by Price, Leah
5. For informants reading earlier installments of London Labour, see, e.g., 3:214. For subtle analyses of Mayhew’s characterization of his informants’ literacy, see Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 85–91, and Victor Neuburg, ed., The Invention of the Streets, 2. vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). On the other hand, one wastepaper dealer who declares that “the people as sells ‘waste’ to me is not such as can read” adds that “I don’t understand much about books”; the point is proven a moment later when he describes a customer asking, “Have you any black lead?”—which Mayhew’s readers must themselves gloss as “black letter” (2:110). Another dustman adds, “I niver vos at a school in all my life; I don’t know what it’s good for. It may be wery well for the likes o’ you, but I doesn’t know it ’u’d do a dustie any good. You see, ven I’m not out with the cart, I digs here all day; and p’raps I’m up all night, and digs avay agen the next day. Vot does I care for reading, or anythink of that there kind, ven I gets home arter my vork? I tell you vot I likes, though! vhy, I jist likes two or three pipes o’ baccer, and a pot or two of good heavy and a song” (2:178). The ballad locution “What cares I” asserts that orality does for him what literacy does for “the likes o’” the researcher.
6. Brantlinger situates Mayhew within a tradition of both romantic and realist fiction that contrasts “oral vitality” with “literate domestication.” Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 91.
7. Nineteenth-century English commentators alternately praise and blame their own nation for recycling less than others. After remarking that old account-book covers can be made into soles of shoes that leak on rainy days, one writer in 1896 remarks, “It is only wicked foreigners who are said to do such things.” “Government Waste-Paper,” Chambers’s Journal 13 (1896): 749; see also “Waste Paper,” Leisure Hour 30 (1881).
8. On papermaking, see Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, 2nd ed. (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947), 555, and Adrian Johns, “Changes in the World of Publishing,” The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 392.
9. See also Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 45–46.
10. Thanks to Natalka Freeland for pointing out the logical lapse to me. Andrew Miller suggests, more generally, that “no object can be owned which does not suggest to [Thackeray’s] imagination the ruin and death of those who own it” (Novels behind Glass, 18).
11. On the paper bag, see Henry Petroski, Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 99; becoming popular thanks to the cotton shortages during the Civil War, it gave birth to new metaphors, as when Barrie compared padded-out novels to “paper bags blown out with wind.” Two of Them (1893), quoted in P. J. Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 33. For the place of waste in eighteenth-century culture, see Sophie Gee, Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).
12. “The Republican Refuted; in a Series of Biographical, Critical, and Political Strictures on Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man,” Monthly Review 7 (1792): 84; thanks to Paul Keen for suggesting this example to me.
13. On the phrase “not worth the paper,” see Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 44.
14. George Gordon Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals: The Complete and Unexpurgated Text of All the Letters Available in Manuscript and the Full Printed Version of All Others, ed. Leslie Alexis Marchand 12 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1973), 8:11–12; thanks to Susan Wolfson and Betty Schellenburg for this reference.
15. Spectator 367 (1 May 1712), reprinted in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald Frederic Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 380–81.
16. Thomas Percy, Bishop Percy’s Folio Ms. Ballads and Romances, ed. Hales and Furnivall (1868), 1:xii, quoted in Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 119.
17. On bibliophilic misogyny, see Willa Silverman, “The Enemies of Books? Women and the Male Bibliophilic Imagination in Fin-de-Siècle France,” Contemporary French Civilization 30.1 (Winter 2005/Spring 2006): 47–74, and Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania, 137–68.
18. Carolyn Steedman offers a different analysis of what she calls the “servant joke”: Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England, 222.
19. A. R. Waller and Adolphus William Ward, The Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 12:362; see also W. W. Greg’s description of bibliography as “the handmaid of literature”: W. W. Greg, “What Is Bibliography?” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 12 (1914): 47. On the bibliographer as service worker, see Jon Klancher, “Bibliographia Literaria: Thomas Dibdin and the Origins of Book History in Britain, 1800–1825” (unpublished paper), and, on the feminization of the literal, Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing.
20. The libretto copies this scene roughly from chapter 9 of Henri Murger’s eponymous novel: there, the “dénouement ne fit que flamber et s’éteindre.” Giacomo Puccini and Henri Murger, La Bohème ([Paris]: Calmann-Lévy, Erato, 1988), 293.
21. The term puns on writing, but also on printing: the “secret composition” that makes the flypaper sticky bears some resemblance to the mixture of glue and treacle used to ink the device known as a “composition roller.” See Annie Carey, The History of a Book (London: Cassell, Petter and Galpin, [1873]) 105.
22. Even the second volume itself distinguishes the tradesman who resells objects “to be disposed of as old metal or waste-paper” from “his brother tradesman [who] buys them to be resold and remanufactured for the purposes for which they were originally intended” (2:108).
