Price 2012

Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton University Press, 2012. Print.

Intro

Overview

• thesis:
• methodology: reception (rejection) history
  • archive: Victorian fiction (and Mayhew)
  • specific period covered:
• evidence/argument:
• relevance/stakes:

Notes

• 1: [Anecdote about Boffin Our Mutual Friend "Rooshan-Empire"] But what if the geographical confusion made bibliographical sense? As a waste-dealer familiar with tanners, Mr. Boffin would have heard of "Russia" as a metonymy for a leather produced in that country, calfskin (often dyed red) tanned with birch oil that imparted a characteristic smell. In this hypothesis, the hope that "you might have know'd him" would look perfectly reasonable: cannier than Silas, Mr. Boffin does recognize the book "without," if not within.
• If we took Russia to refer to container rather than contents, then the dustman's class position would reflect less a deficiency of interpretive skill than an excess of sensitivity to color, texture, and smell. His ignorance of the history in the book would throw into relief how much he knows about the history of the book.
• 2: What meanings do books make even, or especially, when they go unread? And why did Victorian novelists care? That books function both as trophies and as tools, that their use engages bodies as well as minds, and that printed matter connects readers not just with authors but with other owners and handlers -- these facts troubled a genre busy puzzling out the proper relation of thoughts to things, in an age where more volumes entered into circulation (or gathered dust on more shelves) than ever before.
• The opening scene of [Lewes'] Ranthorpe establishes the hero's depth by describing what aspects of books he fails to notice. "He cared not for rare editions, large paper copies, or sumptuous bindings...he cared not even whether they had covers at all."
• 3: Cover and content, authenticity and appearance: the language of insides and outsides makes any consciousness of the book's material qualities signify moral shallowness. Leather bindings rub off on their skin-deep owners.
• 4: The Victorians cathected the text in proportion as they disowned the book. More specifically, they identified themselves as text-lovers in pro-[5]portion as they distinguished themselves from book-lovers.
• 5: Method: The following pages reconstruct C19 understandings of, and feelings toward, the uses of printed matter. In particular, they excavate the often contentious relation among three operations: reading (doing something with words), handling (doing something with the object), and circulating (doing something to, or with, other persons by means of the book - whether cementing or severing relationships, whether by giving and receiving books or by withholding and rejecting [6] them). Often pictured as competing, in practice these three modes almost always overlapped.
• 7: Where nostalgists today conflate the practice of disinterested, linear, sustained attention with the object that is the printed book - equating modular, scattershot, instrumental reading in turn with electronic media - secular novelists like Dickens, Eliot, Bronte, and Trollope assumed that absorption in the text required forgetting its medium.
• I was trained in the method known as "reception history".... The chapters that follow form a prototype for what might better be dubbed "rejection history." However much interest books have in being coveted, [8] bought, hoarded, even stolen, a wide range of Victorian genres devote more attention to the energy expended on refusing to read or own or touch or even refrain from destroying them.
• The book's material properties trump its textual content when its value (whether for use or for resale) lies in attributes orthogonal to its legibility.
• 10: if reading can serve different agendas - to save a soul, to form an identity, to do a job, to place a bet, to snub a spouse - handling figures in even more disparate activities. Just as bibliographers have taught us that the changes among successive editions do not necessarily constitute decay, so the Victorian novel can teach us to distinguish absence of reading from absence of use.
• The Victorians plotted the book/text distinction onto every axis imaginable: temporal (new books get read, old books handled), sexual (the text as the province of male thinkers, the book as raw material for women's curlpapers or pie plate liners), generic (the text as the object of piety, the book as the butt of jokes), ethical (the text as an aid to selfhood, the book as a spur to selfishness), social (the text as the business of intellectuals, the book of filthy rich bibliophiles or literally dirty rag-collectors), even disciplinary (the text as the purview of Skimpoleanly aesthetic sensitivities, the book of Gradgrindianly empirical plodders).
• 11: In social terms, the professional middle classes' rejection of materialism left the book-object in the hands of effete genrty (the owners of country house libraries as selfish hoarders), rich vulgarians (Manchester manufacturers' wives who chose books to match their color schemes), or poor illiterates (costermongers who priced a book by the absorbency of its pages).
• 16: Within a culture where book is to text as outside to inside, secular middle-class fictions and Evangelical tracts alike make the relation between those terms a surrogate for the relation of the material world to the inner life - whether that life belongs to their characters or to their readers. Printed matter raises ethical questions (how much or little should one care about the look of books?) as much as formal ones (how, and how fully, can a mental act like reading be represented?).
• 18: Methodological limits A fuller ethnography or phenomenology of Victorians' interactions with the book would need to approach a wider range of genres and formats from a wider range of methods. My reliance on a few pieces of printed prose that have survived in twenty-first-century research libraries positions me to offer little more than an account of competing ideologies surrounding the book in a few numerically unrepresentative genres. Yet "ideology" sounds at once too lofty and too dry (or in a more Victorian language, too coarse) to do justice to the visceral energies driving my subjects to distance themselves from some uses of books and identify themselves with others. In the end, the most interesting question to ask of these hands now quiet may be not what they felt about the book but why they felt so much.

Ch. 7: The Book as Waste: Mayhew and the Fall of Paper Recycling

Notes

• 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”]