How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (8 page)

If Victorian policy-makers grappled with the special status of the book—should printed matter be mailed at different rates from botanical cuttings? should books be taxed or priced differently from other commodities?—scholars today face analogous questions. Is literary-critical training a help and/or a hindrance to studying the book? How does a library differ from a museum? How should verbal evidence of reception be cross-checked with nonverbal traces? Should textual and material evidence be used to corroborate, to complicate, or even to contradict each other?

In marking the gulf separating bibliographic codes from linguistic codes, the pun provides a corrective to the recent strand of book-historical scholarship that set out to dovetail them. It’s easy to see why book historians trying to find an audience among literary critics have emphasized those moments where the book’s material form converges with its linguistic content: where, for example, the small size or printed form of the novel (and by extension, its susceptibility to being read in private) reinforces its thematics of solitude. Yet the result is a catch-22: when such analyses of the material conditions of production and consumption corroborate some formal or thematic analysis of the text itself, they become redundant; and in those rarer cases where they contradict conclusions reached through textual explication, they become irrelevant. Heads you win, tails I lose. It may prove more productive to turn our attention to moments where these two strands of evidence pull apart, when (for example) an anticolonial manifesto is printed on paper imported from the
metropole, or when an oath of revenge is sworn upon the same bible whose text preaches forgiveness.

Book historians are hardly alone in facing this challenge: the evidence that other schools of literary historicism invoke is equally incommensurate with the language in which they frame their claims. William St Clair is right to charge our entire profession with basing historical claims on literary evidence—more specifically, with supporting arguments about early nineteenth-century culture with texts that were produced in that era but found an audience only later (St Clair). By extension, historicist literary critics could be accused of wanting to have their cake and eat it—to make cultural claims about a different time and place while restricting ourselves to evidence that gives a particular set of professional readers aesthetic pleasure in the here and now. I plead guilty to a different bait and switch: I draw my evidence for bibliographical claims from sources chosen at least in part on the basis of their linguistic content. If I had taken my own premises more seriously, the table of contents would have looked rather different. Unlike Dickens, neither Trollope nor Charlotte Brontë employed particularly innovative publishing strategies. More fundamentally, if publishing strategies were my primary focus, authors would not provide the marquee names for my table of contents in the first place. Much less Victorian authors, given that the books most
used
by Victorians were not books
written
by Victorians. In the case of books whose life span exceeded that of human beings (notably the Bible) they were not even books printed by Victorians.

Worse, this study of those uses of the book that exceed or even replace reading is based primarily on the evidence of my own . . . reading. My occasional appeal to material evidence (the traces of wear and tear, of handling or ignoring) is dwarfed by my more regular use of textual proof. Certainly my interpretations are conditioned by the list price and current condition of the books that I study, but they appeal more heavily (to state the obvious once again) to the evidence of words. I confess not only to the absence of a volume of sources or a systematicity of sampling that would satisfy historians—as for most literary critics’, my sources are printed (or reprinted or digitized), not manuscript; skewed toward the literary canon; too few in number to support any bibliometric claim—but also to the presence of literary-critical tastes and priorities. My subject is Victorian representations and perceptions of, and fantasies and illusions about, the circulation of books, not the circulation of books itself. And even within representations, my corpus skews heavily toward the literary and journalistic: a search across a few digital repositories for the character string “locked bookcase” yields one kind of result; a search of locksmiths’ records to find out how often bookcases tampered with by servants needed to be repaired would have yielded quite another.

To make book-historical claims on the basis of textual evidence is not the same as making cultural-historical claims on the basis of literary evidence: the book’s material form can give aesthetic pleasure as easily as its textual content can withhold it. It’s a fallacy to assume that analyses of noncanonical or nonliterary texts are somehow more “book-historical” than others: the fact that a text is not aesthetically pleasing does not necessarily make it bibliographically significant, and book historians might do better to analyze the category of the “literary” than to flee it. But for a book historian drawing on a corpus defined by textual parameters (title, keyword, generic form, theme) as much as for a cultural historian drawing on a corpus defined by literary parameters, means will never match perfectly with end.

