How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (41 page)

In classroom or church, the audience is captive, the reader its captor. Florence Nightingale extended that logic to the drawing room in a series of rhetorical questions:

Don’t you feel, when you are being read to, as if a pailful of water were being poured down your throat, which, but that it comes up again just as it goes down, would suffocate you? Very few swallow it at all; fewer still digest it. Many people like to read aloud; but how many can bear being read to without going to sleep? Yet
everybody
can’t be reading aloud . . . What is it to be “read aloud to”? The most miserable exercise of the human intellect. Or rather, is it any exercise at all? It is like lying on one’s back, with one’s hands tied and having liquid poured down one’s throat. (Nightingale,
Cassandra
714, 213)
²⁶

Compare a young girl’s diary entry from 1875: “Such a detestable evening, Grobee actually made a fuss because I was writing my journal while the reading was going on. He not only makes us read a dry, stupid old book (which we do willingly to please him) but forbids those who are not reading to do anything which prevents them from listening. It is really too bad. Why should we be forced to listen when we don’t want to? . . . No one may move or speak a word the whole evening—it is most dull” (Troubridge 125).

Such accounts of domesticity draw on a tradition of comic writing that stretches back to Jane Collier’s
Art
of
Ingeniously
Tormenting
(1753):

The same indifference, also, you may put on, if [your husband] should be a man who loves reading . . . If, for instance, he desires you to hear one of Shakespeare’s plays, you may give him perpetual interruptions, by sometimes going out of the room, sometimes ringing the bell to give orders for what cannot be wanted till the next day; at other times taking
notice (if your children are in the room), that Molly’s cap is awry, or that Jackey looks pale . . . If you have needle-work in your hands, you may be so busy in cutting out, and measuring one part with another, that it will plainly appear to your husband, that you mind not one word he reads. If all this teazes him enough to make him call on you for your attention, you may say, that indeed you have other things to mind besides poetry. (89)

To listen is to submit to another’s power; like Trollope’s characters going to sleep, the wife resorts to passive resistance. Yet even Nightingale—whose leading questions can themselves be experienced as coercive—acknowledges that listening can also be experienced as parasitism: “women like something to tickle their ears and save them the trouble of thinking, while they have needlework in their hands. They like to be spared the
ennui
of doing nothing, without the labour of doing something” (Nightingale,
Cassandra
74).

On the one hand, Elizabeth Hamilton’s 1800
Memoirs
of
Modern
Philosophers
contrasts the selfless Harriet’s reading aloud at a sickbed with Bridgetina Botherim’s selfish insistence on reading silently to herself even in a roomful of other people (Hamilton and Grogan 176, 72, 84).
²⁷
On the other,
Poor
Miss
Finch
proportions female listeners’ “suffering” to the male reader’s “pleasure.” In its indifference to content (“read what he might”),
Poor
Miss
Finch
echoes Nightingale’s sense that the text itself is almost incidental to the power relations created between reader and listeners.

On the other hand, reading aloud can constitute torture just as easily as being read aloud to. In Broughton’s
Second
Thoughts
, a father whose daughter arrives at his sickbed prepared to read him “something . . . a little serious” amuses himself by reminding her of her duty to read whatever she is asked (in this case, a French gossip column) seated “under his direction, exactly opposite him, where he can nicely observe every shade of expression, every nervous blush and mortified contraction that passes over her face” (Broughton,
Second
Thoughts
41–43, 54). The violation of a girl’s innocence is even more explicitly sadistic in the late-Victorian pornographic novel
“Frank” and I
, where the narrator’s first reaction to unmasking “Frank” as a cross-dressed girl is to take out a Mudie’s subscription. More specifically, after Frank is discovered to be Frances, the narrator discovers as well that the most pleasant sequel to flogging her is to lie in an armchair listening to her read aloud . . .
The
Moonstone
(
“Frank” and I
43). As a middle-aged male landowner orders his teenaged female dependent to read a trashy novel, the power dynamics of the tract distributing represented
within
Collins’s novel take on a secular and sexual charge.
²⁸

