How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (48 page)

If realism is the fictional mode that grants finality to waste,
London
Labour
would be “novelistic” not in the sense that’s usually supposed—that its reality effect depends on formal conventions borrowed from contemporary fiction—but, on the contrary, in that it shares the novel’s constitutive oscillation between the real and the romantic. The former finds its thematic corollary in a narrative of mortality, whether of humans or of papers; the latter, in the hope that characters can return from the grave, or papers from the grocery.

Of Mayhew’s series in the
Morning
Chronicle
, Thackeray claimed that “readers of romance own they never read anything like it” ([W. M. Thackeray]). The title of the RTS’s internal history,
The
Romance
of
Tract
Distribution
, too, inscribed tracts within the plot of the discarded manuscript that finds readers as providentially as orphans find parents. The found manuscript trope is recycled by Mayhew’s brother Horace in
Letters
Left
at
the
Pastrycook’s: Being the Clandestine Correspondence between Kitty Clover at School and her “Dear, Dear Friend” in Town
(1853), whose contents are presented as a set of letters about to be sold for wastepaper. Framed by a reminiscence couched in terms of more durable media (“I had carefully noted down in the porcelain tablets of my recollection . . . ”), the letters themselves are punctuated by metaphors of paper put to nontextual uses: one character is described as having “hair the colour of blotting-paper”; another “felt I was going to be turned inside out, like a paper bag” (1, 29, 80, 48).

Expelled from the central tradition of British fiction as thoroughly as the wastepaper trope from book reviewing, the found manuscript migrates in two directions. One is the providentialism of religious tracts; the other is the closed economy of the detective novel. Natalka Freeland shows that the “conservation of information” governing mid-nineteenth-century detective fiction means that any document that a character tries to destroy will come back to haunt him: a pile of ashes will always turn out to contain fragments of a will; the contents of any wastebasket can be pieced together to form a letter (Freeland). That convention of trashy fiction finds its Evangelical counterpart in the “story of a man who tore up a tract in the face of a distributor on board a ship. Two fragments, however, were blown by the wind into the folds of his coat, which he was surprised
to see on the cabin floor the next morning. On one fragment was the word ‘God,’ on the other ‘Eternity’” (N. Watts 9). Where D’Israeli tells us that destruction is easy and preservation is difficult, detective novel and tract alike suggest just the reverse.

A mechanistic model of the relation between literary history and economic history might lead us to expect a four-part correlation: the found manuscript trope should decline in tandem with the price of paper, and the wastepaper trope should disappear from book reviewing once paper comes to be discarded rather than repurposed.
³²
Certainly the
practice
of reading old papers seems to have declined over the course of the nineteenth century. David Vincent has argued that “the spread of literature and cheap literacy in the nineteenth century represented a shift for the bulk of the population from rereading to reading. It became acceptable for the first time to throw print away before every word had been perused” (
The
Rise
of
Mass
Literacy
103). What’s more crucial for our purposes is that it became acceptable for the first time to throw print away
after
every word had been perused: that is, that reading material was no longer designed with “after-uses” in mind.

If we look at the
representation
of wastepaper, however, no such story emerges. Neither found manuscripts and legible grocery wrapping, nor the pastry-cook and the trunk-maker, disappear. Instead, both tropes adapt: the latter, as I suggested, by subsiding into the metaphor of the bibliographer as servant, and the former, I want to argue now, by migrating into stories of childhood. On the one hand, stories
for
children are now framed as found manuscripts: thus manuscripts conspire with oral tradition to eclipse the printed form of Hans Christian Andersen’s tales, introduced as something fished out of a barrel (“Auntie Toothache”) or unwrapped from a piece of cheese (“The Goblin and the Huckster”) (Andersen 1096, 457). On the other, stories
about
children rely on the serendipitous or even providential discovery of books or papers discarded by adults. Remember the antiprovidential language in Anne Mozley’s assertion that any child “will surely find that the book thus influential came to him by a sort of chance, through no act of authority or intention” (195). Such “chances” shade into something more like a miracle, however, when Edmund Gosse associates found manuscripts with the “wonder” of childhood, describing the skin-trunk and hat-box that he came across in (cue to
Copperfield
) the lumber room:

