How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  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.

  ANIMAL SPIRITS

  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.

  It’s as insulting to imagine the book resembling food (in that both consist of slaughtered animals, for example) as it’s flattering to imagine the book replacing food (as when a literary character starves himself to buy a much-loved text). The narrator whose high-mindedness is established by a preference for books over food—as early as 1791, James Lackington boasts of his wife’s dismay that “I have often purchased books with the money that should have been expended in purchasing something to eat”21—secularizes the Christian logic that allowed missionaries to respond to demands for bread by distributing bibles. When the Shepherd of Salisbury Plain testifies in the anti-Jacobin tract of the same name that “my Bible has been meat, drink, and company to me, as I may say,” he proves that reading can defuse the lower orders’ demand for food (More, Tales 36). Remember that “in early Christian monasticism, reading took its place alongside fasting, prayer, the keeping of vigils, and the making of pilgrimages as an ascetic practice” (I. Hunter, “Literary Theory in Civil Life” 1109). Ruskin turns that political quietism into aesthetic transcendence when he praises books “bought out of saved halfpence; and perhaps a day or two’s fasting. That’s the way to get at the cream of a book.”22 Reducing cream to a metaphor for ideas, the speaker substitutes word for food as decisively as does the hypothetical reader whom he describes.

  At the end of the century, “food for the soul” would become the refrain of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. Where the writers portrayed in New Grub Street produce bad books in order to buy food, here the narrator forgoes food in order to buy good ones.23 “Books [were] more necessary to me than bodily nourishment,” the narrator tells us; reading as a boy, “I was astonished to find that it was four o’clock, and that I had forgotten food since breakfast.” Men’s forgetfulness of dinner depends, it’s true, on women’s remembering: “little girls should be taught cooking and baking more assiduously than they are taught to read” (Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft 43, 32, 125, 211).24 Yet as chapter 7 will show, that doesn’t imply keeping women from books: on the contrary, they enlist the book enthusiastically in that same “cooking and baking,” whether in the form of pie lining or butter wrapping. Exalted when substituted for food, paper is degraded when associated with it.

  The book’s status depends on whether it displaces or conjures up its user’s body. To convey the peacefulness of his new home, the narrator remarks that “the page scarce rustles as it turns” (Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft 75). Hearing joins sight among the senses that books are not supposed to stimulate—more, are supposed to deaden. No looking, listening, touching, tasting, smelling: the sensory deprivation of the post-1850 public library, where food was banned along with talking or even reading aloud, stands opposite the medieval scriptorium where books were voiced, stroked, smelled, and gazed at. Only in a paper-rich and information-saturated society do such acts begin to provoke nervous laughter.

  LITERARY LOGISTICS

  Not noticing that the book was made of paper also implied ignoring that others had commissioned, manufactured, and transmitted it, and that other handlings had preceded and would follow one’s own. The good reader—himself disembodied and unclassed—forgot what books looked like, weighed, and would fetch on the resale market; he also forgot how books had reached his hands, and through whose, and at what price. (The abstraction of the book thus mimics the abstraction of its readers.)25 Yet paradoxically, those acts of oblivion themselves became enmeshed in human relationships, since reminders of the book’s material attributes got delegated to persons less rich or male or Protestant than oneself.

  Once piggybacked onto class and gender, the division between those who refer to “texts” and those who speak of “books”—those who memorize Penguin reprints and those who buy new hardbacks—is now replicated within the upper middle class by the difference between English majors and everyone else, from illiterates to book historians. A familiar intellectual-historical narrative tells us that since the New Criticism, literary critics have spearheaded an assault on the book’s materiality, elevating the study of literature by demoting bibliographers to a service profession. It’s true that if the book has been invisible and intangible even to those literary-critical schools that succeeded them, it isn’t only for the negative reason that material culture remains absent from our training; it’s also because a commonsense Cartesianism or Platonism more actively numbs us to the look and feel of the printed page. Hence critics’ discomfort with purely bibliographic units—the page-break as opposed to the line-break, the volume as opposed to the chapter.

