How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (44 page)

As early as 1820, Washington Irving dramatized that ambivalence in the essay describing Geoffrey Crayon’s visit to Westminster Abbey, which begins by comparing the library to a catacomb, and “authors” (metonymically, books) to mummies—or else to “treasured remains of those saints and monarchs that lie enshrined in the adjoining chapels; while the remains of their contemporary mortals, left to the ordinary course of nature, have long since returned to dust.” Yet when the narrator is surprised to find a “hoarse and broken voice” emerging from a small quarto, it tells a different story. “What a plague do they mean,” the voice complains, “by keeping several thousand volumes of us shut up here, and watched by a set of old vergers, like so many beauties in a harem, merely to be looked at now and then by the Dean?” Here as so often, books are invested with the literal power of speech at precisely the moment when they fail to metaphorically “speak” to their readers. But also as so often, everything rides on what metaphor you choose: the narrator tells the quarto to thank its lucky stars for being immured in an old library “which, suffer me to add, instead of likening to harems, you might more properly and gratefully have compared to those infirmaries attached to religious establishments for the benefit of the old and decrepit, and where, by quiet fostering and no employment, they often endure to an amazingly good-for-nothing old age” (167–69).

One reason that books can so easily replace financial instruments as the protagonists of it-narratives is that both share the same duality: like coins and banknotes, bibles and hymnbooks derive value at once from their material form (coins are made from precious metals; in this period especially, paper costs account for a high proportion of the production costs of books) and from their power to evoke a reality independent of that material form (a “pretty book” is not a handsome object so much as a tasteful text). The resemblance breaks down, though, once you reach the end of the object’s life. For while a well-defined system regulates the moment when worn coins are taken out of circulation, no such thing is true for battered books. This is the breach into which Mayhew steps.

Whether martial or scatological, life cycle metaphors overlay the relation of text to book onto a time line. Yet that before and after also correspond to richer and poorer. If wastepaper looms large in the slums that Mayhew describes, the simplest explanation is that the Victorians associated mental operations (such as reading) with the upper classes, manual gestures (such as wrapping) with the lower. If the former reflects the price of new paper, the latter has more to do with the resale value of old—and, by extension, with the lack of materials manufactured specifically for packaging. Today, books themselves are one of the few commodities that, even in the developed world, continue to be packaged in used paper rather than new plastic: what reader of this page has not unwrapped a secondhand book from the outdated local newspaper of an online bookseller in some never-visited small town identifiable only by the real-estate ads? But where we use newspaper to wrap other texts, the Victorians associated it with nontextual and even antitextual contents. Before the invention of toilet paper and paper bags—both first produced for sale in the same decade as
London
Labour
—and the even more spectacular rise of plastics, old paper was inextricably linked to food. Its habitats were the kitchen and the privy, its associations with the larder and the body (at best, with Dora Copperfield’s curlpapers).
¹¹
In this context, even Mayhew’s term “after-use” takes on an anatomical meaning.

The setting in which Mayhew’s contemporaries would have expected to come upon such references to grocery packaging was neither ethnographic (as in his costermongers) nor economic (as in Jevons’s “butter-man”). On the contrary, food wrapping had by the nineteenth century come to occupy a central role in aesthetics, because a long satirical tradition ensured that the easiest way to insult a work of literature was to mention it in the same breath with groceries. The
Monthly
Review
’s
1792 attack on Charles Harrington’s
The
Republican
Refuted
, for example, concludes with two lines: “Here, boy! throw this to the great heap that lies there, in the corner, for the cheesemonger: it may be of some use to him, though we can make nothing of it in
our
way
.”
¹²
By 1830, Macaulay could demolish Montgomery’s
Satan: A Poem
in the pages of the
Edinburgh
by remarking, a propos of nothing in particular, that “the fashionable novels of eighteen hundred and twenty-nine hold the pastry of eighteen hundred and thirty” (T. B. Macaulay, “Mr. Robert Montgomery” 279). A year later, a satirical newspaper dismissed a parliamentary speech with the couplet

For sale, waste paper lying in a loft—
Perceval’s speech,
particularly
soft!

