How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  WHAT USE ARE BOOKS?

  The following pages reconstruct nineteenth-century understandings of, and feelings toward, the uses of printed matter. In particular, they excavate the often contentious relation among three operations: reading (doing something with the words), handling (doing something with the object), and circulating (doing something to, or with, other persons by means of the book—whether cementing or severing relationships, whether by giving and receiving books or by withholding and rejecting them). Often pictured as competing, in practice these three modes almost always overlapped. Impossible to read without handling (even if certain genres took pains to suppress any mention of handling), or to get one’s hands on a book without its having passed through someone else’s hands (even if other genres imagined books as found objects). We might posit, then, that what look like antonyms are in fact subsets: handling without reading is easier to imagine than reading without handling, circulating without reading than reading without circulating. Yet the opposite asymmetry occupies an even more prominent place in certain Victorian literary genres—notably the bildungsroman and the memoir—which represented reading as systematically as they avoided any mention of the social transactions in which the book was enlisted or the material properties with which it was invested. The fact that a few instances of these genres continue to be reprinted and reread, while genres that acknowledged handling now look like repositories of jokes gone flat, and genres that theorized circulation look like depositories for dated didacticism, suggests how much twenty-first century culture values the first use over the second and third.

  To ask how one use relates to the other two is also to ask how—even whether—books differ from other kinds of object. Where do books fit in a postal system that mandates different pricing for letters than for freight? What about newspapers, catalogs and advertising circulars, or books that contain nonverbal objects (herbaria, scrapbooks, tradesman’s sample books)? When you display a book in your hands or on your shelf, are you implicitly claiming to have read it—and therefore, as often as not, lying? In what operations other than reading can books be enlisted? Is it legitimate to hide behind the newspaper, use an encyclopedia as a doorstop, turn a newspaper into fish wrapping, match the binding of your bible to your dress, fill a study wall with hollowed-out books, decorate a living-room table with intact ones that you have no intention of opening?

  Are books likelier to be put to one or another of the three uses if they’re free? What about if they’re bought, borrowed, inherited, received as a gift from an acquaintance or as a giveaway from an organization? (In some quarters, the price of subsidized bibles was raised in order to prevent their being worth reselling for wastepaper; in others, to inherit, stumble upon, or even steal books was considered morally superior to buying them.) Do traces (verbal or nonverbal) left by past users increase or decrease the value of books (commercial or sentimental)? What should be done with printed matter when its contents go out of date?

  Under what circumstances is it acceptable to annotate, extra-illustrate, cut up, disbind, rebind, reprint, recycle, or discard books? And when is it permissible to disperse, sell, or export entire library collections? What should be pulped (and how soon), what should be archived (and how long)? What relation do those persons responsible for interpreting and evaluating texts bear to those responsible for dusting or shelving books? And the formal corollary of that social question: why do Victorian writers develop such a rich language in which to name the manual gestures of holding, turning, and handling, with no matching lexicon to describe the mental act of reading?

  Investigating these questions may help us understand the printed “before” against which so many twenty-first-century commentators measure their digital “after.” We can learn, in particular, from the Victorians’ struggle to articulate how far the power of books (for good and evil) depended on their verbal content, their material form, or the social and antisocial practices that they enabled and even prompted. (In the language introduced a moment ago: on their reading, handling, or circulating.) When we use idealized printed texts as a stick with which to beat real digital ones, we flatten the range of uses to which the book was put before digital media came along to compete with it. If we shift our gaze from the library to the kitchen and the privy, an ethnography that juxtaposes reading with handling and circulating can replace the Manichaean contrast between print and digital by distinctions within the uses of each. Where nostalgists today conflate the practice of disinterested, linear, sustained attention with the object that is the printed book—equating modular, scattershot, instrumental reading in turn with electronic media—secular novelists like Dickens, Eliot, Brontë, and Trollope assumed that absorption in the text required forgetting its medium. The ideal text was, as we say today, platform-independent; the ideal reader, binding-blind and edition-deaf (see Kirschenbaum). Evangelical tracts, in contrast, showed less interest in the words that the book conveyed than in the interpersonal transactions that served to convey it. Web 2.0 has lent new life to a question that Victorian missionaries first formulated: does the distribution of texts compete with, or piggyback onto, social relationships among human beings?

