How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  Lady Southdown, we’ve learned already, “launched packets of tracts among the cottagers and tenants, and would order Gaffer Jones to be converted, as she would order Goody Hicks to take a James’s powder, without appeal, resistance, or benefit of clergy” (333). Like medicine, tracts hover between categories: understood by one party as a gift and the other (whether children or the poor) as a burden, they cure but also disgust. This isn’t to say that the economically powerful figure couldn’t also be emotionally vulnerable: anyone who’s ever leafleted on a street corner—or taught an English class—knows how powerless he or she is to make anyone read anything.

  To read about bad readers is comfortable; to be addressed as one of them, less so. In a surprising number of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century essays, a moral failing (the soiling of books, for example) is first attributed to working-class others but then brought home to the conscience of the essay’s own readers. In an essay titled “Cheap Literature” in the middle-class Contemporary Review, for example, Helen Bosanquet wonders whether it is quite fair to judge penny dreadfuls by their effect on readers: “We ourselves should resent having our recreative reading judged by a moral standard.” Even Bosanquet’s attack on cheap novels’ “narrowing and morbid” obsession with marriage is qualified by an afterthought: “Of course, I am aware that the same criticism applied to the majority of novels placed in the hands of girls of the more educated classes.” And after mocking the puffs that penny magazines supply for themselves, she adds, “But might we not say much the same of the readers who make up their Mudie lists with such touching confidence in the verdict of ‘Athenaeum’ and ‘Spectator’?” (680). Another article, “Reading and Readers,” in 1893 similarly declares that “human nature is pretty much the same wherever we go, and the record Mr Hileken of Bethnal Green and I can give would shame that of many a West-End knight and dame” (191). (G. F. Hileken was the librarian of the Bethnal Green Free Library.) The rueful tone drags the author and his readers down to the level of those they observe.

  Even the addressee of a proto-sociological tract rarely maintained complete distance from the styles of reading under discussion. When Florence Bell set out to survey the reading habits of a manufacturing town in 1911, she ended up turning her gaze back on her own readers: “On finding what were the results of the inquiry made respecting reading among the workmen, a similar investigation was attempted among people who were better off, and the result of this inquiry among those whom we may call ‘drawing-room readers’ is curiously instructive” (250). In describing workers’ reading to a middle-class audience, Bell appeals over and over to her readers’ own experience for confirmation. Thus “There are a certain number of born readers among the workpeople in the town described, as there are, happily, in every layer of society . . . But . . . reading, perhaps, is not as prevalent in any class of society as we think” (203–4). Or, on working-class women’s reluctance to take time away from daily tasks for reading: “Is there not some truth in this view? Even among the well-to-do this idea persists a great deal more than one would at the first blush admit” (237).

  As novels like Northanger Abbey forced readers to recognize themselves in the romance-reading misses being satirized, so periodicals made the working-class people whose reading habits they investigated into a mirror for their own middle-class public. The common act of reading cut cross moral distinctions in one case, social distinctions in the other. And if reading books “made kitchen and drawing-room kin,” so did distributing them. A Religious Tract Society pamphlet that praises the best tract-distributors for being “as clever as Fagin was at sliding their silent messengers into people’s pockets without attracting notice” erases any distinction between missionaries and common thieves (N. Watts 13). The scene of Evangelical gentlemen “spending hours with the hawkers in order to learn the mysteries of their trade,” too, emblematizes the danger that the books designed to shore up class distinctions ultimately blur them.

  In fact, the fear of maids’ peeking into their masters’ bookshelves proves surprisingly reversible: if servants can be led astray by their masters’ books, young ladies can also be corrupted by accepting forbidden books from a governess, as in Maria Edgeworth’s “Mademoiselle Panache” (1801) or Sewell’s Laneton Parsonage (1846–48). Just as Jeames’s or Caroline’s act of illicitly borrowing books cancels out the innocuousness of their content, so the badness of the romances described here is doubled by the sinfulness of the process by which they’re acquired—whether lying to parents, hiding the volume, borrowing money to pay for it, or making oneself vulnerable to blackmail. Accepting a book from a servant thus forms the modern, print-culture equivalent of the older nightmare that your children might listen to ghost stories told by an old nurse (Steedman 50; Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism 211). From a servant, or even from other inferiors: in a plot that Mrs. Sherwood constructs to illustrate the dangers of preferring low and vulgar friends to one’s own sisters, the offer of a book is what tempts the culprit to jump the fence separating her family’s property from the neighbor’s (“Intimate Friends” 234).

