How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  From the other side of the countless twentieth-century autobiographies that borrowed this trope from nineteenth-century fiction, it’s hard to appreciate just how radically new its premises were. In the eighteenth century, references to the book as object or commodity can be found most often in the narrator’s own voice—though “narrator” may be the wrong term, since such references tend to interrupt the narrative, breaking frame so violently that readers have no choice but to surface temporarily from their absorption. By the middle of the nineteenth, however, characters, not narrator, are now the ones who notice the look of the book. Where self-referential asides once broke readers’ concentration, now a represented book is what interrupts characters’ absorption. What once took place on the level of discourse now migrates to the level of story. Instead of an “editor’s” paratextual jokes breaking into the narrative as in Tristram Shandy, now a book thrown by one character breaks into the text read by another. The violence of book throwing at the level of story replaces the violence of frame breaking at the level of discourse. Replaces, or at least supplements: for every time a novel reminds us of the sensory attributes of the object we’re holding—and by extension, reminds us of our own eyes and our own hands—it shatters our concentration as violently as John Reed or Miss Murdstone breaches David’s or Jane’s. John aims the book to avoid breaking windows, but book throwing still ruptures the transparency of mimesis.

  By 1850, paper falls under the same taboo as sex: “the page” (as Gissing put it in a different context) “scarce rustles as it turns.” Scatological jokes and self-referential asides become equally recognizable as throwbacks to the eighteenth-century satirical tradition. When the narrator of Vanity Fair relates that “the curses to which the General gave a low utterance . . . were so deep, that I am sure no compositor in Messrs. Bradbury and Evans’s establishment would venture to print them were they written down,” the shock of the unnamed curse is conveyed through the breach of publishing decorum (285). Harking back to the era in which Fielding could entitle a chapter “Containing Five Pieces of Paper” (Tom Jones bk. 4, chap. 1), the eighteenth-century pastiche of Esmond and The Virginians gave Thackeray an alternative to a more modern domestic realism that was thematically close-minded and formally closure-driven, equally opposed to linguistic and to sexual digression and play. “Here it is—the summit, the end—the last page of the third volume”: the fall from the metaphor of a “summit” to the literalism of a “page” and a “volume” registers the narrator’s skepticism that happy endings can reflect anything more than the telltale compression of pages.

  UNREAD BOOKS (JANE EYRE AND THE MILL ON THE FLOSS)

  In the eighteenth century, a joke; by the nineteenth, a threat. The consciousness of the book’s physicality that was witty in the mouth of the narrator becomes immoral in the minds of characters: to thematize materialism is also to stigmatize it. We might predict, then, that the bildungsroman quarantines any awareness of the book-object within the consciousness of its least sympathetic characters—that the text serves as a catalyst for sympathetic protagonists’ daydreams, the book as a press for minor villains’ flowers. Yet even the characters whom we remember as readers usually turn out to be doing something to the book that it would take a stretch to describe as “reading.” What jump-starts the narrator’s interiority isn’t love of texts so much as hatred of books—whether fear of the books handled by the Murdstones or disgust at the books fingered by Uriah Heep. The child reader’s out-of-body raptness finds its foil in Uriah “reading a great fat book, with such demonstrative attention, that his lank forefinger followed up every line as he read, and made clammy tracks along the page (or so I fully believed) like a snail” (Dickens, David Copperfield 222). A mind marked by the text recoils from a book marked by the body. The ink of marginalia looks no better than an animal’s slime. Yet here as so often, clerical work threatens any distinction between Uriah and David—who, despite working at shorthand “like a cart-horse,” finds himself “laboriously and methodically plod[ding] over the same tedious ground at a snail’s pace” (505).

  The corollary is that Brontë and Dickens hardly provide their own readers with role models. Between the girl retreating behind the covers of a book and the boy acting out a remembered text, reading dwindles to a vanishing point. In one case, inwardness is occasioned by the book, not the text; in the other, the text enters David’s mind only once the book has left his hands. To call it “Jane’s salvation to be a reader” or to describe her as an “avid and impressionable reader” is to misremember that from the very first page of the novel, Jane is staring at the pictures, not the text (L. Green, Educating Women 28; Brantlinger 115).8 Jane “cares little” for the “letter-press” of Bewick’s Birds, as little as Maggie Tulliver does for the text of the History of the Devil: the best she can say of the introductory pages is that “I could not pass [them] quite as a blank.” The “quite” acknowledges a bibliographical version of the pathetic fallacy: the whiteness of the page seems to have rubbed off on the world that the pages represent, with its “death-white realms” and “forlorn regions of dreary space,—that reservoir of frost and snow.” Like the encroaching margins of “Baxter’s Procrustes” or the out-of-focus newspapers that Trollope represents, the book figures here as a negative space, “bleak” if not “blank.”

