How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (33 page)

To measure the force of the tension between a paratext that prescribes vengeance and a text that proscribes it, compare
The
History
of
a
Family
Bible. A Tale of the American War
(1851). Narrated by a young minister who transcribes the family records on the flyleaves of cottagers’ bibles, this moral tale quotes from their manuscript paratexts as much as from their printed texts. The story ends with a family’s bible being seized by the bailiff, as its owner cries “spare me but this book—my father’s book—our family Bible—the book I brought from America on purpose for him—his and my mother’s comfort in their latter days. Spare me this precious book.” When the bailiff insists, the owner replies,

“I’ll have a part of it; I’ll have some memento of those I so fondly love,” and before he was aware of what I was about, I had cut the thread that fastened on the linen cover, and grasped that in my hand with the violence of despair. No sooner were the lids disclosed, than two bits of paper folded perfectly smooth fell on the ground.”

These turn out, of course, to be Bank of England notes inscribed by the narrator’s parents. One is marked “your father’s ears are never deaf”; the other, “when sorrow overtakes you, seek your Bible.” Like the bible, then,
the banknote signifies doubly: through its official content (the printed text, the formulaic language of a financial instrument) and through a personal inscription alluding to the hands through which the object has passed. The latter literalizes the former: when her granddaughter exclaims, “look at the treasure you have found,” the narrator replies, “’tis true that literal banknotes may not be given as in this case but what is far better than gold and silver is the certain portion of all believers” (Best 138–40). In Mr. Tulliver’s case, however, no such dovetailing: text and paratext contradict, rather than reinforcing, one another.

The tension between print (the Gospels) and manuscript (the Family Record) reflects a struggle between literally writing oneself into the book and imaginatively putting oneself in its characters’ place. And as writing on the flyleaf replaces reading in the book, self-inscription replaces selflessness.
³⁵
We all know that Eliot expected texts to give their readers practice in empathizing with fictional Others—in what “The Natural History of German Life” calls the “extension of our sympathies.” Yet her characters invest most heavily in texts where reader coincides with writer, and writer becomes protagonist: “It’s got everything in [it]—when I was born and married” (G. Eliot,
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
273).
³⁶
Even the title page of
Holy
Living
and
Holy
Dying
, oddly, becomes indistinguishable from the flyleaf of the bible: “Mr Tulliver felt somehow a familiarity with that great writer [Jeremy Taylor] because his name was Jeremy” (G. Eliot,
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
21).

Jeremy—but why always Jeremy? Perverse where we expect it to be pious, the novel insists that reading doesn’t involve losing oneself in a text so much as finding oneself in it.
³⁷
That swerve away from empathy culminates in the scene in which Mr. Tulliver orders Tom to inscribe in the bible what sounds like a summary of the book that we ourselves are reading:

“Write as your father, Edward Tulliver, took service under John Wakem, the man as had helped to ruin him, because I’d promised my wife to make her what amends I could for her trouble, and because I wanted to die in th’old place. Where I was born and my father was born. Put that i’ the right words—you know how . . .

“Now let me hear what you’ve wrote,” said Mr Tulliver. Tom read aloud, slowly. (281)

Tulliver’s shift from the third person (“took service under the man as had helped to ruin him”) to the first (“because I’d promised”) mimics the model of reading that governs
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
as a whole. To subsume “him” into “I” is to displace the hope that the novel will enlarge sympathy by the acknowledgment that whatever text one reads turns out to be about the self.