(“Brevities,” 7)

(Nathaniel Ames observed that “sailors paying little or no attention to the ‘serious calls’ of these ‘gospel trumpeters’ . . . have quietly handed over to the cook all the tracts which a blind sectarian zeal had intruded upon their notice” (Skallerup 39). In 1844,
Punch
’s parodic “Report of the Select Committee on Parliamentary Petitions” suggested that the dustmen appointed to cart away petitions categorize them by party, so that cheesemongers could avoid losing customers by sending their wares wrapped up in offensive papers: instead, “Conservative petitions [could be] used for sending home Parmesan, Gruyere, and Stilton; the Whig petitions were used for the Cheshire class of cheeses; while the Radical petitions were devoted to the cheaper sorts, including black-puddings, and single rashers of bacon.” Along the way, the article restored a series of figurative terms to their literal meaning: learning that the majority of petitions are tabled, the committee proceeds to examine the table; a dustman testifies that the papers in question are both “heavy” and “dry” (“Report of the Select Committee on Parliamentary Petitions”).

Reviewers invoked food wrapping to dismiss others’ writing, not their own. But authors, too, could smear their own writings by association with household uses, as in
Biographia
Literaria
:

Of the unsaleable nature of my writings I had an amusing memento one morning from our own servant girl. For happening to rise at an earlier hour than usual, I observed her putting an extravagant quantity of paper into the grate in order to light the fire, and mildly checked her for her wastefulness; la, Sir! (replied poor Nanny) why, it is only “WATCHMEN.” (Coleridge 1:187)

Coleridge’s rueful joke locks text and book into a zero-sum relationship: the more valuable the paper, the more worthless the page. In a culture that dismisses texts as “not worth the paper they’re printed on,” to register
the usefulness of the book-object—how fast it catches fire or how much mutton grease it can sop up—is to assert the uselessness of its contents.
¹³
In the same vein, the preface to John Mills’s
The
English
Fireside: A Tale of the Past
(1844) apologizes for having boasted that an earlier novel “did not find its way to the trunkmakers’ or the chandlers’ shops in the time specified for the reception of modern productions of literature.” Over the course of a printed object’s lifetime, texture replaced text as the source of its value.

If these reviews draw their scatological humor from classical satire, their obsession with domestic uses can be traced to more recent, more religiously pointed forms of biblioclasm. The Reformation—often billed as the triumph of the book—caused manuscripts to be cut up for “sewing-guards, fly-leaves, and wrappers of bookbindings”; in 1536, John Leland complains that iconoclasts cut leaves from ancient manuscripts to clean their shoes (Christopher de Hamel quoted in Sherman 102). And James Simpson has observed that during the dissolution of the monasteries, those into whose hands they fell “reserved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr iakes, some to scoure theyr candel styckes, and some to rubbe their bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and the sope sellers, and some they sent over the see to the bokebynders” (Simpson, “Bonjour paresse” 258). William Sherman adds that cutting and pasting could just as easily connote reverence: same action, different cause (Sherman 103). The pyres of Nuremberg confer a dignity lacking from the kitchen fire.

Reading, then wrapping: reviewers invoke wastepaper to taunt authors with the ephemerality of the works that were supposed to counterbalance their own mortality. As Fielding’s translation of Martial put it, “How many fear the Moth’s and Bookworm’s Rage, / And Pastry-Cooks, sole Buyers in this Age? / What can these Murtherers of Wit controul? / To be immortal, Books must have a soul” (Gigante,
The
Great
Age
of
the
English
Essay
170). This may explain why authors themselves so often experience wastepaper as a memento mori, even when its contents happen to be by someone else. In an entry for 4 January 1821—later cut and pasted into a printed book—Byron’s diary records,

I was out of spirits—read the papers—thought what fame was, on reading, in a case of murder, that ‘Mr. Wych, grocer, at Tunbridge, sold some bacon, flour, cheese, and, it is believed, some plums, to some gipsy woman accused. He had on his counter (I quote faithfully) a book, the Life of Pamela, which he was tearing for waste paper, etc. etc. In the cheese was found, etc., and a leaf of Pamela wrapt round the bacon.’ What would Richardson have said could he have traced his pages from their place on the French prince’s toilets (see Boswell’s Johnson) to the grocer’s counter and the gipsy-murderess’s bacon!!!

