How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (28 page)

“[I can] not exchange them for books, for that would be selling them”: one measure of bibliographical overload was the number of books that stood outside the market. Early Victorian innovations in production technology look insignificant when compared to the revolution in distribution systems—in particular, new networks for funneling printed matter (whether religious tracts or advertising circulars or political pamphlets) into the hands of a captive audience.

Liberal intellectuals celebrated the cheapening of postage from 1839 onward and the establishment of prepayment in the following year. But the March of Mind devolved into a parade of paper. Even the reformer Charles Knight acknowledged that triumphalist statistics about the rise of the newspaper press need to be adjusted for the fact that “price-currents, catalogues, and circulars” could legally be mailed as newspapers (
The
Old
Printer
and
the
Modern
Press
291).
⁴
The same postal reforms that prompted the invention of the postcard spawned the advertising circular, the chain letter, and the postal scam.
⁵

Reformers’ high-minded abstractions about the diffusion of knowledge were soon countered by conservatives’ reminders that the post was being used to convey not just ideas, but things: “specimens of vegetable seeds; cuttings of trees from Professor Henslow’s shrubberies; . . . new manures, books of patterns, . . . pills, patent medicines, . . . and turtle” (
Administration
of
the
Post
Office
103); “a great-coat, a bundle of baby-linen, and a pianoforte” (Hill and Hill 1:241). Specimens of vegetable seeds could be understood as a metaphor for text via the biblical parable of the sower, eventually to be secularized in the metaphor of “broadcasting” (Matthew 13).
⁶
As Louis James points out, the 1823 religious tract that begins with the image of a rider who “every now and then pulled from his coat-pocket a bundle of tracts and scattered two or three in the road” would have been understood by any reader as a reference to
sowing (135). Yet the same seeds that provided a figure for letters could also function as their antonym—as a form of scientific or agricultural knowledge that competed with the written word. On the other side of the Atlantic, the narrator of Melville’s “The Tartarus of Maids” engages in “the seedsman’s business (so extensively and broadcast, that at length my seeds were distributed through all the Eastern and Northern States, and even fell into the far soil of Missouri and the Carolinas)”; the papers that he sends through the post are envelopes “made of yellowish paper, folded square” (321–22).

Between parcels and letters, books occupied an ill-defined middle ground. The book post established in 1848 at sixpence per pound allowed unmarked volumes to be sent more cheaply than any other object of equivalent weight; only later, however, was it extended to encompass secondhand books, newspapers and circulars (in 1856), and patterns (in 1863) (Lewins 167). Railway companies’ objections were answered with the high-minded claim that “the exceptions taken in the case of the book-post were only to books and printed matter intimately connected with . . . the diffusion of knowledge” (Lewins 233). Knowledge, not paper: the division of labor separating post from rail treated books and newspapers
as
if
they lacked material dimension. Pianofortes could travel by rail, sheet music by post; initialed handkerchiefs by rail, printed rag pulp by post. The postal system thus institutionalized the exceptionalist logic of those etiquette guides that excluded books from the advice against unmarried ladies’ accepting gifts from gentlemen: “Gentlemen, as a rule, do not offer ladies presents . . . Should the conversation, however, turn upon some new book or musical composition, which the lady has not seen, the gentleman may, with perfect propriety, say, ‘I wish that you could see such or such a work and, if you will permit, I should be pleased to send you a copy’” (Cooke 123).
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Yet the abstractions of information overload were doubled by the more literal weight of parcels—a complaint that appears throughout the correspondence of even, or especially, those social reformers who devoted their time to reading and writing letters in support of widening access to the postal system. Harriet Martineau was one of the most prominent apologists for postal reform (“we are all putting up our letter boxes on our hall doors with great glee, anticipating the hearing from brothers and sisters—a line or two almost every day”), but her own collected correspondence teems with apologies for troubling her correspondents and complaints about the logistics of receiving, storing, and disposing of unsolicited paper (Hill and Hill 1:390). To the architect of postal prepayment, Martineau writes, “Dear Mr Hill, I write not to trouble you for an answer, about which I always feel most scrupulous, but to thank you for sending me [‘The State and Prospects of Penny Postage’]” (Hill and Hill
2:14). When Martineau writes to the queen, she “particularly request[s] that no sort of acknowledgment—no notice of my letters whatever should be thought of”; another letter insists, “I may add that I desire no reply” (Martineau,
Selected
Letters
80). Martineau’s etiquette code anticipates the postal system’s change from payment on delivery to prepayment by the sender. Both take pains to shift the cost of correspondence (whether measured in pounds or in hours) from reader to writer.

