How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (55 page)

21.
Sherwood invokes the same verse in “The Red Book” and in “The Penny Tract.” Mary Sherwood,
The
Works
of
Mrs. Sherwood. Being the Only Uniform Edition Ever Published in the United States
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1834), 13:146, 351.

22.
“Answers to Correspondents,” 47.5 (1 November 1851), reprinted in Henry Mayhew,
The
Essential
Mayhew: Representing and Communicating the Poor
, ed. Bertrand Taithe (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), 212.

23.
L. N. R[anyard],
The
Missing
Link, or, Bible-Women in the Homes of the London Poor
(New York: Robert Carter, 1860), 116–17. On Mrs. Ranyard, see John Matthias Weylland,
These
Fifty
Years
Being
the
Jubilee
Volume
of
the
London
City
Mission
(London: Partridge, 1884).

24.
On charity visiting in
Bleak
House
, see also Beth Fowkes Tobin,
Superintending
the
Poor: Charitable Ladies and Paternal Landlords in British Fiction, 1770–1860
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 129–52.

25.
See Dorothy J. Hale, “Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel,”
Narrative
15 (2007).

26.
M. O. Grenby argues that tracts could themselves address middle-class children as well as working-class adults: M. O. Grenby, “Chapbooks, Children, and Children’s Literature,”
The
Library
3 (2007): 290.

27.
As Laura Green argues, “because its destination is always ultimately the self, literary identification . . . tends to consolidate rather than expand the subject’s consciousness.” Laura Green, “‘I Recognized Myself in Her’: Identifying with the Reader in George Eliot’s
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
and Simone De Beauvoir’s
Memoirs
of
a
Dutiful
Daughter
,”
Tulsa
Studies
in
Women’s Literature
24.1 (2005): 57.

28.
As William McKelvy points out,
Felix
Holt
, too, has a character asserting his identity by rejecting a father’s archival bequest. William R. McKelvy,
The
English
Cult
of
Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–1880
, Victorian Literature and Culture Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 230.

29.
For an example of a Victorian reader’s annotations to the
Imitation
of
Christ
, see Florence Nightingale,
Florence
Nightingale
on
Mysticism
and
Eastern
Religions
, vol. 4 of
The
Collected
Works
of
Florence
Nightingale
, ed. Gerard Vallee, 16 vols. (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001–), 81–104.

30.
Though Eliot, as usual, expressed an anxious investment in the production values of her own novels: Leah Price,
The
Anthology
and
the
Rise
of
the
Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 122.

31.
On those other possessions, see Jeff Nunokawa,
The
Afterlife
of
Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).

32.
Similarly, John Kucich argues that Maggie values objects as intensely as Tom does, though more diffusely: see John Kucich, “George Eliot and Objects: Meaning and Matter in the Mill on the Floss,”
Dickens
Studies
Annual
12 (1983).

33.
On the “reified communication” that makes the value of words depend on their embodiment in an object, see Kucich, “George Eliot and Objects: Meaning and Matter in the Mill on the Floss,” 326.

34.
Compare Gaskell’s
My
Lady
Ludlow
: where the bible “was not opened at any chapter, or consoling verse; but at the page whereon were registered the births of her nine children.” Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell,
My
Lady
Ludlow
and
Other
Stories
, ed. Edgar Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 162.

35.
In formal terms, however, the family bible bears more resemblance to the newspaper, as a source that narrators can quote to introduce new information into the plot: as late as 1901,
Buddenbrooks
cites its flyleaf as authority for three plot points. Thomas Mann,
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
, trans. John E. Woods, 1st American ed. (New York: Knopf, 1993), 155, 71, 510. Yonge cuts even straighter to the chase, introducing a near facsimile with the remark that “for the convenience of our readers we subjoin the first page of the family Bible.” Charlotte Mary Yonge,
The
Pillars
of
the
House; or, under Wode, under Rode
(London: Macmillan and Co., 1874), 82. What the confidante performed in classical drama, the bible and the newspaper parcel out between them in the modern novel.

On the peculiarities of manuscript-print interaction in bibles, see Sherman,
Used
Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England
, 71–86. Sherman notes that the Bible less often provided a place for the family record than did the Book of Common Prayer and collections of sermons and homilies (60).

36.
My thoughts on association copies owe much to the late Jay Fliegelman.

37.
On the moral ambiguity of a model of sympathy in which “another’s internal state becomes ‘intimately present’ only by losing its distinct quality of belonging to someone else,” see Gallagher,
Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of
Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820
, 170; similarly, Caroline Levine argues that identification in Eliot ends up obliterating the alterity of the Other. Caroline Levine,
The
Serious
Pleasures
of
Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt
, Victorian Literature and Culture Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 108. For a counterargument, however, see Suzy Anger’s critique of recent critics’ symptomatic readings of Eliotic sympathy. Suzy Anger,
Victorian
Interpretation
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 96.

