Victorian Waste/Obscene Book History
Waste Paper and Recycled Books in Victorian Britain
Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton University Press, 2012. Print. 219: 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. 220: …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 texrt 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. 221: London Labour decouples the realist mode from fictionality 224: There’s something especially poignant, however, about measuring the ephemerality of a text against the adaptability of a book, because the contrast inverts the traditional hope that words will survive the surfaces on which they’re inscribed – whether brass, stone, or marble and gilded monuments, much less paper. Within that tradition, pages transcend the temporal limits that paper embodies. If texts broker a transhistorical meeting of minds, the book – “Poor earthly cask of immortal verse” (Wordsworth) – can never break free of a particular location in space and time. Mayhew turns that contrast on its head, pitting the durability of paper against the disposability of words. [In 2.9 waste collector section] 226: Friswell’s two possible destinations for a no longer readable book – butter wrapping and manure – remind us that paper ended its life as an aid to ingestion and excretion. And as it accumulated traces of its successive users’ hands, or intestines, the book reneged on its traditional mission of transcending the body. 231: If wastepaper looms large in the slums that Mayhew describes, the simplest explanation is that the Victorians associated mental operations (such as reading) with the upper classes, manual gestures (such as wrapping) with the lower. Before the invention of toilet paper and paper bags – both first produced for sale in the same decade [1860s] as London Labour – and the even more spectacular rise of plastics, old paper was inextricably linked to food. 232: [Macaulay in “Mr. Robert Montgomery”] The fashionable novels of eighteen hundred and twenty-nine hold the pastry of eighteen hundred and thirty. 232-3: In a culture that dismisses texts as “not worth the paper they’re printed on,” to register the usefulness of the book-object – how fast it catches fire or how much mutton grease it can sop up – is to assert the uselessness of its contents…. Over the course of a printed object’s lifetime, texture replaced text as the source of its value. 233: And James Simpson has observed that during the dissolution of the monasteries, those into whose hands they fell “reserved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr iakes, some to scoure theyr candel styckes, and some to rubbe their bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and the sope sellers, and some they sent over the see to the bokebynders” (Simpson, “Bonjour paresse” 258). William Sherman adds that cutting and pasting could just as easily connote reverence, same action, difference cause. The pyres of Nuremberg confer a dignity lacking from the kitchen fire. 235: Tracing the book’s origins exalts; predicting the book’s fate degrades: a similar symmetry links Sartor Resartus’s reflection on the mortality of books – “is it not beautiful to see five million quintals of Rags picked annually from the Laystall; and annually, after being macerated, hot-pressed, printed on, and sold – returned thither; filling so many hungry mouths by the way?” – with Carlyle’s boast that a letter from John Sterling attacking SR would be “made into matches.” 239: In anticipating its own disposal, London Labour drags its readers down to the level of grocers. Where most Victorian reformist genres, from the political speech to the industrial novel, leveled up – asking middle-class readers to endow working-class characters with an interiority that mirrored their own – Mayhew levels down, reducing the page in front of us to tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper. Texts from Oliver Twist to Ranthorpe to David Copperfield withdraw the book from the marketplace; Mayhew instead reminds us of the resale value of the page before our eyes. [“the outer pages of this periodical will, in future, be used as a wrapper, intended to be cut off in binding”] Chase, Karen, and Michael Levenson. “Green Dickens.” Contemporary Dickens. Ed. Eileen Gillooly and Deirdre David. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2009. 131–151. Print. 131: [Dickens’s] work always unfolded in relation to the material world that impinged on it.
132: [Describing short piece “Scotland Yard”] This is economy as ecology, a self-contained system of human exchange (narrative as well as material) that exists in organic relation to the natural world.
141: Dickens recognizes London as an apparatus producing modernity. But he also sees it as a complicated machine. It flattens the past; it produces homogeneity; it ravages tradition. But crucially, it fails to complete its project. London remains in his fiction as it remained in fact: the pleated city, the city of folds, the creased metropolis. Even as it endures the simplifications of modernity, it carelessly allows spaces for the obsolete, the endangered, and the elderly.
144: Krook’s shop is mirror and precursor of the dust heaps of OMF: a place where everything goes, the receptacle at the end of the world.
145: Women performed the essential work in the making of paper. For Dickens, it was elevating labor (unlike factory work) that prepared for marriage across the chasm of class. The extent of his investment in the iconic paper mill – the flourishing workspace, clean and productive, a fit place for women – offers a way in to the material problem we mean to follow here.
