How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  In the context of David’s stenographic career, the analogy between skin and slate may point back to Cassian, the patron saint of stenographers, martyred by being stabbed to death with his pupils’ styli. With two differences: in David Copperfield, the metonymic relation between scarring and writing gives way to a metaphorical one, and the man attacked by boys gives way to a boy attacked by men. The only case in which a child is the attacker—Steerforth scarring Rosa with a hammer—occurs before the novel begins; all David sees, belatedly, is the scar “lengthening out to its full extent, like a mark in invisible ink brought to the fire . . . I saw it start forth like the old writing on the wall” (278). When David evoked the visions rising in his mind “as if they were faintly painted or written on the wall,” a solid but counterfactual inscription provided the metaphorical counterpart to real but intangible images. Here, in contrast, an imaginary wall competes with an implied sheet of paper as terms of comparison for very real skin.

  The violence of inscription may help explain David’s oddly bifurcated experience at school. Forbidden (and pleasurable) oral performances of remembered texts differ as starkly from required (and painful) physical punishment for forgotten lessons as—well, as night and day. What redeems David from the tale the sandwich board tells about him by day is his own ability to tell tales by night—not to an encyclopedic public of butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers, but rather to a clandestine coterie of schoolboys centered on his self-styled aristocratic patron, Steerforth. Transforming him from the wearer of a written sign to the reciter of printed books, David’s storytelling prefigures his later career not only in its “hard work” but in its schedule: both the telling of stories and the learning of shorthand depend on early rising (94).30

  The novel is structured, then, by a double progression: first, a fall from women’s speech to men’s writing (usually on David’s hapless body); second, a rise from David’s own feminized speech (whether at school or in the bottle warehouse) to the writing that he himself comes to perform on arriving at manhood. From “the gentleness of my mother’s voice” as she reads aloud and prompts his lessons in stage whispers, David is exiled to a classroom whose “quiet” is underlined by chirographic overload: the “scraps of old copybooks” littering the floor, the graffiti carved into the desks, and the “beautifully written” sign that David himself is forced to display (80–82).

  Like Captain Somebody’s collision with the Latin Grammar, David’s nighttime storytelling sessions translate absent books into mental images that are externalized in turn, whether in the form of playacting at home or recitation at school. And both performances derive from the same lumber room: like Jane Eyre banishing the act of reading to its backstory, David Copperfield represents only the state of having read. In the presence of a “litter” of paper, ink, and other school supplies, but the absence of printed storybooks, oral transmission turns David himself into a walking reprint series.

  Where David’s domestic education pitted the abstract pleasures of acting out remembered texts against the physical pain of being beaten or boxed with a book, here a mental storehouse of stories is contrasted with the schoolchild’s bodily suffering. What the pedagogy of pain shares with the pedagogy of pleasure is that both equate learning to write and read with coming to be written and read. The only difference is whether what’s marked is the child’s mind, or his skin. In the Renaissance, according to Walter Ong, pain was integral to the learning of Latin—and vice versa.31 At the same time as he translates that symbiosis into a modern vernacular idiom, Dickens also adds a corollary: the pleasures of orality provide a foil for the pain of inscription, or more precisely of being inscribed. It makes sense, in that context, that Steerforth should try to change writing instruments into vocal aids—counteracting David’s hoarseness, for example, with cowslip wine “drawn off by himself in a phial, and administered to me through a piece of quill in the cork” (Dickens, David Copperfield 94). Instead of ink, wine; only a hundred pages later, once David begins to sell off the Micawbers’ books to the tipsy bookseller, does the oral storyteller too disinterested to be paid in any currency stronger than home brew morph into the businessman who reduces books to money that can be exchanged in turn for drink. Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny: David’s life can be parsed either as a fall from a gift economy to the market, or as a Whiggish progression from the face-to-face audiences figured here by Steerforth’s pseudoaristocratic “patronage” to the anonymity of a modern, professionalized public sphere.

