How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  The tension between commonality and distinction cuts across genres as different as circulating-library triple-deckers representing middle-class couples and didactic tracts written for and about servants. Midcentury middle-class fiction substituted power struggles within the middle-class family (chapters 2 and 3) for more public debates about working-class literacy (chapters 5 and 6). Yet even as the antagonists in these battles of the books shift from master/servant to husband/wife and stepfamily/stepchild, the question of who has “business in the library” (a phrase echoed across these different contexts) continues to determine who stands inside and outside of the “family”—whether in the older sense of an internally stratified economic entity or the newer affective unit divided by age and gender. In both cases, the self-made reader—whether “made” as a middle-class child develops interiority, or as a working-class person climbs the social ladder—may be represented either with empathetic intimacy or with satirical distance, and this generic choice implies an ideological choice between embedding the book within, or counterposing the text to, social structures.

  The self-made reader in turn implies a self-propelling text: to acknowledge how books reached one’s hands is to recognize one’s dependence, in every sense of that now old-fashioned word. Victorian secular fiction deploys two genres of required reading—school textbooks (chapter 3) and religious tracts (chapters 5 and 6)—as foils to its own claim to be freely chosen, even secretly coveted, hoarded, begged, borrowed, or stolen. Tracts are to the mid-Victorian novel what romance was to its predecessors: the inscribed genre against which it defines itself. Institutions like school and church stand opposite the novel’s putative market, imagined as an aggregate of independent (even rebellious) individuals. By representing teachers foisting grammars, dictionaries, and prize books upon middle-class children, and tract-distributors doing the same to working-class men, the novel presents itself as a commodity driven more by demand than by supply. A different novelistic subgenre, the Evangelical it-narrative (chapter 4), substitutes divine providence as the motor driving the circulation of books, a logic borrowed, surprisingly enough, by the resolutely anticlerical Henry Mayhew to structure his account of paper recycling (chapter 7).

  The subgenres discussed in Part I grope for ways to discuss the circulation and handling of books while bracketing their textual content. Those comedies of manners that I call “behaviorist” perform that substitution lexically (by substituting manual phrases like “turned the page” or spatial phrases like “sat with a book before him” for the mental verb “read”) as well as thematically (by representing characters going through the motions of reading or even pretending to read). In novels that more dogmatically prize psychological depth, however, the child who internalizes the content of books at the expense of any awareness of their material or commercial properties stands opposite the adults who throw, display, and sell books with no interest in actually reading them. Seen from the inside, a prompt for absorption; from the outside, a prop for avoidance. Does the book compete with human friendships (as when the metaphorical “companions” that populate a man’s library crowd out his wife and children) or enable them (as when the loan of a bible provides a missionary an excuse to enter a home)?

  The book as barrier (Part I) gives way to the book as bridge (Part II): reading can create interpersonal bonds (in the sense of constraint as well as of intimacy), but so can using and choosing books—for oneself, or on behalf of others. Over the course of the nineteenth century, new commercial developments (including the introduction of new raw materials for papermaking), new political arrangements (notably the removal of “taxes on knowledge”), and new distribution infrastructures (ranging from the penny post to the missionary press) changed books from a scarce resource to a storage problem. Printed matter came to be figured as a chain, for better and for worse: what linked its users also burdened them. Too much information, too many readers, too much paper: Part II explores the first problem through the rise of junk mail and subsidized tracts (chapter 5), the second through the shift from masters’ concern about servants’ reading to public library patrons’ concern about one another’s handling (chapter 6), the third through the fall of paper recycling (chapter 7).

  Subsidized Evangelical tracts and middle-class three-volume novels alike shifted their attention from the individual reader to the social and economic transactions that link one user to another (with or without their consent). If hiding behind a book could undercut the compulsory intimacies expected of family members who shared the same domestic space (whether the husbands and wives of chapter 2 or the parents and children of chapter 3), conversely peeking into one’s master’s bible (chapter 4) or procuring novels on the sly from one’s servant (chapter 6) could undermine the distance that unequals were expected to maintain.

  Like religious relics, books link us not just to an author but to those who have touched them before: think of Barack Obama’s being sworn in at his inauguration on Abraham Lincoln’s bible or, two years earlier, Keith Ellison’s being sworn in to the House of Representatives on Thomas Jefferson’s Koran. Those transitive relationships sound cosy enough: conventionally compared to a friend or companion, the book can also broker friendships, even between the living and the dead. By the nineteenth century, however, the cheapening of both paper and literacy opened the less pleasant possibility of bumping into one’s social inferiors within the readership of a particular book, or the handlership of a particular copy of a book. The traditional fear that a text might poison its readers’ minds was now joined by a newer anxiety that poor, sick, or dirty fellow handlers might infect their bodies.

