Leah Price
How to Do Things with
Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using
books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become
an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the bible? What
made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies
who matched their books’ binding to their dress, and servants who reduced
newspapers to fish n’ chips wrap?
Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the
Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew,
Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts
and household manuals. From knickknacks to waste paper, books mattered to the
Victorians in ways that can’t be explained by their printed content alone. And
whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter
participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches
far beyond reading.
Supplementing close readings with an ethnography of how
Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for
integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian England reshapes our
understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth
century and beyond.
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