The Informed Victorian Reader by Christie A. P. Allen a Dissertation

The Informed Victorian Reader by Christie A. P. Allen A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2016 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Daniel S. Hack, Chair Professor Lucy Hartley Professor Adela N. Pinch Associate Professor Megan L. Sweeney Acknowledgements I would like to thank my excellent committee for the help and support they provided me in imagining, researching, and writing this dissertation. First and foremost, I’m grateful to my chair, Daniel Hack, for patiently reading and rereading my work over many years and for offering unfailingly helpful feedback. I have benefitted immeasurably from Danny’s expertise, as well as his ability to see the potential in my ideas and to push me to refine my arguments. I would also like to thank my readers, Adela Pinch, Lucy Hartley, and Megan Sweeney. Adela’s practical advice and optimism about my project have sustained me through the long process of writing a dissertation. I am grateful to Lucy for always challenging me to consider all sides of a question and to take my analysis a step further. I appreciate Meg’s thoughtful feedback on my chapters, and I will always be thankful to her for being a kind, conscientious, and resourceful mentor to me in my growth as a teacher as well as a writer. I appreciate the many other readers who have helped make this project possible. Kathryne Bevilacqua, Julia Hansen, and Logan Scherer offered feedback and moral support in the very early stages of dissertation-writing. Comments and questions from conference participants at the 2013 and 2014 North American Victorian Studies Association conventions, as well as the 2014 graduate student conference “Reading Then and Now” at the University of Virginia, helped me to clarify points in my chapter on cataloging. Readers for a Nineteenth-Century Forum workshop at the University of Michigan in 2015 offered feedback that helped me to revise my chapter on browsing. More generally, I am very grateful for the community I have been privileged to be part of at the University of Michigan, a community that includes my professors and other mentors, staff members, ii classmates, cohort members, fellow GSIs, and students. My work has profited from the environment of inquisitiveness, rigor, and generosity that they collectively create. I am also thankful to a number of individuals and institutions for providing resources for my research. Karen Markey and Fran Miksa advised me about cataloging from an information science perspective and pointed me toward many useful sources. Richard Menke and Troy Bassett answered questions about the finer points of Mudie’s library, nineteenth-century book history, and cataloging. Librarians at Ohio University, the Grolier Club, and Houghton Library guided me through their catalogue collections and kindly provided photocopies of archival sources I was unable to see in person. The Rackham Graduate School and the English Department at the University of Michigan generously provided fellowships that enabled me to focus on my research and writing. Last but certainly not least, I am thankful to my family, without whom I would never have gone to graduate school, let alone completed a dissertation. My parents, Allen and Patrice Peterson, have always encouraged me to value education, to take opportunities, and to do my best. My siblings, Brandon, Aaron, and Meagan, have time and again set a great example for me in all areas of life, including scholarly work. Most of all, I am grateful to my husband, Steven, for cheering me on and being my best friend through this process, and to my daughter, Evelyn, for making every day a delight. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii List of Figures v Abstract vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Mudie’s Catalogues and the (Re)Writing of Victorian Literary History 21 Chapter 2 “What’s that book that everybody’s talking about just now?”: Cultural Gatekeeping and Information in Victorian Bookselling 78 Chapter 3 Victorian Readers Browsing “as if for life” 133 Chapter 4 Her Life, My Life, Your Life, Our Lives in Middlemarch: Guiding the Modern Reader through Victorian Fiction 184 Appendix 1 244 Bibliography 257 iv List of Figures Figure 1: Volume numbers and sizes in Mudie’s 1860 catalogue. 245 Figure 2: Author names in Mudie’s 1860 catalogue. 246 Figure 3: Novel titles in Mudie’s 1860 catalogue. 247 Figure 4: Description of fiction lists in Mudie’s 1902 catalogue. 248 Figure 5: Fiction list by title in Mudie’s 1907 catalogue. 249 Figure 6: Fiction list by author in Mudie’s 1907 catalogue. 250 Figure 7: Index to Mudie’s 1907 fiction classification by subject. 251 Figure 8: “Detection of Crime” list in Mudie’s 1907 catalogue. 253 Figure 9: “Utah” novels in Mudie’s 1907 catalogue. 254 Figure 10: “Yorkshire” novels in Mudie’s 1907 catalogue. 255 Figure 11: “George III, 1760” novels in Mudie’s 1907 catalogue. 