How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (53 page)

11.
On this construction in
Jane
Eyre
, see Stewart,
Dear
Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
.

12.
“Tolkien, the Book; Rereading Lord of the Rings,”
Weekly
Standard
, 31 December 2001, 43; Martha Nussbaum,
Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Literature and Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 8; Charles M. Reed,
Reading
As
If
for
Life: Preparing Young Women for the Real World
(speech delivered at the Women’s College at Brenau University, Gainesville, Georgia, 13 September 2001). Carla Peterson,
The
Determined
Reader: Gender and Culture in the Novel from Napoleon to Victoria
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), begins with an acknowledgment to the daughter whom she describes “curled up in an armchair with a book, ‘reading as if for life’” (ix). See also Anne Fadiman,
Rereadings
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), xv. On this passage, see also Rosemary Lloyd, “Reading As If for Life,”
Journal
of
European
Studies
22.3 (1992).

13.
On reading aloud and library visits as compared to owning books, see Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner,
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: William Morrow, 2006), 172; as Maria Tatar nicely summarizes their claim, “parents (their socioeconomic status level of education and so on) matter [more than] parenting (reading to children, taking them to museums and so on.” Maria Tatar,
Enchanted
Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood
, 1st ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009), 33. For parents’ educational level compared to presence of books in the home, National Endowment for the Arts
To
Read
or
Not
to
Read
, 73. Similar results are cited in McQuillan,
The
Literacy
Crisis: False Claims and Real Solutions
, 1998, and Stephen D. Krashen,
The
Power
of
Reading: Insights from the Research
, 2nd ed. (Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited; Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2004). In another counterintuitive study, “the amount of shared parent-child reading time did not matter, on average, for the reading skills of either group of kids [mothers who read an average amount and mothers who spent an unusually high amount of time reading]. What mattered instead . . . for the kids of the high-reading moms was how orderly the family’s home was” (
http://www.slate.com/id/2212318/).

14.
As Andrew Miller shrewdly argues, “George de Barnwell’s mistake—and, implicitly Bulwer’s as well—is to conceive of books he reads as fundamentally superior to, and different in kind from, commodities, the currants and tea and cocoa sold in the shop . . . For Thackeray, however, books simply are objects, and are governed by the forces that govern the production of objects”—and, one could add, their consumption. Andrew Miller,
Novels
behind
Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 45–46.

15.
The trope of childhood reading as more authentic than adult reading persists in recent examples of the genre that Seth Lerer has dubbed “biblioautobiography” (i.e., nonacademic essays about the history of reading that contain a significant autobiographical component). Seth Lerer, “Falling Asleep over the History of the Book,”
PMLA
21 (2006): 230. See, e.g., Alberto Manguel,
A
History
of
Reading
(London: HarperCollins, 1996), 10, and Sven Birkerts,
The
Gutenberg
Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
(Winchester, Mass.: Faber and Faber, 1994), 37, 88–89. One of the few examples of such an essay that shows great sensitivity to the social structures that shape a child’s imaginative engagement is Francis Spufford,
The
Child
That
Books
Built
(London: Faber and Faber, 2002)—but then the narrator’s mother happens to be a historian of literacy.

16.
On David’s shift toward a more utilitarian model of literacy, see Leah Price, “Stenographic Masculinity,” and Ivan Kreilkamp, “Speech on Paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian Phonography, and the Reform of Writing,” both in
Literary
Secretaries/Secretarial Culture
, ed. Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

17.
National Endowment for the Arts,
Survey
of
Public
Participation
in
the
Arts
(2002), and National Endowment for the Arts,
Reading
at
Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America.
(2004).

18.
Mrs. Sherwood,
A
Drive
in
the
Coach
through
the
Streets
of
London: A Story Founded on Fact
(London: F. Houlston and Son, 1824); see Katie Trumpener, “The Making of Child Readers,”
The
Cambridge
History
of
English
Romantic
Literature
, ed. James Chandler, New Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 564.

19.
Thanks to Catherine Robson for this reference.

20.
For analogous issues in Hardy, see Jonathan Wike, “The World as Text in Hardy’s Fiction,”
Nineteenth-Century Literature
47.4 (1993).

21.
Gaskell reports that when Patrick Brontë “asked Charlotte what was the best book in the world; she answered, ‘The Bible.’ And what was the next best; she answered, ‘The Book of Nature.’” Gaskell herself described Miss Brontë’s “careful examination of the shape of the clouds and the signs of the heavens, in which she read, as from a book, what the coming weather would be”; she also quotes a letter from Charlotte asserting that “if no new books had ever been written, some of these minds would themselves have remained blank pages: they only take an impression.” Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell,
The
Life
of
Charlotte
Brontë
, ed. Angus Easson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 48, 353, 85.

22.
Sir Charles Russell, speech at a dinner of the First International Shorthand Congress, Tuesday, 27 September 1887, in
Proceedings
of
the
First
International
Shorth and
Congress
(London: Isaac Pitman, 1888), 159.

23.
Manual
of
Phonography
(1860), 11–13, quoted in Lisa Gitelman,
Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 28.

24.
Charles Dickens,
The
Speeches
of
Charles
Dickens
, ed. K. J. Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 347.

25.
Kreilkamp, “Speech on Paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian Phonography, and the Reform of Writing.”

26.
On Dickens’s eagerness to protect his study from acoustic interference, see John M. Picker,
Victorian
Soundscapes
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 52–65.

