by Price, Leah
Have I read the little book wot you left? No, I an’t read the little book wot you left. There an’t nobody here as knows how to read it; and if there wos, it wouldn’t be suitable to me. It’s a book fit for a babby, and I’m not a babby. If you was to leave me a doll, I shouldn’t nuss it. (132)24
Part of what makes Mrs. Pardiggle disturbing is that she’s anything but (in the words of the previous chapter) a “silent messenger”: far from slipping into places where a human body can’t penetrate, the book she proffers provides an occasion for rather noisily embodied humans to poke into other humans’ houses. Equally significant, however, is that the brickmaker’s parody of the catechistic form of tracts rejects the double degradation of being associated with children and females. No “cottage woman,” Yonge notes, “likes a book manifestly for children lent to themselves”; yet Yonge’s own annotated catalog of books suitable for giving away remarks of one title, “May be useful where children or servants fear a haunted house” (What Books to Lend and What to Give 8, 24). “Children” are interchangeable with “servants” not simply because both are ignorant and superstitious—a commonality that results in part from servants’ telling oral ghost stories to their masters’ children—but because both depend on others to select and supply printed books for them. The involuntary listening to stories echoes the involuntary receiving of books: children “should never be terrified with nonsensical stories of ghosts,” Ann Taylor writes in The Present of a Mother to a Servant (1816), “unless you wish to render them as unhappy about such things as you may have been, and perhaps still are” (quoted in Steedman 235). The middle-class adult’s past is the servant’s present—when it comes to books as much as to oral traditions. The working-class man who has books thrust upon him stands opposite the middle-class child who seizes his own books independently of any curriculum. On the one hand, Mrs. Pardiggle’s tracts; on the other, the romances in the Copperfields’ lumber room.
“CLASS LITERATURE”
Free print reminds us that where booksellers fulfilled the orders of middle-class adults, most readers—whether young, female, or working-class—had to submit to the literary direction of others. The same belongings that allowed financially independent adults to stamp their identity onto bookcases and sofa tables were tainted for middle-class children by association with the teacher or parent, and for working-class adults by association with the district visitor. Tracts, reward volumes, and advertising circulars all contradicted print’s claim to individualize its users.
The Protestant overtones of that claim may help explain why tract societies show such ambivalence about bunching readers into market segments. On the one hand, Evangelical groups pioneered niche marketing long before commercial advertisers began to copy them. One of the earliest sets of instructions for tract distribution explains that they should be “adapted to various situations and conditions . . . When an address is particular, and directed to a specified situation, it comes home to the man’s bosom, who sees himself described . . . Hence the propriety and necessity of Tracts for the young and for the aged, for the children of propriety and of affliction” (Bogue 13). According to a later chronicler, tracts were variously crafted “for seamen and soldiers; others for person in particular situations, as prisoners, attendants on pleasure fairs and races, patients in hospitals, the sick, etc. . . . Thirty-two tracts most suitable for the aged are in large type” (Jones 118). Jones’s history is itself divided into sections such as “Books for the Young,” “The Road Labourer,” “The Hospital Patient,” “The Showman.” “Jewish tracts” meant tracts for Jews, not by them. Even Jones’s tables adding up numbers of books sold are broken down by audience:
Emigrants 641,639
Soldiers, sailors etc. 1,622,661
Sabbath-breakers 1,059,590
Prisoners 106,303
Hospitals 60,924
Workhouses 68,836
Railroad men 447,407
Foreigners in England 50,742
The RTS annual reports break grants down into tracts for “Soldiers, sailors, rivermen,” “Patients in hospitals,” “railway labourers,” “foreigners in England,” “fairs,” “races,” and so on. In this sense, tract societies blazed the trail that newspapers would follow in dividing their material into a fashion section for women, a comics page for children, and a sport section for men. The directiveness of tracts, which explicitly addressed particular readers, stood opposite the studious neutrality of the bibles distributed by the BFBS, whose lack of notes or commentary was designed to avoid slotting their implied reader into any particular sectarian identity.
