How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  The tract, then, is to the Second Period what Robinson Crusoe was to the First. As if to recapitulate the historical shift from chapbook to tract, a romance treated as if it were a bible gives way to a tract that feebly imitates the conventions of fiction. The bibliomancy that allows Betteredge to “[wear] out six stout copies” through the “wholesome application of a bit of ROBINSON CRUSOE” paves the way for Miss Clack’s equally instrumental and equally discontinuous reading habits. Like Betteredge, she understands reading as both aleatory and combinatory, prefacing her quotations with the claim to have “chanced on the following passage” and wresting out of context snippets that “proved to be quite providentially applicable to” the recipient.

  Miss Clack herself sees Bruff’s reading not as identical to hers, however, but its competitor: when she describes Bruff as “equally capable of reading a novel and of tearing up a tract,” she imagines the two genres fighting over a limited pool of readers’ attention (W. Collins, The Moonstone 9, 193, 215). William Wilberforce’s famous declaration that “I would rather go render up my account at the last day, carrying up with me The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain than bearing the load of [the Waverley novels], full as they are of genius,” reminds us that one virtue of tracts is negative: they fill the time that might otherwise be spent reading novels (Rosman 188).

  Novel and tract fight to occupy the same space twice over. In the editorial frame, Franklin Blake rejects the “copious Extracts from precious publications in her possession” that Miss Clack tries to insert into her “Narrative,” forbidding her to slip quotations from tracts into the novel that we are reading: “I am not permitted to improve—I am condemned to narrate.” The converse is more literal: within the “Narrative” Miss Clack tries to slip novels inside tracts. “On the library table I noticed two of the ‘amusing books’ which the infidel doctor had recommended. I instantly covered them from sight with two of my own precious publications” (W. Collins, The Moonstone 237, 24).

  The image of a tract covering up a novel figures the uncomfortable proximity of the two genres. On the one hand, tracts represent novels competing with devotional texts. The narrator of the Adventures of a Bible reports, “I am sorry to say that Jane, was by no means pleased with the good woman’s gift; but pouted, and said she would much rather, had it been left to her own choice, have a story book to amuse her” (12). And Gilbert Guestling, or, the Story of a Hymn-Book (published by the Wesleyan Conference Office in 1881) features a character moved to buy the hymnbook after reading Brontë’s parody of a Dissenting Sunday school in Shirley (Yeames). Here as so often, More’s Cheap Repository Tracts set the tone for their successors. In “Mr Bragwell and his Two Daughters,” the title characters

  spent the morning in bed, the noon in dressing, and the evening at the Spinnet, and the night in reading Novels . . . Jack, the plow-boy, on whom they had now put a livery jacket, was employed half his time in trotting backwards and forwards with the most wretched trash the little neighborhood book-shop could furnish. The choice was often left to Jack, who could not read, but who had general orders to bring all the new things, and a great many of them.

  The quantitative language in which More’s tract describes novels anticipates the quantitative language in which Frances Trollope’s novel evokes tracts. Just as reductively, “Mr Bragwell” lumps novels together with other, humbler, consumer goods: the title character complains that “our Jack the Plowboy, spends half his time in going to a shop in our Market town, where they let out books to read with marble covers. And they sell paper with all manner of colours on the edges, and gim-cracks, and powder-puffs, and wash-balls.” One daughter rejects a good match because “he scorned to talk that palavering stuff which she had been used to in the marble covered books I told you of” (More, Works 133, 31, 41). Not for nothing did Bishop Porteus speak of More’s “spiritual quixotism” (quoted in Pedersen 87): the tract’s representation of novel renting and novel buying at once repeats the eighteenth-century novel’s embedding of romance reading and prefigures the nineteenth-century novel’s satire on tract distributing.

