The Edinburgh History of Reading: Subversive Readers 9781474461924

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The Edinburgh History of Reading: Subversive 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: Subversive Readers Edited by Jonathan Rose

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 Jonathan Rose, 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 6191 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 6192 4 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 6193 1 (epub) The right of Jonathan Rose 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 and Plates List of Contributors

vii ix

Introduction1 Jonathan Rose   1 History, Politics and the Separate Spheres: Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America Mark Towsey

10

  2 Reading in Australian Prisons: An Exploration of Motivation 31 Mary Carroll and Jane Garner   3 Hawking Terror: Reading the French Revolutionary Press Valerae Hurley   4 Hellfire and Cannibals: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Erotic Reading Groups and Their Manuscripts Brian M. Watson   5 The ‘tactile Ba[b]ble under which the blind have hitherto groaned’: Dots, Lines and Literacy for the Blind in Nineteenth-Century North America Joanna L. Pearce

52

75

97

  6 British Cultures of Reading and Literary Appreciation in Nineteenth-Century Singapore Porscha Fermanis

116

  7 Moral Readership and Political Apprenticeship: Commentaries on English Education in India, 1875–1930 Pramod K. Nayar

138

  8 The ‘Pleasure and Profit’ of Reading: Adolescents and Juvenile Popular Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century Trudi Abel

162

  9 Trans Culture and the Circulation of Ideas Lisa Z. Sigel

184

vi  Contents

10 Reading History, History Reading in Modern Iranian Literature: Prison Writing as National Allegory or a World Literary Genre? Alireza Fakhrkonandeh 11 Beyond Mein Kampf: Bestsellers, Writers, Readers and the Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany Christian Adam

207

234

12 Reading Spaces in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia: The Project to Create and Translate a Japanese-Language Library 255 Atsuhiko Wada, translated by Edward Mack 13 Just Send Zhivago: Reading Over, Under and Through the Iron Curtain Jessica Brandt

270

14 African Readers as World Readers: UNESCO, Worldreader and the Perception of Reading Ruth Bush

289

15 The Kindle Era: DIY Publishing and African-American Readers313 Kinohi Nishikawa 16 ‘I loved the stories – they weren’t boring’: Narrative Gaps, the ‘Disnarrated’ and the Significance of Style in Prison Reading Groups Patricia Canning Select Bibliography Index of Methods and Sources General Index

333

351 370 371

Figures and Plates

Figures 11.1 List of Publications Unsuitable for Young People and Libraries, compiled by the Propaganda Ministry, 1940 237 11.2 German book production (numbers of titles), compared with other countries, 1934 241 11.3 Frontline bookstore on a bus in occupied France 244 11.4 ‘The People Live Through the Book’, from the Ministry of Propa­ganda’s Die Woche des Deutschen Buches 1936 (German Book Week 1936)245 12.1 Advertisement for the Nihon Shuppan Haikyū Gaisha (Nippai), Shin Jawa, 1 (October 1944) 263 15.1 Schema from Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing317 15.2 Schema from Mark McGurl, ‘Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon’ 324  Plates 1 2 3 4

Cover of Laura Lee Hope’s The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale (1913) Sun Koh: The Hypnotised Submarine (number 9 in the series Sun Koh: Der Erbe von Atlantis). On the cover of the first edition, Sun Koh is accompanied by Nimba A later edition of Sun Koh: The Hypnotised Submarine, with Nimba omitted Front cover of Thicker Than Water (2008)

Contributors

Trudi Abel is a cultural historian and archivist at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University. She currently directs the undergraduate Archives Alive initiative and ‘Teaching with Archives’, a Duke Summer Doctoral Academy seminar. Christian Adam studied German literature and journalism at the Free University of Berlin, and then worked for several publishers as an editor. Since 2007 he has served the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the GDR Ministry for State Security (Stasi) in Berlin as Head of First Releases, and since 2015 he has been Head of Publications at the Centre for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr in Potsdam. His books include Lesen unter Hitler: Autoren, Bestseller, Leser im Dritten Reich (2010) and Der Traum vom Jahre Null. Autoren, Bestseller, Leser: Die Neuordnung der Bücherwelt in Ost und West nach 1945 (2016). Jessica Brandt is Associate Dean in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Montclair State University. Her research focuses on transnational media during the Cold War, with a recent chapter on the intersection of Star Wars, public radio and middle­brow culture in A Galaxy Here and Now: Historical and Cultural Readings of Star Wars (edited by Peter W. Lee, 2016). She is currently working on an interactive digital project incorporating Radio Liberty broadcasts with listener mail. Ruth Bush is Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol. Her first book was Publishing Africa in French: Literary Institutions and Decolonization 1945–67 (2016), which won the First Book Prize of the African Literature Association. She has also published a history of New Beacon Books, the UK’s first radical black bookshop and publishing house; and co-produced an exhibition and digital resource about Awa: la revue de la femme noire, a pioneering early African women’s magazine. ix

x  Contributors

Patricia Canning is Assistant Professor of Stylistics, Rhetoric and Linguistics at University College Utrecht. Her research investigates the linguistic production and reception of narratives in forensic contexts. Her published work includes Style in the Renaissance: Language and Ideology in Early Modern England (2012), as well as many articles and chapters on style and literature, and readers’ responses to both. She has established a number of reading groups in forensic environments and is currently writing a book on reading experiences in prison. Mary Carroll is an associate professor and course director in the School of Information Studies, Charles Sturt University. Her research focuses on the relationship between education and libraries and on the history of collections used in education. Alireza Fakhrkonandeh is Assistant Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Southampton. His publications include Body and Event in Howard Barker’s The Castle and Other Plays (2019) as well as numerous journal articles on Howard Barker, somaesthetics, oil and literature, and medical humanities, appearing in journals such as Symploke, Textual Practice, Comparative Drama and Cultural Critique. He is the sole authorised translator of Barker’s works into Persian. His book Oil and World Dramas is forthcoming in 2020. Porscha Fermanis is Professor of Romantic Literature at University College Dublin. Her books include John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment (2009); Rethinking British Romantic History, 1780–1850 (edited with John Regan, 2014); Romanticism: A Literary and Cultural History (with Carmen Casaliggi, 2016); Early Public L ­ ibraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere (with Lara Atkin et al., 2019); and Romantic Pasts: History, Fiction, and Feeling, 1790–1850 (forthcoming). She is currently prin­cipal investigator of a project on nineteenth-century literary culture in the southern hemisphere, funded by the European Research Council. Jane Garner is a lecturer with the School of Information Studies, Charles Sturt University. Her research focusses on the role and value of libraries in prisons as well as in the lives of both child and adult prisoners. Valerae Hurley is Senior Professor of History at Union County College. She was the 2014 recipient of the League of Innovations

Contributors  xi

Excellence Award. She is currently working on a comparison study of politically polarised women in the French Revolution. Pramod K. Nayar teaches in the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad, India. His most recent books include Ecoprecarity (2019) Brand Postcolonial (2018), Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic (2017), Human Rights and Literature (2016) and The Indian Graphic Novel (2016). Forthcoming work includes Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire, 1830-1940 (Bloomsbury). Kinohi Nishikawa is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. He has published on African-American print and popular culture in the journals Book History, American Literary History and PMLA, and in the edited collections Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights (edited by Derek C. Maus and James J. Donahue, 2014) and The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (edited by Frances Gateward and John Jennings, 2015). His first book, Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Under­ ground, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. Joanna L. Pearce is a PhD candidate in history at York University in Toronto. Her dissertation, ‘“Which naught but the light of knowledge can dispel”: Experiencing Blindness in Nineteenth-Century North America’, examines the experiences of blind people who did not attend residential schools. Her research on the establishment of free education for blind children in Nova Scotia was published in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association in 2012. Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University. He was the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and a founding editor of the journal Book History. He currently edits (with Shafquat Towheed) the monograph series New Directions in Book History (Palgrave Macmillan). His books include The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001); The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (2001); The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (2014); Readers’ Liberation (2018); and (with Simon Eliot) A New Companion to the History of the Book (2nd edition, 2019). Lisa Z. Sigel is Professor of History at DePaul University. Her books include Governing Pleasures (2002), International Exposure (2005),

xii  Contributors

Making Modern Love (2012) and The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America (2020). She curated the major exhibition ‘Hardcore: A Century and a Half of Obscene Imagery’ at the Museum of Sex in New York City (2015–17). Mark Towsey is Professor of the History of the Book and Director of the Eighteenth-Century Worlds Research Centre at the University of Liverpool. His publications include Reading the Scottish Enlighten­ ment: Books and Their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750–1820 (2010), Before the Public Library: Reading, Community and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850 (2017) and Reading History in Britain and America, c. 1750 – c. 1840 (2019). Atsuhiko Wada is Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at Waseda University. His research focuses on the history of reading and publishing in Japan from the nineteenth century onward. His books (in Japanese) include The Japan–US Relationship Viewed Through Book Circulation: Establishing the Beginning of Literacy History (2007); Books Across Borders: The Past and Present of Readers’ Circumstances (2011); and An Inquiry into the History of Reading: Readers and Print Culture in Modern Japan (2014). Brian M. Watson is the Graduate Archivist at the Kinsey Institute Library and Special Collections, as well as a historian of the book and sexuality. In information science, Watson researches linked data and queer classification in archives; in history, interests include long histories of sexuality, censor­ship and obscenity. Watson holds an MA in History and Culture from Drew University and is finishing an MLIS at Indiana University Bloomington. Publications include Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad (2017) and a chapter in Representing Kink (2019). Watson tweets at @brimwats.

Introduction Jonathan Rose

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a literary critic, but in 1992 I presumptuously wrote that academic critics seemed to be headed in the wrong direction. By and large, I thought, they underestimated the independence of the reader. The general thrust of Marxist, feminist and post-colonial criticism presumed that texts effectively propa­gandised and manipulated readers, that the act of reading itself involved ‘passive insertions into pre-existing discursive positions’ (to quote Kaja Silverman). If that was the case, then there was no point in studying readers at all; one need only examine the text to determine what it ‘obliges’ the reader to think.1 However, there were already some scholars who sensed, as I did, that readers exercised a large measure of control over their own reading. Carlo Ginzburg located a sixteenth-century Italian miller who brought his own distinctive interpretations to the books he studied, interpretations that did not please the Inquisition.2 Janice Radway found that romance novels were not in fact insinuating patri­ archal values in the minds of their fans, as many feminists feared.3 Studying seventeenth-century English labourers and peasants, Margaret Spufford was ‘startled’ to find that they were reading the Bible with minds of their own, ‘far from being the docile material which their ministers no doubt desired’.4 We all found, in widely diverse reading publics, what Roger Chartier termed ‘appropriation’: that is, texts are ‘less than totally efficacious and radically acculturating’, because readers make of those texts what they will.5 And since then, historians have located readers everywhere who read books in ways that deeply disturbed clerics, educators, critics and propagandists – readings that even the authors of those texts never intended.6 That kind of reading is possible even (or perhaps especially) in totali­ tarian societies. This volume, then, focuses on the subversive reader, 1

2  Jonathan Rose

though some might prefer the adjectives independent, resistant, sceptical or just plain ornery. A major episode in the emancipation of women was the Enlightenment, which saw a surge in female authorship and female literacy. And as Mark Towsey argues in Chapter 1, ‘History, Politics and the Separate Spheres: Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America’, women were also reading more widely. They were devouring history, heretofore regarded as a man’s business, and histori­ ans like David Hume and William Robertson responded to the new market by making their works more female-friendly. Naturally, women readers wanted to read about women’s history, especially Mary Stuart, Elizabeth Tudor and Marie Antoinette. But they also learned a great deal about politics, given that historiography was then (and to a large extent still is) inherently political. Long before women were formally enfranchised, some elite women played active and important political roles: as hostesses and networkers, as assistants to their husbands’ parliamentary careers, or sometimes as local power brokers in their own right. In those capacities, they found that an understanding of history enabled them to break out of their ‘separate sphere’. Down the social scale, some audiences were more captive. In Chapter 2, ‘Reading in Australian Prisons: An Exploration of Motiva­ tion’, Mary Carroll and Jane Garner show that convict reading has always been a central part of the Australian national experience, ever since the arrival of the first prison ships in 1788. Of course, the first books provided for prisoners were pious and uplifting, but in the early 1840s Alexander Maconochie, chief of the penal colony on Norfolk Island, experimented with more liberal library policies. He did not object to polemical works (‘They open the mind’) and he logically concluded that Robinson Crusoe, James Cook’s Voyages and perhaps even Scott’s Waverley novels might prepare inmates for productive post-prison lives in the antipodes. He was accused of coddling convicts and was dismissed, but his methods were adopted by prison reformers elsewhere. So it is ironic (as Carroll and Garner note) that Australian prison libraries today are usually inadequate, underfunded and neglected. But in response, prisoners have taken matters into their own hands, and many of them have become passionate readers. They often seek the kind of broad liberal education they did not get in school, pursuing everything from geology to Roman history. Of course they seek escape, as well as inspirational stories about those who have triumphed over adversity. As yet we have found no surviving evidence of reader response among Australia’s earliest convicts, but perhaps they too found a similar kind of liberation in books.

Introduction  3

This is not to say that subversive reading is necessarily a good thing. Under certain conditions, it can lead straight to mass hysteria. In 1789, centuries of royal press censorship in France came to a sudden end, and for a few years anyone could publish anything. Competing newspapers proliferated across the political spectrum. In Chapter 3, ‘Hawking Terror: Reading the French Revolutionary Press’, Valerae Hurley closely tracks post-revolutionary papers on both the left and the right, and notes the rapidly increasing use of the term vengeance: royalists called on readers to avenge the humiliation of the royal family, while republicans demanded popular retribution for centuries of aristocratic exploitation and repression. For a few sous, anyone could patronise cabinets de lecture, where they could read all the Parisian papers and follow the vitriol. Editors on both sides learned that extremist journalism built circulation. They read each other’s increasingly bloodthirsty diatribes, and as their rhetoric escalated out of control, they urged their readers to pre-emptively strike down their enemies. The result was the Reign of Terror, which was largely fomented by journalists, and ultimately sent many of them to the guillotine. As Robert Darnton established, the history of books definitely includes dirty books, which can tell us a great deal about sexuality, politics and even Enlightenment philosophy. Eminently respectable historians like Darnton, Ian Frederick Moulton, Lynn Hunt, Julie Peakman, Sarah Toulalan and Lisa Z. Sigel have done much to legiti­ mise the serious study of pornography, though the field still carries something of a stigma (as scholars discover when they return from overseas research trips and try to bring their notes and photocopies through customs). Historians of pornographic books have focused on their texts and illustrations, the authors (often anonymous) who wrote them, the publishers (often clandestine) who printed them, the booksellers who sold them (often under the counter) and the officials who outlawed them. But very little has been written about their readers, and that is the subject of Brian M. Watson’s chapter, ‘Hellfire and Cannibals: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Erotic Reading Groups and Their Manuscripts’. Watson asks the same questions that historians ask about all readers: how did they interpret, respond to, engage with and use texts, which in this case happened to be salacious? These questions are difficult to answer, precisely because pornography is almost by definition subversive: it is sexual literature that we suppress because we view it as a threat to the moral order. Although some readers have left records of erotic reading (for instance, the diaries of William Gladstone), such accounts tend to be self-incriminating and are therefore rare. Watson has, however, located two understudied groups

4  Jonathan Rose

distinguished by their cultivation and appreciation of pornographic literature. The eighteenth-century Hellfire Club sponsored The Dis­ course on the Worship of Priapus (1786–7): its members included the populist rake John Wilkes, author of the scandalous An Essay on Woman (1752). The nineteenth-century Cannibal Club was led by Sir Richard Francis Burton and the pioneer­ing erotic bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee. It produced such works as the first translation of the Kama Sutra (1885) and The Perfumed Garden: A Manual of Arabian Erotology (1886). Although both circles are sometimes mentioned in biographies, they have not yet been studied as sites of pornographic reading. But both yield revealing primary source evidence in the form of letters, diaries and the scandalous texts themselves. For the past century Braille has been the standard print system for the blind, but its general adoption was not inevitable or uncontested. The familiar six-dot grid was invented by a French blind man in the 1820s, yet competing alphabets were proposed by both blind and sighted advocates. The result was a long-running and many-sided public controversy, traced by Joanna L. Pearce in Chapter 5, ‘The “tactile Ba[b]ble under which the blind have hitherto groaned”: Dots, Lines and Literacy for the Blind in Nineteenth-Century North America’. Some favoured embossed Roman letters; others tried to devise systems that would allow the blind to easily write as well as read. This debate was carried on not just by sighted publishers and edu­ cational officials: many blind self-advocates (including Helen Keller) vocally participated. This chapter aims to restore these now-forgotten blind activists to the narrative of disability history. Colonial regimes don’t normally encourage subversive reading among either colonists or the colonised. As Porscha Fermanis notes in Chapter 6, ‘British Cultures of Reading and Literary Appreciation in Nineteenth-Century Singapore’, early British libraries in the colony reflected conventional middle-class tastes, including Edward Bulwer Lytton, Frances Trollope and the surplus stock of Mudie’s Select Library. At first their clientele was almost entirely male and European. They scarcely noticed that, meanwhile, the Malay and Chinese communities were developing their own extensive networks of circulating libraries. The colonists tried to standardise Malay and publish translations in that fairly artificial language, but Malays found these books unidiomatic, ungrammatical and practically unreadable. Moving forward into the early twentieth century, the British libraries opened up somewhat: they admitted a significant minority of Asian members, they became increasingly interested in Malay literature and ethnography, and they occasionally stocked Arabic and Malay books.

Introduction  5

In his notorious 1835 minute, Thomas Babington Macaulay had declared that an education in English literature would inculcate Indian students with English moral values, and British educators in India proceeded on that assumption. But towards the end of the century, it was apparent to worried imperial officials that this pedagogical strategy had backfired. English texts were supposed to make Indians productive colonial subjects, freed from local loyalties to caste or religion and open to capitalist modernity. But the young Anglophone generation of Indians was in fact discontented and sceptical of authority: evidently they had read English authors subversively, as Pramod K. Nayar explains in Chapter 7, ‘Moral Readership and Political Apprenticeship: Commentaries on English Education in India, 1875–1930’. Gooroo Dass Banerjee, the future vice chancellor of Calcutta University, granted that there was much to be said for English culture, but, after all, Indians had been teaching their own morality for a few millennia, and didn’t necessarily need imports. In Theodore Roosevelt’s America, adolescent readers carved out what was arguably the first youth culture, as uncovered by Trudi Abel in Chapter 8, ‘The “Pleasure and Profit” of Reading: Adolescents and Juvenile Popular Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century’. The Edward Stratemeyer syndicate churned out a vast array of book series for young people, of which the best known are Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Today they strike us as hopelessly quaint and wholesome, but in the early twentieth century public librarians banished them from their shelves. Undeterred, young readers built up their own collections and loaned out volumes to each other. These books invariably appealed to adolescent desires for independence: for instance, the Outdoor Girls series, in which a circle of girlfriends enjoyed travel and camping adventures. Fans of that series wrote gushing letters to the author, Laura Lee Hope – though she was as fictitious as the characters in the series. In reality Laura Lee Hope was one of eighty-nine pseudonyms used by Stratemeyer, who sketched in plots, farmed them out to ghost writers and then polished the final versions. Yet to her young readers, Laura Lee Hope represented an inspirational model of a modern career woman, even if Stratemeyer himself had fairly conservative ideas about gender roles. A very different (and distinctly subversive) morality was circulated via pornography throughout what would now be called the transgender community, well before the term was coined. In Chapter 9, ‘Trans Culture and the Circulation of Ideas’, Lisa Z. Sigel identifies a body of erotic literature, originating in the late nineteenth century, which centred on themes of forced feminisation. Given that these

6  Jonathan Rose

stories generally involved sexual bondage, pain and humiliation, some readers may find them deeply disturbing. But all ideological, religious, national, cultural and sexual movements organise around a core of common texts, and Sigel argues that these pornographic tales served that function for transgenderism. Transgender individuals may have always existed, but this literature enabled them to come together as a conscious and self-defined community. Sigel tracks in detail how these materials were sold, saved, scrapbooked and recirculated through the used-books trade in Europe and America. By the 1950s they had found their way into the archives of the Kinsey Institute in Indiana. They were suppressed by state censorship and often hidden by transsexuals themselves, who feared (not without reason) that revealing this side of their sexuality would repel doctors and scientific researchers. But such literature continues to flourish today on websites. We anticipate that this chapter will be controversial in the finest sense of the term, and that it will become a salient contribution to the emerging field of transgender history. Given the political history of modern Iran, prison writing in­ evitably dominates Iranian literary history. In Chapter 10, ‘Reading History, History Reading in Modern Iranian Literature: Prison Writing as National Allegory or a World Literary Genre?’, Alireza ­Fakhrkonandeh addresses the question of the intended audience for these memoirs: are these imagined readers Iranian or international, and how does the choice of audience affect the construction of the narrative? Does the prison experience itself fundamentally change the way the prisoner (or ex-prisoner) reads? And can that experience ever be communicated to readers who have never been caged or tortured? Historians of censorship have found again and again that no matter how severely literature is repressed, it continues to be read under­ground. Christian Adam reaches that conclusion in Chapter 11, ‘Beyond Mein Kampf: Bestsellers, Writers, Readers and the Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany’. Book-burnings and propaganda dominate the popular image of literary life under the Third Reich, and they were certainly a frightening reality, but underneath these ideo­logical terrors, quiet and diverse reading continued. Storm­troopers could not weed out every forbidden volume in used-book stalls and private libraries. In practice, Fahrenheit 451 was unattain­able. Even Joseph Goebbels realised that the German public would not swallow an unmixed diet of politically orthodox literature. They also needed light reading, if only to momentarily escape war and totalitarianism. Heinrich Spoerl achieved enormous success by producing featherweight novels set in Germany before the rise of Hitler, thus avoiding politically risky topics

Introduction  7

altogether. Nazi censorship was ruthless but also wildly inconsistent, blocking some innocuous books (Erich Kästner’s Emil und die Detektive) while allowing through some not-so-subtle critiques of the regime (Ernst Jünger’s Auf den ­Marmorklippen). The Albatross Press (a German precursor of Penguin Books) continued to publish cheap paperback editions of the great modernists in English: the Ministry of Propaganda was not happy, but it was overruled by the Ministry of Finance, on the grounds that Albatross was earning sorely needed foreign currency. There was in fact great public demand for American and British books of all types, especially detective fiction. The censors couldn’t block them all, and they permitted novels that revealed the grimmer aspects of American society (The Grapes of Wrath) or were com­pat­ible with Nazi racial ideology (Gone with the Wind). In the wake of Pearl Harbor, Japan swiftly conquered and occupied the Dutch East Indies, offering an unusual case study of one Asian nation trying to impose its literary culture on another. In Chapter 12, ‘Reading Spaces in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia: The Project to Create and Translate a Japanese-Language Library’, Atsuhiko Wada outlines the propaganda strategy carried out by the Japanese military, which involved the transmission of texts across national and cultural boundaries. ‘Cultural activities’ (bunka kōsaku) were a key priority of the occupation authorities, who brought Japanese writers to Indonesia and published a range of periodicals. Their goal was to replace the Eurocentric literary culture promoted by the Dutch with a literature rooted in Asia – or, more exactly, Japan. But outside of the small Japanese community in the archipelago, their efforts probably had little impact. Even though the Japanese language became a required subject in the schools, Indonesia already had a thriving indigenous reading culture in several vernacular languages, including hundreds of newspapers, at least 2,300 libraries, and millions of volumes printed and distributed every year. The title of Jessica Brandt’s chapter, ‘Just Send Zhivago: Reading Over, Under and Through the Iron Curtain’, echoes a letter from a Soviet listener to Radio Liberty in July 1968. During the Cold War, readers behind the Iron Curtain sent hundreds of letters to CIA-supported Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), requesting broadcasts of specific literary works or soliciting actual printed books, sometimes in response to a giveaway offer and sometimes apparently un­solicited. The stations often transmitted the work of dissident authors back into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, as well as translations of Western literature. In effect, RFE/RL became a disseminator of samizdat, the Russian term for self-published literature. In this case,

8  Jonathan Rose

a US government agency was the literary gatekeeper, but it was highly responsive to reader demands, and it had to deal with censorship in the form of Soviet jamming. Whenever we address post-colonial literature – or indeed post-colonial anything – we must inevitably confront the question, ‘What do you mean, “post”?’ African nations may be nominally in­ depend­ent, but they are still very much under the influence of Western governments, Western corporations, Western foundations and Western NGOs. And as Pascale Casanova noted, African authors must cater to publishers, critics and literary prize juries based in New York, London or Paris.7 A prime example is the Heinemann African Writers Series: launched in 1962, the moment of formal decolonisation, it soon dominated the African textbook market. In Chapter 14, ‘African Readers as World Readers: UNESCO, Worldreader and the Perception of Reading’, Ruth Bush explains that even global literacy is promoted on Western terms, as a tool to advance economic development along Western lines. In contrast, Africans actually read promiscuously, unpredictably and often for pure pleasure. True, Western cultural influence is inescapable and African publishers commonly copy Western genres: the Adoras romance series produced by Nouvelles Éditions Ivoiriennes is essentially a knockoff of Harlequin and Mills and Boon, reset in Africa. But Bush sees the emergence of a genuinely African and reader-driven literature via social media. In Chapter 15, ‘The Kindle Era: DIY Publishing and African-­ American Readers’, Kinohi Nishikawa introduces another burgeoning form of samizdat. At age twenty-five, Takerra Allen launched her brilliant literary career entirely through her own efforts. Taking on the roles of author, publisher, marketer and press agent all at once, she produced her first novel, Thicker Than Water (2008). It chronicled the intertwined adventures of ‘four spitfire vixens’ from Newark (not New York) who are educated, successful and in fashion: Sex and the Inner City, you could call it. Mainstream publishers were reluctant to take on that kind of raw urban fiction, but Thicker Than Water and Allen’s later novels won a huge following among black women, largely because she cut out the intermediaries and connected directly with her readers. She practically grabbed them by the shoulders in one of her introductions: ‘All of my hard work, blood, sweat, and tears is for you. Yes, you! You, reading this! Yes, you!’ Later she allowed Amazon to publish and promote her work, enabling her readers to express their public appreciation on the website. In 2017, DIY publishing accounted for 28 per cent of general American fiction but fully 71 per cent of African-American fiction. The black reading public, then, has

Introduction  9

largely bypassed the big publishers and called into existence its own literary niche, a strikingly successful self-help effort. Patricia Canning worked with prisoners in Northern Ireland in the years 2010–14, and she lays out her findings in the last chapter, ‘“I loved the stories – they weren’t boring”: Narrative Gaps, the “Disnarrated” and the Significance of Style in Prison Reading Groups’. Many researchers have found that organised reading can rehabilitate and socialise prison inmates, and Canning offers an explanatory theory. She argues that all stories contain some ‘disnarration’: that is, they inevitably leave out some details, background and context that are essential to understanding the narrative. Those gaps must be filled creatively by readers, who thus become active co-authors, and different readers will make different authorial choices. Moreover, the actions of the characters compel readers to address questions of motive and ethics. All this takes readers out of the confines of their cells and exercises their capacity for morality and empathy. Much like Mary Carroll and Jane Garner in Chapter 2, as well as the other contributors to this volume, Canning concludes that free reading can liberate prisoners, whether their prison happens to be an Australian penitentiary, colonial India, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Iran under the shahs or the mullahs, the Newark ghetto or blindness.

Notes 1. Jonathan Rose, ‘Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (January– March 1992), pp. 47–70. 2. Carlo Ginsburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a ­Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). 3. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 4. Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), pp. xvii, 30–4. 5. Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 3–8. 6. For a concise overview of this scholarship, see Jonathan Rose, Readers’ Liberation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 7. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Chapter 1

History, Politics and the Separate Spheres: Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America Mark Towsey

Cultural commentators of the eighteenth century were convinced that more women now read than ever before. The Lady’s Magazine heralded the ‘happy revolution in the history of the fair sex, that they are now in general readers’,1 while Samuel Johnson declared that ‘all our women read now’.2 As part of the wider feminist recovery of women’s writing in the period, scholars have been equally impressed by the importance of reading in the lives of Georgian women. For Jacqueline Pearson, the female reader is ‘one of the most striking phenomena of the eighteenth century’,3 while Amanda Vickery asserts that women at that time ‘enjoyed unprecedented access to the public world of print’.4 Such arguments are endorsed by the extravagant growth in female literacy documented in this period – 10 per cent of women could sign their names in 1640, rising to 25 per cent in 1714 and 40 per cent in 1750, with virtually all women from aristocratic, gentry and professional families able to engage to some extent with print by 1780. This great influx of new women readers had a formative influence on the literary production of the period, but it was also deeply contested. As John Brewer points out, troubled moralists became fixated by the idea of the female novel-reader, ‘filled with delusive ideas, swayed by false ideas of love and romance, unable to concentrate on serious matters – all of which led to frivolity, impulsiveness and possibly to sexual indiscretion’.5 This degenerate female novel-reader was largely fictitious but, as one recent critic has observed, she ‘provides a vivid image of the period’s cultural prejudices’.6 The contemporary struggle to come to terms with the cultural meanings of female literacy has had important repercussions for the way modern scholars have viewed the rise of women’s reading in this period. Scholarship tends to focus on printed debates about women’s 10

Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America   11

reading but does so overwhelmingly from the writer’s perspective. Pearson’s Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous ­Recreation (1999) focuses on the representation of female readers in novels and conduct books, and on the reading experiences of four famous female writers who together span the period – Laetitia Pilkington, Elizabeth Carter, Frances Burney and Jane Austen. As her subtitle suggests, Pearson concentrates on the ‘tightrope act’ demanded of female readers in negotiating the hidden dangers of reading, and on the female novel-reader as a ‘key icon’ in contests about British morality and national identity.7 Richard de Ritter’s more recent Imagining Women Readers, 1789–1820: Well-Regulated Minds (2015) takes this argument further, contending that eighteenth-century conduct writers fashioned an ideal self-regulating woman reader who wielded moral and cultural authority from the domestic sphere. De Ritter deliberately refuses to engage with questions about reader response, choosing instead to emphasise the cultural power of ‘prescriptive accounts’ of reading, which he suggests reveal ‘the anxieties generated by the conjunction of reading and femininity’ in a period during which more women encountered the printed word than ever before.8 Such scholarship reveals a great deal about how women’s reading was theorised by eighteenth-century writers, and how several famous female writers engaged in print with these debates. But a major weakness is that it risks reducing prescription to description, and there has been relatively little sustained interest to date in how identifiable female readers responded to conduct books and enacted – or challenged – their advice about how women should read.9 As Pearson points out, ‘the rhetoric of the moralists is just that and, as always, real life was richer and stranger than their prescriptions allowed’.10 This chapter looks at what can be learned from surviving manuscript sources of women’s reading, turning from the ‘ideal’ reader to the real reader by examining commonplace books, diaries, letters and other sources in which female readers wrote about their encounters with books. In doing so, it will suggest that their reading – often achieved collaboratively – led to new forms of political, intellectual and cultural self-expression on both sides of the Anglophone Atlantic, often subverting the restrictive principles of contemporary constructions of gender while taking place safely within the prescribed boundaries of the domestic sphere. It is worth reminding ourselves at the outset that this alternative reader-led methodology is itself limited by the nature of the surviving source material. No matter how many examples of reading ex­periences we collect, warns William St Clair, ‘they can never be, at

12  Mark Towsey

best, anything beyond a tiny, randomly surviving, and perhaps highly unrepresentative, sample of the far larger total acts of reception which were never even turned into words in the mind of the reader let alone recorded in writing’.11 Our quest to find useable reader responses is also likely to be heavily skewed socially, with material tending to survive only for those elites and upwardly mobile middling sorts whose family and personal papers were archived and eventually deposited in public repositories. Nevertheless, these are precisely the sort of women who were expected to comply with the dominant separate spheres ideology of the period. As numerous historians have pointed out, the powerful doctrine that women should occupy a sphere separate from men – characterised by their domesticity, passivity, emotion and lack of reason – was largely irrelevant for the majority of women, for whom economic productivity was a vital facet of everyday life.12 Yet for those increasing numbers of affluent middling sorts and elites who had the leisure time and purchasing power to buy or borrow books, the printed word was a powerful means by which contemporary notions of womanhood, femininity and appropriate female behaviour were codified, disseminated and learned. As well as contributing to scholarship on women’s reading in this period, then, this chapter offers a new perspective on the broader cultural problem of ‘separate spheres’, exploring women’s responses to a specific genre that contemporary conduct writers thought lay problematically at the intersection between the private (female) and public (male) sphere, namely history. Several historians have already flagged the growing importance of women as readers of history during this period. Daniel Woolf has traced women’s increasing interest in the past in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,13 while Mark Phillips has argued persuasively for the pivotal role played by the ‘ideal’ female reader in reformulating Enlightenment historiography.14 Keen to draw new audiences to their work, successful writers such as David Hume and William Robertson adapted narrative techniques from the novel to enhance the sentimental depth of their histories, allowing them to speak more directly to women by capturing the emotional registers of private life as well as the turbulent upheavals of public policy. Woolf suggests that this led to a certain ‘gendering of genre’, whereby history reading was seen no longer as a firmly masculine-oriented endeavour but something that could assist in ‘the cultivation of feminine sociability’.15 We see this very clearly mapped out in Charles Allen’s ebullient recommendation of history books to female readers. Allen advised his eponymous Polite Lady (1769) that ‘every accomplished woman

Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America   13

should have a tolerable knowledge of history’, adding that ‘of all the different kinds of reading, there is none that can afford more profit­able instruction, or more delightful entertainment than that of history’. For Allen, history acted as a polite accomplishment par excellence, capable of teaching young female readers indispensable lessons for their behaviour and deportment in an array of real-life circumstances: From this inexhaustible source of profit and pleasure, you may derive the wisest maxims and rules of life. Here you will behold the obedient child, the dutiful daughter, the chaste virgin, the prudent mother, and the resigned and pious widow; and, by observing how others have acted when surrounded with dangers, or involved in difficulties, you will learn how to behave yourself when placed in the same, or the like circumstances. Here you may behold every virtue that can dignify human nature in general, or the female sex in particular, reduced into practice. In a word, here you may acquire the knowledge of the world without the danger of being infected by its bad example, which indeed is a circumstance peculiar to history alone.16

Allen’s last point is particularly revealing, since history’s value to female readers was thought to derive in large part from the potential dangers inherent in other genres. As Abigail Williams has recently put it, ‘history could provide the same insights into human nature as the novel, but without its ethical complications’.17 Yet history reading also had wider benefits, by inculcating patriotic lessons about the significance and distinctiveness of the British national story. The Reverend John Bennett instructed his female readers that ‘you cannot be un­ acquainted with the history of your own country’, and he enumerated the unique features of Britain’s constitutional history that he thought every informed woman ought to know: It would betray an unpardonable ignorance, if you could not tell, on being asked in company the general character of all the sovereigns that have sat upon the British throne; what contributed to bring about our reformation from the Church of Rome; at what period the outline of our happy constitution first began to be sketched out, and what is the particular excellence of our government over all others in the known world.18

While Bennett suggested that patriotic historical knowledge would help elite women make a credible impression as conversationalists in polite ‘company’, it also had a still more specific role to play in conversations between women and their children, amid great interest generally in the importance of mothers in raising children

14  Mark Towsey

from Lockean ‘blank slates’ to becoming virtuous, useful and, above all, patriotic citizens.19 After all, Bennett insisted elsewhere in his prolific conduct writing ‘that a mother should be the preceptress of her children, and that such children would stand a chance of the happiest instruction’.20 The prospect of motherhood underpinned Hester Chapone’s enthusiastic endorsement of the propriety of reading history, together with her stern admonition that her young female readers would ‘hereafter bitterly regret their loss’ if they ‘waste in trivial amusement’ the formative periods of their life. ‘Above all’, Chapone warned, ‘if you should ever be a mother, when you feel your own inability to direct and assist the pursuits of your children – you will then find ignorance a severe mortification and a real evil’.21 History, then, was thought to be beneficial to female readers in a number of ways: it was presented as an ideal antidote to immoral novels in teaching appropriate models of female behaviour; it provided an essential grounding in the basic contours of British political, religious and social life; and it was a valuable ornament to conversation, as well as being an essential preparation for motherhood, equipping mothers to direct the moral and patriotic education of their own children. Importantly, however, eighteenth-century writers expected female readers to read history differently from men. When asked about which specific histories should be read, Chapone thought it self-evident that her female readers would read historical works for entertainment rather than for critical reflection or political insight: ‘As you will not read with a critical view, nor enter deeply into politics, I think you may be allowed to choose that which is most entertaining’.22 As Williams concludes, the aim of history reading was ‘to render a young woman fit for company, without making her overly learned’.23 Pearson concurs, pointing out that history reading was ultimately designed to repress women’s self-expression rather than to empower them. ‘By dealing with public issues’, Pearson suggests on the basis of fictional representations of female history reading, history ‘keeps the heroine safely private’, history reading being used ‘more as a form of control than intellectual development’.24 There is a great deal of manuscript evidence that female readers at various ages and from a very wide range of backgrounds acted on this advice with some enthusiasm and application, compiling critical reading diaries, commonplace books and lengthy manuscript abridgements (some spanning 300 manuscript pages or more) in which they collated, summarised and commented on a wide variety of ­historical material. Indeed, there is considerable evidence to suggest that female readers picked up these practices at a very early age. Letitia Napier of

Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America   15

Pennard House, Somerset, may have been as young as eight or nine when she compiled a short digest from Oliver Goldsmith’s History of England in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to His Son (1764) in 1798,25 while Harriet Cary, the daughter of West Indies planter turned Boston (Massachusetts) farmer Samuel Cary, was not much older when she began a chronological outline of Hume’s History of England around the same time.26 The historical reading notes of Alice Money from Much Marcle in Herefordshire are a particularly poignant memorial of one young girl’s efforts to learn history. Intended ‘only for my self to read because it is written so badly’, Money started a digest of Goldsmith’s popular schoolbook Abridgement of the History of England (1785) when she was no more than thirteen or fourteen years old, beginning with Goldsmith’s very first line that ‘Britain was but little known to the rest of the world before the time of the Romans’. Drawn particularly to his typically elegiac depiction of King Alfred’s successes in establishing the rule of law, Money had reached the reign of Henry II before her digest ended abruptly mid-sentence while describing the personal ablutions of Thomas Becket. Alice Money evidently died soon afterwards, and her father subsequently turned the unfinished volume into a physical monument to ‘My Angel blest and happy girl, I loved thee much too well. Adieu, adieu, until we meet’.27 For all the precious paper, candles and time invested in them, many of these notebooks provide little detailed sense of how the reading notes were intended to be used, but they do occasionally suggest that women were reading history in precisely the ways prescribed for them by contemporary conduct writers. The historical reading notes compiled in the 1770s by Elizabeth Rose, the lady laird of Kilravock, near Nairn in Scotland, covered conventional domestic themes, including the introduction of ‘sallads, carrots and other vegetable roots’ to English tables in the sixteenth century, and the relative price of beef, mutton and veal in the reign of Henry VIII. More compellingly still, Rose concentrated on the exemplary lives and actions of women through history, especially those forced under duress into the active world of men – such as the widow of Don Juan de Padilla, who took up her husband’s fight for Toledo after he was executed for treason against Charles V, and the misadventures of Margaret of Anjou, battling (disastrously as it turned out) to secure a prosperous future for her son.28 Rose paid particularly close attention to the celebrated rivalry between queens Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor, copying out Hume’s reasoning that Elizabeth had sacrificed her femininity for the

16  Mark Towsey

command of men: ‘her qualities as a sovereign with some exceptions are the objects of undisputed applause and approbation . . . it may be difficult to reconcile our fancy to her as a Wife or a Mistress’. But she was much more effusive in her treatment of Hume’s already sympathetic account of the controversial Queen of Scots, adding silently to her notes eulogistic phrases that Hume himself had never used – that Mary ‘died a Heroine to her Religion and Principles’ and that ‘the beauty of her person and graces of her air, charms of her address combined to make her the most lovely of women’.29 If Rose’s treatment of Hume’s Queen of Scots – like her treatment of Charles I, which I have discussed elsewhere30 – demonstrates the success of his efforts to appeal to female readers by deepening the emotional range of his narrative, it is equally suggestive that her comments on female historical characters hinge on their qualities as women. Elizabeth Rose lamented Mary Queen of Scots for the same reason that she bristled with resentment towards Elizabeth Tudor: Mary had apparently succeeded in retaining her femininity even in the most trying of circumstances. This same interest in the fate of female characters comes through particularly strongly in the reading notes of a quite different woman reader. The daughter of an eminent Boston lawyer, Rebecca Amory Lowell was a Sunday school teacher in Roxbury, Massachusetts, for forty years. On first encountering William Robertson’s Reign of Charles V in September 1813, Lowell commended ‘the splendour & magnitude of the events which it portrays [which] must naturally arrest our attention & excite both astonishment & admiration’, but it was the same historian’s History of Scotland that became her long-term favourite. This was because it dealt principally with ‘the sufferings of an accomplished & beautiful princess’, Mary Stuart, and was therefore ‘better calculated to call forth our feelings & awaken our sensibility’. Lowell’s use of the loaded term ‘accomplished’ here is immediately suggestive, associated as it is so closely with the type of educational attainments recommended to women in the domestic sphere. She returned to Robertson’s portrayal of Mary Queen of Scots some ten years later, acknowledging that ‘the crimes or innocence of Mary are still after the lapse of two centuries the subject of bitter contention & have awakened those passions which are generally only rarely excited by present events’. This politically astute observation acts as the prelude for a remarkable comparative essay, perhaps compiled with her Sunday school scholars in mind, analysing what Lowell terms ‘the similarity of the fortunes of the late Queen of France with those of Mary’:

Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America   17

Both were beautiful & in their manners captivating, both suffered under the weight of evil reports, both passed from the splendour of a throne to a prison, & both finally ended their lives on the scaffold. I might have added that both seemed to acquire from misfortune new spirit & energy.31

Rooted in Lowell’s close engagement with Robertson’s account of Mary Stuart, and paying scrupulous attention to the consistency (or otherwise) of Mary’s character, the subsequent essay is the very model of what conduct writers expected women to find in historical literature, although in this instance Lowell’s sympathies lay rather more firmly with the more recent exemplar under consideration: ‘M. Antoinette was imprudent, but her imprudences were not like those of Mary criminal or even blameworthy in themselves. They were the imprudences rather of conscious & unsuspecting innocence.’ Marie Antoinette’s suffering – brought about by an unfortunate but understandable flaw in her character – trumps the sentimental, regal and composed figure of Mary Queen of Scots portrayed so affectively by Hume and Robertson. While Mary died like a queen, ‘in all the splendid attire which might add new brilliance to her beauty, surrounded by her weeping women & a select number of admiring witnesses, with dignity & fortitude’, Marie suffered a brutal fate, alone and stripped of the trappings of power, rank and beauty: No magnificence of apparel enhanced the native majesty of her counten­ ance; in robes borrowed from her low-born jailers, in a cart, treated like the meanest criminal, was the daughter of imperial Austria, the Queen of France, the once beautiful, flattered, idolised Marie Antoinette.32

Louisa Grenville, second wife of Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope, was rather more sympathetic to the character of Mary Stuart, in an undated sequence of reading notebooks compiled as an instructive tool for her large brood of intellectually gifted children. She thought Robertson had not gone far enough in recovering Mary’s repu­tation, confessing that she had ‘always been moved with sentiments of pity for Mary which our historian undoubtedly had not’.33 Recent scholars have shown that Robertson in fact bent over backwards to draw out the emotional appeal of Mary’s character. Karen O’Brien, for example, suggests that the History of Scotland is an exercise in ‘carefully contained nostalgia’, using ‘the language of sentiment to unite readers around a picture of misfortune while neutralising their indignation at its political causes . . . Robertson’s Mary is passive, beautiful, the epitome of gentility, and always in tears’.34 Grenville instead implied that only a fellow woman could fully sympathise with

18  Mark Towsey

Mary’s plight (‘perhaps it is natural for a woman to pity a woman’s frailties but I cannot think Robertson has said all that might have been waged in her favour’), before using Mary’s character as the occasion for a lengthy disquisition on the relationship between gender, feeling and action that is worth quoting at some length: All the accounts we have of her person, manners, talents & address form an enchanting lovely mixture. Her transition from the elegant refinement of the French court to the gloomy severity of the prevailing party in Scotland who criticised her every action, & stamping even her innocent gaiety with the name of guilt made guilt itself become an idea familiar to her. I mean not to justify all her actions. Reason cannot submit to such an imposition, yet surely from her sex, her youth, her amiable sweetness upon going into Scotland, she invited a better treatment than she received. But such was the tumultuous face of affairs in those days that one of a rougher cast would have suited more the genius & manners of the country over whom she was to reign. V. quick, sensibility when repulsed & treated with contempt frequently enrages a female mind (where feeling is stronger than judgement) into furies the bare thought of which would in happier days have created horror or disgust. The evening of her life was particularly disastrous & she behaved during her tedious imprisonment with a dignity & at the time of her unfortunate death with a composure, recollection & placidity which to me appears incompatible with the Heinous crimes laid to her Charge. Conscious guilt is generally an inveter­ate enemy to solitude & when the awful hour of dissolution approaches with all the terrors of an ignominious death, the mask of hypocrisy falls & the most determined mind is apt to recoil & if guilty acknowledge the equity of the impending blow.35

If Louisa Grenville thought Mary’s feminine innocence could be read in her composed, compliant and unresisting end, she also dwelt in­ evitably on the comparison between two queens who exercised such a powerful sway over eighteenth-century readers seeking to learn femin­ inity – and how to be better women – from historical exemplars: Perhaps it would have been better both for Elizabeth & Mary had they not been contemporaries. The former would have appeared a more perfect character by avoiding the indelible stain which her conduct towards Mary has cast upon her memory, the latter would probably have escaped her cruel fate & by having no near & envious enemy to encourage the spirit of dissention & sedition in her Kingdom would have been a happier Queen & in consequence might have been a better woman.36

The examples we have looked at so far provide evidence that at least some women read history for many of the reasons prescribed

Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America   19

for them by conduct writers. These readers drew out domestic and emotional themes and concentrated closely on the exemplary lessons taught by the behaviour of historical women, especially when placed in situations that had tested or reaffirmed their femininity. At the same time, however, each woman reacted in quite different ways to these narratives, even when dealing with accounts of the same women, written by the same historians. This was a function of the reading methodologies these readers were adopting, which involved making decisions about what material to keep and what to leave out, copying down passages that particularly interested them, and storing them away for future recall, reflection and discussion. In doing so, readers placed historical notes in knowledge landscapes of their own making, setting historical characters often in dramatically new settings, some of them – most clearly in the case of Rebecca Amory Lowell’s comparative analysis of the characters of Marie Antoinette and Mary Queen of Scots – tied inextricably to the new political contexts in which histories were encountered. Crucially, each of these readers also challenged in some way the textual authority of the original historian, in Grenville’s case going so far as suggesting that a woman’s history could be satisfactorily written only by another woman. This proactive approach to handling history is important because, as John Bennett had indirectly acknowledged in his Letters to a Young Lady, history was fundamentally concerned with politics – a realm from which women were generally thought to have been excluded. Not only did histories – and national histories in particular – help to inculcate patriotic fervour, they were also deeply contentious, with writers from different political persuasions replaying the historical controversies of previous centuries to promote their own ideological positions. Whigs, Tories and Jacobites used history to make very different arguments about the relationship between Crown and Parliament, and about the dangers of arbitrary government. American colonists deployed historical precedents both to attack and to defend what some perceived to be the encroachments of the Crown and its ministers against the principle of popular sovereignty. And in the wake of the French Revolution, radicals across the Anglophone Atlantic used Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights to call for more fundamental constitutional reform.37 By reading history critically, female readers could insert themselves into these political debates, laying down markers of their own principles and beliefs, and disseminating politicised readings of historical texts to other members of their reading communities. This realisation encourages us to situate women’s reading experi­ ences within the wider recovery of women’s political engagement

20  Mark Towsey

during the long eighteenth century that has gathered pace over the last two decades.38 Elaine Chalus, for example, has shown that the familial nature of Georgian political culture allowed elite women to become powerful political brokers, arranging many of the key political deals of the period even while they remained safely ensconced in the conventional setting of domestic sociability.39 Such insights allow us to view the dozens – perhaps hundreds – of surviving historical reading notebooks compiled by elite and middling women in a quite different light, because they help us to understand where women got their political training and ideas from. This is especially the case when we consider the conversable and familial contexts within which female readers encountered and reflected on history texts, which were often highly politicised. As women from politically active families grew up with politics and learned its conventions, they came to participate in the wholesale manipulation of the past for partisan purposes which characterised British historical culture in this period. Take, for example, Lady Margaret Heathcote, who wrote enthusiastically to her sister-in-law Jemima, Marchioness Grey, about her encounter with the recently released Tudor volumes of Hume’s History of England in 1759. Heathcote chose first to praise Hume’s ‘account of Q: Elizabeth, which exactly answers my idea of her’, but her subsequent dissection of Elizabeth’s character is pitched in much more political language than the examples we have looked at so far: In some respects I cannot bear her, & even some of the best parts of her Character proceed but from a very middling foundation; her firmness was in great measure obstinacy & arbitrariness; her religion was certainly policy, as her title to the Crown depended upon it; & her Good nature was for the most part dissimulation.40

Heathcote and Marchioness Grey came from precisely the sort of backgrounds Chalus has in mind, deeply embedded in the aristocratic Whig political circles occupied by their fathers, brothers and husbands. While Heathcote now lived a boring and lonely life in rural Rutland as the wife of an unspectacular baronet and ineffectual MP, she had grown up the daughter of the powerful Yorke Earls of Harwicke, and her correspondence with her brother’s wife was an important means of staying in touch with contemporary politics.41 With this context in mind, Heathcote’s reference to Elizabeth’s ‘obstinacy & arbitrariness’ looks less like an attempt to model female behaviour and more a reflection of recurrent Whig fears about the re-emergence of arbitrary government. If this politicised reading seems farfetched, it is confirmed by Heathcote’s aside that ‘I had much rather have

Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America   21

George the 2nd for my King’ than Elizabeth Tudor, which shows that these two political women read Hume with contemporary politics very much in mind – while also perhaps reflecting rumours about the arbitrary tendencies of the elderly king’s likely successor, the future George III, who was already in sway to the Scottish aristocrat who would become his controversial prime minister, Lord Bute.42 While it is extremely rare in the surviving evidence to find contemporary politics impinging so explicitly on eighteenth-century readers’ responses to historiography, women brought their political instincts to bear on Hume’s text in other ways – even when they never commented explicitly on the political ramifications of their reading. Besides attending to female biography and domestic economy, Elizabeth Rose went about systematically accumulating from Hume a comprehensive overview of British political history, summarising key moments in each monarch’s reign. Her notes on Henry VIII outlined his arbitrary govern­ment, ‘blindly complied with by his Parliaments . . . without regard to the safety and liberty of the subjects’, while those on James I’s reign culminated in Hume’s claim that ‘there was more liberty asserted by this ditto [i.e. Parliament] than by any former’.43 Some of these claims were quite controversial: scholars now agree that Hume aimed to put British politics on a sound rational footing by sweeping aside the partisan myths of the past, providing in their place what he saw as an impartial account of how the British constitution had emerged.44 James I went awry, Hume argued, because he gave Parliament much more latitude than recent practice and longstanding convention should have allowed. Hume’s approach involved diminishing the conventional role played in Whig historiography by constitutional landmarks like the Anglo-Saxon constitution, the Civil War and Magna Carta – yet by removing specific events from the context in which Hume had placed them, Rose’s editorial approach (like that of many contemporary readers) obliterated the fine political nuance of this strategy. Crucially in this instance, Rose’s notes afforded Magna Carta – as ‘the basis of English liberty’, another phrase never used by Hume himself – pride of place in her compilation of British constitutional history at the expense of later moments that Hume himself thought were of much greater longer-term significance.45 For some women, wide reading of this kind in constitutional history could clearly support active political engagement. The Yorkshire heiress and lesbian diarist Anne Lister read very extensively in political and constitutional history, while her social position meant that she was also a major figure in local politics in Halifax in spite of her gender. Lister became an energetic supporter of local anti-reform

22  Mark Towsey

candidates in the tumultuous political climate of the 1820s, bullying newly enfranchised male tenants on her estate into voting for them and boosting their electoral expense funds. Occasional anecdotes in Lister’s personal papers indicate that she would often deploy ­historical arguments in her canvassing activities, although these were not always sufficient to win over reformers to her point of view. On one such occasion in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre, she sought shelter from a sudden rain squall in a shoemaker’s premises in Halifax only to find that the proprietor ‘astonished me by his knowledge of English history’.46 Although Elizabeth Rose did not involve herself so directly in electoral politics despite her elevated social status, her historical reading was political in other ways. Having married unusually late in life, Rose had lost her husband six months after her pregnancy. When her father and her brother then both died soon afterwards, she was left to fight a protracted legal battle over her right to succeed to the family estate and baronetcy, a battle which went all the way to the House of Lords. While her thorough grounding in legal and constitutional history undoubtedly underpinned her determination to pursue her case to the highest court in the land, her notes on Hume’s History had a more practical role still. Elizabeth dedicated her life to giving her son Hugh ‘such an education as may form him to be independent’, and her prodigious reading notes – of which at least a dozen commonplace books survive – were the material basis on which his education was enacted. Hugh Rose himself ultimately became MP for Nairnshire, taking with him to Westminster the personalised grounding in English constitutional history that his mother had prepared for him from Hume’s History of England.47 The expectation that women would supervise their children’s historical education therefore had potentially political consequences, if only insofar as mothers could mediate – sometimes on behalf of their families and the wider political networks to which they belonged – the historical knowledge acquired by their children. A particularly illumin­ ating example is provided by Sarah-Ann Philips, the wife of George Philips, a Mancunian cotton lord turned radical Whig MP who was elevated to a baronetcy in 1828.48 Sarah-Ann’s reading notes, compiled around the turn of the century, show how reading history could be used by a wealthy, upwardly mobile manufacturing family working hard (in intellectual, cultural and political terms) to secure their transition to the landed gentry. As a young mother, Sarah-Ann compiled a large number of historical notebooks as an investment in the political education of her young son, George Richard, but she

Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America   23

had first commissioned a detailed ‘Course of History’ from other members of her husband’s political networks, notably his business partner and fellow radical Whig MP Richard ‘Conversation’ Sharp.49 Sharp produced no less than forty pages of richly detailed guidance, recommending Hume’s History of England as the key entry point into constitutional history, and mapping out what he thought should be the main focus of the Philips’s reading: ‘Observe how civil liberty existed in England & not in France. The origin of the 2 houses of Parliament after the Wittenagemot. Origin of the Power of the Crown. Laws much advanced between the heptarchy & the reign of Edward I.’50 Typically, Sharp was not content to let Sarah-Ann rely purely on Hume, insisting that he should be supplemented by other authors for specific episodes – and, occasionally, by reference to the original documents. For instance, Sharp gave the following warning: Hume & Rapin differ widely in their account of the character of Richard II. Hume says he imposed no taxes, Rapin that he did. Rapin is here correct. . . . Compare Hume & Rapin & whenever they differ in their conclusions refer to the original documents.

