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- At a moment when Britons were learning to value the vernacular literary
tradition as a mechanism of social cohesion and hoping that the literary
curriculum might serve (in the 1820 words of Oxford Professor of Poetry
Edward Copleston), as a source of "common topics" that would "kindle
a common interest" (qtd. in Carnochan, 30), the British bibliomaniac
made himself a pest. He—and the plutocratic collectors who fascinated
early-nineteenth-century Britain as they made, dismantled, and bartered
libraries were almost always he's—was pesty in part
because the malady afflicting him was so unlikely to be transmitted.
Bibliomania was much publicized between 1809 and 1826, when deflation
brought this boom period for the antiquarian book trade to a sudden
end. During these years, two verse epistles enumerated the bibliomaniac's
symptoms (Figure
1). A roman à clef that dubbed itself a bibliographical romance
interspersed its account of the courtship yoking one of its collector-protagonists
to the sister of another collector-protagonist with a history of valuable
old editions—thereby folding two stories of desire into one. In
1812 Britons were, in addition, regaled with eye-witness accounts of
the Roxburghe Auction, when frenzied bidding among dueling aristocrats
drove up the prices of the volumes to utterly unprecedented heights.
The splashy publicity does not, however, gainsay the fact that, by definition,
the so-called "book disease" could not reach epidemic proportions. The
etiology of this malady was a function of its exclusivity. The bibliomaniac
preferred his books rare, savoring select volumes' scarcity at
the very moment when contemporaries were heralding the universal diffusion
of reading.
- Bibliomaniacs were censured, that is, for eschewing commonplace means
of engaging the material traces of the literary past and commonplace
means of cohabiting with the nation's literary tradition. Period discussion
portrays these collectors' hoarding of rare books as "wholly unconnected
with, nay, absolutely repugnant to, all idea of reading them"
(Beresford, 4). Hence the list of "symptoms" that one encounters in
almost every period commentary—symptoms comprising 1. a liking
for large paper copies; 2. for illustrated copies; 3. for copies printed
on vellum instead of paper; 4. a liking not just for first editions
but also 5. for particular copies rendered not simply rare but unique
by printers' errata. Such lists portray these collectors as downplaying
meaning, and loving matter, in all its truculent particularity.[1]
Another symptom of bibliomania, 6. the collector's drive to acquire
volumes in which the pages have never been cut, is described in telling
terms in a poem from 1810: Bibliosophia heralds the delights
of proprietorship in a book whose pages have never yet become "free,
common, and accessible as the coffee-house volumes of a Newspaper" (Beresford,
29).
- Since the eighteenth century, literary history in Britain had developed
as a discipline founded on the drive to situate texts in time: in national
histories, the context of particular periods, or the lines of literary
influence linking men of genius across the ages. But, eschewing this
new account of "English," the bibliomaniac insisted, as Neil Kenny puts
it, on locating books in space—as if dispensing with
the premise that books were made for reading made it easier to see books
as made for arranging and indeed endless rearranging, and in this way
made for the dislocations and relocations that extract these objects
from the public contexts of literary history. (Collectors, Susan Stewart
has taught us, devise means to customize context so that its final signified
will be their own selfhood.) (Figure
2) Certainly, Romantic-period collectors were zealous in the pursuit
of incunabula, old plays, ballads, and medieval romances, in ways that
made their collections crucial resources for the new literary history's
source studies, its investigations, for instance, into what was called
Shakespeare's and Spenser's "blackletter lore." (Thus, the seventh classic
symptom of the book disease was, as described in John Ferriar's 1809
verse epistle, the tendency when confronting an auctioneer's "dusty
lot" to seek out "English books, neglected and forgot." "[D]ismal
ballads, sung to crowds of old" are, Ferriar notes, "now cheaply bought
for thrice their weight in gold" ["Bibliomania," 203].) But this literary
history justified itself by appealing to the charismatic idea, more
plausible after the Law Lords' 1774 decision against perpetual copyright
in the case of Becket vs. Donaldson, that the canon—now emphatically
instantiated in cheap reprint series, in anthologies, and books of extracts—represented
common property, Britons' birth-right. And bibliomaniacs appeared to
reprivatize this public domain.
