Advertisement

‘Books in my Hands — Books in my Heart — Books in my Brain’: Bibliomania, the Male Body, and Sensory Erotics in Late-Victorian Literature

  • Victoria Mills
Chapter
Part of the Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture book series (PNWC)

Abstract

Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–9) documents a bibliophile’s delight in hunting down a book in a bustling Florence flea market. This ‘square old yellow book’ is a jealously guarded find. ‘Give it back!’ the poet commands, allowing the reader possession of the volume for a fleeting moment. The passage suggests a corporeal relationship between collector and object as the book bears traces of the body of its author (his ‘brains, high-blooded’), which transform it into a nostalgic object. Such nostalgia, far from being a ‘social disease’,2 has curative potential that is couched in terms of sensory experience, it is ‘restorative / I’ the touch and sight’.

Keywords

Love Affair Sexual Inversion Genital Sense Private Paper Yellow Book 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. 1.
    E. Nesbit, ‘The Bibliophile’s Reverie’, Library Chronicle, 4 (1887), 95;Google Scholar
  2. Robert Browning, The Major Works, ed. Adam Roberts and Daniel Karlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 351.Google Scholar
  3. 2.
    Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 23.Google Scholar
  4. 3.
    In a recent essay, Michael Hatt explores reading practices in relation to what he calls the ‘homosexual imagination’. Collecting narratives draw attention to a further dimension of late-Victorian book love. See Michael Hatt, ‘The Book Beautiful: Reading, Vision and the Homosexual Imagination’, in Illustrations, Optics, Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures, ed. Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 167–84.Google Scholar
  5. 4.
    William A. Cohen, Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Cohen downplays eroticism. See also Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Sedgwick notes how ‘the sexual interest of the essays … seems to decrease’ as part of a shift from sex to affect (p. 21).Google Scholar
  6. 5.
    See Robert Morris Seiler, The Book Beautiful: Walter Pater and the House of Macmillan (London: Athlone Press, 1999);Google Scholar
  7. Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000).Google Scholar
  8. 7.
    Diana Maltz, ‘Practical Aesthetics and Decadent Rationale in George Gissing’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 28 (2000), 69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  9. 8.
    On the bachelor as a ‘threshold figure’ see Katherine V. Snyder, Bachelors, Manhood and the Novel, 1850–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  10. 9.
    Octave Uzanne, The Book-Hunter in Paris: Studies Among the Bookstalls and the Quays (London: Elliot Stock, 1893), p. 110.Google Scholar
  11. 10.
    Walter Pater, ‘Winckelmann’, in The Renaissance, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 124.Google Scholar
  12. 11.
    Bernhard Berenson, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (London: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), p. 4.Google Scholar
  13. See also Vernon Lee, Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1912).Google Scholar
  14. 12.
    Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 206.Google Scholar
  15. 13.
    James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 221.Google Scholar
  16. 14.
    De Quincey was himself a book collector. See Josephine McDonagh, ‘De Quincey and the Secret Life of Books’, in Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions, ed. Robert Morrison and Daniel S. Roberts (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 123–42.Google Scholar
  17. 15.
    Max Simon Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 27.Google Scholar
  18. 17.
    See Jean-Martin Charcot and Valentin Magnan, ‘Inversion du sens génital’ [Inversion of the Genital Sense], Archives de neurologie, 3 (1883), 53–60.Google Scholar
  19. 19.
    Buchanan wrote a review of an edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poems titled ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’. He criticized Rossetti’s poetry, along with that of Algernon Swinburne, for its ‘sensuality’ and a ‘morbid deviation from healthy forms of life’. See Thomas Maitland [Robert Buchanan], ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti’, Contemporary Review, 18 (1871), 334–50.Google Scholar
  20. 20.
    Robert Buchanan, ‘The Bookworm’, in The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan, 2 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1901), I, 176.Google Scholar
  21. 21.
    Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 26.Google Scholar
  22. 23.
    Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (London: Cassell, 1994), p. 109.Google Scholar
  23. 24.
    See, for example, Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Critics of Victorian fiction tend to focus on the ‘bad’ aspects of collecting.Google Scholar
  24. See Jim Reilly, Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad, and George Eliot (London: Routledge, 1993). Reilly focuses on the collector’s alienated relationship to the objects in his collection.Google Scholar
  25. 25.
    Eugene Field, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), p. 98.Google Scholar
  26. 27.
    Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 14, emphasis mine.Google Scholar
  27. 29.
    George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (London: Dent, 1964), p. 48.Google Scholar
