How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (57 page)
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Authors: Leah Price
15.
Spectator
367 (1 May 1712), reprinted in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele,
The
Spectator
, ed. Donald Frederic Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 380–81.
16.
Thomas Percy,
Bishop
Percy’s Folio Ms. Ballads and Romances
, ed. Hales and Furnivall (1868), 1:xii, quoted in Susan Stewart,
Crimes
of
Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 119.
17.
On bibliophilic misogyny, see Willa Silverman, “The Enemies of Books? Women and the Male Bibliophilic Imagination in
Fin-de-Siècle
France,”
Contemporary
French
Civilization
30.1 (Winter 2005/Spring 2006): 47–74, and Jackson,
The
Anatomy
of
Bibliomania
, 137–68.
18.
Carolyn Steedman offers a different analysis of what she calls the “servant joke”: Steedman,
Labours
Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England, 222
.
19.
A. R. Waller and Adolphus William Ward,
The
Cambridge
History
of
English
Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 12:362; see also W. W. Greg’s description of bibliography as “the handmaid of literature”: W. W. Greg, “What Is Bibliography?”
Transactions
of
the
Bibliographical
Society
12 (1914): 47. On the bibliographer as service worker, see Jon Klancher, “Bibliographia Literaria: Thomas Dibdin and the Origins of Book History in Britain, 1800–1825” (unpublished paper), and, on the feminization of the literal, Homans,
Bearing
the
Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing
.
20.
The libretto copies this scene roughly from chapter 9 of Henri Murger’s eponymous novel: there, the “dénouement ne fit que flamber et s’éteindre.” Giacomo Puccini and Henri Murger,
La
Bohème
([Paris]: Calmann-Lévy, Erato, 1988), 293.
21.
The term puns on writing, but also on printing: the “secret composition” that makes the flypaper sticky bears some resemblance to the mixture of glue and treacle used to ink the device known as a “composition roller.” See Annie Carey,
The
History
of
a
Book
(London: Cassell, Petter and Galpin, [1873]) 105.
22.
Even the second volume itself distinguishes the tradesman who resells objects “to be disposed of as old metal or waste-paper” from “his brother tradesman [who] buys them to be resold and remanufactured for the purposes for which they were originally intended” (2:108).
23.
See Christopher Herbert,
Culture
and
Anomie
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 221, and Michal Peled Ginsburg, “The Case against Plot in
Bleak
House
and
Our
Mutual
Friend
,”
ELH
59.1 (1992): 179.
24.
Altick,
The
English
Common
Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900.
108.
25.
Edwards, manuscript scrapbook, Book E (1860–1876), Manchester Public Library Archives, p. 189, quoted in Black,
A
New
History
of
the
English
Public
Library: Social and Intellectual Contexts, 1850–1914
, 93.
26.
Similarly, a missionary in Jerusalem named Mr. Whiting explains that he gives tracts to illiterate Arab women who claim their sons can read “in the hope that, even if their object be to sell them, they will fall into the hands of some one who will derive benefit from them.” William Jones,
The
Jubilee
Memorial
of
the
Religious
Tract
Society
Containing
a
Record
of
Its
Origin, Proceedings, and Results, A.D. 1799 to A.D. 1849
(London: Religious Tract Society, 1850), 389.
27.
See Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones,
Renaissance
Clothing
and
the
Materials
of
Memory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). On clothing in the context of preindustrial recycling more generally, see Donald Woodward, “Swords into Ploughshares: Recycling in Pre-Industrial England,”
Economic
History
Review
38 (1985): 177–79.
28.
Sutherland,
Victorian
Novelists
and
Publishers
, 70; Freeland, “Trash Fiction,” 11. Walter Siti, too, argues that the novel bears a special relationship to repetition, citing Vauvenargues’s observation that “you never reread a novel.” Franco Moretti,
The
Novel
, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1:99.
29.
On the history of the text/textile metaphor, see Roger Chartier,
Inscription
and
Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century
, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 95–97.
