How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (15 page)

From the other side of the countless twentieth-century autobiographies that borrowed this trope from nineteenth-century fiction, it’s hard to appreciate just how radically new its premises were. In the eighteenth century, references to the book as object or commodity can be found most often in the narrator’s own voice—though “narrator” may be the wrong term, since such references tend to interrupt the narrative, breaking frame so violently that readers have no choice but to surface temporarily from their absorption. By the middle of the nineteenth, however, characters, not narrator, are now the ones who notice the look of the book. Where self-referential asides once broke readers’ concentration, now a represented
book is what interrupts characters’ absorption. What once took place on the level of discourse now migrates to the level of story. Instead of an “editor’s” paratextual jokes breaking into the narrative as in
Tristram
Shandy
, now a book thrown by one character breaks into the text read by another. The violence of book throwing at the level of story replaces the violence of frame breaking at the level of discourse. Replaces, or at least supplements: for every time a novel reminds us of the sensory attributes of the object we’re holding—and by extension, reminds us of our own eyes and our own hands—it shatters our concentration as violently as John Reed or Miss Murdstone breaches David’s or Jane’s. John aims the book to avoid breaking windows, but book throwing still ruptures the transparency of mimesis.

By 1850, paper falls under the same taboo as sex: “the page” (as Gissing put it in a different context) “scarce rustles as it turns.” Scatological jokes and self-referential asides become equally recognizable as throwbacks to the eighteenth-century satirical tradition. When the narrator of
Vanity
Fair
relates that “the curses to which the General gave a low utterance . . . were so deep, that I am sure no compositor in Messrs. Bradbury and Evans’s establishment would venture to print them were they written down,” the shock of the unnamed curse is conveyed through the breach of publishing decorum (285). Harking back to the era in which Fielding could entitle a chapter “Containing Five Pieces of Paper” (
Tom
Jones
bk. 4, chap. 1), the eighteenth-century pastiche of
Esmond
and
The
Virginians
gave Thackeray an alternative to a more modern domestic realism that was thematically close-minded and formally closure-driven, equally opposed to linguistic and to sexual digression and play. “Here it is—the summit, the end—the last page of the third volume”: the fall from the metaphor of a “summit” to the literalism of a “page” and a “volume” registers the narrator’s skepticism that happy endings can reflect anything more than the telltale compression of pages.

In the eighteenth century, a joke; by the nineteenth, a threat. The consciousness of the book’s physicality that was witty in the mouth of the narrator becomes immoral in the minds of characters: to thematize materialism is also to stigmatize it. We might predict, then, that the bildungsroman quarantines any awareness of the book-object within the consciousness of its least sympathetic characters—that the text serves as a catalyst for sympathetic protagonists’ daydreams, the book as a press for minor villains’ flowers. Yet even the characters whom we remember as readers
usually turn out to be doing something to the book that it would take a stretch to describe as “reading.” What jump-starts the narrator’s interiority isn’t love of texts so much as hatred of books—whether fear of the books handled by the Murdstones or disgust at the books fingered by Uriah Heep. The child reader’s out-of-body raptness finds its foil in Uriah “reading a great fat book, with such demonstrative attention, that his lank forefinger followed up every line as he read, and made clammy tracks along the page (or so I fully believed) like a snail” (Dickens,
David
Copperfield
222). A mind marked by the text recoils from a book marked by the body. The ink of marginalia looks no better than an animal’s slime. Yet here as so often, clerical work threatens any distinction between Uriah and David—who, despite working at shorthand “like a cart-horse,” finds himself “laboriously and methodically plod[ding] over the same tedious ground at a snail’s pace” (505).

The corollary is that Brontë and Dickens hardly provide their own readers with role models. Between the girl retreating behind the covers of a book and the boy acting out a remembered text, reading dwindles to a vanishing point. In one case, inwardness is occasioned by the book, not the text; in the other, the text enters David’s mind only once the book has left his hands. To call it “Jane’s salvation to be a reader” or to describe her as an “avid and impressionable reader” is to misremember that from the very first page of the novel, Jane is staring at the pictures, not the text (L. Green,
Educating
Women
28; Brantlinger 115).
⁸
Jane “cares little” for the “letter-press” of Bewick’s
Birds
, as little as Maggie Tulliver does for the text of the
History
of
the
Devil
: the best she can say of the introductory pages is that “I could not pass [them] quite as a blank.” The “quite” acknowledges a bibliographical version of the pathetic fallacy: the whiteness of the page seems to have rubbed off on the world that the pages represent, with its “death-white realms” and “forlorn regions of dreary space,—that reservoir of frost and snow.” Like the encroaching margins of “Baxter’s Procrustes” or the out-of-focus newspapers that Trollope represents, the book figures here as a negative space, “bleak” if not “blank.”

The opening scene of
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
upstages content by heft: introduced “dreaming over her book,” Maggie Tulliver soon “forget[s] all about her heavy book, which fell with a bang within the fender” (G. Eliot,
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
18–19). Even as Eliot and Brontë both make the use of books a proxy for moral worth, then, the criterion is oddly negative: it’s less that readers identify with characters who read, than that we distance ourselves from characters who recognize the book’s material qualities. (We hate those who love the book-object as much as we love those who hate it.) Reading is one possible way of crowding out that awareness, certainly, but so are daydreams whose starting point lies no
further into the book than the title page. No surprise that Mr. Tulliver buys the
History
of
the
Devil
because “they was all bound alike—it’s a good binding, you see—an’ I thought they’d all be good books . . . They’ve all got the same covers, and I thought they were all o’ one sample, as you may say. But it seems one mustn’t judge by th’outside” (G. Eliot,
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
251). What’s more disturbing is that Maggie, too, “did not take the opportunity of opening her book”: not content to deny that Maggie is reading, the narrator refuses even to go beyond the absence of the more minimal material bodily gesture that might or might not signify the mental act.

