How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  If we took a long historical view, we might expect that as one model of family replaced the other, domestic service would cease to be the locus of anxieties about the transitive powers of shared books. It’s true that after 1850, the library arguably replaced the household as the site where middle-class ladies could funnel subsidized books into the hands of their inferiors—with the difference that library books involved turn taking across classes. And it’s also true that fears that books might become a vector for dirt migrated from housekeeping manuals to library science guides. The dirty thumb of Little Servant Maids reappears half a century later in Marie Corelli’s remark that

  the true lover of books will never want to peruse volumes that are thumbed and soiled by hundreds of other hands—he or she will manage to buy them and keep them as friends in the private household . . . A little saving on drugged beer and betting would enable the most ordinary mechanic to stock himself with a very decent library of his own. To borrow one’s mental fare from Free Libraries is a dirty habit to begin with. It is rather like picking up eatables dropped by someone else in the road, and making one’s dinner off another’s leavings. One book, clean and fresh from the bookseller’s counter, is worth half a dozen of the soiled and messy knockabout volumes, which many of our medical men assure us carry disease-germs in their too-frequently fingered pages. (9; my emphasis)

  So far, so conventional: reading is represented as both competitor to, and enabler of, betting; both competitor to, and adjunct to, eating. What’s more original is Corelli’s assumption that relations among readers compete with relations to books instead of enabling them. Where tracts function as both cause and effect of interpersonal connections, Corelli uses the metaphorical “friend” that is a book to displace actual friendships among human beings: the library must link reader to book, not one reader to another. In the same way, kindness to the metaphorical children that are books justifies unkindness to very real children: in The Enemies of Books, the Emersonian dictum that “the surest way to preserve your books in health is to treat them as you would your own children” is followed by the remark that “a neighbour of mine some few years ago suffered severely from the propensity, apparently irresistible, in one of his daughters to tear his library books . . . A single ‘whipping’ effected a cure” (Blades 32, 131).16 Beat your daughter and she’ll stop beating up your books.

  The library described by Corelli looks as socially promiscuous as the home described by Adams (servants literalized Corelli’s metaphor every time they “made their dinner off of another’s leavings”), the page as overpopulated as the reading room. Corelli is hardly alone in identifying books as vectors of contagion. The eighteenth-century policy of dipping in seawater the bibles on which shipmasters swore that they had disinfected the contents of their ship—the text guaranteeing purity, the book spreading contagion—gave way to the act of 1910 that forbade the kissing of bibles during the taking of oaths (Rickards and Twyman 122; Watson 485). Between those dates, the library reformer Frederick Greenwood campaigned on behalf of what he called the “book disinfecting apparatus”:

  Figure 6.4. Book Disinfecting Apparatus, 1890.

  Thomas Greenwood, Public Libraries: A History of the Movement and a Manual for the Organization and Management of Rate-Supported Libraries (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1890), 495.

  At Dundee [the] apparatus . . . consist[s] of a sort of closed cupboard made of ordinary tinplate, with a lid at the top, a wire shelf half-way up, and a little door at the foot . . . At Sheffield they tried a system of heating the books in an oven to the temperature of boiling water, and that at the same time they should be exposed to the vapour of carbolic acid. It is claimed that this plan does not injure the binding or cause the books to smell of carbolic acid for very long afterwards . . . The simplest and best arrangement which has yet been introduced is . . . a metal fumigator made from 16th wire gauge sheet iron, with angle iron door-supports and side-shelf rests. Its weight is 3 cwt 1qr. and the cost of it was £5 10s. Compound sulphorous acid is burned in a small lamp, and a very little suffices to disinfect the books . . . The shelves should be perforated in order to allow of a free circulation of the fumes of the acid. (T. Greenwood 494–95; see also Roberts; Black, “The Library as Clinic”)