I mention these inconsistencies and trade-offs as symptoms of dilemmas that face many scholars today—and not just card-carrying literary critics. Even when book historians choose objects that stand outside of the literary, the language in which they describe their own scholarly practices remains parasitic on a literary canon in which reading gets tirelessly thematized. Chapter 4 argues that a particular corner of that canon, the bildungsroman, has both generated and limited the stories scholars tell about reading. I attempt to test those limits not only by finding countermodels in other genres—notably the it-narrative—but also, in the opposite direction, by tracking sweeping generalizations and unspoken pieties back to the tropes and leitmotifs of the particular bildungsromans in which they originate. Like most literary critics (and indeed like most readers), I go to past texts seeking origins for, as well as alternatives to, my own models. I hope this casts my sources as sibyls rather than ventriloquist’s dummies.

Or, perhaps, as mirrors. Book history differs from most scholarly disciplines in that its object of study is also its means of transmission—the message is also the medium. For all its interest in marginalia and marginalized persons, the history of books is centrally about ourselves. It asks not only how past readers have made meaning (and therefore, by extension, how others have read differently from us); but also, closer to home, where the conditions of possibility for our own reading came from. Self-referentiality generates self-knowledge at the price of blind spots. The book historian too easily finds herself in the position of Thoreau (the son of a pencil manufacturer) forgetting to list his own pencil; or of the Reverend Alfred Hackman, who died in 1874 after spending thirty-six years as a sublibrarian at the Bodleian:

During all the time of his service in the Library he had used as a cushion in his plain wooden armchair a certain vellum-bound folio, which by its indented side, worn down by continual pressure, bore testimony to
the use to which it had been put . . . When after Hackman’s departure from the Library it was removed from its resting-place of years, some amusement was caused by finding that the chief compiler of the last printed Catalogue had omitted from his Catalogue the volume on which he sat, of which too, although of no special value, there was no other copy in the Library! (Macray 388)

Shortly before Hackman’s death, the magazine founded by the original of Mr. Brocklehurst reprinted an American anecdote from half a century earlier:

Some gentlemen of a Bible Association lately calling upon an old woman to see if she had a bible, were severely reproved by a spirited reply. “Do you think, gentlemen, that I am a heathen, that you should ask me such a question?” Then addressing a little girl, she said, “Run and fetch the bible out of my drawer, that I may show it to the gentlemen.” They declined giving her the trouble; but she insisted upon giving them ocular demonstration that she was no heathen. Accordingly the bible was brought, nicely covered; and on opening it, the old woman exclaimed, “Well, how glad I am that you have come; here are my spectacles that I have been looking for these three years, and didn’t know where to find ‘em.” . . . My child, which have you: a
dusty
or a
well-worn
bible? (“The Two Bibles”)

We think of spectacles as a tool for reading books, but one joke casts books as tools for storing spectacles; we think of a desk chair as a device for reading, but the other presents books as an aid to sitting. Is “furniture book” an oxymoron or a pleonasm?

Two cases mark the limits of my topic: on the one hand, the ephemerality that the newspapers of chapters 2 and 7 share with the middle-class circulating-library novels of chapters 2 and 3 and the didactic fictions of chapters 4 and 6; on the other, the durability of the bibles discussed in chapters 4 and 5, whose verbal text and material form both remain themselves through many adventures. Even the law enforced the distinction between the dated and the timeless. For the first half of the nineteenth century, taxes kept newspaper prices artificially high and bible prices artificially low: the latter benefited from the only exception to the duties levied on all paper used for vernacular publication, to which an extra tax was added from 1819 onward for serials that both contained news and appeared at intervals under twenty-six days (Fyfe,
Science
and
Salvation
40; Collet).

