How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (45 page)

it might have been swept, new and unworn, out of the vast collection of the shreds and patches, the fustian and buckram, of a London tailor; or it might have accompanied every revolution of a fashionable coat in the shape of lining—having travelled from St. James’s to St. Giles’s, from Bond Street to Monmouth Street, from Rag Fair to the Dublin Liberty, till man disowned the vesture, and the kennel-sweeper claimed its miserable remains. In each or all of these forms, and in hundreds more which it would be useless to describe, this sheet of paper a short time since might have existed. No matter, now, what the colour of the rag—how lily the cotton—what filth it has gathered and harboured through all its transmutation—the scientific paper-maker can produce
out of these filthy materials one of the most beautiful productions of manufacture.” (
The
Old
Printer
and
the
Modern
Press
256–57)

The cloth itself trickles down the social ladder from St. James to the secondhand markets of Monmouth Street, but the next phase of its life reverses that process, turning “filthy” raw materials into the medium of pure thought.

Scatological jokes age as badly as bookish puns. The idea of paper falling into the hands of a servant—or tradesman, or Irishman, or woman—had a better run than most, leading a long and happy life in the most recyclable of genres, the anecdote (Donaldson 4). Between 1791 and 1823, Isaac D’Israeli’s six-volume
Curiosities
of
Literature
cataloged a mind-numbingly comprehensive series of variations on this theme. “We are,” D’Israeli concludes, “indebted to the patriotic endeavours of our grocers and trunkmakers, alchemists of literature! they annihilate the gross bodies without injuring the finer spirits” (D’Israeli 3:311). One antiquarian “left [old manuscripts] carelessly in a corner, and during his absence his cook used them for culinary purposes” (D’Israeli 3:54)—rather as Percy found the seventeenth-century manuscripts that would form the basis of his
Reliques
of
Ancient
English
Poetry
“lying dirty on the floor under a bureau . . . being used by the maids to light the fire.”
¹⁶

Gender could easily enough be replaced by class, as when another antiquarian “one day at his tailor’s discovered that the man was holding in his hand, ready to cut up for measures—an original Magna Charta” (D’Israeli 3:54), or by race, as when Allan Quatermain complains at the beginning of a tale that “a Kaffir boy found my manuscript convenient for lighting kitchen fire” (Haggard 11). Alternatively, gender could trump class: in a third anecdote retailed by D’Israeli, a scholar’s “niggardly niece, although repeatedly entreated to permit them to be published, preferred to use [his] learned epistles occasionally to light her fires!” (D’Israeli 3:54).
¹⁷
Servants recycle what masters once read; women discard what men once created. Like Gladstone’s comparison of librarian to warehouseman, Thackeray’s “littery footman” makes manual laborers a figure for the degeneration of the literary at once into the literal and into litter. When Harriet Taylor’s maid kindled a fire with the first draft of Carlyle’s
French
Revolution
, she walked straight into a literary convention.
¹⁸

In the era of wood pulp and Tupperware, with fireplaces and therefore servants on the wane, the trope should have died. Instead, it adapted, by substituting a figurative for a literal maidservant, and a preserver for
a destroyer. As early as 1881, Jon Klancher points out, Andrew Lang declared that “the book-collector may regard his taste as a kind of handmaid of critical science” (Lang 23); and as late as 1939, the
Cambridge
History
of
English
Literature
pronounced that “bibliography . . . is only the handmaid of literature [and] . . . it is only because of their loyal services to letters that [bibliographers] can claim a place in these pages.”
¹⁹
David Greetham riffs on this tradition when he declares that “bibliographers are the good housekeepers of the world of books” (Eliot and Rose 9). Where the figure of the maid who reads her master’s books survives even into the age of the public library (as we saw in the previous chapter), so the maid survives within scholarly discourse as a figure for literalism. Without disappearing, the maid subsides into metaphor—with her historical belatedness making her an apt image for those bibliographers whose relation to the text has never made the leap into New Critical idealism and abstraction.