Maggie’s replacement of plot by Scott reminds us that characters “dreaming over a book” often turn out to be less interested in its content than in a story about its author—which becomes in turn a story about its reader (18). You’ll remember that Scott appears as a secondary character in Maggie’s own fantasized
autobiography
, not as the author of a text representing lives distant from her own. For Maggie as for her father, the printed book functions less to contain a story than to occasion one. Whether handwritten (Mr. Tulliver’s family bible) or purely mental (in the case of Maggie’s “vision”), that story always concerns the self. In fact, Maggie can recognize another’s handwriting only in the process of remembering a flyleaf inscribed with her own name: “At last, Bob brought her a letter without a postmark—directed in a hand which she knew familiarly in the letters of her own name: a hand in which her name had been written long ago in a pocket Shakespeare which she possessed” (522). While a name handwritten in a printed book brings the family bible to mind, the term “familiar” recalls more closely the language that had described Jeremy Tulliver’s identification with Jeremy Taylor. Just where we expect Maggie’s empathy to contrast with her father’s egotism, we’re reminded that the daughter and the father share the inability to read anything but their own names.

More sophisticated than her father, Maggie resists “applying” texts to her own life—whether reading the
Imitation
of
Christ
as a how-to manual or identifying with the dark Scott heroine in preference to the blonde. Yet even as the
Imitation
of
Christ
inspires Maggie to deny herself the luxury of a mirror, the book itself becomes a medium for the “sort of looking-glass,” as Mrs. Molesworth would put it, that makes the heroine “yourself under her name.” With a crucial difference: the figure with whom Maggie “sympathizes” isn’t the heroine
in
a text, but rather an earlier reader
of
a text. By the same token, where her father wants to imagine that his namesake Jeremy speaks uniquely to him, Maggie understands herself as only one of a long line of readers. The “low voice” and “quiet hand” that she discerns in her secondhand copy of the book belong to a previous owner, not to the author, let alone to a character represented in its pages. Communion with earlier readers can undo the covert narcissism of identifying with fictional characters or recognizing oneself in authors’ names.

A copy of
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
that Emily Dickinson’s family bequeathed to Harvard’s Houghton Library bears two traces of use: like Mr. Tulliver, Susan Dickinson has written her name on the flyleaf; and like the Dodsons, someone has pressed a fern leaf between the leaves of the book. Within the novel, the value of readers’ marks remains more ambiguous. Where the family bible has been held out of the auction (where its markings would in any case have lowered its price), the
Imitation
acquires an extraeconomic value precisely by changing owners. Mr. Tulliver’s bible proves as difficult to alienate as his wife’s monogrammed linens—one “spoiled” by writing in the margins, the other by stitching in the corners. Both offer a countermodel to Maggie’s hunger for a virtual community of readers: for her parents, objects are valuable only to the extent that they can be imagined as never having been in, and never destined to pass into, others’ hands.

The previous chapter located the meaning of tracts in the interactions that they represent, but also in the relationships they establish: relationships of difference between giver and reader, relationships of similarity between character and reader. That second meaning may be more readily available to book historians than to literary historians: a quarter century ago, a magisterial analysis of the literary representation of servants never asked what servants read (Robbins). If tract distributing punctures the myth that makes reading an expression of individual choice, it also threatens the hope—or staves off the fear—that the shared act of reading will break down social barriers. The relationships that reading vehicled were asymmetrical, conflictual, and frequently asynchronous. Even, or especially, where a single text such as the Bible was shared among different audiences, the different physical formats of the book and different temporalities of reading restored social differences.
¹

Throughout the nineteenth century, three spaces became staging grounds for the tension between commonality and hierarchy: the public library (where successive borrowings of a single volume linked patrons across classes); the home (where the fear that masters and servants could access each other’s corrupting books mirrored the hope that masters could inflict godly books on their servants); and the margin (where the trace of previous readers’ hands bridged the living with the dead). These spaces all differ from one another, of course: the first two stand on opposite ends of a /files/20/75/06/f207506/public/private spectrum, and both of them contrast in scale with the third. The home and the library were (and are) often contrasted as spaces for reading, whether one is imagined as a retreat from the other’s civic openness or a refuge from its capacity to spread disease. Yet in both settings, books undermined social distinctions not through their content but through each user’s knowledge that the object in his or her hands had been handled by someone else before, and would eventually fall into someone else’s.