  Conversely, writers signify proper reading not only by naming the book’s title, but also by mentioning how it reached the servant’s hands. A good maid in The youth’s magazine or evangelical miscellany “was very soon lost in her book, Miss Thornton’s present to her when she left home. She had read the Pilgrim’s Progress through. Her father had an old copy, full of quaint pictures; but this was a large and handsome edition, beautifully illustrated” (“The Bunch of Keys” 331). In one model, good books trickle down; in the other, bad books percolate up. In both, their meaning lies as much in how they’re transmitted as in what they represent. Where secular writers cast books as a refuge for the powerless, didactic literature represents access to books as dependent on social relationships, and domestic power struggles playing out in tugs-of-war over books.

  I spoke earlier of “cementing or severing relationships . . . by giving and receiving books or by withholding and rejecting them.” It may not have been clear there how little those pairs map onto each other: to withhold a book is not necessarily to sever a relationship any more than to give a book is to cement one. On the contrary, anonymous market transactions in a bookshop often grant freer access to books than does the more intimate censorship carried out by personal acquaintances like parents or masters. Yet the intimacies that sometimes blocked access to books also enabled it. Associated in theory with individual liberation, in practice reading not only reflected but created social dependence. This is not to say that those models were mutually exclusive. One 1824 critic of female bible distributors asked, “is it correct, particularly in females, to go from house to house, and sow seeds of discord between husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants?” (Martin 50). The echo of Diderot (himself echoing Matthew 10:35) makes clear that a tract can corrupt as much as any Richardson novel—as long as its giver stands outside the household.

  Autodidacts’ memoirs celebrated literacy as a means for individuals to rise above their social class of origin; middle-class bildungsromans focalized the delicate child narrator withdrawing from an insensitive family; cartoons satirized men hiding from wives or fellow commuters behind a newspaper. Protestant tracts like Claude the Colporteur made Catholic countries the site of bookish heroism, turning readers from sedentary goody-goodies into manly risk-takers: like the adults who serve as blocking figures in the bildungsroman, the Catholic authorities make reading narratable.19 Yet in Britain—to state the obvious—reading was learned in schools run by the church, then by the state. And even outside of formal education, the provision of something to read depended on complex networks of gift, sale, loan, exchange, even theft. What was true for middle-class adults held even more strongly for those who depended on others’ voices to spell out text, others’ judgment to select titles, others’ money to provide copies, and others’ permission to read them.20

  THE TRACT AND THE MOONSTONE

  If so
cial commentary invited its middle-class readers to displace their self-criticism onto working-class counterparts, light literature established its own entertainment value by contradictions to tracts. More specifically, by mocking tract-distributors for harassing a captive audience, secular novels and magazines congratulated themselves on being freely chosen and paid for. Although the RTS entitled its internal history The Romance of Tract Distribution—as if the wanderings of books, like foundlings, led providentially toward a happy ending—the secular press more often chose a satiric mode. In 1843, for example, Thackeray reprinted in Punch a note from the Times:

  ‘The Agents of the Tract Societies have lately had recourse to a new method of introducing their tracts into Cadiz. The tracts were put into glass bottles, securely corked; and, taking advantage of the tide flowing into the harbour, they were committed to the waves, on whose surface they floated towards the town, where the inhabitants eagerly took them up on their arriving on the shore. The bottles were then uncorked, and the tracts they contain are supposed to have been read with much interest.’

  Thus far verbatim; but Thackeray goes on to reply in the persona of the “Regent of Spain . . . and of the Regent’s Park,” calling the “manoeuvres of the Dissenting-Tract Smuggler (Tractistero dissentero contrabandistero)” worse than any Jesuit arts.

