Book-Men, Book Clubs, and the Romantic Literary Sphere

Ina Ferris

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137367600
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This book re-reads the tangled relations of book culture and literary culture in the early nineteenth century by restoring to view the figure of the bookman and the effaced history of his book clubs. As outliers inserting themselves into the matrix of literary production rather than remaining within that of reception, both provoked debate by producing, writing, and circulating books in ways that expanded fundamental points of literary orientation in lateral directions not coincident with those of the literary sphere. Deploying a wide range of historical, archival and literary materials, the study combines the history and geography of books, cultural theory, and literary history to make visible a bookish array of alterative networks, genres, and locations that were obscured by the literary sphere in establishing its authority as arbiter of the modern book.

Part I

Urban Associations

1

Unmooring the Literary Word

The Rev. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, may be called the Typo-Dandy. He has long been well known in the literary world as the Beau Brummell of book-makers.

The London Literary Gazette, 26 May 1821

The idea of writing books germinates out of the material book and not the converse; the furniture invents for itself a character out of its own cloth.

Régis Debray, ‘The Book as Symbolic Object’

Romantic bibliomaniacs have lately become a lot more interesting: ‘pests’ disturbing literary relations, ‘garish’ twins of sober bibliographers, and avatars of ‘all types of wild, inordinate, improper and forbidden reading practices’ (including the practice of non-reading).¹ No longer negligible book fools to be ridiculed or indulged, the extreme bookmen of early nineteenth-century bibliomania – disorderly figures all – are increasingly read in terms of provocative energies, forms of interference within a literary system which may not block its operation but crucially nudge it from the margins. Thus in Philip Connell’s important reading of the bibliomania (which sparked much of the new literary interest in this phenomenon), the sudden ardour for collecting early printed books that swept wealthy patrician circles in the first two decades of the nineteenth century was a spur to the highly consequential, broadly conservative gentry project of remodelling the literary past into a common ‘national heritage’. Significantly, however, this function depended on the expulsion of the more extravagant ‘effete’ fringes of the mania.² More recently, Deidre Lynch, repositioning literature within a history of modern affections, finds in the bibliomaniac’s ‘disorderly desires’ a generative power, as these desires ramified into the wider culture (suitably subdued) to underwrite the period’s ‘consolidation of literature as a love-object’ (Lynch 114, 106). Building from work by these and other scholars of the bibliomania phenomenon, this chapter pursues the analysis of the bibliomania’s strained relationship to the literary sphere but from a rather different angle.³ Both in its own time and since, bibliomania has been generally placed under the category of collection, understood as ‘the passion for collecting books, at enormous prices, with almost exclusive regard to mere rarity’.⁴ But Romantic bibliomania also manifested itself in the production of particular kinds of books. Moving this less-noticed dimension into the foreground, I want to suggest that the specificity of the pressure exerted by the bibliomania on the early nineteenth-century literary sphere lay as much in its character as a practice of writing and making books as in its role as a form of collection.

What made the bookman suspect in literary circles was not simply his inordinate attachment to the ‘body’ of books, and his eagerness to handle, collect, and decorate them. He was also eager to write about and produce books, enacting a key move out the matrix of reception inhabited by collectors into the matrix of production. Unlike the period’s other gendered figure of misplaced literary ardour, the female reader, the bookman represents not only a deformation of readership but also a deformation of authorship. Herein, as much as in his way of encountering books, lay his unsettling effect. Staging his book mania in printed words and printed books, the bibliomaniac claimed status as a literary man: ‘amateurs of black-letter’, as Henry Hallam sniffed, who assumed ‘the credit of a literary man’ on the basis of ‘a title-page acquaintance with books’.⁵ This is not to downplay the cultural significance of the bibliomaniac as a book collector but it is to argue that as a bibliophilic writer, bibliographer, and book producer the bibliomaniac hit a literary nerve in a way the collector, more easily brushed aside as the proverbial Book Fool, did not. The crucible of all this productive activity was the Roxburghe Club, formed in June 1812 in direct response to the celebrated Roxburghe sale. This club and its founder and vice-president, Thomas Frognall Dibdin, whose 1809 Bibliomania made him the public face of British bibliomania, are my focus. Unlike the Roxburghe sale, the Roxburghe Club has largely escaped attention in Romantic studies, but from it emerged significant innovations in book culture: a new kind of book society, a new class of book, a distinctive style of book discourse, and the new (and very peculiar) bookish genre of bibliographical romance invented by Dibdin.

