Abstract
Murphy’s introduction situates her study in terms of recent scholarship in library and book history, as well as in military history and imperial studies, and argues that the significance of the reading of the nineteenth-century British soldier has largely been overlooked by literary critics and historians. Drawing upon soldiers’ memoirs and letters, as well as upon official records relating to the East India Company and the Regular Army, it suggests that during the 1800s reading was hugely significant to many British soldiers and that providing them with garrison libraries was seen as a means of regulating their behavior and attitudes. Murphy also argues that from a broader point of view, study of this history sheds further light on British attitudes toward working-class reading, literacy, and leisure during the later Romantic and Victorian periods.
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Notes
- 1.
“A Soldier” [Joseph Donaldson], Recollections of an eventful Life: chiefly passed in the Army (Glasgow: W.R. McPhun, 1824), pp. 69 and 86–87. Henceforth “Donaldson, Recollections.”
- 2.
On how the sale and reprinting of out-of-copyright texts in general were affected by the House of Lord’s 1774 decision that perpetual copyright had been illegal since 1710, see William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 54, and on how this affected Robinson Crusoe in particular, see pp. 507–8.
- 3.
Donaldson, Recollections, p. 3.
- 4.
Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 184.
- 5.
Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education, 2 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1798), volume 1, p. 336. Edgeworth wrote of the composition of this work, “In [this] work … the principles of education were peculiarly his [that is, her father’s] … all the general ideas originated with him, the illustrating and manufacturing them [sic], if I may use the expression, was mine.” See Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq. Begun by himself and concluded by his Daughter, Maria Edgeworth, 2 vols. (London: R. Hunter, 1820), vol. 2, p. 190.
- 6.
Timothy Gowing, A Soldier’s Experience; or, Things not generally known, showing the Price of War in Blood and Treasure (Colchester: Benham & Co., 1883), p. 2.
- 7.
Thomas Gowing, Voice from the Ranks: A Personal Narrative of the Crimean Campaign by a Sergeant of the Royal Fusiliers, edited by Kenneth Fenwick (London: Folio Society, 1954), p. 1. Fenwick notes that Gowing had this text “privately printed” by a Nottingham printer (p. vii), and the old soldier certainly seems to have published or arranged for the printing of his military experiences in several editions/variations. This was no doubt to encourage sales, and may also help to explain the variation of his first name.
- 8.
John Pindar, Autobiography of a Private Soldier (Cupar-Fife: Printed in the “Fife News” Office, 1878), pp. 2–3.
- 9.
John Fraser, Sixty Years in Uniform (London: Stanley Paul, 1939), p. 23.
- 10.
Eileen Hathaway, introduction to A Dorset Soldier: the Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence, ed. Eileen Hathaway (Tunbridge Wells: Spellmount, 1993), p. ii. Lawrence refers on two respective occasions to letters that he “wrote” or “sent” to his parents during his career in the army; presumably he drew upon the service of an amanuensis here as well (pp. 101, 124).
- 11.
John Green, The Vicissitudes of a Soldier’s Life, or a Series of Occurrences from 1806 to 1815; together with an introductory and concluding Chapter: the whole containing, with some other matters, a concise Account of the War in the Peninsula, from its commencement to its final close (Louth and London: J. & J. Jackson; Simpkin Marshall, 1827), p. 53–54.
- 12.
See Richard Holmes, Sahib: The British Soldier in India, 1750–1914 (London: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 94.
- 13.
E. Milton Small (ed), Told from the Ranks: Recollections of Service during the Queen’s Reign by Privates and Non-Commissioned Officers of the British Army (London: Andrew Melrose, 1897), pp. 159–60. Hinton was a corporal when he began his studies.
- 14.
Jowett, W. Memoir and Diary of Sergeant W. Jowett, Seventh Royal Fusiliers (London and Beeston, Nottinghamshire: W. Kent & Co. and B. Porter, 1856), p. ix.
- 15.
See, for examples, K.A. Manley, “Engines of Literature: Libraries in an Era of Expansion and Transition,” in Giles Mandelbrote and K.A. Manley (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. II, 1640–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 509–528; Holmes, Sahib, especially p. 159; Peter Stanley, White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India, 1825–1875 (London: Hurst & Company, 1998), especially pp. 43–45; Linda Colley, Captives (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), pp. 277–287; and Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), passim. The only detailed work that has been done to date on the provision of books to soldiers in India is represented by Dora Lockyer’s “The Provision of Books and Libraries by the East India Company in India, 1611–1858,” Thesis submitted for Fellowship of the Library Association, 1977.
- 16.
Examples here might include Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990), especially pp. 107–35; Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (eds), A Companion to the History of the Book (Malden, Massachusetts; Oxford, England; and Carlton, Australia: Blackwell, 2007); and Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
- 17.
