Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-mwwwr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-09-08T06:52:19.990Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

BODIES OF SCHOLARSHIP: WITNESSING THE LIBRARY IN LATE-VICTORIAN FICTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2010

Daniel Cook
Daniel Cook*
Affiliation:
Saginaw Valley State University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In one of the fictive dialogues from his 1872 book The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. dispensed advice to any scholar planning to start a private library:

I have a kind of notion of the way in which a library ought to be put together – no, I don't mean that, I mean ought to grow. . . . A scholar must shape his own shell, secrete it one might almost say, for secretion is only separation, you know, of certain elements derived from the material world about us. And a scholar's study, with books lining its walls, is his shell. It isn't a mollusk's shell, either; it's a caddice-worm's shell. (211)

Here, the scholar's library entails separation in several senses both physical and ideal. On the one hand, books form a literal carapace insulating the scholar from the outside world – and perhaps even from the distractions of home life. At the same time, the library operates by separation in the sense of discrimination. In accumulating his library, the scholar winnows a vast textual tradition into the manageable dimensions of a single room, and curriculum just enough for a singular human life. Most interesting, however, is the suggestion that the scholar “secretes” the library, as though the books are somehow synthesized from within as an expression of, and memorial to, the scholar's essential self. The caddice worm, as Holmes informs us, “has his special fancy as to what he will pick up and glue together, with a kind of natural cement he provides himself” (211). This may strike us as a crudely glandular way of envisioning the relationship between tradition and the individual talent. Nevertheless, the passage is in keeping with the late-Victorian obsession with the private library, as well as with period representations of the scholar, who is best encountered within a concealing womb of books, carrying on secret exchange with the dusty relics of his own intellectual pilgrimage.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 107 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