  READER-UNRESPONSE

  I was trained in the method known as “reception history.” That enterprise shifts literary and intellectual historians’ sights from writers to readers, from upstream arguments about a work’s sources to downstream speculations about those other works that it influenced or spawned. The chapters that follow form a prototype for what might better be dubbed “rejection history.” However much interest books have in being coveted, bought, hoarded, even stolen, a wide range of Victorian genres devote more attention to the energy expended on refusing to read or own or touch or even refrain from destroying them.

  The umbrella term “nonreading” encompasses an array of practices that have little in common except what they are defined against:

  • novelistic narrators replacing the mental act of reading by the manual gesture of holding, in order to repudiate the omniscience that could penetrate characters’ thoughts

  • writers reducing the term “reading” to a metaphor for activities that involve the interpretation of something other than books, and books to a front for daydreaming or for ignoring others sharing the same physical space

  • in the case of free print, refusing to vest time (or shelf space) where you have not chosen to invest money

  • a sign of respect for the book—protecting it from wear and tear—or on the contrary an insult to the text: branding it unworthy of your own time and attention or, worse, delegating or relegating it to your social inferiors

  • a feeling that you don’t belong in its audience, whether your identity doesn’t match its implied reader’s or because you are too good (or not good enough) to rub elbows with others in its public. Or, more contingently: the sense that it’s too soon, or too late, for you to shove your way among them—that a servant, for example, should hand today’s news to his master without peeking, contenting himself instead with using last month’s paper to wrap food. Or, more comprehensively: the sense that you do not fit into any text’s audience, either because your place is to handle (or dust or fetch) books rather than to read. Or, more crudely, because you are unable to read at all—or because you are able to put the book to humbler uses, such as wrapping groceries in its pages.

  “Nonreading” may be too negative a term to encompass one more scenario in which, whether or not a text is worth reading, the book becomes more valuable for some other purpose. The book’s material properties trump its textual content when its value (whether for use or for resale) lies in attributes orthogonal to its legibility. This could be for aesthetic reasons, as when a book’s textual content is judged particularly worthless and its material properties are judged especially valuable: the gap between the two yawns particularly wide, for example, in the case of coffee-table books and their early-nineteenth-century ancestor, the annual. The reason could be that one of those two axes look
s more relevant to a particular situation; material value trumps textual value in times and places where paper is particularly scarce, including among the poor, in wartime, at moments when the raw materials fall short, or at times and places in which paper is heavily taxed or imports restricted. Or cultures in which the idea of the book signifies more than the content of any particular book: during China’s Cultural Revolution, for example, burning formed a sign of hostility not just to a particular text’s political message, but also to the social classes that were literate and inherited cultural goods. Or the moment of nonreading could be determined not by the history of a nation, but by that of a book: the point in its life span when its read-by date has passed and its pages are ripe for cutting, wrapping, and even wiping.

  As late as 1711, Pope could gibe of a miscellany published by Bernard Lintot (and containing works of his own):

  Lintot’s for gen’ral Use are fit,

  For some Folks read, but all Folks ——.

  (Pope 280)

  The couplet aligns the gap between the many books that are handled and the few that are read with the gap between the few who read books and the many who use them. To reconstruct the hermeneutics of handling is also to situate the book within a larger social world. Since the nineteenth century, activists and scholars alike have assumed that the place to look for the illiterate classes’ relation to printed matter was reading aloud—that is, those moments where the information contained in newspapers overleaps their written medium. Pope directs our attention instead to the converse: those moments where the medium outlives its content.

