How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  As a result, the long-standing search for technologies to make literary production more efficient shifted to the consumption side. Francis Jeffrey replaced speed-writing by speed-reading when he speculated that “if we continue to write and rhyme at the present rate for 200 years longer, there must be a new art of short-hand reading invented—or all reading will be given up in despair” (472). In 1893, Herbert Maxwell contrasted “the number of books that a single bookworm” could consume (9,000, in his generous estimate) with the number produced (20,000 annually added, in a phrase that once again invoked furniture, “to the shelves of the British Museum”)—without even counting “the vastly greater mass of journalistic literature which consumes part of everyone’s time and attention” (1047). It’s true that periodicals multiplied more rapidly than books: Simon Eliot calculates from tax returns that in the first half of the nineteenth century the production of stamped periodicals increased fivefold (Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 78–86). One reason was the abolition of the newspaper tax in 1855. The end of “taxes on knowledge” opened the floodgates not (just) for knowledge but for ephemera.2 Periodicals were blamed for crowding out more durable works: competition between the two was taken for granted in comparisons like the calculation that “at the end of the year [the Times] is comprised in a book larger than all the classics and all the standard histories of the world put together” (L. Stephen, “Journalism” 60). In 1825, Charles Lamb filled a few column inches of the Times by comparing books to Sisyphus’s boulder: “No reading can keep pace with the writing of this age, but we pant and toil after it as fast as we can. I smiled to see an honest lad, who ought to be at trap ball, labouring up hill against this giant load” (C. Lamb, “Readers Against the Grain,” 238).

  Newspapers and magazines had only themselves to blame, since their own pages were padded out with hackneyed statistics about the number of newspapers and magazines. Indeed, the Pall Mall Gazette for 12 January 1886 proposed marking Victoria’s Jubilee by a year in which “the literary soil should be allowed to lie fallow,” with an embargo on the production of new literature—except, of course, for newspapers (quoted in Mays 189). Printed attacks on printed matter always risk self-referentiality, if not quixotism. “We find the ‘Quarterly Review’ anathematising circulating libraries with great force,” notes an 1871 article titled “Circulating Libraries,” but “this is very hard on libraries now-a-days, especially as no inconsiderable number of the ‘Quarterly Review’ is taken in by Mr Mudie” (Friswell 519). Conduct books remarked that trashy reading took time away from outdoor activity, but neglected to count the hours eaten up by their own perusal.

  W. H. Wills estimated in 1850 that the daily papers produced in 1848 added up to “1,446,150,000 square feet of printed surface”; a decade later, another journalist observed that “there are persons who will count up the number of acres which a single number of the Times would cover if all the copies were spread out flat, or illustrate the number of copies by telling us how long the same weight of coal would serve an ordinary household . . . Every morning, it is said, a mass of print, containing as much matter as a thick octavo volume, is laid on our breakfast-tables” (Wills 238; L. Stephen, “Journalism” 60). The comparison with coal emphasized the material aspect of paper but also lent it a factitious ephemerality: newspapers may count as consumables, but, unlike coal, they don’t consume themselves with use.

  As a result, readers had to cope not just with new material being added to the old, but also with the survival of existing books and the reprinting of existing texts. The Quarterly’s review of the seventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1842) complains of “the imperishable nature of books, the cheapness with which they are now produced, and the rapidity and extent of their production.”

  Unfortunately for authors there is no epidemic among books, to thin their ranks, and render necessary a new supply; and the fire-proof inventions of the present day extinguish the hopes that were sometimes realised from the timber boards of our books and the wooden carpentry of our libraries. There is, therefore, no law of mortality by which the number of books is regulated like that of animals. (“The Encyclopedia Britannica” 71)

  In a review that also critiques the Britannica’s article on fire, the comparison of library collections to animal populations inverts a Promethean logic: far from symbolizing enlightenment, fire appears here as a destroyer of cumbersome knowledge. Libraries expand as geometrically as populations (books beget books), but books lack animals’ fixed life span.3 In fact, the Quarterly itself confesses to contributing to the problem, to which the Britannica’s miniaturizing strategies adumbrate a solution:

