How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Price, Leah

  24. On charity visiting in Bleak House, see also Beth Fowkes Tobin, Superintending the Poor: Charitable Ladies and Paternal Landlords in British Fiction, 1770–1860 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 129–52.

  25. See Dorothy J. Hale, “Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel,” Narrative 15 (2007).

  26. M. O. Grenby argues that tracts could themselves address middle-class children as well as working-class adults: M. O. Grenby, “Chapbooks, Children, and Children’s Literature,” The Library 3 (2007): 290.

  27. As Laura Green argues, “because its destination is always ultimately the self, literary identification . . . tends to consolidate rather than expand the subject’s consciousness.” Laura Green, “‘I Recognized Myself in Her’: Identifying with the Reader in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Simone De Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 24.1 (2005): 57.

  28. As William McKelvy points out, Felix Holt, too, has a character asserting his identity by rejecting a father’s archival bequest. William R. McKelvy, The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–1880, Victorian Literature and Culture Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 230.

  29. For an example of a Victorian reader’s annotations to the Imitation of Christ, see Florence Nightingale, Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions, vol. 4 of The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, ed. Gerard Vallee, 16 vols. (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001–), 81–104.

  30. Though Eliot, as usual, expressed an anxious investment in the production values of her own novels: Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 122.

  31. On those other possessions, see Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).

  32. Similarly, John Kucich argues that Maggie values objects as intensely as Tom does, though more diffusely: see John Kucich, “George Eliot and Objects: Meaning and Matter in the Mill on the Floss,” Dickens Studies Annual 12 (1983).

  33. On the “reified communication” that makes the value of words depend on their embodiment in an object, see Kucich, “George Eliot and Objects: Meaning and Matter in the Mill on the Floss,” 326.

  34. Compare Gaskell’s My Lady Ludlow: where the bible “was not opened at any chapter, or consoling verse; but at the page whereon were registered the births of her nine children.” Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, My Lady Ludlow and Other Stories, ed. Edgar Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 162.

  35. In formal terms, however, the family bible bears more resemblance to the newspaper, as a source that narrators can quote to introduce new information into the plot: as late as 1901, Buddenbrooks cites its flyleaf as authority for three plot points. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, trans. John E. Woods, 1st American ed. (New York: Knopf, 1993), 155, 71, 510. Yonge cuts even straighter to the chase, introducing a near facsimile with the remark that “for the convenience of our readers we subjoin the first page of the family Bible.” Charlotte Mary Yonge, The Pillars of the House; or, under Wode, under Rode (London: Macmillan and Co., 1874), 82. What the confidante performed in classical drama, the bible and the newspaper parcel out between them in the modern novel.

  On the peculiarities of manuscript-print interaction in bibles, see Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, 71–86. Sherman notes that the Bible less often provided a place for the family record than did the Book of Common Prayer and collections of sermons and homilies (60).

  36. My thoughts on association copies owe much to the late Jay Fliegelman.

  37. On the moral ambiguity of a model of sympathy in which “another’s internal state becomes ‘intimately present’ only by losing its distinct quality of belonging to someone else,” see Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820, 170; similarly, Caroline Levine argues that identification in Eliot ends up obliterating the alterity of the Other. Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt, Victorian Literature and Culture Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 108. For a counterargument, however, see Suzy Anger’s critique of recent critics’ symptomatic readings of Eliotic sympathy. Suzy Anger, Victorian Interpretation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 96.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE BOOK AS GO-BETWEEN: DOMESTIC SERVANTS AND FORCED READING

  1. Compare Roger Chartier’s argument that as the spread of literacy made the fact of reading, or even of reading a particular book, less significant, ways of reading became a surer marker of social position—and therefore that historians should pay special attention to divergent uses of shared texts. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 15–16.

  2. Compare the 1868 cartoon in Punch showing a maid borrowing a lodger’s sensation novel—with the difference that here the book crosses a gender divide. Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914, 279.

  3. On differences among formats, see also Fyfe, Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain, 157.

  4. On Dickens’s method of “working the copyrights,” see Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers, 236–65.

  5. Dusting is also, as Carolyn Steedman points out, the least dirty of household activities, and one of the few that the lady of the house might condescend to perform herself: Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 347.

  6. Andrew Lang remarks similarly that the amateur “loves to have his study, like Montaigne’s, remote from the interruption of servants, wife, and children.” Andrew Lang, The Library (London: Macmillan & Co., 1881), 34.

  7. On the problem of master-servant privacy and secrecy, see David Vincent, The Culture of Secrecy in Britain, 1832–1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 71–73. In the opposite direction, locks may have been even more important for servants than for masters, since the former’s privacy was more precarious, as were their belongings: see “Thresholds and Boundaries at Home” in Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).

