How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  Matthew Battles has explained modern intellectuals’ ambivalence toward the research library by comparing the scholarly fantasy of stumbling on books whose significance you are the first to discern with “the rags-to-riches fantasies of the [American] penny dreadfuls—the dream of personal success unaided by unnamed others” (202). In this analysis, the reader’s sense of self depends on his editing out those librarians or teachers—now often female—who provide the material conditions for his self-creation. At the same time as he blocks out others physically present, the reader also blots out the means by which the text has reached his hands. Dickens’s occlusion of the publishing industry prefigures Mozley’s exclusion of parents and teachers (not to mention children’s magazine editors, like her). By reducing mediating figures to blocking figures, both turn a manufactured good into a found object.

  This coyness about the book trade in fiction about children contrasts sharply with its prominence in fiction for them, as Katie Trumpener has shown in rich detail. Some early nineteenth-century children’s books puff other volumes by the same publisher. Others show their characters coveting gorgeously bound books; Fenn’s Fables begins, “You must have been good, else your ma-ma would not have bought a new book for you” (quoted in A. Richardson 133). Still others even name the bookseller in whose shop windows their young characters are staring.18 Where fiction about children is idealist, fiction for children is materialist.

  Such product placement takes on a darker hue in the Evangelical press, where one symptom of the child’s fallen state is acquisitiveness: he or she wants to buy books, not to read them. In the prelapsarian model of childhood that the Romantics bequeathed to the bildungsroman, the child internalizes texts while adults wield books; in Evangelical literature addressed to children themselves, on the contrary, virtuous adults understand the text as something to be memorized, while greedy children fixate on the book as a thing to be owned. The preface to Watt’s Divine Hymns (reprinted throughout the nineteenth century) advises parents to make their children memorize the hymns, turning “their very Duty into a Reward, by . . . promising them the Book it self, when they have learnt ten or twenty Songs out of it” (I. Watts ii).19 In Mrs. Sherwood’s tract “The Red Book,” too, the father gives the eponymous object to his daughters on condition that they keep it on their dressing tables and read it every time they look in the mirror (M. Sherwood). Remember the Evangelical magazine that contrasts a young character who “puts books into his head” with those members of its own public whose books are “only on your shelves”; it speaks to the reach of this logic, across otherwise unbridgeable ideological divides, that its editor happens to be the clergyman on whom Brontë based Mr. Brocklehurst (“How to Read Tracts”).

  Today, once the reading child has become as iconic as the reading woman, the tension between a model in which children are pictured licking the page or stacking books into towers and another in which children are credited with a particularly pure and disinterested absorption in texts bears a striking resemblance to the tension between the belief that women are particularly rapt readers and the suspicion that women will arrange volumes by color, match bindings to their outfit, or otherwise reduce the book to a material thing. Both tensions reflect the historical shift that we saw in the previous chapter from a culture in which women and children had less access to books than adult males, to one in which the opportunity cost of reading (as measured by lost wages) is lower for women and children than for men. Women and children are now credited with as much disinterested inwardness as they were once blamed for vulgar superficiality (see also Armstrong).

  Even as the Evangelical press associates children with the book-object and adults with its verbal contents—and the secular press, vice versa—both share two premises: that uses of the book change at puberty, and that whichever age group values the text over the book is morally superior. Both map age onto conceptual debates: should the book be understood as a material object or a mental prompt—situated on the shelf or in the mind, within or above the market? So far, so thematic. Only the bildungsroman, as the next section argues, aligns those debates in turn with a tension between diegetic and extradiegetic discussions of text—between (on the one hand) representations of characters writing and (on the other) analogies that the narrator draws to never-to-be-realized acts of inscription.

  READ NONBOOKS

  We’ve seen how often printed objects break into memories of, daydreams about, or role-playing based on absent texts. In the episode of Captain Somebody, that face-off occurs at the level of story; soon enough, however, it migrates to the level of discourse. Stuck in the bottle warehouse—where print takes only the degraded form of labels—David reverts to daydreams. Like his earlier identification with Captain Somebody, these take remembered but unnamed books as their launching pad. David’s new fantasy of “going away somewhere, like the hero in a story, to seek my fortune” is introduced through a counterfactual: “but these were transient visions, daydreams I sat looking at sometimes, as if they were faintly painted or written on the wall of my room, and which, as they melted away, left the wall blank again” (Dickens, David Copperfield 132). Ultimately, of course, “whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life” depends on the narrator’s writing—more precisely, on the printed pages that sit solidly before our eyes. Here, however, text takes the form, at best, of half-remembered reading (of the unspecified story whose unnamed hero inspires daydreams); at worst, of hypothetical writing (“as if they were faintly painted or written”). And even that counterfactual “melts away” when David’s body is jerked back to the task of bottle labeling: here as in childhood, printed matter held in the hand interrupts stories stored in the mind.

