How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  26. On Dickens’s eagerness to protect his study from acoustic interference, see John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 52–65.

  27. See James Buzard, “Home Ec. with Mrs. Beeton,” Raritan—A Quarterly Review 17.2 (1997), and Chris Vanden Bossche, “Cookery, not Rookery: Family and Class in David Copperfield,” David Copperfield and Hard Times, ed. John Peck (London: St. Martin’s, 1995), 31–57. On preprinted account books, see also Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 384.

  28. On the figure of Mr. Dick, see Alexander Welsh, From Copyright to Copperfield: The Identity of Dickens (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 117–18; on copying more generally, see Alexander Welsh, “Writing and Copying in the Age of Steam,” Victorian Literature and Society, ed. James Kincaid and Albert Kuhn (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), 30–45.

  29. On the body as a writing surface, see Sara Thornton, Advertising, Subjectivity and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Dickens, Balzac and the Language of the Walls, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 38–41.

  30. On this passage, see also D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 198. Compare Thackeray’s parody, whose narrator complains, “The big boys keep me awake telling stories to ’em all night; and I know ever so many, and am always making stories in my head; and somehow I feel that I’m better than many of the chaps—only I can’t do anything.” [William Thackeray], “Why Can’t They Leave Us Alone in the Holidays?” Punch, 1851.

  31. Walter J. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), 113–41.

  32. For a subtle reading of this logic, see Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Knowing Dickens (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007).

  CHAPTER 4

  IT-NARRATIVE AND THE BOOK AS AGENT

  1. This is not to say that books were the only speaking objects: the genre was revived in large part by Douglas Jerrold’s Story of a Feather (1843). Catherine Waters, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 14.

  2. “Cheap Books,” Christian Spectator, July 1846, 146, quoted in Aileen Fyfe, Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 159.

  3. The metaphor is common enough: compare “Julia has free access to all her father’s books, with the exception of one book-case; this has glazed doors, and the books are all turned with their titles inward, so we do not know their names or contents, but Mr. Waldron says they are not suitable for us to read. Julia looks at them with a sort of awe; she says they are criminals locked up in their condemned cell.” She Would Be a Governess: A Tale (London: Routledge, 1861), 25. The carceral metaphor sometimes gives way to a sexual one, as when one article compares “books behind their glass doors” to “Persian beauties behind their jalousies, to be looked at.” Sarah G. S. Pratt, First Homes (1882), American Periodicals Series Online, ProQuest, 1 November 2009.

  4. On the magazine, see Rosemary Scott, “The Sunday Periodical: Sunday at Home,” Victorian Periodicals 25.4 (1992).

  5. An exception is the Story of a Pocket Bible: according to Jacky Bratton, “an edition of the early 1860s offers evidence of the value which was placed upon it; inscriptions carefully record that it was bequeathed to a beloved daughter in 1875, who received it in 1884, and left it in turn to her dear daughter.” J. S. Bratton, The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 65.

  6. Thanks to Ellen Garvey for this reference.

  7. The narrator figures itself even more insistently as a body in “Adventures of a Robinson Crusoe. Written by Itself. To the Editors of the Young Gentleman’s and Lady’s Magazine,” where “I was clothed in a most elegant and substantial manner, in what might be called a military dress; for it was red laced with gold.” The little girl who chooses the narrator over other editions, it adds, “was not the only young lady that has been captivated with scarlet and gold!” Vanity is followed by sexual consummation, itself naturally followed by abandonment: “Being carried home, she was for some time so fond of me, that she was constantly tumbling over my leaves by day, and even took me to bed with her at night.” Once she becomes “mistress of my contents,” however, “I became more estranged from my young mistress, or rather she from me.” Eventually the book is passed on to her young son: “Hitherto my coat was not much the worse for the wear. The red was indeed a little faded, and the gold tarnished; a few wrinkles and spots deformed my substance; but still I would have passed for a middle-aged book, and among younger competitors would not have appeared to much disadvantage.” Like any fallen woman, the book ages in proportion to how much it’s been loved, or at least used: “The more I became a favourite, the harder was my usage. I was thumbed without mercy, my leaves began to curl, my binding to break . . . I had been used till novelty was no more.” A gaudy dress, an initial physical closeness followed by boredom and estrangement once the owner “soon became mistress of” its insides: we don’t need to wait for the book’s later reference to being “in keeping” to understand that it tells its story by analogy to a prostitute’s. Finally traded for half a dozen apples, the book blames its owner for never once reflecting how much “it must wound the feelings of a tender mother to part with me on such easy terms, and for such an ignoble end . . . he was sensible of his error when it was too late to recover me—when my destiny was sealed for ever.” Finally, the narrator is traded for a copy of—the Young Gentleman’s and Lady’s Magazine. Abandoned in favor of “a little new flaunting pamphlet in a French gray patent wrapper, tricked out with painted flowers, and composed of more subjects than there are colours in the rainbow,” the “old faithful servant” has nothing left to tell but that “my poor remains were gathered up, and I was sold to a chandler for a penny.” “Adventures of a Robinson Crusoe. Written by Itself. To the Editors of the Young Gentleman’s and Lady’s Magazine,” Young Gentleman’s & Lady’s Magazine, or Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction and Amusement 1 (1799): 186–92.