The hat-box puzzled me extremely, till one day, asking my Father what it was, I got a distracted answer which led me to believe that it was itself a sort of hat, and I made a laborious but repeated effort to wear it. The skin-trunk was absolutely empty, but the inside of the lid of it was lined with sheets of what I now know to have been a sensational
novel. It was, of course, a fragment, but I read it, kneeling on the bare floor, with indescribable rapture . . . This ridiculous fragment filled me with delicious fears; I fancied that my Mother, who was out so much, might be threatened by dangers of the same sort; and the fact that the narrative came abruptly to an end, in the middle of one of its most thrilling sentences, wound me up to almost a disorder of wonder and romance. (51)

What unites the trunk with the box is the child’s confusion of insides with outsides. In both cases, he treats container as content. (A leather book is traditionally more legible than a skin-trunk.) Gosse implies that one would need to be a child—in fact, a child of a generation ago, brought up by religious fundamentalists—to find “wonder and romance” in an empty trunk.

For Gosse as for Dickens, romance isn’t just a textual mode: it’s also a distribution method (accident), a setting (the lumber room), and a medium (waste). Its prelapsarian model of reading is premised on a providential model of circulation: if the pages are cut out, so is the middleman. Or indeed middlewomen like Gosse’s own mother, whose tract writing and tract distributing are described a page earlier with the caveat that “I would not for a moment let it be supposed that I regard her as a Mrs. Jellyby”: the author of “a tract, called ‘The Guardsman of the Alma,’ of which I believe that more than half a million copies were circulated,” reappears as a character in either a gothic romance (the genre with which tracts compete) or a modern novel in which tracts are ridiculed.

The parallelism between box wearing and trunk reading produces another, subtler, effect. The comic mode of the former—the deadpan “laborious but repeated” juxtaposed with the image of a boy with a box on his head—can’t help rubbing off on the latter. “What I now know” marks a distance between naive child and world-weary narrator that bears more resemblance to the gap separating narrator from heroine in
Northanger
Abbey
than child from adult in
David
Copperfield
. Where Dickens pictures the child reading less into books than would an adult—”whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me”—Gosse and Austen show the child reading something into them that the adult narrator knows was never there.

With one crucial difference: while
Northanger
Abbey
reveals a laundry list where we expected to find a story, Gosse gives us a story in place of the clothing that we expect to find in a trunk. In early modern satire as in book reviewing, found manuscripts signify realism: the humbling truths of embodiment and mortality, whether of persons or of papers. In a world where wastepaper has lost its economic value, however, found manuscripts can also, on the contrary, mark “wonder” and “romance.”
As accident gives way to miracle, Catherine Morland’s naïveté is replaced by David Copperfield’s innocence. More specifically, where Catherine is excessively enmeshed in genre (in this case, the gothic), the children in the later narratives stand blissfully outside of it. The young Gosse doesn’t even recognize “what I now know to have been a sensational novel,” any more than the young David can identify “a cheap series of reprints then in course of publication.” It’s not enough to share the ignorance that characters
within
romance model (not to know, for example, that innkeepers get paid); closer to home, romance can’t withstand the knowledge that books themselves are for sale. Yet Austen forbids us even to feel nostalgia for an age where found manuscripts crowded out bought books. Even the progression from a “roll . . . of trifling size” to a triple-decker’s telltale compression of pages is undercut, in turn, by Catherine’s disappointment that what looked like a scroll is really more like a codex: “she now plainly saw that she must not expect a
manuscript
of equal length with the generality of what she had shuddered over in
books
, for the
roll
, seeming to consist entirely of small disjointed
sheets
, was . . . much less than she had supposed it to be” (137; my emphasis).

If some materials are more renewable than others, some genres are more rereadable. Artificial safeguards are needed to prevent fashion-books from being recycled, but literary texts remain quotable; the ephemerality of laundry lists provides a foil for the timelessness of the novel that frames them.