In the middle-decades of the nineteenth century, there was a British paper emergency. Where to find enough of it, when so much more was needed every year? By the 1850s the demand for paper was increasing at ten times the rate of a fast-growing population. These years saw the emergence of a documentary society, intent to record the smallest transactions; this was also an avid newspaper-reading society, and one that needed to print fresh banknotes to circulate through industry and empire. Then there were all those copies of all those novels by Dickens. And all the wills for the many dead. The paper emergency was a sudden eruption. It flared at mid-century, but by 1870 it was nearly over. Still, while it lasted, it created a visible agitation well-captured in a remark by Harriet Martineau, who wrote in 1854 that “we cannot, by any means yet tried, get anything like enough paper; and the scarcity and dearness of it now constitute what might be called without exaggeration, a national calamity.” Meanwhile, the duty on paper kept the scarce material more expensive than it would otherwise have been. The duty had been a staple of government revenue since the reign of Queen Anne, but despite the protests of authors and paper manufacturers, it was not lifted until 1861.
146: By 1870, as Dickens’s career and his life were ending, so was the rag production of paper: the perfection of wood-based technologies, brought from America, transformed the process. But until then, paper was an industry of rags, and for mid-century London, the pursuit of rags was a ceaseless activity, and a humming part of the street economy. In the eighteenth century it had still been necessary to find white cloth for white paper, but after the discovery of the bleaching power of chlorine gas, rags of any color were greedily sought – even as foreign governments worked to block the export of their own precious rags. 147: The blank, open, virginal expanse is a sign of possibility, especially for Dickens, who is ready to pen BH upon these sheets [from the Paper Mill article]. But the question to be pressed is: What then? After this transformative act, what happens next? Old clothes into rag, rag into paper – a wedge of matter changes shape, alters form – it is written on and circulated – but where does it go then? Mid-century London not only saw an accumulating mass of printed matter on its streets, but that mass was also so often ephemeral: newspapers, broadsheets, flyers that exhausted their meaning as soon as they were glimpsed. What became of the hard-won products of the paper industry? With so many publishers, large and small, clamoring for so much paper, what became of the wedge of matter after the notice was scanned, the newspaper read? Sought in vast quantities, “waste paper” became a precious commodity in its own right – so common an object it was simply called “waste,” and those who sold it, “waste men.”
Clothes -> rag -> paper -> text -> waste paper -> dust
148: What fascinates Mayhew is the uncanny scene of the destruction of meaning, the sinking down of text into waste.
After the rags have been sold, the paper milled, the Times printed, the waste gathered, and the cheese wrapped, then the particles finally break apart into this “paper currency” that blows in bits through the atmosphere, as part of the “abominable emanation of the streets” – what Dickens elsewhere calls “the city grit” that “gets into the hair and eyes and skin.”
149: Torn from the back of a child or a woman, rags might change from poor clothes into dear paper…. Rags, paper, clothes, human beings: this is the wider circuit of waste at mid-century.
150: This creation myth [in “Paper-Mill”] – ethereal paper born out of dirty rags – is a product of deep imaginative investment, not only in Dickens but in a reading public newly conscious of the expensive meanings of paper. At this very moment in the 1850s, pressures toward materialism and scientism were growing briskly. The metamorphic story of paper – its virgin birth, its recovery of ethereal whiteness out of dirt – was a lustrous and consoling tale.
Tilley, Heather. “Waste Matters: Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and Nineteenth-Century Book Recycling.” Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary. Springer, 2014. 152–171. Print. 155: Horne also identified white linen rags as one of the detritus sifted from the mounds that would be washed and sold onto papermakers, signaling the role of the dust mound in Britain’s chain of paper and book production. 156: Significantly, one of the activities associated with the waste trade that we can trace in the novel is paper manufacturing: most pointedly signified by the anachronistic depiction of the paper mill, where Lizzie Hexam finds work as a supervisor. 157: Yet Fledgeby’s association with the paper trade, along with the dubious ethics of John Harmon senior, point to an anxiety about the practices associated with paper manufacture. This anxiety can be traced in wider cultural discourse, as well as the novel’s own treatment of the stuff that paper makes – books – and is articulated through the association of the sites of paper mill and dust mound with death and destruction, as I discuss below. The rapid expansion of literary output catering for newly literate masses helped fuel rising demands for paper, which British manufacturers increasingly found difficult to meet as supplies of linen rags ran low. Paper manufacturers were increasingly dependent on the vicissitudes of foreign markets, reliant upon the import of rags from Russia, Egypt and continental Europe, reliant upon the import of rags by war, or driven up in price by the imposition of tariffs. The text of Our Mutual Friend generates a networked economy within the city of London; the book Our Mutual Friend extends that network outwards in space and backwards in time. 159: The production of literature relies on a series of material transmutations, from clothes, to linen, to paper, to Press: materials and manufacturing processes that are literally represented in the world of OMF as dust heap and paper mill. 160: The relationship between Dickens’s novel and the library is a particularly suggestive one that I want to briefly explore, as it raises two contrasting metaphoric models for the dust mounds as a site for either disposal or preservation of books. These contrasting models are embodied in the nineteenth-century circulating library, as well as the library collection of the British Museum, both of which prompted concerns about the management (storage, circulation and disposal) of the seemingly sublime mass of texts produced in the period. 161: …the novel is undecided whether dust acts as an archive, a place of safety for the deposition of texts, or whether the texts it is temporarily custodians of have, like the books in Mudie’s collection, a latent tendency toward decomposition. Freeland, Natalka. “Trash Fiction: The Victorian Novel and the Rise of Disposable Culture.” BOOK. Yale University, 1998. Print. 1: Almost all studies of trash emphasize the apparent perversity of the subject. In fact, the surprising amount of attention which the Victorians devote to this wasteful issue suggests a paradoxically central role for refuse in nineteenth-century culture. 2 Since garbage consistently figures as both public and a private concern, the Victorian novel – its culture’s main vehicle for mediating between larger social forces and ostensibly self-contained individuality – plays a particularly important role in interpreting the increasing prevalence of rubbish.
