How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (14 page)

An ethical tension, then: while the verbal content of novels forces readers to empathize with other minds, the material heft of the book allows them to block each other out. But also a formal problem: the unrepresentability
of reading becomes a proxy for the incredibility of selfhood. The wedge that novels drive between the outside of books and the interiority of readers, or between material cover and verbal content, forces the genre to choose between describing the look of reading and its feel. I posited at the beginning of this chapter that any turn toward material media means a swerve away from both the text and the mind—as if the narrator needed to stake out a vantage point either inside the pages or outside the covers. In coding the handling of books as authentic and the reading of texts as a front, Trollope’s comedies of manners upstage textually occasioned absorption by bibliographically assisted repulsion; but, more crucially, they abdicate any attempt to plumb psychological depths. Whenever the novel juxtaposes competing vocabularies in which to describe a printed object—whether it puns on “remembered her novel” or replaces “page” with “paper,” or substitutes the opening of a book for the beginning of a text—it stages questions about the relation of the inner life to the object world.

In making behaviorism to solipsism what book is to text, novelists of manners also prefigure the challenge facing historians of reading: how to observe an activity against which the social defines itself. Chapter 4 will argue that the conventions for representing reading elaborated by competing subgenres of Victorian fiction have trickled down (through the intermediary of biography) into competing schools of twentieth-century historiography. It’s to the second such subgenre that the next page turns.

To acknowledge that the trope of repulsive reading cuts across classes, genders, genres, and even media isn’t to deny that the novel—traditionally the genre most invested in absorptive reading—lends that cliché a polemical edge. The comedies of manners that we’ve just seen enlisting the book in hostilities between husbands and wives mirror the scene of reading that opens the most canonical of Victorian bildungsromans. In these novels, the child’s sense of self is jump-started not by reading, but by being hit with a book. (Or boxed on the ear with an encyclopedia, or poked in the ribs with a prayer book, or knocked off balance by having a book wrested out of his hands.)

This chapter asks what makes the novel associate printed matter with violence in general and interruption in particular. And what difference does it make that the act in which characters are interrupted consists not (contrary to what most readers remember) of reading, but rather of using an unread book as a material prompt or alibi for inwardness and abstraction? One answer, I’ll suggest, is that the bait and switch that structures the midcentury bildungsroman sets us up to expect a novel about an agent
shaped
by
books, only to reveal the protagonist instead as an object
compared
to
books—metaphorically imprinted, bound, sold, and scanned.

You’d think that bookishness began and ended in childhood. The child is small, lonely, sensitive, thoughtful, a strong imagination in a weak body; the child retreats to attics, lumber rooms, and window seats, fencing herself or himself behind a copy of Bewick’s
Birds
, of
Robinson
Crusoe
, of
The
History
of
the
Devil
, only to be jolted back into his or her surroundings by a poke with a prayer book or a volume thrown at her face or a box on the ear with a Latin Grammar. The child is baptized Jane or David, but will reappear under the names of Maggie Tulliver, Barbara Churchill, Aurora Leigh, Nell Adair, Beth Caldwell. By 1883, when Tant’ Sannie catches Waldo reading Mill’s
Political
Economy
and “fling[s] the book at his head with much energy,” the narrator of
The
Story
of
an
African
Farm
can add that “books have been thrown at other heads before or
since” (Schreiner 101). Without renouncing the Protestant tradition that celebrates texts as the weapon of the weak, these novels cast books, more literally, as weapons of the strong.

Like the Trollope novels that we saw in the previous chapter and the religious tracts to which we’ll turn in Part II, the bildungsroman makes books a pawn in familial power struggles. Yet for the omnisciently narrated symmetry that pits the husband’s unread newspaper against the wife’s unread novel, first-person narrative (or more rarely, free indirect discourse) substitutes a less evenly matched battle between young and old—the former corresponding to the character through whose consciousness the narrative is focalized (nose in a book), the latter to characters viewed from the outside (book in hand). Where Trollope makes mutual avoidance an unlikely leveler, this more Manichaean subgenre projects the contrast between word and object at once onto a moral axis (a love for tattered pages signifies virtue; for morocco albums, vulgarity), a formal hierarchy (protagonists use the book as a mental prompt, minor characters as a manual prop), and a social structure (one of the many fantasies that the bildungsroman fulfills is that the reader’s inner resources can overcome economic constraints).