  28. 30.
    Andrew Lang, Books and Bookmen (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1892), p. 106.Google Scholar
  29. 31.
    William Roberts tells us that English women are ‘as book-collectors or bibliophiles, an almost unknown quantity’. See William Roberts, The Book-Hunter in London: Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting (London: E. Stock, 1895), p. 273. In France, ‘book-huntresses’ do exist but in categories such as ‘sentimental work girls’ and ‘quiet housewives’. See Uzanne, Book-Hunter, p. 113. Such women do not enjoy the same sensory experience of books as that afforded to men. According to Uzanne, they ‘touch the books with the tops of their gloved fingers’ and they handle them badly, using one hand to flick through them and never replacing them properly in the stalls (p. 116).Google Scholar
  30. There are few female bibliophiles in fiction. An exception is Laura Jadwins in Frank Norris’s The Pit: A Story of Chicago (New York: Doubleday Page, 1903).Google Scholar
  31. 34.
    Andrew Lang, The Library (London: Macmillan, 1881), p. 28.Google Scholar
  32. 35.
    David M. Halperin, ‘Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality’, Representations, 63 (1998), 93–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  33. 36.
    Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 145.Google Scholar
  34. 37.
    Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 10.Google Scholar
  35. 39.
    See Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct; A Medico-Legal Study (Philadelphia, PA: Davis, 1892).Google Scholar
  36. 40.
    Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 124–58.Google Scholar
  37. 44.
    Carolyn Dinshaw is the first to use this term. See Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘Chaucer’s Queer Touches/A Queer Touches Chaucer’, Exemplaria, 7 (1995), 75–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  38. 45.
    Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  39. 46.
    Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘Got Medieval?’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 10 (2001), 203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  40. 47.
    Holly Furneaux, Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  41. 48.
    Steven Connor, Book of Skin (London: Reaktion, 2004), p. 264.Google Scholar
  42. 50.
    Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 257, 340. The term ‘subtle’ appears nineteen times in the novel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  43. 57.
    Kevin Hetherington, ‘Second-handedness: Consumption, Disposal and Absent Presence’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22 (2004), 171, 170.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  44. 59.
    Compton Mackenzie, Sinister Street (London: Penguin, 1983), pp. 215–16. Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) is a novel of sexual intrigue in which a man and his mistress both fall in love with Madelaine de Maupin, who is disguised as a man named Théodore.Google Scholar
  45. 62.
    George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 451.Google Scholar
  46. 63.
    Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 4 vols. (New York: Random House, 1936), II, 100.Google Scholar
  47. 68.
    The notion of ‘Queer-Friendly Gissing’ has been explored by Diana Maltz who discusses his imagining of ‘queer-heterosexual’ relationships in The Crown of Life. See Diana Maltz, ‘Bohemia’s Bo(a)rders: Queer-Friendly Gissing’, Gissing Journal, 37 (2001), 7–28. Ryecroft’s bachelor, bibliophilic behaviour identifies him with the idea of ‘straight queer’, an identity in opposition to normative sexuality. See Maltz, ‘Queer-Friendly Gissing’, 22.Google Scholar
  48. 69.
    Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 75.Google Scholar
  49. 71.
    Gustave Flaubert, Bibliomania (London: Rodale Press, 1954), pp. 11–12.Google Scholar
  50. 73.
    Kate Flint, The Victorians and Visual Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 53.Google Scholar
  51. 76.
    Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania (London: Soncino Press, 1932), p. 132.Google Scholar
  52. 78.
    Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  53. 79.
    Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, ed. Nicholas White, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 133.Google Scholar
  54. 84.
    Sigmund Freud, ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1971), XI, 167–75.Google Scholar
  55. 86.
    Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (London: Virago, 2009), p. 218.Google Scholar
  56. 92.
    Nathaniel Dole quoted in Henry H. Harper, Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1904), p. 23.Google Scholar
  57. 98.
    Chris Packard, Queer Cowboys and Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 109.Google Scholar
  58. 100.
    Elaine Freedgood, ‘Fringe’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 30 (2002), 262. Both the bachelor and the dandy are ‘threshold’ or ‘fringe’ figures.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  59. 102.
    Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 133.Google Scholar
  60. 103.
    Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Jerome Loving (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 382.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Victoria Mills 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  • Victoria Mills

There are no affiliations available

Personalised recommendations

Cite chapter

Buy options