3: [ Quote from George Sims’s How the Poor Live (1889)] The worship of the beautiful is an excellent thing, but he who digs down deep in the mire to find the soul of goodness in things evil is a better man and a better Christian than he who shudders at the ugly and the unclear, and kicks it from his path, that it may not come between the wind and his nobility.
The forces which made refuse into a problem – urbanization, population growth, industrialization – also propelled the nineteenth century into an un uneasy consciousness of itself as a period of transition. As Walter Houghton has observed, “although all ages are ages of transition, never before had men thought of their own time as an era of change from the past to the future. Indeed, in England that idea and the Victorian period began together.”
6: This new value placed on novelty – what I am calling “the rise of disposable culture” – creates anxieties about the unsettling shift of social values.
7: …literature also plays an especially important part in this process because the culture’s ambivalence about the relative values of preservation and innovation requires a reassessment of the place of cultural artifacts whose role, insofar as they are anything more than transient entertainment (“trash”), is to construct, codify, and preserve a shared heritage. For the Victorians, the novel, perched precariously between trash and literature, was a crucial battleground on which this contest was waged.
9: The use of cleanliness to reinforce class boundaries moreover assumed a particular urgency at a time when, as many of Dickens’s contemporaries worried, socio-economic distinctions were being eroded by a massive redistribution of wealth.
25: The disappearance of an age of changelessly solid material in one of ephemeral representations is one of the most common complaints about the rise of disposable culture. The trajectory of this transformation appears unambiguous in retrospect: twentieth-century Western cultures value change and innovation, almost ot the exclusion of any emphasis on tradition and stability. Nonetheless, this “rise” of disposable culture is by no means a simple teleology – or, at very least, it is a teleology heavily marked by the irony of a rise which can appear dangerously similar, as Dickens makes clear in Our Mutual Friend, to a Decline and Fall. In other words, the increasing prominence of trash in a throw-away society signals at best to a dubious form of progress. Meanwhile the implicit rejection of the past involved in “carting away the useless rubbish of past centuries” [Barchester Towers] destabilizes both of the prominent Victorian narratives of historical continuity: neither Carlyle’s pessimistic story of degeneration from past to present nor Macaulay’s Whig optimism can account for this radically disconnected anti-historicism.
27: OMF, in which both the impulse to preserve inherited relics and the work of creating new value out of cast-off debris prove dangerously dehumanizing. OMF also discusses the newfangled trashiness which is even more hazardous than these alternatives of preservation or recycling: the Veneerings, representatives of a world of unreliable facades and planned obsolescence, underscore the novel’s attack on an ever-more disposable culture.
29: Within each of the novel’s main subplots, the different alternatives available for dealing with garbage involve various kinds of narrative breakdown: the accumulation of the rubbish of past lives in the mounds entails the cyclical rehearsal of a story which has already been prescripted, while the recyclers’ attempts to create new life our of decaying refuse disrupts any narrative continuity. Ultimately, Dickens’s emphasis on the particular threat posed by veners and deceptively mimetic facades prompts the novel to look for radically new representational forms.
GO BACK TO NOTE 53 ABOUT SWINBURNE’S REVIEW OF COLLINS/SHAKESPEARE – AC Swinburne, “Wilkie Collins” (1889), repr. In The Complete Works ed. Gosse and Wise (London: Heniemann: 1926), XV: 289-306.
31: The fact that Victorian novels were increasingly published in inexpensive and implicitly impermanent forms – in cheap editions instead of costly calf-bound library volumes, or in serials, including the most transient and disposable of serials, newspapers – bolstered the implication that the novel itself might be an inherently disposable genre.
