Reading Contagion

The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print

Annika Mann

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813941783
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Primordi della storia moderna

Eighteenth-century British culture was transfixed by the threat of contagion, believing that everyday elements of the surrounding world could transmit deadly maladies from one body to the next. Physicians and medical writers warned of noxious matter circulating through air, bodily fluids, paper, and other materials, while philosophers worried that agitating passions could spread via certain kinds of writing and expression. Eighteenth-century poets and novelists thus had to grapple with the disturbing idea that literary texts might be doubly infectious, communicating dangerous passions and matter both in and on their contaminated pages.

In Reading Contagion, Annika Mann argues that the fear of infected books energized aesthetic and political debates about the power of reading, which could alter individual and social bodies by connecting people of all sorts in dangerous ways through print. Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Tobias Smollett, William Blake, and Mary Shelley ruminate on the potential of textual objects to absorb and transmit contagions with a combination of excitement and dread.This book vividly documents this cultural anxiety while explaining how writers at once reveled in the possibility that reading could transform the world while fearing its ability to infect and destroy.

1

Reading Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Medicine

Infectious or contagious Vertue and Operation then is an assimilating Quality, a conversive Force in Matter, to change the Nature of Things, by turning them into its own, when by immediate Contact one Body alters the Properties, and changes the natural inward Form and Constitution, and Disposition of another, and works it to a Conformity to it self, draws it into its own Likeness, impressing its own Character upon it, and communicating to it its own Form and Nature: matter that has this Vertue of Operation, is called infective or contagious; and the Body that is violently drawn and forced by it out of its own Form, is said to be infected.

—Mr. Place, An Hypothetical Notion of the Plague (1721)

In Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), the plague provokes an epistemological crisis. According to H. F., its narrator/editor, the plague spreads via contagious contact with the breath, sweat, or possessions of an infected person. Yet such persons do not always, or even often, present visible signs of infection; they look healthy, up until the moment they fall down dead in the streets. H. F. explains that, while occasionally contagious persons will present “tokens,” or “gangrene Spots, or mortified Flesh in small Knobs as broad as a little silver Peny,” most don’t do so until late into the period of their infection, even while “their Breath, their Sweat, [and] their very Cloths were contagious for many Days before” (188). H. F. thus creates the category of “the well” to describe those who are infected but not yet visibly ill, a category that effectively erases distinctions between diseased (“sick”) and healthy (“sound”) persons. He writes that “it was not the sick People only, from whom the Plague was immediately receiv’d by others that were sound, but THE WELL” (183):

By the Well, I mean such as had received the Contagion, and had it really upon them, and in their Blood, yet did not shew the Consequences of it in their Countenances, nay even were not sensible of it themselves, as many were not for several Days: These breathed Death in every Place, and upon every Body who came near them; nay their very Cloaths retained the Infection, their Hands would infect the Things they touch’d. . . . And this is the Reason why it is impossible in a Visitation to prevent the spreading of the Plague by the utmost human Vigilance, (viz.) that it is impossible to know the infected People from the sound; or that the infected People should perfectly know themselves. (184)1

Helen Thompson has argued that, because there is no bodily organ capable of sensing one’s absorption of contagious matter, infection by the plague cannot be known, even by those who are already dying.2 Because infection is insensible, Defoe’s H. F. asserts that print is necessary to produce knowledge about contagious disease. Thus, for many scholars, A Journal of the Plague Year operates not only as a hinge between religious and secular plague narratives3 but also as propaganda for the healing power of print, which still possessed “reputational instability” during this early period.4 And with good reason. At the outset of the text, H. F. distinguishes between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by reference to the ubiquity of print publication during the latter period: “We had no such thing as printed News Papers in those Days, to spread Rumours and Reports of Things; and to improve them by the Invention of Men, as I have liv’d to see practis’d since” (3). He further explains that the goal of the Journal is to disseminate useful information about the plague, which will work as a “Direction” (10) for future readers. “I desire this Account may pass” with those who come after “rather for a Direction to themselves to act by, than a History of my actings,” H. F. writes, “seeing it may not be of one Farthing value to them to note what became of me” (10).

