The Edinburgh History of Reading: Modern Readers 9781474446129

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The Edinburgh History of Reading: Modern Readers

THE EDINBURGH HISTORY OF READING General Editors: Mary Hammond and Jonathan Rose Bringing together the latest scholarship from all over the world on topics ranging from reading practices in ancient China to the workings of the twenty-first-century reading brain, the four volumes of The Edinburgh History of Reading demonstrate that reading is a deeply imbricated, socio-political practice, at once personal and public, defiant and obedient. It is often materially ephemeral, but it can also be emotionally and intellectually enduring. Early Readers, edited by Mary Hammond Modern Readers, edited by Mary Hammond Common Readers, edited by Jonathan Rose Subversive Readers, edited by Jonathan Rose

The Edinburgh History of Reading: Modern Readers Edited by Mary Hammond

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Mary Hammond, 2020 © the chapters their several authors, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Sabon and Futura by R. J. Footring Ltd, Derby, UK, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 4611 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4612 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4613 6 (epub) The right of Mary Hammond to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Published with the support of the University of Edinburgh Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

Contents

List of Figures, Plates and Tables List of Contributors

vii ix

Introduction1 Mary Hammond   1 The Rise of Night Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain Christopher Ferguson   2 The Book as Prop in the Missionary Imagination: Picturing Africans as Readers Natalie Fossey and Lize Kriel

9

30

  3 Augustus De Morgan (1806–71), His Reading and His Library 62 Karen Attar   4 William Gladstone Reads His Contemporaries Michael Wheeler   5 Reading While Travelling in the Long Nineteenth Century Mary Hammond   6 The Empire Reads Back: Travel, Exploration and the British World in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries John McAleer   7 ‘Knowledge of books’ and ‘Appreciation of literature’: Reading Choices of Aspiring American Librarians in the Progressive Era Christine Pawley

83 104

124

145

  8 Papers, Posters and Pamphlets: UK Readers in the Second World War Simon Eliot

165

  9 Peace of Mind in the Age of Anxiety: Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman and America’s Post-war Therapeutic Faith Cheryl Oestreicher

185

vi  Contents

10 Reading and Classical Music in Mid-Twentieth-Century America  Joan Shelley Rubin

206

11 Remaking the World Through Reading: Books, Readers and the Global Project of Modernity, 1945–70 Amanda Laugesen

226

12 Amazing Stories, 1950–3: The Readers Behind the Covers Angelle Whavers 13 The Other Digital Divide: Gendering Science Fiction Fan Reading in Print and Online, 1930 to the Present Cait Coker 14 ‘A bolt is shot back somewhere in the breast’ (Matthew Arnold, ‘The Buried Life’): A Methodology for Literary Reading in the Twenty-First Century Philip Davis and Josie Billington Select Bibliography Index of Methods and Sources General Index

250

264

283

306 334 335

Figures, Plates and Tables

Figures   1.1 Thomas Gray’s illustration accompanying W.T.’s poem ‘In the Firelight’  21   2.1 ‘Rev. Moffat’s Preaching Journey’ 38   2.2 ‘Sermon’  39   2.3 ‘Eromonga Youth Preaching on the Ship’  40   2.4 Engraving after Missionary Carl Hoffmann’s drawing (Plate 5) 40   2.5 Missionary teacher surrounded by pupils  42   2.6 A woman school teacher with a book in her left hand makes sure the children’s hands are clean 43   2.7 A little white girl reading to a black family 43   2.8 According to the Calwer Bilderbuch, an image of Jakob Okofi, a young Christian from Niger who showed great interest in English books, c. 1863 45   2.9 Grandfather and grandson instructing [one another] 46   2.10 A frequently reproduced photograph of two evangelists of the Berlin Mission in conversation over two books 48   2.11 Advantages of mission education: Carl Hoffmann’s illustration of an enthusiastic African reader 49   2.12 Abegu and Durugu, the two youths who assisted with the translation of the Bible into Hausa, depicted in England in the 1850s 51   2.13 A photograph of Joel Modiba with an open Bible in the veld 52   4.1 Upper part of page 60 of Gladstone’s copy of John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua87   4.2 Page 11 of Gladstone’s copy of H. R. F. Bourne et al., John Stuart Mill92   5.1 John Tenniel’s illustration for page 53 of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There109 12.1 Gender breakdown of Amazing Stories’ letter-writers between 1950 and 1953 259

viii   Figures, Plates and Tables

14.1 ‘Hands’. Photograph by Joe Magee 14.2 Using physiological data to examine the effects of literature

283 297

Plates   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Robert Braithwaite Martineau, The Last Chapter (1863) A. Courcell, I am Tir’d of Reading! (c. 1810) A. Courcell, So am I of Working! (c. 1810) Self-portrait of missionary Carl Hoffmann, from his private diary: ‘In the garden of the Mission House on Arkona Mission Station, Transvaal, South Africa’ Preaching scene in Mashonaland by Missionary Carl Hoffmann, from his private diary The History Room, Gladstone’s Library, containing the Gladstone Foundation Collection Vitorre Carpaccio, The Dream of St Ursula (1497–8) Pierre Auguste Cot, Pause for Thought/Ophelia (1870) Abraham Solomon, First Class – The Meeting and at First Meeting Loved (1855) Abraham Solomon, Second Class – The Parting: ‘Thus part we rich in sorrow, parting poor’ (1854) Abraham Solomon, First Class: The Meeting . . . and at First Meeting Loved (1854) (original version) Augustus Leopold Egg, The Travelling Companions (1862) Agnes Cleve-Jonand, Train Compartment (c. 1920) Amazing Stories, October 1950. A typical ‘sexy’ cover Amazing Stories, August 1952. A more conservative cover after readers demanded more attention to science and less to the female body Amazing Stories, September 1952 Tables

12.1 Gender breakdown of the readership of Amazing Stories, 1950–3  260

Contributors

Karen Attar is the Curator of Rare Books at Senate House Library and a research fellow at the Institute of English Studies, both University of London. Her major publication is the third edition of the Directory of Rare Book and Special Collections in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland (2016). She has published widely on library history, especially pertaining to the University of London. Josie Billington is Professor in English at the University of Liverpool. Her publications include Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare (2012) and scholarly editions of George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She has published extensively on the power of literary reading to influence mental health, including as the author of Is Literature Healthy? (2016) and as the editor of Reading and Mental Health (2019). Cait Coker is Associate Professor and Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and completed her doctoral degree in literature from Texas A&M University in 2019. She is co-editor of the Women in Book History Bibliography (http://www.womensbookhistory.org) and Senior Bibliographer of the Science Fiction Research Index. She frequently publishes on genre history and women in book history. Philip Davis is Professor of English and sometime Director of CRILS (Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society) at the University of Liverpool. He is general editor of the ‘Literary Agenda’ series at Oxford University Press in which his book Reading and the Reader: The Literary Agenda appeared in 2013, and of a new Oxford University Press series, ‘My Reading’. Simon Eliot is Professor Emeritus of the History of the Book at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He was involved in founding the Reading Experience ix

x  Contributors

Database; the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP); and London Rare Books School. He has published on quantitative book history, publishing history, history of lighting, library history and the history of reading. He was general editor of the four-volume History of Oxford University Press (2013– 17) and recently directed a large-scale project on the communication history of the Ministry of Information, 1939–46, the first publication of which is Allied Communication to the Public During the Second World War (2019). Christopher Ferguson is Associate Professor of History at Auburn University. He is the author of An Artisan Intellectual: James Carter and the Rise of Modern Britain, 1792–1853 (2016). He is currently writing a book on the history of Christmas in nineteenth-century Britain. Natalie Fossey is a printmaker and fine arts lecturer in the School of the Arts University of Pretoria, working in printmaking, drawing and print culture. She developed her interests at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, receiving a Master of Arts in Fine Art (MAFA) (Cum Laude). She has exhibited in a number of group shows, most recently ‘Drawing Conclusions’, at Pretoria Art Association, curated by Diane Victor. Her most recent publication was a chapter co-authored with Lize Kriel, ‘The “Reading African” in the Hierarchy of Others as Visualised in the Periodical Der Missionsfreund, Early 20th Century’ (in the book Menschen – Bilder – Eine Welt, 2018). Mary Hammond is Professor of English and Book History at the University of Southampton. She is the founding Director (since 2012) of the Southampton Centre for Nineteenth-Century Research, and a former (2004–7) project manager of the Reading Experience Database 1450–1945. She has written a number of works on the literature and print culture of the long nineteenth century, including Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914 (2006) and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations: A Cultural Life, 1860–2012 (2015), and is co-editor of Publishing in the First World War (2007), Books Without Borders (2008) and Rural/Urban Relation­ ships in the Nineteenth Century (2016). Lize Kriel is Professor of Visual Culture Studies in the School of the Arts at the University of Pretoria. She is interested in the produc­tion of historical knowledge, with a specific focus on the intersections

Contributors  xi

between oral art, image and text in African–European missionary encounters. She is the author of The Malaboch Books: Kgaluši in the ‘Civilization of the Written Word’ (2009) and co-author (with Annekie Joubert, Inge Kosch and Gerrie Grobler) of Ethnography from the Mission Field: The Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowl­ edge (2015). Amanda Laugesen is a historian and lexicographer, and is currently Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre and Associate Professor at the Australian National University. She has published widely on Australian as well as US history, including on the history of the book. Her most recent monographs are Taking Books to the World: American Publishers and the Cultural Cold War (2017) and Globalizing the Library: Librarians and Development Work 1945– 1970 (2019). John McAleer is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southampton. He was previously Curator of Imperial and Maritime History at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. His work explores the British encounter and engagement with the wider world, situating the history of empire in its global and maritime contexts. His monographs include Representing Africa: Landscape, Exploration and Empire in Southern Africa, 1780–1870 (2010), Britain’s Maritime Empire: Southern Africa, the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, 1763–1820 (2016) and Picturing India: People, Places and the World of the East India Company (2017). Cheryl Oestreicher is Head of Special Collections and Archives and an associate professor at Boise State University. She authored an article for Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History and has authored, edited and contributed to books, articles and conference proceedings about archival topics for the Society of American Archivists and Washington State University Press, Archivaria, Provenance and the Council on Library and Information Resources. Christine Pawley is Professor Emerita at the Information School, University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was previously Director of the School and of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture. Her publications include Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa (2001) and Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America (2010).

xii  Contributors

Joan Shelley Rubin is the Dexter Perkins Professor of History and the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center at the University of Rochester. She is the author, among other works, of The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992), Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (2007) and Cultural Considerations: Essays on Readers, Writers, and Musicians in Postwar America (2012). A co-editor of A History of the Book in America, Vol. V: The Enduring Book (2014), she also co-edited The Oxford Encyclopedia of ­American Cultural and Intellectual History (2013) and the United States sections of The Oxford Companion to the Book (2010). Angelle Whavers is a recent graduate of Drew University with a bachelor’s degree in history. She is member of the Phi Alpha Theta and has worked as a dramaturg conducting research for the shows ‘Reaching Back to Move Forward’ (2016) and ‘Surely Goodness and Mercy’ (2017). Michael Wheeler is a visiting professor of English at the University of Southampton. He founded the Ruskin Centre and the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University, and was then Professor of English at Southampton and Co-Director of Chawton House Library in its early days. His books include Ruskin’s God (2006), Heaven, Hell and the Victorians (1994), The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (2006), St John and the Vic­ torians (2012) and The Athenæum: 200 Years of ‘the brainiest club in the world’ (2020).

Introduction Mary Hammond

What is a ‘modern reader’? How can historians reliably constitute him or her, or even begin to think about ‘modern readers’ collectively? The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms designates ‘early modern’ as ‘a period of European history broadly equivalent to that of the 16th and 17th centuries’,1 but has no entry for ‘modern’. The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, however, gives the date ­parameters of ‘the modern’ as 1800–2000,2 while the Oxford Handbook of Modern African History focuses on ‘the history of the continent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although also looks back to the era of the Atlantic slave trade’.3 As these three scholarly works from the same stable – all with international contribu­ tors – imply, the idea of ‘the modern’ is not only different in different geographical locations, but changes according to the subject matter under review. ‘Literary terms’ appear to have a different timeline from ‘politics’, and ‘British politics’ to differ again in its modernity from ‘African history’. Perhaps more to the point for our purposes, who is not, in his or her own analysis, a ‘modern’ reader? The answer is probably no one; and since it is our contention that a history of reading must pay close attention to the self-constitution of its subjects, we begin this second volume of the Edinburgh History of Reading fully cognisant of the fact that ‘modern readers’ are as plural as their ‘early’ counterparts covered in the first volume, and that any attempt to periodise them is probably doomed to failure. That said, there are subtle but important methodological differences in the ways in which historians of reading must tackle subjects of different periods, and one of the foremost of these is a change in the type and quantity of evidence they have left (or indeed are still leaving) behind. This second volume moves us from early (pre-nineteenth-century) readers and the methodological problems attendant on recovering and in some cases reconstructing the traces of their habits to readers in what we have (perhaps contentiously) termed the ‘modern’ world. This rich evidential tranche covers post-industrialisation Western 1

2  Mary Hammond

contexts in most cases, and the methods of recovery and analysis naturally therefore change accordingly, as increasing literacy rates and a corresponding increase in the accessibility and prevalence of a wide range of reading material in Western culture have led to a far richer and more accessible range of sources. Many readers began to leave traces of their habits and practices in this period. Judicial and media bodies also began to record them more comprehensively, and historians are thus faced with a new set of problems: how to capture and understand a body of evidence that is often overwhelming, but sometimes paradoxically skewed in favour of a particular gender, age group, ethnicity, profession or class. The chapters in this volume apply a range of methods – from the empirical to the scientific, from an analysis of crime and accident reports through individual reader testimony to the deconstruction of official propaganda about reading – to make sense of this evidence. Christopher Ferguson (Chapter 1) raises a key issue here: reading requires not just material texts, but particular physical conditions. He uses his analysis of reading at night in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, drawing on autobiographies, newspaper accounts and Old Bailey proceedings, to situate many readers as caught between reading’s physical and ideological costs. ‘When choosing to read at night’, he argues, ‘ordinary readers embraced the economic and physical costs of reduced sleep, and the risk of fire, but gained the freedom to read, think and feel for themselves, free from interruptions or regulations’. This was surely true for ‘early’ readers also: and the late appearance of the kinds of evidence he examines is able to show us how we might fruitfully read backwards from the ‘modern’ situation. We are careful, then, not to assume too radical a break with the past here. Many chapter authors, like Ferguson, dip back into the historical terrain covered by Early Readers. Readers in this sense serve as vibrant reminders that to be human is just as likely to be messy, stubborn, chaotic, eccentric and attached to tradition as it is to adhere to neat historical time slices or obediently go along with the march of progress, and that historiography had better take account of that fact. The methodological problems and potential solutions (like the time periods) are not, therefore, entirely distinct between these first two volumes of The Edinburgh History of Reading, although in many cases they need adjustment to take account of new problems. In their jointly authored chapter in the first volume, for example, Helwi Blom, Rindert Jagersma and Juliette Reboul discuss in detail some of the problems associated with using library catalogues as sources for reading history. In the present volume, too, Karen Attar notes in

Introduction  3

Chapter 3, on the library of the nineteenth-century mathematician Augustus De Morgan, that library collections both are and are not evidence of reading, and that even marginalia are not totally reliable. As she explains, ‘De Morgan’s marginalia provide instances where annotation does not prove reading, or where it proves reading of a book other than the one in hand’. Messy readers indeed. Michael Wheeler, however, finds in William Gladstone’s library not only irrefutable evidence of ownership and reading but also an extraordinary commitment to engaging critically with the publications of his contemporaries (Chapter 4). Gladstone’s annotations were made in his own private code and deciphering it has required a considerable amount of detective work. But these annotations – so often witty, perplexed, contemplative or even profoundly troubled – reveal an intensely personal experience that was – while far from typical for the period, given Gladstone’s social status – deeply and perhaps universally human nonetheless. In many chapters in this book, in fact, the contributors must still wrestle with the kinds of problems that dogged the historians in the first volume. This problem is particularly apparent in those chapters dealing with lower-class readers, with regions where record capture has been patchy or virtually non-existent for whatever reason, with non-industrial nations and regions, or with reading practices that are more ephemeral than those that usually appear in the official record. These contributors, too, must find other ways to ‘get at’ the history of reading practices, building up a plausible story out of fragments. In order to do so, for example, Natalie Fossey and Lize Kriel (Chapter 2) use the concept of ‘visuality’ to examine the politics embedded in images of missionised readers in nineteenth-century Africa, arguing that in doing so they are able to demonstrate the complex interplay between a number of images that were recycled as engravings as well as photographs in different print contexts over the span of more than a century. My own chapter (Chapter 5) analyses the traces of reading habits left behind by travelling readers in the long nineteenth century, now collected in the Reading Experience Database 1450–1945. I argue that many recent critical deconstructions of images of travelling reading and its attendant dangers are more useful as stories of cultural anxiety and ideology than as evidence of real readers’ experiences. In my analysis, women, the working classes and children were all easily able to ignore such negative depictions in order to get happily lost in a book to while away the tedium of travel, and they paid scant attention to the nay-sayers. John McAleer (Chapter 6) broadens the discussion of travelling readers to consider those who crossed the oceans, using as

4  Mary Hammond

his evidence personal diaries, ships’ records, ships’ newspapers and travelogues. For McAleer, ‘reading was a crucial technology, aiding European travellers to overcome distance, unfamiliar environments and practical obstacles’, and he concludes that the ‘place where one reads matters’. Again, we might usefully ‘read back’ from this testimony into earlier periods when readers, not just texts, were on the move. Several of the contributors benefit from the increase in evidence the ‘modern’ period enables. Christine Pawley (Chapter 7) examines a rare tranche of student records at the Wisconsin Library School. Her sample of 118 librarianship students who graduated between 1907 and 1927, who submitted a combined total of more than 2,400 books read for pleasure, demonstrates that ‘despite the fact that we know their names and a few bare facts about them, these really are “ordinary” readers who largely lived out their lives in anonymity’. In this sense, the find gives us an invaluable glimpse into the reading habits of ordinary people who, while on course to become professionally bookish, reserved the right to read for pleasure many texts that would not have found their way onto the period’s library shelves. Simon Eliot (Chapter 8), by contrast, explores a body of readers who were, it was assumed by government propagandists, likely to be (or likely to need to be) more ‘obedient’ in response to a grave national emergency. He focusses on the papers, posters and pamphlets distributed or available to UK readers during the Second World War, using Ministry of Information records to illustrate how the wartime reading subject was ideologically constructed through an astonishing range of materials disgorged through official channels. Cheryl Oestreicher (Chapter 9) moves us into the post-war period in the USA, her focus on a single text and author rather than a single reader or organisation. She is able to demonstrate through an analysis of readers’ letters to the author that a surprisingly wide range of readers of a non-denominational self-help book by Rabbi Joshua Liebman, Peace of Mind (1946), gained comfort from it whatever their faith. This evidence, she concludes, provides a fascinating insight into post-war ideas of faith and psychiatry, as well as readers’ habits and preferences. This should warn us not to assume too readily that even in deeply religious eras (such as many of those covered in the first volume, Early Readers), faith-based reading itself might not have been as dominant as we have tended to assume, and that readers may have explored their spirituality in a number of surprising ways. Joan Shelley Rubin (Chapter 10) gives us another example of complex readerly interactions, this time with different media simultaneously. She examines books about music, and designed to be read

Introduction  5

while listening to music, in America in the period between 1920 and 1970. Intriguingly, she suggests that the tenor of readers’ letters to the composer and music writer Leonard Bernstein reveal that ‘for part of Bernstein’s audience the experience of reading a work on music – albeit one in an accessible register – was not qualitatively different from reading a novel’. She is also able to demonstrate here that ‘intensive reading’ – the practice of studying a single text deeply and often repeatedly over time – did not die out in the early nineteenth century as ‘extensive reading’ for pleasure became the norm, as has so often been assumed since 1969, when Rolf Engelsing first posited the idea of an eighteenth-century ‘reading revolution’.4 As Rubin is able to show, among ‘modern’ readers intensive reading was – and still is – alive and well for certain categories of book. Amanda Laugesen’s chapter, on the other hand, posits a stark contrast between this evidence of genuine readerly independence in the USA in this period and the official US-driven promotion of reading (particularly certain types of reading) in other locations (Chapter 11). For her, ‘efforts to promote ideologies of reading and print culture at the global level in this period were imbued with the politics of Cold War foreign policy, and took place within a context of decolonisation, modernisation and the rise of nationalism in newly independent and developing countries’. As we have seen, evidence of real readers’ practices and habits as analysed by many of the contributors was emerging more fully, and being captured in more stable forms, in the USA and Europe in the modern period. But in many other locations in the world, such as those affected by the UNESCO reading programme investigated by Laugesen – namely Africa, Brazil, Iran and India – the old problem of paucity of evidence not only remains, but emerges as politically constructed. Here, ‘the “real” reader – reading as a lived experience – remains frustratingly elusive for the most part. Real readers were often ignored or even disapproved of, and an “ideal reader” was promoted or assumed.’ Readerly freedoms, like evidence, are geographically relative. Other contributors who examine evidence such as fan letters or blogs, which are both definitively ‘modern’ in different ways, throw the issue into even starker relief; and in so doing they also manage to demonstrate that relative readerly freedoms and the traces of readers’ interactions with texts can be remarkably revealing of broader political agendas, even those at the international level. Angelle Whavers (Chapter 12) examines readers’ letters to a popular 1950s pulp fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. She is thus able to demonstrate that such magazines were once a central piece of American popular culture,

6  Mary Hammond

and that they paid close attention to what their readers wanted. But they also, crucially, became ‘a key player in debates about censorship and juvenile delinquency during the moral panics of the early Cold War’. Such evidence would be impossible, of course, without high literacy rates, cheap literature and a cheap and efficient postal system, all of which are resolutely features of a technologically and politically ‘modern’ period that did not exist prior to the nineteenth century. But the application of this type of evidence in the service of wider social histories of morality and crime offers an unexpected bonus: reading, as I insisted in the Introduction to Early Readers, is always a deeply imbricated, political social practice, and its history can be of use way beyond the boundaries of our discipline. Several contributors to the present volume offer invaluable links between the past and the present that underscore our contention that some readerships readily break period, generic and technological boundaries. Cait Coker (Chapter 13) examines Anglo-American science fiction fandom, providing a historical overview of changing print and digital practices from 1930 to the present. She demonstrates that while several disparate fields of study have accounted for various parts of this phenomenon of readerly interaction, none has yet joined the dots to explore how groups of readers have emerged and coalesced over time, able to share long-standing affinities even as technologies change. We end this volume with new research on how to capture and try to understand what is going on in the reading brain. Philip Davis and Josie Billington (Chapter 14) are based in the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society, University of Liverpool, in association with national UK charity The Reader. Their project analyses the psychological and neurological effects of reading Victorian literature on ‘people who would not normally be involved in reading literature: people in drug and rehabilitation centres, prisons, hospitals, drop-in centres in local medical practices, dementia care homes, facilities for looked-after children, schools and libraries’. Their ‘combination of . . . qualitative and quantitative research measures’, they suggest, ‘provides rare empirical insights into private processes of reading, a window onto what is usually hidden within solo literary reading but is here made spontaneously manifest.’ In so doing, they indicate in the most vivid way possible that ‘old’ literature can cross boundaries, both appealing to and even helping to create ‘new’ readers, for whom the experience can be life-changing. The chapters in this volume are overwhelmingly Anglophone, for the obvious reason that for some years from the eighteenth century

Introduction  7

onwards Anglophone cultures dominated the making of the modern publishing industry, and tended to capture evidence of readerships more efficiently due to the emergence of niche marketing. But, as McAleer, Coker, Laugesen and several other contributors so ably demonstrate, in the ‘modern’ period it is problematic to consider literature as in any sense exclusively ‘national’, or the Anglophone (or any other language) as a stable linguistic-textual category (or indeed in terms of a centre–periphery model). Many Anglophone records ignore altogether evidence of the long tradition of book culture in Continental Europe, the Arab world or in India for example, although their textual products reached far beyond national borders in a number of different versions and impacted Anglophone cultures in profound ways. Texts travelled in this period more widely than ever before, and their journeys are not only geographic but also linguistic, as they were translated (sometimes simultaneously) into other languages. They also effortlessly crossed media, as they were adapted, borrowed, pirated or can be seen to have influenced other textual forms. And they time travel across period boundaries in ways we have only just begun to understand. The readers and reading experiences the contributors try to capture in this book are at times very vocal, at other times silent, or even silenced. What the contributors collectively reveal, though, is the intriguing and sometimes startling extent to which not only modern readers, but also potentially readers whose experiences are lost to us, might somehow have found a way to exert their reading will, no matter what their circumstances, or what form that will eventually took. The intricate particularities of their engagement with texts might even help us to understand just a little bit more about the elusive part of human nature that feels the need to transmit and imbibe ideas and information across vast tracts of time and space.

Notes  1. Chris Baldick (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 101.   2. David Brown, Robert Crowcroft and Gordon Pentland (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).   3. John Parker and Richard Reid (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).  4. Rolf Engelsing, ‘Die Perioden der Lesergeschichte in der Neuzeit. Das

8  Mary Hammond statische Ausmass und die soziokulturelle Bedeutung der Lektüre’, Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, 10 (1969), cols 944–1002, and Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500–1800 (Stuttgart, 1974).

Chapter 1

The Rise of Night Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain Christopher Ferguson

One night during the winter of 1810, the young tailor James Carter fell asleep while reading in bed. Carter later described this incident at length in his 1845 autobiography.1 At first glance, the tailor’s account of the act of falling asleep while reading might seem to offer the ultimate confirmation that Carter’s writings are of minimal value for understanding the history of the nineteenth century.2 After all, for the inhabitant of the twenty-first century, what could be more familiar or meaningless than falling asleep while reading in bed? Yet, to dismiss Carter’s account in this fashion is to forget that for most of history reading after sundown was a minority experience. Before the modern era, the expense and potential dangers associated with sources of artificial light ensured that night reading remained in the purview of a small community of socially privileged or exceptionally motivated readers. Indeed, for a large swathe of the inhabitants of the nineteenth century, reading at night remained an unfamiliar, extraordinary practice, and thus the act was perceived as being imbued with a range of positive and negative meanings that were debated throughout the century. That the tailor Carter chose to read at night – and to narrate the act long afterwards – also was indicative of the beginning of the end of this longstanding relationship between nocturnal reading and exceptional persons. If the night-time represented one of the ‘frontiers’ of human experience that was ‘colonised’ during the modern era (to borrow the sociologist Murray Melbin’s metaphor), then Carter was one of a number of humble colonists contributing to this transformation, for – much like in the modern era’s other imperial endeavours – the British were at the forefront of the process of conquering the night.3 At first glance, the increasing prevalence of night reading in nineteenth-century Britain might be dismissed as a logical outgrowth 9

10  Christopher Ferguson

of that century’s well known expansion of reading in general, characterised above all by the rapid proliferation of cheap print and the appearance of controversial ‘new readers’ – women, workers and children.4 Yet the persistence of significant economic costs and dangers associated with available lighting technologies continued to militate against any easy shift from daytime to night-time reading during the century. Nevertheless, the evidence of night reading examined here indicates that the practice expanded considerably over the course of the nineteenth century. It did so despite these continued physical constraints, suggesting the existence of some additional impetus beyond heightened levels of literacy or the greater availability of print media drove an increasing number of ordinary British men and women to forgo sleep in order to read. Thus, if understanding the history of reading in the nineteenth century requires us to examine that century’s ‘new readers’, it likewise demands that we also investigate the new times of day at which they were choosing to read. During these years, readers like Carter not only laid claim to texts that had previously been within the purview only of wealthy elites, but also to the once exclusive hours in which these texts had been consumed. In doing so, these ordinary Britons transgressed the bounds of acceptable readerly behaviour, stealing hours away from sleep in order to read for improvement or pleasure. By choosing to stay up at night to read – and by claiming the right to do so – despite the existence of a range of physical, economic and social factors that advised against the practice, nineteenth-century men and women democratised the act of nocturnal reading, helping to create the world of ubiquitous night reading and night readers we take for granted today. For most of the inhabitants of past times and places, the end of daylight ended the possibility of reading. When, for example, in 1774 the young William Cobbett sat down in the shade of a haystack to devour a newly purchased copy of Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, he was capable of doing so only ‘until it was dark’, at which point he ‘could see no longer’, put the book in his pocket, and went to sleep.5 While it is technically possible to read by the light of the moon and stars, in reality such light is heavily dependent on the lunar cycle and weather. In places like the British Isles, the weather conditions frequently require the inhabitants to seek shelter indoors. Before the nineteenth century, the homes of all but the wealthiest Britons had few windows, and those they possessed were small and often bereft of glass, thus placing additional limits on the availability of natural light. Reading after dark in most cases required artificial light.

The Rise of Night Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain   11

Before the invention of electricity, all the sources of artificial illumination – fires, rushlights, lamps or candles, for example – produced their light through combustion. Thus they all carried with them the risk of fire. They were also expensive – often prohibitively so for all but the wealthiest elites, and even many aristocrats were not eager enough to read after dark to incur the expenses necessary to do so.6 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, described herself as a ‘fool’ for refusing to deny herself the pleasure of sitting up ‘all night reading’ in 1748.7 Simon Eliot shrewdly observes that to ask whether it was ‘worth the candle’ was not a metaphorical but a literal question for most readers in the past.8 Indeed, Roger Ekirch asserts that throughout the early modern era reading after dark was always ‘constrained by concerns for both safety and frugality’.9 Nevertheless, Ekirch and other scholars demonstrate that during the early modern period the number of Europeans willing to incur the risks and expenses of night reading slowly began to increase. The influence of the Protestant Reformation, and later the Enlightenment, encouraged individuals to read at night in the belief that the personal spiritual and intellectual benefits of this reading offset the costs and dangers of reading after dark.10 As a young boy, for example, the eighteenth-century clothier Thomas Wright was often allowed to stay up reading his Bible until ‘twelve, one, or two o’clock in the morning, till [he] fell asleep’, despite knowing that this was a ‘dangerous practice’.11 This gradual expansion of night-time reading by early modern Britons like Wright occurred alongside the growth of other night-time activities like walking, socialising and crime – and its policing. Thus, the slow spread of night reading during the early modern era represented one part of what Craig Koslofsky describes as a pattern of early modern ‘nocturnalisation’, involving the ‘ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night’.12 When the tailor Carter ‘unwisely’ decided to stay up to read, he joined a community of night readers whose ranks had been expanding slowly over the course of the preceding centuries. His observation that by falling asleep reading in bed he had not only incurred ‘considerable danger’ but also ‘much waste’ of a candle likewise seems to place him within the same regime of experience as that of Wright, Montagu and other early modern readers, and where the history of artificial lighting was concerned his observation was largely true.13 Though the second decade of the nineteenth century witnessed the widespread adoption of gas lighting in Britain, its provision was far from universal, especially in the homes and neighbourhoods of the poor and labouring classes, leaving many still relying on candles,

12  Christopher Ferguson

lamps and fireplaces for their household illumination well into the final decades of the century. Furthermore, even within the homes of the middle and upper classes, the installation of gas lighting was uneven and incomplete.14 A leading gas engineer noted at mid-century, for example, that within many homes the technology continued to be employed only in the public spaces – in entrance halls, dining rooms and staircases – on account of either aesthetic preferences or for reasons of economy.15 Children’s and servants’ bedrooms, in particular, were frequently left unlit by gas under the perception that the rooms’ inhabitants could not be trusted to use the lighting in a safe or economical fashion.16 Many who possessed gaslight also still preferred to read by lamp or candlelight. By the late 1830s, for example, William Gladstone had already caused considerable damage to his eyesight on account of ‘hard reading’ done ‘entirely by candle-light’.17 Never­ theless, like the future prime minister, many other Britons chose to continue to read by candlelight, preferring it over the harsher, though superior, illumination provided by gaslight.18 Thus, the majority of night reading conducted during the nineteenth century continued to be done by the light of a fire, or a lamp or a (above all) candle. Evidence gleaned from witness testimonies at London’s Old Bailey confirm as much. Of seventeen witnesses during the 1840s whose evidence included descriptions of reading after dark, seven mentioned their source of illumination, and only one of these was gaslight. The others read either by firelight or by candlelight.19 Similar evidence is also presented in one of the most canonical artistic depictions of reading produced during the nineteenth century: Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s 1863 painting entitled The Last Chapter (Plate 1), which depicts a young woman reading by firelight. Accounts of reading from nineteenth-century autobiographies offer similar confirmations. To Carter’s description of reading by candlelight, we might add those of: the Chartist Thomas Cooper, who described reading in prison by candle in 1844; the sawyer Christopher Thomson, who recalled becoming terrified while reading Matthew Lewis’s The Monk by candlelight in the 1810s; the teacher Mary Smith, who described reading many books by candlelight throughout her life (as well as Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by the light of the moon in 1850); and the Irish journalist and political radical John Binns, who claimed he was ‘in the habit of reading after I went to bed’ for much of his youth and early adulthood, and who also usually read by candlelight, noting that he ‘frequently fell asleep while the candle was burning’.20

The Rise of Night Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain   13

A random sampling of anecdotal evidence from other contem­ porary sources offers a similar picture of night reading conducted by premodern sources of illumination. A correspondent informed the scientist William Nicholson in 1803 that watching a ‘stream of wax’ overflow ‘the cup of the wax candle by which I have been reading’ late at night inspired him to develop a theory on the role of ‘irregular cooling’ in ‘the Laws of Crystallization’.21 Two decades later, the essayist Charles Lamb asserted that there was ‘absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle’.22 Another two decades later, a minister eagerly informed the Home Missionary Society about a ‘very aged’ woman of the ‘rural poor’, who allowed herself ‘the extravagance . . . regularly every other day to buy a candle’, with which she read her Bible.23 In the same decade, the noted oculist William White Cooper warned that ‘Reading by fire-light . . . is highly injurious to feeble eyes . . . yet many persons will . . . try their eyes in this way’.24 By the 1880s, warnings like Cooper’s had become a regular element in medical discourse, indicating that concerns about the relationship between night reading and optical health continued to be based on the assumption that this reading would be done by firelight or candlelight late into the century.25 If nineteenth-century night readers continued to employ the same sources of lighting available to their early modern predecessors, doing so also exposed them to similar dangers. The Statistical Society of London, for example, claimed that between 1833 and 1842 seven fires occurred in the national capital directly as a result of ‘reading in bed’ in hotels and private residences.26 As in early modern times, many of these fires proved fatal. In 1853, the Reverend James Commeline died after he fell asleep reading by candlelight. By the time his servants heard his screams, Commeline’s ‘bed was in flames’ and he had been ‘badly burned’.27 Contemporary newspapers regularly depicted similar tragic fatalities.28 If nineteenth-century newspapers chronicled the deaths occasioned by night reading, autobiographies narrated the instances in which individuals narrowly escaped similar disasters. Binns, for example, noted that one night he awoke in bed to find one-third of an ‘octavo-volume . . . reduced to ashes’.29 Even reading at night by gaslight did not necessarily eliminate the threat of fire. The apprentice Thomas Roper learned this the hard way in 1846, when he was accused of arson after he fell asleep reading in his master’s shop with the gas still burning, setting the building on fire.30 If reading by artificial light in the nineteenth century continued to be a dangerous enterprise, the economic costs of doing so likewise remained considerable. Candles, in particular, remained expensive

14  Christopher Ferguson

(recall the ‘extravagance’ of the old woman buying a candle every other day in the 1840s). The same century that witnessed the installation of gas lighting in mills and factories also saw the massive expansion of outwork in many traditional industries, and one justi­fication for this shift was the savings to masters in the form of reduced lighting costs – a common point of complaint voiced by outworkers, who saw their earnings reduced by the need to purchase their own candles.31 That many workers could not afford the lighting necessary to labour at home reminds us just how significant the costs of night reading remained for a large swathe of the population of nineteenth-century Britain. In fact, in the 1820s a distributor for the Religious Tract Society reported that at least one poor reader became much more interested in his tracts when they were accompanied by the gift of a free candle, which allowed the man to read the tracts at night, something he could not afford to do otherwise.32 Unlike gas or electric lighting, the process of combustion made the costs of reading by fire, lamp or candle visible to the reader. As Eliot notes, the gradual consumption of wood, wax or wick ‘recorded explicitly the consumption of money’; readers likely knew exactly how much it would cost to replace the fuel being consumed while they read. Thus, in the nineteenth century, reading by pre-industrial light sources continually confronted the readers with the costs of their reading, forcing them – like early modern readers – to also answer the question, ‘is it worth the candle?’33 For an increasing number of nineteenth-century readers the response to this question was a resounding ‘yes’. If the dangers and economic burdens associated with night reading for much of the populace remained similar to those that had confronted their an­ cestors in earlier centuries, a range of evidence suggests that a far greater number now chose to incur those risks and burdens. Carter was not the only British worker staying up late to read, and this ensured that while the physical circumstances that accompanied the act of night reading may have changed little between the nineteenth century and the centuries that preceded it, the incidence and implications of the practice had altered considerably. Again, witness testimonies from London’s Old Bailey offer one means of charting the expansion of night reading during the first half of the century. Between 1800 and 1850, the presence of anecdotal accounts of reading in witness testimonies climbed steadily, a pattern that roughly paralleled rising levels of literacy. Accounts of night reading always represented the minority of these testimonies. The percentage of testimonies featuring night reading, however, grew at a

The Rise of Night Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain   15

far greater rate than those mentioning reading during the daytime. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, accounts of night reading appeared in roughly 16 per cent of the evidence given by witnesses. By the 1840s it had more than doubled, appearing in 35 per cent of testimony, and it had climbed steadily during the two intervening decades.34 Though such evidence is imperfect, it is nevertheless suggestive of a rising tendency to engage in night reading – one that was exhibited across the social spectrum. The testimonies from the 1840s, for example, encompassed a wide range of members of British society, including working-class and middle-class boys and girls, domestic servants, an apprentice to an unspecified trade, an accountant, a tailor, a female lodging-house keeper and a Member of Parliament.35 These glimpses of the expanding practice of night reading offered by the records of the Old Bailey become even more illuminating when combined with that acquired from other corners of nineteenth-century British life. Evidence of rising night reading, for example, also is offered (albeit in the negative) by the change in emphasis with which the authors of contemporary advice manuals addressed the practice during the 1840s. Arnold James Cooley warned readers that ‘the practice of reading in bed cannot be too much censured; it is a common cause of fires’. Yet, he then proceeded to advise those who would do so in spite of his warnings to ‘Avoid leaving your candle burning at the side of your bed, but place it on a table or a floor, at a respectable distance from any article of linen, or other equally inflammable substances’.36 The year before, an anonymous ‘Lady’ had likewise cautioned domestic servants, ‘Never be tempted to read in bed’. She then reasserted more forcefully: ‘It is impossible to say too much against [it] . . . for nothing can excuse an act which is attended with the greatest danger’. The virulence of her admonitions, however, suggests that more were succumbing to the temptation.37 Binns offered similar warnings in his autobiography, only to conclude they likely would be ignored: ‘I would raise my warning voice; yet how am I to expect that my voice shall act as a warning, when my example . . . invites to the practice rather than deters from it’. Even after the burning of the ‘octavo-volume’, Binns noted he was unable to cure himself of the habit of night reading, so why should he expect his readers to behave more sensibly?38 To these admonitions might be added a number of random anecdotes about night reading gleaned from a range of other sources. In the 1830s, for example, a joke made its way back and forth across the Atlantic in which a scholar ‘who was reading at night, heard a thief breaking through the wall of his house’, and happening to have ‘a tea-kettle with boiling water before the fire’, took it up and scalded

16  Christopher Ferguson

the burglar as he came through the wall.39 In the decade before, the future working-class poet John Critchley Prince frequently read by ‘the light of the “slacked” fire’ during the ‘witching hour of night’, despite his father’s opposition.40 In her 1848 account of ‘ghosts and ghost-seers’, Catherine Crowe described an Oxford professor who was reading ‘between eleven and twelve at night’, when he was confronted by ‘Mr. Naylor . . . dead full four years’.41 In the same decade, the elderly Frederick Sewell Burton was brought to court by his landlady, Mrs Jemima Pettit, for refusing to pay for ‘dress-glasses’ he had broken in his bedroom on four separate occasions, when using them to ‘reflect the light of the candles’ at ‘night when reading’.42 In 1847 the writer William Howitt recorded how he had paid a visit to the home of the chair maker (and future journalist) John Alfred Langford between the hours of eleven and midnight, to find Langford reading Goethe’s Faust by the light of the fire.43 In 1852 a Mr Hurst was asked to resign as schoolmaster at the Hull workhouse on account of his ‘night reading’.44 Finally, in 1873 the writer Francis Jacox compiled a selection of examples of nineteenth-century ‘Night Students’, including the parish priest Robert Walker, who spent many a ‘cold winter’s night, without fire . . . reading . . . till the day dawned’, the horticulturalist J. C. Loudon, who ‘acquired the habit of sitting up two nights every week for the purpose of reading’, and a nameless Glasgow university student who supposedly recalled ‘with fondness’ his ‘midnight hours of solitary study, when he heard the clock strike two, three, four, five through the silent house’.45 Thus, a range of evidence attests to the increasing prevalence of night reading in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. How are we to explain this development? We have seen already that the uneven access to gaslight, particularly among the ranks of many of those joining the community of night readers (members of the working classes and children, for example), undermines any easy correlation between the expansion of night reading and the changing technologies of artificial illumination. Nor was there a precipitous fall in the price of candles or other light sources. Could some other material change account for this rising night readership? The century’s dramatic expansion in affordable print media would seem to offer one important change in readerly circumstances. In fact, William St Clair argues that the arrival of cheap books (as opposed to changing levels of literacy) was the single most important facilitator of increased reading during the first half of the nineteenth century.46 Contemporaries voiced similar arguments. William Howitt, for example, asserted in the 1840s that there was a direct correlation between the

The Rise of Night Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain   17

expansion of cheap print and opportunities for ‘intellectual inquiry’ conducted at night ‘over the lamp’.47 In a less positive manner, the Reverend Doctor Folliott, a character in Thomas Love Peacock’s satirical novel Crotchet Castle (1831), blamed the near-destruction of his home on a ‘six-penny tract’ which his cook had fallen asleep reading, overturning her candle and setting the curtains ablaze.48 The relationship between this expanding range of affordable reading material and the rise of night reading, however, is far from clear. The increased publication of duodecimos associated with the cheap reprints of the early nineteenth century may have facilitated night reading.49 On the one hand, the smaller size of these volumes would have made them ideally suited for reading in bed. Indeed, the journalist William Davenport Adams noted in the 1880s that the bed was ‘the appropriate locale of the duodecimo’. On the other hand, the print of these volumes was also often notoriously small, making it difficult to read them by candlelight – a point that Adams also noted, arguing that the typeface of a ‘bedside book . . . must not be too small . . . unless the reader can command plenty of illumination’, something we know most nineteenth-century readers could not command.50 Eliot makes similar assertions about the ambiguous advantages of news­ papers and periodicals for night readers, noting that these not only often had small type, but also frequently appeared in large sizes, which made them difficult to illuminate fully by candle or lamp.51 Further­ more, as the late Stephen Colclough argued, we should be wary of assuming an easy correlation between cheap print and readerly practices, as a ‘book owned is not necessarily a book read’ – to which we might add the addendum that a book owned does not necessarily imply it will be read at night, especially given the continuation of other material circumstances that would tend to discourage the practice, like the costs of illumination and the danger of fire.52 That a steadily expanding number of nineteenth-century Britons now chose to ignore these limitations and stay up to read after dark despite the existence of any clear technological or material change in circumstances encouraging them to do so suggests that cultural changes must have been primarily responsible for the rising incidence of night reading. In order to understand how cultural changes facilitated these alterations to personal reading practices among ordinary British men and women, however, we must first examine the range of associations the act of nocturnal reading had collected over the course of the preceding centuries. Night reading, it must be emphasised, was not conceptualised in the same way as simply reading ‘after dark’. From at least the Middle

18  Christopher Ferguson

Ages onward, Britons made specific distinctions between ‘evening’ and ‘night’ reading, and these distinctions continued to influence perceptions of reading into the nineteenth century. Evening reading was generally understood to involve reading aloud in company: it was a collective experience. In the eighteenth century, for example, Abigail Williams notes that reading together in the evenings conserved both eyesight and candles and allowed others to work while listening. It also provided a means for parents (especially fathers) to maintain control over the contents of family reading.53 Furthermore, reading in the evenings was not seen as compromising the hours for sleep, a point of singular importance for early modern Britons, who associated sleep with physical and spiritual health, and social and political stability.54 A pair of comic prints (Plates 2 and 3) from the 1810s illustrates the persistence of these associations in nineteenth-century culture. In the first print, I am Tir’d of Reading!, a respectably dressed man yawns over a collection of sermons he has been reading by candlelight, while in the paired image, So am I of Working!, a woman (presumably the man’s wife) yawns over her sewing. The narrative is clear: the man has been reading aloud by candlelight to his wife, who has been dutifully listening while sewing. The husband has selected an appropriate text for himself and his audience (the sermons of Hugh Blair). Finally, when sleep approaches, he stops his reading and prepares for rest (as nature intended), and his wife does the same. Thus, as these prints demonstrate, in the nineteenth century evening reading continued to be imbued with positive associations. Indeed, the activity was regularly praised by authors of domestic advice manuals like Sarah Stickney Ellis, who argued that evening reading by the family hearth represented an important signifier of a ‘well-regulated home’.55 If the culture of nineteenth-century Britain continued to embrace many of the early modern era’s associations with evening reading, it also inherited many of that period’s ideas about reading at night. Since medieval times, night reading had usually been conceptualised as a solitary enterprise, one that was linked closely to personal intellectual and spiritual growth. (In fact, accounts of medieval and early modern night reading often provide evidence for those scholars seeking to undermine the claim that solitary reading represents a peculi­ arly ‘modern’ practice.)56 Night reading was perceived as a studious means of personal improvement. It was a serious – not a recreational – pursuit, usually undertaken by clergy and other scholars, exceptional seekers of knowledge, implicitly (if not explicitly) assumed to be male. Such rigorous study occurred at night because this was when the

The Rise of Night Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain   19

majority of the population slept, thus allowing uninterrupted hours of peace and quiet for contemplation, something that was unavailable in the crowded dwellings of medieval and early modern Europe during the daytime.57 Night reading that failed to conform to these criteria was frequently viewed as selfish and morally suspect, on account of its ‘wastefulness’, and because of the way it potentially undermined personal health and spirituality while simultaneously exposing individuals to potential temptations.58 Again, many of these earlier associations with night reading persisted into the nineteenth century. The extraordinary sacrifices early modern men had made to read after dark in order to educate themselves became a prominent component in nineteenth-century accounts that sought to celebrate reading as a means of personal improvement – what came to be known as the ‘pursuit of knowledge under difficulties’, after a set of character studies of the same title by George Lillie Craik. Craik regularly emphasised the act of night reading in his case histories as an act that was indicative of extraordinary individuals’ quests for knowledge, and many other contemporary works of history and biography offered similar claims. Nineteenth-century Britons thus came to associate the practice of night reading with some of the most celebrated intellectuals of prior centuries, including Benjamin Franklin, William Cowper and Samuel Johnson, but also with lesser known autodidacts like the ‘learned tailors’ Robert Hill and Henry Wild.59 Thus, when nineteenth-century autobiographers like Carter recorded their experiences as night readers they were simultaneously making claims about why they read and what kind of readers they claimed to be – readers who, among other things, also desired quiet solitude for contemplation and the pursuit of knowledge, and who could obtain these only at night, because they laboured at other tasks during the daytime and because their homes remained crowded and noisy. Christopher Thomson noted, for example, that it ‘was a usual practice with me to sit up to read after the family had retired for the night’, a lifelong practice he shared with Carter and the mechanic Timothy Claxton.60 Lamb offered similar justifications, arguing that since writers produced their best ideas by the light of the ‘midnight taper’, those who wished to truly understand these works ought to read them by the same illumination.61 In 1849, Thomas Cooper encouraged ‘young men of the working classes’ to emulate his own practice of sacrificing some of the hours of sleep in order to read. ‘If you have not time, make it from sleep, as I did’, Cooper contended; ‘you will grow no wiser by sleeping’.62

20  Christopher Ferguson

It was this continued belief in a correlation between nocturnal reading and personal intellectual improvement that informed a set of stanzas from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s popular poem ‘The Ladder of Saint Augustine’ (1858): The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their compatriots slept, Were toiling upward in the night.63

Mary Smith later cited Longfellow’s poem as a description of her own lifelong pursuit of knowledge – one that had frequently involved night reading.64 In the third quarter of the century, the phrase ‘toiling upward’ became the title of a series of biographical sketches in The British Controversialist celebrating the achievements of ‘common’ Britons, which also highlighted acts of night reading as indicative of these individuals’ ‘holy passion of working upwards’.65 In this way, older associations with night reading that had been the exclusive preserve of elite or extraordinary readers in earlier centuries now were embraced by the ‘new readers’ of the nineteenth century. Yet, if some Britons refashioned these positive associations as justi­ fications for night reading, others continued to deploy longstanding negative ideas about the practice as a means of responding to the century’s ‘new readers’. The fact that positive ideas about nocturnal reading for personal improvement were now being invoked by ordinary men and women – by humble artisans, teachers and labourers – raised doubts in the minds of many other Britons about whether such individuals ought to be engaged in the act of night reading and the broader pursuit of knowledge of which it was a part. Many contended that such individuals lacked the fortitude necessary to stay awake to read, and that by endeavouring to do so they imperilled their neighbours and masters. (Recall, for example, Dr Folliott’s burned curtains.) When giving evidence about a London burglary in 1845, the boy John Paul was pressed by the magistrates about whether he had fallen asleep while reading, and thus only imagined seeing Robert Robinson break into his father’s parlour.66 A similar claim was made by a poem, ‘In the Firelight’, and the illustration (Figure 1.1) that accompanied it in Belgravia magazine in 1868, which depicted a woman sleeping and dreaming (but not reading) before a fire with an open book in her lap. The implications seem clear: this woman may have also stayed up reading like the woman depicted by Martineau five years before,

The Rise of Night Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain   21

Figure 1.1. Thomas Gray’s illustration accompanying W.T.’s poem ‘In the Firelight’ (Belgravia, 5 [1868], p. 66). Christopher Ferguson’s collection

hoping to likewise reach the ‘last chapter’ of her book, but she lacked the physical stamina necessary to actually do so.67 The belief that many individuals lacked the mental or physical capabilities necessary to engage in night reading implied that they ought not to be engaged in the practice in the first place, thereby invoking older associations of nocturnal reading with selfishness and waste. Sewell Burton’s night reading (with the broken dressing-glasses it had occasioned) was described as a ‘rather destructive’ habit, not just because it had resulted in literal destruction, but also because he was an ‘amateur’.68 Individuals like him, it was argued, ought to go to bed and leave the night reading to those truly capable of undertaking rigorous study. Others continued to warn that, by reading at night, ordinary Britons were recklessly endangering their health. Contemporary medical authorities notoriously warned that ‘excessive’ reading in general was particularly dangerous to the minds and bodies of women.69 Night reading, however, was portrayed as being equally dangerous to both sexes. The early death of the historian Charles Mills from lung disease, for example, was explained as arising primarily from his habit of ‘intense nightly application’ to his studies.70 Night reading was also cited regularly by both physicians and the ordinary public as a symptom of insanity, with men and women again being viewed as

22  Christopher Ferguson

equally susceptible to the practice’s injurious consequences. Evidence of nightly reading, for example, was invoked in cases of suicide where family members and other witnesses sought to demonstrate that the victim had not been sane at the time they ended their lives, and thus could not be found guilty of the crime of ‘self-murder’. In 1838, the surgeon William Costello assured the participants at a London inquest that the engineer Caiman Duverger’s suicide had resulted from his ignoring Costello’s advice ‘not to apply himself so much to study’, and instead insisting on remaining ‘up during the whole of the night reading’. The result was a ‘temporary derangement, brought on by over mental exertion’.71 In like manner, when an unknown man was found dead in a railway carriage at Lincoln in 1854, the coroner received an anonymous letter stating that ‘the deceased, against long remonstrance, had injured his health and shattered his nerves by a habit of excessive reading at night’.72 Evidence of regular night reading also was deployed to prove the insanity of murderers, including the Londoners Daniel M’Naughten in 1843 and William Newton Allnutt in 1847 – successfully in M’Naughten’s case.73 Nineteenth-century associations with night reading, therefore, present us with some of the same continuities between the early modern and the modern era that we have already encountered with the history of the illumination by which this reading occurred. Yet, it is also clear that – unlike in the case of lighting – these cultural continuities were largely surface level, and that the implications of reading at night had changed considerably, because of the types of people who were now increasingly engaged in the act of night reading – the century’s ‘new readers’. Nothing makes this more explicit than ­Martineau’s The Last Chapter. Both contemporary and subsequent critics consistently agree that the scene depicted in the painting is set in the ‘evening’ (‘as the daylight fails’) rather than the depths of the night, on account of the ‘dusky scene’ viewable through the window in the background.74 The painting and the commentary it invoked nonetheless drew heavily on existing ideas about night reading. Martineau’s middle-class woman reads in solitude, absorbed in her book. Her bodily posture, Amelia Yeates argues, is reminiscent of depictions of religious women readers from medieval and early modern art, but the title of the painting nevertheless implies that she is reading a novel, not a religious text.75 In fact, contemporary and subsequent commentators on the painting have assumed she is reading a work of ‘sensation fiction’.76 She is not, therefore, the idealised night reader of the early modern era. Furthermore, the woman in the painting may be reading by firelight, like her

The Rise of Night Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain   23

early modern predecessors, but she would not have been included among the ranks of the night readers of the preceding centuries cele­ brated by contemporary Britons. Instead, in that period, she likely would not have been reading at all. Thus, the continuities with past reading practices informing Martineau’s painting functioned only to highlight what was new, and many Britons would have objected to the readerly practices the artist depicted. First, Martineau’s painting implies that while some of the century’s night readers were pursuing knowledge, others were pursuing pleasure. It was one thing to stay up late meditating on the scriptures. It was quite another to spend these hours reading novels. Yet it is clear that in the nineteenth century many readers were consuming novels by midnight candles. Remember Thomson, for example, reading The Monk at night by candlelight. An early biographer of Sir Walter Scott likewise noted that young men sat ‘up all night’ reading his novels.77 Thomas Haynes Bayly’s comic poem ‘The Fashionable Novel’ recalled in a similar vein how the ‘silver fork’ novels of the 1820s had charmed ‘girls who sat reading all night’.78 ‘In the Firelight’ likewise implied that the sleeping woman’s dreams were produced by the sensational events of novels.79 Thus, in the nineteenth century, many warned, the proliferation of novels had produced a very different kind of night reader, who shared little in common with the studious nocturnal readers of earlier centuries. Yet, the pursuit of knowledge and pleasure by night readers equally aroused the ire of nineteenth-century critics and elites, suggesting that what was most objectionable about the rising incidence of the practice in their eyes had less to do with what was being read at night than with who was doing the reading. Herein also lies a clue to the activity’s increasing appeal, and thus its expansion over the course of the century. Yeates argues that we ought to view Martineau’s painting as a record of theft – of a ‘stolen moment’. Martineau, she contends, depicted a woman reading alone – perhaps even clandestinely – and unrestricted by societal conventions. Furthermore, the artist did so in decidedly ambiguous terms, allowing his viewers to criticise or celebrate her choices as they saw fit.80 This suggests that the rise of night reading – and arguments about its expansion – were ultimately disputes about time, and possessing the independence to determine how time was spent. Recall Cooper’s advice to his fellow workers: ‘If you have not time, make it from sleep, as I did’. Prior to this statement, Cooper had invoked a line from the labouring poet Henry Kirke White’s poem

24  Christopher Ferguson

‘Time’: ‘The night’s my own! – They cannot steal my night!’81 E. P. Thompson famously argued that the onset of the Industrial Revolution resulted in a society in which time was monetised. Time was now ‘spent’.82 It is no coincidence that both defenders and critics of night reading employed the imagery of ‘theft’ when describing the hours readers snatched from sleep or other pursuits in order to read at night. Furthermore, during the same years the hours of labour expanded, regardless of the industry or setting. Whether working in offices or factories lit by gas, or in candlelit workshops, homes or sweaters’ dens, most Britons worked longer and harder than the generations that had preceded them.83 For those who wished to read, often only the hours of night remained. Finally, industrial labour conditions, popular evangelicalism and the culture of domesticity collectively created a society that was more subject to discipline throughout the day, whether at home or at work. In such a context, Kirke White’s claims – ‘The night’s my own! – They cannot steal my night!’ – represented a powerful counter-current to the prevailing social order. In such a society, reading at night became an act of independence, even transgression. The hours of darkness had long been associated with trans­ gression.84 They remained so in the nineteenth century. Accounts of night reading repeatedly invoked these associations. Recall the young Critchely Prince reading at night by firelight, despite his father’s opposition. Prince was not the only Briton who claimed to have read at night against the wishes of others. The satirist John Close described an ‘insatiable’ reader named ‘Jem’, who ‘frequently read from ten o’clock at night till four or five next morning’, but had to do so ‘by stealth’ as his father forbade the practice, and when he was caught he felt the ‘weight of the old strap’.85 As a boy, the wool-sorter and poet John Nicholson’s mother hid the family’s candles in an effort to keep him from reading at night. In response, Nicholson stole cotton rags dipped in oil from the factory where he worked, and by this light ‘studied through the night’.86 Smith stayed up all night reading Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation because she ‘got hold of the book one night’, and knew that this was her one chance to read it, as she would not be able to read it otherwise on account of its controversial character.87 Carter likewise claimed to have read at night ‘by stealth’ as a boy.88 Night reading expanded during the nineteenth century, therefore, because ordinary men and women wanted to read, and found the night-time either a congenial setting in which to do so, or because the night was the only time that remained available to them. Night reading was controversial in the nineteenth century for the same

The Rise of Night Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain   25

reasons. Reading at night allowed individuals to select their own reading matter and read it clandestinely, in solitude. Jonathan Rose has rightly argued that in the nineteenth century there was something ‘profoundly menacing’ about the reading worker, and the same might be asserted about the reading of women and children, as all seemed to demonstrate a dangerous autonomy.89 Ellis warned that ‘nothing should be done clandestinely in a family’. This included the reading of ‘many books . . . alone and in secret’, and, as the century’s autobiographers remind us, there was no better time to do so than at night.90 Many of them might also have begun their accounts of night reading like the nameless female protagonist of ‘In the Firelight’: ‘They had all gone to bed but me, and I sat by the fire’.91 In the nineteenth century, reading at night involved laying claim to time – for reading, but also for oneself – in an era when such claims carried revolutionary implications. Whether they read for improvement, pleasure or a combination of the two, when choosing to read at night ordinary readers embraced the economic and physical costs of reduced sleep, and the risk of fire, but gained the freedom to read, think and feel for themselves, free from interruptions or regulations. In this way, night reading produced countless acts of personal independence. Though such acts may seem small in nature, they were profoundly important for the individuals in question, as opportunities for pleasure, education and autonomy in a world where rulers, employers and family members frequently sought to deny them these same things, and where the physical contexts of daily existence likewise worked against their realisation. In these hours stolen from slumber, the nineteenth century’s night readers pushed back against the forces that sought to limit their mental lives, much as their candles pushed back against the darkness of the night. Notes The author would like to thank Sarah Ferguson, Mary Hammond, Katherine Nesbit and Joseph Stubenrauch for their assistance in helping him improve this chapter.   1. [James Carter], Memoirs of a Working Man (London: Charles Knight, 1845), pp. 159–60.  2. Nan Hackett, XIX Century British Working-Class Autobiographies (New York: AMS Press, 1985), pp. 65–8.  3. Murray Melbin, Night as Frontier: Colonizing the World After Dark (New York: Free Press, 1987).

26  Christopher Ferguson  4. Martyn Lyons, ‘New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers’, in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds), The History of Reading in the West (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. 312–44.  5. Robert Huish, Memoirs of the Late William Cobbett, Esq. (London: John Saunders, 1836), vol. I, p. 103.   6. A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), pp. 48–50, 100–11.   7. Mary Wortley Montagu, Lady M. W. Montagu’s Letters from France and Italy (London: John Sharpe, 1821), p. 70.  8. Simon Eliot, ‘Reading by Artificial Light in the Victorian Age’, in Matthew Bradley and Juliet John (eds), Reading and the Victorians (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), p. 27.  9. Ekirch, At Day’s Close, p. 109. 10. Ibid., pp. 205–7. 11. Thomas Wright, The Autobiography of Thomas Wright (London: John Russell Smith, 1864), p. 24. 12. Craig Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 2. 13. [Carter], Memoirs, pp. 159–60. 14. Brian Bowers, Lengthening the Day: A History of Lighting Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 41–56. 15. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 158–60. 16. Bowers, Lengthening the Day, p. 132. 17. George William Erskine Russell, The Right Honourable William Ewart Gladstone (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1891), p. 59. 18. Eliot, ‘Reading by Artificial Light’, pp. 15–16. 19. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913, website (accessed November 2019) (hereafter POB), case reference numbers t18400406-1281a (fire), t18400615-1629 (candle), t18400706-1877 (fire), t18420103-525 (fire and candle), t18450203-437 (fire), t18460330-844 (gaslight), t1840103-432 (fire). 20. Thomas Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper (1872; New York: Humanities Press, 1971), p. 253; Christopher Thomson, The Autobiography of an Artisan (London: J. Chapman, 1847), p. 67; Mary Smith, The Autobiography of Mary Smith, Schoolmistress and Nonconformist (London: Bemrose and Sons, 1892), pp. 40, 162; John Binns, Recollections of the Life of John Binns (Philadelphia: J. Binns, 1854), p. 19. 21. William Nicholson, A Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts, 4 (1803), p. 176. 22. Charles Lamb, Popular Fallacies (1826), in The Works of Charles Lamb (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1880), vol. V, pp. 456–7. 23. Home Missionary Magazine (June 1845), p. 144.

The Rise of Night Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain   27

24. William White Cooper, Practical Remarks on Near-Sight, Aged-Sight, and Impaired Vision (1846), quoted in ‘Cooper, Little, and Sichel on the Eye’, Medico-Chirurgical Review, 50 (1847), p. 204. 25. Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 10, 40–3, 204–5. 26. ‘Statistics of Fires in London’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 7 (1844), pp. 261–2. 27. ‘Reading in Bed’, Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 3 February 1853, reproduced in British Library Newspapers, Part I: 1800–1900 (hereafter BLN1), at (accessed 17 December 2019). 28. Eliot, ‘Reading by Artificial Lighting, pp. 25–6. 29. Binns, Recollections, p. 19. 30. POB, case t18460330-844. 31. David R. Green, From Artisans to Paupers: Economic Change and Poverty in London, 1790–1870 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), p. 27. 32. Joseph Stubenrauch, ‘“Pleasing Testimony”: Plebeian Voices in the Tract Magazine’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 52 (2019), p. 129. 33. Eliot, ‘Reading by Artificial Light’, p. 27. 34. Based on a keyword search for ‘reading’ in all trials between 1800 and 1849 on POB. 35. POB, case numbers t18450203-437 (boy), t18400406-1281a (girl), t18400511-1345 (domestic servant and boy), t18460330-844 (apprentice), t18450303-673 (accountant), t18430227-874 (tailor), t18471213-290 (lodging-house keeper), t18400615-1629 (MP). 36. Arnold James Cooley, A Cyclopaedia of Practical Receipts, and Col­ lateral Information in the Arts, Manufactures, and Trades (London: John Churchill, 1845), p. 435. 37. A Lady, Instructions in Household Matters; or, The Young Girl’s Guide to Domestic Service (London: John W. Parker, 1844), pp. 21–2. 38. Binns, Recollections, p. 19. 39. ‘The Use of a Tea-Kettle’, Liverpool Mercury, 20 April 1832, BLN1. 40. Robert Alexander Douglas-Lithgow, The Life of John Critchley Prince (Manchester: Abel, Heywood, and Son, 1880), p. 10. 41. Catherine Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers (London: T. C. Newby, 1848), vol. II, p. 170. 42. ‘Saturday’s Police’, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 19 November 1843, BLN1. 43. William Howitt, ‘Visit to a Working Man’, Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress, 2 (1847), p. 243. 44. ‘Hull Workhouse’, Hull Packet and East Riding Times, 19 November 1843, BLN1. 45. Francis Jacox, At Nightfall and Midnight: Musing After Dark (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1873), pp. 168, 178, 172–3.

28  Christopher Ferguson 46. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 109. 47. Howitt, ‘Visit to a Working Man’, p. 243. 48. Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle (1831), in Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle (London: Penguin, 1969), pp. 133–4. 49. St Clair, The Reading Nation, pp. 116, 205. 50. William Davenport Adams, By-Ways in Bookland (London: Elliot Stock, 1888), p. 86. 51. Eliot, ‘Reading by Artificial Light’, p. 24. 52. Stephen Colclough, Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–1870 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 2. 53. Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 57. 54. Sasha Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 76, 184. 55. Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Mothers of England: Their Influence and Responsibility (London: Fisher, Son and Company, 1843), p. 333. 56. Diana Webb, Privacy and Solitude in the Middle Ages (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), pp. 158–9. 57. Ibid., pp. 33, 67, 149, 158–9, 215; Ekirch, At Day’s Close, pp. 202–5. 58. Handley, Sleep, p. 92; Webb, Privacy and Solitude, pp. 215, 218. 59. Christopher Ferguson, An Artisan Intellectual: James Carter and the Rise of Modern Britain, 1792–1853 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), pp. 75–7. 60. Thomson, The Autobiography, p. 67; Ferguson, An Artisan Intellectual, pp. 55–7; Timothy Claxton, Hints to Mechanics, on Self-Education and Mutual Instruction (London: Taylor and Walton, 1839), p. 15. 61. Lamb, Popular Fallacies, p. 457. 62. Thomas Cooper, Eight Letters to the Young Men of the Working Classes (London: James Watson, 1851), pp. 10–11. 63. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘The Ladder of Saint Augustine’ (1858), ll. 37–40, in The Poetical Works of Longfellow: Cambridge Edition, ed. H. E. Scudder (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), pp. 100–1. 64. Smith, The Autobiography, pp. 134–135. 65. ‘Toiling Upward’, The British Controversialist, 22 (1865), p. 138. 66. POB, case t18450393-437. 67. W.T., ‘In the Firelight: A Dream’, Belgravia, 5 (1868), pp. 65–6. 68. ‘Saturday’s Police’. 69. Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 58–9. 70. [A. Skottowe], A Memoir of the Life and Writings of Charles Mills (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1828), pp. 42–3. 71. ‘Melancholy Suicide’, Morning Chronicle, 12 April 1838, BLN1. 72. ‘Suicide in a Railway Carriage’, Daily News, 23 August 1854, BLN1.

The Rise of Night Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain   29

73. POB, cases t18480103-432 (Allnutt), t18430227-874 (M’Naughten). 74. Amelia Yeates, ‘Women’s Reading and Space in Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s The Last Chapter’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 34 (2012), pp. 119, 126, 127. 75. Yeates, ‘Women’s Reading’, pp. 119–23. 76. Ibid., p. 117. 77. George Allan, The Life of Sir Walter Scott (1834; Philadelphia: Crissy, Waldie and Company, 1835), p. 329. 78. ‘The Literary Examiner’, The Examiner, 10 February 1844, BLN1. 79. W.T., ‘In the Firelight’. 80. Yeates, ‘Women’s Reading’, pp. 125–7. 81. Cooper, Eight Letters, pp. 10–11. 82. E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38 (1967), p. 61. 83. Ibid., pp. 90–3. 84. Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, pp. 7–9. 85. John Close, The Satirist; or, Every Man in His Humour (Appleby: John Biggs, 1833), p. 131. 86. John James, ‘The Life of John Nicholson’, in John Nicholson, Poems (London: W. H. Young, 1859), p. xii. 87. Smith, The Autobiography, p. 163. 88. Carter, Memoirs, p. 74. 89. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 20. 90. Ellis, The Mothers of England, p. 234. 91. W.T., ‘In the Firelight’, ll. 1.

Chapter 2

The Book as Prop in the Missionary Imagination: Picturing Africans as Readers Natalie Fossey and Lize Kriel

Worldwide, the Christian missionary enterprise of the nineteenth century was accompanied by the translation and distribution of the central book of the Christian faith, the Bible, into the languages of the numerous missionised communities on virtually every habitable continent and island in the world. Along with the Bible, a mass of other edifying printed media were produced for the newly converted Christians, ranging from textbooks to songbooks to almanacs and illustrations of Bible stories. Christians from missionising communities, mostly in the northern hemisphere, sponsored not only these publications, but also the agents for their distribution, the missionaries working ‘abroad’. The supporters of mission in Europe and North America needed regular incentives to continue dropping coins into collection boxes. Missionary festivals, Sunday school projects and magic lantern shows contributed to this purpose. It was further bolstered by a vast variety of missionary newsletters, periodicals and other reading material produced for the supporters of mission, the Christian readers ‘at home’.1 While reporting on the endeavours of the missionaries and the plight of the newly converted, these publications also served an early process of globalising knowledge by accumulating images, narratives and reports about different parts of the world, their geography, animals and vegetation, their people, their habits and their histories.2 During the course of the nineteenth century, formal schooling was incrementally reaching larger proportions of the growing population of the Western world, making print an ideal medium for appetising and feeding human curiosity about the strange and the unfamiliar – the ‘other’ – elsewhere.3 It makes sense, therefore, that many of the missionary publications for the ‘home’ market also doubled as an escapist adventure genre.4 30

The Book as Prop in the Missionary Imagination   31

From early on, the missionary texts circulated for the ‘home’ market were accompanied by visual images.5 An obvious visual prop to mark the spread, the reach and the effect of the European and American missionising endeavour of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was the image of a book (very often the Book, the Bible) presented in the illustrative material of the missionary societies’ marketing literature. As affirmed by Christoph Rippe: ‘Photographs of Africans with books (not necessarily the Bible), made by missionaries are a recurring example of representing the desire for, anxiety about, or achievement of literacy’.6 Such photographs and, more broadly, pictures, where the book as prop was employed as a signifier of African literacy in a Christian missionary context, are the focus of our investigation. From the art historical discourse that addresses visual representations of people reading, we know that European viewers of images containing books had a long tradition of associations to draw on. Books were featured in paintings and sculptures and invoked connotations ranging from power, knowledge and learning to pleasure and leisure, including the gendered and generational ways in which these relations played themselves out in different communities at different times.7 These connotations were no less relevant in missionary marketing material where books were placed in African settings, and yet there is also more to consider. Following visual culture studies scholar Nicholas Mirzoeff in his application of the concept visuality,8 we argue that a European mission­ary visuality is represented in the images of readers prepared as missionary marketing material: a way of looking at the missionised Africans had been established through the repeated reproduction of particular tropes. In almost all the images we managed to investigate,9 the European technology of the book renders the African docile, and compels the African body into paying attention. Eyes are cast downwards; the missionising finger draws the African gaze towards the book and into the parameters of a world in which knowledge is dictated and power is exerted through the medium of mechanic­ ally transferred (printed) black pigment inks. This marked a radical intervention, especially in communities where, prior to Christian missionising, knowledge transfer had been primarily oral and performative and not associated with textual literacies.10 But, in the words of missionary historian Paul Jenkins: ‘European preconceptions about the images appropriate to Africa did not have it all their own way’11 – or, in Mirzoeff’s vocabulary, there are also glimpses of ‘countervisualit[ies]’:12 instances where the subalterns do not act out their part as directed in the European colonialists’ and/

32   Natalie Fossey and Lize Kriel

or missionisers’ script, and where they do not follow the missionary’s finger, but look back, or deeper, daring to see for themselves how the established power is legitimated, and then pushing back. In her study of the reproduction and circulation of one particular engraving that began as a militant African-American response to slavery during the mid-nineteenth century, Lori Leavell illustrates the malleability of engravings reproduced in print.13 While Leavell focuses on the changing ways in which a single image was recycled, we endeavour a more panoramic view of the interplay between a number of images recycled in many different illustrations reproduced as engravings as well as photographs over the span of more than a century. In some early examples from the range we take under scrutiny, there are images of Africans asserting their right to look away from the book, leaving the artist and draughtsman with no other option but to ridicule this dissent which surpasses European control or comprehension. But perhaps most forcefully, because not even the most convincing mission­ ary or the crudest coloniser can control the private act of reading (that which happens between a reader and a text),14 we argue that every image of an African with a book must also be con­sidered as a potential moment of countervisuality: Africans taking up the right to look, read – and see – for themselves. This is what makes the book such a potent – and malleable – symbol in missionary iconicity. As technological advances brought reproduction costs down, photographic images and the use of colour became more common in missionary publications.15 However, photographs did not simply replace engravings.16 Some of the oldest engravings continued to reappear, although, eventually also, reproduced by means of photographic processes. Toernvall argues for the importance of under­standing the materiality of printing, of the extent to which the ‘historical and social meaning of texts and images’ is related to the printing techniques and the technological conditions allowing for their mass reproduction at any particular moment in time, as well as over time.17 Therefore, besides the categorisation of visual images according to thematic content, these material considerations will be kept in mind when assessing the malleability of the book as icon in the assessments that follow. Demarcation of the scope of the chapter This chapter focuses primarily on ways in which the book as prop featured in illustrated missionary literature meant for missionising

The Book as Prop in the Missionary Imagination   33

reading communities centred, mostly, in Western Europe. These include (1) images of the book linking missionising readers and preachers with missionised communities targeted to be converted, as well as (2) images of the missionised having accomplished independent reading and, by implication, no longer in need of white (Western) mediators. We do not claim to be comprehensive in our assessment: it would be challenging to cover the vast amount of printed matter produced by missionary societies during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a single research project, not to mention a single chapter. Given our situatedness as researchers in the northern part of South Africa, our examples will be prone to display more density in relation to this geographic area (historically known as the Transvaal and dominated by Protestant English- and German-speaking missionaries from the mid-nineteenth century). We are also wary, however, of the possible loosening of contextual moorings as images were repeatedly being reproduced and recirculated over the decades. We began our search by extrapolating from what we could find in three existing clusters of visual material. The first comprises the engravings accumulated during the nineteenth century by a publisher in Calw, Germany. These represent a relatively early collection of pictures that were sourced from a whole range of (at least) English-, Dutch- and German-speaking missionary societies, and subsequently reproduced in various contexts, again, by different missionary societies – some well into the twentieth century. The second cluster that we consult as a collection is from a more recent initiative: the International Mission Photography Archive (IMPA), an online database of the photographic collections of more than a dozen institutions based in Europe and the United States.18 IMPA enables keyword searches of the archives and collections of all these institutions dating from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Our IMPA search led us to images in the archive of the Basel Mission, and on advice of the archivist, going directly to its online database, we found even more images of readers.19 Thirdly, where applicable, we also draw on illustrations made and photographs taken by one particular missionary: Carl Adolf Hoffmann, a prolific writer and image maker, who worked for the Berlin Missionary Society in the then Transvaal, South Africa, during the early decades of the twentieth century. The Hoffmann collection has been digitised as an open-access online resource hosted by the Humboldt University of Berlin since 2015.20 We include examples from this third source in cases where they can help us determine

34   Natalie Fossey and Lize Kriel

the extent to which the production and circulation of book-related images harnessed missionaries into a particular visuality, provided them with particular tropes and channelled their own observations and representations accordingly. We conclude our investigation into the production, reproduction and circulation of particular images as tropes in missionary engravings and photographs by considering the extent to which the staged missionary images may have reflected, or may have enthused, the African missionised and their descendants’ lived experiences with the Book, and books more generally. Christian Gottlob Barth and missionary publishing from Calw, Württemburg Owing to its dominance in the proliferation of images from early in the era of illustrated missionary material, it is useful to look more closely into the history of Calwer Verlag (Calw Publishers) in Germany and its potential influence on the reproduction of particular images. The Calwer Verlagsverein (Calw Publishing Union), today based in Stuttgart, was established in 1833 and has been producing Christian and educational literature ever since.21 The press was founded by Christian Gottlob Barth (1799–1862), a Lutheran minister and a noteworthy character in Württemberg during the Pietistic revival movement of the early nineteenth century.22 Barth started his endeavours in 1825 when he founded Calw’s Missionary Society. By 1828 the Society had its own periodical, the Calwer Missionsblatt (Calw Missions News), edited by Barth himself. Soon more periodicals followed, like the Monatsblätter für öffentliche Missions-Stunden (Monthly for Public Missions Meetings), edited by Barth’s associate Johann Christoph Blumhardt, the pastor of nearby Möttlingen.23 There was fertile ground for Barth and Blumhardt to educate the people of Württemberg. Among their followers were some wealthy benefactors, but also people ‘barely able to keep head above water with cattle and pig husbandry, sheep-raising and some linen-weaving’,24 as the congregation of Möttlingen was described. By founding a press, Barth could teach these fellow Europeans, and also many others further beyond, about Bible history and the history of Christian mission25 – including the worldwide Evangelical mission of their own time. The press contributed to the expansion of Anglo-German Evangelical networks. Barth started up Calwer Verlag with the financial support

The Book as Prop in the Missionary Imagination   35

of the London branch of the Religious Tract Society and woodblock engravings sourced from England. These engravings were used for his highly successful and often reprinted Dr Barth’s Bible Stories, as it became known in English translation.26 Barth and his compatriots priced their publications only to recover costs. Within ten years the press had sold some 700,000 tracts and 432,000 schoolbooks.27 In the words of Nicholas Hope: ‘Württemberg’s leading Evangelical preachers founded an evangelical press which helped to fashion a new pious, strictly Sabbatarian, and politically conservative subculture’.28 In 1883, the year of its fiftieth anniversary, Calwer Verlag printed a large picture book dedicated to missionary work all around the world. The Calwer Bilderbuch29 (Calw Picture Book) comprised 1,690 pictures, divided into 178 panels covering the different regions of the world, and provided with one-line captions. These pictures were old favourites of the patrons of the press, who would already have seen most of them in the thirteen volumes of Missionsbilder (Mission Pictures) which had appeared between 1864 and 1875.30 In the Missions­bilder volumes, the pictures were inserted in a textual narrative that anchored them in time and place and identified the events and persons depicted in the images. But there is evidence that the reproduction history of the pictures in the Missionsbilder volumes dates even further back. One example is a picture of missionary J. J. Kicherer with a book in his hand, teaching three black Christians,31 which can be traced back to a Dutch book published in Amsterdam in 1805.32 While Calver Verlag endeavoured to reproduce pictures faithful to the situations which they initially intended to represent, the contextualisation of the reproduction in the Missionsbilder is already more vague than in this much older Dutch book. Subsequent appropriation of the images for further publications by third parties would become increasingly ambiguous, affirming the malleability of their iconicity, as Leavell has referred to it.33 This is precisely what we intend to pursue in the kind of book-related images popularised by the Calwer publications, and preceding, as well as subsequent, missionary materials. Con­sider­ing that the Calwer Bilderbuch of 1883 offered a compilation of best-loved and most representative pictures which had already been circulating across missionary society and country boundaries by 1883, we assumed that they would offer at least a range of possible symbolic roles, or images, which the book as prop had been fulfilling in prot­ estant missionary publications by that time. Owing to the nature of nineteenth-century printing costs and technology,34 it could be expected that the earliest visual images of

36   Natalie Fossey and Lize Kriel

African readers would have been reproduced repeatedly and, consequently, would have circulated quite widely. Before the reproduction of photographic images in print became more affordable in the late 1800s, publishers and printers relied mostly on etches or engravings, which, once they had served their purpose for one missionary publication, could easily be copied for inclusion in a publication of another society.35 Reproduction would have reinforced the mythical currency of the messages conveyed by these images, which is partially confirmed by the tendency to continue reproducing some of the most iconic engravings well into the era of photography, when it would have been quite possible to adorn the particular publication instead with a photograph.36 Some examples will be discussed in the section below. While the content of engravings, through repeated reproduction, could be loosened from their source and acquire a kind of general missionary applicability (making the one ‘other’ stand in for ‘an-other’), photographs, as will be illustrated below, could be employed in almost opposite ways: they could be styled by making the subjects pose to replicate those familiar older engravings, but they could also be made to do something which an engraving that had been exhausted of its malleability would no longer be able to offer: specificity of person and of place.

Readers and books as tropes in visual images in African missionary contexts In this section, the book-related images sourced from the Calwer and IMPA compilations as well as the Hoffmann collection, are categorised under a number of recurrent tropes. We give examples of the ways in which the same pictures, or similar images, continued to circulate as reproductions in new contexts. We also investigate whether, and in what ways, representations dating from the pre-photographic era carried over into newer media. While certain tropes can be recognised as quite established by the end of the nineteenth century, the evidence does not lend itself to a narrative of linear development from one particular kind of image to the next. Different assumptions and expectations seem to have competed for representation at the same time; and stereotypes presumed to have lapsed seem to be capable of cropping up again in later years. There were ambiguities, continuities and ruptures as well as recurrences.

The Book as Prop in the Missionary Imagination   37

Reading imposed Considered against the broad range of missionary images circulating since the early nineteenth century and employing the book as prop, relatively few served the blatant purpose of ridiculing and implying the ignorance of indigenous communities.37 In the few cases where books are employed to serve this purpose, an effort has been made to compose a distinction in performed gesture. The illustrations of the African characters are animated, reactionary, engaged with their senses (hand to eyes and ears) and captured in motion: startled by the book. In contrast, the European figures are illustrated in a significantly more stoic, composed posture. We could not locate examples of missionary photographs of white men startling Africans with books, which tempts us to deduce that this was an older trope, no longer deemed so fitting once a missionary presence had been established and some successful conversions had been exacted for the missionary supporters back in Europe. By the time the reproduction of photographs in periodicals had become common, in the 1880s,38 a different kind of sensible inter­ action with the Bible would have been expected on established mission stations. By now the Bible would rather have been represented as a revered book of great significance. In the 1890s Carl Hoffmann of the Berlin Missionary Society, having recently arrived from Germany in the northern parts of southern Africa,39 privately commented on this notion of the Bible as an enchanting object by subtly mocking himself as the missionary-with-book in a humorous sketch in his personal diary40 (see Plate 4). Engrossed in the content of his reading, he wanders through the garden of the Arkona Mission Station, oblivious of the actual work going on around him, and clearly not instilling fear in the people around him. An African woman peeling vegetables hardly takes notice of him and, inverting the biblical truth that one cannot live by bread alone,41 his wife brings him actual sustenance, as if reminding him that one cannot survive on the Word of God alone either. Hoffmann depicts his young son as trying to copy the behaviour of his father, but the obvious mimicry is signified by the boy’s book being closed, and tucked under his arm. There is, thus, a self-aware scrutiny of the trope of the awe-inspiring missionary in this self-portrait and Hoffmann demonstrates this humorous irony visually. Most amusing is the fact that the yard animals flock behind the missionary, satirically invoking the biblical narrative of Noah’s ark. The missionary is being followed because he is holding the Book – the Word of God. At least the animals can sense that he is the one entrusted with the power to lead, and to see in a ‘new’ order.

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Carl Hoffmann’s drawings – and photographs – dating from the 1890s and early 1900s are particularly interesting42 because they confirm his familiarity with the tropes popularised by images such as the ones distributed by Calwer Verlag. As will be seen below, he does take himself more seriously in some of them – particularly in preaching scenes. There is an abundance of preaching scenes depicted in the nineteenth-century missionary publications. Usually a group of indigenous people are attentively (either respectfully or engagingly) receiving the Word of God via a missionary (always male and mostly, but not exclusively, white) extracting it from a book (by implication the Bible, either open or closed) resting on his lap, in his hand or in front of him on the floor or the ground. Figure 2.1 reproduces probably the most quintessential missionary image. It is Calver Verlag’s version of an earlier engraving by C. Baxter that had appeared on the cover of missionary pioneer Robert Moffat’s 1842 book Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa. Initially labelled ‘Preaching at Mosheu’s Village’, this engraving, in Moffat’s own words, ‘so well depicted’ the scene ‘in the centre of the village,

Figure 2.1  ‘Rev. Moffat’s Preaching Journey’. Source: QQ_30_006_0009, from the Basel Mission Archive; but also reproduced in Calwer Verlagsverein, ‘Südafrika (Betschuana), Missionar Moffat auf einer Predigtreise’, in Calwer Historisches Bilderbuch der Welt, p. 125.13, facsimile reprint (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1987) of Bilder-Tafeln zur Länder- und Völker-Kunde mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der evangelischen Missionsarbeit (Calw: Calwer Verlag, 1883)

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Figure 2.2  ‘Sermon’. Source: QQ_30_006_0004, from the Basel Mission Archive

composed of Bechuana and Coranna houses, and cattle-folds’. The missionary, standing on his wagon, uses the ‘Testament’ in his hand almost like a magic wand, spell-binding the townspeople into solemn attention.43 Scenes like these lent themselves to frequent reproduction, if not of the particular etching or engraving, then restaging thereof in local contexts (as can be seen in Figure 2.2).44 Probably because this encounter between a white missionary preacher and supposedly eager listeners remained so central to the missionary’s calling, photographs were also set up to reflect this interaction between missionary preacher and listeners. In engravings as well as photographs, the white preacher could eventually be replaced by a local African one (as can be seen in Figure 2.3).45 Both Christian converts and people not yet convinced could be pulled into such scenes. Quite early in his career, Carl Hoffmann considered the preaching scene so typifying of his calling that he made a drawing, probably of himself, preaching to a group of people sitting in front of their huts, receiving the gospel via the book held up in his left hand.46 Hoffmann would soon start staging such encounters to be photographed as well. His Missionary Society found his drawing (Plate 5) so useful that it reproduced it three times in the same periodical over a period of eleven years (1904, 1909 and 1915), each time applying it to a different

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Figure 2.3  ‘Eromonga Youth Preaching on the Ship’. Source: QQ_30_009_0047, from the Basel Mission Archive

Figure 2.4  Engraving after Missionary Carl Hoffmann’s drawing (Plate 5), as published in a magazine for German supporters of the Berlin Missionary Society. Source: Der Missions-Freund, June 1904, p. 45; October 1909, p. 75; and January 1915, p. 3

The Book as Prop in the Missionary Imagination   41

geographical area (even Namibia) by changing the caption.47 By the last time it appeared, a printed engraving (Figure 2.4) had become a rarity among the missionary photographs of the periodical. The older medium clearly served the purpose of reiterating an established idea. The original hand-drawn image survives in Hoffmann’s personal diary, giving a glimpse into the kind of adjustments made by the engraver in the process of manual production prior to mechanical reproduction. Despite the obvious exclusion of full colour owing to the limitations of the processes, the vegetation and the rock formations are still recognisable and faithful to the original, and are all the more admirable given that the engraving process would have required the incising of the mirror image on the print matrix. The rock art and grain stores painstakingly recorded by Hoffmann, on the other hand, had been omitted in the final circulation of the engraving. Remarkably, in 1984, Hoffmann’s illustration was reproduced yet again in a new magazine of the Berlin Mission. Illustrating an article on the history of the Society in South Africa north of the Vaal River, it was, at least, returned closer to the geographical context it had initially been intended for.48 Personalised as it is, Hoffmann’s illustration also reads as a compilation of visual tropes from older images. Viewing it together with various engravings included in the 1883 Calwer Bilderbuch, the shared quality of the images can be seen to emerge quite clearly. As in Hoffmann’s illustration, the Calwer Bilderbuch pictures subscribe to a formal composition, complete with visual signifier and indexical images. All these pictures allude to a typical encounter, with that familiar action of the preacher’s one hand in the air, gesturing towards the heavens, while the audience look on attentively – listening, by implication. On all occasions, the presence of the Book is prominent, enabling the preacher to open the portal between the unseen God above and the believing, or still to be converted, earthlings below. Under further scrutiny, the preaching scenes reveal the formulaic approach taken in assembling an image that could be disseminated to missionising audiences and satisfy their interest in a romanticised ‘other’. The formula appears to include specifics of the communities represented, the distinct characteristics of their homes, their attire, their family or community composition and interaction, their practices of domesticating animals, the landscape, and some information about the fauna and flora. But then again, since so few of the European viewers would actually have been to Bechuanaland, or Zululand, or Mashonaland or Matabeleland, such specifics could over time also simply blur into signifiers for ‘elsewhere’ – ‘exotic Africa’.49

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Several elements from the preaching scenes discussed above spilt over into images of school scenarios. Here, the preacher is also the teacher. He is conveying the powers of the book to his followers. Popular in the early engravings are scenes with the white missionary and the book centre-stage, surrounded by curious onlookers, mostly children. The missionary is portrayed as the active reader, often pulling one particular child into a learning position, close beside him50 (see Figure 2.5). These images invoke the biblical episode from the New Testament of Jesus blessing the little children.51 Such engravings were also popular for reproduction, curiously, for researchers in the twenty-first century searching for a defining visual identity for the white missionary. One particular picture, of the mission­ary seated in front of a house, entertaining children with a large picture book,52 was used as the cover image for scholarly publications in 2008 and 2010.53 The picture had previously featured, along with two others in which the same missionary appeared, in the Missionsbilder of 1871.54 In this Calwer Verlag publication these three images were employed as illustrations accompanying the German translation of a narrative on the work of an employee of the London Missionary Society, Charles Jukes, who had arrived in Madagascar in 1866. All three of these pictures of Jukes appear again in the 1883 Calwer Bilderbuch55 as part of the feature on Madagascar, but now loosened from the more specific account still detectable in the 1871 publication. Although the white male missionary teacher dominates in most of the nineteenth-century Calwer Bilderbuch engravings, white female

Figure 2.5  Missionary teacher surrounded by pupils. Source: QQ_30_​ 006_0020, from the Basel Mission Archive. This often-reproduced image had circulated in missionary publications of the societies of Calw, Basel and Berlin

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Figure 2.6  A woman school teacher with a book in her left hand makes sure the children’s hands are clean before they enter the school. Source: QQ_30_006_0014, from the Basel Mission Archive

teachers also feature. What is striking, is the modesty of these female figures, necks bent, and sometimes even in a kneeling position (see Figure 2.6).56 A rather curious recurrence is an image of a white girl reading a book, presumably out loud, to a black family (Figure 2.7). Linked to a particular character from history, ‘The little evangelist Pelagia from Mauritius’ in the 1883 Calwer Bilderbuch,57 she also

Figure 2.7  A little white girl reading to a black family – in Mauritius according to Calw, or in the ‘West Indies’ according to Basel. Source: QQ_30_​008_​0024, from the Basel Mission Archive

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surfaces from the IMPA database among the historical images of the Basel Mission, undated, and now transposed to a destination in the Caribbean.58 Similarly, a widely circulating image from Uncle Tom’s Cabin59 is a reminder of the white girl promoting literacy across racial and other boundaries. Imaginings of the white girl reading to Africans befitted the spatial fuzziness of the engraving as medium, and did not make a successful transition to photography, perhaps because the greater specificity of a photograph would have pierced the fantasy. Reading embraced: independent African reading While it might be expected that images of white people teaching Africans to read should pre-date images of independent African reading, pictures in this category also feature among the early engravings circulated by Calwer Verlag and the Basel Mission in the 1860s and 1870s. For example, Figure 2.8 features an adolescent reading under palm trees in ‘West Africa’.60 Images of independent African reading often include children. One such picture, of an African man teaching his son to read, in a section on Natal and Zululand in the Calwer Bilderbuch, resurfaced in a Berlin Missionary Society magazine to illustrate a report on the indigenisation of African reading in the Transvaal in 1897.61 In contrast to this image of the African Christian having taken over the role of the white male teacher (by implication rendering the latter redundant), the Calwer Missionsbilder and Calwer Bilderbuch also include images of African children challenging the existing order in African society by teaching elders their newly acquired skills. In the section dedicated to West Africa, one Calwer Bilderbuch engraving introduces a scene of a little boy sitting on his grandfather’s lap. The caption reads: ‘The grandchild teaches the grandfather to read’.62 A very similar engraving also surfaced in the IMPA, again from the historical photographs of the Basel Mission (see Figure 2.9), confirming that this image, too, had a history of reproduction, and that the trope of God’s Word spread via an innocent child had been significant in nineteenth-century missionary propaganda. The Basel image is dated in the IMPA online inventory as ‘not after 1905’ and bears a caption somewhat more ambiguous than the Calwer Bilderbuch one: ‘Grossvater u. Enkel unterichten’ [sic]. In the online database it has been translated as ‘Grandfather and grandson instructing [one another]’.63 A related image, this one again in the Calwer Bilderbuch, grouped with images from the southern coastal areas of West Africa,64 is reminiscent of the child Jesus teaching the elders in the temple.65 A

The Book as Prop in the Missionary Imagination   45

Figure 2.8  According to the Calwer Bilderbuch, an image of Jakob Okofi, a young Christian from Niger who showed great interest in English books, c. 1863. In the Basel Mission Archive, the image is merely marked ‘Adolescent Reader’. Source: QQ_30_05_0051, from the Basel Mission Archive

little African boy is featured reading to the chief. As in the previous two examples, the listening elders are not portrayed as if in a compromised or humiliated position. Nevertheless, dignified as the chief and his advisers are while receiving the message, their pensive moods confirm that they have a lot to contemplate and digest about changing times, especially because two of the African men in the background of this picture, standing behind the ruler’s advisers, are in chains – by implication, about to be sold into slavery for trans-Atlantic shipment. It should therefore not surprise us that an image of an African father challenging a missionary with physical violence for daring to teach his child the ABC is also included in the Calwer Bilderbuch. The caption of one such image identifies the missionary as African-American Mission­ary Taylor in Yorubaland.66 From quite early on, thus, African

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Figure 2.9  Grandfather and grandson instructing [one another]. Source: QQ_30_005_0103, from the Basel Mission Archive

engagement with the book unleashes a wide range of responses, less predictable than the images of white preachers. As a representation of independent African reading, one particular Calwer Bilderbuch engraving struck us as rather puzzling: should the extent to which reading has been indigenised in this engraving be ascribed to the artist’s slippage, or idealism? It is a scene simply entitled ‘African huts’,67 geographically situated in the Xhosa-speaking Eastern Cape area of southern Africa. The huts are, indeed, ‘African’, dome-shaped structures neatly covered in thatch mats. The rectangular wooden doors and window hatches have been appropriated from European examples. A white man, presumably a missionary, occupies the centre of the stage, but he is balanced by three figures towards the right. An African man, an African woman with what appears to be a baby on her back and an African youth are in conversation with the white man. The white man may or may not be holding a book or a document in his hand. It is not quite clear, but this would have provided a focal point for his conversation with the African group. A bare-chested African man with a bundle on his head passes by as if nothing extraordinary is playing itself out around him. The scene towards the left in the picture is remarkable: a group of three African people, apparently relaxed in mood, their backs against the side of a hut, are joined together by what is, unmistakably, a book.