  In laying the sign on David’s own back open to the “back of the house,” which lacks the expected division from the middle-class front, the novel embodies the underside of Dickens’s own ambition to be read by a representative cross-section of English society. The servants and tradesmen who read David’s sandwich board form a dystopian mirror image of the figures whom Victorian critics conventionally used to embody the classlessness of novel reading. For Bagehot, Dickens was the one writer “whose works are read so generally throughout the whole house, who can give pleasure to the servants as well as to the mistress, to the children as well as to the master” (Bagehot 459); according to Fraser’s review of David Copperfield, its author “has done more for the promotion of peace and goodwill between man and man, class and class, nation and nation, than all the congresses under the sun . . . [His novels] introduce the peasantry to the peerage, the grinder at the mill to the millionaire who owns the grist” (“Charles Dickens and David Copperfield” 700).

  What do those claims about the power of reading to transcend class do to the story of David’s own fall out of the middle class and ascent back into it? For one thing, they complicate the child’s downward mobility, because storytelling is the one act that spans the divide between a before and an after, school and warehouse, which the novel otherwise so strenuously keeps apart. Where the return of the middle-class schoolmates who can “read” David is preceded by his being “read” by the servants, the baker, and the butcher, conversely David’s storytelling to Steerforth prefigures his storytelling to the other boys in the warehouse. And just as the sign erases the distinction between front and back of the house, so the only time his workmates venture to call him by his first name is when they become “confidential” under the influence of his storytelling (Dickens, David Copperfield 159). The novel leaves open whether to explain that fact by the theory that stories debase their teller or on the contrary that they cut across class lines. What is clear, however, is that storytelling in the warehouse looks back on the one hand to storytelling in the dormitory, and on the other to self-display in the schoolyard. The narrator’s assertion at the bottle warehouse that “how much I suffered it is, as I have said already, utterly beyond my power to tell” mirrors his statement that “what I suffered from that placard, nobody can imagine”—so closely, in fact, as to make a reader wonder whether that “saying already” refers to the schoolyard rather than the workplace (57, 81).

  Helen Small has argued that the mid-Victorians’ hope that novel reading in general (and reading Dickens in particular) could suspend or transcend class divisions culminated in the public readings of the end of Dickens’s life, where the transformation of texts into speech became inseparable from the dream of uniting the nation in the act of listening (Small). In contrast, the sandwich board figures the mass reading of visual signs as a nightmare. Trollope’s celebration of a society whose cohesion is measured by the fact that novels are “read right and left, above stairs and below,” is reversed in the democratically “open” schoolyard where the backstairs outdo the front stairs in reading and objectifying the future author (Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography 220). In the warehouse window as in the bare schoolyard, shame can best be vehicled through writing. To be labeled is to be exposed—not just for David, but for the Micawbers, whose social decline is emblematized by the fact that “the centre of the street door was perfectly covered with a great brass-plate, on which was engraved ‘Mrs. Micawber’s Boarding Establishment for Young Ladies’” (Dicken
s, David Copperfield 154).

  Yet the novel manages to recuperate even the worst humiliations: an upward trajectory leads from the school where David wears a label to the bottle warehouse where he pastes labels. The bottle warehouse may not represent the opposite of literary production, then, so much as its analogue: the progression from being labeled to labeling foreshadows the shift from a body that’s written upon to a mind that writes.32 As the plot turns a child who is acted upon into an adult who acts, its trope shifts from metaphor (a child who resembles a book, as the next chapter argues in more detail) to metonymy (an adult who makes one). As a result, David Copperfield turns only belatedly into a proto-Smilesian account of self-help—of salvation by books such as Gurney’s Brachygraphy, unaided by human agents such as Mr. Spenlow. Its first debt is to an older genre that, far from celebrating self-help, associates selfhood with helplessness and passivity—more specifically, that locates consciousness not in a person marked by books, but in a book marked by readers. That genre forms the subject of the next chapter.

