How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (6 page)

A
RMY
C
HAPLAIN
. “Glad to hear it. Shall I give you a paper?”

C
ONTRABAND
. “Sartain, Massa, if you please.”

A
RMY
C
HAPLAIN
. “Very good. What paper would you choose, now?”

C
ONTRABAND
. “Well, massa, if you chews, I’ll take a paper ob terbacker. yah! yah!” (
The
Railway
Anecdote
Book
213)

Or to age: when Mr. Brownlow observes Oliver Twist surveying the books lining the walls of his study, the workhouse boy notices what a propertied adult doesn’t.

“You shall read them, if you behave well,” said the old gentleman kindly; “and you will like that, better than looking at the outsides, that is, in some cases; because there are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”

“I suppose they are those heavy ones, sir,” said Oliver, pointing to some large quartos, with a good deal of gilding about the binding.

“Not always those,” said the old gentleman, patting Oliver on the head, and smiling as he did so; “there are other equally heavy ones, though of a much smaller size. How should you like to grow up a clever man, and write books, eh?”

“I think I would rather read them, sir,” replied Oliver.

“What! wouldn’t you like to be a book–writer ?” said the old gentleman.

Oliver considered a little while; and at last said, he should think it would be a much better thing to be a bookseller; upon which the old gentleman laughed heartily, and declared he had said a very good thing, which Oliver felt glad to have done, though he by no means knew what it was. (Dickens
Oliver
Twist
107)

Insides and outsides of books, figurative and literal senses of “heavy,” writing and selling: the dichotomies mapped onto the difference between gentlemen and paupers or adults and children break down only in laughter.

No use claiming novelty for these jokes: as we’ll see at the end of this book, their lineage stretches back to Roman satire. But they cluster in different genres at different moments. In the early nineteenth century, bookish puns migrate from the book review, to the comic press, to the triple-decker realist novel. In the genre that (Jakobson tells us) replaces metaphor by metonymy, the reliteralization of dead metaphors takes on a particular force: the novel’s formal partisanship of the literal over the figurative and the concrete over the abstract finds its strongest thematic corollary in the bathetic substitution of material book for verbal text (Jakobson).
¹⁵
In
Vanity
Fair
, the illustration of George lighting his cigar with a letter from Amelia is captioned “Lieutenant Osborne and
His Ardent Love-Letters.” In the figurative sense that the caption leads us to expect, the adjective would have implied romantic passion; in the literal sense that sinks in once we see the illustration, practicality if not coxcombery.

In a culture where page is to paper as ideal is to real, the novel will establish its realism not only by contrasting the content of high-flown literary texts with a more mundane reality (the older quixotic move), but also by replacing textuality
tout
court
with a materiality that, like charity, begins at home—that is, that begins with the book in our hands.
¹⁶
Generic disillusion traditionally tracks social debasement: romance is to the real as Dulcinea to a cowherd. In the nineteenth century, the lower orders reject abstraction as much as idealism.

The prominence of servants in these jokes reflects their combination of material access to, and intellectual or political unfitness for, literature. The
Yellowplush
Papers
, which
Fraser’s
commissioned from Thackeray in 1837, are narrated by a “littery” footman who quotes an Irish journalist praising the Cabinet Cyclopaedia as a “litherary Bacon.”
¹⁷
Thackeray’s pun on “beacon” can replace metaphorical enlightenment by literal food, or literature by litter, only because it occurs in the mouth of an Irish hack as quoted by an English servant. From study to kitchen, from lofty brainwork to footmen below-stairs: in ventriloquizing a servant literalizing his masters’ language, Thackeray draws on the occupational puns already elaborated in an 1830 pamphlet satirizing the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’s ambition to publish for the lower orders.

Shakespeare and Milton they supply
That those who run may read;
A circulating library
It may be call’d indeed.
. . .
Meanwhile the butler, worthy man
So snug o’er his o-port-o,
Enjoys the ‘life of sherry-dan,’
Appropriately in quarto.