30.
Henry Mayhew and John Binny,
The
Criminal
Prisons
of
London
and
Scenes
of
Prison
Life
(London: Frank Cass, 1968), 37; on this passage, see Anne Humpherys,
Travels
into
the
Poor
Man’s Country: The Work of Henry Mayhew
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 148.
31.
The paper duty imposed in 1711 was reduced in 1836 and removed by Gladstone in 1860, the same year in which esparto grass was first used. George Richardson Porter,
The
Progress
of
the
Nation
in
Its
Various
Social
and
Economic
Relations
from
the
Beginning
of
the
Nineteenth
Century
(London: Methuen & Co., 1912), 405.
32.
For an analogous argument that attributes the rise of the novel to the fall of paper prices, see Erikson,
The
Economy
of
Literary
Form
.
33.
For a theory of such shifts from figurative to literal and metaphor to metonymy, see Elaine Freedgood,
The
Ideas
in
Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 20.
34.
Cp. Bill Brown’s shrewd observation that “the immaterial/material distinction often asserts itself as the difference between the visible and the tangible,” as if sight were not just as physically embodied as touch. Bill Brown, “Materiality,”
Critical
Terms
for
Media
Studies
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 51.
35.
It’s telling in this respect that an earlier study like Hans J. Rindisbacher,
The
Smell
of
Books: A Cultural-Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), could analyze the literary representation of smell without ever mentioning the literal “smell of books” from which it took its title.
36.
It’s no accident (as literary critics used to say) that a single term designates both a maid’s intrusion into the decisions about which version of a text survives—decisions that should remain the purview of gentlemanly editors—and those features of the text that are entrusted to a lesser functionary than the author (punctuation, for example, began as the publisher’s responsibility and only gradually became part of the author’s remit). David C. Greetham,
Theories
of
the
Text
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 142; Allan C. Dooley,
Author
and
Printer
in
Victorian
England
, Victorian Literature and Culture Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992).
ONCLUSION
1.
Compare “Depuis que je savais que—contrairement à ce que m’avaient si longtemps représenté mes imaginations enfantines,—il n’y avait qu’une scène pour tout le monde, je pensais qu’on devait être empêché de bien voir par les autres spectateurs comme on l’est au milieu d’une foule; or je me rendis compte qu’au contraire, grâce à une disposition qui est comme le symbole de toute perception, chacun se sent le centre du théâtre” Marcel Proust,
A
l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1919), 1:26.
2.
On “the fantasy of an ideal listener”—or rather, in what I think is an important distinction, ideal reader—see Carla Kaplan, “Girl Talk:
Jane
Eyre
and the Romance of Women’s Narration,”
Novel: A Forum on Fiction
30.1 (1996): 25.
3.
As Jon Klancher argues, “the intense cultural politics of the Romantic period obliged writers not only to distinguish among conflicting audiences, but to do so by elaborating new relations between the individual reader and the collective audience.” Klancher,
The
Making
of
English
Reading
Audiences, 1790–1832
11. Ian Duncan shows more specifically that “the Waverley novels, soliciting a ‘universal’ reading public, definitively establish the ‘popular’ form of an expanding national literacy, at the same time as they mark off a class boundary in economic terms.” Ian Duncan,
Modern
Romance
and
Transformations
of
the
Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 179.
4.
Even Anderson’s critics accept this premise unquestioningly, as when Culler’s counterargument begins, “Since newspapers are read on the day of publication and thrown away.” Jonathan Culler, “Anderson and the Novel,”
Diacritics
29.4 (1999): 27; for a more nuanced sense of Romantic-era newspaper circulation in Britain, see Kevin Gilmartin,
Print
Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 65–114.
5.
Similarly, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s claim that “printed materials encouraged silent adherence to causes whose advocates could not be located in any one parish and who addressed an invisible public from afar” does little to address the role of parishes in ensuring the circulation of printed matter: Elizabeth Eisenstein, “Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report,”
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