How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  More narrowly, it-narrative could offer a precedent for the internalist account of reading audiences that Roger Chartier has called for. Chartier urges book historians to look, not at the reading habits of a group defined by “a priori social oppositions,” but rather at “the social areas in which each corpus of texts and each genre of printed matter circulates” (Chartier, The Order of Books 7).15 This method follows the order of it-narrative in that instead of starting from a person and asking what books he owned, it starts from a book and asks into whose possession it came. In this model, the book would exemplify Arjun Appadurai’s argument that while “from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context” (5).

  In shifting their gaze from the meeting of minds to the manipulation of things, early twenty-first-century book historians not only draw on the bibliographical tradition but mimic the turn of late twentieth-century historians of science toward the object world—as in Sherry Turkle’s interest in prostheses or Bruno Latour’s case study of a driverless train (Turkle; Latour, Aramis).16 What Turkle says of objects in general holds particularly true of books: “Behind the reticence to examine objects as centerpieces of emotional life was perhaps the sense that one was studying materialism, disparaged as excess, or collecting, disparaged as hobbyism, or fetishism, disparaged as perversion . . . So highly valued was canonical abstract thinking, that even when concrete approaches were recognized, they were often relegated to the status of inferior ways of knowing, or as steps on the road to abstract thinking” (Turkle 6).

  The it-narrative, I’ve suggested, bequeaths a powerful set of conventions to the bildungsroman—even if a formal gimmick in the first becomes an ethical commitment in the second. Another place to look for the legacy of the genre, however, is in nonfiction discussions of the book, both in their own time and after. The habit of slotting books into roles normally occupied by human beings soon spilled out from it-narratives into the religious press at large. Like the Number of Godey’s describing its “visits,” RTS magazines such as The Visitor (1833), The Weekly Visitor (1836), and The Monthly Messenger (1844) figure themselves as persons paying social calls, not as objects being bought and sold.17 Termed “silent messengers,” “silent monitors,” or “silent preachers,” tracts are also characterized as “preachers which penetrate where no voice of man could reach”—even at the risk that such speaking objects can too easily be confused with the “dumb idols” that they are designed to displace (Jones 43, 238, 594, 174, 360, 32). Even in the secular press, in fact, Charles Knight’s The struggles of a book against excessive taxation (1850) casts the book as an agent whose desire is to circulate as widely as possible.

  Such metaphors don’t only draw on the conventions of the it-narrative: they reach back to a much older and less localized tradition of comparing books to friends, which stretches from Petrarch right through to Groucho Marx’s remark that “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend; inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read” (Emerson and Lubbock 35). Here as in the jokes we saw in the introduction, books become the pivot between a figure of speech and its bathetic literalization. But Marx also draws on an equally old metaphor of book as animal (think of the religious tract “exposed to sale with as little remorse as cattle in Smithfield”) that in turn invokes the metonymic derivation of books from skins. The tenth-century anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry known as the Exeter Book poses a question in the first person (essentially, who am I?), to which the answer appears to be “a book,” but Bruce Holsinger argues that the answer can also be construed as “an animal,” the animal whose slaughtered corpse provides the parchment (622).18 Here as in the it-narrative, suffering is what gives voice to the book-object: the “I” becomes a book only once it’s been killed and flayed. More specifically, the marks of wear and tear are what remind handlers of the book’s animal origins: as one scholar notes, “handling a parchment page even hundreds of years after it has been rendered into a writing surface, the reader is often well aware of its history as flesh: one can see hair follicles, tiny veins, discolorations where the living skin carried scars or blemishes” (Kearney, The Incarnate Text 7).

  As we saw in relation to sumptuary codes, anthropomorphism hinges on a sartorial metaphor that makes the printed sheets to the body what the (cloth or leather) binding is to clothing—a metaphor taken to its logical conclusion in the Sikh tradition, whose holy book is covered with light cloth in summer and heavy cloth in winter (G. S. Mann). In an 1851 description of a railway bookstall, “here and there crouched some old friends, who looked very strange indeed in the midst of such questionable society—like well-dressed gentlemen compelled to take part in the general doings of Rag-fair” (“The Literature of the Rail” 7). Earlier, Hester Piozzi had praised “our Leather-coated Friends upon the Shelves; who give good Advice, and yet are never arrogant or assuming” (H. J. Jackson, Romantic Readers 121). Dickens draws at once on the trope of binding as clothing and on the logic that anthropomorphizes battered or abused books when he prefaces the Cheap Edition of 1847 with the hope that the book will

  become, in his new guise, a permanent inmate of many English homes, where, in his old shape, he was only known as a guest, or hardly known at all: to be well thumbed and soiled in a plain suit that will bear a great deal. (Dickens, Prospectus for the Cheap Edition of the Works of Mr. Charles Dickens; my emphasis)

  Or, reciprocally, humans’ clothing can be assimilated to books’ binding, when the same journalist who compares dog-earers to wife-beaters adds that “he is no true lover of books who suffers his volumes to remain in yellow paper and blue boards. Would he like to see his wife, the very apple of his eye, go about a dowdy?” (Watkins 101). To compare binding to clothing is to endow books with a human body, but not necessarily a human soul.

