How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (21 page)

Yet the novel manages to recuperate even the worst humiliations: an upward trajectory leads from the school where David wears a label to the bottle warehouse where he pastes labels. The bottle warehouse may not represent the opposite of literary production, then, so much as its analogue: the progression from being labeled to labeling foreshadows the shift from a body that’s written upon to a mind that writes.
³²
As the plot turns a child who is acted upon into an adult who acts, its trope shifts from metaphor (a child who resembles a book, as the next chapter argues in more detail) to metonymy (an adult who makes one). As a result,
David
Copperfield
turns only belatedly into a proto-Smilesian account of self-help—of salvation by books such as Gurney’s
Brachygraphy
, unaided by human agents such as Mr. Spenlow. Its first debt is to an older genre that, far from celebrating self-help, associates selfhood with helplessness and passivity—more specifically, that locates consciousness not in a person marked by books, but in a book marked by readers. That genre forms the subject of the next chapter.

Until now, the subjects of my sentences have been human agents. Whether decoding words or throwing volumes, whether facing a page or hiding behind a paper, these persons do something with (and to) books. What they don’t read, they still use. So far, so conventional. No matter how energetically book historians distance themselves from the aesthetic, we remain no less attached than literary historians to narratives centered on agents: the author, the editor, the reader, or (even more literally) the literary agent. Such scholarly accounts mirror the structure of their sources, whether authors’ biographies, company histories, or readers’ memoirs. They also recapitulate a more diffuse tradition—both religious (specifically Augustinian) and literary (specifically Wordsworthian)—that relies on the encounter with a book to account for the development of a self.

Even when book historians choose examples that happen to fall outside the literary canon, the language in which they describe their own scholarly practices remains parasitic on those novels and memoirs that thematize reading. The previous chapter argued that one subset of that tradition, the bildungsroman, has both generated and limited the stories scholars tell about reading. Where else, then, might we look for models that make the book narratable? This chapter contends that the most productive overlap between recent book-historical scholarship and the longer tradition of bibliographically themed life writing lies not in their common interest in human subjects, but rather in their shared attention to the circulation of things.

Analytical bibliographers have taught us that books accrue meaning not just at the moment of manufacture, but through their subsequent uses: buying and selling, lending and borrowing, preserving and destroying. A history of the book that took that whole range of transactions as building blocks (rather than focusing on the fraction of the book’s life cycle that it spends in the hands of readers) could usefully borrow its formal conventions from the “it-narrative”: a fictional autobiography in which a thing traces its travels among a series of richer and poorer owners.

When late twentieth-century critics rediscovered the it-narrative, they were thinking of a late eighteenth-century genre. By 1800, its babbling banknotes, canting coins, prosing pocket watches, and soliloquizing snuffboxes seem to have talked themselves out. It might not be too far-fetched to explain the recent vogue of it-narrative as a stick with which to beat the Victorians. On the one hand, the it-narrative’s obsession with two-dimensional objects—whether metal or paper—prompted literary critics beginning with Deidre Lynch to reexamine the metaphor that dismissed early fictional characters as “flat” and therefore valueless (
The
Economy
of
Character
). On the other, the metaphor of the “rise of the novel” deflated. The eighteenth-century fiction that had once led upward to later realism now bled outward to contemporaneous nonfictional genres: the advertisement, the economic treatise, the slave autobiography, the letter of credit. Synchronic juxtaposition replaced diachronic succession. To the extent that eighteenth-century it-narrative could be made to prefigure anything at all, its telos was no longer nineteenth-century fiction but twenty-first-century “thing theory.”

In the decades hopscotched over by those critics, however, it-narratives never stopped being read, or even written—with two differences. First, the guineas, rupees, and banknotes whose histories, adventures, and lives had formed the genre’s stock-in-trade were now replaced by talking books; and instead of addressing middle-class adults, it-narratives now went down-market to those too young, or too poor, to choose the books they owned. Both shifts register in
Middlemarch
, a novel whose own plot is structured, it-narrative-like, by the circulation of “a bit of ink and paper.” When Lydgate is driven to a dusty encyclopedia entry on anatomy—until which “he had no more thought of representing to himself how his blood circulated than how paper served instead of gold” (143)—it’s only because he’s already tired of
Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea
(1760–65). Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: the child draws his reading material from the infancy of the novel, the adult from modern medical research. The displacement of the inanimate by the human over the course of Lydgate’s life mirrors the novel’s shift from focalization through things (in the it-narrative) to focalization through human characters (in the strand of “subject narrative” that culminates in Eliot’s novel for grown-up people). Yet Lydgate’s own fantasies continue to feature nonhuman heroines: “the primitive tissue was still his fair unknown” (272).

Likewise, it-narratives continued to be not only recirculated and reprinted, but even composed from scratch. All that changed was their audience. Although some had always trickled down to children, eighteenth-century it-narratives were adult—occasionally in the strong sense of
the word, as the narrator of
Middlemarch
acknowledges in describing
Chrysal
as “neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk” (143). Crébillon’s
Le
sopha
(1742) and Diderot’s
Les
bijoux
indiscrets
(1748) prefigure Prince Charles’s latter-day it-fantasy of being reincarnated as a tampon. But around the same time that the handpress was dethroned, the genre became G-rated: witness
The
History
of
a
Religious
Tract
Supposed
to
Be
Related
by
Itself
(1806);
The
History
of
an
Old
Pocket
Bible
(1812);
Adventures
of
a
Bible: Or, the Advantages of Early Piety
(1825);
The
History
of
a
Pocket
Prayer
Book, Written by Itself
(1839);
The
Story
of
a
Pocket
Bible
(1859);
The
Story
of
a
Red
Velvet
Bible
(1862);
Handed-On: Or, the Story of a Hymn Book
(1893). Moving from one kind of printed paper to another, the it-narrative shadowed two competing disciplines: first numismatics, then bibliography.

