How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  It would be stating the obvious to acknowledge that bildungsroman and it-narrative stand at opposite poles of Victorian fiction: one on the rise, another on the wane; one centered on subjects, the other on objects. More crucially for our purposes, the it-narrative reveals what the bildungsroman conceals: the backstory by which books reach their readers. Nothing could be further from the fantasy of the self-made reader and the self-distributing text that we saw in the previous chapter than the it-narrative’s understanding of books as vectors for human relationships. Nothing further from the bildungsroman’s representation of books as found objects—stripped of price tag, Micawberishly turning up in uninhabited garrets, finding their way into children’s hands through an agency as invisible as that which supplies gas and running water. In endowing books with a life story, the it-narrative restores what the bildungsroman suppresses. Or more precisely, what the bildungsroman confines to human subjects: David develops a Personal History (as the full title of the novel has it) at the expense of his books’ being stripped of one.

  Those contrasts would seem to undermine the logic of much recent research on it-narrative, which mines the genre for intertexts to more familiar works of (human-narrated) fiction. Thus Jonathan Lamb and Lynn Festa have described slave autobiography as giving voice to a piece of property, and Paul Collins has reclassified Black Beauty as at once an it-narrative whose object happens to be animate and a slave narrative whose hero happens to be equine.10 These readings take as their benchmark the earlier, numismatically themed phase of it-narrative. The bildungsroman borrows something far more specific from later it-narratives: in both cases, I want to suggest now, questions about agency are routed through a particular category of object, the book.

  The child metaphor doesn’t just construct the book as a particular kind of subject; more specifically, it also constructs the book as a particular kind of narrator. A sensitive yet powerless protagonist who forms the object rather than the subject of action, a camera eye whose plight serves as an index to the morals of those with whom it comes into contact: if it-narratives draw at once on slave autobiography (as in The History of a Religious Tract Supposed to Be Related by Itself) and seduction plots (as in the “longing looks,” “blushes,” and “stolen moments of communication” in the History of a Bible, or the Godey’s Lady’s Book’s descent from pride in its fine clothing to humiliation at the violation of its body), they would go on to be drawn upon by the bildungsroman and the narrative of animal rights. Whether the seduced women upstream of it-narrative or the child narrators downstream, the “wife and children” of Emerson’s analogy mirror the book’s ability to sift the virtuous who recognize its subjectivity from the vicious to whom it remains a tool. The it-narrative functions at once as a user’s manual (treat your books as well as you treat yourself) and a litmus test (beware the suitor in whose home you notice spread-eagled books or whimpering dogs).

  Lynn Hunt and Joseph Slaughter have argued that vulnerability to suffering defines the limits of the human. “In the eighteenth century,” Hunt contends, “readers of novels learned to extend their purview of empathy. In reading, they empathized across traditional social borders between nobles and commoners, masters and servants, men and women, perhaps even adults and children” (Hunt 40; Slaughter). But also, thanks to it-narratives, between animate and inanimate beings. If, as Slaughter suggests, our modern conception of “human rights” comes from the novelistic enterprise of imagining the pain of unprotected beings like women, children, and slaves, that list could also include books—which, as we’ve seen, become anthropomorphized at precisely those moments when they are assimilated to a “prisoner,” “captive,” “slave,” “wife,” “child,” or even war invalid.

  Outside the boundaries of the it-narrative, judicial punishment has traditionally anthropomorphized books: a volume put on trial and burned by the public hangman looks more human than a book that’s being read. Heine’s prediction that book-burners will come to burn people transposes the pseudo-Emersonian aphorism into a judicial register. Predictably, Ray Bradbury spins that comparison out in a plot that ends with persons “becoming” books in the hope that bodies will prove harder to burn than pages; a draft of Fahrenheit 451 endows books with body parts at the moment of destruction, making a character declare that “we just gave them the bullet behind the ear” (quoted in Seed 238).

  Remember that the books which distract Julien Sorel and Hugh Trevor from their surroundings get drowned and burned: where the bildungsroman links book with person through metonymy (a book is knocked out of a child’s hands before the child himself is knocked down), the object narrative and the legal regime of censorship both link books with persons through metaphor (a book becomes most humanized when manhandled in the it-narrative, or burned by the public hangman in real life). If, as we saw in the previous chapter, the bildungsroman makes those characters who judge a book by its cover identical to those who objectify human beings, Heine’s phrasing reverses that logic: for him, the same metaphor that anthropomorphizes books can also objectify humans.

  By extension, the same it-narratives that elevate books to narrators can reduce narrating subjects to grammatical objects. The Lockean metaphor in which “a profound impression was made upon” David Copperfield is literalized in the account that the narrator of The History of a Book gives of its equally painful entrance into consciousness.11 “No words can express the secret agony of my soul,” David tells us, when he begins his work at the bottle warehouse; “I mingled my tears with the water in which I was washing the bottles; and sobbed as if there were a flaw in my own breast, and it were in danger of bursting.” The sandwich board, too, turns “me” into “it”: “the servants read it, and the butcher read it, and the baker read it.” Here as in the earlier scene that reduces him to a parcel—stowed on top of the scale in the luggage office “as if I were weighed, bought, delivered, and paid for”—what assimilates David to an object is their common state of being written upon (Dickens, David Copperfield 152, 82, 76). To be labeled with words is to be made wordless—for David as much as for the narrator of the History of a Bible, “confined in the family prison, called the library,” where books “had their names written upon their foreheads, but none of them were allowed to speak” (1).