  It’s a mark at once of respect for the Bible and dismissal of social inferiors that missionaries often make the book the grammatical subject and the reader the object, rather than the other way around. “Moreover, the book goes where missionaries and other workers do not; where under present circumstances, for lack of numbers or for other reasons, they cannot go. Be it that the book remains unread, that it is used by the women for putting their silks in . . . ” (Watkins121). In choosing not to say “be it that no one reads the book,” the writer avoids naming the natives. More playfully, the tract writer Legh Richmond writes to his daughter: “I wish very much to know how you are behaving since I saw you; what character will your pen and your needle give of you when I ask them? And what will your book say? Your playthings, perhaps, will whisper that you have been very fond of them” (Pugh 55). The trope that we’ve seen already of the book rising to testify against its owner sharpens here into the fantasy that conversation with books might altogether replace conversation with the daughter.

  Tracts are imagined not only talking but walking: in China in 1814, “such is the political state of the country at present, that we are not permitted to enter it, and publish, by the living voice, the glad tidings of salvation. Tracts may, however, penetrate silently even to the chamber of the emperor. They easily put on a Chinese coat, and may walk without fear through the length and breadth of land” (Jones 474; emphasis mine). The young hero of another RTS publication, coming across a bible in his new home, “recognised [it] in a moment by its binding; and a feeling of joy came over him, as if an old friend had met him” (Millington 52). The promise of the Girl’s Own Paper (published by the RTS from 1880 onward) to be “to its readers a guardian, instructor, companion, and friend” (report of the Committee, 1880, quoted in S. G. Green 128) borrows doubly from the logic of the it-narrative: in anthropomorphizing the book and in relocating agency from persons to objects. More specifically, reviewers trying to describe the material attributes of books find a ready-made vocabulary in the it-narrative—or, at least, this seems like the most plausible explanation for the pronouns in a 1846 review of a vo
lume newly reissued in a tenpenny binding, where the Baptist Magazine remarks archly that now “he appears in clothing which will facilitate his reception into good company, and conduce to his preservation from the casualties of the way” (quoted in Fyfe, Science and Salvation 159). In fact, one midcentury History of the British and Foreign Bible Society describes a Protestant Bible hidden in a cradle rocked by a young girl (Zemka 112).

  To make books narratable was—and is—to make them human. The metaphor of books as “witnesses” rising in judgment against their owners reappears in secular guise in the 2009 printing of the standard textbook on bibliography: “analytical bibliography considers books,” it declares, “as witnesses to the processes that brought them into being” (Williams and Abbott 10). The metaphor of the book as a living being who ages and dies persists, too, in scholarly titles like “The Biography of a Book” (the first chapter of Robert Darnton’s The Business of Enlightenment) and in Cathy Davidson’s play on italics in “The Life and Times of Charlotte Temple: The Biography of a Book.”19 The master trope of book history has always been personification. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Jerome McGann’s “socialization of texts,” and Paul Duguid’s Social Life of Information anthropomorphize books as thoroughly as any it-narrative does. All three draw on the long tradition of users ventriloquizing books, like the inscription in one early modern copy of The Treasury of Amadis of France that reads “Dale Havers oweth me / he is my veri tenet [owner] / and I this booke confesse to be / quicunque me invenit [whoever finds me]” (Sherman 17). Outside of the object narrative’s covers, no book speaks for itself. But the speech produced in (and by) its pages may provide one model for the stories that get told about books and their users.

  It’s also worth asking, however, what the personification of the book elides. When tract-distributors imagine volumes walking around China or penetrating where persons can’t, they conveniently forget that books need someone to carry them: that only in the most metaphorical sense do ideas have legs. This isn’t to say that the agent of their transmission is necessarily a person endowed with legs and hands. To Evangelicals, the force that drove books around the world was divine rather than human; and as we’ll see in the final chapter of this book, even a thinker as defiantly secular as Mayhew could substitute literacy for Protestantism as the motor of a providential narrative in which pages are drawn almost magnetically into readers’ field of vision. Information may not want (as Stewart Brand once claimed) to be free, but some ideological force—whether God or progress—is usually imagined as causing the written word to spread. Nineteenth-century Evangelicals thus anticipate the providentialism of twentieth-century cybertheorists: “in the claim that information will circulate freely once liberated from the book,” Paul Duguid points out, “information is personified and endowed with the desire to transmit itself” (“Material Matters” 74). Between the self-propelling book of it-narrative and the providentially propelled book of master narratives (whether Christian or techno-utopian) lies a vast middle ground in which human agents take responsibility for forcing printed matter into the right hands. It’s to those agents that the next chapter turns.

  PART II

  Bookish Transactions

  CHAPTER 5

  The Book as Burden: Junk Mail and Religious Tracts

  Anthropocentrism makes orphans’ hunger for books more recognizable than pocket bibles’ quest for owners. Yet as the traditional dearth of text (and paper) gave way to a scarcity of attention (and shelves), books struggled harder to reach the proper audience. Old problems of production gave way to new problems of distribution: the modern genres to which this chapter turns—religious tracts and junk mail—were impelled less by new manufacturing technologies than by new social networks through which printed matter could be exchanged, donated, requested, accepted, or, increasingly, rejected.

