by Price, Leah
“What! Injure a man because he hesitated to suffer you to use his property as freely as though it were your own?”
“But, it is only a book.”
“Very true, and that yonder is only a bonnet. How would you like to have that passing from head to head, when it came from the milliner, being borrowed in turn by all the girls of the village.”
“Yes, but a bonnet is a necessity.”
“And the ‘Lady’s Book’ becomes a necessity very soon: it is mental food.” (426)
Women read, but men buy: even the goody-goody who refuses to join the twenty-eight women who club together for a single subscription cites the authority of her father, who thinks so highly of Godey’s that he has given her permission to take out her own subscription. When the schoolmaster laments that “the copy I have to pay for” is extorted by girls who “spend yearly, on folly, more money than would suffice to support me,” he endorses the very equation between person and thing on which this blackmail depends: the “yearly . . . money” could just as well be the narrator’s name for the annual cost of supporting (that is, subscribing to) itself. The magazine competes with the schoolmaster as an instructor of youth.
The structure of it-narrative is used to reframe a debate about the rights of persons (in this case, publishers) as one about the rights of objects (in this case, magazines). Where the Religious Tract is insulted at being bought, the Number of Godey’s is wounded instead by a bibliographic promiscuity that forces it to serve the pleasures of more successive subscribers than it can stand. Beginning its life “dressed by the binder,” the Number ends up with “my cover taken entirely off, leaving me in a distressing state of nudity.” If clothing is both personal and subject to an annual fashion cycle—who would wear a secondhand bonnet?—so are magazines. To pass “from hand to hand” is to be sullied. Like the Religious Tract, the Quire of Paper, the Old Pocket Bible, and the Book, the Number of Godey’s feels most vulnerable at those moments where it’s endowed with skin that can be scarred and limbs that can be amputated:
The brown mark on one of my corners came from the hot ashes of a cigar. Every step that I took was marked with fresh indignity and additional mutilation . . . Here I am, prematurely old, and ready to fall to pieces from continued ill treatment. At one house I would find the face of one of my plates, smudged with candy from a child’s fingers; at another, the eyes of a lady in the fashion plate were ornamented with an enormous pair of spectacles. (426)7
Whether the narrator’s wounds are metaphorical (inflicted on the bodies it resembles) or metonymic (inflicted on the bodies it represents), the topic that moves books to speech is the wear and tear to which they have been subjected. “The History of an Old Pocket Bible” begins, “I am at present in a most tattered condition. One of my covers has long since been missing, and the other hangs only by a single thread. A great part of my leaves are torn out, and the remainder are so doubled down and spoiled as scarcely to be legible. Indeed I daily expect to be cast into the flames” (89). The narrator of The History of a Book introduces its description of the printing process by punning that “I was yet to undergo a great deal of sharp usage” (Carey 141). The eponymous Quire of Paper translates that bruised and battered condition more specifically into a loss of voice.
What horrors I endured when after being borne through several dark apartments, I saw before our eyes a dreadful machine, whirling round with terrible velocity, and roaring with so loud and tremendous a voice for prey that every ear was deafened, and every sound lost near it! Think what my situation must have been, when I discovered that I was the kind of food this monster craved for, and amongst the number of its devoted victims. All language were weak to describe to you the terror and anguish I felt when I was thrown between its gaping and voracious jaws. (“Adventures of a Quire of Paper” 449)
The physical violence of being mangled is doubled by the psychic violence of being silenced. Yet the indignity of a literal voice’s being drowned out by a machine’s metaphorical “roar” is undermined by the fact that that voice belongs to an equally inanimate object: if the narrator’s “language [is] weak,” what else could we expect from a sheet of paper?
Like the repentant sinners that it depicts, the genre becomes self-conscious only on its deathbed. One of its final instances, Handed-On: Or, the Story of a Hymn Book (SPCK, 1893), transposes the it-convention from a formal to a thematic register, shifting away from the first person but recapitulating every other cliché of the genre. Here again, the plot charts the colonial and domestic travels of a volume whose flyleaf is inscribed: “This is a wandering hymnbook. The finder will please mark some line or verse and then pass it on” (30). Here again we find a debate over the value of circulation, beginning with the eponymous book’s being spotted by the side of road:
I shall pick it up, and see what it is, and whether there is any name inside the cover.