  8. When Ben Franklin composed an epitaph for himself comparing the body to “an old Book . . . stript of its Lettering and Gilding” but insisting that “the Work shall not be lost” but rather “Appear once more / In a new and elegant Edition / Corrected and improved / By the Author,” he made clear that the hackneyed analogy (text is to book as soul is to body) gains its greatest anthropomorphic force at the moment of death (quoted in Robert Darnton, First Steps toward a History of Reading [New York: Norton, 1990], 186).

  9. Compare “But here is the old family Bible. Not one with double clasp, gilt back, and full morocco binding, with colored marriage certificate, and two pages for photographs; not the kind which is enveloped in its own dignity, and seems to say to any who would venture to open its stiff clasps, I am only to be looked at. The Bible they read is in grandmother’s room.” Charles Le Roy Goodell, My Mother’s Bible: A Memorial Volume of Addresses for the Home (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1891), 24.

  10. Jonathan Lamb, “Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 158; Lynn M. Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); see also Paul Collins, “You and Your Dumb Friends,” Believer, March 2004. On the relation of slave narrative to bildungsroman more generally, see Julia Sun-Joo Lee, The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  11. The same could be said of his namesake, David Grieve, who finds “an old calf-bound copy of Paradise Lost” in a meal chest; “all the morning he had been lying hidden in a corner of the sheepfold devouring it, the rolling verse imprinting itself on the boy’s plastic memo
ry by a sort of enchantment.” Mary Arnold Ward, David Grieve (London: Macmillan, 1891), 88.

  12. I owe the idea of bibliomorphizing to Mark Kauf (Tufts).

  13. On the extent to which it-narrators are empowered to speak for themselves, see Mary Poovey’s discussion of the shifting positions occupied by the narrator of Bridges’s Adventures of a Bank-note, which sometimes represents its powers of speech as an idiosyncrasy and sometimes seems to assume that its fellow banknotes can speak as well, sometimes imagines itself as a speaker whose words are being recorded by a human “secretary” and sometimes uses phrases that imply its own power to write and even to transact business with booksellers. Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 149.

  14. For the paradox of the weak hero in the nineteenth-century British novel, see Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963). Compare Michael Gamer’s reading of Waverley as an object narrative, where the protagonist’s passivity doesn’t prevent him from providing the novel’s formal center—with the difference, of course, that object narratives, like Copperfield but unlike Waverley, are conventionally first-person. Michael Gamer, “Waverley and the Object of (Literary) History,” Modern Language Quarterly 70.4 (2009).

  15. Cp. David Pearson, “What Can We Learn by Tracking Multiple Copies of Books?” Books on the Move: Tracking Copies through Collections and the Book Trade, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2007), 18.

  16. On nonhuman agents, see also Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation—Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy,” Common Knowledge 3.2 (1994).

  17. See also Aileen Fyfe’s argument that the Evangelical press praised tracts for their ability to reach places where middle-class bodies could not safely venture. Fyfe, Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain, 29.

  18. See also Seth Lerer, Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 21.

  19. Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Cathy Davidson, “The Life and Times of Charlotte Temple: The Biography of a Book,” Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy Davidson (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Not that this metaphor is confined to books in particular: witness Igor Kopytoff’s essay “The Cultural Biography of Things.” Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For the longer history of the “talking book,” see Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 152–69.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE BOOK AS BURDEN: JUNK MAIL AND RELIGIOUS TRACTS

  1. Collier, “Of the Entertainment of Books,” quoted in Holbrook Jackson, ed., The Anatomy of Bibliomania (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 71; see also Collet Dobson Collet, History of the Taxes on Knowledge; Their Origin and Repeal (London: T. F. Unwin, 1899), 35. For the prehistory, see Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Unversity Press, 2010).

