Ideas of Books and Reading in Literature, 1880–1914

IDEAS OF BOOKS AND READING IN LITERATURE, 1880–1914 Submitted by Dewi Evans ENCAP In partial fulfilment of the requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2012 1 SUMMARY This thesis elucidates some of the ways in which concerns about the status of ‗the book‘ at the end of the nineteenth century both inform and are, in turn, informed by the representation of books in the period‘s fiction. Focusing on the work of Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, M.R. James and E.M. Forster, I argue that their fiction places a discursive ‗idea‘ of the book at the centre of a range of socio-political debates in which literary texts participate and which they also help to shape. In particular, I argue that the fragmentation of dominant nineteenth-century print-cultural institutions forms an important context for these authors‘ preoccupation with the ability of the written word to refract ideas and experiences it purports accurately to reflect. In Wilde‘s work, for example, books are simultaneously the facilitators of panoptic surveillance and sites upon which, by asserting their right to a wholly subjective interpretation of text, readers can resist such surveillance. Stevenson‘s adventure fiction is underscored by similar anxieties about the insidious formative influence of fiction – anxieties that lead him to adopt a range of metafictional strategies, designed to draw the reader‘s attention to the book as the product of a specific marketplace. James and Forster‘s fiction goes further, using books as the symbol of a wider epistemological crisis that underscores turn-of- the-century reading practices. Ultimately all four writers reject, in different ways, a utilitarian conception of books as repositories for knowledge about the world, to which readers‘ own subjectivities must become subordinate in order to ensure a ‗right‘ reading. Instead, they foreshadow modern reader response theory, presenting books as sites upon which ‗ideas‘ – the product of a dynamic interaction between text and reader – are continually shaped and reshaped as they circulate within the ideologically-charged materiality of a particular historical moment. 2 Acknowledgments Sincere and heartfelt thanks are extended to: my supervisors, Anthony Mandal and David Skilton, for their advice and suggestions at every stage of this research; Henrietta Philips, who read the final draft in detail and whose comments were invaluable; Rosemary Sweet and Luke Thurston, for their kind and helpful responses to e-mail enquiries regarding their research; Carl Plasa and Penny Fielding for their valuable and constructive examiners‘ comments; Martin Coyle for chairing the viva; the administrative and secretarial staff at Cardiff University‘s School of English Communication and Philosophy for efficient and sympathetic assistance in matters of University protocol. Special thanks are due to my parents, Ann and David Evans, and to my partner, Christopher, for whose generous support at every step of the way I am more grateful than I can say. This work is dedicated to the memories of my grandparents, Nancy and Watkin Evans, who passed away before the thesis was completed. 3 CONTENTS Introduction...….………………………………………………………………………4 Chapter 1 No Purchase Necessary: Books and Ownership in the Writings of Oscar Wilde…….…………………………………………………………………………...65 Chapter 2 Terms and Conditions Apply: Robert Louis Stevenson‘s Metafictional Strategies...124 Chapter 3 ‗A Momentary Contact with Reality‘: Reading and Otherness in E.M. Forster and M.R. James………………………………………………………………………………..186 Conclusion ‗No More Literary Works and No More Readers‘…..……………………………...267 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………...274 4 Introduction This thesis examines the representation of books in the imaginative literature of late- nineteenth-century Britain. It investigates the ways in which such representations reflect and engage with changes in the perception of the book within the wider context of the period‘s literary history, the ways in which these relate to concurrent changes in perceptions of reading, as well as the extent to which authors‘ perceptions of these shifting attitudes affect the nature of their own literary productions. Such an enquiry might profitably be made of any given period of literary history – certainly of any point since the ‗rise of the novel‘ in the late eighteenth century. I share, for example, many of the same central objectives as Andrew Piper‘s Dreaming in Books (2009), a study of the book as represented in early-nineteenth-century European and American romanticism. Like Piper‘s, my work is informed by Jerome McGann‘s idea that there is ‗no such thing as an unmarked text‘, a statement which encapsulates the idea that the textual meaning of a work of literature is inevitably mediated by the material conditions governing its production, distribution and consumption – and that this is something that nineteenth-century writers always recognised. I also share Piper‘s concern that, while book history has covered effectively the ways in which ‗literature‘s meaning was shaped by the printed book […] we have overlooked in the process the ways in which literature contributed to shaping the identities of books and the bookish identities of the individuals who used and consumed them‘.1 Although it takes as its point of departure a different period of literary history, therefore, my work is underscored by the same central question as Piper‘s: ‗How did literature make sense of the book so that it in turn made sense to its reader?