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’.
Here it is, this I toss and take again;
Small-quarto size, part print part manuscript:
A book in shape but, really, pure crude fact
Secreted from man’s life when hearts beat hard,
And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since.
Give it me back! The thing’s restorative
I’ the touch and sight.1
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Notes
E. Nesbit, ‘The Bibliophile’s Reverie’, Library Chronicle, 4 (1887), 95;
Robert Browning, The Major Works, ed. Adam Roberts and Daniel Karlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 351.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 23.
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.
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).
See Robert Morris Seiler, The Book Beautiful: Walter Pater and the House of Macmillan (London: Athlone Press, 1999);
Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
Diana Maltz, ‘Practical Aesthetics and Decadent Rationale in George Gissing’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 28 (2000), 69.
On the bachelor as a ‘threshold figure’ see Katherine V. Snyder, Bachelors, Manhood and the Novel, 1850–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Octave Uzanne, The Book-Hunter in Paris: Studies Among the Bookstalls and the Quays (London: Elliot Stock, 1893), p. 110.
Walter Pater, ‘Winckelmann’, in The Renaissance, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 124.
Bernhard Berenson, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (London: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), p. 4.
See also Vernon Lee, Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1912).
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 206.
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 221.
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.
Max Simon Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 27.
See Jean-Martin Charcot and Valentin Magnan, ‘Inversion du sens génital’ [Inversion of the Genital Sense], Archives de neurologie, 3 (1883), 53–60.
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.
Robert Buchanan, ‘The Bookworm’, in The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan, 2 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1901), I, 176.
Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 26.
Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (London: Cassell, 1994), p. 109.
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.
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.
Eugene Field, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), p. 98.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 14, emphasis mine.
George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (London: Dent, 1964), p. 48.
Andrew Lang, Books and Bookmen (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1892), p. 106.
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).
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).
Andrew Lang, The Library (London: Macmillan, 1881), p. 28.
David M. Halperin, ‘Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality’, Representations, 63 (1998), 93–120.
Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 145.
Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 10.
See Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct; A Medico-Legal Study (Philadelphia, PA: Davis, 1892).
Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 124–58.
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.
Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 151.
Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘Got Medieval?’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 10 (2001), 203.
Holly Furneaux, Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 214.
Steven Connor, Book of Skin (London: Reaktion, 2004), p. 264.
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.
Kevin Hetherington, ‘Second-handedness: Consumption, Disposal and Absent Presence’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22 (2004), 171, 170.
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.
George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 451.
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 4 vols. (New York: Random House, 1936), II, 100.
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.
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.
Gustave Flaubert, Bibliomania (London: Rodale Press, 1954), pp. 11–12.
Kate Flint, The Victorians and Visual Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 53.
Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania (London: Soncino Press, 1932), p. 132.
Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 3.
Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, ed. Nicholas White, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 133.
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.
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (London: Virago, 2009), p. 218.
Nathaniel Dole quoted in Henry H. Harper, Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1904), p. 23.
Chris Packard, Queer Cowboys and Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 109.
Elaine Freedgood, ‘Fringe’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 30 (2002), 262. Both the bachelor and the dandy are ‘threshold’ or ‘fringe’ figures.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 133.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Jerome Loving (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 382.
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© 2012 Victoria Mills
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Mills, V. (2012). ‘Books in my Hands — Books in my Heart — Books in my Brain’: Bibliomania, the Male Body, and Sensory Erotics in Late-Victorian Literature. In: Boehm, K. (eds) Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283658_7
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