- Evaluating their sector of Romantic library culture in this manner,
I have been following the lead of Philip Connell's and Neil Kenny's
fine analyses of the vexation that bibliomania caused for the period's
emergent nationalistic notions of the literary heritage. Connell, in
particular, outlines how bibliomaniacal self-indulgence threatened the
ideological sleight-of-hand that invited Britons to understand others'
private properties as part of the common stock of the national heritage,
and to understand gentlemanly book collecting—like that of Jane
Austen's Mr. Darcy, who maintains at Pemberley a family library that
is "the work of many generations" (32)—as an act of patriotic munificence.
This attempt (in Connell's words [28]) to "promote the participation
of distinctively aristocratic cultural practices within a broader .
. . idea of the literary past as a collective . . . heritage," to harmonize
that new idea with traditional social structures, was fraught; it depended
on the gentleman's agreement to act as a disinterested public man in
the precincts of his domestic library and to use that space to reiterate
the nationalist themes of a shared public culture. Bibliomaniacs made
themselves pests by, for a start, parading their aristocratic credentials
and yet departing from this patrician script.
- My argument today builds on this discussion. But I also hope to complicate
it: by considering not simply the acts of possession but, in addition,
the dramas of possessive love enacted and modeled within bibliomaniac
libraries; and by thinking about how Romantic-era representations of
bibliomaniacs might have contributed to the revisions of the maps of
culture that made it possible for the domestic library, and the national
archive for which the domestic library imperfectly doubled, to win recognition
as scenes of individuals' affective lives.
- The account of cultural patrimony, literary heritage, and of the hegemonic
work these new nationalistic notions performed that I have borrowed
from Connell sounds themes that have become familiar. It explains culture's
invention of tradition and forging of canons by referring to imperatives
of social control, thereby unmasking the politics hidden within those
discursive formations. It ascribes to the bibliomaniac, accordingly,
a kind of unwitting resistance to the mystified ideological solutions
that Britain developed to manage its real social divisions. But if (as
I will propose) the book disease affecting the aristocracy raised enticing
questions for the Romantics about what it means to get intimate with
a "national heritage," and if it matters that, in this period, discussions
of this bibliomania jettison the old framework in which acquisitiveness
counts as sin and begin to gravitate toward the emergent idiom of the
psychological case history, then it will be worth nuancing this paradigm
for how the discourses of culture hit home. It will be worth developing
an account of the relations between the self and institutions that instances
not just the coercive power structures of the Foucauldian prison, but
also those power structures that reside in the family and in sexuality.[2]
- To write our histories of the notion of literary heritage in conjunction
with the history of intimacy might help us to assess what, for
instance, Leigh Hunt is doing when he imagines himself "wedded to books."
In the 1820 Indicator essay on that topic, Hunt not only declares
his fidelity to a library but also, covertly, indulges the fantasy that
books in their turn might, forsaking all others, cleave to him alone
(104-05). When the Indicator gets all Romantic (in a double sense) with
the canon, this essayist is, doubtless, chastising the bibliomaniac.
But he is also, simultaneously, in his possessiveness, emulating the
bibliomaniac's ways of being private with the stuff of the public domain.
- Hunt helps us to recognize a paradox that recent historians of book-collecting
underplay, which is that the book-collectors' obsessive acquisitiveness
not only vexed their contemporaries but also beguiled them, as
the undertone of affection in period commentaries hints. (The other
reason indulgence and castigation often are hard to distinguish in an
account of bibliomania is that those diagnosing the disorder so often
detect symptoms in themselves.) The author of Bibliosophia, for
instance, appends to his text a footnote in which he invites the collector
with whom he's been remonstrating to accompany him "into this private
corner of the page, where" he will "whisper" in his interlocutor's ears
(Beresford, 3n). The passage manipulates the material form of the page
so as to snuggle up. To call this a joke does not preclude seeing it
as a tribute, one making a collector feel totally at home, to the snugness
enjoyed by those who immerse themselves in their collected worlds.