Sarah-Ann evidently took much of this advice to heart, compiling reams of historical notes from Hume, Rapin, Gibbon, Robertson and others in which constitutional history was a principal theme – while always being alive to the political implications of the material she read. On the legendary Anglo-Saxon precursor of representative govern­ ment, the Wittenagemot, Sarah-Ann noted down Rapin’s argument ‘not only that each kingdom of the Heptarchy had a Wittenagemot of its own, but that there was a general one for all the seven kingdoms’. In this case, however, Sarah-Ann was not entirely convinced by Rapin’s argument, and specifically his claims about this supposed national Wittenagemot: his reasoning in this subject does not produce satisfaction in my mind . . . nor is there any likelihood of its being ever set in a clearer light as almost all the ancient monuments which might seem to unfold the difficulties were buried in the ruins of the monasteries.51

While Sarah-Ann Philips and Elizabeth Rose read history in large part with their sons’ constitutional education in mind, many women maintained a supervisory interest over their wards’ historical reading well into adulthood, often with clearly political intentions. For John Murray, an MP for Perthshire, who would succeed as 3rd Duke of Atholl in 1764, the Unionist politics of histories by William Robertson

24  Mark Towsey

and David Hume were extremely pertinent. Murray’s past was intimately bound up with Scotland’s turbulent post-Union legacy: as the eldest son of the famous Jacobite general and virulent anti-Unionist Lord George Murray, he had campaigned tirelessly to redeem his tainted heritage, serving in the Hanoverian army against his father in 1745, marrying into the loyalist branch of his family, and aligning himself squarely with the Bute and Grenville administrations in Parliament.52 When his aunt and mother-in-law Jean Drummond, the 2nd Duchess, read Hume’s History in the early months of 1762, she eagerly wrote to Murray, presenting the book as the latest step in John’s rehabilitation: I can form more distinct notions, and retain them better in my memory of what were the transactions, laws and customs of the earliest times of this island . . . than I ever was by any history of England I have read formerly; were you to read it, I’m persuaded you would think your time very well bestowed.53

In Drummond’s apparently nonchalant terms, Hume’s History would be useful to Murray precisely because the history of ‘this island’ was unequivocally presented by Hume as the ‘history of England’. As a more recent observer has explained, ‘Hume does not feel much need to invoke Scottish history to explain the present that preoccupies him and his readers. . . . He thought Scots should study the English national context and not their own.’54 A still more impassioned intervention was made by Hanna Hume (who was, as far as we know, not related to David), although her opinion of Hume’s History of England could not have been more different. Probably the wife of the merchant and inactive Whig MP Sir Abraham Hume (d. 1772), Hanna wrote a detailed and combative letter to dissuade her daughter-in-law from what she saw as her naïve admiration of Hume’s History, explaining that ‘what is called his history is allowed to be an apology for the family of the Stuarts & written for that purpose only’.55 As she continued, The great deceit in his book is that he does not distinguish between the constitution & administration, & so supposes that whatever is done by the most wicked kings or ministers is constitution. The falsity of this is evident. It is certain that most of the kings before the Stuarts were as tyrannical as they but you who have read Robertson will easily account for their being so. . . . How does it follow that because the kings were tyrants before the Stuarts, tho in defiance of the most plain & express laws, that the Stuarts are justifiable in following their example. If the Stuarts had

Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America   25

not been as ill judging as tyrannical they would have found out that they had no powerful barons to support them. Mr Hume is charged with want of veracity in not telling the whole truth but only as much as serves his purposes by which an action may be represented quite contrary to what in reality it would appear if the whole truth was told.56

What is particularly revealing about this intervention is that it reflects a cross-generational divide in how Hume’s History was being received, involving at least four individual readers whose role in the controversy was governed by gendered conventions about who was responsible for supervising a family’s reading. This emerges from a postscript to the letter, in which Hanna explains that ‘Mrs. H. Junior may forget how she provoked Mr. H. Snr. to give her this trouble by saying in her last that let Mr. H. Sen. abuse Mr. Hume as much as he please, she & Mr. Gib. must defend him’.57 Suggestively, this postscript indicates that the letter’s detailed arguments about Hume’s apparent errors emerged from the combined reading of both parents – and that it had been the family’s matriarch, Hanna Hume, who had been tasked with communicating their displeasure, not the father, who would more usually be expected to speak on what were fundamentally political matters. Equally, the couple’s son Abraham, who would be elected to Parliament as a Tory candidate in the 1770s, is entirely absent from the exchange; instead, it is the daughter-in-law’s mistaken enthusiasm for Hume that most exercises the Humes, egged on inappropriately by the unidentified ‘Mr. Gib.’ One final example reveals another way in which women mediated the wider political implications of history reading. This example again involves Hume’s History of England, and returns to the political dimensions of his treatment of Mary Queen of Scots. Though encouraging his readers to engage emotionally with Mary’s plight, Hume nevertheless believed Mary to have been complicit in the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley. This enraged Scottish Jacobites, who had adopted Mary as a figurehead because she was viewed – like their titular leader James II – as a martyr both to English political interests and to the overmighty claims of the Scottish Parliament.58 A particularly detailed response was penned in the early 1760s by the Jacobite philosopher and political economist Sir James Steuart of Coltness, who set out ‘to counterbalance the unfavourable impressions our author has some how unvoluntarily imbibed against the fair and unfortunate Princess’.59 Although the details of Steuart’s response need not detain us, its treatment after his death by his widow, Francis Wemyss, is important. Wemyss transcribed copies of Steuart’s

26  Mark Towsey

manuscript response to Hume and distributed it to fellow Jacobite families in north-east Scotland as a way of commemorating ‘those valuable sentiments which formed the basis on which their Friendship was built and mutually subsisted’.60 This devotional act of manuscript circulation is noteworthy in several ways. In the first place, it tallies with Wemyss’s largely hidden role in Steuart’s influential publishing career, which involved acting behind the scenes as a copyist and pre-publication reader for Steuart while he was alive, and promoting his work to publishers and potential translators after his death. Wemyss also became a writer in her own right after Steuart’s death, composing an ‘emotionally charged’ memoir of her married life which circulated not in print but in the ‘more personal sphere’ – and therefore more safely feminine sphere – of manuscript circulation.61 Most importantly for our purposes, Wemyss’s intervention reveals the political dimensions of women’s participation in what Daniel Woolf terms the ‘social circulation’ of the past.62 Woolf shows that from the seventeenth century onwards women were engaged in collating, archiving and distributing manuscript accounts of family and local history, as an activity wholly appropriate to their roles and responsibilities in the domestic sphere. In this case, however, Wemyss’s scribal energy was devoted to perpetuating a distinctively politicised reading of a specific text to a wider reading community whose shared politics were by this time in terminal decline. By focusing on the vexed figure of the degenerate female novel-reader, and on the eighteenth century’s voluminous prescriptive literature on how women might avoid the moral dangers of reading, scholars have obscured some of the ways in which reading allowed women to break free from the apparently rigid confines of the separate spheres. While it will never be possible to tell how representative the responses discussed in this chapter were of female reading experiences more generally, attending to the surviving manuscript traces of women’s reading shows that each reader reacted unpredictably to the texts in front of her. None of the readers discussed in this chapter were passive or compliant readers of the history books they read. Instead, they were all active agents in the negotiation and appropriation of meaning, deciding for themselves what they thought was important about what they read, placing historical notes in information landscapes of their own design, and adapting historian’s arguments – or refuting them entirely – when they did not coincide with their own political opinions and beliefs. Importantly, much of this took place within the domestic sphere, and women took advantage of the

Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America   27

roles and responsibilities assigned to them in conventional ‘separate spheres’ ideology to disseminate alternative interpretations of significant ­historical events and personalities. In the process, the familial, sociable and conversable contexts within which history was commonly read and discussed by women ultimately drew them close to the public realm of political culture. Reading history was, by all means, a polite accomplishment – informative, patriotic and character-forming in equal measure – but history was also an important outlet for the expression of women’s core political beliefs. Women claimed authority as interpreters of historical narratives and interpretations, and their self-expression profoundly shaped how history was appropriated and utilised as families on either side of the Atlantic made sense of the rapidly changing world around them. Notes   1. ‘Hints on Reading’, Lady’s Magazine, 20 (1789), p. 79.  2. Quoted by Norma Clarke, Dr Johnson’s Women (London: Pimlico, 2005), p. 155.  3. Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 22.   4. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 287.   5. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 160.  6. Richard de Ritter, Imagining Women Readers, 1789–1820: Well-­ Regulated Minds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), p. 3.  7. Pearson, Women’s Reading, pp. 15, 219–20.   8. De Ritter, Imagining Women Readers, p.2.  9. For an important exception, see John Brewer, ‘Reconstructing the Reader: Prescriptions, Texts and Strategies in Anna Larpent’s Reading’, in James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 226–45. 10. Pearson, Women’s Reading, p. 43. 11. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 5. 12. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987); Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal, 36:2 (1993), pp. 383–414; Anna Clark, The Struggle for the

28  Mark Towsey Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1995). 13. D. R. Woolf, ‘A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500–1800’, American Historical Review, 102:3 (1997), pp. 645–79. 14. Mark Salber Phillips, ‘“If Mrs Mure be not sorry for poor King Charles”: History, the Novel and the Sentimental Reader’, History Workshop Journal, 43 (1997), pp. 110–31; Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), ch. 4. 15. Woolf, ‘A Feminine Past?’, pp. 648, 663. 16. Charles Allen, The Polite Lady; or, A Course of Female Education (London: Printed for Newbery and Carnan, 1769), pp. 139, 133–5. 17. Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 256. 18. John Bennett, Letters to a Young Lady, on a Variety of Useful and Interesting Subjects (Warrington: W. Eyres, 1789), pp. 173–4. 19. M. O. Grenby, ‘The Origins of Children’s Literature’, in M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Litera­ture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 9–11. 20. John Bennett, Strictures on Female Education; Chiefly as it Relates to the Culture of the Heart (London: T. Cadell, 1787), pp. 151–2. 21. Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (London: H. Hughs, 1773), pp. 222–3. 22. Ibid., p. 212. 23. Williams, The Social Life of Books, p. 251. 24. Pearson, Women’s Reading, p. 51. 25. Warwickshire County Record Office, Warwick, CR464/145/2, Letitia Napier, ‘Notebook’, 1798. 26. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MS N-2001.1, Harriet Cary, ‘History Notebook’, n.d. (around 1800). 27. Wiltshire and Swindon Archives, Chippenham, 1720/724, Alice Money, ‘Notes on the History of England’, n.d. (around 1802), pp. 1, 13, 15, inside front cover. 28. National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh, GD1/726/10, Elizabeth Rose, ‘Notes on Hume’s History of England’, n.d. (around 1770s), fols 3r, 15v, 7r–8r; GD1/726/6, Elizabeth Rose, ‘Book of Extracts’, 1775, pp. 73–4. 29. Rose, ‘Notes on Hume’s History’, fols 22r–23v. 30. Mark Towsey, ‘“An Infant Son to Truth Engage”: Virtue, Responsibility and Self-Improvement in the Reading of Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock, 1747–1815’, Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 2 (2007), p. 77. 31. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, N-1606, Rebecca Amory Lowell, ‘Notebook of Literary Observations’, 1813, unpaginated.

Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America   29

32. Ibid. 33. Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone, U1590/C119, Louisa Grenville, ‘Notebooks’, n.d. (1790s), Vol. 6, unpaginated. 34. Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 108, 115–16. 35. Grenville, ‘Notebooks’, Vol. 6, unpaginated. 36. Ibid. 37. From a very extensive literature, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); R. J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Mark G. Spencer, David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005). 38. See for instance contributions to Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (eds), Women in British Politics, 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). 39. Elaine Chalus, Elite Women in English Political Life, c. 1754–90 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 40. Bedfordshire Archives and Record Service, Bedford, L30/9/56/45, Lady Margaret Heathcote to Jemima, Marchioness Grey, 27 June 1759. 41. Biographical details taken from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). For the political activities of Marchioness Grey and another of her sisters-in-law, see Chalus, Elite Women, pp. 66–7. 42. Heathcote to Grey, 27 June 1759. 43. Rose, ‘Notes on Hume’s History’, fols 15v, 30r. 44. Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Phillips, Society and Sentiment. 45. Rose, ‘Notes on Hume’s History’, fol. 3r. 46. Jill Liddington, Presenting the Past: Anne Lister of Halifax, 1791–1840 (Hebden Bridge: Pennine Pens, 1994), pp. 9, 31–2, 34, 39–40, 65. 47. See Towsey, ‘“An Infant Son to Truth Engage”’; further biographical information on Hugh Rose is given in the History of Parliament project, (accessed 1 March 2018). 48. ODNB; David Brown, ‘From “Cotton Lord” to Landed Aristocrat: The Rise of Sir George Philips Bart., 1766–1847’, Historical Research, 69:168 (1996), pp. 62–82. 49. ODNB. 50. Warwickshire County Record Office, Warwick, VR456/in Box 35, Lady Philips, ‘Notebooks on History’, n.d. (early 1800s), unpaginated. 51. Ibid.; see also M. G. Sullivan, ‘Rapin, Hume and the Identity of the Historian in Eighteenth-Century England’, History of European Ideas, 28:3 (2002), pp. 145–62.

30  Mark Towsey 52. ODNB. 53. National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh, National Register of Archives for Scotland, 234, Box 49/I/56, Duchess of Atholl to J. Murray, 2 March 1762. 54. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Vol. II: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 179, 261. 55. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Osborn MS7733, Letter of Hanna (Frederick) Hume, discussing Hume’s History of England. The letter is undated, but it must have been written sometime between the publication of James Beattie’s Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth in 1771 and the death of the writer’s husband the following year. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Lawrence L. Bongie, ‘The Eighteenth Century Marian Controversy and an Unpublished Letter by David Hume’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 1:4 (1963–4), pp. 236–52; O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 114–22. 59. National Library of Scotland (NLS), Edinburgh, MS9376, attributed to Sir James Steuart of Coltness, ‘Notes on Hume’s History of England’, n.d. (1760s), p. 68. 60. Formerly held by the National Trust for Scotland at Leith Hall, 77.8160, ‘Queen Mary’, December 1785 (Present location unknown); MS copy of NLS MS9376. 61. Katherine Glover, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011), p. 76. 62. Woolf, ‘A Feminine Past?’, p. 647.

Chapter 2

Reading in Australian Prisons: An Exploration of Motivation Mary Carroll and Jane Garner

This chapter explores and critically considers the act of reading and the motivation for it over time as part of the broader experience of the convict in Australian prisons. Two main analytical methods – empirical historical work in archives and contemporary interviews – have been employed to contrast and compare the historical and contemporary convict experience of reading. Consideration of the place of reading in Australian society is nuanced by the value and power vested in this act as a means to construct a civil society in a challenging and remote environment. Most particularly, the power of reading and its signifi­cance are amplified when we consider its place and function in the life of the convict, both past and present. An examination of attitudes towards, and motivations for, the provision of books in prisons both past and present provides insight into attitudes to prison reform and the functions of incarceration. Exploration of the significance and motivations underlying reading and the structures supporting and encouraging it provides a touchstone for contrasting and comparing contemporary attitudes to reform with the historic record, allowing for a wider and more critical lens on these debates. As a measure of civil society, the reading environment can provide the scholar of penology with critical perspectives over an extended period on official attitudes to the debate over reform and punishment and the function prisons have in enacting these missions. The Assignment System Australia was colonised by the British as a penal settlement in 1788, at a critical point in the development of thinking about the treatment of prisoners, and this new thinking was to play a part in the development of colonial penology. Books, literacy instruction, libraries and reading 31

32   Mary Carroll and Jane Garner

for convicts were important features of this new thinking. In Britain, this early period (1788–1840) was one of social and political change, responsive to attitudes emerging from the European Enlightenment. The prevailing eighteenth-century European attitudes around human perfectibility, morality and individuality were to influence the early administrators of the new colonies in both their personal views and attitudes, and their approach to the treatment of convicts. Books had arrived in the colony of New South Wales with the First Fleet in 1788, and during this first period of European colonisation had both a symbolic and a utilitarian function. Books represented a means of transmission of accepted values and cultural norms, a tool for use in spiritual wellbeing, a device for the formation of character and a means to facilitate the economic development of the new colonies. The value placed on books saw the early establishment of institutions such as those found in Britain, including private and subscription libraries, scientific societies and Mechanics’ Institutes to facilitate their use and distribution. An insight into the value and place of books for the free population in the new colonies can be found in a mention of the establishment of a library in Hobart Town in 1827 where the author writes: On Tuesday the 21st inst. a very numerous meeting of the members of the Hobart-town Book Society, took place in the Court of Request room, at which it was resolved to send home a remittance by the next vessel for an additional supply of books, and also that it would be desirable to extend the objects of the Society to  the formation of a library and a reading room. . . . We consider these symptoms of intellectual improvement, among the most gratifying proofs of the rank which Van Diemen’s Land is shortly destined to hold among the British colonies. Such a disposition to improve the best faculties of our nature, must very strongly point out to the Colonial Department at home, how well the inhabitants of this island, above all others, are qualified to act as guardians and reformers of the criminals from England from time to time committed to their charge.1

Reading good books and their utility in the reform of the convict did not feature heavily in the formal administrative or philosophical approaches to crime and punishment in this early settlement period and therefore their use was often incidental rather than formalised. In this early period, the of Assignment System for the convicts promoted reform through graduated levels of freedom, from forced hard labour for the government to a ‘ticket-of-leave’ scheme whereby convicts could hire out their services to free settlers. In this system, reform was

Reading in Australian Prisons: An Exploration of Motivation   33

the primary objective and, according to John Barry, ‘while harshness and brutality were concomitants, they were often incidental and in­ evitable’.2 Insufficient employment and a change in social attitudes in the late 1830s saw a shift of support from the incentive-based Assignment System to a new Probation System, which sought to address what was viewed by some as the earlier system’s failure to deter crime and contribute to social stability. It was claimed that failure to find adequate employment for the convicts among the free settlers resulted in ‘The congregation of large masses of male convicts, under imperfect superintendence, with arrangements which admitted of little or no regard to decency, and wholly destitute of anything like religious or moral instruction’.3 The period of the Probation System has been described as one in which the emerging middle class in Britain were concerned about increased crime, social unrest and political upheaval, and it was considered that stern punishment, routine and order were essential to the prison system, to quell the industrial classes and deflect them from further crime.4 Books and reading were to have an active role in containing the emerging industrial poor, who were feared to be a threat to the expanding middle classes. According to historian Sidney Ditzion, this was a period when libraries – and consequently books and reading – played four main functions. These were: 1. The library would keep people away from cheap and harmful entertainment e.g. drinking; 2. It would prevent crime and delinquency, even rehabilitate the delinquent; 3. It would provide relaxation for the tired workingman; 4. And it would provide reading for the poor and their children.5

These influences would be manifest in the approaches taken in penology around the world. In the Australian colonies, the growing influence of the free settlers coupled with changing attitudes in Britain to convict reform were to place education, particularly reading instruction, as an equally important pillar in the treatment of convicts, alongside that of order, routine and harsh punishment. In this new system, ‘the primary objective of punishment’ was ‘to be to deter others from committing the same crime, from a dread of subjecting themselves to the same condemnation’.6 The new system was not universally popular or accepted by the population or by leading reformers, as indicated by a correspondent in the Colonial Times of 1841 who decried the introduction of such a system: ‘It is quite surprising that any statesman could be induced to adopt a

34   Mary Carroll and Jane Garner

system of punishment for offenders so defective in all its branches’. Concerned with the lack of classification of prisoners into educated and non-educated, the correspondent despaired at the plight of the ‘many who have received a superior education’, whose fate now would be the same as that of the ‘common labourer’.7 Despite such concerns, the system was adopted and was to have a profound impact on the treatment of convicts in Australia. The new Probation System In the new Probation System, training and work in industries such as logging, shipbuilding, tanning, brick making and blacksmithing were seen as essential to the rehabilitation process, as it was the belief of many that the convict, and the colony, would benefit from the convict’s hard labour, acquisition of skills and the acquisition of positive work habits. The aim was to inculcate ‘habits of industry and self-control as will qualify him [the convict] to enter upon his new career when the period of his confinement is expired’.8 According to Benjamin Horne in his report on the Point Puer boys’ settlement in 1843, ‘Instruction in trades and various industrial employment is valuable both as a means of reforming the juvenile delinquent and of preparing him after his liberation to preserve his subsistence by honest labour’.9 The new system also resulted in the eventual establishment of peni­ tentiaries and model prisons such as at Port Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, where new approaches to criminal behaviour were undertaken, and education and reading were made part of the convict’s daily routine. These new approaches included the provision of a library for the convicts (and the officers) alongside workshops, chapels and schoolrooms in the prison buildings, and the appointment of ‘librarians’. The previously quoted correspondent in the Colonial Times of 1841 used the appointment of librarians from among the convicts as a means to highlight flaws in the new system, and to illu­strate concerns. The correspondent writes of the Probation System: Miserable as it is in theory, it is worse in practice. Let us look at a particular gang of probationers for example. There is a ‘Librarian’ at £165 per annum, who delivers out the books according to the several tastes of the ‘students’. . . . Is the Librarian a Protestant or a Catholic? If the latter his duty in administrating to their religious wants is very light, for there are six Protestants to one Catholic.10

Reading in Australian Prisons: An Exploration of Motivation   35

The selection of books available for convicts was initially largely religious in nature and uplifting in intent. In contrast, textbooks such as those in the Irish Readers series, with their deliberately non-sectarian approach, were used in the classroom to teach reading. The intention behind giving convicts access to religious texts was to expose them to ‘God’s word’ as a path to reformation, with organisations such as the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and the Quakers providing some reading material in the form of religious tracts. Later, the selection, supported by the government and with the encouragement of leading reformers such as Captain Alexander Maconochie, a former naval officer appointed as superintendent of the penal settlement on Norfolk Island, was to include literature and popular magazines, examples of which will be discussed later in this chapter. Literacy instruction became a common practice aboard the prison hulks and the transport ships, and it has been claimed that convicts in New South Wales were ‘better educated than the “average” English worker left behind in Britain’ and ‘were also better educated than the British prison population’, with a ‘read and/or write rate of 75 per cent, and a read and write rate of 46 per cent’.11 Educating these convicts was seen, to use a contemporary concept, as an investment in the human capital of the new colony, to ensure its economic viability. Closely associated with reform and the provision of education, books and reading instruction during this second phase of the settle­ ments, Maconochie became superintendent of the infamous and reputedly brutal penal settlement on Norfolk Island. In an experi­ ment to effect an alternative approach to penology, M ­ aconochie implemented a new regime in the face of opposition and the British government’s commitment to the harsher elements of the new Probation System – a system which Barry describes as one in which the ‘moral regeneration of criminals became a dominant objective, to be achieved through pain and degradation’.12 Maconochie’s admin­ istration of the Norfolk Island penal settlement (1840–4) allowed him to trial his alternative system, promoting education as a critical element in the reform of the convicts, and reading and the provision of ‘good books’ as a central element in reforming the convict character. He rejected the harsher aspects of the Probation System, devising instead a regime that aimed to make ‘corporal punishment and physical coercion unnecessary’.13 Maconochie sought to use education through reading, as well as music and the pursuit of training in useful occupations, as a means of successfully re-integrating the convict into society. He ‘established an adult school’

36   Mary Carroll and Jane Garner

which he attended regularly to carry out his role of ‘examining and distribution [of] a few prizes in marks, for attention and proficiency’. Marks were a currency which could be awarded or removed, and which could be used to purchase education, books, food and clothing and so on. When sufficient marks had been acquired, the prisoner’s punishment would be complete. Maconochie designed a new prison in which inmates in their cells could choose – or not – to listen to a convict reader by opening or closing a sliding panel in the roof of the cell. He ‘gave marks to the educated prisoners employed to read aloud in the gaol, hospitals, dormitories and larger huts’,14 rewarding the efforts of these convicts, and illustrating the centrality of books and reading in his reform process. It is worth pointing out that Maconochie’s innovative views and methods were later reflected in the prison reform movement in Britain, which was increasingly calling for change to the treatment of prisoners and education, particularly moral education. Maconochie’s views were controversial and divisive both in the new colonies and in Britain, flying in the face of the commitment of governments to harsh punishment and order, as well as the fears of the general population. Despite the evidence to the contrary, many in authority believed his system was bound to fail. Ultimately, pressure from free settlers and other critics saw him dismissed in 1844 and Norfolk Island returned to the harsher regime of its past. Maconochie’s dismissal did not halt his influence, however, and his success saw his ideas and practices reach beyond Norfolk Island, to Irish prisons; later, they were to influence penology in America. In Australia, Maconochie’s activities now serve as a concrete example of the link across time of early concerns, attitudes and practices and twenty-first century issues.15 The naming of the Alexander Maconochie Correctional Centre, a model prison located in Australia’s capital, is no coincidence and the practices of this modern prison owe much to Maconochie’s example. Maconochie also influenced the practices of his contemporaries. While it had been considered customary to provide books for convicts from the beginning of transportation, and ministers were known to provide ‘good books’ to those contained in the prison hulks, during the Probation period changes were made to the routine of the convicts to include regular education, the appointment of schoolmasters and ‘librarians’, and the establishment of convict libraries.16 A government report on transportation to Australia in 1845 claimed that ‘there is not now a gang without its library and its religious instructor or free schoolmaster’.17 As will be discussed further within this chapter, this contrasts markedly with the current situation found in most modern

Reading in Australian Prisons: An Exploration of Motivation   37

Australian prisons and the comparative importance placed on reading and books as part of the convict experience. Reforms throughout the nineteenth century also reflected changing attitudes and concerns in Britain, where a perceived need for ‘popu­lar education’ emerged.18 In this changing industrial context, a shift occurred, from crafts­workers, small-unit production and traditional trader/­apprentice practices to large-scale industry, leading, accord­ing to Ditzion, to a breakdown in the traditional means of knowledge transfer. Access to books and reading began to be framed as a vehicle for popular training and education. He states: Books assisted not only in the mastery of the processes of production but also in the revelation of vast power in the broad expanse of knowledge which had hitherto been the property of the privileged few. The multitudes from workshop and field could now march triumphantly through the ‘gates of the temple of science’ and share in the complete culture of the times.19

This reflects our understanding of the provision of books and the promotion of reading in the penal settlements of Australia of the period, as the colony needed workers who were familiar with new agri­cultural practices and means of production, and skilled in the trades. The colonies and their penal settlement lacked the traditional means of skills and knowledge transfer from master to apprentice; therefore, reading and ‘popular education’ were seen as the only means of providing access to the knowledge required to transform the remote Australian settlements into fully functional communities. Generally, the libraries were overseen by the settlement chaplain, schoolteacher, or occasionally educated convict on land, or the ship’s surgeon at sea. The chaplain’s responsibilities were defined in the 1833 Standing Instructions for the Regulations of the Penal Settlement on Tasmania’s Peninsula: ‘He is to establish Schools and anxiously superintend them’.20 Over time, a librarian and schoolmaster were appointed to the new settlements, though this responsibility often remained in the hands of the chaplain, and both regular instruction and reading were encouraged. Literacy instruction and the promotion of reading were thus closely aligned to attempts to change the moral character of the convicts. Thomas Lempriere describes approaches to instruction in his report on Van Diemen’s Land, stating: The instruction given at Point Puer is confined to plain reading, writing and the simple rules of arithmetic, under the inspection of the Catechist, aided by the overseers and men attached to the establishment, who act as teachers in the various de­partments according to their abilities.21

38   Mary Carroll and Jane Garner

Reading Reading aloud to the convict population by the schoolmaster, chaplain or an educated convict was a common part of prison routine and considered an important element in the dissemination of cultural norms. The Norfolk Island experience included regular readings of sacred texts and of worthy books at mealtimes, in the evenings and during the winter months.22 Reading aloud was to serve a particular purpose as, in the view of those such as Maconochie (who believed in the communality of reading), the convict ‘preferred one reading, and the others listening’.23 Library books were distributed to the convicts as described in the 1841 Standing Orders for the Regulation of the Probation System of Convict Labour in Van Diemen’s Land: The Superintendent will issue the Books in his charge, at discretion, to the best-conducted Convicts of each class, on Saturday and Sunday after­noons; taking great care that they are returned to him through his Assistants on each evening in a proper state. So, upon days upon which the usual labour cannot be performed, owing to the state of the weather; and on these days, in addition to the Saturday afternoon, such Convicts as are desirous of obtaining instruction in reading will be allowed to attend in a hut set apart for that purpose. Upon all these occasions the Super­ intendent will read a moral lecture and an evening prayer to the Convicts in the Gang.24

Further insight into the context in which reading took place can be gained from descriptions of library use. In a letter to the editor of the Mercury, for example, a correspondent describes the library facilities for convicts at Port Arthur, in response to comments on their ill treatment. The description paints a positive picture: ‘a very large and most useful library is provided and is freely used by the prisoners both for their Sunday reading and for those leisure intervals which wet weather and other causes may occasionally furnish’.25 Thomas Lempriere, working as deputy commissary general in Van Diemen’s Land, provides further evidence of reading for enjoyment when he describes Sundays for the boy convicts as consisting of: reading and spelling, learning and repeating the Church Catechism. The books used in the school are the Bible, New Testament, Psalter and common spelling book, a small library is at present in possession of this establishment, consisting of books, chiefly furnished through the kindness of different individuals who have visited Point Puer, a small donation

Reading in Australian Prisons: An Exploration of Motivation   39

from the Religious Tract Society, London, together with a number of tracts selected by different per­sons, of which the boys frequently avail themselves during their leisure hours.26

He had concerns, however, over the inadequacies and appeal of the book choices, and suggested ‘That the library be increased with cheap, suitable and useful works for the purpose of lending to the boys to read during their leisure hours’.27 He also recommended: That some small portion of the values of each boy’s estimated labour be invested in the savings bank, the accumulation of principal and interest to be handed over to them on expiration of their sentences . . . in the event of misconduct, certain deductions to be made from the accumulated sum to be appropriated in the purchase of books for the Library.28

In light of great concern over the texts made available to convicts, much thought was given to guiding their reading, as an account of a controversy over ‘light reading’ attests. With the title ‘Convict Life in Norfolk Island: Authentic Records. Light? Reading’, an 1891 newspaper article by an anonymous writer describes the collection between 1845 and 1846 (i.e. post-Maconochie) as consisting of: ‘The Jewish Expositor’, ‘The Life Of God in the Souls of Man’, ‘Elements of Practical Knowledge’, ‘Two Volumes of Assorted Tracts’, ‘Christianity in China’ and ‘Buchannan’s Christian Rest’. Those, with a few catechetical and some old magazines, were the sole reading for eighteen hundred men.29

According to this anonymous author, an unnamed military commandant at that time took the ‘Reverend Librarian’ to task for making available material that was ‘altogether too light to be given to felons’ and that only the Bible was to be given to those in solitary confinement. Subsequently, according to the article, the librarian could not issue a book to a felon without approval of the chief gaoler and if convicts were found to have an unapproved book in their ­possession, they were flogged.30 Railing against this perceived injustice, the anonymous author outlines a case study detailing the consequence of denying all books but the Bible to those in solitary. The case was put using the words of a convict named Henry Alyne: I have a bible sir, and I read it as often as I can, but you know, sir, a man cannot go on reading the bible and nothing else for ever. In fact, it makes me sick of the bible altogether and I don’t think I will ever look at again.

40   Mary Carroll and Jane Garner

Alyne later murdered his gaoler and escaped. In giving evidence at his trial, a clergyman was to claim, ‘I believe if the man had two or three other books in addition to the bible Orford [the gaoler] would be alive today’.31 The collections ‘It will be universally admitted that the literature of a prison library should be such as to elevate the thoughts to nobler things, and thus set the perverted mind in the right direction for reform.’32 This quote, drawn from the 1891 Bathurst Free Press article, highlights a common perception that the reading materials available to the early convicts ought to consist almost exclusively of religious tracts and reading aimed to ‘elevate the thoughts’. However, as will be demonstrated, the breadth of reading material, while carefully curated to achieve these higher aims, consisted in reality not only of religious books but also of textbooks and items more pragmatic and practical in their aims. What is known of the books available to the convicts has been gathered through fragments of evidence. There are two surviving book registers: one from Norfolk Island, which notes the borrowings of particular prisoners;33 and another from Port Arthur, which outlines the use of a circulating collection of books sent to the various outstations for distribution to the officers and prisoners.34 The Port Arthur leger was created in January 1874 after Civil Commandant James Boyd was asked to furnish the Colonial Secretary’s Office ‘with a catalogue of all reading. Books belonging to the government in the establishment under your control, both of a religious and secular character.’35 The Norfolk Island register has, over time, become almost illegible, and can now provide only tantalising glimpses into the collection and its readers. These registers of books provide us with one small window into the contents of the libraries. Other sources, such as contemporary newspaper accounts, rules and regulations on the distribution of books and the government regulations for schoolmasters and ministers of religion in the penal settlements, governing their role as librarians in taking care of the organisation and the distribution of books, also provide insight into the function of the library services.36 Further useful sources include the plans drawn up for the buildings of the penal establishments, advertisements for the tender for books placed in the local newspapers by the colonial commissariat office, the requests for books by Maconochie to the colonial administration, and the reports of various visitors and dignitaries to the settlements.

Reading in Australian Prisons: An Exploration of Motivation   41

From the records, the collections consisted, unsurprisingly, of religious texts and tracts, useful books such as those associated with the trades and agriculture, and books intended for reading instruction and schooling.37 There is evidence in the register of books from 1874 of the Port Arthur collection to suggest that the reformist movement and Captain Maconochie’s efforts on Norfolk Island were to have a wider impact on practices at settlements such as Port Arthur and the boys’ settlement of Point Puer in Van Diemen’s Land.38 This register contains many books Maconochie recommended to the Colonial Office for purchase in 1840. McConachie’s recommendations had included ‘The respective Series of the Farmers[’] and Mechanic’s Magazines’. He believed such material would be ‘eminently useful’: I have practically known several examples of the minds of men in very humble life, and otherwise remaining illiterate, stimulated to considerable activity in their own lives by suggestions taken from these Books. And, besides the valuable abstract effect thus produced, the Scheming and Contrivance for the future encouraged by it appear to me eminently calculated to wean from vicious retrospections.39

He also encouraged the acquisition of ‘polemic’ religious works, stating: ‘Polemical discussions are sometimes inconvenient; but I do not dread them, for they are nearly always, I think, improving. They open the mind’.40 Works such as Robinson Crusoe and Cook’s Voyages and Scott’s Waverley novels appear in the register and were present in Maconochie’s original request, as he believed that: Narratives of a Moral tendency would be all likewise useful, especially where (as in Robinson Crusoe for example) they teach energy, hopefulness in difficulty, regard and affection for our brethren in Savage Life, etc. And a good collection of Voyages and Travels, in particular including Cook’s and the modern Missionary and other Pacific Ocean Voyages, would be for the same reasons important. The mind of the whole white Race in this Hemisphere wants softening towards its Aboriginal brethren; and nothing seems to me better Calculated to Supplement a Sense of duty on this head than a familiarity with narratives in which they are placed in important and interesting Situations, without, at the Same time, pointing out, with too much affection, the object thus in view.41

Evidence of few practical books exists in the Port Arthur and Norfolk Island registers but those present or decipherable include titles such as: Mechanic’s Magazine; Domestic Economy, Vol. II and Lessons in Mechanics; Cotton, Factories to Fields; Guide to Trade:

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Conditions of Animals; and The Guide to Trades: Shoemaker.42 The general collection on the register for Norfolk Island is small. However, larger numbers of religious and schoolbooks were maintained in a separate list, suggesting that religious and teaching collections –bibles, arithmetic books and religious tracts – appear to have been kept separate from general works in the settlements. It may be that the number of religious and teaching volumes was much greater than the number of recreational titles. Support for this view can also be found in the commissariat’s call for tenders to supply books to the Probation System. In January 1842, the commissariat in Hobart called for tenders for the provision of ‘Arithmetic books, Walkingham’s, 86’, 825 Bibles, 825 prayer books, 225 Testaments and 825 spelling books,43 and in 1844 for the provision of ‘2000 Books of Prayer’44 for convicts professing the Catholic religion. In July 1843 a call went out for the provision of 180 Irish national schoolbooks, 180 sacred histories by the SPCK, 500 church catechisms and 400 prayer books.45 In 1849 there was a call for the supply of ‘six sets of Chamber’s Journal, 400 Monthly parts ditto, 100 vols Chambers Miscellany, various, Penny Magazine 300 Monthly parts ditto’.46 It is worth reflecting on the nature of the privilege provided to convicts by access to these books: for many of the general population, the subscription or cost of books would certainly have been unaffordable, and access to them very welcome. But, while a privilege, access to the library and its collection would have been carefully controlled, with the contents curated and considered to reflect the intent behind – and guided by the agenda of – those administering the prisons. The library had a clarity of purpose reflected and embodied in the collection; and through its fragments we are able to capture some of the cultural politics of nineteenth-century penology and under­stand the important role reading was seen to play in it. Collections: the contemporary context Reflecting on this historical agenda provides an opportunity to throw light on contrasting twenty-first-century attitudes to books and reading in prisons. The collections in the many libraries in contemporary Australian prisons, most without professional supervision, are dated and lack any clarity of purpose at all. While they share some of the eclectic nature of those historic prison libraries, they demonstrate none of the guiding hands that their predecessors display; and, unlike the carefully curated collections of the nineteenth-century

Reading in Australian Prisons: An Exploration of Motivation   43

convict library, modern collections are assembled through a variety of disparate and unconsidered means. The collections are usually built through donation and chance, with no guiding objective or mission, and no direct reference to or consideration of the prisoners’ needs. They are usually not funded, and housed in far from ideal conditions. These collections exist as testament to the continued recog­nition that they are needed, but without the commitment to their growth, economic benefit or to the wellbeing of prisoners that was exhibited in the early convict settlements. A link appears to be broken more generally in the provision of libraries as a service to prisoners and as evidence of a commitment to the possibility of education and reform. History has much to offer in its use as a means of developing policy which considers past conditions to highlight contemporary circumstances. In addition to comparing the conditions found in Australian prison libraries today with those of the colonial period, it is also interesting to compare the role of reading in Australian penal colonies with the role of reading in today’s Australian prisons. The historic role of reading as a means to educate and reform prisoners was well supported, both by those in charge and by the prisoners. Much effort was made to provide texts believed to have a reformative effect on the reader. Specific times for reading were granted to prisoners, and reading materials that would educate prisoners in skills lacking in the colonies were provided. Reading was central to the reform of the prisoners and the development of the young colony. In some ways, the role of reading to educate and reform prisoners is still seen in the Australian prison system. The operation of Australian prisons is guided by a 2012 publication, Standard Guidelines for Corrections in Australia (referred to as the Guidelines), published by the Australian Correctional Administrators, a group of senior members of state and territory governments responsible for corrections.47 According to the Guidelines, all Australian prisons must have a well stocked prison library and prisoners must be encouraged to use it. Prisoners with ongoing legal matters must also have access to current legal resources. This direction to provide access to libraries suggests a link between books and reform that has persisted since the early days of Australia’s penal history. However, although libraries are provided for prisoners today, their purpose is more for distraction and time-filling than for education or reform. Most modern Australian prison libraries are not funded and their collections are not built to reflect any of the needs of prisoners. Unlike the historic precedent where a librarian was often charged with the

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collection, most current Australian prison libraries are not managed and have no librarian or other designated staff member to maintain or develop them. In a recent study that examined the experience of using Australian prison libraries, of the seven libraries surveyed only one received any funding to develop the collection or to respond to the reading needs of prisoners.48 It is unknown why or when this significant change in support for prison libraries occurred, and it is a topic that warrants much further examination and debate. The lack of well developed and professionally supported prison libraries suggests that current prison administrators do not see the role of reading in the same way as their historic counterparts. There is no current evidence of prison administrators curating lists of books to be supplied to prisoners to initiate their reform. There are no compuls­ory reading times in modern prisons, or opportunities for prisoners to have books read to them. These conditions provide perspective on the changing attitudes to the place of books, libraries and reading in Australia’s prison system from colonial times to today. While the early convicts demonstrated literacy levels above those of their peers, the situation in contemporary prisons is very different. There is an equally great, if not greater, need to educate modern prisoners to be functionally literate in today’s society. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare provides some information about current Australian prisoners’ educational standards. Thirty-two per cent of adults entering Australian prisons have completed only year 9 studies or below, or have no schooling. Only 16 per cent have completed year 12 studies.49 The Victorian ombudsman identified that in 2013 in prisons in Victoria, 59.5 per cent of prisoners had literacy levels that required intensive support.50 At a national level, the National Centre for Vocational Education Research identified that 62 per cent of Australian prisoners had literacy levels classified as less than functional.51 Despite this, the link between education, particularly literacy education and reading provided by a prison library, is not well recognised in our modern prisons. Today, prison libraries and their books are not considered educational resources by those who manage our prisons or teach within them. They are no longer viewed as an essential tool in the reform process, and the power vested in access to and use of books and reading has diminished. Despite current prison libraries often falling within the administrative area of prisoner education, there are few, if any, practical links between literacy classes offered to prisoners and prison libraries. This contrasts markedly to the situation in the 1840s, when the library was seen as part of the overall educational

Reading in Australian Prisons: An Exploration of Motivation   45

mission of the convict experience. Literacy was central to the efforts in the early colonies to reform character and to produce individuals of economic benefit. In equal contrast, in contemporary prisons the libraries are rarely staffed by librarians, and the teaching offered to prisoners is usually outsourced to an external registered training organisation. It is very unusual for these contract teachers to use reading from library books as a means of supporting literacy develop­ment.52 In some prisons, inmates are forbidden from visiting their libraries at all. Instead, they must choose from a printed alphabetical list of titles. Once a week, their selected books are delivered to them, with no opportunity to exchange them for another that week. Choosing appropriate reading in these situations is difficult and often frustrating. Prisoners wishing to improve their education or wellbeing through reading often find that their prison impedes the realisation of this desire. Historically it has been difficult to establish the motivations of the convicts themselves to read, as the act of reading was inscribed in official policy, and further research is needed to assist us in understanding the internal motivation of the early convicts. Such research will provide a more comprehensive and as yet largely unexplored understanding of the reading culture of the early penal colonies and perhaps help make explicit the impact of policy on desired outcomes. Recent research by Garner, however, provides an important insight into the contemporary context and motivation to read in prison.53 She demonstrates that, despite the lack of official support for the role of reading to educate and reform prisoners in our current correctional system, there is evidence that prisoners are motivated to use the resources available to them to bring about positive changes in their lives. Although the collections in the libraries in most of our prisons are poor, outdated and not managed or developed, prisoners are doing what they can with these collections to improve their literacy, education and knowledge. It can be argued that the motivation to read, and the recognition of the role of reading to educate and reform prisoners, has shifted from that of prison governors to the prisoners themselves. Prisoners often recognise that they have not been able to benefit from their school education. This can be the result of high mobility as children, previous removals from the general population into the juvenile justice system, and/or being the recipients of parenting that did not recognise the value of education and literacy. This situation was well described by an Australian female prisoner incarcerated in a maximum-security prison when asked what materials she wished were available in her library:

46   Mary Carroll and Jane Garner History books would be probably one major thing I’d go and do. I think it’s important, like, for, especially girls that are in prison because we generally don’t have the best education or history when it comes to knowing history and stuff.54

Unlike the prisoners of Australia’s colonial penal establishments, who were usually directed to undertake hard labour or to learn a trade, or who were assigned to free settlers, current prisoners often have much longer periods of unstructured and potentially unproductive time to fill each day. For prisoners who can read, access to books through their libraries is valued as an opportunity to fill some of this unstructured time. Many prisoners are motivated to read to help pass considerable amounts of time, and to improve their education. Despite this motivation, there is usually no reciprocal attempt by prison administrators to provide managed collections that meet the informational, educational or recreational needs of prisoners. Therefore, the collections available in an environment without Internet or digital tools are unlikely to meet prisoners’ needs. This discrepancy was noted by an Australian prisoner in a maximum-security men’s prison when asked if his library met his needs: Not at all. It is because there is no turnover of books. We don’t get new books. They don’t buy new books. There is limited new books. Guys buys books, and get books sent in, and they end up in the library. Occasionally, maybe a box of books turns up. I am not sure how that works, but on the whole it is not that good at all.55

The value understood by early prison administrators of transforming the convict into a literate and therefore potentially economically productive and ‘civilised’ member of society through reading no longer appears to prevail in prison thinking. It is possible to argue that there has been a shift in the drivers of the motivation to read in prisons since the early colonial times, with an accompanying change in the infrastructure provided to support these motivations. In Australia’s early history, the choice to read (or to be read to) was not always made by the prisoners: instead, this choice was often made for them by their gaolers, and it was the gaolers who saw the value of reading. The motivation to obtain books and encourage prisoners’ reading concerned education, economic viability and reform, and was seen as critical to the development of the new colony and the survival of the colonists. With convicts constituting at least 50 per cent of the colonial population during the 1840s, education and reform were of immediate and practical concern if social order was to be

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maintained and the colony was to thrive. Between 1842 and 1845, a total of 12,762 British convicts of all ages and of both genders were transported to Van Diemen’s Land under the new Probation System, swelling the convict population to around 30,000, with an average increase of around 3,500 men and 700 women transported annually to Norfolk Island and Van Diemen’s Land.56 Ever present in the colonies and unlike contemporary practice, the reform of the convict was a practical and tangible concern for the whole community. The importance of reading was supported by the early colonial administrators through the careful selection and requisition of titles, and the controlled and targeted distribution of books to those deemed in need. The motivation to read may have existed within the prisoners themselves, but it was the early governors of the colonies who were the main drivers behind the use of reading to education and reform. Today, in contrast, we see the provision of books and time to read as highly restricted and undervalued by the Australian prison administrators; the prisoners themselves are now the drivers of the motivation to educate and reform themselves through reading. When today’s prisoners are asked what motivates them to read, Garner’s study revealed multiple drivers.57 Often, prisoners are motivated to read to pass time or to ‘escape’ into the other worlds they find in their books. However, prisoners also read to create a connection to other readers in prison and with the world they have left behind, through reading newspapers and magazines. They believe reading will help them learn about and better themselves. Reading books about people who have faced adversity but have later experienced success in life apparently helps them to realise that a positive future can be a reality for them too. This was described by a maximum-security female prisoner when asked what she would like to read: I really want to find in [books], people that have had a hard life and then they turned it around, those kind of true stories. So that inspiring stories for people in here that are feeling low, to read something inspiring I think would be good.58

Prisoners are also motivated to read to improve their education and knowledge, and to answer immediate information needs, such as health or legal issues. Because the majority of Australian prison libraries receive no funding to purchase books, prisoners are restricted to reading from poorly developed collections. They often have to pursue sub-optimal literary pathways to the knowledge they seek. For example, one prisoner in Garner’s study was interested in Roman history and was restricted to reading titles from a series of historical

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novels by Australian author Colleen McCullough, ‘The Masters of Rome’ series.59 The motivation to learn from reading was a frequent observation from Garner’s study. When asked what he liked to read, a medium-security male prisoner from the study stated: [I] just read mainly non-fiction books. I like to read biographies, also autobiographies, and I love to read stuff about geology, Australian history, anything with some knowledge, biology books.60

While this is yet to be fully explored, it is possible that many of these motivating factors also existed among the convicts of the early penal settlements, far removed from all that was familiar, and that many of the same motivating factors were present in their desires to become literate, and to read consistently. Conclusion This chapter has drawn on historical archival resources and modern phenomenological data to discuss the shift of motivations to read in incarcerated and convict communities. It has demonstrated that today’s prisoners are now driving the use of reading to educate and reform, rather than the practice being driven by their gaolers, as was the case in the early penal colonies. Using this method of combining historic and modern data provides us with an opportunity to track reading as a marker of other cultural forces at play. For example, a shift of the goal of incarceration from that of reform to one less focused on this, or on nation-building, could perhaps be evidenced in the role of reading in prisons through time. The use of archival and modern data provides a method of drawing a link between past and present that can identify changes in practices, attitudes and values. Such an approach could be usefully applied to studying the effect of other cultural forces on reading, such as a gendered view of reading, or the role and purpose of developing private reading collections, over time. In contrasting motivations and the attitudes of prison administrations towards reading and books in the reform process, we are gifted with an opportunity to highlight the possibilities of such a method in informing policy for the future. Such a study can highlight the contextual shift in attitudes towards the purpose of incarceration and the treatment of prisoners, and can raise questions about contemporary approaches to penology. What is constant is the evident importance

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of reading to the education and reform of Australian prisoners, regardless of their place in time, and regardless of who is driving the motivation to read. Notes  1. Hobart Town Gazette, 25 August 1827, p. 5.  2. John Vincent Barry, The Life and Death of John Price (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1964), p. 41.  3. Confidential Memorandum on Transportation (London: Commonwealth and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices, 1846).   4. Ibid.   5. Sidney Ditzion, ‘Social Reform, Education, and the Library, 1850–1900’, Library Quarterly, 9:2 (1939), pp. 156–84 (p. 161).  6. Confidential Memorandum on Transportation., p. 4.   7. ‘Hobart Town’, Colonial Times, 7 September 1841, p. 2.  8. Confidential Memorandum on Transportation, p. 3.   9. Archives Office of Tasmania, Document C0280/157/520, Edited extracts from Benjamin Horne’s Report on Point Puer Boys’ Prison. 10. ‘Hobart Town’, p. 2. 11. S. Nichols and P. R. Shergold, ‘Convicts as Workers’, in Stephen Nichols (ed.), Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 62–84. 12. Barry, The Life and Death of John Price, p. 41. 13. Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 260. 14. John Vincent Barry, Alexander Maconochie of Norfolk Island (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 114–15. 15. Regulations for the Religious and Moral Instruction of Convicts in Van Diemen’s Land’, British Parliamentary Papers (Convict Department, 1846), p. 3c. 16. K. Adkins, ‘Convict Probation Station Libraries in Colonial Tasmania’, Script and Print, 34:2 (2010), pp. 87–92. 17. ‘Regulations for the Religious and Moral Instruction’. 18. Sidney Ditzion, ‘Mechanics’ and Mercantile Libraries’,  Library Quarterly, 10:2 (1940), p. 205. 19. Ibid. 20. Standing Instructions for the Regulations of the Penal Settlement on Tasmania’s Peninsula (Colonial Secretary’s Office, 25 January 1833). 21. Thomas Lempriere and the Royal Society of Tasmania, The Penal Settle­ ments of Early Van Diemen’s Land ([Launceston?]: Royal Society of Tasmania, Northern Branch, 1954), p. 85, available at (accessed 20 November 2019).