  The sequential uses of a single copy of a book embodied in “association copies” find their converse in Benedict Anderson’s famous analysis of strangers bonding through simultaneous newspaper reading. Yet if we shift our sights from text to book, the relationships enabled by print look more negative—a prop for avoiding persons in the same space, as easily as communicating with strangers at a distance. And if we look beyond reading to handling (an activity that occupies a larger fraction of any newspaper’s life cycle), it becomes clear that while the meaning of texts changes as new generations reinterpret them, the relation between page and paper changes as the former ages. In Henry Mayhew’s ethnography of the wanderings of books from class to class and hand to hand, we find a media theory that lumps paper together with humbler commodities while insisting on the power of even illiterate users to invest even papers past their read-by date with fresh value.

  UNCOMMON READERS

  Like most literary-historical arguments, mine has both a corrective and a creative ambition. In negative terms, it seeks historical and critical distance from the heroic myth—whether Protestant, liberal, New Critical, or New Historicist—that makes textuality the source of interiority, authenticity, and selfhood (Raven, The Business of Books 132, 377). In more positive terms, it seeks to recover stories that this myth overwrites: stories about women, children, and working-class or non-European men who remained sensitive to the material affordances of books and, therefore, to the stories in which books themselves figured as heroes. Some of the following chapters will trace antibookishness back to a particular time (around 1850) and a particular genre (the secular middle-class bildungsroman). Others excavate Victorian alternatives to a worship of the text that demonizes the book: now-forgotten genres and subcultures whose challenges to that model may be worth fishing out of the dustbin—no: the glass-fronted bookcase—of history.

  Within a culture where book is to text as outside to inside, secular middle-class fictions and Evangelical tracts alike make the relation between those terms a surrogate for the relation of the material world to the inner life—whether that life belongs to their characters or to their readers. Printed matter raises ethical questions (how much or little should one care about the look of books?) as much as formal ones (how, and how fully, can a mental act like reading be represented?). Identifying a deep structure underlying different representat
ions of the book, however, doesn’t mean lumping “the” Victorians into some monolithic mass. Multiple fault lines separated those narratives and essays that celebrated the spread of ideas from those that mocked the circulation of paper: political and sectarian and economic and educational positions of readers, writers, and publishers; size and format and pricing of books; genre of texts. It’s hardly surprising, for example, that Evangelical Protestants produced and consumed texts that figured reading rather differently from those that emerged from Catholic or freethinking subcultures, or that those who favored or feared the social mobility of persons developed different vocabularies in which to discuss books’ movement through space and across social ranks, or that proponents of individualistic economic or religious models valued silent reading as highly as others condemned it. What held for discourses applied less evenly to practices: each subculture developed its own ways of showing books off or hiding them away, distributing or hoarding, alienating or personalizing, bequeathing or disposing of, noticing or taking for granted.

  Such sectarian and political identities crosscut a second determinant of attitudes toward the book: genre. Cast by circulating-library novels as a buffer between intimates (chapters 2 and 3) and by subsidized tracts as a bridge among strangers (chapters 4–6), the book could figure in the Evangelical press as a picaresque wanderer (chapter 4) or in radical journalism as the protagonist of a providential plan (chapter 7). And a third: narrative mode. First-person accounts showed the individual reader transcending the constraints of space, time, age, and social class—whether that individual was the middle-class child through whom the bildungsroman was focalized, the working-class autodidact of rags-to-riches memoirs, or the narrator of an American slave autobiography. The counternarrative that emphasized the material, social, and commercial properties of paper, in contrast, clustered in third-person comic and anecdotal genres, distanced by the Olympian irony of an omniscient narrator.

  The two halves of the book correspond, therefore, not only to different genres and different classes of audience, but also to different models of literacy. Middle-class bildungsromans, like working-class autodidacts’ autobiographies, frame reading in terms of individual agency, self-fashioning, even transgression. To read a subsidized tract, in contrast, was to engage in an interpersonal transaction. In that sense, surprisingly, Evangelical tracts (chapters 5 and 6) had less in common with those bildungsromans that secularized the Christian conversion narrative (chapter 3) than with social satires and comedies of manners that cast books as props in etiquette dilemmas (chapter 2).

  Yet what divided these genres was ultimately less what powers they ascribed to the book than what value judgments inflected that ascription. All three associated autodidacticism with the text, formal education with the book. If the text guaranteed upward mobility; the book made users placeable. The text signifies individual freedom, the book social determinism; the text generates empathy among different classes and genders, while the book marks differences of rank and age. It’s logical enough, in that context, that the religious tracts produced by anti-Jacobin propagandists should celebrate the moment of elders and betters handing books to the young and the poor, while more secular middle-class fictions instead praised texts for propelling themselves into the hands of protagonists (often, again, young and poor) who were badly treated by other human beings. By extension, the protagonists of the great Victorian bildungsromans are characterized less by their love of texts than by their hatred of books—less by immersion in verbal content than by indifference, or even repugnance, to its material container.

