by Price, Leah
The catchphrase’s ubiquity suggests that “reading [as if] for life” provides convenient shorthand for a post-Romantic paradigm that makes reading the recourse of the poor, the lonely, the marginalized, the physically or socially powerless. The books inside the “smallest and least promising of all” boxes find their match in the smallest and least promising of children. Adults have little place in this model, except (at best) to remember their own past reading or (at worst) to punish children for reading in the present. David Copperfield celebrates the model of selfhood that the newspaper in Trollope’s fiction so cruelly parodies: whether from the inside or the outside, the book is imagined as a shield against others who inhabit the same domestic space. Just as the books that constitute Edwards’s metaphorical “friends” and “companions” crowd out human friends and companions, so the virtual “company” provided by literary characters isolates the reader from the human beings around him—from the “boys at play” as much as from “[every]body else in our house.” Although David’s “fancy” can take in the wildest counterfactuals, the one possibility to which his imagination never stretches is that his taste for reading might be shared.
Shared by relatives living in the same house, but also shared by the mass audience to which printed books are marketed. When Forster quotes this passage, he points out that in translating his “autobiographical fragment” into the novel, Dickens made one silent change: “his omission of the name of a cheap series of novelists then in course of publication, by means of which his father had become happily the owner of so large a lump of literary treasure in his small collection of books.” The metaphorical “price” for which the captain sells his life can be named, but the price of the “cheap series” can’t. Or even its title: David’s “—I forget what, now—” strips paratext away from text as aggressively as Jane’s “(as at a later period I discovered)” distances chapbooks from storytelling. Both sets of punctuation marks quarantine the provenance from which (and for how much) stories make their way into the child’s consciousness. Both children must wait until adulthood to discover that their own imaginative investments are shared with tens of thousands of other owners of mass-produced reprints.
Where Don Quixote learns that the one thing unmentionable in romances is the price that anyone paid for a night’s lodging, by reading bildungsromans we learn, closer to home, not to ask what books cost. To inherit them is to preserve one’s innocence. Even to steal them, like the young narrator of Stendhal’s Vie de Henry Brulard, is better than to buy. The vulgar owning without reading epitomized by sofa-table books and dummy spines finds its antithesis in reading without buying (the child stumbling across a collection of books that are literally priceless), and even reading without owning (remember the hero of Ranthorpe freeloading at a bookstall). Twenty-first-century social-scientific surveys give the lie to this logic: according to them, the number of books owned in a household correlates more strongly with a child’s academic success than does the parents’ educational level (Evans et al.). Reading aloud and library patronage are even weaker predictors: better to have books lying around unread than to read books that don’t belong to you.13
In our cultural imaginary, in contrast, reading undoes the book’s commercial taint. A second bookstall scene in Oliver Twist shows engagement with the text making the marketplace disappear.
[Mr. Brownlow] had taken up a book from the stall, and there he stood, reading away, as hard as if he were in his elbow-chair in his own study. It is very possible that he fancied himself there, indeed; for it was plain, from his abstraction, that he saw not the bookstall, nor the street, nor the boys; not, in short, anything but the book itself which he was reading straight through. (Dickens, Oliver Twist 74; my emphasis)
“Reading away” literalizes the sense in which reading takes Mr. Brownlow away from his surroundings; “reading straight through” literalizes the sense in which the book becomes (if I can borrow the language that David Copperfield later applies to a play) “like a shining transparency, through which I saw” (271). This time, “as if” reconciles the realities of the market with their banishment from the text. What Mr. Brownlow “fancies” is not the story he’s reading, but rather the position of its reader: he imagines not that the fiction is true, but that he is standing somewhere other than the market.