  The opening scene of The Mill on the Floss upstages content by heft: introduced “dreaming over her book,” Maggie Tulliver soon “forget[s] all about her heavy book, which fell with a bang within the fender” (G. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 18–19). Even as Eliot and Brontë both make the use of books a proxy for moral worth, then, the criterion is oddly negative: it’s less that readers identify with characters who read, than that we distance ourselves from characters who recognize the book’s material qualities. (We hate those who love the book-object as much as we love those who hate it.) Reading is one possible way of crowding out that awareness, certainly, but so are daydreams whose starting point lies no further into the book than the title page. No surprise that Mr. Tulliver buys the History of the Devil because “they was all bound alike—it’s a good binding, you see—an’ I thought they’d all be good books . . . They’ve all got the same covers, and I thought they were all o’ one sample, as you may say. But it seems one mustn’t judge by th’outside” (G. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 251). What’s more disturbing is that Maggie, too, “did not take the opportunity of opening her book”: not content to deny that Maggie is reading, the narrator refuses even to go beyond the absence of the more minimal material bodily gesture that might or might not signify the mental act.

  What catalyzes Maggie’s “dreaming over her book” is not its contents but rather her looking away: “somehow, when she sat at the window with her book, her eyes would fix themselves blankly on the outdoor sunshine” (18, 299).9 And that blank corresponds to a space that books should have occupied: “her eyes had immediately glanced from him to the place where the bookcase had hung; there was nothing now but the oblong unfaded space on the wall, and below it the small table with the Bible and a few other books” (251). Even when text does enter Maggie’s consciousness, it stops at the title page.

  Then her brain would be busy with wild romances of a flight from home in search of something less sordid and dreary;—she would go to some great man—Walter Scott, perhaps, and tell him how wretched and how clever she was, and he would surely do something for her. But in the middle of her vision her father would perhaps enter the room for the evening, and, surprised that she sat still, without noticing him, would say complainingly, ‘Come, am I to fetch my slippers myself?’” (300)

  Scott appears as a secondary character in Maggie’s fantasized autobiography, not as the author of a real book. For Maggie as for her father, the printed book functions less to contain a story than to occasion one—whether handwritten (in the case of the family Bible) or purely mental (in the case of Maggie’s “vision”). Like marginalia unrelated to the content of the text being written in, daydre
ams can become untethered to the book being held.

  More strikingly, the conjunction of Maggie’s flight of fancy with her imagined “flight from home”—correlated in turn with Mr. Tulliver’s more immediate consciousness of being ignored—rules out the zero-sum competition between attention to books and attentiveness to relatives that the novels discussed in the previous chapter took for granted. Here, Mr. Tulliver’s realist slippers are displaced not by Scott’s represented armor, but on the contrary by a daydreaming that crowds out the page and the world alike: instead of finishing The Pirate, Maggie “went on with it in my own head” (318).

  The Mill on the Floss leaves no safe vantage point from which to condemn such lumping, for the character in whose consciousness readers become most deeply absorbed is herself no reader. On the contrary, Eliot places books in the hands of characters only to thwart our assumption that they will be read: unlike the gun whose appearance in the first act guarantees that it will be fired before the end of a play, The Pirate, whose first volume Maggie remembers having begun in the second volume of The Mill on the Floss, remains unfinished by the end of the third. Conversely, readers’ noses are rubbed in the materiality of the book they themselves are holding: when Book II ends with the narrator announcing that “the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind” Maggie and Tom, we can’t help noticing that the covers of the volume are about to close behind us as well.

  Chapter 5 will return to the question of what Maggie does with the books she fails to read. For now, consider the analogous problem in Jane Eyre. In the wake of John Reed’s book throwing,

  Bessie had been down into the kitchen, and she brought up with her a tart on a certain brightly painted china plate . . . Vain favour! coming, like most other favours long deferred and often wished for, too late! I could not eat the tart; and the plumage of the bird, the tints of the flowers, seemed strangely faded: I put both plate and tart away.

  Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word book acted as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver’s Travels from the library. This book I had again and again perused with delight . . . Yet, when this cherished volume was now placed in my hand—when I turned over its leaves, and sought in its marvellous pictures the charm I had, till now, never failed to find—all was eerie and dreary; the giants were gaunt goblins, the pigmies malevolent and fearful imps, Gulliver a most desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous regions. I closed the book, which I dared no longer peruse, and put it on the table, beside the untasted tart. (28; my emphasis).

  Unread book joins untouched tart: the content fails to live up to the promise of the container. Where remembered reading is invested with “delight,” the book loses its magic once placed in the present or “placed in my hand.” Manual gestures short-circuit mental operations: “I turned over its leaves” leads directly to “I closed the book.” Like Captain Somebody’s travels (or like Goldsmith’s History of Rome), Gulliver’s are read only offstage. “My own thoughts always swam between me and the page I had usually found fascinating”: Jane is still a child, but it’s never too early to start banishing reading to a prelapsarian past (27; my emphasis).

  To the past, or to minor characters, for the absorbed reading that critics misattribute to Jane is in fact displaced onto Helen Burns: “absorbed, silent, abstracted from all round her by the companionship of a book, which she read by the dim glare of the embers” (65).10 Where the opening scenes lead us to expect a protagonist’s reading to be interrupted by minor characters, here, on the contrary, it’s the heroine who shatters a secondary figure’s textual “abstraction.” The first time Helen pauses to turn a page, Jane interrupts her to take the book from her hands; when Helen begins to read again, “again I ventured to disturb her.” Jane’s only role in this scene is to interrupt Helen’s reading—as if her cousinship with John Reed were as hard to disclaim as Maggie’s with the Dodsons (60).

