Chapter 7 ‘Into separate brochures’: stitched work and a new New Testament in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure

A re-arranged Bible

Jude the Obscure is a novel full of books and reading, and of biblical allusion and quotation. The Bible I consider here belongs to Sue Bridehead, Jude’s cousin and lover and the novel’s other main character. Where Jude begins with a kind of dogged, dubious Christian faith, closely linked with his fantasies about scholarship, Sue begins with an assumed confidence of intellectual scepticism. She describes her ‘new New Testament’ in a conversation early in their friendship, after making an illicit escape from her teaching training college and wading through a river in order to visit Jude at night. He is still pursuing theological study and regular devotional practices, so while he says his evening prayers, she turns away and looks through a small Bible as she waits for him.

‘Jude,’ she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; ‘will you let me make you a new New Testament – like the one I made for myself at Christminster?’

‘O yes. How was that made?’

‘I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate brochures, and re-arranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My University friend Mr.________but never mind his name, poor boy – said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable.’

‘H’m,’ said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege.¹⁴

‘Brightly’ she renews their conversation, but she is soon in tears again, and not much later he is ‘rather more ruffled than she’. The scene is charged, not only with Jude’s ‘sense of sacrilege’ and ‘sense of her sex’, but also with Sue’s rapidly shifting feelings: she finds the chapter headings ‘the drollest thing’, then becomes ‘spirited, and almost petulant’, then besieged: ‘nobody is ever on my side’. At the centre of this discussion are two Bibles: Jude’s, and the restitched New Testament she describes (III.4, pp. 145–7).

Bibles are freighted in Jude with a threatening meaning. Earlier, the square-cut title page lettering of Jude’s Greek New Testament expressed ‘fixed reproach in the grey starlight’ on his having left his desk to meet Arabella (I.7, p. 43). The scholarly credentials of this edition are given, and his feelings about it: ‘[h]e was proud of the book, having obtained it by boldly writing to its London publisher’ (I.7, p. 38). It is his book specifically, unique and single, unlike Mercy Chant’s ‘armful of Bibles’ in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a superfluity of volumes savagely associated with an evangelicalism that ‘[sacrificed] humanity to mysticism’.¹⁵ Jude’s dogged labour is remembered in this dog-eared Testament after his death; the material Bible, ‘roughened with stone-dust’, is an emblem of his failed ideals (VI.11, p. 396).

For Sue, Bibles represent a different danger. Her ‘new New Testament’ should be read with attention to her intellectual poise and complex sensitivities. Manuscript corrections show Hardy laboriously adding emotional nuance during composition. He changes his mind twice about ‘moist’ eyes (Figure 7.1). He allows Sue an emotion about her emotions, replacing ‘tears running down her cheeks’ with ‘turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes’ (Figure 7.2). And as Jude and Sue shake hands, their feelings are peeled apart so that each has a different realisation rather than sharing the same one (Figure 7.3). If some readers share Jude’s surprise ‘at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument’, others might sympathise with Sue’s hatred of ‘humbug’ and the intensity of her resistance to the interpretations of the powerful: ‘nobody is ever on my side … You are on the side of the people in the Training School’ (III.4, p. 146). Yet commentators on Hardy have favoured an iconoclastic reading of this scene. Elisabeth Jay says that Sue ‘taunted’ Jude; Mary Rimmer reads her activity as deconstructive, destructive: ‘[t]he characters subject the Bible to physical dismemberment as well as irreverent quotation: Sue Bridehead literally cuts it up, rearranging it in a textual parody’.¹⁶ Rimmer draws on Joss Marsh’s argument that the novel ‘commits blasphemy with a vengeance’ and on Marjorie Garson’s vivid account of Sue, which construes her experiment as dissolution or ‘antisacramental sparagmos’ (that is, an act of tearing apart, or a ritual dismembering of a classical hero).¹⁷ Without wishing to contradict these readings exactly, I would suggest that they are not the only possibilities. Alternative perspectives on Sue’s character emerge if we examine her new New Testament as book-historical detectives, taking seriously the manual and intellectual work involved in making this new book.