  Let Punch, let Lord Aberdeen, let Great Britain at large, put itself in the position of the poor mariner of Cadiz, and then answer. Tired with the day’s labour, thirsty as the seaman naturally is, he lies perchance, and watches at eve the tide of ocean swelling into the bay. What does he see cresting the wave that rolls towards him? A bottle. Regardless of the wet, he rushes eagerly towards the advancing flask. ‘Sherry, perhaps,’ is his first thought (for ’tis the wine of his country). ‘Rum, I hope,’ he adds, while with beating heart and wringing pantaloons, he puts his bottle-screw into the cork. But, ah! Englishmen! fancy his agonising feelings on withdrawing from the flask a Spanish translation of ‘The Cowboy of Kennington Common,’ or ‘The Little Blind Dustman of Pentonville.’ ([W. Thackeray], “Singular Letter from the Regent of Spain”)

  Figure 6.5. “Singular Letter from the Regent of Spain,” Punch, 1 December 1843, 268.

  The joke doesn’t require much exaggeration. “The Cowboy of Kennington Common” is hardly more alliterative than real RTS titles like Lucy the Light-Bearer (1871), Claude the Colporteur (1880), or The Book-stall boy of Batherton (1872). And RTS reports did in fact associate temperance with thirst for the Word:

  Eight men went in a punt to convey goods to a ship in the river; while they were on board, the captain asked them whether they would have a glass of rum each, or a book; they all chose a book, and said they did not drink rum. Tracts were given, which were gratefully received. (Jones 599)

  The tract society that devised the message in a bottle was punning on the same confusion of word with drink that allowed the magazine to publish miscellanies like A Bowl of Punch (1848)—or Lady Southdown, in Vanity Fair, to “pitilessly dose [Miss Crawley’s household] with her tracts and her medicine” (Thackeray, Vanity Fair 351). Even secular reformers could borrow the analogy: although Rowland Hill acknowledged grudgingly that “the wish to correspond with their friends may not be so strong, or so general, as the desire for fermented liquors,” he persisted in predicting the effects on the revenue of the proposed penny post system by extrapolating from taxes on beer and wine (93).

  Books competed with drink both for poor people’s time (did one go to the pub or stay at home with a book?) and their money (as when a temperance tract exults that “the variety of useful books they can afford to purchase, at once proclaims how much has been gained since the public house has been abandoned” (Best 13). The same Evangelicals who countered requests for bread with offers of a tract worried that free bibles would be sold or pawned to pay for gin. (Lower resale value gave tracts an advantage over bibles in this respect.) In 1860, one bible-distributor responded to those who “shut the door in my face, and said, ‘We want bread instead of Bibles’” by “invit[ing] her poor neighbors to devote the pence too often squandered in gin to the purchase of the precious Word of God, which is the ‘water of life’ to all who drink its refreshing streams” (Ranyard 69). As a result, philanthropists remained unsure whether to link books with food metaphorically or metonymically: should tracts be piggybacked onto gifts of food and blankets, or substituted for such tangible handouts? In Trollope’s Castle Richmond, the recurring pun that renders as “mail” the Irish characters’ pronunciation of the “meal” provided at soup kitchens during the Famine places debates about the public distribution of food in parallel with debates about the public distribution of letters. Yet if free food and free bibles alike disturbed the workings of the market, how to make sense of the need for advertising circulars and other forms of free print to stimulate consumer appetites?

  Whether middle-class triple-deckers or penny serials, novels characteristically represent tracts as filler—a poor substitute either for a different genre of book (usually a novel), or for nonbookish objects like food, drink, or paper money. Thus when a canting character in Rymer’s radical The White Slave leaves a piece of paper on the heroine’s father’s snowy grave: “Is it a bank note?” “No, this is a religious tract.” Later, an Evangelical lady who has just denied the starving heroine food exclaims: “You would have been supplied with tracts, provided you kept them clean, and returned them” (34).

