How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  BOOK, PRISONER, SLAVE

  Where eighteenth-century it-narratives taught readers the rules governing cash and credit in a commercial society, the Stories, Histories, and Adventures that straggle in after 1800 take on a narrower topic: how one very particular kind of consumer good—books—should be bought, sold, given, borrowed, and disposed of. More specifically, it-narratives commissioned by religious publishers struggle to reconcile the competing imperatives of a person’s relation to his books (imagined as less alienable than other belongings) and a person’s relation to other persons (vehicled, in the world that tracts both represent and inhabit, by the exchange of printed matter).

  After 1800, as secular it-narratives shifted their focus to manufacture, religious publishers kept alive the genre’s traditional emphasis on circulation. What mechanical technologies are to one, social relations are to the other. Talking tracts allot as little space to their own conception as any human narrator does: only a secular volume like the 1873 History of a Book could end, Tristram Shandy–like, at the moment when its narrator first goes on sale. In asking how books are shared, and only secondarily how books are made, it-narratives put out by Evangelical publishers anticipate the 1847 pamphlet that urged the Religious Tract Society to stick to its professed aim of “circulation, leaving production to individuals” (Fyfe, “Commerce and Philanthropy” 176).

  The distribution of printed matter forms the central problem of the “Appendix, containing Anecdotes calculated to shew the utility of distributing religious tracts” that is tacked on to the History of a Religious Tract Supposed to Be Related by Itself—itself the inaugural volume in a series of tracts that appear under the title of “The Cottage Library of Christian Knowledge.” “Should the Story of the Little Red Velvet Bible have the effect of arousing any,” another it-narrative declares, “to the conviction that the noblest work in which a Christian man or woman can be employed, is that of circulating the Bible amongst all classes of the community, both at home and abroad, it will not have been written in vain” (Horsburgh 95).

  Founded in 1799 for the purpose of moving books across classes and continents, the Religious Tract Society called for books to be “used, worn out, and worn to pieces.”2 Handling trumps hoarding; books should be transferred, not treasured. As speaking books replace speaking coins, the Enlightenment faith in exchange gives way to its Christian equivalent—the hidden hand to the parable of the sower. The narrator of one American History of a Bible tells us nothing about the moment of its making, choosing instead to begin its life story at the moment when a buyer “liberates” it from being a “close prisoner” in a bookseller’s shop. Elated when praised for “the elegance of my dress” (that is, binding), the bible soon discovers that its new owners “would not permit me to say one word”: instead, these “jailors” force it “to sit upon a chair in the corner of the room.” One owner, worried that the bible will turn her son into an “enthusiast,” “in the heat of passion locked me into my old cell, where I remained in close confinement”; others “joined in scandalizing my character; and I was again confined to my old cell”—that is, to a bookcase where, to make matters worse, it has to rub shoulders with vicious companions. To be read, in this metaphor, is to be “discharged from prison”; even the glass front of the bookcase becomes a “prison door” whose locking and unlocking determines the narrator’s fortunes (History of a Bible 1, 5, 6, 7).3

  Although it reappears, for example, in The Story of a Pocket Bible’s description of its narrator “shut up” in the “prison-house of a strong chest,” the carceral metaphor is hardly unique to the Evangelical press (Sargent, 1st ser., 2). The same image is recognizable in the graveyard of metaphors that is Emerson’s 1858 essay titled “Books” in the Atlantic: “In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us,—some of them,—and are eager to give us a sign, and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to” (344). The episodic structure of it-narrative dovetails equally well with the Evangelical imperative to circulate as with the secular logic that privileges use above display and reading above collecting.