  What sets gentlemen apart is the ability not just to read books, but also to abstract them through metaphor. At school, David’s metaphor of picking up “crumbs of knowledge” shifts to an even more explicit simile: “I could no more keep a secret [from Steerforth], than I could keep a cake or any other tangible possession” (95–96). Yet his downward mobility will soon be emblematized by a shift from figurative to literal bread: on his way to the warehouse, David will be embarrassed by “carrying my own bread (which I had brought from home in the morning), under my arm, wrapped in a piece of paper, like a book” (156). The middle-class schoolchild can compare the “knowledge” contained in books to loaves of bread; the boy whose work is to paste papers rather than to read them, in contrast, must redefine loaves as an analogue to the physical object sandwiched between paper covers. As bread compared to books replaces knowledge compared to cake, David descends from abstractions to things. (And not just any thing: let them eat cake.) David’s biography projects onto the level of plot the bathetic thud of puns we saw in the introduction that substitute the Irishman’s or servant’s use of paper to wrap food for their betters’ focus on the words it contains.

  Like the works of cultural theory discussed in the introduction, too, David Copperfield can make the verb “to read” ubiquitous precisely because its meaning is rarely literal, and its object even more rarely a book.20 “I believed that [Agnes] had read, or partly read, my thoughts”; and David’s face allows Mrs. Steerforth to “look behind her, and read, plainly written, what she was not yet prepared to know” (788, 34). No need to invoke analogues in twentieth-century scholarship, however: in the other direction, Dickens is drawing on a long metaphorical tradition that remains alive in much mid-Victorian fiction. North and South juxtaposes the Thorntons’ coffee-table books not just with the Hales’ library, but also, even more sharply, with the metaphor of “reading” that the narrator invokes to describe the process through which middle-class and working-class characters interpret each other’s expressions. On first meeting Nicholas and Bessy Higgins, Margaret asks for their address but realizes that her question “seemed all at once to take the shape of an impertinence on her part; she read this meaning too in the man’s eyes.” Nicholas returns the compliment: “Hoo thinks I might ha’ spoken more civilly . . . I
can read her bonny face like a book” (Gaskell, North and South 74). Later, when Margaret interprets Bessy’s surprise at a dinner invitation as a sign of thinly veiled skepticism about her social status, “Bessy’s cheeks flushed a little at her thought being thus easily read” (147). And finally, in order to convey Margaret’s understanding of what the rioting workers must be thinking, the narrator tells us that “Margaret knew it all; she read it in Boucher’s face” (176). The contrast between coffee-table book and battered text is subsumed here under a related chiasmus between closed books and faces that lay themselves open to interpretation. The more narrowly the book is reduced to its social or material attributes, the broader the metaphoric reach that the act of “reading” acquires.

  Brontë presents readers with a slightly different choice. We’ve seen already that the action in which Jane Eyre enlists books rarely takes the form of reading; the converse is that what’s “read” is rarely a book. Jane can “read [St. John’s] heart plainly” (414), while Rochester’s face is “no more legible than a crumpled, scratched page” (286); both men “read” her glance, her thoughts, and her face, “as if its features and lines were characters on a page” (154, 76, 396). Even a dunce’s book throwing—apparently the furthest thing from reading—is explained as a result of the hatred that John Reed “read in my face” (16). (A dunce can read, just not books.) Reciprocally, from the moment where the “leaves of the book” win out over a “walk in the leafless shrubbery,” books usurp the place of nonverbal objects (14): the boundary separating world from book dissolves even before we ourselves have crossed that threshold.21

  If Jane Eyre hedges reading around with qualifications—remembered, predicted, delegated, or reduced to a figure of speech—David Copperfield does something similar to writing. Penmanship is introduced only as the analogue to a row of houses: David recognizes Traddles’s landlord as Micawber thanks to the “character of faded gentility” that

  made [theirs] unlike all the other houses in the street—though they were all built on one monotonous pattern, and looked like the early copies of a blundering boy who was learning to make houses, and had not yet got out of his cramped brick-and-mortar pothooks. (373)

  The street becomes a manuscript—the chirographic image replacing the print metaphor that had appeared in the earlier scene where David casts himself as a piece of paper, describing “Mr. Micawber impressing the name of streets, and the shapes of corner houses upon me, as we went along” (373). But this analogy goes further, reversing tenor with vehicle: the printed page represents a street, but the street in turn reproduces a line of writing.

