How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain Read online

  How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

  How to Do Things with Books

  in Victorian Britain

  Leah Price

  PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Princeton and Oxford

  Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press

  Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

  In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

  press.princeton.edu

  All Rights Reserved

  Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2013

  Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-15954-6

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

  Price, Leah.

  How to do things with books in Victorian Britain / Leah Price.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-691-11417-0 (acid-free paper)1. Books and reading—Great Britain—History—19th century.2. Books—Great Britain—Psychological aspects—History—19th century.3. Books—Social aspects—Great Britain—History—19th century.4. Book industries and trade—Great Britain—History—19th century.5. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism.6. Books and reading in literature. 7. Books in literature.I. Title.

  Z1003.5.G7P75 2012

  028'.9094109034—dc23

  2011037436

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  This book has been composed in New Century Schoolbook

  Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  Reader’s Block

  PART I: Selfish Fictions

  CHAPTER TWO

  Anthony Trollope and the Repellent Book

  CHAPTER THREE

  David Copperfield and the Absorbent Book

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It-Narrative and the Book as Agent

  PART II: Bookish Transactions

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Book as Burden: Junk Mail and Religious Tracts

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Book as Go-Between: Domestic Servants and Forced Reading

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Book as Waste: Henry Mayhew and the Fall of Paper Recycling

  CONCLUSION

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Index

  Illustrations

  I.1. “The Turf,” Punch, 1882

  2.1. “How to Make a Chatelaine a Real Blessing to Mothers,” Punch, 1849

  2.2. James Gillray, “Matrimonial Harmonics,” 1805

  2.3. Weekly Caption Contest, New Yorker, 2006

  2.4. “An Appeal Case,” Punch, 1891

  2.5. “Emancipation,” Punch, 1891

  2.6. “Married for Money,” Punch, 1859

  2.7. “The Honeymoon,” Punch, 1884

  2.8. “A Perfect Wretch,” Punch, 1851

  2.9. “The Waning of the Honeymoon,” Punch, 1896

  3.1. “Our Housekeeping,” David Copperfield, 1850

  4.1. “A New Page in My History,” The Story of a Pocket Bible, 1855

  5.1. Darnton’s Communications Circuit

  5.2. Adams and Barker’s Life Cycle of a Book

  5.3. Hannah More, “The Sunday School,” 1798

  6.1. Religious Tracts, Cambridge University Library

  6.2. “A Soft Answer,” Punch, 1895

  6.3. “One Thing at a Time,” Making the Best of It, n.d.

  6.4. Book Disinfecting Apparatus, Thomas Greenwood, Public Libraries, 1890

  6.5. “Singular Letter from the Regent of Spain,” Punch, 1843

  Acknowledgments

  Many readers helped me write. Thanks especially to Srinivas Aravamudan, Margaret Beetham, Peter de Bolla, Larry Buell, Amanda Claybaugh, Nancy Cott, Patricia Crain, Nicholas Dames, Robert Darnton, Ian Duncan, Drew Faust, William Flesch, John Forrester, Elaine Freedgood, Debra Gettelman, Lisa Gitelman, Simon Goldhill, David Hall, Susan Halpert, Richard Hardack, Barbara Hochman, Isabel Hofmeyr, Hansun Hsiung, Virginia Jackson, Melissa Jenkins, Jane Kamensky, Sol Kim-Bentley, Michèle Lamont, Michael Ledger-Lomas, Yoon Sun Lee, Spencer Lenfield, Lauren Lepow, Seth Lerer, Deidre Lynch, Alison MacKeen, Peter Mandler, Jane Mansbridge, Sharon Marcus, Maia McAleavey, Deborah Nord, Geoff Nunberg, Alexander Parker, Clare Pettitt, John Plotz, Christopher Prendergast, Peter Pruyn, Harriet Ritvo, Catherine Robson, Jan Schramm, Jason Scott-Warren, James Secord, Sharmila Sen, Stuart Shieber, James Simpson, Diana Sorensen, Peter Stallybrass, William St Clair, Christopher Stray, Michael Suarez, Ramie Targoff, Pam Thurschwell, Katie Trumpener, Judy Vichniac, David Vincent, Michael Warner, Hanne Winarsky, and Ruth Yeazell. Thanks, too, to King’s College, Cambridge, the Radcliffe Institute, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

  Earlier versions of material from chapters 2, 4, and 7 appeared in Reading Victorian Feeling, edited by Rachel Ablow (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 47–68; Representations 108 (Fall 2009): 120–38; and Bookish Histories, edited by Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 148–68. Thanks to all three for permission to reprint.

  Ann Blair has been the best possible coconspirator in all things book-historical. Natalka Freeland’s friendship remains as strong as her misreadings. Nir Eyal’s love and example teach me daily how to do things with words and without.

  Introduction

  Upon coming into his master’s fortune, Dickens’s illiterate dustman Mr. Boffin immediately hires a ballad-seller to entertain him by reading aloud. Only one detail remains to be checked: “You are provided with the needful implement—a book, sir?”

  ‘Bought him at a sale,’ said Mr. Boffin. ‘Eight wollumes. Red and gold.

