How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (51 page)

13.
See, e.g., Edgar Johnson,
Charles
Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph
(New York: Viking, 1977), 389. For other examples of nineteenth-century dummy books, see H. J. Jackson,
Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 134–35.

14.
See also Charlotte Allen, “Indecent Disposal: Where Academic Books Go When They Die,”
Lingua
Franca
5.4 (1995).

15.
See John Plotz’s argument that the book is defined by the tension between its “metonymic” and “metaphoric” powers—functions that correspond to the two
poles that I call “material form” and “verbal content.” John Plotz, “Out of Circulation: For and Against Book Collecting,”
Southwest
Review
84.4 (1999): 472.

16.
The corresponding scene in the parallel subplot comes when Rebecca interrupts her singing to burn a letter from
her
lover. Asked why the music has stopped, she answers in a voice that echoes the narrator’s, or rather the captioner’s: “it’s a false note.” William Makepeace Thackeray,
Vanity
Fair
, ed. Peter L. Shillingsburg (New York: Norton, 1994), 113. At the other end of the narrative, once financial exchanges have replaced amorous ones, the roles are reversed: Rawdon himself hopes to “wrap a ball in the note”—this time, a banknote—“and kill Steyne with it.” Thackeray,
Vanity
Fair
, 539.

17.
William Makepeace Thackeray, “The Memoirs of Mr. C. J. Yellowplush,”
Christmas
Books; Snobs and Ballads
(New York: Metropolitan Publishing Company), 292, 288. For a very different argument about Victorian literalization, see Margaret Homans,
Bearing
the
Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 29–30.

18.
Thanks to Nick Dames for sharpening my thinking on this point.

19.
In
The
Struggles
of
Brown, Jones and Robinson
(1862), Trollope returns to the theme: the narrator is rudely told, “You’ve been making out all these long stories about things that never existed, but what’s the world the better for it;—that’s what I want to know. When a man makes a pair of shoes—” Anthony Trollope,
The
Struggles
of
Brown, Jones and Robinson
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 214.

20.
Marian Evans, too, opens a slashing review of Lord Brougham’s
Lives
of
Men
of
Letters
by asking readers what they would think of a wealthy amateur pretending to make boots. George Eliot, “J. A. Froude’s
The
Nemesis
of
Faith
,”
Selected
Essays, Poems, and Other Writings
, ed. Nicholas Warren (London: Penguin, 1990), 265. For the relationship of shoes to intellectuals, see also Jacques Rancière,
The
Philosopher
and
His
Poor
, trans. Andrew Parker (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 67–69, and “Political Shoemakers,” in E. J. Hobsbawm,
Workers: Worlds of Labor
, 1st American ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), esp. 107.

21.
James Lackington,
Memoirs
of
the
First
Forty-Five Years of the Life of James Lackington, Bookseller
(1791; 1792), reprinted in Paul Keen,
Revolutions
in
Romantic
Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture, 1780–1832
(Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2004), 48.

22.
John Ruskin,
The
Political
Economy
of
Art
(London: Dent, 1968), 39.

23.
George Gissing,
The
Private
Papers
of
Henry
Ryecroft
(New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 43, 125; see also Janice Radway, “Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor,”
Book
Research
Quarterly
2 (1986). On food as metaphor in this period more generally, see Denise Gigante,
Taste: A Literary History
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005).

24.
Cp. Mary Jean Corbett’s argument that “masculine authorship requires women’s domestic labor.” Mary Jean Corbett,
Representing
Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 63.

25.
I am indebted here to Regenia Gagnier’s account of an “abstract individualism” that emerged in the nineteenth century in opposition to “material conditions and social environment.” Regenia Gagnier,
Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 39.

26.
Discussing nineteenth-century thinkers’ tendency to take reading as an exemplar of automaticity, Deidre Lynch cites Erasmus Darwin’s
Zoomania
(1796), where the words “PRINTING PRESS” are followed by a passage asking readers whether they noticed the shape and size of the thirteen letters or simply conjured up a mental image of the “most useful of modern inventions.” Deidre Lynch, “Canon’s Clockwork: Novels for Everyday Use,”
At
Home
in
English: A Cultural History of the Love of Literature
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

27.
My discussion exemplifies—for better and worse—what Ian Hunter has called a “European university metaphysics” characterized by the tension between “an infinite, atemporal, self-active, world-creating intellect, and a finite, ‘duplex’ (intellectual-corporeal) worldly being.” Ian Hunter, “The History of Theory,”
Critical
Inquiry
33.1 (2006): 98. I am indebted, too, to Ina Ferris’s critique of “a long-standing European tradition of looking through actual books to an immaterial ‘wisdom’ they make available to readers, usually understood (as here) primarily as ‘intellectual beings.’” Ferris, “Bibliographic Romance: Bibliophilia and the Book-Object,”
Romantic
Libraries
.