50   Mary Carroll and Jane Garner 22. Regulations for the Religious and Moral Instruction, p. 3c. 23. John Russell, Earl Russell, et al., Copies or Extracts of any correspondence between the Secretary of State, having the Department of the Colonies and the Governor of New South Wales, respecting the convict system administered in Norfolk Island under the superintendence of Captain Maconochie, R.N. (London: House of Lords, 1846), pp. 2–3, available at (accessed 20 November 2019). 24. Standing Orders for the Regulation of the Probation System of Convict Labour in Van Diemen’s Land (Hobart: James Barnard, Government Printer, 1841), pp. 14–15, available at (accessed 20 November 2019). 25. W. R. Giblin, ‘Our Penal Discipline’, Mercury, 29 March 1873, p. 3. 26. Lempriere and the Royal Society of Tasmania, The Penal Settlements of Early Van Diemen’s Land, p. 85. 27. Ibid., p. 103. 28. Ibid. 29. ‘Convict Life in Norfolk Island: Authentic Records. Light? Reading’, Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal, 31 October 1891, p. 2, available at (accessed 20 November 2019). 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Gustav Quintal and National Library of Australia, [Norfolk Island Register of Books and Slates Issued to the Prisoners] (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1969). 34. Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office, Hobart, CSD7/60/1476, Colonial Secretary’s Office, List of Library Books at Port Arthur Plus Covering Memo ([Hobart], 1874). 35. Ibid. 36. Colin Arrott Browning, England’s Exiles: The Convict Ship and England’s Exiles, 2nd edition (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1847); St Helena Penal Establishment, Rules for Prison Library ([Queensland], 1887). 37. Adkins, ‘Convict Probation Station Libraries’; Janet Fyfe, Books Behind Bars: The Role of Books, Reading, and Libraries in British Prison Reform, 1701–1911 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992). 38. Quintal and National Library of Australia, [Norfolk Island Register]. 39. Frederick Watson (ed.), Historical Records of Australia. Series I. Governors’ Despatches to and from England: Vol. XX, February, 1839– September, 1840 (Sydney: Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1924), pp. 535–7. 40. Ibid., p. 535. 41. Ibid., p. 536. 42. Confidential Memorandum on Transportation, p. 1. 43. ‘The Gazette’, Colonial Times, 25 January 1842, p. 1.

Reading in Australian Prisons: An Exploration of Motivation   51

44. ‘Commissariat’, The Courier, 23 February 1844, p. 2. 45. ‘Commissariat Office’, Colonial Times, 18 July 1843, p. 2. 46. ‘Commissariat Office’, Colonial Times, 17 September 1849, p. 4. 47. Australian Correctional Administrators, Guiding Principles for Corrections in Australia (2018), available at (accessed 20 November 2019). 48. Jane Garner, ‘Experiencing the Use of Australian Prison Libraries: A Phenomenological Study’, PhD dissertation (RMIT University, 2017).  49. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, The Health of Australia’s Prisoners 2015 (Canberra: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2015), p. 21. 50. Victorian Ombudsman, Investigation into the Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Prisoners in Victoria (Melbourne: Victorian Government Printer, 2015). 51. S. Dawe (ed.), Vocational Education and Training for Adult Prisoners and Offenders in Australia: Research Readings (Adelaide: National Centre for Vocational Education Research, 2007). 52. Garner, ‘Experiencing the Use of Australian Prison Libraries’. 53. Ibid. 54. Unnamed prisoner, interviewed by Garner, 11 September 2015. 55. Unnamed prisoner, interviewed by Garner, 20 February 2015. 56. Standing Instructions for the Regulations of the Penal Settlement on Tasmania’s Peninsula. 57. Garner, ‘Experiencing the Use of Australian Prison Libraries’. 58. Ibid. 59. Published by Arrow, 1990–2007. 60. Garner, ‘Experiencing the Use of Australian Prison Libraries’.

Chapter 3

Hawking Terror: Reading the French Revolutionary Press Valerae Hurley

On 25 September 1789, the French police ordered a then little-known journalist named Jean-Paul Marat to appear before Hôtel de Ville, which housed the city’s local administration and was the headquarters of the municipality of Paris. His crime? He had published outlandish accusations against representatives of the newly formed National Assembly. In Marat’s estimation, too many aristocrats who ‘did not respect the right of the people’ were filling these posts. Marat did not immediately surrender himself, but instead published a letter addressed to the representatives of the Commune of Paris (the government of Paris from 1789 to 1795, dominated by the radical left after the fall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792) in which he continued to attack the composition of the Assembly.1 Then, on 28 September, he printed a diatribe that was perhaps born of anger, but which also contained elements of a political philosophy that would grip his imagination for years to come. In frustration, Marat advised readers that any act of ‘vengeance’ taken against these ‘enemies of the state’ was also an act of courage. Vengeance would become a buzzword quickly adopted by both sides in the escalation of rhetoric that followed. The people have stupidly missed the time when they could have done away with the enemies of the State, & the faction who leads the National Assembly, having done everything possible to prevent them from being brought to the feet of the Altars of Justice, they have resumed the course of their machinations; & France is on the eve of the greatest misfortunes. To save her from the abyss, the only hope rests on the energy of the true Citizens, courageous enough to imbue the people with the absolute feeling of its rights, & to urge it to avenge them.2

Neither the letter nor the newspaper article had an immediate effect. Marat had not yet made a name for himself. That would come with 52

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time. In the last four months of 1789, he was nevertheless beginning to attract attention. His role as an influence peddler was taking shape. It took several more years for Marat to gain the sort of moral authority that could sway the sansculottes, a diverse group of craft workers, shopkeepers, artisans, and labourers who would later play a significant role as the militant arm of the radical left. How did that happen? Marat’s success was the result of public denunciations and personal attacks exchanged between journalistic rivals who were reading and denouncing each other’s publications, like bloggers determined to destroy the opposing side. They were acerbic and taunting. They vented their fury without concern or caution, employing twisted logic, ad hominem attacks, red-herring arguments, false dichotomies, hasty generalisations and slippery-slope logic. Every political event triggered increasingly hostile commentary that played out on their printed pages, where they were read and argued about by other journalists as well as by a spellbound public. Over time, this war of words spiralled to the point where it led to the Reign of Terror. When Marat finally appeared before the General Assembly of Representatives to answer the charge of inciting violence, he defiantly charged his accusers with profiteering from the very reforms they had supported. ‘Allow me to point out that in a country in which liberty is known, your mere title of “Pensioner of the King” would be a title for exclusion from an Assembly, where only independent men should be found’, he wrote on 30 September 1789 in L’Ami du Peuple.3 The censure that he received enraged him. On 1 October Marat railed against his accusers and challenged the Assembly to ‘save France by forcing the body to purge themselves’ of such men. ‘Our mores must change!’ he demanded. ‘The trustees of the authority must be attacked without restraint when they abuse their power, until they are brought down from their throne.’4 On 2 October he called for ‘creating a din in the streets’ as the only means by which citizens could ‘avenge the rights of the Nation, ensure freedom, and cement [the] happiness [of the people]’.5 By offering only two possibilities, violent action or silence, Marat was creating a false dichotomy where no other options were available. It was Marat’s involvement in the Women’s March on Versailles, which lasted from 2 to 6 October 1789, that led the police to issue a warrant for his arrest on 8 October. Not only were his written words considered incendiary and directly responsible for this disturbance, so too was Marat’s personal involvement. The facts were hard to ignore. Even fellow journalist and sometimes friend Camille Des­ moulins acknowledged as much: ‘Marat flies to Versailles, returns like

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a flash, makes alone as much noise as four trumpets on the last day of judgment, and cries: O Dead! Awaken!’6 Marat made no denials, choosing instead to go into hiding for the first of what would be many times in his career. Within three months since the fall of the Bastille, on 14 July 1789, Marat was already acknowledged as a provocateur. Initially, the right-wing press responded to the violence with anger or, in some cases, with sarcasm. Pierre-Barnabé Framin de Rozoi, owner of the popular Gazette de Paris, for instance, took exception to episodic insurrections and said so openly. Typically, de Rozoi addressed his remarks to people whom he thought would defend traditions estab­lished by church and state. Utilising his newspaper in service to the king’s cause, on 8 October de Rozoi reacted to the Women’s March by asking nobles to respond in kind. ‘This army [nobles of the realm] is composed of so many Gallant Knights who will avenge us of our Murderers & Despoilers.’ Every ‘Man of Letters’, he argued, had to stand ‘at his post as every Warrior is at his’.7 De Rozoi’s voice of resistance would grow louder as 1789 turned into 1790 and beyond. While right-wing papers frequently insisted that retribution was not their goal, they nevertheless printed articles that called for retaliation and violence out of ‘necessity’. De Rozoi kept a record of all offences against the Crown so that ‘vengeance’ could be duly apportioned after the return of normality. Marat too saw the necessity of revenge in protecting the Revolution from (for example) the Chevaliers, a group of nobles who would in 1791 attempt to kidnap the king (Marat believed the king was a willing participant in this affair). These men, he would declare on 10 March 1791, ‘would infallibly have lit the fire of civil war, and flooded France with blood: it is important for public safety that this crime be pursued with vengeance; the crime must be punished’.8 Thus each side demonised the other, painting their opponents as corrupt, vicious, irrational, radical, brutal or venal. This sold papers. It attracted readers. But it also increased tensions. Marat, long suspecting that the newly formed Assembly was acting in concert with the aristocratic faction to the detriment of the lower classes, warned readers as early as 3 October 1789 that one Count Esterhazy was suppressing evidence of a crime against the public. On 10 November 1789 Marat attacked the ‘fortunates of the century, the leeches of the state, and all the scoundrels who live from public abuses’, and charged Finance Minister Jacques Necker with aiding wheat profiteers to fill his own pockets. It was a red herring, an attempt to distract from the fact that he had been an active participant in the October Days, which saw the murder of members of the king’s

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Swiss Guard and the king and his family forcibly transferred from Versailles to Paris. Charged with responsibility for the Women’s March, Marat deflected. He responded by castigating Necker, a popular minister whom he had formerly praised. He claimed that those in power opposed him because they feared nothing more than the public riots that his newspaper championed: ‘Thus, they always object to energetic writings, to vehement speeches, . . . to anything that can make the people feel their misery and remind them of their rights.’ For Marat, violence was not a problem, but an effective solution. ‘Tragic scenes’ were inevitable in revolutionary situations, ‘a necessary reaction to immoral men who abuse power entrusted to them. The people suffer many ills before avenging themselves.’9 Marat’s rhetoric had a strong influence on both readers and other writers, as reflected in the language used by Desmoulins, himself a well known author and member of the Cordeliers (a radical political club that believed there was no place for monarchy in the new France). Marat’s influence is clear, for, as Desmoulins wrote to the National Assembly on 26 December 1789, ‘since you kill us in a civil way, we will kill you physically. . . . When the legislators oppress the larger number of citizens I know no other law than vengeance.’10 Whether intentional or not, Marat’s most fiery passages often ­ threatened bloodshed and violence. Here, Desmoulins’ does much the same. Within a little over two months after the Women’s March, the decree of outlawry against Marat was revived. A thwarted attempt to take him into custody followed on 9 January 1790. With the help of Cordelier supporters, he escaped arrest. Defiant, he continued to lambast people in positions of power, and Necker in particular. Marat’s unrelenting fanaticism led to another summons. He was to appear before the mayor at the Hôtel de Ville on 17 January. In response, the following day he published his infamous pamphlet D ­ enonciation contre Necker, a diatribe so seditious in tone that no other publisher would touch it. The reaction from the National Assembly was strong. The Cordeliers were accused of helping Marat carry out his treason by hiding him from the authorities. The pressure applied by both the Assembly and the Châtelet police induced Marat to flee to England on 22 January 1790, where he remained until April that year. In his absence, the authorities destroyed what remained of his newspaper.11 He had managed to escape with the help of the Cordeliers, for they had found in Marat’s diatribes a message that resonated, giving voice to what many already believed or were prepared to believe. This long, complicated and exciting incident – referred to in newspapers of the day as the ‘Affaire de Marat’ – was reported throughout Paris.

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In numerous publications Marat accused Necker of everything from profiteering to conspiring with the aristocratic faction. Ironic­ ally, the once popular Necker had been discharged from his position as finance minister for his liberal policies, and for his inability to control competing interests in organising the calling of the Estates General, a general assembly representing the three classes (or estates) of the realm. However, when riots broke out over Necker’s dismissal, the king was compelled to reappoint the well liked minister. Necker’s return did not go well. In a reversal of fortunes, Necker found that his left-leaning support base had dissolved. The inexperienced representatives in the National Assembly, those who were now in power, knew little about governing. The well organised administration in which he had formerly operated was no more. Additionally, though his political views were liberal, Necker did not support mob activity. This made his opinions and ideas suspect to an increasingly extreme left. In the end, it was suspicion caused by Necker’s refusal to condemn nobles that led Marat to attack him in his press, an incident that provided a perfect opportunity for mockery. For example, Marat’s attack on Necker led the right-wing journalist Jacques-Louis Gautier de Syonnet to snipe at both men. ‘We are assured that Marat is hiding in Poisse, others assure that he has taken refuge in the Hôtel of M. Necker’, he snidely commented in his paper on 4 February 1790.12 It was a tongue-in-cheek reference to Marat’s Denonciation contre Necker, the infamous diatribe printed only weeks earlier. Gautier had started his career as a moderate right-wing journalist. Initially, his paper, the Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, popularly referred to as the Petit Gautier, took a dispassionate approach to the events that were reshaping Paris. But as unrest increased, he too began to accuse revolutionaries of using the law to destroy the law. ‘[T]his vast number of denunciations’ and ‘false alarms born from personal passions served only the credulity or the revenge of the denunciators’, he claimed on 27 July 1790.13 Gautier was not against the Revolution in 1789. By 1791 that would all change. However, as right-wing journalists would discover, they were fighting a losing battle. There was mounting concern in the Assembly over Marat and the rising popularity of radical journalism in general. In August 1789, Article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen had estab­lished as a fundamental right ‘the free communication of thoughts and opinions’. Yet, after only one year of this liberalisation, it seemed as if the press was turning into little more than a vehicle for hatred and incitement. The most provocative of the nearly 500 newspapers that had opened and closed since 1789 was L’Ami du Peuple.

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It was so because Marat increasingly and overtly called for acts of retribution in the name of national vengeance. Making matters worse, Marat’s newspaper was outselling many competitors. So, when on 9 January 1790 the Châtelet made a failed attempt to take Marat into custody, the journalist defiantly published the details of the endeavour and called for all ‘good patriots’ and the ‘fathers of the patrie’ to unite against the usurpation of power. ‘Honour these glorious titles with your zeal to make justice triumph . . . by not letting the Friend of the People be a martyr for liberty’, he wrote three days later, on 12 January.14 In that same issue of L’Ami du Peuple, in an open letter addressed to General Lafayette, then head of the National Guard and not yet a target for Marat’s opprobrium, Marat accused his detractors in the Assembly of having been ‘blinded by the low desire of vengeance, judges of its own cause, and abusing in a criminal manner the functions of a holy ministry to hush the truths that they dread’. Certain men, Marat claimed, had instigated a raid upon his home: ‘forty to fifty men . . . surrounded the house where I live to arbitrarily take me away by armed force’. He demanded a response from Lafayette, the man ‘whom the nation looks to as avenger’. When he got no response, on 17 January, while still in hiding, Marat attacked the general in the pages of his press. This and subsequent denunciations no doubt helped undermine public confidence in Lafayette’s commitment to the Revolution.15 On 23 May and 22 June 1790, Marat aimed his poison pen at Count Mirabeau, insisting that true patriots unite and ‘rise up together to demand vengeance’.16 Yet while Marat appealed to the people, he seems to have realised that they might not immediately take up his call to arms: ‘This is, oh citizens! what would happen without fail if you had any virtue: but that is most certainly what will not be’.17 Why had the people failed to react when, only a year earlier, they had risen up in the thousands in response to similar rhetoric? In 1789, there was a grain shortage. People were hungry. Any attempt to correct the problem would have been preferable to accepting starvation. Complicating the issue was the fact that Mirabeau was a hero who had defended the mob’s actions in the attack upon the Bastille. While the slander may have intrigued readers, keeping them hungry for more, Marat’s persecution of Mirabeau did not have the intended impact. Nevertheless, a reading public was taking notice. In answer to Marat, on 3 May 1790 Gautier pointed out the hypocrisy of justifying every illicit act in the name of the people. Dripping sarcasm, he wrote that ‘the populace . . . has just enacted a decree, which will supervise itself. It has for its object that kind

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of active Citizen vulgarly called thieves; they will be hung first, & then their trial will proceed with strictest care.’ It seemed to Gautier that justice had been turned on its head: ‘Let’s hang first, it is always surer.’18 Marat’s words were dangerous. Gautier’s complete shift to the radical right came not over issues of class or privilege but rather because of the ‘danger of using the law to destroy the law’. Later, on 22 December 1791, Gautier too took aim at Mirabeau and the king’s brother, the Duke d’Orleans, both defenders of popular insurrection. To this he added Guy-Jean-Baptiste Target, a lawyer and president of the civil tribunal. Like Marat, Gautier attacked specific legislators for erecting ‘temples to furore, to hatred, to vengeance’. He referred to these men as ‘consti-tuants’, a play on words suggesting that they were killers. Target, d’Orleans and Mirabeau, he wrote, were ‘proposing to raise statues to ignorance and to crime. – Papa Targe . . . can serve as model for the first, Mirabeau and the Duke D’Or [the second]’.19 The play on words extended to Target’s reputation as a rational thinker and to the reputable upholders of law and order, Mirabeau and d’Orleans. Justice, more than law and order, was the concern of the left, and defining justice became part of the political discourse of the day. As early as 1789, Marat had linked the idea of civic virtue to the ‘courage to act’, and held that the people were always correct in their pursuit of justice. But when the Assembly granted greater police authority to the Châtelet police, Marat focused his attention sharply on the question of popular justice. ‘My principles’, he wrote on 2 January 1791, are ‘that an unfortunate without resources has the right to steal to survive; that an oppressed has the right to kill to protect himself from tyranny, and that it is the most holy duty to kill a tyrant [along] with all his henchmen’. The people could ignore the law, he insisted, because other avenues of civil redress had been blocked to them. Marat vowed never to support the arrest of anyone who could not afford a legal defence and he called upon the Assembly to rethink the law they were responsible for creating. ‘Start by making just and wise laws’, he demanded, and provide ‘the means of getting an education’. Only then, in his opinion, would deputies deserve the right to punish offenders under the law. Until that happened, Marat promised that he would continue to ‘arouse public opinion’,’ ‘preach revolt’ and ‘expose you to the vengeance of the people’.20 Marat came close in this article to connecting virtue, justice and vengeance directly to the will of the people. The criminals were not those who did the pillaging and killing, but rather those who made unjust and bad laws. The punishing of such blatant offenders was, in Marat’s view, a natural

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right. The message that readers of L’Ami du Peuple saw in print was that vengeance was morally permissible. It was this very point that had led to Gautier’s shift to the right a year earlier. Since justice was not free, on 25 January 1791 Marat proposed the formation of a Society of the Avengers of the Laws: a fund that would ‘provide money to cover the cost of procedure to avenge any oppressed person not wealthy enough to seek reparation for outrages inflicted on him by the public civil servants, depositories of authority’. Marat now packaged his discourse on justice in a familiar refrain. ‘The most horrible tyranny is the one that takes place under the cover of law’, he wrote, telling readers that they were free of any obligation to obey the laws of the land since the legislators had left them penniless: ‘since the police leave you prey to the rapacity and to the violence of the money grabbers; since the tribunals do not avenge their assassinations, and since the government itself delivers you to the horrors of poverty . . . you are free of any duty toward it’.21 On 15 February he reminded readers that the success of the Revolution against those who would keep the people ‘under the yoke’ was due to the fact that they had been ready to act. ‘We were armed, our cruel oppressors shaking with fear of becoming the objects of our vengeances, subscribed to our requests.’ Promising that he would ‘never stop calling for the avenging axe to fall on their heads’, Marat proclaimed that the people ‘will in the end exterminate the entire race of these incorrigible monsters’.22 The right expressed themselves in like fashion. De Rozoi predicted that ‘Conspirators & Accomplishes, judges & executioners will each have his turn . . . & that day is not far’. On 4 October 1791, he dismissed the ‘rebellious horde’ as godless thugs ‘who had put the Civil Constitution in motion’, and he went on to warn readers of the vengeance that God would surely visit upon them: Ah! Mad humans . . . don’t be fooled, a vengeful God exists & is preparing His wrath; if crime does not alarm you, may the heavenly wrath make you tremble. All the kings of the earth got together at His voice to avenge the divine majesty, avenge the majesty of the throne; they come from the north and the south & strong winds announcing their course, will dissipate this rebellious horde & will scatter them like straw. So new deputies, choose between crime & virtue; & you, lightweight and inconsistent people, incapable that you are of bearing the bit & break [a reference to horse tackle], you are going to learn that it is not in vain that one can spurn God and the Kings.23

By 1791 de Rozoi’s paper was chronicling crimes of the Revolution, publishing a long list of so-called traitors, and calling upon foreign

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governments to intervene. Gautier exercised more restraint, though he too was completely convinced that the Revolution had taken a wrong turn, and like de Rozoi, he began to focus on resistance. Though he did not at first support the aristocracy, he concluded that the émigrés who had escaped to Coblenz and elsewhere across the border were the best hope for France’s future. The émigrés, he argued on 19 October 1791, ‘go back to their homes, not to wreck vengeance, but to re-establish the reign of justice’.24 Religion, too, was of central importance to the right. Both de Rozoi and Gautier reacted to a papal bull made public on 10 March 1791 condemning the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, a document that placed the Catholic Church under government control, required priests to take an oath of loyalty, barred non-juring priests (those who refused to take the oath) from performing their ecclesiastical duties and banned monastic orders. Gautier’s reaction to the Assembly’s decision not to recognise Catholicism was to warn the reading public of God’s wrath. ‘Ungrateful subjects, coward Christians, tremble! The heavens test virtue by letting it be oppressed, but it avenges it’, he wrote on 19 April. He chastised the French people: ‘You deserve a tyrant, not a father. You horrify the neighbouring nations; what was left of honest people among you have fled.’25 This time, the response from the left was immediate. The Parisian sansculottes, many of whom were Marat’s loyal followers, seized and burned copies of the Journal de la Cour et de la Ville. Though the crowd attempted to destroy de Rozoi’s office, they were stopped by Lafayette’s National Guard, a fact that must have annoyed Marat given his already strained relationship with the general.26 Shortly thereafter, on 21 June 1791, Louis XVI and his family, finally recognising the danger, attempted escape. They were captured only miles from the Austrian border and forcibly returned to Paris. A letter left behind revealed that Louis had planned to return to Paris with a foreign army, dissolve the Assembly and restore his throne. Exposed, the king had no choice but to cooperate with the work of the Constituent Assembly. Even so, his reputation as the protective and caring ‘father of the country’ was destroyed. This incident contaminated the political atmosphere beyond hope. Matters were made worse when, on 26 June 1791, General François-Claude-Amour de Bouillé issued a letter from the safety of Coblenz addressed to the deputies of the Assembly warning that no stone would be left unturned if any harm or insult came to the king. Gautier decided to print the threat on 1 July, presumably hoping to forestall Louis’s dethronement. A synopsis of the article provides a

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very real sense of the menace. ‘[Y]ou have turned into ferocious & blood thirsty monsters, object of terror for the whole universe’, Bouillé had charged, arguing that this was the reason behind Louis’s attempted escape. ‘The rabble were masters, the laws were without strength, the army an unrestrained soldiery.’ Now, Bouillé wrote, and Gautier repeated, ‘the princes of Europe who are threatened by the monster you gave birth to, do plan to attack you. I know your defensive means, they are nothing, & your punishment will be a memorable example for posterity.’ As if this was not enough to enrage the Jacobins, Bouillé added, ‘[T]his is only the prelude of a manifesto from European powers, who will instruct you in more forceful ways, of what you have to do. Adieu Sirs.’27 On 11 July Gautier praised Bouillé’s courage and loyalty. ‘The French are surprised by the conduct of M. le marquis de Bouillé’, he wrote. ‘They would cease to be, if like us, they had seen him on the champs de l’Amerique, always brave & loyal. They would say: the great Bouillé was born to serve the king, despite cowards who abandoned him, & especially to avenge his injuries.’28 As other journalists took up the cry for revenge, Bouillé’s promise to march on Paris began to seem plausible. Assured that the days of the Revolution were numbered, on 16 August Gautier taunted: ‘If our émigrés come back to France in triumph, as they are hoping, they have planned to take revenge in a very cruel way for the vexations they endured from demagogues’. ‘We have learned that they have condemned master de Beaumar . . . to read every day la Chronicle de Paris’, a conservative paper.29 Pierre Beaumarchais, the playwright, was famous for his shocking mockery of aristocrats and his appeals for equal justice, as in his ground-breaking work Le marriage de Figaro. For Gautier, public derision accomplished what no sword could. And as sales of his paper indicate, readers savoured every snarky comment. On 18 January 1791 a large police force had attempted to arrest Marat. He escaped capture but was forced into exile. During his absence, another journalist, Jacques-René Hébert, set up shop in Paris. His paper, Père Duchesne, notorious for its vulgarity and exaggeration, was destined to become the most popular paper in France, for it was written in a lingo that the sansculottes understood.30 When in 1793 the revolutionary government purchased copies and sent them to soldiers fighting at the front lines, sales reached several hundred thousand. Hébert’s approach was simple. He employed ad hominem attacks against individuals (Marie Antoinette was a favourite target), offered hasty generalisations that drew conclusions on limited evidence and applied slippery-slope reasoning (if priests are allowed to practise their faith, the Church would reinsert itself in matters of state). He used an

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eponymous fictional character called Pére Duchesne to establish credibility, a pipe-smoking man of the people who assured readers that he had been an eyewitness to many of the incidents in question. Hébert came to revile both the aristocracy and the Catholic Church. In one of his first issues [1790], he accused the émigré Comte d’Artois, brother of the king, of ‘harbouring hatred for the people and seeking support from foreign powers’. Artois, he wrote, ‘planned to enter soon, iron and fire in hand, to destroy a nation that has done no wrong against him than to have . . . exhausted its assistance & its blood to cover his outrageous expenses & his revolting luxuries’. He regretted having ever shown such ‘odious monsters’ deference.31 Hébert’s opinions were hardly original. Marat had already attacked the king’s brother in May of that same year, after the Assembly had enacted a law which made it a crime for writers to publish or sell incendiary literature. Marat used the opportunity to denounce the émigré population at Coblenz, and d’Artois in particular. He took aim at nobles and clerics suspected of counter-revolutionary sym­pathies and charged the queen herself with conspiring with her brother in Austria to start a war.32 This article caused excitement in Paris and caught the attention not only of the authorities, but also of other journalists keen to attract a wider audience. Hébert was among those who recognised the value of Marat’s sensational hyperbole. It sold papers, after all. In June 1791 the right-wing press went on the defensive. Louis XVI’s failed attempt to escape had caused de Rozoi to fall silent for a time. His support of the king was further complicated when several demonstrators opposing Louis’s reinstatement were fired upon and killed by Lafayette’s troops on 17 July. Newspapers reported this as the Champ de Mars massacre. Afterwards, the sansculottes joined forces with militant Jacobins with one objective in mind: to dethrone the king. Cries for revenge led the government to react by closing the Cordeliers Club. Louis’s refusal to pass decrees against émigrés and refractory priests sparked yet another slogan, ‘Dethronement or vengeance’. This led in August 1791 to the Pillnitz Declaration – a statement by King Frederick William II of Prussia and the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold II, that foreign powers were ready to intervene. On 16 October de Rozoi published his own warning: ‘As I write, we learn that some of the Emperors are penetrating the Piedmont. Those sovereigns are not alone in coming to the defence of the King. Vengeance will be general just like the assault.’33 Three days later, on 19 October, he followed this up by printing a letter from an aide-de-camp of ‘Monsieur’, brother of the king:

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[O]ur generous hearts worry about the fate of these unhappy People blinded by the rebellious Chiefs who betrayed them, ruined them, debased them; that they may least, by a prompt return to God, to King, to Honour, offer us only for victims the criminal Chiefs, whose agonies equating to their crimes, must wreak into the most distant Posterity. These unfortunate people can be well assured that any resistance would be in vain, & that their conduct will be the fair measure of our vengeance.34

The Assembly had responded to the Champ de Mars affair by questioning the role of all political clubs, which many suspected were the origin of growing radicalism in Paris. The Jacobins fought back. The debate that followed created another yet rift that played out in the pages of the press. Gautier did not object to the closing of the political clubs. Repeatedly, the Journal de la Cour et de la Ville championed the actions of the National Guard, claiming that vengeance was the motive ‘not of good and moral people’ but of the ‘fractious’. In defending Lafayette’s troops, he informed readers that the carnage on the Champ de Mars had been the ‘plan of republican dissidents who [wanted] to shed blood all over the streets of Paris, & to sacrifice to their vengeance the greater majority of the Assembly, the municipality, the National Guard, & all citizens [and] friends of order’. Given Marat’s ongoing diatribes against the deputies of the Assembly, it is easy to see why Gautier might have suspected so-called ‘dissidents’. Still, he held that consideration should be given to those who were tricked or misguided into fanaticism. ‘Just as it is fair to apply the total severity of the law against a scoundrel, it would be a propos to show clemency toward a citizen misguided by a moment of fanaticism’ he wrote on 19 August.35 De Rozoi, too, responded to the chaos. He often reminded readers, as he did on 10 October 1791, that the king’s authority was rooted in a feudal contract between lord and vassal, and he challenged the Jacobins’ right to change anything in accordance with their will. They will say, that I blaspheme against their new dogmas these low flatterers of the people, who make them Kings so they can become one: they will deliver me to the justice of this King who has so many arms & hands, who does not want to have one head; they will threaten me with the vengeance of this King born yesterday on his dunghill, living in blood, to die tomorrow in misery; I hear their roaring; It does not matter. No, no you cannot, new men validate your Powers, because you do not have any.36

Blind to the danger and violence that were about to erupt, de Rozoi again warned in an article that he titled ‘News from Coblenz’ that an

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invasion was coming and that the ‘vengeance’ visited upon the unfaithful would be ‘in proportion to the violation of the most solemn treaties’. The émigré faction in Coblenz was providing propaganda produced by the ex-minister Charles Alexandre de Colonne (forced into exile in 1787 after his handpicked Assembly of Notables failed to approve new taxes) and de Rozoi reproduced as much misinformation as possible. Beginning on 6 December 1791 and continuing throughout most of 1792, de Rozoi published what he referred to as his ‘vengeance list’. It was a catalogue of the names of those he believed to have committed crimes against France: ‘The book of actions of every Individual is at this time a journal of the assets & the debts, from which one day each person will be allotted his due. Conspirators & accomplices, judges & executioners, will each have his turn . . . & that day is not far.’37 Though not initially an avid supporter of the aristocracy, Gautier began to defend the émigrés more vigorously. He still expressed dislike for the notion of privilege but advised readers that the émigrés had changed in that respect. On 19 October 1791, he claimed that they would ‘go back to their homes not to wreak vengeance, but to re-establish the reign of justice’. Émigrés were, in his view, keepers of the law. ‘They do not come to avenge personal insults; they do not buckle up the fighting sword to defend the privileges they long ago generously sacrificed; they only ask for the vengeance of the law and of justice.’38 The hitherto cautious Gautier was insulting very powerful players. He suggested that Georges Jacques Danton, leader of the Cor­deliers and a favourite of the sansculottes, was corrupt and venal.39 He condemned the journalist Antoine-Joseph Gorsas for aligning himself with the moderate Girondist party, calling him an ‘ugly toad’.40 Nor were women off limits. In a fictitious exchange between Madame de Staël (Jacques Necker’s daughter and one of Gautier’s favourite targets) and a certain Monsieur Champcenetz, the latter says that he is the only man who can ‘boast under oath’ of not ‘having had her’. The provocative dialogue and an allusion to her lover, the Comte de Narbonne, whom Madame de Staël helped to get appointed to a position within the finance ministry, proved too offensive to ignore. Gautier cruelly called her ugly and belittled a woman who supported the Revolution and who used her talents to encourage a new role for women in French society. A public figure in her own right, Madame de Staël reacted in kind. On 18 April 1791, she railed against the author and penned an angry response warning that due punishment would be forthcoming as soon as ‘the new laws are completely established’.

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Tremble! Young pamphleteer; soon it will not be allowed anymore to insult the good citizens & as far as libel is concerned, the French nation is going to be even more severe than your ancient tribunal! If you had been born with a little bit of heart, my sex alone would have sufficed to disarm you; but your heart is not worthy of the slightest refinement, & you have been born only to tear all that the world holds respectable.41

She concluded her letter by promising to expose Gautier for the prideful and hateful person that he was. She signed it ‘Your most dedicated enemy’. Unimpressed, Gautier published her letter in its entirety. Gautier targeted de Staël not because of her rank or wealth. Rather, it was a reaction to her publications, which appeared to be in the service of those who undermined law and order, as Gautier understood those things to be. The left was no kinder to women who did not share their views. Marie Antoinette was frequently vilified as the ‘Austrian Whore’, ‘Madame Veto’ and an interfering busybody with ulterior motives.42 The left went so far as to falsely accuse the former queen at her trial of incest with her son, the dauphin. Women acting in the public sphere, regardless of class, were suspect on both sides of the political equation. When Marat returned from exile he reacted to the decree outlawing incendiary language. On 2 January 1791, he vowed to never ‘stop arousing public opinion against your [the Assembly’s] unjust decrees of preaching revolt, to cover you with opprobrium, and to expose you to the vengeance of the people’.43 Two weeks later, on 16 January, he promoted the idea of creating a ‘really useful patriotic society’44 that would punish traitors, primarily nobles and priests but also moderates who did not meet his level of revolutionary zeal, a dogma that would become central to the Terror. On 15 February 1791, he held that nothing short of death would prevent him from using incendiary language to incite riots if it would obtain the necessary revenge: Nothing in the world will make me change my language, as long as conspirators plot our ruin. I will say it in the people’s Assemblies, in front of the tribunals, in the heart of the National Assembly itself. Yes I take the oath, I will not stop but with my last breath, will call for the avenging axe to fall on their heads.45

The rhetoric he employed was designed first to attract and then to persuade his loyal readers of the validity of their anger and the righteousness of their violence. He incited readers to act. Propaganda studies have shown that repeatedly reading the same message chips away at conscious disbelief. Readers can be groomed to believe.

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On 21 May 1791 Marat added another figure to his enemies list: Lafayette would be ‘immolated by the patrie when the day of vengeance arrives’.46 Six days later he was demanding executions on a grand scale: Eleven months ago five hundred heads would have sufficed; today fifty thousand would be necessary; perhaps five hundred thousand will fall before the end of the year. France will have been flooded with blood, but it will not be more free because of it.47

Now convinced that constitutional monarchy would never work in France, he began to campaign for the abolition of monarchy al­ together. When a rebellion broke out in Metz, a city in north-eastern Lorraine, Marat saw in it the hand of Lafayette and his crony, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the mayor of Paris. He immediately went to press and instructed readers, on 26 June, to ‘secure without delay Bailly, Mottié [a code-name for Lafayette], the staff, [and] the traitors of the assembly; and may the avenging sword rid you of the last of the infamous race of tyrants under whom you have suffered for so many centuries’.48 He followed up the next day by charging Lafayette and Bailly with plotting the king’s escape. ‘How can anyone doubt the plot of his flight has been hatched in the Austrian committee, of which ministers, Mottié, Bailly d’Andre, Cazalès, Branave and the other counter-revolutionary conscript fathers are the columns.’49 Popular retribution was not only acceptable – for Marat it was a patriotic duty. Angry over the Assembly’s failure to hold Louis XVI accountable for the attempted escape, Marat charged the deputies with intentional duplicity. On 2 July he claimed that the representatives wanted to ‘lull the people’ into complacency: ‘Their [the Assembly’s] first care was to put the people in chains by [deceitfully] calming their anxieties, and by preaching peace, by [deceptively] promising them vengeance; because there is nothing they fear more than their people’s just furore.’50 Five days later he labelled the Assembly ‘a prostitute to Louis XVI’ and proclaimed that ‘a dictatorship would counter their bad influences’.51 This would become a familiar refrain in the years ahead. When the Assembly all but ignored the Champ de Mars incident and formally reinstated Louis XVI on 16 July, Marat joined with many who denounced this as a betrayal. He used L’Ami du Peuple to prompt readers to petition for dethronement. The National Guard’s firing upon the crowd on the Champ de Mars with no warning would be the subject of Marat’s diatribes for the remainder of July. Angry with the king, Lafayette and the National Assembly over the bloodshed, he responded with increasingly furious invectives. On 20

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July he charged Lafayette with intentionally giving ‘barbaric orders’ to shed the ‘blood of the best citizens’ and accused the general of hiring riffraff to attack the forces of order while pretending the people initiated the violence. He wrote of the ‘blood of old men, of women, of children massacred around the altar of the patrie’. Vengeance was the inevitable response.52 The Assembly did not sit idly by as Marat assaulted its authority. It passed laws to silence the radical presses, which only further in­ furiated Marat: ‘As for the friend of the people, you have known for a long time that all your decrees attacking the declaration of rights are for him only so much ass-wipes [torcheculs]’, he shot back. Marat declared war on Lafayette, holding that if only he could ‘rally to his voice two thousand determined men’, he would ‘tear out the heart of the infernal Mottié in the midst of his battalion of slaves’. Moreover, he threatened to ‘burn the monarch and his henchmen in his palace’ and ‘impale in your seats the members of the rotten Assembly’.53 But if Marat’s language grew more extreme, his readers nevertheless did not yet respond as quickly or as violently as he had hoped. When in September 1791 France became a constitutional monarchy, Marat was so upset he announced to his readers that he would shut down his press and leave the country. In fact, he also feared retribution from the government. He did not leave France, however. Hoping to throw off his pursuers, he informed readers that he would consign two issues of his journal to a trusted friend for later publication. Meanwhile, Marat continued to write and publish from various hiding places throughout Paris. One of the king’s first acts as a constitutional monarch was to veto two decrees initiated by the Assembly against the émigré faction. On 16 November Marat made his views clear to the reading public. ‘[A]s soon as the princes return . . . then their infamous emissaries will come to tell us impudently that it was decided that the king does not need to give motives, because he is free to exercise the rights of the monarchy.’ The purpose of all this was to trick the people into believing that the émigrés were ‘only unfortunates whose vengeful spirit removed them from their homes’.54 Marat scoffed at Louis’s claim that he had brought the émigrés into line with the aims of the new nation. In December 1791 Marat departed for London. Weary and frustrated over the people’s failure to follow his advice, he charged them in his 15 December edition with neglecting their best interests, declaring that to ‘defend one’s liberty’ was the ‘most sacred of duties’.55 Marat exhorted the people to arm themselves with a weapon befitting men of courage: a ‘well sharpened, double-edge dagger’. He believed that

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weapons such as these ‘could not be warded off’. Whereas a few days earlier he had disparaged the people for their ‘readiness to consent to new despotism’, he now appealed to their sense of rights and freedoms: ‘only the citizen eager to avenge his rights and to assure his freedom is ready to fight’.56 Up to this point, Marat’s rhetoric had been more extreme than Hébert’s. That was about to change. Having been accused by a competitor of putting across ideas that were ‘aristocratic and dangerous’, presumably because he called for leaving matters in the hands of the authorities, Hébert joined the radical chorus, rejecting any semblance of moderation with energy equalling that of Marat. Like Marat, he began to target deputies of the Assembly, accusing them of treasonous intentions. Not surprisingly, given Marat’s popularity and Hébert’s desire to make money from sales of Père Duchesne, he put forth the notion that virtue equated with the ability to act, even when that action included revenge. Though he did not yet hold the king entirely at fault, he nevertheless considered the émigrés a threat to the Revolution. Though Hébert never dated his publications, we can see from the content of his work that, as of late 1791, he was still professing love for the king but a growing hatred for the aristocracy. ‘The best thing you can do right now’, he warned the nobility, ‘is to be quiet, to moderate yourselves, and to stop trying to sadden our good king’.57 Not only did Hébert give full support to Louis in this piece, calling him the ‘father we adore’, but he also juxtaposed the ‘reason of the people’ against the arrogance of the aristocracy. The voice of the people was the voice of God, with which the king was in tune – or so Hébert felt at the time. Hébert may not yet have turned against the king, but as early as March 1791, he was already beginning to voice objections against the Church, a loathing that only increased with time. The papal brief condemning the Civil Constitution of the Clergy as well as the revolu­tionary principles it reflected ignited his passion. He accused the opposition of ‘exhorting the people & urging them to avenge the altars’ and reminded readers that danger lurked everywhere. ‘I knew it, foutre, the aristocracy would try a last effort to take their revenge on us, and if we did not watch out all would be lost . . . friends, let’s unite! Let’s take up arms to exterminate them.’58 Hébert was sounding very much like his most popular journalistic rival. Initially, Hébert was satisfied to smear the queen’s reputation in a general manner. By the end of 1791, however, he began to hint at darker motives. She now became Madame Veto, plotting with the likes of Monsieur Veto, or the Comte de Narbonne (the loyalist minister of war) to dupe the people and take revenge for her good friend

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and confidant Madame de Polignac. ‘Yes, I will avenge myself’, Père Duchesne reportedly overhears the queen say, ‘yes, I will catch you, but with honey from Narbonne’.59 In this way, Hébert reduced the queen to just another woman with female wiles and passions, but one who dared to step out of the private sphere. He linked Marie Antoinette’s base desires to the corrupting influence of Monsieur Veto. ‘Nothing escapes [the people], they know everything you do to show your zeal to M. Veto; they know the baseness of all who get their hands greased . . . the good citizen’s hatred will follow you everywhere’, he warned. ‘The day of vengeance will come. The enemies of liberty will not have an ounce of land to rest on.’60 Hébert also gave weight to the idea of a moral revenge. To be good, vengeance had to be exercised by a ‘good people’. Again, sounding very much like Marat, he insisted that representatives not loyal to the Revolution should be driven from office, violently if necessary. When the Legislative Assembly replaced the National Constituent Assembly on 1 October 1791, Robespierre, who had been instrumental in the decision to make deputies ineligible for re-election, stepped down. Hébert responded by praising Robespierre for his defence of the people, expressed ‘sorrow’ to see him go, and communicated his ‘GREAT ANGER’ for those who had ‘betrayed the people’. He made his feelings clear in an article entitled ‘Les Adieux du Père Duchesne [Tome IV, issue 81]’. ‘Against the fuckers who have betrayed the People. Invitation to all departments to deal with the assholes [viédases] according to what they deserve, & not to give them any positions afterward.’61 Hébert spoke to his readers in a language they understood, rough and crude as it may have been. Through most of 1791, Hébert had adopted the attitude that revenge remained the responsibility of legal authorities. However, when in November non-juring priests refused to take the new oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitution, Hébert saw this as an effort to upset the revolutionary government. ‘[O]ne cannot help but see in it the hand of the skull-capped monsters who have become mad at the loss of their properties . . . what are they thinking, the cowardly deviants!’62 In the year to come, Hébert would spearhead an anti-Christianisation movement that would target the Catholic Church and everything associated with it. He saw lawlessness as emanating from the aristocracy rather than from the people. He crossed into fanaticism when he began expressing approval for violence in the name of justice: It’s time, fuck it [foutre], that terrible examples bring an end to a dangerous leniency that maintains subversive fervour, which could suddenly express

70  Valerae Hurley itself with horrible damage. It is necessary, foutre, to punish once . . . in order not to have to punish all the time.63

Again, there is much mirroring of Marat’s work in this call for action. On 11 June 1792 Louis used the power of the veto to thwart laws passed by the newly formed Legislative Assembly. Outraged, Hébert encouraged the sansculottes to act. ‘Well, fuck it’, he wrote, ‘behave the way you did on 14 July again. Imagine you have to destroy a new Bastille; forge thousands of pikes and arm your wives and children with them’.64 Paris was faced with food shortage and the very real threat of starvation. Hébert now crossed to the dark side. His once relatively judicious outlook was gone. In the process, Père Deschene gained a following already convinced of the righteousness of popular sovereignty. Hébert and Marat proved to be powerful foes, for it could be argued that their denunciations of the deputy Brissot de Warville and other Girondin moderates during the spring of 1793 led to the execution of the entire moderate faction. Brissot, the leader of the Girondin faction, was arrested on 2 June and executed on 31 October 1793, after languishing in prison for five months. Many other Girondins were executed between 31 October and 8 November. After that, Hébert’s voice became even more strident and obscene. Through the printed word, both Marat and Hébert encouraged the antagonism of the sansculottes for political and journalistic ends. They were influence peddlers. They pitted the masses against the govern­ment. The inflammatory words employed by journalists of every political ilk fuelled the idea of justifiable ‘vengeance’. In their hostile exchanges we see the growth of a zealotry that indirectly contributed to the Terror in 1793. These journalists may not have been thinkers of great note, but they were aware of far-reaching ideas such as popular sover­eignty, liberty, justice and equality before the law. Their talent was in making these grand ideas relatable to average readers. They had no clear political programme, but they knew their enemies and how to deal with them. In the process, vengeance became virtue. Violence became the people’s justice. Constant repeti­ tion cemented it all into accepted truth. Discord was encouraged by many, including but not limited to the journalists discussed here. In an intensely competitive market, angry rhetoric was intentionally employed to attracted readers, for the first goal of every new press was to keep the customer returning for more. The question was whose truth would dominate. It was answered on 10 August 1792, when the sansculottes, in lockstep with the Montagnard (the radical left in the Convention), purged all opposition and

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dismantled the right-wing press. De Rozoi was taken into custody on 13 August and executed on 25 August. In his last issue of the Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, dated 10 August 1792, Gautier, oblivious to the danger, continued to advise readers that Austrian forces were about to capture France and punish the Parisians for their disloyalty. The sansculottes destroyed his press. Gautier lived to write again though never with the same degree of success. The year 1793 saw the execution of Louis XVI, the arrest and guillotining of the Girondins and the official launching of the Terror. Marat was assassinated on 13 July by Charlotte Corday, a young Girondist sympathiser who hoped to end popular violence by eliminating the voice of L’Ami du Peuple. Père Duchesne continued to enjoy a government subsidy, which made Hébert a rich man, but his growing extremism and refusal to heed Robespierre’s warnings led to his execution on 24 March 1794. ­Robespierre too would fall. On 28 July 1794 he was arrested and executed, the Terror’s final victim. The journalists discussed here represent a larger discourse in the French revolutionary press. Their rhetoric was not only strikingly similar but also employed the same justifications for encouraging violence. They differed only in political perspective. Their first goal was to sell papers. To accomplish that, Hébert hit upon a formula that kept readers entertained if perhaps sometimes a bit confused. The frequent publication of sensational content left the reading public hungry for more. Simple repetition did the rest. The same might be said of Gautier. His snarky personal attacks on prominent people read much like today’s gossip columns. The eighteenth-century equivalent of ‘fake news’ played out in the pages of uncensored and uncontrolled journals from 1789 to the rise of Napoleon, who reinstituted state censorship. How did fake news work in Revolutionary France? If a story was pre­sented as having come from a legitimate source, something with a trustworthy or an institutional-sounding name – the revolutionary govern­ment’s sponsorship of Père Deschene or Marat’s role as an elected official in the National Convention, for example – biases kicked in, making it more likely that the story would be passed on to others. Circulation depended on keeping the reading public interested. Journalists amused or outraged their readers to keep them coming back, addicted to exaggeration. With more than 500 new presses opened after 1789, it was easy to find someone to validate a point of view. Literacy, or the lack thereof, played a role too. Although the ability to read had reached a historical high during the Revolution, basic literacy and the ability to understand the information provided was

72  Valerae Hurley

not necessarily on the same level. The Girondist writer Brissot de Warville understood this and advised journalists to keep their writing lively and simple to attract an unschooled public. While many could read, they were not always capable of analysing the facts as presented. Therefore, the most sensational stories attracted the most readers. It was a lesson that both Gautier and Hébert learned early on. Most readers of daily journals were not necessarily critical thinkers; they gravitated towards newspapers that gave them the answers they wanted. An unfettered press, therefore, led to scurrilous journalism, which eventually undermined press freedom. Confusion, selective evidence, repetition, sensationalism, bias and shallow content were weapons employed in this contest for the reader’s attention. While the printed word alone could not have produced the Terror, reading certainly contributed to the climate of fear and hostility that made such a policy seem acceptable, if not downright necessary to those who held the reins of power.

