How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  ‘Mrs—[it is not easy to judge whether the flourished letters are ‘Mrs.’ or ‘Miss,’ but certainly more like ‘Mrs.’] Mrs.—(Zoological Artist) presents her compliments to Mr.—, and being commissioned to communicate with a gentleman of the name, recently arrived at Charing-cross, and presumed by description to be himself, in a matter of delicacy and confidence, indispensably verbal; begs to say, that if interested in the ecclaircissement and necessary to the same, she may be found in attendance, any afternoon of the current week, from 3 to 6 o’clock, and no other hours. (2:114)

  The “however” that singles out the quotable exception from the illegible mass also substitutes reproduction for description. Once the roman à clef breaks in on an economic tract, wastepaper becomes hard to distinguish from used books. As always with London Labour, it would be easy to tabulate the stylistic tricks that make this passage so novelistic: the ostentatious substitution of blanks for names; the silver-fork gesture toward a West End address; the hints of “delicacy” and “confidence”; and, of course, the speculation over the marital status of the owner of the “elegant, and I presume female” hand. But what makes this passage novelistic is ultimately less a stylistic or even thematic toolbox than the faith that a legible narrative can be assembled from a pile of “dull and common-place” letters. As an article on wastepaper declares in an Evangelical magazine, “Of waste paper it may truly be said ‘Resurgam’; it undergoes processes of apparent destruction only to rise Phoenix-like from its ashes—or rather pulp” (“Waste Paper” 419). In the miraculous logic that makes Mayhew’s pages touch the heart of any literary critic, entropy can always be reversed.23

  In their own perverse way, even Mayhew’s infidel informants draw on the parable of the sower. When he cites a pickpocket as authority for the report that tracts are good to light pipes with, he borrows the logic that classical satire bequeaths to the book reviews where a social inferior is pictured disposing of competing publications.24 Yet Mayhew’s mention of pipe lighting draws as much on Evangelical literature as on the classical tradition. One RTS account compares handing out tracts to “casting pearls before swine,” explaining that “what grieved me was, to see these tracts torn in pieces before my eyes, to light pipes with” (Jones 169). Another Evangelical magazine acknowledges that “cautious ministers have shaken their heads, and told stories of the burning of Bibles, and Testaments, and tracts; and how the priest got them, and sold them for waste paper; and even that they have received their butter from the shops wrapped in pages of the Bible. The soldiers, they admit, receive them freely, but it is because the size of the paper exactly suits for making cigarettes”; yet these misuses disseminate good books among precisely those populations that would not seek them out to read (Manning). A third tract recounts that “an enterprising grocer had picked up and appropriated to himself the Bible which the priest had thrown away, and had thought to turn to good account the large leaves of the book, and so he had wrapped up his wares—his soap and cheese and candles—in the leaves which he tore out”; as customers unwrapped their groceries, they read and were converted (Borrett White 126). As the American Tract Society explains, “If made waste paper of, as some of them are and will be, even in that state the scattered leaves of the Bible, or of other religious books have been made, and will continue to be made, the means of exciting serious and godly thoughts” (Annual Report of the American Tract Society 130). One 1885 sermon praises “the enterprise of Andrew Fuller and some others along ago, who printed hymns upon papers which were to be used in the sale of cottons and other small wares . . . I knew a friend who in purchasing his tobacco found it done up in a passage of the Word of God, and, by the perusal of that portion, became a converted man” (R. Stewart). Dispersal didn’t need to mean disposal: in some cases, it could become the most effective means for the providential spread of the Word.

  Administrators of free libraries after 1850 translated the tension between preservation and circulation into a secular, civic register. Over a decade after the Public Libraries Act, when Edward Edwards set out to attack fellow librarians who put the needs of books above the interests of borrowers, his language became at once mock-antiquarian and mock-blasphemous: a library that reduces the “public stock of learning” into an “exclusive” closed-stack collection was “a talent digged in the ground,” “an idol to be respected and worshipped for a raritie by an implicite faith, without anie benefit to those who did esteam it far off.”25 Love of the text can shade into idolatry toward the book, or reverence be coded as coolness.

