How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain Read Online Free PDF Page A

from text to book, the relationships enabled by print look more negative—a prop for avoiding persons in the same space, as easily as communicating with strangers at a distance. And if we look beyond reading to handling (an activity that occupies a larger fraction of any newspaper’s life cycle), it becomes clear that while the meaning of texts changes as new generations reinterpret them, the relation between page and paper changes as the former ages. In Henry Mayhew’s ethnography of the wanderings of books from class to class and hand to hand, we find a media theory that lumps paper together with humbler commodities while insisting on the power of even illiterate users to invest even papers past their read-by date with fresh value.
U NCOMMON R EADERS
    Like most literary-historical arguments, mine has both a corrective and a creative ambition. In negative terms, it seeks historical and critical distance from the heroic myth—whether Protestant, liberal, New Critical, or New Historicist—that makes textuality the source of interiority, authenticity, and selfhood (Raven,
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132, 377). In more positive terms, it seeks to recover stories that this myth overwrites: stories about women, children, and working-class or non-European men who remained sensitive to the material affordances of books and, therefore, to the stories in which books themselves figured as heroes. Some of the following chapters will trace antibookishness back to a particular time (around 1850) and a particular genre (the secular middle-class bildungsroman). Others excavate Victorian alternatives to a worship of the text that demonizes the book: now-forgotten genres and subcultures whose challenges to that model may be worth fishing out of the dustbin—no: the glass-fronted bookcase—of history.
    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?). Identifying a deep structure underlying different representations of the book, however, doesn’t mean lumping “the” Victorians into some monolithic mass. Multiple fault lines separated those narratives and essays that celebrated the spread of ideas from those that mocked the circulation of paper: political and sectarian and economic and educational positions of readers, writers, and publishers; size and format and pricing of books; genre of texts. It’s hardly surprising, for example, that Evangelical Protestants produced and consumed texts that figured reading rather differently from those that emerged from Catholic or freethinking subcultures, or that those who favored or feared the social mobility of persons developed different vocabularies in which to discuss books’ movement through space and across social ranks, or that proponents of individualistic economic or religious models valued silent reading as highly as others condemned it. What held for discourses applied less evenly to practices: each subculture developed its own ways of showing books off or hiding them away, distributing or hoarding, alienating or personalizing, bequeathing or disposing of, noticing or taking for granted.
    Such sectarian and political identities crosscut a second determinant of attitudes toward the book: genre. Cast by circulating-library novels as abuffer between intimates (chapters 2 and 3) and by subsidized tracts as a bridge among strangers (chapters 4–6), the book could figure in the Evangelical press as a picaresque wanderer (chapter 4) or in radical journalism as the protagonist of a providential plan (chapter 7). And a third: narrative mode. First-person accounts