Just as reading without buying is admired and buying without reading ridiculed, so a room dubbed the “study” but filled with guns and fishing-rods shows vulgarity as clearly as books found in a space not supposed to contain them (a garret, under the bedcovers, outdoors) bespeak good taste. Surprisingly, the scene of standing up at the bookstall makes the market another such space. In “George de Barnwell” (a parody of Bulwer-Lytton in Punch’s Prize Novels), the young hero reads in the middle of a grocer’s shop:
Immersed in thought or study, and indifferent to the din around him, sat the boy. A careless guardian was he of the treasures confided to him. The crowd passed in Chepe: he never marked it. The sun shone on Chepe: he only asked that it should illumine the page he read . . . The customer might enter: but his book was all in all to him. (Thackeray, “George de Barnwell” 5)14
Here as in Oliver Twist, books’ physical location within a shop highlights their textual power to block commerce out. And here as in Trollope, the book’s power is established only negatively. Where Flaubert would have paraphrased the text being read, in Oliver Twist and “George de Barnwell” its place is taken by a description of the real surroundings from which the text grants oblivion.
The foundlings who give their names to David’s titles—Tom Jones, Roderick Random, Humphrey Clinker—bring their stories to a close by discovering their father’s identity. His own story, though, is set in motion by his discovering the father’s books, themselves doubly orphaned—first by the death of their owner and then by the suppression of their publisher’s name. And if you read this episode side by side with the autobiographical fragment, as Forster did, then it’s hard not to notice that the commercial information suppressed in the case of books belonging to David’s biological father resurfaces in the person of a father surrogate. Many chapters later, David’s humiliation at the bottle warehouse is compounded by his being enlisted to dispose of Mr. Micawber’s library to a tipsy book-dealer. On the one hand, a dead father who keeps books in the family; on the other, a living father figure (Micawber slotted into the place that John Dickens occupies in the memoir) who disperses them into the marketplace. The split between biological and fictive father maps onto the contrast between two bibliographical models: one in which texts magically (or at least Micawberishly) turn up; another in which books, lumped with spoons and other pieces of portable property that can be sold or pawned, change hands amidst embarrassment, declassment, and drink (Dickens, David Copperfield 160–61).
Common sense suggests that children get literacy, and books, from somewhere. But in Dickens’s bibliographical riff on family romance, the reader emerges self-made: the father who bought the books killed, the publisher who reprinted them airbrushed out, the mother who taught reading banished to the past—“I can faintly remember learning the alphabet at her knee” (Dickens, David Copperfield 57)—and the only adults left standing likelier to wield a book than to read it. (That even the kindest adults fit this pattern suggests that age trumps morals: the first thing that David notices in the Peggotty household is a tea tray “kept from tumbling down, by a bible” [37].) That tension stands in parallel to the financial contradiction at the center of the novel’s plot—the conflict between the individualist language in which David’s professional rise is imagined, and the belated revelation that the loss of Betsey Trotwood’s fortune was a fiction. As with money, so with books: as David Vincent argues, the self-made reader is as powerful a Victorian myth as the self-made millionaire (Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture 259).
In Jane Eyre, an oral source can be named in full but printed origins only in retrospect; in Copperfield, too, the child remains as innocent of where stories
come from as where babies do. As usual, Trollope provides a bathetic contrast to this Bounderbyesque self-mythologizing. Directly after the de rigueur reminiscence of his father knocking him down with “the great folio Bible which he always used,” his Autobiography mentions a dozen rereadings of the only books found in the house, “the two first volumes of Cooper’s novel, called “The Prairie”, a relic—probably a dishonest relic—of some subscription to Hookham’s library” (15). It’s characteristic that what Trollope remembers is the commercial transaction—legitimate or not—by which the book reached his young self. In his novel Ayala’s Angel, conversely, the narrator measures its young heroine’s economic fall by the loss of access to new novels—cut off not by a puritanical guardian or wicked stepmother, but by the unavailability of the subscription fee. Before the crash, “that Mudie’s unnumbered volumes should come into the house as they were wanted had been almost as much of a provision of nature as water, gas, and hot rolls for breakfast” (10). As the bathetic specificity of breakfast rolls replaces the bread to which texts are usually compared, the adults who traditionally block children’s access to books give way to adults who bankroll it.