1.
Compare Roger Chartier’s argument that as the spread of literacy made the
fact
of reading, or even of reading a particular book, less significant,
ways
of reading became a surer marker of social position—and therefore that historians should pay special attention to divergent uses of shared texts. Roger Chartier,
The
Order
of
Books
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 15–16.

2.
Compare the 1868 cartoon in
Punch
showing a maid borrowing a lodger’s sensation novel—with the difference that here the book crosses a gender divide. Flint,
The
Woman
Reader, 1837–1914
, 279.

3.
On differences among formats, see also Fyfe,
Science
and
Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain
, 157.

4.
On Dickens’s method of “working the copyrights,” see Patten,
Charles
Dickens
and
His
Publishers
, 236–65.

5.
Dusting is also, as Carolyn Steedman points out, the
least
dirty of household activities, and one of the few that the lady of the house might condescend to perform herself:
Labours
Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 347.

6.
Andrew Lang remarks similarly that the amateur “loves to have his study, like Montaigne’s, remote from the interruption of servants, wife, and children.” Andrew Lang,
The
Library
(London: Macmillan & Co., 1881), 34.

7.
On the problem of master-servant privacy and secrecy, see David Vincent,
The
Culture
of
Secrecy
in
Britain, 1832–1998
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 71–73. In the opposite direction, locks may have been even more important for servants than for masters, since the former’s privacy was more precarious, as were their belongings: see “Thresholds and Boundaries at Home” in Amanda Vickery,
Behind
Closed
Doors: At Home in Georgian England
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).

8.
With exceptions, as in
Ward
and
Lock’s Home Book
, which urges householders to banish their own worn-out volumes to the kitchen, because servants “should be allowed access to the books of the house, always, of course, under proper restrictions. In these auxiliary cases may be kept such books as those whose original cloth binding is dilapidated, but not yet sufficiently so as to consign them to the binder’s hand.”
Ward
and
Lock’s Home Book
, (London: Ward, Lock, 1882), 281. On servants’ libraries, see Felicity Stimpson, “Servants’ Reading: An Examination of the Servants’ Library at Cragside,”
Library
History
19.1 (2003).

9.
Quoted in Flint,
The
Woman
Reader, 1837–1914
, 234; for a rich account of servants’ reading more generally, see 232–34.

10.
In Worboise’s
Thornycroft
Hall
, the character who corresponds most closely to Mrs. Reed complains that “the dust was so thick that I could have written my name on every article of furniture.” “And did you write it, my dear?” asks her husband. “No, Mr. Ward, I did not; but I wrote ‘SLUT’ in great capital letters on the looking glass, and on both the tables.” Emma Worboise,
Thornycroft
Hall: Its Owners and Its Heirs
(London: J. Clarke, 1886), 21.

11.
On breakage of china, see, e.g.,
Domestic
Management, Or the Art of Conducting a Family; with Instructions to Servants in General. Addressed to Young Housekeepers
(London: printed for H. D. Symonds at the Literary Press, No. 62 Wardour-Street, Soho, 1800), 87.

12.
“My mistress’s bonnet,”
Godey’s Lady’s Book
37 (September 1848): 119, reproduced in Anna Vemer Andrzejewski,
Building
Power: Architecture and Surveillance in Victorian America
, 1st ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008), 129.

13.
Pawnbroker’s Gazette
865 (1855): 194–95; many thanks to Beth Womack for this reference.

14.
On the politics of literacy in More, see Brantlinger,
The
Reading
Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Britain
, 6.

15.
In the following chapter, Jane asks of John: “Master! How is he my master? Am I a servant?” To which a maid replies, “No; you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep.” Charlotte Brontë,
Jane
Eyre
, ed. Michael Mason (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 19. See also Leah Price, “The Life of Charlotte Brontë and the Death of Miss Eyre,”
SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900
35.4 (1995).

16.
Cp. one American decorating manual’s claim that with a locked bookcase “one does not soil one’s hands, which is inevitable where books stand uncovered and undusted for weeks; and he is no lover of his books who will allow the house-maid to include them in her daily duties, for she is usually far more dangerous than the corrupting moth and dust.” Maria Oakey Dewing,
Beauty
in
the
Household
(New York: Harper, 1882), 84.

17.
On the relation between finger and bookmark, see Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,”
Books
and
Readers
in
Early
Modern
England
, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

18.
Similarly, a novel cowritten by (among others) Charlotte Yonge has a clergyman’s wife complain that her husband “never can remember to leave the right tracts; the drunkards don’t get the intemperate ones, and that elect woman Mrs. Scroggs was so offended because he gave her ‘Are you Converted?’” Frances Awdry,
The
Miz
Maze; or, the Winkworth Puzzle. A Story in Letters
(London: Macmillan, 1883), 139.

19.
Compare Joseph Slaughter’s argument that the bildungsroman characteristically depicts “the passage from orality to writing: Joseph R. Slaughter,
Human
Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law
, 1st ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 284.

20.
Remember again Vincent’s argument that “the self-educated reader was as much of a [Victorian] myth as the self-made millionaire.” David Vincent,
Literacy
and
Popular
Culture: England 1750–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 259.