How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  None of this means that scarcity ceased to exist: that wastepaper continued to command resale value (as we’ll see in chapter 7) makes clear that books and even broadsheets remained a scarce resource for the poorest Londoners. Yet at the same time that the costermongers depicted by Henry Mayhew were hard put to find enough paper to wrap their wares, middle-class readers struggled to find enough wheelbarrows and incinerators.

  GIFT BOOK, WASTEPAPER

  Twenty-first-century intellectuals inherit an eighteenth-century understanding of literacy as a precondition for psychological interiority and political self-determination—along with a nineteenth-century infrastructure that thrusts printed paper into our letter slots, our faces, our hands, our fields of vision, and even the bedside tables of our hotel rooms. (“No Menus Please” is the New Yorker’s declaration that his home is his castle.) In theory, a self formed by print; in practice, a mass assaulted by printed matter. Rather as prophets of the paperless office soon realized that the personal computer had increased the rate of paper consumption, so the strand of mid-twentieth-century sci-fi that predicted a postliterate future looks increasingly quaint in an era of print and pixel pollution.

  In the political sphere, campaigns against censorship make it hard to remember that even those twentieth-century regimes most closely associated with biblioclasm spent more energy distributing books than burning them. Some estimates call Mao’s Little Red Book the most-circulated book of its time; Mein Kampf, too, is often described as a best seller, thanks to the ten million copies in circulation by 1945 (almost one per German household). It might be more accurate to coin a neologism like “best giver,” for those copies were donated, not sold; from 1936 onward a copy was handed out at every wedding (Fritzsche 796). (Reciprocally, the US Office of Information described its propaganda newspaper airdropped over enemy territory as “the German newspaper with the world’s largest circulation” [Rickards and Twyman 11].) When Macaulay estimated in 1823 that “there is scarcely one Englishman in ten who has not belonged to some association for distributing books, or for prosecuting them,” the symmetry of his syntax already lumped positive with negative controls on reading (T. B. Macaulay, “On the Royal Society of Literature” 20). If A Clockwork Orange turns out to be more prescient than Fahrenheit 451 about the role of high art in totalitarian states, it may be because Bradbury is to Burgess what American slave narratives are to religious tracts. Reading looks more heroic when proscribed than when prescribed, just as book burning poses a greater threat when it implies indifference than when it bespeaks hostility.

  Even in liberal democracies, print is now less often sold than given away for the purpose of selling something else. By one modern scholar’s calculations, more unsolicited advertising passes through the UK mail than individually addressed letters; and thanks to Metro International (founded in 1995), in many cities fewer newspapers are now bought than given away.9 Ubiquity ensures invisibility: we continue to think of sale as the norm, and gift as the exception. But “gifts” is too kind a term for paper foisted upon readers who have never consented to receive it, let alone demanded. It’s telling that the English language lacks even a noun that would encompass spam sent electronically, leaflets handed out on the street, and circulars delivered through the post. Certainly important differences divide these genres. The cost of some materials is borne by the distributor, of others by third parties: in the United States in 2010, newspaper revenue is 87 percent advertising, 13 percent sales. And paper catalogs retain resale value that electronic spam lacks—unlike the fiber-optic cable through which it’s transmitted. Nonprinted nonmatter like Viagra ads stand opposite the pure materiality of Victorian wastepaper. Yet the absence of any umbrella term points less to the heterogeneity—far less to the insignificance—of these genres than, on the contrary, to the threat that their combined volume poses to unspoken assumptions about how print works.

  In decoupling who reads from who pays, free print challenges three tenets of what could be called “bookish liberalism”: that acquiring a book implies choosing it; that owning a book implies an intention to read it; and that virtual encounters with an author distant in space or time can release readers from the constraints of their own social position.10 Giving free print its due would result in a different economic history in which disposal and storage would upstage production and distribution, and a different cultural history in which—far from enabling mobility or independence—the book would become a prop for commemorating one’s forebears, deferring to the judgment of one’s elders, and accepting favors from one’s betters. Lest that sound too gloomily Foucaultian, let me rephrase in positive terms: taking free print seriously would allow us to recognize forms of individual and collective creativity that otherwise remain invisible, because their inventiveness operates at the level of the book’s circulation, not its content.

  Measuring by what has survived, we call the nineteenth century the age of the novel; but if we counted instead what was produced, the Victorians might look more like a people of the tract. One historian calculates that in the first seven years of its existence, the Religious Tract Society (founded by an interdenominational group of Evangelicals in 1799) had distributed two million titles; between 1840 and 1849 that number went up to twenty-three million (Fyfe, “Commerce and Philanthropy” 166; St Clair 569). Another estimates that the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (its Anglican counterpart) unloaded eight million in 1867 alone (R. Altick 100; see also Fyfe, “Commerce and Philanthropy,” and St Clair 350–54). And another adds that individual RTS titles could sell over a million copies (Ledger-Lomas 327). These modern scholars at least take the individual volume as their unit of measure; in 1837, Frances Trollope despaired of any such precision, simply referring to “tracts, so numerous that it would be impossible to give their measure or their value by any other calculation than that of their weight” (191).

