by Price, Leah
On the one hand, Elizabeth Hamilton’s 1800 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers contrasts the selfless Harriet’s reading aloud at a sickbed with Bridgetina Botherim’s selfish insistence on reading silently to herself even in a roomful of other people (Hamilton and Grogan 176, 72, 84).27 On the other, Poor Miss Finch proportions female listeners’ “suffering” to the male reader’s “pleasure.” In its indifference to content (“read what he might”), Poor Miss Finch echoes Nightingale’s sense that the text itself is almost incidental to the power relations created between reader and listeners.
On the other hand, reading aloud can constitute torture just as easily as being read aloud to. In Broughton’s Second Thoughts, a father whose daughter arrives at his sickbed prepared to read him “something . . . a little serious” amuses himself by reminding her of her duty to read whatever she is asked (in this case, a French gossip column) seated “under his direction, exactly opposite him, where he can nicely observe every shade of expression, every nervous blush and mortified contraction that passes over her face” (Broughton, Second Thoughts 41–43, 54). The violation of a girl’s innocence is even more explicitly sadistic in the late-Victorian pornographic novel “Frank” and I, where the narrator’s first reaction to unmasking “Frank” as a cross-dressed girl is to take out a Mudie’s subscription. More specifically, after Frank is discovered to be Frances, the narrator discovers as well that the most pleasant sequel to flogging her is to lie in an armchair listening to her read aloud . . . The Moonstone (“Frank” and I 43). As a middle-aged male landowner orders his teenaged female dependent to read a trashy novel, the power dynamics of the tract distributing represented within Collins’s novel take on a secular and sexual charge.28
The analogy with music may give a subtler sense of the contradictory connotations of reading aloud: girls’ piano playing, too, could be coded either as self-importance (Mary Bennet being told that “You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit”) or self-abnegation (Sophia Western playing “Bobbing Joan,” rather than her beloved Handel, to her drunken father) (Austen, Pride and Prejudice 69). By 1934, when A Handful of Dust ends with Tony Last being kept alive on condition that he read Dickens aloud to his captor (like David to Steerforth?), the inventive Scheherazade is reduced to a mechanical drudge. “He had always rather enjoyed reading aloud and in the first years of his marriage had shared several books in this way with Brenda, until one day, in a moment of frankness, she remarked that it was torture to her” (Waugh 292).29 The “torture” of being read aloud to prefigures the torture of reading aloud: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny as the paterfamilias’s voice gives way to something more like the prison workforce that today recites scripts on customer service lines. When the contrast is between who speaks and who listens, the reader-aloud looks like the powerful figure, inflicting sounds on his public as autocratically as Miss Clack inflicts objects on hers; but when the question is rather who decides what book he wants to hear and who executes those orders, then the reader-aloud becomes as powerless as the child or woman or bricklayer whose reading material is chosen by their betters.
Such harangues don’t need a book as prop; when Sydney Smith “dreamt I was chained to a rock and being talked to death by Harriet Martineau and Macaulay,” neither nightmare figure held a book (Kemble 65). The two contrasting models of reading aloud do, however, exemplify the larger question of whether reading (in whatever medium) expresses selfhood or dependence. If tract distribution enforces the latter model (while apotropaically representing the former) and novel reading enacts the former (while systematically satirizing the latter), the postal debates with which this chapter began can be understood as a face-off between these two models, with reformers championing correspondence as the medium of individual enlightenment and conservatives exposing it as a generator of mass markets.
In this context, a third possible explanation for Collins’s obsession with tract-distributors emerges: Miss Clack transposes the effects of Rowland Hill’s new postal regime into a religious register. I’ve suggested that hand-distributed tracts and junk mail delivered by post together emblematized the shift from paper scarcity to paper surfeit; more specifically, both prompted concerns about the relation of print to manuscript, broadcast to personal communication, and written matter to nontextual objects. The difference between tracts and bulk mail lay less in their content (after all, both drew on a rhetoric of persuasion) than in their distribution methods: in one case, a reformed postal system driven by modern liberal principles that glorified virtuality, impersonality, and mediation; in the other, a nostalgic (though equally reformist) network of face-to-face relationships.
This is not to say that the two enterprises were antagonistic. In one direction, tract distribution provided a model for postal distribution: when Cobden offered to subsidize a cheap edition of Hill’s pamphlet Post Office Reform, the model of the Cheap Repository Tracts must have come to mind (Robinson 273). Rowland Hill the postal reformer was named after the Rowland Hill who helped to found the Religious Tract Society; reciprocally, the post provided a channel for tracts. One chronicler of the RTS rejoices that “in these days of penny-postage blessedness, in almost every letter we write we can proclaim the glad tidings of mercy, by inserting an eight-paged tract” (Jones 258). A prospectus for a system of “Evangelization by book-post” explains that
the post, we thought, is a neutral agent, often spreading evil, but capable of spreading good, why then not make use of it to scatter the seed of truth in all directions? Doubtless many papers so distributed find their way to the wastepaper basket, without obtaining the favor of a reading; but, after all, there must be a real benefit in so expensive a distribution, since so many tradespeople persevere in it. (Dardier 318)
Commercial circulars provide a generic model for religious tracts as well as a template for their distribution. Henry Mayhew had more on his side than shock value when he lumped the religious tract together with the commercial advertisement, describing “sham indecent” packets stuffed with “a religious tract, or a slop-tailor’s puff” (London Labour and the London Poor 1:241). Both genres developed an ambivalent relation to the market: where the religious tract tried to beat commercial chapbooks at their own game, the advertising circular sold goods by giving printed paper away for free.