  Bafflingly, Jane explains her urge to stop Helen from reading by the assertion that she herself likes to read: “I hardly know where I found the hardihood thus to open a conversation with a stranger; the step was contrary to my nature and habits: but I think her occupation touched a chord of sympathy somewhere; for I too liked reading, though of a frivolous and childish kind” (59). To be a reader is to claim an identity, not to perform an action. Or even to allow others to perform it unmolested: famously no fan of Austen’s, Brontë may nonetheless be riffing on the scene in Pride and Prejudice where Miss Bingley, yawning over a prominently displayed book, interrupts Darcy’s reading to remark, “How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!” (37). Like Miss Bingley, Jane proclaims her love of reading at the very moment when she prevents others from engaging in it. Yet what begins as a cliché (of course a hypocrite will lack any authentic love of reading) becomes more unsettling when the action is transferred from a blocking figure to the heroine.

  In the other direction, Brontë prefigures the Trollopian narrator’s perception of the book as a buffer between men and women. At first, Jane recognizes her kinship with the Riverses by listening to them read aloud—from the outside of the window this time, in a mirror image of her silent perusal of Bewick’s illustrations. Soon, however, she begins to describe their holding of books as an antisocial gesture: “St. John had a book in his hand—it was his unsocial custom to read at meals—.” Later, St. John cuts short an awkward conversation on the excuse of asking her to tell him the location of a particular book:

  I showed him the volume on the shelf: he took it down, and withdrawing to his accustomed window recess, he began to read it.

  Now, I did not like this, reader. (438)11

  By juxtaposing a direct address to the novel’s reader with her dislike for another character’s reading, the narrator makes visible the tension between reading as a bridge linking an author with an unknown audience, and reading as a barrier separating members of a single household.

  St. John’s “window recess” pays back Jane’s long-ago window seat: St. John likes me, the implication goes, as little as I ever liked John Reed. Or, more crudely: when I read, it’s interiority; when you read, it’s hostility. Absorption can connote selfhood as easily as selfishness: Dickens and Brontë code as a psychological good what the conduct books quoted in the previous chapter cast as a moral evil. Even the sociable reading exemplified by Diana and Mary voicing Schiller—a use of books that, far from sundering characters sitting at the same table, draws in the outsider crouched on the wrong side of the glass—can never be more than a temporary recuperation of stories that will always be dragged back to their print origins. In her own window seat, Jane reflected that in Bewick “each picture told a story . . . as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings . . . taken from old fairy tales and older ballads; or (as at a later period I discovered) from the pages of Pamela, and Henry, Earl of Moreland” (15). The comparison reduces print to a way station between the visual and the oral. Moving from “letter-press” to picture to voice, the novel runs a technological time line in reverse—with the twist that Bessie’s stories turn out themselves to be traceable back to print, coming full circle to the medium that Jane initially dismisses. Their bibliographical provenance is identified only offstage, in parentheses, in the future.

  UNASSIGNED READING

  In David Copperfield, a different set of punctuation marks elides editorial backstory. They occur immediately before the boot-tree incident:

  My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs to which I had access (for it adjoined my own), and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time—they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii . . . I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of voyages and travels—I forget wh
at, now—that were on those shelves; . . . When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed reading as if for life. (60)

  This passage must rank as one of Dickens’s most memorable, and memorized. The final phrase continues to turn up Micawberishly today in venues as varied as a commencement speech, a movie review, a philosopher’s memoir, and the acknowledgments to an academic monograph. Sometimes it’s bowdlerized by the omission of the “as if”; sometimes intensifiers are added, as when an autodidact’s memoir riffs that “I see myself in the far away time and cottage reading, as I may truly say in my case, for dear life” (Rose, The Intellectual Life 3); sometimes a single noun serves to conjure it up, as in Sartre’s memory of posing with a book (before he even knew how to read) in the solitude of a lumber room (cabinet de debarras) (Sartre 36).12 Even earlier, Amelia Edwards’s otherwise Jane Eyre–inflected Barbara’s History borrowed this passage almost verbatim, changing nothing but gender. After its young heroine wanders into a lumber room empty except for old boxes, “in one, the smallest and least promising of all, I found a dusty treasure. This treasure consisted of some three or four dozen wormeaten, faded volumes, tied up in lots of four or six, and overlaid with blotches of white mould.” To the list of books that follows, the narrator adds: “Other books I had as well—books better suited to my age and capacity; but these, being common property, were kept in the school-room, and consisted for the most part of moral tales and travels, which, read more than once, grow stale and wearisome. Fortunate was it that I found this second life in my books; for I was a very lonely little girl, with a heart full of unbestowed affection, and a nature quickly swayed to smiles or tears. The personages of my fictitious world became as real to me as those by whom I was surrounded in my daily life. They linked me with humanity. They were my friends, my instructors, my companions” (Edwards; my emphasis).