  On the other hand, middle-class novels are themselves haunted by the fear of turning into tracts—as when Herbert Pocket refuses even to call Pip by a name that “sounds like a moral boy out of the spelling-book, who was so lazy that he fell into a pond, or so fat that he couldn’t see out of his eyes, or so determined to go a-bird’s-nesting that he got himself eaten by bears who lived handy in the neighborhood” (Dickens, Great Expectations 165). The tracts represented in The Moonstone share the pseudo-orality of the frame narrative (“There was a precious publication to meet her eye, or to meet her hand, and to say with silent eloquence, in either case, ‘Come, try me! try me!’”) as well as its strategy of mixing the domestic with the sensational (W. Collins, The Moonstone 223). Titles like “Satan in the Hair Brush” and “THE SERPENT AT HOME” parody the sensation novel’s own obsession with “those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors” (H. James, “Miss Braddon” 593).

  Like tracts, too, sensation novels not only represent the home, but pervade it. Compare Trollope’s assertion (also in 1868) that novels are in “our library, our drawing-rooms, our bed-rooms, our kitchens,—and in our nurseries,” with Miss Clack’s campaign to “judiciously distribute [tracts] in the various rooms [Rachel] would be likely to occupy” (Anthony Trollope, “On English Prose Fiction” 108; W. Collins, The Moonstone 224). Earlier, Miss Clack attempted to ensure that a tract lies in wait “in every room that [Lady Verinder] enters,” an ambition that requires her to imagine—like the author of some domestic novel—what activities her victim will engage in over the course of an ordinary day:

  I slipped [one] under the sofa cushions, half in, and half out, close by her handkerchief, and her smelling-bottle. Every time her hand searched for either of these, it would touch the book; and, sooner or later (who knows?) the book might touch HER . . . In the drawing-room I found more cheering opportunities of emptying my bag. I disposed of another in the back drawing-room, under some unfinished embroidery, which I knew to be of Lady Verinder’s working . . . I put a book near the matches on one side, and a book under the box of chocolate drops on the other . . . But one apartment was still unexplored—the bath-room, which opened out of the bed-room. I peeped in; and the holy inner voice that never deceives, whispered to me, “You have met her, Drusilla, everywhere else; meet her at the bath, and the work is done.” (223–25)

  Miss Clack’s strategy recalls the Quarterly’s observation that novels “come to us when we are off our guard, and gain their place and position before we have fairly begun to discuss them” (“Recent Novels”). Both reach their readers by stealth, in the places of daily life rather than in the dedicated space of classroom, church, or library. Yet no classroom teacher who spends her life “assigning” works of literature—including, in my case, The Moonstone—can escape recognizing herself in Miss Clack.

  The tract doesn’t just resemble The Moonstone; in the opposite direction, it resembles the moonstone. The Evangelical spinster who sneaks into bedrooms to deposit books mirrors the Evangelical suitor who sneaks into bedrooms to remove jewels. Miss Clack’s reverse shoplifting anticipates the Religious Tract Society’s invocation of Fagin—or another RTS anecdote in which an atheist flees a coach to escape the exhortations of an Evangelical passenger, but “as he got down, the pocket of his coat gaped open, and, unperceived, his fellow-traveller quickly and quietly dropped into it Mr. Blackwood’s little book, Eternal Life” (N. Watts 7).

  What would it mean to model book distribution after pickpocketing? The parallel between Miss Clack and Mr. Ablewhite makes tracts look as anomalous as the eponymous diamond: it’s in people’s interest to acquire books and jewels, but to get rid of tracts and moonstones.24 Just as Sir John’s bequest of the diamond turns out to be motivated by malice masquerading as kindness, so Miss Clack’s and Lady Verinder’s attempts to force tracts onto one another reflect aggression misrepresente
d as generosity. The niece disguises printed matter as personal letters, copying out extracts by hand to elude Lady Verinder’s suspicions; the aunt, in turn, sends back the tracts disguised as a “legacy.” Once tract and moonstone exemplify a circulation driven by push rather than pull, then Christian charity becomes hard to distinguish from Hindu curse. And when printed matter is imagined as burden rather than boon, it becomes more appropriate for mistresses to give their young maids than for a poor relation to thrust upon her aunt.

