George Eliot and the production of consumers

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Winter 1997 by Leah Price

Where Eliot wants a public, Main gives her a market. The gilt-edged pages of the Sayings literalize Main's promise of the text's "rich worth": they advertise its status as a material object and a consumer good. Eliot's criticism of the vulgar audience and gaudy binding of the Birthday Book repeats her satire in Middlemarch of readers who judge books by their covers. Mr. Trumbull, who boasts that he owns "no less than two hundred volumes in calf" (Middlemarch 347), belongs to the same "class" whom Blackwood blames for the "ornate cover" of the Birthday Book. As a consumer, Trumbull values books for their bindings; as an auctioneer, he prices a painting by its frame and a book by its lettering, "no less than five hundred [riddles] printed in a beautiful red" (Middlemarch 347).16 While the form of the riddle-book anticipates the red-and-black lettering of the Birthday Book, its self-contained fragments of wit prefigure the contents of the Sayings-in which, ironically, the passage ridiculing the riddle-book is duly reproduced.

Mr. Trumbull's description of the riddle-book as "an ornament for the table" and of his books as "calf" reminds us that what we ourselves are reading-- Middlemarch--is also an object for sale. Yet his vulgarity immediately warns us to forget it. Expensive bindings denote empty heads: the traditional humiliation of finding one's books recycled for trunk-linings or curl-papers gives way to the fear of finding oneself displayed on a coffee-table. In a culture where book is to text as body to mind, books must represent their own circulation as suspect. In G. H. Lewes's novel Ranthorpe (1847), the hero is introduced reading the wares of a bookstall without buying any of them: "He cared not for rare editions, large paper copies, or sumptuous bindings. His hunger was for knowledge; he had a passion for books-no matter what edition, what bindings; he cared not even whether they had covers at all" (4-5). The willful blindness to the cover which positions Ranthorpe opposite to Mr. Trumbull or to Eliot's "colonial" readers reinforces his failure to buy; yet the placement of this scene in the first chapter means that its readers may well have just purchased Ranthorpe itself. In Middlemarch, too, the auctioneer's substitution of "volumes" for "books," and his specification of the binding and coloring, make clear Eliot's worry about the decorative and commercial uses to which books can be put-including her own.

Rosamond Vincy provides a feminine counterpart to Trumbull's taste. The only book that she is shown reading is characterized, like his, by its binding: "the last Keepsake, the gorgeous watered-silk publication which marked modern progress at that time" (Middlemarch 302). As the specification of watered silk makes clear, the Keepsake shares the "ornate cover" that attracts vulgar buyers to the Birthday Book-as well as its gilt-edged pages and engraved inscription plate. Like the Birthday Book and like Trumbull's calf-bound library, the annuals subordinate contents to cover, text to book: in Thackeray's words, "the first and most important fact of the Keepsake is its binding" ("Execution" 2: 366).? Eliot's protests against the luxurious material form of the Birthday Book echo the ambivalence of men who write for the annuals, like Wordsworth, who claims that "it would disgrace any name to appear in an annual" but publishes his own work in Winter's Wreath (qtd. in Adburgham 241); Tennyson, who claims to have "foresworn all annuals provincial or metropolitan" but continues to contribute to them (qtd. in Erikson 41); and Southey, who calls annuals "picture-books for grown children" but publishes in several including the Keepsake itself (qtd. in Erikson 30). Rosamond's embarrassment about reading the Keepsake resembles Southey's about writing for it: "Rosamond herself was not without relish for these writers, but she did not readily commit herself by admiration, and was alive to the slightest hint that anything was not, according to Lydgate, in the very highest taste" (Middlemarch 304). At the same time, her reluctance to declare herself a Keepsake reader prefigures Eliot's reluctance to acknowledge her share in compiling the Birthday Book.