Forensic bookbinding

One way to uncover alternative meanings of Sue’s New Testament is to try the experiment oneself: forensic bookbinding, a parallel to Janet Stephens’ work on ancient hairstyles using a professional hairdresser’s techniques and skill.¹⁸ I made the attempt with a cheap, modern, glued New Testament, a chopping-board and a vegetable knife (Figures 7.4–7.5), but a nineteenth-century woman working with a properly sewn text block would follow a meticulous process of unpicking. Turning back the front board and pressing down the text block with a ruler, she would gently force the binding outwards, then snip her way into the book’s spine. Opening the first gathering, she would cut the thread and tease out stitching bit by bit, freeing each chunk of pages one by one. The New Testament books are all different lengths, so, having cut them apart, she would have a gathering here, a gathering and a half there, some stubs, some loose leaves. To reconstruct the text block Sue would have had to find ways of stitching all these together again, in a sort of amateur exercise in book conservation. It would be careful and precise work, with at least as much effort going into rearranging and reattaching as into detaching and dividing; not so much a destructive activity as a creative and constructive one.

That the task is constructive and requires skill is implied by Hardy’s dialogue. Sue offers to ‘make’ the book for Jude, perhaps feeling that her artist-shop experience renders her more suited to the task than his as a stonemason. (One introduction to bookbinding states that ‘the earlier operations’ in the bookbinding process, ‘from folding to sewing’, were once known as ‘the women’s departments’.¹⁹) Jude picks up on the verb ‘make’, asking ‘How was that made?’ where he could have said, for example, ‘What was that?’ or ‘What do you mean?’ And when Sue speaks of ‘cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate brochures’, the word derives from the French word for stitching: a brochure is ‘a stitched work’ or ‘a few leaves stitched together’.²⁰ She is conscious of the tactile reality of the material text, and of a task that involves working with, through and between the pages in a controlled and thoughtful way. Jude’s sense of sacrilege will come only later and may be read as creeping discomfort rather than outright horror.

This constructive emphasis puts a twist on ‘taunt’ as a reading of Sue’s tone and pulls away from the idea that Sue’s alterations are primarily iconoclastic. Rimmer and Garson probably think of ‘physical dismemberment’ because cutting up is mentioned by Sue, whereas restitching is not; a quickness to discover irreverence which is to take Sue’s words on trust. A subtler indication of her attitude is given by punctuation: Sue uses a capital B for Bible twice in this chapter, whereas the narrator refers to ‘the bible’ as well as ‘a bible’, distinguishing Sue’s earnestness from the narrator’s impartiality (III.4, pp. 141, 145–6). The rebound Bible is an investment of labour, attempting to establish meaning more securely through the very risk of structural weakening. This could have been evidence in support of Rimmer’s view that Jude holds the Bible vulnerably balanced between reverence and scepticism, affection and despair. In a way, Sue is engaging with the text, not recreating it; her project could be thought of as an accelerated version of the wear and tear caused by ordinary reading. Sue’s fast-forwarding of the process, like her room-sharing arrangements with her undergraduate friend, is exposed to the readers’ judgement or sympathy. Is she right or wrong? Who will throw the first stone?

‘An apostle of culture’

The intellectual work that lies behind this project is also more about putting ideas together than taking ideas apart. Sue says in an easy way that she re-arranged the volume ‘in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on’. But the biblical books do not come with their date of publication attached. By asking what the correct chronological order is, Sue is entering into a field of academic study where there were, and still are, differences of opinion. One modern study Bible suggests that Galatians may be placed in the late 40s or mid-50s AD, Philippians in the mid-50s, late 50s or early 60s, Hebrews between 60 and 95; Revelation contains conflicting evidence, II Corinthians consists of more than one letter, II Thessalonians could be early if written by Paul or impossible to date if not, and Jude is obscure.²¹ It is plausible that Sue would have put serious research into this topic, weighing up the evidence and arguments on different sides, and forming her own conclusions.