One early imitation of Jane Eyre even more explicitly calls the bildungsroman’s bluff: where, it asks, do those persecuted heroes and heroines get the books that so richly furnish their imaginations? When the Rochester figure asks the governess whether she is fond of Shakespeare, her answer is not a literary critique but simply the confession that she has never been able to lay her hands on a volume:
“Never read Shakspeare!” he repeated in an accent of surprise. “Had you assured me this morning you could read and enjoy that Greek poem I handed you down, I should have been less astonished.”
“But, sir, I have always been at school. And school girls have no opportunity of obtaining such works. At a school I was at in England, Miss Fenton’s, there were some volumes of Shakspeare in the governess’s private parlor, but I never saw any thing of them but their backs.”
“Have you no home—no parents?”
“None.”
“Have you never read Byron?”
“Oh no.”
“Nor any novels?”
“No books of that kind.”
He looked at me with a half smile, standing with his back against a tree. “Your later years have been spent in France, I understood my sister to say; did you never get any French novels?”
“Indeed no. Mademoiselle Barlieu would have been in fits at the bare thought. And since I left them I have been too fully occupied to read for recreation.” (Wood 100)
The few Victorian novels that have entered our canon associate wealth with anti-intellectualism, poverty with a love for literature. In making books the refuge of the powerless, these bildungsromans forget that access to books requires a minimum of economic power: enough money to “obtain such works,” along with (as the last line quoted from Wood acknowledges) enough money to afford the time in which to read them. The bildungsroman’s association of reading with childhood, Wood reminds us, masks a reality in which adults had more access to books than children, and heads of households than dependents. Indeed, a second 1860s rewriting of Jane Eyre, Emma Worboise’s novel Thornycroft Hall, associates reading instead with evil minor characters, in particular a cousin (the counterpart to the Reed children) “who keeps novels under her pillow and in a pocket,” “who covers them with schoolbook covers.” Where Jane calls John Reed a dunce, Worboise’s orphan accuses her rich cousins of excessive reading: “Who took The Secret Marriage to church, and read it all through the sermon?” she taunts them (104). By casting books as objects that need to be bought or borrowed, Wood and Worboise question the bildungsroman’s assumption that reading is free, in both senses.
Situating Shakespeare in the schoolmistress’s parlor rather than in a remote attic, Wood reminds us that the books on which a schoolgirl is likeliest to get her hands are . . . schoolbooks. In contrast, a Dickens novel teeming with schoolmasters still manages to cast adults as blocking figures, rather than enforcers or even enablers of the child’s alphabetization. More specifically, by pitting fond memories of pleasure reading against textbooks used as projectiles, David Copperfield represses the extent to which (as Catherine Robson has argued) literary memorization forms at once the result and the mechanism of adult violence against children (Robson). The record of nonfictional sources like diaries and schoolbooks (though not of retrospective autobiographies modeled generically after the bildungsroman) suggests that nineteenth-century children were likelier to be either punished for not having memorized assigned texts, or punished by being given lines to memorize, than to be beaten for internalizing forbidden pleasure reading. As Henry Tilney gently reminds Catherine Morland, “even you yourself, who do not altogether seem particularly friendly to very severe, very intense application, may perhaps be brought to acknowledge that it is very well worth-while to be tormented for two or three years of one’s life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. Consider—if reading had not been taught, Mrs. Radcliffe would have written in vain” (Austen, Northanger Abbey 80). Reading can “spell” work, in both senses: James’s office worker fishes a novel out from under her paperwork to mark the lunch hour, but Thackeray’s schoolboy slips a romance under his Latin grammar.