The seminal work here, of course, is represented by Richard D. Altick’s ground-breaking The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (1957; Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998). Other examples include Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–1850: A Study of the Literature produced for the Working Classes in early Victorian Urban England (London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1963); Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison, Wisconsin and London: University of Wisconsin, 1987); and James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 18.
See Alistair Black and Peter Hoare, “Libraries and the Modern World,” in Alistair Black and Peter Hoare (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. III, 1850–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 7–18; Chris Baggs, “Radical Reading? Working-Class Libraries in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries,” in Black and Hoare (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. III, pp. 169–179; Joanna Innes, “Libraries in Context: Social, Cultural, and Intellectual Background,” in Giles Mandelbrote and K.A. Manley (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. II, pp. 285–300; and Robert Snape, Leisure and the Rise of the Public Library (London: Library Association Publishing, 1995) and “Libraries for Leisure Time,” in Black and Hoare (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. III, pp. 40–55.
- 19.
Altick, Common Reader; Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 1980); Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, Maryland and London: Johns Hopkins, 1974) and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, Maryland and London: Johns Hopkins, 1978).
- 20.
Influential works here are represented by Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.
- 21.
Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, introduction to Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 3.
- 22.
Gary Kelly, “Romantic Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 197.
- 23.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus Ltd., 1993), p. 82. See also Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 7.
- 24.
Colley, Captives, p. 278.
- 25.
See, for examples, Edmund G.C. King, “E.W. Hornung’s Unpublished ‘Diary,’ the YMCA, and the Reading Soldier in the First World War,” English Literature in Transition, vol. 57, no. 3 (2014): 361–87, and, “‘Books are more to me than Food’: British Prisoners of War as Readers, 1914–1918” Book History, vol. 16 (2013): 246–71; Amanda Laugesen “Boredom is the Enemy”: The Intellectual and Imaginative Lives of Australian Soldiers in the Great War and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Molly Guptill Manning, When Books went to War: The Stories that helped us win World War II (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014); and Donald Mesham, “A Forgotten Book Collection: The Army Standard Unit Library,” Publishing History, vol. 69 (2011): 85–111. The following work is forthcoming at the time of writing: Shafquat Towheed and Edmund King (eds), Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives, New Directions in Book History series (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
- 26.
Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989; London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 20.
- 27.
Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, p. 20.
- 28.
Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, p. 2.
- 29.
Rose, Intellectual Life, p. 4.
- 30.
St. Clair, Reading Nation, p. 433.
- 31.
Useful works on the history of the East India Company Army include Gerald James Bryant, “The East India Company and its Army, 1660–1778,” Ph.D. Thesis submitted to the University of London, 1975; Raymond Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972); and Alan J. Guy and Peter B. Boyden (eds), assisted by Marion Harding, Soldiers of the Raj: The Indian Army, 1600–1947 (London: National Army Museum, 1997). See also T.A. Heathcote’s The Indian Army: The Garrison of British Imperial India, 1822–1922 (Newton Abbot, Devon: David & Charles (Holdings) Ltd., 1974).
- 32.
The East India Company’s commercial and political power was increasingly checked from the late 1700s onward. On the history of the Company, see Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (1997; London: Abacus, 1998); John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London: HarperCollins, 1991); and Philip Lawson, The East India Company: A History (London and New York: Longman, 1993).
- 33.
Useful texts here include Barnett Correlli, Britain and her Army, 1509–1970: Military, Political and Social Survey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), and Richard Holmes, Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (Hammersmith: HarperCollins, 2001).
- 34.
Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, p. 183.
- 35.
Carl F. Kaestle, “Studying the History of Literacy,” in Shafquat Towheed, Rosalind Crone, and Katie Halsey (eds), The History of Reading, Routledge Literature Readers (London and New York: Routledge, 2011) p. 175.
- 36.
Snape, Leisure and the Rise of the Public Library, p. 15.
- 37.
Snape, Leisure and the Rise of the Public Library, pp. 17–19. Snape refers to P. Bailey’s arguments in relation to this in his Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
- 38.
Alistair Black, “The People’s University: Models of Public Library History,” in Black and Hoare (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. III, p. 29. On the “public function” of libraries, see Joanna Innes, “Libraries in Context,” in Mandelbrote and Manley (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. II, p. 285.
- 39.
Alan Ramsay Skelley, The Victorian Army at Home: The Recruitment and Terms and Conditions of the British Regular, 1859–1899 (London: Croom Helm, 1977), pp. 19–20.
- 40.
Quoted in Roy Palmer, The Rambling Soldier: Life in the Lower Ranks, 1750–1900, through Soldiers’ Songs and Writings (Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publications, 1985),
p. 1.
- 41.