The Renaissance scholar James Kearney has described Christianity as “a religion of the book that was always made uneasy by the materiality of the text.” To the extent that the Reformation thought of itself as “a return to the book within a religion of the book,” “the book became an emblem of the desire to transcend the merely material and irredeemably fallen world of objects,” but “at the same time, Reformers were suspicious of all human media . . . [and] distrusted the material dimension of text” (
The
Incarnate
Text
8, 3).
³²
More specifically, Catholics and heathens alike were accused of subordinating a text to its material container: of violating, whether by idolatry or illiteracy, what Tyndale called a law written “not with ink (as Moses’ law) but with the Spirit of the living God: not in tables of stone (as the Ten Commandments) but in the fleshly tables of the heart” (Kearney, “The Book and the Fetish” 436; Tyndale 161). As we’ll see in chapters 4 and 5, missionaries boasted that “silent messengers”—that is, religious tracts—would displace the “dumb idols” that natives worship. When a man in Burma proudly shows a missionary his old prayer book, he is told: “You have been ignorantly worshiping the book. I will teach you to worship the God whom this book reveals.” Yet the author exults in the enthusiasm of others in Burma who “were all so earnest for tracts, and there not being enough for all those who desired them, they cut the tracts up into bits, that each might have a few words or a few lines of the sacred writings to keep in their houses” (Jones 474, 62, 63).

Catholics, too, were accused of sharing non-Europeans’ respect for the material book, as when a bible was kissed during the Mass (Kearney, “The Book and the Fetish” 462). “To evince a belief in the power of the object was to engage in a fundamental category mistake that separated superstitious and credulous others (non-whites, non-Christians, Catholics, the lower classes, and women [and, one might add, children]) from the rational European man” (Kearney, “The Book and the Fetish” 436). That such rationality was not entirely a delusion is perhaps best proven by the it-narratives of chapter 4: while Evangelical publishers systematically produced accounts of bibles being desecrated, torn, and trampled, it would be hard to imagine any equivalent body of literature surrounding the Torah or the Koran.

Protestant missionaries described their goal as spreading literacy; on the ground, however, they often seemed more concerned with limiting bibliolatry. They worried, that is, not only about the
in
ability of the poor and the heathen (and often the Catholic) to read their sacred text, but also about the
ability
of those populations to put the Bible to uses
other
than reading.
³³
In colonial contact zones as among working-class populations in Britain, illiteracy made the zero-sum relation between material book and verbal text especially visible. The first English explorers found the
natives of Virginia, for example, “glad to touch [a bible], to embrace it, to kisse it, to hold it to their brests and heades, and stroke all over their bodies with it” (Wogan 407). Elsewhere in the present-day United States, native graves have been found to contain a leaf torn from a bible (Amory). Even in Protestant Europe, a bible could be kissed to lend weight to an oath, stuck under invalids’ pillows, used as a shield against bullets, and even eaten (Cressy 98). Decisions were made, and the future predicted, by what page fell open. Births and deaths were recorded in blank spaces of bibles (often the only writing surface available in poor households). At the other end of the social scale, the librarian Edward Edwards could compare the unread books in aristocratic private libraries to “idols”—as if bibliophiles were no better than heathens.
³⁴

Yet the same Protestant clergy who accused others of “idolatry” for investing the book with totemic powers laid themselves open to that charge when they placed their faith in the dissemination of printed matter. People of the book—Protestants or even freethinkers whose faith lay in reading—could be accused in return of fetishizing literacy. Thus Francis Hitchman conflated paganism with a different religion of the Book when he called English social reformers “good people in whose eyes in a book is a species of Fetish, and who look upon printed paper with as much reverence as do the Mahometans” (151). One anticlerical journalist in 1899 complained that “some minds, even in the midst of civilization, retain a sort of heathen, or Arab, reverence for the printed page” (Ogden).