  By the following century, what Pope represents as a subset has become a contrary. At the very moment when the poor are learning to read, the rich are unlearning how to handle—are forgetting, as paper ceases to be taxed and new manufacturing methods substitute cheap wood pulp for expensive linen, how to assess the reuse potential and resale value of pages. Servants continued to eyeball how much animal gelatin had been used to “size” a page (determining whether liquids like ink, and later grease, would sink in or bead up); they knew, therefore, which pages were suitable for sealing food and which for absorbing dirt. Masters, in contrast, now noticed only whether the text was absorbing. Although all folks still ——, not all folks associated that activity with print: memoirists now described Queen Victoria visiting Cambridge “and saying, as she looked over the bridge: ‘What are all those pieces of paper floating down the river?’ To which, with great presence of mind, [Dr. Whewell, the master of Trinity College] replied: ‘These, ma’am, are notices that bathing is forbidden’” (Raverat 34).

  Figure I.1. “The Turf,” Punch, 18 March 1882, 122.

  Between reading and wiping, a range of uses stretches: the social breadth to which Pope’s “gen’ral” alludes is matched by (though not always mapped onto) an equally wide spectrum of practices. If reading can serve different agendas—to save a soul, to form an identity, to do a job, to place a bet, to snub a spouse—handling figures in even more disparate activities.8 Just as bibliographers have taught us that the changes among successive editions do not necessarily constitute decay, so the Victorian novel can teach us to distinguish absence of reading from absence of use.

  Not all uses, however, were created equal. The Victorians plotted the book/text distinction onto every axis imaginable: temporal (new books get read, old books handled), sexual (the text as the province of male thinkers, the book as raw material for women’s curlpapers or pie plate liners), generic (the text as the object of piety, the book as the butt of jokes), ethical (the text as an aid to selfhood, the book as a spur to selfishness), social (the text as the business of intellectuals, the book of filthy rich bibliophiles or literally dirty rag-collectors), even disciplinary (the text as the purview of Skimpoleanly aesthetic sensitivities, the book of Gradgrindianly empirical plodders). All that cuts across these otherwise ill-assorted word-pairs is value: in each case, the text is aligned with whichever term happens to be considered superior. A higher-order instance of that logic is that the text is associated with moderation, the book with extremes. In social terms, the professional middle classes’ rejection of materialism left the book-object in the hands of effete gentry (the owners of country-house libraries as selfish hoarders), rich vulgarians (Manchester manufacturers’ wives who chose books to match their color schemes), or poor illiterates (costermongers who priced a book by the absorbency of its pages). And in historical terms, book fetishism looked forward (to new technologies for facsimile reproduction and nouveaux riches furnishing their houses with bran-new bindings) as well as backward (to country-house collectors ignoring the post-1850 public libraries, or superstitious old women eating the pages of their bibles). What was true for users also held for things. Just as the very rich and the very poor, the excessively scholarly and insufficiently literate, were both imagined to be either above or below reading, so books were faulted as too cheap or too expensive. Terms like “penny dreadful” and “shilling shocker” took a low price as metonymic for literary worthlessness; more counterintuitively, mentions of perfumed or hot-pressed paper did the same with high.

  CHAPTER SUMMARY

  My study starts where Curtius’s foundational survey of “the use of writing and the book in figurative language” leaves off: in intellectual terms, at the end of the Enlightenment; in technological, as the handpress era closed (Curtius). It ends with the midcentury legal and technological developments that cheapened paper, shortening its life cycle and narrowing its affordances. The boundaries of my subject, therefore, are at once technological, legal, and literary- (or sometimes intellectual-) historical. Changes in printing and papermaking technology; innovations in distribution systems; institutional changes in schooling, both sacred and secular; legal changes to copyright and to taxes on knowledge—even if these add up to a coherent narrative, they map less neatly onto the time line of literary history, itself complicated by gaps between production and reception. (No argument about the books the Victorians read can confine itself to texts composed by Victorians.)