Notes   1. The Commune, established by municipal law on 14 December 1789, was the seat of the radical government in Paris from 1792 to 1795. It came into being after the fall of the Bastille and was situated in the Hôtel de Ville. Before the fall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792, representatives of the Commune were elected residents and served for two years. After 10 August 1792, newly elected delegates were more closely scrutin­ ised by other members. Twenty-five ‘rejections’ (as the standard) were enough to unseat a legitimately elected official. After the dethronement of Louis XVI, the composition of the Commune shifted: the number of merchants declined, replaced largely by artisans and workers. These delegates tended to support the radical left in the Assembly until the execution of Danton on 4 December 1793 and the fall of Robespierre on 28 July 1794. After the death of Hébert, the Commune lost power. The Constitution of Year III curtailed its political role and it became largely ineffective as a political body.  2. L’Ami du Peuple, 28 September 1789, p. 156. Translations here and below are the author’s.  3. L’Ami du Peuple, 30 September 1789, p. 173.  4. L’Ami du Peuple, 1 October 1789, pp. 184, 185.  5. L’Ami du Peuple, 2 October 1789, p. 190.   6. Cited in Louis R. Gottschalk, Jean Paul Marat, A Study in Radicalism (1927; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 58.  7. Gazette de Paris, 8 October 1791, p. 1.

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 8. L’Ami du Peuple, 10 March 1791, p. 11.  9. L’Ami du Peuple, 10 November 1789, p. 47. 10. Mercure National, no. 3, 26 December 1789, cited in Jack Censer, Prelude to Power: The Parisian Press 1789–1791 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 63. 11. Gottschalk, Jean Paul Marat, pp. 61–2. 12. Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 4 February 1790, p. 276. 13. Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 27 July 1790, pp. 210, 211. 14. L’Ami du Peuple, 12 January 1790, pp. 1–3, and 17 January 1790, pp. 6–9. 15. Ibid. 16. L’Ami du Peuple, 22 June 1790, pp. 3–4. 17. Ibid. 18. Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 3 May 1790, p. 262. 19. Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 22 December 1791, p. 412. 20. L’Ami du Peuple, 2 January 1791, p. 3. 21. L’Ami du Peuple, 25 January 1791, p. 8. 22. L’Ami du Peuple, 15 February 1791, pp. 4–6. 23. Gazette de Paris, 4 October 1791, p. 4. 24. Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 19 October 1790, pp. 388–9. 25. Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 19 April 1790, p. 446. 26. J. Gilchrist and W. J. Murray, The Press in the French Revolution: A Selection of Documents Taken from the Press of the Revolution for the Years 1789–1794 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1971), p. 88. 27. Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 1 July 1791, pp. 1–2. 28. Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 11 July 1791, p. 84. 29. Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 16 August 1791, p. 372. 30. Gilchrist and Murray, The Press in the French Revolution, p. 46. Hébert appears to have followed Brissot de Warville’s advice, as outlined in his prospectus. Brissot wrote that the purpose of a free journal was to ‘educat[e] a large nation [. . . ] limited in its powers, unaccustomed to reading, and yet anxious to escape the servitude of ignorance’. Since many of the very people whom pamphleteers and writers hoped to reach were unable to afford or to even read many of the more sophisticated publications, he suggested that it was necessary to ‘find another means to instruct all Frenchmen continuously at little cost, and in a form that will not bore them’ (emphasis added). 31. ‘Grand Colere Du Père Duchesne Contre Le Ci-Divant Compte d’Artois’, Père Duchesne, 1:30, p. 4. Issues of Père Duchesne were never dated, but most carried a volume (tome) and issue number. The historian Albert Soboul organised the editions into Tomes I through X with relevant issues documented. Often the topic provides an indication of timeframe, although this can prove problematic too. 32. L’Ami du Peuple, 23 May 1790, p. 4. Marat’s denunciation of the émigré population at Coblenz, particularly d’Artois, coupled with his calls for

74  Valerae Hurley vengeance against nobles and clerics suspected of counter-revolutionary sympathies threatened to many who were still in office. He also charged the queen with being in secret conspiracy. The Assembly charged Marat with intention to cause a riot. True to his pattern, Marat responded to the charge in his newspaper, taking aim at Mirabeau over the question of what constituted ‘crimes against the nation’. Marat continued to address this and similar points throughout the next few months. 33. Gazette de Paris, 16 October 1791, p. 6. 34. Gazette de Paris, 19 October 1791, p. 4. 35. Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 19 August 1791, pp. 401–2. 36. Gazette de Paris, 10 October 1791, p. 2. 37. Gazette de Paris, 6 December 1791, p. 4. 38. Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 19 October 1791, pp. 388–9. 39. Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 25 November 1791, p. 197. 40. Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 21 August 1791, p. 412. 41. Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 18 April 1791, p. 440. 42. Père Duchesne, 3:73, p. 6. For a detailed discussion of attitudes regarding women who stepped out of their approved role as keepers of the hearth and family, see Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 43. L’Ami du Peuple, 2 January 1791, p. 3. 44. L’Ami du Peuple, 16 January 1791, p. 6. 45. L’Ami du Peuple, 15 February 1791, pp. 5, 6. 46. L’Ami du Peuple, 21 May 1791, p. 4. 47. L’Ami du Peuple, 27 May 1791, p. 8. 48. L’Ami du Peuple, 26 June 1791, p. 2. 49. L’Ami du Peuple, 27 June 1791, p. 3. 50. L’Ami du Peuple, 2 July 1791, p. 3. 51. L’Ami du Peuple, 7 July 1791, pp. 4–5. 52. L’Ami du Peuple, 20 July 1791, pp. 2–3. 53. L’Ami du Peuple, 20 July 1791, p. 8. 54. L’Ami du Peuple, 16 November 1791, pp. 3–4. 55. L’Ami du Peuple, 15 December 1791, p. 8. 56. Ibid. 57. Père Duchesne, 3:42, pp. 4–5. 58. Père Duchesne, 3:70, pp. 1–2. 59. Père Duchesne, issue 106, pp. 2–7. 60. ‘Grande Tapage du Père Duchesne’, Père Duchesne, 4:112, pp. 3–4. 61. Père Duschesne, 4:81, p. 1. 62. Père Duchesne, vol. 1 (no number, no date), p. 6. 63. Ibid. 64. Père Duchesne, 4:102, pp. 7–8.

Chapter 4

Hellfire and Cannibals: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Erotic Reading Groups and Their Manuscripts Brian M. Watson

Better were it that such literature did not exist. I consider it pernicious and hurtful to the immature but at the same time I hold that, in certain circumstances, its study is necessary, if not beneficial. (Catena Librorum Tacendorum, 1885)

Under the cover of darkness on 30 November 1737, twenty-four men from across the region, from Edinburgh to Dundee, descended on the small seaside town of Anstruther in the Kingdom of Fife, Scotland. Under their dark cloaks, or secluded in their carriages, the men would have been well dressed, convivial and excited – for it was St Andrew’s Day. For some of them, this would have marked their fifth year of attendance at a biannual dinner. For a select three, this would have marked their first attendance at this secret feast. Sometime in the early morning the following day, a secretary would have taken his notes for the records of The Most Ancient and Most Puissant Order of the Beggar’s Benison of Merryland, Anstruther: 1737. St. Andrew’s Day. 24 met, 3 tested and en-rolled. All frigged. The Dr. expatiated. Two nymphs, 18 and 19, exhibited as hereto-fore. Rules were submitted by Mr. Lumsdaine for future adoption. Fanny Hill was read. Tempest. Broke up at 3 o’clock a.m.1

More than casual fans of John Cleland will note something quite remarkable – this is nearly a decade before the (public) publication of his novel Fanny Hill, and Cleland was in India at the time, a mystery which remains somewhat curious. One answer may be that this was an early draft for private circulation, which was common for erotic texts in the eighteenth century. Cleland’s connection with one of the Benison members named Robert Cleland is tantalising – but as of 75

76   Brian M. Watson

yet unexplained; furthermore, there are some reasons to doubt the usage of ‘fanny’ in a sexual matter.2 What is more remarkable for historians of reading, however, is that this is one of the select few ‘reader reactions’ that we have in response to erotic and pornographic material before the twentieth century.3 In the past few decades, historians have begun to engage with this material: in manuscript form (e.g. Ian Frederick Moulton’s Before Pornography, published in 2000, and Lynn Hunt’s The Invention of Pornography, originally published in 1993), in its seventeenth and eighteenth-century developments (the works of Julie Peakman, Sarah Toulalan and others), in the events of the nineteenth century that created obscene libel (too many to name), or by simply focusing on the history of visual pornography in Hollywood and elsewhere. All or nearly all of these accounts are laser-focused on the content of the manuscript, book or etching, the authors who wrote the books, the publishers that printed and advertised the product, or the lawyers and officials who prosecuted and censored them. The biggest gap, however, remains in the readership and reception of erotic and porno­ graphic material. How did readers react to these erotic texts? What did they use them for? What did they think of them? How did they engage with them? There are several reasons for this void. Firstly, not only are these texts exceedingly rare, but it is also very difficult to find information on their readers, especially readers who did not have a censorial agenda. Yet there were a few private erotic book clubs, remarkably understudied, that not only purchased and read erotic material, but were active in funding, authoring and discussing it. The first were the eighteenth-century libertine clubs, the best examples of which were the masturbatory Beggar’s Benison in Scotland and the similarly inspired and contemporary Hellfire and Dilettanti Clubs based around Sir Francis Dashwood in England. The members of these groups, in addition to their rumoured sexual improprieties, were responsible for subsidising the production of The Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786–7), and their number included John Wilkes, whose scandalous Essay on Woman (1752) sparked trials and debates in Parliament. A later notable private erotic book club was the nineteenth-century Cannibal Club, based around Sir Richard Francis Burton, which operated under the auspices of the Anthropological Society. This group was responsible for a huge number of erotic works, such as the first translation of the Kama Sutra (1885), The New Epicurean: The Delights of Sex (1865), The Mysteries of Verbena House (1886), My Secret Life (1888) and others. Although there have

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been various studies of these groups, and their members have been touched on in individual biographies, the clubs as reading institutions and the material they engaged with have not yet been examined in depth. By drawing on members’ letters and diaries, along with the erotic texts themselves, this chapter considers all three together for the first time, showing how these three groups of readers engaged with the emerging genre of pornography. It is important to recognise at the outset that pornography as we understand it – ‘the explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings’ – is not the same thing as what these groups engaged with, nor would they have recognised it as such.4 The word itself was coined only around 1850, to describe the material that was being excavated at Pompeii and for use in treatises on what to do with urban prostitutes.5 Instead, these readers would have recognised their interaction with erotic, or daresay obscene, literature that was directly opposed to many dearly held cultural tenets. Erotic discourse was exactly that, a method of discourse, and it was usually linked with social, political and religious criticism. It was also literature, not just some titillating woodcuts or some back-and-forth baldly mechanical depictions. Indeed, an express tension was manifest in each of these groups and the texts they read. There was, of course, the fear of sexuality – especially uncontrolled sexuality – but also, by way of long tradition stretching back to Aretino and running through Edmund Curll in England, an obscene book that attacked the church or the state was prosecutable obscene libel.6 As a result, these ‘erotic’ book clubs did not function like regular book clubs (there was no public celebration or circulation, and there were no lending libraries for this material) and they were restricted to a certain type of literate gentleman. However, the desire to share, to initiate, to reveal the Playboy magazines under the mattress or to show a trusted confidant the wild positions and creativity of the Kama Sutra was still very present in these groups. All the erotic texts that these groups read and speculated about provided the thrill of transgression and the revelation of something secret, protected, locked away. But to bring a new person in was dangerous – it would only take one Puritan or one morally strident citizen to land the whole group in danger, to disrupt the network and expose these middle- and upper-class men to embarrassment, humiliation and legal consequences, which could mean the end of a political or business career. Then again, there was the constant need for new blood, new money

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and new sources of material. Once a book or poem became tiresome, there was a timeless impulse to search out new material through translation or purchase, or to sponsor the creation of new material, as each of these groups did. There was thus a thin line to walk between publicising the group and protecting the members. The solution, as Jason Kelly and others have identified, was to flaunt the private publicly, to allow gossip and rumour to swirl around certain members and hope that the right kind of person would approach a member, be sponsored and join in the bonds of secrecy and privacy – perhaps after some minor hazing and drinking.7 All of these groups belonged to a common libertine tradition that was symptomatic of a much larger cultural shift that had been ongoing at least since the Earl of Rochester went on a stroll in London’s St James’s Park. They represented an increasingly sceptical and decreasingly religious society which blasphemed and libelled the Church and religiously inspired societal norms and customs. The members of these groups tended to be conservative or specifically Tory, upper class and powerful, but they were generally not ‘in power’. In fact, most of them were out of power due to changes in politics or culture or because they rejected the majority morality. Like so many other Britons, they found solace in coming together around a common associ­ation – in this case, the use and discussion of ancient and modern erotic texts as justification for libertinism, free sex or an attack what they viewed as an oppressive majority. Clubs were the most distinctively British institutions following the Restoration, and along with the population they saw enormous expansion. By 1755, when Samuel Johnson was publishing his Dictionary, the concept of clubs had fully emerged into ‘an assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions’, which is as good a definition as any.8 The eighteenth century was era of peak-club in the British world – as many as 25,000 different clubs and societies of 130 different types were having regular meetings and events throughout England and its colonies.9 Wherever they came from or whatever their purposes for belonging to the club, they were all bound together by the idea of ‘clubness’, in which societal, religious or personal grievances or differences should be subsumed into the larger group. The idea of clubs, in the words of Peter Clark, increasingly penetrated every nook and cranny of British social and cultural life: Almost every group or institution, past and present, was reincarnated in associational terms: King Arthur’s knights were described as the ‘original club of Round Table Troopers’, while Edinburgh town council was

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denounced as the ‘land-market club’. Increasingly, voluntary associations were not so much perceived as miniature exemplars of national society; rather, national society itself was viewed as an untidy aggregation of voluntary societies. Even heaven was visualized in terms of one large friendly society.10

Merriment and gaiety made up the central core of clubs, and the friendships and common interests created an institution that was charged with the advancement of a common cause. It might be as serious as the study of Italian art (the Society of the Dilettanti) or cultural anthropology (the Cannibal Club) in lectures, discussions and essay-reading, but it could also descend from this lofty highbrow pillar to simpler lower-brow purposes such as a drinking club. The members of the Beggar’s Benison club were largely of ‘the middling sort’, and included educated and literate clerks, schoolmasters, parish priests and military officers – but also the 2nd Lord Scarsdale, the 5th Baronet Wentworth, and George, Prince of Wales (later George IV).11 Regardless of decorum, nearly every club maintained its own ritual and myth-making, which might cover as little as the selection of officers and their founding story, or be as rarefied and arcane as the Freemasons and their secretive codes. It was this love of initiation and arcana that fed into obsession over hidden erotic material. Ritual is the explanation for that strange note in the Order’s records: ‘24 met, 3 tested and en-rolled. All frigged.’ Another entry explains the ritual: The Recorder [secretary] and two Remembrancers [officers] prepared the Novice in a closet, by causing him to propel his Penis until full erection . . . when thus ready, he was escorted . . . and ordered to place his Genitals upon the Testing-Platter. . . . [Thereafter] the new Brother’s health was heartily and humorously drunk. He was told to select an amorous Passage from the Song of Solomon and read it aloud with comments.

After that, a hearty banquet followed, where they were shewn Curiosities; Songs were sung composed for the occasion; Sentiments and Toasts were given . . . [and] Ovid’s Art Of Love and Byron’s Don Juan were spouted . . . [and] anatomical Bible texts were freely anatomized.

Although some of the surviving records of the Benison are suspect – in particular, the 1733–8 minutes are most likely a creation of a later author – historians of the Benison such as David Stevenson largely agree there was some sort of masturbatory ritual in response to the texts.12 Surviving membership diplomas and objects such as the

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frigging (masturbation) platter and the group’s Bible give further support to the rumoured rituals. The Benison Bible in particular is worth analysing as a surviving record of reader engagement. This Bible, which is now privately owned, is a high-quality paper leather-bound issue, printed in Edinburgh in 1744. The spine has been rebacked and titled THE BIBLE. BEGGAR’S BENISON, ANSTRUTHER. On the front is a (broken) lock and keyhole in the style of a vulva, and the words LIGNUM SCIENTIAE and BONI & MALI are engraved above and below. Finally, there are golden hasp plates on the front and back which carry the letters P.B.B.A. and B.B.B.E. respectively – these initials refer to the parent Benison of Anstruther and the branch in Edinburgh. The Latin around the vulva roughly translates as ‘The tree of Knowledge . . . [of] Good and Evil’. Stevenson describes the rest: An inscription on the title page reads ‘Beggar’s Benison, Castle of Dreel, Anstruther. Given for use by Thomas Earl of Kellie, at the Initiation of Standing Members’. . . . Between the title page and the beginning of the text nine sheets of lined paper have been inserted. Both their sizes and the handwriting on them varies . . . and comprise attempts at bawdy wit and inane obscene profundities. . . . At the end of the text of the Bible two further sheets of paper (unlined) are glued, and contain miscellaneous anecdotes and reflections relating to sex.

The record-keeping Bible – and, by extension, the club – evidences a heavy fascination with sex, especially prohibited sex. At some point in the club’s existence, a member of the Benison annotated and compiled every sexual event in the Bible, taking particular notice of the forbidden ones – from events as salacious as Genesis 19: 4–9 and 30–4 (the city of Sodom and Lot’s daughters’ incest) to as vague as Leviticus 5: 3 (concerning priests of God touching the unclean parts of man).13 The creation of personal Bible indexes in preparation for reading aloud was a common practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.14 We usually imagine such rather well-to-do fathers reading selections from the Bible to their families to educate and set moral standards for future generations, but when these ‘gentlemen’ were secluded in more private (masculine) environments they were willing to let loose their tongues and their belt loops. So what do the somewhat wild and definitely drunken antics of this particular group tell us about the history of reading? They show that even in private settings ‘out loud’ reading still took on the performative role that was an essential part of sociability among groups of friends and family in the eighteenth

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century.15 The initiates’ reading and commentary would have been judged on performance, pacing and delivery – much in the same way that ‘spouting’ club competitions were.16 Moreover, the very act of this commentary would have marked them as a member of an in-group. Their surviving jokes and anecdotes range from lowbrow double entendres to references to Boccaccio and others, within a framework of a common libertine and masculine culture – a commonality among all of these erotically inclined clubs. Additionally, their use of the Bible shows that there was simply not as much erotic material available to the Beggar’s Benison as there would be to later groups: they had to make do with what they had. Another conclusion that we can draw from the club’s reading selections and sexual rituals is that it was essentially reactionary, founded in reaction against changing cultural norms and values. In particular, these gentlemen were reacting in defiance against Onania. Onania OR, the Heinous Sin OF Self-Pollution, AND All its Frightful Consequences (1756) is one of those rare books that marks a definite break, with a before and an after. There had always been murmurs against the practice of masturbation by churchmen and moralists, but to a true fervour and moral panic required a new perspective, which in this case was provided by an unknown clergyman who conjoined religious arguments against masturbation to the newly emerging field of scientific medicine. The author argued that the practice surely led to disease, injury, disorder and eventually death. It was an amazing success: by 1760 the book had sold out nearly twenty English editions and had rapidly been translated into French, German, Italian and Dutch. At first blush, this would seem to be the worst possible time to form a club devoted to masturbation (if there is ever truly a good time to form such a club). Even allowing for the fact that the members of the Beggar’s Benison club in Anstruther were more provincial than Londoners or the members of the Edinburgh branch of the club, it is very unlikely that they were unaware of the onanism scare. In fact, there is more than adequate evidence that these gentlemen were up to date (or even ahead of date in the case of Fanny Hill) on all the sexy literature that London had to offer. It is much more likely that they were reacting against the crazy ideas coming out of London. As Stevenson notes: These were men who were malcontents, muttering subversively on politics, on innovations inflicted on them from above – a new dynasty (possibly), union with England (certainly), customs and excise duties (certainly).

82   Brian M. Watson Now there was another ridiculous innovation from London which affronted them – the idea that masturbation was harmful. What nonsense: it had never done them any harm. It was an attempt to suppress a traditional – and gratifying – pastime, part of their cultural heritage. So, let’s mock the whole silly idea. Make fun of it in a ritual which demonstrates that we don’t believe a word of Onania.17

Although these were better-off men, who had the freedom to associate at secretive club meetings without fear of public backlash, they were also men out of power, frustrated by the majority. Many of them shared political (Jacobin) or moral (libertine) opinions that were out of step with the mainstream and they were resentful of the moral backlash of the Glorious Revolution, having grown up in the more libertine culture of the Restoration. Like other out-of-power groups, they turned to bitter satire and parody, in this case using erotic literature. The other eighteenth-century libertine club of note is the Hell­ fire Club, which was a sort of inner sanctum of the Society of the ­Dilettanti. It shared with the Beggar’s Benison a ritualistic and obsessive phallus interest as well as a dedication to heavy drinking and partying. Horace Walpole famously described the group as ‘a club, for which the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk: the two chiefs are Lord Middlesex and Sir Francis Dashwood, who were seldom sober the whole time they were in Italy’.18 The main differences between the groups is that while the Beggar’s Benison could afford to have knowledge of their rituals to be semi-public and survive, the Hellfire Club was made up of much more powerful and higher-class members, subject to the much harsher glare of London society, who could (and would) not survive once knowledge of their activities had captured the attention of the media. Further, its members were expected to act like gentlemen, in contrast to earlier libertine rakes. In many ways the members were reacting to the shift and reprioritisation of manly values towards politeness and moral rectitude, from the sexual to the social, as both Philip Carter and Erin Mackie have documented.19 However, there still remained an outlet for raffish behaviour, as demonstrated by the Monks of the Order of St Francis of Medmenham Abbey. Founded by Sir Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron le Despencer, the Monks of Medmenham, known colloquially (and here) as the Hellfire Club, shared membership and heavy connections with the Dilettanti, but took their interest erotic and obscene material to a new level. At some point in the later 1740s, Dashwood and other notoriously rakish Dilettanti members began to meet, first at the George & Vulture, then at the King’s Arms, and later at Dashwood’s estate in West Wycombe,

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a leisurely day’s ride from London. The members would spend up to a week at the Palladian estate, passing under the Mercury-capped door where their motto, ‘fay ce que voudras’, was inscribed.20 The rumours of the Monks’ activities first spread among their fellow nobles, as attested by Horace Walpole: Whatever their doctrines were, their practice was rigorously pagan. Bacchus and Venus were the deities to whom they almost publicly sacrificed; and the nymphs and the hogsheads that were laid in against the festivals of this new church, sufficiently informed the neighbourhood of the complexion of those hermits.21

The club meetings, whether in private rooms at the King’s Arms or on Dashwood’s estates, followed the same general pattern of donning pseudo-Franciscan monk’s robes, extreme consumption of alcohol, the reading of pornographic literature, the singing of bawdy songs and the hiring of prostitutes. At some point, the famous rabble-rouser John Wilkes joined the club, likely through the mentorship of Thomas Potter, who was Wilkes’s lifelong friend and initiated him into libertinism. He quickly became the club librarian and the locus through which obscene or titillating books passed, for we find Sir William Stapleton writing on 5 September 1761: I unfurnished my library at Twickenham last week and sent the pious books to Mr. Deards [the bookseller] with orders to send them to George Street [Wilkes’s address]; if the Chapter think them worthy of the Abbey. I shall be extremely glad, hoping they will now and then occasion an extraordinary ejaculation to be sent up heavenward.22

This demonstrates that the Hellfire Club had greater access to erotic material than the Beggar’s Benison Order, but also that the availability of sexual literature was still limited, which will become very apparent when we discuss the Cannibal Club. The Hellfire Club was following the same changes that more pedestrian reading clubs were, in that they were associating with a certain type of material and accumulating it, but they had not yet become a procuring audience for it. This is evident when one considers the age and contents of the books in the club’s library: nearly all were a century or more old, and they concerned social, political and religious criticism more than just straight pornography. They included Aretino’s Ragionamenti (1536), a dialogue between an older and more experienced prostitute with a much younger one, and one of the mainstays of literary erotica which Dashwood purchased on his Grand Tour in Italy. There was also Nicolas Chorier’s The School of Women (1660), which Dashwood

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had displayed in his portrait by William Hogarth (another Hellfire member). Libertine poetry made a strong showing too, especially the poems of Lord Rochester, as another member (Lord Sandwich) was his grandson, and of course François Rabelais, from whom the club’s motto came. The common threads uniting this selection of material was its emphasis on critiquing and satirising Western Christian sexual morality from a male and free-love point of view. The School of Women, for example, focuses largely on two women discussing how to please their husbands in the best way possible, and (conveniently) how men might convince women to sleep with them. These books were stored in the main chapter room of the house, from which the members’ ‘cloisters’ or individual bedrooms branched off, where they could retire for private recreation with the women they had brought to the event. A 1779 tell-all, Nocturnal Revels, by ‘a MONK of the ORDER of St FRANCIS’, describes what the meetings were like: They however always meet in one general sett at meals, when, for the improvement of mirth, pleasantry, and gaiety, every member is allowed to introduce a Lady of cheerful lively disposition, to improve the general hilarity. . . . The Ladies are not compelled to make any vows of celibacy upon their admission, any more than the Monks. . . . Disquisitions of an amorous and Platonic kind sometimes are introduced, in which full liberty of speech is allowed. . . . In case the topics should unexpectedly become too warm and passionate, the use of fans is allowed, to prevent the appearance of the Ladies’ blushes; and under these circumstances, some female seize this opportunity for a temporary retreat with their paramours.23

Nocturnal Revels’ exaggerations should not be taken as gospel truth in all cases, but its descriptions of the parties are not very far off from how meetings of the Beggar’s Benison were conducted, and indeed how Wilkes himself described the meetings. In strong contrast to the Benison, though, Wilkes heavily emphasised the heterosexual nature of the Hellfire Club: he disavowed the casual bisexuality that had been practised by aristocrats since the Elizabethan era.24 In addition, we have an example of the literary work that was produced by club members and read aloud at their meetings – the Essay on Woman, a satire of the highest order against Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man. While the Essay on Woman is not a porno­ graphic work in the modern sense, it targeted and criticised the pretentious morality of Pope line by line. Where the first stanza of Pope runs:

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Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things To low ambition, and the pride of kings. Let us (since life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die) Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man; A mighty maze! but not without a plan; A wild, where weeds and flow’rs promiscuous shoot; Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.

The Essay on Woman proclaims: Awake, my Fanny, leave all meaner things This morn shall prove what rapture swiving [fucking] brings. Let us (since life can little more supply Than just a few good Fucks, and then we die) Expiate free o’er that lov’d scene of Man; A mighty Maze! for mighty Pricks to scan; A wild, where Paphian thorns promiscuous shoot, Where flow’rs the monthly Rose, but yields no Fruit.25

In much the same way as the Beggar’s Benison or the Priapus manu­ script, the text mocked and abused Christian ideas and a newly developing public morality, and promoted the Hellfire Club’s ideology of free sex. While usually credited to John Wilkes, the Essay was largely a production of the minor politician Thomas Potter, another unrepentant Hellfire rake. Wilkes seems to have had some input into the poem, but he was more involved in its printing and distribution to Hellfire members before he was interrupted by the constables. Whatever his role in the production, the text doubled down on social and religious critique by including footnotes supposedly authored by Bishop Warburton, who had written a high-minded and pious paratext for Pope’s Essay. George III and the Tory government, already deeply suspicious of and outraged at Wilkes for his political criticism in the North Briton, issued a highly controversial general warrant for the arrest of Wilkes and his publishers.26 Wilkes was vulnerable to a charge of obscene libel, a newly minted (1728) legal concept, so the government tampered with the text of the poem to make it more blasphemous and increase its chance of a successful prosecution. While one complete stanza had originally read ‘Immortal Honour, endless Fame, / Almighty Pego! to thy Name; / And equal Adoration be / Paid to the neighb’ring Pair with Thee’, which would seem blasphemous enough, the government decided to up the ante by adding the line ‘Thrice blessed Glorious Trinity!’ to the end.27 The result was one of

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the strangest moments in parliamentary history: Lord Sandwich, a Hellfire Club member, read into the parliamentary minutes an obscene Hellfire Club poem written by one Hellfire Club member as a piece of evidence against another Hellfire Club member. Things were getting too hot for Dashwood, and the club avoided further publicity, the obscene pictures were torn off of the walls, and the member’s outfits were removed and possibly destroyed. There are some suggestions that there continued to be one-off meetings over the course of the next few years, but the club never managed to reclaim its regular meetings afterwards, and former members went on to disavow or deny their involvement with the group. In retrospect, like the Beggar’s Benison, the group made a business of flaunting their secrecy and rakishness in a public manner to attract the right kind of people as additional members, but as soon as the gossip became too much and former members were taking to the press to stoke the coals, the remaining members had to retreat from the limelight. Moreover, the political winds had shifted with the ascension of George III and Lord Bute. Suddenly, the men who had formerly found themselves bitterly dispossessed and out of power, whiling away their time with dirty books and mistresses, found themselves swept into power as members of the Tory government: Dashwood became chancellor of the Exchequer and Sandwich became northern secretary and then postmaster-general. They had to put away young men’s things; they had become respectable. While the Hellfire Club never revived, there remained enough of a trade in erotic books and licentious material for George III to feel it necessary in 1787 to issue the blistering Royal Proclamation for the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for the Preventing and Punishing of Vice, Profaneness and Immorality discouraging loose and licentious Prints, Books, and Publications, dispersing Poison to the minds of the Young and Unwary and to Punish the Publishers and Vendors thereof.28 A prosecutorial Proclamation Society of largely upper-class political and religious men was set up in the weeks following the Proclamation to enforce and punish the vice, profaneness, and immorality of the lower classes – but not the morals of its upper-class membership of course. It was later rolled up into the Society for the Suppression of Vice and helped to bring about the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, the first really comprehensive and effective anti-pornography legislation – an act that would lead to the British government taking on the duties of prosecuting perceived obscenity (even to the current day, as illustrated by 2012’s R. v. Peacock decision and the ban on ‘violent’ pornography).29

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During this time, male clubs, ideas of masculinity and standards of acceptable behaviour and taste underwent a dramatic transformation. The elite libertinism that tied a man’s success and prowess to his sexuality, ability and honour was in decline.30 By the dawn of the nineteenth century, as heralded by the Proclamation and enforced by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, middle-class respectability was on the rise. By the mid- to late nineteenth century it was seen as boorish, immature and uncivilised to boast of sexual conquest. The cult of domesticity and virtuous self-control held increasing sway, and a man’s honour and (more importantly) his credit and chances for advancement became increasingly dependent on his public behaviour.31 To put it another way, in 1786 a duke’s mistress could be introduced to the queen, but by 1802 Charles James Fox had to marry his before she could be introduced in polite society.32 However, elite interest in prurient literature, imagery and history continued unabated, although slightly more restricted and confined, buoyed by the crescendo of pornography over the nineteenth century. Despite these shifts in the majority morality, the culture of elite male libertinism continued to operate nearly along the same lines as the clubs founded over a century beforehand. Like the Society of the Dilettanti, the Anthropological Society of London became the host for the Cannibal Club. In 1863, Sir Richard Francis Burton, the famous adventurer and linguist, began hosting private dinner parties at ­Bertolini’s restaurant in Leicester Square with members of elite British society who considered themselves as connoisseurs of fine porn­ ography, as well as experts on race and worldwide sexual practices. Just as their host, the conservative Anthropological Society, doubted that ‘negroes’ could be the same as white men, the Cannibal Club was suspicious of Western sexual practices and sought to promote alternatives. ­Bertolini’s, a mixed Italian and French restaurant, was the perfect location for this sort of meeting. It occupied a part of town that had once been fashionable but was now a congregation point for prostitutes and rougher types – Tennyson called the location ‘­Dirtolini’s’ and Dante Gabriel Rossetti took models of a decidedly ‘loose’ type there.33 The club was named such because Burton had always been interested in cannibalism, and was bitterly disappointed that he never managed to witness it – and perhaps participate in the ritual. This fasci­nation was not limited to Burton: in a particularly revolting letter, one Cannibal begged Burton to acquire the ‘skin of an African girl’ so he might bind his volumes of the Marquis de Sade in it.34 This particularly grotesque detail points to the men’s shared interest in

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non-Western ritual and sexual practices, as well as their sadistic tendencies, but the interests of all the members sprawled in the same way the British Empire did. Like the Benison and Hellfire clubs before them, the meetings of the Cannibal Club, jokingly called ‘orgies’ by Burton, were excuses for the members to get rip-roaringly drunk with a group of like-minded men – and no topic of conversation was taboo. The membership included Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, the conservative politician and poet whose erotic literature collection was surpassed only by that of another member of the club; Edward Sellon, a translator and author of several erotic works; James Campbell Reddie, an openly homosexual translator of French and Italian erotic novels, and a pioneering erotic bibliographer; Frederick Hankey, a major Conservative politician; George Augustus Sala, the famous reporter and erotic novelist; Algernon Charles Swinburne, the taboo poet and playwright; and of course Henry Spencer Ashbee, the erotic bibliographer and encyclopaedist who helped to tie all of these disparate counterculture threads together. Despite their countercultural tastes, many of the Cannibals also belonged in the conventional culture – many of them also belonged to London’s Royal Geographical Society, Ethnological Society or Royal Society. Also like the members of the two earlier clubs, the Cannibals delighted in constructing an erotic and fictional backstory and ritual items. The chairman was supposed to keep order with a mace carved in the shape of an African chewing on a large bone, presumably human. They also mocked Christianity by uttering their very own ‘catechism’: Preserve us from our enemies Thou who art Lord of suns & skies, Whose meat & drink is flesh in pies And blood in bowls! Of thy sweet mercy, damn their eyes, And damn their souls! [ . . .] Glad tidings of great exultation Proclaim we to the chosen nation; [. . .] They are going to damnation And we to glory. . . . Roast all brown faces that were pretty, All black even blacker, Strip off the trappings of their city . . . Give thou their carcases to fill Thy servant’s bellies!35

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This so-called ‘Cannibal’s Catechism’ was written by Swinburne and read aloud by the group at every initiation and meeting. The poem would go on to provide the members with the code and allusions they would use in letters to each other. For example, Swinburne wrote to J. Fredrick Collingwood in 1868, ‘Dear Brother, By the grace of Satan I will be with you – Deo Nolente – with a friend – on Tuesday. Yours in the faith, A. C. Swinburne.’36 Just like the Benison and Hellfire clubs, the meetings of the Cannibals provided a fertile breeding ground for collaboration and cooperation. Nearly every member of the latter, at one time or another, would turn his hand towards the creation pornographic material. Thus, while the Beggar’s Benison and the Hellfire Club had a limited supply of erotic/pornographic literature, the Cannibal Club never ran into this problem. They made themselves an audience for erotica. Some works even became collaborations between two or more members, such as the Mysteries of Verbena House (1882), a novel that focuses on the flagellation and birching of schoolgirl after schoolgirl by a headmistress. The work was started by Sala but was completed by Reddie when Sala lost interest or otherwise failed to finish. Reddie also took up the completion of The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881), a work begun by another Cannibal, Simeon Solomon, the homo­sexual Pre-Raphaelite painter, when Solomon was convicted of public indecency and disgraced in 1873. The work was supposedly the ‘true’ biography of a Victorian rent-boy named Jack Saul, likely based on the real-life John Saul in Ireland, and recounts a number of homo­sexual encounters in graphic detail. Ashbee notes in his bibliography that the Romance of Lust (1873–6) is also not the produce of a single pen, but consists of several tales, ‘“orient pearls at random strung”, woven into a connected narrative by a gentleman, perfectly well known to the present generation of literary eccentrics and collectors’, referring of course to himself and the Cannibals.37 The members also took the opportunity of the meetings to buy, sell and recommend erotic literature to each other, much of which was available from a friend of the club, the publisher William Dugdale, or from Swinburne’s publisher, John Camden Hotten. Indeed, in the 1860s Hotten joined the Royal Geographical Society and Royal Ethnological Society of London solely for the purpose of using of building a closer relationship with Cannibals by loaning out his decidedly indecent catalogue to members in order promote his wares.38 It seemed to be successful: in the days after club meetings we see Ashbee, Swinburne and others writing for copies of new or rumoured works, such as The Romance of Chastisement, Exhibition

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of Female Flagellants or the satirical opera Lady Bumtickler’s Revels, all published by Hotten. The performative aspect continued to be important: members would read to the club erotic works they had discovered or written. For example, at one meeting in 1865, Swinburne waxed poetically about a new edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that included several poems celebrating sensual and romantic love between men. Additionally, they shared the eighteenth-century Benison and Hellfire fascination with the history of phallus worship: Edward Sellon read ‘On the Phallic Worship of India’ before the Anthropological Society, a work that draws on Priapus and orentalises it within an Indian context. He was also the author of Ophiolatreia, an account of ‘the rites and mysteries connected with the origin, rise, and development of serpent worship’, the whole of which formed ‘an exposition of one of the phases of phallic, or sex worship’.39 A final continuance between the Cannibals and their eighteenth-century brethren is that they flaunted the private publicly – by ‘using scholarly apparatuses [to] emphasize and even expand these works’ eroticism. . . . Like “warnings” pornographers often included in their advertisements, such notes actually highlight the “offensive” content’.40 This allowed both Hotten and the late Victorian erotic publisher Charles Carrington to harness the language of the Cannibals in advertising to promote their books to a new generation of men in the libertine tradition, often going so far as to form new clubs. Unlike the Benison or Hellfire members before them, there is no outright suggestion that these men engaged in sexual activities at their meetings. This was partially because the Cannibals mostly met in public spaces, but it may also have been a result of the increasing privatisation and regulation of sexuality by the 1824 Vagrancy Act and the 1864 Contagious Diseases Act. The irony, of course, was that there was an increasingly rising tide of erotic literature, illustrations and eventually postcards and photography besieging the metropolis. Some Cannibals, especially Hankey, even contributed to the flood, illegally using the diplomatic bags of the British embassy (which were protected from search and seizure) to smuggle flagellant novels into the country for publication by Dugdale or Hotten.41 There was also the very real threat of prosecution by the Society for the Suppression of Vice or, later, the full fury of the British government. For the entire year of 1885 Isabel Burton, wife of Richard, was convinced that she was being watched by members of the censorial Society for the Suppression of Vice. When one member of the Society took lodgings in the same building as her, she demanded that the

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landlord throw him out or the Burtons themselves would be forced to move (the landlord obliged the Burtons).42 This contrast – insistent profession of public manners against a background of vice and immorality – did not go unnoticed and provided one of the stereotypical critiques of the late Victorian age (and indeed modern critiques of the Victorians). Ashbee in particular savaged the society he lived in, writing that ‘the English nation possesses an ultra-squeamishness and hyper-prudery peculiar to itself, sufficient alone to deter any author of position and talent from taking in hand so tabooed a subject’.43 Henry Spencer Ashbee was, on the surface, a respectable and wealthy international businessman. At a young age he impressed his father-in-law, married into the textile manufacturer Charles Lavy & Co., and went on to make a fortune for himself and the company. His success was largely attributable to his fluency in languages ancient and modern. But, with a little bit of scratching, Ashbee emerges as the stereo­typical Victorian gentleman with a secret life. Through a series of chance meetings, Ashbee fell into a friendship with both Reddie and Hankey, who introduced him to their secret hobby of collecting and publishing erotic literature. By this point, Reddie had written The Adventures of a Schoolboy; or, The Freaks of Youthful Passion and The New Ladies Tickler (both 1866). Ashbee seemed somewhat bemused by these works, later describing them as ‘well written, worthy of a less silly title and better illustrations . . . all [scenes] are forcibly told and very voluptuous’.44 At some point in the 1860s, faced with a midlife crisis, Ashbee began collecting these works, a hobby that would eventually become an overwhelming obsession. Something about these works electrified Ashbee. Was it that they were ‘naturally and powerfully written tale[s]’ in which sex ‘from the most refined voluptuousness to the grossest sensuality are richly and lusciously depicted’, or were these works ‘vile . . . exceedingly licentious [with] no literary merit whatsoever’? Anyway, he simply could not tear himself away.45 The tension within Ashbee, like the tensions throughout all of these clubs, was never fully resolved. In one of his introductions he remarked ‘better were it that such literature did not exist. I consider it pernicious and hurtful to the immature.’46 Ashbee was obviously both repulsed and enticed, and, despite the wishes of his better self, he would go on to collect enough of the material to become the leading collector of erotic books in the world, and go on to write a study of these works. Ashbee emerges as the ultimate connoisseur reader of erotic liter­ ature, becoming the presenter, preserver and definer of it. By the time of his death, he retained a separate London apartment just

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for his erotic library and had amassed thousands of erotic novels, illu­strations and short stories in French, English, Spanish and other languages. He had inherited the collections of other Cannibals and had written a masterpiece of bibliography (under the pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi) in three volumes: Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Pro­hibited Books, 1877), Centuria Librorum Absconditorum (A Hundred Hidden Books, 1879) and Catena Librorum Tacendorum (A Series of Silenced Books, 1885). These volumes categorise and analyse works in much greater depth than a regular bibliography would. Ashbee often remarks on the quality of the plates inserted into a book, gives his opinion on how well the text is written and in many cases provides large excerpts, some of which are the only surviving fragments we have of the referenced works. But even in the depths of his discussions, Ashbee’s works retain a communal quality to them: he often cites from Sellon or from letters of authors whom he knew on a personal basis, to provide greater context. Ashbee’s services were invaluable to the Cannibal Club. For example, when Burton and Indian civil servant Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot tried to publish Bhagwan Lal Indraji’s English translation of the Kama Sutra, they were rebuffed by printer after printer. Ashbee’s publicity campaign reached across the European continent, winning subscribers and persuading collectors of its value. Tucked into Ashbee’s manuscript copy of the Kama Sutra in the British Library is a letter from Dutch publisher R. C. d’Ablaing of Giessenburg – whose erotic publishing and reading activities seem to have gone unnoticed in Dutch scholarship – promising that he would send Ashbee a number of pornographic works, and praising the Hindu work for its insight into the erotics of theology. Another letter, signed ‘J Knight’, tucked into the same volume, promises that he will draw up a handsome jacket for the Kama Sutra, lamenting that that erotic work could not be published without great public outrage. The letters and friendships among members of the Cannibal Club and others involved in the erotic book trade proved essential for authors and publishers writing for and catering to these audiences. Such a club emerges as the first profitable and secure audience for erotic material. The friendships and connections generated the money to fund Burton’s One Thousand and One Nights, Perfumed Garden and Kama Sutra by subscription. When Ashbee wrote the first volume of his bibliography, there existed only four manuscript copies of the Kama Sutra, but by the time he wrote the second volume copies were circulating throughout London. In many ways, the Cannibal Club was the ne plus ultra of the clubs that came before it. Not only were

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they involved in the publication of dozens of erotic novels, poems and images, they also curated a far-flung network of erotic publishers, authors and translators. They brought foreign texts such as the Kama Sutra into Western awareness and circulation. They were more or less responsible for single-handedly popularising the genres of homo­sexual and flagellatory pornography. They reintroduced the works of the Marquis de Sade into intellectual conversation, with dramatic consequences for twentieth-century culture. All three of the clubs discussed in this chapter used erotic literature to justify forms of sex that were in direct opposition to majority morality, though their members were largely conservative, and many of them became important figures in the Tory party. However, in private, behind closed doors or in letters to each other, they were often advocates for free love and anti-Christian moral ideas – especially for upper-class men like themselves. In the end, I return to the epigraph, taken from Ashbee’s third bibliography: ‘Better were it that such literature did not exist. I consider it pernicious and hurtful to the immature but at the same time I hold that, in certain circumstances, its study is necessary, if not beneficial.’ As is hopefully abundantly clear by now, the study of erotic literature is both necessary and beneficial, though it arouses more suspicion and prejudice than any other field of historical research. As Lisa Sigel has said, erotica is important because it illustrates the wealth of desires woven into European history: desires about empire, about nation, about self and other, about plenty and dearth, about mechanization, democracy, wandering, stability, offspring, pain, pleasure and politics. Pornography loads these longings onto the fragile frame of the human body to detail the petty and grandiose pleasures wrought from sex.47

Notes  1. Anonymous, Supplement to the Historical Portion of the ‘Records of the Most Ancient and Puissant Order of the Beggar’s Benison and Merryland, Anstruther’, Being an Account of the Proceedings at the Meeting of the Society, Together with Excerpts, Stories, Bon-Mots, Speeches, and Songs Delivered Thereat (Anstruther: Printed for private distribution, 1892), p. 15.  2. See, for example, Patrick Spedding and James Lambert, ‘Fanny Hill, Lord Fanny, and the Myth of Metonymy’, Studies in Philology, 108:1 (January 2011), pp. 108–32, doi:10.1353/sip.2011.0001.

94   Brian M. Watson   3. On the authenticity of the material detailed in note 1 (Records of the Most Ancient and Puissant Order), see David Stevenson, The Beggar’s Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2001); quotes from this source below are taken from the unpaginated digital edition. Stevenson and others have concluded that the mention of Fanny Hill is not a red herring and it was likely circulating in manuscript format before its publication.   4. Definition of ‘pornography, n’ in the line OED Online (March 2013), at (accessed 7 July 2017).   5. See Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum (Philadelphia: Viking, 1987), pp. 14–16; Amy Wyngaard, Bad Books: Rétif de la Bretonne, Sexuality, and Pornography (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012).  6. Pat Rogers and Paul Baines, ‘The Prosecutions of Edmund Curll, 1725–28’, Library, 52 (January 2004), pp. 176–94, doi:10.1093/ library/5.2.176. Also see Alexander Pettit, ‘Rex v. Curll: Pornography and Punishment in Court and on the Page’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 34:1 (2001), pp. 63–78.   7. See Jason M. Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2009), ch. 2; Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew J. Strathern, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 38–9.   8. Definition of ‘Club’ in A Dictionary of the English Language: A Digital Edition of the 1755 Classic by Samuel Johnson, ed. Brandi Besalke, at (ac­ cessed 2 December 2019).   9. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 2. 10. Ibid., p. 5. 11. Stevenson, The Beggar’s Benison, ch. 5. 12. Julie Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 28–9, argues that ‘the Beggar’s Benison Supplement was probably a money-making scam by the nineteenth-century pornographer, Leonard Smithers, the minutes a fabrication of Smithers himself’. Stevenson agrees that the records should be treated very sceptically, but makes the case that the masturbatory rituals were real; I find his argument convincing. 13. On annotation and memorisation, see Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 87. For the list of the facetiae see pp. 89–91 of anon., Supplement to the Historical Portion. 14. Williams, The Social Life of Books, p. 87. 15. Ibid., pp. 37–63. 16. Ibid., pp. 22–5, and chs 1 and 2 in general.

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17. Stevenson, The Beggar’s Benison, ch. 3. 18. Walpole, quoted in Clark, British Clubs, p. 78. 19. See Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001); Erin Mackie, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 20. Mercury was associated with commerce in general, but in the context of the Monks was a symbol of sexual commerce specifically. The motto translates to ‘do what you will’, an allusion to Rabelais, who was undoubtedly read at meetings of the Monks. 21. Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George III, ed. Derek Jarrett (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 114. 22. Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books, p. 32; and Francis Dashwood, The Dashwoods of West Wycombe (London: Aurum, 1987), p. 30. 23. Monk of the Order of St Francis, Nocturnal Revels; or, The History of King’s-Place, and Other Modern Nunneries (London: M. Goadby, 1779), vol. I, pp. 10–15. 24. For Wilkes’s description of the meetings see The Correspondence of the Late John Wilkes (London: R. Phillips, 1805), vol. III, pp. 60–84. See also Arthur Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 33–5. 25. John Wilkes, quoted in Adrian Hamilton, The Infamous Essay on Woman (London: Deutsch, 1972), pp. 13–22. 26. Cash, John Wilkes, pp. 145–52. 27. Ibid. 28. George Barnett Smith, History of the English Parliament together with an Account of the Parliaments of Scotland and Ireland (London: Ward, Lock, Bowden and Co., 1892), p. 282. 29. Alex Antoniou, ‘R v Peacock: Landmark Trial Redefines Obscenity Law’, Sexuality in Focus, 10:1 (February 2013), pp. 85–103, available at (accessed 2 December 2019). See also the extensive media reporting on the UK ban on extreme and violent pornography, for example Christopher Hooton, ‘A Long List of Sex Acts Just Got Banned in UK Porn’, Independent, 2 December 2014, available at (accessed 2 December 2019). 30. Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman: 1689–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 540–75. 31. John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Pearson Longman, 2005), pp. 61–82. See also Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 32. Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 17.

96   Brian M. Watson 33. Deborah Lutz, Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), p. 149. 34. Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Swinburne Letters Vol. II: 1869–1872, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 20 fn. 35. Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘The Cannibal Catechism: (Versified from the Writings of a Father of the Church)’, in Major Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh (New Have: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 413–15. 36. Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Swinburne Letters, Vol. I: 1854–1869, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 288. 37. Henry Spencer Ashbee, Catena Librorum Tacendorum: Being Notes BioIcono-Graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books (1885; New York: Documentary Books, 1962), p. 188. The mention of ‘pearls’ here is an allusion to the contemporary periodical The Pearl: A Journal of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading (all three volumes of which were reprinted by Grove Press, New York, 1969). 38. Sarah Bull, ‘Reading, Writing, and Publishing an Obscene Canon: The Archival Logic of the Secret Museum, c. 1860–c. 1900’, Book History, 20:1 (2017), pp. 226–57, doi:10.1353/bh.2017.0007. 39. Anonymous (Edward Sellon), Ophiolatreia: An Account of the Rites and Mysteries Connected with the Origin, Rise and Development of Serpent Worship . . . the Whole Forming an Exposition of One of the Phases of Phallic . . . Worship (privately printed, 1889). 40. Bull, ‘Reading, Writing, and Publishing’, p. 239. 41. Lutz, Pleasure Bound, p. 68; Lisa Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), p. 57. 42. Lutz, Pleasure Bound, p. 234. 43. Henry Spencer Ashbee, Index Librorum Prohibitorum: Being Notes Bio-biblio-icono-graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books (1877; New York: Documentary Books, 1962), p. xvii. 44. Ibid., p. 436. 45. Dugdale, quoted in Ashbee, Index Librorum Prohibitorum, p. 16, and in Ashbee, Catena Librorum Taecendorum, p. 131. 46. Ashbee, Catena Librorum Taecendorum, p. LVI. 47. Lisa Z. Sigel, ‘Introduction: Issues and Problems in the History of Pornography’, in Lisa Z. Sigel (ed.), International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 1–26 (p. 23).

