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  • The Book vs. The Text in Victorian England
  • Laura C. Stevenson (bio)
How to Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price (Princeton University Press, 2012. 360 pages. Illustrated. $29.95)

The corner bookcase in our living room displays the works of Hugo, Lamb, Pope, Irving, Lamartine, and other unlikely bedfellows, all encased in handsome bindings that once graced a grandparental library. Next to our dining-room table, glass doors protect my parents' matching [End Page lxxvi] sets of Scott, Dickens, and Conrad. The collections are beautiful, but their volumes are rarely, if ever, taken down for perusal. Nor are these books alone in serving "nonreading" purposes. Some provide booster seats for the young, stools for the short, props for windows, stops for doors, coasters for mugs, and—if you include newspapers under the heading of books—fly-swatters for insects and kindling for the woodstove. The utility of these books has little to do with their contents, and it is to these extratextual uses of books that Leah Price turns her readers' attention in How to Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain.

The "Victorian Britain" in the title means "mid-Victorian England": Price is concerned with the period between "the end of the Enlightenment" and 1861, when the lifting of the tax on paper cheapened "paper almost as dramatically as digital storage has cheapened it in our lifetime." The study is thus primarily confined to the decades before high-speed presses and the Education Act of 1870 developed the mass literature of the end of Victoria's reign—although a glance at pages 194-98 reveals Price's penchant for quietly quoting sources from the 1890s and even the World War i era.

What did mid-Victorians do with books? An engaging possibility appears on the dust jacket of Price's book, which portrays a wreath of paper roses made from pages of Great Expectations. Having opened the monograph, readers find that the author of Great Expectations, well aware of books' decorative potential, "lined his study with dummy spines, for which he composed such titles as History of a Short Chancery Suit (in twenty-one volumes) or Cat's Lives (in nine)." At lower intellectual and social levels, the wives of Manchester merchants chose books whose bindings matched their color schemes, while costermongers "priced a book by the absorbency of its pages." Contemplating these extratextual social uses, I am reminded of my aunt, who sewed black slipcover bindings for her paperback mysteries and romances so people would perceive her as an old lady engrossed in the Bible.

Price directs her historical attention to "Victorian representations and perceptions of, and fantasies and illusions about, the circulation of books, not the circulation itself." Fantasies and illusions lead her into the territory of "the it-narrative"—a genre familiar to present-day readers from Black Beauty—in which an object like a coin, a doll, or a Bible is made a narrator and the reader follows its travels through society. Price's discussion perceptively analyzes both the problems of the genre (if the Bible is cherished by its owner, the plot stops) and the social attitudes it reveals. Among these attitudes is the fear, which Price portrays partly with contemporary illustrations, that servants will waste working time by reading their masters' books, and add to the affront by leaving dirty fingerprints on the pages. In chapter 6 Price further studies circulation fantasies by discussing fears that library books passed from reader to reader would spread contagion. Playing on this concern, a late-Victorian entrepreneur offered libraries a "book disinfecting apparatus" in which books were shelved and disinfected [End Page lxxvii] by burning "a very little" compound sulfurous acid.

Price's discussions of tracts, which extend to those lampooned in Wilkie Collins's Moonstone, demonstrate that while the texts of books theoretically offered to liberate the lower classes by offering them knowledge, salvation, or self-affirmation, the handling of physical books was as likely to reinforce class barriers as to break them down. As with class, so with gender: chapter 2, "The Repellent Book," is concerned with the literary trope (and its pictorial versions in Punch) of married couples excluding...

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