  We have before us now an octavo volume, containing about 1150 pages of double columns, and printed on paper so thin that the thickness of the volume (though not beaten) is only two inches, and in so small a type that the quantity of matter that it contains is equal to above TWELVE NUMBERS of this Review, supposed to be all printed in its ordinary type . . . A bookcase might thus contain a large library, and a moderate one might be packed in a traveller’s portmanteau. Books now forwarded by tardy conveyances might be sent by post . . . These processes too might be aided by a stenographic representation of the terminations of many of our long words, and even by a contraction of the words themselves; and in the spirit of these changes authors might be led to think more closely, and to express their thoughts in the shortest and fewest words. (“The Encyclopedia Britannica” 72)

  Reprints form the problem, but also the solution. In fantasies of epidemics and fires, the library becomes an image at once for comprehensiveness and for permanence. After comparing the air to “one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered,” Charles Babbage added that “no motion impressed by natural causes, or by human agency, is ever obliterated” (37). The backlist could crush readers: as Jack Goody observed in a different context, “literate society, merely by having no system of elimination, no ‘structural amnesia,’ prevents the individual from participating fully in the total cultural tradition” (58).

  Worries about disposal may help explain why Victorian discussions of the book so often take on a ghoulish tinge. Tomes as tombs: Mudie’s Circulating Library justified “selection” (i.e., censorship) on the grounds that “no library could provide space for all the books that might be written, and as bad and stupid novels soon die and are worthless after death—no vault could be found capacious enough to give them decent burial” (Mudie 451). “Burial” was no figure of speech: short on shelf space and forced to stock multiple copies of novels whose backlist value dropped quickly, Mudie’s resorted to

  a charnel-house in this establishment, where literature is, as it were, reduced to its old bones. Thousands of volumes thus read to death are pitched together in one place. But would they not do for the butterman? was our natural query. Too dirty for that. Not for old trunks? Much too greasy for that. What were they good for, then? For manure! Thus, when worn out as food for the mind, they are put to the service of producing food for our bodies!” (Wynter 278)

  Burial wasn’t, of course, always so literal. Gladstone’s essay on library design reluctantly envisages movable shelves described by analogy to a “book-cemetery,” “what I will not scruple to call interment”: “The word I have used is dreadful; but also dreadful is the thing. To have our dear old friends stowed away in catacombs, or like wine-bottles in bins: the simile is surely lawful . . . [but] it can hardly be contemplated without a shudder at a process so repulsive applied to the best beloved among inanimate objects” (386–87).

  The metaphor of companionship that should be familiar from the previous chapter sounded comforting when Gladstone first deployed its most hackneyed form: “In a room well filled with [books], no one has felt or can feel solitary. Second to none, as friends to the individual.” But once those friends are imagined to be dead, the tone shifts; the body to which the book is compared becomes a wine bottle, the person to which the text is
compared a corpse. Once the body replaces the soul as the vehicle of the metaphor, mortal book upstages immortal text—or rather, a book whose inconveniently bulky body remains after the soul has departed. If “the binding of a book is the dress, with which it walks out into the world” and “the paper, type, and ink are the body, in which its soul is domiciled,” then old books deserve to be treated with as much reverence as dead bodies (385).

  Or as little, for a fourth analogy is less respectful. “The artist needed for the constructions required [i.e., the movable shelving] will not be so much a librarian as a warehouseman” (396). To compare a librarian with a manual laborer is also to question what sets the book apart from other, nontextual objects. And as chapter 7 will show, it’s at the end of the book’s life that its physical bulk becomes most visible. Once advances in papermaking drove down the cost of production, disposal became a problem for genres as various as religious tracts and blue books. One MP complained: “[I] object to having tons of papers, which are never opened, sent to my lodgings . . . [I can] not exchange them for books, for that would be selling them; [I can] not burn them, for that would be voted a nuisance” (1865, quoted in Frankel 308). Paradoxically, the resale value of blue books’ raw material made matters worse: Edwin Chadwick campaigned to substitute octavo for folio as the standard format for official papers on the grounds that larger formats—especially useful as wrapping—encouraged waste and overproduction (Frankel 314). Two decades later, a Stationery Office committee would debate how to dispose of unsold stocks of Record Office publications, in language that uncannily echoed contemporaneous arguments about cremation in the Lancet: like human bodies, books needed to be disposed of (McKitterick, “Organizing Knowledge in Print” 557).

