Oleh :
Jennifer Howard
Senior Reporter for The Chronicle
One
of the most vexing and intriguing aspects of studying the history of reading is
how to recover acts and responses that were never deliberately recorded in the
first place.
As
a literary scholar, Leah Price is in the business of interpreting texts. In her
latest book, How to Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain, Price cares
not just about the content of books but how Victorians used them to create or
control social relations. Books "can be used both as a bridge between
people and as a wedge between people," she says. She turned to Victorian
novels and stories to unearth evidence of how Victorians used books to woo and
to repel. She also consulted nonfiction sources, including comportment guides,
newspapers and magazines, and Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor.
Price
sketches out a broad, shifting range of uses for books that go beyond just
reading. Because paper was expensive and therefore precious in early
19th-century Britain, people reused and recycled it. Books might be unbound and
their pages used to make dress patterns, line trunks, or wrap pies. What began
as text might end up as toilet paper. As a result, Price says, "even
people who are illiterate for reasons of rank or sex still have a very
sophisticated, fine-grained taxonomy of paper." Mayhew reports, for
instance, that food vendors preferred certain newspapers because of the
absorbent or repellent characteristics of the newsprint.
As
texts circulated, they triggered class and social anxieties. An upper-class
employer might worry that if she touched a book her maid had touched, she'd be
sullied by the implied contact. "There have to be as many intermediaries
between the master's body and the servant's body" as possible, Price
explains. Think of the ritual of delivering letters on a tray.
After
1850, the rise of public libraries brought readers of different classes into
closer contact. It set off debates about what reading matter was suitable for
the public, Price says. Some libraries blacked out the racing pages of
newspapers so as not to promote gambling, for example.
Victorians
also worried about books as vectors of disease—"that question of where has
that library book been," Price says. Proposals circulated for
book-disinfecting machines to be installed at libraries. "It was mainly,
if you pardon the pun, vaporware," she says. "But there were a lot of
prototypes designed."
Easier
access to reading material created other class-related strains, too, though not
the ones Price expected. "I had expected, going into the project, that
middle-class gentlemen would be worrying about their servants getting their
hands on political tracts," she says. She discovered they were more
concerned about time theft. Hours spent reading, even something like the Bible,
were hours not spent dusting or doing other chores. Conduct books for women and
girls, too, warned their readers against letting books distract from caretaking
duties.
Sometimes
employers inflicted unwelcome reading matter on their servants. A mistress
might press a religious tract on her maid. "These are offers that you
can't refuse," Price says. "One of the things that surprised me about
the kinds of human relationships that are brokered by books in this period is
that you see a pretty dramatic shift from the beginning of the 19th
century." Early on, there was the sense that books were a precious
commodity. By century's end, she says, there's a feeling "that books are
something foisted or forced on inferiors by their social superiors."
Texts
might be invitations to unwelcome contact, or markers used to define household
boundaries. In romantic relationships, books played the part of matchmakers or
match-breakers. "On the one hand, you have the book being used in
courtship—a gentleman giving a copy to a lady that he's picked out for her,
perhaps with certain passages underlined for her particular attention,"
Price says. "But on the other hand, you have the book as a wedge—the
husband and wife who are ignoring each other at the breakfast table," one
buried in her novel, the other in his newspaper.
In
Anthony Trollope's novel The Small House at Allington, Price finds an
especially harsh example of domestic distancing. Badly matched honeymooners,
riding together in a railway carriage, feel more warmly about their reading
material than they do about each other.
Trollope
describes the scene: "He longed for his Times, but resolved at last,
that he would not read unless she read first. She also had remembered her
novel; but by nature she was more patient than he, and she thought that on such
a journey any reading might perhaps be almost improper."
Victorians
used texts to keep each other at arm's length in nonromantic spheres, too. With
the spread of public transportation, "the newspaper grows up with the
commuter rail as a way of avoiding eye contact," Price says. Like modern
subway or bus riders losing themselves in their iPhones, 19th-century commuters
could virtually escape the madding crowd by putting up a wall of paper between
other people and themselves. "The Victorians were using books very much
the way we use smartphones," as a kind of "Do Not Disturb" sign,
Price says.
As
the century wore on, paper itself became something to escape. "If someone
is standing on the street corner handing out religious pamphlets, you don't
want to take it," whereas in earlier decades you might have welcomed any
free scrap of paper, Price says. She points out that, along with the shift from
rag-based to wood-based papermaking, changes in the British tax system made
paper much cheaper. That in turn made it more economical for publishers of
books, newspapers, and pamphlets to print and sell their wares.
Reforms
in the mail system midcentury also made it cheaper to distribute the new
abundance of paper. The postal reformers "wanted to democratize
knowledge," she says. But they "didn't foresee that this wonderful
new postal system would be used primarily to distribute catalogs" and
other ephemera. As Price says, the Victorians "really invented what we now
call spam."
Echoes
of Victorians' shifting attitudes toward text carry over into this era of
digital reading. The 19th century had its cheap paper; we have ever more
electronic content. As it did with the Victorians, abundance changes how we as
a culture treat the physical book. For every bibliophile who worships the
physical codex as an objet d'art, there's someone waiting to turn it to novel
or irreverent purposes. Price points to the whimsical repurposings that turn up
on sites like Etsy, as craftspeople turn books into purses and other objects
with little connection to reading.
"There's
such an increasing awareness today of nontextual uses of books," she says.
"Now that the textual meaning of books is migrating online, all that's
left is an empty shell."
Then
as now, devaluing the object sometimes creates more emphasis on content.
"Going back to the 19th century makes you realize that a phenomenon we
tend to blame on digitization actually happened a century earlier," Price
says. "Once you can throw it away, the value of books comes to reside in
the words they contain rather than their potential for reuse."
NB : Correction
(12/18/2012, 11:11 a.m.): This article originally quoted Price as saying that
Herman Melville owned a copy of The Natural History of the Sperm Whale that
was pristine, indicating he had not read it. After the article was published,
Price learned that the book had in fact been heavily annotated by Melville, and
asked thatThe Chronicle replace her original example with the example of
Hemingway’s copy of Ulysses. The article has been updated to add that
example.
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This Article had taken by Rumah Baca Komunitas at http://chronicle.com/article/Secret-Reading-Lives-Revealed/136261/ (10/02/2013)
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