As good books replaced bad coins, officious thing-exposition upstaged confidential thing-confession.
¹
But religious books weren’t the only ones that talked, nor Evangelical publishers the only ones who gave them voice. As late as 1873, a copy of
Robinson
Crusoe
could narrate Annie Carey’s heavily illustrated account of papermaking and binding,
The
History
of
a
Book
, commissioned by the same firm that had published her earlier
Autobiography
of
a
Lump
of
Coal; A Grain of Salt; A Drop of Water; A Bit of Old Iron; and A Piece of Old Flint
(1870).

Two innovations united both strands of it-narrative religious and scientific. One was that in neither case did the end user correspond to the buyer. Whether gifts presented to children by their parents, or tracts thrust upon poor adults by philanthropists, both reached readers through a more than purely commercial transaction. The other was that both shared a new kind of protagonist. Where banknotes had once exemplified circulation across class lines, paper now changed hands in the form of bibles, hymnbooks, prayer books, tracts.

To readers familiar with the classic phase of the it-narrative, this turn may come as a surprise. But the talking book doesn’t come out of nowhere. Eighteenth-century object narratives already allude to the life cycle of books, beginning with
Chrysal
itself. There, the narrator of the preface happens on a fragment of “some regular work” in the paper wrapping the butter served to him by a poor family; he goes on to seek out more of the same manuscript by going to the chandler’s shop that they patronize, “as if for some snuff, which, as I expected, was given me on a piece of the same paper” (Johnstone x–xi). As Christina Lupton has argued, the classic it-narratives are “in the first place, the life story of a pile of paper, and only in the second, the story of the objects represented there” (“The Knowing Book” 412). In
Adventures
of
a
Black
Coat
a manuscript is used as a potholder, and in
Adventures
of
a
Banknote
an author can’t even afford enough coal to dispose of his rejected verses—although his
neighbor later burns them to revive him from a concussion. Christopher Flint has therefore interpreted it-narratives as an allegory of authorship, arguing that “the speaking object figures the author’s position in print culture” (212). If you read backward from the nineteenth century, however, eighteenth-century it-narratives begin to look less invested in a figurative representation of the author than in a literal representation of the book. To the extent that early it-narratives frame themselves as found objects, they already emphasize the circulation of paper, changing hands as it passes from manufacture to sale to resale to disposal.

All that changes is where that emphasis occurs. In the first generation of it-narratives, the book-object is mentioned around the edges: in prefaces, introductions, and other paratexts. Only around 1800 does its representation migrate from frame narrative to plot. In that sense, the development of the it-narrative mirrors the shift that I’ve argued characterizes the novel as a whole in the nineteenth century. If the bookish self-referentiality that the eighteenth-century novel situates in the voice of an “editor” gets replaced by the nineteenth-century novel’s more thematic interest in
characters’
uses of books—and if, in the process, bibliographical materialism migrates from beginnings and endings to middles, or from paratext to text—similarly the it-narrative goes from joking about wastepaper in its front matter or frame narratives, to taking papermaking and printing as the subject of its plots. In the process, the novel’s bookishness—its allusions to the material forms that it takes and the social transactions that it occasions—goes from exemplifying the reader’s labor to instancing the buyer’s passivity.

Where eighteenth-century it-narratives taught readers the rules governing cash and credit in a commercial society, the
Stories
,
Histories
, and
Adventures
that straggle in after 1800 take on a narrower topic: how one very particular kind of consumer good—books—should be bought, sold, given, borrowed, and disposed of. More specifically, it-narratives commissioned by religious publishers struggle to reconcile the competing imperatives of a person’s relation to his books (imagined as less alienable than other belongings) and a person’s relation to other persons (vehicled, in the world that tracts both represent and inhabit, by the exchange of printed matter).

After 1800, as secular it-narratives shifted their focus to manufacture, religious publishers kept alive the genre’s traditional emphasis on circulation. What mechanical technologies are to one, social relations are to the other. Talking tracts allot as little space to their own conception as any
human narrator does: only a secular volume like the 1873
History
of
a
Book
could end, Tristram Shandy–like, at the moment when its narrator first goes on sale. In asking how books are shared, and only secondarily how books are made, it-narratives put out by Evangelical publishers anticipate the 1847 pamphlet that urged the Religious Tract Society to stick to its professed aim of “circulation, leaving production to individuals” (Fyfe, “Commerce and Philanthropy” 176).

The distribution of printed matter forms the central problem of the “Appendix, containing Anecdotes calculated to shew the utility of distributing religious tracts” that is tacked on to the
History
of
a
Religious
Tract
Supposed
to
Be
Related
by
Itself
—itself the inaugural volume in a series of tracts that appear under the title of “The Cottage Library of Christian Knowledge.” “Should the Story of the Little Red Velvet Bible have the effect of arousing any,” another it-narrative declares, “to the conviction that the noblest work in which a Christian man or woman can be employed, is that of circulating the Bible amongst all classes of the community, both at home and abroad, it will not have been written in vain” (Horsburgh 95).