How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (52 page)

34.
Edwards, manuscript scrapbook, Book E (1860–1876), Manchester Public Library Archives, p. 189, quoted in Alistair Black,
A
New
History
of
the
English
Public
Library: Social and Intellectual Contexts, 1850–1914
(London: Leicester University Press, 1996), 93.

35.
“The Role of the Black West Indian Missionary in West Africa, 1840–1890” (PhD diss., Temple University, 1972), 121, quoted in Isabel Hofmeyr, “Metaphorical Books,”
Current
Writing
13.2 (2001): 105.

1.
See also Nicholas Dames’s observation that “the very straightforward gerund ‘reading’ is almost invisible in Thackeray who prefers the use of slightly imperfect synonyms which reflect discontinuity, such as ‘subsiding into’ or ‘simpering over’ a book; to ‘turn over the leaves,’ ‘dip into,’ or ‘muse over’ a volume; or the virtually constant use of ‘peruse’ or ‘perusal’ to stand in for any more continuous ‘reading’.” Dames,
The
Physiology
of
the
Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction
, 108.

2.
By Eliot’s time, the joke is already a hackneyed one: when Lydia Languish asks, “What are those books by the glass?” her maid answers, “The great one is only The Whole Duty of Man—where I press a few blondes, ma’am.” Richard Sheridan,
The
Rivals
, 1.2.

3.
On this passage, see also Kevin McLaughlin,
Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 111–12.

4.
On the relation between novel and newspaper in Victorian culture, see Richard D. Altick,
The
Presence
of
the
Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), and Matthew Rubery,
The
Novelty
of
Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also one commentator’s mock lament that “during the morning meal, [the newspaper] interferes seriously, and amid protest, with the attention [the householder] ought to pay to the remarks of his wife.” James David Symon,
The
Press
and
Its
Story; an Account of the Birth and Development of Journalism up to the Present Day, with the History of All the Leading Newspapers: Daily, Weekly, or Monthly, Secular and Religious, Past and Present; Also the Story of Their Production from Wood-Pulp to the Printed Sheet
(London: Seeley Service & Co., 1914), 1.

5.
Cp. “in the leisured, stylish world of [James’s] late novels in particular, books are a part of the whole material of social exchange, and James’s interest in them is almost anthropological.” Tessa Hadley, “Seated Alone with a Book . . . ”
Henry
James
Review
26 (2005): 231.

6.
Benedict Anderson,
Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1991), 35. Goffman’s study of the 1954 newspaper strike argues that its main impact was not on public access to information, but rather on subway commuters’ use of space: Erving Goffman,
Behavior
in
Public
Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings
(New York: Free Press, 1963), 52. For an eloquent recent argument for Goffman’s importance to literary interpretation, see Jeff Nunokawa,
Tame
Passions
of
Wilde
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 58–59. My understanding of the paradoxes of silent reading in public draws on Georg Simmel,
The
Sociology
of
Georg
Simmel
, ed. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 337, as well as on David Henkin’s argument that reading in antebellum New York constituted a public performance, even—or especially—when silent. David Henkin,
City
Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 110. David Vincent, too, associates privacy with “control” rather than with “isolation”: David Vincent,
The
Rise
of
Mass
Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 103.

7.
See, e.g.,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/garden/10childtech.html?ref=garden.

8.
Wharton’s “The Line of Least Resistance” contrasts the boudoir where the real work of letter writing is done with the library where nothing happens: “Mr. Mindon has never quite known what the library was for; it was like one of those mysterious ruins over which archaeology endlessly disputes. It could not have been intended for reading, since no one in the house ever read, except an under-housemaid charged with having set fire to her bed in her surreptitious zeal for fiction.” Edith Wharton,
The
Collected
Short
Stories
of
Edith
Wharton
, ed. R.W.B. Lewis (New York: Scribner, 1968), 219.

9.
For a similar face-off between one spouse absorbed in reading and another who reduces the book to a projectile, see the Brontë-esque Helen Mathers,
Comin’ Thro’ the Rye: A Novel
(New York: A. L. Burt, 1876), 219.

10.
Leslie Kaufman, “Making Their Own Limits in a Spiritual Partnership,”
New
York
Times
, 15 May 2008.

11.
As Mikita Brottman asked more recently, “how many nights do you have to spend with a new lover before it’s acceptable to reach out and take a book from the nightstand?” Mikita Brottman,
The
Solitary
Vice: Against Reading
(Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 2008), 71. On the honeymoon as a Victorian institution more generally, see Helena Michie,
Victorian
Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal
, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, 53 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

12.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon,
The
Doctor’s Wife
, ed. Pykett Lynn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 108; see also Barbara Leckie,
Culture
and
Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857–1914
(Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 147.

13.
Unisar announces that its silent “‘TV ears’ will save your marriage”—and the gender of that “you” is made clear when the Web site adds, “No more arguments about watching TV in bed. And no more waking up your wife or baby because the TV is too loud.” One satisfied customer on
Amazon.com
substitutes Unisar’s product for the newspapers represented in Trollope, testifying that the “Marriage Saver” means that “he can watch TV in bed, while I can read in peace and quiet!” (
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2YJORXMEWOXX5).

14.
On the problem of attention in the nineteenth century, see Jonathan Crary,
Suspensions
of
Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).