  8. With exceptions, as in Ward and Lock’s Home Book, which urges householders to banish their own worn-out volumes to the kitchen, because servants “should be allowed access to the books of the house, always, of course, under proper restrictions. In these auxiliary cases may be kept such books as those whose original cloth binding is dilapidated, but not yet sufficiently so as to consign them to the binder’s hand.” Ward and Lock’s Home Book, (London: Ward, Lock, 1882), 281. On servants’ libraries, see Felicity Stimpson, “Servants’ Reading: An Examination of the Servants’ Library at Cragside,” Library History 19.1 (2003).

  9. Quoted in Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914, 234; for a rich account of servants’ reading more generally, see 232–34.

  10. In Worboise’s Thornycroft Hall, the character who corresponds most closely to Mrs. Reed complains that “the dust was so thick that I could have written my name on every article of furniture.” “And did you write it, my dear?” asks her husband. “No, Mr. Ward, I did not; but I wrote ‘SLUT’ in great capital letters on the looking glass, and on both the tables.” Emma Worboise, Thornycroft Hall: Its Owners and Its Heirs (London: J. Clarke, 1886), 21.

  11. On breakage of china, see, e.g., Domestic Management, Or the Art of Conducting a Family; with Instructions to Servants in General. Addressed to Young Housekeepers (London: printed for H. D. Symonds at the Literary Press, No. 62 Wardour-Street, Soho, 1800), 87.

  12. “My mistress’s bonnet,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 37 (September 1848): 119, reproduced in Anna Vemer Andrzejewski, Building Power: Architecture and Surveillance in Victorian America, 1st ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008), 129.
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  13. Pawnbroker’s Gazette 865 (1855): 194–95; many thanks to Beth Womack for this reference.

  14. On the politics of literacy in More, see Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 6.

  15. In the following chapter, Jane asks of John: “Master! How is he my master? Am I a servant?” To which a maid replies, “No; you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep.” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Michael Mason (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 19. See also Leah Price, “The Life of Charlotte Brontë and the Death of Miss Eyre,” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 35.4 (1995).

  16. Cp. one American decorating manual’s claim that with a locked bookcase “one does not soil one’s hands, which is inevitable where books stand uncovered and undusted for weeks; and he is no lover of his books who will allow the house-maid to include them in her daily duties, for she is usually far more dangerous than the corrupting moth and dust.” Maria Oakey Dewing, Beauty in the Household (New York: Harper, 1882), 84.

  17. On the relation between finger and bookmark, see Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

  18. Similarly, a novel cowritten by (among others) Charlotte Yonge has a clergyman’s wife complain that her husband “never can remember to leave the right tracts; the drunkards don’t get the intemperate ones, and that elect woman Mrs. Scroggs was so offended because he gave her ‘Are you Converted?’” Frances Awdry, The Miz Maze; or, the Winkworth Puzzle. A Story in Letters (London: Macmillan, 1883), 139.

  19. Compare Joseph Slaughter’s argument that the bildungsroman characteristically depicts “the passage from orality to writing: Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, 1st ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 284.

  20. Remember again Vincent’s argument that “the self-educated reader was as much of a [Victorian] myth as the self-made millionaire.” David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 259.

  21. Thus Samuel F. Pickering, Jr., “The Old Curiosity Shop—a Religious Tract?” Illinois Quarterly 36.1 (1973), compares the plots of The Old Curiosity Shop and The Dairyman’s Daughter. Tracts may, however, overstate the appeal of novels to readers like Caroline Cox: Jan Fergus and Carolyn Steedman both argue that, in the eighteenth century at least, verse was more accessible to them. Jan S. Fergus, “Provincial Servants’ Reading in the Late 18th Century,” The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England.

  22. The one exception marks Becky Sharp’s nadir: when reduced to living off pious ladies, “she not only took tracts, but she read them.” Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 642.

  23. On the difficulty of getting the poor to buy tracts, see Webb, The British Working Class Reader, 1790–1848: Literacy and Social Tension, 56.

  24. If, as John Plotz argues, the moonstone exemplifies “reverse portability” (from imperial periphery to center), it also shares with the religious tract a kind of reverse desirability. John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 40–44.

  25. Penny Fielding argues that “the distinctions between private collection and lending library are broken down” in “The Tractate Middoth” and “Casting the Runes”: Penny Fielding, “Reading Rooms: M. R. James and the Library of Modernity,” Modern Fiction Studies 46.3 (2000): 764. One might add that the library is dangerous precisely because it puts one reader into relation with others: speculating about the reviewer’s confidentiality, the secretary concludes that “the only danger is that Karswell might find out, if he was to ask the British Museum people who was in the habit of consulting alchemical manuscripts” (132). In that sense, the relation among scholarly colleagues looks less cozy than the cross-class collaboration of the passenger and conductor examining a streetcar ad together.

