How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (54 page)

8.
When Ben Franklin composed an epitaph for himself comparing the body to “an old Book . . . stript of its Lettering and Gilding” but insisting that “the Work shall not be lost” but rather “Appear once more / In a new and elegant Edition / Corrected and improved / By the Author,” he made clear that the hackneyed analogy (text is to book as soul is to body) gains its greatest anthropomorphic force at the moment of death (quoted in Robert Darnton,
First
Steps
toward
a
History
of
Reading
[New York: Norton, 1990], 186).

9.
Compare “But here is the old family Bible. Not one with double clasp, gilt back, and full morocco binding, with colored marriage certificate, and two pages for photographs; not the kind which is enveloped in its own dignity, and seems to say to any who would venture to open its stiff clasps, I am only to be looked at. The Bible they read is in grandmother’s room.” Charles Le Roy Goodell,
My
Mother’s Bible: A Memorial Volume of Addresses for the Home
(Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1891), 24.

10.
Jonathan Lamb, “Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales,”
Critical
Inquiry
28 (2001): 158; Lynn M. Festa,
Sentimental
Figures
of
Empire
in
Eighteenth-Century Britain and France
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); see also Paul Collins, “You and Your Dumb Friends,”
Believer
, March 2004. On the relation of slave narrative to bildungsroman more generally, see Julia Sun-Joo Lee,
The
American
Slave
Narrative
and
the
Victorian
Novel
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

11.
The same could be said of his namesake, David Grieve, who finds “an old calf-bound copy of Paradise Lost” in a meal chest; “all the morning he had been lying hidden in a corner of the sheepfold devouring it, the rolling verse imprinting itself on the boy’s plastic memory by a sort of enchantment.” Mary Arnold Ward,
David
Grieve
(London: Macmillan, 1891), 88.

12.
I owe the idea of bibliomorphizing to Mark Kauf (Tufts).

13.
On the extent to which it-narrators are empowered to speak for themselves, see Mary Poovey’s discussion of the shifting positions occupied by the narrator of Bridges’s
Adventures
of
a
Bank-note
, which sometimes represents its powers of speech as an idiosyncrasy and sometimes seems to assume that its fellow banknotes can speak as well, sometimes imagines itself as a speaker whose words are being recorded by a human “secretary” and sometimes uses phrases that imply its own power to write and even to transact business with booksellers. Mary Poovey,
Genres
of
the
Credit
Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 149.

14.
For the paradox of the weak hero in the nineteenth-century British novel, see Alexander Welsh,
The
Hero
of
the
Waverley
Novels
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963). Compare Michael Gamer’s reading of
Waverley
as an object narrative, where the protagonist’s passivity doesn’t prevent him from providing the novel’s formal center—with the difference, of course, that object narratives, like
Copperfield
but unlike
Waverley
, are conventionally first-person. Michael Gamer, “Waverley and the Object of (Literary) History,”
Modern
Language
Quarterly
70.4 (2009).

15.
Cp. David Pearson, “What Can We Learn by Tracking Multiple Copies of Books?”
Books
on
the
Move: Tracking Copies through Collections and the Book Trade
, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2007), 18.

16.
On nonhuman agents, see also Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation—Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy,”
Common
Knowledge
3.2 (1994).

17.
See also Aileen Fyfe’s argument that the Evangelical press praised tracts for their ability to reach places where middle-class bodies could not safely venture. Fyfe,
Science
and
Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain
, 29.

18.
See also Seth Lerer,
Inventing
English: A Portable History of the Language
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 21.

19.
Robert Darnton,
The
Business
of
Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Cathy Davidson, “The Life and Times of
Charlotte
Temple
: The Biography of a Book,”
Reading
in
America: Literature and Social History
, ed. Cathy Davidson (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Not that this metaphor is confined to books in particular: witness Igor Kopytoff’s essay “The Cultural Biography of Things.” Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,”
The
Social
Life
of
Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective
, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For the longer history of the “talking book,” see Henry Louis Gates,
The
Signifying
Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 152–69.

1.
Collier, “Of the Entertainment of Books,” quoted in Holbrook Jackson, ed.,
The
Anatomy
of
Bibliomania
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 71; see also Collet Dobson Collet,
History
of
the
Taxes
on
Knowledge; Their Origin and Repeal
(London: T. F. Unwin, 1899), 35. For the prehistory, see Ann Blair,
Too
Much
to
Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale Unversity Press, 2010).