  Sowing or digging into the ground: the broadcast metaphor remains ambiguous. Even disasters far worse than finding bible pages wrapped around Indian food can be a blessing in disguise: one missionary shipwrecked in 1814 off the African coast consoles himself for the natives’ seizure of his goods by reflecting that “my having been cast away, may perhaps be the saving of many of those into whose hands these Bibles have fallen, or shall fall in the future” (Howsam 150).26 The Wesleyan Magazine observes that

  in three days 2000 Chinese Gospels and more than a hundredweight of the Scriptures in Mongolian were disposed of to Chinamen, Mongols, and Mohammedans, thus securing their distribution over vast tracts of country. Even where the book sold fails to interest the purchaser, it by no means follows that it is lost. Among the men who have come to crave further teaching concerning “the way of life,” one was questioned as to how he had received his Christian books; he replied that he had bought them from an old woman who was selling them as waste paper. Some men buy every book that is published, and study them all. One such bought ninety books and tracts from Dr. Edkins, of the London Mission at Peking, and by the time he had got through them all, he was so thoroughly convinced of the folly of idol-worship that he pronounced sentence of death on the whole regiment of his domestic idols, numbering nearly a hundred, and representing a ton weight of copper! (“Pioneer Work in China” 902)

  The trope of wastepaper miraculously turning back into legible text is undercut, however, by the parallel linking “a hundredweight of the Scriptures” with the comparison to copper. Measurement by weight restores the very materiality that the anecdote tries to leach out of wastepaper. Like Edwards, Mayhew translates the trope of broadcasting from a religious to an economic register. Where the it-narrative once shifted its voice box from coins to bibles, exalting the commercial providentialism of the hidden hand into an Evangelical defense of circulation, Mayhew now makes circulation in the marketplace the source of paper’s mysterious power.

  Evangelicals’ faith in self-propelling paper could just as easily be borrowed by infidel radicals, like William Hone, who traced his political beliefs to a scrap of a description of Lilburne happened upon at the cheesemonger’s. The attorney general explained at the trial of The Rights of Man that there had been no reason to prosecute Part I, whose audience was limited, but that Part II was “thrust into the hands of subjects of all descriptions, even children’s sweetmeats being wrapped in it” (Nelson 227). In Memoirs of Modern Philosophers—itself framed as a found manuscript—Bridgetina is corrupted by a proof sheet of Godwin’s Political Justice wrapped around her mother’s snuff: “Notwithstanding the frequent fits of sneezing it occasioned, from the quantity of snuff contained in every fold, I greedily devoured its contents. I read and sneezed, and sneezed and read” (Hamilton and Grogan 176). In a novel that exemplifies the battle between everyday truths and pernicious abstractions by comparing the mother’s knowledge of cookery with the daughter’s of books, the association of pages with groceries reminds us of their radical authors’ social inferiority.

  London Labour itself lumps tracts together with every other form of free—and therefore worthless—print: the difference between bibles and advertisements disappears when “sham indecent” packets are described as being stuffed with “a religious tract, or a slop-tailor’s puff” (1:241). Political tracts prove as hard to get rid of as religious tracts: “the anti-Corn-Law League paper, called the Bread Basket, could only
be got off by being done up in a sealed packet, and sold by patterers as a pretended improper work” (1:241). Free tracts, junk mail, bill sticking: Mayhew testifies to a moment when the auditory overload of early modern cities was giving way to the curse of cheap paper.

  WELL-WORN PAGES

  That shift forms part of a larger economic story. By bracketing books with humbler objects, London Labour also places the falling price of paper in the context of a general decline in the life span of manufactured goods. Mayhew registers the extent to which, for books as for other commodities, disposability was beginning to replace secondhandedness as the sign of cheapness. What made an object cheap was no longer that it had been repurposed in the past (think of “the unmistakable look of much of the attire of his class, that it was not made for the wearer”), but that it lacked the potential to be recycled in the future.

