How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (47 page)

That shift forms part of a larger economic story. By bracketing books with humbler objects,
London
Labour
also places the falling price of paper in the context of a general decline in the life span of manufactured goods. Mayhew registers the extent to which, for books as for other commodities, disposability was beginning to replace secondhandedness as the sign of cheapness. What made an object cheap was no longer that it had been repurposed in the past (think of “the unmistakable look of much of the attire of his class, that it was not made for the wearer”), but that it
lacked
the potential to be recycled in the future.

Such disposability characterizes “slop-goods,” whose flimsy fabrics (in the case of clothes) or rosewood veneers (in furniture) place them opposite Mayhew’s own “history of a people, from the lips of the people themselves . . . in their own ‘unvarnished’ language.” The more immediate their appeal to buyers, the more probable that their first owner will be their last: one used-clothes vendor insists that a secondhand cloak “always bangs a slop . . . because it was good to begin with” (2:41). Mayhew gives the best lines to secondhand sellers and buyers, distancing himself from “clerks and shopmen . . . often tempted by the price, I was told, to buy some wretched new slop thing rather than a superior coat second-hand” (2:29). When Mayhew pits mended goods against manufactured “slops,” an older culture in which clothes provided what Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones call the “materials of memory” meets planned obsolescence.
²⁷

In 1854, Charles Knight compared the shortsightedness of the previous century’s booksellers to the shortsightedness of contemporaneous fishmongers who destroyed their surplus at the end of each day rather than sell it at half-price: “The dealers in fish had not recognized the existence of a class who would buy for their suppers what the rich had not taken for their dinners . . . The fishmongers had not discovered that the price charged to the evening customers had no effect of lowering that of the morning. Nor had the booksellers discovered that there were essentially two, if not more, classes of customers for books—those who would have the dearest and the newest, and those who were content to wait till the gloss of novelty had passed off, and good works became accessible to them, either in cheaper reprints, or in ‘remainders’ reduced in price” (
The
Old
Printer
and
the
Modern
Press
225–26). William St Clair has shown how strongly the age of texts determined the price of books: texts published in the nineteenth century remained inaccessible to early nineteenth-century readers (St Clair). His point about new
texts
could be extended to new
books
—and a fortiori to new periodicals. This is a question not just of copyright, however, but also of fashion: when a commentator
in 1871 remarks that “thirty-shilling novels are sold for three shillings” once circulating libraries experience no more demand for them, the explanation has nothing to do with intellectual property (Friswell 522). Newspapers decline most steeply in value, of course: as Richard Altick explains, newspapers rented out as many as seventy times on the day of their publication could then be sent to country subscribers who paid threepence for a copy mailed on the day of publication but only two for one mailed the following day. In a town described by Altick in 1799, the London
Courier
passed from the surgeon, to a French émigré, to the Congregational minister, to the druggist, to a schoolmaster, to a sergemaker, and so on (R. Altick 323; see also Colclough 266). Yet these transactions were not unique to political news: like clothes, magazines, too, were handed from mistress to maid (Beetham, “In Search of the Historical Reader” 98): both lost value according to a cycle that had less to do with their material durability than with the short shelf life of fashion.

The life cycle that fashion plates share with fashionable clothes reminds us that what holds for textiles applies to texts as well. The nineteenth-century book trade formed a key site in the struggle between an economy that paired high prices with a succession of multiple users, and an economy that produced cheap single-use goods. Until the 1890s, as we know, the distribution mechanisms of fiction reflected a trade-off between short- and long-term popularity. On both sides of the Atlantic, publishers balanced their backlist of steady sellers (reference books, schoolbooks, bibles) against novels whose sales spiked in the year following publication. In the United States, this meant large print runs produced so cheaply as to be disposable; in Britain, it meant circulating libraries that saved subscribers from being stuck with stockpiles of last season’s best sellers.

