‘Miss Cathy’s riven th’ back off “Th’ Helmet uh Salvation”’: Representing Book Destruction in Mid-Victorian Print Culture

Abstract

Many of the major novels of the mid-Victorian period were published within a 20-month period in 1847–8, including Ann Brontë’s The Tennant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–8) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848). Both Garrett Stewart and Leah Price have recently paid attention to the way in which the reading of newspapers, tracts and novels is represented in paintings and novels from this period. As Price argues, these ‘embedded’ texts often ‘perform an antiquixotic function: everywhere present in the hands of characters, but nowhere read’ and she wittily argues for her own work as a study of ‘rejection’ rather than ‘reception’.¹ In part, the new cultural authority that was being claimed by the novel at this moment was produced through images that imagined the rejection and negation of other forms of reading. If religious tracts continued to berate the novel reader, the novel made ‘the dullness of tracts a foil to its own pleasures’.² Stewart and Price are mainly concerned with images of ‘pseudoreading’ in which the participants hide behind newspapers, or daydream while reading novels. Despite the frequent appearance in such images of the material text as an object large enough to provide a shield against social interaction, the texts in which they feature often figure the actual response of readers as an immaterial act in which the text becomes ‘disembodied’. As Price notes, Elizabeth Gaskell is just one author from this period who opposes the ornate text bought for show (such as the ‘great, large handsome Bible, all grand and golden’ in Mary Barton) with the ‘immaterial’ text actually read.³