On the other hand, the Religious Tract Society worried that publications targeted too precisely could draw invidious distinctions. Remember the narrator of The Story of a Pocket Bible “recounting the duties of the various classes of persons to whom I had messages to deliver, and among other things I had something to say to servants. ‘Servants,’ I said, ‘obey in all things your masters.’” (Sargent 38). Yet that narrator’s reluctance to be pulled off the shelf by the duster-wielding servant provides a reminder that what’s presented as a principle of inclusion (servants get to have their very own books, all to themselves) can also signal exclusion (servants are not to share their masters’). In 1851, the prospectus for a new RTS magazine declares explicitly that
Avoiding the pernicious principle of creating a distinct literature for each of the different sections of society, there will be no ostentatious parade of condescension in the choices of topics or the mode of treating them; but animated by feelings of pure catholicity, “THE LEISURE HOUR” will seek to utter sentiments which shall meet an equally quick response in the parlour and the workshop, the hall and the cottage . . . the whole forming a miscellany aiming to be highly attractive in itself, and one which the Christian parent and employer may safely place in the hands of those who are under his influence. (“Prospectus for the Leisure Hour”)
It remains unclear whether the resident of hall and parlor is expected to read the magazine herself, or merely to place it in others’ hands. What is clear is that the influence of texts on their readers is doubled here by the influence of “parents and employers” on children and workers—no matter whether their authority derives from class or age.
Two decades later, a magazine article by Charlotte Yonge identified market segmentation as the most pernicious innovation of modern publishing. Yonge lumps books “for children or the poor” under the category of “what may be called class-literature,” whose development she dates to the beginning of her century. Her neologism registers the historical specificity of a model in which “every one writes books for some one: books for children, books for servants, books for poor men, poor women, poor boys, and poor girls. It is not enough to say ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ but the merchant must be edified by the tale of a fraudulent banker, the schoolboy by hearing how seven cherries were stolen, the servants must be told how the wicked cook hid her mistress’s ring in the innocent scullery-maid’s box” (“Children’s Literature: Part III” 450).25
In her book of advice for parish visitors, What Books to Lend and What to Give, Yonge insists more explicitly that “there is no reason against giving details about persons in different stations of the life from that of those who received them, and in fact they are often preferred . . . A book labeled ‘A tale for—’ is apt to carry a note of warning to the perverse spirits of those to whom it is addressed” (12). Her own list of books recommended to read aloud, lend, and distribute in parish work includes a chapter on “drawing-room stories,” that is, representations of life in a higher rank—although a mixed message is conveyed by the very fact that this chapter is separate.
None of this is to say that religious tracts had any monopoly on the attempt to align the identity of characters with the identity of readers. Secular publishers were quicker to recognize, however, that aspiration could trump identification. Yonge’s critique echoes Margaret Oliphant’s observation about cheap literature:
I
f any one supposes that here, in this special branch of literature provided for the multitude, anything about the said multitude is to be found, a more entire mistake could not be imagined . . . An Alton Locke may find a countess to fall in love with him, but is no hero for the sempstress, who makes her romance out of quite different materials; and whereas we can please ourselves with Mary Barton, our poor neighbors share no such humble taste . . . It is not because their own trials are shadowed—their own sentiments expressed—their own life illustrated by the fictitious representation before them, that our humble friends love their weekly story-telling. When the future historians of this century seek information about the life and manners of our poorer classes, he will find no kind of popular print so entirely destitute of the details he seeks as are those penny miscellanies which are solely read by the poor. (207)
Oliphant herself slots class into the place occupied by age in Dr. Johnson’s famous remark
“Babies do not want . . . to hear about babies; they like to be told of giants and castles, and of somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their little minds.” When in answer [Hester Thrale] would urge the numerous editions and quick sale of Tommy Prudent or Goody Two Shoes: “Remember always (said he) that the parents buy the books, and that the children never read them.” (Piozzi 14)
Johnson anticipates Oliphant and Yonge in linking two apparently unrelated phenomena: the coincidence of readers’ status with characters’, and the gap between buyer and end user.