WORKS CITED

ActonDalberg-, John (Lord Acton) Dalberg-, John (Lord Acton). “German Schools of History.” The English Historical Review 1.1 (1886): 7–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Altick, Richard D. “From Aldine to Everyman: Cheap Reprint Series of the English Classics 1830–1906.” Studies in Bibliography 11 (1958): 3–24.Google Scholar
Atherton, Carol. “The Organisation of Literary Knowledge: The Study of English in the Late Nineteenth Century.” The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain. Ed. Daunton, Martin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 219–34.Google Scholar
Baker, James. “Books Read by Coleridge and Southey, from the Records of Bristol Library.” Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts 7 (February 1890): 75–76.Google Scholar
Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History. New York: Norton, 2003.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Foss, Paul, Patton, Paul, and Beitchman, Philip. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting.” Illuminations. Trans. Zohn, Henry. Ed. Arendt, Hannah. New York: Schocken, 1968. 59–67.Google Scholar
Birrell, Augustine. “Book-buying.” 1887. Essays: A Century of Essays from Caxton to R. L. Stevenson & the Later Writers. London: Dent, 1933. 433–36.Google Scholar
Booth, Alison. “Men and Women of the Time, Victorian Prosopographies.” Life Writing and Victorian Culture. Ed. Amigoni, David. London: Ashgate, 2005. 41–66.Google Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.Google Scholar
Buurma, Rachel Sagner. “Anonymity, Corporate Authority, and the Archive: The Production of Authorship in Late-Victorian England.” Victorian Studies 50.1 (2007): 15–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. “The Hero as Man of Letters: Johnson, Rousseau, Burns.” 1841. The Complete Works of Thomas Carlyle. Vol. 12. Sartor Resartus, Heroes and Hero-Worship. New York: Collier, 1897. 377–416.Google Scholar
Davis, Philip. “High Realism.” The Oxford English Literary History. Vol. 8. 1830–1880, The Victorians. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. 358–403.Google Scholar
Doudan, Ximénès. Pensées et Fragments. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1881.Google Scholar
Edwards, Edward. Libraries and Founders of Libraries. London: Trübner, 1864.Google Scholar
Edwards, Edward. Memoirs of Libraries. 2 vols. London: Trübner, 1859.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1872. London: Penguin 2003.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. Romola. 1863. London: Penguin, 1980.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Trans. Miskowiec, Jay. Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22–27.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” The Critical Tradition: Classical Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. Richter, David H.. Boston: Bedford, 1998. 890–900.Google Scholar
Froude, J. A.The Nemesis of Faith. London: Chapman, 1849.Google Scholar
Gissing, George. The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. 1903. London: Dent, 1964.Google Scholar
Gladstone, W. E. “On Books and the Housing of Them.” Nineteenth Century 27 (March 1890): 384–96.Google Scholar
Gladstone, W. E. “‘Robert Elsmere’ and the Battle of Belief.” Nineteenth Century 23 (May 1888): 766–88.Google Scholar
Gross, John. The Rise and the Fall of the Man of Letters: A Study of the Idiosyncratic and the Humane in Modern Literature. New York: Collier, 1969.Google Scholar
Hamerton, Philip Gilbert. The Intellectual Life. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873.Google Scholar
Harrison, Frederic. The Choice of Books. 1886. London: Macmillan, 1907.Google Scholar
Heyck, T. W.The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England. London: Croom Helm, 1982.Google Scholar
Holmes, Oliver Wendell. The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 1872. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899.Google Scholar
Hunt, Leigh. “Autumnal Commencement of Fires.” 1819. The English Familiar Essay, Representative Texts. Ed. Bryan, Frank and Ronald, S. Crane. Boston: Ginn, 1916. 279–82.Google Scholar
Ireland, Alexander. The Book-Lover's Enchiridion: A Treasury of Thoughts on the Solace and Companionship of Books. London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1888.Google Scholar
James, Henry. “The Death of the Lion.” 1894. Selected Tales of Henry James. London: Richards, 1963.Google Scholar
Joseph, Gerhard. “The Labyrinth and the Library: A View from the Temple in Martin Chuzzlewit.” Dickens Studies Annual 15 (1986): 1–22.Google Scholar
Lamb, Charles. “New Year's Eve.” 1821. The Works of Charles Lamb. Vol. 3. Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee, 1860. 51–59.Google Scholar
Le Fanu, Sheridan. “Green Tea.” 1872. In a Glass Darkly. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1995. 3–32.Google Scholar
Lubbock, John. “On the Pleasure of Reading.” Contemporary Review 49 (January-June 1886): 240–51.Google Scholar
Morley, John. Recollections. New York: Macmillan, 1917.Google Scholar
Nietzsche, Frederick. On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. 1874. Trans. Preuss, Peter. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980.Google Scholar
Nuttall, A. D.Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Oliphant, Margaret. The Library Window. 1896. Ed. Winston, Elizabeth. Tampa: U of Tampa P, 2007.Google Scholar
“Our Booking-Office.” Punch 92 (26 Nov. 1887): 244.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. Appreciations, with an Essay on Style. London: Macmillan, 1889.Google Scholar
Pattison, Mark. “Books and Critics.” Fortnightly Review 22 (Nov. 1877): 659–79.Google Scholar
Pattison, Mark. “Life of Montaigne.” Essays by Mark Pattison, Series II. London: Routledge, 1908. 240–62.Google Scholar
Perrot, Michelle, ed. “Introduction to “Backstage” by Alain Corbin. A History of Private Life. Vol. 4, From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War. Trans. Goldhammer, Arthur. Ed. Ariès, Philippe and Duby, Georges. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Poulet, Georges. “Phenomenology of Reading.” New Literary History 1.1 (1969): 53–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Lewis. “Trafficking in Literary Authority: Mudie's Select Library and the Commodification of the Victorian Novel.” Victorian Literature and Culture 34.1 (2006): 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruskin, John. “Of Kings’ Treasuries.” 1865. Sesame and Lilies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900. 1–59.Google Scholar
Stephen, Leslie. “Perishable Books.” Among My Books. Ed. Traill, H. D.. New York: Longmans, Green, 1898. 37–43.Google Scholar
Stewart, Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Sutherland, John. Mrs. Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Taylor, Marvin J. “The Anatomy of Bibliography: Book Collecting, Bibliography, and Male Homosocial Discourse.” Textual Practice 14.3 (2000): 457–77.Google Scholar
“Theology in Fiction.” Atlantic Monthly 62 (Nov. 1888): 699–706.Google Scholar
Verne, Jules. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. 1870. Trans. Bonner, Anthony. New York: Bantam, 1962.Google Scholar
Waller, Philip. Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Ward, Mary Augusta (Mrs. Humphry Ward). “A Morning in the Bodleian.” Fox How: privately printed, 1871.Google Scholar
Ward, Mary Augusta. “The New Reformation: A Dialogue.” Nineteenth Century 25 (March 1889): 454–80.Google Scholar
Ward, Mary Augusta. Robert Elsmere. London: Macmillan, 1888.Google Scholar
Ward, Mary Augusta. A Writer's Recollections. 2 vols. London: Harper, 1918.Google Scholar
Warner, Michael. “Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature: 1875–1914.” Criticism 27.1 (1985): 1–28.Google Scholar
Wheeler, Michael. “Mapping the Victorian Age: Robert Elsmere.” The Art of Allusion in Victorian Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1979. 116–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“The Woman of Feeling.” British Weekly: A Journal of Social and Christian Progress 3 (March 1888): 346.Google Scholar