- In the remainder of this essay, my strategy for reconstructing how
bibliomania assisted in that relocation of library culture that installed
it within the psychic territory of people's intimate lives is to analyze
the relations, of affinity as well as antagonism, between, on the one
hand, Hunt and his fellow practitioners of the familiar essay, and,
on the other, the plutocratic book gluttons who fascinated them. The
Romantic essayists are important to my story of library intimacy as,
in effect, the first professional lovers of literature. Men of letters
such as Hunt, Charles Lamb, and Thomas De Quincey traded not just in
taste and learning, but also in the capacity for feeling that made them
adepts at erasing the distinction between texts and the people who author
them, at misconstruing their subjection to poetry as "friendship with
the poet," and then, as De Quincey's career as a Wordsworthian might
suggest, turning that misconstruction to account (Russett, 224). And
yet their writings have a vexed relationship to the idealism of the
poetry that they helped to canonize and the notions of the immateriality
of genius that they disseminated. While their essays hide the author,
behind, for instance, pseudonyms, spurious reports of his death, or
acts of identity theft, they nonetheless keep displaying the author's
stuff. They keep showing us his book-cases, his books and other
library accoutrements, all the things that might well arouse in men
of letters what Lamb calls the "tickling sense of property" ("Detached
Thoughts," 150). One might think here of how Elia, that inveterately
autobiographical yet mercurial non-entity, beckons the readers of the
London Magazine into his (or Charles Lamb's) "little back study
in Bloomsbury" ("Two Races of Men," 98): when Elia gets personal it
is by showing off the arrangement of his shelves.
- Margaret Russett locates in these moments when magazine writing thematizes
its own materiality an allegory of the minor Romantics' insight that
canonicity is not a quality inherent in the work but a product of the
work's transmission. She emphasizes the essayists' shared recognition
that those acts of transmission that constituted their vocation inevitably
"produce[d] effects in excess of sheer replication." Russett's observation,
in this context, that "the material excess of the signifier sponsors
the minor Romantic's career" (8) helps me draw the following conclusion.
Even as they chastise the bibliomaniacs for their faulty relationship
to the reading of texts, and even as they display their cultural capital
by adopting a stance of high-mindedness in relation to the materialism
of those with real capital, the essayists deliver their own commentary
on canonicity's incarnation and the possessibility that helps
to render a canon loveable. I turn now to that commentary: a series
of moments when the encounter of well-heeled bibliomaniac and shabby-genteel
minor Romantic seems to make them each other's mirror images, united
by a common unwillingness to conceive of books as something we might
assimilate as pure mental phenomena, and a readiness to allow literariness
to be effaced by the volumes that lodge it.
***
- In the January 1825 London Magazine an unknown writer signing
himself the Reverend Tom. Foggy Dribble made his debut, joining the
ranks of such pseudonymic magazine eidolons as "the English Opium Eater,"
"Elia," and "Janus Weathercock." Apparently, Dribble debuted only to
return instantly to obscurity. The essay to which this signature is
appended is the sole evidence of his existence. The work is at a second
level selfless: as befits the author's clerical office, the essay—entitled
"The Street Companion; or the Young Man's Guide and the Old Man's Comfort
in the choice of Shoes"—presents itself as an act of public service.
But from the opening line, it is easy to detect, lurking behind the
public-spirited vade-mecum, the intimate confessions of a fetishist.
I quote: "From the beginning to the end of this paper, I have never
lost sight of what I consider to be the most material object to be gained
from a publication of this nature; namely, the imparting a moral feeling
to the gratification arising from a taste in leather" (De Quincey, 450).
- "The Street Companion" is, of course, a parody, and not the record
of real researches into footwear and feet (that said, I cannot resist
remarking that Dribble's special expertise seems to be the feet of actresses,
"the thousand little niceties" distinguishing the feet of the ladies
who presently tread the stage [451n]). The author of "The Street Companion"
is De Quincey, no stranger himself, we might note, to what it means
to take one's gratifications somewhere other than the beaten track.