(Moncrieff 16, 19, 32)

Each stanza displaces an intellectual abstraction by its material corollary—whether culinary or bibliographical hardly matters. In overlaying the mind/body distinction with the passage from figurative to literal language, the poem associates lower-class pseudoliteracy with the book’s physical format and commercial transmission. It’s true enough that the SDUK literalized the metaphor of “enlightenment” when it campaigned against
window tariffs as a material obstacle to reading in working-class homes: the pun becomes a political platform.

Mind/body puns proliferate at the moment when those classes who use books for pie lining or sandwich wrapping were beginning to identify themselves as readers. F. B. Doveton makes larder to library as literal to figurative:

I lost my
Bacon
t’other day—could anything be harder?
My cook had taken it by stealth—I found it in the
Larder
.

(21)

Meat links readers’ bodies with books’ binding more than would, say, the observation that
Leaves
of
Grass
is printed on esparto grass. The digital-era metaphor of “spam” can be traced back to the era of pigskin bindings: even more than Lamb’s name, Bacon’s lent itself to cheap jokes. Irving Brown’s “How a Bibliomaniac Binds His Books” ends thus:

I’d like my favourite books to bind
So that their outward dress
To every bibliomaniac’s mind
Their contents should express.
. . .
Intestine wars I’d clothe in vellum,
While pig-skin Bacon grasps . . .
Crimea’s warlike facts and dates
Of fragrant Russia smell;
The subjugated Barbary States
In crushed Morocco dwell.

(G. White 21–22)

When Victorian essayists quote Bacon’s aphorism that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested,” they reverse the logic of the dummy spine that Thomas Hood devised for a library staircase at Chatsworth: “Pygmalion. By Lord Bacon” (W. Jerrold 258). Bacon had changed the tongue from an organ that literally affects the book (licking a finger before it turns the pages, for example) to the vehicle of a metaphor for disembodied mental acts. Hood changed “Bacon” instead from the name of a great mind to the name of an animal’s body.

Because puns on bookbinding pit materialist against idealist conceptions of culture, my insistence on belaboring the obvious simply follows the cue of my primary sources. The same could be said of my discipline as a whole: just as Victorian puns prefigure the tension later developed by critics’ plays on words like “stereotype” and “hors-texte,” so Victorian realist
fiction shares its temperamental cast with late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century book history. Both are detail-oriented, business-minded, and petty; both are called upon to integrate descriptions of material details with generalizations about social institutions; both are inclined to privilege the mundane over the ideal, the local over the transcendent, the concrete over the abstract. The overrepresentation of realist fiction among book historians’ case studies betrays a craving for role models.

If we recognize twenty-first-century book historians as the heirs to the realist novel, then twenty-first-century literary critics look more like heirs to the sermon. From Protestant theology, secular explicators have learned to prize spirit over matter—and, by extension, the inwardness of selves produced by reading over the outward circumstances of bodies handling books.
¹⁸
Where the realist novel found its foil in Evangelical tracts, book historians could find theirs in close reading.

As abstract is to concrete, common are to proper nouns: Bacon metonymically bound in pigskin or “crushed Morocco” reduced from the name of a country to a piece of leather. No accident that the person who anathematized “things in book’s clothing” was named Lamb. He alluded at once to rag paper made from old clothes and to the sheepskin that books as well as wolves were covered in. Puns on animal names remind readers that most European books were bound in animal skins, inscribed on parchment or vellum, or held together with glue made from dead horses. (Cultures with different attitudes toward animal by-products, notably Hinduism, developed quite different methods of manufacture [Trivedi 26].) In 1900 alone, Oxford University Press’s binderies used the skins of one hundred thousand animals (Ledger-Lomas 331; Holsinger 619). When La Bruyère sneered in 1688 at a man who “calls a tannery his library,” he implied that the out-of-body experience that is reading requires forgetting those animals’ corpses (La Bruyère 315). Yet for buyers thumbing a British and Foreign Bible Society catalog that listed bibles bound in calf, sheep, or sheepskin artificially grained to resemble calf, the book remained inseparable from the body (
Fifty-Sixth Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society
).