Historical hindsight makes it easier to see a higher-order association: that the structure of arguments about children’s identification with literary characters can be seamlessly slotted into arguments about working-class readers’ identification with literary characters. The missing link, as Dickens’s bricklayer perceives, is that neither audience chooses its own reading. When Charles Knight accused “the learned and the aristocratic” who “prattle about bestowing the blessings of education” of “talking to thinking beings . . . in the language of the nursery” (Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century 243), he was referring not just to the style of tracts but also to their distribution method. Like children’s books, tracts addressed a double audience: the buyer didn’t coincide with the reader. And in both cases, the distributor disciplined rather than fulfilling the end user’s desires.26
Like the adult who forces books about goody-goody children upon young readers, the tract-distributor who tries to wean servants away from aspirational romances of high life takes the moral value of reading to inhere not just in the content of the text itself (in which case children could just as easily become virtuous by reading about sanctimonious adults) but in the degree of overlap between readers’ and characters’ identity. For twelve-year-olds to read about twenty-year-olds, or maids about marquises, was to engage in aspirational escapism; for bad children to read about good children or godless barrow women to read about pious barrow women counted instead as a spiritual exercise.
Yet a logic that put the “self” back into self-improvement inevitably came into conflict with the secular defense of fiction reading that valued identification precisely as an escape from egotism through the enlargement of the sympathies. “It is the endeavour to hold up a mirror to each variety of reader of his or her way of life,” Yonge continues, “as if there were no interest beyond it, and nothing else could be understood or cared for, that we think narrowing and weakening. If it be true that imagination is really needful to give the power of doing as we would be done by, surely it is better to have models set before us not immediately within our own range” (“Children’s Literature: Part III” 450).
Yonge shrewdly diagnoses two contradictory assumptions that structure the genre. First, a logical contradiction, because the same readers who are expected to identify across species (in texts featuring talking animals) or even with inanimate objects (in it-narratives) are presumed incapable of crossing the finer lines separating children from adults, men from women, or rich from poor. Second, a moral contradiction, because the metaphor of “hold[ing] up a mirror” points to the narcissism inherent in an act supposed to foster selflessness. “When sympathizing with the heroine let it be with her, not with yourself under her name,” warned the children’s writer Mrs. Molesworth. “Nothing is more dwarfing and enervating than to make all you read into a sort of looking-glass” (454).27
ASSOCIATION COPIES
The moral ambiguities of both forms of other-directedness catalyzed by books—defining one’s identity by imitation of characters’, or by association with other readers’—find their fullest expression in a novel whose scale, audience, and doctrinal stance (or lack thereof) might appear to place it worlds apart from these cheap tracts. The new copies of the three volumes of The Mill on the Floss that went on sale for a guinea and a half in 1860 presented their readers with representations of books being read, dropped, given, bequeathed, resold, inscribed, and sworn on; they also contribute one installment to Eliot’s lifelong exploration of what will happen to written matter after its owner’s death. Romola centers on the question of whether to obey the promise given to a dying father to keep together the library that he spent his life collecting. (The question projected onto Renaissance Florence was a live one at a moment when great aristocratic libraries were being dispersed into public hands and across the Atlantic.) Casaubon hopes that an analogous promise, once again exacted by an older man from a younger woman, will allow notebooks to outlive their owner.28 In contrast, The Mill on the Floss asks whether to keep or break an oath of vengeance—also sworn to a dying father, but in this case sworn, just as crucially, on the family bible. The book forms a “chain” both in the sense of connection, and in the sense of constraint, drag, or dead weight.
Three questions, then. When text pulls apart from book—when the words that preach forgiveness take the form of a talisman on which vengeance can be sworn—which will win out? What relation does a text establish among its successive users—either between the dead and those who inherit their books, or between the current reader and the traces of their predecessors that linger in the form of inscriptions, dog-earing or even dirt? And why should the materiality of the book swim into focus at the moment of its owner’s death—or, conversely, why should looking at books conjure up the thought of their dead owners?