  Purple ribbon in every wollume, to keep the place where you leave off.

  Do you know him?’

  ‘The book’s name, sir?’ inquired Silas.

  ‘I thought you might have know’d him without it,’ said Mr. Boffin slightly disappointed. ‘His name is Decline-And-Fall-Off-The-Rooshan-Empire.’ (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 59)

  Because no one reading this passage shares Mr. Boffin’s illiteracy, and because few readers of late Dickens have not read at least the spines of Gibbon, we smile. But what if the geographical confusion made bibliographical sense? As a waste-dealer familiar with tanners, Mr. Boffin would have heard of “Russia” as a metonymy for a leather produced in that country, calfskin (often dyed red) tanned with birch oil that imparted a characteristic smell. In this hypothesis, the hope that “you might have know’d him” would look perfectly reasonable: cannier than Silas, Mr. Boffin does recognize the book “without,” if not within. “In what I did know,” David Copperfield reflects upon leaving warehouse for school, “I was much farther removed from my companions than in what I did not” (Dickens, David Copperfield 218). If we took Russia to refer to container rather than contents, then the dustman’s class position would reflect less a deficiency of interpretive skill than an excess of sensitivity to color, texture, and smell. His ignorance of the history in the book would throw into relief how much he knows about the history of the book. “Bought him at a sale”: Boffin knows not only how the “wollumes” were manufactured, but whether he is their first owner. Once endowed with a life story, even a book judged by “his” cover can elicit affection.

  When Silas later arrives to take up his task, it remain
s unclear whether the “gorging Lord-Mayor’s-Show of wollumes (probably meaning gorgeous, but misled by association of ideas)” will end up on Mrs. Boffin’s side of the room (whose shelves display stuffed birds) or Mr. Boffin’s (lined with cold joints). As binding is to text, so “gorgeous” to “gorging”: do books resemble decorative outsides or functional insides? Should the volumes that Boffin has “ranged flat, in a row, like a galvanic battery” be treated as an implement or a show?

  In short, what meanings do books make even, or especially, when they go unread? And why did Victorian novelists care? That books function both as trophies and as tools, that their use engages bodies as well as minds, and that printed matter connects readers not just with authors but with other owners and handlers—these facts troubled a genre busy puzzling out the proper relation of thoughts to things, in an age where more volumes entered into circulation (or gathered dust on more shelves) than ever before.

  It’s not that they hated books. But the great realists did loathe anyone who loved the look of books—who displayed “a great, large handsome Bible, all grand and golden, with its leaves adhering together from the bookbinder’s press,” or whose “splendidly bound books furnished the heavily carved rosewood table” (Gaskell, North and South 79; Jewsbury 13, 37). One wellborn narrator remarks, in the house of a wealthy tradesman, that “the round rosewood table was in a painfully high state of polish; the morocco-bound picture books that lay on it, looked as if they had never been moved or opened since they had been bought; not one leaf even of the music on the piano was dogs-eared or worn” (W. Collins, Basil 61). Book against text, new money against old money—and secondary characters against protagonist. The opening scene of Ranthorpe establishes the hero’s depth by describing what aspects of books he fails to notice. “He cared not for rare editions, large paper copies, or sumptuous bindings . . . he cared not even whether they had covers at all” (Lewes 4–5).

  A moral test doubles as a political stance: the post-Gutenberg consensus that makes differently priced editions of a text functionally equivalent becomes a proxy for the more controversial demand to value human souls alike, whatever the color of their money or their skin. Or was the problem, on the contrary, that literacy was spreading too widely to remain a reliable marker of rank or gender? To use books no longer proved anything; to refrain from misusing them did. The Gentleman’s Magazine’s lament that “too many women value a book solely for its binding” (Watkins 102) is dramatized in a joke about a lady complaining to the librarian: “Look what an atrocious cover it has; haven’t you one bound in saxe-blue to match my costume?” (Coutts 147). In 1851, an Evangelical magazine contrasts the good child who “puts books into his head” with the dunce whose books are “only on your shelves” (“How to Read Tracts”).

  Nothing against books, then, but something against the eyeing and pricing of books imagined to compete with internalizing them. The Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1847 the use of “reading copy” as a euphemism for a book so battered that the only value left lies in the words that it contains. “Books are now so dear,” Southey had reported at the dawn of the Regency phenomenon known as “the bibliomania,” “that they are becoming rather fashionable articles of furniture more than anything else; they who buy them do not read them, and they who read them do not buy them. I have seen a Wiltshire clothier, who gives his bookseller no other instructions than the width of his shelves.”1 Made to be seen through, books find themselves seen. By 1887, an article titled “Literary Voluptuaries” could declare that “the collector is curious about margins, typography, and casings, but comparatively indifferent to contents” (805). Cover and content, authenticity and appearance: the language of insides and outsides makes any consciousness of the book’s material qualities signify moral shallowness. Leather bindings rub off on their skin-deep owners.

