How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (7 page)

It’s as insulting to imagine the book
resembling
food (in that both consist of slaughtered animals, for example) as it’s flattering to imagine the book
replacing
food (as when a literary character starves himself to buy a much-loved text). The narrator whose high-mindedness is established by a preference for books over food—as early as 1791, James Lackington boasts of his wife’s dismay that “I have often purchased books with the money that should have been expended in purchasing something to eat”
²¹
—secularizes the Christian logic that allowed missionaries to respond to demands for bread by distributing bibles. When the Shepherd of Salisbury Plain testifies in the anti-Jacobin tract of the same name that “my Bible has been meat, drink, and company to me, as I may say,” he proves that reading can defuse the lower orders’ demand for food (More,
Tales
36). Remember that “in early Christian monasticism, reading took its place alongside fasting, prayer, the keeping of vigils, and the making of pilgrimages as an ascetic practice” (I. Hunter, “Literary Theory in Civil Life” 1109). Ruskin turns that political quietism into aesthetic transcendence when he praises books “bought out of saved halfpence; and perhaps a day or two’s fasting. That’s the way to get at the cream of a book.”
²²
Reducing cream to a metaphor for ideas, the speaker substitutes word for food as decisively as does the hypothetical reader whom he describes.

At the end of the century, “food for the soul” would become the refrain of
The
Private
Papers
of
Henry
Ryecroft
. Where the writers portrayed
in
New
Grub
Street
produce bad books in order to buy food, here the narrator forgoes food in order to buy good ones.
²³
“Books [were] more necessary to me than bodily nourishment,” the narrator tells us; reading as a boy, “I was astonished to find that it was four o’clock, and that I had forgotten food since breakfast.” Men’s forgetfulness of dinner depends, it’s true, on women’s remembering: “little girls should be taught cooking and baking more assiduously than they are taught to read” (Gissing,
The
Private
Papers
of
Henry
Ryecroft
43, 32, 125, 211).
²⁴
Yet as chapter 7 will show, that doesn’t imply keeping women from books: on the contrary, they enlist the book enthusiastically in that same “cooking and baking,” whether in the form of pie lining or butter wrapping. Exalted when substituted
for
food, paper is degraded when associated
with
it.

The book’s status depends on whether it displaces or conjures up its user’s body. To convey the peacefulness of his new home, the narrator remarks that “the page scarce rustles as it turns” (Gissing,
The
Private
Papers
of
Henry
Ryecroft
75). Hearing joins sight among the senses that books are not supposed to stimulate—more, are supposed to deaden. No looking, listening, touching, tasting, smelling: the sensory deprivation of the post-1850 public library, where food was banned along with talking or even reading aloud, stands opposite the medieval scriptorium where books were voiced, stroked, smelled, and gazed at. Only in a paper-rich and information-saturated society do such acts begin to provoke nervous laughter.

Not noticing that the book was made of paper also implied ignoring that others had commissioned, manufactured, and transmitted it, and that other handlings had preceded and would follow one’s own. The good reader—himself disembodied and unclassed—forgot what books looked like, weighed, and would fetch on the resale market; he also forgot how books had reached his hands, and through whose, and at what price. (The abstraction of the book thus mimics the abstraction of its readers.)
²⁵
Yet paradoxically, those acts of oblivion themselves became enmeshed in human relationships, since reminders of the book’s material attributes got delegated to persons less rich or male or Protestant than oneself.

Once piggybacked onto class and gender, the division between those who refer to “texts” and those who speak of “books”—those who memorize Penguin reprints and those who buy new hardbacks—is now replicated
within
the upper middle class by the difference between English majors and everyone else, from illiterates to book historians. A familiar intellectual-historical narrative tells us that since the New Criticism,
literary critics have spearheaded an assault on the book’s materiality, elevating the study of literature by demoting bibliographers to a service profession. It’s true that if the book has been invisible and intangible even to those literary-critical schools that succeeded them, it isn’t only for the negative reason that material culture remains absent from our training; it’s also because a commonsense Cartesianism or Platonism more actively numbs us to the look and feel of the printed page. Hence critics’ discomfort with purely bibliographic units—the page-break as opposed to the line-break, the volume as opposed to the chapter.

A longer historical view, however, makes it hard to blame or credit literary critics alone for exalting the text to an end and reducing the book to a means. Elaine Scarry frames the status of the book as an aesthetic question when she defines imaginative literature precisely by its power to drown out the significance that would otherwise be attached to its material form. Unlike music, sculpture, or painting, she observes, “verbal art, especially narrative, is almost bereft of any sensuous content. Its visual features . . . consist of monotonous small black marks on a white page.” In fact, Scarry argues, what little sensory response the book does provoke is “not only irrelevant but even antagonistic to the mental images that a poem or novel . . . produce[s]” (5).

From a bibliographic perspective, in contrast, the bifurcation that Scarry associates with verbal “art” appears to inhere not in literature, but in print. It holds as true for intellectual history as for literary history: Popper, too, can assume that “
of
course
the physical shape of the book is insignificant . . . and frequently even the formulation of an argument does not matter greatly. What do matter are contents, in the logical sense” (45; my emphasis). Carlo Ginzburg has argued that the first humanist printings of the classics set aside sensory data in the process of devaluing all those aspects of documents that vary from one copy to another (95).
²⁶
The difference between a white and a yellowed page, to take Scarry’s example, doesn’t mean in the same way that color does in an illuminated manuscript.
²⁷
This isn’t to say that shades of brown and yellow don’t convey useful information about which pages have been most heavily handled, which left untouched—or, indeed, that they don’t conjure up “mental images” of the now-dead hands that have turned those pages. (And as my discussion of association copies in chapter 5 will emphasize, those data are the purview of the impassioned amateur at least as much as of the detached historian.) But as far as textual content itself goes, it seems fair to say that as mechanical reproduction stripped away visual and tactile differences among different copies of a single edition—or, at least, downgraded those differences to traces of error, accident, or wear and tear—printed texts in the West came to demand new ways of reading, and of not looking (Ginzburg 95).
²⁸

“Printed,” not “literary”: what Scarry claims of “verbal art” applies as well to even the most inartistic printed text, and as badly to even the most aesthetically ambitious of texts produced in a manuscript culture. Historical comparison suggests that what causes readers to bracket sense-data is not (or not only) their status as art, but also their status as reproduced and reproducible. A matter of media, not of aesthetics—with the crucial caveat that aesthetically serious texts and aesthetically intense experience figure as limit cases of the logic that all reading post-Gutenberg is supposed to follow. Far from (or as well as) forming a sphere of heightened attention, the printed as described by Ginzburg—no less than the aesthetic as theorized by Scarry—emerges from refusals to attend.
²⁹
The book so strongly exemplifies the contrast between superficial change and fundamental invariability that the narrator of
Waverley
can use it as a metaphor for the continuity of human character, promising to read aloud a chapter from “the great book of Nature, the same through a thousand editions, whether of black-letter, or wire-wove and hot-pressed” (Scott 36).

By the nineteenth century, what had held since Gutenberg for all readers came to apply especially to good readers, whether that excellence was measured morally (as Ranthorpe did) or intellectually (in the manner of the New Critics). In that sense, paradoxically, the new New Bibliography could also be seen as a reductio ad absurdum of the New Criticism against which it appeared to react. The book historians whom literary critics think of as antiformalists have in fact pushed the boundaries of that term to encompass material (along with verbal) form.
³⁰

The opening of
Ranthorpe
echoes Carlyle’s paean—reprinted in several late-Victorian compendia of bibliophilic pieties—to “the most momentous, wonderful and worthy . . . things we call Books! Those poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on them;—from the Daily Newspaper to the sacred Hebrew BOOK” (
On
Heroes
142). Yet the hostility to expensive books that essay shares with the novel suggests that outward form does matter. If what Carlyle calls the “wonder” of books depends on the mismatch between the insignificance of the poor bits of paper and the (metaphorical) richness of the verbal signs that they incarnate, this may be because once object competes with language for attention—as in fine bindings—the former ceases to be available as a foil for the latter.

