How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (42 page)

More specifically, I’ll suggest that working-class users’ relation to books in general, as well as middle-class users’ relation to books that they wish to abject, proceeds not just by omission but also by commission: in the first case, a negative quality (illiteracy) goes together with a positive one (expertise in the use value and exchange value of different weights, textures, and colors of paper); in the second, not only refusing to read a book, but also determining to smear it by association with some culinary use, to besmirch it more literally with one’s own excrement, or to call its author’s gentlemanliness into question by passing his books along to one’s servants. Conversely, to exempt a page from base uses is to exalt its textual contents: a sixth-century Chinese scholar-official noted that “paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from the
Five
Classics
or the names of sages, I dare not use for toilet purposes” (Needham et al. 123).
²

Nothing more embarrassing than a book past its read-by date. What’s no longer worth reading, however, still needs to be handled, if only to make room for more. And at the opposite level of abstraction, what’s no longer fit to read may remain good to think with—if only because the moment where the book’s shelf life diverges from the text’s calls into question the relation of words to things. Such thinking, I want to suggest, stands at the heart of Henry Mayhew’s
London
Labour
and
the
London
Poor
, the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media: eighty-two articles serialized in the
Morning
Chronicle
(October 1849–50) provided the raw material for freestanding weekly numbers published between December 1850 and February 1852, which in turn were expanded, revised, and collected in volume form in 1861–62.

It may seem perverse to conclude a project that opened with realist novels like Trollope’s and Dickens’s by turning to a text that only its harshest critics have described as fiction. But precisely because
London
Labour
decouples the realist mode from fictionality, Mayhew provides the starkest possible test case for the question with which this book opened: why have book historians drawn a disproportionate number of their case studies from the realist novel? Like the novel,
London
Labour
foregrounds practice over theory; Mayhew’s study of the informal economy, too, aspires to dignify the everyday. But he borrows novelistic techniques—including the pileup of metonymic detail that has led so many readers to praise Mayhew as “Dickensian”—only to turn them against the novel.
London
Labour
repudiates fictionality, that is, by means of characteristically realist tics—including, most crucially for my purposes, an obsessive staging of moments where verbal structures pull apart from material objects.

This chapter asks why Mayhew’s “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.
³
In the city that
London
Labour
describes, books and newspapers never stand still: they’re sold to fishmongers, to middlemen who distribute them to fishmongers, to a flypaper manufacturer, and even to a member of what the narrator terms the “sham indecent trade,” whose sealed packets, advertised as “not [to] be admitted into families,” turn out to be stuffed with “a lot of missionary tracts and old newspapers that [the vendor] got dirt cheap at a ‘waste’ shop.”
⁴
Wrapping, wadding, padding, lining: why so much attention to paper, so little to the page? The answer that a middle-class contemporary might have given, for reasons that we’ll see in the following section, is that Mayhew’s informants aren’t literate.
London
Labour
contradicts that hypothesis not only in its content—which represents them reading, among other things, previous installments of
London
Labour
—but in its form, which attributes the reading of texts and the recycling of papers to the same agents.
⁵
As a result, those actions are distinguished not by who performs them (gentlemen read, street urchins recycle) or even by which genres or media invite them (bibles are for rereading, newspapers for recycling), but rather by successive moments in the life cycle of the
same
piece of printed matter. And even that minimal distinction gets broken down as Mayhew replaces the conventional time line in which wrapping follows reading by a counternarrative in which food packaging gets resurrected as legible text.

What, then, if we were to replace “illiteracy” with a more positive term? “Orality” might be an obvious candidate, given how central speech is not just to the informal economy described in
London
Labour
, but to its own use of the interview. Books signify bankruptcy, if only because the wastepaper described is as likely to consist of financial and legal manuscripts as of printed books. One waste-seller offers Mayhew

railway prospectuses, with plans to some of them, nice engravings; and the same with other joint-stock companies . . . Old account-books of every kind. A good many years ago, I had some that must have belonged to a West End perfumer, there was such French items for Lady This, or the Honorable Captain that. I remember there was an Hon. Capt. G., and almost at every second page was “100 toothpicks, 3
s.
6
d.
” I think it was 3
s.
6
d.
; in arranging this sort of waste one now and then gives a glance to it. (2:114)

Contrast that memento mori with the busy street vendor who tells Mayhew that “it’s all headwork with us” (2:24)—by which he means that he operates, as we now say, “off the books.” The more lifeless the papers that Mayhew describes, the more vivid the voices that he quotes: padded packets provide a foil to street cries, wastepaper to oral interviews. In this analysis, the uncanny immediacy that
London
Labour
produces would be thrown into relief against the backdrop of dead media.
⁶

A third possible explanation is more reductive: you could say that paper gets resold in Mayhew’s London simply because everything does. Readers today—at least in the developed world—will be even more struck than middle-class Victorians were by the ubiquity of reuse in
London
Labour
. Unable to afford either to buy new things or to discard old ones, his informants lack the luxury of ignoring the past and future of their possessions. When we’re told of one man that “his dress could not so well be called mean as hard worn, with the unmistakable look of much of the attire of his class, that it was not made for the wearer” (2:65), the narrator’s self-correction encapsulates a characteristic stutter step. Mayhew begins by gesturing toward the possibility of pricing an object on the basis of the amount of labor or quality of materials that went into its original manufacture; but he goes on to upstage that logic by a competing explanation that bases price on the position that the object occupies in a chain of successive owners and uses. As Suzanne Raitt points out, the term “waste” invokes the history of an object—or at least the process of which it’s a by-product—as near synonyms like “rubbish” and “litter” do not (73). More specifically, narrative structures Mayhew’s providential model of the market in which, far from exhausting or depreciating objects, circulation animates them and invests them with fresh value.