‘2 1 Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 10. 2 Ibid. pp. 10-11. 5 In this introductory chapter, I will use a striking passage from Thomas Hardy‘s novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) as a focal point through which to introduce some of the ways in which representations of books within late-Victorian fiction provided a means of working through the changing cultural status of the book within a rapidly evolving print culture, before moving on to articulate some of the wider intellectual and methodological questions that a study of books in fiction might help literary critics and historians of the book alike to address. i. Tess’s absent novels ‗Why didn‘t you tell me there was danger? Why didn‘t you warn me? Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had a chance of discovering in that way, and you did not help me!‘3 This is Thomas Hardy‘s Tess addressing her mother, upon returning from Alec d‘Urberville‘s house a ‗fallen woman‘. The reference to novel reading at this point in the story emphasises a textual encounter (or rather the absence of one), which will have a devastating effect upon subsequent narrative developments. In presenting reading as a biographical intervention with the ability to confer autonomy on those who have access to novels, however, the extract also has relevance for female readers of Hardy‘s novel. The central position of the taboo subject of rape marks out Tess of the D’Urbervilles as precisely the kind of novel Tess regards as able to intervene fortuitously in a young woman‘s education: energising the book in the reader‘s hands, its evocation of books 3 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 82. 6 like itself signals the volume‘s ability to have a very real effect on the course of its (female) reader‘s life. It makes available to the reader what Tess feels she has been denied: knowledge enabling the recognition of dangers faced by young women in a world of sexually-aggressive men. Hardy‘s novel is a potent example of the kinds of issues at stake when books appear (or even, as in this case, conspicuously fail to appear) in fictional narratives. It demonstrates how even the most apparently inconsequential representation or even mention of books in fiction can signal a text‘s situation within specific contemporary debates concerning the role(s) of books in the wider culture in which that fiction was produced and circulated. Tess‘s assertion about novel reading is significant on three counts. By depriving her of knowledge of ‗what to guard against‘ it is the indirect cause of her ‗fall‘: an absent reading act thus implicitly underpins subsequent narrative developments. At the same time, her assumptions about the ability of books to intervene in the lives of individual readers reflects the text‘s interaction with contemporary literary debates by signalling its position in an ongoing controversy concerning the kinds of books to which (young female) readers could and should gain access. Finally, as I will argue, an examination of Hardy‘s participation in those debates helps to determine the ideological position the text adopts and the way in which authors‘ reactions to the shifting cultural position of books help to determine the kinds of texts they produce. Tess‘s outburst is just one in a longstanding metafictional tradition of representing novel reading within the novel itself. What is interesting in this instance, however, is that while, since the mid-nineteenth-century, novel reading was typically construed as pernicious – particularly for women – Tess maintains an equally pernicious role for the absence of novel reading upon its protagonist. Jacqueline Pearson has shown how discourse on the novel in the eighteenth and early nineteenth 7 centuries ‗tended to think in terms of a binary opposition between ―good‖ and ―bad‖ books‘, with novels tending to be placed in the latter category.4 Anti-novel sentiment was rife and its dangers to the female reader everywhere discussed: It seems there was hardly any crime, sin or personal catastrophe that injudicious reading was not held to cause directly or indirectly – from murder, suicide, rape, and violent revolution, through prostitution, adultery and divorce, to pride, vanity, and slapdash housewifery.5 Later-nineteenth-century discourse on the novel tends to be less all-encompassing in its condemnation, but novel reading remained a source of anxiety for many writers, even within novels themselves.

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