come from library collections. (My own was advertised as “a few marginal blind stamps, library stamp on back of title,
but
a good copy of the entirely re-written third edition of this seminal work” [my emphasis]).

The fear of contagion took on special poignancy, then, when expressed by the most energetic public-library advocate of his generation. Like Gladstone, Greenwood compares private collections with graves: “Oh! ye gentlemen of England, who are said to ‘live at home at ease,’ if this not worth remembering? . . . By placing your treasures upon [the empty shelves of public libraries] a new lease of life would be given to books you have prized, and it is impossible to say where, along the lines of the generations to follow, they would cease to gratify and enlighten” (T. Greenwood 4). “Books, like coins,” he adds, “are only performing their right function when they are in circulation . . . Hoarded up,” they remain “only so much paper and leather,” but “in a Public Library, books begin to really live” (5). Yet what breathes life into books seems to kill their owners.

If Greenwood’s “book disinfecting apparatus” assumes that the sharing of books can cause death and disease, reciprocally owners’ death or
ruin can set books into motion. One measure of the value that readers attach to books (as opposed to, say, newspapers) is that they enter into circulation only against their owners’ will. Where object narratives involving coins take circulation as the precondition of financial health, those narrated by books counterbalance their structural need for change (for something to narrate) with their thematic assumption that books can change hands only in consequence of misfortune. Where financial health is marked by the shucking off of old clothes and furniture to replace them with new fashions, new books enter the house without old books ever exiting (a problem that anyone reading these words must have experienced firsthand).

Where the circulation of blood connotes life and the circulation of coins prosperity, the circulation of books instead announces death or bankruptcy. Both converge in
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
, where the books sold at auction after Mr. Tulliver’s financial ruin are replaced by the copy of the
Imitation
of
Christ
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
382).
¹⁰
Yet it’s never explained why, on acquiring a batch of secondhand books, Maggie (not to mention the narrator) immediately assumes that their owners must be dead—even though Maggie herself still lives after having seen her own books sold at auction.

For Eliot’s characters, buying a book conjures up the death of its previous readers as surely as learning to read conjures up one’s own mortality: “Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son’s education than leave it to him in your will” (G. Eliot,
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
23). Marian Evans’s first published poem, “Knowing that Shortly I Must Put off this Tabernacle,” appeared in the
Christian
Observer
for January 1840. In it, the speaker’s death is announced via a farewell to the books that he or she owns:

Books, that have been to me as chests of gold,
Which, miser-like I secretly have told,
And for you love, health, friendship, peace have sold—
Farewell!

(Deakin 36)

As one article in an antiquarian magazine declares, “It is a peculiarity of bookplates that they bring ‘the dead hand’ always before the imagination” (Wallis 257). Borrowing the logic of the saint’s relic, association copies invest the object with value borrowed from the identities of its human users. And like the saint, the previous owner must be dead.

From there, it’s only one step to imagining the book itself as mortal—whether through disuse or overuse. One early nineteenth-century inventor imagined paper manufacture itself as a kind of grave robbing.
In response to the scarcity of linen raw materials for papermaking, his pamphlet (itself printed on a specimen of the inventor’s recycled paper) proposes that by an “act of parliament, which prohibits, under a penalty, the burial of the dead, in any other dress than wool, may be saved about 250,000 pounds weight of linen annually; which in other countries perish in the grave” (Koops 75).

Augustine Birrell’s 1891 essay “Book-Buying” exemplifies both of these contradictory tenets. On the one hand, books are made to be recycled: “It is one of the boasts of letters to have glorified the term ‘second-hand,’ which other crafts have ‘soiled to all ignoble use.’ . . . The writers of to-day need not grumble. Let them ‘bide a wee.’ If their books are worth anything they too one day will be second-hand. If their books are not worth anything there are ancient trades still in full operation amongst us—the pastry-cooks and the trunk-makers—who must have paper.” In this analysis, the wear and tear that debases other commodities ennobles books. On the other, “Book-Buying” associates the circulation of books with the death of their owners. From the past represented in texts, Birrell segues directly to the future in which the book’s current owner will be replaced by another: “Alas! the printed page goes hazy beneath a filmy eye as you suddenly remember that Lycidas is dead . . . the ‘ancient peace’ of your old friends will be disturbed, when rude hands will dislodge them from their accustomed nooks and break up their goodly company” (285, 91).