Scholars disagree about whether Defoe’s text accrues this necessary stability for print—whether H. F. reveals print as cure for or contributing cause of the plague (or perhaps even, as the epigraph for this chapter implies, as identical to it). In the readings of Paula McDowell and Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, Defoe’s Journal suggests that print produces salutary distance during a time of disease.5 According to these scholars, the bills of mortality map when and where the plague is present, thereby allowing Londoners to avoid disease.6 Indeed, H. F. lauds this capacity: at the outset of the text, the bills “turn’d the Peoples Eyes pretty much towards that End of the town” (4) and then from “St. Giles’s and the Westminster End of town” (179) to “the Eastern suburbs and the Southwark side” (181) until, by the end (during the height of the infection), the bills were “sufficient to alarm the whole trading part of the World . . . on their Guard against [London]” (206). The interpretive information provided by the bills thus replaces the fruitless (and dangerous) activities of those who attempt to read “Figures” and “Representations” (23) in clouds. H. F. continually emphasizes the accuracy of the knowledge that the bills demonstrate: “The Weekly Bills themselves at that time evidently discover this Truth” (199). Thus, both the bills and H. F.’s own Journal are elevated over other spurious printed publications (those “Predictions and Prognostications such as Lilly’s Almanack, Gadbury’s Astrological Predictions; Poor Robin’s Almanack and the like” [22]) that, as McDowell has shown, are aligned both with dangerous orality and with superstitious women.7

Diverging from this reading of print as that which protects the body from disease, Jayne Elizabeth Lewis and Peter DeGabriele argue that A Journal of the Plague Year instead aligns writing’s occult powers with the plague and that survival is achieved not by persons keeping their distance from one another via the public (printed) sphere but instead by individuals seeking out intimate encounters with unknown others.8 Indeed, although H. F.’s narrative voice suggests that reading the bills is the best way to see and avoid disease, at the end of the Journal even the bills fail. “When the violent Rage of the Distemper in September came upon us,” H. F. writes, “it drove us out of all Measures: Men did then no more die by Tale and by Number, they might put out a Weekly Bill, and call them seven or eight Thousand, or what they pleas’d; ’tis certain they died by Heaps, and were buried by Heaps, that is to say without Account” (227). During the height of the infection, both narrative (“Tale”) and statistics (“Number”) fail to produce knowledge of any efficacy. Further, as DeGabriele and Juengel have noted, H. F.’s narrative voice is just one of many in the text that cannot secure its own survival without another, later writer. Most strikingly, in the case of H. F. himself, a later editor provides an explanation of H. F.’s own burial via a footnote: “N.B. The Author of this Journal, lyes buried in that very Ground, being at his own Desire, his Sister having been buried there a few Years before” (223).9

These persuasive yet divergent interpretations of A Journal of the Plague Year index how print appears differently under the pressure of contagion. Indeed, the book makes visible a different self-reflexivity regarding the circulation of print and the act of reading than that which has been previously excavated by scholars of eighteenth-century print culture and book history generally. Christopher Flint, Jonathan Lamb, and Christina Lupton have all documented that eighteenth-century authors were extremely aware of the unstable conditions governing textual production and circulation during this period, although they disagree about how such awareness manifests itself and what it produces.10 For Flint, literary writers experiment with the layout of the page and include typographical marks in their texts to ensure agency for the author who creates them rather than for the printer or reader. For Lamb and Lupton, on the other hand, figures (particularly personification), as well as graphic marks, draw attention to the text as a material object and in so doing grant power to the medium of communication rather than to either author or reader.11 This chapter argues that Defoe’s Journal traffics in the kind of awareness identified by Lamb and Lupton and yet exacerbates it by illuminating an agency that is even more difficult to control. As texts circulate, they may spread not just knowledge but the dangerous corpuscles of plague, since readers’ “Hands would infect the Things they touch’d” (184).

Under the pressure of contagion, H. F.’s attempts to separate and hierarchize texts and types of reading only make visible the potentially toxic effects of their spongy, porous pages. Even while H. F. tells his readers that (certain) printed publications can disseminate knowledge of disease and that (certain) acts of reading are productive of health, he follows contemporary medical discourse on contagion by describing the porous page as a potential medium of infection.12 In using medical theories of contagion as his license for organizing (and sanitizing) print, H. F. ironically only reminds his readers that the act of reading—which can provide knowledge or communicate passion—is also haptic, and thus potentially transformative, because of the contact between porous pages and reading bodies. Thus, his corrective also makes readers aware of the potentially toxic status of Defoe’s own text, which might both raise new collectives and spread epidemic disease.

