How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (49 page)

Blackstone’s
Commentaries
famously claimed that “the identity of a literary composition consists intirely in the
sentiment
and the
language
,” while “the paper and print are merely accidents” by which “that composition [is ‘conveyed’] to the ear or eye of another.” In Mayhew’s world, texts reach readers thanks not to intentions but to side effects. Instead of food stains rendering the page illegible, the paper’s usability as fish wrap ensures the transmission of text. As a result, Mayhew’s characters don’t just have the ears and eyes that Blackstone mentions; he also endows them with noses.
³⁴
Although the mention of “a once perfumed love-note” reminds us that papers lose some of their sensory attributes as they age, the persistence of excremental humor points in the opposite direction, toward a materiality that intensifies over time. As the items listed in a “West-End Perfumer’s” account books lose their fragrance, the books themselves accrue smells.

A mystery story published a few decades after
London
Labour
reminds us that the smell of paper can provide as much information as its textual content. After sniffing a letter, the detective tells us, “it became clear to me that I was wasting my time on the handwriting and the contents. I needed to concentrate on outward appearances and use them as my starting-point” (Groller 239). Where literary critics ignore outsides, criminal forensics ignores insides. The historian Paul Duguid dramatizes the clash between those two models in an anecdote about his own archival work: suffering from asthma, he holds his nose in the reading room; in the next seat, however, he notices another researcher passing letter after letter under his nostrils without even glancing at their contents. The researcher turns out to be sniffing for vinegar, to determine whether the port from which the letter was sent was under quarantine. Duguid’s point is that digitizing a paper document can cause relevant information to be
lost or changed, but the shock value of his anecdote comes as his own persona shifts from brainy researcher to embodied asthmatic; he chokes, quite literally, on the realization that the nose can convey more information than the eye (Brown and Duguid 173). A different mind-body contrast structures another early twenty-first century argument against digitization, Sean Latham and Robert Scholes’s “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” which faults an editor for failing to reproduce the advertisements from a 1711
Spectator
. The example given is an advertisement for a “Tincture to restore the Sense of Smelling, tho’ lost for many Years” (Latham and Scholes 526). For these literary critics as for the business historian, to think of the book as something more than words is to recover a long-lost body. For them, too, to use the nose along with the eyes is to identify oneself as a handmaiden of literature.
³⁵

The “accidental” can refer either to mistakes like the burning of a manuscript of
The
French
Revolution
, or to punctuation, spacing, and other features that have been excluded from the historically shifting boundaries of what we call “the text itself.”
³⁶
In neither case does an absence of authorized intention imply an absence of legible meaning. The dog-eared page, the uncut page, the faded page, even the page that smells of the cheese it once wrapped or the vinegar that once disinfected it—each of these can tell us something about what users have done to their books and books have done to their users. What they can’t tell us about is the way in which a text was read, much less in forms that a literary-historical or intellectual-historical training renders interesting.

The cabinetmaker’s wife teaches us to see the page at once as the lining of a barrow and the lines of a poem. Looking backward to the satirical tradition, Mayhew also looks forward to the question that faces historians of the book: how to disentangle reading from handling.
London
Labour
forbids us to parse that difference as hierarchy: to position the text as prior to the book (the book as a residue left over once the text has been used up); or as superior to the book (the book as the province first of illiterate grocers, then of theoretically illiterate bibliographers); or as purer than the book (the book as manual, the text as digital; the book as the dusty residue clogging up our libraries, the text as abstract thought streaming into an ethereal future).

For gissing at century’s end, membership in an audience tainted the aesthetic: “My pleasure in the finest music would be greatly spoilt by having to sit amid a crowd, with some idiot audible on the right hand or left” (
The
Private
Papers
of
Henry
Ryecroft
125).
¹
In
New
Grub
Street
the shallow and quick writer’s wife ceases to be a sympathetic character at the moment when she stops noticing defects “to which the common reader would be totally insensible” and starts commenting instead “on the features of the work which had made it popular”: when, in other words, she positions herself within a public rather than against it. In the process, texts give way to “persons”:

[Amy Reardon’s] interests were becoming more personal; she liked to hear details of the success of popular authors—about their wives or husbands, as the case might be, their arrangements with publishers, their methods of work . . . She talked of questions such as international copyright, was anxious to get an insight into the practical conduct of journals and magazines, liked to know who ‘read’ for the publishing houses. (99)

“Questions such as international copyright,” “practical conduct of journals and magazines,” “who ‘read’ for the publishing houses”: Amy’s new concerns read like a parody of the book-historical scholarship that would emerge half a century later. The quotation marks around “read” reduce the agent to a focus group, responsible no longer for describing her own response but for predicting the response of other potential buyers. Like the midcentury tract-lady, the late-century businesswoman cares more about others’ reading than about her own; both show more interest in distributing books than in reading texts. Once a frivolous dreamer, the female inscribed reader is now too hardheaded: instead of a passive consumer, an overactive middlewoman. In this overcrowded landscape, the book no longer serves as block.

The book, or more specifically the novel:
New
Grub
Street
’s sensitivity to reading by proxy may stem from its own genre’s susceptibility to such secondhand reading. From the beginning, its reviewers frame their arguments not around their own response, but around speculations about the response of a collective, commercialized readership: thus a 1809 review of Edgeworth’s tales begins, “If the importance of a literary work is to
be estimated by the number of readers which it attracts, . . . a novel or a tale cannot be deemed a trifling production” (quoted in Ferris,
The
Achievement
of
Literary
Authority
32), and James Fitzjames Stephen’s 1855 review of Dickens opens by establishing the popularity of novels and adding almost apologetically that “measured by these standards, their importance must be considered very great” (J. F. Stephen 148).