Some readers have imagined that this must have been an act of resistance against organised, orthodox Christianity. Is her New Testament daringly rebellious in that it ‘places the authority of the human reason … above any notion of revelation, or the authority of the Church in establishing the canonical order of the books’?²² This is how J. Russell Perkin describes the scene’s ‘heretical’ nature, while Matthew Bradley gives a differently loaded account: ‘Sue Bridehead is an apostle of culture, whose knowledge … is sufficient to allow her to rearrange and cut up her New Testament into correct chronological order.’²³ But how sacrilegious is it, after all, to divide a Bible into parts? Some such portionings are taken for granted: as Sue Zemka points out, the circulation of the New Testament without the Old, rarely if ever questioned, is not inevitable given ‘the supposed prevalence of typological interpretation’.²⁴ Divisions can be about resources and practicality. In 1804, Granville Sharp, a member of the Bible Society Committee, proposed that the Society’s octavo Bibles could be printed in seven parts so that ‘several persons may read & be instructed in different parts of the House or Garden with one single Copy of the Bible at one and the same time’.²⁵ While the Committee did not catch Sharp’s enthusiasm, instalment-plan Family Bibles were being sold elsewhere.²⁶ Serialised, like Hardy’s novel, these Bibles are a unity forcibly divided into time-staggered sections for the readers’ convenience, while their adherence to the traditional book order, unlike Sue’s Testament, produced an unconventional reading pattern compared to the cyclical reading plans given in lectionaries.²⁷

Sue is not unusual, then, in dividing up her Bible, but it is difficult to find real-life parallels to her cutting and restitching procedure.²⁸ Her New Testament is somewhat like the Little Gidding Gospel harmonies, somewhat like Thomas Jefferson’s Bible. But the Ferrar community and Jefferson were both cutting apart paragraphs within books, the former seeking to weave together, the latter preferring to select and omit, whereas Sue works in line with the existing book divisions.²⁹ The nearest real-life equivalent to Sue’s project that I have found was the work of an ordained minister of the Church of England, Rev. Charles Hebert, a Doctor of Divinity, of Trinity College, Cambridge, who in 1882 published a slim volume entitled The New Testament Scriptures in the Order in which they were Written: A Very Close Translation from the Greek Text of 1611, with Brief Explanations. The First Portion: The Six Primary Epistles to Thessalonica, Corinth, Galatia, and Rome, A.D. 52–58.³⁰ Hebert never got beyond this first volume, but included a contents page for four that he had planned, gamely listing the books ‘in what is assumed to be something like the chronological order in which they were written’.³¹ Evidently rather a character, he also wrote a spirited defence of the ‘actual superintendence of the authentic Scriptures (i.e. as originally written) by the Holy Ghost’, responding to W. G. Clark: ‘and now we live to be told by the Vice-Master of Trinity, that we don’t believe the opinions for which we have been content to suffer loss’.³² This belief in inspiration underpins his chronological New Testament: ‘[t]he one thing to which the writer clings more and more is the letter of the Scripture, with its Divine Plenary Superintendence and with all its historic human peculiarities’.³³ His pastoral and scholarly motive is that even readers with no Greek may be able to ‘watch the first appearance of particular words, and trace their after-growth to a received meaning’.³⁴ For Hebert, his epigraph from St Jerome, ‘The Holy Scriptures – in which even the order of words is a mystery’, ‘breathes such a spirit of strong confidence in the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures that it sounds like a trumpet in this semi-sceptical age’.³⁵ It was not intellectual doubt that drove this real-life re-arrangement of the New Testament, but an earnest Christian faith rooted in academic study.

Sue is indeed semi-sceptical, while Charles Hebert was an ordained, scholarly figure of the sort that Jude would never become; orthodox, and not an apostle of culture. But her New Testament might not be a rebellion against the church so much as a simple assertion of her intellectual capacity. Arguments in favour of women’s education were gaining traction at this time outside the novel’s pages, and women’s colleges had opened in Oxford and Cambridge (although women would not be able to take degrees there until 1922 and 1947 respectively). This context is mostly omitted from Sue’s story: she does not have a stereotypical Girton girl’s bicycle-riding vim, nor is she the severe ‘bluestocking’ imagined by those who believed that ‘excessive intellectual activity conspicuously affect[ed] a woman’s outward appearance’.³⁶ Nor does she ever turn to Christminster on her own account to say: ‘I have understanding as well as you’ (II.vi, p. 112). Instead, she asserts independence: ‘I have no respect for Christminster at all, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side’ (III.iv, p. 141). In making her new New Testament, she positions herself as a student outside the college walls. And it is because she is outside that she works creatively with a physical object. She would never have the option of writing and publishing her own translation; cutting up a New Testament is not necessarily a destructive act, or glamorously heretical, but a practical matter of making use of the resources and skills she had to hand.

