How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain [NOOK Book]

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Overview

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,...

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How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

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Overview

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.

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Editorial Reviews

BookPleasures.com
Price does an excellent job in explaining the how and why of books during the era by discussing how the readers perceived themselves (men read newspapers to learn world events while women read novels that kept them away from their daily chores), the economical and social status of owning, reading or reciting books and how printed paper was mostly thrown away during the era.
— Conny Crisalli
Times Higher Education
[T]ells a compelling 'it-narrative' of its own about the ideological ways in which we handle books and impose them on others.
— Valerie Sanders
National Post
The printed book, certainly, will always be part of our media environment, although perhaps in unexpected ways. This lends particular interest to How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, by Leah Price, a Harvard English professor. Her study is set in an era when mass production of books had not yet quite eliminated a sense of the book as a peculiar object in its own right, quite apart from its content, or as we say now, the 'text.' The book, Victorian readers knew, had more uses than simply conveying that text.
— Philip Marchand
Literary Review
Leah Price's point—very cleverly made—is that Victorians did many things with their reading matter other than read it. One of her more striking examples is of fashionable ladies selecting a book to carry on the basis that its binding (silk-board, preferably, never calf) would match their dress that day. . . . Price is very entertaining on men's use of newspapers to create little zones of domestic, noli-me-tangere privacy. . . . Price asks extraordinarily good questions with wider import [and] has uncommonly brilliant things to say about the things Victorians did with their bookish things.
— John Sutherland
Books & Culture
If you are a literary scholar or a historian whose turf is Victorian Studies . . . you are probably aware of Price's book already. If not, you should add it to your must-read list. If you are interested more generally in the history of the book and reading, especially in connection with current talk about the state and fate of reading—if, for example, you enjoyed Alan Jacobs' The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction—you should read Price. And if you have noted the revival of 'materialism'—as a creed, so to speak, in which the writer explicitly affirms his or her faith—you will certainly want to get this book.
— John Wilson
Times Literary Supplement
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain alternates between a dense critical unpicking of the ways in which books, reading and writing feature in Victorian fiction and non-fiction, and a strong cultural history of texts, writing and reading in social contexts. The long introductory section offers a detailed study of Victorian novelists' depictions of actions done to or with books, newspapers, or pamphlets.
— David Finkelstein
Electric Scotland
A most unusual book, one not to be taken lightly.
— Frank Shaw
Choice

While referencing the works of Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens in particular, Price pays substantial attention to noncommercial, completely disposable popular literature, especially religious tracts. . . . Price makes print's non-reading or un-reading as meaningful as reading.
Toronto Star
Sheer originality.
— Sarah Murdoch
Los Angeles Review of Books

Though rigorously academic, Price's book is also disarmingly humorous, a veritable goldmine of puns and linguistic whimsy.
History Today
[H]ighly enjoyable, well researched and referenced.
— Julia Peakman
Threepenny Review
Price casts herself as an ethnographer setting out to discover what people and books actually did in the nineteenth century.
— Paul Duguid
Open Letters Monthly
Engaging and incisive . . . constantly entertains the reader with new and surprising material. . . . Price raises a host of questions that reach beyond the Victorian period to contemporary reading practices and values . . . a delight.
— Charlotte Mathieson
Times Literary Supplement - David Finkelstein

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain alternates between a dense critical unpicking of the ways in which books, reading and writing feature in Victorian fiction and non-fiction, and a strong cultural history of texts, writing and reading in social contexts. The long introductory section offers a detailed study of Victorian novelists' depictions of actions done to or with books, newspapers, or pamphlets.
Literary Review - John Sutherland

Leah Price's point--very cleverly made--is that Victorians did many things with their reading matter other than read it. One of her more striking examples is of fashionable ladies selecting a book to carry on the basis that its binding (silk-board, preferably, never calf) would match their dress that day. . . . Price is very entertaining on men's use of newspapers to create little zones of domestic, noli-me-tangere privacy. . . . Price asks extraordinarily good questions with wider import [and] has uncommonly brilliant things to say about the things Victorians did with their bookish things.
Times Higher Education - Valerie Sanders

[T]ells a compelling 'it-narrative' of its own about the ideological ways in which we handle books and impose them on others.
National Post - Philip Marchand