  This antivirus hardware did little to stem the fear that particular genres of library book were being read on the sickbed and then put back into circulation. “I always sympathize,” says the narrator of a Rhoda Broughton novel, “with the woman, who, when she went to a circulating library, asked them to give her a dull novel, because she thought it was less likely to have been thumbed and read by convalescent scarlet fevers and mumps” (A Beginner 7). And Corelli’s metaphor of book as food is compounded by a metonymic association of books soiled by food in Arnold Bennett’s exhortation to

  go into the average good home of the crust, in the quietude of ‘after-tea,’ and you will see a youthful miss sitting over something by Charlotte M. Yonge or Charles Kingsley. And that something is repulsively foul, greasy, sticky, black. Remember that it reaches from thirty to a hundred such good homes every year. Can you wonder that it should carry deposits of jam, egg, butter, coffee, and personal dirt? You cannot. But you are entitled to wonder why the Municipal Sanitary Inspector does not inspect it and order it to be destroyed. (105)

  As the traditional fear that “unhealthy” texts could “poison” their readers was literalized by the worry that book-objects could spread disease, older concerns about the communion of a reader with a text gave way to newer ones about readers’ contact with one another. This fear could involve manuscript as easily as books: in Maria Edgeworth’s Patronage, when the Duke receives Lord Oldborough’s letter sealed with a wafer (which is against etiquette in a letter to a superior), he “flung the note immediately to his secretary, exclaiming: ‘Open that, if you please, Sir—I wonder how any man can have the impertinence to send me his spittle!’” (83). But it becomes especially sharp in the case of mechanically reproduced multiples, addressed to no one and exposed to “from thirty to one hundred” thumbs.

  This is not to say that books ceased to be compared to poison: the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 (20 & 21 Vict. c.83) was prompted by a trial for the sale of pornography that coincided with a debate in the House of Lords over a bill aiming to restrict the sale of poisons, and that prompted the chief justice to term pornography “a sale of poison more deadly than prussic acid, strychnine or arsenic.” But once the medical threat posed by books replaces the moral threat posed by texts, circulation comes to look more dangerous: what connotes health and prosperity when it applies to blood or money seems, in the case of books, to cause disease or (as we’ll see in the next chapter) reflect bankruptcy. Where books circulating within the household were accused of making gender trump class (the valet peeking into his master’s newspaper, the maid swiping her mistress’s novel), here cross-gender contamination posed a greater threat. One early twentieth-century librarian joked about a “male borrower (holding out to Lady Assistant the latest novelty in bookmarks)”: “Please, Miss, I wish you would tell some of your lady readers not to leave their fringe-nets in the books. I found a hairpin in my last book, and a fringe-net in this one, and my wife is getting a bit suspicious” (Coutts 142). Transitively, the book that I touch after you’ve touched it blurs the boundary between my body and yours; the fin-de-siècle cult of the uncut page provides a physical barrier against this danger.

  The bookmark that stands in for the reader’s place-holding finger makes the book a conduit between successive bodies.17 And the erotic charge of book borrowing points to the peculiar intimacy that shared handling could broker. In The Children of the Abbey (1796), for example, marginalia first establish and then commemorate a romantic relationship:

  When alone within it, she found fresh objects to remind her of Lord Mortimer, and consequently to augment her grief. Here lay the book-case he had sent her. She opened it with trembling impatience; but scarcely a volume did she examine in whic
h select passages were not marked, by his hand, for her particular perusal. Oh! what mementoes were those volumes of the happy hours she had passed at the cottage . . . The night waned away, and still she continued weeping over them. (Roche 34)

  Half a century later, in Shirley, a student writing in a tutor’s book or even a tutor marking the student’s notebook makes the contact between hand and page stand in for the contact between one body and another:

  “I never could correct that composition,” observed Shirley, as Moore concluded. “Your censor-pencil scored it with condemnatory lines, whose signification I strove vainly to fathom.”

  She had taken a crayon from the tutor’s desk, and was drawing little leaves, fragments of pillars, broken crosses, on the margin of the book.

  “French may be half-forgotten, but the habits of the French lesson are retained, I see,” said Louis: “my books would now, as erst, be unsafe with you. My newly-bound St. Pierre would soon be like my Racine: Miss Keeldar, her mark—traced on every page.”