256 v Abstract How did Victorian readers choose what to read, and why should this matter? Studies of Victorian reading practices have explored which texts Victorian readers chose to read and how they interpreted them, but scholars have generally neglected the actual processes through which readers became informed about and made their reading selections, as well as the Victorians’ discursive treatment of those processes. Addressing this lapse, I argue that from the Victorians’ perspective, the ways readers selected books had a profound effect on their reading experiences, shaping how they understood texts’ meanings, developed relationships with books, and characterized themselves as readers. To investigate this overlooked aspect of reading in the nineteenth century, I draw on a variety of sources from the Victorian period, including metadata, literary representations of readers, and nonfiction prose that addresses book selection, by figures such as John Stuart Mill, Henry Morley, Mark Pattison, and John Ruskin. These sources provide a rich sense of the varied ways in which Victorian readers came across books and made book selections, including searching through catalogues, following others’ recommendations, and browsing book stall shelves or stacks of books at home. I outline two divergent attitudes circulating in Victorian publications about book selection, one advocating readers’ purposeful pursuits of information about books, arranged by educated individuals, and the other celebrating the many ways readers could approach literature from outside of the formal infrastructure of information. The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts that feature most prominently in my analysis of Victorian book selection habits include the catalogues of Mudie’s library from the 1850s vi through the 1930s, as well as a number of novels and poems: Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (1923), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868- 69), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), Ouida’s The Tower of Taddeo (1892), and Mark Rutherford’s Clara Hopgood (1896). I conclude the dissertation by bringing into the present the Victorians’ concerns about informed reading, analyzing Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (2014) to study the relationship between expert guidance on texts and emotional identification with texts. vii Introduction Readers depicted in Victorian literature come by their books in many ways. When Henry Ryecroft, the protagonist of George Gissing’s semi-autobiographical The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), finds a first edition of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in a bookshop, he puts forth extraordinary effort to obtain it. Having already forgone food to save money for just such a book, Ryecroft makes three trips across London to make it his: one to retrieve his money, and then two more to lug the many-volume work home.1 Once finished with his epic journeys, Ryecroft flops into a chair, “perspiring, flaccid, aching—exultant!” The work remains a treasured volume for years but is eventually sold out of necessity; regretting the sale in later life while in more prosperous conditions, Ryecroft never purchases another copy of the Gibbon, because “it would not be to [him] what that other was, with its memory of dust and toil.” Where hard work forges a special connection between Ryecroft and his Gibbon, the heroine of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), Margaret Hale, finds solace in a book passage that she comes upon effortlessly. “In her nervous agitation” from life’s compounding difficulties, the narrator relates, “she unconsciously opened a book of her father’s that lay upon the table [and] the words that caught her eye in it, seemed almost made for her present state.”2 Buoyed by both the perceived relevance of the book’s message and the serendipity of its discovery, Margaret takes it to heart and finds courage to face her challenges. Another fictional Victorian, Tom Pinch of Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), is beguiled by books through neither herculean effort nor chance, but by the clever design of a bookseller’s window display. Attracted by the sight of “spick-and span new works 1 Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, 39-41. 2 Gaskell, North and South, vol. 2, 218-19. 1 from London, with the title-pages, and sometimes even the first page of the first chapter, laid wide open,” Tom notes that “unwary men” might begin to read the book, “and then, in the impossibility of turning over, . rush blindly in, and buy it!”3 “What a heartbreaking shop it was!” Tom concludes, his longing for books made acute by the contrast between his detailed, lingering observations of the books in the shop window and his inability to purchase them.

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