  The two objects that The Moonstone places in parallel—printed matter so worthless, and exotic talismans so potent, that both need to be unloaded onto someone else—would eventually converge in the magic book that forms the subject of M. R. James’s 1911 short story “Casting the Runes.” To the extent that such a convoluted story can be summarized, its plot involves a scholar who gets into another researcher’s “bad books” by returning his conference proposal and finds himself on the receiving end of papers containing an ancient curse. Those papers pursue both indoors and out: a billboard on the tram, “a handful of leaflets such as are distributed to passers-by by agents of enterprising firms . . . thrust” into his hand on the street, “a calendar, such as tradesmen often send,” received by post, a paper that he never dropped returned to him in the British Library reading room. As the rarest of manuscripts becomes interchangeable with mass-produced junk mail, the claustrophobic intimacy of the library (where a scholar can penetrate the secrets of the anonymous reviewer at the next desk) becomes indistinguishable from the home whose door is now breached by a letter slot that any tradesman can penetrate, and the street where every passerby is exposed to billboards and leaflets (M. R. James 131, 42).25 As the plot that begins with an unwanted scholarly paper ends with unwanted paper of a more literal and dangerous kind, free print becomes reenchanted—as if a tract could bear a Hindu curse, or Martineau’s junk mail could not only inconvenience but poison its recipient.

  The more tracts look like the moonstone, however, the less they look like The Moonstone. Even if, as I suggested a moment ago, the two genres share their osmotic distribution mode and their formal strategy of mixing the domestic with the wild and the oral with the printed, they stand opposite each other in one crucial way. Those who love a novel want to hold onto it (even, like Betteredge, wearing out multiple copies); those who love a tract want to give it away. Miss Clack unloads books as surreptitiously as The Moonstone’s own readers acquired them: according to one observer, “even the porters and boys were interested in the story and read the new numbers in sly corners, with packs on their backs” (W. Collins, The Moonstone xxxviii). The force-feeding of tracts throws into relief the hunger for sensation fiction.

  Such hostility to religious tracts is hardly peculiar to the novel: Thackeray could vent his hatred just as easily through the medium of the sketch. But the representation of tract reading, or more precisely of the refusal to read tracts, took on a particular charge in this context, because the novel slotted the tract into the position traditionally occupied by a different embedded genre, the romance. Once fictional characters stop reading romances and start handling tracts, two things change. First, the novel can no longer define its own seriousness in contradistinction to the frivolity of the genre embedded within it. Second, embedded romance and embedded tract imply diametrically opposed models of how books reach their users. Framed by mass-distributed novels, embedded romances harked back to an earlier age of serendipitous individual finds: new novels rented out by circulating libraries represent dusty manuscripts whose price can be measured only in eyestrain. What distinguished frame narrative from framed genres in Don Quixote was that the latter never represented buying and selling; but what distinguishes embedded genres in the gothic is that they’re never bought or sold themselves. As we’ll see in the next chapter, found manuscripts obey an economics of scarcity: the candle gutters before the roll is finished, or the page is torn midsentence. In contrast, the tracts represented in mid-Victorian novels embody an economics of surplus: everywhere distributed and nowhere read, they substitute painful duties for guilty pleasures. That shift helps explain the novel’s particular animus toward nonmarket forms of distribution, whether tract societies, missionary baskets, or bazaars—all competitors to the secular, commercial networks on which its own dissemination depends.

  FORCE-READING

  The standard biography traces the genesis of Miss Clack to two Evangelical tract-distributors who targeted Collins during a vacation at Broadstairs with his mistress and illegitimate daughter (N. P. Davis 226). When juxtaposed with the other forms of information overload cataloged in the previous chapter, however, The Moonstone’s representation of tracts becomes harder to reduce to a localized expression of anticlericalism. In that context, its logic looks not just biographical but also generic (aimed at the Evangelical press’s ambivalent use of fiction) and economic (aimed at a particular mode of distribution).