15.
For a suggestive analogy from cinema, see Paul Willemen’s analysis of “the look at the viewer”: Paul Willemen and British Film Institute,
Looks
and
Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: British Film Institute, 1994), 107.

16.
Sylph
no. 5, 6 October 1795, quoted in John Tinnon Taylor,
Early
Opposition
to
the
English
Novel: The Popular Reaction from 1760 to 1830
(New York: King’s Crown Press, 1943), 53.

17.
Denis Diderot, “Eloge de Richardson,”
Oeuvres
complètes
, ed. Herbert Dieckmann, Jean Fabre, and Jacques Proust (Paris: Hermann, 1975). 1066 (my translation).

18.
Robert Fraser quotes a play called
The
Blinkards
(1915) by the Fante lawyer Kobina Sekyi, in which a lady intellectual scolds her maid for disturbing the petals pressed between the leaves of a book, explaining, “Haven’t I told you that, in England, leaves are placed in the books to dry, the books when the leaves are dry being placed in drawing rooms?” Robert Fraser,
Book
History
through
Postcolonial
Eyes
(London: Routledge, 2008), 90.

1.
See also Charles Bernstein’s analysis of “‘absorption’ and its obverses—impermeability, imperviousness, ejection, repellence.” Charles Bernstein,
A
Poetics
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 20, and Michael Fried,
Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 120.

2.
On the interchangeability of boots with books in a different Dickens text,
American
Notes
, see Meredith McGill, “American Pickwick; or, The Artist in Boots” (unpublished paper, 2007).

3.
On the distinction between online and offline processes in reading, see Andrew Elfenbein, “Cognitive Science and the History of Reading,”
PMLA
121 (2006).

4.
Compare Garrett Stewart’s argument that scenes of reading in modern easel painting (as opposed to, say, illuminated manuscript) require the represented book to be illegible: “the inner is guaranteed by its retreat from the seen.” Stewart,
The
Look
of
Reading: Book, Painting, Text
, 9.

5.
When the late twentieth-century cyberpunk novelist Neal Stephenson has the heroine’s stepfather throw a “Vicky” book at her head, he assumes that readers will remember the Victorian novel’s tendency to reduce books to projectiles. Neal Stephenson,
The
Diamond
Age; or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
(New York: Bantam, 1995), 94.

6.
Grand is careful to point out the gender reversal at work here: the husband is disconcerted at this reaction because, although “it was inevitable that the man should tire . . . he would smile at pictures of the waning of the honeymoon, where the husband returns to his book and his dog, and the wife sits apart sad and neglected,” but “that the wife should be the first to be bored was incredible.” Sarah Grand,
The
Beth
Book
(New York: D. Appleton, 1897), 7, 372.

7.
Even in
Vanity
Fair
itself, Becky’s book throwing is quickly enough redressed by a rather different school scene in which Dobbin, hiding from the rest of the school by dreaming over a book, is violently interrupted:

[P]oor William Dobbin . . . was lying under a tree in the playground, spelling over a favourite copy of the Arabian Nights which he had apart from the rest of the school, who were pursuing their various sports . . . Well, William Dobbin had for once forgotten the world, and was away with Sindbad the Sailor in the Valley of Diamonds, or with Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Peribanou in that delightful cavern where the Prince found her, and whither we should all like to make a tour; when shrill cries, as of a little fellow weeping, woke up his pleasant reverie; and looking up, he saw Cuff before him, belabouring a little boy . . . Down came the stump with a great heavy thump on the child’s hand. A moan followed. Dobbin looked up. The Fairy Peribanou had fled into the inmost cavern with Prince Ahmed: the Roc had whisked away Sindbad the Sailor out of the Valley of Diamonds out of sight, far into the clouds: and there was everyday life before honest William; and a big boy beating a little one without cause. (Thackeray,
Vanity
Fair
41)

Nothing further from Becky’s performance than Dobbin’s absorption: her worldly histrionics against the inwardness that allows the reader, “apart from the rest of the school,” to “forget the world.” The illustration places the book in the foreground, making its spine larger than Cuff’s cane; the narrator’s voice, too, pushes fairies and princes onto the same ontological plane as prosaic Dobbin. Such scenes confirm Deidre Lynch’s description of the hero of late eighteenth-century biography as “endowed with a double life”: “set in front of one book, his Latin grammar, for instance, he dreams of another.” Lynch, “Canon’s Clockwork: Novels for Everyday Use,” 57.

8.
See also Gayatri Spivak’s argument that Jane’s preference for image over text “can make the outside inside” and Antonia Losano on the contradiction that Brontë represents Jane choosing images over letterpress but herself refuses to have
Jane
Eyre
illustrated. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,”
Critical
Inquiry
12.1 (1985): 246; Antonia Losano, “Reading Women/Reading Pictures: Textual and Visual Reading in Charlotte Brontë’s Fiction and Nineteenth-Century Painting,”
Reading
Women: Literary and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present
, ed. Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 29.

9.
On reverie in the novel, see Debra Gettelman, “Reverie, Reading, and the Victorian Novel” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2005).

10.
I am indebted here and throughout to Sharon Marcus’s argument that “Jane experiences attacks on her body that often stem from her verbal outbursts or from an insufficiently abstract relation to reading and writing . . . The very text becomes a catastrophically material object.” Sharon Marcus, “The Profession of the Author: Abstraction, Advertising, and
Jane
Eyre
,”
PMLA
110.2 (1995): 209.