She is resisting authority, though; if not the church’s authority to bind and loose, at least the binding authority of the Bible publisher. The Bible Society’s history shows the usefulness of a binding to mediate reading: BFBS Bibles were sold pre-bound for shipping abroad, for lower-class customers unaccustomed to book-purchasing, and because there had been controversy about the inclusion or exclusion of the Apocrypha; pre-bound Bibles could not easily be combined with other texts.³⁷ By enforcing the BFBS rule of publishing Bibles ‘without note or comment’, the binding became a comment in itself.³⁸ Sue chooses not to have these decisions made for her.

Stitched work

But her home experiment would have been mired in practical obstacles. ‘Twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable’ rightly has an Alice-like wistfulness, because Sue’s idea cannot be realised with a single New Testament. With the end of Matthew printed on the same leaf as the beginning of Mark, the end of Mark on the same leaf as the beginning of Luke, and so on through the whole New Testament, it is impossible to divide one book from the next in a single printed volume. When I tried the experiment, I used two identical Testaments and took half the books from one, half from the other, alternating between the two copies. This means that my new New Testament is full of extra beginnings and ends of books, and its readability is compromised by bits and scraps of extra text appearing in the wrong place (Figure 7.6). I could paste blank paper over the superfluous passages, like the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, who used two Bibles in this way to produce a single Bible in twenty-five easily portable volumes.³⁹ Still, it is likely that my new New Testament will be a little messy. In contrast to the neatly aligned edges of a newly cut book, Sue’s home binding process draws together a jigsaw pattern of differently shaped pieces. However neatly she works, however firm her stitching, some evidence of the process will be visible, and the text block will have weak points where it did not have them before.

This New Testament, full of stubs and re-sewn leaves, would be like the copy of The Imperial Family Bible adapted with pasted-in manuscript notes by Hester Thrale Piozzi.⁴⁰ Each of these Bibles is made materially patchy as its creator works with the text; paper, ink and paste are the visible signs of an intellect forced to operate within and around the parameters of the published book. Sue’s Testament is also like Dinah Morris’s ‘small thick Bible, worn quite round at the edges’: both Sue’s Bible and Dinah’s are marked in their ‘physiognomy’ by the earnestness of a young, serious, working, female owner.⁴¹ The project proves Sue’s mental agility, but she chooses it because it is accessible: she has to cut up her Bible because she has no opportunity to write a new translation from the Greek. ‘Since I can do no good because a woman, / Reach constantly at something that is near it’: without having Dorothea’s idea that classical languages must be necessary ‘to arrive at the core of things, and judge soundly on the social duties of the Christian’, Sue too is a woman doing her best in uncongenial circumstances.⁴² But something says ‘you shan’t’ to a sparkling intelligence when she opens her Bible (VI.2, p. 327).

The new New Testament is a counterpart to the character who made it, then – both more vulnerable and more ferociously held together than a typical volume. It is risky to take a book apart and put it back together, just as it was risky for Sue to break out of her teacher training college and visit Jude against the rules and against social convention. While they have this conversation she herself is rebound in unusual covers, because while her wet clothes dry she is wearing Jude’s Sunday suit. In Jude’s eyes she is ‘a slim and fragile being’, ‘pathetic in her defencelessness’; she seems physically vulnerable, and emotionally susceptible, although in intellectual acuity and self-reliance she is rather stronger than he is. By the end of Sue’s story, another small Testament will symbolise a more explicit threat to her. Jude’s ‘small Bible’ will reappear as ‘a little brown Testament’ on which her eventual husband Richard Phillotson will ask her to swear that she wishes to enter his bedroom, an act of submission that she has forced herself towards as a ‘penance’ and a ‘duty’ (VI.9; pp. 382–6). The contrast is sharp between Sue early in the novel, dressed in men’s clothes, confidently turning pages, and Sue, later in the novel, dressed in nightclothes with her hand on the outside of the book. Jude’s open book is associated with her well-informed, easy intelligence, her equal standing with men in her powers of mind. Closed, Phillotson’s, it represents her impulse to ‘drink to the dregs’ (VI.9, p. 384). Phillotson is not like Dickens’s Magwitch, whom Pip suspects of carrying his ‘little black book about the world solely to swear people on in cases of emergency’.⁴³ He is all the more dangerous because he knows something of the inside of the book as well as the outside and still uses it as an instrument of coercion.