Not that villains or minor characters or poor adults or rich children have no use for books. Even a dunce like John Reed knows that they can be owned and thrown: “I’ll teach you to rummage my book-shelves: for they
are
mine.” In return, all Jane Eyre can hurl is names—“‘You are like the Roman Emperors!’ I had read Goldsmith’s
History
of
Rome
” (C. Brontë,
Jane
Eyre
17). Where Jane remembers an absent text, John holds an unread book. A recent plot summary that describes
Jane
Eyre
beginning “with an assault upon a girl by a male text, or, more correctly, by a male
armed
with a text” confuses the text—whose contents John shows no sign of having read—with the brute materiality of the book (Frith 153).

In
David
Copperfield
, too, the disembodied text faces off against a weaponized book. “I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of voyages and travels—I forget what, now,” the narrator tells us,

and for days and days I can remember to have gone about my region of our house, armed with the centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees—the perfect realization of Captain Somebody, of the Royal British Navy, in danger of being beset by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great price. The Captain never lost his dignity, from having his ears boxed with the Latin Grammar. I did. (60)

Dramatizing what Michael Fried calls “absorption,” these scenes correlate the reader’s attention to the text with his oblivion to the world around him (Fried,
Absorption
and
Theatricality
).
¹

Or at least the user’s: for what the Murdstones do with the Grammar (or John Reed with Bewick’s
Birds
) interrupts an act parasitic upon—but hardly synonymous with—“reading.” In place of a book, David holds only a boot-tree: the book reduced to a prosthetic jackboot (to be thrown at those who would otherwise deserve kicking) matches the stick exalted to a prompt for the imagination.
²
Remember the analogy between novelist and shoemaker: “I can ride a boot-jack as I would a hobby-horse,” boasts G. A. Sala in the pages of
Household
Words
; don’t “stretch your imagination with the boot-tree,” warns
Judy, Or the London Serio–Comic Journal
(Sala; “Things It Is Better Not to Do”). But the boot-tree also forms a reductio ad absurdum of unread
books
’ serviceability as a prompt for mental images—as when Edith Wharton recalls that in her childhood “if the book was in reach, I had only to walk the floor, turning the pages as I walked, to be swept off full sail on the sea of dreams. The fact that I could not read added to the completeness of the illusion, for from those mysterious blank pages I could evoke whatever my fancy chose” (Wharton,
Backward
Glance
33–34).

Unread books, or books read at some other time: nineteenth-century fiction intuited that what cognitive scientists today call “offline” processes (remembering, recombining, constructing coherence after the fact) could be more intense than the “online” act of reading itself.
³
Thus Madame Bovary’s experience is most intense when she has ceased to see (let alone read) the page: “At length, her eyes growing tired, she would close them and see, in the darkness [a description of the world represented in the novel follows]” (Flaubert 52). Where Jane responds to a thrown book with the memory of having “read Goldsmith’s
History
of
Rome
,” conversely the box administered with a Latin Grammar punishes David not for reading but rather for remembering the already-read.

For Dickens as for Trollope, the moment of reading is as formally unrepresentable as thematically central. If visible, reading remains inauthentic; if meaningful, ineffable. To describe the experience is to debunk it. The materialism of a Reed or a Murdstone bears more resemblance to the external perspective of the Trollopian narrator than does the idealism of a Jane or a David. Where in
The
Small
House
the act of reading flies below the narrator’s radar, in
David
Copperfield
it soars above his descriptive powers. This vanishing point should be familiar to reception historians, dogged as we are by the paradox that the most engaged reading is often the most invisible: the more deeply a book marks its reader, the fewer the marks left on its pages (H. J. Jackson,
Marginalia
). In novels, too, those moments where reading is dismissed as a sham are hard to distinguish from those where reading is elevated to a secret.
⁴
The only difference is that the former involve children hiding from adults, the latter spouses hiding from spouses.

