How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (9 page)

As Patrick Harries points out, Africans who invested books with totemic powers could look uncannily like “Europeans who invested the bible with supernatural powers when taking an oath, or who read the Good Book as divine revelation or self-evident truth” and who “collected books not for the information and ideas they contained, but in order to present a show of knowledge and wealth” (421). When William Carey set up a printing press in Bengal in 1798, “the crowds of natives who flocked to see it, hearing Mr. Carey’s description of its wonderful power, pronounced it to be a European idol” (Marshman 80). In West Africa a century later, books were dubbed the “white man’s fetish.”
³⁵
As Joseph Slaughter has recently documented, post-1945 organizations such as UNESCO have made literacy “the functional boundary—globally as much as locally—between the disenfranchised and the unincorporated” (279–81). The literate world takes the place of Christendom.

In the year when I completed the manuscript that became this book, I sat in on a court-ordered book club in Massachusetts. Changing Lives through Literature, the program sponsoring the group, secures probation for convicted criminals on condition that they meet weekly to read and discuss short stories and poems. Read a book or go to jail: this encounter mixed even more messages than my own task of grading college students
on whether they had “done” the reading (Price, “Read a Book, Get out of Jail”). Although elite pupils had long faced the choice between a line of poetry and a stroke of the cane, the spread of formal education made nineteenth-century England one of the first times and places when, for large numbers of children, “school” began to replace “work” as the antonym to “pleasure” (Religious Tract Society).

Cast as a means of rehabilitation—an opportunity for working-class men to practice self-recognition and other-directed empathy in the safely distant imaginative spaces usually reserved for middle-class women—Changing Lives through Literature reminded me how powerful a hold certain Victorian values retain on twenty-first-century Americans (including, as these pages betray, on me). By the middle of the nineteenth century, faith in bible reading had devolved into faith in reading. A Gissing character declares that “every educated person is really a missionary, whose duty it is to go forth and spread the light . . . I couldn’t give money—for one thing, I have very little, and then it’s so demoralising, and one never knows whether the people will be offended—but I sat down and told the poor woman all about the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales”; she typifies the shift from the first decades of the century, in which the distribution of bibles and tracts came to link social ranks, to its last, when secular texts took over that function (
Our
Friend
the
Charlatan
155). William McKelvy points out that “literacy was normalized, and illiteracy pathologized, at the point when the state no longer recognized religious heresies” (34)—that is, over the course of the nineteenth century. Over the course of the same century, educational publishing replaced sectarian publishers’ share of the market (Ledger-Lomas 328). Small wonder, then, that the Victorians joked about the book in proportion as they took reading seriously. As memoirs of found romances inherited the task of conversion narratives, bibliophilia took over the work of idolatry.

Think back to the language in which some Victorian novels establish a character’s position in relation to a book. A mouthful, but my periphrasis reflects the thesaurus-sized arsenal of circumlocutions that the Victorian novel itself elaborates in order to avoid coupling its characters’ names with the verb “to read.”
¹

The first two passages describe eye movements, the next four hand gestures. The seventh and especially the eighth go further, invoking spatial terms to describe the position of the printed object in relation to a person’s body, but refusing to specify what that person is doing with his hand—let alone with his eye, much less his mind. The last uses “over” in a sense that could be either causal (the book’s content inspires a yawn) or purely spatial (in which case the yawn might indicate, on the contrary, that the book is not being read at all).

You could object that these ambiguities are of one reader’s own making: that these quotations appear elliptical only because I’ve wrested them
from their original contexts. It’s true that in
Vanity
Fair
, the description of Mr. Osborne spreading out his newspaper is immediately followed by the punch line that “George knew from this signal that the colloquy was ended and that his Papa was about to take a nap.”
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
makes us wait longer for that resolution: there, a hundred pages separate the initial refusal to specify whether Mrs. Glegg’s laying open of the book forms a prelude to, or a substitute for, the act of reading, from the moment when the narrator remarks, a propos of something quite different, “If, in the maiden days of the Dodson sisters, their bibles opened more easily at some parts than others, it was because of dried tulip petals, which had been distributed quite impartially, without preference for the historical, devotional, or doctrinal” (G. Eliot,
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
284).
²
As “opening” becomes an intransitive verb, and as its agent shifts from Mrs. Glegg to the book itself, a character—as so often in
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
—becomes accessory to an inanimate object. At the same time, though, the strategic ambiguity of that “laying open” gives way to a unmistakably broad joke about the precedence that the material book takes over not only its human user, but its verbal content: any reader can tell that the “opening” of the bible doesn’t refer to Genesis.

If an individual sentence leaves us to decide for ourselves whether to parse an ambiguous act as “reading,” in the long run each novel as a whole makes perfectly explicit the gap between the presence of the book and its user’s absence of mind. Yet the time lag between our initial hunch that what we’re witnessing will count as reading, and a later moment when that possibility is definitively ruled out, exemplifies a strategy by which Victorian novels spread out over time doubts about the relation of persons to books. Thus
The
Mayor
of
Casterbridge
opens with Henchard and Susan walking “side by side in such a way as to suggest afar off the low, easy confidential chat of people full of reciprocity; but on closer view it could be discerned that the man was reading, or pretending to read, a ballad sheet which he kept before his eyes” (Hardy 1). No sooner does the hypothetical observer congratulate himself on shattering the illusion that a human conversation is going on, than the impression that Henchard is communing only with a printed (and therefore non-“reciprocal”) text is punctured, in turn, by the qualification that even physical proximity—whether “side by side” or “before his eyes”—provides no guarantee of mental engagement.
³
The book as obstacle will give way to the book as lens only later, when, after receiving Susan’s posthumous letter, “her husband regarded the paper as if it were a window-pane through which he saw for miles” (122).

Characteristically, Hardy fudges the question of whose consciousness that undecidability should be located in: the passive voice leaves unclear
exactly who is trying and failing to distinguish bodily actions from cognitive ones. Trollope more often shunts onto his characters his readers’ uncertainty about what use a book is being put to. In fact, in the passages that I just quoted from his fiction, the act (in every sense) of reading seems to respond to the presence of such a third party. Thus
The
Prime
Minister
establishes the breakdown of a marriage by pitting Palliser’s newspaper against Glencora’s novel: “He busied himself with books and papers,—always turning over those piles of newspapers . . . She engaged herself with the children or pretended to read a novel” (361). In a parallel subplot, Lopez’s quarrel with
his
wife leads to the same result: “he sat with a magazine in his hand” (383). The sentence stops there: no need to spell out (as the narrator will when the scene recurs a hundred pages later) that “it may be doubted whether he got much instruction or amusement from the pages of the magazine which he turned” (514).

Along with foxhunting and electioneering, pseudoreading forms one of the set pieces that knit together the loose bagginess of the Palliser series. At its other end,
Can
You
Forgive
Her?
already described the young Palliser “
reading, or pretending to read
, as long as the continuance of the breakfast made it certain that his wife would remain with him” (610; my emphasis). Bibliographic aggression spans lifetimes, bridges subplots, and unites enemies. In
The
Claverings
, all that the two feuding brothers share is their use of the book. “At their meals [Sir Hugh] rarely spoke to [his wife],—having always at breakfast a paper or a book before him, and at dinner devoting his attention to a dog at his feet.” In a different household, his brother “was reading,—or pretending to read—a review” (372, 114). The book’s function as a prop for privacy or prompt for interiority depends less on its being looked at by the character who holds it than on that person’s being looked at himself.

Reading or pretending to read: what’s the difference between the two? Not much, Hardy’s lack of punctuation suggests. Trollope’s pileup of commas with dashes puts more distance between them, but the fact that one rarely appears without the other still reduces the book to a prop. This has more to do with the syntactic construction than with the particular verb chosen: an analogous effect is produced when Elizabeth Sewell’s narrator remarks that a character “was reading, or perhaps, more strictly speaking, intending to read; for although a book lay open before her, her eyes wandered chiefly amongst the flowers” (E. M. Sewell 67). By the nineteenth century, the rich repertoire of uses of the book that we saw in
the previous chapter—with reading positioned somewhere in the middle of a spectrum running from divining to wrapping—narrows to a binary opposition between authentic reading and its simulacrum.

In the process, new jokes enter the repertoire.
The
Small
House
at
Allington
, for example, takes the most economical proof of two honeymooners’ hatred for one another to be a game of chicken:

He had the
Times
newspaper in his dressing-bag. She also had a novel with her. Would she be offended if he took out the paper and read it? The miles seemed to pass by very slowly, and there was still another hour down to Folkestone. He longed for his
Times
, but resolved at last, that he would not read unless she read first. She also had remembered her novel; but by nature she was more patient than he, and she thought that on such a journey any reading might perhaps be almost improper. (Anthony Trollope,
The
Small
House
at
Allington
497)

His and hers, newspaper and novel: the railway carriage echoes the railway platform across which Johnny Eames and Adolphus Crosbie chased one another several chapters earlier, ending up at the W. H. Smith bookstall where Johnny “laid his foe prostrate upon the newspapers, falling himself into the yellow shilling-novel depot by the overt fury of his own energy” (371).
⁴
Crushing each genre under the weight of a different combatant, the first scene introduces a face-off between newspaper and novel that the second will peg to sexual difference.

By century’s end, paired novel and newspaper reading was canonical enough that its interruption could carry a sexual charge: in the 1899 film
The
Kiss
in
the
Tunnel
, a woman reading a novel and man reading a newspaper kiss when the train enters the darkness (Hammond 60).
The
Small
House
shows less interest in analogizing men’s newspaper reading to women’s novel reading, however, than in pairing unread copies of each. One measure of this is that “remembered her novel” doesn’t mean what I’d mean if I wondered, for example, whether you remembered
The
Small
House
at
Allington
well enough for me to dispense with plot summary. What Alexandrina remembers isn’t the content of the text, but the location of the book. Even when Crosbie can no longer resist taking out his newspaper, “he could not fix his mind upon the politics of the day.”