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

among working-class populations in Britain, illiteracy made the zero-sum relation between material book and verbal text especially visible. The first English explorers found thenatives of Virginia, for example, “glad to touch [a bible], to embrace it, to kisse it, to hold it to their brests and heades, and stroke all over their bodies with it” (Wogan 407). Elsewhere in the present-day United States, native graves have been found to contain a leaf torn from a bible (Amory). Even in Protestant Europe, a bible could be kissed to lend weight to an oath, stuck under invalids’ pillows, used as a shield against bullets, and even eaten (Cressy 98). Decisions were made, and the future predicted, by what page fell open. Births and deaths were recorded in blank spaces of bibles (often the only writing surface available in poor households). At the other end of the social scale, the librarian Edward Edwards could compare the unread books in aristocratic private libraries to “idols”—as if bibliophiles were no better than heathens. 34
    Yet the same Protestant clergy who accused others of “idolatry” for investing the book with totemic powers laid themselves open to that charge when they placed their faith in the dissemination of printed matter. People of the book—Protestants or even freethinkers whose faith lay in reading—could be accused in return of fetishizing literacy. Thus Francis Hitchman conflated paganism with a different religion of the Book when he called English social reformers “good people in whose eyes in a book is a species of Fetish, and who look upon printed paper with as much reverence as do the Mahometans” (151). One anticlerical journalist in 1899 complained that “some minds, even in the midst of civilization, retain a sort of heathen, or Arab, reverence for the printed page” (Ogden).
    As Patrick Harries points out, Africans who invested books with totemic powers could look uncannily like “Europeans who invested the bible with supernatural powers when taking an oath, or who read the Good Book as divine revelation or self-evident truth” and who “collected books not for the information and ideas they contained, but in order to present a show of knowledge and wealth” (421). When William Carey set up a printing press in Bengal in 1798, “the crowds of natives who flocked to see it, hearing Mr. Carey’s description of its wonderful power, pronounced it to be a European idol” (Marshman 80). In West Africa a century later, books were dubbed the “white man’s fetish.” 35 As Joseph Slaughter has recently documented, post-1945 organizations such as UNESCO have made literacy “the functional boundary—globally as much as locally—between the disenfranchised and the unincorporated” (279–81). The literate world takes the place of Christendom.
    In the year when I completed the manuscript that became this book, I sat in on a court-ordered book club in Massachusetts. Changing Lives through Literature, the program sponsoring the group, secures probation for convicted criminals on condition that they meet weekly to read and discuss short stories and poems. Read a book or go to jail: this encounter mixed even more messages than my own task of grading college studentson whether they had “done” the reading (Price, “Read a Book, Get out of Jail”). Although elite pupils had long faced the choice between a line of poetry and a stroke of the cane, the spread of formal education made nineteenth-century England one of the first times and places when, for large numbers of children, “school” began to replace “work” as the antonym to “pleasure” (Religious Tract Society).
    Cast as a means of rehabilitation—an opportunity for working-class men to practice self-recognition and other-directed empathy in the safely distant imaginative spaces usually reserved for middle-class women—Changing Lives through Literature reminded me how powerful a hold certain Victorian values retain on