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The smaller of two male figures leans in towards the bigger one, who is holding the book upright in his lap, actively reading from it, while the woman slightly towards his right also tilts her face towards the act of reading, her hands remaining busy with the fabric in front of her. In this, almost cosy, side scene, there was no intention by the artist to signify reading as either an act of worship or instruction: it appears as just one of the various things that happen around African people’s huts. Some are in conversation, some are carrying things, some are knitting, mending or weaving, and others are reading to one another – by implication, out loud. And while the white missionary’s presence in the scene remains central, this reading activity plays itself out behind his back – already beyond his orchestration or control. The ambiguity of this image, the multiple activities represented, each with its own possible range of interpretations, probably explains why it was not reproduced as often as engravings in which a single, more explicit image could be employed to stamp out one particular trope – like the African father educating his child. Independent African readers in photographs From this broad palette of malleable images, produced and reproduced over the decades as pictures in the form of engravings, stereotypes or even altered new engravings, some surprisingly fixed images filtered through when technology eventually enabled the missionary societies to reproduce photographs in large numbers in their publications. The fact that these technological advances coincided with the European missions’ growing realisation of African Christians’ readiness to take ownership of their faith certainly played a role – particularly in the case of the Germans, who realised, after the First World War, that they could no longer invest as much in their missionary institutions abroad as they had been able to before their defeat.68 Against this background, almost identical scenes of Africans teaching one another to read ended up being staged by different German missionary photographers from different missionary societies in different parts of the continent during the 1920s. Photography offered an efficient medium for setting up such scenes, thus enhancing the powerful trope of ultimate confirmation that literacy had been embraced by the African. We encountered striking similarity between two photographs, one from the Moravian Mission69 and the other from the Berlin Mission,70 both depicting first-generation African Christians, in Tanganyika (today Tanzania) and the Transvaal (today part of South Africa) respectively.

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Figure 2.10  A frequently reproduced photograph of two evangelists of the Berlin Mission in conversation over two books. Source: Online Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowledge (HC-CK), resource number 541: ‘Evangelist im Aussengebiet v[on] Kratzenstein’, from the Berlin Mission Archive, BMW2-051

The photograph in the archive of the Berlin Missionary Society (Figure 2.10) was most probably taken by Carl Hoffmann and had appeared not only in some of his publications in the early decades of the twentieth century but also as illustrative material in research articles of a century later. But even this powerful trope of Africans having embraced literacy is open to conflicting interpretations: is this a matter of Africans being intelligent and inventive enough to skill themselves, or affirmation of the superiority of the medium of the book? A drawing by Carl Hoffmann (Figure 2.11) reproduced in a 1909 book about the life of a first-generation African convert who was eventually ordained as a pastor in the Transvaal Berlin Mission Church serves as a thought-provoking counterpoint to the harmonious images discussed above. Moses Rakoma, of whom several photographs have survived in the Berlin Mission archive as well as Berlin Mission publications, is clearly recognisable in the drawing, which was obviously intended to be humorous. The missionary illustrator’s attempt to create this cartoon-like scene to accompany his narrative explains the choice of

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Figure 2.11  Advantages of mission education: Carl Hoffmann’s illustration of an enthusiastic African reader. Source: C. Hoffmann, Am Hofe der Buffel (Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung der Berliner Evangel. Missionsgesellschaft, 1909), p. 61

medium. What we find striking is the contrast between the message conveyed by this scene and the earlier scenes from the Calwer Verlag arsenal, where Africans’ first encounters with book culture had been portrayed as frightfully alienating. The caption of the cartoon reads: ‘The keen book reader noticed neither the chickens picking his maize porridge from the bowl, nor the dog who carefully approached his meat dish’.71 This comical trope of the engrossed reader neglecting the realities of the immediate surroundings is reminiscent of Charles Williams’s cartoon Advantages of Modern Education (first published in 1825 and widely circulated in Europe).72 In contrast, however, Hoffmann’s intent was almost certainly not ironic. Unlike Williams’s disapproving commentary on the English woman novel-reading while neglecting her kitchen duties, Hoffmann approvingly depicted his African reader with an edifying religious text. The IMPA contains a number of photographs from later in the twentieth century depicting Africans as accomplished readers who have embraced the practice as part of daily life. One of these, provided with the caption ‘Young people reading books in the cultural centre of Antananarivo, Madagascar’,73 was dated as having been produced

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between 1950 and 1970. Like the engrossed reader in the Transvaal decades earlier, the male readers in this scene seem absorbed in the act, but the modern cultural centre, with its bookshelves and other functional furniture, presents a more ‘appropriate’, and orderly, backdrop for the performance. The Bible as signifier of order and occupation The then frequent portrayal of respectable Christian families suggests the missionary ideal of societal order. In a Calwer Verlag engraving of a Christian Zulu family, the patriarch has his son on his lap, his hat on his knee and a marker of literacy, a document of sorts, in his hands.74 It is remarkable how little would change in the Christian family portrait. Half a century later, one can still observe a striking resemblance between this Calwer Bilderbuch engraving of the 1870s and the family photographs featured in missionary publications of the 1920s and 1930s. Surrounded by his wife and children, the African pastor of the twentieth century continues to hold the Bible.75 Another photographic genre with a precedent in engraving which would increase in popularity once technology allowed it was the figure of the ordained African pastor, minister or bishop, with the book as prop prominently marking the status and occupation of the person. As with the family portraits, in most of the nineteenth-century engravings of eminent individuals, except perhaps for the very early ones, there is really no marked difference in either posture or apparel in portraits of African or European, or American, missionaries (see Figure 2.12). In the case of the early African Christian pioneer John Mahonga of southern Africa, his European-styled portrait is set against a backdrop of artefacts framing his local world.76 The Holy Bible is comfortably leaning against an African shield, spear, battle axe and headgear – the Christian’s armour of Ephesians 6: 13–17. Under an exoticised African skyline finished off with palm trees, the indigenous frame also includes the quintessential preaching scene – the first trope we have identified and described in this chapter, and, unmistakably, again copied from Baxter’s engraving that is supposed to have depicted the famous John Moffat addressing a gathering from atop his wagon.77 Neither Moffat nor Mahonga had been employed by German missionary societies, making it quite likely that Barth had obtained these engravings for Calwer Verlag via his connections in Britain. In the case of individual portraits, the photographic medium did contribute to somewhat less idealised and obviously less imagined

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Figure 2.12  Abegu and Durugu, the two youths who assisted with the translation of the Bible into Hausa, depicted in England in the 1850s. Impeccably dressed in Western attire, they set a trend for the visual representation of African Christian pioneers with their books. Source: QQ_30_005_0049, from the Basel Mission Archive; also ‘WestAfrika, Niger’, in Missionsbilder IX, West-Afrika (Calw and Stuttgart: Vereinsbuchhandlung and I. F. Steinkopf, 1870), pp. 79–80

settings. Again, some photographs taken by Hoffmann in the early decades of the twentieth century serve as interesting examples.78 The backgrounds are less arranged, and less romanticised, and the pastors’ clothes do not fit as impeccably as those of their handsomely engraved nineteenth-century predecessors, but the huge Bibles in their arms stand out more prominently than ever: the foundation of their learnedness, the fount of their authority in the community, but also the signifier of the divine authority to which they had pledged obedience. Hoffmann’s photograph of Joel Modiba of Phalaborwa in the northern Transvaal (Figure 2.13) was reproduced several times, not only for Christian audiences in Germany, but also for the African Christian members of the Berlin Mission Church, as well as in an article Hoffmann had written for a secular Afrikaner magazine on the work of the Berlin Mission.79

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Figure 2.13  A photograph of Joel Modiba with an open Bible in the veld. Source: Online Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowledge (HC-CK), resource number 538: ‘Evangelist Joel Modiba in the vicinity of Kratzenstein’, from the Berlin Mission Archive, BMW2-048

Uncovering ‘the book’: the soil as page In all the images discussed so far, the conventional form of the book, or, in some instances, a paper document, were depicted as the reading medium – and as such a sign of literacy, Christianity, occupation and/or authority. There are also the odd scenes among the Calwer Bilderbuch engravings, however, in which the African community’s own land is presented as the surface from which to read.80 What we find fascinating about these scenes is how the missionary’s whole body is involved in performing the act of inscription in this improvised medium of communication: signs are being engraved into the attentive Africans’ immediate environment right in front of their eyes. Referring back to the two engravings discussed earlier in this chapter under the heading ‘Reading imposed’ (where the Africans had been represented in an animated pose, as if they had experienced multi-sensory distress at the sight of a book), here the roles are reversed. The African onlookers are dignified, yet interested and engaged, while the missionary is bent down, the lowest figure in the composition, wholeheartedly gesticulating to show up God’s word from the African surface. Of course the missionary figure is reminiscent of Jesus himself, who had also once bent down and written in the sand in an episode from one of the Gospels.81

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More than any other, then, this last image offers a bridge between the long missionary tradition of representing the African Christian reader in print, and the more recent tradition of an African-Christian self-representation as readers. The image of the European missionary inscribing the African landscape is, at a very obvious level, a confession of the missionary intention to affect and effect change in the African subject. Perhaps less intentionally, it is also an acknowledgement that the conventional methods of enacting the Word of God through reading are incomplete, and open to African engagement, appropriation, adjustment and redeployment. Not only did African theologians contemplate and comment on this issue,82 but African artists did so too, working on the flipside of the European engraver’s coin. The paintings of African Christian self-representation as readers by South African artist Gerard Sekoto, who had grown up in the Transvaal Berlin Mission Church, and whose family was known to Carl Hoffmann, have been addressed in previous studies,83 and is therefore touched upon here only briefly, although the topic is far from exhausted. As recently as 2018, a privately owned Sekoto painting depicting African schoolgirls with their books was displayed in public for the first time in five decades when it was put on auction.84 Even though Sekoto’s work dates from the 1940s, it is rare for investigating and visualising the reading African girl.85 While Sekoto’s paintings of readers replicated the missionary tradition of depicting African readers with books as props, holding them or looking into them, Namibian artist John Muafangejo took it a step further by incorporating his representations of reading – the act, the subject and object – into the process of inscription itself. As a printmaker, Muafangejo replicated the carving and inking processes of the engravers who had over the years produced the images of African readers to Europeans, but now with one significant difference: he engraved his own reading ex­ periences into the content of his work, giving it an appearance which had been made familiar to him by his missionary education. The European engraving and the African artist – ­Muafangejo Muafangejo, born in Ovamboland, Namibia, a South African printmaker and interpreter of biblical texts,86 can be positioned within the context of this research as literate convert and so much more. His linocut prints were produced at the Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift – a Swedish Evangelical Lutheran mission project in

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KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Each of his prints engages the senses and provokes notions of countervisuality as Muafangejo narrates his life as a Christian. Many of his prints contain images of books.87 The presentation of books in his prints is very different from that in the publications disseminated throughout the missionary publishing network of his experience. There is the obvious difference in use of medium and the inevitable stylistic selections resulting therefrom, and there is the use of the book not only for its outward appearance as an object, but for its content, the book-as-text. This use is not presented in any of the missionary-produced images of the reader – except perhaps the ones where the sermons-in-sand had replaced the book-wielding preacher-teacher. Zimbabwe House: This Is St Mary’s Mission 1975 stands as a profound example of the move from missionary images to images produced in the missionary context for and by African readers. The experience of the artist’s life in text is clearly referential of biblical texts, as the verses are marked numerically and a speared spine extends through the centre of the text, replicating the graphic layout of two columns of text in which most Bibles had been printed at least until the middle of the twentieth century. The text itself reads as a redress: to address stereotypes presented of the African and African figure, alternatively communicating the nuanced experience of an individual. ‘An Artist is struggling with chains in order to tear it from the stem’ is the readable text forming the back of a black figure – Muafangejo’s self-portrait. The artist has been able to take the language of the mission and make it his own, using his own improvised approach to past and present tense, grammar and sentence structure.88 Moreover, he has invaded the missionary press’s medium of the engraving, artistic­ally transforming it into a home as well as a vehicle through which to act out a new way of reading to European and African onlookers alike. Conclusion Having trekked on only one of many possible paths through the bewildering number of missionary-related images produced and reproduced by European printers and publishers since the early nineteenth century, and pausing specifically at ones featuring the book as prop in relation to Africans, we are left with a number of impressions. We have to agree with Christoph Rippe that the book as an object is

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a multi-referential prop. It stood, yes, for the Christian message, for the authority of the European conveyor, for the urgency with which the African had to be taught textual literacy. This could be seen in the way not only similar images but in fact the very same engravings were used interchangeably. Whether with reference to western, eastern or southern Africa or the Caribbean, a particular kind of image came to be expected when a particular kind of story was reported. As time moved on, engravings represented not only an older medium, but also a means of perpetuating well established tropes in mission­ary discourse. The production and circulation of book-related images harnessed missionaries into a particular visuality, provided them with particular tropes, and channelled their own observations and representations accordingly – as we could see in the intertextual water­marks lingering beneath Carl Hoffmann’s creations. And yet the tendency in missionary visuality to assert the difference between Europeans and Africans is also undermined by the book as malleable referent. As we have illustrated, literacy as a means towards a Christian-educated end was not only an urgent project in the far-away mission field, but also among the very Europeans who were primarily targeted by the engravings and photographs of reading Africans. It is important to keep in mind that European audiences, like the ones who had benefited from Calwer Verlag, were a mixture of cultured patrons and simple country folk. To the latter, as to growing numbers of urban working classes – pictures spoke a thousand words. We have to consider the possibility that the book as prop may have enabled the European viewers to identify with the African other. To them, too, books could have been both menacing and inviting. They, too, were expected to make an effort to listen, learn and improve themselves. Featuring the book as prop contributed to the notion that a shared experience could have been possible. And the reading ex­ perience was indeed appropriated by the African subjects represented in the European images. However, as we have seen in an artist like Muafangejo, who had been nurtured in the missionary fold, there were many ways of identifying with the book-as-object once the cover had been lifted from the multiple inked – or re-inkable – surfaces.

Notes This work is based on research supported by the German Research Foundation and the South African National Institute for the Humanities and the Social Sciences.

56   Natalie Fossey and Lize Kriel   1. F. Jensz, ‘Hope and Pity. Depictions of Children in Five Decades of the Evangelisch-Lutherishes Missionsblatt, 1860–1910’, in J. Becker and K. Stornig (eds), Menschen – Bilder – Eine Welt. Ordnungen von Vielfalt in der religiösen Publizistik um 1900 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2018), pp. 260–81.  2. K. Stornig and J. Becker, ‘Menschenbilder in Missionszeit­ schriften: Ordnungen von Vielfalt um 1900’, in Becker and Stornig (eds), Menschen – Bilder – Eine Welt, p. 12; F. Jensz and H. Acke (eds), Missions and Media: The Politics of Missionary Periodicals in the Long Nineteenth Century (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2013), pp. 9–15; U. van der Heyden and Andreas Feldtkeller (eds), Missionsgeschichte als Geschichte der Globalisierung von Wissen. Transkulturelle Wissensaneignung und -­vermittlung durch christliche Missionare in Afrika und Asien im 17., 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012), pp. 11–12.   3. P. Rietbergen, Europe: A Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 355; Stornig and Becker, ‘Menschenbilder in Missionszeitschriften’, p. 14.   4. See, for example, Isaac Shimmin, ‘An Adventure with a Lion in Mashona­ land’, Wesleyan Missionary Notices, March 1892, p. 60.  5. Stornig and Becker, ‘Menschenbilder in Missionszeitschriften’, pp. 9–13.  6. Christoph Rippe, ‘Auxiliary Modes of Collecting: Circulation and Curation of Photographs from the Marianhill Mission in KwaZulu-­ Natal, 1880–1914’, in C. Hamilton and N. Leibhammer (eds), Tribing and Untribing the Archive (Pietermaritzburg: University of Kwa­ZuluNatal Press, 2016), p. 411.  7. S. Bollmann, Frauen die lesen, sind gefährlich (Munich: Elisabeth Sandmann Verlag, 2005); S. P. Casteras, ‘Reader, Beware: Images of Victorian Women and Books’, Nineteenth-century Gender Studies, 3:1 (2007); J. Conlon, ‘Men Reading Women Reading: Interpreting Images of Women Readers’, Frontiers, 26:1 (2005), pp. 37–58; B. Jack, The Woman Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); A. Stretton, ‘The Book in Art’, Art and Australia, 42:4 (2005), pp. 605–8.   8. Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘On Visuality’, Journal of Visual Culture, 5:1 (2006), pp. 53–77.   9. Sincere thanks to all friends and colleagues who alerted us to images of people reading – in particular Ulrich van der Heyden. 10. I. Hofmeyr, We Spend Our Years as a Tale That Is Told: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1995). 11. Paul Jenkins, ‘The Earliest Generation of Missionary Photographers in West Africa: The Portrayal of Indigenous People and Culture’, Visual Anthropology, 7:2 (1994), p. 115. 12. Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counter-History of Visuality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 3–4.

The Book as Prop in the Missionary Imagination   57

13. Lori Leavell, ‘Recirculating Black Militancy in Word and Image: Henry Highland Garnet’s “Volume of Fire”’, Book History, 20 (2017), pp. 150–87 (p. 166). 14. Conlon, ‘Men Reading Women Reading’, pp. 37–58. 15. G. Törnvall, ‘From Copper Plate to Color Lithography: On the Moderniz­ ation of an Illustrated Flora 1800–1900’, Book History, 20, 2017, p. 131. 16. Jensz, ‘Hope and Pity, pp. 280–1. 17. Toernvall, ‘From Copper Plate to Color Lithography’, p. 131. 18. International Missionary Photo Archive at (accessed November 2019). 19. Email correspondence between A. Rhyn and L. Kriel, 11–21 February 2019; see also the Basel Mission/Mission 21 achives website (accessed November 2019). 20. On Hoffmann, see A. Joubert, A Journey into the Life of a Mission-­ Ethnographer (film, Berlin, 2015). The online Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowledge, established by A. Joubert et al. at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2015, is at (accessed November 2019). 21. Calwer Verlag, 175 Jahre Calwer Verlag (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 2011), available at (accessed November 2019). 22. D. Ising, Johann Christoph Blumhardt, Life and Work: A New Biography, trans. M. Ledford (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2009), p. 149. 23. Ibid., pp. 151–3. 24. Ibid., p. 140. 25. M. Keuchen, Bild-Konzeptionen in Bilder- und Kinderbibeln I. Die historische Anfänge und ihre Wiederentdeckung in der Gegenwart (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2016), p. 294. 26. Ibid., pp. 300–1. 27. Ibid., pp. 297–300. 28. Nicholas Hope, German and Scandinavian Protestantism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 385. 29. Calwer Verlagsverein, Calwer Historisches Bilderbuch der Welt, facsimile reprint (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1987) of Bilder-Tafeln zur Länderund Völker-Kunde mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der evangelischen Missions­arbeit (Calw: Calwer Verlag, 1883). 30. The first of the thirteen volumes of Missionsbilder appeared in 1864 and the last in 1875. They were published in collaboration between the Vereinsbuchhandlung in Calw and I. F. Steinkopf in Stuttgart. 31. Missionsbilder XI, Das Kapland (Calw and Stuttgart: Vereinsbuchhandlung and I. F. Steinkopf, 1873), p. 41. Interestingly, this image was not included in the Bilderbuch of 1883. 32. Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), frontispiece.

58   Natalie Fossey and Lize Kriel 33. Leavell ‘Recirculating Black Militancy in Word and Image’, p. 161. 34. Stornig and Becker, ‘Menschenbilder in Missionszeitschriften’, pp. 14–15. 35. E. Rebel, Druckgrafik. Geschichte und Fachbegriffe (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2009), pp. 108–12. 36. Jensz, ‘Hope and Pity’, pp. 280–1. 37. Examples are: Calwer Verlagsverein, ‘Südafrika (Kafraria)’, in Calwer Historisches Bilderbuch der Welt, p. 123.5; ‘Aus dem Missionsleben in Natal’, in Missionsbilder XII, Südost-Afrika (Calw and Stuttgart: Vereins­buchhandlung and I. F. Steinkopf, 1874), p. 66. 38. Jensz and Acke, Missions and Media, p. 11. 39. Archive of the Berlin Missionary Society, Berlin, BMW1-03298, Person­ alien des Missonars C. Hoffmann, p. 102. 40. Online Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowledge (hereafter HC-CK), resource number 485: Hoffmann diary 5 (1897–1901), from University of South Africa Archive, ‘Auf den Pfarrhofe in Arkona’ [‘In the Arkona Parsonage Garden’], p. 153. 41. Matthew 4: 4. 42. Annika Vosseler, ‘The Self and Other: How the Lutheran Missionary Carl Hoffmann Represented Africa, 1894–1910’, MA dissertation (University of Edinburgh, 2015). 43. Robert Moffat, Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (London: John Snow, 1842), cover and p. 596. 44. For a further example, yet again with Robert Moffat and the Book as the centre of attention, see ‘Die Regionen bei Betschuanenstämme’, in Missionsbilder XI, Kapland (Calw and Stuttgart: Vereinsbuchhandlung and I. F. Steinkopf, 1873), p. 104. 45. L. Kriel and N. Fossey, ‘The “Reading African” in the Hierarchy of Others as Visualised in the Periodical Der Missionsfreund, Early Twentieth Century’, in Becker and Stornig (eds), Menschen – Bilder – Eine Welt, pp. 190–1. 46. HC-CK, resource number 485: Hoffmann diary 5 (1897–1901), from University of South Africa Archive, ‘Heidenpredigt in Mashonaland’ [‘Preaching to unbelievers in Mashonaland’], p. 68. 47. Kriel and Fossey, ‘The “Reading African”’, pp. 193–7. 48. H. Lehmann, ‘Aus der Geschichte der Berliner Mission in Südafrika’, Mission, March 1984, p. 21. 49. Two examples are Calwer Verlagsverein, ‘Südafrika (Natal und Zulu­ land), Nächtliche Predigt’ and ‘Südafrika (Kapland), Reisepredigt’, in Calwer Historisches Bilderbuch der Welt, pp. 127.7 and 131.8. 50. ‘Kafraria; Die Mission’, in Missionsbilder XII, Südost-Afrika (Calw and Stuttgart: Vereinsbuchhandlung and I. F. Steinkopf, 1874), p. 37; H. T. Wangemann, Südafrika und seine Bewohner (Berlin: Missionshaus, 1881), p. LXXIV. 51. Mark 1: 13–16.

The Book as Prop in the Missionary Imagination   59

52. Calwer Verlagsverein, ‘Madagaskar’, in Calwer Historisches Bilderbuch der Welt, p. 117.2. 53. G. Pakendorf, Berliner Beiträge zur Missionsgeschichte X (Berlin: Wichern-​Verlag, 2008); U. van der Heyden, Berliner Beiträge zur Missions­­ geschichte XIII (Berlin: Wichern-Verlag, 2010). 54. Der Umschwung unter Ranawalona II’, in Missionsbilder X, Madagaskar (Calw and Stuttgart: Vereinsbuchhandlung and I. F. Steinkopf, 1871), p. 100. 55. Calwer Verlagsverein, ‘Madagaskar’, in Calwer Historisches Bilderbuch der Welt, pp. 117.1 and 117.2; ‘Der Umschwung unter Ranawalona II’, in Missionsbilder X, pp. 97 and 100. 56. See for example ‘Allerlei Tischzüge’, in Missionsbilder XII, Südost-Afrika (Calw and Stuttgart: Vereinsbuchhandlung and I. F. Steinkopf, 1874), p. 39; Calwer Verlagsverein, ‘Ägypten’, in Calwer Historisches Bilder­buch der Welt, p. 109.3; ‘Ägypten’, in Missionsbilder XII, Ost-Afrika (Calw and Stuttgart: Vereinsbuchhandlung and I. F. Steinkopf, 1875), p. 27; Calwer Verlagsverein, ‘Natal und Zululand’, in Calwer Historisches Bilder­buch der Welt, pp. 128.8; and another from ‘Allerlei Tischzüge’, in Missionsbilder XII, p. 72. 57. Calwer Verlagsverein, ‘Mauritius’, in Calwer Historisches Bilderbuch der Welt, p. 118.5. 58. IMPA, Historical photographs from the Basel Mission: record ID Impam­41647. 59. J. A. Morgan, ‘Illustrating Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, paper presented at the Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the Web of Culture Conference, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture Project (University of Virginia, 2007), available at (accessed November 2019). 60. ‘West-Afrika, Der Niger’, in Missionsbilder IX, West-Afrika (Calw and Stuttgart: Vereinsbuchhandlung and I. F. Steinkopf, 1870), pp. 87–8. 61. See A. Merensky, ‘Mogoero oa Basotho oder: Der Basotho-Freund’, Der Missionsfreund, 52:1 (1997), p. 4. 62. ‘West Afrika (Niger)’, in Calwer Historisches Bilderbuch der Welt, p. 135.12. 63. IMPA, Historical photographs from the Basel Mission: record ID Impam41479. 64. Calwer Verlagsverein, ‘West Afrika (Südliche Küste)’, in Calwer Historisches Bilderbuch der Welt, p. 134.7. 65. Luke 2: 41–52. 66. Calwer Verlagsverein, ‘West Afrika (Joruba)’, in Calwer Historisches Bilderbuch der Welt, p.137.2. 67. Ibid., ‘Südafrika (Kafraria)’, p.125.4. 68. F. Ludwig, ‘Der Erste Weltkrieg als Einschnitt in der Kirchen und Missionsgeschichte’, in A. Feldtkeller (ed.), Berliner Beiträge Zur Missions­geschichte (Berlin: Wichern-Verlag, 2003), pp. 8–9.

60   Natalie Fossey and Lize Kriel 69. IMPA, Photograph from the Moravian Church, Herrnhut, Germany, ‘The first Christian and assistant in Unyamwezi, Tanzania, c. 1890– 1940’: record ID Impa-m14656. 70. HC-CK, resource number 541: ‘Evangelist im Aussengebiet v[on] Kratzenstein’, from the Berlin Mission Archive, BMW2-051. The image was reproduced in the following publications: C. Hoffmann, Einst und Jetzt im Heidenland (Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung der Berliner Evangel, Missionsgesellschaft, 1927), p. 16; K. Rüther, ‘“Sekukuni, Listen!, Banna!, and to the Children of Frederick the Great and our Kaiser Wilhelm”: Documents in the Social and Religious History of the Transvaal, 1860–1890’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 34:3 (2004), p. 226; L. Kriel, ‘Reflections on the Mission(s) to Capture “the Reader” and “the Book” in Southern African Art’, Critical Arts, 28: 5 (2014), p. 775. 71. C. Hoffmann, Am Hofe der Buffel (Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung der Berliner Evangel. Missionsgesellschaft, 1909), p. 61. 72. Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, Advantages of Modern Education, Hand-coloured etching, accession number 1963-41-1, available at (accessed November 2019). 73. IMPA, Photographs of the Défap – Service Protestant de Mission, Paris, c. 1880–1971: record ID impa-m74025. 74. Calwer Verlagsverein, ‘Natal und Zululand’, in Calwer Historisches Bilder­buch der Welt, p. 128.2, and ‘Allerlei Tischzüge’, in Missionsbilder XII, p. 75. 75. Family photograph of Reverend Timoteus Pehane, in Thsupa Mabaka a Kereke, 1932, p. 19; Family photograph of Reverend Filippus Malahlela, in Thsupa Mabaka a Kereke, 1936, p. 43. (Thsupa Mabaka a Kereke was the annual almanac of the northern-Sotho-speaking Berlin Mission Church.) 76. Calwer Verlagsverein, ‘Südafrika (Kafraria)’, in Calwer Historisches Bilderbuch der Welt, p. 124.1; and ‘Kafraria’, in Missionsbilder XII, Südost-Afrika (Calw and Stuttgart: Vereinsbuchhandlung and I. F. Steinkopf, 1874), p. 47. 77. Calwer Verlagsverein, ‘Südafrika (Betschuana)’, in Calwer Historisches Bilderbuch der Welt, p. 125.13. 78. Photograph of Joel Modiba, Thsupa Mabaka a Kereke, 1931, p. 31; Photograph of Jonas Mogashwa, Thsupa Mabaka a Kereke, 1936, p. 27; HC-CK, resource number 671: ‘Pastor Charles Mokchaba’, from the Berlin Mission Archive, BMW2-166 (no date). 79. Photograph of Joel Modiba, in C. Hoffmann, ‘Mensvreters’, Die Huisgenoot, 20 January 1933, p. 23. 80. Calwer Verlagsverein, ‘Centralafrika’, in Calwer Historisches Bilderbuch der Welt, p. 121.3; Calwer Verlagsverein, ‘Westafrika (Niger)’, in Calwer Historisches Bilderbuch der Welt, p. 135.7. 81. John 8: 1–11.

The Book as Prop in the Missionary Imagination   61

82. G. O. West, The Stolen Bible: From Tool of Imperialism to African Icon (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster, 2016). 83. N. C. Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto: ‘I am an African’. A Biography (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004). 84. S. G. Stoodley, ‘SOLD! Gerard Sekoto’s “Three School Girls” Fetches More Than $400,000 at Bonhams – Almost Double Its Low Estimage’, The Hot Bid, 14 September 2018. The article, with a reproduction of the artwork, can be viewed at (accessed November 2019). 85. Kriel, ‘Reflections on the Mission(s) to Capture’, pp. 772–6. 86. S. Cornelius, ‘The Power of Images: The Bible in Art and Visual Representation in South Africa’, Scriptura, 87 (2004), pp. 257–9. 87. Linocuts like An Interview of Cape Town University (1974), Worryman (1974) and Oniipa Rebuilding of Printing Press (1981) can be viewed at (accessed 8 January 2020). 88. C. Cole, ‘John N. Muafangejo 1943–1987. A Perspective on His Lino-cuts with Special Reference to the University of Bophuthatswana Print Collection’, MFA dissertation (Rhodes University, South Africa, 1993), p. 46.

Chapter 3

Augustus De Morgan (1806–71), His Reading and His Library Karen Attar

In her seminal work Marginalia, Heather Jackson aims ‘to set out the history and conventions of a widespread custom by reference to a substantial body of specific cases’,1 chiefly of literary giants. To a large extent, we may associate the history of individual reading with the humanities: with literary authors, historians and philosophers, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle and Voltaire, gaining inspiration and developing their thoughts from their reading matter, as documented by marginalia, or perhaps by statesmen, such as William Ewart Gladstone, discussed by Michael Wheeler in Chapter 4 of this volume.2 This chapter supplements and amends such emphasis by focusing on a nineteenth-century mathematician and mathematical historian, Augustus De Morgan (1806–71), much of whose reading was in his academic area, and on his largely subject-related book collection, now at the University of London. The chapter discusses the formation and content of De Morgan’s library. It then examines De Morgan’s use of his books. His annotations, never previously analysed, provide one indication of this, his published output another; and the existence of both enables us to see the connection between them. Similarities with and differences from the annotators studied by Jackson emerge throughout. In a significant divergence from the theory that marginalia prove annotated books to have been read,3 De Morgan’s marginalia provide instances where annotation does not prove reading, or where it proves reading of a book other than the one in hand. A case study of De Morgan thus further exemplifies the unreliability of equating a scholar’s extant library with his reading, and provides a useful addition to previous scholarship on the problem of using marginalia as evidence. Such was De Morgan’s renown that newspaper obituaries throughout Britain described him as ‘one of the profoundest mathematicians in the United Kingdom’,4 ‘one of the most profound mathematicians 62

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of his time’5 and ‘the greatest of our mathematicians’.6 Following undergraduate studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1828, aged twenty-one, he became the first professor of mathematics at the infant University of London, soon to become University College London. He gave his name to two laws in logic. He was a leading figure in the London Mathematical Society and the Royal Astronomical Society. He wrote a few books, including a pioneering bibliography, Arithmetical Books from the Invention of Printing to the Present Time (1847), and numerous articles on mathematics and on its history, the latter extending into bibliography. Although his renown had diminished by the second quarter of the twentieth century,7 he continues to merit lengthy entries in such staple biographical sources as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, and to be accepted as a pioneering mathematical historian.8 De Morgan’s library was also renowned. De Morgan himself and his wife, Sophia, wrote modestly about it. Sophia, terming it a ‘little library’, claimed: ‘Had he been rich his collection would have been large and valuable, but he was soon obliged to deny himself the luxury of buying, except the chance treasures which fell in his way at bookstalls’.9 Others, unhampered by a desire to present De Morgan as a responsible family provider, were less reticent. While De Morgan was still young, William Frend wrote to him of a mechanics’ institution in Hastings: ‘They have also a reading-room for the more select inhabitants, which is about the size of your study, but not so well filled with books’.10 De Morgan’s most detailed obituary describes him as ‘the possessor of a very choice collection of mathematical works’,11 and James Ludovic Lindsay, twenty-sixth earl of Crawford, wrote, in describing his own purchase in 1871 of Charles Babbage’s library through Bernard Quaritch: ‘The offer, needless to say, I accepted without hesitation. It was the best collection of its time after that of Prof. DeMorgan [sic]’,12 and Lindsay used De Morgan’s library to build up his desiderata lists.13 Subsequent connoisseurs have described De Morgan’s collection as ‘one of the best surviving collections of early scientific books formed at this date’, ‘one of the major surviving collections formed before the present [i.e. twentieth] century’ and as ‘one of the finest accumulations of books on the history of mathematics in the country’.14 Institutions echoed private opinions. A mere fortnight after De Morgan’s death, The Spectator, on 1 April 1871, using adjectives reflecting both the rarity of De Morgan’s books and their annotations,

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wondered whether ‘the late Professor de Morgan’s unique mathematical library, which probably contains the most curious collection of books on the history of mathematics to be found in England’, might be secured for the University of London.15 Six weeks later it reported: ‘a great desire to purchase his [De Morgan’s] rare mathematical library (valued at something like £1,200) on behalf of the University of London’.16 University of London senator Samuel Loyd, Baron Overstone, realised the desire,17 thereby thwarting the acquisitive interest in the collection expressed by Cambridge University Library.18 De Morgan collected as comprehensively as he could, taking the view that: The most worthless book of a bygone day is a record worthy of preservation. Like a telescopic star, its obscurity may render it unavailable for most purposes; but it serves, in hands which know how to use it, to determine the places of more important bodies.19

His library, as we know it, comprises almost 4,000 titles, ranging from pamphlets to multi-volume works, published between 1474 and 1870.20 All major mathematicians are represented. De Morgan’s collection included multiple editions of significant or popular works such as Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Sphaera mundi (‘On the Sphere of the World’), Euclid’s Elements, William Oughtred’s Clavis mathematicae (‘Key to Mathematics’), James Hodder’s Arithmetick, Cocker’s Arithmetick and Napier’s work on logarithms. Iconic treasures included the first five printed editions of Euclid, the first and second editions of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, and the first editions of Newton’s Principia and Opticks. Rarities included Lucas Lossius’s Arithmetices erotemata puerilia (1557; ‘Questions and answers in arithmetic for boys’), Theodoricus’s Canon sexagenarum et scrupularum sexa­ gesimorum (1609; ‘Canon of sixties and of sixtieth parts’), the only complete extant copy of Bernardus de Granollachs’s Lunarium ab anno 1491 ad annum 1550 (Lyons: Johannes Siber, 1491) and such apparently unique works as an edition now dated to about 1520 of Johannes de Muris’s Arithmetices co[m]pendium ex Boetij libris (‘Compendium of arithmetic from the books of Boethius’). De Morgan’s main interest was arithmetic, which he regarded as the basis of mathematics, and it is the area most comprehensively represented; but algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, logarithms, probability, annuities and functions are all present, as also are astronomy books (among others, early editions of Proclus, Galileo, Ismaël Boulliau and Tycho Brahe) and, though to a far lesser extent, mechanics. Also held were encyclopaedic works that had sections on mathematics, such as

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two editions of Gregor Reisch’s Margarita philosophica (1508 and 1515; a third edition, from 1504, was noted as missing by 1908);21 a little philosophy (some classical); a little scientific biography; and some literary texts, such as an English translation of José Francisco de Isla’s Spanish satirical romance The History of the Famous Preacher, Friar Gerund de Campazas, Otherwise Gerund Zotes (1772) and a late edition of Paradise Lost (1790). Unsurprisingly, the quantity of books increases per century of publication: twenty-two incunabula constitute 0.6 per cent of the collection, while 7.5 per cent of the books are from the sixteenth century, 13 per cent from the seventeenth and 15 per cent from the eighteenth. Sixty-one per cent of the library’s items are from the nineteenth century, a figure enhanced considerably by a large quantity of offprints and other bound pamphlets, such as sale catalogues. The predominant language is English (64 per cent of titles), followed in decreasing order by Latin and French (16.5 and 15 per cent respectively), then, with a large drop, Italian (2 per cent) and German (fifty titles; 1.5 per cent). Annotations and other references to books reveal that he read his books in all these languages. Concerning the acquisition of his books, De Morgan wrote: I have bought what happened to come in my way at show or auction; I have retained what came in as part of the undescribed portion of miscellaneous auction lots; I have received a few from friends who found them among what they called their rubbish; and I have preserved books sent to me for review.22

De Morgan bought particularly extensively at the sale of James Orchard Halliwell’s mathematical books (June 1840); other auctions at which he was active are those of the books of the astronomer Francis Baily (April 1845) and the mathematicians Abigail Lousada (March 1834), Thomas Galloway (February 1852) and Samuel Maynard (January 1863). Illustrious former owners include the physician and collector Georg Kloss, the mathematicians Christoph Clavius and Jean-Étienne Montucla, and the politician and colonial administrator Frederick North, fifth earl of Guilford. Several books bear inscriptions or accompanying letters that indicate their source as presentation copies and other gifts – a sign of the high regard in which De Morgan was held and the circles in which he moved – with donors including George Salmon, Charles Babbage, Henry Brougham (first Lord Brougham and Vaux) and John Couch Adams among a host of others. Quantitatively, De Morgan’s mathematical library was surpassed by the wider-ranging one of his friend and contemporary at University

66  Karen Attar

College London, John Thomas Graves (1806–70), whose collection bequeathed to University College (which included astrology, chemistry and more physics than De Morgan’s) was assessed as numbering upwards of 10,000 volumes and some 5,000 pamphlets, and embraced seventy-five incunables and fifty-one manuscripts.23 Yet Graves’s collection was far less celebrated.24 De Morgan’s greater mathematical eminence and more prolific publishing may partly account for this. But a major factor is the copy-specific value of De Morgan’s books acquired through his habits of annotation, carried out from student days onwards.25 De Morgan usually wrote his notes on the title pages of volumes or pasted or wrote them directly on front flyleaves. At a time when washing books to obliterate former signs of ownership remained fashionable,26 the manuscript notes De Morgan added to his books were consistently regarded as an enrichment. ‘The value of this collection is besides greatly enhanced by Mr. de Morgan’s own numerous and characteristic annotations’, declared the Spectator,27 while the Astronomical Society’s obituary claimed that ‘most of the volumes contain bibliographical notes’28 and Sophia De Morgan wrote: Visitors to the University Library, who take down any of these works from the shelves, will almost certainly light upon some of the numerous marginal notes and illustrations, serious or otherwise, with which their former owner embellished them.29

Once recorded, the opinion was perpetuated, such that the thirty-​ three-line entry on De Morgan in J. A. Venn’s Alumni Canta­brigi­ensis, not noted for recording reading, describes his books as ‘enriched with quaint marginal notes and learned annotations’,30 a view echoed most recently by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.31 In fact, analysis reveals that annotations beyond mere ownership inscriptions adorn a minority of De Morgan’s books. Of some 3,830 titles in his collection, around 2,280 (59 per cent) remain completely unmarked, in line with predictable practice as noted by David Pearson and others; or, also in line with standard practice of the most common form of annotation, they contain only De Morgan’s name, possibly with a date.32 Volumes of bound pamphlets tend to be marked merely by De Morgan’s utilitarian list of the contents of the volume (485 titles). This leaves approximately 1,100 titles (29 per cent) bearing an annotation with some kind of content. Yet this is still more than many owners have done, and provides an angle from which to examine the connection between ownership, reading and scholarship.

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Assumptions linking De Morgan’s reading practices too closely with his library catalogue risk being misleading. For one thing, personal libraries are fluid entities during the assembler’s lifetime, as books are not only acquired but also discarded. De Morgan did give books away, such as presentation copies which he could not use33 and duplicates,34 and, as an annotation in his copy of Edmund Wingate’s Arithmetique logarithmetique (Paris: M. Mondiere, 1625) describes, he also made exchanges: Galloway [the Scottish mathematician Thomas Galloway] collected Keplers; I collected logarithms: Galloway had this book, which I had not: I had a Kepler, which he had not: I proposed an exchange: he demurred, saying that the book was a favourite of his father-in-law (Wallace). I rejoined that I was more nearly connected with Wingate than his father-in-law with him, for that my great-grandfather had published an edition of Wingate’s Arithmetic, which is a much closer connection, looked at as a matter of science, than the mere marriage with a man’s daughter. He rather doubted this, at first, but by help of a Kepler in the background, he was prevailed upon to see it, and the exchange was made.35

Most significantly, in 1868 the De Morgans moved house from Adelaide Road to 6 Merton Road, near Primrose Hill. The room devoted to the library was smaller than in the previous house, so that, as Sophia recorded, ‘A large number of the books had been sold, but about 3,000 remained’.36 Evidence of disposal appears in volumes found in St John’s, St Catherine’s and Trinity Colleges in Cambridge and at University College London, easily traced through provenance details in their catalogue records. Occasionally books emerge from private hands: in February 2013 a private collector sold through Bonhams auctioneers De Morgan’s inscribed copy of William Jones’s Clavis campanologia, or, A Key to the Art of Ringing (1788), described in De Morgan’s arithmetical bibliography,37 and in 2017 Senate House Library purchased his annotated copy of William Pope’s The Triumphal Chariot of Friction (1829), described in his A Budget of Paradoxes (1872), from Quaritch.38 Ample evidence exists of De Morgan’s professional and recreational awareness and use of libraries beyond his own: private, circulating, professional, academic and national. Augustus’s son William De Morgan remembered his mother changing books, which could easily have been for family consumption, at the popular circulating library Mudie’s.39 As an undergraduate, De Morgan ‘did with Trinity College Library what I afterwards did with my own – I foraged for relaxation’.40 He exhausted the stock of the Cambridge Circulating

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Library,41 and his later use of circulating libraries is perhaps implicit in his query about a Gothic novel by E. T. A. Hoffmann to Sir John Herschel (although it might simply demonstrate an excellent memory): ‘Did you ever read a novel called The Devil’s Elixir? – If not, try for it at the circulating library’.42 He compiled his bibliography of arithmetical books ‘From the Royal Society’s library, the stock of Mr. Maynard the mathematical bookseller, and my own collections, with a few from the British Museum and the libraries of private friends’;43 the collector John Bellingham Inglis, for instance, opened his library to De Morgan.44 His correspondence shows examples of such borrowing, as, for example, he borrows and returns a volume of Le Verrier from Sir John Herschel,45 writes to Charles Babbage ‘I want to borrow your Lambert’s Neues Organon again’,46 and asks Sir William Rowan Hamilton, ‘Have you got Rigaud’s tract (1806) – or can you borrow it for me?’47 Elsewhere, use of Dr Williams’s Library and the libraries of University College London, Lambeth Palace, the Mathematical Society and the Royal Astronomical Society emerges. The importance he laid on using various collections is manifest in his assertion: ‘There is no library in London, public or private, which contains every work from which one authoritative statement on matters of science might be made’.48 But instances also abound where the source of De Morgan’s read­ing matter is unclear, when De Morgan might or might not at some time have owned books which are not in the library as received by the University of London. De Morgan wrote to William Hepworth Dixon in 1856, ‘I have been eight hours reading Mrs Stowe’s book’ (an experience recalled also by Sophia De Morgan);49 he explained the views of proportion in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Sir John Herschel;50 and quoted Byron and referred to a factual error in Scott’s Guy Mannering when writing to Sir William Rowan Hamilton.51 In a letter to Sir William Rowan Hamilton he wrote: ‘I am just come in from Herne Bay – seven miles from Canterbury – where I have been reading novels for three days’.52 His own books, or not? The probability of ownership increases when a particular source was repeatedly read over a long period, or was read immediately after publication. For example, towards the end of his life De Morgan spent considerable time reading the Greek New Testament and comparing texts,53 yet the book is present in his library only in an edition from 1549. De Morgan’s predilection for the novels of Charles Dickens is well documented, with De Morgan’s Athenaeum obituarist recalling: ‘Give him a line or two out of ‘Pickwick’ or ‘Oliver Twist’ and he would repeat by heart, and with the heartiest zest, the page following the quotation’,54 while

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Sophia recalled him reading several of Dickens’s novels aloud to her in entirety, describing how they devoured the original parts as soon as they appeared.55 The likelihood is that the novels were seen as family books, outside the remit of Lord Overstone’s avowedly mathematical purchases, and that the literature that has slipped into the library is an anomaly, a gesture towards broader holdings. De Morgan’s relationship with his own books is that of a genuine book lover who knew his books. He claimed ‘that he never laid out a shilling on a book which was not repaid with interest, even as a money transaction, from the use he made of the purchase.’56 When his family went away on holiday, he remained in London with his books. On one such occasion he wrote to his daughter Mary: ‘I am glad you like your present situation – I like mine. A book is a book: and a mountain is a mountain – mountain for you, book for me’,57 and to George Boole: ‘My wife etc are at Port Madoc in Carnarvonshire . . . and I am here as usual, routing in my book like a pig in a potatoe garden, who does not need much care where his snout goes, as he is sure of finding something’.58 During another family vacation he wrote to Sir John Herschel: ‘My folks are at Walmer . . . and I am here with one son, who joins the rest on Monday. The time flies when I and my books are left to fight the enemy without foreign aid.’59 He arranged books slowly because ‘I stop and look into books, and find out fun’.60 He would return to books several times, noticing new things, as when he wrote about Diogenes Laërtius: ‘I have had occasion to read later – not refer, which I have often done, and I wonder that his stories come out so lame’.61 Also, he sometimes annotates a single book on different dates: for example, on 21 February 1848 and again on 13 July 1852 with Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Sphaera mundi (Venice: F. Renner, 1478), and on 9 September 1864, 20 November 1864 and 29 July 1866 with Johannes Widmann’s Rechnung auf allen Kaufmannschaften (Leipzig: K. Kachelofen, 1489).62 The first annotation sometimes considerably postdated acquisition. The note describing De Morgan’s acquisition of Wingate’s Arithmetique logarithmetique from Thomas Galloway, quoted above, is dated 17 September 1859, almost eight years after Galloway’s death, while De Morgan’s note in John Castle’s The Scholar’s Guide to Arithmetic, edited by E. C. Tyson (1828), is dated 15 September 1857, at least twenty-seven years after De Morgan received and first read it: This book was sent to me by the publisher [. . .]. It convinced me that a work on demonstrative arithmetic was wanting – and was the book which suggested the existence of the deficiency to supply which I wrote my own arithmetic in 1830.63

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Random as De Morgan’s foraging may sound, he regarded arrangement, in a generation preceding the emergence of the first sophisticated library classification schemes, as essential. In a broad context, he exhibited interest in the intellectual arrangement of books by participating in the hot debate of his time about the best way to arrange books in the British Museum library catalogue.64 Within his own library, physical arrangement by subject matter was paramount for findability and therefore use: ‘Books not in ranks are a mob of undisciplined paper clowns’.65 De Morgan outlined to George Biddell Airy: Here I am – surrounded by unarranged books. I thought that if, when I handed them to the shelves as they came, I put aside in distinct heaps – 1. Work of general reference. 2. Logic & its cousins. 3. Bibliography. 4. Annuities, statistics &c. 5. Mathematical Tables. 6. Ancient mathematicians and works relating to Euclid. 7. Volumes of tracts – On all of which my collection is rather strong, I should leave an easy residuum.66

‘A job of 126 hours solid work, to get them to places that I know where to find any one’, he wrote to Airy after completing the task, under­ lining retrievability as a prerequisite for use.67 Part of De Morgan’s concern for order emerges in the orderly binding together of tracts to promote findability, as shown by a complaint he made to James Orchard Halliwell about the difficulty of locating single items in volumes of tracts: ‘O these volumes of tracts! They keep safe – and so does the grave!’68 De Morgan wrote one annotation justifying the binding together of two works on the basis of their similarity – ‘as nearly contemporary, and of the same character of speculation’69 – and he demonstrated concern to bind all of Sir William Rowan Hamilton’s quarto tracts together, writing to Hamilton before binding to check for completeness, and recording in the bound volume: ‘I believe this volume to contain all Wm Rowan Hamilton’s quarto writings up to Jany 1, 1848’.70 The binding indicates knowledge of contents; annotation as an aid to finding frequently occurs in manuscript lists of contents in Sammelbände (individual works bound together) as a precursor to ready location and further reading. De Morgan annotated his books irrespective of age, iconic status or rarity. His annotations fall into seven main categories, namely: the content, quality or importance of a work (the most frequent); the source of acquisition; rarity; the physical features of the book; provenance; notes about the author; and, less often, the connection between De Morgan and a book. Annotations incorporating two or more elements are not uncommon, as in:

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This is one of Sloane’s books – and the British Museum ought to have been ashamed of itself for selling any part of the original foundation. The book is rare. The list of Latin names of towns is particularly useful. Bought at Galloway’s sale this 14th of February 1852.71

Further examples of each type of annotation are given below. (1) Remarks about the content of a book. This is a standard sort of readerly annotation according to Heather Jackson. Such remarks engage directly and intellectually with the book in question, and make the books function as a filing system.72 De Morgan’s notes, grounding his opinions about works or their significance with reference to other writers, contextualise the books within the wider history of the subject. They reveal the wide and deep reading for which he was respected by his contemporaries, as well as his view that all print items, not merely the accepted greats, are important for the history of a subject: a view expressed at a non-verbal level by the totality of the collection. I offer three examples of this style of remark: Sir John Hill, as he was afterwards styled, and who published in 1757, the amusing & sarcastic attack on the Royal Society – deserves, for this book, to be called the English Hyginus. The book is a very good gossiping dictionary, out of which a common thing may be got more easily and pleasantly than out of many profounder works.73 Jacob Coccaeus. Amsterdam 1660. Long life to him! He proposes such a system as is neither Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, nor any mixture of them. See page 30 and Figure III.74 This work was highly commended by Newton: I cannot see why.75

(2) Source of acquisition. Jackson notes this as one of the most common forms of annotation.76 De Morgan’s addition on occasion of such an anecdote is, however, unusual. One of his published papers does, though, begin: ‘I lately found in a second-hand bookshop a trigonometrical canon by the celebrated Rheticus, which was totally new to me’,77 and the fullness of his phraseology for that canon – why ‘This copy belonged to Benj. Gompertz’, rather than ‘Benj. Gompertz’s copy’? – may suggest recording for posterity rather than merely a personal record. That example and one other will suffice: This copy belonged to Benj. Gompertz [the mathematician and actuary Benjamin Gompertz], and was given me after his death by Mrs Gompertz.78

72  Karen Attar This book was bought Jan 1 1845, out of the catalogue for 1845,79 sent me the day before. When I saw this, I was after it at once, and not too soon, for Babbage, who has a keen nose for a mathematical table, was an hour after me. He was a little vexed, but he afterwards acknowledged, when he saw my paper on the subject, that it was better in my hands than his, because I made it known.80

(3) Rarity. This exceedingly common form of annotation reflects the collector rather than the reader. De Morgan shows himself as a bibliographer by substantiating his comments about rarity beyond the usual ‘extremely rare’. One example reads ‘The fourth printed Euclid, and by much the rarest of all. There is no copy in the British Museum.’81 And another: This work of Stevinus [Simon Stevin] is not to be found either in the folio of Albert Girard or in the volumes of Hypomnomata. I cannot find any mention of it, except that made by Gerard Vossius (de Scientiis Mathem­ aticis) who gives it the date 1583. If this be correct it is probably the first work published by Stevinus. It is exceedingly rare.82

(4) Physical features of the book and its production. Like remarks about content, these annotations use the books as a filing system, but from a bibliographer’s, rather than a reader’s, viewpoint. De Morgan was, after all, both. The greatest peculiarity of this first edition is that the printer could not manage the double printing in black and red in the difficult parts. Accordingly, the saints’ days in the right are printed in red, but the golden numbers on the left are written in red. This book therefore is not a printed book: nor is it a manuscript: it is a mule-book.83 Libri cites an edition of 1585: but as the paging of this book agrees with his citations, it may be suspected* that this is the edition of 1585 with a new title page . . . Oct. 7, 1854 ... * This is duly confirmed by examination of M. Libri’s copy with this. His copy has the title of 1585. But his cataloguer does not know it.84

(5) Original provenance. Such remarks reflect the collector: in this instance, one who was well ahead of his time in valuing books which were not pristine. One example is ‘This copy belonged to Montucla, and the errors noticed by the latter in his History, with several others, are corrected in his handwriting’.85 In another example, beneath the inscription ‘Edmond Waller’ appears ‘Edm: Waller. [tracing]. Tracing

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from an autograph in the possession of Mr. Bolton Corney, apparently at a younger age’. Below the half-title there is the annotation ‘There is no autograph of Waller in the Brit. Mus. A De Morgan, Sept.r 1/53’. De Morgan has inserted letters from John Holmes of the British Museum, dated 13 September 1852, and from Bolton Corney, dated 1 November 1852, answering his questions about Waller’s autograph.86 (6) Remarks about the author. These are analogous with remarks about content, but, while inspired by the book annotated, they always draw upon another source: ‘Poor dear old Clavius! nailed to the barn Door 250 years after his death, because he acted kite to the heretic’s chickens’.87 Dutens, the editor of Leibnitz, was a worthy and a learned man, who fancied that he traced all modern science in antiquity. Born 1729; died 1812, a clergyman of the Ch. of Eng. first edition of this book, 1766. It is related of Dutens that he once told some friends that he had in his travels, picked up a tooth which he believed to have belonged to the great Scipio. Where is it, said they, Here, said he, showing his own mouth. He had made it do duty in place of one of his own. A De M. Dutens has missed Hero’s steam-engine.88

(7) Placing De Morgan himself within the history of ownership of the book. This is the most individual form of annotation. Other readers (outside Jackson’s remit) have recorded in a book the date or circumstances of reading, possibly as a distributed diary of reading, such as: ‘June 12 1936. I read this book after a visit to Well Hall with Mr Magee Bookseller of San Francisco. A pleasant morning.’89 De Morgan records a further dimension of his connection with the book, a more public record for the benefit of future readers, which deviates from the trend of nineteenth-century annotators treating annotation as primarily a private affair, for the reader’s own benefit:90 ‘This book suggested my “Book of almanacs”’.91 Playfully, under the inscription ‘C. Hutton [i.e. the mathematician Charles Hutton] 1785’, he has added the number of years between Hutton’s inscription and his (fifty-eight), and added spaces for the owners at future fifty-eight-year intervals, indicating the longevity of the printed word far beyond mortal spans:92 + 58 A de Morgan 1843 58 ? 1901 58 ? 1959

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The many articles and few books that stemmed from De Morgan’s pen demonstrate richly that De Morgan read his books. The 500-page text of his A Budget of Paradoxes discusses exclusively books from his own library.93 His articles in the Penny Cyclopaedia, his journal articles, and his bibliography of arithmetical books refer to De Morgan’s own books, among others. Like his book annotations, De Morgan’s published observations refer primarily to content, but also to bibliography, rarity, authors, acquisition and provenance. For example: Computation by counters and Roman numerals: the Arabic numerals are explained but not used. In the frontispiece is a cut representing the mistress settling accounts with her maid-servant by an abacus with counters. This book is said by Kloss to have been also printed by Kobel himself at Oppenheym in the same year.94 And the same Thomas Digges, in his Pantometria, London, 1591, Preface, repeats the same story, with more detail, omitting, however, all mention of Bacon.95

De Morgan has annotated neither book referred to in the above examples. Clearly, not all annotations indicate reading: in particular, those concerning the source of acquisition tend not to. Notes about physical features, such as the mention of the ‘mule-book’ quoted above, prove thorough examination, but not perusal of the printed words. Many annotations do demonstrate reading, at least in a reference sense, but of a book other than the annotated one, while the book read contains no markings. A salient example, publicised in the twenty-first century by Owen Gingerich and by David Pearson, is De Morgan’s note on the title page of his copy of the first edition of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, highlighting censorship and drawing the first edition into the history of its reception: ‘Aug. 4. 1864. I have this day entered all the corrections required by the Congregation of the Index (1620) so that any Roman Xtian [Christian] may read the book with a good conscience’.96 De Morgan may well have read the first edition of Copernicus, but his manuscript ‘corrections’, and record of having made them, indicate no more than looking at Copernicus to find the passages to which the Congregation had objected. What it does indicate is De Morgan’s reading of the Index librorum prohibitorum of publications prohibited by the Catholic Church as heretical or immoral, an act of reading substantiated by De Morgan’s reproduction of the Index’s corrections, with comments, in his A Budget of

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Paradoxes;97 but De Morgan has marked neither of the two editions of the Index, from 1752 and from 1819–25, in his library.98 Numerous annotations concerning rarity indicate consultation of bibliographies rather than the rare book itself. Take, for example, the above-quoted annotation on the rarity of Stevin’s Problematum geometricorum . . . libri V, referring to Vossius as the only historian to refer to it: De Morgan’s copy of Gerardus Vossius’s De quatuor artibus popularibus (Amsterdam: J. Blaeu, 1650; ‘On the four popular arts’) is marked only by De Morgan’s ownership inscription on the title page.99 Elsewhere for rarity De Morgan mentions, among others, Lipenius, Dechales, Murhard, Hain, Riccioli, Clavius, Gassendi, Weidler, Heilbronner, Delambre, Montucla, Hutton and Kästner.100 Nothing in these bibliographies or histories themselves indicates his frequent consultation of them: in several he has not even written his name. Annotations as an indication of reading must therefore be treated with caution, and in conjunction with other sources. While manuscript indices and references to page numbers are widespread aids for personal use,101 De Morgan’s motivation for annotating books in other ways was, as illustrated above, more public. Thanking Halliwell-Phillips for a cutting and referring to some others, De Morgan wrote: ‘I shall paste these all in proper places [i.e. the books to which they refer] – I am an inveterate paster-in of such things. Little things of the kind are often useful in history, in ways which cannot be conjectured until they arise in fact’,102 a view he later reiterated to John Stuart Mill.103 He similarly respected manuscript notes in books, providing a reason for his own annotation through his views of the annotations of forebears: I have learned from experience that old notes, made in books by their possessors, are statements of high authority: they are almost always confirmed. I do not receive them without hesitation; but I believe that of all statements about books which rest on one authority, there is a larger percentage of truth in the written word than in the printed word.104

De Morgan communicated Victorian scientific scholarship partly by annotating his books. Although he could not know that his books would be kept together in a university after his death, many of his annotations move outwards, to other readers, in the awareness that his ownership was just one part of a book’s history. The motivation can be implicit: De Morgan would surely have remembered his own writings and the books that stimulated them, so have had no personal need to jot down such facts. Sometimes it is more blatant, as in the outward-looking note of 1 October 1865 on the title page of his copy

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of the anonymous pamphlet The Character of the Bible, and the Bible God (London: R. Carlile, 1826): The greatest curiosity of this Tract is in p. 4, in the references to parts of the old Testament which are pronounced indecent: One of them can only be made so by a play upon words which has nothing to do with the meaning. Whether the writer really meant to affirm that his équivoque was the intended meaning, or whether he intended the reference as a joke, is a question above me. The reader must find out what I mean for himself.105

Curious, too, is De Morgan’s anecdote about the library of Sir Joseph Littledale, auctioned in 1843, which contained ‘one of the most extraordinary collections of erotic and otherwise indecent books that ever was put together’. De Morgan commented to the auctioneer’s clerk, ‘The executors ought to have weeded this library’, to which the rejoinder was ‘Bless you Sir . . . they have weeded it already as much as they dared under the will’. De Morgan has recounted the incident both in the sale catalogue of Littledale’s library and in the book he purchased from it, Thomas Tanner’s Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica (London: W. Bowyer, 1748; ‘British-Irish library’).106 The impression is that he wanted the remark perpetuated in case of the separation of his books. Such use of annotation in this way to add to bibliographical history was frequently an alternative to publishing books or articles. De Morgan’s Arithmetical Books from the Invention of Printing to the Present Time shows this particularly clearly. Of the 354 books featured in the main part, 176 are now to be found in De Morgan’s library. Only one-third of those, fifty-nine in all, contain an annotation pertaining to the content. What annotation was not was a form of rough notes as preparation for a publication; indeed, where publication and notes are present, the publication may precede the annotation.107 That a Victorian scholar should use books from many sources is nothing new. That a historian or a bibliographer should collect and write on the same subject, whereby the collection and the writings inspire each other, is also a familiar scenario. What we see through a case study of Augustus De Morgan is a particularly rich instance of evidence of reading combined with evidence of the relationship between a man and his library. We see it, furthermore, in an area outside the norm of figures associated with the humanities. An examination of De Morgan from a bibliophilic point of view helps to develop awareness of the vast number of nineteenth-century collectors beyond the Dibdinesque giants. It re-establishes a balance between

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collecting and reading, as perception swings between either equating the two or seeing the two activities as diametrically opposed. It highlights the caution that needs to be taken in relating annotation automatically to reading, or to the reading of the book annotated. It mines a particularly rich source of annotations in an unusual field for annotation, to supplement the annotations of literary authors examined elsewhere, especially important as salient studies of scientific reading tend to focus on the book or author read by classes of readers.108 Close study of the books of De Morgan’s scientific contemporaries will help to underline the particular contribution of this outstanding worthy. Notes I should like to thank Dr Katie Halsey and the editors of this volume for commenting on drafts of this article and Christine Wise, formerly of Senate House Library, University of London, for allowing me time for archival research. The online cataloguing of the collection was enabled by a generous grant from the University of London’s Vice-Chancellor’s Development Fund.   1. H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 13.  2. See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. XII: Marginalia, ed. H. J. Jackson and George Whalley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1999); William Coolidge Lane, The Carlyle Collection: A Catalogue of Books on Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great Bequeathed by Thomas Carlyle to Harvard College Library, Library of Harvard University: Bibliographical Contributions, 26 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Library, 1888); Voltaire, Corpus des notes marginales. Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Natalia Elaguina et al. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008–18), Wheeler, pp. 136–44.  3. Jackson, Marginalia, p. 250.   4. ‘Our London Letter’, Newcastle Courant, 24 March 1871, p. 5.  5. ‘London’, Western Mail, 24 March 1871, p. 2.  6. ‘Our Contemporaries’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 26 March 1871, p. 11.   7. A. S. Russell, ‘Augustus De Morgan, a Forgotten Worthy’, The Listener, 24 December 1935, p. 1161.   8. See Judith Overmier, ‘Scientific Book Collectors and Collections, Public and Private, 1720 to Date’, in Andrew Hunter (ed.), Thornton and Tully’s Scientific Books, Libraries, and Collectors: A Study of Bibliography and the Book Trade in Relation to the History of Science, 4th edition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 367–91 (p. 371), and especially

78  Karen Attar Rebekah Higgitt, Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of Nineteenth-Century History of Science, Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, 2 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), pp. 100–20.   9. Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan (Lon­don: Longmans, Green, 1882), p. 58. 10. Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, Threescore Years and Ten: Reminiscences of the Late Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, ed. Mary A. De Morgan (London: Bentley, 1895), pp. 113–14. 11. ‘Professor De Morgan’, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 32 (1872), pp. 112–18 (p. 117). 12. M. R. Williams, ‘The Scientific Library of Charles Babbage’, Annals of the History of Computing, 3 (1981), pp. 235–40 (p. 235). 13. A. N. L. Munby, The History and Bibliography of Science in England: The First Phase, 1833–1845 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 13. 14. Ibid., p. 12; Adrian Rice, ‘Augustus De Morgan: Historian of Science’, History of Science, 34 (1996), pp. 201–40 (p. 222). 15. ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 1 April 1871, p. 371; see also ‘Miscellaneous’, Birmingham Daily Post, 7 April 1871, p. 6; ‘Multiple News Items’, Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 7 April 1871, p. 3; Daily News, 6 April 1871. 16. ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 13 May 1871, p. 563. 17. See University of London Archive, UoL/ST/3/2/8, Senate minute 156, 14 June 1871, Letter from Lord Overstone to W. B. Carpenter, registrar, 10 June 1871; cited in Catalogue of the Library of the University of London, Including the Libraries of George Grote and Augustus De Morgan (London: Taylor and Francis, 1876), p. [iv]. 18. Cambridge University Library (henceforth CUL), ULIB 1/2/3, University Library Syndicate minutes, 1868–79, meeting of 31 May 1871. 19. Augustus De Morgan, Arithmetical Books from the Invention of Printing to the Present Time (London: Taylor and Walton, 1847), p. ii. 20. See Catalogue of the Library of the University of London; and Senate House Library online catalogue (accessed November 2019). 21. University of London Archive, UoL/UL/1/1/1, Library committee minutes 1902–13, minute 123, 29 June 1908. 22. Augustus De Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes (London: Longmans, Green, 1872), p. 6. 23. Described in Catalogue of Books in the General Library and in the South Library of University College London (3 vols, London: Taylor and Francis, 1879), vol. I, p. iii; and especially Alison R. Dorling, ‘The Graves Mathematical Collection in University College London’, Annals of Science, 33 (1976), pp. 307–9. 24. Noted by Dorling, ‘The Graves Mathematical Collection’, p. 309. See

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also, though, W. Carew Hazlitt, A Roll of Honour: A Calendar of the Names of over 17,000 Men and Women who throughout the British Isles and in our Early Colonies have Collected mss. and Printed Books from the XIVth to the XIXth Century (London: Quaritch, 1908), which includes Graves and omits De Morgan. 25. See Bewick Bridge, Compendious Treatise on the Elements of Plane Geometry (London, 1818), inscribed ‘Augustus De Morgan, Trinity College Cambridge, May 6th 1823’ and interleaved, with De Morgan’s jottings on the interleaved pages ([DeM] L.5 [Bridge] SSR). 26. See, for example, David McKitterick, Old Books, New Technologies: The Representation, Conservation and Transformation of Books Since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 28–37. 27. The Spectator, 1 April 1871, p. 371. 28. ‘Professor de Morgan’, p. 117. 29. Sophia De Morgan, Memoir, p. 58. 30. J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigiensis: A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Part II, 1750–1900 (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1944), vol. II, p. 276. See also ‘De Morgan, Augustus’ in ACAD: A Cambridge Alumni Database (accessed November 2019). 31. ‘He made many amusing marginal and learned annotations’. Leslie Stephen, rev. I. Grattan-Guinness, ‘De Morgan, Augustus (1806–1871)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) (online edition accessed 5 December 2005). 32. ‘From my experience of looking at books in historic libraries, I would say that maybe half the books you see have no inscriptions or bookplates to show their previous ownership.’ David Pearson, ‘Provenance and Rare Book Cataloguing: Its Importance and Its Challenges’, in David Shaw (ed.), Books and Their Owners: Provenance Information and the European Cultural Heritage (London: Consortium of European Research Libraries, 2005), pp. 1–9 (p. 5); see also Jackson, Marginalia, p. 19. 33. CUL, CUL Add. 9428/36, letter from Augustus De Morgan to William Hepworth Dixon, n.d. 34. See, for example, Senate House Library, University of London (henceforward SHL), MS913A/2/10, letter from Augustus De Morgan to Lord Brougham, 18 June 1852. 35. SHL, [DeM] L.5 Wingate SSR.  36. Sophia De Morgan, Memoir, p. 364. 37. De Morgan, Arithmetical Books, p. 77. 38. De Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes, pp. 166–7. 39. A. M. W. Stirling, William De Morgan and His Wife (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1922), p. 49. 40. Letter from A. De Morgan to William Heald, 21 August 1869; reproduced in Sophia De Morgan, Memoir, p. 393.

80  Karen Attar 41. 42. 43. 44.

Sophia De Morgan, Memoir, p. 17. Royal Society, MS H.6.288, letter of 9 October 1857. De Morgan, Arithmetical Books, pp. i–ii. Letter from John Bellingham Inglis to De Morgan, 3 August 1859, pasted in De Morgan’s copy of Abraham Gotthelf Kastner, Geometriae Euclidis (Leipzig: litteris Langenhemianis, 1750; ‘Euclid’s geometry’), [DeM] L6 [Euclid – Kaestner] SSR. 45. Royal Society, MS H.6.369 (2 May 1864); MS H.6.410-12 (20 October – 8 November 1869). 46. British Library, MS Add. 37194, f. 414, letter of 19 July 1850. 47. Trinity College Dublin (henceforth TCD), MS 1493, letter no. 954 (6 December 1857). 48. ‘References for the History of the Mathematical Sciences’, British Almanac of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge for the Year 1843 (1843), pp. 40–65 (p. 41). 49. CUL, CUL Add. 9428/9; Sophia De Morgan, Memoir, p. 182. 50. Royal Society, MS H.6.372, letter of 18 August 1864. 51. TCD, MS 1493, letters no. 296 (16 December 1844) and 575 (23 April 1852). 52. TCD, MS 1493, letter no. 643 (16 August 1852). 53. Sophia De Morgan, Memoir, p. 364. 54. Athenaeum, 25 March 1871, p. 370. 55. Sophia De Morgan, Memoir, pp. 93–4. 56. Ibid., p. 58. 57. SHL, MS913A/1/3, letter of 18 August 1863. 58. G. C. Smith, The Boole–De Morgan Correspondence, 1842–1864 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), letter no. 87 (p. 114, reproduced verbatim). 59. Royal Society, MS H.6.385, letter of 17 August 1866. 60. CUL, RGO 6/377/189, letter to G. B. Airy, 29 August 1859. 61. Letter to Sir John Herschel, London, Royal Society, MS HS.6, letter no. 371 (24 July 1864). 62. [Incunabula] 16 and [Incunabula] 2, respectively. 63. [DeM] L.1 [Bonnycastle]; described by Jacqueline Stedall in Christopher Pressler and Karen Attar (eds), Senate House Library, University of London (London: Scala, 2012), no. 33. 64. Report of the Select Committee on Public Libraries (London: [Hansard], 1850). De Morgan annotated his copy of a review of the book in the Edinburgh Review, [DeM] Z (B.P.362). 65. TCD, MS1493, ms 1101, letter to Sir William Rowan Hamilton, 21 August 1859. 66. CUL, RGO 6/377/186, letter to G. B. Airy, 21 August 1859. 67. CUL, RGO 6/377/193, letter to G. B. Airy, 6 September 1859. 68. Edinburgh University Library, Coll-103, letter, 3 October 1867. 69. Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich, Philosophiae naturalis theoria (Venice, 1763; ‘Theory of natural philosophy’), bound with Gowin Knight, An

Augustus De Morgan (1806–71), His Reading and His Library   81

Attempt to Demonstrate, that all the Phœnomena in Nature may be Explained by Two Simple Active Principles, Attraction and Repulsion (London, 1748), [DeM] N8 [Boscovich]. 70. TCD, MS1493, no. 347, letter, 23 December 1845; [DeM] Lo (B.P.17). 71. Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Geographiae et hydrographiae reformatae libri duodecim (Venice: G. La Noù, 1672; ‘Twelve books of reformed geography and hydrography’), [DeM] Eo [Riccioli] fol. SSR. 72. Jackson, Marginalia, pp. 26–7, 88. 73. John Hill, Urania, or, A Compleat View of the Heavens (London: T. Gardner, 1754), [DeM] CM [Hill]. 74. Jacobus Coccaeus, Epistola de mundi, que circumferuntur systematis et novo alio (Amsterdam: J. Ravestein, 1660; ‘Letter about the world, which revolves around a new and different system’), [DeM] M [Coccaeus] SSR. 75. Antonius Hugo de Omerique, Analysis geometrica (Gadibus: C. de Requena, 1698; ‘Analysis of geometry’), [DeM] L.6 [Omerique] SSR. 76. Jackson, Marginalia, p. 24. 77. Augustus De Morgan, ‘On the Almost Total Disappearance of the Earliest Trigonometrical Canon’, London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 26 (1845), pp. 517–26 (p. 517). 78. John Landen, The Residual Analysis (London: J. Landen, 1764), [DeM] L.2 [Landen]. 79. W. Brown’s Mathematical Catalogue (London: W. Brown, 1845), [DeM] Z [B.P.356]. 80. Georg Joachim Rhäticus, Canon doctrinae triangulorum (Leipzig: W. Günther, 1551; ‘Canon of the doctrine of triangles’), [DeM] M.1 [Joachimus] SSR. 81. Euclidis Megarensis philosophi acutissimi mathematicorumq[ue] omnium sine controuersia principis op[er]a (Venice: P. Paganini, 1509; ‘Euclid’s complete mathematical works except the controversial postu­ late’), [DeM] L.6 [Euclid – Elements – Latin] fol. SSR. 82. Simon Stevin, Problematum geometricorum . . . libri V (Antwerp: J. Beller ([1583]; ‘Five books of geometrical problems’), [DeM] L.6 [Stevin] SSR. 83. Joannes Regiomontanus, Calendarium (Nuremberg: J. Regiomontanus, 1474), [Incunabula] 12. Original emphasis. 84. Giovanni Battista Benedetti, Speculationum liber (Venice: B. Barezzi, 1599; ‘Book of investigations’), [DeM] L.1 [Benedetti] fol. SSR. 85. Johann Friedrich Weidler, Historia astronomiae (Wittenberg: G. H. Schwartz, 1741; ‘History of astronomy’), [DeM] CN [Weidler]. 86. Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Euclides restitutus, siue, Prisca geometriae elementa, breuiùs, & faciliùs contexta (Pisa: F. Onofri, 1658; ‘Euclid restored, or, the ancient elements of geometry presented more briefly and easily’), [DeM] L6 [Euclid – Elementa – Latin] SSR. 87. Christoph Clavius, Theodosii Tripolitae Sphaericorum libri III (Rome: D. Basa, 1586; translated into English as Clavius’s Commentary on the Sphericks of Theodosius Tripolitae), [DeM] L.6 [Theodosius] SSR.

82  Karen Attar  88. Louis Dutens, Origine des découvertes attribuées aux modernes (London: Spilsbury, 1796), [DeM] CNo [Dutens] fol. SSR.  89. Annotation by John Burns (1858–1943) on his copy of G. C. M. M’Gonigle and J. Kirby, Poverty and Public Health (London: Gollancz, 1936), SHL [Burns] 3633.  90. Jackson, Marginalia, p. 73.  91. Louis-Benjamin Francœur, Théorie du calendrier et collection de tous les calendriers des années passées et futures (Paris: Roret, 1842), [DeM] M.8 [Francœur]. 92. Jean Etienne Montucla, Histoire des recherches sur la quadrature du cercle (Paris: A. Jombert, 1754), [DeM] L6 [Montucla] SSR.  93. De Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes, p. 5.  94. De Morgan, Arithmetical Books, p. 10, about Jacob Köbel, Ain new geordnet Rechen biechlin auf den linien mit Rechen pfeningen ([Augsburg: E. Oeglin, 1514]). Kloss’s catalogue is annotated with a general comment on the title page about its value and one correction, not to the item in question ([DeM] 018.2 [Kloss]).  95. Augustus De Morgan, ‘Bacon Roger’, in Penny Cyclopaedia, Vol. III (London: C. Knight, 1835), pp. 241–4 (p. 242).  96. [DeM] M1 [Copernicus] fol. (S). See Owen Gingerich, An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566) (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 236; David Pearson, Books as History: The Importance of Books Beyond Their Texts (London: British Library, 2008), p. 24.  97. De Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes, pp. 57–60.  98. [DeM] 016.98 [Index] (both editions).  99. [DeM] Lo [Vossius] SSR. 100. De Morgan, ‘On the Almost Total Disappearance’, p. 520. 101. See, for example, Jackson, Marginalia, p. 25. 102. Edinburgh University Library, Coll-103, Letter, 21 January 1862. 103. Letter to John Stuart Mill, 10 October 1864, reproduced in Sophia De Morgan, Memoir, p. 328. 104. De Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes, p. 124. 105. [DeM] M (B.P.7) SSR. 106. Catalogue of the Valuable Library of . . . Sir Joseph Littledale ([London: S.L. Sotheby, 1843]), [DeM] Z (B.P.356); Tanner, [DeM] CC18.3 [Tanner] fol. The quotation is taken from Tanner. 107. For example, Pietro Bongo, Petri Bungi Bergomatis Numerorum Mysteria, 2nd edition (Bergamo: C. Ventura, 1591; ‘The mysteries of numbers by Pietro Bongo of Bergamo’), [Dem] L.1 [Bongus] SSR; the annotations are dated 29 February 1852 through to 25 May 1861. 108. See James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

Chapter 4

William Gladstone Reads His Contemporaries Michael Wheeler

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98) brought in twelve budgets as chancellor of the exchequer and served as prime minister four times. Yet he did not describe himself as a politician: he was more than that. Whether in or out of office, Gladstone always engaged in wider debates about religion, history, and classical and modern literature, an intellectual engagement which expressed itself in a daily quota of correspondence and, most notably, reading. The famous Gladstone diaries, an edition of which is available in fourteen volumes, record the titles of virtually every book, pamphlet and article that he read.1 They reveal that he read compulsively, usually turning to two or three different books on any one day and thus keeping fresh as a reader. He read at the Oxford and Cambridge Club and at the House of Commons, at home and away, in coaches and railway carriages, and even when walking the streets of London. He was often presented with copies of new books by his contemporaries and he bought huge numbers of books, either hot off the press or second-hand. His library of over 30,000 volumes filled the ‘Temple of Peace’, his purpose-built study at Hawarden Castle in Flintshire, and spilled over into several other rooms there. In the 1890s Gladstone donated over 20,000 books to create a library in the village of Hawarden, six miles from Chester, his aim being to make books that had no readers available to those who had no books. What started life as a temporary building, the ‘Tin Tabernacle’, to which the octogenarian himself trundled books from the Castle in a wheelbarrow, later became a handsome permanent memorial to Gladstone, built in red sandstone and in the Gothic style. Today, the residential Gladstone’s Library (formerly St Deiniol’s Library) is the only prime ministerial library in Britain, offering a wide range of courses and housing over 150,000 printed items, together with a large archive of papers associated with Gladstone and his family. 83

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Gladstone the intellectual is the subject of David Bebbington’s ground-breaking study, The Mind of Gladstone (2004), published while Ruth Clayton Windscheffel was working on Reading Gladstone (2008), an excellent study of Gladstone’s long life of reading and the most perceptive account of the motives behind his establishment of St Deiniol’s Library.2 In the course of her research Windscheffel dis­ covered Gladstone’s key to his private annotation code, handwritten at the back of the second volume of his ten-volume set of Locke’s Works.3 The marginalia subsequently became the main focus of the ‘Gladstone’s Reading’ project at Hawarden (2006–9). Matthew Bradley’s transcriptions of the marginalia in over 5,000 of Gladstone’s books are a remarkable resource, available to scholars via an online database.4 For the scholar, the most significant change at the Library in recent years has been the gathering of all the books that can be identified as Gladstone’s own in one remarkable galleried room (Plate 6). To walk into that room feels like entering the mind of Gladstone, an exhilarating and somewhat daunting experience. In order to prepare this chapter, I selected three famous books that are housed there, a tiny but significant sample of material that engaged the close attention of a capacious, sometimes idiosyncratic mind: John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography (1873) and the Life of Samuel Wilberforce (1880–2) by A. R. Ashwell and Reginald Wilberforce. My methodology is reconstructive historicist, with the aim of relating an avowedly exceptional reader’s response to particular texts, registered in marginalia, to the culture in which those texts are embedded. My approach is thus closer to that of John Powell, in his essay on Gladstone’s marginalia in political memoirs, than to Heather Jackson’s, in her pioneering and wide-ranging discussions of many aspects of marginalia.5 I knew from previous browsing that my chosen texts would serve to demonstrate how the small markings inscribed in the margin by Gladstone as reader can themselves be read as markers in the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain as it was lived out. I had not, however, anticipated the extent to which these works provided Gladstone with important material in a lifelong process of self-scrutiny, which in middle and old age included the analysis of past events, public and private, that had helped to shape his own intellectual, spiritual and professional development. Later in life he also became aware that he himself, or rather a younger self, was the subject of some of the material he was reading. Occasionally he even had the opportunity to exercise editorial control over his contemporaries’ readings of his own past self.