  CHAPTER 4

  It-Narrative and the Book as Agent

  Until now, the subjects of my sentences have been human agents. Whether decoding words or throwing volumes, whether facing a page or hiding behind a paper, these persons do something with (and to) books. What they don’t read, they still use. So far, so conventional. No matter how energetically book historians distance themselves from the aesthetic, we remain no less attached than literary historians to narratives centered on agents: the author, the editor, the reader, or (even more literally) the literary agent. Such scholarly accounts mirror the structure of their sources, whether authors’ biographies, company histories, or readers’ memoirs. They also recapitulate a more diffuse tradition—both religious (specifically Augustinian) and literary (specifically Wordsworthian)—that relies on the encounter with a book to account for the development of a self.

  Even when book historians choose examples that happen to fall outside the literary canon, the language in which they describe their own scholarly practices remains parasitic on those novels and memoirs that thematize reading. The previous chapter argued that one subset of that tradition, the bildungsroman, has both generated and limited the stories scholars tell about reading. Where else, then, might we look for models that make the book narratable? This chapter contends that the most productive overlap between recent book-historical scholarship and the longer tradition of bibliographically themed life writing lies not in their common interest in human subjects, but rather in their shared attention to the circulation of things.

  Analytical bibliographers have taught us that books accrue meaning not just at the moment of manufacture, but through their subsequent uses: buying and selling, lending and borrowing, preserving and destroying. A history of the book that took that whole range of transactions as building blocks (rather than focusing on the fraction of the book’s life cycle that it spends in the hands of readers) could usefully borrow its formal conventions from the “it-narrative”: a fictional autobiography in which a thing traces its travels among a series of richer and poorer owners.

  THE BOOK AS VICTIM, THE BOOK AS SUBJECT

  When late twentieth-century critics rediscovered the it-narrative, they were thinking of a late eighteenth-century genre. By 1800, its babbling banknotes, canting coins, prosing pocket watches, and soliloquizing snuffboxes seem to have talked themselves out. It might not be too far-fetched to explain the recent vogue of it-narrative as a stick with which to beat the Victorians. On the one hand, the it-narrative’s obsession with two-dimensional objects—whether metal or paper—prompted literary critics beginning with Deidre Lynch to reexamine the metaphor that dismissed early fictional characters as “flat” and therefore valueless (The Economy of Character). On the other, the metaphor of the “rise of the novel” deflated. The eighteenth-century fiction that had once led upward to later realism now bled outward to contemporaneous nonfictional genres: the advertisement, the economic treatise, the slave autobiography, the letter of credit. Synchronic juxtaposition replaced diachronic succession. To the extent that eighteenth-century it-narrative could be made to prefigure anything at all, its telos was no longer nineteenth-century fiction but twenty-first-century “thing theory.”

  In the decades hopscotched over by those critics, however, it-narratives never stopped being read, or even written—with two differences. First, the guineas, rupees, and banknotes whose histories, adventures, and lives had formed the genre’s stock-in-trade were now replaced by talking books; and instead of addressing middle-class adults, it-narratives now went down-market to those too young, or too poor, to choose the books they owned. Both shifts register in Middlemarch, a novel whose own plot is structured, it-narrative-like, by the circulation of “a bit of ink and paper.” When Lydgate is driven to a dusty encyclopedia entry on anatomy—until which “he had no more thought of representing to himself how his blood circulated than how paper served instead of gold” (143)—it’s only because he’s already tired of Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea (1760–65). Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: the child draws his reading material from the infancy of the novel, the adult from modern medical research. The displacement of the inanimate by the human over the course of Lydgate’s life mirrors the novel’s shift from focalization through things (in the it-narrative) to focalization through human characters (in the strand of “subject narrative” that culminates in Eliot’s novel for grown-up people). Yet Lydgate’s own fantasies continue to feature nonhuman heroines: “the primitive tissue was still his fair unknown” (272).