And he here targets the latest publication of the Reverend Thomas Frognall
Dibdin: the librarian who catalogued (incompetently, it is alleged)
the Earl of Spencer's great antiquarian book collection at Althorp,
the collector whom the author of Bibliosophia invites into a
private corner of the page, and the self-confessed bibliomaniac who
authored the bibliographical romance I mentioned above and who, in 1824,
had published The Library Companion: The Young Man's Guide and the
Old Man's Comfort in the Choice of a Library.
- Throughout its 912 pages, The Library Companion seizes every
opportunity to parade its credentials as a work of public spirit, showing
how taste is a patriotic duty and proposing that private consumption
might advance the project of national definition. Fittingly, then, Dibdin
begins his assessment of book production in the ancient and modern languages
since the advent of printing by referring to the late King's choice
of library. He affirms, sounding a typically priggish note, that it
instances His Majesty's "not inconsiderable skills as a bibliographer"
(vii). After going on to discuss bibles, histories, biographies, travels,
poetry, and novels, Dibdin concludes with the drama and Shakespeare,
in a chapter that appraises the diverse, modern editions of the Bard
and also, in a rhapsodic foot-note, eight pages long, classes
(his term) the thirty First Folios belonging to Dibdin's acquaintance.
(Dibdin's eagerness to hint at how many aristocrats he knows—or,
better still, his habit of only half-revealing their identities, in
pseudonyms decipherable only by the cognoscenti—can make The
Library Companion read like a contemporary silver fork novel or
court calendar.) Earl Spencer's Folio, we learn, is merely of the second
class: "There are . . . in the centre of some of the pages a few greasy-looking
spots, which might have originally received the 'flakes of pie-crust'
in the servant's hall" (811n). This bibliographical exercise is vintage
Dibdin in seeking to link "the prestigious work" to "the singular, expensive
copy" (Kenny, 285). Though of the second class, that copy is rendered
all the more auratic—distanced all the more from the mass reproducibility
that ordinarily defines the book—by those stains from pie crusts
of yesteryear.
- De Quincey recognizes the elitist, possessive politics at work when
Dibdin's close-up look at the matter of the page renders Shakespeare
a family heirloom. Mischievously, he both plays up that materialism,
converting leather binding into leather shoes, and reverses that politics,
replacing the gentleman's private library with the pedestrian's public
street (The Street and not the Library Companion). In
this manner, he counters Dribble's fetishism (his over-valuing of leather)
with a value scheme that sets appreciation at odds with acquisition
and possession. This, of course, is a set up that, in conjunction with
the associated opposition between the ideal and the material, is adopted
in much Romantic writing on the reception of the art-work. Think of
William Hazlitt's desire to remove paintings from galleries into the
"treasure house[s] of pure thoughts" or bind them "up within the book
and volume of [his] brain" (qtd. in Siegel, 175; 171). Think of the
axiom that Lamb's Elia cites in "The Two Races of Men" (borrowing it
from Coleridge, who has borrowed Lamb's books), which holds, Elia reports,
that "the title to property in a book . . . is in exact ratio to the
claimant's powers of understanding or appreciating the same" (98). In
the 1823 Literary Examiner essay "My books," Leigh Hunt declares,
to similar effect, that "a grand private library . . . never looks to
me like a real place of books" (80): a remark packing that much
more punch when we recall how, in this period, the broad dissemination
of pictures and descriptions of the libraries of certain showpiece homes
made literary reception appear an aristocratic prerogative. When, in
his Autobiography, Hunt recalls his impressions of the Roxburghe
Auction—the bibliomania's defining moment—he reconfirms the
spirit of this declaration and sides with the loser in the bidding war
for the "unique copy of Boccaccio" that was prize of the sale. The marquis
of Blandford obtained the volume, with a bid of £2,260, but it is Earl
Spenser, the loser (and the nobleman we just encountered as owner of
a Shakespeare Folio with pie-crust flakes), who for Hunt represents
the "genuine lover of books"; Hunt imagines him returning home from
the auction room and "reconcil[ing] himself to his defeat by reading
the work in a cheaper edition" (124).
- But dissociating texts from the books giving them material form, or
wishing, with Wordsworth in the fifth book of the Prelude, that
the mind could dispense with lodging its spirit in "shrines so frail"
(l. 48) can work to two, diverging ends: either to elevate reception
over mere possession, or to conceptualize a relationship to texts that
might be more proprietary, because more private, more personal.