Neil Ramsey, The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780–1835 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 2.
- 42.
Ramsey, The Military Memoir, pp. 51–52, 72.
- 43.
Carolyn Steedman also makes this point in her introduction to The Radical Soldier’s Tale (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 38–39.
- 44.
Shipp, John. The Military Bijou; or, The Contents of a Soldiers’ Knapsack: Being the Gleanings of Thirty-Three-Years Active Service (London: Whitakker, Treacher, and Co., 1831), p. vii.
- 45.
Ramsey, Military Memoir, p. 115.
- 46.
Fenwick, introduction to Voice from the Ranks, p. xiv.
- 47.
Stanley, White Mutiny, p. 43.
- 48.
Holmes, Sahib, pp. 233–34.
- 49.
Holmes, Sahib, p. 236.
- 50.
Lawson, East India Company, p. 132.
- 51.
Alan J. Guy, “People who will stick at nothing to make money?: Officers, Income, and Expectations in the Service of John Company, 1750–1840,” in Guy and Boyden (eds), assisted by Harding, Soldiers of the Raj, p. 50.
- 52.
Thomas Quinney, Sketches of A Soldier’s Life in India by Staff Sergeant Thomas Quinney, Honorable East India Company’s Service (Glasgow: David Robertson and Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1853), pp. 10–11.
- 53.
Roger S. Schofield, “Dimensions of Illiteracy in England, 1740–1850,” in Towheed, Crone, and Halsey (eds), History of Reading, p. 157.
- 54.
MS Private Charles Henry Smith, NAM 2004-01-39, pp. 46–47.
- 55.
Alexander Somerville, The Autobiography of a Working Man, By “One Who Whistled at the Plough” (London: Charles Gilpin, 1848), p. 188.
- 56.
Sergeant John Ramsbottom to William, letter undated [November 1854?], Ms Add 59876.
- 57.
Stanley, White Mischief, p. 43.
- 58.
Schofield, “Dimensions of Illiteracy in England,” in Towheed, Crone, and Halsey (eds), History of Reading, p. 154.
- 59.
William Jowett, Memoir and Diary of Sergeant W. Jowett, Seventh Royal Fusiliers (London and Beeston, Nottinghamshire: W. Kent & Co. and B. Porter, 1856), pp. vii-viii.
- 60.
Henry Marshall, Military Miscellany; Comprehending A History of the Recruiting of the Army, Military Punishments, &c. &c. (London: John Murray, 1846), pp. 94–95. According to Marshall, 52 % of the individuals in this category were able to read and write “imperfectly” in 1836 and 1837, while the figure rose slightly to 53 % for each of the following two years. The percentage of those able to read and write “well” also varied slightly across the four years: 10 % in 1836, 9 % for both 1837 and 1838, and back to 10 % again in 1839.
- 61.
Stanley, White Mutiny, Endnote 38, p. 60.
- 62.
First Report by the Council of Military Education on Army Schools (London: HMSO, 1862), p. iii, and Third Report by the Director General of Military Education on Army Schools and Libraries (London: HMSO, 1877), p xii.
- 63.
Ramsay Skelley, The Late Victorian Army, p. 90.
- 64.
Pindar, Autobiography of a Private Soldier, pp. 165–66.
- 65.
David Vincent, “Reading and Writing,” in Towheed, Crone, and Halsey (eds), History of Reading, p. 164.
- 66.
Somerville, Autobiography of a Working Man, p. 92.
- 67.
Barnett, Britain and her Army, p. 278.
- 68.
Barnett, Britain and her Army, p. 314.
- 69.
John Corneille, Journal of My Service in India (ed), with an introduction by Michael Edwardes (London: The Folio Society, 1966), p. 70.
- 70.
“Letters from Gibraltar.” No. VII [October 26th]. By the Author of “The Military Sketch Book,” in The United Service Journal and Naval and Military Magazine, 1831 (Part I), p. 45.
- 71.
See T.A. Bowyer-Bower, “The Development of Educational Ideas and Curricula in the Army during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the Degree of Master of Education, May, 1954, p. 70, and Manley, “Engines of Literature,” in Mandelbrote and Manley (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. II, p. 523.
- 72.
Snape, “Libraries for Leisure Time,” in Black and Hoare (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. III, p. 40.
- 73.
Black, “The People’s University,” in Black and Hoare (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. III, p. 35.
- 74.
“A Late Staff Sergeant of the 13th Light Infantry” [John Mercier MacMullen or McMullen], Camp and Barrack Room; or, The British Army as it is (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846), pp. 154–55.
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Murphy, S. (2016). Introduction. In: The British Soldier and his Libraries, c. 1822-1901. War, Culture and Society, 1750-1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55083-5_1
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