Books allow the child to withdraw into his mind and adults to drag him back into his body. When David’s thoughts wander in church, “Miss Murdstone pokes me with her prayer-book”; when they wander at home, Mr. Murdstone (who sits “pretend[ing] to be reading a book”) “takes the book, throws it at me or boxes my ears with it.” The text remains in David’s or Jane’s head even when the book is no longer in their hands; conversely, the Murdstones and Reeds handle books instead of internalizing their contents. Mr. Murdstone “took a book sometimes, but never read it that I saw. He would open it and look at it as if he were reading, but would remain for a whole hour without turning the leaf” (57, 59, 128).

The manual gestures of the nonreader stand opposite the good reader’s out-of-body experience. Helen Keller’s assertion that “literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends” invokes the consensus not only that books are the friends of the friendless, but that the ideal reader experiences through the mind rather than the body (Keller 117). Michel de Certeau speculated that for the past three centuries a “withdrawal of the [reader’s] body, which is the condition of its autonomy, puts the text at a distance. It is the reader’s
habeas
corpus
” (175–76).

The throwing of individual volumes at the physically frail and socially disempowered will eventually snowball into the toppling of an entire bookcase that concludes
Howards
End
(1910).
⁵
The interchangeability of the weak, poor, feminized clerk with the weak, poor, female or feminized stepchild (remember how often David Copperfield is referred to as “it”) reveals how central gender is to the battle pitting a soul absorbed in a text against a body brandishing a book. In Sarah Grand’s New Woman novel
The
Beth
Book
, women’s retreat into a virtual realm is interrupted by books whose physicality shares the grossness of men’s bodies. We fear the worst of Beth’s father from the very first chapter when, exasperated by his pregnant wife, “he flung the book across the room.” Later, Beth herself uses reading to ward off sex: “‘Must I be embraced again?’ she exclaimed one day, with quite comical dismay, on being interrupted in the middle of a book that was interesting her at the moment.”
⁶
Like the Cold War–era housewives described by Radway, female characters use the right to read as a proxy for the right to withdraw from ministering to others’ needs for sex (as in Beth’s husband’s embrace) or food (as in the
Sylph
’s “children crying for bread”). No surprise, then, that the materiality of a thrown book should provide a reminder of the materiality of a vulnerable body.

Victorian novels, that is, anticipate twentieth-century book historians’ populist recuperation of reading as an act by which apparently passive social groups appropriate and subvert official dogmas. Michel de Certeau
compares readers to “guerillas,” describing reading as “the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of ‘discipline’” (xv). A more local measure of the impact of this logic is that the humor of the opening scene of
Vanity
Fair
hinges on readers’ recognizing the trope of a book thrown at (rather than by) a dependent. Becky Sharp’s audacity consists not just in attacking her benefactress, but more specifically in reversing the traditional direction of the book as it travels from richer and older assailant to poorer and younger victim. Yet even if Thackeray’s governess plays John Reed to Miss Pinkerton’s Jane, elsewhere he, too, imagines the weight of the book breaking the spell of the text: “Do I forget one night after prayers (when we under-boys were sent to bed) lingering at my cupboard to read one little half page more of my dear Walter Scott—and down came the monitor’s dictionary upon my head!” (Thackeray,
Roundabout
Papers
334).
⁷
That violence literalizes the weight of the “heavier” schoolbooks whose content David Copperfield is punished for failing to memorize; if light reading gives solipsistic pleasure, heavy books signal painful contact (60). And where the text establishes the boundaries of the self, the book violates them. By century’s end, the metonymic association of hitting a child reader with interrupting a child’s reading is strong enough that one can become a metaphor for the other: the narrator of
A
Little
Princess
observes that “never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment . . . ‘It makes me feel as if someone had hit me,’ Sara told Ermengarde” (Burnett 27). By making the text that fills minds coincide with the thing that thumps heads, these opening scenes dramatize two competing media theories. In one, the book’s power comes from its material attributes (weight, heft, the volume of every volume); in the other, a sequence of words (no matter whether in the memory or on the page) crowds out any awareness of the physical world.