How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (24 page)

observed with joy that the book betrayed tokens of constant reading. Every page appeared to have been frequently, though carefully turned; and various favourite passages were marked, one by a ribbon, another by a dried flower or leaf, another by a bit of thread or tiny scrap of paper; while some pages were doubled in half, others turned down at the corner above, others at the corner below. There could be no doubt of its being the vade mecum of a Bible Christian. (Manning 203)

And a missionary from the Institution for the Evangelization of Gypsies testifies that “in one of the former families there was a Testament, which had been presented by the Committee in Southampton, and bearing date
1830. It bore marks of frequent usage. Many single leaves were turned down as marks for certain passages” (“Institution for the Evangelization of Gypsies” 170). The hero of one 1859 novel even falls in love the moment he notices that the heroine’s bible is “not one of those velvet things with gilt crosses that ladies delight in, but plain-bound, with slightly soiled edges, as if with continual use” (D. M. Craik 59).

Keeping a book too clean is as bad as letting it get too dirty. One London bible-woman reports: “Called on a man in C—— street. His answer was, ‘No, missus, I do not want a Bible. I have one in my box, and it is one hundred and two years old.’ I replied, ‘I should like to see it.’ He took it out, and I was obliged to say, ‘It looks as if every page condemned its several owners.’ ‘How so, missus?’ ‘It has always been kept in the box, and not a leaf is soiled’” (Ranyard 95). The story has a happy ending, as the man eventually agrees to subscribe for a large-print bible. Instead of a person judging books, books sit in judgment over persons. When a character in
Ministering
Children
confesses that “a locked-up Bible is a bad witness against me,” the evidence of the book trumps the testimony of its owner: empty protestations of faith can be faked, but the wear and tear on the page doesn’t lie (Charlesworth,
Ministering
Children
72).

If the happiest women have no history, the same could be said of the happiest books (G. Eliot,
The
Mill
on
the
Floss
400). Conversely, it-narrators must suffer, because the only voice with which prosopopoeia can invest them is the passive. For the narrator of the
History
of
a
Religious
Tract
Supposed
to
Be
Related
by
Itself
, the very basis on which books can be assimilated to speaking subjects is their vulnerability. “Much indeed do I resemble man,” it begins, “not only in the vast variety of my members, but in the delicacy of my constitution. As human ‘Life contains a thousand springs, and dies if one be gone,’ so the loss or misplacing of a word sadly disorders me, and the fraction of a page is death” (1).
⁸
The narrator of the 1873
History
of
a
Book
, too, matures by being humbled: “Not for long was I allowed to remain in this inflated state of mind with regard to my probable size as a book. My sheets were taken and . . . passed between two iron rollers . . . This ‘rolling-machine’ compresses the sheets so very much more than the old ‘hammering’ did [that] the result, to my mind, was to make me ‘feel small’” (Carey 137).

In the
Adventures
of
a
Bible
(1813), a characteristically Christian reversal makes that same smallness a source of power: “I was indeed but six inches in height,” acknowledges the narrator; “but with this I was by no means discontented, as I thought that, probably, I should be more frequently brought into use, than if I had been of a larger size; and I knew that, small as I was, I could teach and do as much as the largest” (Boston Society for the Religious and Moral Improvement of Seamen 6). No less than the undersized and underfunded protagonist of a Dickens or Brontë
novel, it-narrators exemplify the hidden powers of the physically and socially insignificant. A Christian theme, but also a political subtext: a battered paper-covered volume demands as much respect for its contents as the spotless leather-bound twin from which it’s been separated at birth. A book’s a book for a’ that.

Like abused children, too, the book evokes our empathy by reporting mistreatment. In secular accounts of book production, the narrator gets pressed, trimmed, and hammered; in religious accounts of book circulation, the narrator gets pawned, stolen, torn, kicked, and trampled on. If books’ accounts of their own martyrdom borrow from the conventions of missionary autobiography, they also draw on a long tradition in which Christ’s body was compared to a book (Kearney,
The
Incarnate
Text
14). The word made flesh—but as in Kafka’s
Penal
Colony
, flesh most legible when martyred.