  For Trollope, the proliferation of tracts provided the most visible instance of the more general proliferation of books. In keeping with Simon Eliot’s periodization of book production overall, which dates a “distribution revolution” to 1830–55, followed by a “mass production revolution” (1875–1914), it was clear even at the time that the scale of tract societies’ operations owed less to new production technologies than to new distribution channels, including middle-class female volunteers and working-class male hawkers (S. Eliot, Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 107). If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em: tracts aped the very chapbooks they were meant to drive out of business, not only in verbal style and material format but also in their retail model. In 1796, a group of Evangelical gentlemen went slumming in order to investigate how best to feed their Cheap Repository Tracts into existing systems of peddling: as Hannah More wrote to Zachary Macaulay, “Mr Henry Thornton and two or three others have condescended to spend hours with the hawkers to learn the mysteries of their trade” (Z. Macaulay 129). A radical like Mayhew could hardly have done more.

  As Leslie Howsam has shown in rich detail, the British and Foreign Bible Society devoted considerable ingenuity to wresting bibles out of older free distribution channels and into something that mimicked market mechanisms, and the same held true for tracts (Howsam; see also Stott 207).11 Yet that transaction was rarely as simple as a sale outright. The RTS lent tracts for a fee, while the Bible Society collected on an installment plan (R. Altick 100–103). And more fundamentally, even those books not given away were subsidized through volume discounts. Some Cheap Repository Tracts list “Price One Penny, or 4s. 6d. 100” (Kelly 154); from 1796 onward, the text of each tract was printed in two formats, distinguished by paper quality as well as by price structure. As Kevin Gilmartin describes, “profits from the more expensive version were used to subsidize the distribution of cheaper editions, reinforcing the different roles played by different sorts of readers” (“‘Study to Be Quiet’” 513).

  As a result, neither “sale” nor “gift” adequately describes the distribution mechanisms tha
t tract and bible societies elaborated. It’s true that the operations by which books changed hands (what Howsam calls the “Bible transaction”) weren’t required to produce a net profit: both subsidized the retail cost through complex and graduated volume discounts. Yet both also strove to couple the outflow of books with the inflow of money, not only to avoid “pauperizing” recipients or undervaluing their own wares, but also because they understood giving and taking payment—the very transactions whose anonymity secular economists at the same time were theorizing by contradistinction to the personalized nature of the gift—as an opportunity for face-to-face encounters and personal accountability.12

  Widely distributed but rarely read, innovative in their dissemination but clichéd in their composition, tracts fit awkwardly into Darnton’s communications circuit—if only because they so well illustrate Adams and Barker’s point that the book’s life neither begins at the moment of writing nor ends at the moment of reading. Tracts link author and reader less strongly than giver and taker: a virtual meeting of minds becomes the pretext for a face-to-face transaction between unequals (whether in gender, class, or age). The tract did not create what Roger Chartier calls “communities of readers,” much less what Stanley Fish calls “interpretive communities”—if only because to be interpreted, tracts would actually have had to be read. What it did create were relationships between givers and takers (as well as among givers themselves), bonds less cosy and more conflictual than the term “community” implies. As the next chapter will argue in more detail, tracts pose an equally sharp challenge to Benedict Anderson’s model of national community, not only because their circulation encourages their handlers to differentiate themselves from (instead of, or as well as, identify with) one another, but also because they draw their significance from face-to-face interactions within a single household or parish rather than from a virtual “community in anonymity.”

  Figure 5.1. Darnton’s Communications Circuit.

  From The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History by Robert Darnton. Copyright © 1990 by Robert Darnton. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  When the hero of More’s “Tom White, the Postilion” “sent home for his Bible and Prayer book, which he had not opened for two years, and which had been given him when he left the Sunday school,” the narrator takes the opportunity to digress into an address to a very different implied reader: “And here let me remark what encouragement this is for rich people to give away Bibles and good books, and not to lose all hope, though, for a time, they see little or no good effect from it. According to all appearance, Tom’s books were never likely to do him any good, and yet his generous benefactor, who had cast his bread upon the waters, found it after many days.” What’s true of the tract’s characters also holds for its audience: the “remark” interpellates a giver of books, not a reader of them (More, Cheap Repository Tracts 225). In fact, from the beginning tracts seem less interested in representing reading than in representing giving: thus Hannah More’s Sunday School takes as iconic the scene of a book changing hands. No less than it-narratives, religious tracts make changes of ownership the moment of highest drama. Maria Charlesworth’s Book for the Cottage inserts the title of another tract within its plot, where a poor woman’s “visitor did not stay long there, but left a little book with her, called, ‘Cecil’s Visit to the House of Mourning’; the rector’s lady had sent it for her, thinking that if she could read it, it might bring a word of comfort and instruction to her heart” (268–69). The economics and iconography of book distribution alike confirm Susan Pedersen’s claim that “the real success of More’s tracts is to be found less in their conversion of the poor than in their effective recruitment of the upper class to the role of moral arbiters of popular culture” (109).13 The formal corollary is that where middle-class secular novels marginalized the self-referentiality that had been their eighteenth-century predecessors’ stock-in-trade, religious tracts (even those whose fictional stories borrowed novelistic conventions) inscribed self-referential images of their own circulation in order to illustrate the providential spread of the Word.