While tract societies disguised gift as sale and mass-duplicated books as personal “messengers,” the same advertisers who took over the Christian language of the “free gift” presented broadcast communications as point-to-point.30 As one early twentieth-century observer pointed out, a society overloaded with paper creates the temptation to misrepresent the mass-distributed as personal communications and vice versa: “One of the most curious recent developments in the graphic arts is the effort of advertisers to make printed matter look like typescript, while the authors of books that are not in sufficient demand to warrant publication are seeking a typescript that will look like print” (Binkley 526).
The distinction between personal letters and bulk mail becomes especially fraught at a moment where print—once charged with brokering the meeting of an individual reader’s mind with an author’s—comes instead to insert each reader into a mass public. In fact, the statistics about the number of new readers mirrored equally oft-cited calculations about the number of new books. The mechanical production of newspapers spread metonymically to their readers: in 1883 Northcliffe attributes his market to the fact that “the Board Schools are turning out hundreds of thousands of boys and girls annually who are anxious to read” (quoted in R. Williams, The Long Revolution 196). The excess of print implied an excess of fellow readers.
I am a reader, you are a public, they are a market. The commercial nature of the book is best displaced onto others—preferably of a different rank and gender. Even when middle-class men were forced into awareness of who had handled a book before them, the question of whose hands it would fall into later was easier to avoid. Part of what distinguished working-clas
s and female readers, in contrast, was that they never had the luxury of ignoring what would happen to a book after it left their hands. Those after-uses form the subject of my final chapter.
CHAPTER 7
The Book as Waste: Henry Mayhew and the Fall of Paper Recycling
Over the course of this study, the physicality of print has swum into focus at extremes: in the case of books that are especially expensive (bibliophilic collectibles) or especially worthless (free advertising circulars, subsidized religious tracts); among subcultures especially bookish (antiquarians, collectors) or especially bookless (the illiterate, the heathen); with books considered especially sacred and timeless (the Bible) or especially profane and ephemeral (newspapers, almanacs, novels); at the beginning of their life (manufacture) or the end (pulping).
Taking this last case seriously would mean replacing the traditional question “what is a text” by “when is a text?” 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. But even bibliographers need limits. Can the study of printed books stop short of forestry and the secondhand clothing market? Does the interpretation of graffiti require expertise in brickmaking? In the opposite direction, how far downstream should reception theorists venture: to the archive, the depository, the Dumpster?
By the turn of the twentieth century, one modern scholar reminds us, “most of the paper used in Britain was not used for printing. Of what was printed, most was thrown away” (McKitterick, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain 63). Modernity can be defined not just by what’s produced, but by what’s discarded, and when. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, most reading matter was made from old rags, and much of it went on to be recycled in turn. Newspapers were handed down a chain of households as their contents staled; letters were torn to light a pipe; broadsheets pieced out dress patterns or lined pie plates or wiped shit. In their passage from hand to hand and use to use, loose sheets accreted scars and bruises as telling as any it-narrator.
To think about the transmission of paper is to think about the contingent, the unmentionable, and the mundane. Much of the vernacular Chinese fiction now extant has reached our hands by accident, unearthed from tombs or stumbled across in the backing material for other books (Zeitlin 254).1 In Europe, the same “secondary causes” that destroy books have preserved pages. Some of those unintended consequences are bibliographic (binder’s waste), others more vulgarly domestic (trunk linings) (Adams and Barker 31). In Han China, “paper was probably used for wrapping before it was used for writing” (Needham et al. 122); in Britain as late as 1911, the Encyclopedia Britannica continued to define paper as “the substance commonly used for writing upon, or for wrapping things in.” Where pages can make readers forget hunger, as in so many accounts of prison reading, paper serves as a reminder of the need to ingest and excrete. Or at least, did serve as such a reminder, because 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 text 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.