  Commission reinforces omission. Not content to ignore the outsides of books, a good reader actively scorns them. “Due attention to the inside of books, and due contempt for the outside,” Chesterfield had pronounced in 1749, “is the proper relation between a man of sense and his books” (1291). One dictionary defined bibliomania as the fact of being “rather seduced by the exterior than the interior” (Dibdin 58). An article titled “Furniture Books” compared loving one’s “handsomely dressed” volumes to “thinking more of the jewels of one’s mistress than of her native charms” (97). Reciprocally, Wilde could shock by comparing a woman wearing a “smart gown” to “an édition de luxe of a bad French novel” (178, 37).2

  No cheaper cue for our sympathies, no surer predictor of the plot: a character who sells his father-in-law’s library can’t be trusted not to buy a mistress; a character who wants his books bound in leather will marry the blonde; a character who manhandles books will abuse children. The great nineteenth-century novels of individual development domesticate Heine’s 1821 prediction that “when they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” In liberal democracies, the traditional state prosecution of books whose content is judged treasonous gives way to homegrown persecution of persons whose reading is judged antisocial. After Julien Sorel’s father catches his attention by knocking a book out of his hands, the book is drowned; when Hugh Trevor’s master beats him for being “deeply engaged in my book,” the book is burnt (Holcroft 41). The public hangman burned books in place of their author, but domestic tyrants made books a proxy for the readers under their control. When John Reed reduces books to projectiles or Tom Tulliver asks why a bankrupt’s books shouldn’t be auctioned off along with his chairs, their refusal to treat the book as a protected category signals their blindness to what’s special about Jane or Maggie.

  A NOTE ON LANGUAGE

  One of the dark red volumes of the first edition of the New Oxford English Dictionary defines “book” as

  a. . . . a treatise occupying numerous sheets or leaves fastened together at one edge called the back. . . But, since either the form of the book or its subject may be mainly or exclusively the object of attention, this passes on either side into

  b. The material article so made up, without regard to the nature of its contents, even though its pages are occupied otherwise than with writing or printing, or are entirely blank . . .

  c. A literary composition such as would occupy one or more volumes, without regard to the material form or forms in which it actually exists . . .

  In sense b every volume is a ‘book’; whilst in sense c one ‘book’ may occupy several volumes; and on the other hand one large volume may contain several ‘books,’ i.e. literary works originally published as distinct books.

  The minute the contributor pictures the material container, the textual contents empty out: the example imagined is “entirely blank.” Charles Chestnutt’s 1904 story “Baxter’s Procrustes” makes that zero-sum logic a plot twist, imagining a club of book-collectors tricked into accepting a blank book for their collection. “The true collector loves wide margins, and the Procrustes, being all margin, merely touches the vanishing point of the perspective” (830). A thumbed-to-death “reading copy” stands opposite an illegible collectible clean not only of smudges and underlinings, but of print.

  You’ll have noticed my contortions attempting to distinguish “text”—a string of words—from “book” or “book-object”: a physical thing. In an everyday language incapable of even deciding what preposition should link the two—the text “of” a book, the text “in” a book?—one term appears sometimes as contained within the other, sometimes as antithetical to it.3 If “book” really connoted materiality, there would be no need to affix the pleonastic “object”; if “text” really provided an adequate term for a linguistic structure, I would refer to what you’re now reading as “this text.” Only the ambiguity of sentence openings prevented me from generalizing the distinction between the Bible (a text) and the bible (an object) to Books and books.4

  The Victorians cathected the text in proportion as they disowned the book. More specifically, they id
entified themselves as text-lovers in proportion as they distinguished themselves from book-lovers. To take in a text is to tune out its raw materials: a newspaper isn’t called a “rag” if the speaker thinks it worth reading. More surprisingly, in 1818 William Hazlitt could ridicule a book by pointing out the high cost of the paper it was printed on: “Mr. Campbell always seems to me to be thinking how his poetry will look when it comes to be hot-pressed on superfine wove paper” (295). Whenever a review mentions the price or appearance of a book, we know that its textual contents will be either ridiculed or dismissed as beneath contempt. Even in the digital age, to name the ingredients of a book is to insult it—as when an MIT professor refers to “tree flakes encased in dead cow” or a Microsoft researcher to “sooty marks on shredded trees.”5

  Conversely, the best texts eclipse the book. When Amazon launched its first e-reader, Jeff Bezos boasted that the Kindle emulated the way in which “the physical book is so elegant that the artifact itself disappears into the background. The paper, glue, ink and stitching that make up the book vanish, and what remains is the author’s world.”6 A successful e-reader, by this logic, would illustrate Marian Evans’s contention that “on certain red-letter days of our existence, it happens to us to discover among the spawn of the press, a book which, as we read, seems to undergo a sort of transfiguration before us. We no longer hold heavily in our hands an octavo of some hundred pages, over which the eye laboriously travels, hardly able to drag along with it the restive mind; but we seem to be in companionship with a spirit, who is transfusing himself into our souls” (G. Eliot, “J. A. Froude’s The Nemesis of Faith” 265). The double etymology of “liber” points to the book’s Janus-faced potential: some medieval commentators traced it to the word for the “bark” on which texts were inscribed, others to the action (“liberare”) that texts were expected to perform.7 Grounded in a material substance or linked with a lofty abstraction, the same object bound by its medium is credited with the power to free its users.