Free How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price Page A

books, but one joke casts books as tools for storing spectacles; we think of a desk chair as a device for reading, but the other presents books as an aid to sitting. Is “furniture book” an oxymoron or a pleonasm?
P EOPLE OF THE T EXT
    Two cases mark the limits of my topic: on the one hand, the ephemerality that the newspapers of chapters 2 and 7 share with the middle-class circulating-library novels of chapters 2 and 3 and the didactic fictions of chapters 4 and 6; on the other, the durability of the bibles discussed in chapters 4 and 5, whose verbal text and material form both remain themselves through many adventures. Even the law enforced the distinction between the dated and the timeless. For the first half of the nineteenth century, taxes kept newspaper prices artificially high and bible prices artificially low: the latter benefited from the only exception to the duties levied on all paper used for vernacular publication, to which an extra tax was added from 1819 onward for serials that both contained news and appeared at intervals under twenty-six days (Fyfe,
Science
and
Salvation
40; Collet).
    The Renaissance scholar James Kearney has described Christianity as “a religion of the book that was always made uneasy by the materiality of the text.” To the extent that the Reformation thought of itself as “a return to the book within a religion of the book,” “the book became an emblem of the desire to transcend the merely material and irredeemably fallen world of objects,” but “at the same time, Reformers were suspicious of all human media . . . [and] distrusted the material dimension of text” (
The
Incarnate
Text
8, 3). 32 More specifically, Catholics and heathens alike were accused of subordinating a text to its material container: of violating, whether by idolatry or illiteracy, what Tyndale called a law written “not with ink (as Moses’ law) but with the Spirit of the living God: not in tables of stone (as the Ten Commandments) but in the fleshly tables of the heart” (Kearney, “The Book and the Fetish” 436; Tyndale 161). As we’ll see in chapters 4 and 5, missionaries boasted that “silent messengers”—that is, religious tracts—would displace the “dumb idols” that natives worship. When a man in Burma proudly shows a missionary his old prayer book, he is told: “You have been ignorantly worshiping the book. I will teach you to worship the God whom this book reveals.” Yet the author exults in the enthusiasm of others in Burma who “were all so earnest for tracts, and there not being enough for all those who desired them, they cut the tracts up into bits, that each might have a few words or a few lines of the sacred writings to keep in their houses” (Jones 474, 62, 63).
    Catholics, too, were accused of sharing non-Europeans’ respect for the material book, as when a bible was kissed during the Mass (Kearney, “The Book and the Fetish” 462). “To evince a belief in the power of the object was to engage in a fundamental category mistake that separated superstitious and credulous others (non-whites, non-Christians, Catholics, the lower classes, and women [and, one might add, children]) from the rational European man” (Kearney, “The Book and the Fetish” 436). That such rationality was not entirely a delusion is perhaps best proven by the it-narratives of chapter 4: while Evangelical publishers systematically produced accounts of bibles being desecrated, torn, and trampled, it would be hard to imagine any equivalent body of literature surrounding the Torah or the Koran.
    Protestant missionaries described their goal as spreading literacy; on the ground, however, they often seemed more concerned with limiting bibliolatry. They worried, that is, not only about the
in
ability of the poor and the heathen (and often the Catholic) to read their sacred text, but also about the
ability
of those populations to put the Bible to uses
other
than reading. 33 In colonial contact zones as