How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (56 page)

21.
Thus Samuel F. Pickering, Jr., “The Old Curiosity Shop—a Religious Tract?”
Illinois
Quarterly
36.1 (1973), compares the plots of
The
Old
Curiosity
Shop
and
The
Dairyman’s Daughter
. Tracts may, however, overstate the appeal of novels to readers like Caroline Cox: Jan Fergus and Carolyn Steedman both argue that, in the eighteenth century at least, verse was more accessible to them. Jan S. Fergus, “Provincial Servants’ Reading in the Late 18th Century,”
The
Practice
and
Representation
of
Reading
in
England
, ed. James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Steedman,
Labours
Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England
.

22.
The one exception marks Becky Sharp’s nadir: when reduced to living off pious ladies, “she not only took tracts, but she read them.” Thackeray,
Vanity
Fair
, 642.

23.
On the difficulty of getting the poor to buy tracts, see Webb,
The
British
Working
Class
Reader, 1790–1848: Literacy and Social Tension
, 56.

24.
If, as John Plotz argues, the moonstone exemplifies “reverse portability” (from imperial periphery to center), it also shares with the religious tract a kind of reverse desirability. John Plotz,
Portable
Property: Victorian Culture on the Move
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 40–44.

25.
Penny Fielding argues that “the distinctions between private collection and lending library are broken down” in “The Tractate Middoth” and “Casting the Runes”: Penny Fielding, “Reading Rooms: M. R. James and the Library of Modernity,”
Modern
Fiction
Studies
46.3 (2000): 764. One might add that the library is dangerous precisely because it puts one reader into relation with others: speculating about the reviewer’s confidentiality, the secretary concludes that “the only danger is that Karswell might find out, if he was to ask the British Museum people who was in the habit of consulting alchemical manuscripts” (132). In that sense, the relation among scholarly colleagues looks less cozy than the cross-class collaboration of the passenger and conductor examining a streetcar ad together.

26.
On reading aloud in this period, see Philip Arthur William Collins,
Reading
Aloud; a Victorian Métier
(Lincoln: Tennyson Research Centre, 1972); Ivan Kreilkamp,
Voice
and
the
Victorian
Storyteller
, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, 49 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and on Nightingale’s opposition to it, John Plotz,
Semi-detached: The Aesthetics of Partial Absorption
(forthcoming).

27.
Pearson, too, observes that “in didactic novels characters are often judged by their willingness to read to entertain others.” Jacqueline Pearson,
Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 171. But she locates women’s resistance to being read to at the level of content (a woman more concerned with a broken needle than with the death of Nelson is resisting patriarchal culture) rather than, like Nightingale, at the level of form (174).

28.
Compare the gender politics of another Charlotte Adams tract:

It is too common to see men and boys engrossed in the selfish indulgence of reading to themselves books which are highly interesting, while a sister or a wife sits by labouring with her needle for the supply of indispensable wants to the family, without any share in the enjoyment of her companion. Some say they cannot read aloud—it hurts their chest, or it tires them—they never could do so in their lives. Let these tender gentlemen, who will shout for hours in some masculine amusement, try if they cannot acquire the power. (Charlotte Adams,
Boys
at
Home
[New York, 1854], 167)

29.
See also Monica Lewis, “Anthony Trollope among the Moderns: Reading Aloud in Britain 1850–1960” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2006).

30.
In the early Victorian debates over postage, print was strategically conflated with manuscript. Postal reformers overwhelmingly couched their arguments in terms of personal correspondence, often invoking the
Pamela
-esque scenario of a young worker’s virtue saved by letters from home. Mary Favret,
Romantic
Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 204. Thus Rowland Hill quoted employers testifying to the “vice and profligacy . . . among the young persons in our establishment . . . resulting from want of communication with their parents by letter.” Rowland Hill and George Birkbeck Norman Hill,
The
Life
of
Sir
Rowland
Hill . . . And the History of Penny Postage
, 2 vols. (London: Thos. De La Rue, 1880), 1:308. Likewise, a member of the Board of Trade attributed “vicious courses” to young workers arriving in London and unable to afford a letter home. Sir Rowland Hill,
Post
Office
Reform, Its Importance and Practicability
(London: C. Knight and Co., 1837), 93. But the sharpest jump in postal traffic after 1840 did not involve letters from one individual to another: the bulk of objects that passed through the postal system were “printed circulars, prospectuses, catalogues, and prices current.”
Administration
of
the
Post
Office: From the Introduction of Mr. Rowland Hill’s Plan of Penny Postage up to the Present Time
(London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1844), 55. Conservatives could counter Hill’s logic by pointing out that “where the poor man receives, say eight letters, from his sailor-son, or his daughter in service in the capital, or in some distant town, and thus gains a shilling in the year by cheap postage, let any one consider how much is gained and saved by this penny postage in such houses as Lloyd, Jones, and Co; Baring Brothers & Co.”
Administration
of
the
Post
Office: From the Introduction of Mr. Rowland Hill’s Plan of Penny Postage up to the Present Time
, 196. Like Miss Clack copying tracts out by hand, or like tract societies stuffing pamphlets into bottles, postal reformers borrowed the prestige of manuscript to ease the distribution of print.