Marking this distinction makes it easier to acknowledge how often that
opposition between accumulating books and reading literature comes under
pressure in the Romantic essay.
- Doing something more complex than simply castigating the book-collector's
possessiveness, Leigh Hunt's "My books" in fact goes on to cast the
great private library as a site of imperfect possession. When
thinking of one of those libraries, Hunt finds, he claims, that he cannot
think of the books "and the proprietor together." It is no accident
that Hunt turns next to his disappointment with the latest thing in
library furniture, the round table made newly fashionable by designer
Thomas Hope: "instead of bringing the books around you, they all seem
turning another way, and eluding your hands" (80). At Earl Spencer's
great house at Althorp, the books were dispersed among an entire series
of libraries he had had constructed—the Billiard Library; the Marlborough
Library; the Gothic Library, and so on (Wainwright, 15), suggesting
that the Earl might well have sympathized with that sense of books'
evasiveness evoked by Hunt's remark on the round library table. (Hence,
perhaps, the reference to how the Earl "has a great many old SHOES .
. . so many . . . that he does now know where to find them when he wants
them": this claim appears in the Reverend Dribble's "The Street Companion,"
where it is located, aptly, in the footnotes [452n].) But the bibliomaniac
may in fact have supplied his contemporaries with a resource for thinking
about how books—or, better still, the canon (that "imaginary totality
of works" referenced by John Guillory, who cautions us against the ideological
misprision involved in thinking that it might be materialized anywhere)—might
be more firmly attached to persons, might be rendered personal
effects. The book-collector's peccadilloes—understood less and
less as occasions for lectures on temperance and increasingly as evidence
for his standing as a psychological marvel—offered testimony to
what might be personal about desire: testimony that was reassuring for
a culture made anxious by the expansion of the book trade and the increasing
impersonality of the satisfactions which that market afforded.[3]
- To explain this view of the aristocratic book glutton, I return to
the statements about the social meanings of literacy embedded in the
era's much-disseminated images of gentlemen's libraries. The reader
who occupies that scene, all but crowded out by folios, quartos, busts
and figurines of Shakespeare and Milton, and medieval stained glass,
has agreed to his conscription into a historical process that is endlessly
reiterative (Figure
3).[4]
Choosing again what has already been chosen for him, he honors the works
that his ancestors honored. By this means he demonstrates, as Samuel
Johnson had averred in the eighteenth century, that the test of canonicity
is the test of time (440). Yet the period's discussions of how to live
with books also negotiated for the gentleman reader spaces, literal
and conceptual, in which he might play truant to his responsibilities
to tradition. Public men might also have their "cabinet" or "closet
libraries": terms the period used to designate books of less weight,
both morally and materially, than the well-ordered collections of folios
and quartos that were otherwise front and center in accounts of sober-sided,
gentlemanly literacy. Even King George, or so we learn when Dibdin opens
The Library Companion, recognized the need for off-hours reading.
Dibdin loyally reproduces, "copied from the original document in the
King's own handwriting," the book-list the monarch used to assemble
what he called "a closet library for a watering place" (vii). The seal
of royal approval that bestows legitimacy on this partitioning of the
book collection might also be seen as bestowing legitimacy on a new
topography of the reading mind. The category of the cabinet library
registers a cultural agreement that the interior spaces of private houses
needed supplementing, that extra provision for snugness and the erotics
of exclusive possession was required.
- This may be the scandal and allure of the book obsessions publicized,
and never more than half-heartedly condemned, by figures such as Dr.
Ferriar and Reverend Dibdin—and my discussion of the politics of
the latter's Library Companion does not do justice to the moments
of calculated self-exposure that punctuate those 912 pages, moments,
for instance, when Dibdin makes a show first of falling into a prolix
prose reverie and then of cutting himself short when bibliographical
responsibilities call him back to duty. The bibliomaniac seems to take
the license for self-indulgence and self-stylization associated with
the cabinet and closet and remobilize it within the libraries that supplied
patrician public spirit with its notional staging grounds. The bibliomaniac,
that is, remakes the literary heritage as his cabinet library.
