How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  34. Edwards, manuscript scrapbook, Book E (1860–1876), Manchester Public Library Archives, p. 189, quoted in Alistair Black, A New History of the English Public Library: Social and Intellectual Contexts, 1850–1914 (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), 93.

  35. “The Role of the Black West Indian Missionary in West Africa, 1840–1890” (PhD diss., Temple University, 1972), 121, quoted in Isabel Hofmeyr, “Metaphorical Books,” Current Writing 13.2 (2001): 105.

  CHAPTER 2

  ANTHONY TROLLOPE AND THE REPELLENT BOOK

  1. See also Nicholas Dames’s observation that “the very straightforward gerund ‘reading’ is almost invisible in Thackeray who prefers the use of slightly imperfect synonyms which reflect discontinuity, such as ‘subsiding into’ or ‘simpering over’ a book; to ‘turn over the leaves,’ ‘dip into,’ or ‘muse over’ a volume; or the virtually constant use of ‘peruse’ or ‘perusal’ to stand in for any more continuous ‘reading’.” Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction, 108.

  2. By Eliot’s time, the joke is already a hackneyed one: when Lydia Languish asks, “What are those books by the glass?” her maid answers, “The great one is only The Whole Duty of Man—where I press a few blondes, ma’am.” Richard Sheridan, The Rivals, 1.2.

  3. On this passage, see also Kevin McLaughlin, Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 111–12.

  4. On the relation between novel and newspaper in Victorian culture, see Richard D. Altick, The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), and Matthew Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also one commentator’s mock lament that “during the morning meal, [the newspaper] interferes seriously, and amid protest, with the attention [the householder] ought to pay to the remarks of his wife.” James David Symon, The Press and Its Story; an Account of the Birth and Development of Journalism up to the Present Day, with the History of All the Leading Newspapers: Daily, Weekly, or Monthly, Secular and Religious, Past and Present; Also the Story of Their Production from Wood-Pulp to the Printed Sheet (London: Seeley Service & Co., 1914), 1.

  5. Cp. “in the leisured, stylish world of [James’s] late novels in particular, books are a part of the whole material of social exchange, and James’s interest in them is almost anthropological.” Tessa Hadley, “Seated Alone with a Book . . . ” Henry James Review 26 (2005): 231.

  6. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 35. Goffman’s study of the 1954 newspaper strike argues that its main impact was not on public access to information, but rather on subway commuters’ use of space: Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York: Free Press, 1963), 52. For an eloquent recent argument for Goffman’s importance to literary interpretation, see Jeff Nunokawa, Tame Passions of Wilde (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 58–59. My understanding of the paradoxes of silent reading in public draws on Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 337, as well as on David Henkin’s argument that reading in antebellum New York constituted a public performance, even—or especially—when silent. David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 110. David Vincent, too, associates privacy with “control” rather than with “isolation”: David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 103.

  7. See, e.g., http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/garden/10childtech.html?ref=garden.

  8. Wharton’s “The Line of Least Resistance” contrasts the boudoir where the real work of letter writing is done with the library where nothing happens: “Mr. Mindon has never quite known what the library was for; it was like one of those mysterious ruins over which archaeology endlessly disputes. It could not have been intended for reading, since no one in the house ever read, except an under-housemaid charged with having set fire to her bed in her surreptitious zeal for fiction.” Edith Wharton, The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, ed. R.W.B. Lewis (New York: Scribner, 1968), 219.

  9. For a similar face-off between one spouse absorbed in reading and another who reduces the book to a projectile, see the Brontë-esque Helen Mathers, Comin’ Thro’ the Rye: A Novel (New York: A. L. Burt, 1876), 219.

  10. Leslie Kaufman, “Making Their Own Limits in a Spiritual Partnership,” New York Times, 15 May 2008.

  11. As Mikita Brottman asked more recently, “how many nights do you have to spend with a new lover before it’s acceptable to reach out and take a book from the nightstand?” Mikita Brottman, The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 2008), 71. On the honeymoon as a Victorian institution more generally, see Helena Michie, Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, 53 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  12. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, ed. Pykett Lynn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 108; see also Barbara Leckie, Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857–1914 (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 147.

  13. Unisar announces that its silent “‘TV ears’ will save your marriage”—and the gender of that “you” is made clear when the Web site adds, “No more arguments about watching TV in bed. And no more waking up your wife or baby because the TV is too loud.” One satisfied customer on Amazon.com substitutes Unisar’s product for the newspapers represented in Trollope, testifying that the “Marriage Saver” means that “he can watch TV in bed, while I can read in peace and quiet!” (http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2YJORXMEWOXX5).

  14. On the problem of attention in the nineteenth century, see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).

  15. For a suggestive analogy from cinema, see Paul Willemen’s analysis of “the look at the viewer”: Paul Willemen and British Film Institute, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: British Film Institute, 1994), 107.