Until 1840, when prepayment replaced payment on delivery, those two costs coincide: time is money. At the beginning of her career, in fact, Martineau very literally paid the price for her fame by being sent an unmanageable mass of fan mail, hate mail, and prank mail. “I dreaded the arrival of a thirteenpenny letter, in those days of dear postage,” she writes in the
Autobiography
(Martineau,
Autobiography
109).

In the preface to ‘Society in America,’ I invited correction as to any errors in (not opinion, but) matters of fact. After this, I could not, of course, decline receiving letters from America. Several arrived, charged double, treble, even quadruple postage. These consisted mainly of envelopes, made heavy by all manner of devices, with a slip of newspaper in the middle, containing prose paragraphs, or copies of verses, full of insults. (370–71)

And Martineau measures the popularity of the
Illustrations
of
Political
Economy
(1832) less by the size of their own print run than by the volume of fan mail and hate mail that they bring upon her. The first sign of their success, according to her
Autobiography
, is the postmaster’s warning “that I must send for my own share of the mail, for it could not be carried without a barrow—an announcement which, spreading in the town, caused me to be stared at in the streets” (136). The embarrassing wheelbarrow emblematizes a postal regime that makes recipients pay for letters that they never requested.

To advocates of prepayment, then, the mechanics of cash on delivery become a metaphor for the burden of reading. When Hill declares that “I really am at a loss to discover any case in which it is desirable for one person to write to another at the expense of the latter,” he measures in money the problem that Martineau frames in terms of time: how correspondence can be carried on without imposing on a recipient who never asked for it. “Imposition” in both senses: Martineau was herself the target of a postal hoax, and Hill complains that the existing system encourages letters

such as ought not to be sent unpaid, as letters soliciting orders, subscriptions, &c.; or such as ought not to be sent at all, as those written by vindictive people for the purpose of putting the receivers to the
expense of postage . . . [Under Prepayment those] letters would undoubtedly be suppressed: but this, so far from being an objection, is no inconsiderable recommendation to the proposed plan. I would deprive the thoughtless, the impertinent, and the malicious, of a means of annoying others, which is now but too often resorted to; and no one, I presume, would regret the small amount of revenue which would be sacrificed in obtaining so desirable a result. (Hill 97–98)
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The result, however, was the opposite of what Martineau predicted. Far from suppressing solicitations, postal prepayment created the material conditions for the proliferation of unsolicited mail that we know today. Postal prepayment had assimilated letters to books: in theory at least, the reader was expected to pay for access to either. In practice, however, by the nineteenth century neither books nor letters were goods whose cost was borne in some simple way by the end user. Prepayment made perfect sense in a culture where paper had become a more abundant commodity than access. One is reminded of some early twenty-first-century blogger reveling in the lack of wireless on airplanes when Martineau gloats during an ocean journey that “I have enjoyed few things more in life than the certainty of being out of the way of the post” (Martineau,
Autobiography
332).

None of this means that scarcity ceased to exist: that wastepaper continued to command resale value (as we’ll see in chapter 7) makes clear that books and even broadsheets remained a scarce resource for the poorest Londoners. Yet at the same time that the costermongers depicted by Henry Mayhew were hard put to find enough paper to wrap their wares, middle-class readers struggled to find enough wheelbarrows and incinerators.