Don’t, Ethel! How can you tell who touched it last, or from what house of illness it may come? said the fashionably dressed lady, who always declared that she was in constant terror of infection from one cause or another, and that she never ventured into the quarters of the city where the poor congregated. (9)
And here again the daughter can imagine the hymnbook as a person only by dint of imagining it as a victim: “Poor little hymn-book!” she said softly. “Oh, mother, you need not be frightened, for it is . . . a fellow-countryman of ours” (9). In fact, the maid embarrassed to offer her mistress “a dirty old book like this” is proven wrong. Once again, Christianity changes wear and tear from faults to virtues. Another servant (the former nursemaid of the young man whose death precipitates his hymnbook’s travels) balks at passing along the book as its flyleaf requests: “If I did what I liked best I’d ask to have it buried with me” (71, 25). For her as for the young man’s mother, the hymnbook is both metaphor and metonymy for its dead owner: to pass the book along is to accept the sacrifice of the son.
Handed-On does recuperate the form of the it-narrative, but only as an unrealizable fantasy: its third-person account of a “wandering hymnbook” frames the axiom that “no book can tell the story of its ups and downs in the world, or describe how and why it began to pass from hand to hand” (6). The it-narrative reappears only vestigially, in the person of a character who “wished that a book could tell its own true story—or rather the story of its various owners” (46). In The Story of a Pocket Bible, that sentiment had been placed in the mouth of the book itself: it’s the bible who, on the last page of its autobiography, overhears its owner say, “O, if this Bible could speak, what a history it would have to tell!” By 1893, not only can a book no longer tell its story, but that story is itself imagined as a placeholder for human stories. Yet the book itself continues to have a story, and its narratability continues to anthropomorphize it: another character asks, “Where is the book that does not or will not possess a story? . . . A book is for me somewhat like a man or woman; I dream and speculate as to the scenes where it has been” (Handed-On 76). Characters’ consciousness replaces the narrative itself as the place where books are imagined to possess a self.
BOOK, VETERAN, INVALID, PROSTITUTE
One explanation for the it-narrative’s turning bookish at the end of the handpress era, then, is that at a moment when mechanization is making books more closely identical to one another, it-narrators must struggle harder to individuate themselves. When the copy of Crusoe refers to “one of my brothers in better plight than myself,” it makes each copy part of a family, or at least a litter—not, in any case, identical twins (“Adventures of a Robinson Crusoe” 191). And the Number of Godey’s reports that “after having been dressed by the binder, myself with eighty thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine companions were carried over to the publication office” (“The Life and Adventures of a Number of Godey’s Lady’s Book” 425) before going on to describe being cut out and penciled on: only at the moment of transmission do mass-produced objects acquire a unique life story. As Walter Benjamin remin
ds us, “Habent sua fata libelli: . . . not only books but also copies of books have their fates” (61).
A catch-22: too little handling appears as dangerous as too much, being a wallflower as bad as being raped. Lamb lends the book a “voice” only when it bears the mark of dirty thumbs: “How beautiful to the genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn-out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old ‘Circulating Library’ Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield! How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages with delight!” (“Detached Thoughts”; my emphasis). The bible that confesses that its “personal appearance had begun to assume that of a veteran in my Master’s service” (even though, it adds sarcastically, “the parental warning given to my young owner, to take care of me, was so far unnecessary that there was no fear of my becoming further worn or soiled by his frequent usage, whether good or bad”) draws on Lamb’s reference to his books, a moment later, as “battered veterans” (Sargent, 2nd ser., 33–34) . Angus Reach writes, in the same vein, that “the books may sometimes be a little greasy, to be sure, the paper stained and thumbed, and the leaves dog-eared. But what of that? We respect a stained dog-eared book. It is a veteran who has seen service—not a mere gilt ornament to an unread library” (Reach 248; my emphasis).