  16. Sylph no. 5, 6 October 1795, quoted in John Tinnon Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel: The Popular Reaction from 1760 to 1830 (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1943), 53.

  17. Denis Diderot, “Eloge de Richardson,” Oeuvres complètes, ed. Herbert Dieckmann, Jean Fabre, and Jacques Proust (Paris: Hermann, 1975). 1066 (my translation).

  18. Robert Fraser quotes a play called The Blinkards (1915) by the Fante lawyer Kobina Sekyi, in which a lady intellectual scolds her maid for disturbing the petals pressed between the leaves of a book, explaining, “Haven’t I told you that, in England, leaves are placed in the books to dry, the books when the leaves are dry being placed in drawing rooms?” Robert Fraser, Book History through Postcolonial Eyes (London: Routledge, 2008), 90.

  CHAPTER 3

  DAVID COPPERFIELD AND THE ABSORBENT BOOK

  1. See also Charles Bernstein’s analysis of “‘absorption’ and its obverses—impermeability, imperviousness, ejection, repellence.” Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 20, and Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 120.

  2. On the interchangeability of boots with books in a different Dickens text, American Notes, see Meredith McGill, “American Pickwick; or, The Artist in Boots” (unpublished paper, 2007).

  3. On the distinction between online and offline processes in reading, see Andrew Elfenbein, “Cognitive Science and the History of Reading,” PMLA 121 (2006).

  4. Compare Garrett Stewart’s argument that scenes of reading in modern easel pa
inting (as opposed to, say, illuminated manuscript) require the represented book to be illegible: “the inner is guaranteed by its retreat from the seen.” Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text, 9.

  5. When the late twentieth-century cyberpunk novelist Neal Stephenson has the heroine’s stepfather throw a “Vicky” book at her head, he assumes that readers will remember the Victorian novel’s tendency to reduce books to projectiles. Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age; or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (New York: Bantam, 1995), 94.

  6. Grand is careful to point out the gender reversal at work here: the husband is disconcerted at this reaction because, although “it was inevitable that the man should tire . . . he would smile at pictures of the waning of the honeymoon, where the husband returns to his book and his dog, and the wife sits apart sad and neglected,” but “that the wife should be the first to be bored was incredible.” Sarah Grand, The Beth Book (New York: D. Appleton, 1897), 7, 372.

  7. Even in Vanity Fair itself, Becky’s book throwing is quickly enough redressed by a rather different school scene in which Dobbin, hiding from the rest of the school by dreaming over a book, is violently interrupted:

  [P]oor William Dobbin . . . was lying under a tree in the playground, spelling over a favourite copy of the Arabian Nights which he had apart from the rest of the school, who were pursuing their various sports . . . Well, William Dobbin had for once forgotten the world, and was away with Sindbad the Sailor in the Valley of Diamonds, or with Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Peribanou in that delightful cavern where the Prince found her, and whither we should all like to make a tour; when shrill cries, as of a little fellow weeping, woke up his pleasant reverie; and looking up, he saw Cuff before him, belabouring a little boy . . . Down came the stump with a great heavy thump on the child’s hand. A moan followed. Dobbin looked up. The Fairy Peribanou had fled into the inmost cavern with Prince Ahmed: the Roc had whisked away Sindbad the Sailor out of the Valley of Diamonds out of sight, far into the clouds: and there was everyday life before honest William; and a big boy beating a little one without cause. (Thackeray, Vanity Fair 41)

  Nothing further from Becky’s performance than Dobbin’s absorption: her worldly histrionics against the inwardness that allows the reader, “apart from the rest of the school,” to “forget the world.” The illustration places the book in the foreground, making its spine larger than Cuff’s cane; the narrator’s voice, too, pushes fairies and princes onto the same ontological plane as prosaic Dobbin. Such scenes confirm Deidre Lynch’s description of the hero of late eighteenth-century biography as “endowed with a double life”: “set in front of one book, his Latin grammar, for instance, he dreams of another.” Lynch, “Canon’s Clockwork: Novels for Everyday Use,” 57.

  8. See also Gayatri Spivak’s argument that Jane’s preference for image over text “can make the outside inside” and Antonia Losano on the contradiction that Brontë represents Jane choosing images over letterpress but herself refuses to have Jane Eyre illustrated. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 246; Antonia Losano, “Reading Women/Reading Pictures: Textual and Visual Reading in Charlotte Brontë’s Fiction and Nineteenth-Century Painting,” Reading Women: Literary and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present, ed. Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 29.

  9. On reverie in the novel, see Debra Gettelman, “Reverie, Reading, and the Victorian Novel” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2005).