Paradoxically, then, those moments when the book usurps its human owner’s agency occur not when it’s most powerful, but when it’s most abused. Caroline Wilder Fellowes’s “A volume of Dante,” for example, opens, “I lie unread, alone. None heedeth me. / Day after day the cobwebs are unswept / From my dim covers” (White,
Book-Song
53). In fact, this logic exceeds the it-narrative proper: even in a human-narrated tract, Mrs. Sherwood can warn that “Bibles are now so abundant in England, that the rich supply, we fear, rather tends to cause a contempt for the gift than a spirit of thankfulness; but let it be remembered, that every Bible which has lain neglected on the dusty shelf may, some time or other, rise in judgment against its careless possessor” (M. Sherwood 315).
⁹
Here as in
Ministering
Children
, it’s precisely the fact of being silenced that gives the bible standing to complain. Across the ocean, the
Life
of
William
Grimes, the Runaway Slave
(1825) concludes: “if it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave, I would in my will, leave my skin a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment and then bind the Constitution of glorious happy and free America. Let the skin of an American slave bind the charter of American liberty” (quoted in Fabian 87–88). And if a slave’s skin could be imagined as a book’s binding, a book’s cover could be imagined as a slave’s skin: the most heavily subsidized bibles bore a “charity brand”—a stamp referred to, once again, in the language of slavery (Howsam 122).

“If you would know how a man treats his wife and his children, see how he treats his books”: the aphorism often attributed to Emerson (probably apocryphal) endows the book with personhood at the price of vulnerability. An 1882 article titled “The Library” in the
Gentleman’s Magazine
that begins with a hackneyed quotation from
Areopagitica
(“as good almost kill a man as kill a good book”) goes on to make clear that books bear less resemblance to men than to women: “He would think
that he richly deserved the six months’ hard labour which London magistrates deal to brutal husbands who kick and jump upon their wives, could he bring himself to double up the backs of his books” (Watkins 101).

Such analogies pair the book’s capacity to feel pain with its inability to protect itself. Or herself, for the most minimal grammatical marker of the genre—the “it” contradistinguished from those more conventional narrators who must be resolved into a “he” or a “she”—is contradicted both by the sexual metaphors that convey the book’s vulnerability, and by the metaphors of dress that spark the book’s reflections on its own vanity. (In
Romola
, too, selling off your father-in-law’s library brands you capable of monetizing his daughter.) This isn’t to say that Emerson (or whoever came up with the aphorism) is advocating a chivalrous refusal to lay hands on the book: unlike the seduction narratives invoked by
Godey’s
, these analogies figure the book as legitimately married to her (male) owner. By that logic, a book that’s been used to pieces would reflect as badly on its master as does a book that’s respected to the point of not being used at all.

Surprisingly, then, the book speaks most loudly when its words go unread. Or maybe not so surprising. A voice that emerges from a body small enough to be overlooked; a narrator that eloquently analyzes its sensations but can’t talk itself out of a beating; a narrator whose physical pain is compounded by the humiliation of being silenced; a narrator, more fundamentally, whose subjectivity is never acknowledged by other characters: if the it-narrative’s combination of strong focalization with represented weakness sounds at once counterintuitive and familiar, the reason may be that the same contradiction vertebrates a better-known genre, the bildungsroman. Each genre endows its narrators with consciousness while stripping them of power; each contrasts the narrator’s fluency with other characters’ refusal to recognize its standing to speak.

It would be stating the obvious to acknowledge that bildungsroman and it-narrative stand at opposite poles of Victorian fiction: one on the rise, another on the wane; one centered on subjects, the other on objects. More crucially for our purposes, the it-narrative reveals what the bildungsroman conceals: the backstory by which books reach their readers. Nothing could be further from the fantasy of the self-made reader and the self-distributing text that we saw in the previous chapter than the it-narrative’s understanding of books as vectors for human relationships. Nothing further from the bildungsroman’s representation of books as found objects—stripped of price tag, Micawberishly turning up in uninhabited
garrets, finding their way into children’s hands through an agency as invisible as that which supplies gas and running water. In endowing books with a life story, the it-narrative restores what the bildungsroman suppresses. Or more precisely, what the bildungsroman confines to human subjects: David develops a
Personal
History
(as the full title of the novel has it) at the expense of his books’ being stripped of one.