  When Dickens switches the literal with the figurative, the pivot often involves inscription: in Our Mutual Friend, for example, the scene of Bradley writing on the chalkboard is followed by Lavinia accusing her mother of looking as stiff “as if one’s under-petticoat was a blackboard” (772, 876). In Copperfield, however, the pothooks point to a more systematic pattern of jokes about learning to write. When a hungover David tries to produce a letter that would justify the previous night’s behavior to Agnes, the only analogue he can find for his mental struggle is a manual skill: “It took me such a long time to write an answer at all to my satisfaction, that I don’t know what the ticket-porter can have thought, unless he thought I was learning to write” (341). The echo of the night before, when the building “looked to me as if it were learning to swim,” provides a middle term linking the actually existing David to the hypothetical blundering boy: in one case the building’s literal slope reflects human “learning”; in the other, the building itself is the one that metaphorically learns because literally leans. The “unless” here performs the same function as the “as if” in the description of the visions that David looks at “as if they were faintly painted or written on the wall”: in both cases, writing is invoked for comparison purposes only. The counterfactual in chapter 25 borrows even greater force from its framing. Not only would it be absurd to confuse “writing” in the sense of formulating an apology with “writing” in the sense of inking a page, but where the narrator at least takes responsibility for the description of the Micawbers’ street in propria persona, here the flight of fancy is handed off (like some unwieldy package) to the porter—that is, to a working-class figure as comic as the O’Connell of the Dublin University Magazine or the literalistic servants whom we’ll encounter in chapter 7. Not, that is, to a downwardly mobile character who’s gone from carrying knowledge to carrying bread.

  To call this confusion “absurd” is hardly to dismiss it, for an analogous substitution structures David Copperfield’s critical reception. As Copperfield became the poster boy for late twentieth-century literary critics’ deflationary mood, an older language of individual creativity and inspiration gave way to inquiries into professional authorship, intellectual property, and the material conditions governing the selling and buying of text. The tension between those competing definitions of “writing” was projected back into David Copperfield, as Alexander Welsh’s psychoanalytically inflected analysis of David’s copyist doubles was succeeded by Mary Poovey’s analysis of the division of labor between David’s invisible writing and Agnes’s equally silent housework, itself followed by John Picker’s and Jennifer Ruth’s more topical discussions of Dickens’s ambivalence toward professional authorship—as well as by Ivan Kreilkamp’s argument that the process of learning shorthand comes to occupy the narrative space left empty by Dickens’s refusal to tell us anything about David’s authorial career (Welsh, From Copyright to Copperfield 116; Poovey, Uneven Developments; Picker 52–65; Ruth; Kreilkamp, “Speech on Paper”; Price, “Stenographic Masculinity”). In the context of this critical tradition, the porter’s mistake begins to look like a figure for the arc of the novel itself, which introduces literal writing (the penmanship that’s first joked about, then narrated) where we’d expect to find literary “writing” (the authorship that’s taken seriously, but elided).

  When Dora asks David to let her “see you write,” he evades the request by exclaiming, “Why, what a sight for such bright eyes!” This is not the last time that writing will be described as a “sight”: a few chapters later, David introduces Micawber’s bill endorsing with the remark that “to see him at work on the stamps, with the relish of an artist, touching them like pictures, looking at them sideways, taking weighty notes of dates and amounts in his pocket-book, and contemplating them when finished, with a high sense of their precious value, was a sight indeed” (Dickens, David Copperfield 718; my emphasis). “To see him . . . was a sight”: the tautology draws our attention to Micawber’s idiosyncratic textual theory, which reduces letters to pure visuality. Micawber’s sideways glance takes us back into the world of the pothooks to which his street is compared: a world in which even those markings that do look like alphabetical characters end up being looked at, not read. Writing disintegrates into two extremes: on the one hand, insufficiently tangible abstractions like David’s memories and fantasies; on the other, excessively visual objects like Micawber’s bills or women’s account books, and excessively tactile objects like volumes used to poke, prod, or otherwise impress a child.

  WRITTEN WORK

  The OED defines “pothook” as “a curved or hooked stroke made with the pen, esp. as a component of an unfamiliar or unintelligible script or when learning to write.” The example it cites comes from 1846: “Swell’s Night Guide 128/1 Pothooks and hangers, short hand characters.” Replacing product by process and mental operations by manual gestures, the pothook forbids us to reduce “write” to a metaphor for “think”—which makes it all the more striking that pothooks are introduced in David Copperfield as metaphor, only to be literalized chapters later. “As if I was learning to write,” “like the early copies of a blundering boy who had not yet got out of pothooks”: the plot will realize both counterfactuals when David comes to learn shorthand.

  John Forster’s echoes of Copperfield have taught us to read that episode backward—from Dickens’s celebrit
y on the reading, lecture, and after-dinner-speech circuit, to novelist, to humorist, to journalist, to reporter, to clerk. Dickens’s professional success can be measured by his progress from taking notes to having notes taken on him. Readers were quick to identify David’s ten-shilling manual full of “marks like flies’ legs” with Dickens’s 1824 edition of Thomas Gurney’s 1750 how-to book, Brachygraphy, or, an Easy and Compendious System of Shorthand (Steven Marcus). Reciprocally, identity politics ensured that David Copperfield was immediately transposed into shorthand—excerpted in a phonographic magazine, reprinted as a freestanding volume, and even mined for practice exercises in shorthand textbooks. This self-help literature both promised and represented upward mobility, whether for better or for worse: when R. H. Hutton asserted that “in some important intellectual, if not mechanical respects, Mr. Dickens did not cease to be a reporter even after he became an author,” the social connotations of “mechanic” must have grated (Hutton 575). They prefigured our present-day reduction of “stenography” to a term of abuse—once again, for journalism that’s mechanical rather than creative.