Tract-distributors themselves scanned for signs of use more eagerly than any reception historian can. One fictional colporteur testifies that in entering a former Catholic’s house “I found the Bible he had purchased from me lying on the table; it bore marks of frequent usage, for it was quite worn out.” In another house a convert “drew out a New Testament in 12mo., which was all in tatters, so much had it been used” (Fifty-Sixth Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society 31, 10, 14). In a novel about a Protestant colporteur in France, meanwhile, the hero
observed with joy that the book betrayed tokens of constant reading. Every page appeared to have been frequently, though carefully turned; and various favourite passages were marked, one by a ribbon, another by a dried flower or leaf, another by a bit of thread or tiny scrap of paper; while some pages were doubled in half, others turned down at the corner above, others at the corner below. There could be no doubt of its being the vade mecum of a Bible Christian. (Manning 203)
And a missionary from the Institution for the Evangelization of Gypsies testifies that “in one of the former families there was a Testament, which had been presented by the Committee in Southampton, and bearing date 1830. It bore marks of frequent usage. Many single leaves were turned down as marks for certain passages” (“Institution for the Evangelization of Gypsies” 170). The hero of one 1859 novel even falls in love the moment he notices that the heroine’s bible is “not one of those velvet things with gilt crosses that ladies delight in, but plain-bound, with slightly soiled edges, as if with continual use” (D. M. Craik 59).
Keeping a book too clean is as bad as letting it get too dirty. One London bible-woman reports: “Called on a man in C—— street. His answer was, ‘No, missus, I do not want a Bible. I have one in my box, and it is one hundred and two years old.’ I replied, ‘I should like to see it.’ He took it out, and I was obliged to say, ‘It looks as if every page condemned its several owners.’ ‘How so, missus?’ ‘It has always been kept in the box, and not a leaf is soiled’” (Ranyard 95). The story has a happy ending, as the man eventually agrees to subscribe for a large-print bible. Instead of a person judging books, books sit in judgment over persons. When a character in Ministering Children confesses that “a locked-up Bible is a bad witness against me,” the evidence of the book trumps the testimony of its owner: empty protestations of faith can be faked, but the wear and tear on the page doesn’t lie (Charlesworth, Ministering Children 72).
If the happiest women have no history, the same could be said of the happiest books (G. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 400). Conversely, it-narrators must suffer, because the only voice with which prosopopoeia can invest them is the passive. For the narrator of the History of a Religious Tract Supposed to Be Related by Itself, the very basis on which books can be assimilated to speaking subjects is their vulnerability. “Much indeed do I resemble man,” it begins, “not only in the vast variety of my members, but in the delicacy of my constitution. As human ‘Life contains a thousand springs, and dies if one be gone,’ so the loss or misplacing of a word sadly disorders me, and the fraction of a page is death” (1).8 The narrator of the 1873 History of a Book, too, matures by being humbled: “Not for long was I allowed to remain in this inflated state of mind with regard to my probable size as a book. My sheets were taken and . . . passed between two iron rollers . . . This ‘rolling-machine’ compresses the sheets so very much more than the old ‘hammering’ did [that] the result, to my mind, was to make me ‘feel small’” (Carey 137).
In the Adventures of a Bible (1813), a characteristically Christian reversal makes that same smallness a source of power: “I was indeed but six inches in height,” acknowledges the narrator; “but with this I was by no means discontented, as I thought that, probably, I should be more frequently brought into use, than if I had been of a larger size; and I knew that, small as I was, I could teach and do as much as the largest” (Boston Society for the Religious and Moral Improvement of Seamen 6). No less than the undersized and underfunded protagonist of a Dickens or Brontë novel, it-narrators exemplify the hidden powers of the physically and socially insignificant. A Christian theme, but also a political subtext: a battered paper-covered volume demands as much respect for its contents as the spotless leather-bound twin from which it’s been separated at birth. A book’s a book for a’ that.