27.
See James Buzard, “Home Ec. with Mrs. Beeton,”
Raritan—A Quarterly Review
17.2 (1997), and Chris Vanden Bossche, “Cookery, not Rookery: Family and Class in
David
Copperfield
,”
David
Copperfield
and
Hard
Times, ed. John Peck
(London: St. Martin’s, 1995), 31–57. On preprinted account books, see also Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall,
Family
Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 384.

28.
On the figure of Mr. Dick, see Alexander Welsh,
From
Copyright
to
Copperfield: The Identity of Dickens
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 117–18; on copying more generally, see Alexander Welsh, “Writing and Copying in the Age of Steam,”
Victorian
Literature
and
Society
, ed. James Kincaid and Albert Kuhn (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), 30–45.

29.
On the body as a writing surface, see Sara Thornton,
Advertising, Subjectivity and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Dickens, Balzac and the Language of the Walls
, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 38–41.

30.
On this passage, see also D. A. Miller,
The
Novel
and
the
Police
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 198. Compare Thackeray’s parody, whose narrator complains, “The big boys keep me awake telling stories to ’em
all
night
; and I know
ever
so
many
, and am always making
stories
in
my
head
; and somehow I feel that I’m better than
many
of
the
chaps
—only
I
can’t do anything.
” [William Thackeray], “Why Can’t They Leave Us Alone in the Holidays?”
Punch
, 1851.

31.
Walter J. Ong,
Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), 113–41.

32.
For a subtle reading of this logic, see Rosemarie Bodenheimer,
Knowing
Dickens
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007).

1.
This is not to say that books were the
only
speaking objects: the genre was revived in large part by Douglas Jerrold’s
Story
of
a
Feather
(1843). Catherine Waters,
Commodity
Culture
in
Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 14.

2.
“Cheap Books,”
Christian
Spectator
, July 1846, 146, quoted in Aileen Fyfe,
Science
and
Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 159.

3.
The metaphor is common enough: compare “Julia has free access to all her father’s books, with the exception of one book-case; this has glazed doors, and the books are all turned with their titles inward, so we do not know their
names or contents, but Mr. Waldron says they are not suitable for us to read. Julia looks at them with a sort of awe; she says they are criminals locked up in their condemned cell.”
She
Would
Be
a
Governess: A Tale
(London: Routledge, 1861), 25. The carceral metaphor sometimes gives way to a sexual one, as when one article compares “books behind their glass doors” to “Persian beauties behind their jalousies, to be looked at.” Sarah G. S. Pratt,
First
Homes
(1882), American Periodicals Series Online, ProQuest, 1 November 2009.

4.
On the magazine, see Rosemary Scott, “The Sunday Periodical: Sunday at Home,”
Victorian
Periodicals
25.4 (1992).

5.
An exception is the
Story
of
a
Pocket
Bible
: according to Jacky Bratton, “an edition of the early 1860s offers evidence of the value which was placed upon it; inscriptions carefully record that it was bequeathed to a beloved daughter in 1875, who received it in 1884, and left it in turn to her dear daughter.” J. S. Bratton,
The
Impact
of
Victorian
Children’s Fiction
(London: Croom Helm, 1981), 65.

6.
Thanks to Ellen Garvey for this reference.

7.
The narrator figures itself even more insistently as a body in “Adventures of a Robinson Crusoe. Written by Itself. To the Editors of the Young Gentleman’s and Lady’s Magazine,” where “I was clothed in a most elegant and substantial manner, in what might be called a military dress; for it was red laced with gold.” The little girl who chooses the narrator over other editions, it adds, “was not the only young lady that has been captivated with scarlet and gold!” Vanity is followed by sexual consummation, itself naturally followed by abandonment: “Being carried home, she was for some time so fond of me, that she was constantly tumbling over my leaves by day, and even took me to bed with her at night.” Once she becomes “mistress of my contents,” however, “I became more estranged from my young mistress, or rather she from me.” Eventually the book is passed on to her young son: “Hitherto my coat was not much the worse for the wear. The red was indeed a little faded, and the gold tarnished; a few wrinkles and spots deformed my substance; but still I would have passed for a middle-aged book, and among younger competitors would not have appeared to much disadvantage.” Like any fallen woman, the book ages in proportion to how much it’s been loved, or at least used: “The more I became a favourite, the harder was my usage. I was thumbed without mercy, my leaves began to curl, my binding to break . . . I had been used till novelty was no more.” A gaudy dress, an initial physical closeness followed by boredom and estrangement once the owner “soon became mistress of” its insides: we don’t need to wait for the book’s later reference to being “in keeping” to understand that it tells its story by analogy to a prostitute’s. Finally traded for half a dozen apples, the book blames its owner for never once reflecting how much “it must wound the feelings of a tender mother to part with me on such easy terms, and for such an ignoble end . . . he was sensible of his error when it was too late to recover me—when my destiny was sealed for ever.” Finally, the narrator is traded for a copy of—the
Young
Gentleman’s and Lady’s Magazine
. Abandoned in favor of “a little new flaunting pamphlet in a French gray patent wrapper, tricked out with painted flowers, and composed of more subjects than there are colours in the rainbow,” the “old faithful servant” has nothing left to tell but that “my poor remains were gathered up, and I was sold to a chandler for a penny.” “Adventures of a Robinson Crusoe. Written by
Itself. To the Editors of the Young Gentleman’s and Lady’s Magazine,”
Young
Gentleman’s & Lady’s Magazine, or Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction and Amusement
1 (1799): 186–92.