  Such disposability characterizes “slop-goods,” whose flimsy fabrics (in the case of clothes) or rosewood veneers (in furniture) place them opposite Mayhew’s own “history of a people, from the lips of the people themselves . . . in their own ‘unvarnished’ language.” The more immediate their appeal to buyers, the more probable that their first owner will be their last: one used-clothes vendor insists that a secondhand cloak “always bangs a slop . . . because it was good to begin with” (2:41). Mayhew gives the best lines to secondhand sellers and buyers, distancing himself from “clerks and shopmen . . . often tempted by the price, I was told, to buy some wretched new slop thing rather than a superior coat second-hand” (2:29). When Mayhew pits mended goods against manufactured “slops,” an older culture in which clothes provided what Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones call the “materials of memory” meets planned obsolescence.27

  In 1854, Charles Knight compared the shortsightedness of the previous century’s booksellers to the shortsightedness of contemporaneous fishmongers who destroyed their surplus at the end of each day rather than sell it at half-price: “The dealers in fish had not recognized the existence of a class who would buy for their suppers what the rich had not taken for their dinners . . . The fishmongers had not discovered that the price charged to the evening customers had no effect of lowering that of the morning. Nor had the booksellers discovered that there were essentially two, if not more, classes of customers for books—those who would have the dearest and the newest, and those who were content to wait till the gloss of novelty had passed off, and good works became accessible to them, either in cheaper reprints, or in ‘remainders’ reduced in price” (The Old Printer and the Modern Press 225–26). William St Clair has shown how strongly the age of texts determined the price of books: texts published in the nineteenth century remained inaccessible to early nineteenth-century readers (St Clair). His point about new texts could be extended to new books—and a fortiori to new periodicals. This is a question not just of copyright, however, but also of fashion: when a commentator in 1871 remarks that “thirty-shilling novels are sold for three shillings” once circulating libraries experience no more demand for them, the explanation has nothing to do with intellectual property (Friswell 522). Newspapers decline most steeply in value, of course: as Richard Altick explains, newspapers rented out as many as seventy times on the day of their publication could then be sent to country subscribers who paid threepence for a copy mailed on the day of publication but only two for one mailed the following day. In a town described by Altick in 1799, the London Courier passed from the surgeon, to a French émigré, to the Congregational minister, to the druggist, to a schoolmaster, to a sergemaker, and so on (R. Altick 323; see also Colclough 266). Yet these transactions were not unique to political news: like clothes, magazines, too, were handed from mistress to maid (Beetham, “In Search of the Historical Reader” 98): both lost value according to a cycle that had less to do with their material durability than with the short shelf life of fashion.

  The life cycle that fashion plates share with fashionable clothes reminds us that what holds for textiles applies to texts as well. The nineteenth-century book trade formed a key site in the struggle between an economy that paired high prices with a succession of multiple users, and an economy that produced cheap single-use goods. Until the 1890s, as we know, the distribution mechanisms of fiction reflected a trade-off between short- and long-term popularity. On both sides of the Atlantic, publishers balanced their backlist of steady sellers (reference books, schoolbooks, bibles) against novels whose sales spiked in the year following publication. In the United States, this meant large print runs produced so cheaply as to be disposable; in Britain, it meant circulating libraries that saved subscribers from being stuck with stockpiles of last season’s best sellers.

  Natalka Freeland has shown that the second strategy was what allowed fiction to exemplify an emerging culture of built-in obsolescence: the novel in general, and the detective novel in particular, are defined by resistance to rereading.28 Books in general, and novels and periodicals in particular, come to epitomize a trickle-down economy. In fact, Simon Eliot has shown that books descended the social scale not only from individual to individual, but also from institution to institution. In the public sector, bigger metropolitan libraries off-loaded their old best sellers to smaller provincial libraries; in the private sector, Mudie’s resold books and magazines that had been lent out, sometimes as little as a month old (“Circulating Libraries in the Victorian Age and After” 131, 139). Like the protagonists of eighteenth-century it-narratives, nineteenth-century books moved across—or rather down—the social scale. In the process, they mirrored the less concrete movement of texts from library-issue triple-decker to cheap reprint.