  Like nonfictional accounts of individual self-improvement and national progress, serious fictions marketed to middle-class circulating-library patrons vest the text with the power to liberate and individuate. They associate the text with mobility, whether through the power of words to move across media (the cheap reprint’s claim to be functionally interchangeable with the finest folio models the equality of their respective owners), the power of the author to move through space and time (to be read although dead, to do his work “on the top of a mountain or in the bottom of a pit”), or the power of the text to change the reader’s identity (through empathy with fictional characters) and social status (whether by transcending one’s social and physical disabilities, or by forging relationships with fellow readers) (Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography 209). Whether in the privy or on the sofa table, among collectors or bibliomancers, a book that was placed—either socially or spatially—was always a book not being read.

  A fuller ethnography or phenomenology of Victorians’ interactions with the book would need to approach a wider range of genres and formats from a wider range of methods. My reliance on a few pieces of printed prose that have survived in twenty-first-century research libraries positions me to offer little more than an account of competing ideologies surrounding the book in a few numerically unrepresentative genres. Yet “ideology” sounds at once too lofty and too dry (or, in a more Victorian language, too coarse) to do justice to the visceral energies driving my subjects to distance themselves from some uses of books and identify themselves with others. In the end, the most interesting question to ask of these hands now quiet may be not what they felt about the book but why they felt so much. To grope our way back into their intellectual and emotional and ethical investment in paper; their urge to cast written matter in etiological narratives and interpersonal dramas; the leaps of faith and logic that pressed trivial decisions about to whom to hand a tract, or on which shelf to stick a volume, or at what angle to hold a newspaper, into the service of hopes and fears and theories and hunches—this exercise may provide a chance to work through the contradictions of our own media theory and practice.

  CHAPTER 1

  Reader’s Block

  HOW TO HANDLE READING

  Bought, sold, exchanged, transported, displayed, defaced, stored, ignored, collected, neglected, dispersed, discarded—the transactions that enlist books stretch far beyond the literary or even the linguistic. Frustration first made me wonder where that range begins and ends, for among all those uses, reading elicits the most curiosity and leaves the least evidence. There’s a reason that book historians have gravitated toward tearjerkers and pornography: like dolls that cry and wet their pants, past readers come to life through secretion.1 Yet with the exception of the happy few who work on genres that elicit a measurable somatic response, any reception historian will sooner or later be maddened by the low proportion of traces left in books that are verbal. For every pencil mark in the margin, ten traces of wax or smoke; for every ink stain, ten drink spills.

  The book can be used as a napkin for food, a coaster for drink, a device for filing, or (especially in eras where paper was expensive) a surface on which to scribble words only tenuously related to the print they surround. As late as 1897, a manual titled The Private Library still needed to sneer that “books are neither card-racks, crumb-baskets, or receptacles for dead leaves” (Humphreys 24). In earlier eras, traces of the hands through which a book had passed formed an expected and even valued part of its meaning; over the course of the nineteenth century, that practice gradually retreated to particular subcultures: botanists using encyclopedias as devices to store and organize pressed flowers; hobbyists “Grangerizing” texts with carte-de-visite daguerreotypes, or, less systematically, books—and not only cookbooks—bearing, Hansel-and-Gretel-like, a trail of crumbs (H. J. Jackson, Marginalia 186; Garvey).

  Mental actions prove harder to track than manual gestures, human traces that are not intentional, let alone textual, let alone literary. From evidence of reading to nonevidence of reading to evidence of nonreading: those bodily acts that both accompany and replace reading, whether licking a page or turning down a corner, should provide historians of the book with more than a consolation prize. Like the dog that didn’t bark in the night, the book with uncut pages constitutes evidence too. As we’ll see in chapter 4, such negative evidence can carry forensic weight, as when a bible’s prist
ine condition “bears witness” against its owner. It was precisely in order to stave off such testimony that Flann O’Brien proposed (tongue in cheek) a “Buchhandlung” service to break in libraries bought by the yard.

  The spines of the smaller volumes to be damaged in a manner that will give the impression that they have been carried around in pockets, a passage in every volume to be underlined in red pencil with an exclamation or interrogation mark inserted in the margin opposite, an old Gate Theatre programme to be inserted in each volume as a forgotten book-mark . . . , not less than 30 volumes to be treated with old coffee, tea, porter or whiskey stains. (22)