How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (50 page)

By assuming that “the daily newspaper was made to be perishable, purchased to be thrown away,”
Imagined
Communities
confuses the real simultaneity of the “news” with the putative synchronicity of the “paper” (Terdiman 120).
⁴
And in the absence of synchronicity, virtuality disappears as well. No longer dematerialized, papers become paper; no longer disembodied, its users not only read, but eat and defecate. As virtuality goes, so goes equality: if words knit individuals into a nation, paper splinters them into masters and servants, men and women, stepparents and orphans.
⁵
About those relations, books bear tales out of which we can never get the reading.

1.
Letter to C.W.W. Wynn, 25 June 1805, in Robert Southey, “State and Prospects of the Country,”
The
Emergence
of
Victorian
Consciousness, the Spirit of the Age
, ed. George Lewis Levine (New York: Free Press, 1967), 239; he elsewhere reiterated that “the main demand for contemporary literature comes from [circulating] libraries, books being now so inordinately expensive that they are chiefly purchased as furniture by the rich. It is not a mere antithesis to say that they who buy books do not read them, and that they who read them do not buy them. I have heard of one gentleman who gave a bookseller the dimensions of his shelves, to fit up his library.” Robert Southey,
Letters
from
England
, The Cresset Library (London: Cresset Press, 1951), 349. Compare Walter Benjamin’s declaration that “the non-reading of books . . . should be characteristic of all collectors,” and Italo Calvino’s list of “Books Made for Purposes Other than Reading.” Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,”
Illuminations
, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1985), 62; Italo Calvino,
If
on
a
Winter’s Night a Traveler
, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 5. On Victorian anxiety about the materiality of the book, see Kevin Dettmar, “Bookcases, Slipcases, Uncut Leaves: The Anxiety of the Gentleman’s Library,”
Novel
39 (2005 [i.e., 2006]); and, for a longer history, Jeffrey Todd Knight, “‘Furnished’ for Action: Renaissance Books as Furniture,”
Book
History
12 (2009). On book historians’ inconsistent usages of “materiality,” see David Ayers, “Materialism and the Book,”
Poetics
Today
24.4 (2003). My subject draws more generally on Carla Mazzio and Bradin Cormack’s elegant description of what they call “book use” and “book theory.” Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio,
Book
Use, Book Theory: 1500–1700
(Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2005).

2.
Cp. James Kearney, “The Book and the Fetish: The Materiality of Prospero’s Text,”
Journal
of
Medieval
and
Early
Modern
Studies
32.3 (2002): 449.

3.
In Robin Bernstein’s alternative taxonomy, the book functions at once as a “text” that encloses meaning, as a “script” that instructs past and future performances, and as a “prop” that carries evidence of past uses; and lest terms like “script” and “performance” should make one think of an actor reading aloud, it’s worth adding that those performances don’t need to take the verbal contents of the book as their prompt at all. Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,”
Social
Text
101 (2009): 40–41.

4.
Even that would have done nothing to address the related problem that the English language has an umbrella term for different genres of writing—“text”—but no equally wieldy term to encompass different kinds of inscribed object. To avoid mouthfuls like “pieces of printed matter,” I group newspapers and magazines
among “book-objects”—even though much iconography contrasted the two (as we’ll see in chapter 2), and, in a period rife with reprinting, the same text was read and used very differently depending on whether it appeared in the pages of a periodical or a freestanding volume. For precedent, I can plead the most authoritative recent reference book’s declaration that “the use of the term ‘book’ in our title does not exclude newspapers, prints, sheet music, maps, or manuscripts.” Michael Felix Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen, “Introduction,”
The
Oxford
Companion
to
the
Book
, ed. Michael Felix Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), x; or, further back, Lamartine’s much-quoted 1831 slogan: “the only book possible from today is a Newspaper.” See also Thomas Tanselle’s remark that “symptomatic of the confusion is the use of ‘book’ to mean both intangible work and physical object—more often the former, necessitating the use of such phrases as ‘the book as a physical object’ when speaking of the latter. The expression ‘a good book’ does not normally refer to a well-designed book.” G. Thomas Tanselle, “Libraries, Museums, and Reading,”
Literature
and
Artifacts
(Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1998), 10.

5.
Paul Duguid, “Thought for Food,” quoting W.J.T. Mitchell and Bill Hill:
http://www.icdlbooks.org/meetings/duguid.html.

6.
http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/digital/fiona/general/Jeff_letter_narrow._V5047014_.png.

7.
Conrad of Hirsau explains that “a book is the name given to parchment with marks on it. This name originated from the bark of a tree on which men used to write before the use of animal skin . . . ‘Book’ (
liber
) is so called from the verb ‘to free’, because the man who spends his time reading often releases his mind from the anxieties and chains of the world.” A. J. Minnis, A. Brian Scott, and David Wallace,
Medieval
Literary
Theory
and
Criticism
c.1100–c.1375: The Commentary Tradition
, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 42.

8.
Mitch traces popular literacy to the growth of a national sport network made possible in turn by the growth of railways and telegraphs. Betting spurred interest in sporting news and sales of newspapers: “Many a man made the breakthrough to literacy by studying the pages of the
One
O’ Clock
” (quoted in David Mitch,
The
Rise
of
Popular
Literacy
in
Victorian
England
[Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992], 60–61).