  10. I am indebted here and throughout to Sharon Marcus’s argument that “Jane experiences attacks on her body that often stem from her verbal outbursts or from an insufficiently abstract relation to reading and writing . . . The very text becomes a catastrophically material object.” Sharon Marcus, “The Profession of the Author: Abstraction, Advertising, and Jane Eyre,” PMLA 110.2 (1995): 209.

  11. On this construction in Jane Eyre, see Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction.

  12. “Tolkien, the Book; Rereading Lord of the Rings,” Weekly Standard, 31 December 2001, 43; Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Literature and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 8; Charles M. Reed, Reading As If for Life: Preparing Young Women for the Real World (speech delivered at the Women’s College at Brenau University, Gainesville, Georgia, 13 September 2001). Carla Peterson, The Determined Reader: Gender and Culture in the Novel from Napoleon to Victoria (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), begins with an acknowledgment to the daughter whom she describes “curled up in an armchair with a book, ‘reading as if for life’” (ix). See also Anne Fadiman, Rereadings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), xv. On this passage, see also Rosemary Lloyd, “Reading As If for Life,” Journal of European Studies 22.3 (1992).

  13. On reading aloud and library visits as compared to owning books, see Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: William Morrow, 2006), 172; as Maria Tatar nicely summarizes their claim, “parents (their socioeconomic status level of education and so on) matter [more than] parenting (reading to children, taking them to museums and so on.” Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood, 1st ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009), 33. For parents’ educational level compared to presence of books in the home, National Endowment for the Arts To Read or Not to Read, 73. Similar results are cited in McQuillan, The Literacy Crisis: False Claims and Real Solutions, 1998, and Stephen D. Krashen, The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research, 2nd ed. (Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited; Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2004). In another counterintuitive study, “the amount of shared parent-child reading time did not matter, on average, for the reading skills of either group of kids [mothers who read an average amount and mothers who spent an unusually high amount of time reading]. What mattered instead . . . for the kids of the high-reading moms was how orderly the family’s home was” (http://www.slate.com/id/2212318/).

  14. As Andrew Miller shrewdly argues, “George de Barnwell’s mistake—and, implicitly Bulwer’s as well—is to conceive of books he reads as fundamentally superior to, and different in kind from, commodities, the currants and tea and cocoa sold in the shop . . . For Thackeray, however, books simply are objects, and are governed by the forces that govern the production of objects”—and, one could add, their consumption. Andrew Miller, Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 45–46.

  15. The trope of childhood reading as more authentic than adult reading persists in recent examples of the genre that Seth Lerer has dubbed “biblioautobiography” (i.e., nonacademic essays about the history of reading that contain a significant autobiographical component). Seth Lerer, “Falling Asleep over the History of the Book,” PMLA 21 (2006): 230. See, e.g., Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 10, and Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Winchester, Mass.: Faber and Faber, 1994), 37, 88–89. One of the few examples of such an essay that shows great sensitivity to the social structures that shape a child’s imaginative engagement is Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built (London: Faber and Faber, 2002)—but then the narrator’s mother happens to be a historian of literacy.

  16. On David’s shift toward a more utilitarian model of literacy, see Leah Price, “Stenographic Masculinity,” and Ivan Kreilkamp, “Speech on Paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian Phonography, and the Reform of Writing,” both in Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture, ed. Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

  17. National Endowment for the Arts, Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (2002), and National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. (2004).

  18. Mrs. Sherwood, A Drive in the Coach through the Streets of London: A Story
Founded on Fact (London: F. Houlston and Son, 1824); see Katie Trumpener, “The Making of Child Readers,” The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler, New Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 564.

  19. Thanks to Catherine Robson for this reference.

  20. For analogous issues in Hardy, see Jonathan Wike, “The World as Text in Hardy’s Fiction,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 47.4 (1993).

  21. Gaskell reports that when Patrick Brontë “asked Charlotte what was the best book in the world; she answered, ‘The Bible.’ And what was the next best; she answered, ‘The Book of Nature.’” Gaskell herself described Miss Brontë’s “careful examination of the shape of the clouds and the signs of the heavens, in which she read, as from a book, what the coming weather would be”; she also quotes a letter from Charlotte asserting that “if no new books had ever been written, some of these minds would themselves have remained blank pages: they only take an impression.” Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Angus Easson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 48, 353, 85.

  22. Sir Charles Russell, speech at a dinner of the First International Shorthand Congress, Tuesday, 27 September 1887, in Proceedings of the First International Shorth and Congress (London: Isaac Pitman, 1888), 159.

  23. Manual of Phonography (1860), 11–13, quoted in Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 28.

  24. Charles Dickens, The Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed. K. J. Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 347.

  25. Kreilkamp, “Speech on Paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian Phonography, and the Reform of Writing.”