Tracts worry less, we’ve seen, about reading the wrong texts than about touching a book that had passed through the wrong hands or the wrong number of handlers. Gissing’s satire identifies an even more diffuse threat: that the book might become a vector for the social entanglements from which it’s supposed to provide an escape. The reader’s relation with the book (or the author) is pure, his relation with other readers (or handlers) tainted. If the happiest books have no history, the happiest reader is also the one who can imagine himself to be their first, their only, their implied, their intended.
²

Where fantasized romances with literary characters crowd out the consciousness of one’s own husband, wife, or stepparent, so fantasized intimacy with authors upstages any sense of commonality with other readers. As Woolf observed, “it is precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable” (“How Should One Read a Book?” 268). The fin-de-siècle cult of the uncut page forms the mirror image of the book fumigator. In Emerson’s analogy, “a man’s library is a sort of harem, and tender readers have a great pudency in showing their books to a stranger” (Emerson and Lubbock 21).

Common appreciation of literary texts had long been imagined as a social cement. When Diderot writes that “I have never met anyone who shared my enthusiasm [for Richardson’s characters] without being tempted to hug him,” or when the preface to
Pamela
quotes a master’s praises of the serving-boy who cries upon overhearing the novel read aloud, they invest the book with the power to bridge distances of space and rank (Diderot 1099; S. Richardson,
Pamela
19). By the nineteenth century, however, the emotions generated by shared reading were coded less positively. Fellow readers can avoid one another (like those public library users who wanted their books disinfected) or even compete for space—sometimes quite literally for room in the margin. Where the virgin page vehicles a meeting of minds between author and reader, an already-annotated book forces each reader to recognize himself as only one of a series. H. J. Jackson asks, “do second readers respond to the first? Identify with the first? Seek to differentiate themselves? Ignore the other’s notes altogether?” (
Romantic
Readers
263) Those twenty-first-century scholars who debate whether to speak of “the reader” in the abstract or of empirical, plural readers echo nineteenth-century writers’
recourse to reading as one of the arenas in which to explore the relation of the individual to the mass.
³

Today, a gulf separates any literary critic’s description of his own reading of a particular text—whose interest lies in its atypicality, even its perverseness—from a scholar’s description of readings that are removed from his own world (whether in time or in habitus: an academic sociologist describing a middlebrow book club, for example) and whose agent is imagined as either collective or representative (Long). In recent memory, that gulf has mapped on to a division of labor between two disciplines, literary criticism and cultural history. It’s true that the latter doesn’t always focus on collectives; on the contrary, microhistory has produced a spate of exemplary figures whose liveliness depends precisely on their eccentricity. Yet in grammatical terms, literary critics continue to speak of “the reader” (or “this reader”), where historians more easily speak of “readers.” The contrast between the novel of manners described in chapter 2 and the romantic bildungsroman analyzed in chapter 3 prefigures the disciplinary tension between reception studies and literary-critical introspection.

My argument could be taken as one very long footnote to Natalie Davis’s long-ago reminder that the book constitutes “not merely a source for ideas . . . but a carrier of relationships” (N. Davis 192). Reciprocally, relationships are carriers of texts: human interactions transmit books, change books, and imbue books with meaning. Those relationships can be serial (think of the marginalia contributed by successive readers of a single copy of the
Imitation
of
Christ
) or synchronic (think of the simultaneous reading of multiple copies of the newspaper). Benedict Anderson’s famous account of the second scenario has focused scholars’ attention on the public sphere of the “subway” and the “barbershop,” but the homes described in religious tracts, and the parishes in which tracts themselves circulated, form more fraught—as well as more feminine—venues for book sharing (Anderson 35). I contrasted the newspaper’s power to build Andersonian bridges among same-sex strangers with its power to drive Trollopian wedges between opposite-sex intimates. In place of the “community in anonymity” that Anderson describes, tracts both create and represent face-to-face relationships. What links members of this community is something more concrete than the newspaper as conceptualized by Anderson: a book that cannot be in two places at once (though it can be put to two successive uses), and whose different copies are far from interchangeable. The point is not simply that a model of print culture that made tracts its exemplar would look less heroic than one that took the newspaper as representative. More strikingly, even Anderson’s own example presumes a presentist model of how (and when) the newspaper circulates. Taking for granted what he calls “the obsolescence of
the newspaper on the morrow of its printing,” Anderson adds that “we know that particular morning and evening editions will overwhelmingly be consumed between this hour and that, only on this day, not that. (Contrast sugar, the use of which proceeds in an unclocked, continuous flow; it may go bad, but it does not go out of date)” (35).

We’ve seen, however, what a small and unrepresentative fraction of any newspaper’s life cycle was formed by its first day. One of the many objects handed along—or in social terms, handed down—the paper subsided by easy stages from rich readers to poor readers and finally from readers to the grocery, the kitchen, and the privy. Oliphant’s historical novel
Kirsteen
(published in 1890 but set at the other end of the century) describes “a Glasgow paper, posted by its first reader the day after publication to a gentleman on Loch Long, then forwarded by him to Inveralton, thence to Drumcarro. Mr Pyper at the Manse got it at fourth hand. It would be difficult to trace its wanderings after that” (40). In this narrative, the newspaper marks not the functional equality of men within the public sphere, but on the contrary the differences of rank among readers (the later the lower), and even more sharply between readers and those end users (wrappers? wipers?) who populate
London
Labour
but which Oliphant’s more genteel final clause declines to name.