28.
In Catherine Gallagher’s pithy formulation, “print paradoxically gave material evidence for a text surpassing all copies.” Catherine Gallagher,
Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 65.

29.
Compare Garrett Stewart’s argument that “reading dematerializes signs on the way to its imagined scene.” Garrett Stewart,
The
Look
of
Reading: Book, Painting, Text
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 118.

30.
For a fuller discussion, see Price, “Reading: The State of the Discipline.”

31.
Victorianists became interested in reading before scholars in many other fields, and the result is a rich body of secondary literature, stretching from the period itself up to the present, to which this book is everywhere indebted. See especially (in addition to studies cited elsewhere in this book) Robert K. Webb,
The
British
Working
Class
Reader, 1790–1848: Literacy and Social Tension
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1955); Guinevere Griest,
Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970); John Sutherland,
Victorian
Novelists
and
Publishers
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Robert Patten,
Charles
Dickens
and
His
Publishers
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); Scott Bennett, “Revolutions in Thought: Serial Publication and the Mass Market in Reading,”
The
Victorian
Periodical
Press: Samplings and Soundings
, ed. Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982); Raymond Williams,
Culture
and
Society, 1780–1950
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Laurel Brake, “Literary Criticism in Victorian Periodicals,”
Yearbook
of
English
Studies
16 (1986); Jon P. Klancher,
The
Making
of
English
Reading
Audiences, 1790–1832
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Margaret Diane Stetz, “Life’s ‘Half-Profits’: Writers and Their Readers
in Fiction of the 1890s,”
Nineteenth-Century Lives
, ed. Laurence Lockridge et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Ina Ferris,
The
Achievement
of
Literary
Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund,
The
Victorian
Serial
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991); Kate Flint,
The
Woman
Reader, 1837–1914
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Alan Richardson,
Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jonathan Rose, “How to Do Things with Book History,”
Victorian
Studies
37.3 (1994): 461–71; Margaret Beetham,
A
Magazine
of
Her
Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914
(London: Routledge, 1996); John Jordan and Robert Patten,
Literature
in
the
Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Helen Small, “A Pulse of 124: Charles Dickens and a Pathology of the Mid-Victorian Reading Public,”
The
Practice
and
Representation
of
Reading
in
England
, ed. James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Stewart,
Dear
Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
; Peter D. McDonald,
British
Literary
Culture
and
Publishing
Practice, 1880–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Richard Altick,
The
English
Common
Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Patrick Brantlinger,
The
Reading
Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998); Bill Bell, “Bound for Australia: Shipboard Reading in the Nineteenth Century,”
Journeys
through
the
Market: Travel, Travellers, and the Book Trade
, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 1999); Martyn Lyons, “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers,”
A
History
of
Reading
in
the
West
, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); James A. Secord,
Victorian
Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Philip Connell, “Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics, and the Rise of Literary Heritage in Romantic Britain,”
Representations
71 (2000); Graham Law,
Serializing
Fiction
in
the
Victorian
Press
(Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2000); Jonathan Rose,
The
Intellectual
Life
of
the
British
Working
Classes
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001); William St Clair,
The
Reading
Nation
in
the
Romantic
Period
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Daniel Hack,
The
Material
Interests
of
the
Victorian
Novel
, Victorian Literature and Culture Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005); H. J. Jackson,
Romantic
Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005); Mary Hammond,
Reading, Publishing, and the Formation of Literary Taste in England 1880–1914
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Nicholas Dames,
The
Physiology
of
the
Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); David McKitterick,
The
Cambridge
History
of
the
Book
in
Britain, 1830–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

32.
On Protestantism as a religion of the book in this period, see Jon P. Klancher, “The Bibliographer’s Tale, or the Rise and Fall of Book History in Britain
(1797–1825)” (paper presented at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Montreal, 31 March 2006); on the language of the “fetish,” Peter Melville Logan,
Victorian
Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives
, SUNY Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 81.

33.
Kearney, “The Book and the Fetish: The Materiality of Prospero’s Text,” 436; William Tyndale,
The
Obedience
of
a
Christian
Man
, ed. David Daniell, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 2000), 161.