Chapter 5

The ‘tactile Ba[b]ble under which the blind have hitherto groaned’: Dots, Lines and Literacy for the Blind in Nineteenth-Century North America Joanna L. Pearce

The history of tangible text for the blind in North America has focused on two events: the introduction to the USA of Braille in 1860, and the end of the ‘War of the Dots’ in the early twentieth century with the establishment of Standard English Braille for all English-speaking countries in London in 1923. However, connecting these two events leaves one with the impression that the adoption of Braille was the obvious answer to the questions of literacy among educated blind people in North America. Historians have focused on the responses to this debate by sighted educators. By simplifying the battle for a universal tangible text for the blind, historians of reading overlook a complicated and rich history of advocacy, literacy and education within the blind community. The arguments for and against several tangible texts (as they are called, to differentiate them from ink-based texts) were fought across decades, among various members of the blind community, their sighted educators and publishing houses for the blind. Far from being easily accepted, dot-based texts such as Braille and New York Point were resisted by sighted and blind people alike, due to their incomprehension to the average sighted person. Many blind people instead favoured line-based texts, such as Boston Line or the Moon text, due in part to the ease of learning for those already literate before losing their sight. This chapter examines the arguments made for and against several options for tangible text in North America, highlighting the comments and concerns raised by the blind themselves. Each tangible text addressed different concerns about the needs of blind readers, and this chapter explores the ways both blind and sighted people perceived the purpose of reading for the blind. Both felt a personal and economic 97

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stake in which a universal text should be adopted in North America, and wrote impassioned pleas and angry treatises on behalf of their chosen system. By examining this battle more closely, I highlight both self-advocacy among the blind and the ways in which the sighted interpreted that advocacy when making policy. Far from being passive recipients of a universal tangible text, the blind continued to argue both for and against their chosen texts into the twentieth century. Before a universal text was adopted, a blind person would need to be literate in at least three tangible texts to have full access to the limited range of books printed for them. This collection of texts was described as a ‘tactile Bable [sic] under which the blind have hitherto groaned’ by those aware of the variety of texts under debate.1 It is by participating in these debates and insisting that their voices be heard by sighted educators that the blind asserted their agency. Their arguments about the best text to use demonstrate how the blind viewed themselves as part of the greater community of readers in nineteenth-century North America and demanded that books be published for them in a way that met their needs. The earliest forms of tangible text used for the blind were embossed letters – that is, three-dimensional letters which are raised off the page and felt with the fingers – based on the Roman alphabet used in ink-print books. Educators for the blind across Europe and North America developed a variety of these texts, hoping to invent one that would be easy for the blind to read with their fingers, inexpensive to print and simple to reproduce. These included an italic text that used only lower-case letters, developed in Paris in 1784; an English-created text that also used only lower-case letters, designed in 1831; and a similar text designed in Massachusetts at the Perkins Institute for the Blind in 1832. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, more texts were invented at several schools and institutions for the blind, varying in their use of italics, founts and combinations of upperand lower-case letters. When deciding how to best educate both blind children and blind adults, new institutions needed to decide whether to adopt a text already in use, which might be controlled in some part by another institution but would already have some books available, or to attempt to develop one of their own that they could then use to publish, within their institution, books for their students. These decisions led to a patchwork of texts across Europe and North America. The proliferation of types of embossed texts meant that only limited numbers of books were available in any one system and important religious texts were published repeatedly in different embossed systems.

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Dr Simon Pollak, an American eye specialist, wrote about the difficulties the blind experienced in the 1850s in accessing literacy. Pollak lamented both the quality of the embossed texts produced for the blind and the problems the competing texts created for them. He described one embossed text in use in London as ‘coarse and clumsy and it did not require much tactile culture to read it. It was needlessly large, requiring much space. It was unique, for there was nothing like it in any other school, hence their books were few. . . .’2 According to Pollak, each of the seven schools for the blind in London had its own tangible text, as ‘[a]ll these schools are . . . entirely independent of each other’.3 Pollak, who was writing more than fifty years after his visit to London, may have exaggerated how unintelligible each text was to graduates of different institutions; however, his frustration with the number of texts in use is echoed by others at the time.4 Pollak’s autobiography overlooked the reasons why an institution might create a new embossed text in the nineteenth century. Embossed books were expensive to print, not just because of a limited market, but also because of the amount of paper necessary to print books of the size required by embossing. Even publishing a commonly needed book such as an excerpt from the Bible or other religiously motivated text would create something too large to be easily portable and too expensive to risk loaning to potential new readers. Graduates of the institutions could lose their literacy in a text, either due to lack of use or because their fingers became less sensitive due to age, injury or callouses formed through labour. As schools across Europe and North America fought to justify their funding to a charitable public or a government with its eye on cost, being able to produce books cheaply – whether because the institution had its own text that was smaller than other tangible texts, or because they could produce their books internally – was considered an important contribution to the overall welfare of the blind. Schools in North America followed their European counterparts. The school that became the Perkins Institute and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind, founded in Boston in 1829, considered adopting an in-use text from Europe at its foundation. However, director Samuel Gridley Howe ultimately favoured creating his own. The Boston Line Type, as he named it, was designed in 1832, and the first printing press for it was created in 1835.5 When establishing the Ontario Institution for the Education of the Blind (OIEB) in Brantford, Ontario, in 1873, principal Ezekiel Stone Wiggins decided to teach students using the Kneass type, a combination of the Boston Line Type and the Philadelphia (also called Glaswegian) text, ‘with small and capital letters

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combined as in ordinary reading’, arguing it was the best, ‘as when a blind person once acquires a knowledge of it he can with very little effort also read the Boston and Philadelphia type’.6 He hoped that graduates of the OIEB would be able to read books in at least three different tangible texts. The establishment of the Kentucky-based American Printing House for the Blind in 1858 was accompanied by debates about which of the many embossed texts to adopt, even going so far as to suggest developing a new text of its own, as this could: combin[e] many and important improvements over any now in use, both in the facility it would afford in reading, and in the size of the type, thus greatly diminishing the bulk of the now ponderous volumes, and consequently the cost of such works as may be published.7

This cacophony of available texts meant that managers of schools for the blind needed to choose the types of texts they would use, both at their foundation and as new texts and innovations were introduced. This confusion of embossed texts based on Roman characters was the status quo for the first thirty years of formal education for the blind in North America, in part because the system was considered to be working. E. B. F. Robinson, a blind philosopher who had attended the OIEB, described educators as wanting to conform as much as possible ‘to the form of the Roman letter, because, as it had been found to be so useful to the sighted, it was thought that it must be equally useful to the blind’.8 Books printed in the various embossed texts could be read by both the blind and the sighted, ensuring that blind people could read together with sighted friends and family members. Educators of both the blind and the deaf were concerned about communication between their charges and the rest of the public, and resistance to the idea of a deaf- or blind-only language, such as a sign language or a tangible text that was incomprehensible to the sighted, was growing. In addition, using texts that were easy to read for the sighted ensured that sighted adults could teach the blind to read with relative ease. As teachers for the blind were mostly drawn from the pool of sighted educators, ensuring that any potential teachers would not need additional training before they could work within the classroom was another important financial consideration for schools.9 Embossed texts were also considered easier to learn quickly by people who were literate before becoming blind, an important consideration, as blindness was often acquired later in life due to accident, illness or ageing. While these reasons for continuing to use embossed texts mostly reflected the needs of the sighted, blind

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people also wanted to be part of the larger, sighted community, rather than isolated by communication issues. The ability to read embossed text also ensured that the blind would be able to teach sighted children how to read ink-based text, an argument blind adults made into the twentieth century. In his auto­biography, published in 1905, James W. Welch, a graduate of the Ohio Institution for the Blind, argued that embossed Roman text allowed blind adults the option of teaching the sighted as an important path to self-reliance. Blind adults would need to be intim­ ately familiar with the Roman text used by the sighted and be able to use the tools that enabled the blind to write and read this text, including specially designed grids that blind people used to write blocky Roman characters. Welch was concerned that blind children were no longer learning to use slates and grids to write their letters and numbers.10 Other alumni of the Ohio institution also raised this concern, viewing the ability to teach the sighted to read as an important possible career path at a time when other jobs for the blind, such as broom making and basket weaving, were being taken over by factories and machines.11 Again, a strong connection with the literate sighted community was an important aspect of educating the blind, even to the blind themselves. While some blind adults agreed with Welch, others rejected these ideas as not being of service to the blind. Their concerns about the use of embossed text related not just to the number of these texts in circulation, but also to the difficulties using these texts caused blind people. For example, despite being taught the use of slates and grids for writing, it was very difficult for the blind to write clearly without aid from a sighted scribe. While the apparatuses that Welch and others described did allow the blind to write in pencil or ink after a period of training, they could not read these texts on their own and thus could not take their own notes, or even correct their own written work.12 This impeded blind children’s education, as they could not study during the summer or even outside of school hours without aid. Other arguments that rejected embossed text pointed out that despite the experiences of a minority of students, most blind people could not learn to read these texts. They observed that the ability of those who were literate before they were blind to learn them easily was overstated. Describing the difficulties that educators found in teaching the adult blind, a biographer of William Moon, who was both a blind man and an educator of the blind, wrote that ‘he found that many of his scholars were quite unequal to the task of . . . deciphering a type in which the ordinary forms of the Roman alphabet were employed’,

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and added that, in particular, ‘few blind persons advanced in years or accustomed to manual labour were . . . able to read by the touch’.13 Moon was frustrated with arguments for embossed texts that favoured school-aged readers. [i]n providing reading for the blind a type should be selected which is universally applicable; not merely one which can be deciphered by the acute touch of . . . children . . . to be abandoned . . . when their schooldays are past, or when their fingers become hardened by manual labour, but one which can be felt and easily read by the multitudes of the adult blind throughout the country.14

For Moon and others, any text that was to be universally adopted was required to consider needs beyond the classroom. The third reason why some blind adults and sighted educators rejected embossed texts was size and cost. In describing the difficulties in settling on a text to use at the OIEB, Wiggins wrote that experienced educators, including those who were blind, reported that ‘the books produced in raised type are comparatively few, very clumsy and voluminous, and exceedingly expensive’.15 Even with institutions that had their own printing press, the cost of publishing books was prohibitively expensive if only for the paper. The majority of the blind, most of whom were poor, could not afford to buy their own books. In describing the expense of maintaining the school’s lending library in 1894, Sir Charles Frederick Fraser, the blind superintendent of the Halifax School for the Blind in Nova Scotia, wrote in the following year: [t]he average cost per volume is about $4.00, and some idea of the expense incurred in maintaining this Library may be gathered from the fact that a single copy of the Bible, which is stereotyped, and therefore may be purchased for less than many other books, costs $25.00.16

In comparison, the cost of a Bible for a sighted reader was $1.00.17 Even maintaining a lending library for the blind, which would allow graduates to borrow books and maintain their reading level, was prohibitively expensive for some schools. If graduates could not continue to read after leaving, some argued there was no point in wasting school time on literacy when it could be better spent on learning skilled trades. However, this ran the risk of separating the blind even further from their sighted counterparts, as being able to read at least the New Testament was considered the ideal way to ensure morality in children and adults alike.18

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Because of these limitations on effective literacy, both blind and sighted people worked to develop new tangible texts, adopting a variety of techniques. Some designers of tangible text rejected the use of Roman characters or the standard English alphabet altogether, relying on symbols that represented phonemes rather than letters. James Harley Frere, a blind man from London, developed a system of phonetic shorthand that was read by the fingers back and forth across the page. Frere also developed a method to print embossed books that produced sharp characters that were easy for the finger to read.19 While this text reduced the size of books, and the new technique reduced the cost of printing, Frere’s phonetic shorthand was not widely adopted outside England. It was found too difficult for blind students, especially for the aged blind and those whose nerves had been damaged by injury, who made up the majority.20 Some, however, did adopt Frere’s printing technique, but combined it with their own systems of contractions (to reduce the size of books) using the older, more familiar, embossed texts; however, students continued to find it difficult to commit the contractions to memory. These complicated systems also meant that other advantages of the embossed Roman text, particularly the ability of the sighted to read them, were lost. While attempts were made to develop a text based on pin-pricks through the paper that both the blind and sighted could make on their own, these texts continued to rely on the shape of the Roman characters.21 While each of these texts had some advantage to both the sighted and the blind, they suffered from the difficulties described by Moon, Robinson and others. For a text to be widely adopted, it would need to satisfy the blind and the sighted educators, be inexpensive to print and produce an easy-to-read text. As educators in the nineteenth century continued to debate the best texts, three became main contenders in North America. Two were designed by educated blind men from Europe, William Moon of England and Louis Braille of France, while the third, New York Point, adapted Braille to a North American audience. These were by no means the only texts developed and in circulation among schools for the blind in North America and Europe; however, they represent three ideas of how literacy of the blind should be developed, by whom and for what purpose. Braille, the first tangible text developed using points or raised dots rather than lines, was designed to enable the blind to both read and write without the need for a sighted interpreter at any stage. Moon, whose design used a modified Roman text, was most concerned with the needs of adults blinded later in life. His text was designed to be easy to read even if the finger was less sensitive

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due to years of labour. New York Point, created by sighted educator William B. Wait, adopted Braille’s dot system but changed both its assignment of dots and its orientation, with the goal of reducing the cost of printing books for the blind. These debates simultaneously included blind people in the broader community of readers, while still holding them as a separate class within it. The earliest of these texts was Braille. While Louis Braille was not the first person to develop a dot text – his was based on a code for passing military messages at night – he appears to have been the first to decide that it could be adapted for the blind. The original night writing had used two columns of up to six dots each, making a total of twelve, which represented syllables. This code suffered from problems that made it difficult for the blind to learn, including the fact that it was phonetically based and that the characters created were too large to be read by the finger with one pass.22 Braille, who began to develop his system in the 1830s, reduced the number of dots to two columns of three dots, for a total of six, and used these to represent various letters in the French alphabet. This reduction in size meant that each letter could be read with the fingertip, making it faster and easier to read.23 The dots were assigned alphabetically. Braille also developed a stylus system to allow the blind to write the characters, thus rendering them fully able to read and write without assistance from a sighted scribe.24 While Braille’s system was adopted as France’s official language of instruction for the blind in 1854, the text was not adopted by other European countries until decades later. Despite its lack of early success in Europe, the first North American educators introduced to Braille’s system saw its potential. Simon Pollak, the doctor who wrote disdainfully of the number of texts in use in London, also visited Paris during his European tour. While examining Paris’s Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles, its superintendent had students demonstrate Braille. Pollak, who was one of the superintendents of the Missouri Institution for the Education of the Blind, was quickly able to learn the text. According to his autobiography, he ‘saw at once the great importance of [Braille]’ and was ‘determined to introduce it in the United States’.25 Unfortunately, his autobiography does not detail what it was about Braille that captured his attention and devotion.26 Upon the reopening of the Missouri school after his return to St Louis (it had been temporarily closed due to the American Civil War), he was able to easily introduce Braille into classrooms. It was quickly adopted by music teacher Henry Robyn as a form of musical notation that allowed the blind to both read and compose, and from there it was adopted by the literary

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department. Pollak described Braille as ‘the greatest boon the blind ever received’ – assuring the reader that the results for the blind were worth the struggle he went through to bring it to North America.27 While Pollak’s autobiography overlooks the reaction of students and educators to the introduction of Braille, the biannual reports of the Missouri school sing the praises of both it and him. For principal C. M. Fleming, Braille opened possibilities not only for allowing the blind to compose their own music or take their own notes in class, but also for inexpensively printing numerous textbooks for the blind, ones that could be easily re-created through dictation even without a Braille printing press.28 As these reports were written in part to justify further funding for the school, Fleming’s focus on the advantages to learning and recall offered by the new system made a great deal of sense – for the first time in North America, blind children could receive many of the same benefits of public education offered to the sighted through this new system of writing. The advantages of adopting Braille were not limited to improving student performance. The next principal of the Missouri school, Philetus Fales, explained that the system was extremely easy for ‘the youngest and dullest’ pupils to learn, and provided skills that they would have no difficulty maintaining into old age. He also argued that Braille ‘enables the blind freely to communicate with each other by writing’.29 As the text was easily written by the blind themselves with a grid and stylus, they could increase their personal libraries at far less expense than having to buy a book printed in any other tangible text.30 The characters in Braille also took up less space on the page than either embossed line text or the ink type used by the sighted, so books could potentially be much smaller, and thus far more portable as well as easier to read. Robyn, the music teacher at St Louis, emphasised this point when writing about Braille, stating ‘[t]his fact alone is important; as the blind survey with their fingers, and the less space there is to be gone over, the sooner and the easier will the work be accomplished’.31 Braille, both Fales and Robyn argued, made literacy far easier for the blind to achieve. Advocates for Braille also emphasised that it vastly reduced the cost of providing books for students. Robyn invented a press that published Braille books by machine after years of having students transcribe their textbooks as they were dictated by a teacher. According to the trustees of the Missouri school, this not only increased the availability of books to blind readers but allowed the printing of these books ‘with more rapidity and facility . . . diminish[ing] the expense, and . . . increas[ing] the readableness of books for the blind’.32 Both the

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cost and the upkeep of embossed-text books were ongoing issues for educators. Not only were embossed books expensive, but wear and tear would often render them unreadable. Robyn’s press, the trustees argued, would reduce or even eliminate these problems.33 The biannual reports from the Missouri school emphasised that ‘with the simple and very cheap press and types invented by . . . Robyn, this institution can supply all the schools for the blind in the United States with reading matter and music, at half the cost it is held now for the seeing’.34 If more schools for the blind could be induced to adopt Braille, the Missouri school could be the only provider of these books, or at least the provider of Braille printing presses, and could sell the books at a profit, a tempting proposition for a school still recovering from financial problems following the American Civil War. The trustees advocated that other schools adopt Braille, with mixed results. Younger schools, such as the Kansas State Institute for the Education of the Blind, were quick to see advantages. Its first annual report, published in 1869 – nine years after Missouri adopted Braille – explained that teaching using the system allowed blind children to study at their leisure, just like sighted children. Superintendent H. H. Sawyer wrote that ‘[i]ts advantages . . . are obvious, because it enables the blind to communicate freely with each other by means of writing’.35 However, older institutions were resistant to change.36 The trustees of the Missouri school implied resistance to innovation, brought about by the venerable status of those institutions, led to this reluctance. ‘It is much to be regretted that the older institutions of this country, es­pecially in the East, are so slow, even reluctant, to adopt a system of type which has established its superiority both in Europe and America’.37 The Missouri trustees, alongside others who were adopting Braille, clearly viewed their institutions as the ones of the future. Older institutions in North America instead emphasised the importance of embossed text and its advantages to both the blind and the sighted. Howe, who continued to advocate for adoption of his Boston Line Type, argued against Braille. In 1835, before Braille was introduced to Missouri, Howe argued that as ‘the grand object in printing for the blind, is to diminish the bulks of the books’, Braille was a failure. He measured both the size of the paper used and the number of letters that could be printed on the page and concluded that Boston Line Type was far superior. In the books printed at Paris, there are on a page . . . 408 letters; . . . at Boston, 787 letters . . . our books will give to the blind . . . nearly twice the quantity of matter which is contained in those of France; and, by using a

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thinner paper, will give about three times the quantity of reading matter in a book of the same bulk.38

In the same year that Kentucky adopted Braille, Howe wrote of his disdain of having students transcribe their own books. While this might have reduced printing costs for his school, prioritising these transcriptions would have reduced innovations in printing that were beneficial for all the blind, not just students in classrooms.39 Howe was producing books for the blind already, and saw no value in a new system, regardless of the benefits alleged by Missouri, Kentucky and the handful of other schools that had adopted Braille. Braille was competing not only with established embossed Roman texts, but also with another text designed by a blind man: the ubiquitous Moon System of Embossed Reading, also known as Moon type. Like Braille, Moon type was invented by a blind man specifically to address issues with embossed text. Unlike Louis Braille, who had been educated in a blind school from childhood, William Moon of England lost sight in one eye at age four and did not become fully blind until he was twenty-one. He had been educated in a school for the sighted, relying on his classmates for assistance. After his complete loss of sight, he began teaching a small number of blind adults to read but found the embossed texts available to be too difficult for his students. Moon’s concern was for adults who acquired blindness at too late an age to attend most schools for the blind, and his reason for rejection of the various embossed texts was that they were easiest only for children to learn. His adult students struggled to comprehend the individual letters, regardless of which Roman-based text he used. As a result, he turned his attention to creating a text that labourers, adults and even the elderly would find easier.40 Moon did not entirely reject the Roman letters on which most embossed text was based. Instead, he used a simplified version that changed the letters to be easier for the fingers while still being legible to the sighted and used the same spelling and punctuation as ink text. Moon text was composed of the very simplest geometrical forms, such as the straight line, the acute and the right angle, the circle and the semicircle. . . . The alphabet consists of eight of the Roman letters unaltered, fourteen others with parts left out, and five new and very simple forms which may be easily learned by the aged and by persons whose fingers are hardened by work.41

Moon argued that his text could be taught very quickly, which meant literacy was much easier to achieve: this boosted the confidence of

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his students and led quickly to reading the Bible and other religious works, often within days.42 Moon was aware of the number of tangible texts, including Braille, in use across Europe and North America. He argued that competing texts which transliterated English should be rejected because, for the majority of blind people, ‘their sense of touch is far less acute than in early life, so that they fail to distinguish easily the Roman or the dotted types’, while texts that relied on contractions or shorthand should be rejected because, for the blind, ‘their nervous system has oftentimes been so shattered that they are unequal to the task of mastering a system which involves the committing of numerous contractions to memory’.43 In response to concerns that his text made books both heavy and expensive to print, he argued that this was penny-wise and pound-foolish. ‘Would it then be wise to choose a system of contractions for the sake of its rendering their books more portable, if they would by this means become unreadable to the great majority of our blind population?’44 By creating a text that was easier for the majority of the blind, Moon saw himself as rendering far more efficient aid to their literacy than any form of point text. Moon’s text had an advantage that aided its spread to North America: a wealthy patron. Sir Charles Lowther, a blind member of the British aristocracy, supported both Moon and his text financially. As Moon worked to expand his system across the English-speaking world, Lowther supported his efforts by founding libraries that used Moon type. As early as 1870, Lowther was donating Moon books to North American cities, including: one library being set up in Georgia to teach recently emancipated blind slaves to read; a collection of books meant to start the library of the newly founded school for the blind in Portland, Oregon; and a collection of over 2,000 books based in a New York institution but intended to be distributed to schools across North America; and, in addition to libraries in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.45 Thus, while other texts, including Braille, were struggling to ensure enough books were available for readers, books in Moon’s text were becoming available across the entire continent, and the newest schools could start out with a small library already in place at no expense to themselves. Moon, with the aid of Lowther, further spread his text by the creation of Home Teaching Societies for the Blind. These were volunteer-run groups, made up mostly of blind people, who sought out illiterate blind adults and taught them to read using Moon type. Moon described giving lessons in his type not only to blind men and women whom he met in the street, but also to sighted people,

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who could then teach the text to any blind person they knew.46 By 1889, the London Home Teaching Society employed seventeen blind and one sighted teacher, and had taught 5,000 blind adults to read.47 This method of spreading Moon’s text was transplanted to North America with the Home Teaching Society of Nova Scotia, established in 1893. As more blind adults learned to read using Moon’s text, the demand for books published in it increased, further spreading the text through lending libraries and the distribution of other types of reading material. Teaching institutions elsewhere in North America struggled with how to best teach adults to read, and Moon’s text seemed the most effective tool. It suited the needs of their students better than any other tangible text in regular circulation. Philadelphia, which housed not only a school for blind children but also a House of Industry for the indigent adult blind, emphasised the frustration of their residents with embossed texts used in most books for the blind in North America. Moon reported educators in Philadelphia describing these texts as ‘too small and complex for the hardened fingers of adults, few of whom, accustomed to labour, were able to read’.48 Lowther happily founded a library to suit their needs. While Moon’s text was never universally adopted across North America, schools and lending libraries included books published in the text in their collections and it was clearly viewed as serving an important purpose in ensuring that blind adults could become literate.49 Despite the arguments in favour of Moon type for adults, most educators of blind children rejected the text due to sighted teachers’ difficulty in learning it. In rejecting Moon type for use in the OIEB, Wiggins described it as ‘almost entirely composed of arbitrary characters, and is not only more difficult to master, but requires teachers specially trained to impart instruction, and therefore tends to alienate the blind from ordinary seeing persons by rendering them dependent upon skilled teachers for instruction’. He also argued that its lack of adoption in the USA meant that it should not be adopted in Canada.50 Howe in Boston further argued against Moon by again emphasising the expense and size of books printed in it compared with his Boston Line Type.51 While Moon’s text was viewed as having its place, it was not deemed sufficient for the needs of blind children, who were still the primary concern of sighted educators in North America, rather than the largest number of blind people, namely adults who acquired blindness later in life . With neither Braille nor Moon’s text being universally adopted in North America, educators continued to develop new tangible texts,

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seeking one that would address most, if not all, of their concerns, particularly the cost of printing. The New York Institution for the Blind began experimenting with another form of dot text which it hoped would be more efficient than Braille for printing. In 1892, William Bell Wait argued that Braille was hardly known outside of Paris’s Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles when he began experimenting with text for the blind in the 1860s, but he believed that its success in France indicated that dots were far more effective than Roman-based tangible text. In his description of how he created New York Point, he made no mention of Missouri’s championing of Braille throughout the 1860s to other North American schools, including his own. Instead, he emphasised his own creativity and ingenuity: Having by ample experiment first proved the superiority of dots over lines in tangible power, and seeing also that hand writing could be done in tangible form by their use, I became an earnest advocate of ‘points’ as constituting the natural basis of tangible writing and printing.

Wait considered many of the same techniques that had been attempted, adopted or discarded elsewhere in Europe, such as adapting the alphabet to a simplified version, as Moon and others had done, or using stenographers’ abbreviations or phonemes.52 Wait’s interest in typography and printing included the frequency of letters in English, a factor that Braille had not considered when assigning Braille characters to letters in French. After much experimentation, Wait settled on adapting the alphabet based entirely on the frequency of each letter in the English language. More frequent letters were assigned fewer dots, which would make them faster to both read and print, and would reduce the space each one took on the page.53 Unlike Braille, he also had to include the letter ‘w’, which was not in use in French in the nineteenth century. Wait decided to arrange the dots on a horizontal plane rather than the vertical one used by Braille, as a space-saving technique. In Braille, all letters took up the same amount of horizontal space regardless of how many dots were in the character. In New York Point, more frequent letters – which have fewer dots – took up less horizontal space. Wait argued that this meant more letters would fit on a page, making the books that were published both smaller and cheaper.54 Wait tested this text for years and decided to use it exclusively in the New York institution in 1871, eleven years after Braille had been introduced in Missouri.55 He created printing presses for New York Point to publish books, as well as an apparatus for his pupils to use to write their own notes and letters, just as happened at Missouri.

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Wait sought approval and adoption of New York Point in other schools for the blind. He tried to convince other schools to adopt his text by describing how it overcame the structural inferiority of the other texts commonly in use. He described Braille as ‘more bulky and hence more costly than the Boston Line’, which in turn he described as ‘almost prohibitive’ in cost to print. Braille was also inferior due to the small number of characters the two-column system could support, as ‘the number of possible single signs, sixty-three, is inadequate to the requirements of Literature, of Mathematics and of music, so that none of these subjects can be correctly and fully represented by them’.56 As both a sighted man and the superintendent of a well respected school, Wait was able to advocate for his system with educators across North America at the Convention for American Instructors of the Blind. At the second convention, in 1871, the assembled educators, the majority of whom were sighted, passed a resolution that New York Point ‘should be taught in all American Institutions for the Education of the Blind’.57 This was later supported by the Committee of the American Social Science Association due to the usefulness of New York Point in printing books.58 As the use of New York Point spread, blind men also wrote in favour of its adoption. In The Mentor, a magazine published by the Alumni Association of the Perkins Institute, H. H. Johnson, the blind director of the West Virginia school, argued that Wait’s system needed little to no defence, as its widespread use throughout the USA demonstrated the success of the text in compari­ son with Braille.59 William Gibbon argued that he was easily able to adapt New York Point to learn Greek while attending a class with sighted students due to the larger number of possible characters. With more blind people eager to attend university with sighted colleagues, the versatility of the text was ideal.60 Some blind people rejected Wait’s arguments, however. In his own address to the 1871 Convention of American Instructors of the Blind, N. B. Kneass, Jr, a blind man who was also an instructor at the Pennsylvania Institution, argued against using any point texts. Kneass asserted that point texts were too easily damaged from regular finger reading. Erasure of points would render words incomprehensible.61 Any attempt to make the points more durable would require heavier paper, thus eliminating the arguments that Wait made about the books being both lighter and less expensive to print.62 The Mentor, which was published in ink and meant to be read out loud to a blind audience or alone by sighted educators, included articles about the raised-text controversy, with blind people weighing in on all sides.

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The publication of this commentary in The Mentor, along with Wait’s publication of several pamphlets in support of using New York Point, demonstrates how the decision made at the 1871 Convention was by no means final. In the decades that followed, the debate continued about how best to ensure that the interests of the blind were being met by tactile texts. The discussions among educators alone became so intense that they dominated most meetings of the Convention of American Educators of the Blind until they were banned for several years to allow tempers to cool.63 The 1892 Convention voted to discard New York Point in favour of a new Braille system, but this seems not to have been universally adopted.64 In 1909, the New York Board of Education decided that instruction should be given in a modified Braille, but in 1910 the Kentucky Printing House for the Blind’s annual general meeting once again debated between Braille and New York Point. It was decided there that 40 per cent of books would be published in Braille and the rest in New York Point.65 In 1913, the Uniform Type Committee of the American Association of Workers for the Blind argued for scrapping both systems and creating a new one, called Standard Dot, but only on the condition that this same text would be adopted by the British.66 The matter was not considered settled until 1932, when representatives from the blind in the UK and the USA finally signed an agreement for the use of a new, ‘standard’ Braille system throughout both countries.67 The decision on what version of tactile text to use for the blind was controversial. Both blind and sighted people expressed their opinions about the variety of texts in use, with debates ranging across North America. These arguments reflected concerns about community and communication, and fears of blind people becoming isolated – whether from the sighted community using a text they did not understand, or from one another through the use of a text that required a sighted scribe or reader to communicate. By examining these sources, we can see how the educated blind advocated for themselves and for their community throughout the nineteenth century. Their arguments addressed the variety of their needs, including employment issues, ageing and the isolation that comes from poverty. They were not passively waiting for a decision to be made by educators, but actively involved in the debates. Any discussion of the controversy around raised texts must include their voices. Blind people fought to be independent readers with reasonable access to books. While little documentation of their feelings about what they read exists, the serious­ness with which blind people approached the debates about tactile text demonstrates the depth of their feelings about how they read.

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Notes   1. ‘The Education of the Blind’, The Lancet, 23 July 1871, pp. 142–3 (p. 142).  2. S. Pollak, The Autobiography and Reminiscences of S. Pollak, M.D. (St Louis: St Louis Medical Review, 1904), p. 107.   3. Ibid., p. 108.   4. B. G. Johns, Blind People: Their Works and Ways (London: John Murray, 1867); Hanks W. Leavy, Blindness and the Blind (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872).   5. B. L. McGinnity et al., ‘Reading and Writing’, at (accessed 30 August 2018).   6. J. W. Langmuir, ‘Ontario Institution for the Education of the Blind’, in Fifth Annual Report of the Inspector of Asylums, Prisons, &c. for the Province of Ontario (Toronto: Hunter, Rose & Co., 1873), p. 56.   7. D. Sherrod, ‘Report of the General Agent’, First Annual Report of the American Printing House for the Blind (Louisville: Hanna & Co., 1860), p. 7.   8. E. B. F. Robinson, True Sphere of the Blind (Toronto: William Briggs, 1896), p. 109.  9. Fourth Annual Report of the Inspector of Asylums, Prisons, &c. for the Province of Ontario, 1870–1871 (Toronto: Hunter Rose & Co, 1871), pp. 101–2. 10. James W. Welch, Achievements and Abilities of the Blind (Columbus: Fred. J. Heer, 1905), p. 123. 11. Ibid., pp. 164, 174–86, 225. 12. Second Annual Report of the Trustees of the Missouri Institution for the Education of the Blind to the Twenty-First General Assembly (1860), n.p. The annual reports cited throughout this article are located at the Perkins Archives, part of the Samuel P. Hayes Research Library at the Perkins School for the Blind, Watertown, MA, USA. Due to the nature of the collection, which includes some hand-transcribed copies of reports from institutions across North America, not all bibliographic information is always available. I have provided all the information I could find in the Perkins Archive. 13. John Rutherford, William Moon and His Work for the Blind (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1891), p. 13. 14. Ibid., pp. 47–8. 15. Langmuir, ‘Ontario Institution’, p. 55. 16. Charles Frederick Fraser, Raised Print Books for the Blind, Origin and History of Embossed Printing, Interesting Facts about the Circulating Library for the Blind of the School for the Blind (Halifax: Halifax Printing Company, 1895), p. 11. 17. Stuart Wayne Barnard, ‘Religious Print Culture and the British and Foreign Bible Society in Canada, 1820–1904’, PhD dissertation (University of Calgary, 2016), p. 54.

114   Joanna L. Pearce 18. Monica L. Mercado, ‘“Have you ever read?” Imagining Women, Bibles, and Religious Print in Nineteenth-Century America’, US Catholic Historian, 31:3 (summer 2013), pp. 1–21 (p. 4); Miriam Bailin, ‘Victorian Readers’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 44 (2016), pp. 727–39 (p. 729). 19. Donald Bell, ‘Reading by Touch’, Typographica, 6 (December 1962), pp. 6–24 (p. 9). 20. Rutherford, William Moon, pp. 25–6. 21. Robinson, True Sphere, p. 109. 22. W. H. Illingworth, History of Education of the Blind (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1910), p. 16. 23. Fraser, Raised Print Books, p. 4. 24. Bell, ‘Reading by Touch’, pp. 15–16. 25. Pollak, The Autobiography, p. 202. 26. Ibid., pp. 202–3. 27. Ibid., pp. 262, 202. 28. Second Annual Report of the Trustees of the Missouri Institution, n.p. 29. Third Biannual Report of the Trustees of the Missouri Institution for the Education of the Blind to the Twenty-Second General Assembly (Jefferson City, 1864), pp. 7–8. 30. Report of the Missouri Institution for the Education of the Blind to the Twenty-Third General Assembly (Jefferson City: W. A. Curry, 1865), p. 4. 31. Third Biannual Report of the Trustees of the Missouri Institution, p. 4. 32. Report of the Missouri Institution . . . to the Twenty-Third General Assembly, p. 4. 33. Fifth Biannual Report of the Trustees of the Missouri Institution for the Education of the Blind to the Twenty-Fourth General Assembly (n.p., n.d.), p. 790. 34. Ibid., p. 791. 35. First Annual Report of the Trustees and Superintendent of the Kansas State Institute for the Education of the Blind (Topeka: F. P. Baker, 1869), p. 6. 36. Fifth Biannual Report of the . . . Missouri Institution, p. 790. 37. Ibid., p. 791. 38. Annual Report of the Trustees of the New-England Institution for the Education of the Blind to the Corporation (Boston: J. T. Buckingham, 1835), pp. 14–15. 39. Thirty-Seventh Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind (Boston: Weight & Potter, 1869), pp. 4–5. 40. Rutherford, William Moon, p. 13. 41. Ibid., pp. 13–14. 42. Charles Thomas Burt, The Moon Society: A Century of Achievement, 1848–1948 (Brighton: Moon Works, 1948), pp. 6–7. 43. Rutherford, William Moon, p. 48. 44. Ibid., p. 35.

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45. Ibid., p. 107. 46. Ibid., p. 54. 47. Ibid., p. 58. 48. Ibid., pp. 193–4. 49. Fraser, Raised Print Books, pp. 9–10. 50. Langmuir, ‘Ontario Institution’, p. 56. 51. Twenty-First Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind to the Corporation (Cambridge: Metcalf and Company, 1853), p. 38. The school changed its name from the New York Institution for the Blind to the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind in the early twentieth century to reflect the educational nature of the institution, a common practice in schools for the blind at this time. 52. William B. Wait, Origin of the New York Institution for the Blind: The Origin and Development of the New York Point System, the True Structural Basis of a Punctographic System (New York: Bradstreet Press, 1892), p. 9. 53. Ibid. 54. William B. Wait, Phases of Punctography: In Relation to Visual Typography, Writing, Printing, Bookbinding, and Other Features (New York: New York Institution for the Education of the Blind, n.d.). 55. Wait, Origin of the New York Institution for the Blind, p. 10. 56. William B. Wait, Key to the New York Point System of Tangible Writing and Printing for Literature, Instrumental and Vocal Music, and Mathematics, Designed for the Use of the Blind (New York: Broadstreet Press, 1908), p. 5. 57. Proceedings of the Second Convention of American Instructors of the Blind (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Printing and Publishing House, 1871), p. 69. 58. Printing for the Blind: Report of a Committee of the American Social Science Association (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1875), pp. 5–6. 59. H. H. Johnson, ‘A Point Neglected’, The Mentor, 1:7 (July 1891), p. 215. 60. William Gibbon, ‘The Blind Student of Greek’, The Mentor, 3:5 (May 1893), pp. 179–81. 61. Proceedings of the Second Convention, p. 46. 62. Ibid., p. 47. 63. Ibid., p. 9. 64. Ibid., p. 7. 65. Ibid., p. 10. 66. Ibid., p. 34. 67. Ibid., pp. 51–2.

Chapter 6

British Cultures of Reading and Literary Appreciation in Nineteenth-Century Singapore Porscha Fermanis

Colonial schools, museums and learned societies have long received attention as institutions designed to enrich and sustain colonial endeavours.1 Private, pleasurable or recreational reading, on the other hand, is more often set apart from those ‘investigative modalities’ fashioned by the colonial state in order to control and ‘improve’ its citizens and subjects.2 Yet as Michael Warner reminds us, even in its least instrumental and most disinterested form, reading is not a natural or neutral practice. Human relations to the ‘linguistic technologies’ of ‘speaking, reading, writing, and printing’ are never ‘unmediated by such forms of domination as race, gender, and status’.3 It is only relatively recently that scholars of colonial and non-European book history have begun to reconsider how the power dynamics attaching to various types and sites of reading might transform our understandings of the social functions of reading, literacy and literature itself.4 Michael Allan argues in his 2016 study of reading in colonial Egypt, for example, that literature in the Western European sense is not just a corpus or canon of texts but also ‘a disciplined reading practice or a cultivated sensibility linked to civil norms of what it means to be educated’. Allan’s point is not simply that European understandings of literature assign communal, performative and other alternative types of reading to the categories of the ‘non-literate’ or ‘un-critical’, but also that literacy entails much more than ‘learning to decode words on a page . . . it comes to imply the cultivation of critical thinking skills essential to informed participation in a modern state’.5 This chapter considers the complex relationship between reading, literary appreciation and civic participation in nineteenth-century Singapore. Its specific focus is on three very different types of reading by British audiences: recreational reading or reading for pleasure; 116

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reading for reference or knowledge; and reading and translating Malay manuscripts. Each of these types or practises of reading corresponds to a particular reading place: the first is the colonial subscription library – here the Singapore Library (established 1844) – which, I argue, was instrumental in selecting and promoting the kinds of habitus-forming literature deemed desirable for British colonists and, to some extent, for wealthy non-European elites; the second is the creation of reference, manuscript and archival libraries – here the Raffles Library and Museum (established 1874) and the library of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (SBRAS) (established 1877) – which transformed the kind of scholarly and scientific reading that was possible for British and other European readers in Singapore; and the third is the translation and evaluation of Malay literature by European readers in the ‘virtual’ reading spaces of the Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia (JIA) (1847–55; 1856–63) and the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JSBRAS) (1879–1922). While I concentrate on the racialised constructions of reading that emerged from within these British cultures of reading, I also briefly examine the alternative reading cultures that persisted and developed among local-born and diasporic Malay and Chinese communities, particularly those surrounding an emerging middle-class literati of teachers, scholars, translators, copyists, printers and publishers.6 The chapter examines these various reading cultures in colonial Singapore not so much by looking at examples of individual reader testimony, but rather by looking at reading at an institutional and structural level; that is, by considering the stratification processes, curation and acquisition practices, and hierarchical networks of social and institutional power that attach to books, lending libraries and other reading places. Book holdings, circulation figures and even borrowing records ‘may or may not match reading habits’, but I want to think about how the experience of reading is, at least in part, determined both by what books are available or considered ‘vendible’, and by the material and symbolic conditions under which books are acquired, displayed and borrowed.7 Susan Pearce has argued that collecting, whether of books, artefacts or other objects, is in many ways ‘an act of imagination, part corporate and part individual, a metaphor intended to create meanings which help to make individual identity and each individual’s view of the world’.8 Book holdings, although in some cases compiled by accident or for reasons of ex­ pediency, are also formed by the kind of metaphorical or imaginative construction Pearce describes, in particular through the construction

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and cultivation of ideal or potential readers. In this sense, I argue, such readers are just as illuminating of reading tastes and values as the evidence provided by historical readers in actual accounts of reading. Recreational reading: the Singapore Library, 1844–74 By the late 1830s, Stamford Raffles’s ambitious vision of a Singapore Institution (established 1823) that would educate the peoples of the Malay Peninsular and Chinese diaspora and ‘collect the scattered litera­ture and traditions of the country’ amounted to little more than a local school with classes in English, Malay, Tamil and Chinese, and a small school library of around 400 English-language volumes.9 As one would expect of a school library, many of its books were part of useful or improving collections considered suitable for children, with very few novels (only three, all by Walter Scott) and a small number of poetical works.10 After consensus at a public meeting, the Singapore Library, a subscription library with thirty-four founding proprietary shareholders, replaced the school library and inherited its holdings in 1844.11 The new library opened with an initial stock of approximately 895 volumes or 404 titles, and focused on acquiring ‘[a]pproved new Novels, Voyages, Travels and other popular new works of General Literature’.12 By 1863, the library’s holdings had increased to approximately 1,842 titles, with novels and histories each amounting to around a third of its collection.13 As its prioritisation of ‘new’ and ‘popular’ works of fiction, travel writing and general literature suggests, the Singapore Library was primarily designed for what the Straits Times characterised as ‘present reading’ of the ‘light character’.14 Unlike the neighbouring Penang Library (established 1817), no attempt was made to collect or house Malay and Chinese manuscripts; nor was a reference section established.15 While the library held the usual volumes of Shakespeare and Milton, there was no sustained policy between 1844 and 1863 for purchasing the ‘old canon’, with the library’s management committee instead primarily acquiring new books and/or books published within a ten-year period of its establishment.16 So-called ‘standard’ works of fiction (i.e. works already published) or those of any other department of literature (whether old or new) could be purchased only if ‘authorised by the Committee of Management’, whereas the acquisition of the latest works of fiction was, at least initially, at the agent’s dis­cretion.17 The library’s focus on recreational reading is further suggested by its original opening hours (6 a.m. to 9 p.m.), which reflected the idea

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that readers might come to read in the reading room and borrow from the library before and after working hours, as well as by a complex hierarchy of borrowing rights and times, which restricted the monopoly by readers of the latest novels and other new works.18 Brendan Luyt has rightly linked the ‘light’ nature of the library’s holdings with concerns about amusing bored or ‘wayward colonists’ in a mercantile and tropical environment.19 However, the library’s acquisition policies also suggest a desire to cultivate the kind of reader who was as up-to-date as possible with metropolitan reading habits and fashions. By controlling the pace of reading – especially by encouraging readers to consume the latest books in the date order in which they arrived in the settlement and requiring their return within two or three days20 – the library attempted to construct a globally synchronous or contemporaneous reader who could just as easily be reading in London, New York or Calcutta, and who was part of a larger community of readers spanning the Anglophone world. The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser argued, for example, for the particular need for the ‘exiled’ Briton in a settlement without ‘independent political relationships’ or any ‘home politics to speak of’ to ‘keep himself to the level of his countrymen’ by reading the most current books, noting that this will ‘provide against our forming inadequate or false conceptions of what takes place at a distance’.21 To some extent, the colonial reader is figured here as ‘inadequate’ or ‘backward’, belatedly receiving books and news from metropolitan centres, but readers in Singapore were nonetheless exhorted to actively assert themselves in the face of such temporal and spatial distance. The Singapore Library’s acquisition policies also register a determination to directly confront the information time gap that was part of the colonial experience, by providing colonial readers with the most popular, current and fashionable reading material available. For the most part, they were successful in doing so, particularly with the advent of P&O steamers to Singapore from 1845 onwards, which meant that books arrived with ‘increased certainty and celerity’.22 At the same time, the reports of the library’s management committee suggest an ongoing concern to place the library holdings ‘on a respectable footing’, and evince a strict monitoring and review of works purchased.23 Uneasy about the library’s rapid accumulation of novels and, hence, about the relative proportion of ‘works of light reading’ and ‘general literature’, the committee established ‘a new Class of Books’ in 1848, ‘calculated to improve the general character of the Library, which now included works on Divinity, Theology, Moral ­Philosophy, and Ecclesiastical History’; and in 1849 the library

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was given a ‘useful’ collection of scientific books from the Singapore Magnetic Observatory.24 These concerns about the character of the library’s holdings – and about the character of the colonial reader – reveal continued anxieties about circulating libraries and their supposed encouragement of light reading to (mostly) female subscribers. In this case, however, there were no women on the library’s management committee and very few female subscribers. Like most subscription libraries in the colonies, the library was funded, patronised and controlled by the male educated or upper middle classes, and in particular by the Scottish Presbyterian mercantile class, who made up over 50 per cent of the library’s shareholders by profession.25 Of the proprietors of the library, only two were non-European: Frommurze Sorabjee, a Parsee Indian merchant and prominent Freemason in Singapore, and a Mr Arabjee, an Armenian merchant in Batavia.26 Unlike the Penang Library – which required new members to be nominated by three existing members and subscription fees to be paid three months in advance – the Singapore Library was relatively inclusive in its attitude towards potential readers.27 In 1847, the management committee introduced a new, cheaper subscription rate with no specific eligibility requirements apart from the fact that ‘the parties should be known to be respectable’.28 Subscription numbers certainly peaked in the early 1850s, with the committee noting that ‘[i]t is gratifying to notice the extension of this class’.29 But these new subscribers were mainly lower-level administrators and women (in very low numbers), suggesting that even the fee of one Spanish dollar was beyond the means of the tiny white working-class popu­lation in Singa­pore.30 It was certainly well beyond the means of Asian labourers, who were not usually English-language literate.31 The library did not, in any event, cater for local readers literate in various Chinese dialects, Malay or Tamil, a service that tended to be provided instead by mission schools such as Benjamin Keasberry’s Malay boarding school.32 Apart from ‘foreign language’ dictionaries, all of the books listed in the 1863 catalogue are in English.33 The president of the SBRAS, Archdeacon George F. Hose, noted in 1878 ‘a not too keen appetite for reading’ among the Malay popu­ lation in Singapore, concluding that with the advent of printed books ‘manuscripts (never very numerous) are likely to be less prized, and more rarely copied; and many will be lost forever, unless an effort is made to discover them’.34 Hose’s comments, delivered in his inaugural address to the SBRAS, show little awareness of the fact that there was a substantial vernacular press and print culture in Singapore at the time, or that there was a tradition of Malay lending libraries

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across the Malay Archipelago.35 Chinese communities also had their own lending libraries. Referring to the Straits Settlements, the Chinese author Tan Teck Soon notes in the first volume of the Straits Chinese Magazine (established 1897) that ‘[t]he circulating library is an established institution among [the Chinese] and for a small fee any who has acquired the taste may revel in the delights of Chinese Belles Lettres’. It is unclear whether these libraries stocked books only in Chinese, but Tan Teck Soon refers in the same article to the popularity among Straits-born Chinese readers of translations of Chinese romances and ‘lighter novels’ into Romanised Malay, making it likely that books in Romanised Malay also circulated among readers via lending libraries.36 In Penang, too, there were Chinese-language libraries by the end of the nineteenth century: Tong Huck Sean Tong, a charitable society in Penang, provided a ‘free library of Chinese literature to the humblest in the land’.37 By the end of the century, the Chinese population in Singapore had also set up their own libraries of English-language books, for example the library attached in 1893 to the Chinese Christian Association (established 1889) and that of the Straits Chinese Philomathic Society (established 1896), for which a list of thirty-six books ‘related to China’ was approved by the board for purchase in 1899.38 The Penang Young Men’s Association similarly had a small library of English-language books.39 The readers making use of the Singapore Library must therefore be considered within the context of its carefully cultivated dynamic of exclusion and inclusion: there is a sense of a moral and educational mission, of increasing the availability of books for all, but this is not borne out in the demographic of its readers, particularly in relation to non-European populations and the working classes. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the library’s holdings increasingly reflected the values of the Victorian British middle classes to which most of its management committee, subscribers and extended readership belonged, and stocked in abundance the kind of popular fiction devoured globally by an Anglophone mass readership. In 1863, the best-stocked authors of fiction by number of titles in the library were the popular but respectable Edward Bulwer Lytton, Charles Dickens, G. P. R. James, William Makepeace Thackeray and Walter Scott. Popular sentimental novels, historical romances, gothic novels, ‘silver fork’ novels and evangelical novels – particularly those by Catherine Gore, S. C. Hall, Anne Manning, Margaret Oliphant and Frances Trollope – were also well represented, a circumstance that can partly be explained by the fact that by 1859 the library was primarily selecting its books from Mudie’s list of surplus new publications.40 While this decision was made

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largely to reduce costs, it is important to recognise that Mudie himself was catering for the ‘aspirational and self-improvement market’ of the British middle classes and was increasingly influential in determining what was read in Britain’s colonies from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. As the century progressed, Mudie’s Select Library was to participate in what Lewis Roberts has called a ‘general cultural project of homogenization’: the library not only ‘disseminated textual objects representing “British culture”’ (that is, British writers and British books) ‘but also normalized reading practices and attitudes through its standardized distribution practices’ in the British colonies.41 The Singapore Library’s non-fiction holdings might, however, make us stop to think about the apparently ‘provincial’ nature of colonial libraries and their readers. Not only was a relatively large proportion of the library’s periodicals accounted for by regional publications, suggesting that readers increasingly received news of events in India via papers published in India rather than via London, but from the 1850s the library also specifically targeted ‘any valuable new publications on India, China, or other Eastern British Settlement’, which were ‘to have the first consideration on all occasions’.42 While history books made up the bulk of the ‘History, Voyages and Travel’ category of the library’s 1863 catalogue (31 per cent of the collection as a whole), the books listed in the 1844, 1860 and 1863 catalogues suggest an increasing interest in works on regional places and spaces – from Australia to China to the Indian Archipelago – with a shift away from the acquisition of books recounting voyages and travels in the 1840s to the acquisition of ethnographic accounts in the 1860s. The library’s focus on popular ethnographic narratives from a range of regional and colonial locales is suggestive of the ways in which local libraries played what Tony Ballantyne has called a ‘vital role’ in the study of comparative ethnologies, by making newly textualised or mapped knowledge available to settler reading communities. As Ballantyne has shown, even libraries in very small frontier towns in New Zealand held ‘surprisingly rich ethnological collections’, which were intended to encourage settlers to read about the ‘phenomena, statistics, and history of [their] own immediate locality’.43 In some ways, the encouragement of this kind of reading among white settlers, like the learning of vernacular languages, was part of a project of colonial cultural appropriation, which, as Gauri Viswanathan has argued, concealed its own interests by ‘successfully camouflaging the material activities of the colonizers’ in the guise of ‘culture’, ‘recreation’ and ‘enjoyment’.44 Moreover, as Anna Winter­ bottom has demonstrated, the utility of these kinds of texts as a way

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of promoting British interests was not limited to the reading room or domestic environment, instead being used almost as practical guides across settlements and trading posts, especially in the fields of bio-prospecting and agricultural transplantation.45 Despite its inclusive rhetoric, the Singapore Library was therefore deeply embedded in a culture of racial prejudice and the economic policies of imperial exploitation. As Luyt has argued, even ‘recreational’ reading and the reading of fiction must be seen in the context of an extended colonial ‘governance role’, with libraries such as the Singapore Library creating European ‘micro-environments’ as a means of encouraging the social distance between European and Indigenous populations, and introducing an ‘internal civilizing mission’ to prevent the supposed degeneracy of the European character in colonial territories.46 Reading for knowledge: the Raffles Library and the library of the SBRAS, 1874–1900 By 1874, financial difficulties forced the proprietors of the Singapore Library to sell their collection to the new government-subsidised Raffles Library, which contained a public reference section and reading room but continued subscriptions for borrowing rights. In 1874, the library had nine life members, thirty-one first-class subscribers and sixty-two second-class subscribers; subscriptions reached a peak of 349 in 1899.47 As Luyt has noted, this still represented only a small proportion of the European population: 5.24 per cent in 1874. In 1878, the free reading room received 4,000 visitors but this made up only 1.7 per cent of the total population of Singapore at the time.48 While the library’s 1877 catalogue indicates that there was at least one Chinese member of the library committee as well as some prominent Malay and Chinese subscribers,49 there is no detailed information in library reports on the nationalities of subscribers until 1904, at which point 72 per cent of subscribers were British and 81 per cent were European (including British); the other 19 per cent consisted mainly of Asians (predominantly Chinese but also Eurasians, Malays and Tamils). By 1912, there were twenty-three Chinese, six Malay and thirteen Eurasian subscribers out of a total of 385. Even as late as 1922, the books in the library were mainly in English, apart from small collections in other European languages, and a small number of Malay and Arabic books and manuscripts.50 All this suggests that the readership cultivated by the Raffles Library was a European one, with some accommodation made for Chinese, Malay and Eurasian elites.