The fall from gentlemen’s minds to servants’ bodies pivots on a fall from figurative language. The O’Connell anecdote hinged on competing senses of the preposition “in”: does “I’ve seen something good in your book” refer to the content of the text or to the contents of the object? “Support” performs a similar function in Fielding’s punning description of “writings, which were calculated to support the glorious cause of disaffection or infidelity, humbled to the ignoble purpose of supporting a tart or a custard!” (Gigante,
The
Great
Age
of
the
English
Essay
172). Isak Dinesen’s
Out
of
Africa
opens with a Kikuyu servant criticizing the manuscript’s fragmentary quality, explaining that, in contrast, the author’s copy of the
Odyssey
“is a good book. It hangs together from the one end to the other. Even if you hold it up and shake it strongly, it does not come to pieces” (44). In making the African servant literalize the European mistress’s fear that her collection of vignettes lacks formal coherence, the anecdote substitutes race for gender as the factor that differentiates naive materialists from those who reduce phrases like “hang together” to their metaphorical sense.

To be a gentleman is to be all mind. When the playwright in
La
Bohème
sacrifices his manuscript to heat an icy garret, he describes its contents in a series of equally broad double entendres, as “scintillating” and “ardent” (Puccini and Murger 26).
²⁰
The ambiguous class position of the bohemian is announced, in this opening scene, by the fact that we watch him burning papers before he is ever shown marking them. We know that we stand outside of the class system, in Murger’s imagined Latin Quarter, when we see a single person combining composition (the mental labor of a gentleman) with destruction (the proper work of a maid).

The costermonger who chooses the largest newspaper, in anticipation of the moment when he will have “got the reading out of it,” similarly
collapses into a single person the functions traditionally parceled out between gentleman-scholar and female servant. Yet Mayhew breaks down the distinction between writers and wrappers in part by placing such puns in the mouth not of his middle-class narrator—as Murger and others do—but of working-class informants themselves. The narrator’s indifference to literary genres (“it is no matter what kind”) finds its foil in a flypaper manufacturer’s comically elaborate taxonomy of newspapers:

I use the very best “Times” paper for my “catch-em-alives.” I gets them kept for me at stationers’ shops and liberaries, and such-like. I pays threepence a-pound, or twenty-eight shillings the hundred weight. That’s a long price, but you must have good paper if you want to make a good article. I could get paper at twopence-a-pound, but then it’s only the cheap Sunday papers, and they’re too slight. (3:32)

An “article,” of course, usually refers to a news item, just as a “paper” designates a periodical. By the same token, “cheap” and “slight” figure prominently among the insults dear to Victorian literary critics. By stripping each term of its metaphoric or metonymic charge, Mayhew shifts our attention from texts to objects. Not for nothing does his informant call the paste that gums the paper a “composition.”
²¹

“Composition” in the usual sense remains absent from Mayhew’s pages. Where Addison starts from a legible object and goes on to trace its afterlife, Mayhew’s descriptions of the resale trade open in medias res: third- or fourthhand paper forms their starting point, not their punch line. By exploring from the inside the uses to which the formerly legible can be put, Mayhew forbids his readers to dismiss recycling as a D’Israelian “curiosity,” much less an Addisonian joke or a Carlylean disaster. To take paper seriously is to resist at once the generic logic that reduces it to fodder for anecdote and the social logic that ridicules those who notice it.

By extension, Mayhew refuses to align the life cycle of paper with the social class of its users. The anecdotes that I quoted a moment ago delegated to servants the dirty work of noticing paper’s material attributes: its impermeability, its inflammability, its absorbency. Here, in contrast, the middle-class implied reader (or should that be implied handler?) is never allowed to forget his or her own body.
London
Labour
constantly reminds us that we’re wearing out its pages, if only because the weekly numbers published in 1851–52 were protected by wrappers printed with letters from readers and answers from Mayhew. Even as the wording of the wrappers incorporated readers’ writing, their material form kept dirty hands at a distance.

A similar paradox governs the fate of the wrappers themselves. Generically, the “answers to correspondents” look like the most explicitly theoretical section of the work, substituting finished economic principles for
ethnographic raw material. In physical terms, however, they’ve proven the most disposable, missing from most library copies today because they were tossed aside when the consecutively numbered pamphlets were bound into volumes. This would have come as no surprise to anyone involved in the production of the pamphlets: Mayhew himself termed the wrappers “waste”—as if pamphlets could be packaged like pies—and his publisher announced that “the outer pages of this periodical will, in future, be used as a wrapper, intended to be cut off in binding” (Mayhew,
Essential
Mayhew
87).