Where the nineteenth-century general-interest press asked what uses of the book were acceptable, twenty-first-century scholars are likelier to ask what uses of the book are legible, and how the skills involved in reading texts (notably those possessed by literary critics and intellectual historians)
differ from the skills required to describe objects (notably those possessed by all bibliographers and by some book historians). Closer to home, then, my question is how to situate literary interpretation vis-à-vis the social life of books more broadly understood—and also where different subcultures (from scholarly disciplines to religious traditions to political movements) have drawn the limits of that breadth.

Now that “the history of books and reading” has become a catchphrase, scholars in flight from lexical monotony refer to “the history of the book” interchangeably with “the history of reading.”
³¹
It’s true that both demonize the same opponent: the idealism that literary history shares with the history of ideas (which should remind formalist critics that “history” is hardly the opposite term to “literature”). Yet the survey I’ve just offered of the metaphorization of “reading” and reliteralization of bibliographic terms suggests what gets lost in that lumping. Where late twentieth-century critics insisted that books are not the only thing that can be read, so early twenty-first-century scholars are rediscovering (like so many M. Jourdains) that reading is not the only thing that can be done to books. That some of those other operations can themselves be performed upon objects other than books creates a third methodological problem.

I spoke of a turn away from metaphor, but the opposite case could also be made: that where the old historicism within literary criticism once invoked a metonymic logic to discuss commissioning, writing, editing, printing, and reading—whether upstream as in textual notes or downstream as in reception histories—book historians have substituted something more like metaphor. Reading is compared to other forms of consumption, or writing to other manual practices, or copyright to other forms of property. When Daston brackets the page with a comet, she looks both backward—to the long tradition which exalts reading to an art that other interpretive practices can only hope to emulate—and forward: to new forms of scholarship that reduce the book to one object among many. Where intellectual historians once studied the note-taking habits of individual thinkers, Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass instead analyze scholarly note taking side by side with commercial record keeping; where an earlier generation of “law and literature” scholarship examined the image of lawyers in Romantic poetry, William St Clair juxtaposes the development of copyright with the changing legal regimes governing the sale of pharmaceuticals; where critics once narrated authors’ alcoholism or analyzed the literary figure of the drunkard, Paul Duguid traces the history of authorial signature in parallel to the history of wine branding (Blair, “Note Taking”; Blair and Stallybrass; Duguid,
The
Quality
of
Information
; St Clair). In cutting across different objects (books and ledgers, books and bottles, books and pills) to identify parallel practices, this research topples the text from its taxonomic pedestal.

In some contexts, certainly, verbal content trumps material medium: for someone in search of political information, a newspaper and a radio broadcast have more in common than do a newspaper and a piece of plastic wrap. In others, however, the reverse is true (someone trying to wrap a sandwich can use the newspaper interchangeably with the clingfilm more easily than with the broadcast). At some moments, as we’ll see in chapter 6, a servant’s meddling with her mistress’s books looks similar to eavesdropping on conversations, but at others it bears more resemblance to breaking a china vase. What’s more, those attributes that set the book apart from other objects need to be disentangled from those that set some books apart from others (for example, literary from nonliterary texts or good works of literature from bad); because even the most unreadable book still differs from nontextual objects in the way it’s priced, cataloged, and handled, the exceptionalism of the book should be no less visible to economists than to literary critics. By the same token, few of the issues I’ve mentioned so far are unique to the book: the logic that exalts reading copies while mocking coffee-table volumes shares its structure with contrasts between showy and serviceable clothing, or even between food addressed to the palate and that designed to please the eye.