The book’s dependence on animals’ bodies would continue to generate black humor as late as the publication of
Animal
Farm
, where after the aging workhorse Boxer is taken away—just days shy of the retirement that he plans to spend in pasture “learning the remaining twenty-two letters of the alphabet”—another horse who has gotten further in the alphabet notices something strange:

“Fools! Fools!” shouted Benjamin, prancing round them and stamping the earth with his small hoofs. “Fools! Do you not see what is written on the side of that van?”

That gave the animals pause, and there was a hush. Muriel began to spell out the words. But Benjamin pushed her aside and in the midst of a deadly silence he read:

“‘Alfred Simmonds, Horse Slaughterer and Glue Boiler, Willingdon. Dealer in Hides and Bone-Meal. Kennels Supplied.’ Do you not understand what that means? They are taking Boxer to the knacker’s!” (Orwell 113)

Designed to ensure immortality to authors and disembodiment to readers, the written word here serves as a reminder that books themselves are made from corpses.

The leather binding that linked books metonymically to the animals whose carcasses covered them also linked them metaphorically to other, nontextual leather goods. Whether, in 1860, the
Saturday
Review
attacked Trollope for “mak[ing] a novel just as he might make a pair of shoes” (“Review of Castle Richmond”), or on the contrary Bulwer-Lytton defended the genre by urging novelists who declare “I am not going to write a mere novel” to remember that no one “could ever become a good shoemaker if he did not have a profound respect for the art of making shoes” (“On Certain Principles”), they dragged the novel down from head to feet.
¹⁹
Trollope, of course, returned the favor, calling writer’s block as absurd as if “the shoemaker were to wait for inspiration, or the tallow-chandler for the divine moment of melting” (Anthony Trollope,
An
Autobiography
121).

By the end of the century, the comparison of fiction to shoes was well-enough established for Woolf to assert that “what happened to boots has now happened to books. Books used to be made in small quantities by hand; they are now made in enormous quantities by machinery. Just as hand-made boots fitted better and lasted longer than machine made boots, so hand-made books read better and wore better than do our machine made books” (“Are Too Many Books Written and Published?”). The boot-boy at Claridge’s finds his double in the maker of boots. Galsworthy, too, could take that metaphor as the donnée of “Quality,” a 1911 story about a craftsman’s pride in making shoes by hand, which reads clearly enough as an allegory of the workmanlike in literature.
²⁰
(Here and throughout, I use “literature” to encompass a wider range of genres than nineteenth-century writers themselves did, stretching both to essays as in the eighteenth-century sense of the term, and to the narrative fiction that twentieth-century classifications began to dignify by the name of “literature.”) For the producer to devote his earnest attention to any object,
no matter how trivial, implies an ethic of service; aesthetic attention on the part of consumers, however, implies self-indulgence. By the same token, the artisanal particularity that sets Galsworthy’s bespoke shoemaker apart in an age of machine production is precisely what renders book-collectors ridiculous in the age of the steam-press and the stereotype.

In “The Street Companion; or The Young Man’s Guide and the Old Man’s Comfort in the Choice of Shoes,” De Quincey parodies bibliophilia by the mad-lib-like expedient of replacing the word “book” with “shoes.” As Deidre Lynch has shown, by conflating the leather found in both, De Quincey collapses any difference between the high-end consumers and low-end artisans (Lynch, “‘Wedded to Books’” 11). We’ll see that Mayhew attacks this distinction from the opposite direction when he describes artisans who resole shoes as “translators.” So does the author of
The
Missing
Link, or, Bible-Women in the Homes of the London Poor
(1860), who describes the need to “translate” Christian books for the benefit of a Jew whose job consists of “translating” old shoes (R. 116). In this context, to conflate novelist with shoemaker is also to confuse text with book. Dressing, tanning, tasting, smelling, excreting: the possibilities that the book resembles a body, or is made from a body, or interacts with a body, or even resembles an object used to clothe a body, can be named only in a comic register.