All came under sharp attack from a literary-critical sphere for which the bibliomania had become and was to remain an enduring sore spot, an irritant even when dismissed or derided as a comic absurdity. The November 1811 issue of the Monthly Review, for instance, printed three consecutive articles on bibliomania, starting with a lengthy notice of the recently published and much revised version of Dibin’s Bibliomania. This was followed by briefer notices of the volume that had prompted Dibdin’s original 1809 text, John Ferriar’s similarly titled Bibliomania (1809) and James Beresford’s satiric Bibliosophia; or Book Wisdom (1810).⁶ Each article reiterates the same point: the entire bibliomaniac phenomenon is hardly worth attention, dubious in both its book-collecting and bibliographical registers. All the same, the journal can’t leave the subject alone. Bibliomania and the literary sphere were tied together in a dynamic characterized by a discomfiting interplay of proximity and distance. Occupying very different social sectors both nonetheless defined themselves in terms of detachment from the commercial market (even as they operated inside the commercial order), and they did so bookishly. That is, they sought to remove a class of books from the indifferent sphere of commerce, where books circulated as a consumable among other consumables in a circuit of exchange, by carving out a second-order space under the sign of selection. If they sharply diverged on the criteria of selection and disagreed on the question of circulation, neither allowed circulation to determine a book’s value. On their side, critical reviewers sorted through the mass of contemporary publications (while giving some attention to books of the past) with the intent of creating an enlightened modern ‘reading public’ out of an unpredictable reading ‘crowd’: the question of reading governed critical practice. Bibliomaniacs, on the other hand, notoriously downplayed reading and dissemination, committed instead to unreadable old books outside current circulation which they kept largely to themselves. These books they understood as literal ‘pieces’ of the past, material objects they valued as the products of printers and other book-craftsmen not as immaterial authorial texts. These they were dedicated to preserving either physically or through techniques of description. Circumventing the common ground of the public, they formed a coterie culture that was content to supplement rather than reform current taste.

The scenario I have sketched pertains primarily to the bibliomaniac in the role of collector, and it grounds much of the critical commentary on the bibliomania phenomenon in general. But what really rankled when the bibliomaniac turned writer was a short-circuiting of the ‘common’ ground of language and its communicative function. Dibdin was the primary offender, and he stands as the pre-eminent sign of bibliomaniac writing. The mannered, performative prose of his much ridiculed ‘Dibdinese’ veers wildly between technical bibliographical data and metaphoric flights, effusions of book rapture and sober contemporary commentary. Flamboyant and stagey, it presents the bookman as a consciously stylized character (an intermeshing of geek and aesthete). As a preliminary sample, let me offer Dibdin’s account of the Roxburghe sale in The Bibliographical Decameron (1817), which remains a main source for book and library historians even as most hasten to distance themselves from its style. The sale of the Duke of Roxburghe’s library lasted for forty-one days (there were over 10,000 lots on offer), and it received remarkably wide coverage with notices appearing in the daily press, along with commentaries in weeklies and monthlies. The focus of public attention was the spectacle of the sale’s climactic moment on 17 June 1812, when the second Earl Spencer and the Marquess of Blandford (later Duke of Marlborough) engaged in a fierce competition for the first edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron printed in Venice by Christian Valdarfer in 1471. The book was eventually knocked down to Blandford for the staggering sum of £2,260 (a price that stood as a record for the next seventy-two years). The publicity accorded the Roxburghe sale injected glamour into the musty world of old books and invested bibliomania itself with an aura of celebrity, even as it generated derision and predictable condemnation of aristocratic excess. For most of Dibdin’s contemporaries, as Kristian Jensen notes, the Roxburghe sale served as dramatic confirmation of the way in which an overheated speculative economy was unsettling the distinction between different kinds of objects. The price given for the books at the sale, he observes, signalled a change in their status: now not so much ‘expensive books’ as luxury merchandise, whose function and meaning radically diverged from those commonly accorded to books. As he stresses, the problem lay not in the sums themselves (no one objected when racehorses were sold for similar sums) but in their signalling the disconcerting coexistence of ‘opposing values attached to the same object’.⁷

Dibdin’s own account of this event is weirdly unstable, at once infused with genuine excitement and celebration but permeated too with an irony reinforced by multiple filters and a double-levelled text. In the upper text the story of the sale is narrated by Lisardo, one of the stylized bookish characters inhabiting this work, who adopts a mock-heroic frame elaborating a fanciful chivalric conceit of ‘the far-famed ROXBURGHE FIGHT’ in which resolute ‘book-champions’ engage in ‘deathly’ contests, spilling ‘blood’ on the auction floor. Ironizing his act of narration, he approaches the climactic moment by warning readers to ‘prepare for something terrific!’⁸ So ‘terrific’ in fact he can convey its impact only through surreal hyperbole and emphatic typography:

when the hammer fell at Two Thousand Two Hundred and Sixty Pounds upon the Valdarfer Boccacio of 1471, the spectators stood aghast! – and the sound of Mr. Evans’s prostrate sceptre of dominion reached, and resounded from, the utmost shores of Italy. The echo of the fallen hammer was heard in the libraries of Rome, of Milan, and St. Mark. Boccaccio himself startled from his slumber of some five hundred years. (Decameron 3: 62–5)

But Lisardo’s is not the only telling: his narrative trickles out, a few lines at a time, over some twenty pages whose bulk is taken up by a massive running footnote in much smaller type detailing Dibdin’s personal recollections and report of the sale, to which he adds various sub-notes.