The analogy with music may give a subtler sense of the contradictory connotations of reading aloud: girls’ piano playing, too, could be coded either as self-importance (Mary Bennet being told that “You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit”) or self-abnegation (Sophia Western playing “Bobbing Joan,” rather than her beloved Handel, to her drunken father) (Austen,
Pride
and
Prejudice
69). By 1934, when
A
Handful
of
Dust
ends with Tony Last being kept alive on condition that he read Dickens aloud to his captor (like David to Steerforth?), the inventive Scheherazade is reduced to a mechanical drudge. “He had always rather enjoyed reading aloud and in the first years of his marriage had shared several books in this way with Brenda, until one day, in a moment of frankness, she remarked that it was torture to her” (Waugh 292).
²⁹
The “torture” of being read aloud to prefigures the torture of reading aloud: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny as the paterfamilias’s voice gives way to something more like the prison workforce that today recites scripts on customer service lines. When the contrast is between who speaks and who listens, the reader-aloud looks like the powerful figure, inflicting sounds on his public as autocratically as Miss Clack inflicts objects on hers; but when the question is rather who decides what book he wants to hear and who executes those orders, then the reader-aloud becomes as powerless as the child or woman or bricklayer whose reading material is chosen by their betters.

Such harangues don’t need a book as prop; when Sydney Smith “dreamt I was chained to a rock and being talked to death by Harriet Martineau and Macaulay,” neither nightmare figure held a book (Kemble 65). The two contrasting models of reading aloud do, however, exemplify the larger question of whether reading (in whatever medium) expresses selfhood or dependence. If tract distribution enforces the latter model (while apotropaically representing the former) and novel reading enacts the former (while systematically satirizing the latter), the postal debates with which this chapter began can be understood as a face-off between these two models, with reformers championing correspondence as the medium of individual enlightenment and conservatives exposing it as a generator of mass markets.

In this context, a third possible explanation for Collins’s obsession with tract-distributors emerges: Miss Clack transposes the effects of Rowland Hill’s new postal regime into a religious register. I’ve suggested that hand-distributed tracts and junk mail delivered by post together emblematized the shift from paper scarcity to paper surfeit; more specifically, both prompted concerns about the relation of print to manuscript, broadcast to personal communication, and written matter to nontextual objects. The difference between tracts and bulk mail lay less in their content (after all, both drew on a rhetoric of persuasion) than in their distribution
methods: in one case, a reformed postal system driven by modern liberal principles that glorified virtuality, impersonality, and mediation; in the other, a nostalgic (though equally reformist) network of face-to-face relationships.

This is not to say that the two enterprises were antagonistic. In one direction, tract distribution provided a model for postal distribution: when Cobden offered to subsidize a cheap edition of Hill’s pamphlet
Post
Office
Reform
, the model of the Cheap Repository Tracts must have come to mind (Robinson 273). Rowland Hill the postal reformer was named after the Rowland Hill who helped to found the Religious Tract Society; reciprocally, the post provided a channel for tracts. One chronicler of the RTS rejoices that “in these days of penny-postage blessedness, in almost every letter we write we can proclaim the glad tidings of mercy, by inserting an eight-paged tract” (Jones 258). A prospectus for a system of “Evangelization by book-post” explains that

the post, we thought, is a neutral agent, often spreading evil, but capable of spreading good, why then not make use of it to scatter the seed of truth in all directions? Doubtless many papers so distributed find their way to the wastepaper basket, without obtaining the favor of a reading; but, after all, there must be a real benefit in so expensive a distribution, since so many tradespeople persevere in it. (Dardier 318)

Commercial circulars provide a generic model for religious tracts as well as a template for their distribution. Henry Mayhew had more on his side than shock value when he lumped the religious tract together with the commercial advertisement, describing “sham indecent” packets stuffed with “a religious tract, or a slop-tailor’s puff” (
London
Labour
and
the
London
Poor
1:241). Both genres developed an ambivalent relation to the market: where the religious tract tried to beat commercial chapbooks at their own game, the advertising circular sold goods by giving printed paper away for free.