If textual “abstraction” becomes most visible when violently broken in upon by the book-object, so childhood absorption can be benchmarked most effectively against adult interruption. In an essay titled “On Fiction as an Educator” that appeared in Blackwoods at the end of 1870, the children’s magazine editor Anne Mozley argues that every adult who looks back to “some particular book as an event in his inner history” knows that this book can never be among those supplied by teachers: “He will surely find that the book thus influential came to him by a sort of chance, through no act of authority or intention.” On the contrary, even though a “snug and retired . . . window-seat” forms the best venue for children’s reading, the book can work its effect only against a backdrop of hostile “observers.”
What shame in these tears—the shame that attends all strong emotions—as they are detected by unsympathising, quizzing observers . . . Who cannot contrast the weariness with which he now tosses the last novel aside, with the eager devices of his childhood to elude pursuit and discovery, to get out of earshot, to turn a deaf ear, when the delightful book is in his grasp which is to usher him into another world? What ingenuity in hiding, behind hedges, in out-houses and garrets—nay, amongst the beams and rafters of the roof, to which neither nurse nor governess, nor mamma herself, has ever penetrated? (Mozley 195, 189)
As Charlotte Yonge put it a year earlier, “happy the child who was allowed to revel in [the true unadulterated fairy tale]—perhaps the happier if under protest” (“Children’s Literature of the Last Century” 306). Augustus Hare remembers how “I used to pick the fragments” of the numbers of the Pickwick Papers that his grandmother read “out of the waste-paper basket, piece them together, and read them too” (135).
Coffee table against lumber room: children unearth and secrete books, adults display and deploy them. Governess’s parlor against child’s bedroom: when Conan Doyle remembers reading the Waverley novels “by surreptitious candle-ends in the dead of the night,” he speculates that “the zest of crime added a new zest to the story” (Doyle 25). Auto-enlightenment commands more glamour than forced reading. Yet Samuel Richardson’s boast that when he read “for Improvement of my Mind,” “even my Candle was of my own purchasing, that I might not in the most trifling Instance make my Master a Sufferer,” updates badly to an era in which the ‘prentice-work of middle-class children has become, precisely, reading (Letters 229). Once schools assign “pleasure reading,” the flashlight under the covers becomes an adjunct, rather than an interruption, to academic and ultimately economic success.
The rule is not just that, to be authentic, reading must be attributed to school-aged children but located outside of the classroom; it’
s also that absorptive reading ends at puberty, after which adults can remember past acts of reading more easily than undertake new ones. (Nothing left to do with books but throw them, display them, or unfurl them in your spouse’s face.) Kate Flint’s survey of Victorian autobiographies concludes that mentions of reading occur much more often before marriage than after (The Woman Reader 208). Even today, Matei Calinescu argues that reading about others’ childhood reading “helps us to remember, and perhaps even to recreate,” a kind of “quasi-hypnotic reading experience” no longer available in the present (96). In David Copperfield, too, the child’s disinterested antisocial reading will give way to the adult narrator’s profitable vocational writing.15 In fact, oral storytelling replaces solitary reading at precisely the moment when David is sent away to school.16
If David’s and Jane’s relation to books sticks in English professors’ minds as Crosbie’s and Miss Hereford’s doesn’t, one explanation may be that the former numbs literary critics’ discomfort with the instrumentality of our own reading—and, by extension, with our part in socializing younger readers. The frequency with which academics’ memoirs end before they begin their academic careers suggests that those who read for a living would rather think about reading as if for life. One monograph on reader response published by a university press begins with the stricture that “I shall focus on reading that is done outside the school system, unguided if not completely uninfluenced by it” (Calinescu 92). When the NEA recently surveyed public participation in the arts, its questionnaire, too, excluded reading done within an institutional context: “With the exception of books required for work or school. Did [you] read any books during the LAST 12 MONTHS?”17 Institutional or even commercial: like Mr. Brownlow or George de Barnwell, scholars today can combine fondness for traces of reading with hatred for traces of pricing. Alberto Manguel declares that “if a book is second-hand, I leave all its marking intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page,” but that “old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs” (The Library at Night 17).
