by Price, Leah
FOUND OBJECTS
I’d like to conclude by asking how economic history (in this case, the price of paper both new and used) relates to literary history (that is, to representations on—and of—paper). On the one hand, the raw material of books cheapened even over the period that this monograph covers, thanks to factors both political (the 1861 repeal of the paper tax) and technological (the spread of mechanization in the first decades of the nineteenth century and of rag substitutes in the last).31 Begun in serial form a year before wood pulp was commercially produced for the first time, London Labour appeared in full more than a decade later, once the new technology had established its viability. The wastepaper trade that Mayhew represents was on the verge of being destroyed by the increasing cheapness of new paper (“Traffic in Waste Paper” 135): the halving of its cost between 1840 and 1910 hit the waste trade harder than the trade in secondhand books (Weedon 67). As the price of its raw materials dropped, the book’s life span came to coincide with the text’s.
On the other hand, the late nineteenth-century drop in wastepaper’s market value is anticipated, within literature, by an early nineteenth-century decline in the power of fiction to imbue wastepaper with narrative value. If Mayhew’s scenes of miraculous cheese packaging draw on the language of contemporary religious tracts, those tracts borrow their fascination with wastepaper in turn from the fiction of a century earlier. Old paper is tracked through, or stars in the backstory of, almost every eighteenth-century subgenre: not just object narratives like Adventures of a Quire of Paper (1779), but epistolary novels, pseudomemoirs, and most of all gothic romance.
The trope receives its death blow only once Catherine Morland, coming across a manuscript in an old chest, is crestfallen to discover that “an inventory of linen, in coarse and modern characters, seemed all that was before her” (Austen, Northanger Abbey 134). So far, so quixotic: pages are to romance what paper is to the real. Don Quixote itself, readers will remember, traces its own pages to “waste papers” found by the narrator, not at a bookseller’s but in a silk merchant’s shop. In this universe, books may be burned but waste remains recuperable. In contrast, Austen’s refusal to quote the roll verbatim denies new life to old papers. Once Catherine convinces herself that no amount of framing can turn used paper back into usable text, illegibility becomes a guarantor of realism.
In narrowly literary-historical terms, Catherine’s awakening puts an end to framed narrative—the conceit that until that moment undergirded the novel in forms as various as interpolated tales and inset correspondences. Ian Duncan has incisively described the turn of the nineteenth century as a moment when “as ‘literature’ becomes a commercial object (a printed book for sale) it seeks to recuperate its ‘contexts,’ a lost world of organic relations of production, by representing itself as a relic of precapitalist origins” (Duncan, Scott’s Shadow 274) What Duncan shows for the shift from oral to written culture holds equally true within written culture for the shift from manuscript to print (better, the competition between the two)—or, more to the point for Mayhew, from recycled found objects to single-use manufactured books. Austen’s rejection of the gothic pivots less on the improbability of wife murder than on the outdatedness of narrative hand-me-downs. No longer can oral tales or handwritten letters be translated into print; no longer do readers situate themselves within a food chain. To the found objects of older fiction, Northanger Abbey opposes the manufactured goods of the circulating library; to dusty papers, the “ten or twelve” new novels that Catherine and Isabella Thorpe borrow before throwing aside. From Cervantes’s narrator onward, the figure who treasures wastepaper is a naïf; to be disillusioned is to accept that paper is mortal.
If realism is the fictional mode that grants finality to waste, London Labour would be “novelistic” not in the sense that’s usually supposed—that its reality effect depends on formal conventions borrowed from contemporary fiction—but, on the contrary, in that it shares the novel’s constitutive oscillation between the real and the romantic. The former finds its thematic corollary in a narrative of mortality, whether of humans or of papers; the latter, in the hope that characters can return from the grave, or papers from the grocery.