[Catherine] seized another sheet, and saw the same articles with little variation; a third, a fourth, and a fifth presented nothing new. Shirts, stockings, cravats and waistcoats faced her in each. Two others, penned by the same hand, marked an expenditure scarcely more interesting, in letters, hair-powder, shoe-string and breeches-ball. (Austen,
Northanger
Abbey
134)

Where Catherine Morland fails to turn laundry list into story, Austen’s critics have succeeded—through stories about the reality effect, about money, about women’s domestic oppression. Equivalent operations could be performed upon
London
Labour
: a reader could notice, for example, that the sheet of paper contains a list of sheets, or that for Austen’s narrator as for Mayhew’s flypaper manufacturer, the word “article” doesn’t refer to an essay.
³³
In that McLuhanesque reasoning, Austen’s reference to “a roll of paper” would tip us off to the fact that the “inventory of linen” is literally
of
linen—manufactured from recycled rags, as the
Spectator
reminds us, themselves produced by the washing described. If Catherine finds “nothing new” on the page, the explanation may be that its material is secondhand.

The language that conveys Catherine’s disappointment in the found manuscript mirrors the language that earlier described critics’ disapproval of novels—their “talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans” (Austen,
Northanger
Abbey
21). If that image is to be believed, novels no sooner emerge from the “press” than they become “threadbare”: the moment between production and disposal dwindles to a vanishing point.
Northanger
Abbey
reverses that time line and rehabilitates the “threadbare,” making the exposure of the textile’s grid an image for the laying bare of textual devices. Like the cabinetmaker’s wife turning wrapping back into reading, Austen fishes the cliché of the found manuscript out of the dustbin of literary history.

Even as fashions change (whether in sartorial style or literary conventions), materials endure. Such, at least, is the principle linking the laundry list that appears at the end of the novel to the dialogue with which the novel begins.

“And pray, sir, what do you think of Miss Morland’s gown?”

“It is very pretty, madam,” said he, gravely examining it; “but I do not think it will wash well; I am afraid it will fray . . . But then you know, madam, muslin always turns to some account or other; Miss Morland will get enough out of it for a handkerchief, or a cap, or a cloak. Muslin can never be said to be wasted.” (14)

In this analysis, the end of the novel would force us to cycle back to the beginning, as if to test whether its text is as disposable as a laundry list or as reusable as a length of muslin. Once the question of how muslin will wear gives way to the question of whether the clock can be turned back on the telltale compression of pages, the novel’s structure mimics the passage from clothing to books that defines the life cycle of linen. What Mayhew says of Harpagon’s coat holds true for the novel: in a mirror image of Gosse’s “laborious . . . effort” to wear a hatbox, “the outer part becomes the inner.”

Yet to notice the movement from cloth to paper, or from content to form, would be to ignore the lesson that the scene so painfully impresses on Catherine. The critical urge to transmute empty surfaces into hidden depths—beginning with the two-dimensional plane of the page—replicates Catherine’s faith that the most throwaway document will repay interpretation. Perhaps the more throwaway the better: a dusty manuscript “bangs” a circulating-library novel just as rusty knives sell best (according to one of Mayhew’s informants) because “folks like to clean up a thing theirselves, and it’s as if it was something made from
their own cleverness” (2:11). In Mayhew’s scrap heap, found objects outlast manufactured goods. Once interviews become “more novel, curious and interesting” than fiction, then recycling begins to look like a name for reading.

Rags to riches, or at least rags to text: the fantasy that nothing lies outside the realm of interpretation was as crucial to semiotics in the twentieth century as to the gothic in the eighteenth. No cultural artifact too nonverbal to be metaphorically “read”; no butter wrapping too smelly to be reinvested with legibility. Unfortunately, most scholars’ experience approximates Catherine Morland’s or the costermonger’s more closely than a gothic heroine’s or the cabinetmaker’s. The laundry lists that we find in the archive refuse to yield stories. Nor do volumes in rare-book libraries tell as much about previous handlers as do the heroes of it-narrative. Seeking marginalia, we see uncut pages; craving ink marks, we find drink stains.