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Gladstone’s self-scrutiny is an important feature of his diaries (1825–96), which served partly as ‘an aide-mémoire for a future conversation with St. Peter’, in the words of their first editor, Michael Foot.6 On Christmas Day 1868 Gladstone was still in London, busily preparing a legislative programme for his first administration as prime minister. In his diary he recorded attending church, morning and afternoon, dining with the poet Lord de Tabley, working ‘much’ on draft legislation on the Irish Church, and reading Charles ­Kingsley’s sermons and C. D. Marston’s The Position of the Laity in the Church.7 Four days later, on his fifty-ninth birthday, he chaired a cabinet meeting in London and wrote the minutes and fifteen letters, one of them addressed to the Queen, before travelling to Hagley Hall, near Birmingham, the home of his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, arriving at 10.45 p.m. He also read an anonymous pamphlet on the Church, presumably on the train. On New Year’s Eve he added to his day diary what he called ‘rather a frivolous enumeration’ of past Decembers which had been ‘notable’ in his life: ‘1809 Born, 1827 Left Eton, 1831 Classes at Oxford [a double first], 1832 Elected to Parliament, 1834 Took office: Lord of the Treasury, 1838 Work on Church & State Published, 1846 Secretary of State [for War and the Colonies, in fact 1845], 1852 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1868 First Lord [of the Admiralty and Prime Minister]’.8 Much breast-beating follows, as this privileged and uniquely gifted male member of the upper-middle classes, who regularly drove himself to the point of collapse, always felt that he fell short of the highest Christian ideals. On New Year’s Eve Gladstone also read Arthur (later Lord) Hobhouse’s lecture on charitable foundations and R. W. Taylor’s review of his own recent pamphlet entitled A Chapter of Autobiography, which had been published on 23 November 1868.9 Foot comments that, in old age, Gladstone needed the diary by him ‘for that process of recol­ lection and self-analysis on which his heart had long been set’.10 Of the little that Gladstone published in this vein, A Chapter illustrates most clearly Foot’s further point that his ‘main interests and his main objects remained religious rather than political; this, combined with his shattering ability, helped to make him so extraordinary a phenomenon, and made his career so fascinating a study’.11 At the heart of the pamphlet are Gladstone’s lament over the current state of the Church of England and his celebration of the Oxford Movement in the 1830s and 1840s, when John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey and John Keble, leaders of the so-called ‘Tractarians’, challenged the Church of England to reaffirm its historic Catholic identity, restore to its churches a sense of the beauty of holiness, and resist

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a drift towards Erastianism (state interference in the Church) and ‘Liberalism’ in theology and biblical criticism. In the early 1840s Gladstone’s affiliation with the Tractarians was affirmed in his membership of the ‘engagement’, a small group of highly committed members of Frederick Oakeley’s congregation at Margaret Chapel, London, later renamed All Saints, Margaret Street, when it was rebuilt by William Butterfield after Oakeley’s conversion to the Church of Rome on 29 October 1845. In that critical year Gladstone and his Anglican friends had tried and failed to prevent what they regarded as the opening of the floodgates with Newman’s conversion on 8 October. In 1831, his last year at Oxford, Gladstone read ‘Scott on the Divine will’,12 possibly a reference to a passage from The Force of Truth (1779), which is full of early marginalia, including a pointed hand symbol.13 The writings of the Reverend Thomas Scott, also known as ‘Commentary Scott’, were read by a whole generation of earnest young men and women from Evangelical backgrounds, including both Gladstone and Newman. Gladstone was invited to meet Newman at a tea party in Oxford on 20 August 1831 and met him again when both dined at Pusey’s on 6 September.14 Thirty-seven years later, when describing Oxford in his undergraduate days, Gladstone recorded that ‘Dr. Newman was thought to have about him the flavour of what, he has now told the world, were the opinions he had derived in youth from the works of Thomas Scott’.15 Newman had ‘told the world’ in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, which he published serially in response to Charles Kingsley’s attacks upon him in 1864, and which is the first of Gladstone’s books that I am considering in this chapter. Gladstone, then chancellor of the exchequer in Palmerston’s govern­ment, read Parts II and III of the Apologia on Trinity Sunday, 22 May 1864, seventeen days after the publication of part III, which covers the early history of Newman’s ‘religious opinions’.16 Like Gladstone, Newman described his spiritual formation through an account of his reading. He placed particular emphasis on his teenage adherence to the Calvinist doctrine of final perseverance, derived from a work by William Romaine, from which he had been rescued by Scott: ‘The detestable doctrine last mentioned is simply denied and abjured, unless my memory strangely deceives me, by the writer who made a deeper impression on my mind than any other, and to whom (humanly speaking) I almost owe my soul, – Thomas Scott of Aston Sandford’.17 By inserting a single vertical line in pencil alongside the words that I have italicised here (throughout this chapter, italics indicate the position of a pencil mark), Gladstone highlights a parallel

William Gladstone Reads His Contemporaries   87

Figure 4.1  Upper part of page 60 of Gladstone’s copy of John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Longman, 1864), Gladstone’s Library WEG/I 56.6/NEW. By permission of the Warden and Trustees, Gladstone’s Library

between Newman’s spiritual journey within the Evangelical fold, shaped by focused reading, and his own (Figure 4.1). Whereas Gladstone and Newman, eight years his senior, had followed similar paths as young men, the future cardinal’s apostasy in 1845 created a permanent rift.18 The serial publication of the Apologia, and of the pamphlets from which it sprang, explains why Gladstone’s diary entry on Trinity Sunday is the fourth in a series of no fewer than nine entries in the diaries recording his reading of Newman and Kingsley in the first half of 1864, reading that can best be described as ‘strong’. For example, his second reference to Mr. Kingsley and Dr. Newman: a correspondence on the question whether Dr. Newman teaches that truth is no virtue?, a pamphlet which Newman had published on 12 February, was in a diary entry for Sunday 24 April, when Gladstone was staying with the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland at Cliveden: ‘Read Newmans (trumpery) Letter’.19 Whereas Gladstone’s extensive marginalia in part III of the Apologia are mainly sympathetic, quietly marking parallels between Newman and himself,20 those in part VI, where Newman describes his conversion, indicate a distinct quickening of the pulse. The chancellor was particularly busy on Thursday 27 May 1864, the day on which part VI appeared: in his diary for that day he records writing to Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, meeting Arthur Stanley, dean of Windsor, and Viscount Ossington, speaker of the House of the Commons, and attending the House for over six hours, leaving at 1.30 a.m.21 Next day he was back in the Commons for another four hours, worked on the printed version of the year’s financial statement, and corrected a speech on the franchise and sent it

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to the press. An ‘X’ in the diary indicates that he also carried out some of the ‘rescue’ work among the London prostitutes that had origin­ ally been part of his commitment to the engagement at Margaret Street. Yet in the midst of all this activity he also ‘finished Newman’s Apologia’, by which he probably meant part VI, a long section of 112 pages which fascinated him, judging by his many marginal marks and his handwritten index, inserted below the famous final paragraph.22 Early in the section Gladstone marked a number of passages with a single line, signifying that they were simply of interest. He inserted the Italian ‘ma’ (but), however, indicating a reservation or qualification, against a passage from a letter that Newman wrote as an Anglican to a ‘Catholic acquaintance’ in 1841: ‘I suppose you would obey the Holy See in such a case; now, when we were separated from the Pope, his authority reverted to our Diocesans. Our Bishop is our Pope. It is our theory, that each diocese is an integral Church.’23 Only four years after reading this passage Gladstone was to become prime minister, responsible for recommending bishops for the Established Church to the Queen. As a High Anglican he believed that the apostolic suc­cession was mediated through the episcopacy, as Newman had believed in 1841. But as an increasingly liberal High Anglican he was particularly hostile towards the papacy and its territorial claims,24 and the very idea that Anglican bishops were popes would have appalled him. Four pages later, Gladstone wrote ‘Ambrose Phillips’ in the margin,25 correctly identifying the ‘zealous Catholic layman’ to whom Newman wrote in September 1841, saying ‘I do not fear that you will succeed among us; you will not supplant our Church in the affections of the English nation; only through the English Church can you act upon the English nation’.26 Whereas this sentence is marked with both a single vertical line and an approving cross (+), the subsequent paragraph has a critical ‘ma’ alongside Newman’s question, ‘Are you aware that the more serious thinkers among us are used, as far as they dare form an opinion, to regard the spirit of Liberalism as the characteristic of the destined Antichrist?’ Whereas Newman regarded the ‘Oxford Liberals’ as the enemy within the Church of England, the Gladstone of 1864 sought to uphold the Established Church’s accommodation of its Broad Church, Evangelical and High Church traditions, each of which included ‘serious thinkers’; and he was moving towards a position which we would now describe as ‘Liberal Catholic’ within Anglicanism. In a passage in which Newman explained his difficulties as a Roman Catholic with the kind of ‘Mariolatry’ that he considered better suited to Italian than to English sensibilities, a fascinated

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Gladstone not only inserts a line and ‘NB’ but also adds an entry to his private index.27 (Having been a conservative Anglican, Newman became a liberal Roman Catholic: both positions exposed him to criticism from his co-religionists.) Gladstone was also interested in Newman’s reflections on the development of doctrine in the Christian Church, the subject of Newman’s brilliant Essay on the subject, written as he moved towards conversion. Another ‘ma’ is inserted alongside one of the ‘considerations’ which weighed upon Newman in July 1844, as explained in a letter to a friend, and two key words are underlined: ‘4. The proof of the Roman (modern) doctrine is as strong (or stronger) in Antiquity, as that of certain doctrines which both we and Romans hold: e.g. there is more of evidence in Antiquity for the necessity of Unity, than for the Apostolical Succession’.28 ‘NB’ is inserted alongside the next clause: ‘for the Supremacy of the See of Rome, than for the Presence in the Eucharist’. In his personal index Gladstone interpreted this passage as ‘The final issue’ for Newman.29 A subsequent passage in which Newman explained his position on ‘accumulated probabilities’ incurred two ‘ma’s.30 Between him and Gladstone a great gulf was fixed. Gladstone’s response to such passages was not coolly intellectual: it was both personal and emotional, not least because he had been so deeply involved in Newman’s ecclesiastical agonies in the years leading up to his conversion in 1845. When Newman introduced transcriptions of letters ‘written to a friend’ in the Apologia, Gladstone wrote alongside one dated 14 October 1843, ‘To Manning I think’.31 He was right. Twenty-one years earlier he had seen the original, a momentous letter in which Newman explained to Manning why he had resigned his living at the university church of St Mary’s, Oxford. Manning had forwarded it to Gladstone on 23 October. Next day Gladstone replied that he had ‘read Newmans [sic] letter with a heavy heart’32 and recorded his ‘pain and dismay’ in his diary, where he added, ‘May God restrain & confirm his steps’.33 On 13 June 1864 Gladstone read part VII of the Apologia in London34 and on 27 June described its ending as ‘beautiful’ in a letter to his confidante, the Duchess of Sutherland.35 The publication of part VIII, a long appendix entitled ‘Answer in Detail to Mr. Kingsley’s Accusations’, was delayed until 16 June to allow Kingsley time to reply to Newman, who considered that his antagonist had made a great tactical error in not doing so.36 Other Anglicans did, however, and on 3 August Gladstone read a reply to Newman by the Reverend William Josiah Irons, a staunch establishmentarian and a prebendary of St Paul’s Cathedral.37 Gladstone read many of Irons’s publications

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and presented him to the Rectory of St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London in 1872. So I clearly needed to read Irons’s tract entitled Apologia Pro Vitâ Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1864) for the sake of completeness, even if it was not annotated. As Gladstone’s Library does not hold a copy, the British Library beckoned. Imagine my surprise when, on opening its copy, I saw that it was Gladstone’s, inscribed with his distinctive marginalia. What is more, six other tracts, all annotated by Gladstone, are bound in with Irons’s and labelled ‘The Roman Catholic Question’ on the spine.38 Irons first acknowledged that, ‘as a specimen of mental analysis, extended over a whole life-time’, Newman’s Apologia was ‘probably without a rival’. He then argued that, whereas Newman’s mind was ‘occupied from his youth with the idea of an objective Revelation’, English Churchmen, ‘on the contrary, ethically taught, have had the mind filled from childhood with the idea of Conscience’.39 Gladstone’s interest in this argument is evident from the number of vertical lines that he inserted, including double lines against Irons’s claim that ‘there must be that in the sacred Truth which Conscience knows and feels that it ought to receive, so that he that believeth not is “condemned already”’, and double lines and ‘NB’ against his further assertion that ‘Virtue has been upheld in the world, and that not by a Synod of the human race; much less by external Edicts of “infallible” Caesars. It is living in the Universal Conscience’.40 Ten years later Manning, now Catholic archbishop of Westminster, published Caesarism and Ultramontanism (1874), to which Gladstone, freed from the burden of office, replied with a best-selling pamphlet on The Vatican Decrees (1874). Gladstone in turn received a host of replies, among them a ‘temperate and therefore powerful riposte’ by John Henry Newman of the Birmingham Oratory.41 John Stuart Mill, who disliked the very idea of papal infallibility, had died the previous year, on Thursday 8 May 1873. Gladstone felt the loss of a philosopher and economist to whom he had been indebted since the mid-1840s for ideas on political economy, and whom he was later to describe as having ‘perhaps the most open mind of his generation’ (Gladstone’s emphasis).42 On Wednesday 14 May 1873, a day on which he chaired a three-hour meeting of the Cabinet, Gladstone met Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Arnold, the Radical editor of The Echo, a Liberal evening newspaper, to discuss the most appropriate way to honour Mill’s memory and, as he put it in a letter two days later, hand down to posterity his ‘eminent virtues, talents, attainments and services’.43 Being the serving prime minister, however, and a devout Anglican, Gladstone felt compelled to withdraw his support

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for a memorial tribute to Mill following revelations concerning his pamphleteering in favour of birth control, then a scandalous subject.44 These revelations were accompanied by renewed speculation on the nature of Mill’s relationship with a married woman, Harriet Taylor, in the 1830s and 1840s, the subject of gossip in literary London before and after their marriage in 1851.45 Typically, Gladstone read the various tributes to Mill as they were published. Following the awkward business of the testimonial, he was evidently alert to comments upon Mill’s private life in what amounted to a pamphlet war over his reputation. Colin Matthew guessed that the ‘Memoirs of J. S. Mill’ which Gladstone read on 4 July 1873 were G. J. Holyoake’s J. S. Mill, as Some of the Working Classes Knew Him.46 The copy at Hawarden does not contain annotations, however, whereas a collection of tributes by his admirers and friends, reprinted from The Examiner, does. Gladstone was interested in this passage from an introductory sketch of Mill’s life by Henry Fox Bourne, who owned the weekly: Having retired from the India House in 1858, Mr. Mill went to spend the winter in Avignon, in the hope of improving the broken health of the wife to whom he was devotedly attached. He had not been married many years, but Mrs. Mill, who was the widow of Mr. John Taylor, a London merchant, had been his friend since 1835 or even earlier. During more than twenty years he had been aided by her talents and encouraged by her sympathy in all the work he had undertaken; and to her rare merits he afterwards paid more than one tribute. . . .47

As Gladstone’s pencil formed the vertical line alongside these words, the line branched into three at the bottom, forming a kind of trident (Figure 4.2). He was lingering over the passage. He also inserted a vertical line and a ‘v’ of approval (a truncated tick?) against the words, ‘If to labour fearlessly and ceaselessly for the good of society, and with the completest self-abnegation that is consistent with healthy individuality, be the true form of religion, Mr. Mill exhibited such genuine and profound religion’; and another vertical line against Bourne’s statement that ‘No one who had any personal knowledge of him could fail to discern the singular purity of his character’.48 Gladstone’s own ‘rescue’ work had also long been the subject of gossip in London, as had his close friendship with his new confidante following the death of the Duchess of Sutherland in 1868, the Evangelical former courtesan Mrs Laura Thistlethwayte, a relationship which had at first been intense and fraught with danger, but which was the subject of only occasional ‘X’ markings in the diary by 1873.49 Gladstone’s male guilt would never let him describe himself as pure.

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Figure 4.2  Page 11 of Gladstone’s copy of H. R. F. Bourne et al., John Stuart Mill (Dallow, 1873), Gladstone’s Library 44/A/27. By permission of the Warden and Trustees, Gladstone’s Library

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On 13 July 1873 Gladstone ‘read Simcox on Mill’,50 a reference to a piece in the current Contemporary Review by the anthropologist and political activist Edith Simcox, who also claimed that Mill’s life had been ‘blameless’.51 Between 13 and 20 November 1873 the prime minister managed to read the newly published and post­humous Autobiography of John Stuart Mill in seven sittings, during a busy parliamentary session.52 The most common marking is the ‘v’ of approval, although its frequency could be explained by rapid reading, in which case these marks were pointers to statements which merited attention later. Other markings suggest a more measured engagement, particularly where Gladstone would have seen parallels with his own life. Both men had strong and dominant fathers, for example, and Gladstone heavily annotated chapter 2, ‘Moral Influences in Early Youth. My Father’s Character and Opinions’. He inserted ‘NB’ alongside the opening sentence: ‘In my education, as in that of everyone, the moral influences, which are so much more important than all others, are also the most complicated, and the most difficult to specify with any approach to completeness’.53 Gladstone wrote ‘NB’ again next to a paragraph which begins ‘It would have been wholly inconsistent with my father’s ideas of duty, to allow me to acquire im-pressions contrary to his convictions and feelings respecting religion’.54 Later in the same paragraph, where Mill wrote ‘I have mentioned at how early an age he made me a reader of ecclesiastical history’, his alert reader added ‘p. 8’ in pencil, creating a cross-reference for future use. Like Gladstone and Newman, Mill charted his intellectual and emotional development through references to his reading. In Chapter 3, ‘Last Stage of Education, and First of Self-Education’, he explained that in the winter of 1821–2, when he was fifteen years of age, his father had ‘kindly allowed’ him to study Roman law with John Austin.55 Although Mill had been taught about Jeremy Bentham’s ‘principal speculations’, the ‘Benthamic standard of “the greatest happiness” . . . burst upon [him] with all the force of novelty’ at this time, when his father ‘put into his hands’ a particular book, Étienne Dumont’s rédaction of Bentham in the Traité de Législation Civile et Pénale.56 ‘The reading of this book’, he added, ‘was an epoch in my life; one of the turning points in my mental history’. Gladstone inserted an approving ‘v’ against Mill’s statement that his previous education had been, in a sense, a course in Benthamism. He seems to have been more forcibly struck, however, by a passage in which Mill explained that the ‘principle of utility’, as Bentham understood it in the Traité, ‘gave unity to [his] conception of things’: ‘I now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a

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religion’.57 The word ‘Religion’ inscribed next to the italicised words reflects Gladstone’s primary interest in life and in his reading.58 It is unsurprising that Gladstone’s marginalia are extensive and approving in the pages containing Mill’s famous account of the crisis in his mental history in 1826 (chapter V), when he found Wordsworth’s poems, which were new to him, ‘medicine for [his] state of mind’ and ‘the very culture of the feelings, which [he] was in quest of’.59 Later in the chapter, however, Gladstone inserted a line and a ‘ma’ against a passage in which Mill explained how, in spite of the ‘fabric’ of his ‘old and taught opinions . . . giving way’ after 1829, he ‘never allowed it to fall to pieces’, but was ‘incessantly occupied in weaving it anew’: ‘I never, in the course of my transition, was content to remain, for ever so short a time, confused and unsettled. When I had taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I had adjusted its relation to my old opinions, and ascertained exactly how far its effect ought to extend in modifying or superseding them’.60 Gladstone seems to have recognised that Mill’s weaving analogy did not work in relation to the words that I have italicised here, marking the position of the line on the page. For a constant reader of the Bible like Gladstone, but unlike Mill, it also contradicted Jesus’s teaching in a famous verse from Matthew’s gospel: ‘No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse’ (Matthew 9: 16). Mill’s Benthamite instinct to systematise and to constantly modify a received theory was contrary to Gladstone’s more Coleridgean habit of living with ‘contraries’ during periods of confusion and unsettlement before adopting a new position, as he had when changing his mind in relation to the Church of England (moving from Evangelicalism to Tractarianism to Liberal Catholicism) and Westminster politics (moving from Conservatism to Liberalism). Like Newman’s Apologia, Mill’s Autobiography fascinated Gladstone, not only because he knew the individual in question, but also because the author’s life and opinions provided numerous parallels and contrasts with his own. Sometimes there is a flat disagreement between writer and reader, as when Gladstone places a line and a ‘ma’ against a passage in Mill’s analysis of the third period of his ‘mental progress’, when he ‘reckoned chimerical’ the notion of ‘removing the injustice’ of primogeniture and entail: ‘for injustice it is, whether admitting of a complete remedy or not – involved in the fact that some are born to riches and the vast majority to poverty’.61 The Gladstone who was educated at Eton and Christ Church, who inherited wealth and chose to spend weekends with wealthier Whig friends on their great estates, and who delighted Ruskin by admitting

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that he was an ‘out-and-out inequalitarian’,62 held a different position from Mill’s. On the other hand, Mill’s account of his own intellectual powers chimes with Gladstone’s self-assessment, and is accorded a line and a ‘v’: I was . . . an interpreter of original thinkers, and mediator between them and the public; for I had always a humble opinion of my own powers as an original thinker, except in abstract science (logic, metaphysics, and the theoretic principles of political economy and politics), but thought myself much superior to most of my contemporaries in willingness and ability to learn from everybody.63

As interpreters and learners, both were constant and highly focused readers. Having been touched by Mill’s death in May 1873, Gladstone was devastated by that of Samuel Wilberforce two months later. On 19 July the prime minister was staying at one of his favourite weekend retreats during the parliamentary session, Holmbury, near Dorking, which belonged to the wealthy Liberal politician and autobiographer Lord (Frederick) Leveson-Gower. As Gladstone recorded at the end of the day, they were expecting the arrival of Frederick’s elder brother, Lord Granville, the foreign secretary, who was accompanying Wilberforce from London on horseback.64 Wilberforce, a keen rider and huntsman, was thrown from his horse and died soon afterwards, as a ‘pale & sad’ Granville announced on his arrival. Gladstone, who wept beside the deathbed and was unwell for days, wrote a characteristic diary entry on 21 July: ‘Saw Him for the last time in the flesh: resting from his labours. Attended the inquest. Inspected the spot: all this cannot be forgotten. Read Fortnightly Rev and M. Muller on Darwin.’ In Colin Matthew’s view, Gladstone’s response to A. R. Ashwell and Reginald Wilberforce’s Life of Samuel Wilberforce (1880–2) perhaps marked the beginning of his ‘seeing himself as a chief actor in the published biographies of the day, and watching the intimate personal and religious crises of his youth replayed before his own and the public’s gaze’.65 Each of the three stout volumes in the Library contains a sizeable handwritten index, indicating a wide range of ‘facts’ that clearly appealed to Gladstone; and in volume III he supplemented the printed index with handwritten page references to himself. He inserted marginal notes alongside transcriptions of his own letters to Wilberforce in the printed text, having first cleared the letters for publication. Canon Ashwell, the author of volume I, sent him the chapter titled ‘The Hampden Controversy’ in August 1879.66 A month later Gladstone noted in his diary, ‘reviewed letters to Bp Wilberforce

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sent for my permission to publish’, adding a characteristically self-deprecating remark: ‘They are curiously illustrative of a pecular [sic] and second-rate nature’.67 Ashwell added a note to the printed version of Gladstone’s letter to the then bishop of Oxford, dated 29 November 1847: ‘Mr. Gladstone wishes it to be here added “that some years afterwards he came to regret the whole original proceeding at Oxford (1836), and wrote to Bishop Hampden to say so”.’68 On 21 and 22 December 1879 Gladstone read the first volume of the Life. In his handwritten index, the entry ‘95 Newman’ is a page reference to a letter from Wilberforce to Louisa Noel, dated 1 April 1836, giving an account of a recent visit to Oxford to protest against Hampden’s appointment as regius professor of divinity.69 During the visit Wilberforce had been ‘very much delighted’ by some ‘very long conversations with Newman upon several of the most mysteri­ ous parts of the Christian Revelation, the Trinity, &c., as well as upon some of the greatest practical difficulties to faith arising from the present torn state of Christendom’. This could have been the Gladstone of 1836 writing, as the Gladstone of 1879 perhaps recognised in his index entry. Wilberforce had been joined in Oxford by his brothers Henry and Robert, and by Henry Manning, all of whom were on ‘the right side’ on Hampden, and all of whom later converted to Rome, much to the dismay of both Wilberforce and his friend and fellow High Churchman William Gladstone. Canon Ashwell died only two days after the final revision of volume I had been completed and was later succeeded as editor by Reginald Wilberforce, the bishop’s eldest surviving son. When Reginald sent proofs of volume II to Gladstone for acceptance, in November 1880, he received the following reply: ‘I am afraid that I must from real in­capacity ask you to excuse me from undertaking in any shape the task of criticism, which, while I heartily wish well to your Biography, requires a mind more free than mine’.70 (Now prime minister for the second time, he had left Sandringham for London that morning.) He added, however: ‘With respect to my letters, there are two and only two which I should wish to be withdrawn. They are those relating not to your Father, but to your Uncle the Archdeacon and they are dated Sept. 4. 1854 and Oct. 17. 1854’. In the second of these letters to Samuel Wilberforce, who was poleaxed by his brother Robert’s apostasy,71 Gladstone reveals the depth of his fellow feeling concerning converts in an extraordinary statement: ‘For could I, with reference to my own precious children, think that one of them might possibly live to strike, though in sincerity and thinking he did God service, such a blow, how far rather would I that he had never been born’.72

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On Monday 4 April 1881 Gladstone wrote to the Queen, worked all day on budget figures (he was chancellor as well as prime minister), attended the Commons for over nine hours, delivered his eleventh budget in a speech of only two hours and ten minutes, also spoke after 1 a.m. on the Mutiny Bill, and ‘read Bp Wilberforce’.73 Twenty-five references to ‘WEG’ are listed in Gladstone’s handwritten index to volume II, which covers the years 1848–60, during which he and the bishop of Oxford collaborated in wrestling with a series of challenges to the unity of the Church of England. One of these was the row at King’s College, London, over Professor F. D. Maurice’s Theological Essays (1853), in which received doctrines relating to hell and divine punishment were questioned. Alarmed by the possibility of Maurice’s dismissal, Bishop Wilberforce wrote privately to his ‘old friend’ Dr Jelf, the principal of King’s, in August 1853, in the hope of smoothing things over.74 His letter to Maurice, dated 24 October 1853, is heavily marked by Gladstone, whose marginalia indicate approval of Wilberforce’s interpretation of Maurice’s argument, twenty-eight years later. Gladstone inserted a cross (+) against the first part of the following statement, which I have italicised, and a heavy vertical line, made with two strokes of the pencil, against the last: ‘What I do understand you to say, is this: That to represent God as revenging upon His creatures by torments through never-ending extensions of time their sinful acts committed here is (1) unwarrantably to transfer to the eternal world the conditions of this world. For that time is of this world; and that eternity is not time prolonged but, rather, time abolished . . .’.75 Again, Gladstone’s strength of feeling reflects the fact that he had been involved. As a member of the council at King’s, he had written several letters to Wilberforce before and after the bishop wrote to Maurice.76 Gladstone was appalled by his colleagues’ behaviour in dismissing Maurice, and confessed to the Reverend Gerald Wellesley, soon to be made dean of Windsor, that ‘there is blinding power in theological rage, which often induces honest men to act like scoundrels’.77 Also listed under ‘WEG’ in Gladstone’s handwritten index to volume II is a page reference relating to a letter that he wrote to Wilberforce from Hawarden on 2 November 1857. The heavy marginalia are suggestive of one marking one’s own homework, as Gladstone inserts three sets of double vertical lines against his own comments on Church matters. The first of these reads: ‘It is neither dis-establishment, nor even loss of dogmatic truth, which I look upon as the greatest danger before us, but it is the loss of those elementary principles of right and wrong on which Christianity itself must be built’.78

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Most of Gladstone’s private index references to ‘WEG’, however, are to pages relating to his political life in the 1850s, and particularly to passages from Wilberforce’s diary, now encountered for the first time. For example, the bishop’s entry for 3 November 1853 reads: ‘Long talk with Arthur Gordon [Aberdeen’s son]. Lord Aberdeen now growing to look upon Gladstone as his successor and so told Gladstone the other day. Cabinet shaky.’79 As well as writing ‘1854’ alongside this passage for some reason, Gladstone underlined the page number in his personal index. On 17 March 1855 Wilberforce noted ‘Lord Overstone’s high opinion of Gladstone: “He has some faults; he is too apt to meddle, and his bonds, &c., were a mistake; but he has put the finance of the country on a firm footing by his income and succession tax”.’80 Gladstone not only inserted ‘NB’ in the margin and listed the page number in his index under ‘WEG’, but also added a separate index entry, ‘Ld Overstone on WEG’. Although habitually self-deprecatory, Gladstone was interested in and protective of his reputation, past and present. In a diary entry of 7 August 1855, Wilberforce recorded what he learned during a walk with Lord Aberdeen, the former leader of a coalition ministry. Against the statement, ‘Gladstone intends to be Prime Minister’, Gladstone wrote ‘No’.81 He placed an approving ‘v’, however, against this statement: ‘The Queen had quite got over her feeling against him, and liked him much’. One can almost hear the sigh: when he did become prime minister he struggled to establish a good working relationship with his sovereign, who eventually came to despise him. Although Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford was probably the most dynamic and effective of all Victorian bishops, his reputation was tainted by his slippery handling of the controversy surrounding Hampden’s appointment as bishop of Hereford (1845–7), during which he acquired the sobriquet of ‘Soapy Sam’. Always ambitious and hopeful of ever higher things, he had to wait until Gladstone’s first ministry to be translated to the see of Winchester. When Reginald Wilberforce sent Gladstone further letters for clearance, in preparation for volume III of the Life, he was assured that he need not be under any ‘difficulty or pressure’ with respect to them.82 Gladstone wrote: My memory does not record any single instance in which your Father’s advancement to Winchester was associated even by the most censorious of men with political subserviency. It was a very small acknowledgement of his best services to the Church of England, given when greater ones had been (as I think) unhappily withheld. Undoubtedly he gave me a warm

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personal support, and probably he suffered for it, but with his politics generally I was far from satisfied and more than once I think I had a friendly expostulation with him about them.83

(Wilberforce was a Tory.) It was against this background that Gladstone began to read volume III on 17 December 1882, and to note on Christmas Day, ‘finished Life of the great Bishop Wilberforce’.84 This time the marginalia are comparatively light. Alongside one passage, however, Gladstone placed two reversed question marks, a rare insertion which presumably signified extreme doubt or scepticism. Disraeli, his political adversary and bête noire, wrote to Wilberforce in October 1862: I wish you could have induced Gladstone to have joined Lord Derby’s Government, when Lord Ellenborough resigned in 1858. It was not my fault he did not. I almost went on my knees to him. Had he done so, the Church, and everything else, would have been in a very different position.85

Disraeli had succeeded Gladstone as chancellor of the Exchequer in February 1858, when Palmerston resigned and Earl Derby formed a minority Conservative government. Derby tried more than once to strengthen his Cabinet by inviting Gladstone to join it. In May, Disraeli stepped in, sending Gladstone a private memorandum which began: ‘Confidential. I think it of such paramount importance to the public interests, that you should assume at this time a commanding position in the administration of affairs, that I feel it a solemn duty to lay before you some facts’.86 This memorandum has been described by Richard Aldous as ‘perhaps the most extraordinary and unlikely communication of [Gladstone’s] political life’.87 Gladstone may have concurred, but the inverted question marks probably indicate his surprise that Disraeli had written to Wilberforce at all, and in such hyperbolic terms. In conclusion, Victorian high culture was largely shaped by a male literary élite, ‘literary’ in the broadest sense of being involved in the world of letters, and as exemplified in groups such as the Athenæum, which Gladstone frequented but never joined,88 or the Metaphysical Society, of which he was a member, along with Ruskin and Cardinal Manning. In this chapter I have been ‘reading’ or interpreting Gladstone’s ‘readings’, literal and metaphorical, of three of his contemporaries, who were themselves exceptionally acute readers and interpreters. This kind of recession sheds new light on a culture in which the boundaries between religion and politics, science and the

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arts were less sharply drawn than they are today. Through his daily habit of reading, Gladstone moved effortlessly across such bound­ aries, drawing together past and present, the classical and the modern, received wisdom and innovative ideas, through sustained and earnest intellectual effort. Simon Heffer writes of Gladstone, ‘There was no greater public life in the nineteenth century’.89 Gladstone’s reading of his contemporaries, which proved to be invaluable to him in a lifelong process of self-analysis, allows us access to his inner life, richly supplementing the data already available to us in his diaries and letters.

Notes   1. W. E. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, with Prime Ministerial Correspondence, ed. M. R. D. Foot and H. C. G. Matthew, 14 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968–96). The original diary notebooks are held at Lambeth Palace Library.  2. David Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, Reading Gladstone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).  3. Windscheffel, Reading Gladstone, pp. 49–50.  4. GladCAT, in Reading Rooms/Library Catalogues, at ; see also Matthew Bradley, ‘Gladstone’s Unfinished Synchrony: Reading Afterlives and the Gladstone Database’, in Matthew Bradley and Juliet John (eds), Reading and the Victorians (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 127–42. Other work on marginalia includes K. E. Attar, ‘Victorian Readers and Their Library Records Today’, in Bradley and John, Reading and the Victorians, pp. 99–110.   5. John Powell, ‘Small Marks and Instinctual Responses: A Study in the Use of Gladstone’s Marginalia’, Nineteenth Century Prose, 19:3 (1992), pp. 1–17; H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), and Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).  6. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. I, p. xix.   7. Ibid., vol. VI, p. 653.  8. Ibid.   9. W. E. Gladstone, A Chapter of Autobiography (London: Murray, 1868), available at . 10. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. I, p. xxi. 11. Ibid., vol. I, p. xxxi. 12. Ibid., vol. I, p. 360. 13. T. Scott, The Force of Truth: An Authentic Narrative (London: Keith, Johnson, 1779), p. 123 (Gladstone’s Library callmark F36/183). Other

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possible sources include T. Scott, Letters and Papers, 2nd edition (London: Seeley, 1826), p. 242. 14. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. I, pp. 375, 377. 15. Gladstone, A Chapter of Autobiography, p. 52. 16. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VI, p. 277. 17. J. H. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a Reply to a Pamphlet Entitled ‘What, then, does Dr. Newman mean?’ (London: Longman, 1864), pp. 59–60. Gladstone’s Library callmark WEG/I 56.6/NEW. This and other marginalia are quoted with permission from the Warden and Trustees of Gladstone’s Library. 18. See, for example, J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 vols (London: Macmillan, 1903), vol. II, p. 188. 19. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VI, p. 271. Gladstone first read the Correspondence on 16 February, in London (ibid., vol. IV, p. 256). He read Kingsley’s What, then, does Dr. Newman Mean? A reply to a pamphlet lately published by Dr. Newman (published on 20 March) on 2 April, probably en route to Cliveden(ibid., vol. IV, p. 267). 20. For parallels indicated by lines and by crosses of approval in the margin, see Newman, Apologia, pp. 65, 67, 69, 75. When marking Newman’s comments on distinctive Roman Catholic doctrines in part III, Gladstone inserts a mild NB in the margin: see Newman, Apologia, pp. 61, 83. (On p. 83, Gladstone’s annotation in the margin – ‘Source of error[?]’ – has been truncated during rebinding, when the pages were shaved, as in many medieval manuscripts.) 21. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VI, p. 278. 22. ‘On the morning of the 23rd [February 1846] I left the Observatory. I have never seen Oxford since, excepting its spires, as they are seen from the railway’ (Newman, Apologia, p. 369). Gladstone ‘read Newman’ on 23, 24 and 25 May 1864 (see Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VI, pp. 277–8), which could have brought him up to part V, published on 19 May. 23. Newman, Apologia, p. 307. On Newman’s ‘Catholic acquaintances’ see Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. M. J. Svaglic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 556–7; and on Ambrose Phillips (see below), one such acquaintance, see p. 557. 24. Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone, pp. 139–41. 25. Newman, Apologia, p. 311. 26. Ibid., p. 313. 27. Ibid., pp. 318, 369. 28. Ibid., p. 322. 29. Ibid., p. 369. 30. Ibid., p. 324. 31. Ibid., p. 349. 32. The Correspondence of Henry Edward Manning and William Ewart Gladstone, 1833–1891, ed. P. C. Erb, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), vol. I, p. 390.

102  Michael Wheeler 33. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. III, p. 321. 34. Ibid., vol. VI, p. 282. 35. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, vol. II, p. 192. 36. Newman, Apologia, ed. Svaglic, p. xl. 37. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VI, p. 293. 38. These tracts (British Library classmark 3942.c.73) have accession stamps dating from November 1922. A possible explanation is that they were donated by the Gladstone family then, but not included when the British Library passed other material to Gladstone’s Library at a later date. 39. W. J. Irons, Apologia Pro Vitâ Ecclesiae Anglicanae: in reply to John Henry Newman (Oxford and London: Parker, 1864), pp. 3, 9. 40. Ibid., pp. 11, 18. 41. Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone, p. 225. 42. H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1898 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 77, 576n. 43. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VIII, pp. 328–9. 44. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, vol. II, pp. 543–4; Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VIII, p. 331. 45. See Jose Harris’s entry on Mill in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 46. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VIII, p. 350. 47. H. R. F. Bourne et al., John Stuart Mill: notices of his life and works, together with two papers written by him on the land question, reprinted from The Examiner (London: Dallow, 1873), p. 11. Gladstone’s Library callmark 44/A/27. The ‘notices’ that follow were written by W. T. Thornton, Henry Trimen, W. Minto, J. H. Levy, W. A. Hunter (two notices), J. E. Cairns, Henry Fawcett, Millicent Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Herbert Spencer. 48. Ibid., p. 16. 49. Matthew, Gladstone, pp. 239–44, 321. 50. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VIII, p. 355. 51. Edith Simcox, ‘On the Influence of John Stuart Mill’s Writings’, Contemporary Review, 22 (June–November 1873), pp. 297–317. 52. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VIII, pp. 410–13. 53. J. S. Mill, Autobiography (London: Longmans, 1873), p. 38. Gladstone’s Library callmark WEG/D33/MIL. 54. Ibid., p. 42. 55. Ibid., p. 63. 56. Ibid., p. 64. 57. Ibid., pp. 66–7. 58. I disagree with Powell, who claims that Gladstone ‘read political Lives and Letters more carefully than other classes of writing’: Powell, ‘Small Marks’, p. 7. 59. Mill, Autobiography, p. 148. 60. Ibid., p. 156.

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61. Ibid., p. 231. 62. John Ruskin, Letters to M.G. and H.G., ed. G. O’B. Wyndham (Edinburgh and London: p.p., 1903), pp. 25–7. The conversation with Ruskin took place in October 1878. 63. Mill, Autobiography, p. 242. 64. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VIII, pp. 357–8. 65. Ibid., vol. VII, p. c. See also Powell, ‘Small Marks’, p. 7. 66. Gladstone, Diaries, vol. IX, p. 434. See British Library Add. MS 44460, f. 305. 67. Gladstone, Diaries, vol. IX, p. 440. 68. A. R. Ashwell and R. Wilberforce, Life of the Right Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, D.D., Lord Bishop of Oxford and afterwards of Winchester, with selections from his Diaries and Correspondence, 3 vols (London: Murray, 1879–82), vol. I, p. 432, n. 5. Gladstone’s Library callmark WEG/I 56/WIL/ASH. 69. Ashwell and Wilberforce, Life of Wilberforce, vol. I, p. 95. 70. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. IX, p. 619. 71. Wilberforce, Life of Wilberforce, vol. II, p. 261. 72. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VII, p. cxii. 73. Ibid., vol. X, p. 44. 74. Wilberforce, Life of Wilberforce, vol. II, pp. 209–10. 75. Ibid., p. 211. 76. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. IV, pp. 564–6. 77. Correspondence on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone, ed. D. C. Lathbury, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1910), vol. I, p. 360. 78. Wilberforce, Life of Wilberforce, vol. II, p. 353. 79. Ibid., p. 225. 80. Ibid., p. 282. 81. Ibid., p. 286. 82. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. X, p. 293. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., vol. X, pp. 381, 385. 85. Wilberforce, Life of Wilberforce, vol. III, p. 70. 86. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, vol. I, p. 587. 87. R. Aldous, The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli (London: Hutchinson, 2006), p. 105. 88. See M. Wheeler, The Athenæum: 200 Years of ‘the brainiest club in the world (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020). 89. Simon Heffer, The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914 (London: Random House, 2017), p. 335.

Chapter 5

Reading While Travelling in the Long Nineteenth Century Mary Hammond

I begin with an image that is neither from the nineteenth century nor about modern travel, but is nonetheless intimately connected to both: a Renaissance painting of the virgin St Ursula being visited in her sleep by an angel, who has arrived to warn her of her impending martyrdom (Plate 7). Still and calm, surrounded by the accoutrements of her devotion (including several books and a devoted lapdog), St Ursula embodies the perfect spiritual journey, an out-of-body ex­ perience that ends with a good death and a sainthood. If we fast-forward four and a half centuries to 1872, we find John Ruskin dwelling rapturously on the lessons to be drawn from this painting in letter number 20 of Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain. He uses the image to explain to his ‘working’ readers the difference between being cursed and being blessed. For him, St Ursula is blessed not just because she sticks to her moral guns at the cost of her life, but because her chastity is signalled by her reading habits: So dreams the princess, with blessed eyes, that need no earthly dawn. . . . But the loveliest characteristic of all is the evident delight of her continual life. Royal power over herself, and happiness in her flowers, her books, her sleeping and waking, her prayers, her dreams, her earth, her heaven.

We know she is piously industrious, he explains, ‘by the evident use of all the books she has (well bound, every one of them, in stoutest leather or velvet, and with no dog’s-ears)’.1 Through his emphasis on her beautiful, carefully kept books and her studious private reading, Ruskin invokes the image of an ideal, blessed (female) reader as one who is static, travelling only in the imagination, and only to God. She is a reader fully in control of herself and her dreams, and blissfully free of cheap ephemeral literature and the restless consumption associated with modern life. 104

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He then moves abruptly from this idealised picture of the blessèd reader to an image of a very different type of reader, encountered on the train to Verona the very day he left Venice and St Ursula behind. ‘In the carriage with me’, he reports, ‘were two American girls with their father and mother, people of the class which has lately made so much money suddenly, and does not know what to do with it’. They could, he muses, have profitably gazed out of the window and reflected on the classically saturated landscape drifting by. However, since ‘The two American girls were neither princesses, nor seers, nor dreamers’ but creatures of the modern age, classical literature had no interest for them. So instead, They pulled down the blinds the moment they entered the carriage, and then sprawled, and writhed, and tossed among the cushions of it, in vain contest, during the whole fifty miles. . . . They were dressed in thin white frocks, coming vaguely open at the backs as they stretched or wriggled; they had French novels, lemons, and lumps of sugar, to beguile their state with; the novels hanging together by the ends of string that had once stitched them, or adhering at the corners in densely bruised dog’s-ears, out of which the girls, wetting their fingers, occasionally extricated a gluey leaf. From time to time they cut a lemon open, ground a lump of sugar backwards and forwards over it till every fibre was in a treacly pulp; then sucked the pulp, and gnawed the white skin into leathery strings, for the sake of its bitter. . . . And so they went their way, with sealed eyes and tormented limbs, their numbered miles of pain. There are the two states for you, in clearest opposition; Blessed and Accursed.2

Such an outpouring of male disgust, invariably mingled with desire, over the image of the modern young female and her reading matter is very familiar to most historians of nineteenth-century reading. We know that modernity, reading and gender were worriedly conjoined in all kinds of ways in the first half of the nineteenth century, and that these anxieties often centred on the bodies of women. Novels and romances – food for licentious or (equally contentious) simply private, ungovernable daydreams – are often seen to be the main culprits among the newly available modern reading material. It is no accident that – as Amelia Yeates demonstrates elsewhere in The Edinburgh History of Reading, in her chapter on nineteenth-century reading, gender and space3 – works of fiction appear in more Victorian images of women readers than any other type of text. As Susan P. Casteras has suggested, [while] there is no single or unified woman reader or monolithic image in Victorian art, there are numerous recurrent motifs and distinctive and

106  Mary Hammond collective formations, with middle-class women cooperating in culturally endorsed fictive constructions of female passivity, eroticism, and unattainability. These pictorial readers seem complaisant in the spectator’s fantasy, thanks to the artist’s manipulations of the narrative situations . . . the presence, possession, touching, self-absorption, and watching of this act of reading is charged with eroticism.4

Such pictures of women readers habitually allow you to gaze at her without the likelihood of her catching your eye or turning away. As several scholars have suggested, she usually seems poised on the brink between absorption and arousal, and the position she adopts or the objects with which she is surrounded – often fruit, whether lemons (sweetened with lumps of sugar or otherwise) or oranges, or flowers dripping with symbolism – highlight the connection. In Plate 8, a young woman reader (who may or may not be Ophelia, and whose sanity is therefore already in some doubt) has glanced up and caught the viewer’s eye, and the image speaks volumes about prevailing cultural discourses around the relationship between women readers and books. This reader’s under-the-lashes glance might appear modest, but her skin is suffused with a flush of pleasure, the background is dark, the unnatural light seems to emanate from the book itself, and she is tantalising the corner of a page with her finger. As Kate Flint has suggested in one of the most famous works on the topic of women readers, ‘the eroticism of the female subject for the male spectator or commentator provoke[s] questions which indicate his own fascination with the woman’s mental processes’.5 Flint and Casteras both point out that a woman reading anywhere was a subject of particular scrutiny during the Victorian and Edwardian period, in both images and print. But one of the most visible and contentious places for women to read, and thus for these cultural anxieties to surface, was when travelling; and this was particularly true when women travelled by train (as witness the Ruskin example above). The same technology that enabled the mass production of novels also created new public spaces in which to consume them, and as a result trains loom very large in the psyches of nineteenth-century novelists and artists as well as social commentators and the general public. In this period, the steam train became simultaneously a symbol of national pride and a site of excitement, danger and anxiety, well worth painting or weaving into the plot of a story. This intriguing historical moment of ideology writ large has been well documented by historians of many disciplines, but for me it raises some questions that to date have not been satisfactorily answered. What did real travelling readers feel about the issue? Did all this

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scrutiny and anxiety trouble the women (or indeed the men) who rode on trains and omnibuses in their millions? Were middle-class women in fact ‘cooperating in culturally endorsed fictive constructions of female passivity, eroticism, and unattainability’? What was the relation­ship between this modern travelling reader and his or her earlier counterpart? How did modern travel affect reading practices (if at all)? In this chapter, my aim is to compare some visual depictions of travelling readers with the testimony of real readers drawn from the UK Reading Experience Database (RED), 1450–1945.6 Like W. R. Owens,7 as a long-standing member of the RED project team I have long found it useful to test theoretical and ideologically-driven analyses of readers of the past against real empirical evidence provided by these readers themselves, a methodology that I believe casts light in both directions. Readers can often surprise us by resisting, absorbing, normalising, or simply ignoring the implications of the cultural constructions in which they are thought to have played a part. And their myriad responses can temper and illuminate hidden historiographical tendencies to focus on our own concerns, at the expense of theirs. In a nutshell, they do not always behave as we would wish. Because RED captures evidence from diaries, letters, marginalia, memoirs, court cases, biographies and autobiographies (both published and unpublished), it also manages to dilute some of the methodological problems associated with the subjective, self-aggrandising or hagiographical personal accounts of reading that often dog readership historians. It is not perfect, and it certainly benefits from other analytical methods that help to fill in or interpret its many gaps. But nonetheless it is an enormously valuable resource that – as I will show, and as Rosalind Crone, Katie Halsey and Shaf Towheed have pointed out – has now achieved sufficient critical mass to enable it to ‘substantiate or revise the grand narratives about reading in the past’.8 In ‘Traveling Readers’, Kate Flint also focuses on the question ‘What difference does it make where one reads a book?’ But I take issue here with the following conclusion she draws: the evidence furnished by a whole range of nineteenth-century sources links . . . the best-traveled Anglophone texts to . . . the sense of security that they deliver: security of narrative convention, of a resolved outcome, of moral certainties. The traveling reader who is prepared to resist, as well as engage in empathic involvement . . . is as rare as she or he is welcome.9

As we will see, resisting readers of one sort or another make up a significant proportion of those from whom we have gathered evidence in RED.

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The travelling reader in art Pictorial evidence suggests that the travelling reader seems to have been a scapegoat for a number of social problems, from the negligent parent to the lascivious stranger. In Abraham Solomon’s 1855 painting First Class – The Meeting and at First Meeting Loved (Plate 9), which depicts a ‘love-at-first-sight moment’, everything is as it should be. We have the responsible father gently quizzing a young officer while the object of his devotion simpers modestly in the background, an innocently sunny daytime landscape is visible through the window and informs the painting’s colourway, and the paterfamilias has gladly put down his newspaper to concentrate on being a good parent. The partner painting to this one was Second Class – The Parting (Plate 10), in which a lower-class mother hugs her young Australia-bound son goodbye in a battered carriage, while an un­ chaperoned couple canoodles on the seat behind them against a backdrop full of text-heavy adverts. The combined message offered by this pair of pictures seems to be that a constant vigilant parental presence is a good thing, and a luxury available only to the rich. But in the original version of First Class (Plate 11), sent to the Royal Academy in 1854 and withdrawn following strenuous objections, major differences emerge: it is sunset and seductive darkness approaches. The suitor is no officer, the young lady has been reading what looks like a novel, and the father has been rendered criminally negligent by the soporific effects of a newspaper and Bradshaw’s railway timetable. This was clearly not an image designed to reassure Victorian parents anxious about letting their daughters travel on public transport, and the consequences of reading in the heterogeneous public space are central to its effect. In this pairing, one possible cumulative message seems to be that the wealthy are more susceptible to literary corruption while travelling than the poor, who were statistically more likely to be illiterate in any case – and a very good thing, too. Augustus Leopold Egg played it safer in The Travelling Companions (Plate 12). Here we have a scene as peaceful as St Ursula’s: no squirming half-dressed Americans sucking sugared lemons, but a pair of modestly dressed women (perhaps the same woman), one of whom is reading, the other asleep. While it is unlikely these girls would have impressed Ruskin (like the Americans, they are blasphemously ignoring the passing scenery), they are at least decently dressed. It may be that one of the travelling companions of the title is actually the book and – since it is painted without dog ears or lemony smears – probably

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a respectable one. It is difficult not to read this painting as an attempt to ameliorate parents’ (and art critics’) fears about young women travelling alone. Here they are: demure, safe and private, their books respected (and perhaps respectable), their fruit untouched. But Egg’s painting raises another, equally important if more subliminal issue, captured by John Tenniel’s parody (Figure 5.1) a decade later. Between the guard, the goat and (ostensibly) an oblivious and surreal Disraeli reading a newspaper and wearing a paper hat, the looming threat to this child travelling unaccompanied on the railway is brought to surreal life. In all these images, looking at women is an integral, often uncomfortable, part of the railway journey – one shared, of course, by the spectator of the image. This is our cue to think – as Tenniel does – about what the woman passenger herself felt about the issue. Tenniel’s Alice is clearly distressed by all this overt and inappropriate male attention, and it drives me to wonder how the two teenage girls trapped in Ruskin’s sweaty

Figure 5.1  John Tenniel’s illustration for page 53 of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (New York: G. H. McKibbin, 1899; first published 1871). Public domain. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, (accessed 11 November 2019)

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carriage in 1873 felt about a wild-whiskered forty-three-year-old man ogling at and tutting over them, despite the presence of their parents. In these circumstances, a French novel might have been a welcome escape for them. (And why wasn’t he reading or looking out of the window?) What I want to do next is to refresh and perhaps even revise our understanding of the travelling reader in the long nineteenth century by comparing these common sorts of images and representations with the testimony of real readers. I draw here on Kate Flint’s exploration of the ‘convergences’ it is possible to find between the ‘physical mobility’ of texts, ‘the known and imagined responses of the reader’ and the ‘metaphor of reading as a form of traveling’,10 with the aim of finding out what travelling does to the reader–text relationship. I suggest, however, that this goal is not achievable unless we listen more fully to a wider range of the voices of readers themselves. The convergences and differences I locate between the images (which have so often fed into our retrospective ‘imagined responses’) of travelling readers, and the testimony of real readers who travelled, demonstrate that while it does indeed make a difference to the individual’s ex­ perience of a text where they were when they read it, the results do not – as Flint suggests – tend to confirm formal and political conservatism in readers’ tastes (what she sees as a preference for the familiar in the face of the strange). Instead, they suggest that travelling actually encouraged wide and eclectic reading, the rereading of favourites, the reading of texts outside one’s comfort zone, and a keen sense that a text brought along for the ride owed its reader a special type of ex­ perience. Such testimony needs to be interpreted with caution, coming as it does most often from middle-class, educated and sometimes professional readers who recorded their habits; but precisely because these are the readers most often also depicted in Victorian art, it might help us to approach all those images of women reading a little differently. We might even begin to see them as self-consciously performative, deliberately erotic, ironic, or even comical, and middle-class women as less cooperative in ‘culturally endorsed fictive constructions of female passivity, eroticism, and unattainability’ than we have assumed. Recovering the voices of travelling readers It is worth mentioning here that, in literature, and sometimes in art (as witness Alice’s bookless discomfort, and Ruskin’s bookless obsession with the American girls), just as problematic as women reading on trains were people of both sexes not reading. Many a Victorian

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murder story ramps up the tension at the moment of inappropriate eye contact, or intense scrutiny, or unexpected movement away from one’s prescribed seat, all of which are possible only by non-readers. Sherlock Holmes might be a brilliant social analyst, but even the devoted Watson thinks he’s a little odd in the way he often spends train journeys ‘reading’ the traces of private lives on the clothes and faces of fellow passengers and mulling over cases instead of reading a newspaper like everyone else.11 Doyle was by no means unusual in this: in the short story ‘A Perilous Ride’, by C. Soames, published in 1873 in the London magazine Belgravia, the seventeen-year-old female narrator has her pleasant train ride interrupted by the entry into her carriage of a middle-aged man with a small book and a black bag. She amuses herself by imagining who this ‘learned-looking’ man might be, and romantically assuming the book in which he immerses himself to be a case or law book or some other learned tome indicative of his respectability. The first hint she gets that he is actually a madman on the loose is when he throws both the bag and the book out of the train window and starts devoting his attention to her.12 Ubiquitous as it becomes in mid- to late nineteenth-century art and fiction, though, the image of the travelling reader as a new phenomenon with new problems specifically associated with modernity is not borne out by the evidence. In fact, railway reading merely extended long pre-existent cultural practices: usefully for our purposes, regular coach-users such as Samuel Pepys in the seventeenth century and Samuel Johnson and Robert Southey in the eighteenth took careful and illuminating note of the reading they were able to do while travelling by coach. Indeed, for Southey such reading time was indispensable: Akenside & Lucan are my pocket companions. you would be astonishd at the number of volumes I have read in this manner. it is very seldom that I am without a book in my pocket. & the half & quarters of hours wasted so often in waiting amount to a great deal in the year. ten to one but I read all the way to Bath & should the sun shine it makes the glad heart of man spout vociferously to the edification of all the stage coachmen.13

We have no record of how edifying the stage coachmen may actually have found Southey spouting poetry all the way to Bath (perhaps it was these captive coachmen who first dreamed up the idea of a ‘quiet’ zone); but the notion we have often tended to accept as a truism, that it was railways that carved time up into idle quarter hours which the publishing industry rushed to fill with trash, is problematised here: clearly, travelling always entailed ‘dead’ time, and – by the literate – reading has always been used to fill it in particular ways.

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Travelling also always seems to have provided an opportunity for people crushed together in close confinement to annoy each other. Boswell clearly found Johnson mildly irritating on this coach journey to Luton Hoe: He [Samuel Johnson] talked little to us in the carriage, being chiefly occupied in reading Dr. Watson’s second volume of ‘Chemical Essays’, which he liked very well, and his own ‘Prince of Abyssinia’, on which he seemed to be intensely fixed; having told us, that he had not looked at it since it was first published. I happened to take it out of my pocket this day, and he seized upon it with avidity.14

It is to be hoped that Boswell had a back-up book with which to while away the rest of the journey. The pestering of travelling women is clearly nothing new either: the lady in this account by Samuel Pepys has (typically for this period) left no record of her reaction to having her literary taste commandeered as a weapon in the fight for her attention, but it is highly likely it was an uncomfortable or irritating encounter for her: . . . and so we set out for Chatham – in my way overtaking some company, wherein was a lady, very pretty, riding single, her husband in company with her. We fell into talk, and I read a copy of verses which her husband showed me, and he discommended but the lady commended; and I read them so as to make the husband turn to commend them.15

We should note here also the evidence that in the pre-steam age people read even when on horseback and that there were dangers attendant on that too, as farmer William Coe discovered, noting in his diary: ‘My black mare fell down and threw me over her head, but God be praysed I got not the least harm. I rode a slow trot reading the Northampton news paper . . . it was upon Bury Heath.’16 Some readers even discovered a way of reading while driving: ‘The anonymous Stonemason [author of Reminiscences of a Stonemason, By a Working Man (London, 1848)] . . . employed as a roundsman, taught his horse the route and thereafter read as he travelled’.17 And some read while walking – an equally dangerous pastime: [Alfred, Lord Tennyson] was always a great reader; and if he went alone he would take his book with him on his walk. One day in the winter, the snow being deep, he did not hear the Louth mail coming up behind. Suddenly ‘Ho! ho!’ from the coachman roused him. He looked up and found a horse’s nose and eyes over his shoulder, as if reading his book.18

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Thus far my examples of reading experiences have all been male – and it will come as no surprise that men (more literate, more public-facing, and thus more likely to leave a record of their ex­ periences) dominate the entries in the Reading Experience Database prior to the nineteenth century. But there are exceptions, particularly in the late eighteenth century, and they reveal that women also read while travelling in stagecoaches. Some of them, like the famous Quaker social reformer Elizabeth Fry, usually read religious texts, and she frequently used the opportunity of a coach journey to memorise parts of them: ‘I had rather a comfortable drive here from Shrewsbury, read in the Testament and got by heart one or two verses’.19 According to one of Fry’s travelling companions, there were also both communal readings of the scriptures, and opportunities for private devotion and reflection while travelling: These journeys are, I trust, not lost time; we have two Scripture readings daily in the carriage, and much instructive conversation; also abundant time for that which is so important, the private reading of the Holy Scripture. This is very precious to dear Elizabeth Fry, and I have often thought it a privilege to note her reverent ‘marking and learning’ of these sacred truths of divine inspiration. Often does she lay down the Book, close her eyes, and wait upon Him, who hath the key of David to open and seal the instruction of the sacred page.20

There are clear echoes here of the type of reading habit ostensibly practised by St Ursula – Ruskin would no doubt have wholeheartedly approved. But other women had very different experiences, and (given the weight of societal disapproval attendant on lighter reading) they contain far less devotional reading or submission to social codes than one might expect. In this next example, a woman traveller called Hester Thrale – a near-contemporary of Fry and an author and patron of the arts – tells us how she felt when a male passenger presumed to tell her how to read efficiently when on the move: Apropos to riding in a coach, Perkins told me that he had found out the Secret how to read in a Carriage and would tell it to me, to whom it might be useful; he put a Piece of Paper he said on the Page he was reading, & so moved it when he came to the End of the Line. – where I suppose he thought the Sense naturally stopt, as it does in an Account Book. – comical enough.21

Not only is this evidence of Thrale laughing up her sleeve at this sort of male patronage, it is fascinating evidence of the problem identified by Flint – the relationship between the physical and intellectual

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challenges of reading on the move. A tip about how not to lose one’s place on a jolting journey gives rise to an intriguing comment about the ebb and flow of sense across the spaces of the moving page, and suggests that the unexpected punctuation effects of locomotion were less of a problem in some written genres (such as fiction, perhaps) than in others (such as accounting). Women in the eighteenth century were also opportunistic readers: they read while out on joy rides in the carriage (often aloud to each other – something that had a much longer life than we have tended to assume). And they reflected on their reading afterwards: Yesterday we set off soon after four. . . . Our road lay through a most pleasant country. In the coach we amused ourselves with some of the seventh volume of Mad. de Sevigne’s Letters, and some of Mrs [Sarah] Fielding’s. ’Tis vexatious in the last-named book to find such a mixture of refinement a perte de vue proceeding from her inclination to support, I fancy, a false system.22

On into the nineteenth century, when left to their own devices travel­ ling women were equally at home chatting, napping and reading, by turns: We started after six [a.m.], M and myself on the outside seat [of the coach]. What with pleasant conversation, the reading of ‘Rienzi’ [by Mary Russell Mitford] and the newspaper, and occasional little naps, I managed to spend an agreeable day.23

Given the date of this entry (1861) in the diary of Elizabeth Missing Sewell, it is hard to resist bringing to mind Egg’s 1862 painting The Travelling Companions (though Sewell and her companion were travel­ling by stage coach in Italy, whose railway system lagged behind that of the UK). We might read into that painting evidence of ‘good’ and/or ‘bad’ female reading practices, but in reality middle-class women clearly felt no guilt or embarrassment whatsoever about reading or sleeping while travelling (quite the reverse; these pastimes made travelling more ‘agreeable’ than not), and indeed, RED contains no references to either as a problem. Predictably, women’s testimonies increase in both number and diversity as the nineteenth century wears on. But the evidence for how people read and how they felt about doing so is remarkably consistent. In 1832, the British writer and actress Fanny Kemble described roads being so bad in the USA that reading in the coach was impossible, and here there’s a strong hint that being able to read comfortably while

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travelling was more a marker of decent civilisation than of social degeneration: Arrived at Amboy [New Jersey], we disembarked [from the steamboat] and bundled ourselves into our coach, ourselves, our namesake, and a pretty quiet lady. . . . The roads were unspeakable. . . . I attempted to read, but found it utterly impossible to do so.24

Even when it is not hazardous or difficult, reading while travelling is not, of course, always straightforward or planned, and this fact, too, has a long and remarkably stable history. Travel reading can be communal and shared (like Ruskin’s American tourists, or Elizabeth Fry’s coach companions); it can be stolen (like Boswell’s loss of his copy of The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia to Samuel Johnson). It can bind travellers together, or cause disagreements (like Pepys’s married couple, arguing over the merits of a book of verse). It can also be contentious, abandoned or even rejected outright. Susan Major’s fascinating work on excursion trains has shown that working-class travellers packed into oversold carriages were brought up before magistrates – or ended up injured or worse – on a regular basis for ignoring warnings handed or read out to them about not riding on rooftops, drinking excessively, or hanging out of carriage windows.25 There were versions of the rebellious travelling reader across all classes, and some rejected the safe and conservative entirely. The writer Ernest Dowson was determined not to be trapped by his regrettable choice on a long journey, and told a friend that he soon elected to do without it: I perceive you mention ‘Looking Backwards’ [a speculative fiction by the American author Edward Bellamy (1888)]. I write to save your life. Don’t DON’T DON’T read that most . . . [ellipsis in original] of shockers. I bought it at Truro coming up on the [Great Western Railway] lately and before I got to Plymouth it had retired out the window. It isn’t a shocker – it’s a dreary fraud.26

Reading can also be stolen. Well aware of the potential breach of etiquette she was performing, nonetheless, in late December of 1855 Elizabeth Gaskell could not resist reading over the shoulder of a fellow passenger on the horse-drawn omnibus to Knutsford: In the ’bus I sate next to somebody, whose face I thought I knew, & then I made out it was only that he was very like Mr Hensleigh Wedgwood; however he read ‘Little-Dorrit’ & I read it over his shoulder. Oh Polly! he was such a slow reader, you’ll sympathise, Meta won’t, my impatience at

116  Mary Hammond his never getting to the bottom of the page so we only got to the end of the page. We only read the first two chapters, so I never found out who ‘Little Dorrit’ is.27

Kate Flint describes this experience as an example of an ‘unreliable encounter with reading material . . . partial and frustrating’28 as a result of the transient space in which it occurs; and it is certainly that. But the letter also provides subtle evidence that Gaskell valued the ability to speed-read over its alternative (and one daughter’s prowess in that skill over the other’s); and, in a self-mocking denouement to the story that reveals the stranger in the bus was in fact someone she knew, it also reveals a certain pleasure in letting stolen reading in the anonymous public space take precedence over social niceties. This sort of experience – surely repeated a thousand times every day across the transport networks of Britain for several hundred years – raises some intriguing questions. For one thing, even a woman as careful of her public face as minister’s wife Elizabeth Gaskell clearly did not feel embarrassed to be reading on the move – even over someone’s shoulder; indeed, her story is underpinned by the assumption that such a practice has both a long precedent and a requisite skill set. But it also (like Hester Thrale’s earnest adviser with his helpful page marker) raises questions about the ways in which travelling was already understood to disrupt or alter the accessibility and the meaning of texts for a given individual. This surely suggests that any attempt to represent idealised travelling readers or direct the traveller’s reading tastes would have been received by at least some (if not many) contemporary viewers as naive and maybe even amusing. After all, even the devout Elizabeth Fry abandoned her scripture reading at one point on the journey and closed her eyes instead. One of the things that RED’s testimony restores to us, at least in part, is a sense of readers’ very human complexity – and, in the Victorians’ case, a wry and playful sense of humour quite at odds with the solemn obeisance to patriarchy we so often attribute to them. By the 1860s, and across the next two decades, women as well as men recorded their travel reading as a thing of duty, work, comfort, distraction and sometimes real joy; and there is no sense of guilt or awareness of moral surveillance in evidence anywhere. In the summer of 1867 Emma Darwin, wife of the famous naturalist, took a novel called The Lancashire Wedding; or, Darwin Moralized (anonymous, 1867) with her to read in a train carriage on a journey with her husband. ‘The moral is’, she confided to her daughter Henrietta later, ‘that it is not wise to give up a pretty, poor, healthy girl you love and

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marry a sickly, rich, cross one you don’t care for’. The book, she concluded, was ‘too dull [even] to give to the [village] library’. Thereafter she switched genres and lost herself in some Thackeray.29 Some readers found a book could remove them from their physical moment and transport them to another world, sometimes for days. On 7 December 1886, Henry James wrote to William Dean Howells: The last thing I did before leaving London three days and a half ago was to purchase [Howells’ novel] ‘Lemuel Barker’ . . . and though I laid him down twenty-four hours ago I am still full of the sense of how he beguiled and delighted and illumined my way. The beauties of nature passed unheeded and the St. Gotthard tunnel, where I had a reading lamp, was over in a shriek. The book is so awfully good that my perusal of it was one uninterrupted Bravo.30

James, indeed, was such an enthusiastic railway reader the journey was sometimes, for him, too short to accommodate the narrative: I have been reading the Hazard of New Fortunes . . . it has filled me with communicable rapture . . . I read the first volume just before I left London – and the second, which I began the instant I got into the train at Victoria, made me wish immensely that both it and the journey to Bale and thence were formed to last longer.31

Some travellers sensibly took a variety of different types of reading material with them, understanding what James apparently did not: that some types of material were better on a journey than others, and that boredom was best defeated by carrying a range of options. On 16 September 1891, Cornelia Sorabji, a student at Oxford, wrote home to her family in India about her trip across Ireland: We are in the far west. The journey North was a long one – from 9 am till 6.30 I had a Browning & Thackeray, a Criminal Digest & some need to work to occupy me & so time passed less heavily than I anticipated.32

By the 1890s and on into the early decades of the twentieth century, rail travel, with its improved lighting and comfort, provided an opportunity not only for catching up on missed classics or reading new literature, but also for rereading texts. This seems to have been particularly important for professional writers and critics (or those with aspirations in that direction); for these readers, it often seemed as though the train journey itself, simply by virtue of the time it held one captive, encouraged repeat reading and offered up a different level of enjoyment and engagement. It was thus an important new space in which to work, as well as to play. For example, as Philip Waller notes,

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‘[Walter] Besant told [William Robertson] Nicoll that no sooner had he read [Kipling’s] ‘The Light that Failed’ (1891) on a long train journey than he started it again and read it through a second time’.33 Arnold Bennett (like many a professional critic) used train journeys to reread material he wanted to review: I read [George Sturt’s] ‘A Year’s Exile’ during the three hours’ journey down here on Thursday afternoon, & have passed it on to Frank to review in Woman. As for me, I shall review it in Hearth & Home. I have now read it twice, and come to a definite conclusion about it.34

Indeed, Bennett used train journeys as prime reading time throughout his career, and not always for work: on another occasion ‘He travelled alone, by train [from Victoria to Rome] . . . reading ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ for the fourth time’,35 clearly for pure enjoyment. Professional women were no less committed to utilising their travel time effectively. The journal of Gertrude Bell (linguist, traveller, archaeologist, information gatherer for the British government and Middle East political adviser) is filled with references to a given journey as ‘prosperous’ largely because she has managed to do some reading. That reading ranged from George Moore to George Eliot, with everything in between (including Ruskin, whose disparaging remarks about travelling female readers in Italy clearly didn’t put her off): ‘Started at 11 from Victoria. . . . Very prosperous journey – smooth, fine. I read “Francis Cludde” [by Stanley Weyman] which is most exciting and interesting. Reached Paris at 7.30.’36 By the twentieth century, the idea of travelling as a golden opportunity to study, or to revisit and reflect on one’s reading, was firmly and widely established. On 29 September 1907 Leonard Woolf reread Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as he went up to Hatton in the train, and in 1911 he read The Brothers Karamazov at the rate of a page an hour while drifting across a lake in a steam boat.37 The pace of travel seems intricately linked to the depth of mental engagement here. In 1915, Virginia Woolf reread Pope’s Rape of the Lock on the train and his Essays on Criticism while waiting at Hammersmith station, and later commented ‘The classics make the time pass much better than the Pall Mall Gazette’.38 By 1926, far from feeling guilty about reading trash on the train, Gertrude Bell worried about the opposite problem, conscious that reading Dante on the train to Mesopotamia might make her and her companions seem snobbish: ‘We take with us a Dante from which to read our favourite cantos. It sounds rather priggish but I don’t think that matters. I shall also take some novels, I may add, and some delicatessen to eat in the train.’39 We need look

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no further than this for evidence that the performativity of women’s travel reading had come full circle. Conclusion The testimony of all these travelling readers – comfortable with, honest and often humorously expansive about their reading practices – suggests that Ruskin’s lament about the modern woman’s reading in the 1870s was not only the last gasp of a dinosaur, but perhaps the marker (like all those cautionary paintings) of a cultural psychosis that ordinary travellers of both genders were already likely to find a little eccentric. A woman accustomed to reading while travelling who saw one of Egg’s or Solomon’s paintings at an exhibition would surely not have interpreted it primarily as a warning about women behaving badly in public, or endangering their virtue. In fact, such a viewer may have been more likely to recognise in these images a new public space that women were free to occupy as they chose – a marker of a seismic shift in thinking about individual liberty. The truth is there is no evidence that anxiety about their reading had ever really affected women’s reading, or their travelling habits, which were already well established by the time steam trains and steam-driven printing presses and paper mills brought both literature and travel within the reach of almost everyone. As early as the 1860s, as Emma Darwin and Elizabeth Missing Sewell prove, reading of all kinds while travelling was not only already perfectly acceptable but expected of middle-class women. By the 1890s Gertrude Bell was as happy using Ruskin’s Modern Painters to navigate her way around classical Italy as devouring both popular novels and classics on trains, on ships and in tents all over the world. She was not alone. The RED is filled with such examples, which, though we have to use them with care, since all writing is of course a form of mediation, provide a critical mass of individual experiences with enough in common to enable us to adjust some previous assumptions. Read through the lens of all this real testimony, the mid-century rash of images of the female reader emerges most clearly, perhaps, as a response to broader anxieties about the increasing visibility of middle-class women in public spaces such as railway stations and carriages. It may also reflect the anxieties of men about how to deal with looking (or not looking) and perhaps even with being looked at themselves, or with having their looks go unnoticed – a set of practices existing outside the prescribed traditions of middle-class

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heterosexual courtship. Pictures of women’s reading, then, might not only have ‘served as markers and signifiers of femininity and feminine roles’, or ‘communicated a sense of visual possession, the presence of an “all-seeing eye” and an assumed right by the viewer (and artist) to enter the female’s space’, as Susan Casteras has suggested.40 They might also have been a way of simultaneously re-educating the possess­ive gaze of the anxious modern male, reassuring him (whatever his sexuality) that not all women in the public space were trying to catch his gaze, warning him that the power of his gaze had its limits, and reaffirming for the modern woman the right to her private mental space. With this convergence of art and common cultural practice in mind, the resurgence of women-and-reading paintings in the 1890s, such as Alexander Rossi’s Forbidden Books (1897), as discussed by Amelia Yeates,41 was, to many viewers, just a bit of fun or even overt titillation. In this image (typical of Rossi, whose works almost always celebrate the joy and beauty of youth) the joke is most definitely on the disapproving eavesdropping old matron dressed in black: the sunshine, the movement, the colour, the companionship and the sensual pleasure all belong to the young readers rifling through Daddy’s library. By the 1920s, female artists such as Swedish painter Agnes Cleve-Jonand were depicting the woman reader as a figure fully able to read unmolested. In Plate 13, Train Compartment (c. 1920), the foremost figure’s cold shoulder is turned firmly to the onlooker and the only male in the carriage is relegated to the pale background. The women claim the right to be defiantly alone with their reading and their thoughts in the public space. But in our common assumption that such freedom was a long time in coming, we may have been to some degree misled by our focus on the images, rather than the voices, of women readers. Travelling seems to have afforded women a space in which to defy the constraints of the domestic sphere from before the earliest days of steam, and they seem to have signalled it most clearly by their reading. Desultory or devotional, defiant or dutiful, partial or immersive, the reading of travellers serves as a useful marker of the myriad small ways in which individuals can be resistant to cultural pressures.

Notes   1. John Ruskin, Letter 20, in Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, 4 vols (London: George Allen, 1871–84), vol. II, pp. 269–70.

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 2. Ibid.   3. Amelia Yeates, ‘Space and Place in Nineteenth-Century Images of Women Readers’, in Jonathan Rose (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Reading: Common Readers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 96–115.  4. Susan P. Casteras, ‘Reader, Beware: Images of Victorian Women and Books,’ Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 3:1 (spring 2007), available at (last accessed 11 November 2019).  5. Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 4.  6. For the Reading Experience Database (henceforth RED), see (last accessed 15 August 2019). In notes that follow, I cite the record numbers for items included in RED, as well as the original source.   7. W. R. Owens, ‘Reading Aloud, Past and Present’, in Mary Hammond (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Reading: Early Readers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 297–314.  8. Rosalind Crone, Katie Halsey and Shafquat Towheed, ‘Examining the Evidence of Reading: Three Examples from the Reading Experience Database, 1450–1945’, in Bonnie Gunzenhauser (ed.), Reading in History: New Methodologies from the Anglo-American Tradition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), pp. 29– 46 (p. 30).  9. Kate Flint, ‘Traveling Readers’, in Rachel Ablow (ed.), The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience of Victorian Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), pp. 27–46 (p. 43). 10. Ibid., p. 31. 11. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 75–101. 12. C. Soames, ‘A Perilous Ride’, Belgravia, 19 (January 1873), pp. 386–9 (p. 388). 13. Letter from Robert Southey to Horace Walpole Bedford, 30 December 1793, Letter 78, in The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Romantic Circles Electronic Edition, at ; RED record number 24382. 14. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 1155–6; RED record number 22189. 15. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1971), vol. VI, p. 182; RED record number 12240. 16. Diary of William Coe, 24 May 1721, in Matthew Storey (ed.), Two East Anglian Diaries (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1994), p. 250; RED record number 218. 17. David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-​ Century Working-Class Autobiography (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 124.

122  Mary Hammond 18. Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son (London: Macmillan, 1897), vol. I, p. 17; RED record number 21242. 19. Elizabeth Fry, ‘Journal’, entry for 31 August 1798. British Library, Add Mss 47456, ff. 33; RED record number 22279. 20. Entry for August 1838 contributed by Fry’s travelling companion William Ball, a Quaker minister. Elizabeth Fry and Katharine Fry, Memoir of Elizabeth Fry, with extracts from her Journal and letters, edited by two of her daughters (London: J. C. Gilpin, 1847), vol. II, p. 279; RED record number 23123. 21. Hester Lynch Thrale, 30 November 1780, in Thraliana, ed. Katharine C. Balderston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), vol. I, p. 461, italics in original; RED record number 23269. 22. Letter dated 21 July 1753, in A Series of Letters between Mrs Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, from the year 1741 to 1770. To which are added, Letters from Mrs Elizabeth Carter to Mrs Vesey, between the years 1763 and 1787 (London: Rivington, 1809), vol. II, pp. 130–1; RED record number 28071. 23. Elizabeth Missing Sewell, 5 June 1861, in Impressions of Rome, Florence, and Turin, By the Author of ‘Amy Herbert’ (London: Longmans, 1862), p. 298; RED record number 13420. 24. Fanny Kemble, 3 December 1832, in Fanny Kemble’s Journals, ed. Catherine Clinton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 54; RED record number 7864. 25. Susan Major, Early Victorian Railway Excursions: The Million Go Forth (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Books, 2015). 26. Ernest Dowson to Arthur Moore, 18 October 1889, in Letters of Ernest Dowson, ed. Desmond Flower (London: Cassell, 1967), p. 109; RED record number 32271. 27. Elizabeth Gaskell to her daughters Marianne and Margaret, late 1855, in Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 373. Italics in original. 28. Flint, ‘Traveling Readers’, p. 29. 29. Emma Darwin to her daughter, summer 1867, in Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters, 1792–1896, ed. Henrietta Litchfield (London: John Murray, 1915), vol. II, p. 187; RED record number 29386. 30. Henry James to William Dean Howells, December 1886, in Henry James: Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), vol. III, p. 148; RED record number 6905. 31. Letter from Henry James to William Dean Howells, 17 May 1890, ibid., p. 281; RED record number 7025. 32. Cornelia Sorabji to her family in Poona, India, 16 September 1891, British Library mss F165/5; RED record number 20419. 33. Philip Waller, Readers, Writers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 959, n.152. 34. Arnold Bennett to George Sturt, 10 April 1898, in Letters of Arnold

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Bennett, ed. James Hepburn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 109. 35. Margaret Drabble, Arnold Bennett (London: Arts Book Society, 1974), p. 320. 36. Gertrude Bell, diary entry for 11 August 1894, Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University Library, at ; RED record number 30777. 37. Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 29 September 1907, in Letters of Leonard Woolf, ed. Frederic Spotts (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), p. 132; RED record number 19795; and Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 2 August 1911, ibid., p. 166; RED record number 19801. 38. Entry for 20 January 1915, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), vol. I, p. 24; RED record number 17982. 39. Letter from Gertrude Bell to Florence Bell, 27 January 1926, in Gertrude Bell Archive ; RED record number 30952. 40. Casteras, ‘Reader, Beware’, p. 13. 41. Yeates, ‘Space and Place’.