Of Mayhew’s series in the Morning Chronicle, Thackeray claimed that “readers of romance own they never read anything like it” ([W. M. Thackeray]). The title of the RTS’s internal history, The Romance of Tract Distribution, too, inscribed tracts within the plot of the discarded manuscript that finds readers as providentially as orphans find parents. The found manuscript trope is recycled by Mayhew’s brother Horace in Letters Left at the Pastrycook’s: Being the Clandestine Correspondence between Kitty Clover at School and her “Dear, Dear Friend” in Town (1853), whose contents are presented as a set of letters about to be sold for wastepaper. Framed by a reminiscence couched in terms of more durable media (“I had carefully noted down in the porcelain tablets of my recollection . . . ”), the letters themselves are punctuated by metaphors of paper put to nontextual uses: one character is described as having “hair the colour of blotting-paper”; another “felt I was going to be turned inside out, like a paper bag” (1, 29, 80, 48).
Expelled from the central tradition of British fiction as thoroughly as the wastepaper trope from book reviewing, the found manuscript migrates in two directions. One is the providentialism of religious tracts; the other is the closed economy of the detective novel. Natalka Freeland shows that the “conservation of information” governing mid-nineteenth-century detective fiction means that any document that a character tries to destroy will come back to haunt him: a pile of ashes will always turn out to contain fragments of a will; the contents of any wastebasket can be pieced together to form a letter (Freeland). That convention of trashy fiction finds its Evangelical counterpart in the “story of a man who tore up a tract in the face of a distributor on board a ship. Two fragments, however, were blown by the wind into the folds of his coat, which he was surprised to see on the cabin floor the next morning. On one fragment was the word ‘God,’ on the other ‘Eternity’” (N. Watts 9). Where D’Israeli tells us that destruction is easy and preservation is difficult, detective novel and tract alike suggest just the reverse.
A mechanistic model of the relation between literary history and economic history might lead us to expect a four-part correlation: the found manuscript trope should decline in tandem with the price of paper, and the wastepaper trope should disappear from book reviewing once paper comes to be discarded rather than repurposed.32 Certainly the practice of reading old papers seems to have declined over the course of the nineteenth century. David Vincent has argued that “the spread of literature and cheap literacy in the nineteenth century represented a shift for the bulk of the population from rereading to reading. It became acceptable for the first time to throw print away before every word had been perused” (The Rise of Mass Literacy 103). What’s more crucial for our purposes is that it became acceptable for the first time to throw print away after every word had been perused: that is, that reading material was no longer designed with “after-uses” in mind.
If we look at the representation of wastepaper, however, no such story emerges. Neither found manuscripts and legible grocery wrapping, nor the pastry-cook and the trunk-maker, disappear. Instead, both tropes adapt: the latter, as I suggested, by subsiding into the metaphor of the bibliographer as servant, and the former, I want to argue now, by migrating into stories of childhood. On the one hand, stories for children are now framed as found manuscripts: thus manuscripts conspire with oral tradition to eclipse the printed form of Hans Christian Andersen’s tales, introduced as something fished out of a barrel (“Auntie Toothache”) or unwrapped from a piece of cheese (“The Goblin and the Huckster”) (Andersen 1096, 457). On the other, stories about children rely on the serendipitous or even providential discovery of books or papers discarded by adults. Remember the antiprovidential language in Anne Mozley’s assertion that any child “will surely find that the book thus influe
ntial came to him by a sort of chance, through no act of authority or intention” (195). Such “chances” shade into something more like a miracle, however, when Edmund Gosse associates found manuscripts with the “wonder” of childhood, describing the skin-trunk and hat-box that he came across in (cue to Copperfield) the lumber room:
The hat-box puzzled me extremely, till one day, asking my Father what it was, I got a distracted answer which led me to believe that it was itself a sort of hat, and I made a laborious but repeated effort to wear it. The skin-trunk was absolutely empty, but the inside of the lid of it was lined with sheets of what I now know to have been a sensational novel. It was, of course, a fragment, but I read it, kneeling on the bare floor, with indescribable rapture . . . This ridiculous fragment filled me with delicious fears; I fancied that my Mother, who was out so much, might be threatened by dangers of the same sort; and the fact that the narrative came abruptly to an end, in the middle of one of its most thrilling sentences, wound me up to almost a disorder of wonder and romance. (51)
What unites the trunk with the box is the child’s confusion of insides with outsides. In both cases, he treats container as content. (A leather book is traditionally more legible than a skin-trunk.) Gosse implies that one would need to be a child—in fact, a child of a generation ago, brought up by religious fundamentalists—to find “wonder and romance” in an empty trunk.