  Slops are to castoffs as best sellers to chapbooks. That analogy between clothes and pages requires no ingenuity on my part: it was a well-worn one (as Sartor Resartus still testifies) for anyone writing or reading before wood pulp.29 Paper came from cloth and borrowed the language of cloth; both are metonymically referred to as “prints.” Conversely, Dickens brings the manufacturing process full circle by comparing old clothes to parchment: in A Tale of Two Cities, the shoemaker’s “poor tatters of clothes, had, in a long seclusion from direct light and air, faded down to such a dull uniformity of parchment-yellow,” and in “Meditations in Monmouth-Street” “there was the man’s whole life written as legibly on those clothes, as if we had his autobiography engrossed on parchment before us” (A Tale of Two Cities 43; Sketches by Boz 78). The analogy gains weight from the geography that Mayhew describes: Holywell Street, off the Strand, was the center both for the sale of dirty books and for Jewish rag-traders (Nead 178).

  One slum that Mayhew visits contains clotheslines “on which hung . . . handkerchiefs looking like soiled and torn paper” (2:89). The flypaper maker’s room, too, reminds him of “a washerwoman’s back-yard, with some thousands of red pocket-handkerchiefs suspended in the air . . . I had to duck my head down, and creep under the forest of paper strips rustling above us . . . A pile of entire newspapers was here brought out, and all of them coloured red on one side, like the leaves of the books in which gold-leaf is kept” (3:31). In a different study of London, he accuses readers of “dig[ging] their scissors into [my] results, taking care to do with them the same as is done with the stolen handkerchiefs in Petticoat Lane—viz., pick out the name of the owner.”30 Such analogies weave the author’s stylistic signature (as needlework or as watermark) into what might otherwise look like others’ words. In the process, they equate the repetition of words with the recycling of fibers. Although the section devoted to sellers and buyers of secondhand goods begins, “In commencing a new volume . . . ” (2:1), the description of rag-buyers that follows will remind us that no volume is entirely new, either in its material form or in its verbal content.

  The rise of extensive wearing signals the fall of intensive reading. Mayhew couldn’t yet have predicted the technological changes that papermaking would undergo in the decades following, but what he did sense was a cultural and economic shift toward limiting goods to a single owner. Mayh
ew’s liveliest informants tend to share his nostalgia for that older dispensation; thus one complains that customers who disdain the secondhand trade are

  often green, and is had by ‘vertisements, and bills, and them books about fashions which is all over both country and town. Do you know, sir, why them there books is always made so small? The leaves is about four inches square. That’s to prevent their being any use as waste paper. I’ll back a coat such as is sometimes sold by a gentleman’s servant to wear out two new slops. (2:29)

  Remember Chadwick campaigning to scale down blue books to an octavo less negotiable on the resale market, or missionaries in Madras printing tiny books to avoid tempting recipients to put them to base uses. The imaginary fight on which this vendor bets isn’t just between one kind of clothes and another; it’s also between two kinds of book about clothes. On one side, artificial safeguards against resale unite fashion-books with the goods that they advertise; on the other, Mayhew himself invokes an old play to explain how cloth can be renewed. The dealer’s attack on four-inch books is prefaced by an antiquarian digression:

  In the last century, I may here observe, . . . when woollen cloth was much dearer, much more substantial, and therefore much more durable, it was common for economists to have a good coat “turned.” It was taken to pieces by the tailor and re-made, the inner part becoming the outer. This mode prevailed alike in France and England: for Molière makes his miser, Harpagon, magnanimously resolve to incur the cost of his many-years’-old coat being “turned,” for the celebration of his expected marriage with a young and wealthy bride. (2:29)

  The quotation marks around “turned” draw our attention to Mayhew’s own reuse of an old text—the same one mentioned ten sheets of paper earlier among the uncut copies of “Shakespeare, Molière, [and] Bibles . . . found in the insatiate bag of the waste collector.” Mayhew’s Molière has been cut—and not for tailor’s measures, either. Although the pages that hawk slop-goods can’t even be torn off for wrapping, the texts that describe mended clothes can still be reproduced a century and a half later.