More specifically, I’ll suggest that working-class users’ relation to books in general, as well as middle-class users’ relation to books that they wish to abject, proceeds not just by omission but also by commission: in the first case, a negative quality (illiteracy) goes together with a positive one (expertise in the use value and exchange value of different weights, textures, and colors of paper); in the second, not only refusing to read a book, but also determining to smear it by association with some culinary use, to besmirch it more literally with one’s own excrement, or to call its author’s gentlemanliness into question by passing his books along to one’s servants. Conversely, to exempt a page from base uses is to exalt its textual contents: a sixth-century Chinese scholar-official noted that “paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from the Five Classics or the names of sages, I dare not use for toilet purposes” (Needham et al. 123).2
Nothing more embarrassing than a book past its read-by date. What’s no longer worth reading, however, still needs to be handled, if only to make room for more. And at the opposite level of abstraction, what’s no longer fit to read may remain good to think with—if only because the moment where the book’s shelf life diverges from the text’s calls into question the relation of words to things. Such thinking, I want to suggest, stands at the heart of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media: eighty-two articles serialized in the Morning Chronicle (October 1849–50) provided the raw material for freestanding weekly numbers published between December 1850 and February 1852, which in turn were expanded, revised, and collected in volume form in 1861–62.
It may seem perverse to conclude a project that opened with realist novels like Trollope’s and Dickens’s by turning to a text that only its harshest critics have described as fiction. But precisely because London Labour decouples the realist mode from fictionality, Mayhew provides the starkest possible test case for the question with which this book opened: why have book historians drawn a disproportionate number of their case studies from the realist novel? Like the novel, London Labour foregrounds practice over theory; Mayhew’s study of the informal economy, too, aspires to dignify the everyday. But he borrows novelistic techniques—including the pileup of metonymic detail that has led so many readers to praise Mayhew as “Dickensian”—only to turn them against the novel. London Labour repudiates fictionality, that is, by means of characteristically realist tics—including, most crucially for my purposes, an obsessive staging of moments where verbal structures pull apart from material objects.
AFTER-USES
This chapter asks why Mayhew’s “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.3 In the city that London Labour describes, books and newspapers never stand still: they’re sold to fishmongers, to middlemen who distribute them to fishmongers, to a flypaper manufacturer, and even to a member of what the narrator terms the “sham indecent trade,” whose sealed packets, advertised as “not [to] be admitted into families,” turn out to be stuffed with “a lot of missionary tracts and old newspapers that [the vendor] got dirt cheap at a ‘waste’ shop.”4 Wrapping, wadding, padding, lining: why so much attention to paper, so little to the page? The answer that a middle-class contemporary might have given, for reasons that we’ll see in the following section, is that Mayhew’s informants aren’t literate. London Labour contradicts that hypothesis not only in its content—which represents them reading, among other things, previous installments of London Labour—but in its form, which attributes the reading of texts and the recycling of papers to the same agents.5 As a result, those actions are distinguished not by who performs them (gentlemen read, street urchins recycle) or even by which genres or media invite them (bibles are for rereading, newspapers for recycling), but rather by successive moments in the life cycle of the same piece of printed matter. And even that minimal distinction gets broken down as Mayhew replaces the conventional time line in which wrapping follows reading by a counternarrative in which food packaging gets resurrected as legible text.
What, then, if we were to replace “illiteracy” with a more positive term? “Orality” might be an obvious candidate, given how central speech is not just to the informal economy described in London Labour, but to its own use of the interview. Books signify bankruptcy
, if only because the wastepaper described is as likely to consist of financial and legal manuscripts as of printed books. One waste-seller offers Mayhew
railway prospectuses, with plans to some of them, nice engravings; and the same with other joint-stock companies . . . Old account-books of every kind. A good many years ago, I had some that must have belonged to a West End perfumer, there was such French items for Lady This, or the Honorable Captain that. I remember there was an Hon. Capt. G., and almost at every second page was “100 toothpicks, 3s. 6d.” I think it was 3s. 6d.; in arranging this sort of waste one now and then gives a glance to it. (2:114)
Contrast that memento mori with the busy street vendor who tells Mayhew that “it’s all headwork with us” (2:24)—by which he means that he operates, as we now say, “off the books.” The more lifeless the papers that Mayhew describes, the more vivid the voices that he quotes: padded packets provide a foil to street cries, wastepaper to oral interviews. In this analysis, the uncanny immediacy that London Labour produces would be thrown into relief against the backdrop of dead media.6
A third possible explanation is more reductive: you could say that paper gets resold in Mayhew’s London simply because everything does. Readers today—at least in the developed world—will be even more struck than middle-class Victorians were by the ubiquity of reuse in London Labour. Unable to afford either to buy new things or to discard old ones, his informants lack the luxury of ignoring the past and future of their possessions. When we’re told of one man that “his dress could not so well be called mean as hard worn, with the unmistakable look of much of the attire of his class, that it was not made for the wearer” (2:65), the narrator’s self-correction encapsulates a characteristic stutter step. Mayhew begins by gesturing toward the possibility of pricing an object on the basis of the amount of labor or quality of materials that went into its original manufacture; but he goes on to upstage that logic by a competing explanation that bases price on the position that the object occupies in a chain of successive owners and uses. As Suzanne Raitt points out, the term “waste” invokes the history of an object—or at least the process of which it’s a by-product—as near synonyms like “rubbish” and “litter” do not (73). More specifically, narrative structures Mayhew’s providential model of the market in which, far from exhausting or depreciating objects, circulation animates them and invests them with fresh value.