  For David to imagine himself traveling is also to imagine himself being sold or read. When he runs away to Dover, too, “I began to picture to myself, as a scrap of newspaper intelligence, my being found dead in a day or two, under some hedge; and I trudged on miserably, though as fast as I could, until I happened to pass a little shop, where it was written up that ladies’ and gentlemen’s wardrobes were bought, and that the best price was given for rags, bones, and kitchen-stuff” (Dickens, David Copperfield 174). The scrap of newspaper that David “pictures” proves no more durable than the visions that arise in his mind “as if they were faintly painted or written.” In the first case, labels on actual bottles make writing fade away from a hypothetical wall; in the second, an imagined scrap of newsprint gives way to the raw material of paper manufacturing. The installments in which Goroo dribbles out payment for David’s jacket would remind us of serial publishing even if his real name weren’t Charley, but the place that he occupies in the printing industry lies far upstream of that. Any reader in 1850 would have known that the page in front of her was made from rags, collected in shops like Goroo’s to be turned into pulp and then paper. When we speak of a newspaper as a “rag” (or of fiction as “pulp”), metonymy converges with metaphor: paper comes from old clothes; paper resembles old clothes. Copperfield confronts the two figures of speech, pitting a pictured scrap of newspaper against a dealer in real scraps of clothing.

  That these metaphors occur during travel suggests that what it-narrator and bildungsroman protagonist have in common is not just weakness, but more specifically vulnerability to being moved. We’ve seen that anthropomorphic metaphors and metaphors of debasement (slave, animal) both cluster most thickly at those moments when it-narrators chan
ge hands. That clinging to an original owner can be compared in turn to the bildungsroman protagonist’s resistance to moving from country to city, or even (as Franco Moretti has argued) to relinquishing his childhood sweetheart. The only difference is that one circles back to a first love, the other to a first owner (Moretti, The Way of the World).

  Persons were in fact least in control of their own fates when on the move. John Newton reports that on slave ships like those that he captained before turning abolitionist, “the slaves lie in two rows, one above the other, on each side of the ship, close to each other, like books upon a shelf” (248). Dickens’s reduction of a runaway child to raw material for paper echoes his borrowing of that metaphor to describe an American canal boat where

  going below, I found suspended on either side of the cabin, three long tiers of hanging bookshelves, designed apparently for volumes of the small octavo size. Looking with greater attention at these contrivances (wondering to find such literary preparations in such a place), I descried on each shelf a sort of microscopic sheet and blanket; then I began dimly to comprehend that the passengers were the library, and that they were to be arranged, edge-wise, on these shelves, till morning. (Dickens, American Notes and Reprinted Pieces 87)

  Just as it-narratives anthropomorphize the book at its moments of greatest vulnerability, Dickens bibliomorphizes persons at moments when other characters are treating them no better than objects.12 Betsey Trotwood’s insistence on referring to David as “it,” like his own confession to being “cherished as a kind of plaything,” projects onto characters Dickens’s own tendency to confuse persons with things. But in the context of one of his few book-length fictions to be narrated in the first person, that confusion begins to look more specifically like an incursion of the it-narrative into the bildungsroman.

  Even within the object narrative, this sense of the self as marked rather than marking migrates from things to persons: when the Story of a Hymn-Book (an 1881 production of the Wesleyan Conference Office) introduces a smoking, drinking gambler with “a yellow parchment-like skin, bearing significant brown stains about the mouth,” the handling “signified” by the marks of ink or drink on a page becomes the model for the traces left on the body by a human character’s life story (Yeames 80).

  Formally, it-narrative and bildungsroman look like polar opposites: one centered on a human being through whose hands texts pass, the other on a book that passes through characters’ hands. Thematically, both give voice to the voiceless: in focalizing so much of his fiction through child characters, Dickens extends the eighteenth-century humanitarian project implicit in a genre that made snuffboxes speak. From coins to lapdogs to adult slaves to free children, the it-narrative steadily extends the borders of subjectivity. Yet to assimilate books to persons is not to grant them agency, if only because the voice with which they’re endowed is so rarely the active.13 David Copperfield’s grammatical opening gambit (“I am born”) constructs an analogous paradox, in which the expression of self becomes indistinguishable from the lack of power. Not only do both genres endow their protagonists with voice while stripping them of agency: more specifically, both frame that contradiction in bibliographic language. “How much I suffered,” “what I suffered”: David is reduced to a helpless object by being bound between boards. Or more generally, by being labeled, inscribed, read, and sold—sold, in Goroo’s shop at least, in installments that turn out to be more valuable for their rag content than for the human subjectivity that they contain. When drunk, David feels “as if my outer covering of skin were a hard board”; the metaphor doesn’t just plunge the prosperous young man back into the childhood nightmare of the sandwich board, but also equates the debasement of a human being with the process of being assimilated to a book (339). If David Copperfield is bound between labeled boards, so is David Copperfield; in fact, the Fraser’s review reminds us that both sets of boards are degraded by being scanned by the butcher and the baker.