  In invoking Crusoe, the Religious Tract Society’s message in a bottle takes us back to a paper scarcity and a readerly solitude as far as possible from the modern overabundance of both literature and fellow readers. If the RTS’s hawkers and chapmen mimicked the way that romances were distributed, its publicity stunt in Cadiz mimicked the way that romances represent the distribution of texts. Reciprocally, and obsessively, the Victorian novel represented the distribution of tracts. The two genres provided one another with mirror images: when characters in tracts read novels or characters in novels reject tracts, the stakes are intellectual-historical (Evangelical fiction opposite the epic of a world without God) as much as formal (both torn between narrative and didactic modes). But also affective: if the novel was the competitor that the tract was trying to beat at its own game, the novel returned the compliment by making the dullness of tracts a foil to its own pleasures.21 And finally, economic: both widely distributed, neither much respected, tract and novel achieved their common ubiquity via opposite routes—one anonymously or even surreptitiously bought and rented, the other forced on readers through face-to-face relationships.

  Like Trollope’s or Thackeray’s embedded newspapers and novels, embedded tracts perform an antiquixotic function: everywhere present in the hands of characters, but nowhere read.22 Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle emblematize the imbalance between supply and demand. In fact, when the latter “pull[s] out a good book as if it were a constable’s staff,” it’s not enough for every character in Bleak House to refuse to read the tract. Adding insult to injury, characters are dragged in from another novel to second that refusal: “Mr. Jarndyce said he doubted if Robinson Crusoe could have read [the book], though he had had no other on his desolate island” (133). The mounting absurdity of those counterfactuals—if a nineteenth-century genre had already existed, if a copy had made its way to Crusoe’s island—drives home the contrast between two models of transmission: one, viral, that organically diffuses an old romance across economic lines; another, top-down, in which middle-class adults bribe or bully others into owning (if not reading) demographically tailored fictions.23

  Bleak House is one of three mid-Victorian novels that couple Robinson Crusoe’s name with an imaginary tract. Hard Times contrasts Coketown workers’ eagerness to “[take] De Foe to their bosoms” with their reluctance—echoing the bricklayer’s in Bleak House—to read “leaden little books [written] for them, showing how the good grown-up baby invariably got to the Savings-bank, and the bad grown-up baby invariably got transported” (Dickens, Hard Times 65). No
t until Crusoe reappears for a third time in The Moonstone (1868), however, does a nineteenth-century novel stage an all-out battle between an earlier romance and the modern tract. As every reader will remember, the First Period of Collins’s novel takes Robinson Crusoe as its intertext, the Second a tract-distributor as its narrator. Armed with a “little library of works . . . (say a dozen only),” its narrator, Miss Clack, throws tracts in windows, slips them under sofa cushions, stuffs them into flower boxes, sneaks them into the pockets of dressing gowns, and thrusts them into the hands of a cabdriver. “If I had presented a pistol at his head, this abandoned wretch could hardly have exhibited greater consternation” (W. Collins, The Moonstone 214): Miss Clack at once echoes Thackeray’s mock-epic description of Lady Southdown “before she bore down personally upon any individual whom she proposed to subjugate, fir[ing] in a quantity of tracts upon the menaced party (as a charge of the French was always preceded by a furious cannonade),” and anticipates the logic of the journalist who remarks in 1899 that “the gratulations of a successful tract-writer may be only on a par with the boasts of a soldier who knows he has killed 150 of the enemy because he has fired 150 rounds,” and adds: “it may be doubted if as high a proportion of tracts as of Mauser bullets reach their billets” (Thackeray, Vanity Fair 335; Ogden). Even Rowland Hill refers to advertisements for books as “random shots”—a metaphor that survives today in our term “mailshot” but was literalized more directly in the 1944 German experiment firing postcards in rifle grenades over France (89; Rickards and Twyman 11). The tone in which Miss Clack’s struggles are chronicled is hardly more comic than a biographer’s description of Canon Christopher: “On one occasion the younger members of his family thought they had prevented such untimely and embarrassing activity—as they conceived it—at a Governor’s garden party in the Isle of Man. All his pockets had been quietly emptied, and those in the secret set out with a light heart. They were presently disillusioned by the sight of Christopher offering tracts. More alert than they had supposed, he had taken the precaution of stuffing a few packets into his elastic-sided boots” (Reynolds and Thomas 233).