How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

by Leah Price

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap?


Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading.


Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Books About Books, Literature, Literary Criticism

360 pages, Paperback

First published April 9, 2012

About the author

Leah Price is an American literary critic who specializes in the British novel and in the history of the book. She is Professor of English Literature at Harvard University, where at the age of 31 she became the first female assistant professor ever to be promoted to tenure.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about three operations with books: reading, handling, and circulating. Price argues that books do not simply mediate a connection between reader and author. They also broker or buffer, bridge or block relationships between successive and simultaneous readers.

The first half is about “book as wedge.” For example, in Anthony Trollope’s novels, a book often functions as a prop for privacy. What interests Trollope isn’t the relation between a person and a text, but the relation (or lack thereof) that two people can establish in the presence of a printed third party—e.g., two spouses holding up newspapers. Printed matter can be a tool to ward off or replace human relationships: thrown books, unfurled newspapers, the text that allows a child to lose any consciousness of the adults around him.

The second half is about “book as bridge.” Whether you had junk mail or religious tracts foisted upon you, borrowed a book from the public library, saw traces of previous readers’ hands in the margins of your book, or used recycled paper to wrap your fish-and-chips, you were constantly reminded of the presence of other readers. If the reader’s relationship with the book or author is pure, the relationship with other readers or handlers is tainted. If the virgin page offers a meeting of minds between author and reader, an already annotated or smudged book forces each reader to recognize himself as only one of a series.

This book is heavily iceberged: you can tell that years of research are behind every sentence and you are only seeing the tip of that iceberg. I wish we could have seen more of the submerged iceberg because that might have made it easier to follow.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most brilliantly written and most fascinating scholarly book I have read in a long time.

[Holly Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essential reading for Victorian and book history scholars: even when I disagreed with Price's interpretations, I loved every minute of it.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review title: Books as texts and objects

It is irony or perhaps performance art that the first edition of this book that I bought used online arrived with many of the pages cut out, so many that it was unreadable and I got my money back, for Price here writes about the many uses of books in Victorian England that did not involve reading the text. One of my enduring memories of my introduction to cataloging class in my library science master's program was the concept that we were cataloging the content, not the container (the book) that carries it. Leah Price has carried this concept to its furthest impacts on literary theory and cultural history.

I came to this book from Price's more recent What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading; that the bridge between the two books is natural and not imagined is that I also started that review by referencing my library science cataloging lesson. While that book is about the 21st century impact of digital media and content formats on reading, this earlier book is about the historical antecedents of that debate at a time when

-- paper was expensive, mostly manufactured from recycled cloth, and heavily taxed. From the the beginning of the 19th century where Price focuses until the end, all three of those factors would flip.

-- literacy was limited by class, gender, age, and occupation, factors that also began to shift by the end of the century with universal education.

-- texts could be novels (truly new as both text and containers objects), newspapers and magazines, or tracts and Bibles, with widely divergent intended audiences, expected durability of the text, and distribution methods.

Note that while Price is interested in how these textual differences impacted the use, durability, distribution, and end of life of the objects that carried the text, she is not writing or interested in literary criticism of the texts in the objects. Pay attention to the title: while reading is something one does with the text, what did Victorians do with the books?

The dog-eared page, the uncut page, the faded page, even the page that smells of the cheese it once wrapped or the vinegar that once disinfected it--each of these can tell us something about what users have done to their books and books have done to their users. What they can’t tell us about is the way in which a text was read, much less in forms that a literary-historical or intellectual-historical training renders interesting. (p. 257)

One thing readers did with books then (and now) is repel others, Price writes in the chapter "The Repellent Book." That sounds counterintuitive and, well, repellent until she provides examples from 19th century sources of female readers deterring unwanted male attention by burrowing into a book, and men in a carriage and later train car avoiding conversation by hiding behind the raised pages of a newspaper (I'm reminded of Steve Martin reading the instructions on a vomit bag on an airplane to try to avoid John Candy's unwanted nonstop conversation in the great movie "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles"). And those repelled were not always strangers: "Like televised sports in the twentieth century, newspapers (for the masses) and books (for the elite) provided men with a refuge from their wives." (p. 55) Another repellent form which depended on class and gender authority within the household was forced reading aloud, servants forced to "listen to their masters read aloud godly books. Daughters, too, were enlisted alternatively to read at their fathers' sickbeds and to listen to their fathers reading family prayers." (p. 214)

Religious tracts are an interesting text and object in Price's study. They were usually short, cheaply produced, and intended for wide distribution to get them in the hands of their intended audience--many of whom did not want the text but could use the object for other purposes, including starting fires, wrapping food, cleaning up after bodily functions (uh, toilet paper), or reselling as waste paper. Well aware of these alternate uses, the producers of tracts debated the propriety of free, wide distribution, especially of copies of the Bible which might be disassembled for what might be considered sacrilegious uses. When the British post office switched from postage payment on delivery by the mail recipient to prepayment if postage by the sender, it enabled mass distribution of materials like tracts without the person-to-person witness opportunity desired by tract societies, and "created the material conditions for the proliferation of unsolicited mail that we know today." (p. 148)