Natalka Freeland has shown that the second strategy was what allowed fiction to exemplify an emerging culture of built-in obsolescence: the novel in general, and the detective novel in particular, are defined by resistance to rereading.
²⁸
Books in general, and novels and periodicals in particular, come to epitomize a trickle-down economy. In fact, Simon Eliot has shown that books descended the social scale not only from individual to individual, but also from institution to institution. In the public sector, bigger metropolitan libraries off-loaded their old best sellers to smaller provincial libraries; in the private sector, Mudie’s resold books and magazines that had been lent out, sometimes as little as a month old (“Circulating Libraries in the Victorian Age and After” 131, 139). Like the protagonists of eighteenth-century it-narratives, nineteenth-century books moved across—or rather down—the social scale. In the process, they mirrored the less concrete movement of texts from library-issue triple-decker to cheap reprint.

Slops are to castoffs as best sellers to chapbooks. That analogy between clothes and pages requires no ingenuity on my part: it was a well-worn one (as
Sartor
Resartus
still testifies) for anyone writing or reading before wood pulp.
²⁹
Paper came from cloth and borrowed the language of cloth; both are metonymically referred to as “prints.” Conversely, Dickens brings the manufacturing process full circle by comparing old clothes to parchment: in
A
Tale
of
Two
Cities
, the shoemaker’s “poor tatters of clothes, had, in a long seclusion from direct light and air, faded down to such a dull uniformity of parchment-yellow,” and in “Meditations in Monmouth-Street” “there was the man’s whole life written as legibly on those clothes, as if we had his autobiography engrossed on parchment before us” (
A
Tale
of
Two
Cities
43;
Sketches
by
Boz
78). The analogy gains weight from the geography that Mayhew describes: Holywell Street, off the Strand, was the center both for the sale of dirty books and for Jewish rag-traders (Nead 178).

One slum that Mayhew visits contains clotheslines “on which hung . . . handkerchiefs looking like soiled and torn paper” (2:89). The flypaper maker’s room, too, reminds him of “a washerwoman’s back-yard, with some thousands of red pocket-handkerchiefs suspended in the air . . . I had to duck my head down, and creep under the forest of paper strips rustling above us . . . A pile of entire newspapers was here brought out, and all of them coloured red on one side, like the leaves of the books in which gold-leaf is kept” (3:31). In a different study of London, he accuses readers of “dig[ging] their scissors into [my] results, taking care to do with them the same as is done with the stolen handkerchiefs in Petticoat Lane—viz., pick out the name of the owner.”
³⁰
Such analogies weave the author’s stylistic signature (as needlework or as watermark) into what might otherwise look like others’ words. In the process, they equate the repetition of words with the recycling of fibers. Although the section devoted to sellers and buyers of secondhand goods begins, “In commencing a new volume . . . ” (2:1), the description of rag-buyers that follows will remind us that no volume is entirely new, either in its material form or in its verbal content.

The rise of extensive wearing signals the fall of intensive reading. Mayhew couldn’t yet have predicted the technological changes that papermaking would undergo in the decades following, but what he did sense was a cultural and economic shift toward limiting goods to a single owner. Mayhew’s liveliest informants tend to share his nostalgia for that older dispensation; thus one complains that customers who disdain the secondhand trade are

often green, and is had by ‘vertisements, and bills, and them books about fashions which is all over both country and town. Do you know,
sir, why them there books is always made so small? The leaves is about four inches square. That’s to prevent their being any use as waste paper. I’ll back a coat such as is sometimes sold by a gentleman’s servant to wear out two new slops. (2:29)

Remember Chadwick campaigning to scale down blue books to an octavo less negotiable on the resale market, or missionaries in Madras printing tiny books to avoid tempting recipients to put them to base uses. The imaginary fight on which this vendor bets isn’t just between one kind of clothes and another; it’s also between two kinds of book about clothes. On one side, artificial safeguards against resale unite fashion-books with the goods that they advertise; on the other, Mayhew himself invokes an old play to explain how cloth can be renewed. The dealer’s attack on four-inch books is prefaced by an antiquarian digression:

In the last century, I may here observe, . . . when woollen cloth was much dearer, much more substantial, and therefore much more durable, it was common for economists to have a good coat “turned.” It was taken to pieces by the tailor and re-made, the inner part becoming the outer. This mode prevailed alike in France and England: for Molière makes his miser,
Harpagon
, magnanimously resolve to incur the cost of his many-years’-old coat being “turned,” for the celebration of his expected marriage with a young and wealthy bride. (2:29)

The quotation marks around “turned” draw our attention to Mayhew’s own reuse of an old text—the same one mentioned ten sheets of paper earlier among the uncut copies of “Shakespeare, Molière, [and] Bibles . . . found in the insatiate bag of the waste collector.” Mayhew’s Molière has been cut—and not for tailor’s measures, either. Although the pages that hawk slop-goods can’t even be torn off for wrapping, the texts that describe mended clothes can still be reproduced a century and a half later.

I’d like to conclude by asking how economic history (in this case, the price of paper both new and used) relates to literary history (that is, to representations on—and of—paper). On the one hand, the raw material of books cheapened even over the period that this monograph covers, thanks to factors both political (the 1861 repeal of the paper tax) and technological (the spread of mechanization in the first decades of the nineteenth century and of rag substitutes in the last).
³¹
Begun in serial form a year before wood pulp was commercially produced for the first
time,
London
Labour
appeared in full more than a decade later, once the new technology had established its viability. The wastepaper trade that Mayhew represents was on the verge of being destroyed by the increasing cheapness of new paper (“Traffic in Waste Paper” 135): the halving of its cost between 1840 and 1910 hit the waste trade harder than the trade in secondhand books (Weedon 67). As the price of its raw materials dropped, the book’s life span came to coincide with the text’s.

On the other hand, the late nineteenth-century drop in wastepaper’s market value is anticipated, within literature, by an early nineteenth-century decline in the power of fiction to imbue wastepaper with
narrative
value. If Mayhew’s scenes of miraculous cheese packaging draw on the language of contemporary religious tracts, those tracts borrow their fascination with wastepaper in turn from the fiction of a century earlier. Old paper is tracked through, or stars in the backstory of, almost every eighteenth-century subgenre: not just object narratives like
Adventures
of
a
Quire
of
Paper
(1779), but epistolary novels, pseudomemoirs, and most of all gothic romance.

The trope receives its death blow only once Catherine Morland, coming across a manuscript in an old chest, is crestfallen to discover that “an inventory of linen, in coarse and modern characters, seemed all that was before her” (Austen,
Northanger
Abbey
134). So far, so quixotic: pages are to romance what paper is to the real.
Don
Quixote
itself, readers will remember, traces its own pages to “waste papers” found by the narrator, not at a bookseller’s but in a silk merchant’s shop. In this universe, books may be burned but waste remains recuperable. In contrast, Austen’s refusal to quote the roll verbatim denies new life to old papers. Once Catherine convinces herself that no amount of framing can turn used paper back into usable text, illegibility becomes a guarantor of realism.

In narrowly literary-historical terms, Catherine’s awakening puts an end to framed narrative—the conceit that until that moment undergirded the novel in forms as various as interpolated tales and inset correspondences. Ian Duncan has incisively described the turn of the nineteenth century as a moment when “as ‘literature’ becomes a commercial object (a printed book for sale) it seeks to recuperate its ‘contexts,’ a lost world of organic relations of production, by representing itself as a relic of precapitalist origins” (Duncan,
Scott’s Shadow
274) What Duncan shows for the shift from oral to written culture holds equally true within written culture for the shift from manuscript to print (better, the competition between the two)—or, more to the point for Mayhew, from recycled found objects to single-use manufactured books. Austen’s rejection of the gothic pivots less on the improbability of wife murder than on the outdatedness of narrative hand-me-downs. No longer can oral tales or handwritten
letters be translated into print; no longer do readers situate themselves within a food chain. To the found objects of older fiction,
Northanger
Abbey
opposes the manufactured goods of the circulating library; to dusty papers, the “ten or twelve” new novels that Catherine and Isabella Thorpe borrow before throwing aside. From Cervantes’s narrator onward, the figure who treasures wastepaper is a naïf; to be disillusioned is to accept that paper is mortal.