  Figure 5.2. Adams and Barker’s Life Cycle of a Book.

  Thomas Adams and Nicolas Barker, “A New Model for the Study of the Book,” A Potencie of Life: Books in Society (London: British Library, 1993), 14. © British Library Board (2708.e.2071).

  Figure 5.3. Hannah More, “The Sunday School,” 1798.

  Hannah More, Cheap Repository Tracts; Entertaining, Moral, and Religious [v.1] (London: Sold by F. and C. Rivington, no. 62, St. Paul’s church-yard, 1798).

  Eighteenth-century philanthropists assumed that existing associations—like that linking clergyman’s wife with parishioners, or squire’s daughter with tenants—could form a conduit for bibles or blankets. In that setting, goods could be given away because the implicit repayment—improved behavior—could be checked up on. In contrast, as Howsam points out, “not many commercial and professional people like the members of the early Committee [of the British and Foreign Bible Society] enjoyed a direct relation with those whom they wished to covert” (39). In the modern city, a credit economy no longer made moral sense; donating bibles to strangers would have been risky, but selling bibles on the installment plan provided an excuse for return visits. Paying for a book week after week (whether by giving money or by accepting visits) turned out to be just as entangled in ongoing relations of trust, guilt, and obligation as any gift giving ever was.14 Rather than being slotted into preexisting social relationships, the transfer of books became the occasion for inventing them.

  Did social networks serve to transmit books, or books serve to connect human beings? The former model underpins a manual for district visitors which explains that “The first idea they learn to associate with you is, that the Bible has to do with you, and you with it: your visit is a signal for the mother to read to you, or you to her, and they must be silent the while. By degrees, as reason dawns, they gather somewhat of the meaning of what passes, the sound of words and names becomes familiar, and a feeling of interest, perhaps of love, is first linked with the precious volume, because of its inseparable association with you” (Charlesworth, The Female Visitor to the Poor 80). Yet in the opposite direction, another manual predicts that “you will find this exchange of tracts a good introduction to your visits, especially at first. It will give time for the little awkwardness that is sometimes felt on both sides to pass away” (Nixon 49). Perhaps the distinction is too stark to begin with: as we saw in the previous chapter, the meaning of books resided not only in their printed content but in the history of gifts and exchanges to which their manuscript markings bear witness.

  A freethinker like Henry Mayhew saw hypocrisy in the enlistment of books as a pretext for interpersonal transactions, whether philanthropic or commercial: “tract-sellers . . . are regarded by the other street-traders as the idlers, beggars and pretenders of the trade” (Mayhew, London Labour 289)—which is not to say that tracts were not also the mirror image of radical leafleting on the other side of the political spectrum. The confusion troubled even more orthodox middle-class observers: for surreptitious subsidies to misrepresent gift as sale was as bad as for the charity bazaar and the missionary basket to blur the boundaries between donation and purchase.15 (Charlotte Brontë refers to such a basket as “a monster collection of pincushions, needle-books, cardracks, work-bags, articles of infant wear, &c.&c.&c., made by the Christian ladies of a parish, and sold perforce to the heathenish gentlemen thereof, at prices unblushingly exorbitant” [Shirley 134].) The next chapter will examine in more detail why a genre whose own distribution depends as heavily on the market as does the novel’s might express particular distaste for pseudocommercial transactions, whether in the form of Dickens’s and Thackeray’s satire on tract societies or Trollope’s extended send-up in Miss Mackenzie of a charity bazaar.

  More surprisingly, some within the Evangelical press itself echoed freethinkers’ accusations of unfair competition.
Missionaries, in fact, were the first to identify books as the locus of two problems that some twenty-first-century commentators imagine unique to digital media: whether content can be distributed more effectively through gift, sale, or rental, and what role social networks should play in that transmission. Even the native colporteurs paid by mission societies to hawk pamphlets complained that charitable English ladies who distributed tracts for free were undercutting their customer base: information overload was compounded by what can only be called distributor overload (Manning). Hawkers present themselves, too, as torn between the desire to give tracts away and the duty to charge a price: the same colporteurs who describe subsidizing tracts out of their own pockets are also capable of self-consciously resisting the temptation, like one who confesses the urge “to return the 50 centimes, and thus enable this good woman to free herself from her debts, paying for the New Testament out [of my?] own funds; but knowing by experience that the Lord regards [* illegible] sacrifice that is made for His name, I felt that I ought not to [deprive?] this female of a great blessing which is in store for her” (Fifty-Sixth Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society 18). This model invested paying for a book with as much significance as reading it: where the secular press represents the book’s imbrication in the market compromising its textual value (think back to Ranthorpe, Mr. Brownlow, or David forgetting how much his books cost), the Evangelical press takes the commercial transaction as a guarantor for a more than commercial value.