How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (34 page)

Not literally, of course; on the contrary, the problem is precisely that books lay within the reach of servants’ arms. Just as men’s newspapers and women’s novels repelled others physically present (as we saw in chapter 2), men’s newspapers and women’s novels also created bonds with physically absent or socially distant others who had touched the same object. When Alfred Austin called the sensation novel “that one touch of anything but nature that makes the kitchen and the drawing-room kin” ([Austin] 424), he echoed another reviewer’s claim that Mary Elizabeth Braddon “may boast, without fear of contradiction, of having temporarily succeeded in making the literature of the Kitchen the favorite reading of the Drawing-room” (Rae 204). That claim itself responded to the “likeness” that the novel itself establishes between Lady Audley and her lookalike maid, who “knew enough of the French language to be able
to dip into the yellow-papercovered novels which my lady ordered from the Burlington Arcade” (M. E. Braddon 104).

Sauce for the gander: Thackeray asks the reader of his
Roundabout
Papers
in the
Cornhill
to “suppose you ask for your newspaper, and Jeames says, ‘I’m reading it, and jest beg not to be disturbed.’” The narrator of
The
Newcomes
, too, introduces a digression with the observation that “‘our John finishes reading the newspaper before he answers our bell, and brings it to us’” (
Roundabout
Papers
85;
Newcomes
428).
²
The problem here is not just the fact of different classes handling the same object, but, more specifically, the order in which they do so: the traditional logic in which the newspaper descended along a social chain as it aged (or in which a maid inherited her mistress’s castoffs once they went out of fashion) is upended in the scenario of the valet getting first crack at his master’s newspaper.

I say “handling the same object” instead of “reading the same text” to register that shared reading of a single text—in particular the Bible, as we saw in the previous chapter—was sanctioned as long as each audience owned it in a different format or a different binding. The particular text chosen was often less significant, in fact, than the distinction between books given by masters to servants (or forced by masters upon servants) and books that servants themselves took the initiative to buy, beg, borrow, or steal. Tract societies reassert the social order threatened within the home by book borrowing, and outside the home by the rise of the public library. They do so not by denying that books have the power to link masters with servants, but by substituting unilateral giving for secret sharing. Where Thackeray’s secular fiction represents valets thrusting their way into the
Times
’s putatively middle-class audience, tracts require their middle-class writers and distributors to think themselves temporarily into the consciousness of working-class readers. Different power dynamics, different temporalities: far from the valet cutting ahead of his master or the maid peeking into a yellowback en route to her mistress, a tract reaches its end users only after being screened by their betters.

Those competing models of the relationships brokered by books collide in Charlotte Adams’s
Little
Servant
Maids
, a tract published by the SPCK in 1848 for 3s. 6d. in a binding suitable for middle-class ladies to give to young servants, with a style to match. Its episodic narrative, structured by a long-suffering lady’s hiring and firing of successive servants with the assistance of a tattling upper servant named Martha, culminates in the elderly Martha’s being taught to read. Yet no less than
The
Story
of
a
Pocket
Bible
, this tract also criticizes the two premises on which its own circulation depends: that servants are literate and have access to books. (Both would have applied more fully to the indoor servants who figure in such tracts than to the larger class of farm workers.)

Figure 6.1. Religious Tracts, Cambridge University Library.
By permission of Cambridge University Library.

Mrs. Sewell had, among others, a few handsomely bound volumes, lying on a table in her sitting-room, they were chiefly presents to Frank, and contained some pretty engravings: these proved a great attraction to her young servant; and heedless of soiling the binding, or marking the fair pages with dusty fingers, [Caroline] would amuse herself
by looking over them whenever opportunity offered. She knew that she had no business to open these books, and whenever she heard a step approaching she closed them hastily, so that many of the leaves got creased and dog-eared. One small volume of poems she was so delighted with, that she did very wrong, and took into her bed-room, where she kept it concealed under her pillow, to draw forth and study whenever she could do so unobserved . . .

Detection came at last, and with it disgrace, as is the case with most deceitful persons. Martha discovered the volume of poems in its hiding place, and carried it directly to her mistress. This led to an examination of the other books, and Mrs. Sewell was vexed to find how much they had been thumbed and pulled about . . .

“It is very strange,” observed Mrs. Sewell to Martha, after she was gone, “that these sort of persons always fix on one’s best things to entertain themselves with; there were other books quite as amusing, with plain bindings, lying beside those that are handsomely bound, but they do not appear to have been touched; and there was a book of poems in a paper cover, exactly the same as the morocco one she took away to her bed–room.” . . .

Poor people should begin early to teach their children to respect what is costly and ornamental; they should make them learn to look without touching. If this was generally attended to, we should not see in every direction clean white walls scribbled all over with pencil or charcoal, panes of glass windows scratched, benches hacked and cut about with letters. (Adams,
Little
Servant
Maids
138–40)