2.
On the taxes on knowledge, see Collet,
History
of
the
Taxes
on
Knowledge; Their Origin and Repeal
; Webb,
The
British
Working
Class
Reader, 1790–1848: Literacy and Social Tension
; Joel H. Wiener,
The
War
of
the
Unstamped: The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–1836
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969); Alan Rauch,
Useful
Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Simon Eliot, “The Business of Victorian Publishing,”
The
Cambridge
Companion
to
the
Victorian
Novel
, ed. Deirdre David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

3.
On the Malthusian metaphor, see Lucy Newlyn,
Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 40. Thomas Hood invokes a similar logic when he prefaces his “National Tales”—
coming right after “My son and heir” (originally published in the Comic Annual for 1831), in which a father laments that “James is too big a boy, like book, / To leave upon the shelf unbound”—with an apology to “the learned Malthusians of our century” for “increasing my family in this kind; and by twin volumes, instead of the single octavos which have hitherto been my issue.” Thomas Hood, “The Choice Works of Thomas Hood, in Prose and Verse, Including the Cream of the Comic Annuals. With Life of the Author, Portrait, and over Two Hundred Illustrations” (1883?), 655.

4.
On junk mail in the nineteenth-century United States, see David M. Henkin,
The
Postal
Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 153, and Richard Menke,
Telegraphic
Realism
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 31–67.

5.
On postal scams, see Henkin,
The
Postal
Age
, 155–58.

6.
On the history of the metaphor, see James Hamilton, “Unearthing Broadcasting in the Anglophone World,”
Residual
Media
, ed. Charles R. Acland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Peters points out that the etymology of “parable” itself involves sowing. John Durham Peters,
Speaking
into
the
Air: A History of the Idea of Communication
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 52.

7.
On books as gifts between men, see also Margot Finn, “Men’s Things: Masculine Possession in the Consumer Revolution,”
Social
History
25.2 (2000): 133–55.

8.
On the
Fraser
’s hoax (designed to trick Martineau and other celebrities into providing references for an imaginary ex-servant), see
Harriet
Martineau’s Autobiography
, ed. Maria Chapman, 2 vols. (Boston: Osgood, 1877), 1:320.

9.
James Raven,
Free
Print
and
Non-Commercial Publishing since 1700
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 4, 5; on free books in the Romantic period, see Jackson,
Romantic
Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia
, 36–37. By its own partisan calculations, Metro PE dwarfs all Pan-European daily and weekly titles with a reach over four times higher than that of the
Financial
Times
and nearly three times higher than the
Economist’s
(
http://hugin.info/132142/R/1496601/432324.pdf
).

10.
My model owes much to Elaine Hadley’s analysis of Victorian liberalism: Elaine Hadley,
Living
Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

11.
See also Michael Ledger-Lomas, “Mass Markets: Religion,”
The
Cambridge
History
of
the
Book
in
Britain, 1830–1914
, ed. David McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 326, and Boyd Hilton,
The
Age
of
Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 314.

12.
Margot Finn dates to the 1820s and 1830s “the inroads made by increasingly individualistic and contractual ways of thinking upon traditions of consumer behavior which had earlier been entangled in a dense reticulation of personal ties and affective obligations.” Finn, “Men’s Things,” 137.

13.
See also Gilmartin on “the circular structure of a print economy of charitable provision.” Kevin Gilmartin, “‘Study to Be Quiet’: Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain,”
ELH
70.2 (2003): 513.

14.
See Leslie Howsam,
Cheap
Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society
, Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), as well as, more generally, Raven,
Free
Print
and
Non-Commercial Publishing since 1700
.

15.
On the system of subsidized pricing, see Anne Stott,
Hannah
More: The First Victorian
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 175.

16.
The narrator of a
Punch
sketch, “Bachelor Days,” plays on the convention when he explains the accumulation of wastepaper in his cupboard by the speculation that his housekeeper must be overcompensating for having discarded a valuable manuscript in some previous job. “Bachelor Days. IV,”
Punch
, 1907, 17.

17.
Missionary
Register
, Church Missionary Society, May 1817, 186, quoted in Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817,”
Critical
Inquiry
12.1 (1985): 164.

18.
See, e.g., Motoko Rich, “With Kindle, the Best Sellers Don’t Need to Sell,”
New
York
Times, 22
January 2010.

19.
Compare a review of the
Twenty-third Annual Report of the Bombay Tract and Book Society
in a local journal, which remarks upon “the millions of tracts which have been distributed, and have served for waste paper in India, China, and other heathen countries.” “Review of the Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Bombay Tract and Book Society,”
Bombay
quarterly
magazine
and
review
7 (1852): 497. See also Graham Shaw’s observation that “large single sheets containing the Ten Commandments were used by boys to make kites.” Graham Shaw, “South Asia,”
A
Companion
to
the
History
of
the
Book
, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Pub., 2007), 133.

20.
For a rebuttal, see, e.g.,
http://illandancient.blogspot.com/2010/01/this-pensioners-burning-books-story.html.