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While the library’s stated focus for its new reference section was on works on East Asia, Malay manuscripts and works of art, science and literature,51 its catalogues and annual reports make it clear that fiction remained central to its collection. The library’s 1877 catalogue, for example, indicates that fiction made up around 28 per cent of the total holdings. Luyt has noted that 34 per cent of the acquisitions in 1886 were fiction, reaching as high as 71 per cent in 1900, suggesting the extent to which readers’ preferences drove the subscription branches of early colonial public libraries. The library’s circulation profile similarly indicates that fiction enjoyed a growing popularity among readers, representing 70 per cent of the circulation in 1881, 82 per cent in 1895 and 87 per cent in 1905.52 Yet despite the overwhelming popu­ larity of fiction among the library’s subscribers, the Raffles Library was increasingly seeking to appeal to a very different kind of reader: the scientist, scholar and collector. This is a development that can, in many ways, be attributed to James Richardson Logan, owner of the Penang Gazette and founder of the JIA, subscriber and shareholder of the Singapore Library, and member of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Ethnological Society and the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences. The Raffles Library purchased Logan’s 1,250-volume collection of ethnographic and philological books on ‘Singapore, the Straits Settlements, and the Eastern Archipelago’ in 1878, which forever changed the character of its holdings.53 Luyt has rightly argued that in the years following the purchase of Logan’s collection, the Raffles Library and Museum gradually acted as a ‘centre of calculation . . . for the South East Asian region as a whole’, and notes the ways in which the library consolidated its status as a serious reference library by allowing the SBRAS to hold its meetings at the library’s address; by purchasing the Hakluyt Society’s publications from 1883; and by acquiring the philological library of Reinhold Rost, the former librarian to the India Office, in 1897.54 In addition, the Raffles Library became a copyright library for the Straits Settlement via the Book Regulation Ordinance of 1886, with the Straits government depositing its official gazettes, blue books and reports in the library, which were to form the nucleus of an archives section in 1938.55 All of these factors combined to create within the library a substantial archive of scientific knowledge on the Malay Peninsula and its surrounding environs,56 which was only ­strengthened and supported by the establishment of the SBRAS in 1877 – a develop­ ment that coincided with the publication in the same year of a full catalogue of the Raffles Library, with new subject classifications, including ‘Eastern Archipelago’, ‘Philology’ and ‘Ethnology’.57

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Initially using the rooms in the Raffles Library and Museum for its meetings, scholarly activities and to house its collection of books, the aim of the Society was to collect and record scientific information about the Malay Peninsula and to carry out other scholarly activities, including the publication of a journal and the formation of a library.58 The library itself was founded to build a collection of books of quite a different nature to that of the Raffles Library, which, as the Society’s first president, Archdeacon Hose, noted, was unlikely to focus on ‘scientific books upon the countries and peoples of Malaya’ because ‘a more popular style of literature is much more in demand’.59 The Society’s library was instead to house: a small and very special collection of the books which are the best authori­ ties upon these countries, and which will be guides to students and help to collectors . . . [and] as complete a collection as possible of the books that have been written in the Malay and kindred languages.60

The intended readership of the SBRAS library was therefore a small and elite circle of students, researchers, scholars, scientists and collectors within the Straits Settlements. This was the circle of users to which the reference section of the Raffles Library also increasingly addressed itself. Due to a lack of funds, the SBRAS library’s holdings grew primarily via donations and exchanges of journals and records with other learned societies; for example, in 1879 the library received a complete set of the Record of the Indian Geographical Survey (twelve volumes) from India, and publications on the Malay and Javanese languages from the president of the École des Langues Vivantes.61 The library’s acquisition of books on Malay culture and manuscripts, on the other hand, was slow. As early as 1879, Hose noted that the library’s collection, at that point only 135 volumes, was made up ‘perhaps too exclusively, of the transactions of Societies like our own’, adding that the ‘formation of a collection of Malay literature’ was imperative to protect manuscripts from ‘native owners who have no idea of their value’ as well as from being scattered by private European collectors.62 As the self-appointed saviour of the Malay textual legacy, the Society’s manuscript collection began with a single work, the Hikayat Abdullah (1849), donated by Hose himself in 1879, and extended to the reprinting and preservation of some selected works of Malay literature. By 1884, the library held 187 titles (still mainly society proceedings), of which ninety-six were in European languages other than English.63 As its library collection suggests, the Society’s members actively sought out their counterparts in philosophical and scientific circles

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around metropolitan Europe, participating in the cosmopolitan world of collecting cultures both via gifts and exchanges, and by publishing reprints and translations of the work of continental European scholars in its journal.64 At the same time, the Society was concerned to build up local networks of readers and scholars by collecting books and manuscripts from within the Malay Archipelago, and by having regular meetings, readings of papers and informal gatherings in the Raffles Library. Hose, for example, noted the importance of the principle of association such a society promoted, which enabled the preservation of knowledge ‘in a way that no one individual can achieve’. He especially welcomed the Society’s monthly gatherings and collective reading of papers, arguing for the importance of such meetings in a predetermined physical space not only for breaking the ‘monotony of Colonial life’, but also for closing the distances in vast and underpopulated areas where ‘men who have much to communicate to, or learn from one another, are unlikely to meet . . . unless there are fixed times and places of meeting’.65 As a committee member of the Raffles Library and as a key figure within this circle of scholars, Hose’s comments underscore the cultural importance of both reading and associational life for European populations in the settler colonial context, where individuals and communities could at times feel isolated and atomised. In 1887, the Society transferred its book collection from the Raffles Library to the new Raffles Museum building.66 In many ways, this move was an appropriate acknowledgement of the Society’s ties to a scholarly collecting culture represented more obviously by the museum space than the library. Although outside the scope of this chapter, the Raffles Museum further encouraged and promoted an interest in ethnographic scholarship and the more general systemis­ ation of knowledge as the nineteenth century progressed.67 The Society’s interest in systemisation is evident from its repeated attempts to catalogue and classify knowledge. In 1879, it undertook the indexing of Logan’s JIA; the binding, labelling and cataloguing of its own collection were undertaken in 1882, 1884 and 1890.68 Articles in the JSBRAS provide additional examples of bibliographical work.69 The Society’s stated desire to act as the region’s unofficial ‘Statistical Gazetteer’ by giving a ‘full account of these regions, their inhabitants, and productions’ and carrying on ‘in the Far East, the work already performed in British India and Burma’ is suggestive of the ways in which the imbricated cultures of reading, scholarship and collecting were both consciously and unconsciously replicated across the British colonies in the East.70

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Reading in translation: British readers of Malay literature, 1820–1900 An example of the ways in which the scholarly circles discussed above applied their ethnographic knowledge to the reading of Malay litera­ ture is provided by articles in the JIA and the JSBRAS, as well as by earlier publications on the region by administrator-scholars such as Stamford Raffles and John Crawfurd. Noting the absence of a learned society in the Indian Archipelago like those in Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Ceylon and Hong Kong, one of the aims of the JIA, as set out in its 1847 prospectus, was to act as a sort of virtual society where conversations could take place between readers and contributors interested in the region.71 The journal’s remit was wide: it was to be a ‘work of reference on all subjects connected with the Archi­pelago’, including scholarship on Australia, China, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, the Philippines and other islands. Insofar as it was interested in the languages and literatures of the region, its focus was far more philological than literary, but it did publish some critical reflections on those Malay prose and poetical works it considered deserving of preservation.72 While there is little information on its circulation, Logan notes in the prospectus that copies were to be distributed ‘among Societies, Journals &c. in India, England, the Continent and America’. Given its small market and high costs, the JIA’s print run was limited, but it was ‘liberally’ subscribed to at five Spanish dollars per annum by the Bengal government and prominent residents of the Straits Settlements.73 The JSBRAS, in many ways a self-styled successor to Logan’s JIA, also concentrated more on philo­logical matters than it did on literary appreciation, although it, too, contained some translations and reflections on Malay manuscripts.74 For the most part, the colonial linguists contributing to the JIA and JSBRAS felt that the Malays had ‘no literature worthy of the name’, focusing on the Malay language and translations of Malay manuscripts as a kind of stand-in or proxy for a national literature defined by absence and lack.75 Such assessments were grounded in the ‘develop­ mental’ approaches and hierarchical classifications of language and literary culture that underpinned the scholarly discourses of both European comparative philology and missionary orthographies, which, in attempting to phoneticise and Romanise Malay, always assumed the sovereignty of European languages and scripts.76 In view of the British tendency both to standardise written Malay and to promote a ‘standard’ spoken Malay, it comes as no surprise that Malay readers were puzzled by the early texts and translations

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produced by missionary and government presses, and promoted in the JIA and JSBRAS. The Malay author and copyist Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir (Abdullah Munsyi), for example, responded to one such text in his famous autobiography, Hikayat Abdullah, by noting: The letters and the form of the words were proper Malay but the style of writing was not. Furthermore, words were used in impossible places, or put together in impossible combinations. Therefore I found I could not understand the real meaning of the book. It all sounded very clumsy to my ear, and I was inclined to say ‘This is a book of the white man, and I do not know the white man’s language.’77

For Abdullah Munsyi, these missionary texts were written in the ‘white man’s’ idiom, suggesting the extent to which languages in the colonies were ‘crafted and classified according to the European model’.78 Indeed, Logan’s stated aims for the translations of literary works in the JIA are not to build a critical understanding or appreciation of Malay literature, but rather to add to the stock of words in existing Malay dictionaries, to ‘facilitate the understanding of Malay in England’, and to ‘assist European scholars’ who cannot personally ‘refer to Malayan literati’.79 Logan hints here at the importance of native-speaker informants to European attempts to codify and classify the Malay language while at the same time recognising that he was partly, if not primarily, writing for readers who were outside zones of colonial contact in Europe’s metropolitan centres. Considering his aims, it is unsurprising that Logan declares that ‘the most literal translation will be the most valuable’ rather than translations which ‘present the ideas of their original in a flowing English garb . . . seeking rather to gratify their own taste than satisfy the curiosity of their readers’.80 Figuring British readers of Malay texts as ‘curious’ rather than ‘appreciative’, Logan positions Malay literature less as works of merit to be studied and appreciated, and more as specimens or artefacts that can reveal interest­ing ethnographic and historical details. Indeed, translators and critics in the JIA rarely figure the reading of Malay and other Indigenous-language texts as a pleasurable activity. Malay manuscripts are read not for enjoyment or entertainment but rather to be mined for information and inaccuracies. The symbolic labour and literary value attaching to this kind of reading was weighted almost entirely in favour of the British reader rather than the original Malay writer, copyist or printer, as well as giving authorial power to European translators, transcribers and transliterators, who

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could claim to have tamed the ‘unruly’ orality and scriptural ambigu­ ities of Indigenous productions. Crawfurd, too, clearly has no idea of what to do with Malay litera­ture as a verbal artefact. While there is the occasional awkward reference to motif, symbol or theme in his heavily racialised History of the Indian Archipelago (1820), Malay prose and poetry are largely stripped of their symbolic meaning in favour of their literal meaning. The literalness of the translations provided are themselves deemed to be a peculiarly European phenomenon. Crawfurd notes, for example, that Malays are incapable of ‘literal or faithful translation’ from the languages and ideas of their sources, and argues that Indigen­ous attempts at translation ‘will appear to the European reader something like the attempt to impose the fetters of Latin prosody upon the modern language of Europe, in the shape of blank verse’.81 Entirely oblivious to the way in which British readers and translators applied similarly anachron­istic methods and idioms to Malay texts in various forms of symbolic violence, Crawfurd concludes that Malay writers and scholars do not ‘translate’ but ‘adapt’ and ‘proximate’ in a way that authorises errors, as well as omissions and other departures from original sources.82 The imputed imprecision of Malay authors is represented as a function of the very language and literary culture in which they write. Logan argues that qualities of language are more important to the Malay poet than either ideas or accuracy: ‘the Malay poet, consulting the taste of his nation, looks upon verbal melody as the great aim of his art’.83 Similarly, Crawfurd considers the Malay language ‘rich in simple epithets, and wantonly and uselessly redundant in trifles’ but lacking in abstraction and conceptual rigour. This privileging of language over message results in the extensiveness of metrical language in Malay culture: not only is the language of the Malays, like the language of other ‘rude people’, inherently metrical, but the Malay people are, according to Logan, ‘much given to amusements of various kinds . . . and in their common conversation addicted to sententious remarks, proverbs, and metrical sentiments or allusions’.84 While Logan finds beauty in the Malay language and even in this tendency to versification, Crawfurd considers the ‘very quality to which it chiefly owes its currency among foreigners’ – its ‘frequency of liquid and vocalic sounds’ and ‘simplicity of structure’ – to be a barrier to intellectual complexity.85 Offering ‘no internal evidence of ancient culture’, the ‘inartificial grammatical form’ of the Malay language is ultimately a marker for Crawfurd of the relatively small improvements and superficial

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advances in civilisation made by the Malay people over generations, and greatly contributes to the general derivativeness of Malay literature.86 The supposed ‘inanity’ of Malay literature is also behind the publisher Alfred North’s encouragement of Abdullah Munsyi’s writing. As he had found nothing but ‘silly tales’ in Malay literature, North aimed to commission works ‘to improve the minds of the people’ and to mend the damage inflicted on Malay readers by those traditional tales that determined ‘they would never go forward a single step in civilization’.87 Any such tales printed by government presses, for example the Sejarah Melayu, were printed almost entirely because of the example their literary style would set.88 Abdullah Munsyi, too, sanctioned the study of Malay tales, despite their ‘lies and nonsense’, because of ‘the language in which they are written’.89 Equally nonsensical as these prose and verse romances for Crawfurd are Malay chronicles and histories, which ‘contain no historical fact, upon which the slightest reliance can be placed; no date whatsoever’.90 Of Malay poetry, on the other hand, scholars such as Logan are more appreciative. While the ideas expressed ‘in general are simple’ and ‘spring neither from passion nor imagination’, the derivative nature of the poetry does not detract from the tenderness and truth expressed. Crawfurd’s emphasis on originality, and his complaints about repetition and derivation, are secondary for Logan to the ‘permanency’ of ‘great truths’. Caught between his own ‘nativism’ and the cosmopolitan collecting cultures of the metropole, Logan’s acknowledgement of the beauty of the Malay language eventually leads him full circle: Add to this that all poems are to be sung or chanted, and that there are numerous words and expressions which, being used only for poetical purposes, always convey a poetical meaning to the ear of the Malay, and the reader may be disposed to admit that the best service which any translator, who is not a poet, can render to him, is to help him to read Malayan poetry in the original.91

Echoing Abdullah Munsyi’s complaint about over-literal translations, the idea that some aspects of Malay poetry are untranslatable permeates Logan’s most literal of translations of the Shair Bidasari. Using the language of appreciation rather than of correction or classi­ fication, Logan comments throughout the notes to his translation on any ‘elegant’ and ‘refined’ uses of words, as well as on any words or phrases not in common usage and therefore not found in popular vocabularies and dictionaries by William Marsden or Gustaaf Van Eysinga.

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Conclusion Logan’s relative appreciation for Malay poetry prefigures the much more substantial aesthetic consideration given to Malay language and literature by British readers and critics such as William Shellabear, Richard Wilkinson and Richard Winstedt in the first two decades of the twentieth century. While both Wilkinson and Winstedt considered classical Malay literature childish and repetitive, they at least saw Malay romances as a necessary first step on the stadial scale of literary progression, and began to apply alternative aesthetic standards in their Papers on Malay Subjects (1907).92 If Wilkinson’s two-volume Malay dictionary (1901, 1903) led to a new wave of efforts to standardise the Romanisation of Malay and if his school textbooks promoted a ‘British concept of Malayness’,93 he also set about redefining the terms of Indigenous literacy, seeking to encourage ‘a love of reading’ in those deemed unaccustomed to reading by promoting the very traditional romances previously dismissed as ‘silly tales’. Literary appreciation was thus increasingly seen as a prerequisite for full participation in the modern colonial state.94 This was a project also taken up by various non-European communities at the end of the nineteenth century. As Philip Holden has demonstrated, the efforts of the Straits Chinese community were heavily bound up in the technologies of reading and writing, particularly those centred around the transcultural and multi­ lingual Straits Chinese Magazine. Being ‘good readers’ and therefore ‘good Asian subjects’ in twentieth-century Singapore meant reading and writing not just in English but also in Malay and Chinese.95 It also meant reclaiming those traditional works of literature that had been bypassed in favour of English-language books, paradoxically using English literacy to negotiate a place for that heritage in the colonial public sphere. For Tan Teck Soon, the Straits Chinese Magazine was a way for Straits Chinese readers to learn about ‘the best products of the Chinese mind’ while also seeing them translated ‘in English dress’.96 As Tan Teck Soon and his colleagues at the Straits Chinese Magazine were only too aware, reading in colonial Singapore was heavily determined by embedded forms of cultural capital and by a racialised knowledge economy. For Chinese and Malay readers, this increasingly resulted in a process of transculturation, navigating both English-language reading institutions and values, and protecting and developing local literatures and reading cultures.97 For British readers, public-sphere reading opportunities were limited to a relatively small number of institutions, which cultivated certain practices of reading

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and types of readers, from recreational readers of fiction to elite scholar-scientists. The reading cultures encouraged by the Singapore Library, the Raffles Library and the SBRAS’s library influenced, in turn, how British scholars read and translated texts by Malay writers in the JIA and JSBRAS, suggesting the extent to which race permeated every aspect of reading in nineteenth-century Singapore. In the absence of detailed reader testimony, I have focused in this chapter primarily on the material and symbolic conditions underpinning book holdings and collections rather than on individual acts of consumption themselves. This methodology, I suggest, allows us to think about the relationship between individual reading habits and choices, and wider institutional structures and ideological concerns: in this case, the ways in which the book holdings of colonial libraries could generate and even organise certain practices of reading in nineteenth-century Singapore and beyond.

Notes This research was funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 679436). I would like to thank Gracie Lee (Senior Librarian, National Library of Singapore) for her assistance.  1. See, for example, Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).   2. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 5.   3. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 6, 17.  4. See, for example, Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond (eds), Books Without Borders, Vol. II: Perspectives from South Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).   5. Michael Allan, In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 7, 8.   6. On Malay book history, see, for example, Ian Proudfoot, Early Malay Printed Books (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaysia Press, 1993); and Jan van der Putten, ‘Abdullah Munsyi and the Missionaries’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde (BKI), 162:4 (2006), pp. 407–40. On Chinese book history in the Malay world, see, for example, Claudine Salmon (ed.), Literary Migrations: Traditional Chinese Fiction in Asia

Reading and Literary Appreciation in Nineteenth-Century Singapore   133

(17th–20th Centuries) (Beijing: International Culture Publishing Cor­ poration, 1987).   7. Susan K. Martin, ‘Tracking Reading in Nineteenth-Century Melbourne Diaries’, Australian Humanities Review, 56 (2014), pp. 27–54 (p. 29); Paul Kaufman, ‘The Community Library: A Chapter in English Social History’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 57:7 (1967), pp. 1–67 (p. 16).  8. Susan Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 27.  9. T. S. Raffles, Minute by Sir T. S. Raffles on the Establishment of a Malay College at Singapore (Singapore: s.n., 1819), pp. 17, 24; Singapore Institution Free School, Fourth Annual Report . . . 1837–38 (Singapore: Singapore Free Press Office, 1838), p. 13. 10. Singapore Institution Free School, Eighth Annual Report, 1842–43 (Singapore: Mission Press, 1843), pp. 13–23. 11. R. Hantisch, ‘Raffles Library and Museum, Singapore’, in Walter Makepeace, Gilbert Brook and Roland Braddell (eds), One Hundred Years of Singapore, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1921), vol. I, pp. 519–66 (pp. 526–7). 12. The Second Report of the Singapore Library, 1846 (Singapore: G. M. Frederick at the Singapore Free Press Office, 1846), p. 12. For the additional stock added to the school library holdings, see The First Report of the Singapore Library, 1844 (Singapore: Mission Press, 1845), pp. 9–11. 13. Catalogue of Books in the Singapore Library, with Regulations and By-Laws, January 1863 (Singapore: Mission Press, 1863). 14. Straits Times, 30 September 1846, p. 3. 15. Edward Lim Huck Tee, Libraries in West Malaysia and Singapore (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaysia, 1970), p. 47. 16. On the policy for standard works, see The Third Report of the Singapore Library, 1847 (Singapore: G. M. Frederick at the Singapore Free Press Office, 1847), p. 6. 17. The Second Report of the Singapore Library, p. 12. 18. The First Report of the Singapore Library, pp. 6–7. 19. Brendan Luyt, ‘Centres of Calculation and Unruly Colonists: The Colonial Library in Singapore and Its Users, 1874–1900’, Journal of Documentation, 64:3 (2008), pp. 386–96 (p. 390). 20. The First Report of the Singapore Library, p. 6. 21. Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 24 August 1843, p. 2. 22. The Second Report of the Singapore Library, p. 6. 23. The First Report of the Singapore Library, p. 3. 24. The Third Report of the Singapore Library, p. 6; The Fourth Report of the Singapore Library, 1848 (Singapore: G. M. Frederick at the Singapore Free Press Office, 1848), p. 6; A Fifth Report of the Singapore Library 1849 (Singapore: G. M. Frederick at the Singapore Free Press Office, 1849), p. 10.

134  Porscha Fermanis 25. For subscribers, see The First Report of the Singapore Library, p. 2, and The Second Report of the Singapore Library, p. 2. 26. C. B. Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, 2 vols (Singapore: Fraser and Neave, 1902), vol. I, p. 350. 27. Tee, Libraries in West Malaysia, p. 47. 28. The Third Report of the Singapore Library, p. 4. 29. The Seventh Report of the Singapore Library (Singapore: Singapore Free Press Office, 1851), p. 7. 30. For a list of the new class of subscribers, see The Eighth Report of the Singapore Library (Singapore: The Mission Press, 1852), p. 3. 31. James Francis Warren, Rickshaw Coolie: A People’s History of Singapore, 1880–1940 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003), p. 45. 32. Lim Peng Han, ‘Elementary Malay Vernacular Schools and School Libraries in Singapore Under British Colonial Rule, 1819–1941’, School Libraries Worldwide, 14:1 (2008), pp. 72–85 (p. 75). 33. Catalogue of Books in the Singapore Library . . . 1863, n.p. 34. JSBRAS, 1 (1878), p. 9. 35. E. U. Kratz, ‘Running a Lending Library in Palembang in 1886 A. D.’, Indonesia Circle, 14 (1977), pp. 3–12; and Henri Chambert-Loir, ‘Muhammad Bakir: A Batavian Scribe and Author in the Nineteenth Century’, Review of Indonesian and Malayan Affairs, 18 (1984), pp. 44–71. 36. Straits Chinese Magazine, 1:2 (1897), pp. 63–4. 37. Straits Chinese Magazine, 8:4 (1904), p. 216. 38. Eastern Daily Mail and Straits Morning Advertiser, 14 September 1905, p. 3; Straits Chinese Magazine, 1:1 (1897), p. 1; and Straits Chinese Magazine, 3:9 (1899), p. 73. 39. Straits Chinese Magazine, 1:1 (1897), p. 12. 40. The Fifteenth Report of the Singapore Library (Singapore: Free Press Office, 1860), p. 3. 41. Lewis Roberts, ‘Trafficking in Literary Authority: Mudie’s Select Library and the Commodification of the Victorian Novel’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 34:1 (2006), pp. 1–25 (pp. 9, 14). 42. The Sixth Report of the Singapore Library, 1850 (Singapore: Singapore Free Press Office, 1850), p. 10. For periodicals, see The Seventh Report of the Singapore Library, p. 7. 43. Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014), p. 43. For instance, the Straits Times, 30 September 1846, p. 3, noted that the library was focusing on local texts. 44. Viswanathwan, Masks of Conquest, p. 20. 45. Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 40–1, 150. 46. Luyt, ‘Centres of Calculation’, p. 389.

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47. ‘Report of the Committee of the Raffles Library and Museum, for the year ending December 31st 1874’, in Straits Settlements, Annual Reports for the Year 1874 (Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1875), p. 121; Report of the Committee of the Raffles Library and Museum 1899 (Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1899), p. 3. 48. Luyt, ‘Centres of Calculation’, p. 388. 49. General Catalogue of Bound Works in the Raffles Library, Sept. 1st 1877 (Singapore: n.s., 1877), n.p. 50. Lim Peng Han, ‘The Beginning and Development of the Raffles Library in Singapore, 1823–1941: A Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-­ Century British Colonial Enclave’, Library and Information History, 25:4 (2009), pp. 265–78 (p. 271); Hantisch, ‘Raffles Library and Museum’, p. 560. 51. ‘Report of the Committee of the Raffles Library and Museum . . . 1874’, p. 122. 52. Brendan Luyt, ‘The Importance of Fiction to the Raffles Library, Singapore, During the Long Nineteenth-Century’, Library and Information History, 25:2 (2009), pp. 117–31 (pp. 118–19). 53. Report of the Committee of the Raffles Library and Museum for 1879 (Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1880), p. 1. 54. Luyt, ‘Centres of Calculation’, p. 391; see also Catalogue of the Rost Collection in the Raffles Library Singapore (Singapore: American Mission Press, 1897). 55. Tee, Libraries in West Malaysia, pp. 70, 71. 56. Wai Sin Tiew, ‘The History of the Library of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (SBRAS) 1877–1923’, n.p., available at (accessed 21 October 2017). 57. General Catalogue of Bound Works in the Raffles Library, n.p. 58. JSBRAS, 1 (1878), pp. iii–ix (pp. iv, iii, ix). 59. JSBRAS, 4 (1897), p. xx. 60. JSBRAS, 1 (1878), pp. 11–12. 61. JSBRA, 2 (1878), p. v. See also the list of exchanges in JSBRAS, 24 (1882), pp. xvii–xviii. For a list of gifts, see JSBRAS, 17 (1886), pp. 159–62. 62. JSBRAS, 4 (1879), p. xx; JSBRAS, 2 (1878), p. 4; JSBRAS, 2 (1879), p. xiv. 63. See the printed catalogue in JSBRAS, 11 (1883), pp. xxi–xxxi. 64. See, for example, JSBRAS, 1 (1878), pp. 38–44; JSBRAS, 10 (1882), pp. 281–2; and JSBRAS, 16 (1885), pp. 251–63, 439–40. 65. JSBRAS, 1 (1878), pp. 10–11; JSBRAS, 2 (1878), p. 3. 66. JSBRAS, 19 (1887), p. xiv. 67. See Brendan Luyt, ‘Collectors and Collecting for the Raffles Museum in Singapore: 1920–1940’, Library and Information History, 26:3 (2010), pp. 183–95. 68. JSBRAS, 4 (1879), p. xv; JSBRAS, 10 (1882), p. xii; JSBRAS, 14 (1884), p. xv; JSBRAS, 22 (1890), p. xviii. 69. See, for example, N. B. Dennys, ‘A Contribution to Malayan

136  Porscha Fermanis Bib­liography’, JSBRAS, 5 (1880), pp. 69–123; and E. M. Santow, ‘Essay Towards a Bibliography of Siam’, JSBRAS, 17 (1886), pp. 1–86. See also Catalogue of the Logan Library (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 1880). 70. See JSBRAS, 16 (1885), p. xvi; JSBRAS, 10 (1882), p. xi; and JSBRAS, 9 (1882), p. vi. 71. J. R. Logan, Prospectus of the Journal of the Indian Archipelago (Singapore: n.s., 1847), p. iv. 72. JIA, 1 (1847), pp. ii, iv, viii. 73. Logan, Prospectus, p. 1; Buckley, An Anecdotal History, vol. II, p. 467; JIA, 1 (1847), p. i; Logan, Prospectus, p. viii. 74. See JSBRAS, 1 (1878), p. 2; and JSBRAS, 4 (1879), p. xv. 75. W. E. Maxwell, ‘Malay Proverbs’, JSBRAS, 1 (1878), pp. 85–98 (p. 85); see also Reinhold Rost, ‘Malay Language and Literature’, JSBRAS, 16 (1885), pp. 99, 100, 101. 76. See Rachel Leow, Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 72–4; and Joseph Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 93–122. On the systemisation of methods of transliteration, see JSBRAS, 9 (1882), pp. 141–52. 77. The Hikayat Abdullah: An Annotated Translation, trans. A. H. Hill (1955; Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 106. 78. Robert J. C. Young, ‘That Which Is Casually Called a Language’, PMLA, 131:5 (2016), pp. 1207–21 (p. 1208). 79. JIA, 1 (1847), p. iii. 80. Ibid., p. 38. 81. John Crawfurd, A History of the Indian Archipelago: Containing an Account of the Manners, Arts, Languages, Religions, Institutions, and Commerce of its Inhabitants, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1820), vol. II, pp. 51, 19. 82. Ibid.; see also vol. II, p. 100. 83. JIA, 1 (1847), p. 38. 84. Crawfurd, A History of the Indian Archipelago, vol. II, pp. 43, 16; J. R. Logan, ‘The Present Condition of the Indian Archipelago’, JIA, 1 (1847), pp. 1– 21 (p. 16). 85. Crawfurd, A History of the Indian Archipelago, vol. II, pp. 49, 58. See also Crawfurd’s later work on the Malay language: A Grammar and Dictionary of the Malay Language: With a Preliminary Dissertation, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1852). 86. Crawfurd, A History of the Indian Archipelago, vol. II, pp. 42, 43, 56–7. 87. Quotations are from North’s letter of October 1843, cited in Van der Putten, ‘Abdullah Munsyi and the Missionaries’, p. 417. 88. Ibid., p. 418. 89. The Hikayat Abdullah, trans. Hill, p. 280. 90. Crawfurd, A History of the Indian Archipelago, vol. II, p. 371.

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91. JIA, 1 (1847), pp. 38–9. 92. Siti Hawa Sellah, Malay Literature of the 19th Century, trans. Quest Services (Kuala Lumpur: Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia, 2010), pp. 78–85; R. J. Wilkinson, Malay Literature (Singapore: FMS Government Press, 1907), p. 9. 93. Naoki Soda, ‘The Malay World in Textbooks: The Transmission of Colonial Knowledge in British Malaya’, Southeast Asian Studies, 39:2 (2001), pp. 188–234 (p. 230). 94. Duncan Sutherland, ‘R. J. Wilkinson’, n.p., at (accessed 7 November 2017); J. M. Gullick, ‘Richard James Wilkinson (1867–1941): A Man of Parts’, Journal of the Malaysia Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 74:1 (2001), pp. 19–42 (pp. 25, 28). 95. Philip Holden, ‘The Beginnings of “Asian Modernity” in Singapore: A Straits Chinese Body Project’, Common/Plural, 1:7 (1999), pp. 59–79. 96. Straits Chinese Magazine, 1:2 (1897), pp. 63–4. 97. Philip Holden, ‘Colonial Fiction, Hybrid Lives: Early Singaporean Fiction in The Straits Chinese Magazine’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 33:1 (1998), pp. 85–97.

Chapter 7

Moral Readership and Political Apprenticeship: Commentaries on English Education in India, 1875–1930 Pramod K. Nayar

Commentaries on the history, role, problems and consequences of English education in India published in the 1875–1930 period, including the Report of the Indian Education Commission (1882, also known as the Hunter Commission Report) and related source materials (such as the Evidence Taken Before the Bombay Provincial Committee and Memorials Addressed to the Education Commission, 1881), demonstrate an abiding concern with the moral training of the native readers. This concern, embodied in a discourse, is linked, this chapter argues, to what one historian termed the natives’ ‘political apprenticeship’.1 The construction of the colonial subject as a moral reader and political apprentice through English education entailed debates over the language, form and content of school and college textbooks and lectures, debates involving English as well as native educationists. There is a discernible belief in print- and pedagogy-mediated subjectivities that marks the commentaries on these textbooks.2 The political apprenticeship of the native involved acquiring a specific set of moral characteristics, alongside knowledge and awareness, through the prescribed textbooks. This chapter does not examine the textbooks themselves. Instead, it relies for its analysis on a wide variety of commentaries, histories, reports and reflections on the progress of English education in India. The assumption here is that the figure of the native moral reader emerges implicitly within these discourses and analyses of textbooks, with their suggestions for pedagogic practices and institutional mechanisms (such as hostels, fees and scholarships, examinations, hiring of teachers, among others). Works discussing textbooks, such as J. G. Covernton’s Vernacular Reading Books in the Bombay Presidency (1906), offer us a detailed portrait of the moral reader the English educationists – and their native supporters as well 138

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as their opponents – had in mind when preparing, recommending or criticising these reading materials. My argument here is consonant with Sudipa Topdar’s reading of late nineteenth-century Calcutta school textbooks. Topdar argues that ‘textbooks of an “aggressive character” generating hostile feelings towards the state were censored and substituted by ones imparting lessons on “state feeling” and the “duties of a good citizen”’.3 The ‘British colonial state undertook curriculum changes with an explicit agenda to stem Indian encroachment as a means to disengage Indian children and youth from nationalist ideas’, writes Topdar.4 Clare Talwalker has argued about similar textbooks in the Bombay Presidency: The textbooks effectively evoked raw materials of life in Marathi-speaking India . . . and transformed them into the portents of a splendid Indian modernity (a dutiful school boy who works to repay his illiterate parents his school fees, the wisdom of growing cash crops for the world market, the wonder of the vastness of the world and India’s place in it, the fascinations of technology and modern conveniences, the motivations provided by pride in heritage). We might say this first primary textbook series manu­factured the beginnings of Indian modernity by its particular framing (both in form and content) of social reality.5

These initiatives in curriculum and educational projects towards the latter half of the nineteenth century came in the wake of the 1857 ‘Uprising’ or ‘Mutiny’. Commentators such as Robert Darnton have argued that censorship and regulatory measures in the form of the 1867 Act XXV, Press and Books Registration Act, were a response to the ‘Uprising’, and the measures in education, especially the concern over textbooks, may be seen as a part of this response as well.6 What exactly did the construction, implied within discourse, of the new citizen-subject consist of? Topdar gestures at the emphasis on industrial capitalism and the trope of ‘melting pot’ India, and Tim Allender examines the construction of forms of native femininity.7 This chapter suggests that the ‘good citizen’ category that Topdar employs merges the moral native and the politically apprenticed native. The moral reader is one whose consciousness and loyalties have been tutored into accepting the authority of the British government in India but also to reject, or to move beyond, local histories, national identity and such, and to accept instead the British Empire, British history and the world. Moral readers were to ‘conduct’ themselves accordingly as citizens of the Empire, even when they were intensely aware of their traditional, local identities. Towards this end, the aim, from what the commentaries tell us, was to offer in the textbooks a different political

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geography and history for the natives to build such identities on, cast as moral training. This chapter considers the collective reader, not individual ones. While this erases individual responses to the textbooks (which are in any case difficult to recover), the informing assumption here is that ‘individualistic responses to texts are mediated within shared codes of interpretation, whether of a national, communal or social nature’.8 The larger aim, it could be said, of the textbook making and revision project cast as moral training was the making of such a suitable interpretive community. The interpretive community of moral readers might, one could say, constitute the model of a colonial public sphere of educated readers. But this was not a public sphere in the traditional sense. I take the ‘public’ to mean those constructed through the consumption of discourses. The commentaries, histories and critiques I take as addresses to the potentially moral readership. Christian Novetzke has proposed that Publics are constituted primarily by passive attention, and people often participate in them through consuming discourse and reflecting their engagement through affect . . . a social formation . . . organized by the circulation of a particular discourse of mutual concern.9

Other commentators have argued that participatory, civic speech has for too long  been seen as the cornerstone of the public sphere, and therefore lays excessive emphasis on the work of the civic actor. Instead, we need to start thinking of visual and other modes of address that enable a public sphere.10 My argument is that the commentaries on English education, by both English and native authors, implicitly construct such a colonial public of readers. The attention of this public is being drawn, constantly, to the (potential or real) moral colonial subject. In other words, the commentaries address, implicitly, a moral readership whose members would then serve as the moral citizens of the Empire. Models of the moral colonial subject are carefully built up in these discourses, akin to what Allender has demonstrated in the case of femininity in educational tracts from the nineteenth century. But, as we shall see, it was not a passive interpret­ ive community consumption of these shared codes: the codes were debated and disputed by the natives as well as the English. Thus, the public sphere, although one of listening, reading and consumption, was not homogenous. The process of discursively constructing this moral reader within the commentaries involved, first, an exposition of the idea of moral

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training that could be imparted via vernacular and English textbooks. Second, the commentaries examined the texts for their proposed content. Together, they build a model of the moral, politically apprenticed, citizen-subject. This chapter is organised around these two intersecting strands within the discourse of moral training. The first section studies the discourse of textual moral training in schools and colleges. I then move on to Covernton’s sustained commentary on an entire series of vernacular textbooks from the Bombay Presidency in order to draw out the figure of the moral reader that emerges here. While the idea of ‘readership’ implies texts and audiences, the school textbook debates over moral training in colonial India were rarely conducted in isolation from larger questions of pedagogy, or apparatuses such as the hiring of teachers, book publication, funding, the tensions between private enterprise (in education) and public (state-funded) instruction, disciplining in hostels, and processes like examinations. I steer clear of the apparatuses – not to do so would mean examining documentation on policy-making by various state governments and agencies and shift the emphasis away from the reader. My focus is primarily on the textbooks, both vernacular and English, since the period I am examining comes well after the Anglicist–Orientalist debate over the appropriate language of books/instruction in Indian schools. In this debate, the Anglicists, led by Charles Trevelyan, argued that English should be the language of instruction, and English texts and literature should be taught in publicly funded schools and colleges, while the Orientalists argued that Sanskrit and Persian were wealthy language traditions, possessed a magnificent storehouse of knowledge, and should be the dominant languages of education in India.11 A point to be noted about the moral readership debate is that this reading is not to be taken as an act of passive consumption. Native responses to the education discourses, some of which are discussed in the course of this chapter, indicate that the native readers, many of whom were participants in the debate as educationists, were alert to the discourses and their politics. In their evidence before the Bombay Provincial Committee (1884) the people testifying were asked to reply to the following questions: ‘Does definite instruction in duty and the principles & moral conduct occupy any place in the course of Govern­ ment Colleges and schools? Have you any suggestions to make on this subject?’12 R. A. Hume, deposing before the Committee, said: ‘The greatest pains should be taken to make the Readers as perfect as possible, and to put into them information about sanitation and agriculture, and moral and social and public duties’.13 William Beatty

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agreed that moral lessons should be taught.14 Taking issue with this, R. G. Bhandarkar would argue: It appears to me that, placing dry moral receipts before young men is not a very efficacious method of making them virtuous or instilling moral principles into their minds. The teacher’s effort should be directed to the cultivation of the emotional side of the pupil’s nature, where lies the root of morality. . . . For this purpose nothing, I believe, is better suited than the best prose and poetic literature of such a great country as England.15

As we shall see, Bhandarkar was echoing a principle that informed much of the school textbooks of the post-1857 period. Dissenting notes, such as Kashinath Trimbak Telang’s, were appended to the Indian Education Commission’s Report and commentaries with explicit and implicit criticisms from both English and native readers suggest that the discourses were disputed and contested. The education discourse’s project of making a moral reader of the native was underwritten by several interconnected assumptions and strands of smaller discourses. The improvable native reader A founding assumption in the education discourse of the era was that the native readership of English texts, and the recipients of English education, were amenable to their teachings, which led them to abandon their traditional manners and disciplines. This necessitated a solid moral training to make them good citizens. The amenable-improvable native (reader) was both a component and consequence of England’s civilisational mission in India. That Indians, once possessed of a glorious past, had remained stagnant but with the potential to improve was accepted as an established truth and it informed missionary educationists. It was a fable and a sentiment that framed all moral training discourse as well and led A. H. Benton of the Indian Civil Service to write, as late as 1917, in Indian Moral Instruction and Caste Problems: ‘[The Indian] People are on the whole kindly, docile, alert, keen-spirited, high and low, one of the best-mannered peoples in the world, and they would appear to offer a very promising field for right spiritual treatment’.16 However, there was no homogenous readership that was open to ‘improvement’. That the readership and public were divided was a truism. The British themselves identified, through the nineteenth century, those populations who were receptive towards receiving

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Christian and English teaching and religion. Some communities, the Englishman noted, were averse to any form of moral improvement through physical exertions (since religious, physical and moral training went together for the ‘improvers’). So, C. E. Tyndale-Biscoe, the headmaster of the Srinagar Boys’ School, in Character Building in Kashmir (1920), wrote: that life of manliness and sports was as yet unknown to them. Was he not talking to holy Brahmans, the sons of holy Brahmans, who wouldn’t ever demean themselves and insult their godlike caste by doing boatman’s work? . . . No Brahman had so vulgar an appendage as muscle on the arm.17

The comment is an echo of the Report of the Indian Education Commission of 1882, which stated: the sedentary habits of the higher castes are proverbial, and we consider that a regular course of physical exercise would have a specially good effect upon the minds and bodies of most Indian students. We therefore recommend that physical development be promoted by the encouragement of native games, gymnastics, school drill, and other exercises suited to the circumstances of each class of school.18

Syed Mahmood, in his 1895 history of education in India, noted that the Muslims stayed away from the new education, with disastrous results: ‘[the Mahomedans’] attitude towards English education was far from friendly’.19 Mahmood continued: Such feelings of aversion towards English education entertained by the Mahomedans . . . stand in sharp contrast to the attitude of the Hindu community. . . . This difference in the sentiments of the two communities towards English education, is the real key to the reasons of the vast disparity of progress of English education which the two nationalities have respectively made. The effects of this disparity have been most baneful to the interests of British India in general, and to the Mahomedan community in particular. . . . 20

Clearly, then, not all natives could become moral readers. Some were more welcoming of the new education than others. Out of this double-edged conviction – that natives were amenable and they were improvable – came the 1882 recommendation in the Resolution of the Government of India on the ‘Improved System and Method of School and Collegiate Education in India’:

144   Pramod K. Nayar that all inspecting officers and teachers be directed to see that the teaching and discipline of every school are such as to exert a right influence on the manners, the conduct and character of the children, and that for the guidance of the masters a special manual be prepared.21

The resolution assumes that the moral training textbook would readily be assimilated by such a welcoming and potentially transforma­tive readership. However, the resolution, like several other documents from the period, also debates the usefulness, or not, of a textbook for moral training, and cannot suggest a definite model for it. The need for some mode of moral training, however, is emphasised throughout. This need for moral training, the commentaries noted, stems from two principal causes: the absence of such training in India’s vernacular or native institutions of learning, and, ironically, from the effects of English education itself. The former point of view was vouchsafed from Macaulay’s now notorious 1835 ‘Minute’ (discussed in the next section), wherein he stated that Indian traditions were irrelevant, ­especially when Britain wanted to train its subjects to be English in their morals. Moral vernaculars and vernacular morality Yet, there was considerable anxiety over the impact the textbooks and pedagogic practices – English, in the main – had on the native reader. Other commentators, both native and English, expressed their concern over the abysmal quality of moral training within vernacular texts that the Indians read in school and college. The rejection of the possibilities of any moral instruction in the native languages, or prevalent in existing indigenous education systems, often took a two-pronged approach. First, the English discourses rejected the existence of any form of the ‘moral vernacular’, as in texts in the vernacular languages, which could possibly impart moral instruction. Second, the discourse proposed that what may be found in the vernacular religious, literary and other texts was a form of dangerous morality. Vernacular morality, in this line of thought, was a moral code, or vision, that could not be accepted as morality at all.22 Macaulay had, as far back as 1835, had famously dismissed the Sanskrit, Arabic and other native-language literatures as lacking in the ‘metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, trade’, in all of which, he claimed, English had a surfeit of textual wealth. Macaulay wrote:

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I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. . . . It [the English language] abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us, – with models of every species of eloquence, – with historical composition, which, considered merely as narratives, have seldom been surpassed, and which, considered as vehicles of ethical and political instruction, have never been equalled – with just and lively representations of human life and human nature, – with the most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, trade, – with full and correct information respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to increase the comfort, or to expand the intellect of man.23

The natural choice for any moral training of the natives, Macaulay asserted, was the book in the English language. Commentators following Macaulay’s footsteps late into the century held similar views about the paucity of good moral texts in the vernacular. A. H. Benton mourned the fact that there were too many competing moralities in India, all embedded in their religious texts and literature.24 Leonard Alston, director of non-collegiate students in economics and history at Cambridge University, and temporary professor at Elphinstone College, Bombay, asked in Education and Citizenship in India (1910): But if the outstanding social institutions of India and the more striking features in Indian philosophy are such as to hinder material progress and moral development, the question naturally arises – Can we point to any indigenous institutions in India which have tended to foster what we should consider a ‘sense of duty’?25

Others, such as F. W. Thomas, argued that Hinduism may be a ‘phil­ osophy’ for the ‘educated’, but for the ‘ignorant’ it was a ‘system of observances sanctioned by immemorial custom’, and there was ‘no authorized scheme of morals’.26 S. Satthianadhan (first assistant to the director of public instruction, and acting professor of logic and moral philosophy, Presidency College, Madras) quotes another commentator: Every schoolboy can repeat verbatim a vast number of verses of the meaning of which he knows no more than the parrot which has been taught to utter certain words. Accordingly from studies in which he has spent many a day of laborious, but fruitless toil, the native scholar gains no improvement, except the exercise of memory and the power to read

146   Pramod K. Nayar and write on the common business of life. He makes no addition to his stock of useful knowledge and acquires no moral impressions.27

The vernaculars, then, do not help in developing the moral Indian reader. The absence of any ‘moral vernacular’ thus becomes the context in which English steps in, as language but also as the source of the morals necessary for Indians. However, the English commentaries do acknowledge a native sense of morality, although this might be driven by religious faith, superstition and irrational beliefs. This form of the moral, though, was deemed an unacceptable one. John Murdoch of the Christian Literature Society declared that Indian literatures should be prohibited for all readers because they portrayed trickery and magic.28 Alston, though, would admit to some benefits from Hinduism: Unreformed Hinduism is not an ethical religion; and though caste rules have had a certain elementary disciplinary effect, they emphasize (as has already been pointed out) not moral but ceremonial duties.29

Evidently, native texts did not offer much by way of moral training, which would also include, in Benton’s odd formulation, a greater utilitarian attitude towards natural resources – something the Indians would never possess. Benton writes: in developing the resources of the Indian Continent, in furthering trade, commerce and industry, in promoting the material comfort and welfare of its immense population, the Indian Government has a record which falls little short of any ideal that could have been anticipated. That is, it is admitted, a British way of looking at the material aspect of recent advancement; if an Indian were sketching the picture, it would doubtless be of a much more sombre character; Indians have but scant esteem for ideals of that nature; they would be much more readily gratified by a lively interest in their spiritual possessions and a similar strenuous effort to make the best of them.30

Benton here proposes that appropriate moral training was essential to erase the deleterious effects of the vernacular morality that drove colonial subjects to irrational beliefs and acts of superstition. The native reader and English moral training A key strand of the discourse of moral training is manifest as a set of concerns in education histories: the loss of traditional moorings and

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discipline among the natives as a result of English education. This concern implicitly signals the crisis of readership among the natives: having abandoned their Sanskrit, Arabic and other roots, they have taken to English texts via schooling and college education and, as a result, come unmoored from their roots. For instance, a circular issued by the government of India based on the 1882 Education Commission Report cited by Satthianadhan states: It cannot be denied that the general extension in India of education . . . principles has in some measure resulted in the growth of tendencies unfavourable to discipline and favourable to irreverence in the rising genera­tion. Such tendencies are probably inseparable from that emancipation of thought which is one of the most noticeable results of our educational system.31