The printed book, certainly, will always be part of our media environment, although perhaps in unexpected ways. This lends particular interest to How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, by Leah Price, a Harvard English professor. Her study is set in an era when mass production of books had not yet quite eliminated a sense of the book as a peculiar object in its own right, quite apart from its content, or as we say now, the 'text.' The book, Victorian readers knew, had more uses than simply conveying that text.
BookPleasures.com - Conny Crisalli

Price does an excellent job in explaining the how and why of books during the era by discussing how the readers perceived themselves (men read newspapers to learn world events while women read novels that kept them away from their daily chores), the economical and social status of owning, reading or reciting books and how printed paper was mostly thrown away during the era.
Books & Culture - John Wilson

If you are a literary scholar or a historian whose turf is Victorian Studies . . . you are probably aware of Price's book already. If not, you should add it to your must-read list. If you are interested more generally in the history of the book and reading, especially in connection with current talk about the state and fate of reading--if, for example, you enjoyed Alan Jacobs' The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction--you should read Price. And if you have noted the revival of 'materialism'--as a creed, so to speak, in which the writer explicitly affirms his or her faith--you will certainly want to get this book.
Electric Scotland - Frank Shaw

A most unusual book, one not to be taken lightly.
Toronto Star - Sarah Murdoch

Sheer originality.
History Today - Julia Peakman

[H]ighly enjoyable, well researched and referenced.
Threepenny Review - Paul Duguid

Price casts herself as an ethnographer setting out to discover what people and books actually did in the nineteenth century.
Open Letters Monthly - Charlotte Mathieson

Engaging and incisive . . . constantly entertains the reader with new and surprising material. . . . Price raises a host of questions that reach beyond the Victorian period to contemporary reading practices and values . . . a delight.
Berfrois - Simon Calder

Each of Price's seven case-studies is as illuminating as it is fascinating.
Review of English Studies - Robert L. Patten

Leah Price has challenged every book historian, librarian, and reader of secular or spiritual scripture to think through the object we fondle or maul and the ways in which it circulates in whole and in pieces through our home and global economies. . . . [T]here's no doubt in my mind that this is a potent intervention in the study of material culture. No one who cares about books should miss handling and reading it.
Wordsworth Circle - Ina Ferris

Price opens up fresh avenues of thought about both the history of the book and the history of the novel in the 19th century. . . . How to Do Things with Books is a wonderfully rich work. Written with Price's customary verve and eye for the telling detail, it is a pleasure to read. . . . It brims with intellectual energy, studded with insights to provoke further thought.
Library Journal
Price (English, Harvard Univ.; The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel) investigates the meanings and uses of books in the lives of Britons during the Victorian era, especially the instances in which books were used for purposes other than reading. Citing the modern example of Barack Obama being sworn into office with Abraham Lincoln's Bible, Price explains how books link us "to not just an author but to those who have touched them before." She delves significantly into the centrality of books to the identities and daily lives of Victorian protagonists David Copperfield and Jane Eyre. Furthermore, she notes how, for the average person, reading material could act as a shield from strangers or, as evidenced in the Punch cartoons she includes, a diversion from one's spouse following the end of the honeymoon phase. Price even analyzes the burden of junk mail and the humor of books becoming waste paper. VERDICT Price's writing is clever and her tone accessible, but her tightly woven, erudite references may interest only the most devoted bibliophiles. Scholars who can appreciate Price's meticulous research into a narrow sliver of study will be the best audience.—Jillian Mandelkern, Spring-Ford H.S. Lib., Royersford, PA
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781400842186
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • Publication date: 4/29/2012
  • Sold by: Barnes & Noble
  • Format: eBook
  • Pages: 328
  • Sales rank: 667,011
  • File size: 4 MB

Meet the Author

Leah Price is professor of English at Harvard University. She is the author of "The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel".
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Chapter One: Reader's Block 19
Part I: Selfish Fictions
Chapter Two: Anthony Trollope and the Repellent Book 45
Chapter Three: David Copperfield and the Absorbent Book 72
Chapter Four: It-Narrative and the Book as Agent 107
Part II: Bookish Transactions
Chapter Five: The Book as Burden: Junk Mail and Religious Tracts 139
Chapter Six: The Book as Go-Between: Domestic Servants and Forced Reading 175
Chapter Seven: The Book as Waste: Henry Mayhew and the Fall of Paper Recycling 219
Conclusion 258
Notes 263
Works Cited 293
Index 327
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