  That convergence makes it doubly puzzling, however, that not every bible seeks out readers as wholeheartedly as does the narrator of the History. A tug-of-war between circulation and stasis structures the Story of a Pocket Bible serialized in the RTS magazine Sunday at Home.4 Given to a child on his birthday, willed to a spendthrift, unloaded onto a bookseller, windowshopped by a laborer, bought for the sake of its binding, inherited by a profligate, passed along to his sick sister, stolen by her servant, resold to a “romanist merchant,” stumbled on by a houseguest, stomped on by a priest, cast into prison along with its owner, auctioned to a tradesman for use as wrapping paper, donated by a pious bookseller to a godless Chartist, shoved under a floorboard by the Chartist’s Catholic wife, trampled (a second time) by striking workmen, traded for a dram, its peripatetic narrator ends up, like a foundling in romance, rescued from a used bookshop by its original owner’s children (Sargent). By this point, the book is not secondhand, but nineteenth-hand: a picaresque narrator must always move on.

  Like the title of Handed-On: Or, the Story of a Hymn Book, the plot of The Story of a Pocket Bible is driven by perpetual motion. Yet every step the narrator takes has violence and theft for its mechanisms, death and bankruptcy for its catalysts. This may help explain why the Pocket Bible worries less about being consigned to solitary confinement than about falling into the wrong hands. Because the History of a Bible’s “close confinement” is matched by the Pocket Bible’s equally long stint on a “shelf of banishment,” we might expect a sigh of relief when, after weeks gathering dust on a licentious gentleman’s bookshelf, the narrator finds a duster approaching, closely followed by a hand. Instead, it shrinks from the servant’s advances:

  After looking around in her trepidation, and wiping her hands with her apron, she mounted on a chair, and reached me from my shelf of banishment . . . It was not right; none have so emphatically condemned the slightest approach to unfaithfulness in servants as I . . . Had this poor girl, therefore, been better acquainted with me, she would scarcely have ventured to seek an interview at that time . . . Those stolen minutes of communication were improper; and on one occasion, I had it in my power to hint as much to her. I was recounting the duties of the various classes of persons to whom I had messages to deliver, and among other things I had something to say to servants. “Servants,” I said, “obey in all things your masters . . . ” Hannah blushed deeply when this reproof reached her . . . She hastily replaced me; and after that, though she cast many longing looks towards me, she did not take me again from my place of repose. (Sargent 38)

  Nothing less Augustinian: instead of being converted through reading, the maid is converted to not reading. Where one conversion begins with the phrase “tolle lege,” the other ends with the decision not to “take” (or read) the book. At least, not the master’s copy on the master’s time: the language of stolen interviews and stolen minutes makes it hard to remember that the volume itself never leaves the room. Here as in Susan Osgood’s Prize, the lesson of reading is not to read—as if the quixotic logic of conduct literature could be extended from the dangers of reading romances to the dangers of reading anything at all. The bible provides a reductio ad absurdum of that logic—proof that the meaning of reading depends on its circumstances more than its content.

  As we’ll see in more detail in the final chapter, a long literary tradition privileges mental operations over manual ones, associating handling with either the female servants who dust books, the tradesmen who tear them apart to wrap groceries, or the even more vulgar nouveaux riches who display them on sofa tables. In this case, the cheapness of the tract in which the anecdote is contained makes it all the more striking that the maid who turns her mind to the pages is u
rged instead to turn her duster to the binding. By the end of this paragraph, the talking bible almost recoils from being read: what was introduced as “my shelf of banishment” is now dubbed “my place of repose.”

  The past two chapters have posited printed matter as a tool to ward off or replace human relationships: the thrown book, the unfurled newspaper, the text that allows the child to lose any consciousness of the adults around him. The Evangelical press turns that relation around: far from competing with human associations, the book enables them. It-narratives hover uneasily between these perspectives— the book as block, the book as bridge. Their form remains torn between the demands of subject and object, relations among readers and relations with books. The history that, as we say today, “personalizes” belongings—a bond that the book trade enshrined earlier in the phrase “association copy”—tugs against the human relationships that can be forged only in the process of alienating possessions: lender and borrower, buyer and seller, carrier and pickpocket, Sunday-school teacher and pupil. The stop-and-go rhythm of it-narrative registers this double bind. At moments when characters treat their book as a “friend” or “companion” too dear to sell—metaphors that project the anthropomorphic logic of the genre onto the world represented within it, as if the characters somehow knew that they were inhabiting a genre that grants books voice—the plot stands still. Only when characters reduce their book to a commodity valued for no more than it can fetch at the pawnshop do they come into contact with other characters; only then can narrative give way to dialogue.