Two contradictions vertebrate this passage. First, the claim that only “these sort of persons” judge a book by its cover collides with the granularity at which the mistress (and the narrator) describe the different books’ physical form. The suggestion that the servant should have chosen the “book of poems in a paper cover, exactly the same as the morocco one,” anticipates the moment in
The
Story
of
a
Pocket
Bible
where the servant puts down the high-end narrator and takes up “the very counterpart of myself, indeed, except in mere externals.” Different editions of the same text, or even the same edition on a different paper or in a different binding, can reconcile the cultural imperative for different classes to share a common canon with the equally strong imperative to mark status. The British and Foreign Bible Society’s annual report for 1840 insists that in cheap bibles, “it is but the casket that is homely, the gem still retains its purity and richness: the peasant, or the peasant’s child, when taking the
cheap
Bible in his hand, looks upon the same great truths . . . as meet the eye of the prince when he bends over the vellumed page” (quoted in Howsam 71). Yet by 1860, its catalog meticulously distinguished
fifty-nine different formats of its English Bible, at prices ranging from sevenpence to twenty-three shillings depending not only on whether a subscriber’s discount was given but also on a dizzying series of permutations and combinations of size, paper weight, edges (plain, gilt, red, or marbled), binding style (limp or circuit), and binding material (morocco, roan, sheep, calf, cloth, enameled cloth, or artificially grained sheepskin) (
Fifty-Sixth Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society
).
³

Even the most doggedly anti-Evangelical of writers and publishers had something to learn from this trickle-down model. Dickens’s strategy of “working the copyrights” by issuing each novel in successively cheaper formats owes more than the creator of Mrs. Pardiggle would have admitted to the tract societies’ schemes for repackaging the same content at different price points.
⁴
At one end of the century, from 1796 onward, each Cheap Repository Tract was issued in two different qualities of paper: one, coarser, sold to hawkers at 24 for 6d., and another, finer, to the gentry at 24 for 1s. 6d. The result was what Kevin Gilmartin calls a “tension between a desire to incorporate every reader and every text within a single print economy, and an insistence that differences of privilege and function within that economy be strictly enforced” (“‘Study to Be Quiet’” 512). By 1893, J. M. Barrie could reverse this trope for comic effect, by imagining a master becoming embarrassed to read his selected Landor once he discovers that the maid owns the
Collected
(Barrie)—itself an updating of the eighteenth-century servant Elizabeth Hands’s joke:

Quoth Madam, I have it;
A Scripture tale?—ay—I remember it—true;
Pray is it i’th’ old Testament or the new?
If I thought I could readily find it, I’d borrow
My house-keeper’s Bible, and read it to-morrow.

(“A Poem, on the Supposition of the Book Having Been Published and Read,” 261)

The Bible, in particular, needs to remind readers of their place while including them in a larger religious community; not only does its numbering system unmoor citations from the pagination specific to any edition or even any language, but it’s precisely because its contents are never outdated that its flyleaves can be enlisted to record the passage from one generation of owners to the next. In Mrs. Sherwood’s popular tract “Little Henry and his Bearer,” the observation that the text of the Bible remains stable across different formats is undercut by the space devoted to leather bindings and silk coverings:

One day Henry came into the lady’s room, and found her opening a box of books. “Come,” said she, “Henry, help me to unpack these
books, and to carry them to my bookcase.” Now, while they were thus busy, and little Henry was much pleased to think that he could make himself useful, the lady said, “These books have different kinds of covers, and some are larger than others, but they all contain the same words, and are the book of God . . . You shall have any one of these books you like best.”

Henry thanked the lady with all his heart, and called Boosy in to give his advice whether he should choose a book with a purple morocco cover, or one with a red one. (M. Sherwood 14)

As another moralist warns, “Children, particularly, should never suffer themselves to be tempted by the rich outside of the book: often a worthless production shines in gold, whilst many a moral and useful work appears in a plain and simple cover (“Little Jack of All Trades”).

The second contradiction is that we might expect Caroline’s “dusty fingers” to connote industry rather than laziness: the reason they are dusty, after all, is that she has been dusting the sitting-room table.
⁵
Mrs. Sewell’s injunction against handling reverses the more predictable logic of
The
Story
of
a
Pocket
Bible
, where the servant is expected to dust without reading—to use her hands instead of her eyes. Unlike smelling, looking is not in any simple sense opposed to reading; in fact, the explicit imperative to “look without touching” oddly inverts the implicit order to touch (that is, dust) without looking (that is, reading).

As an activity that requires books to be handled by those who (for reasons of gender or class) are not supposed to read them, dusting makes anxieties about shared access particularly visible. Mrs. Beeton enjoins housemaids that even when the books are in a locked case, “every corner of every pane and ledge requires to be carefully wiped, so that not a speck of dust can be found” (990). In
The
Enemies
of
Books
, however, the bibliophile William Blades asks in the pseudojocular tone beloved of fin-de-siècle male collectors:

Why need the women-folk (God forgive me!) bother themselves about the inside of a man’s library, and whether it wants dusting or not? . . . When your books are being ‘dusted,’ don’t impute too much commonsense to your assistants; take their ignorance for granted . . . Your female ‘help,’ too, dearly loves a good tall pile to work at, and, as a rule, her notions of the center of gravity are not accurate, leading often to a general downfall. (118–20)
⁶

Book collecting found its mirror image in tract distributing: one an assertion of wealth and taste, the other an act of social condescension and aesthetic slumming; one associated with bachelor dandies, the other with do-gooding spinsters; one aimed at accumulation, the other at dispersal.
Yet even though written by, for, and about women,
Little
Servant
Maids
seems to side more with Blades’s misogyny: in a tract whose practical hints are devoted to the ways servants should touch—and dust and scrub and polish—every surface around them, writing and reading form the only context in which servants’ hands are imagined to defile, not to clean. That contradiction can be resolved only through a bifurcation of the hand: neat fingers polish and iron, dirty thumbs crease and dog-ear. The thumbprint that illiterates use to replace a signature gives way to a thumb smear that semiliterates use to mark their territory, or rather the domestic territory that they service but don’t possess.