What would he have said? what can any body say, save what Solomon said long before us? After all, it is but passing from one counter to another, from the bookseller’s to the other tradesman’s-grocer or pastry-cook.
¹⁴

Where Eliot and Gladstone link the circulation of books to readers’ mortality, Byron compares it to authors’: the fate of books allows a poet to denigrate his trade. The “leaf of Pamela wrapt round the bacon” prefigures our own metaphor that names worthless information by analogy with canned meat.

In fact, Byron’s elegiac tone has more in common with twenty-first-century complaints of information overload than it does with the rags-to-pages triumphalism elaborated a century earlier by one of the periodicals most frequently named in Mayhew’s inventories of waste-dealers’ stock (e.g., 1:293). The
Spectator
for 1 May 1712 begins by observing, “When I trace in my Mind a bundle of Rags to a Quire of
Spectators
, I find so many Hands employ’d in every Step they take thro’ their whole Progress, that while I am writing a
Spectator
, I fancy my self providing Bread for a Multitude”; but he goes on to confess that

I have lighted my Pipe with my own Works for this Twelve-month past; my Landlady often sends up her little Daughter to desire some of my old
Spectators
, and has told me, more than once, the paper they are printed on is the best in the World to wrap Spice in. They likewise make a good Foundation for a Mutton pye.

The shift from metaphorical food (“I fancy my self providing Bread”) to its literal counterpart (“They . . . make a good Foundation for a Mutton pye”) echoes the demotion of “paper” from a count noun (a “Spectator paper”) to a mass noun (“the paper they are printed on”).

The essay counterbalances that fall, however, by a celebration of the benefits that papermaking diffuses among classes and even nations. “It is pleasant enough,” Addison adds (the word here connotes pleasure as well as the older sense of “comic”),

to consider the Changes that a Linnen-fragment undergoes, by passing through the several Hands above-mentioned. The finest pieces of Holland, when worn to tatters, assume a new Whiteness more beautiful than their first, and often return in the shape of Letters to their Native Country. A Lady’s Shift may be metamorphosed into Billet-doux, and come into her Possession a second time. A beau may peruse his Cravat after it is worn out, with greater Pleasure and Advantage than he ever did in a Glass. In a word, a piece of Cloath, after having officiated for some Years as a Towel or a Napkin, may by this means be raised
from a Dung-hill; and become the most valuable piece of Furniture in a Prince’s Cabinet.
¹⁵

Where Mr. Spectator’s writing descended from study to kitchen, here cloth rises from the hands of a servant (“a Towel or a Napkin”) to a prince’s study. Literally handed down from the
piano
nobile
, paper can rise again, phoenix-like, through writing.

If Byron invokes the obituary, Addison channels the it-narrative. Like it-narrators, papers establish transitive relations among the rich and the poor through whose hands they pass in succession. Tracing the book’s origins exalts; predicting the book’s fate degrades: a similar symmetry links
Sartor
Resartus
’s reflection on the mortality of books—“is it not beautiful to see five million quintals of Rags picked annually from the Laystall; and annually, after being macerated, hot-pressed, printed on, and sold,—returned thither; filling so many hungry mouths by the way?”—with Carlyle’s boast that a letter from John Sterling attacking
Sartor
Resartus
would be “made into matches” (Carlyle,
Sartor
Resartus
35, 233). (The material quoted within the novel itself is presented as having reached the narrator’s hands via “one of those Book-packages, which the
Stillschwegen’she Buchhandlung
is in the habit of importing from England [ . . . with] as is usual, various waste printed-sheets by way of interior wrappage; into these the Clothes-philosopher, with a certain Mohamedan reverence even for waste paper, where curious knowledge will sometimes hover, disdains not to cast his eye” [211].)

In an equally self-referential object narrative published a few years before
London
Labour
, Charles Knight traces the pages that we are reading to exchanges among nations—but also among a descending series of social classes. “The material of which this book is formed existed a few months ago, perhaps in the shape of a tattered frock, whose shreds, exposed to the sun and wind, covered the sturdy loins of the shepherd watching his sheep on the plains of Hungary”; or