The story is thus told at least doubly. Although Dibdin’s authorial voice duplicates the mock-heroic tropes in the upper text, on the whole his sub-text injects a more modern and prosaic note. And its further division into sub-sub-notes introduces other voices: press notices, letters, and so forth. A long letter from a fellow bibliomaniac, for instance, decries ‘the shameful prices’ given at the sale (Decameron 3:63n). Motifs of romance and commerce mingle, as do archaic and modern idioms: ‘What a day was this ROMAUNT DAY! Producing for the coffers of John Duke of Roxburghe, somewhere between five and six thousand pounds’ (Decameron 3:68n). Most telling, however, is Dibdin’s framing of the Roxburghe sale with two portraits, not of the titled book collectors involved in the sale (as might be expected) but of the booksellers associated with the event: George Nicol, co-founder with William Bulmer of the renowned Shakspeare Press, who prepared the catalogue for the sale; and Robert Harding Evans, whose debut as an auctioneer at the sale launched a long career in this role. ‘Let Messrs Nicol and Evans move quietly down to a future age, by the side of each other,’ Dibdin writes, ‘as they were once conjointly busied in the Roxburghe contest’ (Decameron 3:51n).

This is the discourse of the ‘book fancy’ I look at more closely in the second section of the chapter. Making print its literal ground, it crystallizes the bibliomaniac’s provocative relationship to both books and words by effecting the reversal to which Régis Debray points in the chapter’s epigraph: ‘The idea of writing books germinates out of the material book and not the converse; the furniture invents for itself a character out of its own cloth.’⁹ Himself a ‘character’ invented by books, the bookman drenched them in his bookish fancy, ‘trifling’ in particular with the powers of figuration definitive of literary language. Hence the problem presented for the literary sphere by the bookman turned bibliomaniac was not so much that he effaced literariness by his attraction to the ‘outside’ of books, as routinely charged. Rather, it was that by saturating books in self-consciously elaborate figures and casting them in mock-heroic plots, he redirected literary energies to the material book itself, unmooring the literary word in the process. Eschewing standard protocols of representation, the self-propelled prose of book fancy at once annoyed and attracted, its insouciant pleasure in its own artifice miming the ideal of an aesthetic realm detached from the responsible realm of signification. Even as it was mocked, however, this style proved oddly contagious – ‘communicable’ in a darker sense – as it moved down from the more elite venues of bibliomaniacal collection and publication to percolate into the shabby-genteel realm of the periodical essayists where, as the chapter’s final section shows, book fancy modulated into a less extravagant register – bibliophilic rather than bibliomaniac – but continued to spar with the literary word as rooted neither in a subjectivity nor in the natural order but in words that came from and returned to old books.

Bibliomania’s book club: the founding of the Roxburghe Club

On the evening of the climactic auction of the Valdarfer Boccaccio, Dibdin gathered together eighteen ‘choice bibliomanical spirits’ to dine at St Alban’s tavern in Fleet Street.¹⁰ Talking over the momentous event of that day, they offered a series of toasts to early printers, starting with Valdarfer and moving on to English printers before concluding with a toast to ‘THE CAUSE OF BIBLIOMANIA ALL OVER THE WORLD.’ Thus energized, the participants agreed to hold an anniversary dinner each year on the same date, the 17th of June, and elected Earl Spencer president, Dibdin vice-president (Reminiscences 375–6). The Roxburghe Club thus took its place in the line of eighteenth-century elite dining and dilettante clubs, but as a book society it made a decision that moved it into the nineteenth century. ‘It was proposed for each member, in turn,’ Dibdin reports, ‘according to the order of his name in the alphabet, to furnish the Society with a REPRINT of some rare old tract, or composition – chiefly of poetry’ (Decameron 72n). The innovation lay not in the reprinting of old texts – the age was awash in reprints of all sorts – but in the inauguration of a new publishing format to run alongside regular commercial publication. This format ushered in a new class or species of book – the club book – which was to become a distinctive feature of the landscape of printed books over the course of the century. Spotlighting their ubiquity, a piece on ‘Club Books’ in Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts in 1875, crediting the Roxburghe Club with initiating ‘the club-book mania’, surveys printing clubs in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, specifying around three dozen and claiming they ‘fill up a place in the literary history of modern times’.¹¹

Circulation of club books was usually if not always limited to the sponsoring club, and this was the case with the reprints produced by/for the Roxburghe Club whose membership was eventually set at thirty-one. In effect, the Roxburghe Club was dedicated to producing rare new books out of rare old ones. Marinell Ash suggests its decision to become a publishing club may have stemmed from worry that the spectacular inflation of rare book prices might herald a drying up of supply. How, then, could bibliomaniacs keep collectin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Bookish Outliers
• Part I Urban Associations
• Part II Beyond the Metropolis
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index