  2. On the taxes on knowledge, see Collet, History of the Taxes on Knowledge; Their Origin and Repeal; Webb, The British Working Class Reader, 1790–1848: Literacy and Social Tension; Joel H. Wiener, The War of the Unstamped: The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–1836 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969); Alan Rauch, Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Simon Eliot, “The Business of Victorian Publishing,” The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Deirdre David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  3. On the Malthusian metaphor, see Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 40. Thomas Hood invokes a similar logic when he prefaces his “National Tales”—coming right after “My son and heir” (originally published in the Comic Annual for 1831), in which a father laments that “James is too big a boy, like book, / To leave upon the shelf unbound”—with an apology to “the learned Malthusians of our century” for “increasing my family in this kind; and by twin volumes, instead of the single octavos which have hitherto been my issue.” Thomas Hood, “The Choice Works of Thomas Hood, in Prose and Verse, Including the Cream of the Comic Annuals. With Life of the Author, Portrait, and over Two Hundred Illustrations” (1883?), 655.

  4. On junk mail in the nineteenth-century United States, see David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 153, and Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 31–67.

  5. On postal scams, see Henkin, The Postal Age, 155–58.

  6. On the history of the metaphor, see James Hamilton, “Unearthing Broadcasting in the Anglophone World,” Residual Media, ed. Charles R. Acland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Peters points out that the etymology of “parable” itself involves sowing. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 52.

  7. On books as gifts between men, see also Margot Finn, “Men’s Things: Masculine Possession in the Consumer Revolution,” Social History 25.2 (2000): 133–55.

  8. On the Fraser’s hoax (designed to trick Martineau and other celebrities into providing references for an imaginary ex-servant), see Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, ed. Maria Chapman, 2 vols. (Boston: Osgood, 1877), 1:320.

  9. James Raven, Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing since 1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 4, 5; on free books in the Romantic period, see Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia, 36–37. By its own partisan calculations, Metro PE dwarfs all Pan-European daily and weekly titles with a reach over four times higher than that of the Financial Times and nearly three times higher than the Economist’s (http://hugin.info/132142/R/1496601/432324.pdf).

  10. My model owes much to Elaine Hadley’s analysis of Victorian liberalism: Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

  11. See also Michael Ledger-Lomas, “Mass Markets: Religion,” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1830–1914, ed. David McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 326, and Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 314.

  12. Margot Finn dates to the 1820s and 1830s “the inroads made by increasingly individualistic and contractual ways of thinking upon traditions of consumer behavior which had earlier been entangled in a dense reticulation of personal ties and affective obligations.” Finn, “Men’s Things,” 137.

  13. See also Gilmartin on “the circular structure of a print economy of charitable provision.” Kevin Gilmartin, “‘Study to Be Quiet’: Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain,” ELH 70.2 (2003): 513.

  14. See Leslie Howsam, Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society, Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), as well as, more generally, Raven, Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing since 1700.

  15. On the system of subsidized pricing, see Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 175.

  16. The narrator of a Punch sketch, “Bachelor Days,” plays on the convention when he explains the accumulation of wastepaper in his cupboard by the speculation that his housekeeper must be overcompensating for having
discarded a valuable manuscript in some previous job. “Bachelor Days. IV,” Punch, 1907, 17.

  17. Missionary Register, Church Missionary Society, May 1817, 186, quoted in Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 164.

  18. See, e.g., Motoko Rich, “With Kindle, the Best Sellers Don’t Need to Sell,” New York Times, 22 January 2010.

  19. Compare a review of the Twenty-third Annual Report of the Bombay Tract and Book Society in a local journal, which remarks upon “the millions of tracts which have been distributed, and have served for waste paper in India, China, and other heathen countries.” “Review of the Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Bombay Tract and Book Society,” Bombay quarterly magazine and review 7 (1852): 497. See also Graham Shaw’s observation that “large single sheets containing the Ten Commandments were used by boys to make kites.” Graham Shaw, “South Asia,” A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Pub., 2007), 133.

  20. For a rebuttal, see, e.g., http://illandancient.blogspot.com/2010/01/this-pensioners-burning-books-story.html.

  21. Sherwood invokes the same verse in “The Red Book” and in “The Penny Tract.” Mary Sherwood, The Works of Mrs. Sherwood. Being the Only Uniform Edition Ever Published in the United States (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1834), 13:146, 351.

  22. “Answers to Correspondents,” 47.5 (1 November 1851), reprinted in Henry Mayhew, The Essential Mayhew: Representing and Communicating the Poor, ed. Bertrand Taithe (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), 212.

  23. L. N. R[anyard], The Missing Link, or, Bible-Women in the Homes of the London Poor (New York: Robert Carter, 1860), 116–17. On Mrs. Ranyard, see John Matthias Weylland, These Fifty Years Being the Jubilee Volume of the London City Mission (London: Partridge, 1884).