Chapter 6

The Empire Reads Back: Travel, Exploration and the British World in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries John McAleer

On his journey up the Congo in Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s Marlow encounters a torn and tattered book at one of the riverside trading stations: ‘Its title was, “An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship”, by a man Towser, Towson – some such name – Master in his Majesty’s Navy’. The book was undoubtedly ‘an extraordinary find’ although its contents could hardly have been more unremarkable: ‘The matter looked dreary reading enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of figures, and the copy was sixty years old.’ More interesting to Marlow, however, was the fact that the book provided physical evidence of the act of reading. It had ‘lost its covers, and the pages had been thumbed into a state of extremely dirty softness’. But ‘the back had been lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton thread’. The episode reminds us that reading was often just as important as writing and publishing in mediating European encounters with the rest of the world. The book purported to offer technical assistance to those who read it, but it also helped to combat boredom and provided a link with the outside world. It clearly offered comfort to the Russian who read it, and it gave Marlow ‘a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real’.1 Indeed, as Jane Blanchard notes, the entire incident questions the purpose and process of reading, as well as of writing, and exposes the tangled relationship between texts and reading, exploration and empire.2 This chapter investigates those complex connections between travel­ling and reading, with particular reference to the British ex­ perience of exploration and empire. It considers reading about travel and exploration, as well as reading undertaken while travelling in the service, or under the auspices, of empire. The period from the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, which included 124

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the European exploration of Africa described in Conrad’s novella, was a ‘profoundly textual era’.3 But it was also a period in which Britain’s place in the world changed dramatically, with the development of both formal and informal structures of empire and the creation of a ‘British world’. From the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Britain’s global influence expanded: greater scientific and governmental interest in the Pacific Ocean; stronger commercial and administrative links with India and China; the growth of Britain’s Asian empire through the agency of the East India Company; increasing numbers of settlers travelling to British colonies in Australasia, North America and southern Africa. And all of these processes were effected and affected by maritime connections and shipboard travel. Using examples drawn from these episodes, this chapter suggests some of the ways in which reading was intimately involved in the processes of understanding, extending and representing Britain’s increasingly global world. The evidence presented comes from a variety of sources: library-borrowing records, ship manifests, contemporary publications, and personal correspondence and journals. Taken together, the chapter argues that the history of reading sheds important light on the history of Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world. Books, libraries and publishing houses have long been associated with the formal and informal extension of political and cultural power, particularly with regard to the British experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, the relationship between travel, exploration and empire, on the one hand, and texts, on the other, has generally been considered in terms of production and distribution. Travellers kept journals, explorers recorded their experiences and migrants wrote their shipboard memoirs. Literary scholars have focused on the writing of texts and post-colonial responses to them. Historians of empire have emphasised collecting, recording and publishing as means of verification and authentication. It is true that, for many, this imperative was strong and directly connected to the reification of political power: at the end of his first voyage to the Pacific Ocean in the 1770s, for example, James Cook urged that its results be ‘published by authority to fix the prior right of discovery beyond dispute’.4 By contrast, however, the scholarship on empire has paid much less attention to the reception of books and texts by readers, or to the activity of reading before embarkation, on expedition or aboard ship. Indeed, if readers are the ‘missing link’ in the history of the book, they are also largely absent from histories of empire, travel and exploration.5 Yet, as Miles Ogborn suggests, reading is a ‘significant cultural act’.6 For David N. Livingstone, it is a

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‘cultural performance’.7 Ultimately, reading is a practice that is always ‘realised in specific acts, places and habits’.8 It follows, therefore, that historians of Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world need to consider the ways in which people read about it. Livingstone, offering a cultural geography of scientific reading, reminds us of ‘the fundamental importance of the spaces where reading takes place’ and the fact that where texts are read has a crucial impact on how they are read.9 Sailors, explorers, officials, merchants and settlers – key groups involved in forging imperial connections and travelling along maritime routes of trade and commerce in the period – consumed texts in significant quantities. And they did so for a variety of reasons. Reading inspired, informed and entertained. For some people, reading indicated a profound engagement with a subject or place, often begun in Britain and continued abroad, providing long-term inspiration. For others, it was a strictly functional activity, undertaken for solely professional reasons of information, instruction and advancement. People read to assist their travels as much as exploration and travel fed into their writing and publications. For yet others, reading was a fleeting and transitory experience, a brief encounter with a text that helped to while away some idle hours and combat imperial ennui.10 In short, when travellers engaged with the world, they also engaged with the written word. Historical experiences of reading and the histories of exploration and empire intersect in at least three ways. First, understanding the travel writing read in Britain sheds light on the way in which information about the wider world, and Britain’s expanded commercial and political presence within it, was presented to readers. Engaging with books of travel and exploration, which were extraordinarily popular in their day, opened new vistas on the Pacific, Oceania and Africa in particular. Unfamiliar landscapes, people and cultures were mediated to readers through books and their authors. Second, reading was a crucial technology, aiding European travellers to overcome distance, unfamiliar environments and practical obstacles. Having reference books to hand – and consulting them on the move – assisted travellers in a range of imperial, commercial, navigational and cultural endeavours. From accurately plotting one’s route to identifying botanical specimens correctly, books of instruction helped in the gathering and computation of information, observations and experiences. Third and finally, the reading that people did while travelling along the transport and communication links of empire gives us unique insights into the purpose that travellers themselves ascribed to that reading: spiritual succour, intellectual stimulation, respite from boredom. The

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discussion concludes by bringing together the themes of reading about places and reading in transit to consider the reading experiences of travellers aboard ship, the quintessential symbol of the early modern British Empire. Travellers’ tales Texts about travel and exploration formed a crucial element in the British engagement with the rest of the world in the period. There was, as William St Clair remarks, ‘a rapid expansion of new writing on foreign travel, voyages, [and] exploration’. No territory seemed to be too remote or obscure for the reading public in Britain, who ‘took all geography and all history into their consciousness’.11 Increasing numbers of travellers and explorers made journeys and reported back, usually with some concern for the advancement of perceived British interests, to an eager readership.12 In 1796, a review of Samuel Hearne’s Journey . . . to the Northern Ocean in the English Review observed that the ‘present taste for books of travels and voyages is stronger than that for any other species of composition or compilation’.13 At its most basic, travel writing introduced new people and places to armchair travellers in Britain in a period when the country’s global connections were expanding rapidly.14 As Robin Jarvis suggests, there was an ‘elementary pleasure in being imaginatively transported to a remote and otherwise unknowable country’.15 In 1777, a critic in the Monthly Review, assessing The Modern Traveller, remarked that ‘no kind of reading is more pleasing, and at the same time more instructive’, than travel literature.16 Measuring the impact of this kind of reading is difficult but we can get a sense of its widespread popularity from sales and library-borrowing figures. By the end of the eighteenth century, travel writing was second only to novels in numbers sold.17 As a contributor to the Monthly Review in 1805 remarked, ‘next to novels, voyages and travels constitute the most fashionable kind of reading’.18 Paul Kaufman’s survey of eighteenth-century English libraries corroborates the popularity of travel literature. The eclectic category of ‘travels, voyages, histories, and memoirs’ made up roughly 12 per cent of their total holdings; writing about travel was only superseded in popularity by theology and sermons in the early period and by novels in the period after 1760.19 Maritime exploration, and the raft of texts it inspired, is a notable example of the way in which travel generated significant material for the reading public in eighteenth-century Britain. Although only

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four British expeditions reached the Pacific Ocean in the first twenty years of the eighteenth century, they inspired six books and several pamphlets, as well as a variety of other published pieces. In contrast, there were just three books describing the much more numerous French voyages.20 Circumnavigations of the globe were also popular. William Dampier’s New Voyage Around the World (1697) was an instant bestseller, going into five editions in six years; fifty years later, the Voyage of Admiral George Anson (1748) went through five editions in seven months and had over 1,800 pre-publication subscribers.21 Even before the 1748 authorised version of Anson’s account became a bestseller, five unofficial accounts of the voyage had already been published.22 The effect of Anson’s text is evident from the example of Alexander Somerville, a farm labourer. Immediately upon acquiring the book, ‘everything gave way to admit the new knowledge of the earth’s geography, and the charms of human adventure which I found in those voyages, I had read nothing of the kind before, and knew nothing of foreign countries’.23 James Cook’s expeditions to the Pacific in the 1770s were particularly important in bringing exploration to a wide public readership. Official and unofficial accounts of these voyages proliferated: more than 100 editions and impressions were published between 1770 and 1800.24 Horace Walpole expected that the publishers, who had paid a huge advance for the account of Cook’s first voyage, would ‘take due care that we shall read nothing else till they meet with such another pennyworth’.25 John Hawkesworth, a self-educated author and editor, was selected to chronicle this expedition.26 Written in the first person, Hawkesworth’s narrative appeared in 1773 and was rapidly reprinted; a second edition appeared the same year. Although expensive, and aimed at an educated and elite readership, Hawkesworth’s Voyages quickly aroused widespread interest in the Pacific and its contents reached a wide section of the British public. It became the most popular title in the Bristol Library from 1773 to 1784, for example, being borrowed 115 times between 1773 and 1775, and 201 times over the whole period.27 Similar patterns can be discerned in texts dealing with other parts of the globe in which British involvement and interest were increasing: North America and the Indian subcontinent from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, and polar and African exploration in the nineteenth century. Few readers could hope to follow in the wake of these global travellers, making their accounts all the more popular for domestic audiences. But travel texts, descriptions of people and places, had an impact over and above their circulation figures. Travel literature framed

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encounters with unknown places and unfamiliar people, and books of travels became cultural reference points. Referring to the published account of James Bruce’s travels in Ethiopia, Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarked that ‘there was one book of the day which everybody who read at all was reading – Bruce’s “Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile”’.28 Mary Mitford, the author and dramatist, was similarly enthralled by ‘the singular mixture of romantic adventure and historical truth’ in Bruce’s Travels and was ‘never . . . so carried away by a man in my life’.29 In reviewing the British exploration of West Africa in 1848, Captain William Allen emphasised the link between exploration, the dissemination of knowledge, and a culture of reading: ‘Mungo Park’s simple and touching narrative is so well known to all who read, that it will be only necessary to refer to the achievement which has placed him at the head of African travellers’.30 James Cook’s travels were among the most popular points of reference. For example, Lucie Duff Gordon drew on her reading experiences to describe her situation in southern Africa in the middle of the nineteenth century: To those who think voyages and travels tiresome, my delight in the new birds and beasts and people must seem very stupid. I can’t help it if it does, and am not ashamed to confess that I feel the old sort of enchantment and wonder with which I used to read Cook’s voyages and the like as a child.31

For Maria Graham, Cook’s voyages were ‘the finest things next to Robin [sic] Crusoe & the tale of Troy – his people are real creatures & his places true places’.32 In describing a camp scene in Africa, Frederick Selous, a big-game hunter, ‘recalled to my mind the pictures, in an old book at home of Captain Cook’s voyages, of the South Sea Islanders dancing round the fire during the preparation of a savoury meal of human flesh’.33 And from his posting in India, James Strange decided to fit out a voyage to the Columbia River on the Pacific coast of America influenced by ‘an attentive perusal of Captain Cook’s last voyage’.34 As well as entertaining, encouraging and offering examples to be emulated, reading travel literature aided the production of subsequent texts while citing it provided evidence of erudition and learning.35 In many ways, processes of citation and quotation, which facilitated the assimilation and creation of new texts by comparing them with familiar ones, are similar to the ‘continuous horizon setting and horizon changing’ that, as Hans Robert Jauss argues, often inform readers’ responses to unfamiliar texts.36 For example, there are references to over thirty-five different explorers in Charles Darwin’s

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published account of his voyage on the Beagle and some of these are mentioned a dozen times.37 George Thompson lauded the achievements of his illustrious predecessors in southern Africa – Barrow, Lichtenstein and Burchell – in order to place himself and his narrative in this continuum of references.38 Thompson advertised the information and knowledge that he acquired through reading and, in doing so, he staked a claim for his own credibility and trustworthiness. Later in the century, Frederick Selous was transfixed by the many accounts of hunting endeavours that he had read in his youth in Britain. He was particularly taken by an image in one of those many books: I remember even today, and with perfect distinctness, though I have not seen it for many years, a certain picture in Gordon Cumming’s well-known book on African hunting, and the fearful fascination it always had for me when I was a small boy.39

For another African explorer, Thomas Baines, the library at Cape Town whetted his appetite for travel. He spent many hours in the reading room, absorbing the accounts of such authors as William Cornwallis Harris, to whom he refers repeatedly in his subsequent journals. Browsing the shelves of the library did not merely bring Baines into contact with his predecessors but helped to lay the foundations of his historical understanding of the regions and people that he would subsequently encounter. His research in the library resulted in a 40,000-word account of the history of the Cape Colony, from its inception as a Dutch victualling post in 1652 right up to the War of the Axe (1846–8), which drew upon an impressively eclectic range of source material.40 Travelling books Travellers not only read in preparation for travel. They frequently carried a range of texts with them, carefully choosing publications to assist their endeavours. Many books were designed to travel with their reader, where they could offer advice in the field. Unlike other forms of reading – undertaken for pleasure or to while away the time – reading here served profoundly practical and functional purposes. For example, copies of Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations were carried aboard East India Company vessels and relied upon by their captains. In one incident, a master located a safe harbour by consulting ‘the Book’ (Principall Navigations), thereby saving his ship and £20,000 in expenses.41 Later, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of

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Nations (1776) became a popular text for those preparing to serve the Company in India. Before joining his older brothers on the sub­ continent, Alexander Fraser of Reelig, Inverness-shire, prepared a crib sheet on Smith’s work, paying particular attention to his remarks on the East India Company.42 In this sense, then, books might be regarded as key technologies of empire, assisting travel, exploration and imperial expansion. This was not confined to the British or Anglo­ phone experience, of course. Neil Safier has shown, for example, that the activities of Portuguese travellers in the Amazon basin in the eighteenth century were directly shaped by their travelling libraries and reading practices.43 Travellers relied on a variety of books, such as handbooks and instruction manuals, to regulate their work and direct their observations.44 Useful texts such as Berchtold’s An Essay to Direct and Extend the Inquiries of Patriotic Travellers (1789) instructed readers on how to collect detailed information on prices, commodities and local practices, even providing blank tables for the reader to complete.45 In their guide, published in 1871, William Lord and Thomas Baines gave advice on the kinds of books that more adventurous travellers should take with them. These covered topics like astronomy, navigation, mathematics, trigonometry, surveying, the construction of maps and the use of instruments. They advised travellers to bring Robert Sullivan’s Geography Generalised (1863) and an updated version of Colonel Julian Jackson’s What to Observe; or, Travelling Remembrancer.46 And they also counselled that ‘every one ought to possess the Admiralty Manual of Scientific Enquiry, which is a series of papers written for the direction of explorers by men of the highest standing in various sciences; and no better general work can be recommended’.47 Scientific expeditions and voyages of maritime exploration needed entire reference libraries, to help navigate or regulate the vessel and to entertain or edify individuals. As early as 1631, when Captain Thomas James fitted out his vessel in Bristol for a voyage in search of the Northwest Passage, he purchased ‘a chest full of the best and choicest mathematicall bookes that could be got for money in England; as likewise Master Hackluite and Master Purchas, and other books of Journals and Histories’.48 On Cook’s first voyage, an account of the circumnavigation of Admiral George Anson was taken on board the Endeavour.49 Joseph Banks, who accompanied Cook’s expedition, carried a further sixty titles, including accounts of previous voyages to the Pacific, major works on natural history and the travels of natural historians to regions beyond Europe, such as Brazil and Jamaica. These texts provided Banks with an instantly accessible corpus of

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reference material to assist his research.50 Books also facilitated the work of the Investigator in charting the coast of Australia in the first decade of the nineteenth century under Lieutenant Matthew Flinders. In addition to an impressive array of precision instruments and expertise, the Investigator relied on an extensive list of reading material. The expedition was under the patronage of Banks, who had by then become president of the Royal Society. Perhaps inspired by his own experiences, Banks ensured that the vessel was equipped with a comprehensive library of charts and relevant literature, and lent his copy of the Endeavour log from Cook’s first voyage. Prior to sailing, Flinders asked for a range of charts, material on the voyages of Dampier, Dalrymple, Cook and Bligh, and Murdoch McKenzie’s Treatise on Maritime Surveying (1797). He also requested the Encyclo­ paedia Britannica, presumably the third edition in fifteen volumes, published between 1788 and 1797.51 Other sea travellers, not engaged in specifically scientific pursuits, were less generously provisioned. But, as Harold Otness has remarked, as long as there have been books, they have been taken to sea.52 Surviving evidence suggests that books and reading played a role in the lives of those plying Britain’s maritime routes of communication and commerce in the period. The diary of Arthur Bowes Smyth, ship’s surgeon on the Lady Penrhyn, a member of the First Fleet (the ships that brought the convicts and officials who founded the first European settlement in Australia), offers insights into the variety of, and value attributed to, books and reading. On their way to New South Wales, Smyth received ‘a present of the 4 vol[ume]s of the Dictionary of Arts and Science’. This was followed, on New Year’s Day 1788, by ‘two fol[io] vol[ume]s of Hamilton Moor’s Voyages and Travels’.53 Calling at stopping-off places allowed them to acquire additional reading material. For example, at Cape Town in December 1787, a midshipman came on board ‘with a parcel of magazines of June last’. These afforded the passengers a ‘great treat’ as most of the content was ‘perfectly new to us having left England on the 12th of May’.54 There was a close association between reading and emigration. The authors of handbooks offered advice on the kinds of books to bring, while others counselled on the wise use of the unusual amount of leisure time afforded by a long sea voyage. The Reverend David McKenzie urged migrants: ‘Shipboard is your place of study. Consider every hour valuable, and diligently employ it in reading or meditation.’55 Some later migrant ships travelling to Australia had a designated space for a library. On the James Baines, this was in the ladies’ cabin, which measured ‘30 feet by 13 and 6½ high’ and

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presented a comfortable appearance: ‘It is pure white with gilt and carved work on the panels and papier maché cornices, furnished with sofas, piano, mirrors also a small but well selected library.’56 Such shipboard libraries could be supplied fully equipped, through the purchase of chests or boxes containing fifteen or twenty books each.57 For example, by 1850, the Religious Tract Society provided three box libraries, for twenty shillings apiece, each comprising fifteen volumes of ‘practical theology, biology, history, and general information’. The ‘Chambers Portable Library’ offered a ‘selection of amusing and instructive reading, well adapted for private families, emigrants, ships’ libraries &c.’ in 1855.58 Those travelling to Asia in the service of empire often used the long sea voyage, and the opportunities to read that it afforded, to acquire new knowledge and skills. Chief among these were languages. William Jones, a key figure in the European scholarly engagement with India, spent his voyage thinking about oriental languages and setting out the ‘Objects of Enquiry’ to be undertaken ‘during my residence in Asia’.59 William Massie, who travelled to India in 1826 as an ensign in the Bengal Army, was ‘determined to make the most of my time before reaching India’ by familiarising himself with ‘Gilchrist’s Hindostanee Dictionary’ on the voyage.60 He was first alerted to the value of this text when one of his travelling companions produced it ‘as we were passing the Cape’. Massie found Gilchrist’s ‘grammar so clear and the language itself so delightfully easy’ that, by his own account, he had mastered it ‘tolerably well’ in three weeks.61 Although it was ‘a most expensive book’, Massie thought it was ‘worth the price’.62 And he recommended ‘other books which are absolutely necessary’ for those travelling to India: ‘Sir Henry Torrens[’s] Evolutions [and] to persons who read or wish to read Mathematics, a Hutton course of Mathematics which is principally for military men and which is a daily amusement to me’.63 William Stephens Dicken, on his way to Calcutta to take up a position with the Bengal Medical Service, recorded in his diary for 6 October 1829: ‘I have been writing Hindustani this morning, and I flatter myself I am getting on exceedingly well; I do not think the language a difficult one.’64 Earlier in the voyage, Dicken had had the pleasure of ‘reading a very interesting book (Travels in the Mogul Empire)’. His interpretation of why he found the book so diverting probably applied to many of his colleagues: ‘To me who am shortly to see what I have only read of, [it] makes it highly interesting’.65 It was not all left up to individuals. The East India Company – the body responsible for British commercial and political authority in

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India until 1858 – took an active interest in the reading material of its officials.66 A military circular of 11 April 1839 recorded that ‘a box of books’ was to be sent on board every Company ship ‘for the amusement and instruction of the [military] recruits’ travelling to the subcontinent. This treasure trove was to ‘be placed in charge of the senior non-commissioned officer of the detachment to whom you will issue a donation of ten rupees if the officer in command shall certify that he has performed the duty in a satisfactory manner’. And there were further instructions to be carried out upon arrival in Asia, demonstrating the importance accorded to books and reading by the Company: ‘The books are on the arrival of the detachment to be delivered to your secretary in the Military Department who will forward them to the different military Libraries established by us at the station for European troops.’67 These examples demonstrate the variety of reading material on offer to travellers embarking in the service of empire in the period, as well as underlining the different uses to which such material could be put. But to understand more fully the effects of reading, we need to explore further the experiences and reactions of those who read while travelling. Reading experiences The sea routes along which people, goods, and ideas travelled – the sinews of the British world in the period – provide some of the most interesting examples of reading on the move. On approaching Brisbane in 1864, and the impending conclusion of his voyage from Britain, Richard Watt recorded that ‘many of our old tropical habits have come into form again today, such as lounging and basking in the sun with an interesting book’.68 William Massie’s early-morning routine on his voyage to India involved sitting ‘at the window till breakfast time in my dressing gown reading’.69 For these travellers, as for many others plying the maritime routes that connected Britain with its far-flung colonies in the period, reading helped to dispel loneliness and boredom. One traveller on his way to India in 1832, possibly the ship’s captain, Thomas Callan, spent a ‘day reading Scott’s Tales of Crusaders for want of something better to do’.70 While, as William St Clair has pointed out, there are methodological problems in dealing with individual responses, they can provide us with rare insights into what people thought when they were reading.71 They contribute to capturing those traces of reading experiences that, as Mary

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Hammond reminds us, are usually ‘ephemeral and un­recorded’.72 Ultimately, therefore, the evidence contained in these readers’ testimonies demonstrates the important role of the written word in mediating travellers’ engagement with the wider world. Reading provided one of the few intellectual pastimes available to those on long sea voyages with an unusually large amount of leisure time. The most popular books among passengers aboard the Pestonjee Bomanjee, sailing for Australia in 1854, were ‘history, biography, travels, tales, and above all books treating of the colonies’.73 Richard Watt set out from Plymouth on the Young Australia in May 1864. As the ship traversed the Atlantic Ocean, he ‘cheered the dull hours by reading one of the ship’s library books – “Martin Chuzzlewit”! – and the time has flown rapidly’.74 The evidence of his journal suggests that he was an eclectic reader and frequent user of the ship’s library. He valued its scholarly attributes, remarking on 23 May: ‘The ship’s library again gives employment to those inclined to be studious.’ 75 At the end of the month, with the Canary Islands in sight, Watt noted: ‘engaged myself all day reading “Self Help” by Sam Smiles and have been highly interested’.76 Edward Buckell, on his way to India, took a little while to get ‘into a reading condition’ but he soon began similarly ‘to feel a desire for a little study’.77 William Massie, who also had self-improving tendencies, spent time ‘devouring Hume’s history ravenously’. His main fear was of ‘getting through it too soon’. And Massie’s supply of reading material did not benefit just him: ‘My books are all of them the greatest prize not only to myself but to all the passengers who are very glad to have any to read, and to whom of course I am glad to have them to lend.’78 Although W. D. Howells, writing in 1911, recommended using the enforced leisure of a long sea voyage to read the classics, most reading aboard ship was an eclectic mix of fact and fiction, education and entertainment.79 The example of Edward Buckell, surgeon on the Malacca, sailing from England to Bombay and then on to China in 1850, provides an unusually comprehensive picture of the reading practices of someone in his position. Buckell’s diary offers an insight into the kinds of reading material and reading practices that charac­ terised mid-nineteenth-century voyages. He seems to have been an admirer of Shakespeare, and the voyage allowed him to make his way through the canon. He read ‘part of Shakespeare’s Henry VI’ on 2 January 1850 as the ship set sail from Portsmouth, followed by Henry VI (10 January), Love’s Labour Lost (12 March), A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream (14 March), Two Gentlemen of Verona (15 March), The Merchant of Venice (16 March), The Taming of the

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Shrew (18 and 19 March) and All’s Well That Ends Well (21 and 22 March). He finished Othello after tea on 25 March.80 These were read in conjunction with another passenger, a ‘Mr Knife’. On 21 March, Buckell expressed his contentment with the arrangements: ‘Mr Knife and I still go on with our historical readings which helps to pass the time away very pleasantly and not unprofitably’.81 Buckell’s reading also encompassed religious tracts, sermons and commentaries. On 9 January, for example, he ‘began the work of Josephus and read for an hour or two’ until ‘the violent rolling motion’ of the ship made it impossible to continue.82 Later in the voyage, Buckell ‘amused myself all day by reading “The Mount of Olives” by [James] Hamilton of Regent Square Church’.83 After breakfast on 12 January, he ‘read the 11 Ch of Genesis with the commentaries and a good quantity of Josephus and also a tract of Dr Archer’s lecture on the “Characteristics of the Middle Ages”’. He ‘cut the leaves of Fergusson’s Surgery’ in preparation for reading that too.84 Reading for what today we would call professional development formed a major part of his study aboard the Malacca. On 6 February, he says, ‘I have commenced reading Blundell’s Midwifery and Thompson’s Practice of Medicine and intend to go regularly through them both before I begin any other work. How far my practice will accord with my intentions time will prove.’85 On 25 March, he ‘read two chapters of Grecian history as usual – also some of Barne’s [sic] Midwifery – finished Othello after tea . . . read some of Paul’s Epistle to Romans with commentary.’86 The following day, Buckell lamented his limited opportunities to get through everything he planned to read: I have had Wilson’s book on skin diseases lent me by Miss Brown. I began it today but having such a vast stock of reading to do before reaching Bombay I much fear that I shall not be able to finish it but I shall try as tis a branch of medical science in which I am by no means well informed.87

The passage to China from India offered ‘a fine opportunity to read up a little’. On 20 June, Buckell spent the day reading widely and eclectically: ‘Bible – Commentary – Milner’s Astronomy – Pickwick and Combes’ Mental Derangements’.88 On 15 January, ‘The captain has kindly lent me a work on the Laws of [Oleron] by Mr Thorn which I intend to study as well as one not acquainted with naval affairs can do or should do in order to get a general notion of the subject. I read all Thompson on dysentery this morning.’89 Buckell’s extraordinarily varied diet of reading material and subject matter reminds us of the eclectic nature of contemporary taste, as well as the unusual opportunity for reading afforded to shipboard passengers.

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As Stephen Berry points out, however, and notwithstanding the eclectic range of subjects mentioned by the readers quoted above, the book most widely read on board was the Bible, and most reading activity in the period revolved around some form of religious text.90 Bound for Canada in 1837, John Fraser of Glasgow ‘distributed religious tracts among the Passengers, many of whom could not read’, but ‘those who could accepted them with avidity’.91 Shortly after departing on the Red Jacket bound for Melbourne in 1856, twenty-year-old Edward Cornell ‘went below and distributed a few tracts this afternoon’, which ‘were gratefully received by most’. Cornell was pleased ‘to see so many carefully reading their Bible’.92 During his voyage, Richard Watt recounted that ‘our worthy pastor read us a good lesson on the uncertainty of life, especially at sea and the immense necessity of being prepared for eternity from which we are but separated by a plank. How awful indeed.’93 While leisure time gave sailors and passengers the opportunity to read, there was often great difficulty associated with reading while travelling, particularly at sea. Adverse weather, darkness, illness and physical tiredness all militated against curling up comfortably with a good book.94 At the outset of his voyage, Jonathan Ware was ‘quite unequal to commence writing or even reading for 10 minutes together’ due to sea sickness.95 While Edward Cornell was happy to see his fellow passengers gratefully accept the religious tracts that he had distributed, he understood that reading them was ‘by no means easy below deck for want of good light’.96 Interruptions were another common problem. Reflecting on his voyage in 1831, John Henderson remarked that a ‘ship is not the best place in the world for study or meditation. Some interruption is constantly occurring. No sooner have you laid your books out before you . . . than a fellow-passenger puts his head down a skylight.’97 Theatrical performances, or rather the rehearsals that preceded them, did not endear this common pastime to the reflective reader. Edward Buckell was incandescent with rage at his fellow passengers: ‘they’re all spouting blank verse to one another and having unnumbered rehearsals in all parts of the ship’. As a result of this activity, Buckell declared that ‘there is no such thing as getting a quiet corner to read in’.98 Noise and clamour were common themes. In recording his voyage aboard the East Indiaman Atlas, the veterinary surgeon George Morris lamented that the serene scene presented by the sky and ocean when the ship crossed the Tropic of Cancer was not replicated below deck: ‘a cursed noise in the great cabin with the infernal flutes that there is no reading, writing or anything else to be done. Tiresome beyond measure enough to drive one distracted.’99

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Reading aloud was a popular shipboard pastime: perhaps such performances helped to mitigate other noises, distractions and difficulties. Gerard Montagu, on his voyage to Bombay as a voluntary apprentice in the merchant ship Princess Charlotte, found that he ‘had but little time which I could call my own excepting on Sunday, which I usually occupied by reading for I had fortunately taken a few books with me’. Montagu discovered that he could entertain more than just himself: Many of the men were not able to read, and I found that by reading aloud I gave them much pleasure and amusement. They often gathered around me when they saw me with my book, and in this way I occupied many happy hours. I read to them from several books but that which they were more particularly fond was the Saturday Magazine [i.e. Penny Magazine]. They really looked forward with pleasure to the hour which was set apart for this purpose usually about four o’clock in the afternoon, at which time I generally found them anxiously waiting with a seat prepared for me and themselves placed in a snug around it. In fine weather we generally assembled on deck to enjoy the coolness of the open air.100

On his voyage to Australia on the James Baines in 1857, Alfred Withers ‘read to Madge [his wife] Household Words on deck for 2 hours while she was netting’ on 27 January. Two days later, the same publication occupied the couple for three hours after breakfast. And the pattern was repeated on 30 January: ‘Did our usual Household Readings, smokings etc. during the day’.101 The experience of reading aloud on the James Baines was not confined to Withers and his family: the ship’s newspaper, the James Baines Times, offered the chance for communal listening and criticism. By the mid-nineteenth century, the circulation of manuscripts in the form of newspapers was one of the most popular saloon entertainments.102 Many survive, usually in the form of versions printed by subscription after arrival as mementoes of the voyage.103 On 18 January, the first edition of the paper was read aloud by another passenger, Captain Bunbury of the Royal Navy. Withers’s response was not entirely positive, concluding that the paper was ‘like what all such productions generally are, very tame, dull, insipid and fuggy, one piece of poetry was particularly incomprehensible and consequently very amusing, but all the funny things were dreadfully serious’. Others reacted more favourably: the enterprise ‘was pronounced however a very great success for the first number and the thing is to be perpetrated weekly’.104 As with Alfred Withers, shipboard newspapers provided some communal reading activity for Richard Watt and his fellow passengers. He recorded in

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his journal that on 4 June ‘the first number of the “Young Australia Times” was read today on the poop by a Mr Shaw (salooner) and although I was not fortunate enough to hear I believe it contained much witty matter’.105 The ship on which Watt travelled sustained two newspapers. On 9 July, the cabin-class passengers published: the first number of ‘Etches and Sketches’ and after going the round of the second cabin it was sent to the editors of the ‘Illustrated Times’ who returned it later in the evening with a note and this week’s ‘Times’. The note said our paper had been read to all in the saloon who were intensely gratified. The sketches too were loudly eulogised and the artist’s name (I am proud to say) was ‘honourably mentioned’. In connection with the papers I may say amalgamation has been mentioned tonight.106

The communal activity of reading aloud, the religious motivations associated with some forms of reading, and the difficulties encountered by all shipboard readers alert us to the fact that reading practices provide information on more than just the choice of reading material or the popularity of different genres. Rather, they help to contextu­ alise further the kinds of material being read aboard such vessels by giving us insights into social conditions and cultural attitudes on ships. More broadly, they offer perspectives on the value ascribed to reading while on the move, and the importance attached to reading by those travelling around the British world. Conclusion The examples considered in this chapter demonstrate that reading about travel, exploration and empire was undertaken by different people in a variety of places for a host of reasons. People in Britain read about travels overseas, as the world beyond Europe came into view and was brought under closer inspection. But reading was not just illustrative and inspirational: it was also instructive and informative. Travellers read to prepare themselves for their future endeavours. And people read on the move: to educate themselves, to relieve boredom or simply to remind them of home comforts. Reading is a form of cultural engagement with the wider world. The place where one reads matters. The history of reading is also, therefore, a history of the cultural context in which it takes place.107 European empires in the early modern period were undoubtedly concerned with codifying, categorising and reducing things to print. But they were also about reading. Reading performed functions that

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imbricate the process in the growth, development and representation of Britain’s global empire. We need to consider reading and its complex, multifarious relationship with travel, exploration and empire. Michel de Certeau’s assertion that ‘readers are travellers’ applies literally as well as metaphorically: when travellers engaged with the world, they also engaged with the published word.108

Notes   1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, ed. Cedric Watts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 189.  2. Jane Blanchard, ‘The Book on Seamanship in “Heart of Darkness”’, Pacific Coast Philology, 45 (2010), pp. 42–52 (p. 46).   3. Innes M. Keighren, Charles W. J. Withers and Bill Bell, Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773–1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 8.  4. Quoted in Glyn Williams, Voyages of Delusion: The Search for the Northwest Passage in the Age of Reason (London: HarperCollins, 2010), p. 354.   5. David Finkelstein and Alastair McCleery, Introduction to Book History (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 100.   6. Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 9.  7. David N. Livingstone, ‘Science, Text and Space: Thoughts on the Geography of Reading’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30 (2005), pp. 391–401 (p. 395).  8. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, ‘Introduction’, in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds), A History of Reading in the West (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), pp. 1–36 (p. 2).   9. Livingstone, ‘Science, Text and Space’, pp. 392, 391. 10. Jeffery A. Auerbach, ‘Imperial Boredom’, Common Knowledge, 11 (2005), pp. 283–305. 11. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 233. 12. Roy Bridges, ‘Exploration and Travel Outside Europe’, in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 53–69 (pp. 55, 57). 13. Quoted in Robin Jarvis, Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel: Expeditions and Tours in North America (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), p. 55. 14. James Duncan and Derek Gregory (eds), ‘Writes of Passage’: Reading Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 3. 15. Jarvis, Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel, p. 25.

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16. Monthly Review, 56 (1777), p. 392, cited in Katherine Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe, 1750–1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 23. 17. Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 26, n. 2. 18. Quoted in Jarvis, Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel, p. 19. 19. Paul Kaufman, ‘The Community Library: A Chapter in English Social History’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 57 (1967), pp. 5–67. 20. Glyn Williams, Naturalists at Sea: Scientific Travellers from Dampier to Darwin (London: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 28. 21. O. H. K. Spate, ‘Seamen and Scientists: The Literature of the Pacific, 1697–1798’, in Roy MacLeod and Philip F. Rehbock (eds), Nature in its Greatest Extent: Western Science in the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988), pp. 13–26 (pp. 14, 15). 22. Williams, Voyages of Delusion, p. 147. 23. Quoted in Jarvis, Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel, p. 37. 24. Alan Frost, ‘New Geographical Perspectives and the Emergence of the Romantic Imagination’, in Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston (eds), Captain Cook and His Times (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1979), pp. 5–19 (pp. 6–7). 25. Quoted in Helen Wallis, ‘Publication of Cook’s Journals: Some New Sources and Assessments’, Pacific Studies, 1 (1978), pp. 163–94 (p. 165). 26. Nicholas Thomas, Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 152. 27. Paul Kaufman, Borrowings from the Bristol Library: 1773–1784 (Charlottes­ville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1960), p. 122. 28. Quoted in Miles Bredin, The Pale Abyssinian: A Life of James Bruce, African Explorer and Adventurer (London: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 204. 29. Quoted in Jarvis, Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel, p. 37. 30. William Allen, A Narrative of an Expedition Sent by Her Majesty’s Govern­ment to the River Niger, in 1841, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1848), vol. I, p. 9 (original emphasis). 31. Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from the Cape, ed. John Purves (London: Humphrey Milford, 1921), Letter X (22 February 1862), p. 123. 32. Quoted in Keighren et al., Travels into Print, p. 73. 33. Frederick Courteney Selous, A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa (London: Bentley, 1881), p. 70. 34. Quoted in James R. Fichter, So Great a Profitt: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 214. 35. Keighren et al., Travels into Print, pp. 78–80. 36. Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’, New Literary History, 2 (1970), pp. 7–37 (p. 13).

142  John McAleer 37. John Tallmadge, ‘From Chronicle to Quest: The Shaping of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle’, Victorian Studies, 23 (1979–80), pp. 325–45 (p. 337). 38. George Thompson, Travels and Adventures in Southern Africa, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), vol. I, p. viii. 39. Frederick Courteney Selous, African Nature Notes and Reminiscences (London: Macmillan, 1908), p. 47. 40. J. P. R. Wallis, Thomas Baines of King’s Lynn, Explorer and Artist, 1820–1875 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1941), p. 45; Thomas Baines, Journal of Residence in Africa, 1842–1853, ed. R. F. Kennedy, 2 vols (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1961–4), vol. II, pp. 54, 101. 41. Harry R. Skallerup, Books Afloat and Ashore: A History of Books, Libraries, and Reading Among Seamen During the Age of Sail (Hamden: Archon Books, 1974), p. 4. 42. Mark R. M. Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and Their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750–1820 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 191–2. 43. Neil Safier, ‘“Every day that I travel . . . is a page that I turn”: Reading and Observing in Eighteenth-Century Amazonia’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 70 (2007), pp. 103–28. 44. Livingstone, ‘Science, Text and Space’, p. 392. 45. Shef Rogers, ‘Enlarging the Prospects of Happiness: Travel Reading and Travel Writing’, in Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. V: 1695–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 781–90 (p. 784). 46. William B. Lord and Thomas Baines, Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life, Travel and Exploration (London: Horace Cox, 1871), pp. 31–2. 47. Ibid., p. 32. 48. Miller Christy (ed.), The Voyages of Captain Luke Foxe of Hull and Captain Thomas James of Bristol, 2 vols (London: Hakluyt Society, 1894), vol. II, pp. 265–7, 606. 49. Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1992), p. 53. 50. Ibid., p. 43. 51. Claire Warrior and John McAleer, ‘Objects of Exploration: Expanding the Horizons of Maritime History’, in Charles W. J. Withers and Fraser MacDonald (eds), Geography, Technology and Instruments of Exploration (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 97–118 (pp. 103–4). 52. Harold M. Otness, ‘Passenger Ship Libraries’, Journal of Library History, 14 (1979), pp. 486–95 (p. 486). 53. Paul G. Fidlon and R. J. Ryan (eds), The Journal of Arthur Bowes Smyth: Surgeon, Lady Penrhyn, 1787–1789 (Sydney: Australian Documents Library, 1979), pp. 45, 52. 54. Ibid., p. 49. 55. David McKenzie, Ten Years in Australia (London: William Orr, 1851), pp. 152–3.

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56. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (NMM), JOD/171/1, ‘Log book of the James Baines’ [Diary of Alfred Withers], 1857, p. 98. 57. Skallerup, Books Afloat and Ashore, pp. 32–5. 58. Bill Bell, ‘Bound for Australia: Shipboard Reading in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Australian Studies, 25 (2001), pp. 5–18 (p. 6). 59. Garland Cannon, ‘Sir William Jones, Persian, Sanskrit and the Asiatic Society’, Histoire Epistémologie Langage, 6 (1984), pp. 83–94 (p. 87); Michael Palencia-Roth, ‘The Presidential Addresses of Sir William Jones: The Asiatick Society of Bengal and the ISCSC’, Comparative Civilizations Review, 56 (2007), pp. 21–39 (pp. 25–6). 60. British Library (BL), Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections (APAC), Mss Eur B74, pp. 54, 53, William Henry Massie to Mrs Massie [mother], 26 September 1826. 61. Ibid., p. 54. 62. Ibid., p. 55. 63. Ibid., p. 54. 64. BL, APAC, Mss Eur C366/1, ‘Journal of a Voyage to India, by William Stephens Dicken, 1829–30’, p. 66. 65. Ibid., p. 11. 66. Sharon Murphy, ‘Imperial Reading? The East India Company’s Lending Libraries for Soldiers, c.1819–1834’, Book History, 12 (2009), pp. 74–99. 67. BL, India Office Records, E/4/759, military circular, 11 April 1839, pp. 222–3. 68. Richard Watt, ‘Second Cabin Passage’, Sea Breezes, 22 (1956), pp. 82–92 (p. 82). Quotes here and below are taken from this transcription of Watt’s 1864 journal, published in serialised form. 69. BL, APAC, Mss Eur B74, p. 28, William Henry Massie to Mrs Massie [mother], 26 September 1826. 70. BL, APAC, Mss Eur D737/7, Journal of a voyage from Liverpool to Calcutta in the ship Bland, pp. 11–12. 71. St Clair, The Reading Nation, pp. 5–6. 72. Mary Hammond, ‘Book History in the Reading Experience’, in Leslie Howsam (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 237–52 (p. 237). 73. Quoted in Andrew Hassam, No Privacy for Writing: Shipboard Diaries, 1852–1879 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1995), p. 214. 74. Watt, ‘Second Cabin Passage’, p. 167. 75. Ibid., p. 168. 76. Ibid., p. 251. 77. BL, APAC, Mss Eur C721, Diary of Edward Buckell, on the Malacca, 1849–51, p. 3. 78. BL, APAC, Mss Eur B74, p. 29, William Henry Massie to Mrs Massie [mother], 26 September 1826.  79. Quoted in Otness, ‘Passenger Ship Libraries’, p. 490.  80. BL, APAC, Mss Eur C721, Diary of Edward Buckell, pp. 1, 3, 18, 19, 20.

144  John McAleer  81. Ibid., p. 19.  82. Ibid., p. 3.  83. Ibid., p. 17. Buckell is referring to James Hamilton’s The Mount of Olives and Other Lectures on Prayer (London, 1846).  84. BL, APAC, Mss Eur C721, Diary of Edward Buckell, p. 4.  85. Ibid., p. 9.  86. Ibid., p. 20.  87. Ibid., p. 20.  88. Ibid., p. 30.  89. Ibid., p. 5.  90. Stephen R. Berry, A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life and Atlantic Crossings to the New World (London: Yale University Press, 2015).  91. Quoted in Bill Bell, ‘Print Culture in Exile: The Scottish Emigrant Reader in the Nineteenth Century’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 36 (1998), pp. 87–106 (p. 94).  92. NMM, TRN/20, Journal of Edward Cornell on board the Red Jacket, Liverpool to Melbourne, May–August 1856, p. 2.  93. Watt, ‘Second Cabin Passage’, p. 412.  94. See Skallerup, Books Afloat and Ashore, p. 205.  95. NMM, TRN/28, Diary of a voyage from Plymouth to Melbourne kept by Jonathan Binns Ware in the William Metcalfe, 1839, p. 15.  96. NMM, TRN/20, Journal of Edward Cornell, p. 2.  97. John Henderson, Excursions and Adventures in New South Wales (London: W. Shoberl, 1851), p. 163.  98. BL, APAC, Mss Eur C721, Diary of Edward Buckell, p. 9.  99. BL, APAC, Mss Eur C166, Journal of a voyage to India on the East Indiaman Atlas, by George Morris, veterinary surgeon to 25th Light Dragoons, 1813, p. 24. 100. BL, APAC, Mss Eur F454, Account by Gerard Montagu aboard the Princess Charlotte, 1835, f. 13. 101. NMM, JOD/171/1, Log book of the James Baines, pp. 35, 37, 39. 102. Skallerup, Books Afloat and Ashore, pp. 216–17. 103. Bell, ‘Bound for Australia’, p. 17. 104. NMM, JOD/171/1, Log book of the James Baines, p. 22. 105. Watt, ‘Second Cabin Passage’, p. 254. 106. Ibid., p. 412. 107. James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor, ‘Introduction: The Practice and Representation of Reading in England’, in James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–21 (pp. 15, 21). 108. Quoted in Cavallo and Chartier, ‘Introduction’, p. 1.

Chapter 7

‘Knowledge of books’ and ‘Appreciation of literature’: Reading Choices of Aspiring American Librarians in the Progressive Era Christine Pawley

In June 1916, Professor A. L. Hawkins of the University of Wisconsin’s English Department provided a recommendation for his student, Gladys M. Hook, who was applying to enter the Wisconsin Library School (WLS). ‘Although I think she has done a considerable lot of reading I remember that she lamented not having done more, and she came to me frequently for lists of books’, Hawkins wrote to Mary Emogene Hazeltine, director of the WLS, in an otherwise glowing account. ‘I realize that this appreciation seems to be very markedly commendatory’, he concluded, ‘but Miss Hook was one of the four students, out of more than a hundred in my classes last year, to whom I gave As. I recommend her heartily.’1 Hazeltine evidently concurred with Hawkins’s positive assessment and Hook duly entered class that autumn and graduated the following year. Librarianship offered an attractive opportunity to the growing numbers of college-educated women seeking alternative employment to teaching at the turn of the twentieth century. The University of Wisconsin archives contain files on WLS students that include application materials, recommendation letters and, of especial interest to historians of reading, lists of book titles. To prepare for the entrance examination and for Hazeltine’s required book selection class, students had to read titles on a standard list, and in addition to note from ten to twenty books that they had read ‘for pleasure’ during the previous two years. Applicants dutifully complied. A persistent challenge in studying reading practices of the past is finding historical records that link specific named readers to the titles of the texts they read.2 The WLS applicants’ handwritten lists, then, represent an important source. A sample of 118 students who graduated between 1907 and 1927 submitted a combined total of more 145

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than 2,400 books read for pleasure.3 This chapter discusses the choices made by these mostly young women, who were shortly to fan out to their first library positions, communicating their aesthetic, social and moral judgements about reading to library patrons across the USA, many inspired by a prevailing cultural ethic that valued reading as a socially transformative activity. It also discusses some methodological challenges of using institutional records to uncover the reading of groups whose practices are hard to recover, and emphasises the importance of investigating and explaining the contexts in which the data were originally produced. Gladys Hook had reason to be attentive to the quality of her reading. Late nineteenth-century librarians held firm (if sometimes divergent) convictions about the kinds of books their institutions should provide. The spread of public education had produced almost universal literacy among white Americans. By 1880, only 9 per cent of native-born and 12 per cent of foreign-born whites reported that they could not read. Among black Americans (most of whom had been enslaved less than twenty years earlier) 70 per cent said they could not read, but that figure was falling fast.4 The new reading public en­countered an expanding print universe that paradoxically exhibited both increased standardisation and increased diversity. Publications were appearing in a variety of languages and appealing to diverse interests. At the same time, the spread of cheap magazines and newspapers contributed to increased standardisation.5 Compulsory schooling also spurred the adoption of uniform texts, while research universities and land-grant colleges combined with a growing government bureaucracy to produce and nationally distribute textual information. Organisations that actively facilitated reading included publishing houses, bookstores, schools, colleges and universities, reading rooms and libraries. These organisations systematically employed techniques of collecting, classi­ fication and administration, which together structured the time and space as well as the content of people’s reading to create a largely invisible taken-for-granted infrastructure of everyday reading. A key infrastructural component consisted of the organisations’ staff, who interpreted their governing rules and regulations, and transmitted and sometimes transformed their defining values. The year 1876 marked several milestones in the development of professional librarianship, including the formation of the American Library Association (ALA). Melvil Dewey (1851–1931), creator of the Dewey Decimal classification system, played a central role, including coining the ALA’s first motto, adopted in 1879: ‘The best reading for the largest number at the least cost’. Free public libraries were rapidly

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proliferating, boosted by both the activism of local women’s clubs and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie’s systematic philanthropy, which helped build more than 2,500 libraries in English-speaking countries between 1886 and 1917. Library staff were beginning to see themselves as members of a more or less unified profession, whose key task was to mediate the best literature to a public largely less well educated than themselves. What counted as ‘the best’ was a matter for contention, however, and fiction posed a particular dilemma.6 The spread of cheap print had produced publications that librarians agreed had no place in public libraries, such as the sensational Police Gazette and dime novels. Some librarians wanted to exclude all fiction, but others believed that ‘harmless’ and ‘wholesome’ novels could help patrons climb a ladder to higher literary forms.7 This grey literary area was a source of anxiety: what books counted as harmless and wholesome? Librarians were carving out a role for themselves as advisers on the subject of reading, both through their individual interactions with patrons and through their collection choices, which were increasingly guided by published selection guides.8 To gain professional knowledge, aspiring librarians were enrolling in training schemes. Education for librarianship began with apprentice­ship programmes in large public libraries, and from 1887 with formal classes at Columbia College, where Dewey aimed to produce librarians capable of promoting the best reading in as efficient and economical a way as possible. In addition to taking classes in library economy and bibliography, with lectures by specialists in binding, printing, publishing, bookselling and mechanical equipment, students followed a curriculum designed to build character and imbue them with commitment to service – ‘library spirit’ – and belief in the transformative effects of books and reading on individuals and on society as whole – ‘library faith’.9 Librarianship in the United States was heavily feminised. Already in 1877, Justin Winsor, director of the Boston Public Library, had declared that two-thirds of his library staff was female, and ‘infinitely better than equivalent salaries will produce of the other sex’.10 Now, contrary to the all-male College’s policy, Dewey encouraged women’s enrolment at Columbia, and also employed women as instructors, recognising that he could obtain women’s dedication and capability at a cut-rate price. Subsequently, several of Dewey’s mostly female former students spread out to head new library education programmes elsewhere, designed to attract students with at least some college experience, who were united in a love of reading and belief in its beneficial effects.

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In Wisconsin, the state’s Free Library Commission initially sponsored summer training classes, but in 1906 opened a full-time one-year programme, hiring as director Mary Emogene Hazeltine, a Wellesley graduate and head of the public library in Jamestown, New York. Hazeltine had no formal librarianship training, but she knew Dewey through her work organising the Chautauqua School for Librarians for five summers.11 Appointed preceptress (or principal) of the new Wisconsin Library School, Hazeltine was clear about the curriculum’s main focus: books. As she wrote to Library Commission Secretary Henry Legler: [T]he Book course [should] be made the center of the curriculum, with the other courses relating to it logically – we classify books, accession books, catalogue them, bind them, etc.: we erect buildings to hold books, that people may have free access to the best reading.12

For the next thirty-two years, her book selection class was the required ‘pivot’ of the programme. She saw students as ‘missionaries of the book’, and instilled in them the duty to take charge of their patrons’ reading. In this, WLS students shared the experiences of library school students across the country, whose training and literary heritage taught them to tell ‘good’ reading from ‘bad’ through repeated exposure to a cultural norm that was especially suspicious of novels, and to distinguish ‘wholesome’ fiction from ‘trash’.13 WLS supervisors were expected to judge students’ ‘Knowledge of books’ and ‘Appreciation of literature’ in their practicum reports.14 Book selection was central to the practice of librarianship, as evidenced by the ALA motto, professional discussions and the library school curriculum. But what reading practices had aspiring librarians already established? Had they imbibed cultural values that shaped their reading in approved ways, even before entering library school? In particular, what titles had WLS applicants previously selected to read for pleasure? How did they divide their reading attention between popular works of fiction, which librarians had learned to devalue, and worthier works of non-fiction? Compiling their lists must have been stressful for students, as they racked their brains to remember what they had read, and decided what to include, wondering if their reading would pass muster. The sample of 118 students who graduated between 1907 and 1927 shared some demographic characteristics. All but one was female. Three-quarters (ninety-three) came from the Midwest, the largest contingent (forty-two) from Wisconsin, with ten each from neighbouring

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Iowa and Minnesota (states where no comparable facility existed at this time).15 But apparently undeterred by the higher fees charged to out-of-state students, fourteen came from Illinois, despite the presence of a library school at the University of Illinois, and five from New York State, home to Dewey’s New York Library School. The students who had travelled furthest came from Georgia (two), Maine (one), New Hampshire (one) and Washington state (one). It seems that all were white. School guidelines stipulated that applicants be aged between twenty and thirty-five. Of the 111 for whom age information exists, sixty-five (59 per cent) were twenty-four and under, twenty-six (23 per cent) were twenty-five to twenty-nine, with fourteen (13 per cent) between thirty and thirty-five. Hazeltine must have made exceptions to the general age guidelines, however, because three were age nineteen, and six were older than thirty-five, three in their forties. Hazeltine preferred to enrol students with college degrees, but mostly she had to settle for less. Only fourteen (13 per cent) of the 107 students for whom educational information exists had received four years of college education at one institution. Thirty-one (28 per cent) had no college experience at all. But seventy-six students (68 per cent) had at least some college education, most at the University of Wisconsin or other publicly funded schools. A handful had attended prestigious private schools: Mount Holyoke and Vassar (two each), and three each at Wellesley and the University of Chicago. Tracking their subsequent careers, WLS data show that most obtained jobs in libraries in Wisconsin or close by, the majority in public libraries. A 1931 Directory of Graduates listed 233 out of 807 graduates (29 per cent) as ‘married’ – most of these having given up employment outside the home. But the Directory also pointed with pride to graduates’ geo­ graphical dispersal, noting their location in ‘42 states, the District of Columbia, Alaska, Canal Zone, Hawaii, Philippine Islands, England, Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Norway, Dominican Republic, France, Italy, and Latvia’.16 To prepare for Hazeltine’s book selection class, students were to become ‘intimately acquainted’ with books on a list they received in advance.17 These books, Hazeltine’s rubric assured them, ‘should be found in all public and school libraries’. If they were unable to obtain the books locally, they were advised to borrow them from the library of ‘some neighboring city’ or to buy them. After all, the rubric continued, purchasing these books ‘would be a wise investment for one’s own library’.18 The instructions thus assumed a ready avail­ ability of print through a network of institutional libraries that would have been unimaginable a hundred or even fifty years earlier.19

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Titles on the required list must have given students some sense of what Hazeltine considered worthwhile literature. The earliest list (1906) included several works of fiction (despite library leaders’ still-common disapproval of novels): Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849) or Oliver Twist (1837), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables (1851), William D. Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) or The Kentons (1902), Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821) or Ivanhoe (1820), either The History of Henry Esmond (1852) or Vanity Fair (1848) by William M. Thackeray, and C. S. Baldwin’s American Short Stories (1904).20 Students were also required to be ‘reasonably familiar’ with anthologies of poetry by F. T. Palgrave and E. C. Stedman. Most of the remaining titles consisted of histories, essays and biographies. Along with American luminaries like Ralph Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Henry Lodge and Henry James were listed works that indicated Hazeltine’s Anglophile leanings, such as Sidney Lee’s 1902 biography of Queen Victoria, Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia (1823), and chapters from clergyman and librarian J. R. Green’s Short History of the English People (1874) on the reigns of Queens Elizabeth and Mary, and the Puritans. Of twenty non-fiction authors listed, three were women: Agnes Repplier, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Jane Addams. Hazeltine must have found herself preparing this list at short notice as she engaged with the daunting task of opening the first semester of the new library school in the space of a few months. A more extensive list subsequently appeared, which was still in use in the early 1920s. By 1921 Jane Addams had vanished, but a 1908 biography of Wellesley principal Alice Freeman (by her husband, G. H. Palmer) had appeared. A new sociology section included American­ism – What It Is, by D. J. Hill (1916), and either C. A. Ellwood’s Sociology and Modern Social Problems (1919) or E. T. Towne’s Social Problems: A Study of Present-Day Social Conditions (1916). Perhaps to expand students’ reading beyond standard English-language fiction, three French authors were added: Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (1833) or Old Goriot (1835), Alexandre Dumas’s The Three ­Musketeers (1844) or The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) and Victor Hugo’s Les ­Misérables (1862), along with Hermann Sudermann’s Dame Care (1891) and Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children (1862). A new category of ‘Classics’ consisted of the ever-popular Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the Book of Job (in R. G. Moulton’s 1897 Modern Reader’s Bible) and the first six books of Homer’s Odyssey (G. H. Palmer’s 1891 translation only). A new drama section consisted

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of John Galsworthy’s Justice (1910) or Strife (1909), Henrik Ibsen’s The Doll’s House (1879), Ulysses (1902) by Stephen Phillips and the verse drama The Piper (1909) by Josephine Preston Peabody (who had lectured on poetry and literature at Wellesley between 1901 and 1903). It seems that successful students readily complied with Hazeltine’s instructions. The sample of 118 students produced 2,405 titles, an average of just over twenty titles each.21 Most stayed within the guidelines of ten to twenty books, but a few fell short. The sample’s sole male (Edel Seebach, 1925) came up with only seven, and four other students listed fewer than ten.22 At the other end of the scale, four students listed forty or more. Far out in front was Harriet Louise Kidder (1917), with an astonishing total of 103, of which ninety-seven were identifiable. Edel Seebach was a twenty-two-year-old married man from Milwaukee when he entered the WLS in 1925; after graduating he spent his entire career at the Milwaukee Public Library. One of his seven titles is untraceable, but the remaining six included Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) and Thomas Aldrich’s 1869 short story ‘Marjorie Daw’, Channing Pollack’s 1922 drama The Fool (a commentary on the hypocrisy of modern life) and Wilbur F. Gordy’s 1901 American Leaders and Heroes, subtitled A Preliminary Text-book in United States History. It also included two books that suggested that Seebach was pondering the unfolding of his own life. He was the only reader of Edward Bok’s 1923 biography Man from Maine, about Cyrus Curtis, founder of the wildly successful Ladies Home Journal (and Bok’s father-in-law). But Seebach was one of seven students to mention How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day (1910) by Arnold Bennett (also popular with WLS students for his novels set in England’s Potteries region). This book gave self-improvement advice to the growing numbers of white-collar workers trapped in unfulfilling jobs – a fate they themselves undoubtedly hoped to avoid. The student with the longest list, Harriet Louise Kidder, had graduated with a BA from Wellesley College in 1907–8 and with a master’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1913.23 Like Hazeltine, Kidder was fond of reading plays. Constituting about one-third (thirty titles) of her total, these included works by J. M. Synge, William Butler Yeats, Hermann Sudermann, Percy MacKaye, John Masefield, Henry Arthur Jones, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Augusta, Lady Gregory, as well as Shaw, Ibsen and Maurice Maeterlinck. Another thirteen titles consisted of poetry (including the Songs from Vagabondia of Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey, and ballads collected by Andrew Lang). Her thirty-two fiction titles included only

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two (Edith Wharton’s 1911 Ethan Frome and Kathleen Norris’s 1911 Mother) that might possibly have given Hazeltine pause, along with three books by Mark Twain and two each by Nathaniel Hawthorne and O. Henry. Kidder’s favourite author across all genres seems to have been George Bernard Shaw (her list included a book of essays in addition to four plays). Among her non-fiction choices, she listed three travel books by Robert Louis Stevenson and a handful exploring social questions: John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), Jane Addams’s A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912) and Ida Tarbell’s The Business of Being a Woman (1912). For the sample as a whole, just over half of the identifiable books (1,323, or 56 per cent) consisted of fiction. Other major categories included non-fiction (690, or 29 per cent), drama (239, or 10 per cent), poetry (133, or about 6 per cent) and essays (94, or about 4 per cent).24 Nearly 80 per cent were published in or after 1900. That students leaned towards more recently published fiction is hardly surprising, but their choices also reflected the durability of some older titles. Works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Meredith, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and W. M. Thackeray stood up well against contemporary favourites like the American novelist Winston Churchill, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Rudyard Kipling, Sinclair Lewis, Myrtle Reed, Gene Stratton-Porter, Edith Wharton, Booth Tarkington and Harold Bell Wright. Most students blended fiction and non-fiction, but a handful (including Gladys Hook) picked only or almost entirely fiction. Ferne Congdon (1914) listed an eclectic mix of fifteen novels, all by different authors. Most were old and respectable favourites: Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman (1857), George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860), Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) and Henry James’s Daisy Miller (1878), but she also included Eleanor Abbott’s popular romance novel Molly Make-Believe (1910). Other recently published choices included journalist Irving Bacheller (The Hand-made Gentleman, 1909) and Progressive leader and newspaper editor William Allen White (A Certain Rich Man, 1909). Maude Dickinson (1918) listed twenty-two novels and one book of poetry. Only two books had been published before 1900: Oliver Twist (1837) and The Scarlet Letter (1850). Her remaining novels were conventionally popular: including Myrtle Reed’s romantic Old Rose and Silver (1909) and Kathleen Norris’s The Story of Julia Page (1915), as well as bestsellers such as John Fox Jr’s Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903), Eleanor Porter’s Pollyanna Grows Up (1915),

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Harold Bell Wright’s Their Yesterdays (1912) and Booth Tarkington’s Penrod (1914). Dickinson also listed Thomas Dixon Jr’s 1905 novel The Clansman, the basis for the notoriously racist 1915 film, D. W. ­Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.25 On her list of nineteen titles, Gladys Hook included one book of poetry (Just Folks, by Edgar A. Guest, 1917) and eighteen of fiction. Five novels published before 1900 would certainly have met with ­Hazeltine’s approval: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), ­Thackeray’s History of Henry Esmond (1852), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851) and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) and The Mill on the Floss (1860). The rest reflected contemporary popular taste: bestsellers like Florence Barclay’s The Rosary (1909) and Mistress of Shenstone (1910) and Winston Churchill’s Inside of the Cup (1907); Harold Wright Bell’s religiously themed Shepherd of the Hills (1907) and its sequel, The Calling of Dan Matthews (1909); Kathleen Norris’s conservative view of ideal womanhood, Mother (1911); and The Testing of Diana Mallory (1908) by the bestselling author (and anti-suffragist) Mary Augusta Ward. Other successful women novelists on Hook’s list included Frances Hodgson Burnett (T. Tembarom, 1913), Lucy M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) and two books by Gene Stratton Porter: Freckles (1904) and The Girl of the Limberlost (1909). With a preponderance of titles like these, Hook may have worried that her choices appeared ‘lightweight’ in Hazeltine’s eyes. It is impossible to tell to what extent students constructed their lists to create a good impression. Some students listed authors and titles that would probably not have appeared on any list of ‘best books’ drawn up by Hazeltine, suggesting that these applicants were perhaps unaware that this might disadvantage them. For example, fifteen students listed Edith Wharton’s books nineteen times, including six mentions of The House of Mirth (1905). That Hazeltine viewed this work with at least ambivalence is suggested by her correspondence with former student Ada McCarthy (1907) over McCarthy’s first position, at the Rhinelander (Wisconsin) Public Library. ‘When I first came here’, McCarthy wrote, ‘I found a group of little girls of about 12–14 who read The House of Mirth, Lady Rose’s Daughter [by Mary Augusta Ward] and so on. But I feel that I am gradually getting their confidence and can lead them to better things.’26 Another applicant, Vera Sieg (1908), noted, perhaps defensively, that she read The House of Mirth ‘for work’. Thirteen students made eighteen mentions of novels by Myrtle Reed, including five of Lavender and Old Lace (1902). Twelve students made seventeen mentions of books by Harold Bell Wright, including five each of The Shepherd of the Hills and The

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Calling of Dan Matthews. Nine made eleven mentions of books by Eleanor Porter, including four of Pollyanna (1913) and two more of Pollyanna Grows Up (1915).27 Nine made ten mentions of books by Eleanor Abbott, including seven of Molly Make-Believe. Hazeltine would hardly have considered such titles ‘the best reading’, but at the same time she could well have counted them as ‘harmless’. Although librarians were wary of fiction, they were not united in outright condemnation of novels, some seeing value in ‘light’ and even ‘exciting’ fiction that could lead patrons to better books.28 Those who espoused this ‘ladder of reading’ theory would certainly have accepted the need for librarians to read fiction, if only to identify titles acceptable for this purpose. WLS students listed few books that would have been considered controversial at the time (and that public libraries tended to avoid collecting) like Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1895), although seven students mentioned Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and three George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903).29 In calling for lists of only ten to twenty books, Hazeltine was no doubt expecting that students would indicate some diversity in their reading, and many students indeed achieved a spread of titles across authors and genres. However, some ‘binged’ on particular authors. Among the forty-seven books on Alice Hudson’s list (1922) were fourteen titles by the popular Californian writer Gertrude Atherton, including one play, Julia France and Her Times (1912), accounting for 82 per cent of the total of seventeen mentions of Atherton by all students. Six more of Hudson’s choices were by Winston Churchill, five each by Henry James and Mary Austin Hunter, three by Edith Wharton and two by William Dean Howells. Suzette Dunleavy (1925) included seven of Charles Dickens’s novels on her list of nineteen books, along with two each by Dorothy Canfield Fisher and A. S. M. Hutchinson. Bergilot Gundersen (1915), who hailed from LaCrosse, Wisconsin, listed ten books, eight of them poetry, and all in German: five by Goethe, three by Schiller and two by Heine. Gundersen was the only student whose list included no works in English.30 More commonly, books in German were sprinkled on a list of otherwise English titles. For example, Florence Castor (1912) listed poetry by Goethe and Schiller in German, but her list of thirty titles also included such standard Anglophone fare as four novels by Walter Scott and two each by Gene Stratton-Porter and Myrtle Reed. Perhaps surprisingly, the overall most frequently mentioned title was a work not of fiction but of drama: The Blue Bird, by Maurice

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Maeterlinck, a Belgian playwright and poet. First performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1908, it opened on Broadway in 1910 and resulted in silent films in 1910 and 1918, as well as a 1919 opera. Listed by twenty-three students, The Blue Bird far outstripped the next four most popular titles, three of them novels: Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 Main Street (listed by fifteen students), Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 Jane Eyre (thirteen), Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s 1916 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (eleven) and Mary Antin’s autobiographical The Promised Land (1912) (eleven). Drama featured prominently in many students’ lists, perhaps reflecting a taste acquired in high school and college literature classes, or from their own (or their mothers’) involvement in women’s clubs, many of which focused on play-reading and other group literary activities.31 Altogether, 239 plays featured on student lists, 10 per cent of the total. We have no information about how the students read these plays, but possibly they did so in company with others, formally or informally. Maeterlinck was the overall most frequently mentioned author. Students reported reading his other dramatic works, including Sister Beatrice (1901), Monna Vanna (1902) and Mary Magdalene (1910) and collections of his essays: The Double Garden (1902), The Life of the Bee (1901) and The Treasure of the Humble (1897). Altogether, Maeterlinck was mentioned forty times, ahead of such perennial favour­ites as Charles Dickens (thirty-seven), Walter Scott (thirty-five) and Rudyard Kipling (twenty-four). But close by, ranked number seven, was Henrik Ibsen, whose drama A Doll’s House (which received ten mentions) was sixth in the list of most popular titles. Written in 1879, the play’s themes – the constrictions of conventional marriage and the importance of individual self-determination – continued to resonate in the early years of the twentieth century. Ibsen received a total of thirty-one mentions; students also listed Brand (1865), Peer Gynt (1867), Pillars of Society (1877), Ghosts (1881), The Wild Duck (1884), The Lady from the Sea (1888), Rosmersholm (1886) and Hedda Gabler (1890). Charles Rann Kennedy was another favoured playwright, receiving nine mentions for his 1907 moralising drama The Servant in the House, with its theme of the brotherhood of man. One student also read his The Winter Feast (1908), The Necessary Evil (1913) and The Idol Breaker (1914), for a total of twelve mentions. Other popular plays included Edmond Rostand’s Chanticleer (1910) and the enormously successful Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), which appeared eight times. Shakespeare’s plays were mentioned ten times (none more than once), and George Bernard Shaw’s ten (Harriet Kidder accounting for

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four of these). Six students listed Israel Zangwill’s 1908 drama The Melting Pot, about a Jewish immigrant family fleeing persecution in Russia. Plays by Gerhart Hauptmann (winner of the 1912 Nobel Prize in Literature) appear six times. At least one student read two plays by Hermann Sudermann, Heimat (1893) and Es Lebe Das Leben! (1902), in German. Henry Arthur Jones received eight mentions for his plays, and John Masefield three for his plays and three for his poetry. Irish writers Augusta, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge and W. B. Yeats also appeared multiple times. The author with the highest number of different titles (not counting duplicates) was Robert Louis Stevenson (nineteen), followed by Walter Scott (sixteen), Charles Dickens (sixteen), Rudyard Kipling (fifteen) and Henry Van Dyke (fifteen). Stevenson was a prolific writer in a variety of genres: some students read his juvenile fiction, like Treasure Island (1882) and Kidnapped (1886), while others read his poetry, essays and books of travel. Rabindranath Tagore (winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913) had fourteen mentions, with students showing a steady interest in his poetry, plays, essays, short stories and memoirs throughout the twenty-year period studied. His poetry, read by nine students, outstripped the verse of Goethe, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Noyes and Henry Van Dyke (seven mentions each).32 Among autobiography, biography and memoirs, five titles stand out: Mary Antin’s 1912 bestseller The Promised Land (eleven readers); Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull House (eight); Arthur Empey’s war report Over the Top (a bestseller in 1917 and the basis of a silent film the following year; seven readers); Helen Keller’s Story of My Life (six); and Cornelia Parker’s American Idyll: The Life of Carleton H. Parker (a bestseller in 1920; five readers). Such books probably seemed safe to list, counting as they did as ‘non-fiction’, and they resonated with the major themes that seemed to preoccupy the students. Not surprisingly, students who compiled their lists in the years during and following the First World War showed considerable interest in the theme of war. The seven students who listed Over the Top all entered the school between 1918 and 1920, having read the book at the height of its popularity. Edna Holden (1920) listed six war books out of her total of thirty-eight titles, Florence Dodd (1920) five out of twenty-three. Another four students each included four such titles. Most were written from the American, British or French perspective, but the Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler’s Four Weeks in the Trenches (a 1915 account of his experience as an Austrian soldier fighting Russians) was an exception. By far the most commonly mentioned book in this category was the novel The Four Horsemen

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of the Apocalypse, by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, published in Spanish in 1916, and first translated into English in 1918. In the story, a wealthy Argentine family finds itself on both sides of the war, losing family members and material possessions as the Four Horsemen wreak death and destruction upon the world. Eleven students listed this novel, making it the fourth most popular title (along with Mary Antin’s The Promised Land). It was a bestseller in 1919 and a silent film in 1921. A very different account of war was James Watson Gerard’s My Four Years in Germany (1917, made into a film in 1918), listed by five students. Gerard, who had served as US ambassador to the German Imperial Court, warned that ‘Unless Germany is beaten, the whole world will be compelled to turn itself into an armed camp, until the German autocracy either brings every nation under its dominion or is forever wiped out as a form of government’.33 In 1918, the social activist and popular novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher published her collection of short stories Home Fires in France, the outcome of two years spent in Paris between 1916 and 1918, exploring the role of French women in their occupied communities. Four students listed this book. Nine listed another novel that offered more oblique commentary on the social position of women against a war background: If Winter Comes, by British author A. S. M. Hutchinson, published in 1921, a bestseller in 1922 and a film in 1923. In some ways the novel is deeply conventional (a man can be saved by marriage to a good woman) but at the same time it tackles unconventional topics, including unwed pregnancy and divorce. Students who read If Winter Comes could as well have been drawn to its exploration of women’s social and economic circumstances – or its romantic ending – as to its wartime setting. In the group as a whole, at least thirty-nine titles dwelt on the theme of women and society, broadly construed. The most frequently listed was Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, mentioned by ten students. Jane Addams’s exposé of the sexual exploitation of young working-class women in Chicago, New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912), received five mentions, while her 1909 condemnation of the effect of urban living conditions on young people, Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, received two. Other feminist works mentioned included Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labor (1911); Scott and Nellie Nearing’s Woman and Social Progress (1912); Cornelia Parker’s 1922 Working with the Working Woman, an account of her experiences employed in various poorly paid jobs; Dorothy Richardson’s 1905 fictional Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl as Told by Herself, about a young woman struggling to survive in a series of

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low-wage jobs; an undercover account of the working conditions of factory girls, The Woman Who Toils, by Bessie Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst (1903); British women’s suffrage leader Sylvia Pankhurst’s book The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905–1910 (1911); William Harvey Allen’s Woman’s Part in Government, Whether She Votes or Not (1911); and journalist Rita Childe Doerr’s What Eight Million Women Want (1910). By contrast, one student listed The Business of Being a Woman (1912), in which Ida Tarbell, despite her own career as a muck-raking journalist, took a conservative stand that placed other women firmly in a domestic setting. Caroline Shaw (1918) listed two books on prostitution: journalist Reginald Wright Kauffman’s The Girl That Goes Wrong (1911) and Panders and Their White Slaves (1910) by Clifford G. Roe, a Chicago prosecutor. These choices suggested that at least some of the applicants embraced the Progressive agenda and welcomed a vision for women’s lives that went beyond nineteenth-century domestic values. Immigration was another hot-button political issue. Mary Antin’s account of her Jewish family’s migration from Belarus to Boston and her Americanisation, The Promised Land, was published in 1912 and became a bestseller. The eleven students who listed Antin’s book must have appreciated her paean to public libraries. ‘Anything so wonderful as a library had never been in my life’, Antin declared. ‘One could read and read, and learn and learn as fast as one knew how. . . . When I went home from the library I had a book under my arm; and I would finish it before the library opened next day’.34 That Antin had evidently so clearly absorbed the library faith no doubt reinforced the applicants’ confidence in their own career choice. Six students listed Israel Zangwill’s 1908 drama The Melting Pot, which popularised this metaphor for American assimilation, and tells of David Quixano, who arrives in America following his family’s murder in a pogrom. There he falls in love with Vera, a Christian whose own father was the officer responsible for the pogrom. Despite this appalling history (not to mention their social and religious differences) David and Vera marry and live happily ever after. At the end of the play David expresses his comforting vision for American unity: ‘East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross – how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame!’35 In contrast to the interest shown in white immigration, questions about race and books by black authors received little attention. Al­ together, only seven mentions were made of black writers. Three students listed works by Booker T. Washington: Future of the

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American Negro (1899), Up From Slavery (1901) and Man Farthest Down (1912). Eileen Duggan (1915) listed W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903), and Ruth Cairncross (1925) cited poetry by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Conversely, Gertrude Husenetter listed American journalist Charles Morris’s 1888 The Aryan Race: Its Origin and Its Achievements. ‘The one perplexing problem of America is the Negro . . .’ wrote Morris: The American Negro has marked persistence, while there is little promise that he can be raised to the level of Aryan energy and intellect. Mentally his only strong development is in the emotional direction, – the most primitive phase of mental unfoldment. Yet he is increasing in numbers with a discouraging rapidity.36

And Maude V. Dickinson (1918) listed Thomas Dixon Jr’s racist novel The Clansman. We do not know what use Hazeltine made of these handwritten lists that hopeful applicants appended to their WLS entrance forms. Neither do we know anything about the lists by students who were unsuccessful – whether the contents of these lists contributed to their rejection. Hazeltine undoubtedly saw reading as a character-shaping activity that required constant attention over a reader’s lifetime, analogous to the personal spiritual development that religious leaders urged upon their flocks, and maybe she felt that the most useful aspect of compiling the lists was in encouraging students to reflect on the content of their own reading. Or perhaps she was just curious. That fiction was popular would have come as no surprise. Public libraries regularly reported that fiction accounted for most of their circulation, although the ALA’s 1893 Catalog recommended that novels should comprise only 15 per cent of their collections.37 Hazeltine must have been reassured that reputable novelists like Scott, Dickens and Kipling, who appeared on her list of required reading, also appeared frequently on the lists that students compiled. Some, like Gladys Hook, had clearly learned to defer to cultural authorities such as English professor A. L. Hawkins, perpetuating a reliance on the judgement of literary experts outside librarianship that Dewey had incorporated into his Columbia curriculum.38 The picture of the aspiring librarians that emerges from a study of these reading choices suggests that they enjoyed a variety of genres, and they apparently preferred fiction of the kind that at the very least conformed to prevailing notions of middle-class respectability. Controversial fiction of the time appears very little, and students’ taste in novels appears to be largely mainstream, if not always as literarily

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acceptable as Hazeltine might have wished, with their preference for authors like Mary Augusta Ward, Eleanor Porter and Myrtle Reed. But by the time most of these students entered the WLS, the height of the debate about the suitability of fiction in public libraries had in any case passed, presenting librarians with less of a dilemma about whether or not they should be stocking it.39 To twenty-first-century eyes, some other characteristics of the students’ choices stand out. Drama and poetry occupied a significant place in many students’ lists, which raises more questions than can be answered based on these data. We cannot tell if students were reading plays and poems silently and alone, or aloud in company – formally or informally. And we might wonder if these preferences for performative literature were already dwindling, perhaps displaced by new forms of mass entertainment, such as the silent movies that often put best­ selling literature on the screen. The themes that students explored through their non-fiction reading indicate that they were interested in a broad array of social and political topics, but that they also shared the prejudices and blind spots of other white middle-class people of the day. They were interested in inequality, but apparently more with regard to white Europeans like Mary Antin than black Americans like Booker T. Washington (far less W. E. B. Du Bois) and some probably accepted prevailing beliefs about white supremacy. They seem not to have been very indignant about their own lack of political rights, evincing little interest in reading about the suffrage movement even before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But the economic and sexual exploitation of women attracted their attention, and it seems that through their reading students were asking questions about the options open to them as women – what kind of work to do, or whether to marry and to whom. The booklists reflect an institutional setting in which students accepted the need to give a kind of cultural accounting of themselves, and in so doing created a record that few can have imagined persisting so long beyond their lifetimes. The records tell us little about the students as individuals: despite the fact that we know their names and a few bare facts about them, these really are ‘ordinary’ readers who largely lived out their lives in anonymity. Institutional records such as these can provide a fascinating avenue for book historians to explore the reading practices of groups for whom individual records are likely to be scant. But their interpretation requires an understanding of the infrastructural context in which the records were produced and retained, a context which is itself an important, if sometimes

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neglected, element in the world of print culture.40 As a group, the students display some revealing patterns. After all, these were people who planned to spend at least a few years and maybe the rest of their working lives facilitating the reading of others. Their own book choices suggest that most read widely but not daringly, that they were alert to topical controversies and dilemmas in the world around them, and that they appreciated mainstream literature. Or perhaps they suggest that the students understood that these were the kinds of choices they could admit to, in the interest of their future careers in librarianship. If students had reading secrets, these institutional records provide no hint.

Notes  1. University of Wisconsin–Madison Archives, Library School Student Records Series 7/20/8/1–3 (henceforth LSSR), A. L. Hawkins to Mary Emogene Hazeltine, 15 June 1916.  2. For a discussion of some of the methodological issues involved, see Christine Pawley, ‘Seeking “Significance”: Actual Readers, Specific Reading Communities’, Book History, 5 (2002), pp. 143–60.   3. The original sample consisted of 120 students, but two sets of records were found to be too incomplete to be useful.  4. Carl F. Kaestle, ‘Seeing the Sites: Readers, Publishers, and Local Print Cultures in 1880’, in Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway (eds), Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p. 29.  5. Carl F. Kaestle, ‘Standardization and Diversity in American Print Culture, 1880 to the Present’, in Carl F. Kaestle et al. (eds), Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 272–93.  6. An extensive literature describes the so-called ‘Fiction Problem’. For summaries, see Wayne A. Wiegand, ‘The American Public Library: Construction of a Community Reading Institution’, in Kaestle and Radway, Print in Motion, p. 431; and Christine Pawley, Reading Places, Literacy, Democracy and the Public Library in Cold War America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), especially pp. 123–43.  7. To this end, many libraries employed a ‘two-book’ policy, by which readers could borrow a second book as long as it was non-fiction.   8. These included the ALA’s Catalog (1893, 1904) and Booklist (1905) and the H. W. Wilson Company’s Book Review Digest (1905), Children’s Catalog (1909) and the Standard Catalog for Public Libraries (1918, later titled Public Library Catalog). Like library professional journals

162  Christine Pawley elsewhere, the monthly Wisconsin Library Bulletin (with large input by Hazeltine) also published lists of what not to buy, warning particularly against series books for young people. See, for instance, ‘For Boys and Girls: What Not to Buy’, Wisconsin Library Bulletin, 23:4 (April 1927), pp. 95–6.   9. For an overview of the development of education for librarianship during the twentieth century, see Christine Pawley, ‘“Missionaries of the Book” or “Central Intelligence” Agents: Gender and Ideology in the Contest for Library Education in Twentieth Century America’, Libraries: Culture, History and Society, 1:1 (2017), pp. 72–96. 10. Justin Winsor addressing the ALA conference of October 1877, reported in Library Journal, 2 (January–February 1878), p. 280. By 1910, women made up 78.5 per cent of library workers, and by 1920 the figure was 90 per cent. 11. After Hazeltine retired at the age of seventy in 1938, she went back to Jamestown, where she died in 1949 at the age of eighty-one. See Margaret Schroeder, ‘Mary Emogene Hazeltine’, unpublished typescript dated 8 January 1959, pp. 1, 5; and Valmai Fenster, ‘The University of Wisconsin Library School, a History, 1895–1921’, PhD dissertation (University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1977), p. 151. 12. Fenster, ‘The University of Wisconsin Library School’, p. 177. Original emphasis. 13. Joanne Passet, Cultural Crusaders: Women Librarians in the American West, 1900–1917 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), p. 21. 14. ‘Report of Co-operating Librarian’, Mimeographed form, Wisconsin Library School, 1922, LSSR. 15. The University of Minnesota Library School opened in 1928 (and closed in 1985). The University of Iowa Library School opened in 1967. 16. Archives, University of Wisconsin–Madison Information School, Wiscon­sin Library School, Directory of Graduates (1931), p. 46. 17. Fenster, ‘The University of Wisconsin Library School’, pp. 176–7, 174. 18. Form 9, ‘Extra Entrance Requirement; Reading List’, Wisconsin Library School, 1906, LSSR. 19. We do not know how the students acquired the books they read for pleasure, but probably they did so through the same channels. 20. ‘The books named are preferred, but others by the same authors will be accepted if they have been read recently’, stated the instructions. 21. Includes duplicates, representing 1,510 individual works, of which 98 per cent were identifiable in terms of title and author and (usually) publication date and subject matter. 22. Student names are followed by the year in which they graduated from the one-year WLS programme. 23. Wellesley College Calendar, 1907–8, pp. 154; Alumni Directory, the University of Chicago, 1913.

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24. Some titles, such as collections of poetry and essays, fall into more than one category. Of the 1,510 single titles, half were fiction, just over one-third non-fiction and 15 per cent poetry or drama. 25. Dickinson was the only student to list this book, although one other student, Alva Cochrane (date illegible), may also have done so. Cochrane’s handwriting is hard to read. 26. Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Wisconsin Free Library Commission, Correspondence with local libraries, 1900–1943; Box 9, Ada McCarthy to Mary Emogene Hazeltine, 18 September 1907. 27. These books would now be considered appropriate for children, but in the early twentieth century books were not rigidly segregated by age. Also, ‘childhood’ was considered to last well into an individual’s teens. See Christine Pawley, Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late Nineteenth Century Osage, Iowa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), pp. 106–7. 28. Those who supported public library circulation of fiction included Samuel Swett Green, influential librarian of the Worcester, Massachusetts, Free Public Library, who argued in a 1879 Library Journal article that even ‘sensational’ fiction could be worthwhile on occasion. See Samuel S. Green, ‘Sensational Fiction in Public Libraries’, Library Journal (September–October 1879), pp. 345–54. 29. For more on public libraries, controversial books and censorship, see Evelyn Geller, Forbidden Books in American Public Libraries 1876–1939: A Study in Cultural Change (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984), and Wayne A. Wiegand, An Active Instrument for Propaganda (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989). 30. That German was the foreign language most often mentioned by students would not have drawn comment in Wisconsin, where the German-born accounted for half of the state’s immigrants and 10 per cent of its total population in 1900. 31. A large literature exists on the women’s club movement. For an introduction, see Elizabeth Long, ‘Aflame with Culture: Reading and Social Mission in the Nineteenth-Century White Women’s Literary Movement’, and Elizabeth McHenry, ‘Reading and Race Pride: The Literary Activism of Black Clubwomen’, in Kaestle and Radway, Print in Motion, pp. 476–90 and pp. 491–510; on reading tastes acquired in high school, see Allan Abbott, ‘Reading Tastes of High-School Pupils: A Statistical Study’, School Review, 10:8 (1902), pp. 585–600. 32. For historical analysis of the place of poetry in American lives between 1880 and 1950, see Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007). 33. James W. Gerard, My Four Years in Germany (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1917), pp. ix–x. 34. Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), pp. 256 and 341. See also Thomas Augst, ‘Faith in Reading: Public Libraries,

164  Christine Pawley Liberalism, and the Civil Religion’, in Thomas Augst and Kenneth Carpenter (eds), Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), pp. 148–83; and Barbara Sicherman, Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), p. 211. 35. Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (New York: American Jewish Book Company, 1914), pp. 272–3. 36. Charles Morris, The Aryan Race: Its Origin and Its Achievements (Chicago: S. C. Griggs and Co., 1888), p. 312. 37. Pawley, Reading on the Middle Border, pp. 89–90; Wayne A. Wiegand, Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876–1956 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), p. 17. 38. Wayne A. Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey (Chicago: American Library Association, 1996), p. 95. 39. Dee Garrison, Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), p. 100. 40. For an extended discussion of the value to historians of reading of studying institutional contexts, see Christine Pawley, ‘Beyond Market Models and Resistance: Organizations as a Middle Layer in the History of Reading’, Library Quarterly, 79:1 (2009), pp. 73–93.

Plate 1  Robert Braithwaite Martineau, The Last Chapter (1863). Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery

Plate 2  A. Courcell, I am Tir’d of Reading! (London: W. Belch, c. 1810). Christopher Ferguson’s collection

Plate 3  A. Courcell, So am I of Working! (London: W. Belch, c. 1810). Christopher Ferguson’s collection

Plate 4  Self-portrait of missionary Carl Hoffmann, from his private diary: ‘In the garden of the Mission House on Arkona Mission Station, Transvaal, South Africa’. Source: Online Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowledge (HC-CK), resource number 485: Hoffmann diary 5 (1897–1901), from University of South Africa Archive, p. 153

Plate 5  Preaching scene in Mashonaland by Missionary Carl Hoffmann, from his private diary. Source: Online Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowledge (HC-CK), resource number 485: Hoffmann diary 5 (1897–1901), from University of South Africa Archive, p. 68

Plate 6  The History Room, Gladstone’s Library, containing the Gladstone Foundation Collection. By permission of the Warden and Trustees, Gladstone’s Library

Plate 7  Vitorre Carpaccio, The Dream of St Ursula (1497–8). By permission of the minister of cultural activities and heritage, Gallerie dell’Accademia of Venice

Plate 8  Pierre Auguste Cot, Pause for Thought/Ophelia (1870). Image© https:// www.the-athenaeum.org/art

Plate 9  Abraham Solomon, First Class – The Meeting and at First Meeting Loved (1855). Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire, UK/Bridgeman Images

Plate 10  Abraham Solomon, Second Class – The Parting: ‘Thus part we rich in sorrow, parting poor’ (1854). Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire, UK/ Bridgeman Images

Plate 11  Abraham Solomon, First Class: The Meeting . . . and at First Meeting Loved (1854) (original version). Oil on canvas, 69 cm × 97 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC

Plate 12  Augustus Leopold Egg, The Travelling Companions (1862). Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images

Plate 13  Agnes Cleve-Jonand, Train Compartment (c. 1920). Photograph: Bukowskis auctions

Plate 14  Amazing Stories, October 1950. A typical ‘sexy’ cover. Photograph by Angelle Whavers

Plate 15  Amazing Stories, August 1952. A more conservative cover after readers demanded more attention to science and less to the female body. Photograph by Angelle Whavers

Plate 16  Amazing Stories, September 1952. Of course, ‘sexy’ covers continued, but their numbers would decrease over time. Photograph by Angelle Whavers

Chapter 8

Papers, Posters and Pamphlets: UK Readers in the Second World War Simon Eliot

One the main tasks given by the UK government to the Ministry of Information (MOI) on its foundation in 1939 was the maintenance of public morale during wartime. In a total war, the home front was as important as the battle front. In the population as a whole, any pessimism about the final outcome – or doubts about the country’s just cause, or false rumour, or panic – could reduce the nation’s ability to wage war. As the collapse of France in 1940 was to illustrate vividly, a rapid decline in civilian morale could lead, in extreme cases, to collective panic, resulting in millions fleeing their homes, clogging the transport systems and thus paralysing the armed forces’ ability to fight back. To fulfil its mission, the MOI developed a sophisticated information and communications system that employed almost every medium available to it. The Ministry published or supported newspapers, magazines, comics and books. It produced tens of millions of leaflets, flyers, postcards and posters. Working with the determinedly in­ dependent BBC, it encouraged a wide range of broadcasts. By 1945 it had produced or helped finance more than 2,000 short and feature-length films. It created and toured hundreds of exhibitions; some would fit into a shop window, while others occupied thousands of square feet. Each year it organised tens of thousands of public meetings and debates throughout the country. The MOI did not think of this wide variety of media initiatives as consisting of separate efforts; rather, it regarded them as different aspects of various campaigns. The term is significant, for in some respects the MOI was a very large advertising agency – and any effective agency needed to assess the public’s response to its campaigns. By 1940 the MOI had such a system in place. The Home Intelligence Reports (HIRs) were initially issued daily, then weekly 165

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from the end of October 1940. These reports were circulated within the MOI and to selected individuals in other ministries and government agencies. At first, Mass Observation was heavily involved in this exercise and, when finally the MOI took over, many of Mass Observation’s techniques and some of its personnel continued to be used. In order to counterbalance the frequently qualitative nature of Home Intelligence Reports, Wartime Social Surveys (WSSs), which addressed specific topics, were added to the mix and produced a large number of reports based on more quantitative methods. Although broadcasting, films and public meetings were important, a great deal of the MOI’s output was print-based, so it was much concerned with readers and reading. However, given the broad front on which the MOI operated, the reading of newspapers, magazines (and the advertisements within them), pamphlets, posters and captions in exhibitions was as important to it as the reading of books. Its surveys captured the responses of readers from different social classes and different levels of education. This means that the HIRs and the WSSs have the potential to give a much broader account of the variety of non-literary reading experience than is usually available to the historian. Between June and July 1943, a Wartime Social Survey was undertaken on ‘Newspaper Reading amongst the Civilian Population’.1 The importance of this exercise was made clear: ‘Among the publicity media used by Government Departments to keep the public informed about the war and the many new facts and arrangements that affect the lives of civilians, newspapers are of great importance.’ The survey was as broad and as balanced as wartime conditions would allow. It involved 5,639 men and women from a variety of social classes and occupations, of different ages and from all parts of the country. Many of its discoveries were predictable. The most popular national daily newspapers were the Daily Express (read by 19 per cent of the sample), Daily Herald (13 per cent), Daily Mirror (12 per cent) and the Daily Mail (9 per cent). The Daily Telegraph and The Times attracted just 6 and 2 per cent respectively. Among Sunday papers, News of the World was predominant, read by 32 per cent of the sample; The People attracted 29 per cent and the Sunday Express and the Sunday Pictorial 14 per cent each. The broadsheet Sundays limped after: the Sunday Times with 4 per cent and the Observer with 3 per cent.2 Men were more likely than women to have seen a paper on the day before the interview: 81 to 67 per cent. Age also played a part: people between forty-one and sixty-five years old were more likely to have seen a paper on the previous day than those who were younger or older.3

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One of the most useful findings of the survey, at least for the MOI, was that newspapers were one of the few ways in which one could reach a very large percentage of the population very speedily. Of the sample, 77 per cent saw a morning paper every day or on most days, and a remarkable 87 per cent had seen the most recent issue of at least one Sunday paper. With many jobs still requiring people to work on Saturday mornings, the unique quality of Sunday newspaper reading was obvious. Certainly, the MOI was always keen to buy advertising space in Sunday papers, and often asked specific questions within other surveys about the reading of these newspapers. However, the MOI was not interested only in the readers of other producers’ publications. It was itself a major and innovative publisher. In 1941 it initiated a series which would become known as ‘Official War Books’. Using the techniques pioneered by the photojournalism of the weekly Picture Post and its rivals, these paperback books featured striking graphic covers and were packed with photographs, maps and diagrams. They were usually priced at a competitive 6d or 1s. The most popular of all was the first, The Battle of Britain (1941), which, by the end of that year, had sold 4.8 million copies in Britain alone.4 The second in the series, Bomber Command, published in October 1941, sold 1.36 million copies in just over a month. By March 1944 the series had total sales of more than 23 million copies and was making a profit of around £30,000 a year for the MOI.5 A Wartime Social Survey to assess the reception of the ‘Official War Books’ took place in June and July 1943, and was concerned with several specific titles in the series: Combined Operations; East of Malta, West of Suez; Battle of Egypt; Coastal Command; Front Line; Bomber Command; Bomber Command Continues. As the MOI described them: The books produced are varied in subject matter, although they all deal with one or other aspect of the war effort. They are well produced and their price is kept low. The text in all cases is unsensational, although the matter may be exciting, and they are written for an adult audience. Frequent illustrations, mainly photographic, are used to assist the narrative.6

The aim of the survey, which involved a balanced sample of 5,895 potential readers, was: to find out how such books were received by the public; how many and what sort of people saw them, bought them and read them; whether those who had not seen them would like to have seen them and why they had

168  Simon Eliot not; what first brought the books to people’s notice; what they thought about them, what they got out of them and whether they approved of Government money being spent on the production of such books.7

Market penetration was, as one might have expected, less than that achieved by newspapers, but it was still impressive: 56 per cent of the sample had seen one or two of the publications, and 26 per cent had seen three or more. As with newspapers, a higher percentage of men (63 per cent) than women (50 per cent) had seen at least one of the titles.8 ‘Seeing’ may not be the same as ‘reading’ but, given the substantial graphic content of these publications, scanning a book of this sort could convey a considerable amount of information, as the books were designed for both the literate and the less literate. This was made clear by Robert Fraser, director of publishing at the MOI, in his description of an ideal Official War Book: The book must be cheap. Its treatment must be dramatic, human, lively. It must, above all, use pictures. Indeed, it must so use pictures as to become two books in one – a picture book and a text book – and it must carry the full propaganda message once in the text and for a second time in the pictures and captions which together must tell a continuous story to those who will not read continuous text.9

As with the reading of newspapers, clear social and educational distinctions were visible between those who had a lot of experience of the books and those who had much less. Among the former were the young and middle aged, those from higher economic groups and those with higher education. Workers who were more likely to have seen the books were in clerical jobs or munitions factories, or were skilled industrial workers. Geographically speaking, the most positive responses came from London, the south and Scotland. Conversely, those who showed least knowledge and interest came from the older generation, the lower economic groups often associated with having only elementary education, agricultural workers and miners, and unskilled labourers. The least enthusiastic respondents came from northern England and Wales.10 These distinctions remained clear even in the reactions of those in all groups who had read the books: Men, the upper economic groups, the more highly educated, and in general those groups which gave the biggest audiences to the books, were more frequently interested in technical matters and ‘The way the Services work together’. Women, and in general those groups which were under-represented in the audience, more frequently mentioned the pictures and the idea that the books made the war more real to them.11

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For the MOI, the most encouraging response came in answer to a question about value for money. It turned out that 74 per cent of those who responded thought that the publication of the books was a good use of the government’s time and money.12 For a historian of reading, and of the way in which reading matter circulated among readers, the following observation on the population whom the books reached is illuminating: ‘The number of persons seeing books is about five times as great as the number of books sold, copies being passed on to friends or shared between families.’13 Some MOI Wartime Social Surveys were directed at very specific reading experiences. Concerned about public attitudes to America soon after that country had joined the war, in early 1942 the MOI attempted to find out British people’s impressions of the USA as derived from, in part, the books they had read. The question ‘Can you remember any books you have read about America?’ revealed that 10 per cent recalled Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind (a memory no doubt reinforced by the 1939 film starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable),14 while 5 per cent remembered at least one book by either Sinclair Lewis or Upton Sinclair. Three per cent mentioned Mark Twain’s works or Steinbeck’s books. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was remembered by 3 per cent and Theodore Dreiser’s books by 2 per cent, while 1 per cent managed to recall something from the work of Louisa M. Alcott, or O. Henry, or Jack London, or from Log Cabin to White House. Another 1 per cent had gained some information on the USA from genre fiction, either Wild West books or detective fiction, and 1 per cent had read non-fiction and technical books from the USA.15 The survey concluded: When the answers are grouped, it appears that the majority of the books read and remembered (Lewis’s, Sinclair’s, Steinbeck’s and Dreiser’s) – 15% – are those with a sociological, and usually a ‘debunking’ theme. It may be suggested that the public attitude to the U.S.A. as shown in subsequent answers is strongly influenced by American criticisms of America, and that there is a big field open for constructive education.16

The enjoyment British readers in the 1930s and 1940s gained from reading satirical or critical accounts of American society was part of a long tradition, which stretched back at least as far as the works of Frances Trollope and Dickens’s Martin Chuzzle­wit. Clearly, much needed to be done, and quickly, by the MOI in order to encourage readers to adopt a more positive attitude to the USA.