This discussion turns the usual concept of the text as the enduring value of the object on its head. Books were more valuable as reused objects than as texts. It also turns the economic and class discussion upside down; where the wealthy or at least middle class literate population might value a personal library of upscale volumes, "consciousness of the book's material qualities signify moral shallowness" (p. 3) when the rest of the culture is a marketplace that values the reuse or alternate use of the book more than your use of the text. "I am a reader, you are a public, they are a market" (p. 218) is a succinct summary of Price's topic.

The reason for my middling three-stars rating and nothing higher is that Price at this earlier stage of her career was too esoteric in her language and convoluted in her argument. As an example, "metonymy" is a favorite and often used word that I looked up ("The substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example suit for business executive") and still had trouble understanding Price's usage of the word. It feels like she is defining her topic in terms to give it academic credibility, which may have been necessary and important to the academic standing of the topic and the writer when the book was published but detracts from its value to the general reader. Readers who love books as both texts and objects will find this interesting and worth working through.

[Jack Goodstein · Rating 2 out of 5]

What are books good (or maybe not good) for besides their content. Tough going,lots of jargon.

[Lois · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her introduction to How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, Professor of English and Chair of the History & Literature program at Harvard University, Leah Price, asks a few key questions: “… what meanings do books make even, or especially, when they go unread? And why did Victorian authors care?” Following on these prefatory posers, she asks a great many more regarding the format and treatment of books during the nineteenth century, all of which she attempts to answer in this 350-page exploration of how Britons understood, and what they felt about, the uses of printed matter during that time and age. In this critical analysis of the major focus of the publishing arena, attention is laid on three major activities that were undertaken in connection with such material, namely reading, handling, and circulating.

Asserting that she writes from within the parameters set by reception history, which centers on the reader’s reception of a literary text in historical perspective, Prof. Price first explores the relation of book history to literary-critical theory and practice, before embarking on more accessible and detailed case studies covering a wide span of relationships, ranging from husband-wife, through parent-child, to master-servant, that had to do with the literary output of the day. The author neatly guides readers with specific interests in certain types of printed material (including Bibles and newspapers) to particularly relevant chapters of the book. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain pays much attention to the work of such leading writers of the day as Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as to the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew.

Prof. Price’s discursive style does credit to her subject, as, in addition to How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain being packed with clearly well-researched information, it is also highly readable. The author provides prolific examples taken from the literature to illustrate the points that she expresses powerfully and clearly. Her profound insights and far-reaching understanding of her subject have emerged from her close familiarity with the genres of literature of which she writes. And, even though she clearly wrote How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain with the literary scholar in mind, the text should be highly accessible to any reader with a modicum of intelligence.

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain is illustrated throughout with relevant satirical cartoons from Punch and black-and-white illustrations from some of the literary works that were produced during the nineteenth century. In addition to the 29 pages of endnotes, which are extensive and enlightening, the 24-page index is comprehensive and detailed, containing such key entries as “bildungsroman,” “it-narratives,” “libraries,” and “religious tracts.” How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain should make a worthy addition to any genuine book lover’s own library, as well as be acquired for any library or resource center that focuses on history and/or English literature.

[Samantha]

Recommended by Ruby Granger

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Price does an incredible job of justifying why both literary critics and book historians should consider aspects of the book's life beyond reading in order to more fully grasp the object's valences in a given time. Though her own analysis is (self-consciously) comprised of the close readings of a literary critic, the content of these readings is thoroughly convincing of her point. And though the generalizeability of her readings is somewhat constrained by the delimited historical period the books she studies addresses, she does an incredible job of situating her own readings and philosophical/theoretical orientations within both literary and reception studies in order to claim ground for similar types of studies addressing different aspects of books' lives in other times and places.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

This scholarly work by a book historian of Victorian literature is necessarily erudite, clever and droll. It seems we owe most of our bookish habits to the Victorians, who continue to shape so much more of our life today than we acknowledge, despite persistent deconstruction. I encountered many more literary terms than I was familiar with and enjoyed looking them up. The book historian critiques literary criticism and her own reception writing with the highest skill. A dense read in a slim volume.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

An academic treatise on Victorian relations with books and paper. It looks at cultural history through different theoretical lenses to try and understand how the modern relationship with books and by extension, media was formed at the beginning of mass production. This provides good reference material in the scholarship of book history.

[Mills College Library]

028.90941 P9459 2012

[Sannie Hald · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very interesting read. The Victorians had many concerns about books and their usage. A must read for fans of the Victorian Age.