  26. On reading aloud in this period, see Philip Arthur William Collins, Reading Aloud; a Victorian Métier (Lincoln: Tennyson Research Centre, 1972); Ivan Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, 49 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and on Nightingale’s opposition to it, John Plotz, Semi-detached: The Aesthetics of Partial Absorption (forthcoming).

  27. Pearson, too, observes that “in didactic novels characters are often judged by their willingness to read to entertain others.” Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 171. But she locates women’s resistance to being read to at the level of content (a woman more concerned with a broken needle than with the death of Nelson is resisting patriarchal culture) rather than, like Nightingale, at the level of form (174).

  28. Compare the gender politics of another Charlotte Adams tract:

  It is too common to see men and boys engrossed in the selfish indulgence of reading to themselves books which are highly interesting, while a sister or a wife sits by labouring with her needle for the supply of indispensable wants to the family, without any share in the enjoyment of her companion. Some say they cannot read aloud—it hurts their chest, or it tires them—they never could do so in their lives. Let these tender gentlemen, who will shout for hours in some masculine amusement, try if they cannot acquire the power. (Charlotte Adams, Boys at Home [New York, 1854], 167)

  29. See also Monica Lewis, “Anthony Trollope among the Moderns: Reading Aloud in Britain 1850–1960” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2006).

  30. In the early Victorian debates over postage, print was strategically conflated with manuscript. Postal reformers overwhelmingly couched their arguments in terms of personal correspondence, often invoking the Pamela-esque scenario of a young worker’s virtue saved by letters from home. Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 204. Thus Rowland Hill quoted employers testifying to the “vice and profligacy . . . among the young persons in our establishment . . . resulting from want of communication with their parents by letter.” Rowland Hill and George Birkbeck Norman Hill, The Life of Sir Rowland Hill . . . And the History of Penny Postage, 2 vols. (London: Thos. De La Rue, 1880), 1:308. Likewise, a member of the Board of Trade attributed “vicious courses” to young workers arriving in London and unable to afford a letter home. Sir Rowland Hill, Post Office Reform, Its Importance and Practicability (London: C. Knight and Co., 1837), 93. But the sharpest jump in postal traffic after 1840 did not involve letters from one individual to another: the bulk of objects that passed through the postal system were “printed circulars, prospectuses, catalogues, and prices current.” Administration of the Post Office: From the Introduction of Mr. Rowland Hill’s Plan of Penny Postage up to the Present Time (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1844), 55. Conservatives could counter Hill’s logic by pointing out that “where the poor man receives, say eight letters, from his sailor-son, or his daughter in service in the capital, or in some distant town, and thus gains a shilling in the year by cheap postage, let any one consider how much is gained and saved by this penny postage in such houses as Lloyd, Jones, and Co; Baring Brothers & Co.” Administration of the Post Office: From the Introduction of Mr. Rowland Hill’s Plan of Penny Postage up to the Present Time, 196. Like Miss Clack copying tracts out by hand, or like tract societies stuffing pamphlets into bottles, postal reformers borrowed the prestige of manuscript to ease the distribution of print.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE BOOK AS WASTE: HENRY MAYHEW AND THE FALL OF PAPER RECYCLING

  1. Polastron observes that books buried in tombs are at least protected from wear and tear: “it is certainly possible to view as a fair
ly honest conservation system this egotistical practice that wipes them from the face of the earth” Lucien X. Polastron, Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries Throughout History, 1st U.S. ed. (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2007) 10. On the other hand, the salvage value of the carrier can sometimes hinder the survival of its contents, as when silent films were melted down for silver.

  2. See also Jonathan Bloom, Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

  3. On Victorian attitudes toward waste, see Natalka Freeland, “Trash Fiction: The Victorian Novel and the Rise of Disposable Culture”; on wastepaper more specifically, Talia Schaffer, “Craft, Authorial Anxiety, and ‘the Cranford Papers,’” Victorian Periodicals Review 38.2 (2005). On paper more generally, see McLaughlin, Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age (which focuses more on nineteenth-century representations of paper than on representations on paper); Lee Erikson, The Economy of Literary Form (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) (whose analysis of the relation of paper to nineteenth-century literature is weakened by its emphasis on technology at the expense of changing taxation regimes); Christina Lupton, “Theorizing Surfaces and Depths: Gaskell’s Cranford,” Criticism 50.2 (2008); Andrea Pellegram, “The Message in Paper,” Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, ed. Daniel Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Joshua Calhoun, “The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper,” PMLA 126.2 (2011).

  4. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor; Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work (London: Griffin Bohn, 1861), 1:289–90, 3:33, 1:40. On the sham indecent trade in Mayhew, see also Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 157. On the dustman in Victorian culture, see Brian Maidment, Dusty Bob: A Cultural History of Dustmen, 1780–1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).