Indeed, in some contexts, binding Bibles was already recognised as a danger to women. High demand for cheap Bibles had driven down wages and the quality of working conditions: with bookbinder strikes on the one hand, there were outraged BFBS supporters on the other, talking of ‘Scripture Slaves’ and alarmed that these pressures would force female workers into prostitution. Howsam argues that playing upon middle-class anxieties about female sexual purity was a strategic move by advocates for the bookbinders: one memorial ‘submit[ted] that the making it more difficult, and in some cases impossible, for females to earn an honest subsistence, by their labour, is in the same proportion to give potency to the seducers of female virtue’.⁴⁴ I have not found biographical evidence linking Hardy to these disputes, so it may be fanciful to imagine a connection between the women bookbinders and Sue. But it is a curious and sinister idea, that the binding of these fictional Bibles might have reminded some readers of the real exploitation of vulnerable women.

‘I know something of the book’

It may be that all this is to perceive more in Sue’s anecdote than Hardy did. He may have set her an impossible task simply because he did not think the project through. On the one hand, a revision to the dialogue shows a concern for accuracy: the serial and first editions offered Romans as the first book in Sue’s Testament, which was later amended to the more probable Thessalonians.⁴⁵ But on the other hand, the slight clunk in the final rendering, implying that I and II Thessalonians are not Epistles, could indicate that for Hardy the details were not to be minutely weighed (III.4, p. 145). Perhaps, as Leah Price points out, a fictional book need not work the same way as a real one:

We have a special word for persons when they’re represented in fiction (‘character’), but none for represented books. Yet both raise analogous questions. Is it legitimate to imagine an offstage life for either (for example, should we picture what news items Crosbie’s newspaper contains)? What’s the relation between the use we make of the represented object and the use we would make of its real-life referent?⁴⁶

Sue’s conversation with Jude flows smoothly enough without the reader imagining her rearranged Bible in full bibliographical detail. But a consequence of taking Sue’s book seriously is taking Sue herself more seriously. In pursuing the probable life of the fictional object, even to the point of uncovering contradictions and impossibilities, we have been able to explore the complexities of the character handling it. This is a way to see through the façade if she seems to be ‘putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her’ (III.4, p. 145). As with the Hampshire woman who ate a New Testament, it may be unexpected earnestness, rather than irreverence, that kindles a ‘sense of sacrilege’ in the observer (III.4, p. 145). An unconventionally unironic commitment, too much respect rather than too little – her indignant feeling that ‘people have no right to falsify the Bible!’ – makes Sue ‘spirited’, ‘almost petulant’ and tearful (III.4, p. 146). Her cutting and stitching of the material Bible is done in defence of the Bible, not as an act of destructive iconoclasm.

The complexity of Sue’s relationship with Christianity is important to notice here if the crisis of her later religious breakdown is to be understood. ‘But you are not to say it now!’ she says to Jude in their early conversation about the Bible (III.4, p. 146). After the trauma of their children’s deaths, she corrects him in the same way, this time after she startles him by returning from a church service smelling of incense:

‘You see, Jude, it is lonely here in the week-day mornings, when you are at work, and I think and think of – of my – ’ She stopped till she could control the lumpiness of her throat. ‘And I have taken to go in there, as it is so near.’

‘O well – of course, I say nothing against it. Only it is odd, for you. They little think what sort of chiel is amang them!’

