How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (46 page)

Compare a contemporaneous review that insults a novel by imagining it falling into the hands of a female Irish street vendor: “‘Hawkstone’—if it has not gone to the butter-shop, and enlightened Irish barrow-women before that time—‘Hawkstone,’ if surviving, will teach [the reader] how important it was once thought to furnish a model-protestant hero with a rosary” (“The Progress of Fiction as an Art” 361). It’s not entirely clear where to situate the irony in “enlighten”: whether the reviewer is implying that the book will go from cradle to grave, from press to barrow, without ever finding a reader, if only because the hypothetical barrow women aren’t literate; or whether, on the contrary, the point is that to read a page of
Hawkstone
—even for a barrow woman—would be the reverse of “enlightening.”

This article has now been attributed to Marian Evans, at that time the editor in all but name of the
Westminster
Review
. Two decades later, with the luxury of shunning magazine serialization, let alone the labor of reviewing novels more fit for the pastry-cook than for her audience, George Eliot returned to the metaphor. Chapter 41 of
Middlemarch
opens by comparing two forms of evidence, stone and paper:

As the stone which has been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious little links of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labors it may at last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping or stop-gap may at last be laid open under the one pair of eyes which have knowledge enough to turn it into the opening of a catastrophe. (412)

Remember how effectively the plot of
Middlemarch
is jump-started by the it-narrative that Lydgate reads,
Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea
, a classic whose characteristically eighteenth-century interest in numismatic “circulation” is eventually displaced by Lydgate’s more modern interest in the circulation of blood. At the other end of
Middlemarch
, however, “a bit of ink and paper” comes back into circulation to provide the same impetus that paper does in nineteenth-century children’s books organized around the travels of a bible or a hymnbook. At the same time, the opening of chapter 41 glances back at the question that Casaubon spent the early books of the novel dodging: whether biblical scholarship should rely on philological or archaeological evidence—on words or things, on metaphorical digging through sources or literal digging through dirt, on the tradition of the library or the transmission of the potsherd.

Butter in the review of
Hawkstone
, sandwiches in the
Dublin
University
Magazine
: traditionally, to couple books with food is to strip them
of their textual value. In the resolutely materialist landscape of
London
Labour
, however, the specificity of “bacon or fresh meat, or . . . saveloys” comes across as more than simply comic. Another vendor, after complaining that “we should both be tired” if he were to inquire too closely into the contents of his wastepapers, adds: “Very many were religious, more’s the pity. I’ve heard of a page round a quarter of cheese, though, touching a man’s heart” (2:114). For the
Monthly
Review
, nothing was lower than cheese: even butter would be less smelly. For Mayhew, in contrast, wrapping doesn’t preclude reading. The paper may touch the cheese, but the page still touches the heart. In that sense,
London
Labour
has less in common with the scatological humor of satire than with the providential logic invoked in
The
Romance
of
Tract
Distribution
(1934), which describes a tract used to wrap groceries converting the shopper (N. Watts 16). If book distribution can be narrated as “romance,” it’s less for its entertainment value than because its providential logic shares the circularity of a foundling’s wanderings. It-narrative simply makes explicit the assurance that no matter how many times it’s given away, lost, stolen, pawned, shipwrecked, and shot at, a book will always find its way home (Yeames).

Even the form of
London
Labour
endorses the cabinetmaker’s wife’s sense that wastepapers remain continuous with legible texts. It’s true that a volume break quarantines those vendors who resell objects for a further iteration of their original use (including secondhand booksellers) from those who bill them as raw material for a new purpose (including wastepaper dealers).
²²
The first sell by the piece, the second by weight (2:107). But the distinction that works for tools or crockery applies less neatly to paper. As soon as printed matter enters
London
Labor
, the aging process begins to run in reverse, if only because where scrap metal is counted, wastepaper is quoted:

The letters which I saw in another waste-dealer’s possession were 45 in number, a small collection, I was told; for the most part they were very dull and common-place. Among them, however, was the following, in an elegant, and I presume a female hand . . . The letter is evidently old, the address is of West-End gentility, but I leave out name and other particularities:

‘Mrs—[it is not easy to judge whether the flourished letters are ‘Mrs.’ or ‘Miss,’ but certainly more like ‘Mrs.’] Mrs.—(Zoological Artist) presents her compliments to Mr.—, and being commissioned to communicate with a gentleman of the name, recently arrived at Charing-cross, and presumed by description to be himself, in a matter of delicacy and confidence, indispensably verbal; begs to say, that if interested in the ecclaircissement and necessary to the same, she may
be found in attendance, any afternoon of the current week, from 3 to 6 o’clock, and no other hours. (2:114)

The “however” that singles out the quotable exception from the illegible mass also substitutes reproduction for description. Once the
roman
à clef
breaks in on an economic tract, wastepaper becomes hard to distinguish from used books. As always with
London
Labour
, it would be easy to tabulate the stylistic tricks that make this passage so novelistic: the ostentatious substitution of blanks for names; the silver-fork gesture toward a West End address; the hints of “delicacy” and “confidence”; and, of course, the speculation over the marital status of the owner of the “elegant, and I presume female” hand. But what makes this passage novelistic is ultimately less a stylistic or even thematic toolbox than the faith that a legible narrative can be assembled from a pile of “dull and common-place” letters. As an article on wastepaper declares in an Evangelical magazine, “Of waste paper it may truly be said ‘Resurgam’; it undergoes processes of apparent destruction only to rise Phoenix-like from its ashes—or rather pulp” (“Waste Paper” 419). In the miraculous logic that makes Mayhew’s pages touch the heart of any literary critic, entropy can always be reversed.
²³

In their own perverse way, even Mayhew’s infidel informants draw on the parable of the sower. When he cites a pickpocket as authority for the report that tracts are good to light pipes with, he borrows the logic that classical satire bequeaths to the book reviews where a social inferior is pictured disposing of competing publications.
²⁴
Yet Mayhew’s mention of pipe lighting draws as much on Evangelical literature as on the classical tradition. One RTS account compares handing out tracts to “casting pearls before swine,” explaining that “what grieved me was, to see these tracts torn in pieces before my eyes, to light pipes with” (Jones 169). Another Evangelical magazine acknowledges that “cautious ministers have shaken their heads, and told stories of the burning of Bibles, and Testaments, and tracts; and how the priest got them, and sold them for waste paper; and even that they have received their butter from the shops wrapped in pages of the Bible. The soldiers, they admit, receive them freely, but it is because the size of the paper exactly suits for making cigarettes”; yet these misuses disseminate good books among precisely those populations that would not seek them out to read (Manning). A third tract recounts that “an enterprising grocer had picked up and appropriated to himself the Bible which the priest had thrown away, and had thought to turn to good account the large leaves of the book, and so he had wrapped up his wares—his soap and cheese and candles—in the leaves which he tore out”; as customers unwrapped their groceries, they read and were converted (Borrett White 126). As the American Tract
Society explains, “If made waste paper of, as some of them are and will be, even in that state the scattered leaves of the Bible, or of other religious books have been made, and will continue to be made, the means of exciting serious and godly thoughts” (
Annual
Report
of
the
American
Tract
Society
130). One 1885 sermon praises “the enterprise of Andrew Fuller and some others along ago, who printed hymns upon papers which were to be used in the sale of cottons and other small wares . . . I knew a friend who in purchasing his tobacco found it done up in a passage of the Word of God, and, by the perusal of that portion, became a converted man” (R. Stewart). Dispersal didn’t need to mean disposal: in some cases, it could become the most effective means for the providential spread of the Word.