Ranthorpe would appear to find his double in Maggie, who seizes on an Imitation of Christ with its “corners turned down in many places,” in which “some hand, now for ever quiet, had made at certain passages strong pen and ink marks, long since browned by time” (G. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 303).29 In fact, her asceticism is associated just as strongly with the book’s material form as with its textual content: even before she reads a word of Thomas à Kempis, Maggie prefers the “little, old, clumsy” copy of Imitation of Christ, “for which you need only pay sixpence at a book-stall,” to the tastelessly illustrated annuals that only a peddler like Bob Jakin (the auctioneer’s down-market double) would call the “bettermost books” (303, 295).30 When Maggie “read[s] where the quiet hand pointed,” however, she merely replaces one version of bibliophilia by another: the materialism that registers clean pages and lavish bindings by the fetishism that prizes a book for the hands through which it has passed. We flinch when Tom answers Maggie’s lament for the auctioned-off books by asking, “Why should they buy many books when they bought so little furniture?” (252). The juxtaposition of the two nouns sounds as oxymoronic as Jewsbury’s coupling of noun with verb: “a few splendidly bound books furnished the heavily carved rosewood table.” Yet the novel’s own homology between inscribed books and initialed linens levels those terms, reducing books to keepsakes (namesakes of Rosamond Vincy’s annual) while elevating housewares to expressions of identity.
The Mill on the Floss thus makes association copies—books whose value, like that of a religious relic, derives from the history of their transmission rather than from the text that they contain—a model for the circulation of nontextual possessions.31 In the process, El
iot flattens any distinction between books and humbler objects: chairs, teapots, sheets. Where almost every other Victorian novel—including some by Eliot herself—use sofa-table books to exemplify the evils of the market, The Mill on the Floss turns a specific sector of the book trade into a template for a larger reflection on the embeddedness of objects within human relationships.
No less than her flower-pressing aunts and bible-signing father, Maggie understands the book as a means of preserving memories. And she, too, locates this preservative power not in its printed contents but in the traces that past owners have left of their own presence: “Our dear old Pilgrim’s Progress that you coloured with your little paints . . . I thought we should never part with that while we lived . . . the end of our lives will have nothing in it like the beginning!” (252).32 Painted woodcuts mirror scribbled flyleaves: the authorial hand that describes the heroine as fair or blonde matters less than the hand-colored illustration that brings to mind a beloved brother.
Where Maggie calls down Tom’s wrath by mourning the auctioning off of her inscribed books, what Mrs. Tulliver regrets is the sale of her trousseau, the “things wi’ my name on ’em” (215). In The Mill on the Floss, books form only the last addition to a long list of inside-out objects whose value derives less from their contents than from their owners’ signature. That category includes the hand-colored Pilgrim’s Progress and the family bible whose flyleaves are inscribed but whose printed content goes unread, but it also encompasses the monogrammed teapot too good to be dirtied with tea and the initial-embroidered sheets too fine for a living body to lie between. Like the pristine pot or folded sheets, Mr. Tulliver’s confusion of a “good book” with a “good binding” repeats the Dodsons’ determination to empty containers of their contents—whether Mrs. Glegg’s “brocaded gown that would stand up empty, like a suit of armour,” or the display of pristine jelly-glasses that Mrs. Tulliver invokes in response to Mrs. Deane’s offer of jelly for the invalid: “There’s a dozen o’ cut jelly-glasses upstairs . . . I shall niver put jelly into ’em no more.” Even when Aunt Pullet finally progresses from the “very bright wardrobe, where you may have hastily supposed she would find the new bonnet” but which holds only a key, to the second wardrobe in which the hat is actually hidden, the object inside turns out to be less interesting than its paper covers: “The delicious scent of roseleaves that issued from the wardrobe made the process of taking out sheet after sheet of silver-paper quite pleasant to assist at, though the sight of the bonnet at last was something of an anticlimax” (127, 95, 96).