‘What do you mean, Jude?’

‘Well – a sceptic, to be plain.’

‘How can you pain me so, dear Jude, in my trouble! Yet I know you didn’t mean it. But you ought not to say that.’ (VI.3, p. 335)

On both occasions, Sue’s emotions are further stirred up by Jude’s accusations of scepticism: ‘You are quite Voltairean!’; ‘a sceptic, to be plain’. On both occasions, too, she is the one hampered in making her case by the physical manifestation of distress, whether ‘brimming eyes’ or ‘the lumpiness of her throat’ (III.4, p. 146, VI.3, p. 335). Jude can see that ‘Sue and himself had mentally travelled in opposite directions since the tragedy … She was no longer the same as in the independent days, when her intellect played like lambent lightning over conventions and formalities which he at that time respected, though he did not now’ (VI.3, p. 333). It is true that she is no longer the same, declaring now that ‘self-abnegation is the higher road. We should mortify the flesh – the terrible flesh – the curse of Adam’ (VI.3, p. 333). But this response to grief is not simply a neat reversal of her previous attitude, a dazzlingly heretical apostle of culture brought low by the events of the novel. Rather, it is the same Sue before and after, first made raw by her wish to resist ‘humbug’ and ‘ecclesiastical abstraction’ but worn down until she can say: ‘I should like to prick myself all over with pins and bleed out the badness that’s in me’ (VI.3, p. 334). There is by this time no vision of rearrangement and restitching; she imagines pins applied destructively to herself, rather than a needle applied constructively to the book.

‘She had not her Bible before her for nothing.’ This quotation has formed a sort of epigraph for this chapter in my mind, although it is not about Sue or any other Victorian reader, but Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe, whose Bible was opened so often at the book of Job that it developed a permanent inclination that way: ‘[o]ne opens naturally here, I see’, says Sally; ‘I make no doubt but you have doubled down the useful places, as honest Matt Prior says.… – You see, Miss Horton, I know something of the book.’⁴⁷ It takes a character who knows something of the book, though perhaps not so much of the text, to make the point that Clarissa’s Bible has been shaped by her way of reading it: a mere forefinger of the right hand holding her place alters the book’s physical character and shows that her reading of the volume is skewed.⁴⁸ The slight distortion of the object reflects a distorted interpretation. Whatever your theology, something must be missing if the only part of the volume being read is the book of Job. A reordered Testament, in contrast, shows an ambition to deal not only with the ‘useful places’, but with the whole thing. Sue’s way of handling her New Testament is an attempt to do justice to the text, and even if, in fact, she had her Bible before her for nothing, it is right for Hardy’s readers to do justice in turn, as far as possible, to her method of reading.

Notes

1. 1.  Matthew 4.4 (KJV).

2. 2.  David Cressy, ‘Books as Totems in Seventeenth-Century England and New England’, Journal of Library History (1974–87), 21(1) (1986), 92–106 (p. 99), citing Notes and Queries, 9th ser. 8 (1901), p. 103. (Cressy gives ‘sides’ for ‘slices’.)

3. 3.  Notes and Queries, p. 103; Timothy Larsen, A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 262–3.

4. 4.  Larsen, A People, p. 1.

5. 5.  Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 40; Alyssa J. Currie, ‘The Victorian Thumb Bible as Material Object: Charles Tilt’s The Little Picture Testament (1839)’, Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens [Online], 2016, https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.2910, accessed 10 February 2022; Leslie Howsam, Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) pp. 100, 122.

6. 6.  Price, How to Do Things with Books, pp. 107–35.

7. 7.  See note 5.

8. 8.  Benjamin Jowett, ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’, in Essays and Reviews (London: John W. Parker and Son, West Strand, 1860), pp. 330–433 (pp. 338, 337–8).

9. 9.  Charles LaPorte, Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); Norman Vance, Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

10. 10.  Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. by Barbara M. Benedict and Deirdre Le Faye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), vol. 1, ch. 14, p. 109.

11. 11.  G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Invisible Man’, in The Complete Father Brown (London: Penguin Books, 1981), pp. 64–77.

12. 12.  Howsam, Cheap Bibles, pp. 124–5.