A decade before this resolution, John Murdoch had opined that, with English education, the Indians were ‘in danger of losing their former good qualities and acquiring new vices’.32 James Johnston, a Glasgow minister, had similarly declared that English education ‘under­mine[s] the religion of the Hindus and offer[s] no substitute in its place’.33 J. Ghosh, the principal of Ananda Mohan College, Calcutta, likewise, noted that Western education ‘loosened the hold on them of the conventions and decencies of Indian society while it did not or rather could not provide regulating principles of equal authority and usefulness’.34 Ghosh was of the opinion that English education had generated a ‘new temper’ that moved beyond the ‘mysticism and the drab monotony’ accrued and escaped from the ‘intellectual fatigue that had followed centuries of almost infertile speculation’.35 Yet, Ghosh said, this emphasis on ‘reasonable thought’ was both ‘an inspiration and a snare’.36 It instilled in the natives a ‘distrust of rapturous emotions’, but did not allow creativity and genius.37 Ghosh also pointed to a likely problem emanating from ­Macaulay’s insistence on ‘English’ morals for Indian subjects: ‘[It] would remove the education from the mainstream of national life and even place them in perpetual conflict with the surge of its deepest impulses and yearnings’.38 J. G. Covernton notes that, for the natives, ‘a smattering of English can be but a dubious benefit, if not distinctly harmful’.39 And, as late as the 1910s, commentators would complain of this unforeseen and unwelcome consequence of English education. R. Nathan of the Indian Civil Service, in his Progress of Education in India 1897/98– 1901/02 (1904), cites a government of India letter of 31 December 1887 to local governments in India: ‘It cannot be denied that the general

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extension in India of education on these principles has resulted in the growth of tendencies unfavourable to discipline and favourable to irreverence in the rising generation.’40 Leonard Alston cites a critic of the education policy: Our Indian education is creating an immense class for whom it has largely loosened the authority and obligation of the past, and who with quickened intellectual capacities crave for a career which we cannot afford to open, for lack of that – moral fibre which we have failed to supply them, in the place of what they have lost. Such a situation is charged with peril; and it cannot possibly stop there. We must go on to furnish those moral and spiritual forces which alone can supplement and justify our education.41

Alston is echoing the Report of the Indian Education Commission (1882), which also stated that Indians had been separated, with deleteri­ous moral effects, from their past due to the English education received: ‘It appears that a good deal of what is sometimes described as moral deterioration in Indian school boys is in reality a departure from the gentle and respectful manners of old times.’42 A. H. Benton points to an unfortunate consequence of English institutions: Indians have been furnished not only with great facilities for obtaining justice, but they have at the same time earned for themselves a great reputation for abusing them, in order to indulge their litigious instincts, and thereby wreak vengeance on their enemies. This indicates, it may be observed, not any defect of the Courts of Justice, but rather an urgent need for improving and strengthening the general conscience.43

Hence, says the Report of the Indian Education Commission, demands are being made to inculcate moral training, via textbooks and discipline.44 Having prepared the ground for constructing the politically apprenticed moral reader, the documents proceed with the task of unpacking the content and purpose of the textual materials needed for this project. There is a clear and unambiguous sense in which the moral reader is to be ‘politically apprenticed’ through disciplining and ensuring an acceptance of authority. Hence the commentators criticise literature and texts that do not preach moral conduct in terms of obedience. The nature of the disobedience as these commentators describe it is illuminating, suggesting as it does that reading is inseparable from politics, and that a national literature in the wrong hands can foment rebellion. Benton refers to the increasing protests among Indian

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students, notably Hindu ones, in the opening pages of his account.45 He later dwells upon this theme of politicisation and discipline. The aim of English education, he writes, was to ‘make the Indian peoples attain a political apprenticeship and ethos’.46 Without adequate moral instruction, writes Benton, English education has ‘expung[ed] many pages of religious traditionary records’.47 The higher education system is geared more towards passing exams, he continues. Then Benton raises his chief concern: ‘hot-headed youths’, who have failed these exams, ‘commit raids and robberies’, with the ‘specious pretext’ that ‘they wish to secure resources in order to liberate India from an alien government’.48 Benton notes that two special tribunals had to be set up to conduct cases against such ‘malcontents’.49 John Murdoch insists that Indian literatures that embody ideas of ‘successful trickery’ and magic should be excluded.50 He then proceeds to recommend the qualities of educational texts and teaching: The defrauding of masters by servants under the name of ‘custom’ should be exposed. Honesty towards government as well as individuals should be taught. . . . Purity in speech and behaviour should be enforced. . . . Respect for authority ought to be instilled. The late Superintendent of Public Schools in New York, remarks: ‘The tendency of the age on which we live is, it is greatly to be feared, to habits of insubordination, irreverence, and disrespect of all established authority, however sacred or venerable’. Men are prone to rush from one extreme to another. ‘Young India’ charges ‘Old India’ with servility. The parent complains of his son’s pride and self-conceit.51

He warns that acquiring the English language alone is not sufficient, but Indian youth should acquire the spirit of the English. He then proceeds on a different note: The Hindu family system, to a certain extent, trains the young to respect age. This system is breaking up. There is great danger lest the good qualities it tended to cherish should be lost. Redoubled efforts should be put forth to prevent this.52

Nathan, in his Progress of Education in India, also cites various reports: Such tendencies [of indiscipline] are probably inseparable from that emancipation of thought which is one of the most noticeable results of our educational system. But though inevitable under the circumstances of this country, they are nevertheless, it will be admitted, tendencies which need control and

150   Pramod K. Nayar direction, so far as control and direction can be supplied by a judicious system of scholastic discipline and of such moral training as our policy of strict neutrality in religious matters enables us to apply.53

An 1888 memorandum from a J. Duncan, appended to Satthi­ anadhan’s history, has this to say: The present state of thought and feeling in this country is a part of that restless, critical, unsubmissive spirit which is at present manifesting itself in all parts of the civilized world, showing itself to be no respector [sic] of institutions, political or religious, however powerful – hallowed by time or sanctified by sacred associations. Indian society is breathing the same social and political atmosphere as all other civilized communities – an atmosphere which happens at present to be deficient in reverence for authority and in willingness to submit to it.54

As it emerges, the moral training that texts from 1882 onwards seek is geared at a readership especially in public schools, whose pupils are beginning to acquire both what Benton terms ‘political apprenticeship’ and ‘irreverence’. The questioning mind of which the commentators speak, they now worry, is turned towards the ‘alien’ government of British India. The Report of the Indian Education Commission states: In all colleges, and under all courses of instruction, the most effective moral training consists in inculcating habits of order, diligence, truthfulness, and due self-respect combined with submission to authority, all of which lessons a good teacher finds useful opportunities of imparting. The formation of such habits is promoted by the study of the lives and actions of great men, such as the student finds in the course of his English reading; and, it may also be hoped, by the silent influence upon his character of constant intercourse with teachers whom he is able to regard with respect and affection.55

Alfred Croft, director of public instruction in Bengal, in his commentary on the Report, notes: Nor, again was there any difference of opinion as to the moral value of the regard for law and order, of the respect for superiors, of the obedience, regularity, and attention to duty which every well-conducted college was calculated to promote.56

And later: [Students are] growing impatient of control, and are losing even the form of respect for authority . . . the causes lie . . . but chiefly in the peculiar

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conditions of Hindu society at the present day, and the circumstances which permit and even encourage a spirit of lawlessness in the young. There is great difference of opinion as to the remedial measures to be employed; some holding that all such measures must be unavailing until Hindu society has worked out its own reformation; others that we may usefully have recourse to systematic moral training, the introduction of a boarding school system, and the adoption of stricter rules for enforcing discipline.57

Exactly how this moral training to instil discipline could be undertaken became the subject of much debate. The Commission considered a moral training textbook. Among its recommendations were: ‘That an attempt be made to prepare a moral text-book based upon the fundamental principles of natural religion, such as may be taught in all Government and non-Government colleges’. Moreover, ‘The Principal or one of the Professors in each Government and aided college deliver to each of the college classes in every session a series of lectures on the duties of a man and a citizen’.58 However, notes Croft, there was no agreement as to either of the two recommendations: ‘Possibly no two professors would agree as to what this duty [of man and citizen] consisted in and it was clearly undesirable to introduce into schools and colleges discussions on subjects that opened out such a very wide field of debate’.59 Due to the lack of consensus, Croft concludes, the idea of the moral textbook and the idea of the lectures were both dropped. Since the government was committed to religious neutrality, and since morality could not be taught without subscribing to some religious text/ideas or other, it was not seen as feasible. Without a religious basis, a moral text-book could be little better than a collection of copy-book maxims. The course of a student’s reading and the influence of his professors were far more potent factors in his moral education, and had produced results in the matters of honesty, truthfulness, and general good-conduct, such as no text-book of morality could achieve. . . . [The government of India] disallowed the recommendations of the Commission on the ground that the introduction of the proposed text-book would raise a variety of burning questions without doing any tangible good.60

In place of the moral textbook, the Report said, the regular classroom textbook and lectures would serve the purpose: ‘the ordinary reading-books used in each class in most cases conveyed, and in all could be made to convey, lessons in conduct suited to the understanding of students at different stages of moral growth’.61

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These recommendations, and the debates around them, form an interesting discourse in themselves, for several reasons. First, the recommendations and the debates see pedagogy and reading texts as integral to the formation of the colonial subject. Built into this discourse was the assumption of a subjectivity that was malleable through moral instruction, including classroom work, general disciplining by the educationists (at all levels) and textbooks. Second, the discussion veered around the practice of moral training based on ‘foundational’ truths gleaned from various religions. Here, it was noted, the native reader is likely to be confused for the following reasons. This is again from Croft: As to colleges the question was for the present dropped; and indeed it seemed to be felt that there was some incongruity in prescribing a compendium of moral precepts for students who, in their college lectures on moral science and the ethical systems, were critically analysing the foundations on which the very nature of moral obligation rested.62

This second question was more than a concern: it was an ideological battleground for the debate around native readership itself. This questioning mind, accompanied by a new political consciousness, as a result of the English education system, is a point Kashinath Trimbak Telang, a judge of the Bombay High Court, raises as part of his dissenting minutes to the Report of the Indian Education Commission. Telang asks why the Commission made the recommendation quoted above that the ‘Principal or . . . Professors . . . deliver . . . a series of lectures on the duties of a man and a citizen’. Telang argues that the effects of state education on the morals of (Indian) students has been ‘mischievous, not to say disastrous’.63 He continues: if collegiate education is to subserve one of its most important purposes, and is to cultivate the intelligence so as to enable it to weigh arguments and form independent judgments, then these moral lessons present an entirely different aspect. At that stage, it is almost entirely unnecessary to instruct the intelligence, while it is of great use to discipline the will and to cultivate the feelings. The proposed lectures will, I fear, have little or no effect in this latter direction; while in some individual cases their effect in the former direction, being meant to operate not on the intellect but on conduct, may be the reverse of that which is desired.64

Telang is also sceptical about the efficacy of lectures on the ‘duties of a man and citizen’: If the Professor’s lectures tend to teach the pupils the duty of submission to the views of Government without a murmur of dissatisfaction, there is

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sure to come up a set of Liberal irreconcileables who will complain that Government is endeavouring to enslave the intellect of the nation. If the Professor’s lectures are supposed to lead in the opposite direction, there will be some Tory irreconcileables ready to spring up and say, even more loudly and quite as erroneously as they are saying it now, that the colleges supported from State revenues are hotbeds of sedition. This is almost certain to occur in times of excitement.65

Telang is likely gesturing at those students who have begun to question the legitimacy of the British government in India, and to whom lectures on ‘submission’ to authority are unlikely to be received with any degree of warmth. Ghosh notes that English education gave the Bengali people the ‘idea of nationality’.66 The educated would seek to build a new national­ism, even though a synthesis of old (Indian) and new (English) ideas would have served the purpose better.67 Gooroo Dass Banerjee, who would become the vice chancellor of Calcutta University, denies the English education system taught any morals to Indians: We are told that English education has not only given us useful knowledge which was unknown to us, but has taught us indispensable morals which we had not before. Now whilst we candidly and thankfully admit that English education has given us an insight into vast stores of literary, historical, and scientific knowledge which we shall have to learn for years and years, by which we are deriving inestimable benefits, I gravely question if it has given us a single rule of sound morality which we or our forefathers in the days of Manu [Manusmriti] had not.68

None of the Indian commentators deify either the proposed moral training or the moral citizen. Rather, what they imply is a critically astute readership, with a burgeoning sense of nationalism and national identity. Banerjee, of course, is reclaiming a cultural nationalism, as a response to the advocacy of English education. The lessons proposed by committees created for this purpose would have to be moral but not religious, in keeping with the government principle of religious neutrality (a much-discussed subject at the time). Thus J. G. Covernton, who served as the director of public instruction in Bombay, notes about the Bombay Presidency: it was specially laid down in this connection that to furnish religious books formed no part of the design though this was not intended to preclude the supply of moral tracts or books of moral tendency ‘which without interfering with the religions sentiments of any person may be calculated to enlarge the understanding and improve the character’.69

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Having examined the dominant discourses that construct the moral reader, I now turn to a source text of sorts, Covernton’s Vernacular Reading Books in the Bombay Presidency (1906). Covernton’s is the only contemporary study I know of that discusses the informing principles behind the textbooks and their organisation and, in the process, reveals the ideologies immanent to colonial education discourse and the implied relationship between texts and readers. Worrying about the moral training to be imparted through these textbooks to their student readers, the discourse focused on producing suitable colonial citizens. The job before the Committee appointed by the Bombay government was, as Covernton describes it: [The] revision of the vernacular reading books used in the Bombay Presi­ dency. This revision was carried out through a Committee appointed by the Bombay Government and presided over by the writer. The period covered by the Committee’s official activities ranged from October 1903 to March 1905. . . . The books to be revised were those intended mainly for primary pupils but also used in middle and high Anglo-vernacular schools and in Training Colleges for primary teachers. Written in four different tongues, according to the nationalities which they served (viz., in Marathi, Gujarati, Sindhi and Kanarese) they consisted of five distinct graduated series, the past evolution of which had been a somewhat lengthy process moulded by the idiosyncrasies and educational circumstances of each nationality.70

The diversity and emphasis on local identity were, as Covernton notes, a problem, or ‘idiosyncrasy’. The Committee had Indian authors but the overall control was in the hands of a European educationist. In his introductory remarks, Covernton first outlines the principles, assumptions and ideas of the Committee tasked with revising the vernacular texts. He states that the natives are aware of their heritage and, while not averse to reading Western texts, ‘in language and in literature, in ethics and in religion the vast bulk of its [India’s] population is true to the Oriental ideals of its past’.71 The Committee was to produce moral books but without offending the religious sentiments of any community and ‘to furnish religious books formed no part of the design’.72 For the elementary schools, the Committee was to prepare vernacular texts translated from English or written by Indian authors in the vernacular, but from English sources. For advanced levels, the texts were to be in the English language alone.73 Later, he furnishes a list of books published since 1820, in order to map a history of textbook production in the Presidency. After this we begin to see come into play the discourse of moral training as aligned

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with specific ideologies of imperial control, the civilisational mission and political education. Covernton notes that these texts tried to standardise native-language scripts and their orthography.74 The Committee wanted uniformity but not of a ‘mechanical’ kind.75 It wanted local emphasis but not too much variety. As Covernton puts it: ‘too much local patriotism and local colour’ meant ‘hindrances to efficient organization’.76 The problem arose when histories were written in the vernacular. Each ‘nationality’ (as he calls Gujarati, Sindhi and others) was intent on ‘possessing and glorifying its own historic past’, leading to a ‘striking diversity’.77 To address the concern over these burgeoning ethnic identities and diversity, which would have constituted a different order of political awareness among the natives, the textbooks had to offer a palliative. Echoing Murdoch’s comment cited above about not including stories of deceit and trickery, Covernton claims the Committee’s principle when dealing with entirely local myths, legends and such narratives was a simple one: And in all stories the Committee’s aim has been to palliate nothing ignoble and to magnify nothing that good men of whatever creed would deem unworthy of praise. More particularly has care been exercised in the selection of legends and fairy tales and myths.78

In the Indian context this was all the more pertinent because ‘myth is still informed with vital force, and can propagate its kind with undiminished vigour. Here still the part is often greater than the whole, and mythology identifies itself with Religion and works wonders in its name’.79 The Committee decided, therefore, that ‘Mythical tales if inserted should deal with the gods rather as historic or legendary personalities . . . their superhuman activities should not be presented as facts or verities a belief in which is essential for the faithful’.80 Equally, the aims of history lessons, ‘apart from their general objects of interest and instruction, should be not political, but ethical’ and the duty of the teacher should be to ‘impartially . . . hold up examples of conduct for guidance and warning, not to disseminate a partisan propaganda’.81 And current politics should be left out of textbooks: Detailed points of current politics and the exercise of what may be termed political logic, whether inductive or deductive, should be left unessayed. On the other hand, easy lessons on citizenship, the rights of the state and the individual, etc., should be provided in the highest books, and a steadfast spirit of simple loyalty should be implicitly cultivated.82

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Where does one find examples that teach appropriate conduct? Covernton claims the Committee had the answer: ‘In this last respect more can be done explicitly through the medium of reading lessons in geography, especially those which deal with the British Empire in general, and the British Isles and colonies in particular.’83 The task of such textbooks was clearly to reduce the emphasis on local histories, myths and stories, except those which demonstrated the linkage of the subcontinent to Britain for the purpose of moral training and political apprenticeship. Covernton writes that these lessons are useful too in another way, since they take the native inhabitant of India out of the narrow compass of his own native ideals and experience and teach him the moral and material greatness of those other countries with which the destiny of his own is now irrevocably united. But this is not enough. In order to enable him to realize his place in the world sketches of those of the great European nations that count or have counted as Asiatic powers (e.g., the Portuguese and Dutch, France, Russia and Turkey) as well as of the chief native kingdoms of Asia are desirable. The treatment may be historical or geographical or a mixture of both, but special care should be taken to bring out the national characteristics of the people concerned and, where necessary, to draw instructive comparisons and contrasts between such countries and India.84

This emphasis on teaching world history, the great arts of other nations, modern European civilisations and the mandatory reading on the British Empire and its peoples – ‘Why the British People Are Great’, was one such lesson, according to Covernton85 – ensured that the textbooks did not allow a political apprenticeship founded on national, cultural or a geospatial identity. Also included were lessons on the technological-industrial achievements of the Empire in India.86 The lessons remained gendered, however: The girls’ readers are simpler in general treatment and narrower in the range of subjects than the boys’. The wider topics of history, literature and science are of little concern to vernacular girls, for whom (apart from the practical demands of domestic economy) biographies illustrating the good deeds of great and virtuous women, accounts of their native land and its distinguished sons, ethical stories and lessons inculcating modesty and sobriety of conduct and demeanour, together with poems of a moral and natural religious tendency are held by native public opinion to be more fitting pabulum. Such have been provided, but the Committee has also introduced geographical lessons dealing with Series, important natural phenomena, with the authorities of the Presidency and India, and with the British Empire. Lessons too on the King Emperor and his Consort and family as well as on Queen Victoria, have not been forgotten.87

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The emphasis, then, was on India’s place in the larger globe as an instantiation of its incorporation into a global capitalist framework made possible by imperial trade, but also into a certain kind of modernity driven by colonialism, as Talwalker notes. This is a prescient reading, but there is more to be said. The readers of these texts were meant to acquire models of conduct through the accounts of English history and find an identity not within the geographical or cultural frames of one’s traditional references but as one of many nations. The textbooks, in Covernton’s reading, then effectively, and necessarily, question the role of both cultural nationalism (which relies on myths, legends and histories) and geo-national identity (with too much local colour and local patriotism, as he described it earlier). The textbooks, although produced in the vernacular, had to be ‘Englished’ and were directed at expanding the knowledge of the world for the native. The enforced expansion, with the tutoring of (hi)stories of the Empire and the world, ensured that any political apprenticeship would be built around information, models and attitudes derived from elsewhere. The moral reader who was also politically apprenticed, then, was one who, through the consumption of these textbooks at the school level, would see beyond her or his country, culture and location. With their emphasis on science, ‘object lessons’ (about everyday things), world history, geography and cultural achievements, Covernton implies that the texts were not intended to be India-centric. The morally trained reader was one whose political interests had stopped being about national identity. Conclusion Texts like Covernton’s, Murdoch’s or any of the histories of education in India are crucial for us to understand how the native, the colonised subject, was perceived and constructed within these discourses. Discourses of native ‘improvement’ were entangled with discourses, from different or even the same quarters, of native political rebellion, of native departure from their otherwise quiescent character, and other similar ‘dangerous’ outcomes of reading English works. Reading English books would, such entangled discourses embodied in critical commentaries and histories note, empower the Indian reader to fit better into the British Empire, and as colonial subjects into the larger comity of nations. A moral Indian reader was constructed as a particular model of a political Indian, and these commentaries help us see the process of this construction even in the absence of direct

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readerly records. Objections and dissent filed by Indians – in, say, the Report of the Indian Education Commission – offer us some insights into the ways in which the readers dealt with the prescribed (and proscribed) texts. But it is in the commentaries by English and Indian observers that we come to see the models of collective readership that the Empire wanted in its subjects.

Notes   1. A. H. Benton, Indian Moral Instruction and Caste Problems: Solutions (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1917), p. 92.   2. See Stephanie Newell, ‘Articulating Empire: Newspaper Readerships in Colonial West Africa’, New Formations, 73 (2011), pp. 26–42.   3. Sudipa Topdar, ‘Duties of a “Good Citizen”: Colonial Secondary School Textbook Policies in Late Nineteenth-century India’, South Asian History and Culture, 6:3 (2015), pp. 417–39 (p. 420).  4. Ibid.  5. Clare Talwalker, ‘Colonial Dreaming: Textbooks in the Mythology of “Primitive Accumulation”’, Dialectical Anthropology, 29 (2005), pp. 1–24 (p. 23).   6. Robert Darnton, ‘Literary Surveillance in the British Raj’, Book History, 4 (2001), pp. 133–76.   7. Tim Allender, Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820–1932 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).   8. David Finkelstein, ‘Book Circulation and Reader Responses in Colonial India’, in Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond (eds), Books Without Borders, Vol. II: Perspectives from South Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 100–11 (p. 108).  9. Christian Lee Novetzke, The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 28. 10. E. Cram, Melanie Loehwing and John Louis Lucaites, ‘Civic Sights: Theorizing Deliberative and Photographic Publicity in the Visual Public Sphere’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 49:3 (2016), pp. 227–53. 11. See Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, ‘Introduction’, in Lynn Zastoupi and Martin Moir (eds), The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist–Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843 (Surrey: Curzon, 1999), pp. 1–72. 12. Education Commission, Bombay, Evidence Taken Before the Provincial Committee and Memorials Addressed to the Education Commission, Vol. II (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1881), unpaginated. 13. Ibid., p. 384.

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14. Ibid., p. 245. 15. Ibid., p. 268. 16. Benton, Indian Moral Instruction, p. 3. 17. C. E. Tyndale-Biscoe, Character Building in Kashmir (Salisbury: Church Missionary Society, 1920), pp. 4–7. 18. Report of the Indian Education Commission (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1882), p. 127. 19. Syed Mahmood, History of English Education in India, Its Rise, Develop­ ment, Progress, Present Condition and Prospects. Being A Narrative of the Various Phases of Educational Policy and Measures Adopted Under the British Rule from its Beginning to the Present Period (1781 to 1893) (Aligarh: M.A-O. College, 1895), p. 53. 20. Ibid., p. 54. 21. S. Satthianadhan, History of Education in the Madras Presidency (Madras: Srinivas, Varadachari and Co., 1894), appendix H, unpaginated. 22. I am grateful to Anna Kurian for this term. 23. ‘Minute by the Hon’ble T.B. Macaulay, dated the 2nd February 1835’, in H. Sharp (ed.), Selections from Educational Records Part 1: 1781–1839 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1920), pp. 109–10. 24. Benton, Indian Moral Instruction, pp. 97–8. 25. Leonard Alston, Education and Citizenship in India (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1910), pp. 51–2. 26. F. W. Thomas, The History and Prospects of British Education in India (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell and Co.,; London: George Bell and Sons, 1891), p. 119. 27. Satthianadhan, History of Education, p. 4. 28. John Murdoch, Hints on Government Education in India, with Special Reference to School Books (Madras: C. Foster, 1873), p. 61. 29. Alston, Education and Citizenship, p. 52. 30. Benton, Indian Moral Instruction, p. 3. 31. Satthianadhan, History of Education, p. 282. 32. Murdoch, Hints on Government Education, p. 58. 33. James Johnston, Our Educational Policy in India (Edinburgh: John Maclaren, 1879), p. 37. 34. J. Ghosh, Higher Education in Bengal Under British Rule (Calcutta: The Book Company, 1926), p. 161. 35. Ibid., Higher Education, pp. 70–1. 36. Ibid., p. 70. 37. Ibid., p. 71. 38. Ibid., p. 94. 39. J. G. Covernton, Vernacular Reading Books in the Bombay Presidency (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906), p. 16. 40. R. Nathan, Progress of Education in India 1897/98–1901/02 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1904), vol. II, p. 419. 41. Alston, Education and Citizenship, p. 124.

160   Pramod K. Nayar 42. Report of the Indian Education Commission, p. 128. 43. Benton, Indian Moral Instruction, p. 2. 44. Report of the Indian Education Commission, p. 127. 45. Benton, Indian Moral Instruction, p. 4. 46. Ibid., p. 92. 47. Ibid., p. 95. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Murdoch, Hints on Government Education, p. 61. 51. Ibid., p. 62. 52. Ibid., p. 63. 53. Nathan, Progress of Education, vol. II, p. 419. 54. Satthianadhan, History of Education, appendix I. 55. Report of the Indian Education Commission, p. 307. 56. Alfred Croft, Review of Education in India in 1886, with Special Reference to the Report of the Education Commission (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1888), p. 331. 57. Ibid., p. 334. 58. Croft quoting the recommendations of the Commission ibid., p. 331. 59. Ibid., p. 332. 60. Ibid. 61. Croft quoting the recommendations of the Commission ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Report of the Indian Education Commission, p. 610. 64. Ibid., p. 611. 65. Ibid., p. 612. 66. Ghosh, Higher Education, p. 205. 67. Ibid., p. 207. 68. Gooroo Dass Banerjee, Reminiscences, Speeches and Writings, compiled by Upendra Chandra Banerjee (Calcutta: Narkeldanga, 1927), p. 21. 69. Covernton, Vernacular Reading Books, p. 25. 70. Ibid., p. 1. 71. Ibid., p. 25. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid, pp. 30–1. 75. Ibid., p. 41. 76. Ibid., p. 39. 77. Ibid., p. 43. 78. Ibid., p. 45. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., p. 46. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., p. 47.

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84. 85. 86. 87.

Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., pp. 48–50, 75. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., pp. 80–1.

Chapter 8

The ‘Pleasure and Profit’ of Reading: Adolescents and Juvenile Popular Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century Trudi Abel

In early December 1926, Homer Moffett, the son of a small-town Illinois lawyer, sat down to write to his favourite author. He placed a sheet of paper into his typewriter and commenced: Dear Mr Chapman; I am a boy twelve years old, but I have read every one of your Radio Boy’s [sic] books eleven times, and I will probebly [sic] start to read them all over. XXXX. I have made a radio crystal set, and I will start on a one[-]tube set soon, I do not see how the Radio boy’s [sic] managed to make big radio sets. . . . Are you writing another book? I hope so, because it means more enjoyment for me.1

Sixty-two years later, I found young Homer’s letter in an attic along with other letters penned by early twentieth-century readers of juvenile series fiction. The envelope (with Homer’s return address) bore the traces of the author to whom the letter was sent – a pencil-scrawled note read ‘Boy Answered’. I was thrilled to find this cache of manuscript letters under the eaves of the roof. To me, they both raised questions (what did the author write back?) and promised to open up a way of understanding how historical adolescent readers engaged with books and made meaning of the texts that they read in the early twentieth century. Over the past three decades, scholars of reading have recovered the reading experiences of actual historical readers, as Jonathan Rose has shown, through the creative mining of diverse sources such as police records, probate and booksellers’ records, sociological surveys, book club records, memoirs and diaries of ordinary readers, commonplace books, library registers, letters to the editors, oral histories and fan mail.2 For scholars trying to understand the experience of reading in historical contexts, each set of sources offers benefits and challenges. 162

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‘Fan mail’, historian Clarence Karr notes, ‘is an important, often overlooked primary source for the history of reading. Whereas the evidence found in diaries and letters is fragmentary, collections of letters from readers provide a concentrated mass of responses to a corpus of works.’3 For Karr, the power of fan mail as a source is the way this intimate correspondence ‘reveals a private world removed from public observation’.4 Fan mail also has its potential flaws. Authors might curate their letters. Some might preserve a portion of correspondence, others destroy their communications. Rose acknowledges that fan mail can provide an ‘intimate portrait of a particular author’s reading public, provided we remember that these samples over-represent enthusiasts and under-represent disgusted or lukewarm readers’.5 A central question for historians of reading is, how did readers in the past make sense of texts? This chapter analyses over 1,100 letters from adolescents who read juvenile fiction series books created by Edward Stratemeyer and his literary syndicate from the 1900s through to the 1920s.6 Stratemeyer authored many books under his own name, but he also adopted a rationalised system of literary production modelled on the nineteenth-century dime novel industry. In this ‘fiction factory’ system, Stratemeyer outlined stories, distributed these to ghost writers and edited the texts. He then issued the completed texts in a series under one of the eighty-nine pseudonyms that he owned. Like Homer Moffett, most twenty-first-century readers and scholars would not understand that Allen Chapman was one of Strate­meyer’s pseudonym­ ous authors. Because Stratemeyer feared that public knowledge of his fictive authors would repel his audience, he shrouded his business in secrecy. Some readers now recognise the names Carolyn Keene and Franklin W. Dixon as the respective pseudonymous authors of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series, but not everyone recognises that Stratemeyer created, and owned, these authorial entities as well. Who were Stratemeyer’s correspondents? What can they teach us? A significant number of writers gave their ages and provided their home addresses. Most children wrote from isolated farming communities, small towns, new suburbs and metropolises across the United States. One eight-year-old boy sent his letter from a YMCA in China, while several girls wrote from Canada. The youngest, a six-year-old, printed in block letters; the older correspondents wrote in cursive script or typed their correspondence. Most writers were between ten and fifteen years old. Many young people wrote on a parent’s stationery. Where children used the family stationery, we sometimes know that their fathers were, for example, proprietors of small-town

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department stores, stove dealers, local government officials, lawyers and insurance salesmen. Most of the fan-letter writers were middle class. But not all readers came from these backgrounds. Louis Botelho, the son of a Portuguese immigrant textile spinner, wrote that ‘I always read military life and college stories because I love military academy’s [sic] and colleges but I never can go to both because I am not rich’.7 The invention of adolescence By the turn of the twentieth century, American society required new skills from its workers as the nature of employment changed to be more professional, technical and corporate. As a result, greater and greater numbers of children were barred from the workforce so that they could gain an education. The implementation of child labour and compulsory education legislation expanded public school attendance in the 1910s and 1920s, so that by 1930 over 40 per cent of seventeen-year-olds attended school. The prolongation of education led to the creation of a new demographic entity – the adolescent. Historian Joseph Kett notes that American society responded to the ‘massive reclassification of young people as adolescents’ by creating institutions to ‘segregate them from casual contacts with adults’.8 A celebration of the child coincided with this ‘invention of adolescence’. Birthdays came to be observed with greater regularity and much fanfare. These celebrations manifested the rise in age consciousness and the growth in individualism. Children’s merchandising came into vogue during the first two decades of the twentieth century. ‘Before 1890’, William Leach notes, ‘most American children wore, ate, and played with what their parents had made or prepared for them. There were almost no domestically manufactured goods for children.’ The American toy business grew phenomenally in these same years: its output increased by 1,300 per cent between 1905 and 1920.9 As toys proliferated, so did books for juveniles. When he began his literary syndicate in 1905, Stratemeyer had ten series in the marketplace. Between 1906 and his death in 1930, he created nearly eighty-five more.10 Edward Stratemeyer had a deep understanding of American adoles­cents. He recognised the significance of their changed economic position. Though they were no longer producers, he believed that they still had an economic role to play. Attitudes about children and money had changed – the proliferation of allowances gave youngsters money with which they could enter the marketplace. Stratemeyer created

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a new book for this new audience. He created ‘the fifty-center’, a hardcover series book which sold for a half or even a third of the cost of competing reading materials. Stratemeyer’s innovation meant that the literary marketplace offered hardcover books ‘within the limit of the child’s own pocket money’.11 In 1910, he expanded his line by offering books for adolescent girls. The Outdoor Girls In 1913, Stratemeyer created the Outdoor Girls series under his pseudonym Laura Lee Hope. The books had cloth covers with an illustration of three girls sitting at their campsite on a lake shoreline. Their image is framed by a canoe in the foreground and a tent and cooking equipment in the background (Plate 1). The books promised adventure and freedom to their readers. An advertisement in the end pages of The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale described the series as comprising ‘the tales of the various adventures participated in by a group of bright, fun-loving, up-to-date girls who have a common bond in their fondness for outdoor life, camping, travel and adventure’.12 Thus, admen at the series’ publisher, Grosset and Dunlap, promoted the books – The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car, The Outdoor Girls in the Air and The Outdoor Girls on a Hike – as adventures played out in the contemporary world of youth. Scores of fan letters suggest that many female readers used the books as scripts for action and adventure. Marion Jeannette Du’rand, a reader from East Orange, New Jersey, shared details in her letter to Laura Lee Hope: Three other very dear friends of mine, and I, of course, play that we are the Outdoor Girls. Julia is Grace. Margaret is Betty, Sara is Amy and I of course am Mollie. . . . We have wonderful times, which are all due to you, and hope soon to go camping and try to be real outdoor girls and do some of the things that they did, and go to the places they go to.13

A number of readers wrote to Hope to say that they had formed Outdoor Girls clubs, patterned on the fictional one. Much of the boating, motoring and flying in which the fictional Outdoor Girls participated was made possible by the fact that each girl came from relatively well-to-do backgrounds and that the characters were, after all, fictional. Thus, what was plausible for the fictitious and privileged characters would probably have been beyond the means of most of Hope’s readers, who were largely children from

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middle-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds. None of the young fans wrote of their attempts to take flying lessons or long car trips, although several planned outdoor excursions close to their homes. Betty Lawrence McGuire of Columbus, Ohio, shared the dreams and aspirations that she had for her club: Dear Laura Lee Hope, I have let some of the girls in my class at school read the Out Door Girls and they like them so much that four of us started a[n] Out Door Girl Club[.] [N]ext Saturday if it is a nice day we are going on a[n] all day hike, and on another Saturday we are going to Edge Mont [sic] Park to a cottage that belongs to one of the Girls and horse back ridding [sic] another. We are going to give shows and things till we have enough money to rent a cottage at Lake Erie and maybe one at Buckey Lake, and I think that we will have loads of fun all due to you.14

For these readers, the Outdoor Girls books fostered or reinforced their notions of independence and their interest in outdoor activities and physical exercise. Though the series was advertised as ‘adventures’, the books also incorporated a number of romantic subplots, which engaged many readers. In this sense, the series reflected Stratemeyer’s traditional views regarding etiquette, courtship and women’s proper role. In interviews after her father’s death, Stratemeyer’s eldest daughter, Harriet, revealed that she battled her father for the privilege of working after she had finished her college course. Stratemeyer was a religious man, steeped in bourgeois Victorian values, who sent Harriet to Wellesley College, but he refused to allow his college graduate to work at his New York office, so he brought manuscripts home for her to edit.15 The content of the Stratemeyer Syndicate series books reflect many of Stratemeyer’s traditional views, particularly with regard to women and work. Fan letters reveal that a significant number of readers avidly read the Outdoor Girls series as romances. In January 1924, fourteen-year-old Frederica Trapnell wrote to Hope to request that certain adjustments to the plot be made in subsequent volumes. ‘Dear Miss Hope’, Frederica began, I have read your interesting books about the Outdoor Girls. I feel as though Betty, Mollie, Grace and Amy are my own friends and I am very interested in Allen. . . . In the last book Betty and Allen were getting along famously and I hope as do my two sisters and our friends that you will write several more books about our dear friends. Please have Betty and Allen get married and tell us all about their homes (of course we want

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Amy and Will to be united as well as Grace and Mollie to find the ‘right man’)[.] I hope you will write and tell us some more about them as soon as possible. I lie awake at nights wondering what will happen next to our four Outdoor Girls and their best boy friends. We remain your faithful readers and admirers[,] Frederica Trapnell (age 14½) Virginia Trapnell (11¾) & Eveline Trapnell (10)16

What seems particularly apparent from Frederica’s letter is that all three of the Trapnell sisters desired the marriage of the characters.17 This amorous interest engrossed a number of readers and apparently afforded them great pleasure. But it also created in these same readers a certain anxiety based on the uneasy coexistence of two conflicting desires. On the one hand, most readers wanted their favourite heroines to marry; on the other, they held out the hope that the adventures would continue. ‘Dear Miss Hope’, Phyllis Stepler wrote, ‘even if Betty Nelson did marry Allen Washburn please continue the series, as I as well as thousands of others my own age, adore them’.18 An overwhelming number of readers voiced their desires for narrative closure in the form of marriage. Yet many of these same fans believed that the marriage of the characters would end the series, thus foreclosing any further adventures and romances. Thirteen-year-old Vyvyen Hamilton expressed this anxiety in her letter to Hope: I was sorry when Betty got married because I thought you might stop writing any more. So I wrote this little note to ask you please to write one more book at least. . . . Please write some more ‘Outdoor Girls’ books about the girls’ marriages and their children.19

Those readers who did not fear that the marriage of the characters would cause the direct demise of their favourite series had other fears. They wondered whether it was possible for married characters to enjoy adventures. They assumed that it would be exceptionally difficult for married women characters to lead the exciting and adventurous lives that the young and single Betty, Mollie, Amy and Grace experienced. Jane Hartman of Louisville, Kentucky sensed that marrying the characters would complicate the plot of the adventure books, but she desired the marriage resolution nonetheless and recommended that Hope follow this bit of advice: ‘Please Miss Hope write one more book at least and tell us who “Mollie” marries. We would also like . . . the married girls to leave their husbands at home and go for one last frolic.’20

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The fan letters of these readers reveal that the Outdoor Girls series amused and engaged its audience by providing them with a way of representing, producing and resolving their anxieties. The main perpetrator of tension was the literary practice of continually deferring weddings and marriages. In the first fourteen volumes of the series, which were published from 1913 to 1924, each of Hope’s heroines is a young single girl who is friendly with all four of the boy chums. At first it is only Betty who seems to be romantically inclined, but then, gradually, the other characters become enamoured of their male friends. For eleven years, Stratemeyer suspended the marriage resolution. During those years, Hope received numerous letters from anguished readers. ‘Two steady readers’ of the Outdoor Girls series enquired whether Miss Hope had ‘written any book concerning the marriagement of the Outdoor Girls’.21 They advised that if such a book had not been written, it should be. Other readers made the specific request of Hope to please write a book in which Betty and Allen get married.22 Hope finally married Betty and Allen in the last three pages of The Outdoor Girls at Cape Cod, which was published in 1924. Once Betty was married, she left the club and a new flurry of letters commenced, for the readers of the Outdoor Girls series were still in suspense about the futures of the remaining characters. A Maine reader, Ethel M. Phillips, asked Hope to please write three more Outdoor Girls books and ‘gradually hav[e] each girl get married’. She continued, ‘I am sure the girls would appreciate it very much’.23 Another reader asked Hope to ‘finish the boys & girls “up”’, adding almost parenthetically that she meant the characters should ‘get married’.24 The rise of the New Woman Historians such as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Nancy Cott have charted the rise of the ‘New Woman’ in the late nineteenth century. They have noted how highly educated, economically autonomous women eschewed marriage and came to achieve a degree of political power. They have also shown that critics charged these women with being ‘unnaturally sexual’ and that, eventually, the public condemnations led to marked changes in women’s behaviour in the 1910s and 1920s. Marriage increased among the post-feminist generation while, at the same time, the percentage of women who attended graduate and professional schools and who pursued careers dropped proportionately.25

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Concomitant with this retreat from professional prominence and economic autonomy was the rise of what Mary Ryan calls the ‘hetero­ sexual imperative’. She argues that ‘ideolog[ical] and institutional changes conspired to break down the homosocial bonds of the nineteenth century and erect in their place a tight union between pairs of males and females. . . . Heterosexual bonding was judged so imperative’ that the adolescent years in ‘the female life cycle were devoted to its cultivation’.26 Ryan notes how a number of different facets of popular culture reinforced these emerging heterosexual norms. Using the Lynds’ study of Middletown, she asserts that neighbourhood theatres served their adolescent clientele ‘potent doses of female and masculine stereotypes, while the love stories nourished the romantic fantasies and heterosexual consciousness of young girls’.27 Like the motion pictures, the Outdoor Girls series served to reinforce these emerging heterosexual norms. The characters in the book gradually moved from their homosocial worlds into hetero­ sexual pairings. The fan letters illustrate how deeply apprehensive young female readers felt about making that move themselves. Many young readers used the books to represent and resolve their anxieties about the tension between increased societal pressure to marry and their own emerging independence. While, at times, the traditional role of women is invoked by and indeed animated by the series, an analysis of the fan letters shows us that another group of readers actively read this series to open up more possibilities for themselves. These young women read a future for themselves as single, economically independent career women writers. To many readers, the Outdoor Girls series as well as Hope’s other books materially represented the achievements of a successful woman writer. The book – the corporeal object – the assemblage of some 200 pages within cloth covers – had great significance for this constituency of readers. For these adolescent girls, the book served as a marker of an author’s existence. The scores of books in the Outdoor Girls series, Bobbsey Twins series, Blythe Girls series, Bunny Brown series and Six Little Bunker series provided tangible evidence for many readers that an exceptionally talented and popular female author – Laura Lee Hope – was hard at work. The fan letters indicate that a number of Outdoor Girls readers desired to establish a supportive friendship with Hope through correspondence. These girls aspired to be writers, and they looked to Hope as a model for what they might achieve in the future. Numerous girls addressed Laura Lee Hope as ‘My dear Favorite Author’, ‘My Dear Miss Hope’ and ‘Dear Friend authoress’

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and closed with such salutations as ‘your friend in book land’, ‘your loving admirer’ and ‘your loving bookworm’.28 Since the book jackets, advertising copy and biographical dictionaries of the period lacked information on Laura Lee Hope, readers were left to construct their own image of this prolific writer. How the readers wrote to Hope and thereby constructed this author is more important than who she actually was. Through compiling the assumptions that girls made about Hope in their letters to her, I can present a composite sketch of this influential author. To her audience, Hope appeared to be single: the readers, while sometimes uncertain, always addressed Hope as ‘Miss’ not ‘Mrs’.29 Her fans considered Hope to be a ‘famous’ ‘authoress’ who had established herself in her ‘career’ and had reaped success through her writing of ‘popular’, in fact bestselling, fiction.30 Many fans believed Hope had a fascinating ‘life story’ and they wrote to request an account of it. The fans ascribed characteristics to Laura Lee Hope that they felt would be true.31 In their reading, Hope emerges as a model of the New Woman – she is perceived by her fans as a single, economically independent career woman. Readers looking for a model of the New Woman could not, however, find her in the Outdoor Girls series, for all the female characters are either married matronly figures or young adolescent girls enjoying adventures but looking forward to marriage and a settled life. In this sense, there are no models for career women in the texts. Even so, readers who wanted to narrate their futures in ways not offered by the texts often created a capable, individualistic author out of Laura Lee Hope, tried to establish a relationship with her through correspondence, and consciously emulated her. Thus, out of the bounds of the text, working from the authorial presence created by three words – Laura Lee Hope – many readers read a future for themselves as writers. As an astute literary businessman, Stratemeyer chose to issue the Outdoor Girls books under a woman’s name. What is fascinating for us, in light of the readers’ responses, is that the fictive author, Laura Lee Hope, held so much significance for many readers. While Stratemeyer resisted his eldest daughter’s attempts to enter the working world, and while he designed girls’ series that excluded career women and highlighted romance and the marriage of heroines, he was nonetheless forced by what he perceived to be the workings of the market to issue girls’ series books with a woman’s name on the cover. Ironic­ ally, his fictive creation Laura Lee Hope came to embody for many of her readers the independent career woman – that character who is noticeably absent from the pages of the texts themselves.