170  Simon Eliot

However informative general surveys of reading tastes and practices are, reading is commonly the experience of the individual scanning a particular text. For accounts of a particular person’s reading experience, or the reactions of a small group to a specific text, we need to move from the Wartime Social Surveys to the Home Intelligence Reports. Commonly, the Home Intelligence Reports record the opinions or reactions of a group of readers, sometimes from a particular sector of society, sometimes from a broad swathe. However, occasionally a single and specific case is described, for instance: Some criticisms of sensational press presentation of Sir John Anderson’s War Zone Courts Bill. Simple explanations would ease people’s minds about this and such remarks as: ‘if we are not shot by the Germans we are evidently going to be shot by our own people’ made in [a] tram by working man reading [a] newspaper would be silenced.17

Given that reading newspapers was an experience shared by a very large portion of the British public, the Home Intelligence Reports were very interested in how readers responded to the war news, to advertisements, and to the maps and photographs contained in newspapers. They were also keen to pin down the elusive characteristics of the reading population. ‘Public opinion is notoriously fickle’, a review of a year’s worth of Home Intelligence Weekly Reports concluded, but immediately added: Yet when in possession of the relevant facts, it is surprisingly sound. It respects ‘security reasons’ for reticence, provided it can be satisfied of their validity. It always spots if it is being ‘talked down to’, and it is most suspicious of the ‘high falutin’. . . . For the British public, this [personal experience] is the most important of all. Seeing, for them, is believing. Air-raids, food shortages, shopping difficulties, queues, factory conditions, evacuees and hosts, these are the things about which the British public thinks and feels most.18

Clearly, readers – especially the less educated – were sensitive to tone, particularly to the patronising and the grandiose. They feared being bamboozled or hoodwinked. They had little patience with, and were suspicious of, wordiness. Above all, British readers craved the solidity and reliability of details and personal experience because such things seemed to have the power to cut through the fog and to represent matters as they were. Readers wanted to be trusted with the truth. For instance, in Belfast (Northern Ireland) in June 1940 it was observed that:

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Many people are reported to think that there is some ground for Haw Haw’s attack on B.B.C. and British newspaper editorials for glossing over unpleasant facts. Majority view is that news should be more candid when things are going badly; ‘we can take it’.19

The mental complexion revealed in this comment was memorably summarised in the MOI’s survey of its first year of Home Intelligence Reports: ‘the British public has a basic stability of temperament, with a slightly gloomy tinge’.20 The desire for clear and unambiguous reporting meant that many readers were worried by inconsistencies in the way the war was reported by the BBC and newspapers: when accounts were conflicting, who and what could readers credit? People’s comments vary with the source of news and some confusion has been caused by the different tone of the wireless and of the various newspapers. The public is becoming quick to notice and comment upon conflicting statements.21

It was even more troubling to readers when contradictions were presented in the same newspaper, and sometimes on the same page. In late July 1941 it was observed: Although the Russian communiques are believed rather than the German, there are still ‘lingering doubts’ of their accuracy. People are ‘tired of seeing both Russian and German claims, which bear no relation to one another, on the same page of a newspaper’.22

The need for clarity and for solid, immediately graspable facts meant that the visual elements of newspapers, such as photographs and maps, were often read closely, though not necessarily accurately. In June 1940 the regional intelligence officer in Cardiff reported that in Wales there was ‘Wide popular misapprehension about extent of France occupied by Germany as newspaper maps only show northern France and this appears largely occupied’.23 More commonly, maps inspired interest and even enthusiasm. Reports covering November and December 1942 referred to the response to newspaper maps illu­ strating the Allies’ advance in North Africa: The Eighth Army: The public are said to be ‘really thrilled at the speed with which the Allied forces have progressed’, and ‘the re-capture of the familiar places, particularly Benghazi, has greatly heartened people’. Pleasure is reported at once more ‘seeing Tunis somewhere near the middle of the map in the newspaper’.24

172  Simon Eliot The printing in some newspapers of maps of North Africa, with inserted maps of Great Britain drawn to scale, is said ‘to help the public to realise the vast distances which the campaign involves’, and it is suggested that all war maps should follow this practice.25

But not all responses to visuals in newspapers were so positive. It is clear that many readers had an acute and uncomfortable awareness of other readers, particularly the enemy, who were very likely scanning the same print. In 1943, newspaper photographs of RAF bomb damage in Germany were objected to: ‘Two Regions refer to the recent newspaper picture of a famous Berlin church burning; this is described as “only helping Goebbels’ propaganda”.’26 In the earlier years of the war, newspaper coverage of German air raids on Britain, particularly of the sort that suggested that life afterwards carried on as usual, had the opposite effect on readers than was intended: a new type a rumour which attributes any blitz to a speech or a newspaper article saying how well the town was carrying on. In Swansea, a speech by the Lord Privy Seal was blamed; at Bristol, an article in the Daily Express comparing Bristol with a town bombed by the R.A.F. in Germany, led to blame being attached to Lord Beaverbrook.27 There was ‘great resentment’ at an article in the ‘Daily Mail’ of April 7th, which described how Bristol had beaten the night bombers. This is regarded as a plain invitation to the enemy to return to the attack. An earlier raid was widely attributed to a similar newspaper article.28

In Coventry, it was reported that: On April 11 [1941], the day following the second serious raid. . . . There was much grumbling that the new raids were the result of optimistic press statements after Coventry’s first blitz, indicating that the industries of the town were carrying on. There were many requests that nothing of the kind should be said on this occasion. One incident is described by the Deputy Regional Information Officer as ‘significant and symptomatic’. An anonymous note was left in a Ministry of Information loudspeaker car which read: ‘It’s time the so-called Ministry of Misinformation was closed down. Any more blah about Coventry factories not being affected, and you ought to be hounded out of the city’. This feeling of sensitiveness has continued, and an article in the Daily Sketch of April 12, headed ‘COVENTRY CARRIED ON – AS BEFORE’ was regarded by the public as likely to provoke further raids.29

One of the considerable advantages of the Home Intelligence Reports is that they allow the historian to observe reading experience

Papers, Posters and Pamphlets   173

beyond books and newspaper reports. Text and pictures that were presented in public spaces – and designed to be read there – have always been an important but usually inaccessible aspect of reading in the past, from Pompeii to fly posting on virtually every available wall in nineteenth-century towns. The MOI needed to understand the sum of a person’s or a group’s reading, and thus could not ignore what went on in the street or on public transport. As readers could be scared by maps whose scale or selection might misrepresent an event, so could passers-by be frightened by what caught their eyes momentarily. Street newspaper sellers’ placards were apparently a great source of worry and rumour. On 18 May 1940 it was recorded that: Reports sent in yesterday afternoon and evening and this morning show that disquiet and personal fear has returned. [Newspaper sellers’] Placards in towns had something to do with this. Many observers reported great nervousness at the placard ‘MASS RAIDS OVER BRITAIN’ Threat. A clear indication comes that frightening placards should be prohibited (see today’s ‘76 MILES FROM PARIS’ Nazi Claim). Posters [can be seen] as a personal threat; they are read privately, so to speak. Moreover, they are a strong source of rumour.30

Evidence that placard-reading might be a threat to civilian morale must have been building, for by 27 May such placards had been prohibited. This was approved of in the North Midlands Region, where they were not missed, the general opinion being that ‘we are better off without scare headlines’.31 However, the prohibition seemed not to be working, print simply having been replaced by manuscript in pencil and chalk: ‘Newspaper placards were prohibited yesterday. Last night and this morning, however, pencilled placards and chalked blackboards have been freely displayed and the headlines on them have been of the same order as before’;32 ‘Complaints that newspaper vendors are chalking up defeatist placards in West End’.33 Nevertheless, the power of print in readers’ minds was so strong that handwriting simply could not convey the same authority, so its power to scare was significantly reduced: ‘Over the whole country newspaper placards have been replaced by pencillings and blackboard chalkings. The degree of irresponsibility they display is considerable but their effect is certainly less prejudicial to public morale than printed posters.’34 In the case of placards, the MOI could only react to others’ attempts to engage readers in the street, but posters were another matter. The Ministry was responsible for the production and pasting-up of tens

174  Simon Eliot

of millions of posters, from small flyers designed to be displayed in windows or pinned on notice boards, to huge spreads covering billboards and hoardings. Given that, by 1941, the landscape of many British towns included bombsites surrounded by hoardings, the oppor­tunities for engaging readers by imposing posters were many.35 One advantage of a poster was that it could offer a pithy message of advice and encouragement to a reader in what might be desperate circumstances. After a particularly heavy bombing raid on the night of 10 April 1941, Home Intelligence reported: On the morning of April 11, many people were unable to find the whereabouts of rest centres and other restorative services. This was attributed to their extreme fatigue and to an influx of police from other areas, unfamiliar with the emergency arrangements. Five loud-speaker vans were later in operation, but it was suggested that with a tired-out public, posters were more valuable than the spoken word.36

On occasion, posters, designed to have an impact, were perhaps too successful. In late June 1940, a poster on the subject of evacuation troubled those who read it in East Anglia: ‘The wording of the “invader” poster seems to have caused much alarm in certain areas, and a brisk increase in evacuation arrangements was noticeable in various East Coast districts as soon as it was exhibited.’37 In the south-east, reactions were a little more mixed, though clearly some readers took the exhortations to heart: ‘Hythe acutely agitated about evacuation poster – “It made people distinctly windy”. Folke­ stone has taken it calmly. Ramsgate voluntary evacuation suddenly increased after the poster. Public stated to be on tenterhooks.’38 But readers did not simply react passively to a poster; they were aware of its potential and keen to evaluate it and suggest improvements. In 1943 there was a major campaign to alert the population to the dangers of venereal disease: how the infection was spread, its symptoms and its effects. The campaign used advertisements in newspapers, short films shown in cinemas – and posters. The responses recorded in Home Intelligence Reports were remarkably positive: Venereal Disease Campaign: Favourable comment is reported from five Regions this week. Interest is said to be increasing, especially among young people, and it is thought that the seriousness of the situation is beginning to be realised by the general public. It is suggested that this is partly due to the film ‘Subject for Discussion’ and to the posters which ‘have produced talk and helped to remove the shame which has hitherto led to concealment and prevented treatment’.39

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However, the North Western Region reported less success, and even some violent reactions to the posters, although these appeared to be as much aesthetic as moral: In the North Western Region it is said that some cinema managers are reluctant to show ‘Subject For Discussion’ on the grounds that it lacks that ‘entertainment value which other “Into Battle” films possess very highly’. This Region also reports that ‘Loose living’ posters recently put up were torn down almost immediately in some districts. They were thought by some to be ‘melodramatic’ and ‘cheap and nasty’.40

Not content with reacting, readers and viewers came out fighting when given an invitation to make suggestions for ways in which the campaign on venereal disease might be improved: There is a fairly general feeling that ‘press advertisements are all very well as a beginning, but can only be a beginning’ and that ‘the Government should go much further in bringing home to the people not only the consequences of infection but the seriousness of the present position’. Many people feel that ‘such advertisements are read by only a proportion of the community’, and that ‘an advertisement in the corner of a newspaper does not give sufficient prominence to so important a subject’ . . . ‘Why could not the advertisements be placed in the centre of the page?’ Even more is it doubted whether ‘such advertisements get to the right people’, and it is felt that ‘stronger methods are needed to reach the ignorant, uneducated, careless and indifferent’ – such as, for example, ‘young girls in country districts, who, at the moment, are possible victims because of their haunting of camps and aerodromes’. Suggestions include: . . . ‘Posters that will easily catch the eye’, on hoardings generally, in railway stations, factories, technical colleges, and the lavatories of pubs and cinemas. Pictures and photographs, whether in the press or on posters. It is pointed out that ‘lots of people don’t read advertisements and only look at pictures’. Some ‘advocate the use of “horror pictures” to bring home the gravity of the matter not only to young people, who ignore the advertisements, but also to some older people who regard the diseases as almost routine matters’. One suggestion is ‘a photo of a blind baby, with the caption: “Do you want your baby to be born blind?”’41

One can hear the clear, insistent tone of the middle classes in many of these comments, but it is striking how open and unprudish the observations are. They also reveal a strong sense of how words or images make, or fail to make, an impact on the reader: that advertisements, even when placed in the centre of a page, are likely to be ignored; how

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pictures and posters should invade the work and leisure spaces of the ‘careless and indifferent’; and how pictures, in order to get through, should be shocking. It would be wrong, though, to think of government agencies domin­ating public reading spaces to the exclusion of all other voices. In a society that was, to a large extent, still open, and which prided itself on being so, other publications and other posters jostled for the attention of readers. The need for something to read while confined by an air raid to a bomb shelter was clearly pressing. This need had been recognised by other interests more speedily than by the MOI. In December 1940 it was reported that the communist Daily Worker ‘is the only newspaper on sale in many public shelters. As a result, it is bought by many who might prefer other papers.’ However, the official sources of information could offer an attractive alternative to print: ‘it has been found that the provision of counter-attractions – films, lectures, etc. have caused the activities of communist shelter committees to be neglected’.42 It was not just newspapers that competed with the official line. Government-funded posters, although in the overwhelming majority, did not have it all their own way. Readers in the streets might be confronted by communist-inspired posters demanding the immediate launch of a second front, although by March 1943 such readers were rarely sympathetic: there is not the same demand for a second front at all costs as there was last October. There are many who, though greatly desiring it, feel that ‘we mustn’t hurry the Government’. ‘Left wing clamour’ is said to get little response, and some resentment is reported at ‘huge posters on the lines: “Kharkov has fallen . . . open a second front now”’.43

Nor were communist opinions the only ones that intruded into the landscape created by official posters. Anti-vivisection posters: There is a ‘plague’ of these posters at Oxford and Reading, attacking diphtheria immunization. They are thought to be ‘deliberately misleading’, by quoting a statement by the Minister of Health out of its context.44

For very understandable reasons, individual and public health was a matter of pressing concern for both government agencies and many readers. In July 1943 a Home Intelligence Special Report on ‘Public Knowledge and Beliefs about some Aspects of Health’ had been compiled. Among fascinating accounts of false beliefs firmly held (even by some older doctors in rural areas of Wales),45 there was a

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survey of the ways mothers learned how to ensure their own and their children’s health. ‘Volumes on mothercraft’ and ‘mothercraft articles in magazines and newspapers’ are said to be widely read, but there is some regret that ‘there appear to be no Government publications’, and it is suggested that ‘the Government should send the best book on the subject gratis to all mothers’. Books on birth-control have been read by ‘the more educated, thoughtful or responsible’.46

The importance of the reading of periodicals is again made clear, but also a revealing belief among those interviewed that the government should be an active publisher and distributor of health advice. By 1943 the efforts of the MOI and other government departments to establish the means of communicating trusted information to the public had begun to bear fruit: readers now expected the government to take on the job of providing guidance and help, even in the most private and personal of matters. It has been argued that the creation of publishers’ serious non-fiction series – such as ‘Penguin Specials’ and Oxford University Press’s wartime pamphlets – had helped to create an appetite for the social reforms that set up the welfare state in Britain after 1945. However, it could be reasonably argued that the publishing activities of the MOI had an even greater impact on the mentalité of the British people in the 1940s. As was confirmed in MOI surveys, reading habits were largely a function of education. For instance, better-educated women were more likely to read books on birth control. However, posters particularly but also, to a lesser extent, newspaper advertisements and pamphlets could have a broader social audience. Nevertheless, the Home Intelligence Reports show an awareness that there was an ever-present danger that readers from all social classes might feel ‘got at’, or fatigued by, an overwhelming quantity of advice and information. In a survey of responses to ‘Fuel Communiques’, for example, it was observed that: It is believed that only a ‘minority of housewives bother to read the newspaper advertisements’, and reports from nine Regions emphasize that the Communiques were ‘too long and wordy’ to be read through and digested, though a minority of ‘more intelligent and educated women’ who have read the advertisements are reported to have understood and appreciated them. The length of the Communiques were compared un­ favourably to the brevity of the ‘Fuel Flashes’, and the third Communique was particularly liked because it was ‘less wordy’ and only emphasized one important point.47

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‘Too wordy’ was a common complaint from readers from the lower social classes: they felt irritated by officious verbosity, which both belittled them and wasted their time. In May 1943, a survey of ‘Housewives’ Attitudes towards Official Campaigns and Instructions’ brought – from London, the South East and the Southern Regions – the acknowledgement that a saturation point might have been reached, and could be avoided only through a process of ruthless filtering: There is not much evidence of confusion, but many people seem to think that ‘there is a limit to the degree to which the public can be successfully nagged, and this stage now appears to have been reached’. . . . This ‘flood of information’ is regarded, however, as inevitable, and from it ‘people . . . pick out what they need.’ . . . There is no direct evidence that the public is either confused or annoyed. There are signs, however, ‘that a fair number of housewives . . . have developed a protective shell as regards Government instructions, and in fact, ignore all those which they can safely ignore.’48

As observations about the dearth of reading matter in public air raid shelters made clear, there were also material factors that determined what readers could get hold of. Paper was in short supply, and printing capacity not directly related to war work was restricted. In December 1942 came complaints from two regions that ‘Women’s papers are hard to come by now for the casual purchaser who has not got a standing order, and are therefore not read by a great number of people’.49 Almost a year earlier, a review of newspaper shortages reported that, although some areas were managing to cope, The Board of Trade has reported that, owing to the operation of the pre-war quota, there are complaints of very inadequate supplies of newspapers in rural areas where war industries have recently developed. . . . In all areas, rural and urban, where the population has increased from any cause (reception areas, etc.) few or no spare newspapers are available for casual customers; but standing orders placed in advance are usually executed. A true shortage is stated to exist in the inland parts of the Southern Region. . . . In some rural areas, there are complaints of shortages of local papers, which are particularly useful to newcomers for information about local events, entertainment etc. . . . In Northern Ireland, a shortage is general, and one Belfast paper has complained strongly that restriction of newsprint gives an unfair advantage to Dublin papers (some of them unsympathetic to Britain).50

Paper rationing and the conscription of many workers in the printing trade also affected the supply of books, at least certain types of book. From Glasgow and Manchester in 1942 came the complaint that ‘while “trash is still published, serious books are hard to obtain”’.51

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The war affected not only the supply of reading matter but also the opportunities for, and the circumstances of, reading. When reading newspapers was difficult, other means of accessing the news had to be found. The blackout and its unintended consequences meant that some readers had to alter the balance of the sources of information available to them. In December 1942 it was reported that: There is continued appreciation of the repetition of headlines after the news, though there is some demand from the South Western Region that they should be more detailed; in two Regions the importance of the 9 p.m. news bulletins to war workers is stressed as so much time is taken up travelling in the blackout that they have little opportunity to read the newspapers.52

If, despite this, a reader was determined to read later at night, other problems associated with the blackout arose. Reading in bed, with inevitably growing drowsiness, might prevent readers getting enough fresh air: The blackout – ‘the greatest trial of the war’ – is at present the most formidable enemy of ventilation, according to all reports. Even efficient and well made blackout arrangements tend to exclude fresh air, but when, as is often the case, the blackout is ‘the Heath Robinson sort that exists in most types of homes’ the temptation to leave it in place indefinitely is very strong. One report refers to ‘many houses where the blackout was left up from week-end to week-end, as the workers both left for work and returned home during the hours of darkness’. Even where the blackout consists of ordinary curtains, which could easily be drawn back after the lights have been put out, many people, particularly the nervous or old are frightened to do so, ‘in case of the sirens’. Those who like to read in bed are reluctant, once they have reached ‘the pleasantly drowsy state’, to switch off the light, get out of bed, ‘grope their way to the windows, cope with the blackout, open the windows and grope their way back to bed in the dark’.53

Whether on a bus or in the blackout, readers wanted a balanced and (as far as possible) accurate view of the war. This included a desire to read the enemy’s explanation of events, even if it were generally known that such narratives were significantly less reliable than the sometimes equivocal accounts provided by the Ministry. Leaflets dropped by the enemy on the night of May 15th were met with mixed curiosity and ridicule. In some cases, information about sinkings was said to be demonstrably false, but workers in one Tyneside shipyard

180  Simon Eliot who had read the leaflets, approached the management for correct information about the alleged sinking of fifteen of the ships they had built. They were disappointed that fuller information could not be given. Many people are said to be waiting for ‘the next instalment’ of leaflets which has been promised.54

The anticipation of a next instalment of German leaflets was probably motivated by readers’ suspicions of a cover-up by British authorities. These suspicions were intensified by attempts of the police and soldiers to gather up the German propaganda scattered by aircraft: ‘There is criticism from Don Valley that the police and military, in collecting German leaflets and preventing their circulation have led people to say there is something in them which the Government does not want people to know.’55 London readers were equally suspicious: ‘German leaflet dropping aroused interest. Suspicions voiced that there is something in leaflet [sic] not revealed in reports of Hitler’s speech as leaflets were so quickly collected.’ 56 This frustration felt by readers when witnessing the hoovering up of German leaflets, however, was not simply generated by suspicion, but also the thwarted desire to read the views of the other side: There is evidence that the public is dissatisfied at the action of the police (and wardens) in collecting the German leaflets dropped on this country. These would be valued as souvenirs and many people declare they would like to read with their own eyes what was written in the leaflets.57

What is even more remarkable than the wish to hear the other side (however sceptical readers might be of German propaganda, as were listeners to Lord Haw-Haw) is the wish to preserve these leaflets as souvenirs. These readers, of course, realised that they were living through extraordinary times, but those who feel in imminent danger rarely stop to collect souvenirs. It was as though these respondents, even in the very dark days of 1940 and 1941, felt confident enough to wish to collect objects that would remind them of the events in a distant, and presumably happier, future. This implies a relatively high level of confidence among readers and, indeed, the general population – something that the accounts compiled by the MOI of the British people’s morale during the war would tend to confirm. Some recent research has suggested that this confidence in Britain’s economic and technological strength may have been well founded.58 So concerned was the MOI to capture and hold the trust of its readers that the Home Intelligence Report for 7 August 1940 recorded the following remarkable proposal: ‘It has been suggested that

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reproductions of the [German] leaflets should be made for circulation, and this would satisfy those who are dissatisfied as well as convincing opinion abroad of our sincerity.’59 The need for a liberal democratic society – which was engaged in a total war in which the feelings and ideas of citizens were critical to its successful prosecution – to reconcile authenticity with authority, sincerity with confidence, and accuracy with security was expressed on virtually every occasion when the MOI surveyed readers and their responses. Reading experience really mattered to the Ministry, hence the amount of space the Home Intelligence Reports devoted to it. However, more important still was that the message got through. It was more likely to get through if several approaches were used, so the printed or written word was usually complemented, and sometimes superseded, by radio broadcasts, lectures, films or exhibitions. The verbal, the oral (and aural) and the visual intertwined. This meant that reading was never assessed in isolation, but always as part of a mix of ways in which information might be conveyed. This mix created an environment of communication with its own ecology, in which the balance between the ways of conveying a message was dynamic and self-adjusting. Sometimes a short film got through when a leaflet did not. Sometimes an earnest poster exhorting people to further effort failed, and was replaced by a set of humorous cartoons. On occasions a leaflet would not work well on its own but, distributed at a public meeting, its effectiveness would be increased.60 The MOI in its various reports made this ecology of communication highly visible.61 Operating as it did in the twentieth century, there was a much wider range of media available to a reader than in previous centuries. Readers could pick and choose what they read, and then combine that in various ways with information from other sources. Reading experience has always been a product of a person’s capacity to create a patchwork, or a personal anthology, from a diversity of texts and other sources of information. The readers surveyed by the MOI provide an extended and explicit example of this process.

Notes  1. The National Archives, Kew (TNA), RG 23/43, ‘Newspapers and the Public: An Inquiry into Newspaper Reading amongst the Civilian Population carried out by the Wartime Social Survey for Campaigns Division of the Ministry of Information, June–July 1943’. All the Home

182  Simon Eliot Intelligence Reports and all the Wartime Social Surveys can now be found on the MoI Digital website at (lasted accessed 10 January 2020).   2. Ibid., p. 2.   3. Ibid., p. 5.   4. TNA, INF 1/123, Robert Fraser, ‘Books and Pamphlets Programme’, 2 December 1941, p. 1. It is estimated that up to 15 million copies were produced when overseas licences are included in the total.   5. TNA, INF 1/75, Robert Fraser to G. S. Royds, 28 April 1943; and TNA, INF 1/76, ‘Draft Submission to the Minister by Controller of Production’, 23 June 1944.   6. TNA, RG 23/42, ‘A Study of Public Attitudes towards Six Ministry of Information Books, June–July 1943’, p. 2.   7. Ibid., p. 2.   8. Ibid., p. 3.   9. TNA, INF 1/123, Robert Fraser, 2 December 1941, p. 1. Fraser was right to adopt this dual approach: of those surveyed, between 23 and 30 per cent looked only at the pictures in one or more of the six books (RG 23/42, p. 34). 10. TNA, RG 23/42, p. 3. 11. Ibid., p. 4. 12. Ibid., p. 23. 13. Ibid., p. 3. 14. When same survey asked the question ‘Which of the films you have seen gives the best picture of what life is like in America?’, the highest scorers were the Andy Hardy series (4 per cent), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (3 per cent) and Mr Smith Goes to Washington (2 per cent). The report commented: ‘As with books, so with films; if answers are grouped, the preponderant section is composed of films with a socio­ logical “debunking” theme’. TNA, INF 1/293, ‘British Public Opinion and the United States’, 23 February 1942, p. 4. 15. Ibid., p. 4. 16. Ibid., p. 5. 17. TNA, INF 1/264, Home Intelligence Daily Report (HIDR) No. 53, 18 July 1940, f. 102. 18. TNA, INF 1/292, Home Intelligence Weekly Report (HIWR), October 1941, ‘Appendix – Home Morale and Public Opinion, A review of some conclusions arising out of a year of Home Intelligence Weekly Reports’, f. 276, p. 4. 19. TNA, INF 1/264, HIDR No. 37, 29 June 1940, f. 145. 20. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR, October 1941, ‘Appendix – Home Morale and Public Opinion’, f. 277, p. 6. 21. TNA, INF 1/264, HIDR No. 21, 10 June 1940, ‘Public Opinion on the Present Crisis’, f. 193. 22. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 45, 23–30 July 1941, p. 2.

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23. TNA, INF 1/264, HIDR No. 18, 6 June 1940, ‘Public Opinion on the Present Crisis’, f. 200. 24. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 112, 26 November 1942, p. 1. 25. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 115, 17 December 1942, p. 6. 26. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 133, 22 April 1943, p. 6. 27. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 23, 5–12 March 1941, p. 2. 28. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 27, 2–9 April 1941, p. 2. 29. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 28, 9–16 April 1941, p. 1. 30. TNA, INF 1/264, HIDR, 18 May 1940, f. 274, p. 2. 31. TNA, INF 1/264, HIDR, 8 June 1940, ‘Public Opinion on the Present Crisis’, p. 1. 32. TNA, INF 1/264, HIDR, 28 May 1940, ‘Public Opinion on the Present Crisis’, f. 299. 33. TNA, INF 1/264, HIDR, 16 May 1940, ‘Points from Region’, f. 109. 34. TNA, INF 1/264, HIDR No. 18, 6 June 1940, ‘Public Opinion on the Present Crisis’, f. 199. 35. References to the frequency and size of posters in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) may well owe something to this new urban landscape. His wife worked for the MOI, and Orwell himself for the BBC, so both must have been acutely aware of the Ministry’s campaigns. 36. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 28, 9–16 April 1941, p. 1. 37. TNA, INF 1/264, HIDR, 24 June 1940, ‘Points from Regions’, f. 155, p. 2. 38. TNA, INF 1/264, HIDR, 27 June 1940, f. 151, p. 2. 39. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 134, 29 April 1943, p. 11. 40. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 135, 6 May 1943, p. 10. 41. TNA, INF 1/293, Home Intelligence Special Report (HISR) No. 41, 26 March 1943, ‘Public Reactions to the Venereal Diseases Campaign’, p. 6. 42. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 11, 11–18 December 1940, p. 3. 43. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 129, 25 March 1943, p. 3. 44. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 130, 1 April 1943, p. 10. 45. TNA, INF 1/293, HISR No. 47, July 1943, ‘Public Knowledge and Beliefs about some Aspects of Health’, p. 4. 46. Ibid., p. 4. 47. TNA, INF 1/293, HISR No. 31, ‘Public Response to Fuel Communique Nos 1, 2, and 3’, p. 2. 48. TNA, INF 1/293, HISR No. 44, 14 May 1943, ‘Housewives’ Attitudes towards Official Campaigns and Instructions’, p. 3. 49. TNA, INF 1/293, HISR No. 35, 3 December 1942, ‘The Mend and Make Do Campaign’, p. 1. 50. TNA, INF 1/293, HISR No. 3, 20 January 1942, ‘Shortage of Newspapers in Newly Developed War Industry Areas’, p. 1. 51. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 90, 25 June 1942, p. 10. 52. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 115, 17 December 1942, p. 6. 53. TNA, INF 1/293, HISR No. 47, July 1943, p. 11. 54. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR No. 138, 27 May 1943, p. 6.

184  Simon Eliot 55. TNA, INF 1/264, HIDR, 17 August 1940, f. 32. 56. TNA, INF 1/264, HIDR No. 65, 2 August 1940, f. 67. 57. TNA, INF 1/264, HIDR, 7 August 1940, f. 54. 58. See the graph of morale reproduced as end papers of Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979). David Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine (London: Allen Lane, 2011), puts forward an interesting case for Britain’s preparedness for, and considerable capacity to wage, war. If true, this would provide one explanation for the British public’s persistent optimism. 59. TNA, INF 1/264, HIDR No. 69, 7 August 1940, f. 54. 60. ‘Leaflets by themselves will arouse little interest. But leaflets distributed at effective local meetings would be read and marked. One leaflet should state clearly the facts of the situation. Others might follow the model of the leaflet “Workers under Nazi Gangsters” e.g. “Miners under Nazi Bosses”’. TNA, INF 1/292, HIWR, 26 May–4 June 1941, ‘Secret Appendix Scottish Miners and the Present Emergency’, p. 6. 61. Simon Eliot, ‘Recasting Book History’, Book Collector, summer 2017, pp. 363–75, especially pp. 368–70.

Chapter 9

Peace of Mind in the Age of Anxiety: Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman and America’s Post-war Therapeutic Faith Cheryl Oestreicher

Happiness was a desired and elusive goal in post-war America. Although profoundly affected by the recent world wars and economic depression, many Americans were challenged more by the stresses of day-to-day life.1 To cope, some sought guidance from mental health professionals or clergy. Yet the clergy were seldom trained to help with mental health issues, while psychiatrists could not adequately address spiritual crises. Recognising this disparity, Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman published Peace of Mind in 1946. This religious self-help book bridged the gap between earlier religious tracts that emphasised guilt and sin, and psychological texts which caused readers to believe their inner thoughts and feelings were abnormal. By blending religion, self-help and simplified Freudian psychology, Peace of Mind offered simple and easy methods for incorporating faith and psychiatry into everyday life to achieve happiness. Liebman was the first non-Christian author to publish a bestselling post-war religious self-help book in the United States.2 Letters and responses to the book revealed that its readers were anxious, lost and desperate for guidance. Men and women of various ages, education levels, faiths, geographical locations, marital statuses and occupations wrote to Liebman for advice about relationships, grief, parenting, careers, religion, mental health, emotions and other dimensions of their daily lives. For many readers, Peace of Mind provided comfort, hope and validation that they were not alone in their quest for happiness. Readers’ responses and reactions to Peace of Mind provide insight into post-war ideas of faith and psychiatry. In the 1920s, a number of writers, both lay and clergy, had produced easily understandable books about religion that appealed to the public. Book historian John Tebbel noted that the biggest sellers 185

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were non-denominational books that offered practical religious advice for ‘social and moral problems’.3 This trend continued into the 1930s and 1940s, when religious self-help books reflected a re-evaluation of religion and science, and a search for new faiths and philosophies. Authors such as Liebman, Norman Vincent Peale and Harry Emerson Fosdick merged contemporary psychology and religious concepts into an affordable ‘everyman’s psychiatry’.4 Sociologist Philip Rieff called for clergy to infuse therapy with religion, or a ‘therapeutic’ faith, for their followers: that is, a faith that therapy provided people with a way to overcome their mental and emotional issues and better adapt to society.5 Historians Charles Lippy and David Paul Nord both argued that this therapeutic faith, or ‘religio-therapy’, allowed readers to interpret their own meanings and beliefs instead of those mandated by traditional religious doctrine through connecting what they read in the text directly to their own lives and worldviews.6 The lines between religion and psychology blurred as clergy accepted and reframed the connections to best suit their institutions’ and congregants’ needs. To communicate their messages to a wider public, they capitalised upon growing consumerism and individuals’ turn to popular culture and the media for their information, leading to the proliferation of religious self-help books. Clergy took psychological theories and restated their simplified interpretations within a mostly ecumenical context. By altering the definitions of psychology, faith and religion, religious self-help authors reached wider audiences than if they wrote to strictly denominational beliefs. As described by sociologists Louis Schneider and Sanford M. Dornbusch, inspirational literature focused on individualised instead of organised religion, emphasising the personalisation of God, affirming that faith brings happiness, and reconciling psychology and religion.7 Though these trends reflected a personalised religion, they simultaneously encouraged participation in religious institutions. Readers wanted help to become better people, relate better to others, or better deal with issues from daily life. Instead of forcing tenets to meet their faith’s unrealistic expectations, religious self-help authors adapted aspects of their faiths to serve readers’ individual needs. Indeed, these books fit within the 1940s self-help culture that embraced self-empowerment to build character.8 On bestseller lists for three years, Peace of Mind provided a ‘therapy for the normal’.9 Its popularity was largely due to Liebman’s practical guidance to bring religion and faith in God back into individuals’ lives, while validating the normality of inner conflict and difficult feelings. Liebman explained how using psychiatry and religion together could

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help people achieve emotional and spiritual maturity, ultimately leading to happiness. Though Peace of Mind contemporised Sigmund Freud’s theories to understand oneself utilising therapeutic methods,10 Liebman disagreed with Freud’s assumption that only the individual mattered. He instead followed the philosophies of William James and John Dewey and believed that healthy-minded individuals made for a well adjusted society. Liebman understood the need for individual therapeutic assistance if one wanted to become a well adjusted person in society. Many of the self-help texts that incorporated psychology and religion were written by clergy who had experienced therapy. This pairing became more accepted11 as authors created a religious book subgenre that was a new type of personal counselling – books with answers and practical applications to solve both religious and emotional problems. Peace of Mind explored what Liebman called the five ‘universal human dilemmas’ which worked against personal fulfilment: ‘conscience, love, fear, grief, and God’. By interpreting and explaining these dilemmas within both religious and psychological contexts, Liebman demonstrated how they related to each other and intertwined on the road to happiness. Religion defined sin and the moral ways of humankind, while psychiatry offered the best cure for overcoming an emotional condition that might result from sins committed. Liebman emphasised that religion must learn this from psychiatry; instead of focusing on punishment, religion should focus on acknowledgement and acceptance to achieve personal strength.12 Liebman expected his readers to accept his theory of the compatibility of psychiatry and religion but still allowed them to interpret it to best serve their beliefs in God and themselves. Overwhelmingly, the majority of readers accepted this interpretation and expressed apparent relief at having practical solutions to apply easily. Demonstrating the strong connection readers felt to Peace of Mind, they shared their interpretations, reactions, uses and thoughts through letters to the author. In 1946, the same year Peace of Mind appeared, Henry C. Link and Harry Arthur Hopf published their study of 4,000 interviews conducted in the United States in 1944, in both rural and urban areas, to determine people’s book-buying and reading habits. The study indicated that most readers were upper or middle class, educated and of various ages and religious affiliations. Specifically, 50 per cent of Americans aged fifteen years or more were ‘active readers’ (i.e. they had read at least one book within the past month), which broke down as 46 per cent men and 53 per cent women. Of the most recent books

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read, 14 per cent were religious, 7 per cent dealt with psychology and 3 per cent were self-help titles.13 Their findings support folklorist Sandra K. Dolby’s argument that most self-help books were ‘popular’ and geared towards middlebrow culture.14 Both Dolby’s theory and Link and Hopf’s study align with the demographics of Liebman’s readers, taken from nearly 900 ‘fan mail’ letters.15 Though few letters provided enough detail to assess comprehensive sociological data, an overview of location, gender, occupation, education, marital status, race and religious affiliation suggests there was no single, predominant reader type. Unsurprisingly, more than two-thirds identified as Jewish, and about a quarter were clergy (the majority of whom were rabbis). A general summary of readers’ demographics, as self-disclosed in their letters, is as follows: • Gender – 49 per cent men and 48 per cent women (gender could not always be ascertained).16 • Occupation – clergy (of various faiths), medical personnel, psy­chia­ trists, therapists, academics, teachers, business people, secretaries, soldiers, lawyers, librarians, booksellers, salespeople, students (middle school through to advanced degrees) and journalists. • Religious affiliation – Jewish, Baptist, Catholic, Christian Science, Congregational, Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian and Unitarian/ Universalists, non-religious, agnostic, and believing in God but not adhering to a particular faith. • Age – ranged from middle school age to over sixty-five. • Education – ranged from middle school to PhD, MD and JD degrees. • Race – the vast majority white, but a few African-American. • Marital status – single, married, divorced and widowed. • Geographical location – urban and rural areas in forty-four of the forty-eight states then comprising the USA; countries from six continents, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Istanbul, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Rhodesia and South Africa. Historian Andrew Heinze speculated that the majority of Liebman’s readers were women. He pointed out that, historically, women were often responsible for the ‘therapeutic tendencies’ in both Protestantism and Judaism, and that interest in the ‘psyche’ was feminine. He and historian Matthew Hedstrom also argued that the timing of publication spoke to women who grieved for loved ones lost in the Second World War.17 In fact, in the sample analysed, the proportions of men and women were roughly equal, and only

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rarely did either mention losing someone in the war. Instead, readers asked for advice about marriage, children, friends, relatives, grief, depression, careers, loneliness, religion, God, faith, employment and relationships, and other difficulties of daily life. Liebman wanted readers to ‘use’ his book, which meant accepting and incorporating his views on religion and psychiatry into their daily lives. Readers apply meaning to a text based on their individual contexts, situations, interpretations and knowledge.18 Accordingly, Peace of Mind was not just read but was given as a gift, reread, annotated, marked and used, fulfilling Liebman’s goal that readers value it as a manual for everyday living. Readers who responded to Liebman’s book did so for a variety of reasons: to praise Peace of Mind, ask advice about personal problems, seek assistance in finding a psychiatrist, request speaking engagements, ask to translate his book into other languages, request autographed copies, solicit book recommendations to learn about Judaism, enquire where they could buy the book, or just say thank you. Many told Liebman, ‘you’re the only one I feel I can turn to’, indicating their comfort with expressing to him their intimate thoughts about religion and mental health. By the 1940s, in part due to Jewish analysts fleeing Nazi occupation, the USA had become the centre of psychoanalysis.19 American psychiatry did not strictly adhere to Freud’s practices but instead melded different theories to formulate a practical therapy. Psychiatry and psychology, often with an emphasis on how good mental health brought happiness, reached the general public through legislation, social programmes, popular culture, education and the media. As more professionals were trained, more books were published, more magazines offered advice and more opportunities were created for people to seek or learn about therapy; therefore, the public became more receptive to and entrenched in a therapeutic culture. As only the affluent could afford professional psychiatric services, the general public turned towards other methods, including the ‘everyman’s psychiatry’ offered by self-help books.20 The accessibility of psychology and psychiatry increased during the first half of the twentieth century and proliferated after the Second World War, coinciding with the expansion of popular culture and consumerism. The terminology, ideas and theories reached the general public not through formal education or professional therapy, but through films, books, popular magazines and the media.21 However, alongside this popularisation there was still an element of fear and judgement surrounding mental health issues.

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Liebman used such terms as ‘neurotic’, ‘neurosis’, ‘drive’, ‘narcissism’, ‘ego’, ‘repression’ and ‘sublimation’ in ways that demonstrated they were part of the era’s vernacular.22 Readers also utilised words such as ‘neurotic’, ‘depression’, ‘melancholic’, ‘mentally sick’ and others that indicated their familiarity with psychiatric terminology. But, typical of ‘pop psychologists’, Liebman was inconsistent in his use of the terms ‘psychology’, ‘psychiatry’ and ‘dynamic psychology’.23 Whereas psychology is the study of the mind, psychiatry concerns the treatment of the mind. Added to the mix was ‘dynamic psychology’, now known as behavioural psychology.24 Liebman interchangeably used these terms and phrases throughout the text, not to provide an intellectual analysis but instead to break them down into sim­ plistic ideas and ‘uses’ for his readers: how to ‘look within’, uncover repressed emotions and talk issues through. Readers either did not recognise or did not mind these vocabulary inconsistencies. Liebman’s approach to psychiatry was deeply grounded in Freudian theories. Citing Sigmund Freud as the ‘greatest mind of the twentieth century’,25 Liebman bridged authentic Freudian philosophies with neo-Freudian trends. As a Freudian, he completely subscribed to the theory that all emotional problems were rooted in childhood, but he was also neo-Freudian in the sense that he ignored some aspects of Freud’s theories. Following the American trend of melding multiple theories, he consolidated and expressed ideas that he believed in and also practised.26 One aspect of Freudian theory that Liebman pointedly ignored was sexuality. In a sermon, Liebman dispelled the misinterpretation that Freud promoted sex and promiscuity.27 In a letter to a Presbyterian minister, he concluded that treating sex as ‘evil’ in a religious context or ‘taboo’ in a social context were unsound approaches to the ‘problem of sex’ and contributed to people’s mental ailments.28 Peace of Mind was published at a time when the neo-Freudians were challenging Freud’s theories on sexuality and prior to Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 report Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, but Liebman did not clarify why he excluded these theories from his book. It was possibly because he focused on emotional well-being, and did not view sex or sexuality as important as other life issues that caused mental stress. This omission did not preclude a few readers from addressing this issue in their letters. At least two readers praised this absence because they believed psychoanalysis placed too much emphasis on sex.29 Other readers discussed emotional stress from having premarital sex, dissatisfaction with or an inability to have marital sexual relations, or not feeling sexually desired.30

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One area where Liebman adhered to Freudian theory was with regard to conscience. Liebman framed his idea of ‘conscience’ within feelings of guilt, and it was guilt from ‘sinful’ or ‘immoral’ acts and thoughts that caused both mental and physical ailments. This mind-set came from repressed emotions from childhood, where instead of being allowed to assert independence, parents and others forced authority and curbed rebellion.31 Clearly rephrasing Freud’s discussion of children’s difficult transition to develop autonomy from their parents, Liebman held religion responsible for this failure to achieve full adulthood. Liebman unequivocally believed that all problems stemmed from childhood. Parents, siblings, teachers and clergy affected a child’s development, and Liebman contextualised this within an adult’s repressed tendencies. Readers connected with this by describing home lives, family relationships, unpopularity, alcoholism, financial straits, repressed feelings, depression, abuse or just general unhappy childhoods.32 One reader pronounced himself ‘a specimen of tangled up mess of humanity I am sure caused from problems of mis­ understanding and confusion originating even before the memory of my childhood days’.33 Readers undoubtedly believed their childhoods affected their current mental health, and some seemed to have never previously made that connection. Whether they discussed childhood or more recent issues, descriptions of emotions consistently appear in most letters, particularly ‘bad’ emotions. Historian Peter Stearns explained that categorising the emotions of fear, anger and guilt as ‘bad’ developed in the 1920s and led to a belief in the strong need to suppress them. Grief, in particular, was a ‘bad’ emotion: even after the atrocities of the Second World War, death was downplayed and people were expected to be ‘brave’ and avoid mourning.34 Influenced by Freud, Americans started to believe and accept repressed childhood memories as their cause. Liebman received his education and started his rabbinical career during this era and there is a strong correlation between how Liebman approached emotional health and Stearns’s analysis. Liebman later criticised society’s categorisation of ‘bad’ emotions and instead argued that they were actually healthy and normal. Instead of hiding or suppressing them, he promoted psychoanalytic methods to acknowledge and accept these emotions. The chapter on grief was the one readers responded to the most. Titled ‘Grief’s Slow Wisdom’, an abridged version also appeared in the Reader’s Digest shortly after the book’s release. Liebman accused ‘education and religion’ of promoting feelings of shame when

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someone felt anger or guilt for grieving over the death of a loved one.35 Liebman’s counselling on grief was at once scornful towards religion, his best demonstration of how religion and psychiatry blended, and his clearest practical advice to his readers. Liebman pointed out that while religion helped spiritually, psychiatry assisted emotionally.36 In particular, Judaism was ‘psychologically sound in its approach to death’ because it encouraged people to express their grief. Liebman claimed this was opposite to the cultural norm at the time: not showing emotions supposedly demonstrated strength.37 As Stearns noted, the First World War ‘emphasized the need to put grief aside’, and after the Second World War society avoided discussion and mourning the atrocities of war.38 The pressure to ignore or suppress grief caused continuous angst as readers tried to deal with losses from various points in their lifetimes. Liebman utilised the theory of his former psychoanalyst, Dr Erich Lindemann, that all bereaved persons go through successive stages for weeks or months, including physical distress, guilt, lack of interest in life and preoccupation with the deceased. Liebman explained how Lindemann discovered that if repressed, these emotions manifested sometimes months or years later, as physical disease, or severe depression or other mental disturbance.39 Liebman provided several examples supporting this theory but, interestingly, none about losing loved ones in the war. Instead, he primarily discussed how instances of death during childhood affected how one dealt with it as an adult. Readers’ reactions support Stearns’s argument that American society discouraged the expression of grief. To Liebman, and perhaps to no one else, they shared their deep emotional stress caused by the loss of a spouse, child or parent, often recently.40 A few discussed losing someone in the war,41 though far from the extent to which Heinze and Hedstrom speculated. One reader asked of her son lost after V-J Day, ‘I would like to know if my boy was taken by the “will of God” or otherwise’.42 Aligning with Liebman’s emphasis on looking back to childhood, one reader discussed how his mother’s grief from losing her husband and aunt in his childhood made his family acquire ‘the feeling of insecurity, sorrow, glumness, and inequality and shunning of other people’, which caused suicidal thoughts, depression, hopelessness and a lack of purpose in life.43 Letters left the impression that people had little or no guidance on how to cope, and highly praised Liebman’s chapter for its comfort and support. Readers’ responses to Liebman’s discussion of grief were overwhelmingly positive, but there was occasional criticism. A Jewish doctor stressed that there was nothing new in his theories of how grief

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causes physical ailments. He took issue when Liebman encouraged telling children the truth about death so they could openly grieve, and insisted that ‘most experienced pediatricians and other physicians’ opposed allowing children to attend funerals.44 Contrarily, one reader suggested that all ministers and funeral directors should give copies of Liebman’s book to the bereaved.45 The few readers who objected to conveying grief reflected the larger cultural expectations against expressing emotions. Critiquing contemporary culture, Liebman believed in discussing mental health issues openly, yet he failed to grasp neo-Freudian theories of the effect of culture upon individual mental health. He discounted how societal, cultural and even familial factors created new issues in adulthood unrelated to repressed childhood memories. Readers either did not see this or did not mind the contradiction in Liebman’s position. Liebman’s disregard for cultural impacts was noteworthy considering Peace of Mind appeared less than a year after the end of the Second World War. Though he made occasional references to the war, he did not outwardly acknowledge that two recent world conflicts, the Holocaust or the US Depression might have contributed to modern people’s ‘psychic anxieties’. Liebman mentioned how psychiatry helped returning shell-shocked soldiers, but explained that their neuroses originated not from war experiences but from repressed childhood traumas.46 Indeed, he did not address how the general public should heal their emotional war wounds, stating outright that dynamic psychology ‘ignores ofttimes the social sources of human misery’.47 Purposely downplaying those recent events reinforced his Freudian tendencies and encouraged readers to think not of the present but of their own pasts. The most practical psychiatric method he promoted, and possibly the easiest for his readers to use, was to talk problems through. Simplistically, people should look within themselves and discuss their issues. He chided religion for utilising repression, which forced people to suppress any emotion they thought bad or sinful.48 Thus psychiatry was better than religion, because if individuals looked within themselves and expressed their emotions, they would find the path to ‘peace of mind’. Dozens of readers desired someone to talk to and requested referrals to psychiatrists in their respective locations. These enquiries signify both the difficulty in finding a local psychiatrist, as well as readers’ openness to seeking therapy. Some also detailed their experiences with therapists, often indicating a lack of success. As professional psychiatrists were not always available or affordable,

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Liebman recommended the practical solution of consulting anyone – friend, clergy, relative – because just the act of talking helped restore mental health. Readers took him at his word, but instead of talking to others they wrote to Liebman. Unhappiness with religion, faith and God was a common trouble that pervaded readers’ letters. Freud argued that people no longer looked towards religion for answers, and Heinze reinforced this by claiming that religion did not offer techniques for Americans to help heal ‘their psychic pains’.49 Yet even if discontented with their faith, many wanted to reconnect with religion and God. Liebman’s theological perspective, though deeply rooted in Judaism, presented little need for strict adherence to a traditional faith but offered instead a personalisation of religion and God. As a rabbi who embraced interfaith relations, he capitalised on the changing religious culture to promote the idea that individuals make religious faith work for them instead of forcing themselves to fit into a mould expected, if not demanded, by traditional religious institutions. Dissatisfaction with clergy and organised religion caused some Americans to turn to religious self-help literature to find answers outside of conventional dogmas.50 Historian Sydney Ahlstrom noted that the interfaith movement began in the 1920s,51 the same time Liebman was in seminary, and it likely affected his ministries. Sociolo­ gist Will Herberg argued that, in the post-war era, religion no longer had ‘authentic’ Jewish or Christian content but instead related more to society as a whole.52 Even with this transition, Americans had a growing acceptance of and desire to learn about Judaism. Liebman embraced both these ideals. His writings allowed for interpretation to suit individual spiritual needs of any faith, but complied with contemporaneous rabbinical practice to ‘make Jewishness familiar to non-Jews’.53 As such, Liebman promoted both Judaism as well as interfaith interpretation to meet individual preferences. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr argued that a religious revival focusing on a deeper understanding of human existence and ‘divine power’ could be a factor in the ‘healing of the nations’.54 Liebman paralleled these thoughts, as he believed that ‘happy people create a happy society’. He defined religion as ‘accumulated spiritual wisdom and ethical precepts’ that ‘gradually formulated into a body of tested truth for man’s moral guidance and spiritual at-homeness in the universe’.55 He also explained that the goal of inner peace was explored by ‘saints and mystics, the poets and philosophers’ like Buddha, ­Maimonides and Thomas à Kempis.56 By citing a variety of religious figures, he demonstrated that many faiths had similar goals

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regarding God, life, happiness and peace. Essentially, Liebman wanted his readers to use religion to build a sense of community and lead a moral life. This overgeneralisation allowed for the potential of a larger readership but also discounted the differences between religions. Jewish theology was apparent throughout the text, but, as with psychiatry, Liebman reduced it to simplistic theories, to be more acceptable and accessible to a wide audience. Rabbi Milton Steinberg stated that Judaism contained seven aspects woven together: doctrine, morality, customs and ceremonies, law, sacred literature, institutions, and people.57 In Peace of Mind, Liebman omitted the strict traditions of law, institutions, doctrine and ceremony, while emphasising morality, literature and people. This approach gave individuals a way to find their purpose in the world, a relationship to God, group fellowship, and a guide to a moral and spiritual way of living. Though Liebman clearly iterated that Judaism was the best course to a religious life, he echoed philosopher William James’s idea of a modern religion that accepted others’ faiths as long as they believed in God and embraced religion as an important part of ‘peace of mind’. To some extent, the faith with which one identified did not preclude discontent. Of those who indicated their religious affiliation in their letters to Liebman, the vast majority were Jewish. One likely possibility is that they felt a connection with a fellow Jew. Many of these were rabbis offering praise, but also readers discussing their personal problems. One issue brought up by Jews but no correspondents of other faiths was intermarriage. At a time when some Americans of other faiths expressed interest in learning more about Jews and their faith, Jews strived to maintain their identity and preserve their culture and heritage. Some parents conveyed their deep concerns about their children marrying outside the faith. They worried that Jews would leave their Jewishness behind, become assimilated into mainstream society and disappear from existence. While Jews desired more acceptance and understanding from the Christian majority, many feared that in entering the American mainstream they would lose their identity. Though many Jews wrote to Liebman, readers of numerous other faiths wrote praising his explanations of religion and God: ‘It gave me an understanding of a dynamic, new thinking about religion and God’; ‘It transcends dogma to strike at the foundation stones of living. A modern Ten Commandments’; ‘modern approach to religious problems’; ‘helped me understand my religious beliefs better than anything I’ve ever read’.58 Phrases like ‘new thinking’ and ‘modern approach’ signify the openness some readers had to amending or reforming their religious views. Interestingly, several commented

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on the relationship between Peace of Mind and the Bible: ‘It is the greatest book since the Bible’; ‘It should be sold with every copy of the Bible’; ‘Peace of Mind gave me more down-to-earth common sense than Spinoza, the Bible, The Age of Reason’.59 There was also a small subset of readers who enquired about how they could learn about Judaism, or asked Liebman to speak to their organisations, of which some were Jewish but the majority were Protestant or not affiliated with a particular religion. Similar to their connections to mental health issues, some readers related their current ideas and beliefs about religion back to their childhood, such as broken faith or inadequacy of childhood faith.60 More often, they expressed general discontent without attributing their loss of faith to a specific time or event. Conversely, a Jewish reader indicated how to adapt religious views to a modern mind-set when she said ‘The mature attitude toward God in which we give up our childish, selfish view is exactly what I have always wanted to have’.61 Though intellectuals like Herberg and Rieff believed religious dissatisfaction began in the post-war era, these comments suggest it started long before the war. Most readers respected Liebman’s insights into faith and God but he was sometimes criticised for omitting Jesus Christ. Unsurprisingly, these comments primarily came from Catholic readers, though not all indicated their affiliation. Comments included: ‘Personally, I could never attain perfect “Peace of Mind” without a belief in Christ, the Saviour’; ‘it failed to emsize [sic] with the religion and philosophy of the Old Testament and modern psychiatry the contribution made by Christ’; ‘why does Rabbi Liebman not believe that the Old Testament is incomplete without the use New Testament for us Jews?’; ‘It seems so difficult for presumed educators to teach the simple truth as simply and understandably as did the Master Jesus’; ‘he is practically shattering the foundation upon which the Christian faith is built’.62 Even though Liebman stated he was a rabbi and overtly referenced the benefits of Judaism throughout the book, these readers either disagreed with or did not understand Judaism. Unlike the readers discontented with their faith, these comments came from readers with devout religious beliefs. The majority of letters focused on either mental health or religion, but several commended Liebman for bringing science and religion together. Most offered general comments and did not delve into deep interpretations: ‘it promises to narrow the conflict between science and religion’; ‘it supplies the spirituality sometimes lacking in books on psychology’; ‘an enlightening and worthwhile attempt to clarify certain

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phases of both religion and psychiatry which are usually not very thoroughly understood by the layman’; ‘This book has given me something additional: the know-how of combining Faith with modern psychology’; ‘uniting of psychology and spiritual backgrounds strikes a much needed approach to present-day problems’.63 An agnostic wrote that it was ‘the most helpful book I have read from the point of view of its psychological achievement of bridging the gap that separated religion from our modern psychiatric conception of man’.64 These readers, for the most part, already believed in the benefits of combining religion and psychiatry as a therapeutic approach, even if the concept was not yet universally accepted. Most importantly, the comments confirm that Liebman achieved his ultimate goal in Peace of Mind. A few readers disagreed with Liebman’s blend of psychology and religion. One said, ‘The real problem however is that psychiatry needs the help of religion; the author fails to present this problem in its full and tragic depth and has nothing to contribute except commonplaces’. Another had the similar view that ‘The author fails as a man of religion to add any new meaning in his correlation of psychology and religion’.65 This last comment came from a woman who wrote that she was ‘a Gentile and want to rid myself of racial prejudice’. A Boston Catholic priest wrote, ‘it would be a serious mistake for the teacher of religion to practice psychiatry. . . . The most a teacher of religion should do is to note the need and recommend psychiatric treatment, in much the same way that we urge medical treatment to those who are physically ill.’ Calling psychiatry an ‘infant science’, he did not disagree with people exploring the field, just the merging of it with religion.66 As with the fan mail, many reviews of the book extolled both Liebman and Peace of Mind. In the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, a non-denominational minister gave merit to how Liebman demonstrated the mutually beneficial relationship of psy­ chiatry and religion.67 The Chicago Sunday Tribune called it ‘the book of the year to date’.68 A review from an unidentified but likely Jewish newspaper noted Liebman’s emphasis on psychiatry over religion, provided an overview of the chapters that related them directly to Jews and stated that Peace of Mind was a ‘MUST on the reading list of all’.69 Reviews praising the book also appeared in World Affairs, Current History and the Atlantic Monthly.70 Reviews in religion and psychology journals were positive, but with some criticism. In the American Journal of Psychotherapy, Joseph Wilder noted that Liebman’s exploration of religion would be ‘un­ acceptable to many readers’ but would interest historians, sociologists and philosophers, and he also promoted its potential use for social

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workers, physicians and psychoanalysts.71 The Bulletin – Jewish Welfare Service recommended ‘that everyone read Peace of Mind by Joshua Loth Liebman’ to help with psychological issues.72 A combination of accolade and criticism also came from his fellow rabbis. Conservative rabbi and author Milton Steinberg’s review in The Reconstructionist praised Peace of Mind for its insight and truthfulness. In pairing religion and psychiatry, it offered ways ‘a man may most comfortably live with himself’. Steinberg described it as ‘an invaluable handbook’ to clergy, social workers and physicians, as well as theologians and psychiatrists. However, he thought Liebman’s religion conceded ‘too much and too readily to psychology and psychiatry’.73 Reform rabbi Bernard Heller had less issue with Liebman’s deference to psychiatry but more with how his liberal theology challenged non-Reform Judaism. In the Menorah Journal, Heller acknowledged that Liebman had created ‘the holy marriage of religion and psychiatry, combining only the best features of both’. However, Heller scathingly criticised Liebman’s tendency ‘to think of ourselves as responsible co-workers with God’, no matter the religious affiliation. He interpreted this as encouraging people to create God as ‘an image of yourself’, which he considered ‘blasphemous fiction . . . a denial of Judaism’.74 By interpreting Peace of Mind more as an academic and theological work, he ignored its purpose as a religious self-help manual for the general public. Catholic reviews were the most critical of Peace of Mind. In the Catholic News, the Thomas More Book Shop in Chicago gave Peace of Mind a rating of ‘Disapproved’ on its list of new books.75 There was no explanation for this view, but similar disapproval was expressed in the fan mail from Catholic readers, relating to a dislike of Liebman’s theology, the omission of Jesus Christ and/or the treatment of God. The liberal Catholic weekly Commonweal presented the book favourably as ‘a revival and development of the art of spiritual direction’ but acknowledged that Catholics would find the idea of integrating psychiatry with religion ‘unacceptable’.76 In addition to reviews, Peace of Mind appeared on numerous lists. The Wilson Bulletin and other library publications frequently had it on their lists of favourites and bestsellers. The Detroit Public Library created a list of twelve books called ‘Peace of Mind: Readings in Mental Health’.77 And when the Boston Public Library asked J. Edgar Hoover ‘What six books would you choose, if all the books in the world were to be destroyed and no more written?’, he included Peace of Mind along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Locke and Norman Vincent Peale.78 It also was on lists in Social Forces: International

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Journal of Social Research and even the tabloid New York Mirror’s ‘Books, Churches and Schools’ section. Quotations and excerpts from Peace of Mind appeared in numerous sermons, books and articles. Dr Martin Luther King Jr mentioned Peace of Mind in at least two sermons, in 1958 and 1960.79 Liebman was quoted or referenced in articles and books about marriage, living well, happiness, religion and other self-help topics.80 Reprints, excerpts and articles by or about Liebman also appeared in the National Jewish Monthly, Liberty, Life, Reader’s Scope, Journal of Living, American Weekly, Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan and Look.81 The book also garnered attention in scholarly journals, such as Ethics, the Journal of Higher Education, the Journal of Negro Education, Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors and the American Journal of Nursing.82 It was cited in calls to fund the Mental Health Act of 1946, Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen’s denunciation of psychoanalysis, and President Harry Truman’s 1948 speech at Hebrew Union College.83 That many of these references occurred both contemporaneously and for decades past Peace of Mind’s 1946 publication date is indicative of its influence over both the short and the long term. At the peak of his popularity, Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman died at the age of forty-one, in 1948. Through Peace of Mind, he reached readers across the world. Their letters indicated they were lost, discontent, generally unhappy and did not know where to turn for assistance. At a time when many Americans were discontent with religion and were unable to seek professional psychoanalysis, Peace of Mind filled this gap and gave readers hope. Religious self-help literature offered people an accessible, affordable and personal way to learn about themselves. They could read the books at their own pace and interpret the text to best suit their personal needs. Peace of Mind’s popularity was attributable to Liebman’s straightforward prose and practical advice. Readers selected and applied the book’s techniques and suggestions to help them deal with a variety of mental health and religious issues. Thus Rabbi Liebman guided the American people in their post-war quest to find happiness.

Notes   1. James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 80.  2. Matthew S. Hedstrom, ‘Psychology and Mysticism in 1940s Religion: Reading the Readers of Fosdick, Liebman, and Merton’, in Charles

200  Cheryl Oestreicher Lloyd Cohen and Paul S. Boyer (eds), Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), p. 249; Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers: A Study of the American Quest for Health, Wealth and Personal Power from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale (Garden City: Doubleday, 1965), p. 327.   3. John William Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, Volume III: The Golden Age Between Two Wars, 1920–1940 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1978), pp. 237–9.   4. Louis Schneider and Sanford M. Dornbusch, Popular Religion: Inspirational Books in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 11.   5. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (1996; Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006), p. 215.   6. David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 23–4; Charles Lippy, Being Religious, American Style: A History of Popular Religiosity in the United States (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 17.   7. Schneider and Dornbusch, Popular Religion, pp. 13–15.  8. Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psycho­analysis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), pp. 66–7; Steven Starker, Oracle at the Supermarket: The American Preoccupation with Self-Help Books (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1989), p. 6; Meyer, Positive Thinkers, p. 13; Micki McGee, Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 49.   9. Joel Pfister, ‘Glamorizing the Psychological: The Politics of the Performances of Modern Psychological Identities’, in Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (eds), Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 168. 10. Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul, p. 16; Rieff, The Triumph of the Thera­ peutic, p. 74. 11. Starker, Oracle at the Supermarket, p. 56. 12. Joshua Loth Liebman, Peace of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), p. 40. 13. Henry C. Link and Harry Arthur Hopf, People and Books: A Study of Reading and Book-Buying Habits (New York: Book Industry Committee, Book Manufacturers’ Institute, 1946), pp. 55–117. 14. Sandra K. Dolby, Self-Help Books: Why Americans Keep Reading Them (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), p. 6. 15. This sample of 898 letters represents approximately one-third of the letters in the Joshua Loth Liebman (JLL) papers (including material from fans) held by Boston University and by Temple Israel, the synagogue in Brookline, Massachusetts, where Liebman served as a rabbi at the time he wrote Peace of Mind. Within further citations, papers from Boston

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University are designated as JLL/BU, those from Temple Israel as JLL/TI. A letter is defined as fan mail if the writer specifically references reading the book, asks for advice or thanks Liebman for writing the book. All letters are quoted verbatim, with misspellings and grammatical errors uncorrected. The fan mail excludes letters between Liebman and his publisher, requests to review and provide quotes for forthcoming books, enquiries about translations, appeals for speaking engagements, queries about price or where to purchase the book, requests for reprints, or requests for permission to publish or quote. 16. The gender breakdown excludes rabbis who wrote as colleagues (e.g. offering congratulations and/or requesting speaking engagements), for a more accurate reflection of gender division within the letters analysed. 17. Andrew R. Heinze, Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 210–12; Hedstrom, ‘Psychology and Mysticism in 1940s Religion’, p. 254. 18. John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Cultures, 2nd edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), pp. 41–49; Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 222; Ruth May Strang, Exploration in Reading Patterns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 2; R. L. Duffus, Books, Their Place in a Democracy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), p. 210; Robert Darnton, ‘What Is the History of Books?’, in David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (eds), The Book History Reader (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 11. 19. C. Kevin Gillespie, Psychology and American Catholicism: From Con­ fession to Therapy? (New York: Crossroad Publishers, 2001), pp. 14–15. 20. Schneider and Dornbusch, Popular Religion, p. 11. 21. Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul, pp. 144–5, n400. 22. See also Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1937), p. 13. 23. Meyer, The Positive Thinkers, p. 16. 24. Raymond J. Corsini, The Dictionary of Psychology (Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazel, 1999). 25. JLL/BU, Box 17, Sermon, ‘The Greatest Mind of the Twentieth Century’, 1944. 26. Jonathan Engel, American Therapy: The Rise of Psychotherapy in the United States (New York: Gotham Books, 2008), p. 17. 27. JLL/BU, ‘The Greatest Mind of the Twentieth Century’. 28. JLL/BU, Box 41, Folder ‘N Miscellaneous’, JLL to Dr E. Marcellus Nesbitt, 24 January 1947. 29. JLL/BU, Box 28, Folder ‘D Miscellaneous’, Mrs Charles M. Siegel to JLL, 5 May 1946; JLL/TI, Box 6, Folder ‘Letters Regarding “Peace of Mind”’, John B. DeHoff to JLL, 30 September 1947. 30. JLL/BU, Box 28, Bonnie Mac Franz to JLL, 12 January 1947; JLL/BU, Box 28, Mrs Edris Frenzel to JLL, 23 June 1947; JLL/BU, Box 28, Folder

202  Cheryl Oestreicher ‘DI Miscellaneous’, Mrs Frankie F. Dunklin to JLL, 4 February 1948; JLL/BU, Box 34, Folder ‘Psychiatrists’, Arthur Eagle to JLL, 26 August 1947; JLL/BU, Box 30, Folder ‘HO Miscellaneous’, Milton Hochberg to JLL, 2 July 1947. 31. Liebman, Peace of Mind, p. 32. 32. JLL/BU, Box 41, Folder ‘ME Miscellaneous’, Roberta Metcalfe to JLL, 12 June 1946; JLL/BU, Box 39, Folder ‘G Miscellaneous’, Mrs Rodman Gilder to JLL, 29 August 1946; JLL/BU, Box 34, Folder ‘Psychiatrists’, H. A. Oestreich to JLL, 21 October 1946; JLL/BU, Box 38, Folder ‘X–Y–Z Miscellaneous’, Mrs B. Zucker to JLL, 23 October 1947; JLL/ BU, Box 28, Folder ‘D Miscellaneous’, Edrie Marie Delgado to JLL, 22 January 1948; JLL/BU, Box 28, Folder ‘DI – Miscellaneous’, Mrs J. R. Duncan to JLL, 30 July 1947. 33. JLL/BU, Box 34, Folder ‘Psychiatrists’, A. R. Ives to JLL, 21 March 1947. 34. Peter Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth Century Emo­ tional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 157–9. 35. Liebman, Peace of Mind, p. 113. 36. Ibid., pp. 101–4. 37. Ibid., p. 118. 38. American Cool, pp. 154–9. 39. Liebman, Peace of Mind, pp. 104–5; Heinze, Jews and the American Soul, p. 204; Erich Lindemann, ‘Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 101:2 (1944), pp. 143, 147. 40. JLL/BU, Box 39, Folder ‘FO Miscellaneous’, William Freeman to JLL, c. July 1946; JLL/BU, Box 32, Folder ‘L Miscellaneous’, Ruth A. Lewis to JLL, 14 September 1947; JLL/BU, Box 39, Folder ‘F Miscellaneous’, Ange Fagnano to JLL, 12 December 1946; JLL/BU, Box 37, Folder ‘CI Miscellaneous’, Mrs Jack Cogen to JLL, 16 June 1947; JLL/BU, Box 26, Manuel K. Berman to JLL, 22 October 1947; JLL/BU, Box 28, Folder ‘D – Miscellaneous’, Marion J. Donnan to JLL, 13 February 1948; JLL/ BU, Box 38, Folder ‘WH Miscellaneous’, Helen Wolf to JLL, 5 November 1947; JLL/BU, Box 39, Folder ‘GR Miscellaneous’, Mrs H. L. Green to JLL, 18 April 1947. 41. JLL/BU, Box 39, Folder ‘G Miscellaneous’, Mrs Rodman Gilder to JLL, 29 August 1946. 42. JLL/BU, Box 41, Folder ‘Miscellaneous’, Mr and Mrs L. I. Manley to JLL, 29 August 1946. 43. JLL/TI, Box 6, Folder ‘(untitled)’, Wendell E. Rau to JLL, 19 May 1946. 44. JLL/BU, Box 39, Folder ‘F Miscellaneous’, Dr Louis Fischbein to JLL, 28 September 1946. 45. JLL/BU, Box 38, Folder ‘WH Miscellaneous’, Helen Wolf to JLL, 15 November 1947. 46. Liebman, Peace of Mind, p. 88. 47. Ibid., p. 168.

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48. Ibid., pp. 33, 40, 90. 49. Heinze, Jews and the American Soul, p. 15. 50. Ibid., pp. 93, 226, 274–278; see also Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1960), p. 13. 51. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (Garden City: Image Books, 1975), p. 395. 52. Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, p. 15; Will Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation of Jewish Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951), p. 134. 53. Lila Corwin Berman, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 76. 54. Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘Is There a Revival of Religion?’, in William L. O’Neill (ed.), American Society Since 1945 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), p. 36. 55. Liebman, Peace of Mind, p. 21. 56. Ibid. 57. Milton Steinberg, Basic Judaism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), pp. 3–5. 58. JLL/TI, ‘Information Please’ cards from J. Zimmerman, Mark E. Connelly, Leo E. Turitz and Brett [illegible last name]. While promoting the book’s purchase, the publisher, Simon and Schuster, sent out ‘Information Please’ cards to collect information about Peace of Mind’s readership, receiving at least 223 responses (not included in fan mail statistics). Specifically, Simon and Schuster asked ‘the reasons which prompted the purchase of this book’. 59. JLL/TI, ‘Information Please’ cards from Mrs Phil Mossler, Helen E. Mashen and Charles Van Cott. 60. JLL/TI, Box 6, Mary Beal to JLL, 25 April 1946; JLL/BU, Box 28, Folder ‘D – Miscellaneous’, Marion J. Donnan to JLL, 13 February 1948. 61. JLL/TI, Box 6, Bettie Morris to JLL, 2 May 1946. 62. JLL/TI, ‘Information Please’ cards from Mrs F. C. Leibold, Mrs Kyle Allen, Harriet Neckwith and someone who did not give a name; also JLL/BU, Box 41, Folder ‘PH Miscellaneous’, D. M. Pinkham to Simon and Schuster, 27 May 1947. 63. JLL/TI, ‘Information Please’ cards from Florence G. Leon, Elhin E. Reiner, Vivian Vance, Mildred Marsh and Jean M. Herman. 64. JLL/TI, Box 6, A. v. A. van Duym to publisher Dick Simon, 7 March 1946. 65. JLL/TI, ‘Information Please’ cards from J. Choron and Mrs C. Bennitt. 66. JLL/BU, Box 26, Timothy P. O’Connell to JLL, 17 October 1947. 67. John Haynes Holmes, ‘Toward Serenity’, New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, 31 March 1946, p. 16. 68. Lloyd Wendt, ‘Gentle Man’s Counsel About Peace of Mind’, Chicago Sunday Tribune, 24 March 1946.

204  Cheryl Oestreicher 69. W.B.F., ‘The Bookshelf: “Peace of Mind” by Dr. Joshua Loth Liebman’, 13 June 1948. 70. M.S.C., ‘Peace of Mind by Joshua Loth Liebman’, World Affairs, 109:4 (December 1946), p. 300; ‘Peace of Mind’, Current History, August 1946, p. 130; Frederick May Eliot, ‘Peace of Mind’, Atlantic Monthly, July 1946, p. 153. 71. Joseph Wilder, ‘J. L. Liebman: Peace of Mind’, American Journal of Psychotherapy, 1:3 (1947), pp. 388–90. 72. ‘“Peace of Mind”: A Viewpoint’, Bulletin – Jewish Welfare Service (Trenton, NJ, undated). 73. Milton Steinberg, ‘Between Religion and Psychiatry’, The Reconstructionist, 12:10 (1946), pp. 28–30. 74. Bernard Heller, ‘Holy Snake Oil’, Menorah Journal, November 1947, pp. 322–7. 75. JLL/TI, Box 6, Catholic News, June 1947. 76. Harry MacNeil, Commonweal, 16 August 1946, p. 437. 77. JLL/TI, Box 6, ‘Peace of Mind: Readings in Mental Health’, Detroit Public Library, 1948. 78. JLL/BU, Box 4, ‘Celebrities Choices’, Boston Public Library, Spring 1958. 79. Martin Luther King Jr, ‘The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life: Ser­mon Delivered at the Unitarian Church of Germantown’, 28 February 1960 (accessed 8 January 2020) and ‘A Knock at Midnight: Sermon Outline for the Youth Sunday Services of the Woman’s Convention Auxiliary, National Baptist Convention’, 14 September 1958 (accessed 8 January 2020). Copies of both are held by the Martin Luther King Jr Papers Project. 80. See, for example, Rex A. Skidmore and Anthon S. Cannon, Building Your Marriage (1951); Robert H. Bonthius, Christian Paths to Self-­Acceptance (1948); Sidney Greenberg, A Treasury of the Art of Living (1963); William Nichols (ed.), The Best of Words to Live By (1966); Francis S. Onderdonk, 1144 Paths to Happiness: The Emerging Science (1997); Carl Hermann Voss (ed.), The Universal God: The Eternal Quest in Which All Men Are Brothers. An Interfaith Anthology of Man’s Search for God (1953). 81. Advertisement, New York Times, 22 March 1948; see also Jennifer Snead, ‘The Work of Abridgements: Readers, Editors and Expectations’, in Bonnie Gunzenhauser (ed.), Reading in History: New Methodologies from the Anglo-American Tradition (Brookfield: Pickering and Chatto, 2010), p. 78. 82. John G. Gill, ‘An Abstract Definition of Good’, Ethics, 80:2 (1970); Louis Tomlinson Benezet, ‘What Is Our Deadline?’, Journal of Higher Education, 20:6 (1949); Walger G. Daniel and Marion T. Wright, ‘Notes from Recent Books’, Journal of Negro Education, 21:2 (1952); Louis

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Tomlinson Benezet, ‘Modern Mythology in Women’s Education’, Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, 36:3 (1950); Lillian M. Reitsma, ‘As Life Ebbs’, American Journal of Nursing, 48:3 (March 1948), pp. 171–2. 83. See the following New York Times articles: ‘Funds Asked to Aid the Mentally Ill’, 2 April 1947, p. 31; ‘Dr. Brill Replies to Msgr. Sheen’, 6 July 1947, p. 42; ‘U.S. Role in World Stressed by Kinkaid’, 1 February 1948, p. 22; ‘Religious Faith Urged by Truman’, 13 March 1948, p. 16.

Chapter 10

Reading and Classical Music in Mid-Twentieth-Century America Joan Shelley Rubin

In the mid-1950s, the Committee on Musicology of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) embarked on an effort to publicise the new discipline it represented by ‘establishing in print its relations to all types of music and music-making’.1 The result was a series of short books that included, in addition to more narrowly focused volumes, a wide-ranging set of observations titled Music in American Life (1956). Its author, the eminent Columbia University critic and historian Jacques Barzun, posited the emergence of a ‘new musical culture’ over the first half of the twentieth century. The hallmark of this culture, Barzun suggested, was democratisation, traceable to the technological innovations – the phonograph, the film sound track, the radio and Muzak – that had increased access to opportunities for listening and performing.2 As Barzun noted, in 1954 approximately $70,000,000 was spent on classical records, as opposed to around $750,000 twenty years earlier, when discs contained only one-fifth the amount of music available on long-playing records, which had been introduced in 1948. Another measure of democratisation, in Barzun’s account, was the fact that 25 per cent of the population was ‘reached by art music’. The ‘first great truth about music in this country at the mid-point of the twentieth century’, Barzun stated, was that it had become ‘for many people a passionate avocation’.3 Yet however revolutionary the consequences of modern technology (and, Barzun hypothesised, modern malaise) for musical culture, what appears to have been a golden age for the reception of classical music in the mid-twentieth-century United States depended not on new inventions alone, but rather on the intersection of those breakthroughs with older ideologies and institutions related as much to print as to sound. As the creation of the ACLS series signalled, the dissemination of musical knowledge involved a population of listeners who were also readers. 206

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A complete map of the universe of print surrounding the popularisation of the classical canon between (roughly) 1920 and 1970 would have to include the production of programme and liner notes, concert reviews, biographies and memoirs of composers and performers, music columns in general periodicals, and specialised publications. Three aspects of that universe, however, stand out as particularly pertinent to the reading experience. The first is the identification of listening to music with the act of reading a book, an equivalency that led to the reconfiguration of school and public libraries as sites for the distribution of phonograph records. The second, exemplified by the Book-of-the-Month Club, is the marketing of records by capitalising on the same anxieties that readers exhibited in their quest for culture. The third is the production, dissemination and reception of volumes about how to understand classical music, a type of book that made reading a prerequisite for the full ‘appreciation’ of a concert or radio broadcast. Works by people who went on the air themselves were especially visible. For the most part, such writings allow a glimpse of an implied audience, although, in the case of Leonard Bernstein (discussed at some length below), it has been possible to recover the responses of an actual readership. These phenomena proceeded from a common ideal, widely shared in the nineteenth century: the belief that familiarity with classic works of both literature and music were characteristics of the refined or cultured person. That ideal was under threat in the era after the First World War, contested by the trend towards specialisation, challenged by the growth of mass entertainment, and rendered irrelevant in some quarters by business priorities. Yet it was buttressed at the same time by a dramatic rise in the number of college and high-school graduates, an increase in leisure time, a booming book market that packaged the humanities in various forms, and a concern among more thoughtful observers about the dangers from rampant materialism to what they denominated ‘civilisation’.4 Those factors coalesced to strengthen middlebrow audiences for both music and words, opening up new possibilities for mediators to address Americans’ aspirations and fears. For decades, patrons of public libraries have had access to collections of recorded music as well as to books, yet no one much thinks about how it came to be that a space designed to house objects for readers also came to be repositories of objects for listeners. The credit for initiating this service, as librarians regarded it, seems to belong to the public library in St Paul, Minnesota, which started circulating

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records in 1914.5 Crucial to that development, however, were the efforts of the phonograph manufacturer that campaigned hardest to overcome the association of the new technology with cheap entertainment: the Victor Talking Machine Company, manufacturer of the Victrola.6 In 1911, ten years after its founding, the company hired a progressive music educator, Frances Elliott Clark, to urge phonograph and record purchases on parents and teachers. Employing Clark, who established an education department at Victor, was a brilliant stroke: by focusing on exposing children to recorded music, the company could create a lifelong demand for its product. But Clark’s effort also marks the evolving relationship between recording technology and reading, as well as between a commercial entity and high-mindedness. In 1926, Victor donated over 400 discs to the Library of Congress to augment its holdings of printed music materials, starting the Library’s Recorded Sound Division. By that time, Clark had generated a spate of her own writings to promote the idea that exposure to ‘good’ music benefited both the individual and society. Her book Music Appreciation with the Victrola for Children (1923), embellished on the title page with the famous ‘His Master’s Voice’ logo, included lesson outlines – tied to a numerical listing of Victor recordings available for purchase – that helped turn classrooms into sites for the encounters with ‘beauty’ and opportunities for ‘expression’ that accorded with progressive pedagogy. ‘Victor Educational Literature’, in booklet format, was distributed free of charge, with special materials aimed at rural schools. But Clark’s activities also intersected with reading in another way. Recordings, she insisted, should become part of school libraries. In that way, her recom­mendation bespoke the affinity she (and her librarian colleagues) assumed between classical music and great literature: records and books belonged together as essential means to become fully cultured.7 As the record industry grew and refined its technological capabilities, Clark’s vision of the place of recorded music in an institution of reading had additional champions. On the eve of the Great ­Depression, public libraries in Detroit, Philadelphia, New York and Cleveland were among those that had joined St Paul in lending records along with books, although some institutions made patrons listen to music on site to prevent the damage that librarians thought home circulation invited.8 The equation of readers and listeners is especially apparent in the activities of the National Committee for Music Appreciation, formed by educators and philanthropists in 1939. Howard Hanson, director of the Eastman School of Music, headed the group in its first year, 1939–40, and was succeeded by former Juilliard president and

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‘great books’ proponent John Erskine. One of its projects was the establishment of ‘Public Music Libraries’ to ‘encourage the lending of or listening to recorded music in the same manner as books were available to the public’.9 The National Committee piloted free home lending in Washington, DC, Newark, NJ, and Chicago and Evanston, IL, by supplying libraries in those localities with symphonic ‘masterpieces’. In that way, as one librarian commented, the Committee ‘put good music on the same plane as good reading’.10 The question of who has the authority to define ‘good’ hovers over any account of this activity. Librarians working with the National Committee generally limited collections to the classics but struggled over where to draw the line between ‘classical’ and ‘popular’.11 In that respect, the Committee members functioned as agents of the sacralisation of culture that Lawrence Levine described.12 But sacralis­ ation always coexisted with processes of desacralisation, which the inception of public music libraries beautifully exemplifies. The librarians who participated in the project reported that ‘music appreciation is in no wise confined to a limited circle bounded by money or educational advantage’. The overarching goal of the National Committee for Music Appreciation was to create ‘a continuing opportunity for the masses of people to enjoy good music’, not to confine the pleasures of listening to an ‘elite’.13 This purpose carried with it the conviction that the individual enjoyment of music led to certain social benefits – what the Committee’s director labelled ‘cultural community progress’.14 The spread of classical music to ever-larger audiences constituted, in the Committee’s view, a means of creating better citizens. Such thinking was by no means confined to the National Committee. In America, the conceit that musical performance would promote social harmony dated to the colonial period.15 The phrase ‘civic orchestra’, a type of ensemble proliferating at this time, is the most salient manifestation of this idea in the twentieth century. But the leadership of the Committee invoked the same rhetoric in touting its support for public music libraries. Especially given the outbreak of war in Europe, the image of a community united by a shared commitment to the democratisation of music gave the Committee’s efforts to make the classics accessible through institutions of print culture a decidedly political cast.16 As educators and librarians conflated reading and listening in their endeavour to popularise compositions by Beethoven, Mozart or Schubert, entrepreneurs joined the Victor Company in devising marketing schemes that depended on the recognition that American

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audiences for ‘good’ music and ‘good’ literature were one and the same. The richest example comes from that quintessential middlebrow print culture institution, the Book-of-the-Month Club, which in the early 1950s began a classical record distribution operation that served as a pilot for its broader-based record sales efforts later on. Harry Scherman had founded the Club in 1926 in order to sell newly published books by subscription through the mail. After three decades of success, Scherman decided to collaborate with the Metropolitan Museum on a mail-order course in art history that involved the distribution of miniature reproductions of the museum’s holdings.17 This venture built on the Club’s attunement to an aspiring public’s desire for tutelage in matters of cultural knowledge that went beyond the literary. The Club’s launch of the art print enterprise established the feasibility of creating subsidiaries. But Scherman’s decision in 1953 that he would sell recordings depended on three additional factors. First, as Scherman recalled, the invention of the long-playing record made it profitable to set a ‘reasonable price’ for a single classical composition.18 Second, Scherman perceived that ‘there was a real demand for . . . “understanding music”. . . . [People] felt they should have more information about what they were listening to.’19 That insight arose in part from a third factor, one that powerfully symbolises the overlapping social worlds of the publishing and the music business in New York City at this time: namely, the role in the Club’s operation of Harry Scherman’s son Thomas. Tom was the founder, in 1947, of the Little Orchestra Society, and subsequently started a series of concerts for children that had greater instructional content than similar fare for young audiences. Noticing that the parents were as interested as the children, he then staged concerts with radio commentator David Randolph from WNYC, New York City’s municipal radio station, which drew more diverse listeners than the ones who attended the Little Orchestra Society’s Town Hall performances.20 These technological and personal circumstances melded in the deter­mination of Scherman and his associates to do something other than just to sell symphonies or concertos, which people were already able to purchase by mail order and through subscription from other concerns such as the Literary Guild and (beginning in August 1955) from the Columbia Record Club. Instead, the management of the Book-of-the-Month Club devised a combination of ‘enjoyment’ and ‘education’: Music-Appreciation Records, which featured classical music on one side and analysis of the piece, written or supervised by Tom Scherman, on the other.21 Prospective purchasers could send in for free samples – Debussy’s ‘La Mer’, Beethoven’s Fifth

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Symphony – to decide whether to subscribe, a strategy that, as Axel Rosin, Scherman’s son-in-law and a key figure in the Club’s record operation, explained, eschewed the bargain appeal of a discounted price and hence won over a ‘higher level’ of customer.22 Obscuring his commercial interests (a move which actually furthered them), Harry Scherman pronounced the plan ‘a straight educational job that, to our minds, is being done better on our records than in any other way’. Book-of-the-Month Club subscribers were the first test market, with ‘very good results’, bearing out the premise, as a Club advertising executive put it, that ‘although it might seem that this would not be the case’, the ‘people who are interested in books and in good music and in such educational and cultural things . . . are more or less the same people’. A year into the venture there were around 175,000 subscribers to the records.23 In order to reach that audience, Scherman relied on all of the techniques that the company’s distribution to readers had pioneered, including the avoidance of the bargain look. The Music-Appreciation Records product entailed not only the subscription obligation and the ‘negative option’ to send back the monthly selection, but also the develop­ment of a printed pamphlet, analogous to the Book-ofthe-Month Club News, that carried the judgement of an expert – in this case, the music commentator Deems Taylor – about the merits of the offering. ‘Many people are bewildered by the proliferation of recordings’, Scherman declared in his interview with the Columbia Oral History Project the year the actual distribution of the MusicAppreciation Records began. ‘They don’t know where to turn.’24 That bewilderment paralleled the confusion of the hapless book buyer on which the Club had staked its success since 1926. The advertisements for Music-Appreciation Records addressed an additional anxiety that musical encounters amplified: consumers’ uneasiness about exactly what to listen for in ‘good’ music. The ads’ underlying message emphasised the purchasers’ personal inadequacies. ‘Our minds wander’, one ad in Popular Science Monthly declared, ‘and we realize afterward that we have missed most of the beauties of the work’.25 The subscription arrangement promised the knowledge required to prevent that state of disarray. This psychological approach displaced the emphasis on civic responsibility in the rhetoric of the National Committee for Music Appreciation. Nevertheless, the ad, like middlebrow culture generally, balanced competing appeals. It combined allusions to listeners’ deficiencies with the celebration of their powers of ‘self-education’, assuring potential subscribers that the records would enable them to hear what ‘great conductors’

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hear. Scherman’s assumption that deeper ‘aesthetic and intellectual pleasure’, as the ad put it, would result from developing one’s analytical skills (a premise he shared with Clark) amalgamated homage to longstanding ideals of the cultured person as serious and disciplined, with explicit references to the heightened ‘enjoyment’ that a subscription would provide; the ad highlighted Scherman’s sense of the dual purposes the double-sided records served. A similar balance between the modern consumer’s demand for time-saving devices and respect for the social standing of college graduates appears in an endorsement from the publisher and television personality Bennett Cerf, which ran initially in the quintessentially middlebrow Saturday Review: ‘In a few minutes Music-Appreciation Records taught me more about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony than I learned in a month in a course at college!’26 That selling point had been a staple of advertisements for commodities accommodating consumers’ desires to acquire culture on relatively painless terms at least since Dr Eliot’s ‘Five-Foot Shelf’ of books proffered the equivalent of a university education in fifteen minutes of reading a day. At the time of his interview with the Columbia Oral History Project, Scherman was pondering whether to do ‘something for new records comparable to what is done for new books’, including the possibility of instituting a board of judges like the one that selected the book of the month.27 By 1957 the Club had entered into an arrangement with what had now become the RCA Victor company to promote such a plan: the RCA Victor Society of Great Music. The Society’s brochure employed domestic imagery, a feature of earlier distribution campaigns such as the one mounted by the Washington Star newspaper in 1939 to sell its product, declaring that its offer embodied ‘an idea so natural and so widely needed it seems sure to be welcomed in every home where music is loved’.28 The innovative feature of the enterprise, however, was the Selection Panel, which included Jacques Barzun and a raft of notable musicians and musicolo­gists – Aaron Copland, William Schuman, Carleton Sprague Smith and G. Wallace Woodworth among them. This group especially served a type of cultural consumer who had emerged as records had become less novel and more accessible: the collector engaged in building a ‘record library’ (a revealing phrase). As one Society document declared, ‘A cardinal feature of the plan is guidance . . . to keep your growing library at once valuable and enjoyably balanced’.29 Although the Book-of-the-Month Club paid panellists for their printed remarks about the music in the newsletter Great Music, the ‘experts’ chose the repertoire, not the recordings, a means of positioning them above

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the market. As Barzun wrote to Scherman in some unhappiness concerning the Club management’s failure to keep the panel informed about the outcome of their deliberations, the Society was ‘in part an intellectual enterprise’.30 Yet echoing the Club’s calculated effort, with respect to book selection, to preserve a space for the authority of the reader, the Society of Great Music announced that its ‘dependable’ guidance ‘obviously . . . need not be slavishly followed whenever one’s personal tastes dictate otherwise’.31 The Book-of-the-Month Club’s Music-Appreciation Records and RCA Victor Society of Great Music endeavours thus illustrate the fully complementary relationship between middlebrow print and musical cultures of the 1950s. By 1974, Book-of-the-Month Club Records (not limited to classical music) had superseded those efforts; ten years later the Club began manufacturing its own recordings, available in retail outlets as well as through the mail. The Schermans’ function in mediating a classical repertoire was thereby diminished, but the alignment of records with books under the Club brand continued to assure consumers uncertain about what to buy that they were purchasing music that they could ‘respect’.32 Books about how to understand the intricacies of classical music were available to American readers in the second half of the nineteenth century. As technological advances widened audiences for classical performance, however, an increasing number of writers took up the subject of what those audience members should listen for in order to arrive at understanding and enjoyment. A large group of individuals embraced radio and television as a means to convey that knowledge, while at the same time constructing listeners as readers by expressing their precepts and opinions in print. By mid-century, that group of commentators-cum-authors included Deems Taylor, Sigmund Spaeth, David Randolph, George Marek, Olin Downes, Abram Chasins and Leonard Bernstein. Edward Tatnall Canby, who reviewed records for the quintessentially middlebrow Saturday Review and did the same on WNYC, deserves special mention as the son of Henry Seidel Canby, long-time chair of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s board of judges. To be sure, numerous books and periodicals about classical music appeared that were only indirectly related to radio or television programmes. Furthermore, it must be acknowledged that, while some books on music published in the mid-twentieth century became bestsellers for idiosyncratic reasons, for the most part individual titles either fell into the category that historians of print culture have denominated ‘steady sellers’, accumulating sizeable readerships

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only over time, or earned notice in the trade for a season or two. Yet radio and television personalities who became authors enhanced their authority with their listeners and corroborated their status as celebrities through the use of both media.33 In the process, they made reading books about classical music an antidote to the anxieties of their audiences, and augmented the experiences that permitted individuals to fulfil their aspirations to culture. Nevertheless, the terms on which these doubly visible intermediaries created accessibility varied significantly. Two such individuals – Sigmund Spaeth and David Randolph – exemplify some of the possibilities. Spaeth illustrates an extreme version of desacralis­ ation, coupled with an open disposition towards the commercial. In 1924, while working as a piano salesman, he did a series of programmes on music appreciation that stressed the importance of learning to recognise melody; the same year, he carried that conviction to readers in a book, The Common Sense of Music. Within its pages, he argued as well that classical music was not ‘highbrow’ or ‘something difficult’ but rather a source of ‘fun’. Spaeth extended his role as a pitchman for approachability in more than a dozen subsequent volumes, symbiotically related to his growing fame as a radio star. He was on the air in some capacity every year between 1921 and 1951. The moniker he adopted – ‘the Tune Detective’ – became the title of an NBC show in the early 1930s.34 Perhaps Spaeth’s most representative book was At Home with Music, for which he partnered with Magnavox, the manufacturer of ‘radio-phonographs’. Addressing ‘frightened’ readers who suffered from an ‘aesthetic inferiority complex’, he offered lists of recordings categorised into ‘What Every Music Lover Should Know’ and ‘Music You Enjoy’. Yet despite Spaeth’s stance as an expert, At Home with Music reiterated the importance of trusting one’s judgement and listening for the familiar.35 In that respect, it echoed the marketing strategies for the Book-of-the-Month Club’s records, alleviating audiences’ self-doubt both by supplying guidance and by bolstering individuals’ confidence in their own taste. If a subscription to Music-Appreciation Records was worth more than a month in college, the act of reading Spaeth was arguably worth more than an hour on a therapist’s couch. David Randolph’s writing tendered the same benefits, but con­ figured the availability of those benefits differently. Randolph came to radio not from sales but from a background as a choral conductor. In 1943, he founded the Randolph Singers, a five-voice madrigal group that gave concerts, made recordings and appeared on the radio. He became host of his own programme on WNYC in 1946. The initial