Administrators of free libraries after 1850 translated the tension between preservation and circulation into a secular, civic register. Over a decade after the Public Libraries Act, when Edward Edwards set out to attack fellow librarians who put the needs of books above the interests of borrowers, his language became at once mock-antiquarian and mock-blasphemous: a library that reduces the “public stock of learning” into an “exclusive” closed-stack collection was “a talent digged in the ground,” “an idol to be respected and worshipped for a raritie by an implicite faith, without anie benefit to those who did esteam it far off.”
²⁵
Love of the text can shade into idolatry toward the book, or reverence be coded as coolness.

Sowing or digging into the ground: the broadcast metaphor remains ambiguous. Even disasters far worse than finding bible pages wrapped around Indian food can be a blessing in disguise: one missionary shipwrecked in 1814 off the African coast consoles himself for the natives’ seizure of his goods by reflecting that “my having been cast away, may perhaps be the saving of many of those into whose hands these Bibles have fallen, or shall fall in the future” (Howsam 150).
²⁶
The
Wesleyan
Magazine
observes that

in three days 2000 Chinese Gospels and more than a hundredweight of the Scriptures in Mongolian were disposed of to Chinamen, Mongols, and Mohammedans, thus securing their distribution over vast tracts of country. Even where the book sold fails to interest the purchaser, it by no means follows that it is lost. Among the men who have come to crave further teaching concerning “the way of life,” one was questioned as to how he had received his Christian books; he replied that he had bought them from an old woman who was selling them as waste paper. Some men buy every book that is published, and study them all. One such bought ninety books and tracts from Dr. Edkins, of the London Mission at Peking, and by the time he had got through
them all, he was so thoroughly convinced of the folly of idol-worship that he pronounced sentence of death on the whole regiment of his domestic idols, numbering nearly a hundred, and representing a ton weight of copper! (“Pioneer Work in China” 902)

The trope of wastepaper miraculously turning back into legible text is undercut, however, by the parallel linking “a hundredweight of the Scriptures” with the comparison to copper. Measurement by weight restores the very materiality that the anecdote tries to leach out of wastepaper. Like Edwards, Mayhew translates the trope of broadcasting from a religious to an economic register. Where the it-narrative once shifted its voice box from coins to bibles, exalting the commercial providentialism of the hidden hand into an Evangelical defense of circulation, Mayhew now makes circulation in the marketplace the source of paper’s mysterious power.

Evangelicals’ faith in self-propelling paper could just as easily be borrowed by infidel radicals, like William Hone, who traced his political beliefs to a scrap of a description of Lilburne happened upon at the cheesemonger’s. The attorney general explained at the trial of
The
Rights
of
Man
that there had been no reason to prosecute Part I, whose audience was limited, but that Part II was “thrust into the hands of subjects of all descriptions, even children’s sweetmeats being wrapped in it” (Nelson 227). In
Memoirs
of
Modern
Philosophers
—itself framed as a found manuscript—Bridgetina is corrupted by a proof sheet of Godwin’s
Political
Justice
wrapped around her mother’s snuff: “Notwithstanding the frequent fits of sneezing it occasioned, from the quantity of snuff contained in every fold, I greedily devoured its contents. I read and sneezed, and sneezed and read” (Hamilton and Grogan 176). In a novel that exemplifies the battle between everyday truths and pernicious abstractions by comparing the mother’s knowledge of cookery with the daughter’s of books, the association of pages with groceries reminds us of their radical authors’ social inferiority.

London
Labour
itself lumps tracts together with every other form of free—and therefore worthless—print: the difference between bibles and advertisements disappears when “sham indecent” packets are described as being stuffed with “a religious tract, or a slop-tailor’s puff” (1:241). Political tracts prove as hard to get rid of as religious tracts: “the anti-Corn-Law League paper, called the
Bread
Basket
, could only be got off by being done up in a sealed packet, and sold by patterers as a pretended improper work” (1:241). Free tracts, junk mail, bill sticking: Mayhew testifies to a moment when the auditory overload of early modern cities was giving way to the curse of cheap paper.