1.
Polastron observes that books buried in tombs are at least protected from wear and tear: “it is certainly possible to view as a fairly honest conservation system this egotistical practice that wipes them from the face of the earth” Lucien X. Polastron,
Books
on
Fire: The Destruction of Libraries Throughout History
,
1st U.S. ed. (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2007) 10. On the other hand, the salvage value of the carrier can sometimes hinder the survival of its contents, as when silent films were melted down for silver.

2.
See also Jonathan Bloom,
Paper
before
Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

3.
On Victorian attitudes toward waste, see Natalka Freeland, “Trash Fiction: The Victorian Novel and the Rise of Disposable Culture”; on wastepaper more specifically, Talia Schaffer, “Craft, Authorial Anxiety, and ‘the Cranford Papers,’”
Victorian
Periodicals
Review
38.2 (2005). On paper more generally, see McLaughlin,
Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age
(which focuses more on nineteenth-century representations
of
paper than on representations
on
paper); Lee Erikson,
The
Economy
of
Literary
Form
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) (whose analysis of the relation of paper to nineteenth-century literature is weakened by its emphasis on technology at the expense of changing taxation regimes); Christina Lupton, “Theorizing Surfaces and Depths: Gaskell’s Cranford,”
Criticism
50.2 (2008); Andrea Pellegram, “The Message in Paper,”
Material
Cultures: Why Some Things Matter
, ed. Daniel Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Joshua Calhoun, “The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper,”
PMLA
126.2 (2011).

4.
Henry Mayhew,
London
Labour
and
the
London
Poor; Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work
(London: Griffin Bohn, 1861), 1:289–90, 3:33, 1:40. On the sham indecent trade in Mayhew, see also Lynda Nead,
Victorian
Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 157. On the dustman in Victorian culture, see Brian Maidment,
Dusty
Bob: A Cultural History of Dustmen, 1780–1870
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

5.
For informants reading earlier installments of
London
Labour
, see, e.g., 3:214. For subtle analyses of Mayhew’s characterization of his informants’ literacy, see Brantlinger,
The
Reading
Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Britain
, 85–91, and Victor Neuburg, ed.,
The
Invention
of
the
Streets
, 2. vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). On the other hand, one wastepaper dealer who declares that “the people as sells ‘waste’ to me is not such as can read” adds that “I don’t understand much about books”; the point is proven a moment later when he describes a customer asking, “Have you any black lead?”—which Mayhew’s readers must themselves gloss as “black letter” (2:110). Another dustman adds, “I niver vos at a school in all my life; I don’t know what it’s good for. It may be wery well for the likes o’ you, but I doesn’t know it ’u’d do a dustie any good. You see, ven I’m not out with the cart, I digs here all day; and p’raps I’m up all night, and digs avay agen the next day. Vot does I care for reading, or anythink of that there kind, ven I gets home arter my vork? I tell you vot I likes, though! vhy, I jist likes two or three pipes o’ baccer, and a pot or two of good heavy and a song” (2:178). The ballad locution “What cares I” asserts that orality does for him what literacy does for “the likes o’” the researcher.

6.
Brantlinger situates Mayhew within a tradition of both romantic and realist fiction that contrasts “oral vitality” with “literate domestication.” Brantlinger,
The
Reading
Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Britain
, 91.

7.
Nineteenth-century English commentators alternately praise and blame their own nation for recycling less than others. After remarking that old account-book covers can be made into soles of shoes that leak on rainy days, one writer in 1896 remarks, “It is only wicked foreigners who are said to do such things.” “Government Waste-Paper,”
Chambers’s Journal
13 (1896): 749; see also “Waste Paper,”
Leisure
Hour
30 (1881).

8.
On papermaking, see Dard Hunter,
Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft
, 2nd ed. (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947), 555, and Adrian Johns, “Changes in the World of Publishing,”
The
Cambridge
History
of
English
Romantic
Literature
, ed. James Chandler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 392.

9.
See also Johanna Drucker,
The
Visible
Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 45–46.

10.
Thanks to Natalka Freeland for pointing out the logical lapse to me. Andrew Miller suggests, more generally, that “no object can be owned which does not suggest to [Thackeray’s] imagination the ruin and death of those who own it” (
Novels
behind
Glass
, 18).

11.
On the paper bag, see Henry Petroski,
Small
Things
Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 99; becoming popular thanks to the cotton shortages during the Civil War, it gave birth to new metaphors, as when Barrie compared padded-out novels to “paper bags blown out with wind.”
Two
of
Them
(1893), quoted in P. J. Waller,
Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain, 1870–1918
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 33. For the place of waste in eighteenth-century culture, see Sophie Gee,
Making
Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).

12.
“The Republican Refuted; in a Series of Biographical, Critical, and Political Strictures on Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man,”
Monthly
Review
7 (1792): 84; thanks to Paul Keen for suggesting this example to me.

13.
On the phrase “not worth the paper,” see Jacques Derrida,
Paper
Machine
, trans. Rachel Bowlby, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 44.

14.
George Gordon Lord Byron,
Byron’s Letters and Journals: The Complete and Unexpurgated Text of All the Letters Available in Manuscript and the Full Printed Version of All Others
, ed. Leslie Alexis Marchand 12 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1973), 8:11–12; thanks to Susan Wolfson and Betty Schellenburg for this reference.