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

showed the individual reader transcending the constraints of space, time, age, and social class—whether that individual was the middle-class child through whom the bildungsroman was focalized, the working-class autodidact of rags-to-riches memoirs, or the narrator of an American slave autobiography. The counternarrative that emphasized the material, social, and commercial properties of paper, in contrast, clustered in third-person comic and anecdotal genres, distanced by the Olympian irony of an omniscient narrator.
    The two halves of the book correspond, therefore, not only to different genres and different classes of audience, but also to different models of literacy. Middle-class bildungsromans, like working-class autodidacts’ autobiographies, frame reading in terms of individual agency, self-fashioning, even transgression. To read a subsidized tract, in contrast, was to engage in an interpersonal transaction. In that sense, surprisingly, Evangelical tracts (chapters 5 and 6) had less in common with those bildungsromans that secularized the Christian conversion narrative (chapter 3) than with social satires and comedies of manners that cast books as props in etiquette dilemmas (chapter 2).
    Yet what divided these genres was ultimately less what powers they ascribed to the book than what value judgments inflected that ascription. All three associated autodidacticism with the text, formal education with the book. If the text guaranteed upward mobility; the book made users placeable. The text signifies individual freedom, the book social determinism; the text generates empathy among different classes and genders, while the book marks differences of rank and age. It’s logical enough, in that context, that the religious tracts produced by anti-Jacobin propagandists should celebrate the moment of elders and betters handing books to the young and the poor, while more secular middle-class fictions instead praised texts for propelling themselves into the hands of protagonists (often, again, young and poor) who were badly treated by other human beings. By extension, the protagonists of the great Victorian bildungsromans are characterized less by their love of texts than by their hatred of books—less by immersion in verbal content than by indifference, or even repugnance, to its material container.
    Like nonfictional accounts of individual self-improvement and national progress, serious fictions marketed to middle-class circulating-library patrons vest the text with the power to liberate and individuate. They associate the text with mobility, whether through the power of words to move across media (the cheap reprint’s claim to be functionallyinterchangeable with the finest folio models the equality of their respective owners), the power of the author to move through space and time (to be read although dead, to do his work “on the top of a mountain or in the bottom of a pit”), or the power of the text to change the reader’s identity (through empathy with fictional characters) and social status (whether by transcending one’s social and physical disabilities, or by forging relationships with fellow readers) (Anthony Trollope,
An
Autobiography
209). Whether in the privy or on the sofa table, among collectors or bibliomancers, a book that was placed—either socially or spatially—was always a book not being read.
    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