What catalyzes Maggie’s “dreaming over her book” is not its contents but rather her looking away: “somehow, when she sat at the window with her book, her eyes would fix themselves blankly on the outdoor sunshine” (18, 299).
⁹
And that blank corresponds to a space that books should have occupied: “her eyes had immediately glanced from him to the place where the bookcase had hung; there was nothing now but the oblong unfaded space on the wall, and below it the small table with the Bible and a few other books” (251). Even when text does enter Maggie’s consciousness, it stops at the title page.

Then her brain would be busy with wild romances of a flight from home in search of something less sordid and dreary;—she would go to some great man—Walter Scott, perhaps, and tell him how wretched and how clever she was, and he would surely do something for her. But in the middle of her vision her father would perhaps enter the room for the evening, and, surprised that she sat still, without noticing him, would say complainingly, ‘Come, am I to fetch my slippers myself?’” (300)

Scott appears as a secondary character in Maggie’s fantasized autobiography, not as the author of a real book. For Maggie as for her father, the printed book functions less to contain a story than to occasion one—whether handwritten (in the case of the family Bible) or purely mental (in the case of Maggie’s “vision”). Like marginalia unrelated to the content of the text being written in, daydreams can become untethered to the book being held.

More strikingly, the conjunction of Maggie’s flight of fancy with her imagined “flight from home”—correlated in turn with Mr. Tulliver’s more immediate consciousness of being ignored—rules out the zero-sum competition between attention to books and attentiveness to relatives that the novels discussed in the previous chapter took for granted. Here, Mr. Tulliver’s realist slippers are displaced not by Scott’s represented armor, but on the contrary by a daydreaming that crowds out the page and the
world alike: instead of finishing
The
Pirate
, Maggie “went on with it in my own head” (318).

The
Mill
on
the
Floss
leaves no safe vantage point from which to condemn such lumping, for the character in whose consciousness readers become most deeply absorbed is herself no reader. On the contrary, Eliot places books in the hands of characters only to thwart our assumption that they will be read: unlike the gun whose appearance in the first act guarantees that it will be fired before the end of a play,
The
Pirate
, whose first volume Maggie remembers having begun in the second volume of
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
, remains unfinished by the end of the third. Conversely, readers’ noses are rubbed in the materiality of the book they themselves are holding: when Book II ends with the narrator announcing that “the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind” Maggie and Tom, we can’t help noticing that the covers of the volume are about to close behind us as well.

Chapter 5 will return to the question of what Maggie does with the books she fails to read. For now, consider the analogous problem in
Jane
Eyre
. In the wake of John Reed’s book throwing,

Bessie had been down into the kitchen, and she brought up with her a tart on a certain brightly painted china plate . . . Vain favour! coming, like most other favours long deferred and often wished for, too late! I could not eat the tart; and the plumage of the bird, the tints of the flowers, seemed strangely faded: I put both plate and tart away.

Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word
book
acted as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver’s Travels from the library. This book
I
had
again
and
again
perused with delight . . . Yet, when this cherished volume was
now
placed
in
my
hand
—when I
turned
over
its
leaves
, and sought in its marvellous pictures the charm I had, till now, never failed to find—all was eerie and dreary; the giants were gaunt goblins, the pigmies malevolent and fearful imps, Gulliver a most desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous regions. I closed the book, which I dared no longer peruse, and put it on the table, beside the untasted tart. (28; my emphasis).

Unread book joins untouched tart: the content fails to live up to the promise of the container. Where remembered reading is invested with “delight,” the book loses its magic once placed in the present or “placed in my hand.” Manual gestures short-circuit mental operations: “I turned over its leaves” leads directly to “I closed the book.” Like Captain Somebody’s travels (or like Goldsmith’s
History
of
Rome
), Gulliver’s are read only offstage. “My own thoughts always swam between me and the page I
had
usually
found fascinating”: Jane is still a child, but it’s never too early to start banishing reading to a prelapsarian past (27; my emphasis).

To the past, or to minor characters, for the absorbed reading that critics misattribute to Jane is in fact displaced onto Helen Burns: “absorbed, silent, abstracted from all round her by the companionship of a book, which she read by the dim glare of the embers” (65).
¹⁰
Where the opening scenes lead us to expect a protagonist’s reading to be interrupted by minor characters, here, on the contrary, it’s the heroine who shatters a secondary figure’s textual “abstraction.” The first time Helen pauses to turn a page, Jane interrupts her to take the book from her hands; when Helen begins to read again, “again I ventured to disturb her.” Jane’s only role in this scene is to interrupt Helen’s reading—as if her cousinship with John Reed were as hard to disclaim as Maggie’s with the Dodsons (60).

Bafflingly, Jane explains her urge to stop Helen from reading by the assertion that she herself likes to read: “I hardly know where I found the hardihood thus to open a conversation with a stranger; the step was contrary to my nature and habits: but I think her occupation touched a chord of sympathy somewhere; for I too liked reading, though of a frivolous and childish kind” (59). To be a reader is to claim an identity, not to perform an action. Or even to allow others to perform it unmolested: famously no fan of Austen’s, Brontë may nonetheless be riffing on the scene in
Pride
and
Prejudice
where Miss Bingley, yawning over a prominently displayed book, interrupts Darcy’s reading to remark, “How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!” (37). Like Miss Bingley, Jane proclaims her love of reading at the very moment when she prevents others from engaging in it. Yet what begins as a cliché (of course a hypocrite will lack any authentic love of reading) becomes more unsettling when the action is transferred from a blocking figure to the heroine.