How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (35 page)

When a character in
Little
Servant
Maids
covers a glass of beer “with a dirty-looking tract,” the generic designation provides a bridge between the pages that we’re holding and the world represented within them (Adams,
Little
Servant
Maids
15). Yet where the SPCK’s book is designed to link mistresses with servants, Adams’s text represents a world in which the potential for papers to connect their successive handlers must be held at bay. The proper relations that the book enables find their mirror image in the improper relations that it represents. Inhabiting spaces traversed by both masters and servants, depending on the former to select and pay for it but on the latter to carry, tidy, and dispose of it, written matter inevitably posed choices about how to balance privacy against convenience. (Do you tell your IT administrator your password?)

The scene of Caroline thumbing what’s on the sofa table dramatizes traditional debates about whether to lock the bookshelf—themselves back-formed from questions about how best to secure the places where food and drink are kept. Remember that the noun “safe” designated a chest for holding meat long before it came to refer to the storage of money; remember, too, that the late nineteenth century saw the invention of the tantalus, which allowed decanters—like books in a glass case—to remain visible while preventing servants from accessing their contents.
⁷
The difference, however, is that books were not included among “vails” or perquisites: while leftover food or hand-me-down clothes provided a socially accepted (if often disputed) bond between masters and servants, printed matter spoiled less quickly than food and went out of fashion less quickly than clothes. Even old newspapers tended to be passed along at gradual removes, rather than changing hands all at once from servant to master.
⁸

Some exceptions involve legacies upon a master’s death; others, rejects that masters never wanted to read even when new, as when one servant remembers that she was given only “‘goody books,’ deportations from the parlor.”
⁹
In Mrs. Sherwood’s story of the same name, Susan Gray recounts that her mistress “left me her Bible and Prayer-book, and a black stuff gown and petticoat to wear as mourning for her”;
The
Story
of
a
Pocket
Bible
makes one wonder about the binding. Gladstone (hardly a typical reader or master) assembled a library of SPCK volumes for his servants, though he allowed them to borrow freely from his own collection as well (Windscheffel 114). In general, however, newspapers are to hand-me-down clothes as books are to servants’ livery: even when new, they would not be used by masters. Where American slave narratives make literacy both symbol of, and means to, freedom, contemporaneous British tracts make receiving books a sign of servants’ dependence. And where American slave narratives blame masters for forcibly withholding books, secular British novels blame mistresses for forcibly distributing them. It speaks at once to Harriet Martineau’s eccentricity, conscientiousness, and obsession with unwanted paper that she worried about the effect on servants of her own discards, complaining of the “curious assortment of religious books and tracts sent to me by post . . . too bad in matter and spirit to be safe reading for my servants; so, instead of the waste-basket, they go into the fire” (
Autobiography
111).

Books, in other words, fit uneasily within the accepted models for managing the tension between the need for servants and masters to handle the same objects, and the need to avoid direct contact between masters’ and servants’ bodies. Adams’s disgust at the maid who touches her mistress’s volumes transposes from manuscript to print the traditional insistence that letters be presented on a tray—more specifically, that the moment when the servant’s hand puts the paper onto the tray be separated in time and space from the moment when the master’s hand takes it off. Caroline’s successor, too lazy to walk upstairs to take a letter, asks the messenger to throw it down to her in the area:

Now Becky had been told not only not to look out of the area door when there was a ring or knock, but she had been especially charged never to let messengers throw down their notes or letters, a thing which has a very bad appearance, besides often dirtying them, so that they are unpleasant for a mistress to handle. She remembered all this, but being in a hurry to finish her toast before Martha’s return, she determined to disobey orders.

The note was from a lady recently married, and had a silver border, and a delicate white seal. The area was wet and dirty, for it was the month of November; still Becky thought she should avoid all risk of detection by holding out her apron to catch the note; so she bid the boy throw it down; but he made an awkward cast, and it fell in the dirt. Becky picked it up and began wiping it, but she only made matters worse, for her fingers and apron were all black from the fire she had been poking about to make her toast. (Adams,
Little
Servant
Maids
214)

The fear of servants’ dirtying books is common enough: a later Wesleyan tract for servants, for example, advises its readers, “if, through inadvertence, you have allowed a drop of ink to fall on linen, or a drop of tallow from the candle on the leaf of a book, the more speedily you do all you can to remedy the evil, the less the mischief which will ensue” (Smith 202). And another tract figures a mistress telling the narrator to “never handle a book carelessly . . . never take a dirty duster to books. Have always a clean one for them . . . Never come to books with hands dirty with work”; later, the maid illustrates her remarks about slatternly households by describing “books the worse for their handling” (Charlesworth,
The
Old
Looking-Glass
89, 118).

Servants’ unworthiness to own books has less to do with their inability to understand their contents, then, than with their refusal to handle them properly. The hero of
John
Hartley
warns another servant boy that, “as mother used to say, by often wetting the corners, the paper gets rotten, and the edges tear off, and the [prayer]book looks shabby” (Adams,
John
Hartley
163). Yet Adams extends this problematic to middle-class children as well: in
The
Useful
Little
Girl
, when an adult “sent the young ladies a book of prints to look at, desiring, at the same time, they would be careful of it, as it was a borrowed book,” a girl grabs the book from her cousin, spilling broth on the book in the process: “in vain was the print carefully wiped and then dried, a large stain remained” (Adams,
The
Useful
Little
Girl
75). And in another of Adams’s tales for and about middle-class children:

A servant passing at the moment, Peter seized upon a single cup of coffee that remained on the tray, and was going to drink it, when Hugh snatched it from his hand, declaring that his brother had already had two cups, while he had had none. Peter attempted to regain his coffee, but Hugh jerking it away, the cup was overturned, and a great part of the contents spilled on Claude’s beautiful prints. In a moment Hugh closed the book, and hastened to another part of the room, wholly indifferent to the fate of the engravings, and only anxious to escape detection. (Adams,
Boys
at
Home
182)

In the remainder of the chapter, defacing the book leads to telling a lie: to lose respect for books is to lose the self-respect that underpins virtue.