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title of Randolph’s show, ‘Music for the Connoisseur’, suggests, if not a deliberate attempt to counteract Spaeth’s emphasis on ‘fun’, a paradoxical attempt to widen the audience for classical music by preserving its status as a rarefied form of expression – by playing, in other words, to listeners’ desires to join the cultured few. He also strove to play works that were, in Musical America’s phrase, ‘off the beaten path’.36 The premise of ‘Music for the Connoisseur’ was, as one implicitly self-congratulatory fan put it, that ‘the listener has some intelligence and knowledge’. Yet not too much knowledge: the programme was in reach, the Musical America reviewer stressed, of those who might have ‘relatively limited musical background’. Randolph achieved this aura of accessibility by adopting a stance that Deems Taylor called ‘erudite without being soporific’. One woman wrote in to WNYC to praise him as a ‘radio personality whose authority and friendliness is untouched by affectation and conceit’. Randolph’s voice added to that aura because it was as ‘dry and crackling as Crispy Corn Flakes’ and ‘quavering’.37 When Randolph turned to a major engagement with print by bringing out This Is Music in 1964, he solidified his several appeals. At least fifteen years in the making, This Is Music contained no musical notation, but rested solely on Randolph’s adamant argument that music had no meaning or subject matter except for ‘our inner emotional condition’. According to Randolph, telling listeners to identify the ‘pictures’ that music created was far from harmless, because it deflected their attention from the chief source of ‘pleasure’ in music: a grasp, not primarily of melody, as Spaeth would have it, but of the complexities of form. Operating on this principle, Randolph devoted a third of This Is Music to non-technical exposition of the nature and purposes of classical music’s formal elements, which, he averred, were ‘determined by our emotional needs’. In Randolph’s view, both ‘sensuous’ and ‘intellectual’ satisfaction were ‘open to everyone’ who embraced his perspective.38 By freeing listeners and readers from the necessity of discerning meaning, Randolph disenfranchised the ‘expert’ who could demystify works that seemed beyond the audience’s understanding. Concomit­ antly, he empowered amateurs to shed their ‘feeling of inadequacy’. As Randolph declared, ‘Appreciation of a very high order is possible for the listener with no technical knowledge’.39 The notice of This Is Music in the Book-of-the-Month Club News for March 1964 underscored the book’s reassuring quality, stating that it should be ‘helpful’ to those who have ‘listened to a great deal of music’ but erroneously suspect ‘that its deeper meanings are beyond their ken’.40 Evidence

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for that effect on readers came from the editor of Stereo Review, who reported that a 1979 reissue of the volume had transformed the life of a friend previously ‘intimidated by the whole aura of classical music’.41 For all his apparent disdain for Spaeth, then, Randolph’s turn to print sounded, in another key, the same comforting message that the ‘Tune Detective’ had promulgated about the relationship between reading and listening. But the two commentators relied on opposite strategies to supply that comfort – Randolph bolstering the sacralisation of culture by admitting his followers to its restricted precincts, Spaeth (more the desacraliser) by tearing down the gates. Not all readers about classical music in mid-twentieth century America, however, required the same degree of reassurance. A segment of the middlebrow public sought primarily to confirm their attainment of culture more than to relieve their worries about their deficiencies – although the two impulses are admittedly not entirely separable. This alternative relationship between reading and listening is strikingly apparent in the fan mail that the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein received about his first book, The Joy of Music. The letters to Bernstein are all the more interesting because, while there is no extant correspondence to Spaeth and only scant material from readers in Randolph’s papers, the Bernstein archive makes it possible to document reader response directly.42 The Joy of Music landed on the nation’s bookshelves in November 1959, in time for the Christmas trade.43 By then, its author was famous as the principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic orchestra, as a master of diverse compositional genres (including the Broadway musical) and as the commentator about classical music on two television series: Omnibus and Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. The Joy of Music drew on those activities: it consisted of seven Omnibus scripts and three ‘imaginary conversations’ about musical interpreta­ tion and composition, together with a piece on film scoring and a section of photographs. For the purposes of locating Bernstein culturally, however, perhaps the most important part of The Joy of Music was the introduction, subtitled ‘The Happy Medium’. There Bernstein staked out a middle ground between what Virgil Thomson called the ‘music-appreciation racket’, whose exemplars explained music in oversimplified extramusical terms, and technical analysis. Bernstein aligned his interpretive stance with his presumptive readers, who, he said, were ‘intelligent’ and ‘more often than not longing for insight and knowledge’.44 The circumstances governing the production and marketing of The Joy of Music made that readership possible. The volume’s

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publisher was the New York house of Simon and Schuster, one of the upstart, young, mainly Jewish firms that had originated in the booming book trade of the years following the First World War. Its co-founder, Richard L. Simon, came from (and later fathered) a musical family. Dick Simon had spent some time as a piano salesman before entering the book business. In the 1940s, authors on Simon and Schuster’s music list included Deems Taylor and Leopold Stokowski; a steady seller for the firm was Charles O’Connell’s Victor Book of the Symphony, along with several other compendia, such as Henry W. Simon’s A Treasury of Grand Opera. Thus the firm well understood the ready market for titles that capitalised on the insecurities and ambitions fuelling the book-buying public’s musical interests. But it was Henry Simon, Dick Simon’s brother, who made the crucial difference in the publication of The Joy of Music, as Bernstein acknowledged in calling him in his acknowledgements the ‘godfather’ of the book. Henry Simon, who joined his brother’s firm as an editor in 1944, wrangled with Bernstein throughout the late 1940s and 1950s in hopes of getting a manuscript out of him. Perhaps because of his own desire to cement his credentials as an intellectual, the maestro finally took time from his numerous commitments to complete the volume. But Simon exercised a heavy shaping hand throughout the process. A letter about the manuscript from Simon to Bernstein’s secretary, Helen Coates, in 1956 is instructive, first of all, for highlighting how reading words differs from listening to them. ‘On account of the nature of the occasions and the type of audience they are written for’, Simon wrote, ‘there creeps, occasionally, into the language a certain air which did not sound like it on TV or on the records but reads suspiciously like condescension’. Secondly, Simon’s critique reveals his effort to acknowledge prospective readers’ ambivalent regard for expertise. Simon’s sense of Bernstein’s audience likewise dictated the structure of the book, which moves, as Simon put it, ‘from the sort of piece that can be read by the musical illiterate to the sort that will at least seem to be more technical because of the inclusion of musical examples’. This was a progression calculated to appeal to a wide swathe of the public and to strike, in form, the balance that Bernstein and Simon strove for in tone and content.45 The advertisements for The Joy of Music targeted the eclectic readership the author and his editor envisioned. The most inventive and revealing of the ads’ themes is the deployment of the phrases ‘Leonard Bernstein in Book Form’ and ‘Bernstein between covers!’46 This pitch can be read on several levels. It affirms Bernstein’s skill as a writer. Implicitly, it also alludes to his television appearances,

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promising to substitute permanence for the evanescence of broadcasting. (‘Millions of us’, the publication-day advertisement stated, ‘have wanted to revisit Leonard Bernstein’s inspiring television programs on Omnibus’.47) ‘Leonard Bernstein in Book Form’ also suggests the containment of Bernstein’s wild energy, even as advertisers sold an encounter with pages that ‘glow[ed]’ with the author’s ‘genius’. The slogan reduced the phenomenon of Bernstein to manageable proportions. In book form, music became ‘clear’ as well as ‘entertaining’.48 Presenting Bernstein between covers was analogous to putting the genie (or genius) back in the bottle, where readers inclined to feel uneasy about their musical knowledge could view it at a safe distance. The letters that Bernstein received in response to the book’s publication attest that, as another ad for the volume proclaimed, it was ‘snapped up by readers of all ages and all degrees of musical sophisti­ cation’.49 These items, it should be noted, are a small fraction of his voluminous fan mail, most of which refers to television programmes or live concerts alone. Yet that fraction includes notes from high-school students and middle-aged correspondents in about equal proportion. It contains as well some complaints about readers’ frustra­tions at not being able to decipher the book’s printed musical examples, along with earnest queries from young performers about how to pursue musical careers. That is, Simon and Schuster’s targeted mixed-level audience materialised. As for the rest of the broad demographic picture, these documents substantiate Bernstein’s appeal to both male and female readers (though with the latter predominating) and his national reach. By the same token, none of the writers to Bernstein about his first book mentioned that they were other than white and middle class. More noteworthy are the revelations that the letters contain pertaining to how readers thought about and used The Joy of Music. The frequency with which Bernstein’s audience relied on conventions of response – on formulaic phrases that might be applied to any book– is in itself worth observing. ‘My parents bought your book and gave it to me’, a thirteen-year-old girl wrote, ‘and it trapped me. I could hardly let it down [sic]. Every bit of it fascinated me.’50 Another reader remarked that she had ‘devoured’ the chapter in The Joy of Music on the art of conducting.51 Letter-writers commonly thanked Bernstein for writing a work that they ‘enjoyed’.52 That language was, and remains, the stock-in-trade of fan mail, but it usually conveys the intensity and pleasure associated with the reading of fiction. The fact that The Joy of Music evoked the same statements argues that, while one might expect otherwise because of the specialised nature of the subject matter, for part of Bernstein’s audience the experience of

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reading a work on music – albeit one in an accessible register– was not qualitatively different from reading a novel. Readers’ recourse to convention, however, coexisted with their description of the particular practices that The Joy of Music permitted. A young woman student affirmed that one advantage of ‘Leonard Bernstein in Book Form’ was the opportunity it presented for rereading – an implicit contrast, again, to the ephemerality of attending a concert or watching television. ‘I have read “The Joy of Music” so often’, she declared, ‘that the pages of my book are crumbling. I can quote you quite accurately.’53 A high-school student documented another form of intensive perusal. ‘This past summer, I read your book The Joy of Music’, she wrote, ‘and I found it so interesting that I spent the whole day reading it. It was one of the few books on music that I have ever completely understood.’54 Greater depth of knowledge was the primary goal of this immersion in the text. ‘I think I could read it 100 times’, a correspondent averred, ‘& still find something each time I hadn’t learned before and I have been told that quality is what constitutes a great book’.55 Yet while those comments implied that the printed volume could stand on its own, other responses signalled the reciprocal relationship between reading and listening on which the ads that promised the book would ‘revisit’ Omnibus sought to capitalise. Readers used Bernstein’s book to reinforce performances and to prepare for new ones. A woman from Illinois first told him that ‘at the end of your broadcasts, I know an awful lot more than I did an hour earlier, and that I have a far greater appreciation of those composers whose works I hadn’t known well nor particularly liked before’. She went on: I am frank to admit that this year, since I have spent time reading (and re-reading) ‘The Joy of Music’ I find I am enjoying your concerts even more than in previous years. I only wish that all your TV concerts were available on records. With your book on my lap and your concerts on the Victrola, I might be able to call myself a student of music appreciation quite honestly.56

For other individuals, Bernstein’s volume compensated for missing telecasts.57 Most important, while a number of letter-writers regretted the absence of recordings to accompany the book, others indicated that reading enabled them to relive the sound of the commentaries integral to Bernstein’s televised concerts. One woman wrote: ‘After hearing and seeing you on TV so often, when I read your book, I could hear your voice as I studied each word’.58 A fan who read The Joy of Music in two days and who had watched Young People’s

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Concerts asserted, ‘As I read your book I could almost hear your voice and see your expressions’.59 The latter remarks suggest that Bernstein ‘in book form’ created a sense of intimacy between audience and conductor, offsetting the distance imposed by Bernstein’s position as a celebrity. Hearing Bernstein’s voice in one’s head while encountering him on the page allowed for the feeling that he was speaking directly, and only, to oneself. Moreover, experiencing a sense of connection to Bernstein through reading (and then writing to) him could have the effect of confirming the reader’s identity as a cultured person. One way to understand the references to love of classical music that pepper Bernstein’s fan mail is to see them as a means for the letter-writers to certify themselves as part of Bernstein’s milieu. Reading Bernstein possibly signified even more seriousness than watching him on television, and licensed a correspondingly greater confidence in one’s cultural credentials. ‘The Joy of Music I have enjoyed a great deal’, a woman from suburban Boston informed the author, ‘and have recommended it to many not-awfully-musical people who also seem to have “got something” out of it, if you know what I mean’.60 A subset of this correspondence is the mail from teenagers who looked to Bernstein as a source of approval for their rejection of rock‘n’roll.61 The impulse to affirm one’s identity likewise governed the act of owning Bernstein’s work (as distinct from the act of reading it). Released as it was for the Christmas market and later sold as a graduation present, The Joy of Music falls into the tradition of the Victorian gift book, which was designed as a keepsake and decorated for display. While Bernstein’s hardcover volume lacks any embellishments, it accrued some of the gift book’s effects. Many readers told Bernstein that they had put the book on their ‘Christmas list’ or obtained it as a welcome holiday present – one that acknowledged their musical interests and potentially endowed The Joy of Music with the status of a treasured object.62 A letter from a seventeen-year-old girl in Bennington, Vermont, reflects the same phenomenon: I have just finished your book and have decided it is the only present I hope to receive when I graduate this June. And as I told mother, ‘It will be one of the few chosen books I will take to college next fall’.63

A key piece of documentation for this point comes from my own copy of The Joy of Music, bought with five dollars I had received for a poem published in a now-defunct teenage magazine. In an inscription on the flyleaf, I wrote that I had ‘made this book a sacred possession

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of mine’. These readers, including myself, turned the material embodiment of Bernstein’s stature and sensibility into a token of their own sensitivity, which could conveniently be displayed to others. As the seventeen-year-old wrote to Bernstein, ‘The music I thought I knew so much about never existed for me until now . . . and I am beginning to learn all about it all over again. . . . It’s as if I never before had any feeling for it.’64 In my own case, a desire to stand out from my peers as artistic and intellectual was surely wrapped up in my Bernstein purchase. With some exceptions (‘as far as classical music is concerned we are practically illiterate’65) Bernstein’s correspondents, regardless of their level of musical ability, do not reveal the distress about their short­ comings that Spaeth and Randolph attributed to their readers. Rarely do they admit that they used to feel intimidated by the mysteries of the classical canon until they heard or read the maestro. Instead, Bernstein’s fans mainly write as musical insiders – or at least reveal their wish to join an inner circle of cultured individuals. Bernstein’s apparently less anxious readership may be an artefact of the self-selection attending the writing of a fan letter. The greater opportunities for prior exposure to classical music in the years between Spaeth’s and Bernstein’s books may account for the more confident tone of the Bernstein archive. Was the television audience more affluent, and therefore perhaps more knowledgeable about classical music to begin with, than the population who tuned into Spaeth or Randolph? Or was the act of writing to Bernstein in an assured voice simply a different strategy for managing underlying feelings of inadequacy about one’s cultural credentials? In any event, a larger lesson emerges from exploring reading and the popularisation of classical music in the mid-twentieth-century United States: the patrons who checked out recordings from public libraries, the subscribers to Music-Appreciation Records, and the readers of books proffering musical understanding were not a monolithic group of consumers. Put another way, there were multiple middlebrow publics. That point comes across in an invitation Jacques Barzun received around 1960 from the magazine High Fidelity, itself a print manifestation of technological advances in the reproduction of sound. The editors asked Barzun – as well as other ‘writers, businessmen, teachers, actors, public servants, etc.’ – to contribute to a series titled ‘Living with Music’. The idea was to offer models of ‘home music listening’ on the part of amateurs, not professional performers, so that High Fidelity readers could both gain understanding and feel

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comfortable with their own habits. ‘The readership these articles will reach’, the invitation observed, is an attentive and grateful one. Nearly all our readers are thoroughly in love with music, but some on very short acquaintance, extending back only through the current renascence of the phonograph. They are very adventuresome and curious, much more so than concert audiences. They expect music to affect them intimately, and they are keenly interested in the experiences of people who have lived intimately with music.66

High Fidelity’s readers differed from the run of concert-goers not least because they had taken the step of subscribing to a specialised periodical. One is tempted to go further and argue that the variability among individuals who sought musical knowledge through institutions and forms of reading undermines any coherent formulation of ‘middle-class taste’. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, the striking thing is that the assimilation of transformations in music culture to book culture rested on a set of common assumptions that have now dissolved. The American Council of Learned Societies’ Committee on Musicology disbanded early on, in 1959, consigning musicology to the academy. To many, the ideal of the cultured person now appears elitist and outmoded. Niche marketing prevails. In the twenty-first century, public libraries still offer music to borrowers, but the compact disc is going the way of the LP. The voice of the expert guide largely has been replaced by that of the empowered Amazon reviewer. Book-of-the-Month Club records are collectors’ items in the era of digital downloads. Fundamentally, listening to music at home with focused attention has dwindled.67 Although fear of the classical canon crops up in a minority of individuals – worsened, perhaps, by the mysteries of modernism – the impulse to assuage that fear through reading is not detectable on publishers’ lists. In those circumstances, my copy of The Joy of Music remains a ‘sacred possession’ not only for evoking my youthful self-image but also for pointing to the vanished values and practices attending the convergence of technological change, reading and listening in what seems a distant past. Notes  1. Jacques Barzun Papers, Butler Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, Series II, Box 75, Folder ‘Music– General Correspondence July 1953–August 1955’, Jacques Barzun to Frederic Cohen, 1 April 1955. Used by permission of Isabel Barzun.

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 2. Ibid.   3. Jacques Barzun, Music in American Life (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 15–17, 20, 77.  4. I have elaborated on the context for the emergence of middlebrow culture, and discussed its literary components, in Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).  5. Dean Howard Keller, ‘The Selection of Phonograph Records for the Library’, Master’s thesis (Kent State University, 1958), p. 10.   6. William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–45 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 44–64.   7. Frances Elliott Clark, Music Appreciation with the Victrola for Children (Camden: Victor Talking Machine Company, 1923), pp. 9, 16, 28, 37, 44, 65, 67–8.   8. Keller, ‘The Selection of Phonograph Records’, p. 11.  9. Projects and Program of the National Committee for Music Appreciation, 1940–41 (Washington, DC: National Committee for Music Appreciation, 1940), p. 28. 10. Ibid., p. 36. 11. Projects and Program of the National Committee for Music Appreciation, 1939–40 (Washington, DC: National Committee for Music Appreciation, 1939), p. 34. 12. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 13. Projects and Program . . . 1939–40., p. 28. 14. Ibid., p. 48. 15. Kirsten E. Wood, ‘“Join with Heart and Soul and Voice”: Music, Harmony, and Politics in the Early American Republic’, American Historical Review, 119:4 (October 2014), pp. 1083–116. 16. Projects and Program . . . 1939–40, pp. 3, 46–59. 17. Oral History Archives at Columbia, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York (henceforth OHA), ‘The Reminiscences of Harry Scherman’, Interview by Louis M. Starr, 1955, pp. 323–9. Hereafter cited as Scherman, OHA. 18. Ibid., p. 329. 19. Ibid., p. 331. 20. Ibid., p. 332. 21. OHA, ‘The Reminiscences of Oscar Ogg’, Interview by Louis M. Starr, 1954–5, p. 34. 22. OHA, ‘The Reminiscences of Axel Rosin’, Interview by Louis M. Starr, 1954–5, pp. 36–7. 23. Scherman, OHA, p. 334; OHA, ‘The Reminiscences of Warren Lynch’, Interview by Louis M. Starr, 1955, pp. 8–9. 24. Scherman, OHA, pp. 332, 336, 339.

224   Joan Shelley Rubin 25. Popular Science Monthly, January 1955, p. 13. 26. A version of Cerf’s endorsement appeared in Life, 21 February 1955, p. 7. 27. Scherman, OHA, p. 337. 28. Barzun Papers, Series II, Box 157, Copy of brochure ‘Great Music’. 29. Barzun Papers, Series II, Box 157, John M. Conly, ‘Credo: RCA Victor Society of Great Music’. 30. Barzun Papers, Series II, Box 157, Jacques Barzun to Harry Scherman, 8 April 1958. 31. ‘Great Music’. 32. Scherman, OHA, p. 339. 33. Starr Cornelius, ‘Music – Food of Books’, Publishers Weekly, 23 September 1940, p. 1960. 34. OHA, ‘The Reminiscences of Sigmund Spaeth’, 1958, pp. 54–6, 60 (hereafter Spaeth, OHA); Sigmund Spaeth, The Common Sense of Music (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), pp. 13, 29–31. 35. Sigmund Spaeth, At Home with Music (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1941), pp. vii; Spaeth, OHA, p. 82. 36. ‘For Record Programs – A Sounder Pattern’, Musical America, September 1946, p. 24. 37. David Randolph Papers, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Box 4, Folder 4.1, Ray Papineau to David Randolph, 14 November 1946; Randolph Papers, Box 4, Folder 4.1, Sidney Alexander to WNYC, n.d.; Randolph Papers, Box 4, Folder 4.1, Ruth Van Norman to WNYC, 13 August 1946; Randolph Papers, Box 4, Folder 4.1, Deems Taylor to David Randolph, 18 December 1949; Fred Rayfield, ‘Randolph Is a New Kind of Favorite’, Daily Compass (New York City), January 1950, p. 31. The quotation from Deems Taylor is used by permission of Michael Cook. 38. David Randolph, This Is Music (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), pp. 17, 32, 42–3, 188. 39. Ibid., pp. 45, 140, 195. 40. Leon Wilson, ‘This Is Music: A Guide to the Pleasures of Listening’, Book-Of-The-Month Club News, March 1964. 41. Randolph Papers, Box 4, Folder 4.8, Bill Livingstone to David Randolph, 31 October 1979. 42. The Leonard Bernstein Collection is housed in the Music Division, Library of Congress. Hereafter cited as Bernstein Collection. 43. The initial print run was 24,000; within its first six weeks almost 70,000 copies were sold. 44. Leonard Bernstein, The Joy of Music (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), pp. 11–17. 45. Bernstein Collection, Box 1016, Folder 6, Henry Simon to Helen Coates, 19 November 1956. Quote (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956) reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

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46. New York Times, 28 April 1960, p. 33. 47. New York Times, 22 November 1959, p. BR31. 48. Ibid.; New York Times, 22 May 1960, p. SM17. 49. New York Times, 21 January 1960, p. 29. 50. Bernstein Collection, Box 400, Deborah Stein to Leonard Bernstein (LB), 10 January 1960. All of the readers’ letters to Bernstein are in the Bernstein Collection in alphabetically organised files. 51. Bernstein Collection, Box 399, Marjorie Anderson to LB, 30 April 1960. 52. Bernstein Collection, Box 400, Paul B. Simpson to LB, 16 January 1960, is an example. 53. Bernstein Collection, Box 402, Vicki Anne Young to LB, 7 July 1960. 54. Bernstein Collection, Box 403, Mary A. Daly to LB, 14 September 1960. 55. Bernstein Collection, Box 400, Joan Shapira to LB, 7 December 1959. 56. Bernstein Collection, Box 399, Mrs George M. Landon to LB, 9 February 1960. 57. Bernstein Collection, Box 400, Judy Wilt to LB, 27 December 1959, is an example. 58. Bernstein Collection, Box 411, Mrs Arthur C. Grebner to LB, 27 June 1962. 59. Bernstein Collection, Box 399, Janet B. Clark to LB, 24 November 1959. 60. Bernstein Collection, Box 401, Pamela E. Anderson to LB, 24 April 1960. 61. Bernstein Collection, Box 399, Ruth May Ames to LB, 26 December 1959, is an example. 62. Bernstein Collection, Box 399, Bradford Gowen to LB, 28 January 1960, is an example. 63. Bernstein Collection, Box 399, Cathy Elwell to LB, 25 February 1960. 64. Ibid. 65. Bernstein Collection, Mrs Lon Rankin to LB, 10 February 1960, Box 400. 66. The circular from High Fidelity is in Barzun Papers, Series II, Box 75, Folder Music – general correspondence, July 1953–August 1955. 67. Miles Hoffmann, ‘A Note to the Classically Insecure’, New York Times, 18 April 2018; Benjamin Carlson, ‘How to Listen to Classical Music, and Enjoy It’, Atlantic, 9 June 2010, available at (accessed 29 April 2018).

Chapter 11

Remaking the World Through Reading: Books, Readers and the Global Project of Modernity, 1945–70 Amanda Laugesen

William H. Carlson, university librarian at Oregon State University and a former president of the Association of College and Research Libraries, wrote a brief article in the American Library Association Bulletin in 1958 entitled ‘The World Wakes Up to Read’. This article aimed to put America’s annual National Library Week into an international context. Carlson praised the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for helping to ‘effect­ ively and quietly roll back the dark curtain of ignorance that rests over all who have not mastered the mysteries of the printed word’. He argued that ‘the peoples of all the world are awakening through reading’. The United States should become more aware of this fact and could materially assist to ‘let the sunshine of knowledge and the cheerful light of understanding through reading shine on all the peoples of our planet’.1 Carlson’s imagery of a world awakening to the ‘sunshine’ of knowledge through reading was a powerful ideological statement that reflected thinking at a very particular point in history. Carlson imagined a world that was ‘one world’, united by reading and knowledge. Yet his statement retained something of the rhetoric of imperialism – the ‘civilising mission’ – that marked early efforts to bring Western books and education systems to parts of the world under imperial control. Mid-century reading and book development efforts in the ‘emerging’ or ‘developing’ world were shot through with the complexities of the power dynamics and global relations that shaped the era. The post-Second World War period – the years that stretch from the end of hostilities in 1945 up to the economic retractions and political problems of the 1970s – was marked by a sense of possi­bility. Many areas of the world rapidly decolonised, and as new 226

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nations formed and sought to develop infrastructure and institutions, reading (situated within a matrix of libraries, education, literacy and publishing) became central to development. Alongside the language of progress and possibility was a language of anxiety and concern, fuelled by the geopolitical realities of the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union sought to divide the world up into spheres of influence, while trying to avoid nuclear Armageddon. The winning over of ‘hearts and minds’ was of central importance in what became known as the ‘cultural Cold War’, a war fought through ideas, print and other media. Hence efforts to promote ideologies of reading and print culture at the global level in this period were imbued with the politics of Cold War foreign policy, and took place within a context of decolonisation, modernisation and the rise of nationalism in newly independent and developing countries. While reading in the era of the Cold War and decolonisation was directed and shaped by politics, readers derived multiple meanings from that reading. As argued in the recent study Fighting Words, books could be a means to resist empire.2 Reading tied people across the world into the politics of decolonisation and the Cold War, but could also be a vehicle for resisting political power. Reading could be a means for expressing individual and collective agency. This chapter considers some of the efforts on the part of Western English-speaking nations to promote books and reading (especially through associated infrastructure such as publishing and libraries) in the decolonising and developing world. It focuses particularly on the efforts of the United Kingdom and the United States, along with the work of UNESCO. It begins with a discussion of multiple ideologies of reading in the Cold War, and how this tied into the growing internationalist outlook of the post-Second World War period. It continues with a discussion of state-based efforts to promote reading as part of foreign policy and Cold War concerns, highlighting the work of the British Council and the United States Information Agency. This is followed by a discussion of some of the efforts of libraries to provide reading material to citizens of developing nations – focusing particularly on UNESCO pilot public libraries – and examines what we know of those who used them. Finally, it discusses the role of publishers in producing reading material for the developing and decolonising world. In all of this discussion, the concern is threefold: to consider the ideologies of reading promulgated and debated in this important period in global history; to consider the infrastructure and materiality of reading; and to consider what we know of ‘actual’ readers and their responses. Christine Pawley points to the importance of

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understanding libraries and their work in understanding the meaning of reading for the common reader. Reading is, she argues, ‘an ongoing cultural practice deeply enmeshed in organisations and communities’.3 We equally need to consider the other forces that create and maintain infrastructures of reading: for the developing nations at mid-century, these forces included government, publishers, ‘experts’ who consulted on library and book programmes, foundations and their project officers, librarians and many others. Wherever possible, this chapter attempts to at least sketch out some of the responses of readers to efforts made by publishers and librarians, and to try to trace the actual reader. But the ‘real’ reader – reading as a lived experience – remains frustratingly elusive for the most part. Real readers were often ignored or even disapproved of, and an ‘ideal reader’ was promoted or assumed. Visions of this ‘ideal’ reader were more often than not the product of racialist and colonialist thinking, even where well intentioned. Assumptions about the ‘underdeveloped’ subject were often made when reading was conceived within develop­ ment efforts. Real readers’ transactions with print are, however, as Erin A. Smith asserts, inevitably variable and self-interested.4 Emerging nations were often keen to embrace a book and reading culture, but there were many other pressing needs for countries seeking to slough off imperial control and seeking to contend with superpower interference and economic disadvantage. Library and publishing efforts were not always welcomed. H. J. Maymi-Sugrañes argues for an understanding of the library as a ‘modernizing model’ that was often used to promote American power, a model imposed on countries with little regard to cultural differences.5 Basil Amaeshi queries whether British-style library services were really relevant to African societies.6 He argues that oral cultures and a suspicion of the book obstructed the possibility of library development in many African countries.7 Similar observations have been made more recently by scholars who have argued that the public library systems established by colonial governments embodied ‘British power structures and epistemologies that made them unsuitable and unpopular’ in places like Africa.8 As a result of all these efforts made in the mid-century decades, was Western reading and book culture globalised? If so, in what ways and to what ends? This period was undoubtedly a time of accelerated globalisation and development. Results were uneven, and the power politics of the Cold War and the dominance of the capitalist system both circumscribed and shaped the nature of book globalisation. At the same time, the agency of those on the ‘receiving end’ of book modernisation efforts must be properly acknowledged.9 Their

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stories are complex, not simple. Many book programmes ignored pre-existing book and reading cultures or dismissed their importance (for example, the long history of the book in the Arabic world, and the strong print tradition already in place in India). All too often, non-Western book traditions were regarded as a hindrance to more ‘modern’ (Western) traditions of publishing and librarianship. Book history scholars have increasingly moved from the adoption of a transnational approach to an approach that emphasises ‘entangled histories’ of the book.10 We need to apply the ‘entangled’ model to the history of reading as well. The reader in the developing world functioned within a complex cultural, commercial and political web, and encountered (and resisted) Western power and influence through reading and through sites of reading. Reading took on increased significance in the two decades following the end of the Second World War. In the United States, reading was bound up with ideas about American identity and citizenship. Kristin L. Matthews has argued that, in the Cold War, the private act of reading was made public as a key to national security and success.11 It was an age of anxiety about reading as well: there was widespread discussion and research about whether young Americans were failing in their reading skills, and debate over the possible influence of subversive reading material.12 The American Library Association and the American Book Publishers Council were keen to promote the book and reading, thus underscoring the importance of their profession and ‘product’ to American life, especially as mass communication media (notably television) seemed to threaten the primacy of the printed word. Lionel McColvin, Britain’s leading librarian, saw the library and the reading material it offered as a guide to negotiating modern life. The library countered the impact of what McColvin regarded as ‘mass produced ideas’ and propaganda. He stated: ‘I believe that it is the primary – and the unique – function of the public library to provide every man with the full, free opportunity to live his own life and make the best of it to his own satisfaction as a genuine individual in a sane, intelligent and developing society’.13 Elsewhere McColvin linked the library to ‘the development of individuality. . . . In no other way in this modern world of mass media can this highly desirable indi­ vidu­ality and variety be better promoted.’14 Another British librarian, Edward Sydney, who worked closely with UNESCO library development projects, likewise argued that ‘mass technological democracy’ demanded good public libraries to counter the ‘dangerous powers of stimulation’ of the mass media.15

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There was a push to extend this ideology globally, which intersected with the internationalist vision that underpinned UNESCO. Reading would help promote international understanding and world peace but it would also help to fashion the modern citizen and the modern individual.16 Founded in 1946, UNESCO declared its goal to be ‘to promote peace, and social and spiritual welfare by working through the minds of men’.17 Library development became a major concern for UNESCO through the late 1940s and 1950s, initially with rebuilding war-devastated libraries, and then with building libraries and library services in the decolonising nations.18 The influential UNESCO Public Library Manifesto stated that public libraries could be a force for education and information because ‘[t]he complexity and instability of life today make the need an urgent one’.19 Books were to be both instruments of freedom and one of the major defences of peace.20 As the Cold War intensified, American advocates of the book also emphasised international understanding as a response to a sense of crisis. In 1958 Theodore Waller, publisher and chair of the International Relations Committee of the American Library Association, argued that all librarians needed to see international relations as relevant to their professional lives: The world of books is, in a deep and true sense, one world. This is not mere poetry. The practical consequences are that through books, even perhaps more than through the post office and the airplane, let alone the hydrogen bomb – the unity of the world may yet grow. We know that all peoples of the world are, to a degree, united in a common fate and that the best library service is hardly good enough for any of us. We may not have a lot of time. Here in the international field is an area in which individual librarians can in part meet their obligations as citizens in time of stark global crisis.21

In his 1956 book The Chance to Read: Public Libraries in the World Today, Lionel McColvin likewise argued that the present age was ‘obsessed with the fear of destruction’, which libraries might help avert through the spread of knowledge.22 In 1961, French writer André Maurois anonymously authored a pamphlet for UNESCO entitled Public Libraries and Their Mission. The pamphlet promoted the institution of the public library and argued for the value of reading for becoming, as he put it, a ‘cultured’ person: ‘A great book never leaves the reader the same as he was before – he is always a better man for having read it’.23 Reading was imagined as having a transformative effect on the individual and, through the individual, the world. Maurois’s pamphlet was lavishly

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illustrated with pictures of people around the world reading in libraries. Men and women, young and old, are all depicted sharing in the universal knowledge offered by the library. One of the key themes discernible in Maurois’s pamphlet was the idea that information, culture, books and the library could help to fashion the modern self. This discourse intersected with concerns about democracy, rights and intellectual freedom, as the public library ethos was imagined as being central to these fundamental values, but it also spoke to the way reading was being imagined in the middle of the twentieth century. This faith in reading had its roots in Enlightenment thinking, and in nineteenth-century ideas about the civilising effect of reading. But now reading was seen as something that connected people the world over. As racialist thinking receded, it was imagined that modern citizens of modern nations could be fundamentally the same if only they shared similar modes of education and read the same books. UNESCO emphasised strongly the importance of the library in making the modern self and, through that, society. Robert L. Hansen, director of public libraries in Denmark, speaking at a 1951 UNESCO conference in Latin America, argued that libraries were essential to ‘increasing [the individual’s] personal knowledge for the benefit of society as a whole. . . . The social value of a citizen increases when his intellectual and material knowledge increases.’24 Lionel McColvin made much the same point at the same conference: Only if [people] can wander around the shelves, discovering something of the wealth and variety of the world of books, can the public library attempt its most important task – that of educating the public to make full use of books, of permitting readers to discover and take advantage of the immense opportunities that exist for them today because most of what men have done, thought, dreamed and would achieve can be told on the printed page. The book is so important a factor in twentieth century civilization that unless people can read and have full free access to books they suffer an enslavement of the mind, body and spirit which is totally inconsistent with democratic ways of life. Every library . . . is a weapon to destroy their chains.25

Libraries might also make productive workers, although this theme was less prominent. In a discussion of the work of the Industrial Social Service travelling library (SESI) in Brazil in 1952, for example, it was suggested that the library might help make the typical worker ‘a good family man, conscious of his duties and responsibilities, and with higher standards of skill and productivity, [and] he shall improve his own and his children’s minds’.26 This discussion explicitly engaged

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with the idea of the library as a means for producing a particular type of citizen – even performing a normalising and disciplining function within society. This idea of the library was also widely embraced in the developing nations. Leading Indian librarian S. R. Ranganathan closed his presi­ dential address at the Eighth All India Library Conference in 1949 with the exhortation: Let us pray for the day when our land will become rich in the broad highway of libraries, along which everybody can walk all through life to reach his own fullness and thus bring to himself and radiate to others material happiness, mental joy and spiritual delight or Ananda.27

Pakistani librarian Khawaja Noor Elahi argued that the library was ‘an asset of primary importance to a civilised society. Its aim is to meet the social, cultural, intellectual, spiritual and practical needs of man, woman, and child.’28 Fellow Pakistani Dr Mahmud Hasain declared in a presidential address to the Pakistan Library Association in 1961 that the library could help in the fight for ‘men’s bodies and minds’ and could cut through ‘the jungle of racial, religious and ideological prejudices’.29 Through the mid-century decades, book programmes also worked within development activity, and reading was imagined within a rhetoric of modernisation. Development work was imbued with Cold War values and aims in the 1950s and 1960s, but also had a longer history that followed on from efforts that saw education, literacy and the book as central to the ‘civilising mission’. Western states increasingly came to see a role for themselves in assisting the ‘under­developed’ world (imagined and shaped as such by the West) to become more like the West. In the 1930s and through the war years, Britain became more concerned with social welfare and education in its colonies. Recognising that these areas were campaigning for their independence – and after the war were increasingly likely to obtain it – some argued for ‘preparing’ the colonies for their independent future. The question of whether colonial populations were ready for independence exercised many British officials. Books and reading were considered essential for this preparation, and so library and publishing efforts were an important focus. British librarian R. A. Flood, writing about public libraries in the colonies in 1951, regarded colonial populations as ‘not ready’ for self-government, and it was thus the responsibility of the governing power to provide appropriate education to assist them.30 British book efforts thus flowed from older ideas about empire

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and civilisation as much as from the broader post-war agenda about develop­ment and modernisation. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the provision of books to the emerging nations was often focused on modernisation as much as the cultural Cold War. Modernisation was a powerful intellectual paradigm that shaped politics and policy through the 1950s and 1960s, although it had fallen somewhat out of favour by the 1970s. Modernisation intellectuals argued that ‘traditional’ societies were transitioning to become ‘modern’ through a process of economic, social and political change, a process seen as both universal and in­ evitable.31 All societies were seen as moving towards an end point that resembled Western liberal democracy, and it was especially important that the West ensure that developing countries did not follow the Soviet path to a modernity which was neither democratic nor capital­ist. Particularly powerful in the United States, this belief shaped American foreign policy, development aid and projects under­ taken by both govern­ ments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Never­theless, scholars have noted that those on the receiving end of such projects ‘contested and negotiated [their] deployment in important ways’.32 Literacy and education were considered essential components of modernisation and development work. Literacy was often linked to progress in mid-century discourse, but the roots of this idea stretched back to earlier decades. Harvey Graff writes: The rise of literacy and its dissemination to the popular classes, therefore, was, and is, associated with the triumph of light over darkness, or liberalism, democracy, and universal unbridled progress; literacy takes its place among the other successes, and causes, of modernity and rationality.33

While the value of literacy for many cannot be denied, it is also important to acknowledge that, historically, literacy was used to shape and control (especially indigenous) populations in colonial contexts.34 Many advocates of independence valued the book as an essential tool for fighting colonial power.35 Julius Nyerere, anticolonial activist and Tanzania’s first president, was a great supporter of libraries, and himself translated Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into KiSwahili.36 In his autobiography, Nigerian nationalist and political leader Nnamdi Azikiwe attested to the importance of books in his education, citing in particular the works of the Harlem Renaissance.37 Azikiwe estab­lished his own newspaper and the African Book Company: the latter produced and distributed books, newspapers and periodicals (including his own publications).38

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The Cold War fundamentally politicised reading. As Wilson Dizard declared in 1961, books were considered ‘carriers of ideas’.39 They could serve, according to publisher Theodore Waller, ‘both as bullets in the cold war of ideas and as ambassadors of good will’.40 There has been notable scholarship about the CIA funding of cultural production in Europe, especially through the Congress of Cultural Freedom.41 But less attention has been paid to how this cultural Cold War played out in other parts of the world. The United States and the Soviet Union were, as might be expected, the most active in this cultural warfare, but the British Council, too, worked to shore up British influence, teach the English language and promote British reading material in various parts of the world, including the former empire. For the major world powers, the battle for hearts and minds was played out at a variety of levels. The United States Information Agency (USIA), with its field United States Information Service (USIS) offices, became a major vehicle to fight this cultural battle. Information libraries and reading rooms became the ‘front line’ of the cultural Cold War and, in a number of places, the USIS or British Council libraries were the only such facilities available. A 1956 report on library services in Malaya noted that while there were some subscription libraries (mostly available only to European patrons), there were few free libraries other than those of the USIS and the British Council.42 Cold War political imperatives meant that collections in these libraries were carefully selected, but this was not without complications. After Joseph McCarthy in 1953 accused the USIA of stocking its libraries with books written by alleged communists, books were removed from shelves. As a result, book selection processes became increasingly tied to a criterion of ‘usefulness’ for achieving government objectives.43 The McCarthy period raised questions about the functions of books and reading in a Cold War world. American librari­ans defended USIS libraries from McCarthy, arguing that books were among the among the most effective weapons possessed by the United States in the battle to preserve freemen and free minds from the enslavement of Communist political and intellectual tyranny. We know that their effectiveness has depended on the conviction among foreign users that here was a free and open source of truth to which they could turn with confidence for information and enlightenment.44

They expressed their dismay at attacks on these libraries and any removal of books as a consequence – USIS libraries should, they argued, contain whatever books were deemed useful. They also spoke

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of ‘responsible freedom’,45 which entailed giving people the freedom to read what they liked and to exercise their own judgement on what they read and what they chose to believe in. Despite book professionals’ vigorous defence of a broad conception of intellectual freedom, from the early 1960s it became USIA policy that books should make a ‘positive contribution’ in support of US foreign policy objectives.46 In 1967 a USIS representative, Herbert Fredman, told the American Library Association that the special purpose of his libraries was to ‘project the United States’ and that there was an increasing focus on ‘selective patronage’ to influence those who would pass on information to others, such as government officials, teachers and university students and faculty. He also observed how USIS libraries were ‘highly visible symbols of the US government and the principles for which it stands’. He found ‘it encouraging that our government is symbolised abroad by a free, open democratic library, which carries the American message of liberty, freedom and equality, even if stones are aimed at it occasionally’.47 While American books selected by Washington crowded the shelves of USIS libraries, British Council libraries were full of British authors. The British Council was dedicated to promoting the ‘British way of life’ and was keen both to teach English and to use libraries to promote British culture. In 1959, it was noted that the Council libraries could help promote reading in places where such reading was ‘lacking’.48 British Council library collections varied, with book stock chosen to reflect local issues and needs. But the collections also had to be representative of ‘British letters and scholarship and interpretive of the civilisation, institutions, and achievement in every sphere of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth’. Typically, these included the works of Shakespeare, novels by George Orwell, the Dictionary of National Biography and works of history by G. M. Trevelyan.49 What did all this mean for readers? Greg Barnhisel has noted how the American collections tended to push the ‘canon’ of American litera­ ture, with classic authors such as Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James. Modernist and experimental litera­ture was rarely included.50 The shortcomings of USIS collections were evident even to American observers. Lester Asheim, head of the American Library Association’s International Relations Office, when visiting West Africa in the early 1960s, commented that he observed copies of the work of James Baldwin in some African collections, but not in any USIS library he had visited.51 In a Nigerian regional library he saw books on American social politics such as Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and Class and Caste in a Southern Town, titles that would

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never be found in USIS libraries.52 And again, Asheim found that the Lusaka USIS library needed books about Africa and Africans but was not allowed to get books outside of lists directed by Washington, which rarely included texts on Africa.53 In the Tripoli USIS library, a British-born librarian reported to Asheim that the USIA Washington lists did not contain enough material that ‘represented American life today, there was too much of the James Fenimore Cooper type’. If the Americans hoped to get Libyans reading fiction, she argued, there was a definite need for more contemporary fiction.54 William Rutter, a sales promotion manager with Stanford University Press, after surveying the state of publishing and libraries in Asia in the early 1950s, stated bluntly that the USIA’s books ‘tend to appeal to the mediocre mind’, and there was a need for more controversial material.55 Readers undoubtedly used USIS libraries to their own ends, but we have only fragments of evidence as to how those readers used those libraries. We can see some (biased) evidence of readers in USIA success stories: for example, an Indonesian woman who used the library to obtain recipes for American food and then convinced her husband that cheeseburgers were great.56 This same commentary on USIS libraries in Indonesia praised the way that USIS libraries benefited Indonesians who sought ‘anything that can give them a picture of life in the United States’.57 But observers also show us the kinds of material readers sought out. In Accra, Ghana, in the early 1960s, nearly all patrons came to read magazines, including African-American periodicals such as Ebony and the NAACP Journal, as well as Time and Life.58 Also in demand were ‘practical technical and science textbooks’.59 USIS spaces were popular as study spaces, and were frequently used by students and young professionals. Readers in British Council libraries similarly demanded a wider span of literature than what was generally offered – for example, it was noted that there was ‘an insatiable appetite for practical manuals written in clear, simple terms on such subjects as engineering and agriculture’.60 But while British Council librarians often cited the preference for practical and technical reading, as well as reading that matched school and university curricula, there were also readers who clearly read fiction. Many Nigerian readers of the 1950s read ‘nineteenth-century classics’ such as those by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, but there were also readers for Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Amos Tutuola’s The Brave African Huntress (1958).61 As USIS libraries became symbols of American power abroad, they also attracted protests – in Bogotá, Baghdad, Athens, Beirut, Algiers,

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Calcutta and Taipei.62 Some national governments (in Afghanistan, for example) called for readers to avoid using the libraries.63 In addition to libraries, USIA book gift programmes often involved presentations to ‘figures of influence’, which helped to put American books into circulation in many parts of the world. An April 1963 report from a USIS post in Nigeria noted that the office had sent copies of James D. Calderwood and Harold J. Bienvenu’s Patterns of Economic Growth: The American Experience to economics teachers at the universities of Ibadan and Ife as well as to government economists, selected business leaders and members of the Ibadan Rotary Club.64 USIA files contain a number of thank-you letters from countries such as India and Kenya, many from school principals, although they do not indicate that these books were actually read.65 Knowing what actual readers made of USIS and British Council libraries remains elusive, but, as we have seen, there are some scraps of evidence. Readers used these spaces for study and reading, yet the collections were often inadequate. Readers took what was relevant and interesting to them, but also looked elsewhere for reading that had meaning for their everyday lives. Through these decades, there were various efforts to develop public and university libraries and other infrastructures of reading. Librarians were trained, library buildings were established and library services were modernised. Yet the reader often remains only assumed or implied in the descriptions we have of these projects. The UNESCO library projects are something of an exception in at least attempting to survey who used libraries and what was borrowed (if not read). UNESCO pilot public libraries were an effort to model library services that could be replicated in the developing world. Surveys and reports give us some idea of how they shaped readers, and how readers in turn made use of such facilities, if coloured through the Western ‘experts’ who studied them. The Delhi Public Library was the first of the UNESCO pilot public libraries and was opened in 1950 by India’s prime minister, ­Jawaharlal Nehru, who was a strong believer in the power of the book and the library, as well as an author of noted books on India. Within six months the Delhi library had 6,000 members, with fiction the genre most borrowed; the preferred language of books borrowed was Hindi.66 A 1957 survey indicated that the typical member of the library was a young man in his twenties and likely to be either a student or a clerical worker. Businessmen and professionals were the other main groups to use the library, and nearly all members were men.67 Though women were less than 10 per cent of the recorded membership, Frank Gardner,

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the UNESCO ‘expert’ who surveyed the library, believed its books were likely to reach a number of other readers, including women.68 The survey concluded that books were preferred over other types of reading matter. Nearly 40 per cent of users said they used the library ‘for the purpose of increasing knowledge generally’ and just over 25 per cent used the library out of ‘general interest’. While they preferred to read books in Hindi, especially for fiction, most non-fiction works were available only in English. The popular books in English were in the areas of the social sciences, ‘technics’, philosophy, literature and history; in Hindi, literature was the top category; in Urdu, literature, biography and history. While literature topped the category of what was actually read, when users were surveyed as to what they would want to read, they nominated biography first, followed by literature, self-improvement, Indian history and technical knowledge. They least desired to read books on politics, psychology, technical subjects, economics and world history.69 The survey also asked readers what they preferred within each category. In fiction, readers put love stories at the top of their list, followed by stories about modern India, crime and detective novels, and historical stories about India.70 Unable to help himself from judging these preferences, Gardner saw the choice of romance as the preferred genre as ‘regrettable’.71 In concluding his 1957 report, Gardner noted that he thought the Delhi library an inspiration for other library projects in Asia. He was greatly impressed by what he saw as the ‘deep interest in reading and appreciation of books for their own sake’ that the Delhi library users displayed.72 Other pilot libraries were established under UNESCO auspices but had less success, perhaps because of lower local levels of literacy, but also due to circumstances such as finances and a lack of qualified staff. The Enugu pilot library73 in Nigeria was opened in 1959 and surveyed in 1961 by Stanley Horrocks, a British librarian. Literacy rates in eastern Nigeria were low, but even the literate population joined the library only in small numbers. In 1961, only one in eight of the literate population was a member of the library.74 The reference section was better used, but most patrons were European, not African. Of African users of the library, most were young men and students or clerical workers. As in India, few women were members of the library.75 Newspapers made up a large proportion of the material that patrons sought, including both Nigerian publications and English news­papers, such as The Times, The Guardian and The Observer. Time was popular, as was The Economist and the British West African Review.76 Horrocks found that fiction accounted for just over 40 per cent of loans, which, he observed, ‘would seem to belie that

Books, Readers and the Global Project of Modernity   239

oft-repeated statement that the reading of imaginative works is not done by A ­ fricans’.77 ‘Stories of modern Africa’ were in demand, as were Nigerian or West African authors. Non-fiction borrowing included motorcar repair manuals and books on trade, self-improvement, politics, history and African affairs.78 Undoubtedly, creating readers was seen to be a priority for developing nations, as part of more general education initiatives, and often with a focus on young people.79 In Tanzania, the first public libraries open to all were not established until the 1960s. The library in Dar es Salaam, opened in the late 1960s, proved to be very popular, with long queues: accountancy books were especially heavily used.80 But there was concern on the part of Tanzanian librarians by the end of the decade that the library was geared towards minorities and local elites, and the lack of appropriate material was considered to be a problem.81 The books needed for development were available only in English, and language proved to be a major barrier.82 A survey of Indian libraries from 1961 similarly noted how there was a real need for technical, scientific and scholarly books in Indian languages and that the ‘great books of the West’ were beyond the reach of the ordinary Indian reader.83 Books, libraries and publishing were regarded as important to the modernisation project, but only if the books were read and the libraries used. In 1962 Lester Asheim noted that the collection of the Ghana Central Library in 1962 was not at all appropriate for its users, who were increasingly Africans rather than Europeans. He observed that there was ‘almost no recognition of local needs and interests; the collection is the “cultural reading” typical of county regional libraries in England in the 20s. Almost no practical, technical how-to-do-it stuff, or even material of pertinence to Africa.’84 S. I. A. Kotei, a Ghanaian writer and librarian with the George Padmore Library, saw books as essential tools to help create ‘individualism in the modern world’.85 But he also expressed his deep frustration, shared by his compatriots, over libraries stocked with American and European books. Public libraries had to ‘come to grips with African realities’.86 However USIS, British Council and UNESCO libraries tried to shape the reader, readers made their own choices. In the absence of suitable, useful or appealing material, libraries were not used. In 1953 the UNESCO Courier observed that literacy programmes were not going to be of much use or impact if the newly literate had ‘nothing to read or only strip cartoons and the trivial but dangerous trash that can be found even where there are no good books at all’.87 While non-Western readers were typically criticised for their

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preference for utilitarian reading (if reading was undertaken at all), it was also recognised that there was often a dearth of suitable books. This was a real problem. Over and over again, library and book industry consultants in many parts of the world pointed to the lack of locally produced books in vernacular languages. Lester Asheim, while visiting Africa, felt that the reading interests of Africans were shaped by the lack of vernacular material, and believed that one real need was for ‘simplified books’ that nevertheless contained adult content.88 Harold Lancour, touring West Africa to survey library facilities as a UNESCO expert, observed that bookshops stocked only books in English (and mostly British stock).89 In the mid-century decades, the developing world became an area of interest – and competition – for publishers that sought to tap into an emerging market of readers. In Britain after the war, there was an increased awareness of the importance of book exports for the economy as well as for foreign relations.90 Educational books in particular became critical for the publishing industries in both the UK and the US. Gail Low notes how the colonies (and then independent nations) were seen in the post-war years as a source of ‘huge financial gain’.91 As she observes, there was a ‘publishing scramble for Africa’.92 Low and Caroline Davis have both shown how British publishers such as Oxford University Press and Heinemann saw Africa as a continent of growth in the wake of decolonisation, when they enjoyed a period of high sales and high profits.93 The UK government assisted through having British Council offices survey book markets in various areas and showcasing British books in their export promotion efforts.94 Publishers such as Longman aimed not only to develop African arms of their business, but also to focus on developing political networks and influence, along with ‘Africanising’ their staff and publications.95 Despite these attempts at Africanisation, there was open criticism of the dominance of British publishers by the local intelligentsia.96 Alan Hill, who headed up the Heinemann African Writers Series, saw it as his ‘paternalistic mission to help Africa enter the modern world’.97 Oxford University Press developed a strong programme of educational publishing, and also produced many books about Africa and about nation-building.98 But this work could be fraught. The US and the UK battled for markets (and minds) but also contended with the pressures of national­ism in developing countries. Most problematic was language. Creating a readership was much easier to talk about than to achieve. And despite efforts to include ‘locals’, the market remained colonised by outside powers in many areas of the world. Further, the literary

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work produced by these areas was conceived more as a possible literature for consumption by customers in Britain and elsewhere – serving Western readers more so than African readers. The rivalry between British and American publishers was frequently observed by Americans visiting Africa. British publishers actively lobbied for local influence in the market, especially the educational publishing market. This was to be expected, given the legacies of the colonial relationship, but the Americans found this a problem that limited their own possibilities for influence.99 American publishers recog­nised opportunities in the decolonising world, but they also faced the entrenched presence of British publishers, especially in Africa, and observed that British books lined the shelves of libraries and bookshops in parts of the world that had previously been under British control. The Advisory Commission on Books Abroad, appointed by the US State Department in 1952, held a conference at Princeton University in 1955 to talk about the state of book exports and possibilities for the future. There were many challenges for the US publishing industry in getting books to those overseas. A major issue was the strength of the US dollar and the fact that many countries could not afford to buy American books. The International Media Guarantee programme, introduced in 1949, aimed to address this. The programme allowed selected countries to buy books using local currencies and subsidised the publishers that sold the books. US publishers were aware that the developing world was a potential market, but the commercial viability of these markets was questioned. While some university presses and educational publishers explored the possibility of markets in Africa and India, and were developing a greater interest in publishing ‘world’ literature, the main efforts were subsidised by the US government. Franklin Publications was one programme that stimulated American publishers to get involved in the developing world, while also ensuring that American books in translation found their way into the hands of readers across the globe, to serve Cold War ends.100 Funding for the programme, which organised translation rights with American publishers and worked with publishers in developing countries to produce the books, came from the USIA initially, but later from a range of other sources, including the Ford Foundation and governments of the countries in which it operated offices, such as Iran, Egypt and Pakistan. Selections of books for Franklin’s publishing programme were made by local offices, a principle that Datus Smith, who headed up the Franklin programme, insisted on. For Smith, only local choice could reflect ‘local values’.101 The intention was to cultivate a local readership, and books were adapted in various ways to include content that

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would be more relevant to local conditions. But ultimately the books were American and reflected American history, culture and values. The Arabic programme in the 1950s, for example, included Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, biographies of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Lewis Allen’s social history of modern America, The Big Change.102 In the 1960s Franklin worked closely with several national governments, including those of Iran and Pakistan, to support the production of textbooks and books for new literates. In the case of Iran, Franklin supported the Shah’s efforts to modernise and build support for his own regime. The Shah’s twin sister gave her name to a translation of Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care for Franklin, and it went on to be a bestseller in Iran.103 Franklin eventually produced all of Iran’s early-grade textbooks, which were then distributed free to schools through a subsidy scheme run by the Imperial Social Services Organisation. Several Franklin publications appeared on the Iranian Children’s Book Council’s lists of recommended books – not a surprise, given that Franklin had helped to establish the Council. They included editions of E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins and Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was assigned as school reading.104 Such efforts had the consequence of entrenching American books in local cultures, and this was not always welcome. While the Shah’s regime (if not the Iranian people) welcomed US assist­ ance in producing books that could buttress modernisation efforts, other countries expressed much greater suspicion of programmes so obviously connected to US foreign policy goals. As one Egyptian national­ist put it, American books were ‘an intellectual invasion’.105 Alongside Franklin’s programme was the USIA’s ‘Low-Priced Books in Translation’ programme, which in 1956 produced 7 million books worldwide.106 Of these, 2 million were published in India in six different languages.107 In 1962–3, the USIA produced 5,577,805 copies of 974 volumes in translation and 485,900 copies of 106 volumes in English, many aimed at Middle Eastern nations such as Lebanon, Syria and the United Arab Republic.108 ‘Ladder editions’ – simplified books for new literates – were also published throughout the 1960s.109 Titles included William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Isaac Asimov’s Inside the Atom and Owen Wister’s The Virginian, as well as various non-fiction books about China and Russia, life in America, and science and technology. A 1969 USIA study of ladder editions concluded that fiction dominated sales, biographies and science books did well, and anti-communist books sold poorly.110

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Throughout these years, the Soviet Union was also producing large numbers of books in various languages. By 1961, it had published more than 40 million books in English, French, German, several Indian languages, Arabic and Persian. In 1962, Hausa, Sanskrit and Swahili had been added to its publishing programmes. Soviet scientific textbooks, manuals for learning Russian and a variety of political texts formed the bulk of this output.111 In 1962, it was noted that the Soviet Union produced one-sixth of the world’s total translations, mostly multilingual editions of Marxist ‘classics’.112 The circulation of American and British (and Soviet) books complemented a variety of other publishing and book distribution activities. In some emerging nations there were established presses, even if they were often seen to fall short of Western standards. For example, the East African Literature Bureau (EALB), a legacy of mission­ary press work, was among the most active local publishers in that part of Africa, and was one of seven such Literature Bureaus in East and West Africa in the post-war decades. In the early 1960s, much of what it produced were elementary texts, but it often published in vernacular languages. Anne Goodin, who worked for the EALB in Uganda, reported to Lester Asheim that books that included legends and ‘tribal stories’ ‘usually have a good audience everywhere’ and also observed that African women readers liked the ‘home-making, how-to-do-it ence of stuff’. Religious material was also popular.113 The promin­ religious material and the religious intent behind the EALB reflected the ideological orientation of this institution. Efforts were also made to develop an indigenous literary culture, and these often adopted a model of cultural modernism. Magazines such as Drum, Transition and Black Orpheus became important venues for African writers and writing about Africa. Authors such as Chinua Achebe, Bloke Modisane and Wole Soyinka were published in these journals, which helped to establish an African literature, read and recognised internationally, and to craft an African literary intelligentsia. These writers were often represented in the series produced by the British presses, such as Heinemann’s African Writers Series. But the impact on the African common reader remains to be explored. Indeed, while we are able to trace publishing initiatives in the develop­ ing world in this period, we know far less about those who read (or did not read) these publications. What should we make of all these efforts? Mary Niles Maack, writing about West African libraries, notes that it is possible to see the imported book as having a ‘liberating effect’ on African intellectuals,

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though it also ‘perpetuates the center–periphery relationship’.114 Céline Giton has suggested that UNESCO’s use of books had mixed results. Whether books promoted peace, one of UNESCO’s key aims, was questionable, as there is nothing intrinsic in books that furthers peace, and she observes that books quickly became a tool for the cultural foreign policies of states. UNESCO’s book policy was used by the West to legitimise a Western vision of the role of the book in society.115 At the same time, however, the making of the book as a tool of emancipation allowed countries to ‘express a symbolic opposition to the cultural and linguistic imperialisms of the great powers’.116 Yet we should be cautious in looking only for evidence of political and politicised reading – books that were ‘fighting words’ (as a recent volume dedicated to profiling books aiding in the post-colonial project calls itself) were not the only or even the main reading matter for most people. While these books helped create an ‘anti-imperial commons’ and pushed back against imperial control (including that of the post-war superpowers),117 they were not the stuff of everyday reading. Uncovering ‘common readers’ and examining the infrastructures that shaped their reading is just as important in considering the social and political dynamics of decolonisation, the cultural Cold War and the nationalist aspirations of developing nations. The complexity of the story of books and reading for populations in the developing and decolonising world is becoming clear as more scholarship seeks to unravel how books actually circulated and how reading took place. This chapter has sought to contribute to an under­ standing of reading in the developing world through examining the ideologies and infrastructures imposed from without, as well as some of the responses from within. Much more work remains to be done. Notes   1. William H. Carlson, ‘The World Wakes Up to Read’, American Library Association Bulletin, 52:8 (September 1958), p. 633.  2. Dominic Davies, Erica Lombard and Benjamin Mountford (eds), Fighting Words: Fifteen Books That Shaped the Postcolonial World (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017).  3. Christine Pawley, Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy and the Public Library in Cold War America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), p. 278.   4. Erin A. Smith, What Would Jesus Read? Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), p. 197.

Books, Readers and the Global Project of Modernity   245

  5. H. J. Maymi-Sugrañes, ‘Cold Warriors: Advancing the Library Modernizing Model in Latin America’, Investigación, 31:72 (2017), p. 191.  6. Basil Amaeshi, ‘Bibliographic Essay’, in Basil Amaeshi (ed.), Classical Readings in African Library Development (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2003), p. 447.  7. Ibid.   8. Elizabeth B. Fitzpatrick, ‘The Public Library as Instrument of Colonialism: The Case of the Netherlands East Indies’, Libraries and the Cultural Record, 43:3 (2008), p. 283.   9. Matthew Hilton and Rana Mitter, ‘Introduction’, Past and Present, 218: suppl. 8 (2013), pp. 7–28. 10. See, for example, Alison Rukavina, The Development of the International Book Trade, 1870–1895 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 11. Kristin L. Matthews, Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), pp. 5, 13. 12. Ibid., pp. 18, 19. 13. Lionel R. McColvin, ‘Some Aspects of the Public Library Service’, Library Association Record, December 1947, p. 301. 14. Lionel R. McColvin, The Chance to Read: Public Libraries in the World Today (London: Phoenix House, 1956), p. 33. 15. Dave Muddiman, ‘The Public Library in an Age of Inclusion: Edward Sydney, Harold Joliffe and the Rise and Fall of Library Extension, 1927– 1972’, Library History, 18:2 (2002), p. 127. 16. Pawley, Reading Places, p. 3. 17. UNESCO Courier, 6:6 (June 1953), p. 2. 18. For a fuller discussion of UNESCO’s ideologies on reading and libraries, see Amanda Laugesen, ‘UNESCO and the Globalization of the Public Library Idea’, Library and Information History, 30:1 (2014), pp. 1–19. 19. ‘The UNESCO Public Library Manifesto’, Appendix A, in McColvin, The Chance to Read, p. 250. 20. Céline Giton, ‘Weapons of Mass Distribution: UNESCO and the Impact of Books’, in Poul Duedahl (ed.), A History of UNESCO: Global Actions and Impacts (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 51. 21. Theodore Waller, ‘The International Relations Programme of the American Library Association’, American Library Association Bulletin, 53:1 (January 1959), p. 50. 22. McColvin, The Chance to Read, pp. 9–10. 23. André Maurois, Public Libraries and Their Mission (Paris: UNESCO, 1961), p. 8. 24. Robert L. Hansen, ‘Public Library Laws’, in Development of Public Libraries in Latin America: The Sao Paulo Conference, UNESCO Public Library Manual No. 5 (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), p. 41. 25. Lionel R. McColvin, ‘The Open-Access System’, in Development of Public Libraries in Latin America, p. 54.

246  Amanda Laugesen 26. N. M. Piraja, ‘The SESI Travelling Library’, in Development of Public Libraries in Latin America, p. 81. 27. S. R. Ranganathan, Library Needs of Renascent India: Presidential Address, Eighth All India Library Conference, Nagpur, 20–22 January 1949 (Delhi: University Press, 1949), p. 33. 28. Khawaja Noor Elahi, ‘Role of Libraries in West Pakistan’, Quarterly Journal of the Pakistan Library Association, 1:2–3 (January 1961), p. 1. 29. Mahmud Hasain, Quarterly Journal of the Pakistan Library Association, 1:4 (April 1961), p. 9. 30. R. A. Flood, Public Libraries in the Colonies (London: Library Association, 1951), p. 11. 31. There is a large literature on modernisation in this period, mostly focused on American efforts. See, for example, Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and US Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). For an example of intellectual thought of the period, see Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe: Free Press of Glencoe, 1958). 32. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution, p. 5. 33. Harvey J. Graff, ‘Introduction’, in Harvey J. Graff (ed.), Literacy and Social Development in the West: A Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 3. 34. See, for example, Patrick Harries, ‘Missionaries, Marxists and Magic: Power and the Politics of Literacy in South-East Africa’, Journal of Southern Africa Studies, 27:3 (September 2001), pp. 405–27. 35. G. Roe, ‘Challenging the Control of Knowledge in Colonial India: Political Ideas in the Work of S. R. Ranganathan’, Library and Information History, 26:1 (March 2010), p. 22. 36. Anthony Olden, ‘“For Poor Nations a Library Service is Vital”: Establishing a National Public Library Service in Tanzania in the 1960s’, Library Quarterly, 75, 4 (October 2005), p. 432. 37. Nnamdi Azikiwe, My Odyssey: An Autobiography (London: Hurst, 1970), pp. 37, 136. 38. Ibid., pp. 37, 286, 385, 387. 39. Wilson P. Dizard, The Strategy of Truth: The Story of the U.S. Information Service (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1961), p. 153. 40. Theodore Waller, ‘Expanding the Book Audience’, in Harold K. Guinzburg, Robert W. Frase and Theodore Waller (eds), Books and the Mass Market (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953), p. 59. 41. See, for example, Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999). 42. Unesco Bulletin for Libraries, 10:8–9 (August–September 1956), p. 177. 43. Dizard, The Strategy of Truth, p. 140. 44. American Library Association Bulletin, 47:8 (September 1953), pp. 362–3.

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45. Ibid., p. 363. 46. Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 114. 47. American Library Association papers, University of Illinois Urbana-​ Champaign, 7/2/6 International Relations Office New Office Subject Files Box 4, Folder ‘USIA 1961–67’, Statement by Herbert Fredman, 9 October 1967, pp. 2, 4. 48. LA Record, April 1959, p. 87. 49. Bernard P. F. Adams and Sandra Hickman, ‘The Libraries of the British Council’, Libri, 15:4 (1965), p. 364. 50. Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists, pp. 117, 121. 51. Lester Asheim Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina (hereafter Asheim papers), Box 2, Lester Asheim, Africa travel diary, 27 December 1961–22 March 1962, p. 28, . 52. Ibid., p. 40. 53. Ibid., p. 72. 54. Ibid., pp. 174–5. 55. William Rutter, ‘American Books in South Asia’, Library Trends, 5 (July 1956), p. 112. 56. Editorial, American Library Association Bulletin, 50:2 (February 1956), p. 74. 57. Ibid. 58. Asheim, Africa travel diary, p. 9. 59. Ibid. 60. Adams and Hickman, ‘The Libraries of the British Council’, p. 365. 61. The National Archives, Records of the British Council, Library Reports 1948–60, BW 128/2 Nigeria: Books, ‘Annual Report of the Librarian, January–December 1958’, p. 5. 62. Edward R. Murrow talking to the American Council on Education, 5 October 1961, quoted in American Library Association Bulletin, 56:1 (January 1962), p. 24. 63. American Library Association Papers, 7/2/6 IRO New Office Subject Files, Box 1, Folder ‘Asheim Reports to AID on Foreign Trips’, Lester Asheim, Memorandum to USIA Washington, 27 May, 1964, p. 3. 64. National Archives and Record Administration, Washington, DC (hereafter NARA), RG306, USIA Office of Private Cooperation, Box 46, Folder ‘IAA Nigeria 1963’, US Information Service, Ibadan Office, Memorandum to US Information Agency, 30 April 1963. 65. NARA, RG306, USIA Office of Private Cooperation, Box 34, Folder ‘Donated Books, Effectiveness’, Entry 56 250/A/1/01. 66. ‘Municipal Library Notes’, Library Association Record, August 1953, p. 265. 67. Frank M. Gardner, The Delhi Public Library: An Evaluation Report (Paris: UNESCO, 1957), p. 25.

248  Amanda Laugesen 68. Ibid., p. 91. 69. Ibid., p. 45. 70. Ibid., p. 46. 71. Ibid., p. 48. 72. Ibid., pp. 88, 93. 73. For a fuller discussion of the Enugu library project, see Amanda Laugesen, ‘“An Inalienable Right to Read”: Unesco’s Promotion of a Universal Culture of Reading and Public Libraries, and Its Involvement in Africa 1948–1968’, English in Africa, 35:1 (May 2008), pp. 67–88. 74. Stanley H. Horrocks, The Regional Central Library at Enugu, Eastern Nigeria: An Assessment (Paris: UNESCO, May 1961), p. 16. 75. Ibid., p. 21. 76. Ibid., p. 26. 77. Ibid., p. 28. 78. Ibid., pp. 30–1. 79. Anthony Olden, ‘For Poor Nations a Library Service is Vital’, Library Quarterly, 75:4 (October 2005), p. 425. 80. Ibid., p. 425. 81. Ibid., p. 431. 82. Ibid., p. 432. 83. K. Ramakrishna Rao, ‘Library Development in India’, Library Quarterly, 31:2 (April 1961), p. 151. 84. Asheim, Africa travel diary, p. 21. 85. S. I. A. Kotei, ‘Some Variables of Comparison Between Developed and Developing Library Systems’, in Amaeshi (ed.), Classical Readings, p. 19. 86. Ibid., p. 23. 87. ‘The Public Library . . . ’, UNESCO Courier, 40:8 (June 1953), p. 2. 88. Asheim, Africa travel diary, p. 88. 89. Harold Lancour, ‘Impressions of British West Africa’, American Library Association Bulletin, 52:6 (July 1958), p. 420. 90. Amy Flanders, ‘“Our Ambassadors”: British Books, American Com­ petition and the Great Book Export Drive, 1940–60’, English Historical Review, 125:515 (August 2010), pp. 877, 879. 91. Gail Low, Publishing the Postcolonial: Anglophone West Africa and Caribbean Writing in the UK 1948–1968 (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 60. 92. Ibid., p. 64. 93. Caroline Davis, ‘Creating a Book Empire: Longmans in Africa’, in Caroline Davis and David Johnson (eds), The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 138. See also Caroline Davis, Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 94. Flanders, ‘“Our Ambassadors”’, pp. 892, 906. 95. Davis, ‘Creating a Book Empire’, p. 140.

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 96. Davis, Creating Postcolonial Literature, p. 37.  97. Gail Low, ‘In Pursuit of Publishing: Heinemann’s African Writers Series’, Wasafiri, 17:37 (2002), p. 33.  98. Davis, Creating Postcolonial Literature, p. 40.  99. Asheim, Africa travel diary, p. 98. 100. For a fuller discussion of the work of Franklin Publications, see Amanda Laugesen, Taking Books to the World: American Publishers and the Cultural Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017). 101. Franklin Book Programmes Records, Public Policy Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University (hereafter FBPR), Box 3, Folder 5, Don Cameron, Letter to Franklin Publications executive committee, 28 April 1953 (in which Cameron comments on Datus Smith’s insistence). 102. FBPR, Box 3, Folder 5, Correction for page 11 of memorandum of January 11 Report and Recommendations, 15 January 1953. 103. FBPR, Box 3, Folder 4, Datus Smith, Letter to Franklin Publications executive committee, 14 June 1956. 104. J. M. Filstrup, ‘Franklin Book Programmes/Tehran’, International Library Review 8, 4 (1976), pp. 436, 439, 447, 435. 105. FBPR, Box 3, Folder 4, English translation of Samy Dawood, ‘We Are No Enemies of Culture’, Al-Gomhoria, 27 October 1955. 106. Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006), p. 300. 107. Ibid. 108. NARA, RG306, Box 3, USIA Records Relating to the Book Programme, 1966–99, ‘Books Published Abroad, July 1, 1962–June 30, 1963’. 109. NARA, RG306, USIA Office of Private Cooperation, Box 35, Folder ‘Donated Books, ICS Review of Books’, Entry 56 250/A/1/01, ‘Ladder Editions from the USA’. 110. US Information Agency, NARA, RG306, USIA Director’s Subject Files, 1968–72, Box 1, Folder ‘Books, General Reports and Statistics, Entry 42 350/77/27/04, Study of Ladder Editions, 26 September 1969. 111. NARA, RG306, Office of Research ‘R’ Reports, 1960–3, R43-62, Box 3, ‘Soviet Book Publishing in Free World Languages’, 9 May 1962. 112. Daniel P. Bergen, ‘Communist and American Cultural Strategy in Asia, Africa, and Latin America’, Library Quarterly, 32:2 (April 1962), p. 125. 113. Asheim, Africa travel diary, p. 105a. 114. Mary Niles Maack, ‘The Role of External Aid in West African Library Development’, Library Quarterly, 56:1 (January 1986), p. 14. 115. Giton, ‘Weapons of Mass Distribution’, pp. 64, 65. 116. Ibid., p. 68. 117. Dominic Davies, Erica Lombard and Benjamin Mountford, ‘Introduction: Fighting Words: Books and the Making of the Post­colonial World’, in Davies et al. (eds), Fighting Words, p. 6.

Chapter 12

Amazing Stories, 1950–3: The Readers Behind the Covers Angelle Whavers

Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once said ‘The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate’.1 Pulp fiction magazines were once a central piece of American popular culture. They emerged from the margins of society to become a key player in debates about censorship and juvenile delinquency during the moral panics of the early Cold War, then faded from view with the increased popularity of comic books and television. Pulp magazines were published at least once a month at an affordable price, and one of the most famous was Amazing Stories. Founded in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback, Amazing Stories was published in paperback form until 2005, and in 2012 came back to the public eye as, after an absence, it began its legacy as an online magazine. It faced a series of highs and lows as the public lost and regained interest in the magazine during its seventy-nine-year print run. In particular, by 1950 Amazing Stories was losing both credibility and readers, forcing major changes in the magazine over the next several years.2 In order to rebuild its audience, the editorial team behind Amazing Stories undertook efforts to better understand its readership and meet their expectations. The changes to Amazing Stories in the early 1950s were based on several competing factors, some integral to the magazine and its audience, while others were part of larger social trends. This chapter will give a brief overview of these many factors and see how changes were implemented between 1950 and 1953, to please the Amazing Stories audience. Within the magazine itself, controversies had emerged as early as 1938 under the leadership of editor Raymond A. Palmer. Readers came to see his ‘vision’ for the magazine as moving away from the intent of its creator, and reacted negatively. The editor who replaced him in 1950, Howard Browne, therefore had to contend with 250

Amazing Stories, 1950–3: The Readers Behind the Covers   251

a dissatisfied and dwindling audience. He strove to rebuild the readership and the magazine’s reputation by being more receptive to readers. All of the internal changes to the magazine also took place within the context of larger social changes and attitudes towards pulp fiction. The stigma associated with the genre defined its readers as immoral or of a lower class, and this motivated many diehard fans to write to the new editor asking for changes so their peers could see the value in Amazing Stories. Further, the 1950s saw the moral panics of the early Cold War and the resultant regime of censorship directed against not only this magazine in particular but popular culture in general, while at the same time painting its readers as easily influenced deviants. Within this context of internal and external pressures, Amazing Stories initiated changes in the early 1950s to satisfy its audience and survive the larger hysteria that destroyed other pulps. We must begin with an understanding of the audience of Amazing Stories in the late 1940s and early 1950s, how they conceived themselves and what they expected of the magazine. This reception history explores the demographics, lives and wants of those readers. While it is nearly impossible to know exactly how every reader of Amazing Stories felt about the magazine, letters sent to the editor, printed in a section entitled ‘The Reader’s Forum’, provide one window into that audience (at least for those who felt strongly enough to write to the magazine, and whom the editor selected for publication). These letters document the controversies over choices by editor Raymond Palmer, which caused even the most loyal fans to lose faith in Amazing Stories once they saw the series as deviating from its original mission. Moreover, these letters document a defensive audience reaction to increasing censorship, which affected their expectations of the magazine and sensitised them to the public’s perception of pulps and their readers. This analysis makes clear that Amazing Stories was never meant to be a bad influence, and never was, but by 1950 a combination of poor editorial policies and a popular backlash against pulps had hurt its popularity. However, contextualising this process requires understanding the history of the magazine, starting at the beginning, with the man who originally created Amazing Stories in 1926, Hugo Gernsback. Often considered the father of science fiction (which he origin­ ally called scientifiction3), Gernsback made Amazing Stories more than a simple pulp-fiction magazine: he believed it should focus more on science than on fiction. He worked to make sure all the technology described in the stories he published had some kind of scientific grounding: ‘Let it be understood, in the first place, that a science fiction story must be an exposition of a scientific theme

252  Angelle Whavers

and it must be also a story’.4 He saw Amazing Stories as a space for scientific enquiry designed to educate and inspire future scientists: ‘Science-fiction . . . can be defined as: Imaginative extrapolation of true natural phenomena, existing now, or likely to exist in the future’.5 For Gernsback, science was the backbone to the stories he wrote and edited, and he was known to harshly critique and reject work submitted to him for publication. He repeatedly told the pioneering science fiction writer Donald A. Wollheim that his stories did not reach the proper length and that his ideas were clichés. He would even go as far as to write ‘Insufficient Science’ on every rejection slip, circled with coloured ink, driving home his point: science was far more important than fiction.6 Ironically, Wollheim went on to become a well known figure in the science fiction community as an editor, author and founding member of the Futurians.7 Though Gernsback was forced into bankruptcy in 1929 and subsequently lost the magazine, his core ideas lived on. Amazing Stories became known for its strong scientific influence and its readers came to expect this. Yet, at the same time, its status as a ‘pulp’ magazine contributed to its negative image. Isaac Asimov, while an admitted fan of pulp science fiction, described it as ‘99 percent’ garbage.8 During their heyday, there was a plethora of pulp magazines to choose from, with genres ranging from mystery to romance, westerns, war, sports, horror, jungle and much more – something for just about any taste. This breadth meant that some publications took work from amateurs who produced clichéd story lines and corny writing, reinforcing the idea that pulps were lowbrow. Asimov found this to be part of the fun, searching through the magazines, reading what was considered to be ‘trash’ and eventually finding the gems, such as Amazing Stories. But most Americans were not as likely to find the same joy in pulps. This hostility, combined with the flood of comic books in the late 1930s and paper shortages during the Second World War, caused pulp fiction to fade a bit more into the outskirts of popular culture.9 If that was not enough, there was still the issue of editorial choices. The Shaver Mystery was a series of stories introduced to Amazing Stories by editor Ray Palmer, who handled the magazine more like a comic. His covers were louder in design compared with previous or future editions. On a positive note, during his tenure he introduced several capable writers, such as David Wright O’Brien, William Hamling and Leroy Yerxa, while also encouraging the return of veteran writers who had moved on from science fiction, like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ed Earl Repp, helping the magazine to regain some popularity after his start in 1938.10 Still, he faltered by attempting to

Amazing Stories, 1950–3: The Readers Behind the Covers   253

make Amazing Stories ‘fun’ rather than serious, by doings things like publishing a fake letter in the sister magazine Fantastic Adventures about a scientist from 1970.11 It is an understatement to say that he was an editor to be handled suspiciously by readers. Yet that was not the end of Palmer’s trickery. In 1945, when he received a letter from writer Richard Sharpe Shaver with a key for an ancient alphabet of the mother language of all languages, Mantong (Man Tongue), it was not out of character for Palmer to ask Shaver to write a novelette and publish it. This would later become the infamous Shaver Mystery series, which (to then associate editor Howard Browne’s disappointment) was presented as fact, told from the point of view of the last Earth man to leave this planet when the Titans migrated to Mutan Mion. At first the story was well received, as this fantastical world with its even more fantastical explanations took war-weary America’s mind off present reality. Palmer was sent swarms of letters encouraging him to continue the series. He even began suggesting other writers to contribute to it. But, over time, audience support wavered. The Shaver Mystery started to dominate the magazine by 1947, which, while helping to gain new readers, alienated the original science fiction fans who made up the core of the magazine’s audience. Eventually, letters supporting publication of the series dropped off. Presenting the story as factual, though it had no scientific basis, not only went against Gernsback’s original philosophy, but also made readers think of Amazing Stories as cult fiction. Palmer received increasing criticism and spent the rest of his time as editor trying to undo the damage, that is, up until 1949, when he left. Unsurprisingly, there was still criticism over the next few years of the Shaver Mystery, with readers writing in begging for a change back to the scientifically grounded stories the magazine was known for. The audience was making it clear: while Amazing Stories was a science fiction magazine, the emphasis should be on the science, not the fiction. The second reason for the publication’s bad reputation lay in the covers. No matter how well written Hugo Gernsback originally tried to make Amazing Stories, he had to get readers’ attention. He, like many other pulp-fiction editors, made the decision to use images that easily drew a viewer’s eye: those depicting sex and violence. In fact, pulp covers in general often used the feminine physique or action scenes to turn as many heads as possible. When a reader complained that the covers were as bright and colourful as a stop sign, Howard Browne (who succeeded Palmer as editor) replied, ‘Signs are designed to be eye-catching and magazine covers are designed for the same

254  Angelle Whavers

purpose. Nobody ever buys what they can’t find; we want to make sure readers can find their copies.’ Fight scenes, bright art and, especially, beautiful women became cover staples to draw the masses (see Plate 14) but, sadly, they worked as a double-edged sword. Yes, readers could pick up a copy based on the cover art and open the magazine to find decently researched stories with compelling plots. Nevertheless, passers-by seeing only the cover might write it off as pornography or violence, read by only the lowest members of society, a narrative trumpeted by men like Dr Fredric Wertham during his censorship crusade. In the 1950s many forms of popular culture faced persecution. Television, magazines, music, comics, movies, radio programmes and books were investigated for any potential bad influences on audiences, especially children. The fear of youthful delinquency and rebellion grew, as adults began to link bad behaviour with the enter­ tainment to which children were exposed. One of the key figures in this battle against popular culture was Dr Fredric Wertham. A German-educated American psychiatrist, Wertham supposedly found evidence of the harmful effects of mass media on the development of children. He eventually became known as the Anti-Comics Crusader and wrote about the horrors of comic books (a category pulp fiction was often lumped into) in a 1948 article entitled ‘The Psychopathology of Comic Books’ and his infamous Seduction of the Innocent (1954). He even went as far as to get the government involved in his fight against comics, testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Wertham claimed that, through extensive research, he had dis­ covered a direct link between comic books and delinquency, illiteracy, violence, sadism and social deviance. He alleged children wanted to copy the behaviours they saw glorified in comics, and would thereby become criminals, prostitutes, homosexuals and perverts. For example, he argued villains made children dream of murder or sadism, Batman and Robin encouraged homosexual relationships, and Wonder Woman made little girls hate and want to torture men. Nonetheless, a recent study shows that Wertham falsified his research. Rather than working with thousands of children, as he claimed, he actually worked with fewer than 500 and withheld, embellished or blatantly manipulated the information he gained.12 Still, this information was not available during the 1950s and the public took a lot of what Wertham said at face value, even if it was not true. In 1948 the Association of Comic Magazine Publishers (ACMP) had drafted a comics code as a system of industry self-regulation,

Amazing Stories, 1950–3: The Readers Behind the Covers   255

much like the Hollywood Production Code, but it was not well enforced. To appease Wertham and his supporters, the ACMP created a much stricter code in 1954.13 Though the code did not apply to pulp science fiction magazines, this was the moral climate in which Amazing Stories was struggling to survive. Enter Howard Browne, editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures from 1950 to 1956. He had previously worked for both publications as managing editor under Raymond Palmer. He left his post as the magazine’s associate editor, two years prior to taking over as Palmer’s replacement, to work in Hollywood, and then returned to a warm welcome from the magazine’s production team. In fact ‘The Observatory’ (a letter from the editor appearing in each issue) said, ‘It is probably the first time in history that a magazine has stolen a stellar writer from Hollywood, rather than the other way around’.14 Of course this may have been simply been a case of self-boasting on Browne’s part. The reader was not treated to a more unbiased view on the subject until coming to ‘The Club House’ section (a ‘fanzine’ portion of the magazine to which readers could submit short stories and where they could discuss issues revolving around science fiction). There, Rog Phillips noted: ‘between you and me he is a nice guy. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble with him. . . . He has lots of plans for a bigger and better Amazing that I hope pan out.’15 And, just as Phillips foresaw, in the next issue Browne made promises of drastic changes to the magazine in favour of what the readers wanted, and he did much to keep his word. In his introduction to the January 1950 issue of the magazine, Browne asked his readers, ‘Why not sit down now and write us what you think of the changes we propose for Amazing Stories – as well as what you want to go into’.16 Following his suggestion, the readers did just that. He would eventually bring back ‘The Reader’s Forum’ corres­pondence section, and listen intently to what readers asked of him. Furthermore, he dedicated ‘The Observatory’ to responding to those readers. Though he replied in print to many of the letters that appeared in ‘The Reader’s Forum’, if enough readers requested or wanted something he addressed the issue in ‘The Observatory’. For example, in one column he took the time to answer one of the biggest questions Amazing Stories readers asked: who are the writers of these stories? He used almost the entirety of ‘The Ob­servatory’ to talk about the writers Rog Phillips and Robert Moore Williams, his relationship with them and the overall impressions they gave.17 ‘The Reader’s Forum’ featured letters selected by the editor referring to the contents of the publications, voicing complaints,

256  Angelle Whavers

singing praises and discussing other matters, with him often responding in some form or fashion. As Gernsback wanted, for many of the readers Amazing Stories served as a quasi-scientific magazine for likeminded people to share their thoughts. Simply glancing at the back of an issue shows the audiences were not only intelligent (unlike what Wertham suggested) but also inquisitive. Full-blown conversations between readers emerged as they dissected a story or debated the scientific merits of an article. In many cases ‘The Reader’s Forum’ resembled a scientific conference. For instance, Jack Jarrett from Ohio wrote to ask whether dots lie outside our understanding of the realms of time and space since dots have no length: Doesn’t it seem true that no matter how many dots you like up [sic], you can’t get a line of any length, and when you multiply nothing, you still get nothing. It seems to me that the only way a dot could become a line is by moving at the speed of light, and thereby occupying all the space of the line simultaneously.18

The editor responded that dots have length, though they are particularly short, making Jarrett’s argument invalid, though notably interesting in Browne’s opinion.19 Jarrett may have been wrong, but he had raised a serious philosophical question and learned in the process. Such discussions also inspired the creation of fan groups, which Amazing Stories had cultivated even before the introduction of Howard Browne. ‘The Club House’ was a place ‘Where science fiction fan clubs get together’.20 Here, readers provided information about local fan meetings and conferences and even published their own amateur short stories. For instance, one issue discussed the 1950 World Science Fiction Convention,21 while another advertised the Eugene Science Fantasy Society of Eugene, Oregon.22 ‘The Club House’ was an effective form of communication for fandoms at a time when finding fellow Amazing Stories aficionados was not as simple as going to an online forum. It served long-time readers who were confident enough in their knowledge of science fiction and Amazing Stories that they would try their hand at writing their own works. ‘The Reader’s Forum’, on the other hand, gave new voices as well as old a safe place to begin their journey into science fiction. Jack Jarrett wrote a letter after reading Amazing Stories for ‘only two or three months. I don’t know how I missed it before, but I am making up for it by reading the back issues of your “imagazine”.’23 Ray Bryan wanted nothing more than to get members to join a new science fiction fan club. He had trouble finding fellow readers of Amazing Stories on his own, which drove him to write his letter:

Amazing Stories, 1950–3: The Readers Behind the Covers   257

It is my wish to get together with fans in the Springfield [Massachusetts] area and maybe organize a fan club. Now the main difficulty is the finding of the fans. It seems the fans here are the strong, silent type. . . . I would greatly appreciate it if you would publish his letter as it is the only way I can find the non-writing fans.24

The comradery of the fans as well as the scientific and fact-based nature of the readers’ comments not only prove Wertham and his followers wrong about pulp’s audience, but also show what the reader­ ship expected from this series of pulp fiction. They were not easily influenced children liable to become criminals. The letters at the back of the issues reveal that many of the readers were adults. They identified themselves as mothers and fathers, described the jobs they held, and generally met the parameters defining respectable members of society. Additionally, they could be harsh critics of the magazine they enjoyed. While Wertham accused popular culture of seducing the innocent and therefore wanted to change the content, readers also wrote in attempting to do the same. For example, many letters criticised the magazine’s covers for being too scandalous or violent. In fact, one of the youths who fit Wertham’s imagined reader wrote in to say: Bob Jones’ cover on the February issue was really something! . . . The interior art is very good: but, I’m sure that the illustrations on pages 8, 68, and 82, while heartily admired by all of your male readers (I’m one, and no wisecracks), are somewhat out of place in your mag. This is science fiction, not sexy science fiction. Try to keep the nudes down to a reasonable number. The female readers are either embarrassed or envious of those girls in the pix.25

This letter makes several important points. Though the boy, who is fifteen, admitted he enjoyed the female form, he also understood that the magazine was not the place to show it. He asserted Amazing Stories as a place that was supposed to be dedicated to science fiction, with everything else superfluous to this purpose. He expected respectable content and when it was not given, he wrote in to object. In later issues, it becomes clear that the editors listened: though they continued to put women in revealing outfits on the covers, they began to cover them up more (Plate 15). Moreover, the author of this letter shows that Gernsback had succeeded in creating a place to cultivate future scientific minds. The writer, Robert Silverberg, was a teenager at the time he wrote this letter but went on to become a reputable science fiction writer, with works such as Born with the Dead, Invaders from Earth and The Time Hoppers selling more than 3 million copies

258  Angelle Whavers

to this day. He was cultivated by magazines such as Amazing Stories, which he said could ‘rise to the top race of science fiction’,26 displaying how highly he thought of it. He, like many readers of the magazine, was a science and science fiction aficionado who read Amazing Stories for that purpose. In the same issue, the letter right before Silverberg’s, entitled ‘Science or Fantasy?’, echoed similar sentiments. In it, Charles I. Sherill recommended that Amazing Stories be dedicated fully to science fiction, and anything in the realm of fantasy should go in the sister magazine Fantastic Adventures.27 In other letters, readers asked for longer stories, suggesting they wanted meatier and more thought-provoking content. So many readers espoused this position that the editor took a vote on whether the stories in the magazine should be longer, titling one letter ‘Your Vote Is Counted’.28 Browne was clearly listening. Another common misconception about pulp fiction is that it was written by and for men. The editor even assumed that ‘women rarely write science fiction’,29 though arguably the first science fiction novel was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In fact, Amazing Stories had a number of female writers, such as Clare Winger Harris, Pamela Sargent and Kim Mohan. Silverberg’s letter clearly indicates his awareness of a female readership for Amazing Stories and sensitivity to their point of view. Yet despite women’s participation, the stories were often written to cater to a mainly heterosexual male audience, sometimes at the expense of its female readership. Mrs Dorothy Vigor Okamura protested in her letter ‘Everybody Leers’: I do have one complaint, and that is the nude or nearly nude illustrations of girls. . . . Put all the girls you want in them, only please dress them! Men are not the only readers you have; a great deal of women read them too.30

She further lamented that the covers made it hard for her to buy and enjoy the magazine, because of the looks she got. The scandalous covers simply did not represent the content of the magazines, and many of the people who saw her buying or reading the magazine got the wrong idea because of the illustrations, which was another common complaint in readers’ letters. Was Mrs Dorothy Vigor Okamura right? Was there a substantial female audience for Amazing Stories? Reliable demographic statistics of the Amazing Stories audience do not exist and polling former readers is impractical at best. Nevertheless, the letters in ‘The Reader’s Forum’ provide one window into the gender breakdown of the readership. Analysing the letters and counting the number of identifiably

Amazing Stories, 1950–3: The Readers Behind the Covers   259 350 308

300 250 200 150

140

107

100

76 52

50 0

13

7

1950

18

41

1951 Female

17

3

1952 Male

9

5

1953

30 2

Overall

Unknown

Figure 12.1  Gender breakdown of Amazing Stories’ letter-writers between 1950 and 1953

female and male writers provides some demographic data about the magazine’s readership. Figure 12.1 tracks the gender breakdown of letter-writers between 1950 and 1953: There are limits to this data set, of course. ‘The Reader’s Forum’ section was not published consistently, and therefore the numbers change drastically from year to year, making it seem that there were barely any readers in 1950 or 1953. Also, this shows only the letters selected to be published by the editor Howard Browne, based on the letters’ content, his personal interest and the space available in individual issues. As a result, depending on the issue, he might decide to publish more or fewer letters or no letters at all. Furthermore, the genders of some of the writers could not be determined because they signed the letter only with their initials or would not allow their name to be printed at all; these letters are accounted for in the ‘unknown’ bars of the chart in Figure 12.1. Additionally, in 1953 there was only one issue with ‘The Reader’s Forum’ because the magazine changed to a digest format. Even taking these factors into account, the data clearly shows that a female audience was present to some degree, as Table 12.1 makes clear. Yes, they were a minority, but that does not mean that they were ignored. As Silverberg and Okamura asserted, there was a large enough female audience to affect the magazine’s profits should they

260  Angelle Whavers Table 12.1  Gender breakdown of the readership of Amazing Stories, 1950–3 Female

Male

Unknown

1950

18%

75%

 7%

1951

21%

70%

 9%

1952

13%

82%

 5%

1953

31%

56%

13%

Average

20.75%

70.75%

 8.5%

cease to purchase it. If at least one out of five readers was female, it could be bad for business to pretend they did not exist, and Browne did not do so. For instance, Inez Neuman, like other letter-writers, objected to the scandalous art and challenged the editor to take a vote on the matter: I’m sure if you’d dare to put it to a vote, true sf [science fiction] fans would rather have good stories and less fancy art work that makes them ashamed to be caught with a copy of AS [Amazing Stories] or FA [Fantastic Adventures] and ridiculed over reading trash.31

Browne responded, noting the onslaught of letters on the same issue, by accepting the challenge and commencing a vote that could be called ‘Sexy vs. Non-Sexy’.32 As part of this process, readers weighed in on the matter with statements in their letters such as ‘This is just a short note to add my vote to that of Mrs. Inez Neuman’, or simply ‘I vote for sexy covers’.33 This was only one of the many debates among the readers, such as the aforementioned ‘Longer or Shorter Stories’ and a ‘Fiction vs. Fantasy’ debate. Regardless of the issue being debated, all of these arguments between readers, which sometimes involved the editor as well, only further prove they were active in reshaping the magazine themselves, before Wertham’s 1954 Seduction of the Innocent. Going back to the letter written by fifteen-year-old Robert Silverberg, it becomes clear the magazine was facing a lot of backlash at the time: The purpose of this letter is to wish you sincere good luck in your project of reviving interest in AS [Amazing Stories]. I guess you know that the mag lost its popularity among many fans because of Mr. Palmer’s insistence on the truth of the Shaver Mystery. AS became more of an occult mag then. But I’m sure that under new leadership AMAZING will once more climb to the leadership in pulp sf [science fiction], a post it held in my estimation until 1948.34

Amazing Stories, 1950–3: The Readers Behind the Covers   261

He references the Shaver Mystery, which shows once again that the series was frowned upon by the Amazing Stories audience and became a catalyst for the ‘Fantasy vs. Fiction’ debate. Browne engaged in dialogues with readers and changed the magazine to help get it back to its previous level of popularity. Regarding the ‘Sexy vs. Non-Sexy’ debate, he dutifully counted the votes and as a result changed the covers: Perhaps no cover in the history of AMAZING STORIES brought in so much praise and appreciation as did last month’s (December). Because of that, and because a large percentage of our readers have asked (demanded would be more accurate) for more interplanetary covers, we’ve arranged to have several painted. You’ll be seeing them during the next few months.35

Under Browne, the covers did not entirely stop having voluptuous women showing skin; his assertion that covers needed to be like stop signs that grabbed a viewer’s attention meant good-looking women remained. Still, there was a noticeable difference in the covers. Women were portrayed more modestly and even some subjectively good-looking men were put on the covers to please more than those attracted to the female form. Even the remaining nudity on the covers changed, as the artists attempted to justify it, such as having a nude woman present because she was being experimented on or having the man nude as well. The covers could still occasionally be sadistic and pornographic in nature (Plate 16), but there had nonetheless been a notable improvement. Taken together, these changes were meant to present the people on the covers as less objectified and to lend more respectability to the magazine, while still attracting readers. Browne also took note of the ‘Science Fiction vs. Fantasy’ debate by having more stories with scientific merit. He even used a few Observatory columns to explain some science and science fiction terms for the benefit of the readers. He could be jocular, as when he defined ‘atomic cannons’ as ‘Large things that go zap’,36 but he did what his audience asked. He sometimes included discussions of goings-on in the scientific community, such as informing the public of evidence showing that the H-bomb could be produced.37 Browne even went as far as lengthening the magazine to 194 pages in March 1950 for the sake of longer stories, eliciting much applause from ‘The Reader’s Forum’ (this was also one of his first actions as acting editor). However, he aimed to cut back to 162 pages by 1951, for several reasons, including a paper shortage.38 Still, Browne did not rest in his goal of restoring the former glory of the magazine. He understood the pressures from the censorship

262  Angelle Whavers

crusade as well as from his own readers, who still resented the Shaver Mystery as late as 1953. He also understood that its history gave pulp fiction a bad reputation in general. Thus in 1953 he decided to give Amazing Stories a complete makeover. He switched to a digest format that would allow for longer stories on fewer pages, so the paper shortage would not be an issue any longer. Of course, there were sacrifices in making this change. The magazine now came out every other month rather than every month, and sections like ‘The Reader’s Forum’ and ‘The Observatory’ were removed. There was opposition to these changes and readers lamented the loss, but overall the magazine got back on its feet. By listening and responding to his readers, and making timely reforms, Browne was able to sustain Amazing Stories through an age of censorship. Budget cuts would later hurt the magazine as a whole in the future, but because of the transition to the digest format, the magazine survived past Browne’s term as editor. Browne’s readers were not just fans, but readers who expected the best from Amazing Stories. And in spite of what the lurid covers might have suggested, they were an educated and informed audience. These readers behind the covers helped to shape the future on the pulp magazine, and they became critics of the very thing they loved. If not for them and Browne’s work, the magazine might not have continued into the twenty-first century.