  Figure 4.1. “A New Page in My History,” The Story of a Pocket Bible, 1st series, Sunday at Home, 22 March 1855, 177.

  Books therefore balk not only at being stolen, but even at being legitimately sold. When the hero of “The History of an Old Pocket Bible” (published in the Methodist Cottage Magazine; or, Plain Christian’s Library in 1812) is exchanged for a ribband, its only consolation is to remind itself that “Judas sold his divine master for thirty pieces of silver” (129). The narrator of the History of a Religious Tract Supposed to Be Related by Itself secularizes the metaphor, complaining that “very soon after I came into the world I was sewn up into a book, and sent to a certain Depository in Stationers’ Court, where I was exposed to sale with as little remorse as cattle in Smithfield, or Negroes in a slave market” (1). Like slaves, it-narrators find themselves lumped together with inarticulate objects at the moment of changing hands. The Old Pocket Bible, for example, protests being included in a list of stolen goods consisting of “a silver ink-stand, a lady’s pocket-book, a small tea-caddy, and myself” (“The History of an Old Pocket Bible” 241). The narrator of The Story of a Pocket Bible complains more explicitly about the “state of slavery” that makes it liable to being, as it were, sold down the river to a godless stranger (Sargent, 1st ser., 19). The problem is not simply that books can be sold: it’s more specifically that they can be resold, rather than faithfully handed down to the descendants of its first and last buyer.

  Owners prove as ambivalent about alienating their books as books are about being alienated. In fact, the former’s motives often remain opaque to the latter: when the narrator of The History of a Religious Tract is abandoned on a table, for example, it remains unsure “whether from neglect, or from the hope of my benefitting some other person” (2). The poor man who figures in the 1825 Adventures of a Bible agonizes before parting with the narrator, explaining that “it appears to me a kind of sin to sell my bible” (18). At the level of the text, bibles demand rereading (you wouldn’t return one to the circulating library once you’d finished it). At the level of the object, too, devotional books exemplify sentimental value: handwritten births and deaths reduce not only their resalability but even their suitability as gifts. Made to be reread on a cyclical schedule, neither disposable like a novel nor supersedable like an almanac, devotional books would ideally change hands only once in a lifetime.

  A second explanation for this fear of circulation is that where coins (the heroes of the classic it-narrative) are meant to pass through richer and poorer hands, books are marketed to specific social classes—even, or especially, the Bible. What Sargent’s narrator forbids Hannah to read isn’t the Bible so much as a bible—a book, not a text. “Hannah did not rest satisfied,” it adds, “until she had procured the services of another of my own family—the very counterpart of myself, indeed, except in mere externals” (Sargent 38). Books are personified by being subjected to the same sumptuary laws as persons: like a human body, a bible requires clothing befitting its station. One Victorian journalist sneers that “books in handsome binding kept locked under plateglass in showy dwarf bookcases are as important to stylish establishments as servants in livery, who sit with folded arms, are to stylish equipages” (Coutts 120). Reciprocally, a bible—as much as an article of clothing—requires a socially appropriate owner. The question of what texts are appropriate for different social classes to read is upstaged by the question of what bindings are appropriate for them to own or even (as in the servant’s case) to touch without owning.