  Natalie Davis’s foundational essay subtitled Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-Century France took the gift as the paradigmatic interpersonal transaction. Today, we continue to assume that (as Lewis Hyde puts it) “in a market society . . . getting rather than giving is the mark of a substantial person” (xiii). I want to suggest, in contrast, that in the nineteenth century the book came to feel like a burden. Printed matter was foisted upon, more often than given to; receiving a book now connoted powerlessness as often as privilege. That change doesn’t just respond to the increasing abundance of books themselves; too much information and too much paper were compounded by too much contact with fellow handlers. Every reader is cumbered by an excess of books, and every book by an excess of readers—each overwhelmed in turn by the consciousness that others have touched the same book that he or she is now holding, and thereby gain some hold over him or her.

  The Victorians pioneered institutions—whether secular (the post) or religious (the tract society)—that allowed printed matter to be distributed at the expense of someone other than its end user. By disjoining owning from choosing, those transactions challenged Enlightenment assumptions about the relation between reading and identity. Where the secular press trusted print to lift individuals out of their social origin, the niche marketing pioneered by Evangelical publishers and commercial advertisers alike vested it instead with the power to mark age, gender, and class. If the content of tracts interpellated new audiences by matching characters’ demographic to readers’, so did the different material forms that each text took—reprinted on different paper, sold at different price points, distributed in gross and in detail. Even a secular novel as expensive as The Mill on the Floss—rented, not given away; proscribed, not prescribed—could present its characters torn between forming their identity by imitation of fictional persons about whom they read, or by communion and competition with fellow readers, along with fellow owners, fellow handlers, and fellow inscribers of books, whether living or dead.

  PAPER DUTIES

  Maria Jane Jewsbury described hers as “an age of books! Of book making! Book reading! Book reviewing! And book forgetting” (quoted in Newlyn 3). “The difficulty of finding something to read in an age when half the world is engaged in writing books for the other half to read is not one of quantity,” noted one journalist in 1893, “so that the question, ‘What shall I read?’ inevitably suggests the parallel query, ‘What shall I not read?’” (“A Few Words About Reading” 226). In The Choice of Books, Frederic Harrison, too, presented the problem in negative terms: “the most useful help to reading is to know what we should not read, what we can keep out from that small cleared spot in the overgrown jungle of ‘information.’” Even the jungle soon gives way to the rubbish heap: “I often think that we forget the other side to this glorious view of literature—the misuse of books, the debilitating waste of brain in aimless, promiscuous, vapid reading, or even, it may be, in the poisonous inhalation of mere literary garbage and bad men’s worst thoughts” (1, 3). For decades, alarmists continued to reprint a chart showing that as many books were published in 1868 alone as in the first half of the eighteenth century (Ackland). Reprints such as this themselves compounded the problem.

  Where autodidacts’ autobiographies represent a hunger for books, middle-class commentators more often equated reading with indigestion. As George Craik remarked in his classic compendium of exemplary biographies, The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties, “If one mind be in danger of starving for want of books, another may be surfeited by too many” (22). A decade later, an article in Victoria Magazine presented those problems as mirror images: “Of the underfed, in these days of education of women, education of ploughboys, education of curates, we are sure to hear enough, but of the sufferings of their scarcely less pitiable antipodes, whose complaint is overfeeding, we are not so likely to be well informed” (Butterworth 500). An 1869 article found “as curious cases of moral delirium, dyspepsia, and decay from the abuse of mental stimulants as there are records of physical injury from gluttony” (“Excessive Reading”). Like food, books had to be carried, stored, preserved, maintai
ned: Ruskin compared knowledge to “at best, the pilgrim’s burden or the soldier’s panoply, often a weariness to them both” (The Works of John Ruskin 66).

  Nothing new about any of these images: the caricaturists who represent Brougham thrusting the Penny Magazine down readers’ throats with a broomstick draw on analogies between teaching and force-feeding that stretch back at least to Rabelais and Montaigne, by way of Jeremy Collier’s axiom that “a man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating, as wiser by always reading.”1 Newer technologies did replenish the stock of metaphors: references to Brougham’s “steam-intellect society” riff more topically on steam-printing, introduced by the Times during the Napoleonic wars. Such figures of speech shouldn’t obscure the fact that the speed and cost of the printing process mattered less than the cost of raw materials. The reduction of paper taxes in 1836 and their abolition in 1861, together with the advent of machine-made paper in the early decades of the century and of esparto grass and wood pulp in its second half, cheapened paper almost as dramatically as digital storage has cheapened in our lifetime. Paper production went from 2,500 tons in 1715 to 75,000 tons in 1851; measured per person, it shot up from 2.5 pounds per year in 1800 to 8.5 in 1860 (Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail 38). Between 1841 and 1911, similarly, the number of persons employed by the paper, printing, and publishing trades increased sixfold (Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy 82). Where once paper was the scarce and valuable resource, now time looked in shorter supply—along with shelf space and room in the wastepaper basket.