Like abused children, too, the book evokes our empathy by reporting mistreatment. In secular accounts of book production, the narrator gets pressed, trimmed, and hammered; in religious accounts of book circulation, the narrator gets pawned, stolen, torn, kicked, and trampled on. If books’ accounts of their own martyrdom borrow from the conventions of missionary autobiography, they also draw on a long tradition in which Christ’s body was compared to a book (Kearney, The Incarnate Text 14). The word made flesh—but as in Kafka’s Penal Colony, flesh most legible when martyred.
Paradoxically, then, those moments when the book usurps its human owner’s agency occur not when it’s most powerful, but when it’s most abused. Caroline Wilder Fellowes’s “A volume of Dante,” for example, opens, “I lie unread, alone. None heedeth me. / Day after day the cobwebs are unswept / From my dim covers” (White, Book-Song 53). In fact, this logic exceeds the it-narrative proper: even in a human-narrated tract, Mrs. Sherwood can warn that “Bibles are now so abundant in England, that the rich supply, we fear, rather tends to cause a contempt for the gift than a spirit of thankfulness; but let it be remembered, that every Bible which has lain neglected on the dusty shelf may, some time or other, rise in judgment against its careless possessor” (M. Sherwood 315).9 Here as in Ministering Children, it’s precisely the fact of being silenced that gives the bible standing to complain. Across the ocean, the Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave (1825) concludes: “if it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave, I would in my will, leave my skin a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment and then bind the Constitution of glorious happy and free America. Let the skin of an American slave bind the charter of American liberty” (quoted in Fabian 87–88). And if a slave’s skin could be imagined as a book’s binding, a book’s cover could be imagined as a slave’s skin: the most heavily subsidized bibles bore a “charity brand”—a stamp referred to, once again, in the language of slavery (Howsam 122).
“If you would know how a man treats his wife and his children, see how he treats his books”: the aphorism often attributed to Emerson (probably apocryphal) endows the book with personhood at the price of vulnerability. An 1882 article titled “The Library” in the Gentleman’s Magazine that begins with a hackneyed quotation from Ar
eopagitica (“as good almost kill a man as kill a good book”) goes on to make clear that books bear less resemblance to men than to women: “He would think that he richly deserved the six months’ hard labour which London magistrates deal to brutal husbands who kick and jump upon their wives, could he bring himself to double up the backs of his books” (Watkins 101).
Such analogies pair the book’s capacity to feel pain with its inability to protect itself. Or herself, for the most minimal grammatical marker of the genre—the “it” contradistinguished from those more conventional narrators who must be resolved into a “he” or a “she”—is contradicted both by the sexual metaphors that convey the book’s vulnerability, and by the metaphors of dress that spark the book’s reflections on its own vanity. (In Romola, too, selling off your father-in-law’s library brands you capable of monetizing his daughter.) This isn’t to say that Emerson (or whoever came up with the aphorism) is advocating a chivalrous refusal to lay hands on the book: unlike the seduction narratives invoked by Godey’s, these analogies figure the book as legitimately married to her (male) owner. By that logic, a book that’s been used to pieces would reflect as badly on its master as does a book that’s respected to the point of not being used at all.
BOOK, CHILD, NARRATOR: DAVID COPPERFIELD, AGAIN
Surprisingly, then, the book speaks most loudly when its words go unread. Or maybe not so surprising. A voice that emerges from a body small enough to be overlooked; a narrator that eloquently analyzes its sensations but can’t talk itself out of a beating; a narrator whose physical pain is compounded by the humiliation of being silenced; a narrator, more fundamentally, whose subjectivity is never acknowledged by other characters: if the it-narrative’s combination of strong focalization with represented weakness sounds at once counterintuitive and familiar, the reason may be that the same contradiction vertebrates a better-known genre, the bildungsroman. Each genre endows its narrators with consciousness while stripping them of power; each contrasts the narrator’s fluency with other characters’ refusal to recognize its standing to speak.