While tract societies disguised gift as sale and mass-duplicated books as personal “messengers,” the same advertisers who took over the Christian language of the “free gift” presented broadcast communications as point-to-point.
³⁰
As one early twentieth-century observer pointed out, a society overloaded with paper creates the temptation to misrepresent the mass-distributed as personal communications and vice versa: “One of the most curious recent developments in the graphic arts is the effort of advertisers to make printed matter look like typescript, while the authors of books that are not in sufficient demand to warrant publication are seeking a typescript that will look like print” (Binkley 526).

The distinction between personal letters and bulk mail becomes especially fraught at a moment where print—once charged with brokering the
meeting of an individual reader’s mind with an author’s—comes instead to insert each reader into a mass public. In fact, the statistics about the number of new readers mirrored equally oft-cited calculations about the number of new books. The mechanical production of newspapers spread metonymically to their readers: in 1883 Northcliffe attributes his market to the fact that “the Board Schools are turning out hundreds of thousands of boys and girls annually who are anxious to read” (quoted in R. Williams,
The
Long
Revolution
196). The excess of print implied an excess of fellow readers.

I am a reader, you are a public, they are a market. The commercial nature of the book is best displaced onto others—preferably of a different rank and gender. Even when middle-class men were forced into awareness of who had handled a book before them, the question of whose hands it would fall into later was easier to avoid. Part of what distinguished working-class and female readers, in contrast, was that they never had the luxury of ignoring what would happen to a book after it left their hands. Those after-uses form the subject of my final chapter.

Over the course of this study, the physicality of print has swum into focus at extremes: in the case of books that are especially expensive (bibliophilic collectibles) or especially worthless (free advertising circulars, subsidized religious tracts); among subcultures especially bookish (antiquarians, collectors) or especially bookless (the illiterate, the heathen); with books considered especially sacred and timeless (the Bible) or especially profane and ephemeral (newspapers, almanacs, novels); at the beginning of their life (manufacture) or the end (pulping).

Taking this last case seriously would mean replacing the traditional question “what is a text” by “when is a text?” In an age of taxed paper, reading constituted only one point in a cycle: beginning its life as rags no longer worth wearing, the page dwindled back into paper once its content was no longer worth reading. In the wood-pulp era, only bibliographers continued to notice the prehistory and afterlife of legible objects. But even bibliographers need limits. Can the study of printed books stop short of forestry and the secondhand clothing market? Does the interpretation of graffiti require expertise in brickmaking? In the opposite direction, how far downstream should reception theorists venture: to the archive, the depository, the Dumpster?

By the turn of the twentieth century, one modern scholar reminds us, “most of the paper used in Britain was not used for printing. Of what was printed, most was thrown away” (McKitterick,
The
Cambridge
History
of
the
Book
in
Britain
63). Modernity can be defined not just by what’s produced, but by what’s discarded, and when. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, most reading matter was made from old rags, and much of it went on to be recycled in turn. Newspapers were handed down a chain of households as their contents staled; letters were torn to light a pipe; broadsheets pieced out dress patterns or lined pie plates or wiped shit. In their passage from hand to hand and use to use, loose sheets accreted scars and bruises as telling as any it-narrator.

To think about the transmission of paper is to think about the contingent, the unmentionable, and the mundane. Much of the vernacular Chinese fiction now extant has reached our hands by accident, unearthed from tombs or stumbled across in the backing material for other books (Zeitlin 254).
¹
In Europe, the same “secondary causes” that destroy books
have preserved pages. Some of those unintended consequences are bibliographic (binder’s waste), others more vulgarly domestic (trunk linings) (Adams and Barker 31). In Han China, “paper was probably used for wrapping before it was used for writing” (Needham et al. 122); in Britain as late as 1911, the
Encyclopedia
Britannica
continued to define paper as “the substance commonly used for writing upon, or for wrapping things in.” Where pages can make readers forget hunger, as in so many accounts of prison reading, paper serves as a reminder of the need to ingest and excrete. Or at least,
did
serve as such a reminder, because this chapter will suggest that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century—the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader—in fact have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood-pulp paper (in the late nineteenth century) and then (in the twentieth) of plastics.