13. 13.  Price, How to Do Things with Books, p. 38.

14. 14.  Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. by Patricia Ingham, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Book III, ch. 4, p. 145. Based on the 1912 edition, with emendations, adopting the manuscript punctuation. Subsequent references are given in the text in the form ‘III.4’.

15. 15.  Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. by Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), ch. 40 (p. 370).

16. 16.  Elisabeth Jay, ‘Introduction’, in The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature, ed. by Rebecca Lemon et al. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 465–81 (p. 478); Mary Rimmer, ‘ “My Scripture Manner”: Reading Hardy’s Biblical and Liturgical Allusion’, in Thomas Hardy Re-Appraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate, ed. by Keith Wilson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 20–37 (p. 28).

17. 17.  Joss Marsh, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 269–327 (pp. 270–71); Marjorie Garson, Hardy’s Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 152–79 (p. 164); ‘sparagmos, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2021, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/185634, accessed 10 February 2022.

18. 18.  Janet Stephens, ‘Ancient Roman Hairdressing: On (Hair)Pins and Needles’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, 21 (2008), 110–32. The phrase ‘forensic hairdressing’ is used in Stephens’ videos, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68LEUXw2QJU, accessed 10 February 2022.

19. 19.  Lionel S. Darley, Introduction to Bookbinding (London: Faber & Faber, 1965), p. 15.

20. 20.  ‘brochure, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/23561, accessed 2 February 2022.

21. 21.  The HarperCollins Study Bible Student Edition: Fully Revised and Updated, ed. by Harold W. Attridge and Wayne A. Meeks (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).

22. 22.  J. Russell Perkin, ‘Thomas Hardy’s Apocryphal Gospels’, in Theology and the Victorian Novel (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), pp. 159–95 (p. 185).

23. 23.  Matthew Bradley, ‘Religion and the Canon’, in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, ed. by Juliet John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 367–83 (p. 382).

24. 24.  Sue Zemka, Victorian Testaments: The Bible, Christology and Literary Authority in Early-Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 131.

25. 25.  Howsam, Cheap Bibles, p. 101.

26. 26.  Mary Wilson Carpenter, Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), pp. 1–47.

27. 27.  Wilson Carpenter, Imperial Bibles, p. 44.

28. 28.  David Pearson suggested to me that there could be homemade experiments extant in private archives. Also, the fragile results of such experiments would make them more vulnerable to damage than conventional books.

29. 29.  Little Gidding concordance, 1630. A 1275.5. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL.HOUGH:10090806, accessed 10 February 2022; Owen Edwards, ‘How Thomas Jefferson Created His Own Bible’, Smithsonian, January 2012, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-thomas-jefferson-created-his-own-Bible-5659505/, accessed 10 February 2022.

30. 30.  Charles Hebert, The New Testament Scriptures in the Order in which they were Written: A Very Close Translation from the Greek Text of 1611, with Brief Explanations. The First Portion: The Six Primary Epistles to Thessalonica, Corinth, Galatia, and Rome, A.D. 52–58 (London: Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press Warehouse, Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday, 1882). Hereafter New Testament Scriptures.

31. 31.  Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible, 1525–1961, ed. by A. S. Herbert, T. H. Darlow, and H. F. Moule, 2nd edn (London: The British and Foreign Bible Society, 1968), p. 430; New Testament Scriptures, p. v.

32. 32.  Charles Hebert, A Reply to the Pamphlet of The Rev. W. G. Clark, M.A., Vice-Master of Trinity College, Entitled The Dangers of the Church of England (London: Macmillan and Co., 1870), pp. 5, 18.

33. 33.  New Testament Scriptures, p. ix.

34. 34.  New Testament Scriptures, pp. vii.

35. 35.  New Testament Scriptures, pp. i, xi.

36. 36.  Chris Willis, ‘ “Heaven Defend Me from Political or Highly-Educated Women!”: Packaging the New Woman for Mass Consumption’, in The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, ed. by Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 55–7; Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the ‘Minor’ Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 31.

37. 37.  Howsam, Cheap Bibles, pp. 123, 129, 13–14.

38. 38.  Howsam, Cheap Bibles, p. 6.