If eighteenth-century subscription lists inscribed the reader in an economically and sexually homogeneous public, borrowers’ names at the back of a library book did just the opposite. As literacy became more evenly distributed, the fear that texts might corrupt their readers gave way to the fear that books might blur social distinctions among their handlers. The tracts that represent servants’ reading (and dusting) give
way, after 1850, to discussions of books’ circulation among public-library patrons of different social classes; yet even after the rise of the public library and the fall of domestic service, social commentators continue to use servants’ reading as a front for critiques of the middle classes whom they themselves address.

This chapter asks in conclusion why secular fiction devoted so much space to jokes about tract distributing. Where tracts imitate the formal conventions of the same novels with which they competed, mid-Victorian novels almost obsessively represent characters distributing (though rarely reading) tracts. Yet tract distribution was only one among several practices that the secular press used to figure questions about the relation between supply and demand. The experiences of being handed a tract, read aloud to, and tricked into mistaking printed advertisements for personal letters, all provided the novel with mirror images for its own claim to be freely chosen.

By satirizing intrusively personal forms of charitable and familial transmission, the novel made a virtue of a traditional accusation against it: that its commercial distribution and solitary consumption made the novel an antisocial genre. Mid-Victorian novels made both the vertical relationships that bound givers of books to their more or less willing recipients, and the horizontal relationships that linked each user of a book with others who had read or at least handled it before, foils for the kinds of solipsism that they represented fiction itself enabling—whether in the heroic mode of a Dickensian child being beaten for reading in the lumber room, or the bathetic mode of a Trollopian wife hiding from her husband in the pages of an unread book.

If reading is synonymous with individualism (as Victorian secular genres as diverse as the bildungsroman and the political treatise assume), what to make of its logistics? The historical record only occasionally yields reminders that, for example, Frances Hamilton relied on a manservant to return and pick up her books from the local circulating library (Steedman 75). Even apart from books’ dependence on multiple agents to recommend them, sell them, clean them, maintain them, sort them, retrieve them, and dispose of them, the affordability of printed matter has traditionally depended on amortizing costs by sharing, whether in the form of resale (the secondhand trade), of loan (be it public library or private book club), or more complex arrangements in which newspapers were handed down along a chain of users. In an age when books (rather like
cars or college textbooks today) were bought with an eye to resale value, every owner who calculated how much demand there would be for his possession should misfortune lead him to the auctioneer or the pawnbroker was also a reader picturing those other readers who would succeed him (Goolsbee). In the opposite direction, the margins of the page could form a repository for the traces of earlier readers, whether owners of books or borrowers of library stock. Yet those traces were not necessarily articulate or even intentional: in post-1850 public libraries especially, concerns about jam smears and mucus upstaged meetings of mind by contamination of bodies.

Closer to home, masters and servants faced the challenge of reconciling shared access to bookshelves with differential uses of their contents. (This is relevant, of course, only to that subset of servant-employing households whose masters were literate and owned books.) Most simply, how might you get your wife or maid to dust your books, without allowing either to read them? The narrator of Henry James’s 1892 tale “Brooksmith” observes that “a certain feeling for letters must have rubbed off on [the servant] from the mere handling of his master’s books, which he was always carrying to and fro and putting back in their places” (77); and as late as 1935, the protagonist of Canetti’s
Auto-da-Fé
hesitates to lend his housekeeper a book, on the grounds that “it was true that she dusted the books every day and had not yet injured one of them. But dusting and reading are different. Her fingers were coarse and rough . . . A hard binding can naturally stand rougher handling than sensitive pages . . . Charity is all very well indeed, but not at other people’s expense. Why should the books have to foot the bill? . . . They are defenceless against the uneducated” (38–39). As books are anthropomorphized, servants become dehumanized; as books become companions, humans inhabiting the same space are banished to arm’s length.