  Particular but also pervasive: for what Collins take tracts to exemplify isn’t just religiosity, but any social arrangement that licenses one person to force a printed text onto the consciousness of others. His later novel Poor Miss Finch instances “that particular form of human persecution which is called reading aloud” in a character (unsurprisingly, a clergyman) who “inflicted his accomplishment on his family circle at every available opportunity”:

  Of what we suffered on these occasions, I shall say nothing. Let it be enough to mention that the rector thoroughly enjoyed the pleasure of hearing his own magnificent voice. There was no escaping Mr. Finch when the rage for “reading” seized on him. Now on one pretense, and now on another, he descended on us unfortunate women, book in hand; seated us at one end of the room; placed himself at the other; opened his dreadful mouth; and fired words at us, like shots at a target, by the hour together. Read what he might, he made such a noise and such a fuss over it. (W. Collins, Poor Miss Finch 132)

  The military metaphor echoes The Moonstone’s comparison of Miss Clack’s tract to a highwayman’s pistol.

  The listener doesn’t always lack power, of course, any more than the recipient of a free book does. The servants whom eighteenth-century gentry reduced to human audiobooks (standing behind their master’s chair with a book during meals or hairdressing) found themselves forced, a generation later, to listen to their masters read aloud godly books. Daughters, too, were enlisted alternately to read at their fathers’ sickbeds and to listen to their fathers reading family prayers. In fact, by broadening the audience being read to from “family” in the sense of biological kin to “family” in the sense of “household,” family prayers placed wives and children closer to servants than to the master of the house. Or, in some cases, to its mistress: when Trollope lumps Lady Amelia and Mr. Gazebee together with the footman—all three put to sleep by Lady Rosina’s reading—the speaker is clearly the winner; yet his novels draw little distinction between what it feels like to be read aloud to and what it feels like to have someone else read silently in your presence (Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington 386).

  In classroom or church, the audience is captive, the reader its captor. Florence Nightingale extended that logic to the drawing room in a series of rhetorical questions:

  Don’t you feel, when you are being read to, as if a pailful of water were being poured down your throat, which, but that it comes up again just as it goes down, would suffocate you? Very few swallow it at all; fewer still digest it. Many people like to read aloud; but how many can bear being read to without going to sleep? Yet everybody can’t be reading aloud . . . What is it to be “read aloud to”? The most miserable exercise of the human intellect. Or rather, is it any exercise at all? It is like lying on one’s back, with one’s hands tied and having liquid poured down one’s throat. (Nightingale, Cassandra 714, 213)26

  Compare a young girl’s diary entry from 1875: “Such a detestable evening, Grobee actually made a fuss because I was writing my journal while the reading was going on. He not only makes us read a d
ry, stupid old book (which we do willingly to please him) but forbids those who are not reading to do anything which prevents them from listening. It is really too bad. Why should we be forced to listen when we don’t want to? . . . No one may move or speak a word the whole evening—it is most dull” (Troubridge 125).

  Such accounts of domesticity draw on a tradition of comic writing that stretches back to Jane Collier’s Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753):

  The same indifference, also, you may put on, if [your husband] should be a man who loves reading . . . If, for instance, he desires you to hear one of Shakespeare’s plays, you may give him perpetual interruptions, by sometimes going out of the room, sometimes ringing the bell to give orders for what cannot be wanted till the next day; at other times taking notice (if your children are in the room), that Molly’s cap is awry, or that Jackey looks pale . . . If you have needle-work in your hands, you may be so busy in cutting out, and measuring one part with another, that it will plainly appear to your husband, that you mind not one word he reads. If all this teazes him enough to make him call on you for your attention, you may say, that indeed you have other things to mind besides poetry. (89)

  To listen is to submit to another’s power; like Trollope’s characters going to sleep, the wife resorts to passive resistance. Yet even Nightingale—whose leading questions can themselves be experienced as coercive—acknowledges that listening can also be experienced as parasitism: “women like something to tickle their ears and save them the trouble of thinking, while they have needlework in their hands. They like to be spared the ennui of doing nothing, without the labour of doing something” (Nightingale, Cassandra 74).