  The proper nouns that appear in this book’s table of contents form a grudging concession to the unspoken rule that literary-critical monographs must title each chapter after a different author (or in books about a single author, a different text). Although it fits badly with anonymous texts and worse with those (even thicker on the ground in this study) whose authors are named but whose names command no recognition, the convention humors our own protocols of reception—as well as of selection and rejection. With the exception of professional reviewers, people reading such books often skip straight from the introduction to whichever chapter discusses a text or author that the reader himself happens to be reading or writing about.

  In that spirit, some itineraries. Because chapter 1 intertwines an introduction to Victorian debates about media with a survey of (and polemic about) the relation of book history to literary-critical theory and practice, readers interested in methodology should begin at the beginning. Those more interested in the primary texts, however, can easily enough cut straight to the more accessible and more detailed case studies of chapter 2. Husband-wife relations come to the fore there, parent-child in chapter 3, master-servant in chapters 4 through 6. Scholars of reading aloud (and silent listening) may want to skip ahead to chapter 6; bibles figure most prominently in chapters 4, 5, and 6; newspapers in chapters 2, 6, and 7.

  Why can realist novels represent the book (the second chapter asks) only at the price of reducing reading, quite literally, to an act? And why does representing reading from the inside (as do the texts discussed in the third) entail abstracting the visible book? What models of causation (the fourth asks) have the nineteenth-century bildungsroman and it-narrative bequeathed to twentieth-century bibliographers and twenty-first-century book historians? The fifth chapter turns to the circulation of free and subsidized print—especially junk mail and religious tracts—among owners and borrowers, givers and receivers, readers and handlers, preservers and destroyers. The si
xth asks what relationships the Victorians expected particular copies of a book to establish among their users—whether concurrent, as in reading aloud or subscribing to the same periodical, or sequential, as in secondhand books or association copies. Ending with the end of the book’s life, chapter 7 explores the relation between old texts instantiated in new books (reprinting) and new texts transmitted via old books (marginalia, binder’s waste, and paper recycling).

  Books don’t simply mediate a meeting of minds between reader and author. They also broker (or buffer) relationships among the bodies of successive and simultaneous readers—or even between one person who holds the book and others before whose gaze, or over whose dead body, she turns its pages. Ambivalence about circulation runs through these different case studies: untouched books figure as prisoners or wallflowers or clotted blood, but books subjected to too many readers are compared to worn-out prostitutes or knackered horses. The same fictions that credit texts with marking minds blame handlers for marking books. Conservative and radical fiction agree in classifying books as a special category of commodity that can be alienated only at the price of disloyalty. Yet one deplores, and the other celebrates, the intimacies and antagonisms that the book establishes between buyer and seller, lender and borrower, or even between strangers who handle the same piece of paper unbeknownst to one another. Circulation affects not only relations between persons and books, that is, but also between one person and another.

  A second tension runs between the book’s powers to unite and to divide. Books can link their successive readers, owners, and handlers, whether across classes (as in tracts distributed by the rich to the poor, or papers that find their way from the study to the kitchen) or even (as in the case of “association copies” bought or inherited) across the line that divides the living from the dead. Books could just as easily, however, separate individuals (like the husbands and wives who hide from one another behind books and newspapers in chapter 2, or the children of chapter 3 who hide behind books, and within texts, from the adults who jolt them back to their surroundings by hitting them with a book), or separate classes (like the masters and servants of chapters 6 and 7, who handle the same book or newspaper but for different purposes and at different moments of its life cycle). It’s worth emphasizing that this distinction between the book as bridge and the book as wedge does not map onto the dichotomy between reception and rejection: on the contrary, withholding a book can assert a relationship (think of a parent denying a child access to a book) as easily as bestowing a book can sever it (the bookseller who gives that child the book he requests is disowning any more personal responsibility for the child’s morals).