In anticipating its own disposal,
London
Labour
drags its readers down to the level of grocers. Where most Victorian reformist genres, from the political speech to the industrial novel, leveled up—asking middle-class readers to endow working-class characters with an interiority that mirrored their own—Mayhew levels down, reducing the page in front of us to tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper. Texts from
Oliver
Twist
to
Ranthorpe
to
David
Copperfield
withdraw the book from the marketplace; Mayhew instead reminds us of the resale value of the page before our eyes, and the paper in our hands.

The corollary is that handling replaces reading as the locus of interactivity—of the end user’s ability and even responsibility to customize and repurpose books. More specifically, the material attributes of paper, which had once been imagined to constrain appropriation and adaptation, now become a prompt for both. And as in the it-narrative, the handling of paper also replaces the reading of text as the activity that unites different social classes. As it weaves among successive users and uses, each page remains itself (although the same can rarely be said of a bound book). In that sense, Mayhew’s model reverses the logic that we tend to take for granted in the history of the Victorian
novel
, where a single text cuts across different media as its plot migrates fluidly from monthly numbers to library-issue triple-decker to cheap reprint to an equally varied series of theatrical adaptations, falling (or occasionally rising) in price at each remove. Here, in contrast, the medium remains stable—at the level of the page, if not of the book—but its uses change over time.

Like any act of recycling, then, Mayhew’s invocation of used paper is at once old and new. Old, because his interest in the economics of wastepaper plays on the worn-out trope of the pastry-cook and the trunk-maker; but also new, because where the tradition on which he draws overlays the difference between book and text onto a social hierarchy, Mayhew himself maps that distinction onto a life cycle.

Even that second distinction breaks down, however, as Mayhew subjects temporal priority to the same questioning that undermined social precedence. As perversely as he revealed handlers of food as readers of books, he now scrambles the order in which one follows the other. One “fancy-cabinet-maker,” now unemployed thanks to the underselling of slop-masters,

enjoyed no reading, when I saw him last autumn, beyond the book-leaves in which he received his quarter of cheese, his small piece of bacon or fresh meat, or his saveloys; and his wife schemed to go to the shops who ‘wrapped their things from books,’ in order that he might have something to read after his day’s work. (2:114)

Where D’Israeli represents women confusing texts with pie plates, here it’s the wife’s job to spot literary value in cheese packaging. However similar Mayhew’s sociology of recycling might appear to Addison’s or D’Israeli’s, the urge to reanimate waste that the wife shares with
London
Labour
reverses the destruction wrought by landladies and maidservants. In the costermonger’s language, the cabinetmaker’s wife doesn’t get the reading out so much as put it back in. The contrast between shrewish landlady and devoted wife thus personifies the tension between one model that casts women as the weak link in chains of textual transmission, and another that credits female librarians and editors with copying, carrying, and cataloging text, whether for love or for money.

In practice, we owe the survival of many manuscripts to the efforts of wives and daughters—not to mention stenographers, typists, and other female professionals. To compare the bibliographer to a “handmaid,” in this context, is not simply to reduce bibliography to a service industry; it’s also to remember how close the archive lies to the pantry, the oven, and the toilet. Every scholar knows how hard it is to untangle transmission from destruction—whether for material objects (think of printer’s waste) or verbal texts (think of the relations between editing and expurgation). It-narratives admit as much when they struggle to disentangle the indifference that leaves the pages uncut from the respect that protects them from dirty fingers—to distinguish the Pocket Bible’s “shelf of banishment” from its “place of repose.” Untouched by the middle-class male reading public, it-narrators are all too greasily touched by women and servants. Yet far from maids ignoring the value of the papers that they dust, there it’s the infidel master who leaves the Bible to gather dust and the simple maid who puts it to use. In one case, the lower orders leach books of legibility; in the other, they render readable what the upper classes have reduced to objects of display. In whichever direction, the relation of reading to handling is mapped onto class. In satire and reviews as in the marketplace described by Mayhew and the homes represented
in religious tracts, to articulate the relation of textual to nontextual uses of books is to theorize a social order.