Twenty-first-century intellectuals inherit an eighteenth-century understanding of literacy as a precondition for psychological interiority and political self-determination—along with a nineteenth-century infrastructure that thrusts printed paper into our letter slots, our faces, our hands, our fields of vision, and even the bedside tables of our hotel rooms. (“No Menus Please” is the New Yorker’s declaration that his home is his castle.) In theory, a self formed by print; in practice, a mass assaulted by printed matter. Rather as prophets of the paperless office soon realized that the personal computer had increased the rate of paper consumption, so the strand of mid-twentieth-century sci-fi that predicted a postliterate future looks increasingly quaint in an era of print and pixel pollution.

In the political sphere, campaigns against censorship make it hard to remember that even those twentieth-century regimes most closely associated with biblioclasm spent more energy distributing books than burning them. Some estimates call Mao’s
Little
Red
Book
the most-circulated book of its time;
Mein
Kampf
, too, is often described as a best seller, thanks to the ten million copies in circulation by 1945 (almost one per German household). It might be more accurate to coin a neologism like “best giver,” for those copies were donated, not sold; from 1936 onward a copy was handed out at every wedding (Fritzsche 796). (Reciprocally, the US Office of Information described its propaganda newspaper airdropped over enemy territory as “the German newspaper with the world’s largest circulation” [Rickards and Twyman 11].) When Macaulay estimated in 1823 that “there is scarcely one Englishman in ten who has not belonged to some association for distributing books, or for prosecuting them,” the symmetry of his syntax already lumped positive with negative controls on reading (T. B. Macaulay, “On the Royal Society of Literature” 20). If
A
Clockwork
Orange
turns out to be more prescient than
Fahrenheit
451
about the role of high art in totalitarian states, it may be because Bradbury is to Burgess what American slave narratives are to religious tracts. Reading looks more heroic when proscribed than when prescribed, just as book burning poses a greater threat when it implies indifference than when it bespeaks hostility.

Even in liberal democracies, print is now less often sold than given away for the purpose of selling something else. By one modern scholar’s calculations, more unsolicited advertising passes through the UK mail than individually addressed letters; and thanks to Metro International (founded in 1995), in many cities fewer newspapers are now bought than given away.
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Ubiquity ensures invisibility: we continue to think of sale as the norm, and gift as the exception. But “gifts” is too kind a term for paper foisted upon readers who have never consented to receive it, let alone demanded. It’s telling that the English language lacks even a noun that would encompass spam sent electronically, leaflets handed out on the street, and circulars delivered through the post. Certainly important differences divide these genres. The cost of some materials is borne by the distributor, of others by third parties: in the United States in 2010, newspaper revenue is 87 percent advertising, 13 percent sales. And paper catalogs retain resale value that electronic spam lacks—unlike the fiber-optic cable through which it’s transmitted. Nonprinted nonmatter like Viagra ads stand opposite the pure materiality of Victorian wastepaper. Yet the absence of any umbrella term points less to the heterogeneity—far less to the insignificance—of these genres than, on the contrary, to the threat that their combined volume poses to unspoken assumptions about how print works.

In decoupling who reads from who pays, free print challenges three tenets of what could be called “bookish liberalism”: that acquiring a book implies choosing it; that owning a book implies an intention to read it; and that virtual encounters with an author distant in space or time can release readers from the constraints of their own social position.
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Giving free print its due would result in a different economic history in which disposal and storage would upstage production and distribution, and a different cultural history in which—far from enabling mobility or independence—the book would become a prop for commemorating one’s forebears, deferring to the judgment of one’s elders, and accepting favors from one’s betters. Lest that sound too gloomily Foucaultian, let me rephrase in positive terms: taking free print seriously would allow us to recognize forms of individual and collective creativity that otherwise remain invisible, because their inventiveness operates at the level of the book’s circulation, not its content.