  “[I can] not exchange them for books, for that would be selling them”: one measure of bibliographical overload was the number of books that stood outside the market. Early Victorian innovations in production technology look insignificant when compared to the revolution in distribution systems—in particular, new networks for funneling printed matter (whether religious tracts or advertising circulars or political pamphlets) into the hands of a captive audience.

  JUNK MAIL

  Liberal intellectuals celebrated the cheapening of postage from 1839 onward and the establishment of prepayment in the following year. But the March of Mind devolved into a parade of paper. Even the reformer Charles Knight acknowledged that triumphalist statistics about the rise of the newspaper press need to be adjusted for the fact that “price-currents, catalogues, and circulars” could legally be mailed as newspapers (The Old Printer and the Modern Press 291).4 The same postal reforms that prompted the invention of the postcard spawned the advertising circular, the chain letter, and the postal scam.5

  Reformers’ high-minded abstractions about the diffusion of knowledge were soon countered by conservatives’ reminders that the post was being used to convey not just ideas, but things: “specimens of vegetable seeds; cuttings of trees from Professor Henslow’s shrubberies; . . . new manures, books of patterns, . . . pills, patent medicines, . . . and turtle” (Administration of the Post Office 103); “a great-coat, a bundle of baby-linen, and a pianoforte” (Hill and Hill 1:241). Specimens of vegetable seeds could be understood as a metaphor for text via the biblical parable of the sower, eventually to be secularized in the metaphor of “broadcasting” (Matthew 13).6 As Louis James points out, the 1823 religious tract that begins with the image of a rider who “every now and then pulled from his coat-pocket a bundle of tracts and scattered two or three in the road” would have been understood by any reader as a reference to sowing (135). Yet the same seeds that provided a figure for letters could also function as their antonym—as a form of scientific or agricultural knowledge that competed with the written word. On the other side of the Atlantic, the narrator of Melville’s “The Tartarus of Maids” engages in “the seedsman’s business (so extensively and broadcast, that at length my seeds were distributed through all the Eastern and Northern States, and even fell into the far soil of Missouri and the Carolinas)”; the papers that he sends through the post are envelopes “made of yellowish paper, folded square” (321–22).

  Between parcels and letters, books occupied an ill-defined middle ground. The book post established in 1848 at sixpence per pound allowed unmarked volumes to be sent more cheaply than any other object of equivalent weight; only later, however, was it extended to encompass secondhand books, newspapers and circulars (in 1856), and patterns (in 1863) (Lewins 167). Railway companies’ objections were answered with the high-minded claim that “the exceptions taken in the case of the book-post were only to books and printed matter intimately connected with . . . the diffusion of knowledge” (Lewins 233). Knowledge, not paper: the division of labor separating post from rail treated books and newspapers as if they lacked material dimension. Pianofortes could travel by rail, sheet music by post; initialed handkerchiefs by rail, printed rag pulp by post. The postal system thus institutionalized the exceptionalist logic of those etiquette guides that excluded books from the advice against unmarried ladies’ accepting gifts from gentlemen: “Gentlemen, as a rule, do not offer ladies presents . . . Should the conversation, however, turn upon some new book or musical composition, which the lady has not seen, the gentleman may, with perfect propriety, say, ‘I wish that you could see such or such a work and, if you will permit, I should be pleased to send you a copy’” (Cooke 123).7