  These formal borrowings from the it-narrative may help explain George Levine’s argument that “it is one of the curious facts about the most virtuous heroes and heroines of nineteenth-century English realist fiction that they are inefficacious, inactive people” (33).14 If novelistic heroes appear curiously weak, one reason may be that they’re modeled after protagonists who are not even recognized as human. The only difference is that the bildungsroman situates this suffering consciousness in childhood, and the it-narrative in old age: one focalized through a character who has not yet reached the social invulnerability of adulthood, the other through an object that becomes aware of its identity in the process of realizing its own mortality. Between maturation and dissolution, the narrator just born and the narrator about to die, the two genres stake out complementary portions of the life cycle. For it-narrators, to be born is already to be assaulted; in contrast, David can age only by being assimilated to a book, when Dora pencils lines onto his forehead. Yet that contrast looks more like similarity if we emphasize instead both narrators’ hatred of traveling.

  Think back to the prayer book and Latin Grammar that appeared earlier in David Copperfield: the teachers who mark David’s skin like a book take a cue from adults who already marked it by a book. In both cases, the book’s encounter with the body upstages the text’s with the mind. Yet as the metonymic logic of the boxed ears and the poked side gives way to the metaphoric logic of the inked forehead and the rubbed-out welts, something more fundamental changes. Once reduced to an object (valued for its outside rather than for the words that it contains), the book is now exalted to a subject—or, at least, to something to which a human being can be compared.

  If the tattooed arrow pointing in the same direction as the sailor’s bare arm mirrors Dora’s finger steeped in ink to provide a baser counterpart to Agnes pointing upward, both also make the body parts that we expect to perform writing, undergo writing (Dickens, David Copperfield 728). As we saw in the previous chapter, David’s adult career as a writer is preceded by years spent as a surface to be printed upon like a page of a book, ruled like a piece of blank paper, and scarred like parchment. As upward mobility and personal development conspire to turn a child who is written upon into an adult who writes, the novel’s key trope shifts from metaphor (a child who resembles a book) to metonymy (an adult who makes one).

  FROM THE HISTORY OF A BOOK TO “THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK”

  I suggested in the previous chapter that the swerve away from David’s composition to minor characters’ copying prefigures the intellectual-historical shift from a literary criticism interested in authorial genius to one interested in more mundane inscription practices, such as accounting and shorthand. David Copperfield in particular, and the Victorian novel in general, have served as magnets for what could be called “thematic materialism”—whether they read questions of intellectual property into the bottle warehouse, or of branding into the sandwich board on David’s back. The danger is a typological interpretation that reduces the text to an allegory of its own manufacture—or, if you move from supply to demand, its own distribution. In this kind of reading, a history of the material conditions of production and consumption can either redundantly corroborate some formal or thematic explication of the text itself, or irrelevantly contradict it.

  One way out of that impasse would be to trace different models of textuality back to their generic origins—to determine in what contexts, both formal and material, competing understandings of the author, the reader, and the book take shape. The it-narrative would then correspond to a bibliographical project that traces the transmission of textual content and of printed objects; the bildungsroman to those methods that chart the development of an individual’s literary sensibility (whether under the name of reception history or of close reading). No matter whether that individual is the critic in propria persona or is a historical figure like Carlo Ginzburg’s Menocchio or Darnton’s Ranson or John Brewer’s Anna Larpent—readers whose diaries, letters, or inquisitorial files have deposited a record of resp
onse. In those scholarly traditions no less than in the bildungsroman, the guiding thread remains a human subject’s formation through a series of texts. Analytical bibliography and it-narrative substitute an object’s accretion of meaning via a series of uses. One is structured by the growth of a child’s mind (caused or at least catalyzed by books), the other by the aging of a book (worn out as it passes from hand to hand). Competing Victorian fictional subgenres thus anticipate twentieth-century scholars’ oscillation between tracking persons and tracing objects. One could be aligned with Robert Darnton’s “communications circuit,” structured around human agents such as bookseller, author, smuggler, and binder; the other with Thomas Adams and Nicolas Barker’s alternative paradigm, which reduces humans to stations along the path that the book follows from commissioning, to composition, manufacture, circulation, and disposal (Adams and Barker 12, 15). The early twenty-first-century vogue for what is called “the history of books and reading” has blinded us to the possibility that those two histories are distinct and even competing projects. In that context, you could trace reception theory back to the post-Romantic psychologizing of the bildungsroman (David Copperfield and Jane Eyre), the history of the book back to the interest in the outsides of books exemplified by Trollope and Thackeray—or indeed analytical bibliography to the it-narrative.