  A longer historical view, however, makes it hard to blame or credit literary critics alone for exalting the text to an end and reducing the book to a means. Elaine Scarry frames the status of the book as an aesthetic question when she defines imaginative literature precisely by its power to drown out the significance that would otherwise be attached to its material form. Unlike music, sculpture, or painting, she observes, “verbal art, especially narrative, is almost bereft of any sensuous content. Its visual features . . . consist of monotonous small black marks on a white page.” In fact, Scarry argues, what little sensory response the book does provoke is “not only irrelevant but even antagonistic to the mental images that a poem or novel . . . produce[s]” (5).

  From a bibliographic perspective, in contrast, the bifurcation that Scarry associates with verbal “art” appears to inhere not in literature, but in print. It holds as true for intellectual history as for literary history: Popper, too, can assume that “of course the physical shape of the book is insignificant . . . and frequently even the formulation of an argument does not matter greatly. What do matter are contents, in the logical sense” (45; my emphasis). Carlo Ginzburg has argued that the first humanist printings of the classics set aside sensory data in the process of devaluing all those aspects of documents that vary from one copy to another (95).26 The difference between a white and a yellowed page, to take Scarry’s example, doesn’t mean in the same way that color does in an illuminated manuscript.27 This isn’t to say that shades of brown and yellow don’t convey useful information about which pages have been most heavily handled, which left untouched—or, indeed, that they don’t conjure up “mental images” of the now-dead hands that have turned those pages. (And as my discussion of association copies in chapter 5 will emphasize, those data are the purview of the impassioned amateur at least as much as of the detached historian.) But as far as textual content itself goes, it seems fair to say that as mechanical reproduction stripped away visual and tactile differences among different copies of a single edition—or, at least, downgraded those differences to traces of error, accident, or wear and tear—printed texts in the West came to demand new ways of reading, and of not looking (Ginzburg 95).28

  “Printed,” not “literary”: what Scarry claims of “verbal art” applies as well to even the most inartistic printed text, and as badly to even the most aesthetically ambitious of texts produced in a manuscript culture. Historical comparison suggests that what causes readers to bracket sense-data is not (or not only) their status as art, but also their status as reproduced and reproducible. A matter of media, not of aesthetics—with the crucial caveat that aesthetically serious texts and aesthetically intense experience figure as limit cases of the logic that all reading post-Gutenberg is supposed to follow. Far from (or as well as) forming a sphere of heightened attention, the printed as described by Ginzburg—no less than the aesthetic as theorized by Scarry—emerges from refusals to attend.29 The book so strongly exemplifies the contrast between superficial change and fundamental invariability that the narrator of Waverley can use it as a metaphor for the continuity of human cha
racter, promising to read aloud a chapter from “the great book of Nature, the same through a thousand editions, whether of black-letter, or wire-wove and hot-pressed” (Scott 36).

  By the nineteenth century, what had held since Gutenberg for all readers came to apply especially to good readers, whether that excellence was measured morally (as Ranthorpe did) or intellectually (in the manner of the New Critics). In that sense, paradoxically, the new New Bibliography could also be seen as a reductio ad absurdum of the New Criticism against which it appeared to react. The book historians whom literary critics think of as antiformalists have in fact pushed the boundaries of that term to encompass material (along with verbal) form.30

  The opening of Ranthorpe echoes Carlyle’s paean—reprinted in several late-Victorian compendia of bibliophilic pieties—to “the most momentous, wonderful and worthy . . . things we call Books! Those poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on them;—from the Daily Newspaper to the sacred Hebrew BOOK” (On Heroes 142). Yet the hostility to expensive books that essay shares with the novel suggests that outward form does matter. If what Carlyle calls the “wonder” of books depends on the mismatch between the insignificance of the poor bits of paper and the (metaphorical) richness of the verbal signs that they incarnate, this may be because once object competes with language for attention—as in fine bindings—the former ceases to be available as a foil for the latter.

  HOW TO READ HANDLING

  Where the nineteenth-century general-interest press asked what uses of the book were acceptable, twenty-first-century scholars are likelier to ask what uses of the book are legible, and how the skills involved in reading texts (notably those possessed by literary critics and intellectual historians) differ from the skills required to describe objects (notably those possessed by all bibliographers and by some book historians). Closer to home, then, my question is how to situate literary interpretation vis-à-vis the social life of books more broadly understood—and also where different subcultures (from scholarly disciplines to religious traditions to political movements) have drawn the limits of that breadth.