In
Little
Servant
Maids
, however, bodily traces are linked more specifically with secrecy. The echoes of Bluebeard (with ink replacing blood as a mistress replaces a husband) reflect not only the SPCK’s ambivalent stance toward chapbook fairy tales, but also the oddly sexual register in which servants’ contact with written matter is represented. (Again, what makes the book sexual is not any pornographic content, but simply the fact that Becky hides it under her pillow.) Becky’s successor is ordered to
“look at the chairs—the backs all covered with dust, so that you might write ‘slut’ with your finger on every one of them” (Adams,
Little
Servant
Maids
375). A few years later,
Punch
would picture a mistress who complains that she can write her name in the dust being answered, “Lor, mum, so you can! Now I never had no edgercation myself!”
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The joke appears less funny if you remember how many American slave narratives represent their narrators learning to write by scratching their letters in the dirt.

Cleaning is the only form of inscription permitted to servants—a negative of the marks left on the white note by Becky’s sooty fingers. And where ashes take the place of artist’s charcoal, reciprocally ink becomes dirt as soon as a servant touches it:

When Becky had done so, having nothing else to do, or rather, not choosing to do anything which she was not immediately bid, she pulled the inkstand towards her, and, leaning over the table, began to mark the first letters of her name on the window-seat. She could write but very little, and only on a slate, so that being unused to a pen, she filled it too full of ink, and made large blots on the clean white paint; these she from time to time removed by wiping her hand over them, and then cleaned her hand by rubbing it down her pincloth. (Adams,
Little
Servant
Maids
219)

“Dirty books” are no metaphor. When Paget’s antiquixotic novel
Lucretia
attacks “novels which some straitlaced folk would call the dirtiest in every sense, as being the loosest in their morals, and the most greasily thumbed by a discerning public,” “dirt” joins “inflammatory” and “volume” as words whose literal sense Paget substitutes for a more common figurative meaning (Paget 104). The traditional fear that the book’s content will inflame a servant’s desires is crowded out by the fear that the book’s binding will tempt her to disobey. Just as Greenwood imagines
Jack
Sheppard
inspiring apprentices to steal goods that they can use to pay for a copy of
Jack
Sheppard
, so what Caroline steals is the book itself, not (as in so many accounts where reading makes servants covetous) some ribbon or bonnet described within its covers.
Little
Servant
Maids
stops short, too, of imagining Becky peeking into her mistress’s correspondence: no worse fault than the dirtying of paint and cloth. The servant’s grimy hand becomes a leitmotif linking the turned-down corners of a book with the graffiti scratched on the wall: the white page has more in common with white cloth and white walls than with the whitey-brown paper that wraps food. In an inversion of the it-narratives that make handling books gently a predictor of kindness to women, children, animals, and slaves, here respect for books predicts respect for masters; the maid who inscribes her response to the text is also the one who answers back to her mistress.

Figure 6.2. “A Soft Answer,”
Punch
, 30 November 1895, 258.

Taken cumulatively, these scenes conflate an emerging anxiety about the proper relation of reading to marking (do marginalia betray caring too much about the text or being too careless of the book?) with an older debate about whether servants’ literacy should be passive or active. The internal discussion in the early years of the SPCK about whether poor children should be taught to write or only to read gives way here to a plot that positions writing where we would have expected reading to appear—marking the outside of the letter in place of prying into its contents. At some moments, that is, a servant’s meddling with her mistress’s books looks similar to eavesdropping on conversations; at others, it bears more resemblance to breaking a china plate.
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Or maybe a better analogy would be taking a swig from your master’s glass or trying on your mistress’s bonnet behind her back. The image of a servant leaning on her broom figures alike in “One Thing at a Time,” where the other hand holds a book, and in and “My mistress’s bonnet,” where the other hand is trying out a muff.
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Sometimes, in contrast, what seems to be being stolen is not an object at all, but the user’s time or attention. In engaging in what Walmart now dubs “time theft,” maids like Hannah or Caroline go back on the tradition in which (as we saw in chapter 3) an industrious apprentice like Richardson could boast of reading on his own time, by the light of his own candles. And when the mistress in a different tract tells the servant, “Never spend your time for work in looking into books,” she reminds us that the same activity at which middle-class children are praised as “working hard” takes servants the same age away from their legitimate labor (Charlesworth,
The
Old
Looking-Glass
90).

The phenomena known as “Sunday reading” and “airplane reading” remind us that books take on different functions depending on when and where they’re read. Any scholar knows that a bible means something different in a library (even a Gothic one like Sterling Memorial, whose vaulted reading rooms helped me begin this project) than in a church. And religious tracts taught their readers that a bible does something different when read by a maidservant perched on a ladder with a duster in her other hand, than it does when read by the same maidservant in her own room in a plainer binding.