For Gosse as for Dickens, romance isn’t just a textual mode: it’s also a distribution method (accident), a setting (the lumber room), and a medium (waste). Its prelapsarian model of reading is premised on a providential model of circulation: if the pages are cut out, so is the middleman. Or indeed middlewomen like Gosse’s own mother, whose tract writing and tract distributing are described a page earlier with the caveat that “I would not for a moment let it be supposed that I regard her as a Mrs. Jellyby”: the author of “a tract, called ‘The Guardsman of the Alma,’ of which I believe that more than half a million copies were circulated,” reappears as a character in either a gothic romance (the genre with which tracts compete) or a modern novel in which tracts are ridiculed.
The parallelism between box wearing and trunk reading produces another, subtler, effect. The comic mode of the former—the deadpan “laborious but repeated” juxtaposed with the image of a boy with a box on his head—can’t help rubbing off on the latter. “What I now know” marks a distance between naive child and world-weary narrator that bears more resemblance to the gap separating narrator from heroine in Northanger Abbey than child from adult in David Copperfield. Where Dickens pictures the child reading less into books than would an adult—”whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me”—Gosse and Austen show the child reading something into them that the adult narrator knows was never there.
With one crucial difference: while Northanger Abbey reveals a laundry list where we expected to find a story, Gosse gives us a story in place of the clothing that we expect to find in a trunk. In early modern satire as in book reviewing, found manuscripts signify realism: the humbling truths of embodiment and mortality, whether of persons or of papers. In a world where wastepaper has lost its economic value, however, found manuscripts can also, on the contrary, mark “wonder” and “romance.” As accident gives way to miracle, Catherine Morland’s naïveté is replaced by David Copperfield’s innocence. More specifically, where Catherine is excessively enmeshed in genre (in this case, the gothic), the children in the later narratives stand blissfully outside of it. The young Gosse doesn’t even recognize “what I now know to have been a sensational novel,” any more than the young David can identify “a cheap series of reprints then in course of publication.” It’s not enough to share the ignorance that characters within romance model (not to know, for example, that innkeepers get paid); closer to home, romance can’t withstand the knowledge that books themselves are for sale. Yet Austen forbids us even to feel nostalgia for an age where found manuscripts crowded out bought books. Even the progression from a “roll . . . of trifling size” to a triple-decker’s telltale compression of pages is undercut, in turn, by Catherine’s disappointment that what looked like a scroll is really more like a codex: “she now plainly saw that she must not expect a manuscript of equal length with the generality of what she had shuddered over in books, for the roll, seeming to consist entirely of small disjointed sheets, was . . . much less than she had supposed it to be” (137; my emphasis).
WRAPPING UP
If some materials are more renewable than others, some genres are more rereadable. Artificial safeguards are needed to prevent fashion-books from being recycled, but literary texts remain quotable; the ephemerality of laundry lists provides a foil for the timelessness of the novel that frames them.
[Catherine] seized another sheet, and saw the same articles with little variation; a third, a fourth, and a fifth presented nothing new. Shirts, stockings, cravats and waistcoats faced her in each. Two others, penned by the same hand, marked an expenditure scarcely more interesting, in letters, hair-powder, shoe-string and breeches-ball. (Austen, Northanger Abbey 134)
Where Catherine Morland fails to turn laundry list into story, Austen’s critics have succeeded—through stories about the reality effect, about money, about women’s domestic oppression. Equivalent operations could be performed upon London Labour: a reader could notice, for example, that the sheet of paper contains a list of sheets, or that for Austen’s narrator as for Mayhew’s flypaper manufacturer, the word “article” doesn’t refer to an essay.33 In that McLuhanesque reasoning, Austen’s reference to “a roll of paper” would tip us off to the fact that the “inventory of linen” is literally of linen—manufactured from recycled rags, as the Spectator reminds us, themselves produced by the washing described. If Catherine finds “nothing new” on the page, the explanation may be that its material is secondhand.
The language that conveys Catherine’s disappointment in the found manuscript mirrors the language that earlier described critics’ disapproval of novels—their “talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans” (Austen, Northanger Abbey 21). If that image is to be believed, novels no sooner emerge from the “press” than they become “threadbare”: the moment between production and disposal dwindles to a vanishing point. Northanger Abbey reverses that time line and rehabilitates the “threadbare,” making the exposure of the textile’s grid an image for the laying bare of textual devices. Like the cabinetmaker’s wife turning wrapping back into reading, Austen fishes the cliché of the found manuscript out of the dustbin of literary history.
Even as fashions change (whether in sartorial style or literary conventions), materials endure. Such, at least, is the principle linking the laundry list that appears at the end of the novel to the dialogue with which the novel begins.
“And pray, sir, what do you think of Miss Morland’s gown?”
“It is very pretty, madam,” said he, gravely examining it; “but I do not think it will wash well; I am afraid it will fray . . . But then you know, madam, muslin always turns to some account or other; Miss Morland will get enough out of it for a handkerchief, or a cap, or a cloak. Muslin can never be said to be wasted.” (14)
In this analysis, the end of the novel would force us to cycle back to the beginning, as if to test whether its text is as disposable as a laundry list or as reusable as a length of muslin. Once the question of how muslin will wear gives way to the question of whether the clock can be turned back on the telltale compression of pages, the novel’s structure mimics the passage from clothing to books that defines the life cycle of linen. What Mayhew says of Harpagon’s coat holds true for the novel: in a mirror image of Gosse’s “laborious . . . effort” to wear a hatbox, “the outer part becomes the inner.”
Yet to notice the movement from cloth to paper, or from content to form, would be to ignore the lesson that the scene so painfully impresses on Catherine. The critical urge to transmute empty surfaces into hidden depths—beginning with the two-dimensional pla
ne of the page—replicates Catherine’s faith that the most throwaway document will repay interpretation. Perhaps the more throwaway the better: a dusty manuscript “bangs” a circulating-library novel just as rusty knives sell best (according to one of Mayhew’s informants) because “folks like to clean up a thing theirselves, and it’s as if it was something made from their own cleverness” (2:11). In Mayhew’s scrap heap, found objects outlast manufactured goods. Once interviews become “more novel, curious and interesting” than fiction, then recycling begins to look like a name for reading.
Rags to riches, or at least rags to text: the fantasy that nothing lies outside the realm of interpretation was as crucial to semiotics in the twentieth century as to the gothic in the eighteenth. No cultural artifact too nonverbal to be metaphorically “read”; no butter wrapping too smelly to be reinvested with legibility. Unfortunately, most scholars’ experience approximates Catherine Morland’s or the costermonger’s more closely than a gothic heroine’s or the cabinetmaker’s. The laundry lists that we find in the archive refuse to yield stories. Nor do volumes in rare-book libraries tell as much about previous handlers as do the heroes of it-narrative. Seeking marginalia, we see uncut pages; craving ink marks, we find drink stains.
Blackstone’s Commentaries famously claimed that “the identity of a literary composition consists intirely in the sentiment and the language,” while “the paper and print are merely accidents” by which “that composition [is ‘conveyed’] to the ear or eye of another.” In Mayhew’s world, texts reach readers thanks not to intentions but to side effects. Instead of food stains rendering the page illegible, the paper’s usability as fish wrap ensures the transmission of text. As a result, Mayhew’s characters don’t just have the ears and eyes that Blackstone mentions; he also endows them with noses.34 Although the mention of “a once perfumed love-note” reminds us that papers lose some of their sensory attributes as they age, the persistence of excremental humor points in the opposite direction, toward a materiality that intensifies over time. As the items listed in a “West-End Perfumer’s” account books lose their fragrance, the books themselves accrue smells.