Notes   1. Isaac Asimov, It’s Been a Good Life, ed. Janet Jeppson Asimov (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2002), p. 15.  2. Mike Ashley, Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 183–4.   3. Isaac Asimov, I, Asimov: A Memoir (New York: Bantam, 1995).  4. Mike Ashley and Robert A. W. Lowndes,  The Gernsback Days: A Study of the Evolution of Modern Science Fiction From 1911 to 1936 (Holicong: Wildside Press, 2004), p. 150.   5. Quoted in Gary Westfahl, The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), p. 41.  6. R. E. Fulton, ‘Donald A. Wollheim’s Authoritative Universe: Editors, Readers, and the Construction of the Science Fiction Paperback, 1926– 1969’, Book History, 19 (2016), p. 353.   7. Ibid., pp. 350–3.

Amazing Stories, 1950–3: The Readers Behind the Covers   263

 8. Asimov, I, Asimov, p. 45.   9. Ibid., p. 41. 10. Raymond A. Palmer, ‘The Observatory’,  Amazing Stories, December 1949, p. 6. 11. Ashley, Time Machines, p. 178. 12. Carol L. Tilley, ‘Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics’, Information and Culture, 47:4 (2012), pp. 383–413. 13. Amy K. Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), pp. 155–75. 14. Howard Browne, ‘The Observatory’,  Amazing Stories, January 1950, p. 6. 15. ‘The Club House’, Amazing Stories, February 1950, p. 150. 16. Howard Browne, ‘The Observatory’, Amazing Stories, January 1950, p. 6. 17. Howard Browne, ‘The Observatory’, Amazing Stories, October 1950, p. 3. 18. ‘The Reader’s Forum’, Amazing Stories, March 1950, p. 180. 19. Ibid., p. 181. 20. ‘The Club House’, Amazing Stories, February 1950, p. 150. 21. Amazing Stories, March 1950, p. 185. 22. Amazing Stories, April 1950, p. 178. 23. Amazing Stories, March 1950, p. 180. 24. Amazing Stories, September 1950, p. 179. 25. Amazing Stories, March 1950, p. 186. 26. Amazing Stories, March 1950, p. 186. 27. Ibid. 28. Amazing Stories, February 1952, p. 153. 29. ‘The Reader’s Forum’, Amazing Stories, October 1950, p. 3. 30. ‘The Reader’s Forum’, Amazing Stories, November 1950, p. 162. 31. Inez Neuman, ‘The Observatory’, Amazing Stories, September 1950, p. 167. 32. Howard Browne, ibid. 33. ‘The Reader’s Forum’, Amazing Stories, December 1950, p. 152. 34. Amazing Stories, March 1950, p. 186. 35. ‘The Reader’s Forum’, Amazing Stories, January 1951, p. 148. 36. Howard Browne, ‘The Observatory’, Amazing Stories, October 1951, p. 6. 37. Howard Browne, ‘The Observatory’, Amazing Stories, September 1951, p. 6. 38. Amazing Stories, February 1950, p. 148.

Chapter 13

The Other Digital Divide: Gendering Science Fiction Fan Reading in Print and Online, 1930 to the Present Cait Coker

The history of Anglo-American SFF (science fiction and fantasy) fandom has been underexplored in bibliographic scholarship, despite nearly a century’s worth of literary production and reception. This is predominantly a problem of discipline. Science Fiction Studies began to emerge as its own niche field in the late 1950s, modelled on the field of English Literature. It was therefore largely focused on the formation of the literary canon, the identification of great authors and on literary criticism.1 Fan Studies, in contrast, emerged in the early 1990s concurrently with the growing field of Cultural Studies and, later, Media Studies, and generally emphasised sociological approaches to fan activities (which included reading and writing). But even here they were in a narrow and ahistorical locus that identified SFF fandom as primarily emergent with blockbuster film and tele­vision series, rather than literary work.2 Both fields thus tend to broadly overlook SFF fandom and its literary productions prior to the 1970s, while the larger fields of American and English Literature and Bibliography tend to bypass them altogether. While the body of fan writing from 1930 to 1975 per se is not necessarily ‘hidden’ from these various discourses, it is nonetheless neglected in favour of studies of contemporary online fandom, which largely ignores or is unaware of fan print culture. The practice of printing and reading fanzines emerged along with SFF fandom in the early 1930s. The first identified ‘fanmag’ (the term ‘fanzine’ came along later and was in common use by 1940) was The Comet, from 1930. Early zines included a mixture of non-fiction articles, letters of comment, and fiction, with many contributors going on to become professional SFF writers, and many more continuing their fan reading and writing for the rest of their lives. Shifts in technology over time led to a proliferation of titles, 264

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with hundreds and thousands of issues being privately circulated in the early 1990s. With the advent of the Internet, fannish production and circulation practices changed, and became sharply gendered: male fans continued to publish and read print fanzines that contained primarily non-fiction, while women fans moved online and created digital archives and private communities to share writing that was primarily fictional. This disconnect speaks to broader schisms in contemporary SFF fandom, but the issues of gender, genre and age are particularly apparent in fannish reading practices. This chapter will examine Anglo-American SFF fandom broadly, providing a historical overview of changing print and digital practices from 1930 to the present. This is a question of access as well as production methods. In particular, the terminology of ‘gatekeeping’ has been used to describe the dissemination of texts in a mentor–­ apprenticeship model that originated in print fandom (where individuals would be introduced to one another at conventions, and a key to acceptance within the community was knowing someone already in it), while ‘feral’ fans bypassed this system by consuming fan texts in any medium and avoiding the initiation and training aspect of fan interaction. This particularly affects generational access, as non-print media and digital fandom have become sufficiently widespread for the links to previous generations of fans and fan activity to be nearly invisible. For example, reading ‘fan fiction’ has been a norm since the 1930s, but the definition of the term has changed several times;3 contemporary usage is drawn from the mid-1970s, where the term denotes transformative works derived from media or books rather than solely amateur writing (although this latter definition is still common among older male fans). Further, the divide between male and female fans is primarily centred on their reading practices, as sharply demonstrated by journalist Gavia Baker-Whitelaw’s report from the 2014 WorldCon: [D]uring discussions about how to attract a new generation [to] the convention, I’d hear people talking about how the Internet is isolating and incomprehensible – or how it lacked the personal touch of fanzine mailing lists. One audience member asked what had happened to slash fanfic. Why didn’t he see it in fanzines any more? What made it die out? Apparently he was unaware of the vast quantity of slashfic constantly being posted online, including in older fandoms like Star Trek, which long ago made the jump from print to Internet.4

Finally, in the contemporary digital culture there is a common cura­ torial practice of copying and downloading (either as PDFs or by

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making ebook MOBI files) digital fan works both to maintain a private collection for one’s reading and as a precaution against either fan authors taking their work offline or when online archives are no longer being supported (as was the case in 2009 when web domain GeoCities, in use since the 1990s, shut down). I will draw on some of the Fan Theory that scholars have used in recent years to comment on fan authorship and ‘textual poaching’, but I would also like to use Book History as a methodology to tell a production and consumption history that has been ignored by both Science Fiction Studies (because fan writers are less valued than ‘real’ writers) and Fan Studies (which promotes analysis of fan texts without historical grounding or contexts). Fan Studies as a field is meant to encompass all aspects of fandom, including band and sports fandoms, media fandom and theory, and audience and reception studies in popular culture, but the earliest studies in the field were all firmly rooted in SFF fandoms. These studies of fannish activity were usually ethnographic studies, looking directly at fans, and specifically SFF media fans, from a sociological perspective to identify who they were and what they did. Of special interest was the genre of slash stories, or queer romances, in fanzines, and several of the earliest works were preoccupied with this material, such as Joanna Russ’s ‘Another Addict Raves About K/S’ (republished in the same year as ‘Pornography by Women for Women, with Love’) (1985), Patricia Lamb and Diana Veith’s ‘Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines’ (1986) and Constance Penley’s ‘Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture’ (1992).5 Penley’s work would be expanded upon in her 1997 book NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America, but 1992 saw the publication of two of the most important works in the field: Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women and Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers.6 Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women was an extended ethnographic study of women in media fandom, particularly Star Trek fans. It also included numerous explications of zine culture and examples of fan writing and fan works. Focusing specifically on women fans and fan culture, she writes: The creation of this art, the bending of popular culture artifacts – in some cases, popular culture icons – is a subversive act undertaken by housewives and librarians, schoolteachers and data input clerks, secretaries and professors of medieval literature, under the very noses of husbands and bosses who would not approve, and children who should not be exposed to such acts of blatant civil disobedience. [Original emphasis]7

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Nearly three decades later, this insistence may seem like hyperbole, but it is worth re-emphasising that there was a time when the knowledge of one’s private fan reading (and writing) held a certain danger as the threat of being outed was of no small concern, and access to fan material was highly limited. For example, purchasers of slash material often had to provide proof that they were over the age of eighteen, and many zines were quite literally sold under the table at fan conventions, further relegating it to subversive activity (and creating an ongoing analogy to samizdat culture). In contrast, Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers was much more engaged with Media Theory, and surveyed fan writing in tandem with fan vids, filk music and other forms of fannish activity and fan works. (‘Filk’ is a play on ‘folk’, the genre being specific to the fan community; the music can consist of traditional tunes with new lyrics, or original songs.) The recurrent comment on Jenkins and on the popularity of his work largely concerned his self-identification as a member of the community and his refusal to pathologise fannish works. Jenkins’s theories on participatory culture remain pervasive in the field, es­pecially as he coded them within the hierarchies of cultural production: ‘Fan culture stands as an open challenge to the “naturalness” and desirability of dominant cultural hierarchies, a refusal of authorial authority and a violation of intellectual property’.8 But he also identified himself as unusual in that he was a man in feminine space: Claiming a common identity with fans does not erase other forms of power relations that color all ethnographic research, for if I am a fan, I am also a male fan within a predominantly female fan culture. Male media fans are less common than female fans, though certainly not remarkable within this culture; we have learned to play according to the interpret­ ive conventions of that community, even if these subcultural traditions did not originate in response to our particular interests or backgrounds. There are perhaps some corners of fandom or some fans who are closed to me as a male participant, though I have found fandom generally open and accepting of my involvement.9

This particular distinction is one that is brought up significantly less often in the discourse of Fan Studies, despite discussions of other power relationships, and I would argue that it is absolutely key to understanding the field in the academy and in fandom itself: these are heavily gendered spaces with their own norms and codes. Academic discussion often emphasises an objectivity that is imaginary and is coded as a male gaze, and that cannot be forgotten. It is very different when a masculine audience reads women’s writing, both historically

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and in contemporary culture, and this also has significant ramifications for Book History as a disciplinary intervention in reconsidering fan writing. Fan writing as a genre itself is one that has been understudied, though several recent works have looked at fan fiction in recent years. Sheenagh Pugh’s The Democratic Genre (2005) broke with previous scholarly examinations by focusing specifically on the ‘literary context’ of fan fiction writing, which is to say its written output. In a prefacing note, she briefly mentions the gender of the writers in question: ‘I have generally written “he” when speaking of characters in general, and “she” when speaking of fanfic writers, because most of them are female’.10 In 2013 Anne Jamison edited a popular collection called Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas: SmartPop Books), which expanded on the origins of transformative works stemming from early twentieth-century takes on Sherlock Holmes and proceeded to explore a wide variety of fandoms and fan works since the emergence of the Internet.11 Karen L. Hellekson and Kristina Busse’s The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (2014) collected articles and essays – including contributions from Jenkins, Russ and Penley – to present the formation of a canon of scholarship for a body of work that, functionally, had no canon of primary sources per se.12 Francesca Coppa’s collection The Fanfiction Reader (2017) makes a start at remedying this intellectual gap by presenting a selection of works in toto, all drawn from contemporary authors and putting in print what had previously been available only digitally.13 This abbreviated survey of the scholarship demonstrates an emphasis on the contemporary (where ‘contemporary’ is consistently read as the period of publication) and largely bypasses fan writing that is not fiction, thus presenting a skewed picture of the genre as a whole. Further, academic analyses tend to linger on the sociological implications of the writing itself rather than on the dimensions of access, circulation or consumption, all of which are likewise inextric­ ably bound up with the history of circulation and consumption of SFF itself. The rest of this chapter will describe and examine the dual evolutions of SFF and SFF fandom. Science fiction scholarship locates the beginning of SFF fandom with the publication of Hugo Gernsback’s pulp magazine Amazing Stories in 1926, discussed in Chapter 12 of this volume by Angelle Whavers. Though much of the early fiction printed was in fact reprinted from authors such as H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe, Gernsback created a space for letters in the magazine, which was the first locus

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for fandom to identify both one another and themselves. There, as Whavers explains, readers could respond to particular stories or to each other. Readers who were geographically disparate now had a means to contact one another through mailing addresses, spawning flurries of private correspondence that would become, eventually, ‘public’ through numerous fanzines and letterzines of comment. In this early period, the bulk of SFF was literary only, with films being few and far between. This initial environment of literary-only production and consumption would largely set the pattern for ‘fanac’ or ‘fan activities’, which were likewise largely focused on reading and writing. Tom Shippey argues that the SFF genre particularly suits literary analysis by enthusiastic non-professionals like fans: The science fiction reader, of course, likes this feeling of unpredictability. It creates intense curiosity, as well as the pleasure of working out, in the long run, the logic underlying the author’s decisions, vocabulary, and invented world. It is a powerful stimulus to the exercise of ‘cognition’, of putting unknown data into some sort of mental holding tank, to see if and when they start to fit together, and what happens when they do.14

Indeed, early fan readers combined literary analysis alongside scientific (or, sometimes, pseudoscientific) speculation, and it was the crux between the two that often became a source for rivalry among both readers and writers. Damon Knight’s memoir The Futurians (1977) details a number of interpersonal feuds along with literary and political clashes, largely centring on differing ideals of the purpose of the genre: whether it was to promulgate scientific progress and education, or to be a ‘literary’ genre (which is to say mainstream, if not necessarily ‘fine writing’), or merely to entertain.15 If history is written by the victors, we might conclude that the early wars within the SFF genre had either too many or too few. Numerous first-hand accounts of early fandom have been written – largely in and for fandom. Sam Moskowitz’s The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom recounted the first decade of SFF fandom in microscopic detail, concluding with a recounting of the first WorldCon meeting in 1939. Jack Speer’s Up to Now covered the same period and much of the same territory. Harry Warner, Jr, picked up the narrative by writing an account of the 1940s (All Our Yesterdays, 1969) and then the 1950s (A Wealth of Fable, 1976).16 There were a number of others, but these three were the most notable and influential – and, in their own unique ways, challenging to bibliographers and historians. Which of them was ‘published’ and so could be read by a non-private audience?

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Moskowitz’s The Immortal Storm was initially serialised in three issues of the fanzine The Fantasy Commentator in 1951 (some 150 copies of each), reproduced as a single mimeographed text ‘book’ in 1952 (of 200 copies), printed in a hardcover edition by Atlanta Science Fiction Organization Press in 1954 (500 copies), which was then reproduced by photographic reprints in both hardcover and paperback editions by Hyperion Press in 1974 (unknown press run, mass-market edition). Speer’s Up to Now was reprinted numerous times, but always in fanzines: as a single fanzine in 1939, reprinted in the 1964 collection A Sense of FAPA and as a limited edition chapbook in 1994. Warner’s books also appeared in purely fanzine form until a hardcover edition appeared from SCIFI Press in 1992 at that year’s WorldCon. Both Moskowitz’s and Warner’s books have gone on to have a notable footprint on the historiography of the field, alongside that of Knight, while Speer has been lost to the mainstream (he isn’t indexed at all in the massive Internet Speculative Fiction Database, while twenty-nine citations of his unquantified output appear in the Science Fiction Research Index). These problems of publication (private versus public) and access remain definitive to all fields of textual study, but in Science Fiction and Fan Studies the implications do not safely diminish as they do with historical manuscripts. Citing a rare text is a problem; citing a text over which a living author may or may not still have control is another one again (and this topic is hotly debated in the field). These early histories are also explicitly gendered, because it is men who are writing them. Women appear only intermittently, often dimin­ished and defined by marital status (as a fan’s wife, girlfriend or occasionally sister) or by sexual reputation (Fred Pohl, the ex-husband of SFF editor Judith Merril, brought up her extramarital affairs in print every chance he could get). More recent histories have attempted to revise these narratives. Justine Larbalestier’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (2002) recovers a number of letters of comment and other early fan writings by women, alongside critical analyses of published fiction by both men and women, especially that of James Tiptree, Jr, the male alter-ego of author Alice Sheldon.17 The distaff narrative of genre was too often one of exclusion until a new generation of fandom arose in the late 1950s and 1960s. Marion Zimmer Bradley, a prolific fan writer who would soon make the leap to (extremely) successful professional author recounted her experience reading in the field in the 1940s: Letters from the readers. Pages and pages of intelligent discussions of the stories, the authors, the science in the stories . . . and a column of

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reviews of fanzines. Little magazines published by readers, fans in my new language. . . . Within a week I had written off for a dozen of the little magazines, within six months I had started my own, and was writing voluminously to fans all over the United States. My pocket money went for magazines – yes, and sometimes my lunch money too.18

The shifting tide of fan reading transformed from discussions of fiction in the pulp magazines to discussions of the fan community and, increasingly, reading fiction itself. Fan publishing shifts are dually tied to fluctuations in technology and in genre. The popularity of the television show Star Trek (1966–9) has classically been used to explain an influx of women into fandom. However, concurrent with the emergence of media fandom (defined in opposition to ‘literary’ fandom) were several new factors. The widespread usage of Xerox photocopiers to replace mimeograph stencils in making cheap copies was the primary shift in technology: in 1969, the price of a Xerox photocopy page was $0.03 for both labour and materials, as opposed to $0.15 for Veristat prints or even $0.25 for the Photostat prints commonly found in libraries at the time. The average fanzine transformed from a stapled publication of up to around ten leaves, sometimes doubled over into digest-sized pamphlets, to collections of 80–150 pages each eight by eleven inches. This in turn provided new possibilities in fan writing and reading: reviews, letters of comment and short stories gave way to full-length novels and fiction anthologies – and what would become known as fan fiction. ‘Fan fiction’ had appeared in the early 1930s, first as fiction that gave fans pleasure, then as fiction about fans themselves. The Enchanted Duplicator by Walt Willis and Bob Shaw, first printed in February 1954, quickly became a classic of this type of work. An extended allegory in the fashion of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, it concerns the adventures of Jophan (‘Joe Fan’) as he journeys from his home country of Mundane to the land of Fandom, and thus to the Tower of Trufandom, where the Enchanted Duplicator lies. The Enchanted Duplicator initially appears as a mimeograph, ‘a rusty, battered hulk. The frame-work was filthy with ink, the drum was caked, and there was obviously something wrong with the self-feed.’ But when Jophan touches the handle, he is struck by a strange force, and he hears the Spirit of Fandom, who imparts a great truth: ‘For the magic mimeograph is the one with a true fan at the handle’.19 By the next decade, however, fan fiction had a new connotation: that of a work of transformative fiction, drawing from other texts. In Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins (notably) did not attempt to define

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the term ‘fan fiction’ itself, but instead emphasised it as one among numerous strategies for reading and revising popular culture. In a 1997 interview with Amy Harmon he stated that ‘Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk’.20 Nonetheless, Jenkins’s theoretical framework around fan texts displaces historical context in favour of transgressive narratives that, while sometimes useful and incredibly influential, do a long-term disservice to a massive body of writing. Camille Bacon-Smith’s study Enterprising Women is similarly unconcerned with definitions, looking more towards a direct ethnography of fan writers and briefer sections of literary criticism that examine themes and ‘codes’ of convention in specific genres.21 As both studies were published in 1992, they assumed the Oxford English Dictionary’s 1975 definition of ‘fan fiction’ (discussed below) and are unconcerned with its earlier iterations; the majority of the vast and more recent scholarship follows suit. Francesca Coppa’s The Fanfiction Reader (2017), however, takes the time for definition, using a ‘5 +1’ approach that is used in fan fiction itself. Fan fiction is five things: ‘fiction created outside of the literary marketplace’ (2); ‘fiction that rewrites and transforms other stories’ (4); ‘fiction that rewrites and transforms stories currently owned by others’ (6); ‘fiction written within and to the standards of a particular fannish community’ (7); and ‘speculative fiction about character rather than about the world’ (12). She concludes with ‘+1: Fanfiction is made for free, but not “for nothing”’ (14), directly addressing the cultural mores of affective labour in the genre.22 None of the scholarship in either Science Fiction or Fan Studies is concerned with locating historic ‘firsts’ in fan writing, and so identifying the specific shifts in usage over time is problematic. To date, the earliest examples of transformative works I have found are all from Tolkien fandom. Fan-scholar Sumner Gary Hunnewell has tirelessly chronicled and itemised early Tolkien fandom in his series of Tolkien Fandom Review bibliographies available at Efanzines.com.23 Among other interesting items, he has located the earliest known Tolkien fan work, a poem by Ted Johnstone called ‘The Passing of the Elven-kind’ published in All Mimsy in 1959 (issue 5), and the earliest identified piece of Tolkien fan fiction, a story by George Heap entitled ‘Departure in Peace’ that appeared in I Palantir, itself identified as the first Tolkien-only fanzine, in August 1960. Notably, this story is not described as ‘fan fiction’, nor is the term used anywhere in the zine itself: rather, Hunnewell calls it a ‘fictional narrative’.24

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His bibliographies thus far collect material through to 1968, and altogether he identifies ten stories we would identify as fan fiction, eight of which appear in 1967 and 1968 alone. These citations are all concurrent with the early media fiction in Star Trek fanzines; for example, the first issues of Triskelion were published in 1968, as was the third issue of Spockanalia, both of which include fiction (which is presented without identifying paratexts). Seemingly, then, fan fiction emerged from both media and literary fandom, contrary to popular assumption in media history. At this point fan culture began to diverge extensively in terms of genre and gender. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the use of ‘fan fiction’ as stemming from 1975, with Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak and Joan Winston’s licensed collection Star Trek Lives!25 Significantly, it locates the citation to a description of a fan: ‘Laura [Basta], whose ambition is to become a professional writer, has been writing Star Trek fiction since her early teens, and was recently nominated for a Hugo Award for fan fiction for her series “Federation and Empire”’.26 This is curious, because in the same volume there is a fifty-four-page chapter entitled ‘Do-It-Yourself Star Trek – The Fan Fiction’. The phrase is nowhere defined – presumably because everyone knows it when they see it – but it is noted that the bulk of it is written by women: Men are better represented in Star Trek artwork, craftwork, science articles, humor, organizational work and a rare poem here and there in the fanzines. But almost all of the stories are by women and, so far as we know, all of the new crop of professional writers emerging out of Star Trek writing are women. (Though one or two promising men may surprise us any day now.)27

This division would set the pattern throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Fan fiction collections by women fans grew larger as the cost of production declined thanks to Xerox technology; they would be sold through ads in other zines and at conventions. Non-fiction fanzines maintained their much shorter length and were swapped rather than sold, or disseminated through subscription only. For this part of fandom, the initiation through face-to-face interaction as an entrée to a small coterie remained key, and contrasted with more anonymous practices of reading made possible by order forms and shipping. Effectively, the stage was set for the future migration to online content in the 1990s and its own practices of dissemination and consumption. The digital migration of fandom began with a series of listservs, continued with numerous websites and is ongoing today through large

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mega-archives of digitised and born-digital material. In many ways this phenomenon is both a bibliographers’ dream and a nightmare: vast swathes of material can be browsed or searched for, then downloaded. However, these digital objects, whether born-digital or scanned from print and posted online, create a variety of challenges in both access and preservation. Abigail de Kosnick’s Rogue Archives (2016) primarily looks at the challenges of digital media fandom for non-professional archivists and curators: other fans who are invested in maintaining a record of their culture online. However, de Kosnick’s volume takes the familiar avenue of focus on transformative works by women, noting that ‘women fans experienced discrimination and harassment in their early forays into online communities’, which led to a generalised anxiety about the move to digital communal and archival practices that, nonetheless, functionally became the norm.28 The vast bulk of digital archives by women are community-based through digital coteries, collecting the work of individuals in a specific context (usually as an individual media fandom, such as Harry Potter or Star Trek). For example, Rhiannon Bury’s Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online (2005) documents the creation, migration and dissolution of two X-Files communities of reader-writers from the mid-1990s through to the early 2000s. Beginning as a singular listserv, a subgroup created a separate list, and eventually, as listservs were phased out of popularity from 1999 to 2001 (which was a worldwide technical issue and indicative not just of a singular group), they created web archives and then a more insular community on the online diary platform of Livejournal (LJ). Bury concludes that ‘a blog or LJ may well provide a better sense of control and autonomy while still providing a form of interaction with other fans’ (214) and that ‘members prefer to direct their limited time and energy toward blogging rather than interacting on the list’ (215).29 Indeed, the main attractions of Livejournal for many years was the use of its tagging system and virtual communities which enabled users to locate reading material and subscribe to various authors (both fan and professional). Functionally, Livejournal’s platform allowed for a radical change in reading practices that the limited technology of listservs could not compensate for: virtual bookmarks for various posts could be kept and shared, and several blogs were devoted specifically to ‘rec’, that is, recommended posts or authors for reading. Listserv archives were incredibly cumbersome for locating specific posts to reread, with limited filters for searching or browsing. However, Livejournal’s became inextricably tied into real-world politics, and this heralded its demise as a social and reading platform; though used primarily for

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fannish purposes in the Anglo world, the site was (and is) used as a popular platform for political bloggers in Russia. (Though American in origin, the site was bought by a Russian company in 2007.) During the lead-up to Russia’s legislative elections in 2011, a series of ‘denial of service’ (DOS) attacks kept the site down for days and weeks at a time. Scores of fans moved on to other platforms, including Dreamwidth (another online diary system that is in many ways visually and functionally identical to LJ, and the page of aggregated reading material is actually called ‘Reading’), Wattpad (a socially locked platform that requires subscription, but whose focus is on reading and sharing texts) and Tumblr (a picture-heavy social media site that can be used to disseminate and read texts, but whose character limits make tracking authors and readers unusually difficult). In late 2016, the last of Livejournal’s servers were moved to Russia; in early 2017, a change to the Russian-language terms of service put strict limitations on use of the site, especially any material that may be ‘contradictory to the laws of the Russian Federation’, prompting even more users not only to leave but also to delete whatever they had been storing on the site.30 Currently, the main platform for fan reading and text-sharing is the Archive of Our Own (AO3), a massive archive hosted by the non-profit Organization for Transformative Works (which also sponsors the top academic journal for Fan Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures, as well as the fan culture and history wiki Fanlore). At the time of this writing, the site includes more than 3 million texts and has more than 1 million registered users. An official census sponsored by the site in 2013, with just over 10,000 respondents, produced a great deal of data on its users, including that the vast majority were young (the average age is twenty-five), queer (only a third identified as heterosexual), white (78 per cent), women (90.3 per cent) and were using the site for reading rather than for writing or for discussion.31 Of particular interest is that the site imports older archives (usually from the late 1990s and early 2000s) into its system, preserving a great deal of work that would otherwise be orphaned and/or lost. In contrast, the digital archives by men focus on the preservation of material that originated in print and on creating records of memory through individuals. One of the main resources is Fancyclopedia 3, a wiki that was created as a sequel of sorts to the original Fancylopedia (1944) and Fancyclopedia 2 (1959; reissued in 1978).32 Fancyclopedia 3 overlaps with Fanlore in describing some of the early zine publications and fan movements, but while Fanlore functions primarily as an overview and description of contents, Fancyclopedia 3 instead provides transcriptions of some material as well as extensive hyperlinks to

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profiles of the fans (using their real names) who contributed to its production. Essentially, the differences in records revolve around actual texts versus paratexts, and identifying individuals and roles relevant to those texts – in every aspect but the reader. However, these readers would have been known, either through the printed labels necessary for mailing material out or through online pseudonyms used in communities. In both cases they would also have been gendered either through the boys’ club of the Amateur Press Associations or the girls’ club of digital coteries. Further, male fans’ digital archives focus specifically on the preser­ vation of texts and of institutional memory. The extensive archives at Efanzines.com and Fanac.org both provide scanned full texts of print fanzines, often with an introduction and sometimes with additional annotations that more fully contextualise the works themselves. This is the use of an archive as an exhibit space in addition to the ever-expanding library: showcasing knowledge in addition to sharing it. Yet these extensive archival networks are unexamined in the scholar­ship, reinforcing these communities as both insular and aged, and detached from the rest of fandom through the vast gulf of gender. Most recently, a new phenomenon in fan reading, first appearing around 2012, is the ‘fan book’. The death of print in fandom, as elsewhere, remains greatly exaggerated. Print has transformed from the norm of communication to special and in some cases prestige publications to commemorate gatherings or celebrate specific fandoms. Indeed, in the wake of certain controversies with digital fandom such as Ficgate33 (in which an ill-advised undergraduate seminar was assigned to read and comment on fan writing posted online), Anne Jamison commented that ‘I advocate private communities, locked accounts, mailing lists and paper zines for people who value privacy but want to share. It’s not just other fans reading here. Maybe it once was, but it just isn’t true now.’34 The idea of using print to limit a prospective readership is a fascinating one that likely has implications for the future well beyond fan culture. The emergence of what are often called ‘fan books’ contrasts with print zine culture: zines are usually produced serially (though increasingly with an artists’ book-inspired emphasis on the singular or very short-run issues), while fan books are produced in single volumes. They are also usually crowd-funded through venues like Kickstarter or other communal platforms. Crowdfunding projects allow for various tiers of additional material based on interest, each ‘unlocked’ once specific amounts of money have been reached by subscription: if more

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people subscribe to a project, more pages of material can be added, or higher-quality materials (paper stock, covers) can be used. Fan books present a curated reading experience at odds with the communal reading of print zines and digital archives because there is a single editor at work who selects the texts. Contemporary desktop publishing also requires more layout design skills to correctly prepare text for printing, a step largely eliminated through the reproduction of single sheets as done by most print zines and unnecessary for the HTML or XML files used to post online. The creation of the rest of the physical object otherwise takes place at a distance, through printing and binding companies, rather than by hand. While the reader will likely not notice the specific steps required to produce these objects, the process nonetheless affects the reading experience of both the material and the object. Finally, the fan book is the one case in fan reading where the reader is truly an unknown, as in many cases the completed book can be purchased through a third-party vendor rather than directly from the authors or producers. (With Kickstarters, labels can be printed and so the names can be seen, but with the large numbers that can be involved, the abundance of names can blur into another form of anonymity.) While nominally part of a community, it is one of purchasers and consumers, rather than the usual reciprocal relationship of fannish reader-writers. Two notable examples of fan books both originated on Kickstarter. In 2015 Beyond the Breach: A Pacific Rim Fan Book was successfully funded; 334 backers exceeded the $8,500 goal and collected more than $11,000 to produce the book, and in addition two batches of extra copies went on sale to non-backers in 2016. Beyond the Breach consists of a mix of writing, art and photos of individual fans of the titular film Pacific Rim (2013). It credits no publisher and no editor is identified, though ‘A Small Preamble’ by Amanda/alienfirst prefaces the rest of the text, identifying it as ‘a love letter of sorts’ to the film and its fandom. More recently, in January 2017, Not Without You: A Stucky Anthology, celebrating the Steve/Bucky pairing from the Captain America superhero films, blew past its $8,700 goal and raised more than $80,000 for copies of the book. Having wildly exceeded its funding target, the nascent publisher, Daybreak Press, provided subscribers with a hardcover print book with gilt edges and a ribbon bookmark, a poster, stickers and various other small objects like pins and keychains as rewards. The Daybreak Press was able to build a foundation for publishing other collections of transformative works and to act as a significant patron to other fan publishing efforts.

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The fan book is exactly how we would identify a ‘book’: a mass-­ produced, bound codex in print. Print production is the dominant demonstration of literary force and has been for centuries; it trains readers to accept specific aesthetics as defaults for legitimacy, such as the Times New Roman font that is the mainstay for academics, or the octavo format that all but defines genre publishing. Presenting fan writing in a traditional bound book rather than stapled leaves or digital platforms creates a different experience for the readers, one that legitimises their consumptions of texts. The fan reader in all of these contexts is not a theoretical or unknown ‘ideal’ reader but always a concrete, quantifiable and often directly identifiable reader. The mores of the print subscription and online sharing systems all require a verifiable identity of some kind, whether for the print labels for mailing purposes or the online member­ship usernames. Indeed, the ability to identify readers and writers in fandom led to the uncovering of two different reader-writers who ‘performed’ other identities specifically for SFF fandom. In his pioneering study Speculative Blackness (2016), André M. Carrington touches on the early construction of racial blackness in 1950s print fanzines through the writings of the fictional fan Carl Brandon, a popular and influential black fan who was a social fiction engineered by white fan-author Terry Carr. Carrington notes that Brandon ‘was always already a cipher for what fans thought about the meaning of Blackness in their community’ and that By treating genres as a matter of relationships between people as well as between texts, writing in Brandon’s name had reminded his readers that they could become authors. They could take ownership of the contexts in which they read and of the readings they performed.35

Carrington also briefly discusses James Tiptree, Jr, another fan and writer whose real identity, eventually disclosed to the public in the 1970s, was Alice Bradley Sheldon. Both figures are currently memorial­ised in fandom: The James Tiptree, Jr Award, given annually, recognises fictional work that promotes critical thinking on the topics of gender and sexual identity, while the Carl Brandon Society similarly advocates for the topic of race in the community. Though the identity of ‘fan’ is composed of reading and writing as part of a community, it is also obviously composed of the very real individuals who are doing the reading or writing, whoever they may be. Elizabeth Long notes in her 1992 essay ‘Textual Interpretation as Collective Action’ that our contemporary understanding of ‘the

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reader’ is drawn from an extensive iconographic tradition in art that emphasises solitary reading rather than communal reading, imagery that is at odds with reality across time periods and genres. She states: Unseating the ideology of reading as essentially and only a solitary activity challenges the hegemony of an associated model of how culture works, a conception I call the ‘trickle down’ model of cultural dissemination. It holds that innovative ideas and values originate with transcendent high cultural figures and are delivered by abstracted processes – and in diluted form – to the lower (and in this model, relatively passive) levels of the sociocultural hierarchy.36

The ‘trickle down’ relationships between texts and readers are disrupted in fannish discourse, whether in print or digital; fan reading practices hinge on every individual’s ability to be a reader-writer who can contribute to the archive and the text. Long’s ideological ‘unseating’ thus has parallels to how fans consume other fans’ works – both from literature to media and from print to digital. Culturally, fans sit on the perceived lower end of the sociocultural hierarchy; revising the narratives of what texts they read and how they read them promises intriguing avenues for further research. Given the vast gender-specific (and, per Carrington, race-specific) gulf between fan communities, it would be worthwhile to look at what other social identities and intersections are involved when it comes to fan readers, and how they are contextualised through communal discourse. Scholarly perception of fandom has changed over time, from valoris­ing fannish activities in the first wave of academic analysis, to studying individual fans for sociological purposes, and most recently to literary critique of fan writings. It is my hope that this chapter has shown that the methodology of Book History can shed still further light on an extensive body of literary work that is, seemingly, ex­ plicitly gendered. Notes   1. Annual conferences on the study of SFF started as a regular programming track at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1958. In 1961 Mark R. Hallegas presented a paper proposing an early canon of works, which appeared in draft form in Extrapolation, a publication co-edited by Thomas D. Clareson that began life in the shape of a mimeographed fanzine collecting scholarly work, which still exists today as one of the top journals in the field. See M. R. Hellagas, ‘A Draft of the Science-Fiction Canon to be Proposed at the 1961 MLA Conference

280  Cait Coker on Science Fiction’, Extrapolation, 3:1 (1961), pp. 26–30. Clareson’s 1990 monograph Understanding Contemporary Science Fiction: The Formative Period, 1926–1970 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990) records both an account of the period as well as analysis of the genre’s evolution during the first part of the twentieth century. Ritch Calvin’s outline of the early days of the field, ‘Science Fiction in the Academy in the 1970s’, also provides valuable analysis: Ritch Calvin, ‘Science Fiction in the Academy in the 1970s’, in Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link (eds), The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 460–78.   2. Both Jenkins’s Textual Poachers and Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women, discussed below, and the majority of works that follow them, bypass fandom prior to 1975. A notable exception is Helen Merrick’s The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of SF Feminisms (Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2009), which is primarily focused on the entry and reception of women writers into science fiction as a field. However, this landmark study, too, discusses fan writing as incidental or prior to professional publication, rather than as a literary form in its own right.   3. The first identified use of the term ‘fan fiction’ is by Jack Speer, in the September 1936 issue (no. 6) of Cosmic Tales, in an untitled one-page piece identified in the table of contents as ‘Yeah, Let’s Have Fan Fiction Again’. In that article he laments: ‘Remember the fan story in which Lovecraft & many more gathered? . . . And why can’t we have it again? Instead of the sad stuff that tries to be serious sf, and fills so many fan mags, why not some stories of, by, and for fans? Of course, tastes have changed, and we’d no longer be so interested in stories concerning our favorite authors, if we are still interested enuf [sic] in sf to have any’ (p. 15). Two decades later and writing in Fancyclopedia 2 (n.p.: Fantasy Foundation, 1959), Dick Eney and Jack Speer defined ‘fan fiction’ as ‘1) sometimes meaning by fans in the manner of pros; that is, ordinary fantasy published in a fanzine. Properly, it means 2) fiction by fans about fans (or sometimes about pros), having no necessary connection with stfantasy’ (pp. 56–7; original emphasis). ‘Stfantasy’ is short for ‘scientific fantasy’, a term coined by Hugo Gernsback that pre-dates the term of ‘science fiction’ or ‘sci-fi’ – and is still preferred by some.   4. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, ‘How the Growing Generation Gap Is Changing the Face of Fandom’, Daily Dot, 25 August 2014, available at (last accessed 19 November 2019).   5. Joanna Russ, ‘Another Addict Raves About K/S’, Nome, no. 8 (1985), pp. 27–38; Joanna Russ, ‘Pornography by Women for Women, with Love’, in Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays (New York: Crossing Press, 1985), pp. 79–99; Patricia Lamb and Diana Veith, ‘Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines’, in Donald Palumbo (ed.), Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic

Gendering Science Fiction Fan Reading in Print and Online   281

Litera­ture (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 235–55; Constance Penley, ‘Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture’, in Lawrence Grossberg et al. (eds), Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 479–500.  6. Constance Penley, NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America (London: Verso, 1997); Camille Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992).  7. Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women, p. 3.  8. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, p. 18.   9. Ibid., pp. 6–7. 10. Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre (Glasgow: Seren Books, 2005), p. 7. 11. Anne Jamison (ed.), Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas: SmartPop Books, 2013). 12. Karen L. Hellekson and Kristina Busse (eds), The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014). 13. Francesca Coppa (ed.), The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2017). 14. Tom Shippey, ‘Learning to Read Science Fiction’, in Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), p. 15. 15. Damon Knight, The Futurians: The Story of the Science Fiction ‘Family’ of the 30’s That Produced Today’s Top SF Writers and Editors (New York: John Day, 1977). 16. Sam Moskowitz, The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom (Atlanta: Atlanta Science Fiction Organization Press, 1954); Jack Speer, Up to Now (1939); Harry Warner, Jr, All Our Yesterdays (Advent, 1969); Harry Warner, Jr, A Wealth of Fable (Fanhistorica Press, 1976). The following paragraph elaborates on the publication history of these works. 17. Justine Larbalestier, The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002). 18. Marion Zimmer Bradley, ‘My Trip Through Science Fiction’, Algol, 15:1 (1978), pp. 10–20 (p. 13). While no definitive listing of Bradley’s contributions to fanzines exist, she was certainly publishing articles in fanzines by the early 1950s (including a series of articles in Redd Boggs’s fanzine Sky Hook in 1951–2) and was a guest of honour at a convention in Dallas in 1958. See Clardy McCullar, ‘Science Fictioners Way Out Yonder: Regional Convention’, Dallas Morning News, 5 July 1958, section 4, p. 1. 19. An online edition of collated texts can be found at (accessed 15 December 2018). Quotations drawn from Chapter 18 (n.p.).

282  Cait Coker 20. Amy Harmon, ‘In TV’s Dull Summer Days, Plots Take Wing on the Net’, New York Times, 18 August 1997. 21. Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women, p. 300. 22. Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader, pp. 2, 4, 6, 7, 12, 14. 23. Sumner Gary Hunnewell, Tolkien Fandom Review: From Its Beginnings to 1964 (2010), online fanzine. More yearly bibliographies are also available through to 1968. See (accessed 5 September 2017). 24. Ibid., p. 3. 25. Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak and Joan Winston (eds), Star Trek Lives! (New York: Bantam Books, 1975). 26. Ibid., p. 23. 27. Ibid., pp. 222–3, original emphasis. 28. Abigail de Kosnick, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016), p. 194. 29. Rhiannon Bury, Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online (London: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 214, 215. 30. The original Russian-language terms of service may be found online at . The English-language translation notes that ‘this translation of the User Agreement is not a legally binding document’, unlike the ‘original User Agreement, which is valid’; it can be found online at (accessed 6 November 2017). 31. The survey data and analysis are currently hosted by centrumlumina on Tumblr: (accessed 6 November 2017). 32. Fancyclopedia 3, created/edited by Jim Caughran and currently edited by Mark Olson, is at (accessed 6 November 2017). 33. See Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, ‘What Not to Do When Teaching Class About Fanfiction’, Daily Dot, 25 February 2015, available at (accessed 7 November 2017). 34. Anne Jamison, ‘Since I and my class have been cited’, Tumblr, 23 February 2015 (accessed 15 December 2019). 35. André M. Carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 66. 36. Elizabeth Long, ‘Textual Interpretation as Collective Action’, Discourse, 14:3 (1992), pp. 104–30 (p. 124).

Chapter 14

‘A bolt is shot back somewhere in the breast’ (Matthew Arnold, ‘The Buried Life’): A Methodology for Literary Reading in the Twenty-First Century Philip Davis and Josie Billington

Established in 2011, the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS) at the University of Liverpool has worked in partnership with national UK charity The Reader to examine the value of shared reading groups for mental health and wellbeing, and to identify the psychological and neurological processes which underlie those benefits.

Figure 14.1  ‘Hands’. Photograph by Joe Magee

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Shared reading groups are distinct from traditional book clubs: the material is not read in advance nor confined to contemporary texts or a specific demographic. Rather, poems, short stories and novels, from the whole range of the literary heritage down the ages, are read aloud together, live, and the reading is regularly interrupted for group members to share thoughts and responses. Through its trained group leaders, The Reader brings the reading of serious literature to a variety of settings, to include people who would not normally be involved in reading literature: people in drug and rehabilitation centres, prisons, hospitals, drop-in centres in local medical practices, dementia care homes, facilities for looked-after children, schools and libraries. As reflected in our chapter title, The Reader’s shared reading model consciously builds on a tradition formed in the Victorian age, to create communities of new readers in search of meaning.1 But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,  But often, in the din of strife,  There rises an unspeakable desire  After the knowledge of our buried life.2

In the history of reading and its research, the great question, made all the more complex in the reading of powerful literature, remains that of Edmund Huey, writing in The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (1908): To completely analyze what we do when we read would almost be the acme of a psychologist’s achievements, for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind, as well as to unravel the tangled story of the most remarkable specific performance that civilization has learned in all its history.3

No one can access fully the inner processes of silent solitary reading; but within the admittedly different context of these small intimate groups reading aloud together, we suggest that the combination of the qualitative and quantitative research measures which we will go on to describe here provides rare empirical insights into private processes of reading, a window onto what is usually hidden within solo literary reading but is here made spontaneously manifest. Qualitative approaches Since 2011, in all its funded research studies, CRILS has sought to capture and investigate the processes of shared reading by means

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of filming, sound-recording and transcribing group sessions, with informed consent from all participants.4 This will leave an archive of recorded data for future researchers of reading. The recordings have been independently analysed in three key ways: • consensus analysis by an interdisciplinary team; • linguistic analysis applied to the literary-inflected language of participants in group sessions, using the same instruments of literary and linguistic investigation as are employed in the reading of the literary texts themselves; • video-assisted interviews with the participants, reviewing highlights of their own participation. These approaches and the resultant findings are outlined in separate sections below, with indications as to how the approaches complement, corroborate and even overlap with one another. Accordingly (for example), though the methodology involved in the interviews is treated in a separate section, findings prompted by evidence provided from interviews are included regularly throughout. In what follows, we offer instances from reading groups recorded as part of three distinct studies5 with diverse populations, including participants living with specific conditions or difficulties – chronic pain, depression, drug and alcohol addiction – as well as those experiencing more general mental health issues. This in itself reflects one crucial CRILS’ finding: that literature’s wide and subtle range does not discriminate in terms of specific conditions or cases, does not offer a specialist vocabulary of therapeutic treatment or programmed cure, but works its effects more freely, by finding nothing in human experience alien to it, thereby extending the range of human norms.6 In all this, much depends on the specificity of the experience, in contrast to the over-generalisation of memory and response characteristically associated with depression:7 consequently in this chapter we concentrate upon specific examples of key characteristics. All participants’ names are fictionalised. Consensus analysis of video-recordings In the first stage of analysis, an interdisciplinary research team, composed of literature specialists, linguisticians, health professionals and academic psychologists, views the video-recordings to establish significant phenomena. The interdisciplinary team, combining the language of psychology with that offered by the language of literature,

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concentrates above all on what they take to be individual ‘breakthrough’ moments when, in a two-way interaction, the literature seems both to get through to participants and itself to come alive in them. At such points, participants experience an enlivening or awakening within themselves, beneath the level of intention or default opinion. In order to pinpoint these instances of live ‘happening’ – moments of change or breakthrough – the team uses a rating system (refined over successive studies) to ensure inter-rater reliability in relation to William James’s description of ‘emotional excitement’: There are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re-crystallize about it. These hot parts are the centres of our dynamic energy, whereas the cold parts leave us indifferent and passive in proportion to their coldness.8

It is the ‘hot’ and ‘alive’ feeling and thinking we are looking for, both for their own sake in disclosing the power of literary reading, and because – as James (a founder of modern psychology) insists – these are the centres of healthy shift and growth in the individual. Our rating system thus consists of a five-point scale, where 0 = cold/dead, 5 = hot/live. In a two-stage process, we initially use the system to identify blocks of time – ranging from two to ten minutes – within each recording. Then we rate thirty-second intervals in order to isolate salient happenings more specifically. Presented below are some instances of what we saw – that quality of ‘liveness’ registered by the research group in the experience of the group participants themselves. A strikingly explicit example of literature’s vital power as an emotional trigger occurred in a reading group within a day programme for recovery from drug and alcohol dependence. The group was reading John Clare’s poem ‘I Am’ (here quoted in full so that the reader can witness the close relation, italicised in the response quoted below, between the poem’s language and one participant’s almost immediate response): I am – yet what I am none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes – They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes And yet I am, and live – like vapours tossed Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams,

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Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; Even the dearest that I loved the best Are strange – nay, rather, stranger than the rest. I long for scenes where man hath never trod A place where woman never smiled or wept There to abide with my Creator, God, And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, Untroubling and untroubled where I lie The grass below – above the vaulted sky.9

One group member, Carol, said immediately, ‘It has really – hit me; right there [points to heart], the whole poem’. An involuntary emotional and neo-physical connection to the literary work, anterior to the level of considered response, is often the first point of entry, as participants attest: ‘When you’re reading a well written, powerful poem, it sort of hits you in the face even though it physically can’t’; ‘The reading can get to feelings very quickly: it’s almost condensed’; ‘You can feel it deep inside’; ‘The poem really zeroed in on my feelings, laid them bare’. On this occasion, the group carried on initially discussing the poem – the extreme distress in the first two stanzas, the need for the peace of something like a suicidal death in the final stanza. But then suddenly Carol left the room, signalling her need to do so by holding up a single finger, as if to take a moment. She returned some minutes later, however, and immediately said to the group amidst restrained tears: So – the way this is to me is, I exist at the moment but . . . I am but I am not – [Another group-member, Amy, adds supportively: Living]. I am literally vapours, the nothingness of what-have-you, and I feel like a shipwreck, and things I used to esteem in my life are no longer there, and I have been forsaken by a lot of people, so, like, I am a bit of a memory lost, isn’t it, no one really cares or wants to know. And it’s interesting what was said about suicide, because at the end stanza it is like . . . I kind of . . . I don’t want to commit suicide, no, but I want to be at peace . . . and going back to that innocent childhood or, you know, that kind of untroubled place. So the whole thing kind of really got to me.

This session was more consistently marked at level 5 on the five-point rating scale than any other session the consensus group monitored. And here, in particular, Carol is not so much quoting from the text, as inhabiting the emotional reality of the poem, which itself is coming to life again in her through a great rush of personal feeling.

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It is an important example of how poetry has potential at once to ‘hit’ inner trouble and help unfold it into articulate ex­pression. The challenging depth of the emotion, together with the relative difficulty and unfamiliarity of the literary language, blocks simple facility and literalistic opinion, galvanising a new kind of probing, exploratory language: ‘I am but I am not . . . Living’. Failure to be able to translate one’s emotional experience into thoughts, says the psychoanalyst W. R. Bion, is as disastrous for mental health as the ‘failure to eat, drink or breathe properly’ physically: it is ‘a disaster in the development of the personality’.10 It is also as James contests: that the shift of level from feeling to the extrication of the thoughts within feeling – without feeling becoming ‘cold’ – is vital to change itself. It can also be vital to deep forms of recovery. Participant Ona read Dorianne Laux’s poem ‘For the Sake of Strangers’11 in a group for older people, and said: That feeling there . . . disengaged to the world – I . . . I . . . I remember that feeling. I was aware of things but not aware of things. I wasn’t part of it. The words in the poem ‘No matter what the grief, its weight, we are obliged to carry it’. I’m afraid I know that. I can’t say I don’t know that because I do.

Ona had previously found it difficult to speak of the death of her husband. What is characteristic here of a number of other group-readers is what our linguisticians also alert us to: the use of the double negative – ‘I can’t say I don’t’. Amidst the hesitation (‘I . . . I . . .’) comes a kind of involuntary blurting, triggered by emotion and sudden memory. It marks an abrupt and spontaneous liveness, breaking down previous barriers between past and present, self and others. ‘No matter what . . .’. Participants repeatedly described the sudden triggered effect of almost involuntary, live feelings that demand unfiltered honesty. One participant, Keith, from a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre, watching a recording of his response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 (‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’), noted in particular his own expression of self-disgust in relation to the line: ‘Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising’.12 ‘Once you become aware of something,’ said Keith, ‘you cannot turn back, you can’t unknow. So, when I see these things in print, they strike home.’ There again is the physical effect – the striking home – and the mental double negative – you can’t unknow – in response to it. In common with many participants, Keith offered a contrast be­tween the shared reading group and the therapy groups he had attended:

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What with books and poems, it makes you look at things honestly. And it’s harder to tell lies around them. . . . This, it’s about feelings, so you’re talking about feelings. That [therapy groups] you’re talking about actions, behaviours.

In the addiction therapy group: What I thought they wanted to hear was – ‘Yeah I had a really bad day the other day, I really fancied a drink but I sat down and I thought No, it won’t be just one, it’s never just one, so I got through it,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh well done’. . . . If I was getting only comfortable thoughts, I would not change my behaviour.

Literary reading, this suggests, enables profitable contemplation of even the apparently negative or the ostensibly uncomfortable in human emotional experience. Within the consensus group, monitoring interviews as well as sessions, Rhiannon Corcoran, Professor of Psychology at the University of Liverpool, concluded thus, of the emotional impact involved in the close autobiographical relation to a text, in the report on the ‘What Literature Can Do’ study: Shared Reading marks the point at which emotions begin to reclaim their evolutionary value as useful. Originally fear, for example, would be useful as a warning, in its survival value as indicative of present external danger. In further human development, it may become objectless anxiety and counter-productive. But here in Shared Reading, emotions are restored to urgent messages of feeling that usefully tell of a now more internal fact, a psychological reality which, equally, should not be ignored, in the interests of well-being at a higher evolved level of survival.13

Linguistic analysis Language analysis of the participant contributions, inflected by their reading, has been seen as CRILS’ uniquely innovative contribution.14 Transcripts of the video-recorded material analysed by the literary/ psychology team were also independently analysed by linguisticians, using three complementary approaches to the linguistic features of the groups. Extensive quantitative corpus analysis of some of the features in all of the transcripts identified the overall lexical and grammatical expressions that were statistically significant across speakers. Quali­ tative analysis of all the features in selected transcripts related the expressions identified via corpus analysis to their context (at what stages they were more frequent, for example), the functions they served, and how these functions related to the relationship between

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participants and text (for instance, involvement). Intensive conversation analysis identified how the texts being read helped to shape conversational contributions.  Across the studies, the linguistic evidence proved essential in helping to corroborate the qualitative findings from the multidisciplinary team. For example, in discussing the text, readers characteristically maintain the work’s original deixis – that is, the pointing involved in he, she, I, here, now – for identification of person, time and space, rather than shifting to the perspective of the reading group. This linguistic pointing indicates a strong degree of involvement between the partici­ pants in the group and the protagonists in the text. As a result, the text is not detached from but transferred to the here-and-now of the reading group interaction. This relates also to the characteristic use of the present tense in discussion, so that even past life is not distant. This linguistic evidence strengthens the emergent finding of ‘live thinking’ as witnessed on the video-recordings. We further indicate here two key areas where language analysis is able to capture, often in very close relation to specific verbal triggers in the literature, something of large emotional import lodged within small transient moments – moments which, without this research, would go unrecorded because happening very fast, in unfinished or emergent form. These areas we designate ‘creative inarticulacy’ and ‘mobility of mind’. Creative inarticulacy. A much-repeated locution in the sessional transcripts, unconsciously adopted by participants of different social backgrounds and educational experiences, is the phrase ‘it is as though’ or ‘it’s almost as if’ or ‘it is almost like’ or ‘I feel as though’. It is commonly the prelude or bridge to a bold and interesting breakthrough in thought (as opposed to the tonal opinionatedness of, say, ‘I just/still think’). Here is one example, again in relation to John Clare’s ‘I Am’ (here, its final stanza), now read in the context of a community mental health group: Alice: It feels, there’s something about peace isn’t there, because it’s not even talking about being happy. Heather: Yes, it’s almost like he wants freedom from mental turmoil or something like that, you know, just to not kind of cause anyone any trouble. Kate: It’s almost as if the everyday life . . . almost he’s thinking that is what he may interpret as paradise. You know the people every day, or it’s almost as if people are untouched by illness, grief, happiness. That would be paradise for him.

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Arising out of an uncertainty or hesitation which is nonetheless far from disabling, the locutions ‘almost as if’ and ‘something like’ are tools that allow time, space and permission for what is imaginatively tentative or provisional, poised on what consensus-group member Dr Komena Koleva in ‘What Literature Can Do’ described as ‘the very borderline between language and thought’.15 This is where we identify what we call ‘the literary’. It is where normal abilities and automatic competencies become challenged in the act of reading powerful literary work. Inabilities, even disabilities become creative. Ellen already suffered some problems with fluent speech owing to neurological impairment resulting from a traumatic accident in which she came into contact with an electric fence while living in South Africa. It was during a discussion of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ that Ellen’s intermittent speech disability came under more emotional strain than ever before. She stuttered five or more times over ‘If . . . if . . . if . . . I ever had’ before poignantly managing to complete the sentence – ‘children’. To her, in her condition, that possibility must seem unlikely. (And ‘if’ is itself a key word of the poem: ‘I doubted if I should ever come back’16 is the closing line of the penultimate stanza.) That feeling of ‘if’ has often to do with the negotiation of painful areas of feeling through unanswered questions or unlikely possibilities, unresolved matter left hanging. As a linguistician, Dr Koleva pointed to this phenomenon of ‘hangings’, situations in which speakers have to abandon a thought or leave it uncompleted. These ‘stops’ are less like the linguistic probing of ‘as though’ and closer to a processing halt, at which gestures often take over. Participant Jane, responding to a passage relating to the protagonist’s early childhood in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, said ‘It’s not physical violence, it’s psychological violence, it’s more damaging . . . it remains for the rest of your life . . . if you hurt your arm or whatever, it might heal up but . . . [points to head].’ ‘Hangings’ sometimes appear symptomatic of the realisation of what has powerfully stopped lives in the past or the re-creation of hesitant uncertainty in relation to the future. Jud, from a group in a setting for people suffering from psychosis, reading Arnold’s ‘The Buried Life’, was asked directly by the group leader whether he himself had any buried original plan as the poet suggested: ‘Um, yes, possibly, but it seems to be far removed from the reality I am in now’. Smiling ruefully, Jud leaned forward to hear again the final words of the poem: And then he thinks he knows  The hills where his life rose,  And the sea where it goes.17

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‘Yes, it seems to be quite a distance between the person you once were – hoping to be, and the person you have become, so . . . ur . . .’. The research team is interested both in what makes people begin to talk and in what makes them stop. The stop here with Jud is to do with the difficulty experienced by a person who in the present looks back to the past, but a past which seems now to have lost the future it once had – hence the lack of an immediately articulable future now. These complicated time loops are experienced in the linguistic hesitations: it is not only the distance between the person you have become and ‘the person you were’ but also ‘the person you were – hoping to be’. It is important that shared reading is not just about simple ‘outcomes’ when so often it involves people whose own lives, if viewed from that perspective, might look like no more than failures or dead-ends – people living with depression or dementia or psychosis, for example. Hence the importance of unfinished but still managed articulation. At other times, these are instances of group members sensing a reality in the face of which conventional language appeared powerless or floundering. Group members’ hesitancy or groping – ‘something . . . kind of . . . sort of . . . like’ – is an effort to grasp this new reality, sometimes reaching for metaphor or conceit in a process of giving to the sense of the intangible a tangibility equivalent to the creation of poetry itself. ‘This Wordsworth poem raises an enormous sky over all we fear or we hold dear’; ‘It’s quite a quandary: you’re a prisoner who is thinking you are free to do whatever you want’; ‘Something you can’t actually explain but it is an invitation, a light inside the house, to come in by’. Speech stalls or struggles or has to reinvent itself because of the sudden experience of something more than any paraphrase or categorisation can express. Those moments are full of what the philosopher-psychologist Eugene Gendlin calls the ‘implicit’ meaning involved in the coming of words: You want to go on. In an implicit way you feel what should be next, but you do not know what to say. The phrases that come do not precisely say it. Something implicit is functioning in your rejection of them.18

The apparent inarticulacy we witness in these readers, which creatively summons a language for itself rather than finding one ready-made, brings these people, as readers, close to the heuristic processes of the writers by whom they are moved, when a word, a line, a sentence becomes an achievement. Literature, as one group member put it, is not just ‘talking about’ feelings but actually ‘doing feelings’ – getting into them and

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re-experiencing them in another form. Liveness, we have found, comes out of ‘doing reading’, actively and dynamically in the moment. Mobility of mind. One of the main impediments to wellbeing is a feeling of what one participant at interview called ‘stuckness’ – the sense of inescapable predicament, a felt inability to change, repetitive thinking. What linguistic analysis of shared reading reveals at a micro-level are the stirrings of a lost or untaught capacity for shift of perspective, attention to changes. We offer here two linguistic traces for mobility: a flexible movement of mind between (i) pronouns, and (ii) the uses of the negative (finding of another side to ‘not’). (i) Pronouns. The flexibility of thinking which crosses from the self to the text and back again, and also extends imaginatively to a range of perspectives within the text or in the group, is reflected in a series of linguistic habits, particularly the barely conscious use of pronouns. In The Secret Life of Pronouns, James W. Pennebaker suggests that an implicit indicator of mental health is an increasing shift from I-centred discourse to discourse more concerned with others.19 The transcripts of the shared reading groups show a subtler mobility – from ‘I’ to ‘he’ or ‘she’, or ‘we’ – where the shifts are achieved with seamless rapidity in live thought. Most significantly, they feature a particular usage of ‘you’, not in the second person but as a third-person informal version of ‘one’. One striking finding in comparing shared reading with a conventional therapeutic intervention (cognitive behavioural therapy, CBT) for people living with chronic pain was the widespread and consistent replacement of repetitively negative first-person singular formulations characteristic of CBT – ‘I am not who I was before my pain’, ‘I don’t do anything . . . anymore. I can’t even speak . . . about it anymore’ – with a more thoughtfully speculative ‘you’ syntax. Struck by Scrooge’s ability in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol not to be stuck but to alter his future, one participant said: I suppose it’s the change in perception that’s important. ‘I am not the man I was.’20 For the future you’ve got to learn from your past; even the smallest things can teach you. He’s learned not just who he was but who he needs to be.

This mobile use of ‘you’ – moving fluidly between he, I and we – is an instinctive instrument of thought, offering an imaginative middle ground for thoughtful exploration of the relation between ‘the text’ and ‘me’, as well as between ‘me’ and ‘others’ (be they ‘we’ or ‘he, she, they’, in the text or in the group).

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(ii) The uses of the negative. Scrooge’s ‘I am not the man I was’ was not a merely negative utterance. Participant Donald in a local community group had suffered depression through loss of work and purpose in the world. What he found himself responding to was a seventeenth-century love lyric by Robert Herrick: Bid me to live, and I will live   Thy protestant to be: Or bid me love, and I will give   A loving heart to thee. A heart as soft, a heart as kind,   A heart as sound and free, As in the whole world thou canst find,   That heart I’ll give to thee.21

Donald’s usual way of speaking is peppered with ‘not’s – marking all his deficiencies, and what he will not or cannot do. But here he said this: Certain words touch nerves with me [pointing to poem on page and reading] – ‘Heart as soft, heart as kind’. See, it’s that commitment thing. I just find loyalty, commitment, really good things, which I’ve not had. Softness, kindness, I like those traits.

Not much of a reader, Donald was brought up in a tough part of Liverpool: admitting to ‘softness’, taken from the words of the poem, was not something he would usually do, he said at interview. But most important of all here, ‘things . . . which I have not had’ is a transformation of the negatives of lack: this is not about identification but, more remarkably, imagination, in which ‘not having’ is no longer simply a cause for depression but a basis for still generously valuing. Group members living in a drug and rehabilitation centre spoke of what they had not got, or no longer had, in relation to John Clare’s ‘I long for scenes where man hath never trod/ A place where woman never smiled or wept’ or Shakespeare’s crying lines in sonnet 29, ‘Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,/Featured like him, like him with friends possessed’. This is felt imagination, shorn of personal bitterness. One participant said, for example, of her daring to be involved in reading aloud and talking, ‘I was fearful of not stepping out of my comfort zone’. We have already seen the use of double negatives in the groups.

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Video-assisted participant interview In a further methodological innovation developed by CRILS and led by research fellow Fiona Magee, consensus-selected excerpts from the videos were shown to reading group participants at individual interview. The initial purpose was further to test, correct and fine-tune some of the hypotheses already suggested by the research team. But what we were surprised to find was how much re-immersing the participants in the recorded reality of transient moments markedly deepened the human quality and specificity of traditional semi-structured/ qualitative interviews. Participants were able to re-inhabit the feel of significant but small passing moments rather than merely recalling them after the event, in overly generalised terms. As the participants watched themselves reading and responding and began to reread and reflect during the interview itself, the elicitation techniques taught by interview-practitioners22 who sought to engage interviewees in a place of warm recall could fall away when that emotional arena was provided by the literature itself. As one participant put it, comparing his experience of both shared reading and the interview with his involvement in group therapy: ‘In therapy you are being asked questions. You’re often not sure if that’s even what you really think.’ But the feelings in response to literature had greater immediate personal conviction, he said, even in areas of difficulty and ambiguity. It is precisely this triggered spontaneity which is lacking, said another participant, in the targeted therapeutic reading of self-help books: They tell you what to do or how to feel and nobody knows exactly how you feel – every person is different. With a novel you escape into a character. But although you’re escaping you can sort of, like, still see yourself in it.

Of deep importance to participants was how sharing human situations offered by the literature enabled participants not to think of themselves as ‘cases’. For instance, participant Peter said, ‘Oh, I’m not going mad; someone else has had this experience. Somebody else is feeling that way.’ For these readers, literature widens and enriches the human norm, accepting and allowing for troubles, traumas, inadequacies and other experiences usually classed as negative or even pathological. This is a crucial matter for people who remain in volatile or difficult situations. One reader wryly called it ‘therapy by stealth’, another, ‘education but without being taught’, and another added, ‘Things feel more alive’. As we have seen, the readings of these largely untrained lay readers produced moments of extraordinary achievement: they are transient

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and intricate, but nevertheless deserve greater recognition. Most importantly, as a result of the video-assisted interviews, the participants could see that for themselves. One of the central uses of these interviews has turned out to be the further opportunity for participants to develop the capacity for self-reflection, capturing and consolidating some of the insights momentarily arising in the reading-group sessions. Jane said, ‘Oh goodness, I am starting to feel’; ‘I was coming across quite well there. Quite confident.’ Donald was amazed how, since he was ‘not an assertive person’, he had ‘sort of spilled over. . . . It’s a kind of reminder that there is a self in there’. In the context of these often difficult lives, sometimes the greatest surprise is that of suddenly valuing oneself and one’s experience, without self-persuasion or counselling. ‘You suddenly think, “God! I have got an imagination”’, reported Peter, ‘I’m not the person I think I am. I like what I’m seeing. It makes you feel like a fully functioning person again. You know, like a member of society. Whereas your world was very small often, on your own and lonely.’ Liveness happens in shared reading and in the interviews that re-create it for the individual, when the strong language of powerful literature gets under readers’ defences and defaults to release emotion and memories, unrealised needs and hidden powers. And we have been on many thousand lines,  And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;  But hardly have we, for one little hour,  Been on our own line, have we been ourselves.23

Quantitative approaches and physiological measures Across CRILS’ studies, qualitative approaches have been mixed with standard experimental approaches and quantitative measures (Figure 14.2). We outline these quantitative methods below and consolidate the implications of the qualitative and quantitative findings taken together, before considering how these findings can be further developed in future research. Designs for comparisons A key study24 sought to discover which of the intrinsic components of shared reading are beneficial to mental health and wellbeing through a comparison with another cultural activity: we hope to extend this

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Figure 14.2  Using physiological data to examine the effects of literature. Copyright Joe Magee . Courtesy of Christophe de Bezenac and designed by Joe Magee fMRI: functional magnetic resonance imaging EEG: electroencephalography (measures electrical activity in the brain) EDA: electrodermal activity (measures galvanic skin response) ECG: electrocardiogram (measuring heart rhythm) HR: heart rate (taken from ECG)

methodology to other comparisons, including the reading of different types of subject matter. The participants were volunteers from The Reader who were taking part in a Big Lottery-funded initiative to involve in meaningful endeavour people at risk of mental health issues and social isolation. These volunteers were based at The Reader’s headquarters, then newly housed at Calderstones Mansion in Calderstones Park, Liverpool, which, together with the grounds and immediate parkland, was undergoing reconstruction as the International Centre for Reading and Wellbeing. The participants were divided into two groups: in a cross-over design, group A experienced six shared reading sessions (SR) followed by six ‘built environment’ workshops, exploring the development of the surrounding parkland (BE); simultaneously, group B experienced six BE sessions followed by six SR sessions. The same literary texts and design activities were used in both groups, and activities were led by trained experts in literature and environmental/ architectural design.

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Using standard self-report measures of mental health and wellbeing, the study found that there was a consistent and statistically significant tendency in both activities for the self-report of greater positive than negative affect. But the data suggested that involvement in SR prompted the experience of negative affect to a greater extent than involvement in BE. This was consistent with the qualitative findings above, that the intrinsic value of the shared reading of literature lies in its beneficial capacity to open individuals up to a broader range of emotional states – including apparently ‘negative’ experiences such as sorrow – via vicarious response to characters in the text or the texts bringing to mind analogous personal situations or past events. This openness to negative experiences did not prevent overall improvement in psychological wellbeing: on the contrary. A second study25 compared the effects of SR for people suffering chronic pain with those offered by a more formal, programmatic therapy, CBT, the standard psychosocial treatment for the condition. A CBT group and an SR group ran in parallel, with CBT group members joining the SR group after the completion of CBT. Participants kept twice-daily pain diaries as a measure of physical changes, and pain severity was recorded at twelve-hour intervals on a rating scale from 0 (non-existent) to 10 (severe). For SR, statistical analysis showed the pain rating after each weekly session to be lower than the mean over the study period as a whole (which lasted twelve months) and lower than at two days before and two days after each session. The pain rating two days after, however, was also lower than two days before SR, suggesting the possibility of some prolonged effect, beyond the duration of the group session itself. Following the CBT session, the pain rating was above the mean. There was considerably less evidence here that CBT affected pain and emotion beyond the duration of the session. The findings correlated strongly with the qualitative and linguistic analysis of the video-recordings of both interventions. In CBT, partici­ pants focused exclusively on their pain with, as the linguistic evidence found, ‘no thematic deviation’. In SR, by contrast, the literature was a trigger to recall a wide range of diverse life experiences – of work, childhood, family members, relationships – related to the entire life span, not merely the time period affected by pain. This in itself had a potentially therapeutic effect in helping to recover a whole person, not just an ill one. As one consultant put it, ‘When people are in CBT, they are people with pain. When they’re in the reading group, they’re people with lives.’ Whereas in CBT there was a strong emphasis on a sense of diminishment or subtraction – things ‘taken away’ by chronic

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pain – in SR, via the new stimulus of a literary story, there was frequently a renewed sense of energy and vitality, rediscovering what participants still did have (memories, feelings, thoughts, experiences). To add rigour to our study of emotional range and tone in CBT and SR, we are currently subjecting the entire run of transcribed video-recordings from this study to sentiment analysis – the use of computational linguistics to study affective and subjective states.26 We seek to quantify both the relative diversity and the intensity of expressed emotion in CBT and SR, and, within the latter, most crucially, the degree of alignment between participants’ sentiment and that of the text. This extra layer of quantitative analysis will thus statistically measure the degree to which the literary text is the catalyst for transformative affect. Standard measures A range of standard measures have been employed to explore the health and wellbeing benefits of SR relative to other activities and interventions. This has also proved a valuable means to test those measures which are most appropriate for capturing the specific aspects of psychological wellbeing encouraged in SR. For example: the Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS)27 was the measure of choice in early studies, as it is widely used in the context of population-level public health evaluation. It proved a blunt instrument in relation to SR, however, when compared with the more detailed and nuanced Ryff Scales of Psychological Wellbeing.28 The Ryff Scales showed that even short involvement in SR produced statistically significant beneficial outcomes in terms of improving an individual’s sense of ‘purpose in life’. Increased belief in the significance of past and present life was shown to be an intrinsic benefit of SR, differentiated from other group activities to which it was compared: in the BE design workshops the emphasis was on the acquisition of new skills. This finding has methodological implications pointing to the Ryff Scales as a sensitive tool appropriate for further testing in future studies.29 Similar testing has been carried out in relation to another standard measure, the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS)30 used in the SR/BE study. This scale consists of words describing emotions (ten positive, ten negative) and asks participants to write next to each word the extent to which they are feeling each emotion on a scale of from 1 (not at all) to 5 (extremely). In addition, participants in the study were asked to write down two words or phrases which best described

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their experience on each occasion. It was found that SR activated more emotional response descriptors than BE, which, in the great majority, activated cognitive descriptors. As noted above, while there was a consistent and statistically significant tendency for involvement in both group activities to be associated with self-report of more positive than negative affect, the PANAS data suggested SR produced negative affect to a greater extent than BE, without this impacting on overall improvement in psychological wellbeing (as captured by the Ryff Scales). A follow-up use of PANAS in the SR/CBT study likewise showed a greater range and intensity of expressed feeling, good and bad, in the two words or phrases which participants recorded after each SR session. This is again consistent with the qualitative finding of a far greater diversity of elicited emotion in SR as compared with CBT and an expanded vocabulary for emotional expression. Furthermore, words recorded following CBT tended strongly towards the cognitive (‘interesting’, ‘informative’, ‘educational’) and were narrow in range. SR produced extensive emotional expression together with a more expansive range of cognitive words (‘intrigued’, ‘attentive’, ‘concentrated’, ‘thoughtful’, ‘reflective’, ‘alert’, ‘determined’, ‘focused’, ‘deep’, ‘understanding’, ‘thought-provoking’). This quantifiable evidence gave strong corroboration to the hypotheses emerging from qualitative data analysis that, whereas CBT encouraged a top-down strategy of mind over matter, SR tended to bring into conscious awareness and verbal explicitness hitherto inarticulate and implicit pain as from below upwards. CBT sought to manage emotions by means of system­atic techniques, whereas SR helped to ‘find’ the buried life at its personal-emotional source and to turn even the passive experience of suffering into articulate exploration of painful concerns.31 Further research will require more longitudinal studies of the value of reading in a life. Reading and the brain The hypothesis thus emerging from qualitative and qualitative research – that shared reading creates live activation of often under-used aspects of self, in disruption of default mechanisms – has received further support over the past decade from CRILS’ work with neuroscientists, conducted in relation to individuals reading alone. Brain imaging puts to the test William James’s experiential idea of hot spots lighting up in the nascent thinking of the brain. The first experiment in this area examined the effect on brain activity of Shakespeare’s characteristic use of functional shift (FS).32

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FS is the process by which one part of speech is dramatically transformed into another grammatical mode without significant change of shape, offering a powerfully compressed instance of Shakespeare’s rapid movement from one sense to another, as achieved in the sudden creation of metaphor. Thus ‘To lip a wanton in a secure couch’ (Othello, IV.i.70); ‘He childed as I fathered’ (King Lear, III.vi.103); ‘I shall see/Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness/I’ the posture of a whore’ (Antony and Cleopatra, V.ii.215–17).33 Using electro­ encephalography (EEG), the study measured the electrical activity in the brain produced by sentences in which FS occurs relative to control sentences. The processing of, for example, (a) Shakespeare’s ‘A father and a gracious aged man: him have you madded’ (King Lear) was compared with that of three equivalent sentences in which the critical word was replaced (b) by a simple norm (enraged), (c) a semantically incongruent verb (poured) and (d) a verb at once semantically and syntactically unsuitable (charcoaled). In EEG an increase in the amplitude of the P600 wave signals the violation of the syntactic structure of a sentence (peaking 600 milliseconds after the word which upsets grammatical integrity) and an increase in the N400 wave (occurring 400 milliseconds after the triggering word) takes place when the semantic integrity of a sentence seems disrupted, in defiance of meaningfulness. In the above examples, sentence (b) is the control with no semantic or grammatical violations; (d) is the wildest example, effecting both semantic and grammatical violations; and (c) is like a purposeless version of the difficulty in processing a functional shift, making only nonsense. The achievement of (a) is that the brain can still recognise fundamental sense amidst the electric surprise of ‘madded’, which meanwhile creates a suddenly raised level of attention and a newly primed alertness to difficulty. This is a positive use of what is called prediction error,34 but here is no error, neither mistake by the poet nor incapacity in the reader. Instead, by the baulking of simple ­automacity – adjective, noun, verb travelling all too easily left to right across the page – FS forces the mind away from knowing in advance into enlivened search for pathways to meaning. Further experimentation on FS with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)35 showed there was a shift in activation from normal automatic processing structures in the left hemisphere to additional networks in the right hemisphere usually involved in decoding non-literal aspects of language. This included activity in the basal ganglia, also observed when bilinguals are led to switch from one language to another – as if such poetry were indeed a second language. This is the literary brain in action.

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The most recent fMRI experiments,36 extending beyond Shakespeare, required participants to read in the scanner sixteen four-line texts, eight adapted from poems and eight prosaic paraphrases as a control, four of each type consisting of a fourth line ‘a-ha’ moment of surprise, causing reappraisal of the lines that preceded it. It was found that with both poetic and control ‘a-ha’s, there was increased activity in the inferior temporal gyrus (updating meaning) and the hippo­ campus (consolidating new meaning). But with the poetic ‘a-ha’s the left caudate nucleus was additionally activated – as it was with Shakespeare’s functional shift. The left caudate nucleus recognises prediction errors (at dorsal) and creates with it an immediate sense of reward (at ventral). It is also known to be an activation particularly under-utilised in those suffering from depression. This finding suggests (i) that a willing ability to update expectancies/thoughts/ beliefs on the basis of new evidence is related to a greater awareness of what is poetic and (ii) that increased experience of poetic flexibility in accepting and consolidating fresh meanings, and finding intrinsic reward in so doing, may increase mental wellbeing. The next stages of research will replicate these experiments in terms of eye-tracking, to detect moments of hesitation and back-tracking. CRILS’ most recent innovation, under Dr Christophe de Bezenac, is to begin to add a variety of physiological measures of emotion and arousal – wrist-bands measuring heart-beat, temperature and galvanic skin reactions, eye-tracking, pupil dilation, intra-group eye-contact modelled on filmed research into mother–child attachments, papillation. Recognition of the need for such measures was first provoked by the sight on video-recordings of the physical effects on individuals within the reading group, especially at moments of arousal where verbal articulation demonstrably struggles, and re-emphasised in the metaphors of being struck or hit employed at interview. Literary reading demands not merely a cerebral understanding but a physical mentality: A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,  And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.37

Accordingly, the aim is to produce a multidisciplinary methodology that models the multidimensional complexity of serious literary reading, driving mentality through its physical and emotional origins into articulated meaning. Future researchers in this area will seek to re-create through their methods a fuller picture of what it is to be a serious literary reader and by their efforts learn more than the

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history of reading has ever provided before. This is vital not just as knowledge but as evidence, if a future society is to encourage reading as a crucially human activity. Notes   1. See Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 2nd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), chs 2 and 8 (pp. 58–91, 256–97).   2. Matthew Arnold, ‘The Buried Life’, in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (London: Longman, 1965), pp. 271–6.   3. Quoted in Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2008), p. 143.  4. All CRILS’ research studies have been approved by University of Liverpool Research Ethics Committee or the regional NHS Research Ethics Committee.   5. See: (i) Philip Davis, Josie Billington, Rhiannon Corcoran et al., ‘Cultural Value: Assessing the Intrinsic Value of The Reader’s Shared Reading Scheme’ (2015), at ; (ii) Josie Billington, Andrew Jones, et al., ‘A Comparative Study of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Shared Reading for Chronic Pain’ (2016), at ; and (iii) Philip Davis, Fiona Magee and Kremona Koleva, ‘What Literature Can Do’ (2016), at (all ac­cessed 4 December 2019).   6. Josie Billington, Is Literature Healthy? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 3.  7. J. M. G. Williams, ‘Autobiographical Memory in Depression’, in D. C. Rubin (ed.), Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 244–70.  8. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, ed. Martin E. Marty (1902; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 197.  9. John Clare, ‘I Am’ (1848), in Jane Davis (ed.), Poems to Take Home (Liverpool: The Reader, 2011), p. 10. 10. Wilfred R. Bion, Learning from Experience (London: Maresfield, 1962), p. 56. 11. Dorianne Laux, ‘For the Sake of Strangers’, in What We Carry (Brockport: BOA, 1994), p. 23. 12. William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed. John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 91. 13. Rhiannon Corcoran, in Davis et al., ‘What Literature Can Do’.