1.
See, e.g., Robert Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau,”
The
Great
Cat
Massacre
and
Other
Episodes
in
French
Cultural
History
(London: Allen Lane, 1984); for a suggestive analogy in the visual arts, see James Elkins,
Pictures
& Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings
(New York: Routledge, 2001).

2.
As Ina Ferris observes, “the history of the book remains primarily oriented toward a history of publishing, so that books function mainly as physical units available to empirical study and description (verbal, statistical, graphic, etc.),
while its model of history (like that of most historicisms) privileges the parameters of production.” Ina Ferris, “Introduction,”
Romantic
Libraries
(College Park: University of Maryland, 2004).

3.
See, e.g., Meredith McGill,
American
Literature
and
the
Culture
of
Reprinting, 1834–1853
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), and William H. Sherman,
Used
Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England
, Material Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); for a survey of the field, Leah Price, “Reading: The State of the Discipline,”
Book
History
7 (2004).

4.
Other models to which mine is indebted include what Mark McGurl describes (with a keen sense of its ironies) as “philistine literary criticism,” and the approach to media studies that Lisa Gitelman (borrowing from Alfred Gell) calls “methodological philistinism”: Lisa Gitelman,
Always
Already
New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); Mark McGurl,
The
Novel
Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 19–20.

5.
On the competing metaphors, see G. N. Cantor,
Science
in
the
Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature
, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, 45 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1.

6.
See also Roger Chartier’s distinction between “heteronomous but nonetheless interconnected forms of logic—the ones that organize utterances and the ones that command action and behavior.” Roger Chartier, ed.,
On
the
Edge
of
the
Cliff: History, Language and Practices
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1. Thomas Richards points out that it’s in this period that the meaning of “reading” expands from the interpretation of texts to the indication of graduated instruments. Thomas Richards,
The
Imperial
Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire
(London: Verso, 1993), 18.

7.
Charles Dickens,
Our
Mutual
Friend
, ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 605, 263, 81, 636. On this passage, see also Garrett Stewart,
Dear
Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 232.

8.
The article dates to 1991; I owe the reference to Richard Biernacki, “Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History,”
Beyond
the
Cultural
Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture
, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Avery Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 74. See also Mark A. Schneider, “Culture-as-Text in the Work of Clifford Geertz,”
Theory
and
Society
16.6 (1987) on the conflation of “culture” with “text,” or Ian Hunter’s critique of “the imperative to expand the esthetic concept of culture . . . to all social activities and relations,” Ian Hunter, “Setting Limits to Culture,”
New
Formations
2 (Spring 1988): 115, or Bourdieu’s claim that “to read a ritual—which is something like a dance—as if it were discursive and could be expressed in mathematical terms is to transform it profoundly.” Todd W. Reeser and Steven D. Spalding, “Reading Literature/Culture: A Translation of ‘Reading as a Cultural Practice,’”
Style
36.4 (2002): 664. Hayden White charges that “the interpretation of cultural phenomena is regarded merely as a special case of the act of reading, in which the manipulation and exchange of signs is carried out most self-consciously, the act
of reading literary texts.” Hayden White,
Tropics
of
Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 262. The emphasis might usefully be placed instead on “literary
texts
.”

9.
On the place of smell in book history, see Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, “The Rise of Periodical Studies,”
PMLA
121 (2006): 526.

10.
I borrow the term “deflation” from Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,”
Representation
in
Scientific
Practice
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). See also Mary Poovey’s argument that “our modern interpretational habits typically track at too high a level of abstraction to give [material vessels] their due”; and David Greetham’s argument that if mid-twentieth-century “textual activity could be called Platonist, then the postmodern descriptive mode might be seen as Aristotelian.” Mary Poovey, “The Limits of the Universal Knowledge Project: British India and the East Indiamen,”
Critical
Inquiry
31.1 (2004): 183–202; 202. David Greetham, “What Is Textual Scholarship?”
A
Companion
to
the
History
of
the
Book
, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Pub., 2007), 29.

11.
Matthew Brown argues that the one category of object that scholars of material culture shy away from is the book. Even their successors, “thing theorists” like Bill Brown, ask how books represent things, not how books are things (Harvard Humanities Center talk, 2007). See, however, Bill Brown, “Introduction: Textual Materialism,”
PMLA
125.1 (2010).

12.
See, e.g. (among many possible examples), Friedrich A. Kittler,
Discourse
Networks
, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); Gitelman,
Always
Already
New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture
; Dora Thornton,
The
Scholar
in
His
Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997); Patricia Crain,
The
Story
of
A: The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to the Scarlet Letter
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002); Pamela Thurschwell, “Henry James and Theodora Bosanquet: On the Typewriter, in the Cage, at the Ouija Board,”
Textual
Practice
13 (1999); Lawrence S. Rainey,
Institutions
of
Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998); Robert J. Mayhew, “Materialist Hermeneutics, Textuality and the History of Geography: Print Spaces in British Geography, c. 1500–1900,”
Journal
of
Historical
Geography
33 (2007). Kate Flint performs such a move in the Victorian period itself, asking what happens to our metaphor of texts “transporting” readers when those readers (or, one might add, those texts) are being very literally transported—on a train, for example. Kate Flint,
The
Feeling
of
Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature
, ed. Rachel Ablow (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 28–29.