Bookcases, Slipcases, Uncut Leaves: The Anxiety of the Gentleman’s Library

Abstract

As the age of Victoria drew to its close, the gentleman's private library became an increasingly fraught topos in British and American literature and culture. For while writers like Matthew Arnold had fought to maintain a privileged place for literature within a culture whose reading habits had suddenly become far more practical, many Victorians quickly began to fetishize not literature per se but the physical book itself not the contents but the container. It is by now commonplace to say that in essays like The Study of Poetry Arnold makes fetish objects out of short snatches of verse; a methodology like his use of poetic touchstones makes it possible to conceive of the literary field as coming in small denominations, the loose change of literary capital. On a small scale, this kind of approach results logically in the literary anthology, a compendium or short-cut to culture; on the larger scale, this logic gives us the gentleman's library, stuffed with with their pages uncut on show quite explicitly, everything in its right place. For there was a palpable nervousness about the Victorians' relation to their and thoughtful men and women of the time could sense it. In an 1859 essay in Fraser 's Magazine, an anonymous commentator writes about what he calls books not about furniture or the construction of furni-