NOTE 59: Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800-1850
Roberts, Lewis. “Trafficking in Literary Authority: Mudie’s Select Library and the Commodification of the Victorian Novel.” Victorian Literature and Culture 34.1 (2006): 1–25. Print. 1: …the format and price of many Victorian novels precluded (and indeed discouraged) even wealthy readers from actually owning such texts. The three-volume novel was a very specialized commodity, not simply a product to be sold in a capitalist market, but an object whose value was determined solely through its relations to the circulating library system. 2: The three-volume novel had a bookstore price of 31s.6d., a price clearly out of reach for most readers. At such a price, it would be unprofitable for publishers to produce three-volume novels, if such products were intended for sale to individual readers. 3: Mudie’s famous subscription rate of “one guinea per annum” allowed subscribers to borrow one volume at a time and exchange it as often as they desired. This meant that a single subscriber could only obtain one volume at a time of any three-volume novel; the desire to complete the novel would either keep patrons coming back to the library, or else spur them to invest in a higher-priced subscription rate[.] 3-4: By the time that Mudie’s Library was negotiating the purchase of a novel, a number of decisions and material operations had already taken place. The novel had been accepted by a publisher; it had been revised; its format, almost inevitably in three volumes, had been decided; the type had been set; and a minimal number of copies printed and bound. In any negotiation between Mudie’s and a publishing house, the object of negotiation was not a literary text, nor was literary value a primary consideration. Rather, Mudie’s decision to purchase a particular novel, and a particular number of copies, was based on numerous factors, such as how well that novel would be presumed to circulate, how much appeal it might have for Mudie’s patrons…. A novel’s exchangeability was overdetermined by many factors only obliquely related to its “content” or aesthetic value. Within this decision to purchase, the three-volume novel is first clearly perceived as a commodity, for its value now lies in its ability to be exchanged. 5: …an examination of the various positions which a novel occupied as it travelled through the library provides a good example of how the conflicts between economic and literary value in Victorian society. 7: It is this service [purchasing right to borrow, the exchangeability of the text] which is commodified, however, not the novel itself – through this service, the commodity phase of the novel is thus mitigated. The novel’s potential commodity-hood is mirrored in this very process of exchange, but the act of borrowing, as opposed to buying, insulates the novel itself from any direct appearance as an economic object. The library’s policy of the exchangeability of any text for any other text serves to underscore, and indeed naturalize, the commodification of books – books are things which are constantly in circulation, always being exchanged, always potentially exchangeable. However, the practice of Mudie’s Library distanced the commodity potential of the novel in some way, just as the novels themselves were displayed and distanced from the patrons in the Great Hall. 10: …by obscuring the commodification of novels through an appeal to the select status of the library’s books, Mudie’s left itself open to charges of censorship and conflicts with authors over discursive authority. Mudie’s adversaries often couched such conflicts in economic terms, portraying Mudie as a tradesman who was improperly acting as a critic of literature. 12: This is “purely commercial” reason, having to do with a finite storage space and a limited ability to invest in new books, and yet, Mudie’s argument implies that such spatial and financial limitations are themselves necessitated by the flood of “bad and stupid novels” which “no library” could possibly contain. 14: Mudie’s Select Library can be understood as such a technology of representation: the library not only disseminated textual objects representing “British culture” (both materially and linguistically), but also normalized reading practices and attitudes through its standardized distribution practices. Mudie’s was a national institution which represented Great Britain in its scope, power, and efficiency. 17: The novel’s sojourn through Mudie’s Library was intself a temporal process, and the emphasis which Mudie’s placed on “new novels” meant that a novel’s desirability and exchangability would soon depreciate. J.A. Sutherland notes that “unlike pies, books do not disappear once they are consumed”: the huge quantities of novels purchased by Mudie’s may have been caused for wonder and evidence of the library’s status as a national institution, but the material consequences of such accumulation had to be constantly managed if the library was to avoid being overwhelmed in a flood of its own making. Eventually, the commodity potential of these novels had to be reinvoked, the novels returned to the outside world of commodity circulation. The ideal way of doing this was to rebind and sell them as “well-selected second-hand books.” …This change in format from three- to one-volume marked a transition in the novel’s exchangeability. 18: Not all triple-deckers could be sold, however, even in a one-volume format. Novels which were not in demand, which would never be in demand, also had to be re-commodified, and so in addition to disposing of novels as second-hand copies, Mudie’s also sold them as recyclable material. This conversion of value was seen as the final stage of the novel’s failure to hold on to any literary value at all. Such books were “sold for waste paper,” their “covers…removed and the letterpress torn up”. These novels were most likely headed for the trunk-maker, but some had a more distasteful fate: “But here is another heap, and all of popular books, torn, dirtied, and ‘read—to death.’ They have served their purpose. They will not carry butter; nor will they ‘to the trunk-makers.’ Their purpose is – for manure! A fit end: after having served as food for the mind, their dead leaves produce food for the body.” [Qting from Friswell]