- This way of unsettling the codes of library culture might well have
appealed to the Romantic essayists. They, after all, belonged to the
first generation to confront a ready-made canon, the first generation
who, thanks to series such as "Cooke's Uniform, Cheap and Elegant Pocket
Library" of the British poets (which figures prominently in Hunt's Autobiography),
found the classic texts of the literary tradition already collected
for them, as already recommended reading. The literary heritage this
generation encountered as its birthright might also have been experienced
as an "infringement on their individuality": a phrase I borrow from
Julie Carlson, who uses it to delineate the discomfort Hunt, Hazlitt,
and Lamb each endured when subjected to other people's conceptions of
Shakespeare (162).
- It might be worthwhile, therefore, to trace how often the Romantic
essayists' often-discussed negotiations with high Romantic authorship—negotiations
that merge authoring and reading and make it hard to differentiate creativity
from receptivity—register and depend on a mimic, second-order bibliomania.
We might consider, for instance, how Elia's little back-room study in
Bloomsbury and Leigh Hunt's redecorated prison cell at Surrey Gaol (adorned
by Hunt with several book-cases, busts of the poets, and a portrait
of Milton) each miniaturize and pastiche the library-shrines that were
the show-pieces of the country houses of the elite.[5]
Confinement—whether the effect of limited means or (as for Hunt)
the effect of a prison sentence for libel—becomes in these locales
a version of the provisions of interiority that are furnished to the
gentleman by his cabinet library. Or we might engage in this context
the many passages in Hunt's Indicator and Literary Examiner
essays, in the "Elia" essays of the London Magazine, or the memoirs
of their contemporaries that show Hunt and Lamb surpassing the bibliomaniac,
outdoing his capacity for getting agitated about the books that went
astray and spoiled his sets and his capacity for being finicky about
the symmetry of his shelves.[6]
Henry Crabb Robinson, for example, marveled in his journal over the
fervor Lamb displayed in "banish[ing]" four quarto volumes of Burke
from his collection (qtd. in Lucas, 369). Explaining why, as Lamb's
neighbor, he would sometimes catch sight of books that had been sent
sailing over the trees growing in their shared garden, Thomas Westwood
suggested that those rejected volumes were "unharmonious on [Lamb's]
shelves" and "clashed, both in outer and inner entity" with the books
Lamb deemed his "household gods" (qtd. in Lucas, 589). In "Detached
Thoughts on Books and Reading," similarly, Lamb's Elia no sooner declares
that as a reader he has "no repugnances" than he begins to parade them,
staging in prose something like the high dramas of de-accessioning described
by Westwood and Robinson. Cataloguing the variety of biblia a biblia,
"books which are no books," Elia makes a point of denouncing specifically
"those volumes which 'no gentleman's library should be without'" (149).
The denunciation announces the reverse-snobbery that informs Elia's
vaunted love of the city streets' second-hand book-stalls, locales for
bibliographical discovery, where the literary heritage has been splintered
and reordered by chance. It also parodies the priggishness the Reverend
Dibdin enacts in his inspections of high-society libraries.
- Perhaps, while investigating in this manner how the essayists' rites
of book-possession, book-devotion, and book-profligacy might have both
repeated and refuted those of the bibliomaniacs, we might find it helpful
to recollect the case of the Regency dandy—another figure who had
a flair for making the era's great gentlemen look like pale imitations
of themselves. For when Lamb and Hunt make a show of cherishing not
just literature, but also the material appurtenances of literariness,
the show works to some of the same ends that are implemented when the
dandy over-values cravats and snuff boxes and intimates that clothes
can make a man. Both the essayist and the dandy express a volatile amalgam
of cross-class identification and resentment. Both escape the theater
of good taste through the theater of good taste. Reread against the
bibliomaniac's revision of the patrician script for library culture,
the minor Romantics' essays on getting private with the poets by getting
intimate with books can seem to pose in another form some of the questions
the dandies posed. They inquire into the nature of that entitlement
that we call personal style, while they ask how English Literature comes
to be legitimately one's own.
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