  Shirley dropped her crayon as if it burned her fingers. (C. Brontë, Shirley 461)

  Across the Atlantic, Margaret Fuller uses an annotated book to compensate for the absence of the beloved, writing that

  some guests were announced. She went into another room to receive them, and I took up her book . . . I opened where her mark lay, and read merely with the feeling of continuing our mutual existence by passing my eyes over the same page where hers had been. (35)

  In figuring the book as a bridge, these scenes reverse Trollope’s deployment of the book as a wedge. (Writing of “the pleasure of reading out of the same book with” the beloved, Collins asks, “When is your face so constantly close to hers as it is then?—when can your hair mingle with hers, your cheek touch hers, your eyes meet hers, so often as they can then?” (Basil 103). Public libraries extended such triangular intimacies to strangers. Marginalia, valued earlier in the century as proof that reading involved strenuous production rather than idle consumption, was embargoed by the new public libraries, which saw readers’ hands as wandering, dirty, or even capable of spreading disease.

  And yet, it would be too simple to claim a one-to-one swap between pre-1850 admonitions to reading servants and post-1850 caricatures of public library patrons. For even over the course of two centuries that saw equally drastic changes in the nature of domestic service and in modes of book distribution, novels representing master-servant relations continued to prompt the middle-class reader to worry about running into his own servants in their audience. A century before Little Servant Maids, the prefatory letters to Shamela include Parson Tickletext’s recommendation, “Pray let your Servant-Maids read it over, or read it to them,” and his correspondent’s reply that he “stand[s] excused from delivering it, either into the hands of my Daughter, or my Servant-Maid.” A century in the other direction, every juror is charged to imagine a copy of the second most famous English novel about master-servant sex passing from his hands to those of a dependent differentiated by class, age, and gender:

  You may think that one of the ways in which you can test this book, and test it from the most liberal outlook, is to ask yourselves the question, when you have read it through, would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book. Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read? (Lady Chatterley’s Trial 4; emphasis mine)

  While the reference to “your wife” conveniently ignores the presence of three women on the jury, the reference to “your servants” (plural) makes the remark more aspirational than descriptive: perhaps jurors were flattered by the assumption that they were wealthy male householders.

  Michael Warner has argued that in the United States, “black illiteracy was more than a negation of literacy for blacks; it was the condition of a positive character of written discourse for whites. By extension, printing constituted and distinguished a specifically white community; in this sense it was more than a neutral medium that whites simply managed to monopolize” (The Letters of the Republic 12). Here, too, readers’ identity was formed through differentiation from other readers; this chapter should perhaps be called “Masters’ Reading,” Not “Servants’.” Difference, but also self-recognition: for the normative reader (adult, male, middle-class) could think about reading only via a detour through other audiences. Readers discussed were distinguished from readers addressed: thus men were instructed on how to control their daughters’ reading, or middle-class philanthropists informed about the reading habits of mechanics, or jurors asked to speculate about the effects of a book on their maid. An analysis of working-class reading habits can even be couched in a language designed to remind its own readers of their class and gender, as when a Latin tag concludes an 1844 pamphlet polemicizing against postal reform: “let any man only consider the known correspondence of his own servants: sufficit una domus” (Administration of the Post Office 195).

  One magazine responded to Martineau’s Manchester Strike (1832) not by assessing its appeal to the review’s own readers, but rather by imagining those middle-class magazine-readers distributing it to their employees: “If the masters knew their own interest, this little work would be circulated by tens of thousands among their labourers; and the philanthropist who feels the deplorable state of society in Manchester, could not spend a year better than in devoting himself to the circulation of its ideas and pictures” (“Review of Illustrations of Political Economy”). Neither the reader of the book review nor the buyer of the book is imagined to be the end user of the Illustrations: their role is to distribute the text, not to read it. Even more strikingly, the legitimate reader is asked, not to introspect about his or her own response to the stories, but rather to speculate about someone else’s—defined either in contradistinction to his (as when the impressionable servant stands directly opposite the dispassionate judge) or by analogy with it (as when the reviewer both predicts and ventriloquizes the taste of his own readers). Once choosing replaced reading as the expression of working-class selfhood, “placing [books] in the hands of those who are under his influence” replaced reading as the mark of upper-class virtue. And when both vie for the power to decide what the weaker party will read, it’s hardly surprising that conflict should result.