  The Story of a Pocket Bible was itself multiply reprinted, both in magazine and volume form. One American edition, subtitled A Book for all Classes of Readers, abridges the narrative “for the purpose of so reducing it in size and price as to adapt it to the wants of Sunday schools, though nothing essential to its main purpose has been left out” (Sargent 1). Once again, the text can circulate only at the price of mutating. The universality of the bible’s own content paradoxically depends on the variability of its “externals”—lettering, binding, paper, size. But the fact that this humbler “counterpart” never gets to tell its story short-circuits the self-referential conceit with which The Story of a Pocket Bible began. Self-referentiality breaks down just as dramatically in tracts that invite readers to “wear [them] to pieces” but show unremarkably few traces of use: across the several dozen copies of the genre that I’ve been able to examine, wax and smoke stains are surprisingly absent, let alone intentional marks like underlining or turned-down corners.5

  The failure of Hannah’s own bible to narrate reminds us that these books about books are, more specifically, cheap tracts about expensive bibles. The Story of a Red Velvet Bible is covered with paper, not velvet; the Pocket Bible that considers itself too good for a servant to read narrates nothing better than a tract serialized in a penny weekly—a publication whose implied reader shares Hannah’s class position, even if its implied buyer is likelier to resemble her master. (A run of this periodical is found in one of the few surviving servants’ libraries, at Cragside in Northumberland [Stimpson 7].) Even more paradoxically, the aspirational book vehicles a text that slums. Composed by middle-class (or adult) writers mimicking the voice of uneducated (or not yet educated) readers, the language of tracts talks down; the material forms that it represents are both more durable and more upmarket than those it inhabits. Bibliographical “externals” short-circuit linguistic content: the form of the object undermines the circularity on which the text’s feeble humor depends.

  The History of a Religious Tract—a tract about a tract—forms one exception to this rule. Another, which turns the conventions of Evangelical it-narrative to secular and even commercial ends, is “The Life and Adventures of a Number of Godey’s Lady’s Book. Addressed Particularly to Borrowers, Having Been Taken Down in Short-Hand from a Narration Made by Itself, When the Unfortunate Creature Was in a Dilapidated State, from the Treatment Received at the Hands of Cruel Oppressors.”6 Here, the autobiography of a number of Godey’s appears in—a number of Godey’s; what’s more, the conditions under which Godey’s is bought and borrowed form its subject. “You must not suppose that I was always the wretched, coverless, soiled, dog’s-eared and torn object you see,” the narrative begins. “I was an intellectual individual. I knew it; I surveyed my own cover with a proper degree of pride, a little abated, however, by the reflection that I could be bought and sold for twenty-five cents.” Unlike the Pocket Bible and the Religio
us Tract, however, the Number of Godey’s is not complaining about the fact of being put up for sale. On the contrary, its ambition is to fetch an even higher price: “I felt I was worth, at least, a dollar; and to dispose of me for less was a poor reward for all my wit and wisdom” (425). The question here is not (as in the Smithfield metaphor) whether books should be conceptualized as something more or less than commodities, but—more technically—whether the transaction through which they change hands should consist of buying, renting, or borrowing. “When in the course of human events,” the narrator declaims, “it becomes necessary for people to borrow boot-jacks, salt, or cucumbers, let boot-jacks, salt, or cucumbers be loaned. But let indignant subscribers to the ‘Lady’s Book’ declare their independence of borrowers” (427).

  That commercial message drives the complaints that structure its “Life and Adventures”: “One visit would lose me a leaf, another a plate . . . My music got enamoured of a piano at my fifth stopping-place, and shamefully deserted me forever. The great gap you see on one of my pages was occasioned by the scissors of a young lady, who clipped out a beautiful poem, by Mrs. Neal, for her scrap-book . . . One careful housewife, to complete my degradation, after she had read my contents, used me as a duster” (426). Where the Pocket Bible’s reluctance to circulate contradicts its Evangelical mission, the equivalent structure makes perfect sense in a magazine story designed to boost sales. After parting mournfully from an honest schoolmaster, “never to look on his face again,” the Number of Godey’s complains that the thoughtless girls whom he teaches demand to have his copy passed along to them, on pain of being fired by their fathers. A dialogue between two of his pupils drives the point home: