How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  8. Mitch traces popular literacy to the growth of a national sport network made possible in turn by the growth of railways and telegraphs. Betting spurred interest in sporting news and sales of newspapers: “Many a man made the breakthrough to literacy by studying the pages of the One O’ Clock” (quoted in David Mitch, The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992], 60–61).

  CHAPTER 1

  READER’S BLOCK

  1. See, e.g., Robert Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau,” The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London: Allen Lane, 1984); for a suggestive analogy in the visual arts, see James Elkins, Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (New York: Routledge, 2001).

  2. As Ina Ferris observes, “the history of the book remains primarily oriented toward a history of publishing, so that books function mainly as physical units available to empirical study and description (verbal, statistical, graphic, etc.), while its model of history (like that of most historicisms) privileges the parameters of production.” Ina Ferris, “Introduction,” Romantic Libraries (College Park: University of Maryland, 2004).

  3. See, e.g., Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), and William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, Material Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); for a survey of the field, Leah Price, “Reading: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 7 (2004).

  4. Other models to which mine is indebted include what Mark McGurl describes (with a keen sense of its ironies) as “philistine literary criticism,” and the approach to media studies that Lisa Gitelman (borrowing from Alfred Gell) calls “methodological philistinism”: Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 19–20.

  5. On the competing metaphors, see G. N. Cantor, Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, 45 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1.

  6. See also Roger Chartier’s distinction between “heteronomous but nonetheless interconnected forms of logic—the ones that organize utterances and the ones that command action and behavior.” Roger Chartier, ed., On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language and Practices (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1. Thomas Richards points out that it’s in this period that the meaning of “reading” expands from the interpretation of texts to the indication of graduated instruments. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 18.

  7. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 605, 263, 81, 636. On this passage, see also Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 232.

  8. The article dates to 1991; I owe the reference to Richard Biernacki, “Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History,” Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Avery Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 74. See also Mark A. Schneider, “Culture-as-Text in the Work of Clifford Geertz,” Theory and Society 16.6 (1987) on the conflation of “culture” with “text,” or Ian Hunter’s critique of “the imperative to expand the esthetic concept of culture . . . to all social activities and relations,” Ian Hunter, “Setting Limits to Culture,” New Formations 2 (Spring 1988): 115, or Bourdieu’s claim that “to read a ritual—which is something like a dance—as if it were discursive and could be expressed in mathematical terms is to transform it profoundly.” Todd W. Reeser and Steven D. Spalding, “Reading Literature/Culture: A Translation of ‘Reading as a Cultural Practice,’” Style 36.4 (2002): 664. Hayden White charges that “the interpretation of cultural phenomena is regarded merely as a special case of the act of reading, in which the manipulation and exchange of signs is carried out most self-consciously, the act of reading literary texts.” Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 262. The emphasis might usefully be placed instead on “literary texts.”

  9. On the place of smell in book history, see Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” PMLA 121 (2006): 526.

  10. I borrow the term “deflation” from Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). See also Mary Poovey’s argument that “our modern interpretational habits typically track at too high a level of abstraction to give [material vessels] their due”; and David Greetham’s argument that if mid-twentieth-century “textual activity could be called Platonist, then the postmodern descriptive mode might be seen as Aristotelian.” Mary Poovey, “The Limits of the Universal Knowledge Project: British India and the East Indiamen,” Critical Inquiry 31.1 (2004): 183–202; 202. David Greetham, “What Is Textual Scholarship?” A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Pub., 2007), 29.

  11. Matthew Brown argues that the one category of object that scholars of material culture shy away from is the book. Even their successors, “thing theorists” like Bill Brown, ask how books represent things, not how books are things (Harvard Humanities Center talk, 2007). See, however, Bill Brown, “Introduction: Textual Materialism,” PMLA 125.1 (2010).

  12. See, e.g. (among many possible examples), Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture; Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997); Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to the Scarlet Letter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002); Pamela Thurschwell, “Henry James and Theodora Bosanquet: On the Typewriter, in the Cage, at the Ouija Board,” Textual Practice 13 (1999); Lawrence S. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998); Robert J. Mayhew, “Materialist Hermeneutics, Textuality and the History of Geography: Print Spaces in British Geography, c. 1500–1900,” Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007). Kate Flint performs such a move in the Victorian period itself, asking what happens to our metaphor of texts “transporting” readers when those readers (or, one might add, those texts) are being very literally transported—on a train, for example. Kate Flint, The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature, ed. Rachel Ablow (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 28–29.

  13. See, e.g., Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York: Viking, 1977), 389. For other examples of nineteenth-century dummy books, see H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 134–35.

  14. See also Charlotte Allen, “Indecent Disposal: Where Academic Books Go When They Die,” Lingua Franca 5.4 (1995).

  15. See John Plotz’s argument that the book is defined by the tension between its “metonymic” and “metaphoric” powers—functions that correspond to the two poles that I call “material form” and “verbal content.” John Plotz, “Out of Circulation: For and Against Book Collecting,” Southwest Review 84.4 (1999): 472.

  16. The corresponding scene in the parallel subplot comes when Rebecca interrupts her singing to burn a letter from her lover. Asked why the music has stopped, she answers in a voice that echoes the narrator’s, or rather the captioner’s: “it’s a false note.” William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ed. Peter L. Shillingsburg (New York: Norton, 1994
), 113. At the other end of the narrative, once financial exchanges have replaced amorous ones, the roles are reversed: Rawdon himself hopes to “wrap a ball in the note”—this time, a banknote—“and kill Steyne with it.” Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 539.

  17. William Makepeace Thackeray, “The Memoirs of Mr. C. J. Yellowplush,” Christmas Books; Snobs and Ballads (New York: Metropolitan Publishing Company), 292, 288. For a very different argument about Victorian literalization, see Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 29–30.

  18. Thanks to Nick Dames for sharpening my thinking on this point.

  19. In The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson (1862), Trollope returns to the theme: the narrator is rudely told, “You’ve been making out all these long stories about things that never existed, but what’s the world the better for it;—that’s what I want to know. When a man makes a pair of shoes—” Anthony Trollope, The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 214.

  20. Marian Evans, too, opens a slashing review of Lord Brougham’s Lives of Men of Letters by asking readers what they would think of a wealthy amateur pretending to make boots. George Eliot, “J. A. Froude’s The Nemesis of Faith,” Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings, ed. Nicholas Warren (London: Penguin, 1990), 265. For the relationship of shoes to intellectuals, see also Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. Andrew Parker (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 67–69, and “Political Shoemakers,” in E. J. Hobsbawm, Workers: Worlds of Labor, 1st American ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), esp. 107.

  21. James Lackington, Memoirs of the First Forty-Five Years of the Life of James Lackington, Bookseller (1791; 1792), reprinted in Paul Keen, Revolutions in Romantic Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture, 1780–1832 (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2004), 48.

  22. John Ruskin, The Political Economy of Art (London: Dent, 1968), 39.

  23. George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 43, 125; see also Janice Radway, “Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor,” Book Research Quarterly 2 (1986). On food as metaphor in this period more generally, see Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005).

  24. Cp. Mary Jean Corbett’s argument that “masculine authorship requires women’s domestic labor.” Mary Jean Corbett, Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 63.

  25. I am indebted here to Regenia Gagnier’s account of an “abstract individualism” that emerged in the nineteenth century in opposition to “material conditions and social environment.” Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 39.

  26. Discussing nineteenth-century thinkers’ tendency to take reading as an exemplar of automaticity, Deidre Lynch cites Erasmus Darwin’s Zoomania (1796), where the words “PRINTING PRESS” are followed by a passage asking readers whether they noticed the shape and size of the thirteen letters or simply conjured up a mental image of the “most useful of modern inventions.” Deidre Lynch, “Canon’s Clockwork: Novels for Everyday Use,” At Home in English: A Cultural History of the Love of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

  27. My discussion exemplifies—for better and worse—what Ian Hunter has called a “European university metaphysics” characterized by the tension between “an infinite, atemporal, self-active, world-creating intellect, and a finite, ‘duplex’ (intellectual-corporeal) worldly being.” Ian Hunter, “The History of Theory,” Critical Inquiry 33.1 (2006): 98. I am indebted, too, to Ina Ferris’s critique of “a long-standing European tradition of looking through actual books to an immaterial ‘wisdom’ they make available to readers, usually understood (as here) primarily as ‘intellectual beings.’” Ferris, “Bibliographic Romance: Bibliophilia and the Book-Object,” Romantic Libraries.

  28. In Catherine Gallagher’s pithy formulation, “print paradoxically gave material evidence for a text surpassing all copies.” Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 65.

  29. Compare Garrett Stewart’s argument that “reading dematerializes signs on the way to its imagined scene.” Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 118.

  30. For a fuller discussion, see Price, “Reading: The State of the Discipline.”

  31. Victorianists became interested in reading before scholars in many other fields, and the result is a rich body of secondary literature, stretching from the period itself up to the present, to which this book is everywhere indebted. See especially (in addition to studies cited elsewhere in this book) Robert K. Webb, The British Working Class Reader, 1790–1848: Literacy and Social Tension (London: Allen & Unwin, 1955); Guinevere Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970); John Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Robert Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); Scott Bennett, “Revolutions in Thought: Serial Publication and the Mass Market in Reading,” The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, ed. Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982); Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Laurel Brake, “Literary Criticism in Victorian Periodicals,” Yearbook of English Studies 16 (1986); Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Margaret Diane Stetz, “Life’s ‘Half-Profits’: Writers and Their Readers in Fiction of the 1890s,” Nineteenth-Century Lives, ed. Laurence Lockridge et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991); Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jonathan Rose, “How to Do Things with Book History,” Victorian Studies 37.3 (1994): 461–71; Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (London: Routledge, 1996); John Jordan and Robert Patten, Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Helen Small, “A Pulse of 124: Charles Dickens and a Pathology of the Mid-Victorian Reading Public,” The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction; Peter D. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998); Bill Bell, “Bound for Australia: Shipboard Reading in the Nineteenth Century,” Journeys through the Market: Travel, Travellers, and the Book Trade, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 1999); Martyn Lyons, “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers,” A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestig
es of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Philip Connell, “Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics, and the Rise of Literary Heritage in Romantic Britain,” Representations 71 (2000); Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2000); Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001); William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Daniel Hack, The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel, Victorian Literature and Culture Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005); H. J. Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005); Mary Hammond, Reading, Publishing, and the Formation of Literary Taste in England 1880–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); David McKitterick, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

  32. On Protestantism as a religion of the book in this period, see Jon P. Klancher, “The Bibliographer’s Tale, or the Rise and Fall of Book History in Britain (1797–1825)” (paper presented at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Montreal, 31 March 2006); on the language of the “fetish,” Peter Melville Logan, Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives, SUNY Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 81.

  33. Kearney, “The Book and the Fetish: The Materiality of Prospero’s Text,” 436; William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. David Daniell, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 2000), 161.