  Likewise, it-narratives continued to be not only recirculated and reprinted, but even composed from scratch. All that changed was their audience. Although some had always trickled down to children, eighteenth-century it-narratives were adult—occasionally in the strong sense of the word, as the narrator of Middlemarch acknowledges in describing Chrysal as “neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk” (143). Crébillon’s Le sopha (1742) and Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets (1748) prefigure Prince Charles’s latter-day it-fantasy of being reincarnated as a tampon. But around the same time that the handpress was dethroned, the genre became G-rated: witness The History of a Religious Tract Supposed to Be Related by Itself (1806); The History of an Old Pocket Bible (1812); Adventures of a Bible: Or, the Advantages of Early Piety (1825); The History of a Pocket Prayer Book, Written by Itself (1839); The Story of a Pocket Bible (1859); The Story of a Red Velvet Bible (1862); Handed-On: Or, the Story of a Hymn Book (1893). Moving from one kind of printed paper to another, the it-narrative shadowed two competing disciplines: first numismatics, then bibliography.

  As good books replaced bad coins, officious thing-exposition upstaged confidential thing-confession.1 But religious books weren’t the only ones that talked, nor Evangelical publishers the only ones who gave them voice. As late as 1873, a copy of Robinson Crusoe could narrate Annie Carey’s heavily illustrated account of papermaking and binding, The History of a Book, commissioned by the same firm that had published her earlier Autobiography of a Lump of Coal; A Grain of Salt; A Drop of Water; A Bit of Old Iron; and A Piece of Old Flint (1870).

  Two innovations united both strands of it-narrative religious and scientific. One was that in neither case did the end user correspond to the buyer. Whether gifts presented to children by their parents, or tracts thrust upon poor adults by philanthropists, both reached readers through a more than purely commercial transaction. The other was that both shared a new kind of protagonist. Where banknotes had once exemplified circulation across class lines, paper now changed hands in the form of bibles, hymnbooks, prayer books, tracts.

  To readers familiar with the classic phase of the it-narrative, this turn may come as a surprise. But the talking book doesn’t come out of nowhere. Eighteenth-century object narratives already allude to the life cycle of books, beginning with Chrysal itself. There, the narrator of the preface happens on a fragment of “some regular work” in the paper w
rapping the butter served to him by a poor family; he goes on to seek out more of the same manuscript by going to the chandler’s shop that they patronize, “as if for some snuff, which, as I expected, was given me on a piece of the same paper” (Johnstone x–xi). As Christina Lupton has argued, the classic it-narratives are “in the first place, the life story of a pile of paper, and only in the second, the story of the objects represented there” (“The Knowing Book” 412). In Adventures of a Black Coat a manuscript is used as a potholder, and in Adventures of a Banknote an author can’t even afford enough coal to dispose of his rejected verses—although his neighbor later burns them to revive him from a concussion. Christopher Flint has therefore interpreted it-narratives as an allegory of authorship, arguing that “the speaking object figures the author’s position in print culture” (212). If you read backward from the nineteenth century, however, eighteenth-century it-narratives begin to look less invested in a figurative representation of the author than in a literal representation of the book. To the extent that early it-narratives frame themselves as found objects, they already emphasize the circulation of paper, changing hands as it passes from manufacture to sale to resale to disposal.

  All that changes is where that emphasis occurs. In the first generation of it-narratives, the book-object is mentioned around the edges: in prefaces, introductions, and other paratexts. Only around 1800 does its representation migrate from frame narrative to plot. In that sense, the development of the it-narrative mirrors the shift that I’ve argued characterizes the novel as a whole in the nineteenth century. If the bookish self-referentiality that the eighteenth-century novel situates in the voice of an “editor” gets replaced by the nineteenth-century novel’s more thematic interest in characters’ uses of books—and if, in the process, bibliographical materialism migrates from beginnings and endings to middles, or from paratext to text—similarly the it-narrative goes from joking about wastepaper in its front matter or frame narratives, to taking papermaking and printing as the subject of its plots. In the process, the novel’s bookishness—its allusions to the material forms that it takes and the social transactions that it occasions—goes from exemplifying the reader’s labor to instancing the buyer’s passivity.