In this analysis, “after-uses” would provide Mayhew with a lever to topple books from their taxonomic pedestal—to simultaneously defamiliarize and deflate printed matter by lumping it among a long list of humbler commodities that lose value as they pass from hand to hand. (Such a list would encompass every consumer good that turns up in the pages of
London
Labour
, with the possible exception of women’s stays [2:29]: in Mayhew, no such thing as what Igor Kopytoff calls “terminal commodities,” those that make only one journey from production to consumption [75; compare M. Thompson 9].) The question of whether books stand outside the market becomes a test case of whether anything at all stands outside the market. Anything, or even anyone: the value of used paper provides a measure for the value of the human beings who sell it: one “dealer in ‘waste’ (paper)” “had been brought up as a compositor, but late hours and glaring gas-lights in the printing-office affected his eyes, he told me; and . . . a half-blind compositor was about of as little value, he thought, as a ‘horse with a wooden leg’” (1:289).

From wastepaper to blind person to lame horse: as so often in Mayhew, what sounds like a hyperbolic analogy will turn out in retrospect to have been a perfectly serious cross-reference, because the price of the goods and services derived from horse carcasses will form the subject of a tabular breakdown in the next volume (2:9). Books, persons, and horses are all expected to form privileged categories, exempt from base uses. (Or at least, this is the case in England; the French, Mayhew reminds us, are less sentimental about their horses. And even in England, as we’ve seen, books not only resemble horses but are made from their dead bodies.)
⁷
Yet each exemption dwindles with age: what can’t be eaten turns out to be not horses, but young horses; what can’t be pulped turns out to be new books, not books
tout
court
. The same aging that most poignantly humanizes books (in it-narrative, at least) also reduces them most ruthlessly to objects.

If books begin their life as an exception, then, they end up exemplifying the rule. Mayhew’s uncertainty about whether to place books in parallel with, or contradistinction to, other kinds of object prefigures the tension between internalist accounts of print culture—those that emphasize what sets books apart from other commodities—and those that draw on nonbibliographical analogies, situating debates about copyright in the context of pharmaceutical patents or reducing the history of authorship to a subset of the history of branding. Even structurally, the tension between exceptionality and typicality can be measured by the placement of paper within
London
Labour
. The volume devoted to the resale trade opens—before moving briskly along to secondhand backgammon boards and used mattress ticking—with a set piece describing “a body of men in London who occupy themselves entirely in collecting waste paper.”

It is no matter what kind; a small prayer-book, a once perfumed and welcome love-note, lawyers’ or tailors’ bills, acts of Parliament, and double sheets of the Times, form portions of the waste dealers’ stock . . . [M]odern poems or pamphlets and old romances (perfect or imperfect), Shakespeare, Molière, Bibles, music, histories, stories, magazines, tracts to convert the heathen or to prove how easily and how immensely our national and individual wealth might be enhanced, the prospectuses of a thousand companies, each certain to prove a mine of wealth, schemes to pay off the national debt, or recommendations to wipe it off [a bad pun?], auctioneers’ catalogues and long-kept letters, children’s copybooks and last-century ledgers, printed effusions which have progressed no further than the unfolded sheets, uncut works and books mouldy with age—all these things are found in the insatiate bag of the waste collector. (2:9)

The breathlessness of Mayhew’s syntax levels generic “kinds” into undifferentiated “matter.” But the reduction of absorbing reading to absorbent paper doesn’t necessarily imply a social fall, because Mayhew conflates wrappers with readers. “Some of the costermongers who were able to read,” the narrator tells us, “or loved to listen to reading[,] purchased their literature in a very commercial spirit, frequently buying the periodical which is the largest in size, because when they’ve ‘got the reading out of it,’ as they say, ‘it’s worth a halfpenny for the barrow’” (1:26).

What might it mean to “get the reading out of” a newspaper? Before wood pulp, esparto grass, and other raw materials began to replace rags in the decades following the publication of
London
Labour
, the obvious answer would have been that paper outlasts its contents.
⁸
That quality isn’t unique to paper, of course. Mayhew notes elsewhere that brass doorplates fetch a fraction of their original value when they fall into the hands of scrap metal dealers after their owners’ death: there, too, the value of the material medium paradoxically hastens the erasure of the text (2:10). And recent media theorists have emphasized the gap between the life expectancy of hardware (slow to break down in landfills) and software (replaced on an increasingly short cycle) (Sterne 25; Parks).
⁹
There’s something especially poignant, however, about measuring the ephemerality of a text against the adaptability of a book, because that contrast inverts the traditional hope that words will survive the surfaces on which they’re inscribed—whether brass, stone, or marble and gilded monuments, much less paper. Within that tradition, pages transcend the temporal limits that paper embodies. If texts broker a transhistorical meeting of minds, the book—“Poor earthly casket of immortal verse” (Wordsworth 160)—can never break free of a particular location in space and time. Mayhew turns
that contrast on its head, pitting the durability of paper against the disposability of words.

Where stone connotes immortality, paper is associated with death: in imperial China, paper “spirit-money” was placed in tombs five centuries before it was used among the living (D. Hunter 207). In pairing the afterlife of paper with the death of text, Mayhew inverts a paradox most succinctly stated by Drummond of Hawthornden in 1711, the year when paper taxes began the climb that would end the year before the volume publication of
London
Labour
. “Books have that strange Quality,” he observed, “that being of the frailest and tenderest of Matter, they outlast Brass, Iron and Marble” (Drummond et al. 222; West 199). But do they? On the one hand, the high resale value of stone makes it likelier to be erased (Green and Stallybrass 21); on the other, ephemerality makes paper cheap, and cheapness allows each text to be produced in multiple copies that will go on to be stored in multiple locations and transmitted through multiple channels—channels that include the pastry-cook as often as the librarian.