  When Yonge repeats the warning to mistresses that their books can fall into the hands of servants, she draws the opposite conclusion from this fact than Charlotte Adams or the Chatterley prosecution do: “As for servants, it really is needless to try to select books for them, considering the cheapness of novels, and their easy access to all we have in the house” (“Children’s Literature: Part III” 451). More specifically, although I have found no evidence that she read Little Servant Maids, Yonge is careful to decouple the acknowledgment that servants can touch any book from the prediction that they will dirty every book:

  I believe it is a great mistake to have a special library of “books adapted for servants.” There is nothing they so dislike, or that is so unlike themselves, as the model Thomases and Marias in books, except, perhaps, that literature in which little nursery-maids convert all the children, while the nurse drinks wine in the pantry, and hides her lady’s jewels in their boxes. Remember that the servants can, if they choose, read any book of yours they like, and that many of them have been well educated. Tell them, therefore, freely what you think is pleasant reading and give them a turn of a book from your box, if it is suitable. They are no more likely to soil it than you are. (C. Yonge, P’s and Q’s, or, the Question of Putting Upon 199)

  The warning against model Thomases and Marias fits neatly enough with Yonge’s critique of “class-literature’s” pigeonholing of readers. What’s more surprisingly is that the author of didactic literature often seen herself as a conservative goody-goody rubs her middle-class readers’ noses in the power of books to cut across social barriers—whether by dragging masters down to the level of servants (mi
ddle-class readers are now the ones accused of soiling their own books), by invoking principles of fairness (“turn” taking), or by reminding masters that a shared domestic space implies shared access to texts (“remember that the servants can, if they choose, read any book of yours they like”). This last could, of course, sound like a reactionary threat (servants can also, if they choose, spit into whatever food of yours they like), which the tacked-on “if it is suitable” can hardly defuse by invoking mistresses’ superior judgment at the eleventh hour.

  When Yonge remarks in another set of hints for district visitors that “whatever wholesomely interests our own households may well be sent into the club-room,” working-class readers become a proxy through which aspersions are cast on the purity of her own middle-class readers’ tastes (C. M. Yonge, What Books to Lend and What to Give 9). The implication that her readers’ own interests may not bear scrutiny humbles their pride as thoroughly as (and more deliberately than) the unlucky tract-distributor who, by mistake, “handed the tract” ‘To An Unfortunate female’ . . . to a respectable lady” (Jones 174).18 Brontë plays on the same problem of address when Jane Eyre, handed a “thin pamphlet sewn in a cover” containing “‘An account of the awfully sudden death of Martha G——, a naughty child addicted to falsehood and deceit,’” offers to make the book over to Mrs. Reed’s own daughter. Vanity Fair makes the vertical logic of tract distribution even more explicit when Lady Southdown backs down from her plan to thrust a tract on the wealthy Miss Crawley, deciding that Miss Crawley’s downtrodden companion and servants can take her place as the unlucky recipients:

  “Emily, my love, get ready a packet of books for Miss Crawley. Put up ‘A Voice from the Flames,’ ‘A Trumpet-warning to Jericho,’ and the ‘Fleshpots Broken; or, the Converted Cannibal.’”

  . . . By way of compromise, Lady Emily sent in a packet in the evening for [Miss Briggs], containing copies of the “Washerwoman,” and other mild and favourite tracts for Miss B.’s own perusal; and a few for the servants’ hall, viz.: “Crumbs from the Pantry,” “The Frying Pan and the Fire,” and “The Livery of Sin,” of a much stronger kind. (Thackeray, Vanity Fair 335)