  Yet the abstractions of information overload were doubled by the more literal weight of parcels—a complaint that appears throughout the correspondence of even, or especially, those social reformers who devoted their time to reading and writing letters in support of widening access to the postal system. Harriet Martineau was one of the most prominent apologists for postal reform (“we are all putting up our letter boxes on our hall doors with great glee, anticipating the hearing from brothers and sisters—a line or two almost every day”), but her own collected correspondence teems with apologies for troubling her correspondents and complaints about the logistics of receiving, storing, and disposing of unsolicited paper (Hill and Hill 1:390). To the architect of postal prepayment, Martineau writes, “Dear Mr Hill, I write not to trouble you for an answer, about which I always feel most scrupulous, but to thank you for sending me [‘The State and Prospects of Penny Postage’]” (Hill and Hill 2:14). When Martineau writes to the queen, she “particularly request[s] that no sort of acknowledgment—no notice of my letters whatever should be thought of”; another letter insists, “I may add that I desire no reply” (Martineau, Selected Letters 80). Martineau’s etiquette code anticipates the postal system’s change from payment on delivery to prepayment by the sender. Both take pains to shift the cost of correspondence (whether measured in pounds or in hours) from reader to writer.

  Until 1840, when prepayment replaced payment on delivery, those two costs coincide: time is money. At the beginning of her career, in fact, Martineau very literally paid the price for her fame by being sent an unmanageable mass of fan mail, hate mail, and prank mail. “I dreaded the arrival of a thirteenpenny letter, in those days of dear postage,” she writes in the Autobiography (Martineau, Autobiography 109).

  In the preface to ‘Society in America,’ I invited correction as to any errors in (not opinion, but) matters of fact. After this, I could not, of course, decline receiving letters from America. Several arrived, charged double, treble, even quadruple postage. These consisted mainly of envelopes, made heavy by all manner of devices, with a slip of newspaper in the middle, containing prose paragraphs, or copies of verses, full of insults. (370–71)

  And Martineau measures the popularity of the Illustrations of Political Economy (1832) less by the size of their own print run than by the volume of fan mail and hate mail that they bring upon her. The first sign of their success, according to her Autobiography, is the postmaster’s warning “that I must send for my own share of the mail, for it could not be carried without a barrow—an announcement which, spreading in th
e town, caused me to be stared at in the streets” (136). The embarrassing wheelbarrow emblematizes a postal regime that makes recipients pay for letters that they never requested.

  To advocates of prepayment, then, the mechanics of cash on delivery become a metaphor for the burden of reading. When Hill declares that “I really am at a loss to discover any case in which it is desirable for one person to write to another at the expense of the latter,” he measures in money the problem that Martineau frames in terms of time: how correspondence can be carried on without imposing on a recipient who never asked for it. “Imposition” in both senses: Martineau was herself the target of a postal hoax, and Hill complains that the existing system encourages letters

  such as ought not to be sent unpaid, as letters soliciting orders, subscriptions, &c.; or such as ought not to be sent at all, as those written by vindictive people for the purpose of putting the receivers to the expense of postage . . . [Under Prepayment those] letters would undoubtedly be suppressed: but this, so far from being an objection, is no inconsiderable recommendation to the proposed plan. I would deprive the thoughtless, the impertinent, and the malicious, of a means of annoying others, which is now but too often resorted to; and no one, I presume, would regret the small amount of revenue which would be sacrificed in obtaining so desirable a result. (Hill 97–98)8

  The result, however, was the opposite of what Martineau predicted. Far from suppressing solicitations, postal prepayment created the material conditions for the proliferation of unsolicited mail that we know today. Postal prepayment had assimilated letters to books: in theory at least, the reader was expected to pay for access to either. In practice, however, by the nineteenth century neither books nor letters were goods whose cost was borne in some simple way by the end user. Prepayment made perfect sense in a culture where paper had become a more abundant commodity than access. One is reminded of some early twenty-first-century blogger reveling in the lack of wireless on airplanes when Martineau gloats during an ocean journey that “I have enjoyed few things more in life than the certainty of being out of the way of the post” (Martineau, Autobiography 332).