39. 39.  The Holy Bible (London: printed by George Eyre and Andrew Strachan, 1828), Cambridge University Library, BSS.201.E28.19–43.

40. 40.  Wilson Carpenter, Imperial Bibles, p. 49.

41. 41.  George Eliot, Adam Bede, ed. by Stephen Gill (London: Penguin, 1985), ch. 15 (p. 204).

42. 42.  George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. by Bert G. Hornback (London: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 1 (ch. I epigraph from Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy), ch. 7 (p. 42).

43. 43.  Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. by Edgar Rosenberg (London: W. W. Norton, 1999), ch. 40 (p. 250).

44. 44.  Howsam, pp. 134–5.

45. 45.  See Timothy Hands, Thomas Hardy: Distracted Preacher? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), p. 32.

46. 46.  Price, How to Do Things with Books, pp. 49–50.

47. 47.  Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady, ed. by Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), Letter 336 (p. 1071), Letter 333 (p. 1061).

48. 48.  Richardson, Clarissa, Letter 334 (p. 1065).

Bibliography of secondary literature

• Attridge, Harold W. and Wayne A. Meeks (eds), The HarperCollins Study Bible Student Edition: Fully Revised and Updated (New York: HarperCollins, 2006)
• Bradley, Matthew, ‘Religion and the Canon’, in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, ed. by Juliet John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) pp. 367–83
• Carpenter, Mary Wilson, Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003)
• Cressy, David, ‘Books as Totems in Seventeenth-Century England and New England’, Journal of Library History (1974–87), 21(1) (1986), 92–106
• Currie, Alyssa J., ‘The Victorian Thumb Bible as Material Object: Charles Tilt’s The Little Picture Testament (1839)’, Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens [Online], 2016 https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.2910
• Darley, Lionel S., Introduction to Bookbinding (London: Faber & Faber, 1965)
• Edwards, Owen, ‘How Thomas Jefferson Created His Own Bible’, Smithsonian, January 2012, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-thomas-jefferson-created-his-own-Bible-5659505/
• Garson, Marjorie, Hardy’s Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 152–79
• Hands, Timothy, Thomas Hardy: Distracted Preacher? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989)
• Hebert, Charles, A Reply to the Pamphlet of The Rev. W.G. Clark, M.A., Vice-Master of Trinity College, Entitled The Dangers of the Church of England (London: Macmillan and Co., 1870)
• Hebert, Charles, The New Testament Scriptures in the Order in which they were Written: A Very Close Translation from the Greek Text of 1611, with Brief Explanations. The First Portion: The Six Primary Epistles to Thessalonica, Corinth, Galatia, and Rome, A.D. 52–58 (London: Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press Warehouse, Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday, 1882)
• Herbert, A. S., T. H. Darlow, and H. F. Moule (eds), Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible, 1525–1961, 2nd edn (London: The British and Foreign Bible Society, 1968)
• Howsam, Leslie, Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
• Jay, Elisabeth, ‘Introduction’, in The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature, ed. by Rebecca Lemon et al. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 465–81
• Jowett, Benjamin, ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’, in Essays and Reviews (London: John W. Parker and Son, West Strand, 1860), pp. 330–433
• LaPorte, Charles, Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011)
• Larsen, Timothy, A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
• Marsh, Joss, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998)
• Perkin, J. Russell, Theology and the Victorian Novel (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009)
• Price, Leah, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012)
• Rimmer, Mary, ‘ “My Scripture Manner”: Reading Hardy’s Biblical and Liturgical Allusion’, in Thomas Hardy Re-Appraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate, ed. by Keith Wilson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 20–37
• Stephens, Janet, ‘Ancient Roman Hairdressing: On (Hair)Pins and Needles’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, 21 (2008), 110–32
• Thomas, Jane, Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the ‘Minor’ Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999)
• Vance, Norman, Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Willis, Chris, ‘ “Heaven Defend Me from Political or Highly-Educated Women!”: Packaging the New Woman for Mass Consumption’, in The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, ed. by Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 53–65
• Zemka, Sue, Victorian Testaments: The Bible, Christology and Literary Authority in Early-Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997)