This chapter aims to make such toxic self-reflexivity revisible, first by tracing how theories of contagion act as an internal disruption of eighteenth-century medical discourse. Such disruption is particularly evident during the 1720s, when plague once again threatens English shores. As scholars have shown, the paradigm for eighteenth-century medicine is primarily environmental, inspired in part by a vogue for Hippocrates (particularly his Epidemics, Airs, Waters, and Places and Fevers), which was promoted by the seventeenth-century physician Thomas Sydenham, who was posthumously named the “English Hippocrates.”13 Following Sydenham, eighteenth-century physicians postulated that human health is primarily determined by the body’s interaction with environmental conditions external to that body, which act on and shape each body’s constitution (particularly, as I explain in my introduction, the fibers of the nervous system). These external conditions included occupation, living conditions, and geography, as well as the effects of climate, such as temperature, humidity, air pressure, wind, and precipitation, which physicians were especially concerned with and which could be perceived, mapped, and measured with the aid of those new instruments provided by Royal Society members themselves.14

As Jan Golinski and Robert Markley have argued, in its focus on the effects of climate, eighteenth-century medical discourse provides a largely place-bound model of disease and health, one that could be deployed in support of conceptions of both Great Britain’s own climactic superiority and its colonial interventions.15 Physicians following Hippocrates assert that diseases primarily arise from miasmas, or air corrupted or polluted by the presence of rotting animal or vegetable matter, and that these miasmas are more regularly generated by climatic conditions (heat and moisture) outside northern Europe. Further, building on Thomas Willis’s discovery of the nervous system, such physicians emphasize that cold air and rapid changes in air within a controlled range are the best conditions for keeping a person’s nervous fibers springy and responsive. Eighteenth-century medicine thus provides a rationale for the conviction that England’s particular climate is generative of a civilized, polite, healthy population.16 In tandem, the tropics—in their climatic differences from England and northern Europe more generally—operate as the locus of disease, of “biohazards” that, as Markley has shown, align with an ideology of improvement used to justify British expansion in those locations (“Putridness in the Air,” 107).17

Yet, as both Golinski and Markley emphasize, the explanations provided by environmental medicine, like the ideologies that they prop up, are not seamless: still widely held beliefs in supernatural and occult powers routinely erupt throughout the century in response to catastrophic events, particularly storms, so the analysis of climatic phenomena does not always confirm such global superiority.18 The remainder of this chapter argues that medical theories of contagion, even as they are proffered from within the premises of environmental medicine, act as a similar kind of catastrophic challenge to its global maps of disease and health. Like Defoe’s H. F., prominent eighteenth-century physicians such as Richard Mead and George Cheyne argue that contagious diseases like the plague are caused by specific, invisible corpuscles, or matter, which are spread by porous and absorptive entities (bodies, media, objects). Their etiology of contagion is not entirely separate from miasma, for they also postulate that miasmatic diseases can become contagious via continual, imperceptible contacts among those infected bodies, media, or objects. Yet by postulating that contagious diseases are both generated by specific climatic situations and capable of being mediated, transformed, and sometimes co-created by interactions among mobile and infected entities (particularly air), their arguments disperse agential force. As a result, theories of contagion impede the stated purpose of medical writing (and Defoe’s Journal) more largely: to provide a cure for, or protection from, disease. In place of a mapped geography of human body and surrounding world (from which one could identify a position of safety), these texts instead describe a world of soft, porous bodies alike in their ability to mediate contagion—a world that includes their own pages. Thus awareness of the circulation of the porous page among diverse readers proves to be as disruptive for the medical text as it is for Defoe’s strange plague narrative, since the same technology used to produce knowledge about disease is revealed as a means for its spread.

In order to demonstrate that eighteenth-century theories of contagion disrupt medical discourse and that such disruption is evidenced in Defoe’s Journal, this chapter must first return to the early modern period. During that time, still-dominant Galenic medical discourse defines disease as a state of impeded function, first triggered by corrupted air or seasonal influences but only arising within bodies already disposed to be diseased. Faced with the pressure of new and devastating infectious diseases, however, emergent Paracelsan and Helmontian theories argue instead that certain diseases are exopathic and ontological: they possess their own identities and invade the body from without. As early modern scholars have shown, these divergent models of disease become strangely compatible when traditional Galenic medicine successfully incorporates newer iatrochemical theories and when the theories themselves make room for both endogenous and exopathic explanations of disease. As a result of these accommodations, early eighteenth-century physicians and medical writers inherit a strange, volatile mix of endogenous and exopathic disease theory. That inheritance continues to trouble medical discourse throughout the eighteenth century, when environmental medicine seeks to identify foreign locations as diseased and in need of British intervention and when print is identified as the primary means by which to produce knowledge about disease and its locations. For if theories of miasma aid in these...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Theorizing Reading in the Age of Print
• 1. Reading Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Medicine
• 2. Infection: Inspiring Alexander Pope’s Dunciad
• 3. Inoculation: Tobias Smollett and Remediation
• 4. Propagation: Regeneration and William Blake’s “Visible Form”
• 5. Extinction: Sanitation and the End of Plague in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
• Afterword: Germs, Circulating Libraries, and the Great Book Scare
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index