23. See Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 221, and Michal Peled Ginsburg, “The Case against Plot in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend,” ELH 59.1 (1992): 179.
24. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900. 108.
25. Edwards, manuscript scrapbook, Book E (1860–1876), Manchester Public Library Archives, p. 189, quoted in Black, A New History of the English Public Library: Social and Intellectual Contexts, 1850–1914, 93.
26. Similarly, a missionary in Jerusalem named Mr. Whiting explains that he gives tracts to illiterate Arab women who claim their sons can read “in the hope that, even if their object be to sell them, they will fall into the hands of some one who will derive benefit from them.” William Jones, The Jubilee Memorial of the Religious Tract Society Containing a Record of Its Origin, Proceedings, and Results, A.D. 1799 to A.D. 1849 (London: Religious Tract Society, 1850), 389.
27. See Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). On clothing in the context of preindustrial recycling more generally, see Donald Woodward, “Swords into Ploughshares: Recycling in Pre-Industrial England,” Economic History Review 38 (1985): 177–79.
28. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers, 70; Freeland, “Trash Fiction,” 11. Walter Siti, too, argues that the novel bears a special relationship to repetition, citing Vauvenargues’s observation that “you never reread a novel.” Franco Moretti, The Novel, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1:99.
29. On the history of the text/textile metaphor, see Roger Chartier, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth
Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 95–97.
30. Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (London: Frank Cass, 1968), 37; on this passage, see Anne Humpherys, Travels into the Poor Man’s Country: The Work of Henry Mayhew (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 148.
31. The paper duty imposed in 1711 was reduced in 1836 and removed by Gladstone in 1860, the same year in which esparto grass was first used. George Richardson Porter, The Progress of the Nation in Its Various Social and Economic Relations from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen & Co., 1912), 405.
32. For an analogous argument that attributes the rise of the novel to the fall of paper prices, see Erikson, The Economy of Literary Form.
33. For a theory of such shifts from figurative to literal and metaphor to metonymy, see Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 20.
34. Cp. Bill Brown’s shrewd observation that “the immaterial/material distinction often asserts itself as the difference between the visible and the tangible,” as if sight were not just as physically embodied as touch. Bill Brown, “Materiality,” Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 51.
35. It’s telling in this respect that an earlier study like Hans J. Rindisbacher, The Smell of Books: A Cultural-Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), could analyze the literary representation of smell without ever mentioning the literal “smell of books” from which it took its title.
36. It’s no accident (as literary critics used to say) that a single term designates both a maid’s intrusion into the decisions about which version of a text survives—decisions that should remain the purview of gentlemanly editors—and those features of the text that are entrusted to a lesser functionary than the author (punctuation, for example, began as the publisher’s responsibility and only gradually became part of the author’s remit). David C. Greetham, Theories of the Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 142; Allan C. Dooley, Author and Printer in Victorian England, Victorian Literature and Culture Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992).
CONCLUSION
1. Compare “Depuis que je savais que—contrairement à ce que m’avaient si longtemps représenté mes imaginations enfantines,—il n’y avait qu’une scène pour tout le monde, je pensais qu’on devait être empêché de bien voir par les autres spectateurs comme on l’est au milieu d’une foule; or je me rendis compte qu’au contraire, grâce à une disposition qui est comme le symbole de toute perception, chacun se sent le centre du théâtre” Marcel Proust, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1919), 1:26.
2. On “the fantasy of an ideal listener”—or rather, in what I think is an important distinction, ideal reader—see Carla Kaplan, “Girl Talk: Jane Eyre and the Romance of Women’s Narration,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 30.1 (1996): 25.
3. As Jon Klancher argues, “the intense cultural politics of the Romantic period obliged writers not only to distinguish among conflicting audiences, but to do so by elaborating new relations between the individual reader and the collective audience.” Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 11. Ian Duncan shows more specifically that “the Waverley novels, soliciting a ‘universal’ reading public, definitively establish the ‘popular’ form of an expanding national literacy, at the same time as they mark off a class boundary in economic terms.” Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 179.
4. Even Anderson’s critics accept this premise unquestioningly, as when Culler’s counterargument begins, “Since newspapers are read on the day of publication and thrown away.” Jonathan Culler, “Anderson and the Novel,” Diacritics 29.4 (1999): 27; for a more nuanced sense of Romantic-era newspaper circulation in Britain, see Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 65–114.
5. Similarly, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s claim that “printed materials encouraged silent adherence to causes whose advocates could not be located in any one parish and who addressed an invisible public from afar” does little to address the role of parishes in ensuring the circulation of printed matter: Elizabeth Eisenstein, “Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report,” Journal of Modern History 40.1 (1968): 42.
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