Those contrasts would seem to undermine the logic of much recent research on it-narrative, which mines the genre for intertexts to more familiar works of (human-narrated) fiction. Thus Jonathan Lamb and Lynn Festa have described slave autobiography as giving voice to a piece of property, and Paul Collins has reclassified
Black
Beauty
as at once an it-narrative whose object happens to be animate and a slave narrative whose hero happens to be equine.
¹⁰
These readings take as their benchmark the earlier, numismatically themed phase of it-narrative. The bildungsroman borrows something far more specific from later it-narratives: in both cases, I want to suggest now, questions about agency are routed through a particular category of object, the book.

The child metaphor doesn’t just construct the book as a particular kind of subject; more specifically, it also constructs the book as a particular kind of narrator. A sensitive yet powerless protagonist who forms the object rather than the subject of action, a camera eye whose plight serves as an index to the morals of those with whom it comes into contact: if it-narratives draw at once on slave autobiography (as in
The
History
of
a
Religious
Tract
Supposed
to
Be
Related
by
Itself
) and seduction plots (as in the “longing looks,” “blushes,” and “stolen moments of communication” in the
History
of
a
Bible
, or the
Godey’s Lady’s Book
’s descent from pride in its fine clothing to humiliation at the violation of its body), they would go on to be drawn upon by the bildungsroman and the narrative of animal rights. Whether the seduced women upstream of it-narrative or the child narrators downstream, the “wife and children” of Emerson’s analogy mirror the book’s ability to sift the virtuous who recognize its subjectivity from the vicious to whom it remains a tool. The it-narrative functions at once as a user’s manual (treat your books as well as you treat yourself) and a litmus test (beware the suitor in whose home you notice spread-eagled books or whimpering dogs).

Lynn Hunt and Joseph Slaughter have argued that vulnerability to suffering defines the limits of the human. “In the eighteenth century,” Hunt contends, “readers of novels learned to extend their purview of empathy. In reading, they empathized across traditional social borders between nobles and commoners, masters and servants, men and women, perhaps even adults and children” (Hunt 40; Slaughter). But also, thanks to it-narratives, between animate and inanimate beings. If, as Slaughter suggests, our modern conception of “human rights” comes from the
novelistic enterprise of imagining the pain of unprotected beings like women, children, and slaves, that list could also include books—which, as we’ve seen, become anthropomorphized at precisely those moments when they are assimilated to a “prisoner,” “captive,” “slave,” “wife,” “child,” or even war invalid.

Outside the boundaries of the it-narrative, judicial punishment has traditionally anthropomorphized books: a volume put on trial and burned by the public hangman looks more human than a book that’s being read. Heine’s prediction that book-burners will come to burn people transposes the pseudo-Emersonian aphorism into a judicial register. Predictably, Ray Bradbury spins that comparison out in a plot that ends with persons “becoming” books in the hope that bodies will prove harder to burn than pages; a draft of
Fahrenheit
451
endows books with body parts at the moment of destruction, making a character declare that “we just gave them the bullet behind the ear” (quoted in Seed 238).

Remember that the books which distract Julien Sorel and Hugh Trevor from their surroundings get drowned and burned: where the bildungsroman links book with person through metonymy (a book is knocked out of a child’s hands before the child himself is knocked down), the object narrative and the legal regime of censorship both link books with persons through metaphor (a book becomes most humanized when manhandled in the it-narrative, or burned by the public hangman in real life). If, as we saw in the previous chapter, the bildungsroman makes those characters who judge a book by its cover identical to those who objectify human beings, Heine’s phrasing reverses that logic: for him, the same metaphor that anthropomorphizes books can also objectify humans.