304   Philip Davis and Josie Billington 14. Patrycja Kaszynska, ‘Capturing the vanishing point: subjective experiences and cultural value’, Cultural Trends, 24 (2015), pp. 256–66 (pp. 261–2). 15. Komena Koleva, in Davis et al., ‘What Literature Can Do’. 16. The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. E. C. Lathem (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), p. 105. 17. Arnold, ‘The Buried Life’, p. 275. 18. Eugene Gendlin, ‘The New Phenomenology of Carrying Forward’, Continental Philosophy Review, 37 (2004), p. 131. 19. James W. Pennebaker, The Secret Life of Pronouns (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), p. 108. 20. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, ed. Michael Slater (Harmonds­ worth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 126. 21. Robert Herrick, ‘To Anthea, Who May Command Him Anything’, in Christopher Ricks (ed.), The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 144. 22. Claire Petitmengin, ‘Describing One’s Subjective Experience in the Second Person: An Interview Method for the Science of Consciousness’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5:3–4 (2006), pp. 229–69. 23. Arnold, ‘The Buried Life’, p. 274. 24. See Eleanor Longden, Philip Davis, Josie Billington, Rhiannon Corcoran, et al., ‘Shared Reading: Assessing the Intrinsic Value of a Literature-Based Health Intervention’, Journal of Medical Humanities, 41:2 (2015), pp. 113–20 (p. 114). 25. See Josie Billington, Andrew Jones, et al., ‘A Comparative Study of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Shared Reading for Chronic Pain’, Journal of Medical Humanities, 43 (2016), pp. 155–65 (p. 157). 26. See Mika V. Mäntylä, et al., ‘The Evolution of Sentiment Analysis’, Computer Science Review, 27 (2018), pp. 16–32. 27. Ruth Tennant et al., ‘The Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS)’, Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, 5:63 (2007), pp. 1–13. 28. C. D. Ryff, ‘Happiness Is Everything, or Is It? Explorations on the Meaning of Psychological Well-being’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57:6 (1989), pp. 1069–81. 29. See Longden et al., ‘Shared Reading’, pp. 114–15. 30. D. Watson, L. A. Clark and A. Tellegen, ‘Development and Validation of Brief Measures of Positive and Negative Affect: The PANAS Scale’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54 (1988), pp. 1063–70. 31. See Billington et al., ‘A Comparative Study’, pp. 20–4. 32. Philip Davis, Guillaume Thierry, Neil Roberts and Victorina Gonzalez-​ Diaz, ‘Event-Related Potential Characterisation of the Shakespearean Functional Shift in Narrative Sentence Structure’, NeuroImage, 40 (2008), pp. 923–31.

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33. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 842, 929, 1034. 34. See J. B. Tenenbaum et al., ‘Theory-Based Bayesian Models of Inductive Learning and Reasoning’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10:7 (2006), pp. 309–18. 35. Philip Davis, James L. Keidel and Victorina Gonzalez-Diaz, ‘How Shakespeare Tempests the Brain: Neuroimaging Insights’, Cortex, 48 (2012), pp. 21–64. 36. Noreen O’Sullivan, Philip Davis, Josie Billington, Victorina G ­ onzalez-​ Diaz and Rhiannon Corcoran, ‘Shall I compare thee: The Neural Basis of Literary Awareness, and Its Benefits to Cognition’, Cortex, 73 (2015), pp. 144–57. 37. Arnold, ‘The Buried Life’, p. 275.

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Ashley, Mike, and Robert A. W. Lowndes, The Gernsback Days: A Study of the Evolution of Modern Science Fiction From 1911 to 1936 (Holicong: Wildside Press, 2004). Ashwell, A. R., and R. Wilberforce, Life of the Right Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, D.D., Lord Bishop of Oxford and afterwards of Winchester, with selections from his Diaries and Correspondence, 3 vols (London: Murray, 1879–82). Asimov, Isaac, I, Asimov: A Memoir (New York: Bantam, 1995). Asimov, Isaac, It’s Been a Good Life, ed. Janet Jeppson Asimov (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2002). Attar, K. E., ‘Victorian Readers and Their Library Records Today’, in Matthew Bradley and Juliet John (eds), Reading and the Victorians (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 99–110. Auerbach, Jeffery A., ‘Imperial Boredom’, Common Knowledge, 11 (2005), pp. 283–305. Augst, Thomas, and Kenneth Carpenter (eds), Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). Azikiwe, Nnamdi, My Odyssey: An Autobiography (London: Hurst, 1970). Bacon-Smith, Camille, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). Baines, Thomas, Journal of Residence in Africa, 1842–1853, ed. R. F. Kennedy, 2 vols (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1961–4). Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia, ‘How the Growing Generation Gap Is Changing the Face of Fandom’, Daily Dot, 25 August 2014, available at (last accessed 19 November 2019). Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia, ‘What Not to Do When Teaching Class About Fanfiction’, Daily Dot, 25 February 2015, available at (accessed 7 Novem­ ber 2017). Baldick, Chris (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Barnhisel, Greg, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Barzun, Jacques, Music in American Life (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956). Bebbington, David, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Becker, J., and K. Stornig (eds), Menschen – Bilder – Eine Welt. Ordnungen von Vielfalt in der religiösen Publizistik um 1900 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2018). Bell, Bill, ‘Bound for Australia: Shipboard Reading in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Australian Studies, 25 (2001), pp. 5–18. Bell, Bill, ‘Print Culture in Exile: The Scottish Emigrant Reader in the

308  Select Bibliography Nineteenth Century’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 36 (1998), pp. 87–106. Benedetti, Giovanni Battista, Speculationum liber (Venice: B. Barezzi, 1599; ‘Book of investigations’). Benezet, Louis Tomlinson, ‘Modern Mythology in Women’s Education’, Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, 36:3 (1950). Benezet, Louis Tomlinson, ‘What Is Our Deadline?’, Journal of Higher Education, 20:6 (1949). Bennett, Arnold, Letters of Arnold Bennett, ed. James Hepburn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). Bergen, Daniel P., ‘Communist and American Cultural Strategy in Asia, Africa, and Latin America’, Library Quarterly, 32:2 (April 1962), p. 125. Berman, Lila Corwin, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Bernstein, Leonard, The Joy of Music (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959). Berry, Stephen R., A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life and Atlantic Crossings to the New World (London: Yale University Press, 2015). Bhabha, Homi K., ‘Signs Taken For Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817’, Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), pp. 144–65. Billington, Josie, Is Literature Healthy? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Billington, Josie, Andrew Jones, et al., ‘A Comparative Study of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Shared Reading for Chronic Pain’, Journal of Medical Humanities, 43 (2016), pp. 155–65. Binns, John, Recollections of the Life of John Binns (Philadelphia: J. Binns, 1854). Bion, Wilfred R., Learning from Experience (London: Maresfield, 1962). Blanchard, Jane, ‘The Book on Seamanship in “Heart of Darkness”’, Pacific Coast Philology, 45 (2010), pp. 42–52. Bollmann, S., Frauen die lesen, sind gefährlich (Munich: Elisabeth Sandmann Verlag, 2005). Bongo, Pietro, Petri Bungi Bergomatis Numerorum Mysteria, 2nd edition (Bergamo: C. Ventura, 1591; ‘The mysteries of numbers by Pietro Bongo of Bergamo’). Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso, Euclides restitutus, siue, Prisca geometriae elementa, breuiùs, & faciliùs contexta (Pisa: F. Onofri, 1658; ‘Euclid restored, or, the ancient elements of geometry presented more briefly and easily’). Boscovich, Ruggero Giuseppe, Philosophiae naturalis theoria (Venice, 1763; ‘Theory of natural philosophy’). Boswell, James, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

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Bourne, H. R. F., et al., John Stuart Mill: notices of his life and works, together with two papers written by him on the land question, reprinted from The Examiner (London: Dallow, 1873). Bowers, Brian, Lengthening the Day: A History of Lighting Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Bradley, Marion Zimmer, ‘My Trip Through Science Fiction’, Algol, 15:1 (1978), pp. 10–20. Bradley, Matthew, ‘Gladstone’s Unfinished Synchrony: Reading Afterlives and the Gladstone Database’, in Matthew Bradley and Juliet John (eds), Reading and the Victorians (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 127–42. Bredin, Miles, The Pale Abyssinian: A Life of James Bruce, African Explorer and Adventurer (London: HarperCollins, 2000). Bridge, Bewick, Compendious Treatise on the Elements of Plane Geometry (London, 1818). Bridges, Roy, ‘Exploration and Travel Outside Europe’, in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 53–69. Brown, David, Robert Crowcroft and Gordon Pentland (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Bury, Rhiannon, Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online (London: Peter Lang, 2005). Buschman, John E., and Gloria J. Leckie (eds), The Library as Place: History, Community and Culture (Westport: Libraries Unlimited, 2007). Calvin, Ritch, ‘Science Fiction in the Academy in the 1970s’, in Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link (eds), The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 460–78. Calwer Verlag, 175 Jahre Calwer Verlag (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 2011), available at (accessed November 2019). Calwer Verlagsverein, Calwer Historisches Bilderbuch der Welt, facsimile reprint (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1987) of Bilder-Tafeln zur Länder- und Völker-Kunde mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der evangelischen Missionsarbeit (Calw: Calwer Verlag, 1883). Cannon, Garland, ‘Sir William Jones, Persian, Sanskrit and the Asiatic Society’, Histoire Epistémologie Langage, 6 (1984), pp. 83–94. Carlson, Benjamin, ‘How to Listen to Classical Music, and Enjoy It’, Atlantic, 9 June 2010, available at (accessed 29 April 2018). Carlson, William H., ‘The World Wakes Up to Read’, American Library Association Bulletin, 52:8 (September 1958), p. 633. Carrington, André M., Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). [Carter, James], Memoirs of a Working Man (London: Charles Knight, 1845).

310  Select Bibliography Casteras, Susan P., ‘Reader, Beware: Images of Victorian Women and Books,’ Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 3:1 (spring 2007), available at (last accessed 11 November 2019). Catalogue of Books in the General Library and in the South Library of University College London (3 vols, London: Taylor and Francis, 1879). Catalogue of the Library of the University of London, Including the Libraries of George Grote and Augustus De Morgan (London: Taylor and Francis, 1876). Catalogue of the Valuable Library of . . . Sir Joseph Littledale ([London: S. L. Sotheby, 1843]). Cavallo, Guglielmo, and Roger Chartier (eds), A History of Reading in the West (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). Cavell, Janice, Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818–1860 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). Chapple, J. A. V., and Arthur Pollard (eds), Letters of Mrs. Gaskell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). Christy, Miller (ed.), The Voyages of Captain Luke Foxe of Hull and Captain Thomas James of Bristol, 2 vols (London: Hakluyt Society, 1894). Clare, John, ‘I Am’ (1848), in Jane Davis (ed.), Poems to Take Home (Liverpool: The Reader, 2011), p. 10. Clark, Frances Elliott, Music Appreciation with the Victrola for Children (Camden: Victor Talking Machine Company, 1923). Clarke, Steve (ed.), Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (London: Zed Books, 1999). Clavius, Christoph, Theodosii Tripolitae Sphaericorum libri III (Rome: D. Basa, 1586; translated into English as Clavius’s Commentary on the Sphericks of Theodosius Tripolitae). Claxton, Timothy, Hints to Mechanics, on Self-Education and Mutual Instruction (London: Taylor and Walton, 1839). Clinton, Catherine (ed.), Fanny Kemble’s Journals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Close, John, The Satirist; or, Every Man in His Humour (Appleby: John Biggs, 1833). Coccaeus, Jacobus, Epistola de mundi, que circumferuntur systematis et novo alio (Amsterdam: J. Ravestein, 1660; ‘Letter about the world, which revolves around a new and different system’). Coe, William, Two East Anglian Diaries, ed. Matthew Storey (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1994). Cohen, Charles Lloyd, and Paul S. Boyer (eds), Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). Colclough, Stephen, Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–1870 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Cole, C., ‘John N. Muafangejo 1943–1987. A Perspective on His Lino-cuts

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312  Select Bibliography Darwin, John, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-­ System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Darwin, John, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Penguin Books, 2013). David, Robert G., The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Davies, Dominic, Erica Lombard and Benjamin Mountford (eds), Fighting Words: Fifteen Books That Shaped the Postcolonial World (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017). Davis, Caroline, ‘Creating a Book Empire: Longmans in Africa’, in Caroline Davis and David Johnson (eds), The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Davis, Caroline, Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Davis, Jane (ed.), Poems to Take Home (Liverpool: The Reader, 2011). Davis, Philip, Guillaume Thierry, Neil Roberts and Victorina Gonzalez-​Diaz, ‘Event-Related Potential Characterisation of the Shakespearean Functional Shift in Narrative Sentence Structure’, NeuroImage, 40 (2008), pp. 923–31. Davis, Philip, James L. Keidel and Victorina Gonzalez-Diaz, ‘How Shakespeare Tempests the Brain: Neuroimaging Insights’, Cortex, 48 (2012), pp. 21–64. Dawood, Samy, ‘We Are No Enemies of Culture’, Al-Gomhoria, 27 October 1955. de Kosnick, Abigail, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016). De Morgan, Augustus, A Budget of Paradoxes (London: Longmans, Green, 1872). De Morgan, Augustus, Arithmetical Books from the Invention of Printing to the Present Time (London: Taylor and Walton, 1847). De Morgan, Augustus, ‘Bacon Roger’, in Penny Cyclopaedia, Vol. III (London: C. Knight, 1835), pp. 241–4. De Morgan, Augustus, ‘On the Almost Total Disappearance of the Earliest Trigonometrical Canon’, London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 26 (1845), pp. 517–26. De Morgan, Sophia Elizabeth, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan (London: Longmans, Green, 1882). De Morgan, Sophia Elizabeth, Threescore Years and Ten: Reminiscences of the Late Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, ed. Mary A. De Morgan (London: Bentley, 1895). de Omerique, Antonius Hugo, Analysis geometrica (Gadibus: C. de Requena, 1698; ‘Analysis of geometry’). Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Carol, ed. Michael Slater (Harmonds­worth: Penguin Books, 1965). Dizard, Wilson P., The Strategy of Truth: The Story of the U.S. Information Service (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1961).

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Dolby, Sandra K., Self-Help Books: Why Americans Keep Reading Them (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). Dorling, Alison R., ‘The Graves Mathematical Collection in University College London’, Annals of Science, 33 (1976), pp. 307–9. Douglas-Lithgow, Robert Alexander, The Life of John Critchley Prince (Manchester: Abel, Heywood, and Son, 1880), p. 10. Drabble, Margaret, Arnold Bennett (London: Arts Book Society, 1974). Duedahl, Poul (ed.), A History of UNESCO: Global Actions and Impacts (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Duff Gordon, Lady Sarah, Letters from the Cape, ed. John Purves (London: Humphrey Milford, 1921). Duffus, R. L., Books, Their Place in a Democracy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930). Duncan, James, and Derek Gregory (eds), ‘Writes of Passage’: Reading Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 1999). Dutens, Louis, Origine des découvertes attribuées aux modernes (London: Spilsbury, 1796). Edgerton, David, Britain’s War Machine (London: Allen Lane, 2011). Ekirch, A. Roger, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). Elahi, Khawaja Noor, ‘Role of Libraries in West Pakistan’, Quarterly Journal of the Pakistan Library Association, 1:2–3 (January 1961), p. 1. Elbourne, Elizabeth, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002). Eliot, Frederick May, ‘Peace of Mind’, Atlantic Monthly, July 1946, p. 153. Eliot, Simon, ‘Reading by Artificial Light in the Victorian Age’, in Matthew Bradley and Juliet John (eds), Reading and the Victorians (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), p. 27. Eliot, Simon, ‘Recasting Book History’, Book Collector, summer 2017, pp. 363–75. Ellis, Sarah Stickney, The Mothers of England: Their Influence and Responsibility (London: Fisher, Son and Company, 1843). Engel, Jonathan, American Therapy: The Rise of Psychotherapy in the United States (New York: Gotham Books, 2008). Engelsing, Rolf, Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500–1800 (Stuttgart, 1974). Engelsing, Rolf, ‘Die Perioden der Lesergeschichte in der Neuzeit. Das statische Ausmass und die soziokulturelle Bedeutung der Lektüre’, Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, 10 (1969), cols 944–1002. Erb, P. C. (ed.), The Correspondence of Henry Edward Manning and William Ewart Gladstone, 1833–1891, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Fenster, Valmai, ‘The University of Wisconsin Library School, a History, 1895–1921’, PhD dissertation (University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1977).

314  Select Bibliography Ferguson, Christopher, An Artisan Intellectual: James Carter and the Rise of Modern Britain, 1792–1853 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016). Fichter, James R., So Great a Profitt: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Fidlon, Paul G., and R. J. Ryan (eds), The Journal of Arthur Bowes Smyth: Surgeon, Lady Penrhyn, 1787–1789 (Sydney: Australian Documents Library, 1979). Filstrup, J. M., ‘Franklin Book Programmes/Tehran’, International Library Review 8, 4 (1976). Finkelstein, David, and Alastair McCleery, Introduction to Book History (New York: Routledge, 2005). Fisher, Robin, and Hugh Johnston (eds), Captain Cook and His Times (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1979). Fitzpatrick, Elizabeth B., ‘The Public Library as Instrument of Colonialism: The Case of the Netherlands East Indies’, Libraries and the Cultural Record, 43:3 (2008), p. 283. Flanders, Amy, ‘“Our Ambassadors”: British Books, American Com­petition and the Great Book Export Drive, 1940–60’, English Historical Review, 125:515 (August 2010). Flint, Kate, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Flint, Kate, ‘Traveling Readers’, in Rachel Ablow (ed.), The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience of Victorian Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), pp. 27–46. Flood, R. A., Public Libraries in the Colonies (London: Library Association, 1951). Flower, Desmond (ed.), Letters of Ernest Dowson (London: Cassell, 1967). ‘For Record Programs – A Sounder Pattern’, Musical America, September 1946, p. 24. Francœur, Louis-Benjamin, Théorie du calendrier et collection de tous les calendriers des années passées et futures (Paris: Roret, 1842). Frasca-Spada, M., ‘For Boys and Girls: What Not to Buy’, Wisconsin Library Bulletin, 23:4 (April 1927), pp. 95–6. Frost, Alan, ‘New Geographical Perspectives and the Emergence of the Romantic Imagination’, in Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston (eds), Captain Cook and His Times (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1979), pp. 5–19. Frost, Robert, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. E. C. Lathem (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), p. 105. Fry, Elizabeth, and Katharine Fry, Memoir of Elizabeth Fry, with extracts from her Journal and letters, edited by two of her daughters (London: J. C. Gilpin, 1847). Fulton, R. E., ‘Donald A. Wollheim’s Authoritative Universe: Editors,

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316  Select Bibliography Harmon, Amy, ‘In TV’s Dull Summer Days, Plots Take Wing on the Net’, New York Times, 18 August 1997. Harries, Patrick, ‘Missionaries, Marxists and Magic: Power and the Politics of Literacy in South-East Africa’, Journal of Southern Africa Studies, 27:3 (September 2001), pp. 405–27. Hasain, Mahmud, Quarterly Journal of the Pakistan Library Association, 1:4 (April 1961), p. 9. Hassam, Andrew, No Privacy for Writing: Shipboard Diaries, 1852–1879 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1995). Hazlitt, W. Carew, A Roll of Honour: A Calendar of the Names of over 17,000 Men and Women who throughout the British Isles and in our Early Colonies have Collected mss. and Printed Books from the XIVth to the XIXth Century (London: Quaritch, 1908). Hedstrom, Matthew S., ‘Psychology and Mysticism in 1940s Religion: Reading the Readers of Fosdick, Liebman, and Merton’, in Charles Lloyd Cohen and Paul S. Boyer (eds), Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). Heffer, Simon, The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914 (London: Random House, 2017). Heinze, Andrew R., Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Hellagas, M. R., ‘A Draft of the Science-Fiction Canon to be Proposed at the 1961 MLA Conference on Science Fiction’, Extrapolation, 3:1 (1961), pp. 26–30. Hellekson, Karen L., and Kristina Busse (eds), The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014). Heller, Bernard, ‘Holy Snake Oil’, Menorah Journal, November 1947, pp. 322–7. Henderson, John, Excursions and Adventures in New South Wales (London: W. Shoberl, 1851). Herberg, Will, Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation of Jewish Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951). Herberg, Will, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1960). Herrick, Robert, ‘To Anthea, Who May Command Him Anything’, in Christopher Ricks (ed.), The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 144. Higgitt, Rebekah, Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of Nineteenth-Century History of Science, Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, 2 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007). Hill, Jen, White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagin­ation (New York: State University of New York, 2009). Hill, John, Urania, or, A Compleat View of the Heavens (London: T. Gardner, 1754). Hilton, Matthew, and Rana Mitter, ‘Introduction’, Past and Present, 218: suppl. 8 (2013), pp. 7–28.

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Hoffmann, C., Am Hofe der Buffel (Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung der Berliner Evangel. Missionsgesellschaft, 1909). Hoffmann, C., Einst und Jetzt im Heidenland (Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung der Berliner Evangel, Missionsgesellschaft, 1927). Hoffmann, Miles, ‘A Note to the Classically Insecure’, New York Times, 18 April 2018. Hofmeyr, I., We Spend Our Years as a Tale That Is Told: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1995). Holmes, John Haynes, ‘Toward Serenity’, New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, 31 March 1946, p. 16. Hope, Nicholas, German and Scandinavian Protestantism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Horney, Karen, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937). Horrocks, Stanley H., The Regional Central Library at Enugu, Eastern Nigeria: An Assessment (Paris: UNESCO, May 1961). Howitt, William, ‘Visit to a Working Man’, Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress, 2 (1847), p. 243. Howsam, Leslie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Huish, Robert, Memoirs of the Late William Cobbett, Esq. (London: John Saunders, 1836). ‘Hull Workhouse’, Hull Packet and East Riding Times, 19 November 1843. Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Hunnewell, Sumner Gary, Tolkien Fandom Review: From Its Beginnings to 1964 (2010), online fanzine. Hunter, Andrew (ed.), Thornton and Tully’s Scientific Books, Libraries, and Collectors: A Study of Bibliography and the Book Trade in Relation to the History of Science, 4th edition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Irons, W. J., Apologia Pro Vitâ Ecclesiae Anglicanae: in reply to John Henry Newman (Oxford and London: Parker, 1864). Ising, D., Johann Christoph Blumhardt, Life and Work: A New Biography, trans. M. Ledford (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2009). Jack, B., The Woman Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). Jackson, H. J., Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Jackson, H. J., Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). Jackson, Ian, ‘Approaches to the History of Readers and Reading in ­Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), pp. 1041–54. Jackson Kerr, Donald, Amassing Treasures for All Times: Sir George Grey, Colonial Bookman and Collector (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2006).

318  Select Bibliography Jacox, Francis, At Nightfall and Midnight: Musing After Dark (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1873). James, Henry, Henry James: Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). James, John, ‘The Life of John Nicholson’, in John Nicholson, Poems (London: W. H. Young, 1859). James, William, Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, ed. Martin E. Marty (1902; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985). Jamison, Anne (ed.), Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas: SmartPop Books, 2013). Jarvis, Robin, Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel: Expeditions and Tours in North America (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012). Jauss, Hans Robert, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’, New Literary History, 2 (1970), pp. 7–37. Jenkins, Henry, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992). Jenkins, Paul, ‘The Earliest Generation of Missionary Photographers in West Africa: The Portrayal of Indigenous People and Culture’, Visual Anthropology, 7:2 (1994), p. 115. Jensz, F., ‘Hope and Pity. Depictions of Children in Five Decades of the Evangelisch-Lutherishes Missionsblatt, 1860–1910’, in J. Becker and K. Stornig (eds), Menschen – Bilder – Eine Welt. Ordnungen von Vielfalt in der religiösen Publizistik um 1900 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2018), pp. 260–81. Jensz, F., and H. Acke (eds), Missions and Media: The Politics of Missionary Periodicals in the Long Nineteenth Century (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2013). Joubert, A., et al., The Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowledge (Berlin: Humboldt University, 2015). Kaestle, Carl F., ‘Seeing the Sites: Readers, Publishers, and Local Print Cultures in 1880’, in Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway (eds), Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Kaestle, Carl F., ‘Standardization and Diversity in American Print Culture, 1880 to the Present’, in Carl F. Kaestle et al. (eds), Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 272–93. Kaszynska, Patrycja, ‘Capturing the vanishing point: subjective experiences and cultural value’, Cultural Trends, 24 (2015), pp. 256–66. Kaufman, Paul, Borrowings from the Bristol Library: 1773–1784 (Charlottes­ ville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1960). Kaufman, Paul, ‘The Community Library: A Chapter in English Social History’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 57:7 (1967), pp. 5–67.

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Keighren, Innes M., Charles W. J. Withers and Bill Bell, Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773–1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Kennedy, Dane, The Last Blank Spaces Exploring Africa and Australia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Keller, Dean Howard, ‘The Selection of Phonograph Records for the Library’, Master’s thesis (Kent State University, 1958). Kenney, William Howland, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–45 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Keuchen, M., Bild-Konzeptionen in Bilder- und Kinderbibeln I. Die historische Anfänge und ihre Wiederentdeckung in der Gegenwart (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2016). Knight, Damon, The Futurians: The Story of the Science Fiction ‘Family’ of the 30’s That Produced Today’s Top SF Writers and Editors (New York: John Day, 1977). Knight, Gowin, An Attempt to Demonstrate, that all the Phœnomena in Nature may be Explained by Two Simple Active Principles, Attraction and Repulsion (London, 1748). Köbel, Jacob, Ain new geordnet Rechen biechlin auf den linien mit Rechen pfeningen ([Augsburg: E. Oeglin, 1514]). Koivunen, Leila, Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts (London: Routledge, 2011). Koslofsky, Craig, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Kotei, S. I. A., ‘Some Variables of Comparison Between Developed and Developing Library Systems’, in Basil Amaeshi (ed.), Classical Readings in African Library Development (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2003). Kriel, L., ‘Reflections on the Mission(s) to Capture “the Reader” and “the Book” in Southern African Art’, Critical Arts, 28: 5 (2014), p. 775. Kriel, L., and N. Fossey, ‘The “Reading African” in the Hierarchy of Others as Visualised in the Periodical Der Missionsfreund, Early Twentieth Century’, in J. Becker and K. Stornig (eds), Menschen – Bilder – Eine Welt. Ordnungen von Vielfalt in der religiösen Publizistik um 1900 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2018), pp. 190–1. Lamb, Charles, Popular Fallacies (1826), in The Works of Charles Lamb (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1880), vol. V, pp. 456–7. Lamb, Patricia, and Diana Veith, ‘Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines’, in Donald Palumbo (ed.), Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Litera­ture (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 235–55. Lancour, Harold, ‘Impressions of British West Africa’, American Library Association Bulletin, 52:6 (July 1958), p. 420. Landen, John, The Residual Analysis (London: J. Landen, 1764). Lane, William Coolidge, The Carlyle Collection: A Catalogue of Books on Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great Bequeathed by Thomas

320  Select Bibliography Carlyle to Harvard College Library, Library of Harvard University: Bibliographical Contributions, 26 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Library, 1888). Larbalestier, Justine, The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002). Latham, Michael E., The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and US Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). Lathbury, D. C. (ed.), Correspondence on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1910). Lathem, E. E. (ed.), The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: Henry Holt, 1988). Laugesen, Amanda, ‘“An Inalienable Right to Read”: Unesco’s Promotion of a Universal Culture of Reading and Public Libraries, and Its Involvement in Africa 1948–1968’, English in Africa, 35:1 (May 2008), pp. 67–88. Laugesen, Amanda, Taking Books to the World: American Publishers and the Cultural Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017). Laugesen, Amanda, ‘UNESCO and the Globalization of the Public Library Idea’, Library and Information History, 30:1 (2014), pp. 1–19. Laux, Dorianne, What We Carry (Brockport: BOA, 1994). Leavell, Lori, ‘Recirculating Black Militancy in Word and Image: Henry Highland Garnet’s “Volume of Fire”’, Book History, 20 (2017), pp. 150–87. Lehmann, H., ‘Aus der Geschichte der Berliner Mission in Südafrika’, Mission, March 1984, p. 21. Leitch, Vincent B., American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Lerner, Daniel, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe: Free Press of Glencoe, 1958). Levine, Lawrence W., Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Lichtenberg, Jacqueline, Sondra Marshak and Joan Winston (eds), Star Trek Lives! (New York: Bantam Books, 1975). Liebich, Susann, ‘Connected Readers: Reading Practices and Communities Across the British Empire, c. 1890–1930’, PhD dissertation (Victoria University of Wellington, 2012). Liebman, Joshua Loth, Peace of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946). Lindemann, Erich, ‘Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 101:2 (1944), pp. 143–7. Link, Henry C., and Harry Arthur Hopf, People and Books: A Study of Reading and Book-Buying Habits (New York: Book Industry Committee, Book Manufacturers’ Institute, 1946). Litchfield, Henrietta (ed.), Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters, 1792–1896 (London: John Murray, 1915).

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Lippy, Charles, Being Religious, American Style: A History of Popular Religiosity in the United States (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994). Livingstone, David N., ‘Science, Text and Space: Thoughts on the Geography of Reading’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30 (2005), pp. 391–401. Livingstone, David N., and Charles W. J. Withers (eds), Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). ‘London’, Western Mail, 24 March 1871, p. 2. Long, Elizabeth, ‘Aflame with Culture: Reading and Social Mission in the Nineteenth-Century White Women’s Literary Movement’, in Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway (eds), Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 476–90. Long, Elizabeth, ‘Textual Interpretation as Collective Action’, Discourse, 14:3 (1992), pp. 104–30. Longden, Eleanor, Philip Davis, Josie Billington, Rhiannon Corcoran, et al., ‘Shared Reading: Assessing the Intrinsic Value of a Literature-Based Health Intervention’, Journal of Medical Humanities, 41:2 (2015), pp. 113–20. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, ‘The Ladder of Saint Augustine’ (1858), in The Poetical Works of Longfellow: Cambridge Edition, ed. H. E. Scudder (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), pp. 100–1. Lord, William B., and Thomas Baines, Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life, Travel and Exploration (London: Horace Cox, 1871). Low, Gail, ‘In Pursuit of Publishing: Heinemann’s African Writers Series’, Wasafiri, 17:37 (2002), p. 33. Low, Gail, Publishing the Postcolonial: Anglophone West Africa and Caribbean Writing in the UK 1948–1968 (New York: Routledge, 2011). Ludwig, F., ‘Der Erste Weltkrieg als Einschnitt in der Kirchen und Missions­ geschichte’, in A. Feldtkeller (ed.), Berliner Beiträge Zur Missionsgeschichte (Berlin: Wichern-Verlag, 2003), pp. 8–9. Lyons, Martyn, ‘New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers’, in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds), The History of Reading in the West (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. 312–44. M.S.C., ‘Peace of Mind by Joshua Loth Liebman’, World Affairs, 109:4 (December 1946), p. 300. Maack, Mary Niles, ‘The Role of External Aid in West African Library Development’, Library Quarterly, 56:1 (January 1986), p. 14. MacLeod, Roy, and Philip F. Rehbock (eds), Nature in Its Greatest Extent: Western Science in the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988). MacNeil, Harry, Commonweal, 16 August 1946, p. 437. Major, Susan, Early Victorian Railway Excursions: The Million Go Forth (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Books, 2015).

322  Select Bibliography Manganyi, N. C., Gerard Sekoto: ‘I am an African’. A Biography (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004). Mäntylä, Mika V., et al., ‘The Evolution of Sentiment Analysis’, Computer Science Review, 27 (2018), pp. 16–32. Marshall, P. J., and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Matthew, H. C. G., Gladstone, 1809–1898 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Matthews, Kristin L., Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). Maurois, André, Public Libraries and Their Mission (Paris: UNESCO, 1961). Maymi-Sugrañes, H. J., ‘Cold Warriors: Advancing the Library Modernizing Model in Latin America’, Investigación, 31:72 (2017), p. 191. McAleer, John, Representing Africa: Landscape, Exploration and Empire in Southern Africa, 1780–1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). McAleer, John, and John M. MacKenzie (eds), Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). McColvin, Lionel R., ‘Some Aspects of the Public Library Service’, Library Association Record, December 1947, p. 301. McColvin, Lionel R., The Chance to Read: Public Libraries in the World Today (London: Phoenix House, 1956). McCullar, Clardy, ‘Science Fictioners Way Out Yonder: Regional Convention’, Dallas Morning News, 5 July 1958, section 4, p. 1. McGee, Micki, Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). McHenry, Elizabeth, ‘Reading and Race Pride: The Literary Activism of Black Clubwomen’, in Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway (eds), Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 491–510. McKenzie, David, Ten Years in Australia (London: William Orr, 1851). McKitterick, David, Old Books, New Technologies: The Representation, Conservation and Transformation of Books Since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). McLaine, Ian, Ministry of Morale (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979). ‘Melancholy Suicide’, Morning Chronicle, 12 April 1838. Melbin, Murray, Night as Frontier: Colonizing the World After Dark (New York: Free Press, 1987). Merensky, A., ‘Mogoero oa Basotho oder: Der Basotho-Freund’, Der Missionsfreund, 52:1 (1997), p. 4. Merrick, Helen, The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of SF Feminisms (Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2009). Meyer, Donald, The Positive Thinkers: A Study of the American Quest for

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Health, Wealth and Personal Power from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale (Garden City: Doubleday, 1965). M’Gonigle, G. C. M., and J. Kirby, Poverty and Public Health (London: Gollancz, 1936). Mill, J. S., Autobiography (London: Longmans, 1873). Miller, David, and Peter H. Reill (eds), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and the Representation of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ‘On Visuality’, Journal of Visual Culture, 5:1 (2006), pp. 53–77. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, The Right to Look: A Counter-History of Visuality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Moffat, Robert, Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (London: John Snow, 1842). Montucla, Jean Etienne, Histoire des recherches sur la quadrature du cercle (Paris: A. Jombert, 1754). Morgan, J. A., ‘Illustrating Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, paper presented at the Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the Web of Culture Conference, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture Project (University of Virginia, 2007), available at

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324  Select Bibliography (ed.), American Society Since 1945 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969). Nord, David Paul, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Nyberg, Amy K., Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998). Ogborn, Miles, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Olden, Anthony, ‘“For Poor Nations a Library Service is Vital”: Establishing a National Public Library Service in Tanzania in the 1960s’, Library Quarterly, 75, 4 (October 2005), p. 432. Osgood, Kenneth, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006). O’Sullivan, Noreen, Philip Davis, Josie Billington, Victorina G ­ onzalez-​Diaz and Rhiannon Corcoran, ‘Shall I compare thee: The Neural Basis of Literary Awareness, and Its Benefits to Cognition’, Cortex, 73 (2015), pp. 144–57. Otness, Harold M., ‘Passenger Ship Libraries’, Journal of Library History, 14 (1979), pp. 486–95. Otter, Chris, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). ‘Our Contemporaries’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 26 March 1871, p. 11. ‘Our London Letter’, Newcastle Courant, 24 March 1871, p. 5. Overmier, Judith, ‘Scientific Book Collectors and Collections, Public and Private, 1720 to Date’, in Andrew Hunter (ed.), Thornton and Tully’s Scientific Books, Libraries, and Collectors: A Study of Bibliography and the Book Trade in Relation to the History of Science, 4th edition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 367–91. Pakendorf, G., Berliner Beiträge zur Missionsgeschichte X (Berlin: Wichern-­ Verlag, 2008). Palencia-Roth, Michael, ‘The Presidential Addresses of Sir William Jones: The Asiatick Society of Bengal and the ISCSC’, Comparative Civilizations Review, 56 (2007), pp. 21–39. Palmer, Raymond A., ‘The Observatory’, Amazing Stories, December 1949, p. 6. Parker, John, and Richard Reid (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Passet, Joanne, Cultural Crusaders: Women Librarians in the American West, 1900–1917 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994). Patterson, James T., Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Pawley, Christine, ‘Beyond Market Models and Resistance: Organizations as a Middle Layer in the History of Reading’, Library Quarterly, 79:1 (2009), pp. 73–93.

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Pawley, Christine, ‘“Missionaries of the Book” or “Central Intelligence” Agents: Gender and Ideology in the Contest for Library Education in Twentieth Century America’, Libraries: Culture, History and Society, 1:1 (2017), pp. 72–96. Pawley, Christine, Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late Nineteenth Century Osage, Iowa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). Pawley, Christine, Reading Places, Literacy, Democracy and the Public Library in Cold War America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). Pawley, Christine, ‘Seeking “Significance”: Actual Readers, Specific Reading Communities’, Book History, 5 (2002), pp. 143–60. ‘“Peace of Mind”: A Viewpoint’, Bulletin – Jewish Welfare Service (Trenton, n.d.). Peacock, Thomas Love, Crotchet Castle (1831), in Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle (London: Penguin, 1969). Pearson, David, Books as History: The Importance of Books Beyond Their Texts (London: British Library, 2008). Pearson, David, ‘Provenance and Rare Book Cataloguing: Its Importance and Its Challenges’, in David Shaw (ed.), Books and Their Owners: Provenance Information and the European Cultural Heritage (London: Consortium of European Research Libraries, 2005), pp. 1–9. Penley, Constance, ‘Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture’, in Lawrence Grossberg et al. (eds), Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 479–500. Penley, Constance, NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America (London: Verso, 1997). Pennebaker, James W., The Secret Life of Pronouns (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011). Pepys, Samuel, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1971). Petitmengin, Claire, ‘Describing One’s Subjective Experience in the Second Person: An Interview Method for the Science of Consciousness’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5:3–4 (2006), pp. 229–69. Pfister, Joel, ‘Glamorizing the Psychological: The Politics of the Performances of Modern Psychological Identities’, in Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (eds), Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Porter, Dennis, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Powell, John, ‘Small Marks and Instinctual Responses: A Study in the Use of Gladstone’s Marginalia’, Nineteenth Century Prose, 19:3 (1992), pp. 1–17. Pressler, Christopher, and Karen Attar (eds), Senate House Library, University of London (London: Scala, 2012), no. 33.

326  Select Bibliography ‘Professor De Morgan’, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 32 (1872), pp. 112–18. Projects and Program of the National Committee for Music Appreciation, 1939–40 (Washington, DC: National Committee for Music Appreciation, 1939). Projects and Program of the National Committee for Music Appreciation, 1940–41 (Washington, DC: National Committee for Music Appreciation, 1940). Pugh, Sheenagh, The Democratic Genre (Glasgow: Seren Books, 2005). Randolph, David, This Is Music (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964). Ranganathan, S. R., Library Needs of Renascent India: Presidential Address, Eighth All India Library Conference, Nagpur, 20–22 January 1949 (Delhi: University Press, 1949). Rao, K. Ramakrishna, ‘Library Development in India’, Library Quarterly, 31:2 (April 1961), p. 151. Raven, James, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor, ‘Introduction: The Practice and Representation of Reading in England’, in James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–21. ‘Reading in Bed’, Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 3 February 1853. Rebel, E., Druckgrafik. Geschichte und Fachbegriffe (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2009). ‘References for the History of the Mathematical Sciences’, British Almanac of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge for the Year 1843 (1843), pp. 40–65. Regiomontanus, Joannes, Calendarium (Nuremberg: J. Regiomontanus, 1474). Reitsma, Lillian M., ‘As Life Ebbs’, American Journal of Nursing, 48:3 (March 1948), pp. 171–2. Report of the Select Committee on Public Libraries (London: [Hansard], 1850). Rhäticus, Georg Joachim, Canon doctrinae triangulorum (Leipzig: W. Günther, 1551; ‘Canon of the doctrine of triangles’). Riccioli, Giovanni Battista, Geographiae et hydrographiae reformatae libri duodecim (Venice: G. La Noù, 1672; ‘Twelve books of reformed geography and hydrography’). Rice, Adrian, ‘Augustus De Morgan: Historian of Science’, History of Science, 34 (1996), pp. 201–40. Ricks, Christopher (ed.), The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Rieff, Philip, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (1966; Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006). Rietbergen, P., Europe: A Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1998). Rippe, Christoph, ‘Auxiliary Modes of Collecting: Circulation and Curation of Photographs from the Marianhill Mission in KwaZulu-Natal,

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1880–1914’, in C. Hamilton and N. Leibhammer (eds), Tribing and Untribing the Archive (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2016), p. 411. Roe, G., ‘Challenging the Control of Knowledge in Colonial India: Political Ideas in the Work of S. R. Ranganathan’, Library and Information History, 26:1 (March 2010), p. 22. Rogers, Shef, ‘Enlarging the Prospects of Happiness: Travel Reading and Travel Writing’, in Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. V: 1695–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 781–90. Rose, Jonathan, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 2nd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Rubin, D. C. (ed.), Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Rubin, Joan Shelley, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007). Rubin, Joan Shelley, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). Rukavina, Alison, The Development of the International Book Trade, 1870–1895 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Ruskin, John, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, 4 vols (London: George Allen, 1871–84). Ruskin, John, Letters to M.G. and H.G., ed. G. O’B. Wyndham (Edinburgh and London: p.p., 1903). Russ, Joanna, ‘Another Addict Raves About K/S’, Nome, no. 8 (1985), pp. 27–38. Russ, Joanna, ‘Pornography by Women for Women, with Love’, in Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays (New York: Crossing Press, 1985), pp. 79–99. Russell, A. S., ‘Augustus De Morgan, a Forgotten Worthy’, The Listener, 24 December 1935, p. 1161. Russell, George William Erskine, The Right Honourable William Ewart Gladstone (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1891). Rüther, K., ‘“Sekukuni, Listen!, Banna!, and to the Children of Frederick the Great and our Kaiser Wilhelm”: Documents in the Social and Religious History of the Transvaal, 1860–1890’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 34:3 (2004), p. 226. Rutter, William, ‘American Books in South Asia’, Library Trends, 5 (July 1956), p. 112. Ryff, C. D., ‘Happiness Is Everything, or Is It? Explorations on the Meaning of Psychological Well-being’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57:6 (1989), pp. 1069–81. Safier, Neil, ‘“Every day that I travel . . . is a page that I turn”: Reading and Observing in Eighteenth-Century Amazonia’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 70 (2007), pp. 103–28.

328  Select Bibliography ‘Saturday’s Police’, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 19 November 1843. Saunders, Frances Stonor, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999). Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davis (Berkeley: University California Press, 1995). Schneider, Louis, and Sanford M. Dornbusch, Popular Religion: Inspirational Books in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Scott, T., The Force of Truth: An Authentic Narrative (London: Keith, Johnson, 1779). Secord, James, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Sewell, Elizabeth Missing, Impressions of Rome, Florence, and Turin, By the Author of ‘Amy Herbert’ (London: Longmans, 1862). Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Shakespeare, William, The Sonnets, ed. John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999). Shaw, David (ed.), Books and Their Owners: Provenance Information and the European Cultural Heritage (London: Consortium of European Research Libraries, 2005). Shimmin, Isaac, ‘An Adventure with a Lion in Mashonaland’, Wesleyan Mission­ary Notices, March 1892, p. 60. Shippey, Tom, ‘Learning to Read Science Fiction’, in Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). Sicherman, Barbara, Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Simcox, Edith, ‘On the Influence of John Stuart Mill’s Writings’, Contem­ porary Review, 22 (June–November 1873), pp. 297–317. Skallerup, Harry R., Books Afloat and Ashore: A History of Books, Libraries, and Reading Among Seamen During the Age of Sail (Hamden: Archon Books, 1974). [Skottowe, A.], A Memoir of the Life and Writings of Charles Mills (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1828). Smith, Bernard, European Vision and the South Pacific (London: Yale University Press, 1985). Smith, Bernard, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1992). Smith, Erin A., What Would Jesus Read? Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Smith, G. C., The Boole–De Morgan Correspondence, 1842–1864 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

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Smith, Mary, The Autobiography of Mary Smith, Schoolmistress and Nonconformist (London: Bemrose and Sons, 1892). Snead, Jennifer, ‘The Work of Abridgements: Readers, Editors and Expectations’, in Bonnie Gunzenhauser (ed.), Reading in History: New Methodologies from the Anglo-American Tradition (Brookfield: Pickering and Chatto, 2010). Soames, C., ‘A Perilous Ride’, Belgravia, 19 (January 1873), pp. 386–9. Spaeth, Sigmund, At Home with Music (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1941). Spaeth, Sigmund, The Common Sense of Music (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924). Spate, O. H. K., ‘Seamen and Scientists: The Literature of the Pacific, 1697–1798’, in Roy MacLeod and Philip F. Rehbock (eds), Nature in Its Greatest Extent: Western Science in the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988), pp. 13–26. St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cam­bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Stafford, Barbara Maria, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984). Starker, Steven, Oracle at the Supermarket: The American Preoccupation with Self-Help Books (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1989). ‘Statistics of Fires in London’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 7 (1844), pp. 261–2. Stearns, Peter, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994). Steinberg, Milton, Basic Judaism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975). Steinberg, Milton, ‘Between Religion and Psychiatry’, The Reconstructionist, 12:10 (1946), pp. 28–30. Stevin, Simon, Problematum geometricorum . . . libri V (Antwerp: J. Beller ([1583]; ‘Five books of geometrical problems’). Stirling, A. M. W., William De Morgan and His Wife (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1922). Stoodley, S. G., ‘SOLD! Gerard Sekoto’s “Three School Girls” Fetches More Than $400,000 at Bonhams – Almost Double Its Low Estimage’, The Hot Bid, 14 September 2018, at (accessed November 2019). Storey, John, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Cultures, 2nd edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). Stornig, K., and J. Becker, ‘Menschenbilder in Missionszeitschriften: Ordnungen von Vielfalt um 1900’, in J. Becker and K. Stornig (eds), Menschen – Bilder – Eine Welt. Ordnungen von Vielfalt in der religiösen Publizistik um 1900 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2018).

330  Select Bibliography Strang, Ruth May, Exploration in Reading Patterns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942). Stretton, A., ‘The Book in Art’, Art and Australia, 42:4 (2005), pp. 605–8. Stubenrauch, Joseph, ‘“Pleasing Testimony”: Plebeian Voices in the Tract Magazine’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 52 (2019), p. 129. Suarez, Michael F., and Michael L. Turner (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. 5: 1695–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). ‘Suicide in a Railway Carriage’, Daily News, 23 August 1854. Tallmadge, John, ‘From Chronicle to Quest: The Shaping of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle’, Victorian Studies, 23 (1979–80), pp. 325–45. Tebbel, John William, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, Volume III: The Golden Age Between Two Wars, 1920–1940 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1978). Teltscher, Kate, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). Tenenbaum, J. B., et al., ‘Theory-Based Bayesian Models of Inductive Learning and Reasoning’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10:7 (2006), pp. 309–18. Tennant, Ruth, et al., ‘The Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS)’, Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, 5:63 (2007), pp. 1–13. Tennyson, Hallam, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son (London: Macmillan, 1897). ‘The Literary Examiner’, The Examiner, 10 February 1844. ‘The Use of a Tea-Kettle’, Liverpool Mercury, 20 April 1832. Thomas, Nicholas, Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (London: Penguin, 2004). Thompson, E. P., ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38 (1967), p. 61. Thompson, George, Travels and Adventures in Southern Africa, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1827). Thomson, Christopher, The Autobiography of an Artisan (London: J. Chapman, 1847). Thrale, Hester Lynch, Thraliana, ed. Katharine C. Balderston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951). Tilley, Carol L., ‘Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics’, Information and Culture, 47:4 (2012), pp. 383–413. ‘Toiling Upward’, The British Controversialist, 22 (1865), p. 138. Topham, J. R., ‘Scientific Publishing and the Reading of Science in ­Nineteenth-­Century Britain: An Historiographical Survey and a Guide to Sources’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 31 (2000), pp. 559–612. Törnvall, G., ‘From Copper Plate to Color Lithography: On the

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Moderniz­ation of an Illustrated Flora 1800–1900’, Book History, 20 (2017), pp. 126–49. Towsey, Mark R. M., Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and Their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750–1820 (Leiden: Brill, 2010). Turner, Katherine, British Travel Writers in Europe, 1750–1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). van der Heyden, U., Berliner Beiträge zur Missionsgeschichte XIII (Berlin: Wichern-Verlag, 2010). van der Heyden, U., and Andreas Feldtkeller (eds), Missionsgeschichte als Geschichte der Globalisierung von Wissen. Transkulturelle Wissen­ saneignung und -vermittlung durch christliche Missionare in Afrika und Asien im 17., 18. Und 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012). Venn, J. A., Alumni Cantabrigiensis: A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Part II, 1750–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944). Vereinsbuchandlung and I.F. Steinkopf (eds), Missionsbilder IX, West-Afrika (Calw and Stuttgart: 1870). Vereinsbuchandlung and I.F. Steinkopf (eds), Missionsbilder X, Madagaskar (Calw and Stuttgart: 1871). Vereinsbuchandlung and I.F. Steinkopf (eds), Missionsbilder XI, Das Kapland (Calw and Stuttgart: 1873). Vereinsbuchandlung and I.F. Steinkopf (eds), Missionsbilder XII, Südost-­ Afrika (Calw and Stuttgart: 1874). Vincent, David, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-­ Century Working-Class Autobiography (London: Routledge, 1981). Voltaire, Corpus des notes marginales. Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Natalia Elaguina et al. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008–18). Vosseler, Annika, ‘The Self and Other: How the Lutheran Missionary Carl Hoffmann Represented Africa, 1894–1910’, MA dissertation (University of Edinburgh, 2015). W.T., ‘In the Firelight: A Dream’, Belgravia, 5 (1868), pp. 65–6. Waller, Philip, Readers, Writers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Waller, Theodore, ‘Expanding the Book Audience’, in Harold K. Guinzburg, Robert W. Frase and Theodore Waller (eds), Books and the Mass Market (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953). Waller, Theodore, ‘The International Relations Programme of the American Library Association’, American Library Association Bulletin, 53:1 (January 1959), p. 50. Wallis, Helen, ‘Publication of Cook’s Journals: Some New Sources and Assess­ments’, Pacific Studies, 1 (1978), pp. 163–94. Wallis, J. P. R., Thomas Baines of King’s Lynn, Explorer and Artist, 1820–1875 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1941).

332  Select Bibliography Wangemann, H. T., Südafrika und seine Bewohner (Berlin: Missionshaus, 1881). Warrior, Claire, and John McAleer, ‘Objects of Exploration: Expanding the Horizons of Maritime History’, in Charles W. J. Withers and Fraser MacDonald (eds), Geography, Technology and Instruments of Exploration (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 97–118. Watson, D., L. A. Clark and A. Tellegen, ‘Development and Validation of Brief Measures of Positive and Negative Affect: The PANAS Scale’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54 (1988), pp. 1063–70. Watt, Richard, ‘Second Cabin Passage’, Sea Breezes, 22 (1956), pp. 82–92. Webb, Diana, Privacy and Solitude in the Middle Ages (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007). Weidler, Johann Friedrich, Historia astronomiae (Wittenberg: G. H. Schwartz, 1741). Wendt, Lloyd, ‘Gentle Man’s Counsel About Peace of Mind’, Chicago Sunday Tribune, 24 March 1946. West, G. O., The Stolen Bible: From Tool of Imperialism to African Icon (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster, 2016). Westfahl, Gary,  The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998). Wevers, Lydia, Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2010). Wheeler, M., The Athenæum: 200 Years of ‘the brainiest club in the world (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). Wiegand, Wayne A., An Active Instrument for Propaganda (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989). Wiegand, Wayne A., Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey (Chicago: American Library Association, 1996). Wiegand, Wayne A., Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876–1956 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011). Wiegand, Wayne A., ‘The American Public Library: Construction of a Community Reading Institution’, in C. F. Kaestle and J. A. Radway (eds), Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Wilder, Joseph, ‘J. L. Liebman: Peace of Mind’, American Journal of Psychotherapy, 1:3 (1947), pp. 388–90. Williams, Abigail, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the ­Eighteenth-Century Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). Williams, Glyn, Naturalists at Sea: Scientific Travellers from Dampier to Darwin (London: Yale University Press, 2013). Williams, Glyn, Voyages of Delusion: The Search for the Northwest Passage in the Age of Reason (London: HarperCollins, 2010). Williams, J. M. G., ‘Autobiographical Memory in Depression’, in D. C. Rubin

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(ed.), Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 244–70. Williams, M. R., ‘The Scientific Library of Charles Babbage’, Annals of the History of Computing, 3 (1981), pp. 235–40. Wilson, Leon, ‘This Is Music: A Guide to the Pleasures of Listening’, BookOf-The-Month Club News, March 1964. Windscheffel, Ruth Clayton, Reading Gladstone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Withers, Charles W. J., and Fraser MacDonald (eds), Geography, Technology and Instruments of Exploration (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). Wolf, Maryanne, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2008). Wood, Kirsten E., ‘“Join with Heart and Soul and Voice”: Music, Harmony, and Politics in the Early American Republic’, American Historical Review, 119:4 (October 2014), pp. 1083–116. Woolf, Leonard, Letters of Leonard Woolf, ed. Frederic Spotts (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990). Woolf, Virginia, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). Wortley Montagu, Mary, Lady M. W. Montagu’s Letters from France and Italy (London: John Sharpe, 1821). Wright, Thomas, The Autobiography of Thomas Wright (London: John Russell Smith, 1864). Yeates, Amelia, ‘Space and Place in Nineteenth-Century Images of Women Readers’, in Jonathan Rose (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Reading: Common Readers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 96–115. Yeates, Amelia, ‘Women’s Reading and Space in Robert Braithwaite ­Martineau’s The Last Chapter’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 34 (2012), pp. 119–27. Zangwill, Israel, The Melting Pot (New York: American Jewish Book Company, 1914). Zaretsky, Eli, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psycho­ analysis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

Index of Methods and Sources

Annotation (in texts): Attar (Ch. 3); Wheeler (Ch. 4) Assumed/implied readers: Laugesen (Ch. 11) Autobiographies/biographies: Ferguson (Ch. 1); Hammond (Ch. 5); McAleer (Ch. 6) Borrowing (of texts): Laugesen (Ch.11) Circulation (of texts): Fossey and Kriel (Ch. 2); McAleer (Ch. 6); Eliot (Ch. 8) Collection and acquisition habits: Attar (Ch.3), Wheeler (Ch. 4); Coker (Ch. 13); Whavers (Ch. 12) Diaries: McAleer (Ch. 6); Hammond (Ch. 5) Digital scholarship: Coker (Ch. 13) Entangled histories: Laugesen (Ch. 11) Fan Studies: Coker (Ch. 13); Whavers (Ch. 12) Government records: Ferguson (Ch. 1); Laugesen (Ch. 11); Eliot (Ch. 8) Hermeneutics: Rubin (Ch. 10); Davis and Billington (Ch. 14) Images of readers: Ferguson (Ch. 1); Fossey and Kriel (Ch. 2); Hammond (Ch. 5) other: Eliot (Ch. 8); Whavers (Ch. 12) Letters: McAleer (Ch. 6); Oestreicher (Ch. 9); Rubin (Ch. 19); Whavers (Ch. 12) Library records: Laugesen (Ch. 11); Pawley (Ch. 7); Wheeler (Ch. 4); Rubin (Ch. 10) Magazines: Whavers (Ch. 12) Marginalia: Attar (Ch. 3); Wheeler (Ch. 4) Neuroscience: Davis and Billington (Ch. 14) Reception theory: McAleer (Ch. 6) Shared reading: Davis and Billington (Ch. 14) Ships records: McAleer (Ch. 6) Single reader history: Attar (Ch. 3); Wheeler (Ch. 4) Surveys: Eliot (Ch. 8); Pawley (Ch. 7) Theory of emotion: Davis and Billington (Ch. 14) Travelogues: McAleer (Ch. 6) Witness testimony (official): Ferguson (Ch. 1)

334

General Index

Page numbers in italics denote illustrations, those followed by n are notes and by t are tables; numbers preceded by p refer to plates. Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart, 236 Adams, William Davenport, 17 Admiralty Manual of Scientific Enquiry, 131 advertising, 210–12, 217–18 advice manuals, 15, 18 Advisory Commission on Books Abroad, 241 African Book Company, 233 African Christians, 44, 45, 47–50, 53 African libraries, 228, 240–1 American books in, 235–6 African literature, 243 African readers, 30–61, 49 independent, 44–50 women, 243 African-American periodicals, 236 African-Americans, 32 Africanisation, 240 Ahlstrom, Sydney, 194 Airy, George Biddell, 70 Aldous, Richard, 99 All India Library Conference, 232 All Mimsy, 272 Allen, Captain William, 129 Allnutt, William Newton, 22 Amaeshi, Basil, 228 Amazing Stories covers, 250–263, p14, p15, p16 fandom, 268–9 gender breakdown, 259t, 260t Shaver Mystery, 252–3, 260–1, 262

‘The Club House’, 255–6 ‘The Observatory’, 255, 261–2 ‘The Reader’s Forum’, 255–62 American Book Publishers Council, 229 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Committee on Musicology, 206, 222 American Journal of Psychotherapy, 197–8 American librarians reading choices, 145–64 American Library Association (ALA), 146–8, 229, 235 Catalog, 159 American Library Association Bulletin, 226 Anglo-German Evangelical networks, 34–5 annotation, 66–7, 69, 70–1, 73, 74, 75–6, 91–3 Anson, Admiral George, 131 Voyage, 128 Anti-Comics Crusader, 254 Antin, Mary, The Promised Land, 158 Archive of Our Own (AO3), 275 Arkona Mission Station, 37, p4 Arnold, Arthur, 90–1 Arnold, Matthew, ‘The Buried Life’, 283–305 artificial illumination, 10–14; see also candlelight; gaslight Asheim, Lester, 235–6, 239–40, 243

335

336  General Index Ashwell, A. R., Life of Samuel Wilberforce, 84, 95–9 Asia libraries, 236 travelling in, 133, 134 Asimov, Isaac, 250, 252 Association of Comic Magazine Publishers (ACMP), 254–5 Athenaeum, 68–9 Atlanta Science Fiction Organization Press, 270 Atlantic Monthly, 197 Attar, Karen, 2–3 Australia, 132, 135 Azikiwe, Nnamdi, 233 Babbage, Charles, 68 Bacon-Smith, Camille, Enterprising Women, 266–7, 272, 280n Baines, Thomas, 130, 131 Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia, 265 Baldwin, James, 235 Banks, Joseph, 131–2 Barnhisel, Greg, 235 Barth, Gottlob, 34–6, 50 Dr Barth’s Bible Stories, 35 Barzun, Jacques, 212–13, 221–2 Music in American Life, 206 Basel Mission, 44 Baxter, C., 50 ‘Preaching at Masheu’s Village’, 38–9 Bayly, Thomas Haynes, ‘The Fashionable Novel’, 23 BBC, 165, 171 Bebbington, David, The Mind of Gladstone, 84 Belgravia magazine, 20, 111 Bell, Gertrude, 118, 119 Bennett, Arnold, 118 Bentham, Jeremy, 93–4 Berchtold, L., An Essay to Direct and Extend the Inquiries of Patriotic Travellers, 131 Berlin Mission, 47–50, 48

Berlin Missionary Society, 37, 39–41, 44 Bernstein, Leonard, 207 The Joy of Music, 216–21, 222 Berry, Stephen, 137 Besant, Walter, 118 Beyond the Breach: A Pacific Rim Fan Book, 277 Bible Christian family portraits, 50 as enchanting object, 37–8 night reading, 11, 13 on ships, 137 as signifier of order and occupation, 50–2 translated into Hausa, 51 Bienvenu, Harold J., Patterns of Economic Growth: The American Experience, 237 Binns, John, 12, 13, 15 Bion, W. R., 288 Black Orpheus, 243 Blanchard, Jane, 124 Blom, Helwi, 2 Blumhardt, Johann Christoph, 34 Book-of-the-Month Club, 207, 210–13, 214, 222 Book-of-the-Month Club News, 211, 215 books about immigration, 158 about race, 158–9 about women and society, 157–8 affordable, 16–17 by American authors, 234–6, 241–2 educational, 240 physical features of, 72 Boole, George, 69 Boston Public Library, 147, 198 Boswell, James, 112 Bourne, Henry Fox, 91 John Stuart Mill, 92 Bradley, Marion Zimmer, 270–1, 281n

General Index   337

Bradley, Matthew, 84 Brandon, Carl, 278 Brazil, Industrial Social Service travelling library (SESI), Brazil, 231–2 British Controversialist, The, 20 British Council, 227, 234–40 British Library, 128 British Museum, 68 library catalogue, 70–2 Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 291 Browne, Howard, 250–62 Bruce, James, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 129 Bryan, Ray, 256–7 Buckell, Edward, 135–6 Bulletin – Jewish Welfare Service, 198 Bunyan, John, Pilgrim’s Progress, 271 Burton, Frederick Sewell, 16 Bury, Rhiannon, Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online, 274 Busse, Kristina, The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, 268 Byron, Lord, 68 Calderwood, James D., Patterns of Economic Growth: The American Experience, 237 Callan, Thomas, 134 Calw, Württemburg, 34–6 Calw Missionary Society, 34–6 Calw Missionsblatt, 34 Calwer Bilderbuch, 35, 41, 43–7, 45, 46, 50, 52 Calwer Verlag, 34–6, 38–9, 42, 44, 49, 50, 55 Cambridge Circulating Library, 67–8 Canby, Henry Seidel, 213 candlelight, 11–14, 23 Captain America, 277 Carl Brandon Society, 278 Carlson, William H., 226

Carnegie, Andrew, 147 Carpaccio, Vitorre, The Dream of St Ursula (1497–8), p7 Carr, Terry, 278 Carrington, André M., Speculative Blackness, 278 Carter, James, 9, 11, 19, 24 Casteras, Susan P., 105–6, 120 Castle, John, The Scholar’s Guide to Arithmetic, 69 Catholic News, 198 CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), 293, 298–9, 300 censorship, 251, 254, 260–2 Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS), 283–305 Cerf, Bennett, 212 ‘Chambers Portable Library’, 133 Character of the Bible, and the Bible God, The, 76 Chicago Sunday Tribune, 197 children African, 44 health, 177 Christianity, and reading, 30–61 CIA, 234 circulating libraries, 67–8 Clare, John, ‘I Am’, 286–8, 290–1, 294 Clark, Frances Elliott, 208 Appreciation with the Vitrola for Children, 208 Claxton, Thomas, 19 Cleve-Jonand, Agnes Train Compartment, 120, p13 Close, John, 24 Coates, Helen, 217 Cobbett, William, 10 Coe, William, 112 Colclough, Stephen, 17 Cold War, 227, 229–30, 232–5, 241, 244, 251 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 129 Columbia College, 147

338  General Index Columbia Oral History Project, 211–12 Columbia Record Club, 210 Comet, The, 264 comics, 254–5 Commeline, Reverend James, 13 ‘Commentary Scott’, 86–7 Commonweal, 198 Congress of Cultural Freedom, 234 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, 124–5 Contemporary Review, 93 Cook, James, 125, 128, 129, 131–2 Cooley, Arnold James, 15 Cooper, Thomas, 12, 19, 23–4 Cooper, William White, 13 Copernicus, De revolutionibus, 74 Coppa, Francesca, The Fanfiction Reader, 268, 272 Corcoran, Rhiannon, 289 Cornell, Edward, 137 Cosmic Tales, 280n Costello, William, 22 Cot, Pierre Auguste, Pause for Thought/Ophelia (1870), p8 Courcell, A. I am Tir’d of Reading! 18, p2 So am I of Working! 18, p3 Craik, George Lillie, 19 creative inarticulacy, 290–3 Crone, Rosalind, 107 crowdfunding, 276–7 Crowe, Catherine, 16 Current History, 197 Daily Worker, 176 Dampier, William, New Voyage Around the World, 128 Dar es Salaam library, Tanzania, 239 Darwin, Charles, 129–30 Darwin, Emma, 116–17, 119 Davis, Caroline, 240 Daybreak Press, 277 de Bezenac, Dr Christophe, 302 de Certeau, Michel, 140

de Kosnick, Abigail, Rogue Archives, 274 De Morgan, Augustus, 3 Arithmetical Books from the Invention of Printing to the Present Time, 63, 76 A Budget of Paradoxes, 67, 74–5 Greek New Testament, 68 his reading and his library, 62–82 ownership of specific books, 73 De Morgan, Sophia, 63, 66, 67, 69 De Morgan, William, 67–8 de Tabley, Lord, 85 Delhi Public Library, 237–8 Detroit Public Library, 198 Dewey, John, 187 Dewey, Melvil, 146–8, 159 diaries, 85, 87–8, 98, 112, 132, 133, 135 Dicken, William Stephens, 133 Dickens, Charles, 68–9, 135 A Christmas Carol, 293–4 digital coteries, 274–5 digital fan works, downloading, 265–6 digital fandom, 273–4 Diogenes Laërtius, 69 Directory of Graduates, 148 Disraeli, Benjamin, 99, 109 Dixon, William Hepworth, 68 Dizard, Wilson, 234 Dolby, Sandra K., 188 Dornbusch, Sanford M., 186 Dowson, Ernest, 115 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 111 Dr Williams Library, 68 drama, 154–5 Dreamwidth, 275 Drum, 243 duodecimos, 17 Duvenger, Caiman, 22 East African Literature Bureau (EALB), 243 East India Company, 130–1, 133–4

General Index   339

Eastman School of Music, 208–9 Ebony, 236 Echo, The, 90–1 Efanzines.com, 272, 276 Egg, Augustus Leopold The Travelling Companions, 108–9, 114, p12 Egypt, 241, 242 Ekrich, Roger, 11 Elahi, Khawaja Noor, 232 electro-encephalography (EEG), 301 Eliot, Simon, 11, 14, 17 Ellis, Sarah Stickney, 18, 25 ‘emotional excitement’, 286–8 Encyclopaedia Britiannica, 132 Eney, Dick, 280n English Review, 127 engravings, 32, 35–6, 38–47, 50, 52, 53–4 Enugu pilot library, Nigeria, 238–9 Erskine, John, 209 Ethiopia, 129 Examiner, The, 91

Flinders, Lieutenant Matthew, 132 Flint, Kate, 106, 110, 113–14, 116 ‘Travelling Readers’, 107 Flood, R. A., 232 Folliott, Reverend Doctor (character), 17, 20 Foot, Michael, 85–6 Ford Foundation, 241 Franklin Publications, 241–2 Fraser, Alexander, 131 Fraser, John, 137 Fraser, Robert, 168 Fredman, Herbert, 235 Free Library Commission, 148 Frend, William, 63 Freud, Sigmund, 187, 189, 190–1, 194 Frost, Robert, ‘The Road Not Taken’, 291 Fry, Elizabeth, 113, 116 ‘Fuel Communiques’, 177–8 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 301–2 functional shift (FS), 300–2

fan books, 276–8 fan fiction, 264–82, 280n fan readers, 278–9 Fan Studies, 264, 266, 267–8, 270, 272, 275 Fan Theory, 266 fan writing, 268 ‘fanac’, 269 Fanac.org, 276 Fancyclopedia, 275–6, 280n Fanlore, 275–6 Fantastic Adventures, 253, 255, 258 Fantasy Commentator, The, 270 fanzines, 264–5, 270, 272–3, 276, 278, 279n, 281n Ferguson, Christopher, 2 Ficgate, 276 Fighting Words, 227 Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, Home Fires in France, 157

Galloway, Thomas, 67, 69 Gardner, Frank, 237–8 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 115–16 gaslight, 11–12, 14 ‘gatekeeping’, 265 Gendlin, Eugene, 292 George Padmore Library, 239 Gerard, James Watson, My Four Years in Germany, 157 German air raids, 172 German leaflet dropping, 180–1, 184n Germany, missionary publishing, 34–6 Gernsback, Hugo, 250–3, 256, 257, 268–9, 280n Ghana, 236 Ghana Central Library, 239 Gilchrist, John Borthwick, ­Hindostanee Dictionary, 133

340  General Index Gingerich, Owen, 74 Giton, Céline, 244 Gladstone, William annotation, 3 A Chapter of Autobiography, 85–6 Church of England, 85–90 ‘Liberalism’, 86 Library, 87, 92, p6 reading, 83–103 reading by candlelight, 12 The Vatican Decrees, 90 ‘Gladstone’s Reading’ project, 84 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, 16 Goodin, Anne, 243 Gordon, Lucie Duff, 129 Graff, Harvey, 233 Graham, Maria, 129 Granville, Lord, 95 Graves, John Thomas, 66 Great Music, 212–13 grief, 191–3 Hakluyt, Richard, Principall Navigations, 130 Hallegas, Mark R., 279n Halliwell, James Orchard, 65, 70 Halliwell-Phillips, 75 Halsey, Katie, 107 Hamilton, Sir William Rowan, 68, 70 Hammond, Mary, 134–5 Hansen, Robert L., 231 Hanson, Howard, 208–9 Harlem Renaissance, 233 Harmon, Amy, 272 Harris, Clare Winger, 258 Harris, William Cornwallis, 130 Hasain, Dr Mahmud, 232 Hawkesworth, John, 128 Voyages, 128 Hawkins, Professor A. L., 145, 159 Hazeltine, Mary Emogene, 145, 148–51, 153–4, 159–60

Heap, George, ‘Departure in Peace’, 272–3 Hearne, Samuel, Journey . . . to the Northern Ocean, 127 Hedstrom, Matthew, 188, 192 Heffer, Simon, 100 Heinemann, 240 African Writers Series, 243 Heinze, Andrew, 188, 192, 194 Hellekson, Karen L., The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, 268 Heller, Rabbi Bernard, 198 Henderson, John, 137 Herberg, Will, 194 Herrick, Robert, 294 Herschel, John, 68, 69 High Fidelity, 221–2 Hill, Alan, 240 Hindi, books in, 237–8 Hobhouse, Arthur, 85 Hoffmann, Carl, 37–41 African readers, 48–9, 49, 51, 53, 55 engravings, 40 preaching scene from his private diary, p5 self-portrait of, p4 Hoffmann, E. T. A., The Devil’s Elixir, 68 Holmes, Sherlock (character), 111, 268 Holyoake, G. J., J. S. Mill, as Some of the Working Classes Knew Him, 91 Home Intelligence Reports (HIRs), 165–6, 170–81 Home Intelligence Weekly Reports, 170–1 Home Missionary Society, 13 Hook, Gladys M., 145–6, 153, 159 Hoover, J. Edgar, 198 Hope, Nicholas, 35 Hopf, Harry Arthur, 187–8 Horrocks, Stanley, 238–9

General Index   341

‘Housewives’ Attitudes towards Official Campaigns and Instructions’, 178 Howells, William Dean, 117, 135 Howitt, William, 16, 16–17 Hudson, Alice, 154 Huey, Edmund, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading, 284 Hume, David, 135 Hunnewell, Sumner Gary, Tolkein Fandom Review, 272–3 Hutchinson, A. S. M., If Winter Comes, 157 Hyperion Press, 270 I Palantir, 272 Ibáñez, Vicente Blasco, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 156–7 IMPA database, 44, 49–50 Imperial Social Services Organisation, 242 ‘In the Firelight,’ 20, 21, 23, 25 Index librorum prohibitorum, 74–5 India, 133–4, 134, 237 Industrial Revolution, 24 Industrial Social Service travelling library (SESI), Brazil, 231–2 Inglis, John Bellingham, 68 interfaith movement, 194 International Media Guarantee programme, 241 Iran, 241–2 Iranian Children’s Book Council, 242 Irons, Reverend William Josiah, 89–90 Apologia Pro Vita Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 90 Jackson, Colonel Julian, What to Observe; or, Travelling Remembrancer, 131 Jackson, Heather, 71 Marginalia, 62, 84

Jacox, Francis, 16 Jagersma, Rindert, 2 James, Captain Thomas, 131 James, Henry, 117 James, William, 187, 195, 286, 288, 300 James Tiptree, Jr, Award, 278 Jamison, Anne, 276 Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, 268 Jarrett, Jack, 256 Jarvis, Robin, 127 Jauss, Hans Robert, 129 Jenkins, Henry, Textual Poachers, 266–7, 271–2, 280n Jenkins, Paul, 31–2 Johnson, Samuel, 111–12 Johnstone, Ted, ‘The Passing of the Elven-kind’, 272 Jones, William, 133 Clavis campanologia, or, A Key to the Art of Ringing, 67 Judaism, 188–9, 192, 194–8 Jewish readers, 188–9 Jukes, Charles, 42 Kemble, Fanny, 114–15 Kennedy, Charles Rann, The Servant in the House, 155 Kenya, 237 Kepler, Johannes, 67 Kicherer, J. J., 35 Kickstarter, 277 Kidder, Harriet Louise, 151–2 King, Martin Luther, Jr, 199 Kingsley, Charles, 85, 86, 89 Kinsey, Alfred, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Mind, 190 Kirke White, Henry, ‘Time’, 23–4 Knight, Damon, The Futurians, 269, 270 Koleva, Dr Komena, 291 Koslofsky, Craig, 11 Kotei, S. I. A., 239

342  General Index Lamb, Charles, 13, 19 Lamb, Patricia, ‘Romantic Myth, Trans­cendence, and Star Trek Zines’, 266 Lambert, Johann Heinrich, Neues Organon, 68 Lambeth Palace library, 68 Lancashire Wedding; or, Darwin Moralized, The, 116–17 Lancour, Harold, 240 Langford, John Alfred, 16 languages, 133 Anglophone culture, 7 Hindi, books in, 237–8 Hindostanee Dictionary, 133 Larbalestier, Justine, The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, 270 Laux, Dorianne, ‘For the Sake of Strangers’, 288 Leavell, Lori, 32, 35 Legler, Henry, 148 Levine, Lawrence, 209 Lewis, Matthew, The Monk, 12, 23 libraries, 2–3, 227–30 Dar es Salaam library, 239 Delhi Public Library, 237–8 Detroit Public Library, 198 Enugu pilot library, Nigeria, 238–9 Ghana Central Library, 239 Industrial Social Service travelling library (SESI), Brazil, 231–2 Lambeth Palace library, 68 St Deiniol Library, 84 Tripoli USIS library, 236 see also circulating libraries Library Commission, 148 Library of Congress, Recorded Sound Division, 208 Libya, 236 Lichtenberg, Jacqueline, Star Trek Lives! 273 Liebman, Rabbi Joshua Loth, 185–205 Peace of Mind, 185, 186–99

Life, 236 Lindemann, Dr Erich, 192 Lindsay, James Ludovic, 63 linguistic analysis, 289–94 Link, Henry C., 187–8 Lippy, Charles, 186 listservs, 273–5 literacy, 146, 233, 238, 240–1 Literary Guild, 210 literary reading, methodology for, 283–305, 283, 297 Little Orchestra Society, 210 Littledale, Sir Joseph, 76 Livejournal (LJ), 274–5 liveness, 286, 288, 293, 296 Livingstone, David N., 125–6 Locke, John, Works, 84 London Mathematical Society, 63, 68 London Missionary Society, 42 Long, Elizabeth, ‘Tectual Interpretation as Collective Action’, 278–9 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, ‘The Ladder of Saint Augustine’, 20 Longman, 240 Lord, William, 131 Loudon, J. C., 16 Low, Gail, 240 Loyd, Samuel, Baron Overstone, 64, 69, 98 Lusaka USIS library, 236 Maack, Mary Niles, 243–4 Madagascar, 42, 49–50 Maeterlinck, Maurice, The Blue Bird, 154–5 Magee, Fiona, 295–6 Mahonga, John, 50 Major, Susan, 115 Malaya, 234 Manning, Henry, 89, 96 Caesarism and Ultramontanism, 90 marginalia, 62, 84, 86–9, 94, 97, 99

General Index   343

maritime exploration, 127–8 Marshak, Sondra, Star Trek Lives! 273 Marston, C. D., The Position of the Laity in the Church, 85 Martineau, Robert Braithwaite, 20–1 The Last Chapter, 12, 22–3, p1 Mass Observation, 166 Massie, William, 133, 134, 135 mathematical books, 62–82 mathematicians, 62–3 Matthew, Colin, 91, 95 Matthews, Kristin L., 229 Maurice, F. D., Theological Essays, 97 Maurois, André, Public Libraries and Their Mission, 230–1 McCarthy, Ada, 153 McCarthy, Joseph, 234–5 McColvin, Lionel, 229, 231 The Chance to Read: Public Libraries in the World Today, 230 McKenzie, Murdoch, Treatise on Maritime Surveying, 132 McKenzie, Reverend David, 132 Media Theory, 267 Melbin, Murray, 9 Menorah Journal, 198 Merrick, Helen, The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of SF Feminisms, 280n Merril, Judith, 270 Metropolitan Museum, 210 Mill, John Stuart, 75, 90–4 Autobiography, 84, 93–5 Mills, Charles, 21 Ministry of Information (MOI), 165–84 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 31–2 missions, 36–53, 42 African readers, 30–61, 49, 243 book as prop, 30–61 little white girl reading to a black family, 43

Missionsbilder, 35, 42, 44 Mitford, Mary, 129 M’Naughten, Daniel, 22 mobility of mind, 293–4 Modern Language Association, 279n Modern Traveller, The, 127 modernisation, 233, 239 modernity, reading and, 226–49 Modiba, Joel, 51, 52 Modisane, Bloke, 243 Moffat, Robert, 50 Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa, 38–9 Mohan, Kim, 258 Monatsblätter für öffentliche Missions-Stunden, 34 Montagu, George, 138 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 11 Monthly Review, 127 Moravian Mission, 47 Morris, Charles, 159 Morris, George, 137 Moskowitz, Sam, The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom, 269–70 Muafangejo, John, 53, 53–4, 55 Zimbabwe House: This Is St Mary’s Mission 1975, 54 Mudie’s circulating library, 67 Musical America, 215 Music-Appreciation Records, 210–13, 214, 221 Myami-Sugrañes, H. J., 228 Myrdal, Gunnar An American Dilemma, 235–6 Class and Caste in a Southern Town, 235–6 NAACP Journal, 236 National Committee for Music Appreciation, 208–9, 211 NBC, 214 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 237 Neuman, Inez, 260 ‘new readers’, 10, 20

344  General Index New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, 197 New York Mirror, 199 Newman, John Henry, 85–6, 96 Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 84, 86–90, 87 ‘Newspaper Reading Among the Civilian Population’, 166–7 newspapers, 13, 166–7, 170, 171–3, 238–9 shipboard, 138–9 Sunday, 166–7 Nicholson, John, 24 Nicholson, William, 13 Nicoll, William Robertson, 118 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 194 Niger, 45 Nigeria, 233, 235–9 Enugu pilot library, 238–9 night reading, 9–29 advice manuals about, 15 evening reading, 18, 22–3 fires caused by, 13 health dangers of, 21–2 and insanity, 21–2 and intellectual improvement, 19–20 Protestant Reformation, 11 women, 22–3 ‘nocturnalisation’, 11 Noel, Louisa, 96 Nord, David Paul, 186 North Africa, 171–2 Not Without You: A Stucky Anthology, 277 Nyerere, Julius, 233 Oakeley, Frederick, 86 O’Connell, Charles, Victor Book of the Symphony, 217 ‘Official War Books’, 167–9 Ogborn, Miles, 125 Okamura, Dorothy Vigor, 258, 259–60 Okofi, Jakob, 45

Old Bailey, 12, 14–15 Omnibus, 216, 219 Organization for Transformative Works, 275 Otness, Harold, 132 Over the Top, 156 Owens, W. R., 107 Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, The, 1 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 66 Oxford English Dictionary, 272, 273 Oxford Handbook of Modern African History, The, 1 Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, The, 1 Oxford Movement, 85–6 Oxford University Press, 240 wartime pamphlets, 177 paintings, 53–4 Pakistan, 241–2 Pakistan Library Association, 232 Palmer, Raymond A., 250, 251, 252–3, 255, 260 pamphlets, 85, 165–84 paper shortage, 178, 252, 261 Park, Mungo, 129 Paul, John, 20 Pawley, Christine, 227–8 Peacock, Thomas Love, Crotchet Castle, 17 Pearson, David, 66, 74 ‘Penguin Specials’, 177 Penley, Constance ‘Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture’, 266 NASA/Trek: popular Science and Sex in America, 266 Pennebaker, James W., The Secret Life of Pronouns, 293 Penny Cyclopaedia, 74 Pepys, Samuel, 111–12

General Index   345

Pettit, Jemima, 16 Phillips, Rog, 255 photographs, 32, 37, 39–41 Picture Post, 167 placards, 173–4 poetry, 150–6, 286–8 Police Gazette, 147 Pope, William, The Triumphal Chariot of Friction, 67 Popular Science Monthly, 211 Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS), 299–300 posters, 165–84 Powell, John, 84 preaching scenes, 38–44, 38, 39, 40, p5 Prince, John Critchley, 16, 24 Princeton University, 241 psychiatry, 189–90, 192–4, 197–8 psychology, 189–90, 196–8 ‘Public Knowledge and Beliefs about some Aspects of Health’, 176–7 public libraries, and music, 207–9, 221 ‘Public Music Libraries,’ 209 publishers, 227–8, 240–1 Pugh, Sheenagh, The Democratic Genre, 268 pulp magazines, 250–63 Rakoma, Moses, 48–9 Randolph, David, 210, 214–15, 221 This Is Music, 215–16 Ranganathan, S. R., 232 RCA Victor Society of Great Music, 212–13 Reader, The (UK charity), 283–4, 297 Reader’s Digest, 191–2 reading aloud on ships, 138–9 in bed, 179 in the blackout, 179 and the brain, 300–3

and classical music, 206–25 experiences, 134–9, 181 imposed, 37–44 interruptions on ships, 137 stolen, 115–16 Reading Experience Database (RED), 1450–1945, 107, 113, 114, 116, 119 Reboul, Juliette, 2 Reconstructionist, The, 198 religion and science, 196–8 ‘religio-therapy’, 186 Religious Tract Society, 14, 35, 133 Reminiscences of a Stonemason by a Working Man, 112 Rieff, Philip, 186 Rippe, Christoph, 31, 54–5 Robinson, Robert, 20 Roper, Thomas, 13 Rose, Jonathan, 25 Rosin, Axel, 211 Rossi, Alexander, Forbidden Books, 120 Royal Academy, 108 Royal Astronomical Society, 63, 68 Royal Society, 68, 132 Ruskin, John, 94–5, 108–10, 113, 119 Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, 104–5 Modern Painters, 119 Russ, Joanna ‘Another Addict Raves About K/S’, 266 ‘Pornography by Women for Women, with Love’, 266 Russia, 275 Rutter, William, 236 Ryff Scales of Psychological Wellbeing, 299 Safier, Neil, 131 Sammelbände, 70 Sargent, Pamela, 258 Saturday Review, 212, 213

346  General Index Scherman, Harry, 210–13 Scherman, Tom, 210–11, 213 Schneider, Louis, 186 science and religion, 196–8 science fiction fan fiction gendering of, 264–82 see also fan fiction Science Fiction Sudies, 264 SCIFI Press, 270 Scott, Reverend Thomas, 86–7 The Force of Truth, 86 Scott, Sir Walter, 23 Guy Mannering, 68 Second World War, 165–84, 192–3 Seebach, Edel, 151 Sekoto, Gerard, 53 self-help culture, 186–8, 194 Selous, Frederick, 129, 130 Senate House Library, 67 Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, 254 Sense of FAPA, A, 270 Sewell, Elizabeth Missing, 114, 119 Sewell Burton, Frederick, 21 Shakespeare, William, 135–6, 233, 294, 300–2 shared reading groups, 284–305 Shaver, Richard Sharpe, 253 Shaw, Bob, The Enchanted Dupli­ cator, 271 Sheldon, Alice Bradley, 270, 278 Sherill, Charles I., 258 Shippey, Tom, 269 Silverberg, Robert, 257–61 Simcox, Edith, 93 Simon, Henry W., 217 A Treasury of Grand Opera, 217 Simon, Richard L., 217 Simon and Schuster, 217–18 Smiles, Sam, ‘Self Help’, 135 Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations, 130–1 Smith, Datus, 241–2 Smith, Erin A., 228

Smith, Mary, 12, 20, 24 Smyth, Arthur Bowes, 132 Soames, C., ‘A Perilous Ride’, 111 Social Forces: International Journal of Social Research, 198–9 Solomon, Abraham First Class – The Meeting and at First Meeting Loved, 108, p9, p11 Second Class – The Parting: ‘Thus part we rich in sorrow, parting poor’, 108, p10 Somerville, Alexander, 128 Sorabji, Cornelia, 117 Southey, Robert, 111 Soviet Union, 243 Soyinka, Wole, 243 Spaeth, Sigmund, 214, 215–16, 221 At Home with Music, 214 The Common Sense of Music, 214 Spectator, The, 63–4, 66 Speer, Jack, 280n Up to Now, 269–70 Spock, Benjamin, Baby and Child Care, 242 Spockanalia, 273 St Clair, William, 16, 127, 134 St Deiniol Library, 84 St Ursula, 104–5, 113 Stanford University Press, 236 Star Trek, 266, 271, 273 Statistical Society of London, 13 Stearns, Peter, 191–2 Steinberg, Rabbi Milton, 195, 198 Stereo Review, 216 Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy, 68 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 156 Stokowski, Leopold, 217 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 68 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 44 Strange, James, 129 ‘stuckness’, 293–4 suicide, 22

General Index   347

Sullivan, Robert, Geography Generalised, 131 Swift, Jonathan, A Tale of a Tub, 10 Sydney, Edward, 229 Tagore, Rabindranath, 156 Tanner, Thomas, Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica, 76 Tanzania, 233, 239 Taylor, Deems, 211, 215, 217 Taylor, Harriet, 91 Taylor, R. W., 85 Tebbel, John, 185–6 ‘Temple of Peace’, 83 Tenniel, John, 109–10, 109, 243 ‘textual poaching’, 266 therapeutic faith, 185–205 Thistlethwayte, Laura, 91 Thompson, E. P., 24 Thompson, George, 130 Thomson, Christopher, 12, 19, 23 Thomson, Virgil, 216 Thrale, Hester, 113–14, 116 Time, 236 Tiptree, James, Jr, 270, 278 Towheed, Shafquat, 107 ‘Tractarians’, 85–6 tracts, binding of, 70 Transformative Works and Cultures, 275 Transition, 243 Transvaal Berlin Mission Church, 48, 51, 53 travelling, 104–23 books, 130–4 carriages, 114 coaches, 113 and exploration, 124–44 maritime exploration, 127–8 physical difficulties of reading while, 113–15 Portuguese travellers, 131 readers in art, 108–10 shipboard newspapers, 138–9

trains, 105, 106, 111, 117–18 USA, 114–15 women, 113–20 Tripoli USIS library, 236 Triskelion, 273 Tumblr, 275 Tutuola, Amos, The Brave African Huntress, 236 Uganda, 243 UNESCO conference 1951, 231 libraries and the Cold War, 226–7, 229–30 libraries in Africa, 239–40 pilot public libraries, 237–8, 244 Public Libraries and Their Mission, 230–1 Public Library Manifesto, 230 UNESCO Courier, 239–40 United States Information Agency (USIA), 227, 234–7, 239, 241 ‘Ladder editions,’ 242 ‘Low-Priced Books in Translation’ programme, 242 United States Information Service (USIS), 234–7 Tripoli USIS library, 236 United States of America British attitudes to, 169, 182n travelling in, 114–15 University College London, 63, 65–6, 68 University of Liverpool, 283–305 University of London, 62–3, 64 University of Wisconsin, 145–6 US State Department, 241 Veith, Diana, ‘Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines’, 266 Venn, J. A., Alumni Cantabrigiensis, 66 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 12, 24

348  General Index Victor Talking Machine Company, 208, 209–10 Victrola, 208 Walker, Robert, 16 Waller, Philip, 117–18 Waller, Theodore, 230, 234 Walpole, Horace, 128 war books, 156–7 Ware, Jonathan, 137 Warner, Harry, Jr All Our Yesterdays, 269–70 A Wealth of Fable, 269–70 Wartime Social Surveys (WSSs), 166–70 Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS), 299 Washington Star, 212 Watt, Richard, 134, 135, 137, 138–9 Wattpad, 275 Wellesley, Reverend Gerald, 97 Wertham, Dr Frederic, 254–5, 257 ‘The Psychopathology of Comic Books’, 254 Seduction of the Innocent, 254, 260 West Africa, 129, 235, 240, 243–4 Wharton, Edith, The House of Mirth, 153 ‘What Literature Can Do’, 289, 291 Whavers, Angelle, 269 Wheeler, Michael, 3 wikis, 275–6 Wilberforce, Reginald, Life of Samuel Wilberforce, 84, 95–9 Wilberforce, Samuel, 95–9 Wilder, Joseph, 197–8 Williams, Abigail, 18 Williams, Charles, Advantages of Modern Education, 49 Williams, Robert Moore, 255

Willis, Walt, The Enchanted Duplicator, 271 Wilson Bulletin, 198 Windscheffel, Ruth Clayton, Reading Gladstone, 84 Wingate, Edmund, Arithmetique logarithmetique, 67, 69 Winsor, Justin, 147 Winston, Joan, Star Trek Lives! 273 Wisconsin Library School (WLS), 145–6, 148–51, 159–60 Withers, Alfred, 138 WNYC, 210, 213, 214–15 ‘Music for the Connoisseur’, 215 Wollheim, Donald A., 252 women African readers, 243 library staff, 147 night reading, 22–3 novels in images of readers, 105–6 preachers, 43–4 school teachers, 43 science fiction fans, 258–60, 274 science fiction writers, 258, 270–1, 273 travelling, 113–20 Woolf, Leonard, 118 Woolf, Virginia, 118 World Affairs, 197 WorldCon 1939, 269 WorldCon 1992, 270 WorldCon 2014, 265 Wright, Thomas, 11 X-Files, 274 Yeates, Amelia, 23, 105, 120 Young People’s Concerts, 216, 219–20 Zangwill, Israel, The Melting Pot, 158