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This study of actual historical readers’ interactions with books reveals that some girls produced meanings that mirrored the author’s beliefs: they read the books as romances, while others used the adventures as scripts for their outdoor pursuits. The letters also reveal that readers could produce readings that contradicted the author’s intent. Some historical readers actively, and rather self-consciously, read, produced and rewrote the series. For some of these readers, the book, in particular, had significance as an object. The corporeal book – its very physicality – signified an author’s presence. Though we now know that Laura Lee Hope was a fictive construct, that does not negate the meaning that she had for many adolescent girls in the early twentieth century. For these readers, Hope represented the successful and independent career woman. She served as a model to many readers who hoped to follow in the footsteps of their favourite ‘authoress’. Dave Porter and the Rover Boys The cultural and economic transformations in the late nineteenth century which led to the proliferation of secondary schools and the extension of compulsory education created a larger audience for juvenile fiction. As businesses required more highly educated workers, teachers and parents strove to encourage the reading habits of the young. Adolescents made an ideal audience for Edward Stratemeyer. They were a captive audience of sorts – economic dependants of their parents, subjected to prolonged education in secondary schools and extended periods of leisure. An analysis of the Dave Porter and Rover Boys series of books suggests how Stratemeyer articulated middle-class values of education and consumption through his books. The letters from fans of the Dave Porter and Rover Boys series reveal that, through their engagement with these popular books, adolescents created a rich culture of book collecting. The attractions of reading and collecting drew adolescent boys and girls into the marketplace as consumers. Stratemeyer’s juvenile fiction reflects the shift from proprietary to corporate capitalism. In his first cloth-bound book, published in 1891, the young author created Richard Dare, a hero with proprietary ambitions. After the hero’s father, a journeyman painter, dies in an accident, Richard leaves his country village to seek a job in the big city. This honest country boy clerked in a stationery and book store, and by the story’s close he has become a joint proprietor in the business. By the turn of the century, Stratemeyer had created a new breed of heroes. These were not the good-hearted, orphaned newspaper boys

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who had populated the fiction of Horatio Alger, Jr, nor were they young men like Richard Dare with proprietary ambitions. They were representatives of the new demographic constituency – adolescents. Stratemeyer’s new heroes were middle-class youngsters who attended school and had exciting adventures in the afternoons, at weekends and during holiday vacations. Stratemeyer’s readers, like his fictional characters, attended secondary schools. These were young people whose families understood that their children’s future success was linked to their education. The economic changes in the late nineteenth century, particularly the demands made by technical, professional and corporate work environ­ments for more highly skilled labourers, led parents to prolong their children’s education into the teen years.32 Families sacrificed the earnings of their children with the hope that an extended education would help their children obtain a higher social status and financially rewarding careers. Extended education became a new imperative for families who desired advancement. The young heroes in Stratemeyer’s series books are studious learners and avid athletes who champion education. When asked about his aspirations by a well-to-do merchant, the protagonist of Stratemeyer’s Dave Porter series (first published in 1905) replies, ‘If I had my way I’d get all the education I could’. Pressed for more specifics, Dave enthusiastically proclaims, ‘I’d fit myself for college’. ‘And after that?’ enquired Mr Wadsworth. ‘Then I’d like to travel, if I could afford it’, Dave explained, ‘to broaden my mind . . . and after that I’d go in for some profession like law or civil engineering’.33 Stratemeyer presents Dave as a moral hero devoted to his chums, his family and school. He has the impulses of a reformer and the characteristics of a muscular Christian. Dave Porter stands in marked contrast to the villainous school bully, Gus Plum, the spoiled son of a ‘millionaire patent-medicine manufacturer’ who smokes cigarettes, imbibes alcohol and ‘has more spending-money than was good for him’.34 Stratemeyer’s books provided their readers with an introduction into middle-class culture by focusing on the antics of middle-class adolescents. The young characters who populate the adventures have spending money and are active participants in the new consumer society. A reviewer from the Living Age captured the spirit of the Dave Porter series in this way: ‘The hero and his friends have all the accomplishments of the modern youth, and all his apparatus for amusement from cameras to motor cars and the young folk are dressed in the best of apparel and are highly agreeable to contemplate’.35 Contemporary reviewers regarded the Stratemeyer Syndicate series books and their

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protagonists as quintessentially middle class; one reviewer described the Rover Boys as ‘American as The Saturday Evening Post – and yet they are neither Babbitts, beautiful, damned nor Gopher Prairie yokels’.36 A commentator from the Christian Science Monitor added that the Rover Boys ‘were middle class to the core, they had less to strive for than to protect. No mortgage ever clouded their farm, and the boys were never embarrassed by a lack of funds’.37 Clearly, the content of juvenile series fiction perpetuated the new middle-class ethos. The books promoted the consuming impulse and celebrated literacy and education as key skills for future success in a world that was becoming increasingly professionalised. Dave Porter aspired to build bridges. He knew he could attain that goal only once he completed a college education. The days when luck, pluck and hard work yielded success had passed. Consuming adolescents Children’s money became ‘a subject of great controversy between 1870 and 1920’. Urbanisation, together with the prohibition of child labour, had created a new demographic cohort – youth – who lacked the experience that would enable them to ‘interpret a dollar in terms of actual work’. They had no ability, according to education expert Edwin Kirkpatrick, ‘to appreciate the value of money’.38 Economic shifts had created a body of youth who did not produce household funds but were proficient in expending them. Educational experts and psychologists advocated an allowance as long as it did not enable the child ‘to buy everything that he wants’. A modest sum of spending money had an educational value; a generous sum could lead a child to form ‘habits of luxury’. Properly allocated, an allowance taught its recipient that ‘that the money supply is limited’ and there is ‘pleasure and discipline’ from ‘planning purchases so as to get the most for [one’s] money and the best of what is possible’.39 The concept of the allowance became widespread. ‘Parents, whether they could afford it or not’, notes sociologist Viviana Zelizer, ‘were expected to train children as expert consumers’.40 The fan letters reveal that many readers had discretionary capital like the storybook characters whose adventures they read. Their ‘spending money’, ‘pin money’ or ‘pocket money’ enabled them to buy their own books. These funds provided children some autonomy in the emerging consumer culture. The letters portray many young readers as purposeful consumers. These children, like their parents,

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were learning to differentiate domestic monies. They were also learning the art of earmarking. Eleven-year-old Jack Frazer of East Orange, New Jersey, learned to husband his financial resources so that he could buy the books of his favourite writer. He had adopted the new ethos of ‘sav[ing] to spend’.41 ‘When I get a few pennies I save them till I get fifty and then I get one of your books’, he told Stratemeyer. ‘I now have thirteen. I have not got any in a few weeks because I am saving for Xmas’.42 Though the sums of pocket money were small, they did provide youngsters with a valued privilege – independence. Many letters reveal that it was the youngsters themselves who made purchasing decisions. ‘[B]efore long as my spending money increases I intend buying [sic] other series of your work’, Lloyd G. Mehlig wrote to Edward Stratemeyer.43 ‘The other day’, Eldon Elkhart wrote to Arthur M. Winfield, another of Stratemeyer’s pseudonyms, ‘I saw the “Putnam Hall Cadets” on sale, and bought it. I became interested right away and intend to buy more.’44 When readers found discrepancies in prices, or had difficulty procuring books, they offered business advice and, sometimes, personal assistance. An anonymous reader suggested that the retail price for Rover Boys books in his locale was too high: 75¢ can’t be got by every boy so at 50¢ you could sell a lot more books. They had a sale on them at 39¢ so I bought 2 and liked them. The other day I went down and they were 75¢ so I couldn’t get none.45

The reader closed by offering to advertise the Rover Boys series books among his friends if Stratemeyer lowered the price to fifty cents. If readers could not obtain their books at the public library or in local shops, some youngsters purchased their books directly from publishers. Herbert Liebman of Memphis, Tennessee informed Stratemeyer that ‘they do not sell many of your books in my town’ nor did the library offer them, ‘so I have to send of[f] to Lothrop, L[ee] & S[hepard] for them’.46 ‘The collecting instinct’ We can attribute part of Stratemeyer’s success to his understanding of adolescent leisure pursuits, particularly the widespread interest in collecting and organising objects. Turn-of-the century psychologists found a universal and intense ‘collecting instinct, passion or interest among children’.47 Through surveys of schoolchildren, scholars found

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that youngsters collected scores of different objects such as ‘cigar-tags, stamps, birds’ eggs, marbles and shells’.48 In her essay ‘The Collecting Instinct’, Caroline Frear Burk observed that the collecting impulse originated at least as early as the age of three years and then developed rapidly from six years on. It reached its greatest intensity during the pre-adolescent period of ages eight to eleven and then continued with ‘moderate force into adolescence’.49 Burk discerned patterns in children’s collecting. She characterised youngsters under the age of eight as having a ‘crude’ collecting impulse, of pursuing their passion in an ‘undirected’ manner. Pre-adolescents were the most exuberant collectors, who developed a love of quantity. They embodied the true ‘naturalist spirit of finding and hunting as opposed to receiving or buying’. Adolescent collectors embodied a more commercial spirit, revelling in the trading or purchasing of their collected objects. For many youngsters, juvenile series books had value as artefacts, as material objects that could be read, collected or traded. Youngsters across the country created libraries out of books they had received and those they had purchased. ‘I have [a] large library at home. Some of the books are Curly Tops – Six Little Bunkers – Bobbsey Twins [and] Bunny Brown books’, wrote Virginia Wilson.50 Like the young collectors Burk studied, many of Stratemeyer’s readers took pleasure in the great number of books they owned. ‘I am eleven years old and I have a library of my own. It has seventy five books in it’, wrote Robert Edgar of the mining and woodworking town of Ironton, Missouri (population 721).51 ‘I am fourteen years old and I have read your books for six years. . . . I have a library of over two hundred books’, boasted James Bolton of Sioux City, Iowa.52 Book ownership was a marker of literacy, a signifier of self-culture and much more. Youngsters who owned books gained a special status within their peer group, especially in those communities where librari­ ans barred juvenile books or where the books’ popularity made them difficult to borrow from the library. As we saw at the start of the chapter, the young Homer Moffett was a devout fan of the Radio Boys series in the 1920s. In 1988, I found Mr Moffett through a letter to his hometown newspaper. After we corresponded, the seventy-two-year-old writer shared reminiscences of his youthful days with series books with the readers of his newspaper column: I had quite a library then. Youngsters from all over Lombard came to borrow books. The Tom Swift volumes, Roy Blakely (Boy Scout) books, Jerry Todd, many volumes by naturalist Thornton W. Burgess, as well as

176  Trudi Abel adult books like ‘The Covered Wagon’ by Emerson Hough and ‘Captain Blood’ and ‘Scaramouche’ by Rafael Sabatini.53

Private collections of books had their greatest value in those towns and cities where librarians refused to supply series books to their juvenile readers. Many librarians considered juvenile series books to be as inferior as dime novels. In 1914, the chief librarian of the Boy Scouts, Franklin Mathiews, advised parents to protect their children against series books. This modern ‘penny dreadful’, he declared, bore the ‘disguise of the bound book . . . that it takes its place on the retail book-store shelf alongside the best juvenile publications’.54 Many librari­ans heeded Mathiews’ warnings and refused to stock popular juveniles by Stratemeyer, Alger, Optic, Ellis and others. Many young readers wrote to Stratemeyer to tell of the challenges they faced in obtaining his books. Lloyd Mehlig asked Stratemeyer whether his publisher could enquire about the absence of his books at the Fiske Library in New Orleans. He had ‘tried again and again’ to obtain them, but had no success. His only recourse was to purchase the books directly from the Boston publisher.55 As the genteel librarians of Newark, Brooklyn, Boston, New Orleans and numerous other towns and cities banned Stratemeyer’s books from their shelves, they forced his devoted readers to seek books in the marketplace. Children bought books, created personal libraries and developed a mechanism for lending books within their social group. Theirs was a free (or freer) library – a collection of books free from the censoring eyes of the apostles of culture. Adolescents from across the country set up informal book distribution networks comparable to that established by Homer Moffett. Elton Williams created a personal library of ‘nearly 100 boys [sic] books including 21 different authors and 9 different sets of books besides many single volumes’. Reading was a shared pastime among adolescent boys in his hometown of Buffalo, Missouri (population 820), which offered little in amenities aside from a bank, flour mill, carding mill and fresh produce. ‘All the boys I run with have librarys [sic] and we loan and borrow very much’.56 These children aided in the acculturation of themselves and others by making the products of the Stratemeyer Syndicate more widely available. In addition to enjoying books while honing their literacy skills, children learned something about property management and trade. Many custodians of private libraries also learned about the pleasures and frustrations of private property through lending books to friends. ‘I have lent them so often’, Hazel Tirrell lamented, ‘there is hardly anything left of them’.57

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‘Pleasure and profit’ In 1909, a young boy, from a town that manufactured railroad cars and packed fruit, reflected on the books he had received for Christmas. ‘I know I shall get much pleasure and profit from them’.58 Clearly, Robert Heiserman enjoyed the leisure activity of reading in Urbana, Ohio, but how did he hope to ‘profit’ from the books? Perhaps he under­ stood that these enjoyable books would help him hone his literacy skills, skills that would help in the world of work. Or was he thinking of ‘profit’ in an economic sense? Historians of the book have increasingly sought to study the social practice of reading from a number of different vantage points. As Carl Kaestle writes in Literacy in the United States, ‘Reading has cultural, symbolic, ritualistic aspects as well as its instrumental, ideological, economic, educational, casual, and playful sides’.59 To better understand the cultural and ritualistic meanings of reading, it helps to contrast this leisure activity with another popular pastime, stamp collecting. Stamp collecting was the most popular of hobbies among late nineteenth-century middle-class boys. Victorian parents encouraged their boys in this leisure activity, because they believed it to have an educational value. Through stamp collecting, young boys could learn geography and history, but they also used their hobby to assimi­ late late nineteenth-century economic practices. Historian Steven Gelber argues that the philatelic pursuit also served as a primer to ‘Gilded Age capitalism’. ‘Beginning stamp collectors’ gathered ‘their specimens from the real world, asking friends and acquaintances for envelopes from which they could salvage the stamps; but once past the novice stage, no collectors could realistically hope to build a collection by scavenging’. Collectors had to turn, enthusiastically or reluctantly, to the marketplace.60 While girls also collected stamps, Gelber suggests that the ‘market model, which underlay stamp collecting from its earliest days, militated against female participation because both men and women perceived dealing as inappropriate behavior’.61 Because Victorians subscribed to what Ellen Garvey calls a ‘cultural imperative to collect’, late nineteenth-century child-rearing manuals advised parents to encourage their young girls to collect and classify through making scrapbooks.62 This literature presented the creation of trade-card scrapbooks as a feminine corollary of stamp collecting. These advice manuals encouraged girls to collect and arrange commercially produced trade cards, the colourful images that advertised new ‘mass-produced artifacts’.63 The literature also accorded a difference

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in value to the two hobbies. Stamp collectors emulated the economic activities of ‘traders and sellers on the one hand’, while the makers of scrapbooks demonstrated their ‘love for order and beauty’.64 ‘Stamp collecting, in the eyes of cultural commentators, had value while trade card collecting was largely disregarded.’65 If stamp collecting pulled young male collectors into the marketplace as ‘traders and sellers’ and young girls honed their skills as ‘shoppers and tasteful arrangers’ through their trade-card scrapbooks, what lessons did children learn through book collecting? Many children became participants in the new consumer culture through their interest in series books. Some used their allowances to purchase books. In this way, the book habit stimulated consumption and ownership – children converted their spending monies into objects that became their private property. Since books had a use value that distinguished them from stamps and trade cards, children created informal circulation networks for lending and borrowing reading matter. The fan letters show that reading and book collecting were communal activities. In The Social Meaning of Money, Viviana Zelizer describes the process whereby people ‘convert selected objects into the equivalent of currencies, as in the case of cigarettes, postage stamps . . . or baseball cards’.66 Through trading, lending and borrowing series books, early twentieth-century adolescents created their own leisure culture based on the ‘pleasure and profit’ of reading. Unlike the hobbies of stamp and trade-card collecting, which were each explicitly geared to one gender, book collecting drew girls and boys together into a shared economy. In essence, the Stratemeyer Syndicate series books became a shared currency between adolescent boys and girls in early twentieth-century America. While the networks of book exchanges tended to be based on gender, the letters reveal that some boys read books that their female friends had purchased and many girls read books lent to them by their brothers or male cousins or friends. ‘Although I am a girl, eleven years old’, Carol Johnson of Connecticut wrote, ‘I read boy’s [sic] books because they are always more exciting. My brother got them for [C]hristmas, and we both loved them.’67 Like Carol, twelve-year-old Fannie Grossius had a penchant for Stratemeyer’s boys’ books: It says on the back of the covers Stratemeyer’s style suits the boys, but I think they suit the girls also for almost every girl in my class has read them and like them, and every boy in my brothers [sic] class has read them and think they are great and so do ‘I’.68

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In terms of both their content and their form, the Stratemeyer Syndicate series books served as a primer for the emerging middle-class culture. As part of the new demographic constituency – adolescents – both the storybook heroes and their readers divided their time between learning and leisure. They were economic captives, barred from the workplace, sentenced to prolonged schooling and financially dependent on their parents. Though they had lost their role as economic producers, these youngsters had not lost their place in the economic order. With the growing acceptance, by teachers and parents, of the educational value of an allowance, more and more adolescents became consumers. ‘Pocket money’, ‘pin money’ and similar currencies gave youngsters the capital to become something more than readers. Many became book collectors. This passion for collecting led both boys and girls into the marketplace, where they practised the skills needed for the new consumer culture. In studying leisure culture in America, historians generally focus on the experience of workers at play. They often argue that workers used their recreational activities to counteract the harshness of the work experience. Roy Rosenzweig argues, for instance, that in the favoured retreat of the saloon, Irish workers celebrated communality and mutualism through their tradition of ‘treating’, a tradition that stood in opposition to the nineteenth-century world of work and the ethos of individualism that undergirded it.69 How should we understand the leisure experience of early t­ wentieth-​ century adolescents? What is the meaning of leisure in a culture where paid labour is the exception and not the rule? Rather than serving as an antidote to the new economic order, the mainstay of adolescent leisure culture, juvenile popular fiction, reinforced the values needed for a new economy based on corporate capitalism and consumer culture. The Stratemeyer Syndicate books served a primer to an emerging middle-class culture founded on literacy and consumption. Conclusion For some time, historians of the book and literary theorists have struggled to learn what readers do with texts. They have consistently asked, ‘How do readers interpret texts? How do they use them?’ Debate among these scholars centres on the question, ‘Who controls the meaning of the text, cultural producers or their consumers?’ On the one hand, it might appear that authors shape texts, and texts influence their readers. Perhaps the most palpable example of this

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is the way the Outdoor Girls series led to the creation of numerous Outdoor Girls clubs across the United States. The adventures penned by Laura Lee Hope served as model for a number of adolescents who had a yearning for exploration and excitement. At the same time, this chapter demonstrates the limits to an author’s control over the meaning of his text. Though Stratemeyer desired to inculcate his young women readers with a sense of the propriety of marriage and the impropriety of a career, many of his readers used his books to imagine a future as a single, economically independent, career woman. Clearly, neither author nor reader controls the meaning of texts at all times. What is more important, however, is that we recognise what this analysis of fan letters reveals: readers accord significance to the form of reading matter as well as to the text itself. A fuller under­ standing of the history of reading must take into account readers’ interpretations of the words on the page and the meaning they ascribe to the corporeal form of their texts. Notes  1. The author expresses her great appreciation to Edward Stratemeyer Adams and Patricia Adams Harr for allowing her to quote from children’s fan letters in their private collections (henceforth Adams collection and Harr collection, respectively). The letter quoted is Homer Moffett to Allen Chapman, 8 December 1926 (postmark), Adams collection. The Stratemeyer Syndicate Records Collection at New York Public Library offers scholars a complementary set of children’s correspondence as well as publishing records.   2. Jonathan Rose, ‘The History of Education as the History of Reading’, Journal of the History of Education Society, 36:4–5 (July–September 2007), pp. 595–605.   3. Clarence Karr, Authors and Audiences: Popular Canadian Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000), p. 154.   4. Ibid., p. 168.   5. Rose, ‘The History of Education as the History of Reading’, p. 598.  6. For an extensive analysis of Stratemeyer’s literary career, see Trudi Johanna Abel, ‘A Man of Letters, A Man of Business: Edward Stratemeyer and the Adolescent Reader, 1890–1930’, PhD dissertation (Rutgers University, 1993).   7. Louis Botelho to Edward Stratemeyer, 22 February 1926. Adams collection.  8. Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790–Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 216.

Plate 1  Cover of Laura Lee Hope’s The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale (1913)

Plate 2  Sun Koh: The Hypnotised Submarine (number 9 in the series Sun Koh: Der Erbe von Atlantis). On the cover of the first edition, Sun Koh is accompanied by Nimba, his black friend, but Nimba had to disappear from the cover (though not from the text) on later print runs (Plate 3)

Plate 3  A later edition of Sun Koh: The Hypnotised Submarine, with Nimba omitted

Plate 4  Front cover of Thicker Than Water (2008; New Brunswick: Angelic Script Publishing, 2009)

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 9. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993), p. 85. 10. Deidre Johnson, Stratemeyer Pseudonyms and Series Books: An Annotated Checklist of Stratemeyer and Stratemeyer Syndicate Publications (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982). 11. Edward W. Mumford, ‘Juvenile Readers as an Asset’, Paper read before the American Booksellers’ Association, 15 May 1912. The proceedings of this meeting are reproduced in Publishers Weekly, 18 May 1912. Mumford’s presentation begins on p. 1620 and the quotation is from p. 1622. 12. Laura Lee Hope, The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1913). Note, though, that the advertising copy varies in different printings. The copy cited was published c. 1927. 13. Marion Jeannette Du’rand to Laura Lee Hope, 10 July 1923 (postmark), Adams collection. 14. Betty L. McGuire to Laura Lee Hope, 1 March 1927, Adams collection. 15. Shooting script (c. 1980) of Harriet S. Adams film made by Protean Productions, Inc. (Caroline A. Jones, executive producer). From 7B Alumna Biographical Files, Stratemeyer, Harriet 1914, Wellesley College Archives, Wellesley, Massachusetts. 16. Frederica Trapnell to Laura Lee Hope, 31 January 1924, Adams collection. 17. Stratemeyer’s characters are not given a precise age, and they get older as the series progresses. The general readership seems to have been younger than the characters. 18. Phyllis Stepler to Laura Lee Hope, 5 January 1925 (postmark), Adams collection. 19. Vyvyen Hamilton to Laura Lee Hope, 20 February 1925 (postmark), Adams collection. 20. Jane Hartman to Laura Lee Hope, 16 January 1927, Adams collection. 21. Caryl Jane F[inney?] to Laura Lee Hope, 20 July 1923, Adams collection. 22. Jean Champlain Hills to Laura Lee Hope, 27 February 1923, Adams collection. 23. Ethel M. Phillips to Laura Lee Hope, 5 August 1924, Adams collection. 24. Belle H. Smith to Laura Lee Hope, 2 January 1925, Adams collection. 25. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), pp. 245, 265; Nancy Cott, The Grounding of American Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 26. Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present, 3rd edition (New York: Franklin Watts, 1983), p. 238. 27. Ibid., p. 240. 28. Grace A. Morris to Laura Lee Hope, 25 May 1924; Constance McCormick to Laura Lee Hope, 29 December 1923; Helen Phillips to Laura Lee Hope, 30 June 1926; Phyllis Stepler to Laura Lee Hope, 5 January 1925. Adams collection. 29. By way of just one example, see Evelyn S[tetson?] to Laura Lee Hope, 31 July 1926 (postmark), Adams collection.

182  Trudi Abel 30. Dorothy Hunsinger to Laura Lee Hope, 17 December 1926; Margaret M. Meyers to Laura Lee Hope, 18 December 1926; Constance McCormick to Laura Lee Hope 29 December 1923, Adams collection. 31. Mary Farrell and Barbara McDonald to Laura Lee Hope, 30 January 1926, Adams collection. 32. Kett, Rites of Passage, p. 168. 33. Edward Stratemeyer, Dave Porter at Oak Hall (Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1905), p. 33. 34. Ibid., p. 101. 35. ‘Books and Authors’, Living Age, 9 October 1915, pp. 126–7. 36. ‘Dick, Tom, Sam: Will There Be Rover Boys in Utopia, Too?’, Time, 2 July 1923, p. 14. 37. Frederick Chase, ‘He Invented the Rover Boys’, Christian Science Monitor, 5 December 1942, p. WM7. 38. Edwin A. Kirkpatrick, The Use of Money: How to Save and How to Spend (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1915), Editor’s introduction, unnumbered page. 39. Ibid., p. 54. 40. Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 13. 41. Viviana Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 31. 42. Jack Frazer to Edward Stratemeyer, 1 November 1926, Adams collection. 43. Lloyd G. Mehlig to Edward Stratemeyer, 13 September 1910, Harr collection. 44. Eldon Eckhart to Mr Winfield, 19 June 1911. Harr collection. 45. ‘A Rover Reader’ to ‘Dear Sir’, 21 May 1924. Adams collection. 46. Herbert Liebman to Mr Stratemeyer, 22 September 1922. Adams collection. 47. Carolyn Frear Burk, ‘The Collecting Instinct’, Pedagogical Seminary, 7:2 (April 1900), pp. 179–207 (p. 206). 48. Ibid., p. 185. 49. Ibid., p. 181. 50. Virginia Wilson to Laura Lee Hope, 11 March 1925. Adams collection. 51. Robert L. Edgar to Arthur M. Winfield, 23 March 1912. Harr collection. The information on Ironton is taken from the American Newspaper Directory (Philadelphia: N.W. Ayer and Sons, 1914), p. 510. 52. James Bolton to Arthur M. Winfield, 6 June 1917, Harr collection. 53. Homer Moffett, ‘Letter Delivers Old Memories, Friends’, Daily Journal (Wheaton, IL), undated clipping (spring 1989). 54. Franklin Mathiews, ‘Blowing Out the Boys’ Brain’, Outlook, 18 November 1914, pp. 652–4. 55. Lloyd Mehlig to Edward Stratemeyer, 11 September 1907. Harr collection. 56. Elton Williams to Arthur M. Winfield, 22 June 1913. Harr collection.

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The information on Buffalo is taken from the American Newspaper Directory, p. 499. 57. Hazel Tirrell to ‘Dear Friend’, 1 January 1924. Adams collection. 58. Robert Heiserman to Edward Stratemeyer, 11 February 1911. Harr collection. The information on Urbana is taken from the American Newspaper Directory, p. 762. 59. Carl F. Kaestle, ‘The History of Readers’, in Carl Kaestle et al. (eds), Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 33–72 (p. 50). 60. Steven M. Gelber, ‘Free Market Metaphor: The Historical Dynamics of Stamp Collecting’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34:4 (October 1992), pp. 742–69 (p. 758). 61. Ibid., p. 750. 62. Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 26. 63. Ibid., p. 21. 64. Ibid., p. 27. 65. Ibid., p. 26. 66. Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money, p. 20. 67. Carol Johnson to Mr Stratemeyer, 24 January 1914. Harr collection. 68. Fannie Grossius to Edward Stratemeyer, 7 February 1904. Harr collection. 69. Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 61.

Chapter 9

Trans Culture and the Circulation of Ideas Lisa Z. Sigel

Trans issues have been having something of a moment. Movies like Tangerine and The Danish Girl, television shows like Transparent, I Am Cait and Jazz, magazines like National Geographic and People have brought discussions of trans issues and identities into American daily life.1 If popular culture has begun an exploration of trans issues, the academic realm has taken the enquiry much further. Historians including Janice Irvine, Joanne Meyerowitz and Susan Stryker have detailed the history of transsexuality. The field of trans studies now has its own journal, Transgender Studies Quarterly, begun in 2014. The University of Victoria has opened a Transgender Archive, hosted a conference and created a chair in transgender studies. Issues of trans identity have connected academic and popular discourse, making gender theory relevant in new ways.2 One contribution to the focus on transgender issues is Susan Faludi’s book In the Darkroom (2016), which investigates her father’s gender transition. Faludi reflects on the relationship between gender identity and sexual desire in her father’s life, but she found little explanation of such desires in the larger literature about trans issues. Innumerable memoirs have detailed the journey towards sexual re­ assign­ment surgery as a matter of identity, but those sources stay largely silent about sexuality. The silencing of sexual desires in memoirs seems to correlate with a broader demand to excise sexual desire from accounts of trans identity. As historians of transsexuality have noted, trans people needed to eliminate sexual desires from their life stories in order to get the help and support they needed. Psychologists, doctors and the larger society silenced sexual desires and forced trans people to adopt desexed narratives in public. Although desexed narratives were told to the scientific, medical and larger communities, pornographic and pulp materials about trans issues became an alternative way to speak about sexual desires. People cared enough about such stories to save, sell, scrapbook and recirculate 184

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these materials through the used-books trade in Europe and America. These texts, often censored and silenced, formed a hidden wellspring of sexual ideas across 100 years. In documenting the circulation of these materials, this chapter will demonstrate that the realm of the erotic has been and continues to be a powerful force enabling people to tell stories of and to themselves. While much of In the Darkroom examines her parent’s history as a Holocaust survivor trying to fit into American suburbia, Faludi also broaches the relationship between gender identity and sexual desire in her father’s life. She reconnected with her father, Steven Faludi, in 2004, shortly after her father underwent sexual reassignment (or gender alignment) surgery to become Stefánie. According to Faludi, the two had had a strained relationship due to her father’s overweening mascu­ linity during her childhood and adolescence. Her father’s obsessions dominated Susan’s childhood and culminated in a violent outburst that put her mother’s lover in hospital. After decades of severed communications, the two reconnected when Stefánie invited Susan to make sense of Stefánie’s life. The two apparently remained close until ­Stefánie’s death in 2015. Although Stefánie’s gender re­alignment provides the hook for their reintroduction and for Susan’s new book, it quickly becomes just one of many factors that affected Stefánie’s identity and sense of self. According to Susan’s account, ­Stefánie’s past as Hungarian, as a Jew and as a survivor of the Holocaust were central to who Stefánie had been and how she defined herself. Ultimately, Faludi sees questions of gender in relation to issues of anti-Semitism, belonging, Hungarian history, nationalism and family. Though it may seem obvious, sexuality also affected Stefánie’s sense of what it meant to be a woman. While sorting through ­Stefánie’s files and papers, Susan found an archive of materials from Sissy Station and FictionMania, online story sites. Most of these stories belonged to the genre of ‘forced feminisation fantasies’.3 Stefánie had downloaded stacks of such stories and carefully filed them away, a practice that she considered to be a hobby, much like any other. She also replaced characters’ names with her name, remaking the tales into stories about her own gender conversion. As well as hacking the narrative, Stefánie, a professional photographer and retoucher, ‘photoshopped’ her face onto illustrations and photographs. According to Faludi, many of the FictionMania stories featured the theme of forced gender transition, in which mothers and other women forced boys into becoming girls. These stories envisioned the process of male-to-female gender conversion in sexual terms, according to Faludi’s analysis. For Faludi:

186   Lisa Z. Sigel the vast electronic literature of forced feminization fiction was a transgender id in which becoming a woman was thoroughly sexualized, in which femininity was related in terms of bondage and humiliation and orgasm, and the transformation from one gender to another was eroticized at every step.4

Despite the fantasies of forced feminisation that exist online, Faludi found a curious emphasis on gender at the expense of sexuality in memoirs about transgender. Writing conventions bifurcated storytelling into two very different sets of practices, with distinct emotional registers. In one set of stories, trans people constructed life stories that spoke of gender roles. Memoirs, according to Faludi, particularly the early ones, followed ‘every hoary trope of the Cult of True Womanhood’.5 As she explains, ‘the gender identity so many of these chronicles championed was aggressively wholesome, childlike, often prissy, and oddly desexualized’.6 Such memoirs and life stories spoke of a deep awareness of gender identity that gradually worked its way into the surface of consciousness and demanded the alignment of the internal and external self. Whereas memoir after memoir desexualised identity, online fantasies played with sexuality. In this set of stories, the formation of gender identity happened through a social process that reworked the body, effecting the sense of self. Online fantasies, pulp and pornographic stories understood that gender identity had a deeply erotic component and that forced feminisation contained an orgasmic potential. The bifurcation of stories emerged in a particular historical context. Although people could dress at variance with biological sex and/or cultural expectations for gender before the twentieth century,7 long-term changes in medicine, sexology and culture underlay the emergence of trans identity in the late twentieth century. Trans­sexuality emerged within a relatively short period of time alongside the conceptual categories of transvestism, intersexuality, homo­sexuality and heterosexuality. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were no clear and accepted divisions between these categories; by the end of the twentieth century, these identities were recognised by both medical science and the broader public.8 As Barry Reay has noted, historians have been ‘dazzled by this demonstration of the making of sex’.9 Sexual science began to distinguish a variety of sexual desires and identities in the late nineteenth century and that work continued through to the 1950s.10 Karl Ulrich, for example, discussed ‘urnings’ as female souls in male bodies in the nineteenth century, while Havelock Ellis defined ‘eonism’ as a sort of inversion of bodies and souls. In

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1910 Magnus Hirschfeld developed the term ‘transvestite’ for the desire to wear the clothes of the opposite sex, though the desire to wear the clothes of the opposite sex could signify desire or identity. As the conceptual work for articulating differences in bodies, identities and object choice developed, medicine developed methods for body modification. Plastic surgeons developed a new panoply of surgical interventions during the Great War. Scientists discovered hormones and their impact on sexual development, which made hormonal inter­ventions possible. By the 1920s, Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science began to facilitate surgeries for sexual reassignment.11 These techniques migrated to the USA after the Second World War. Harry Benjamin, one of the early authorities on trans issues, made a tour of Berlin’s transvestite culture with Hirschfeld and brought ideas and attitudes from Europe to America.12 Publicity in 1952 and 1953 around Christine Jorgensen’s surgery brought ideas about transsexuality to the broader public, as Joanne Meyerowitz has noted.13 Harry Benjamin on the east coast of the USA and the Langley Porter Clinic on the west became associated with transsexuality during the 1950s, joined by John Money of Johns Hopkins and Robert Stoller at UCLA during the 1960s and 1970s. Protocols were established for surgical intervention and the definition of transsexualism became incorporated into the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), the volume used by the American Psychiatric Association to diagnose mental disorders.14 Although there was no significant national support for transsexuals or gender reassignment surgery in 1965, a decade later there were twenty major medical centres offering treatment.15 As centres, treatments and protocols became standardised, so too did narratives about transsexuality. Robert Hill stated: the formation of ‘trans’ identities was a complex and collaborative process involving men of science who often invented the labels and public categories, members of the media who wrote about gender transgression, and gender variant individuals who negotiated these medical and cultural discourses and also created their own unique lexicon.16

Collaboration between scientists and trans people took place at many levels. Trans people contacted sexologists and sought to affect the ways that the scientific community saw, wrote about and intervened in sexuality. Medical professionals worked with gender-variant individuals, even while studying them for health and illness, for mental maladies and personality flaws. As Susan Stryker notes, the terms of that relationship were not equal:

188   Lisa Z. Sigel Previously, people who occupied transgender positions were compelled to be referents in the language games of other senders and addresses – they were the object of medical knowledge delivered to the asylum keeper, the subject of police reports presented to the judge, they were the dirty little outcasts of feminist and gay liberation discourses whose speakers clamored for the affections of the liberal state.17

Each individual, whether activist, patient or professional, had ideas about gender and the appropriate relationship between gender, bio­ logical sex, and eroticism, though the definitions of appropriate changed from person to person and over an individual’s lifetime. The rapid acceptance of transsexuality as a sexual identity affected the narrative terrain as doctors, scientists, activists and patients weighed language and developed linguistic and narrative structures. Narratives needed to be adapted to the circumstances and transgender individuals tailored their stories for their doctors. Doctors’ lack of sympathy, their general conservatism in matters of sexuality and their overall distrust of patients meant that trans people had to carefully weigh what should and should not be said to their doctors. As one patient stressed, ‘You’ve got to keep him happy’. She did so by pretending and by keeping her own beliefs secret.18 Transgender patients also learned to tell the right kind of stories. As Meyerowitz notes, ‘Those who hoped for surgery had to tell stories to doctors, but they soon learned to censor themselves as well’.19 Any discussion of eroticism could imperil gender reassignment surgery, so individuals carefully eschewed eroticism in their stories. One patient wanted the operation but, according to his account, not for sexual reasons: ‘Sex isn’t important to me’.20 Experts recognised the ways that the situation demanded certain types of stories. One expert from Stanford thought that it was less ‘a case of deliberate fabrication than a pattern of retrospectively rewriting sexual histories to conform to the expected transsexual stereotype’. 21 Medical control over medications, diagnosis, surgery and social services forced trans people into adopting desexed narratives. Even in cases where gender reassignment surgery was not the goal, respectability demanded a repudiation of sexual desires. Virginia Prince, a community organiser and founder of Transvestia magazine, fought against gender reassignment surgery for members of Phi Pi Epsilon, thus ameliorating the need for approval by medical authorities. Initially called the Hose and Heels Club, Phi Pi Epsilon became a national social organisation, founded by Prince and others in the early 1960s.22 Prince tried to ‘distinguish heterosexual crossdressers with a sense of aesthetics and respectability from the unsavory character

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of the fetishistic crossdresser’, according to Robert Hill.23 For Prince, cross-dressing moved along a spectrum from eroticism to aes­thetics as individuals grew into their identities and matured. Those who remained mired in erotics were ‘bottom feeders’ according to her stratification. Prince’s insistence on an aestheticised and desexualised cross-dressing made the erotics of the practice into an open secret at Transvestia and Phi Pi Epsilon, one understood by community members but not discussed. Louise Lawrence, in the first self-consciously written medical article by a trans person about trans issues, kept erotics – and, indeed, sexual desire – out of her analysis. Lawrence had been living full time as a woman since 1944. She personally set up interviews for Alfred Kinsey with a variety of people, including transsexuals, cross-dressers, fetishists, drag queens and transvestites. She also mentored others, including Virginia Prince. Her life focused on creating a community and documenting that community for posterity, working with Al Harris to photograph its members. Nonetheless, in her public writing she carefully distinguished behaviour from sexual desire. According to her, ‘Transvestism, per se, pertains simply to the wearing of the clothing of the sex to which one does not physically belong and therefore it falls into the category of a behavior problem rather than into that of a sexual problem as it has been classified’.24 Lawrence’s attempt to focus on cross-dressing as a behavioural issue rather than one of identity or desire resulted in a cordoning off of sexuality. Her attempts to destigmatise cross-dressing relied on desexualising the practice. Nonetheless, she knew the sorts of fantasies circulating in the gender-variant community at the moment; indeed, she brought these desires to Kinsey’s attention and wanted room for a sense of sexuality that went beyond the behavioural. What makes Prince’s and Lawrence’s excision of sexuality so important is that they worked as community organisers and served as conduits for communication between the medical community, the press and the queer community.25 They understood that there existed a range of sexual desires but silenced the diversity of desires in their public statements. This silencing did not eliminate the circulation of fantasy in their communities; instead, materials documenting those erotic desires circulated in secret alongside the respectable stories told to the broader public. This chapter considers the circulation of erotic fantasies about cross-dressing, particularly the trope of forced feminisation, in novels, pulp magazines, clipping files and online message boards between the nineteenth century and the 1980s. Though not all trans people enjoyed

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forced feminisation fantasies and though not all readers who enjoyed forced feminisation fantasies fit into the trans category, the popularity of these stories over time suggests that the history of trans gender cannot be written without taking these stories into account. These fantasies played with ideas about biological sex, gender and desire. The modern fantasy of erotic cross-dressing and forced feminis­ation seems to have emerged during the late Victorian period, finding voice in novels like Gynecocracy (1893) and Stays and Gloves (1909) and in sets of letters printed in cheap magazines. Rather than becoming outdated, Victorian materials became classics and remained on the used-book market for decades, gaining in value over time. By following the books and ephemera, we can understand the shaping of trans erotic lives. Further, new fantasies relied on older models of forced feminisation as well as historical settings long after gender and sexual roles had changed. The continued circulation of older fantasies and the modelling of new fantasies upon older expressions of desire demonstrate their continued salience. These materials let us see the metaphors that people used to construct an erotic imaginary. Gynecocracy and Stays and Gloves proved to be foundational for fantasies about trans issues, forced feminisation, and cross-dressing. Both books were fictive sexual memoirs, a generic convention that had been well established in the British pornographic publishing market by the time the two books were published. Both came from a small set of British publishers who sold erotic works to high-end clients across Europe and America. Both were set in a late Victorian world that relied on sending children away from the family home for education and social polish. These novels might be considered the erotic fantasy versions of Tom Brown’s School Days. Gynecocracy was written as the fictional memoir of Julian Robinson, Viscount Ladywood. According to the novel’s central premise, adolescent Julian was sent to a private English country estate, where he became subject to petticoat discipline because his parents could not be bothered with raising the unruly but delicate young man. The novel focused on Julian’s emerging sexuality and used the idea of petticoats as a central way of articulating the differences between masculinity and femininity. Emblematic of the separate and mysterious world of women, the petticoat – layered, ruffled, frilly, smelling of the ‘strange intoxicating perfume’ of female bodies – disciplined men through sexual longing.26 Julian’s desires for sexual knowledge led him into petticoat discipline: a trifold process of feminisation in which he was forced under the petticoat and made to perform cunnilingus, he was dressed as a

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woman in petticoats, and he was beaten by a woman in petticoats. Cunnilingus, in the novel, became the ultimate expression of sexual service, in that it dismissed the need for a phallus entirely; instead of being the dominant partner in a sexual exchange, men performing oral sex would be caught by the strength of women’s thighs. According to the novel, ‘A horse’s strength is in his loins, a lion’s in his jaws, and elephant’s in his trunk and weight, and a woman’s evidently in her thighs’.27 Julian was also dressed as a woman. The layers of female clothing – the stockings, garters, belts, corsets, drawers, petti­ coats, dresses and high heels – trained individuals into compliance and submission. Regardless of one’s genitals, figure training could reform both the body and soul. Men could be made womanly, that is, submissive and dainty, by dressing them as women. In Gynecocracy, Julian’s story demands that the reader confronts the relationship between biological sex, gender roles, object choice and sexual desires. When Julian has intercourse with one of his cousins, he momentarily escapes female control and asserts his mascu­ linity by using his penis rather than his tongue and by ejaculating into his cousin’s body. In retaliation, the governess says she will have him castrated. In fact, instead she has a female doctor circumcise him. His mutilated penis is bandaged underneath him, he is dressed as a girl and given a new existence as Julia. The female community then devotes itself to shaming Julia for her previous boyish existence and seals the transformation by giving her to Lord Alfred Ridlington. However, gender inversion brings with it the problem of sexual object choice. Though Julian had always longed for sexual intercourse with women, the transformation from male to female raises the issue of the appropriate partner for a gender-ambiguous person. Though Julian/ Julia believes that men should have sex with women, how that should work in Julia’s case is unclear. First, the biological sex of Julian/ Julia remained in doubt: ‘Suppose, after all, Mademoiselle was wrong; suppose, I was not a hermaphrodite; suppose I was altogether a boy!’ Furthermore, if sex remained unclear, questions of how sex fit with gender brought further confusion. ‘Should I become a mother? . . . Beatrice was to be my wife. Yet, how could I be another man’s wife if I was to be somebody’s husband?’28 Lord Alfred ends such ruminations by ‘proving’ the case of Julian/Julia’s femininity with a logic based on clothing: ‘You have to wear petticoats because you really are a girl, Julia. Do not be deceived about it.’ Then Lord Alfred lays Julian/Julia down and repeatedly sodomises her. However, Julia’s cousin, Beatrice, tells Julian/Julia that she is not a girl and Lord Alfred is not a man. Julian/Julia confronts Lord Alfred, whose ‘penis’ – hairless and tied

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on with ribbons – falls off. The symbolic castration reverses gender roles again; when Alfred reverts to female, Julia can become male. ‘All of the glamour of my actually being a girl had vanished in a blow. I almost wept as I thought I could no longer dream I was one – and one with a lover. Lord Alfred Ridlington no longer interested me for he was a fraud. He was his own wife.’29 The swap of Lord Alfred for Lady Alfred and Julia for Julian purges the text of same-sex desire. Rather than being a girl or assuming the power of masculinity, Julian remains a man who is forcibly feminised and subject to petticoat disci­ pline. He marries his cousin Beatrice, who regularly whips him and dresses him in women’s clothes. Rather than describing an asexual version of identity, Gynecocracy offered a welter of possibilities in a heady mixture of erotic desires. Cross-dressing in this book is presented as a fantastical exploration of powerlessness. When Julian puts on women’s clothes, she/he yields to others who assume control. Perhaps this fantasy recoups ex­ periences; certainly, the novel casts Julian’s sexual education through a golden haze of nostalgia and memory. Or perhaps this novel finds ways to experience a trans identity at a time when admitting such desires could have vicious repercussions. Externalising control could allow readers to enjoy feminisation without the problems of volition. If force was used – as it is repeatedly in the novel – then responsibility for the desire to dress as a woman could be side-stepped. Further, such fantasies of forced feminisation made women culpable for boys’ sexual and sartorial desires. Trying to disentangle any real remembrance on the part of the author from fantasies about the past remains elusive because of the tradition of pseudonymous authorship. Authorship of the volume, like that of many pornographic works of the time, remains hidden. Peter Mendes traced the volume through l’Enfer catalogue, where it was suggested that Stanislaus Matthew de Rhodes, a barrister at the Inner Temple during the period of its initial publication, might have written the book.30 An alternative author might have been Havelock Ellis, according to Gershon Legman, who offers no reliable evidence for the claim.31 The French version gave the author’s name as Jacques Desroix, but without any further substantiation.32 The novel, first published in 1893, was printed in a limited edition of 300 copies, priced £9 for the set of three volumes by H. S. Nichols for Leonard Smithers.33 Nichols and Smithers functioned as two of England’s most significant pornographers during the late 1880s and early 1890s. The trade in pornographic works remained quite small, constrained by censorship and the economics of the market.34

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The book circulated in the erotic-book market for decades. Customers across Europe, the British Empire and America used print catalogues to find materials. These catalogues were sent under closed covers to likely buyers, who included men from society-page announcements, men in the armed forces and boys in public school. Catalogues listed Gynecocracy alongside other rare pornographic works and erotic photosets. The ‘Catalogue of Rare and Voluptuous Reading, 1897’, for example, listed the three-volume set of Gyne­ cocracy for £4.35 Another catalogue priced it at £5.5s in 1905.36 Rarity, fineness and accompanying illustrations could raise prices to exorbitant levels: one catalogue listed an edition of the book with plates at £18.37 The only volume more expensive was the Pearl, which cost a phenomenal £25 with plates or roughly $125 at the time. The extraordinary expense of such books suggests that readership remained limited to wealthy connoisseurs rather than casual readers.38 The circulation of books like Gynecocracy can be seen in the currencies that dealers accepted. By the 1930s, materials could be purchased in ‘English postal orders, or Bank-Bills, American greenbacks, Indian rupee paper or any other paper money’. Dealers accepted cheques and drafts for banks in London or New York City and would ship materials to ‘clients in England, America, India, and British colonies’ using packing that could pass any postal or customs regulations, according to their advertisements. By the 1950s, copies of Gynecocracy had made their way to California and transcriptions of the content then travelled from California to Indiana. Louise Lawrence, the trans writer and activist, noted that her friend Al Harris had a copy of the book that he would be willing to resell for $50 to Alfred Kinsey if the Institute for Sex Research needed one for its collection.39 Gynecocracy’s circulation patterns show the ways that the novel moved through the world for decades after its initial publication, providing a wellspring of forced-feminisation fantasies to English-speakers. The second book, Stays and Gloves: Figure Training and Deport­ment by Means of the Discipline of Tight Corsets, Narrow High-Heeled Boots, Clinging Kid Gloves, Combinations, etc. etc., also featured forced feminisation through the conceit of the fictional memoir.40 Set in the late Victorian world, the book explored petticoat discipline in the nostalgic glow of wealth and privilege. Like Gyne­ cocracy, the book contributed a set of erotic ideas and metaphors around forced feminisation and suggested that the treatment of the body affected gender identity. In Stays and Gloves, ten-year-old Jimmy was sent to boarding school after the remarriage of his mother.41 His schooling was presided

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over by Lady Flayskin, who dressed him as a girl and renamed him Alice. Beaten, humiliated and dressed in corset, dress, stockings, tight boots and gloves, Jimmy became Alice in both actions and ideas. According to the novel, clothes remade Jimmy’s consciousness. While Jimmy had been forthright, Alice was sly and manipulative. ‘To the extent that formerly I had been playful, high-spirited and always ready to engage in pleasures and employments suited to my age and sex, so now I became reserved, secretive, and timorous’.42 This transformation to feminisation (for either boys or girls) carried with it a sexual component. The double burden of wearing women’s clothing and being subject to corporal punishment brought an erotic energy to children’s relationships with each other. The discomfort caused by high-heeled boots, the long tight-fitting gloves and the cruel corset, above all the terror in which we lived of the birch, all this kept us in a continual state of nervous excitement, which easily transformed itself into eroticism and unhealthy passions.43

The novel, masquerading as memoir, detailed forced feminisation of both boys and girls. Both biological sexes were subject to the feminine conditioning that used clothes, discipline and violence to create a certain type of eroticised femininity. Clearly, gender came from the outside and was put upon the body and in the process rewrote the sense of self. Like other pornographic works of the time, this novel was also written pseudonymously and published on the Continent. Printed in a small run (330 copies), it was sold by Roberts et Dardaillon, as one of Charles Carrington’s Parisian agents. Carrington was one of a small set of British publishers who had been forced onto the Continent to evade prosecution.44 The original edition of the novel boasted ten copper­plate illustrations and cost £1.10s or thirty-seven francs in 1912.45 The book was still for sale in 1919 and 1926, the latter volume at a price of £2.10s or $12.46 The volume was translated into French with illustrations by ‘G. Smit’, apparently under the title of Education Anglaise: discipline du corset, des gants, des bottines, etc.47 What might have been a typed excerpt from the book under the name of ‘Figure Training’ appeared in the possession of a man arrested for peddling obscenity in a 1923 arrest.48 That man also owned a copy of Gynecocracy. In 1978, text excerpts of Stays and Gloves were included in a sale catalogue of bondage and figure training items.49 Clearly, these works circulated and recirculated for decades among collectors and readers interested in forced feminisation.

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As well as novels, people collected magazines and ephemera that spoke to forced feminisation and cross-dressing. Although magazines, pamphlets and circulars were made to be ephemeral, a form of cultural knowingness marked certain objects as sexually inflected and made these publications worthy of archiving and savouring. The most famous case of inflected reading was the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine’s corset correspondence,50 which in the 1860s discussed the problems of tight-lacing. Though it was entirely possible that Victorian women read the correspondence for sartorial tips, later readers used the column for tips on cross-dressing, tight-lacing, and forms of body modification. Further, according to Sharon Marcus, stories about the punishment of children and flagellation published in the same magazine were reprinted as part of the Birchen Bouquet, an obscene book.51 William Dugdale published Birchen Bouquet in 1860 and sold it for £2.2s, and Lazenby republished the volume in 1881 for £2.52 Thus, stories published first in the ephemeral press could have a second life and even a third life as erotic fare. Stories with child discipline, forced feminisation, cross-dressing, corseting, high heels and bondage and sadomasochism (bd/sm) as themes recirculated as erotica for decades after their initial publication. Magazines such as Fun, New Fun, Photo Bits, Photo Fun, New Photo Fun, London Life and Modern Society, Modern Society, London Life, Bizarre, Exotique and Transvestia became known as sources for relevant fantasy materials. The first eight publications came out of a publishing group from London that printed materials about corsets, discipline, body modification and other subjects collected by those interested in cross-dressing. Photo Bits, located at 9 Bolt Court, was established in 1911. It became Photo Fun, printed and published by the New Fun Publishing Company, 13 Milford Lane, Strand, in 1912 before being reborn as New Fun in the same year. By 1914, advertisements for London Life began to appear in New Fun, suggesting that a single publisher owned both periodicals.53 New Fun then became Fun in 1915. In 1917 the publication changed names again, this time joining three different publications under one title, Bits of Fun.54 Also in 1917, Philip Henry-Hemyng, editor of both Photo Bits and London Life, was charged for publishing obscene images in those magazines before Bow-Street Police Court.55 After his arrest, Photo Bits disappeared and London Life changed its name to London Life and Modern Society, before becoming simply London Life a year later. By the autumn of 1919, the magazine had moved to New Picture Press, Ltd, 7a Wine Office Court, Fleet Street.56 In 1920, the publication group again ran into trouble with the law for sending

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obscene materials through the mail. The prosecutor called Bits of Fun ‘a nauseating and scurrilous rag, which existed only to pander to the perverted tastes of a certain class of society’.57 Although Bits of Fun collapsed shortly after the prosecution, others in the publishing group continued with the same content and advertisers. London Life and New Fun, for example, carried ads like these: Tiny waists & High Heels For Ladies & Gentlemen. Laurence Lenton, the only Male Corset Specialist in England, Specialises in small waist corsets and dainty high-heeled footwear for gentlemen. Complete outfits supplied for Female Impersonators (including Wigs, Lingerie, etc., etc.). Ladies can consult Manageress. Strictest privacy observed. Ladies type of corsets for gentlemen if desired.58

These publications also became sources for clippings and scrapbooks.59 A correspondent to London Life who named himself ‘Experienced’ wrote that from roughly 1929 until 1939 he had clipped items from the correspondence columns and pasted them into small loose-leaf books. His collection focused on high heels, corsets, domestic discipline, makeup, bondage, dressing up and rubber wear – all told ‘more than 8,500 inches of column space’.60 These collections might be saved for decades but sometimes made their way back onto the market years later, when people’s life circumstances changed. Novels, magazines and clipping files circulated well after their initial publication and affected fantasies, identities and ideas about sexuality in very different contexts. James Joyce had the French version of Gynecocracy in his library as well as copies of Bits of Fun. He used those and other materials in his fiction: Leopold Bloom enjoyed Photo Bits and clipped a story from Modern Society.61 Readers of Ulysses encountered a refraction of forced-feminisation fantasies in the ‘Circe’ episode.62 Thus, forced-feminisation fantasies extended to both the trans and modernist reading communities. In a very different case, materials circulated on the second-hand market before travelling to Indiana and finding a home in the Institute for Sex Research as part of the Louise Lawrence collection. Lawrence’s collection included clippings and retyped columns from Photo Bits on ‘The Art of Female Impersonation’ by Mr C. E. Preston and reviews like ‘Velvet, Female Impersonator Not So Good’ from 1909.63 One contributor to Little Bits of Fun advertised an interest ‘in the training of boys as girls and methods of punishment’ and went on to ask for ‘information from anyone having experience in the same’.64 Lawrence also had a two-part history of the corset taken from Society.65 Her collection was saved and archived because she became a conduit for

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materials to Alfred Kinsey when he became interested in investigating such issues at Lawrence’s urging. Lawrence bought books and collections for Kinsey and retyped stories, columns, letters and even books when materials could not be purchased. Lawrence noted the predominance of British publications: It is the first part of a three part story and, as you will see if you read it, it was originally written in England. Strangely enough it seems that a good many of these stories originate there and I have often wondered why this is so.66

British materials circulated for decades relocating fantasies across time and space, and creating a sort of fictive nostalgia for a place that readers had never experienced. Victorian society had little to do with the American post-war world but nostalgia for the wealth and privilege enriched fantasies of forced feminisation. Motifs in Gynecocracy and Stays and Gloves were recapitulated in later stories, as Lawrence noted. Lawrence eventually amassed an eleven-page list of materials with ‘male transvestite subject matter’ that she sent to Kinsey and the Institute, according to the Institute’s finding aid. Some she retyped: I have on hand temporarily several new stories but before I type them up for you I am sending you the titles as you suggested. They are all dealing with the domination of the male by the female by means of transvestism and flagellation.

These stories included ‘The Painted Slave’, ‘Mistress High Heels’, ‘The Slave Master’, ‘Poor Mr. Halton’, ‘Doris (first of three parts)’, and ‘Edouard at the Transformatory’.67 Others she had seen like ‘Fads and Fancies’ and Derk Fortesque’s series published in Photo Bits in 1911, ‘Dickie’s Diary’ from Photo Bits from 1914 and a thirty-one-page excerpt from Gynecocracy. Still others she wanted, like ‘Boy’s Feminine Fashion’, in three parts. Many of the titles had only single-named authors like Bessie, Daphne and Connie, and most were short pieces of anywhere from four to a few dozen pages. Only a few were longer, like the 400-page volume entitled An American Boy in England.68 Articles like ‘Another Girl Boy’ (Illustrated Bits, 8 May 1915) and ‘The Psychological Effects of Clothes’ (London Life, 8 December 1934) detailed sartorial, emotional and erotic practices of men who cross-dressed as women. According to Peter Farrer, who has recently republished some of these materials, the Lawrence collection contains some 3,000 ‘closely typed pages of manuscript’.69

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The circulation and recirculation of trans texts can also be docu­ mented through a second, related archive housed at the Harris/ Wheeler collection at California State University at Northridge. This collection contains scrapbooks of articles excerpted from the same group of publications on cross-dressing, corsets and discipline, including the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, Family Doctor & People’s Medical Advisor, Photo Bits, New Fun, Fun, Bits of Fun, Confidential Correspondence and London Life. The collection also contains two scrapbooks of John Willie illustrations, famed for his contribution to Bizarre. When Al Harris, who apparently assembled the materials, married in the 1950s, he passed his collection along to Richard O. Wheeler.70 (That was the same Al Harris who Lawrence said was willing to sell his copy of Gynecocracy to Kinsey’s Institute. Photos of ‘Al’, possibly Al Harris, tied up and in a tight corset are in Kinsey’s collection.71) The Harris/Wheeler materials had been origin­ ally scrapbooked by a third person, A. Rodney Patterson. Passing from Patterson to Harris to Wheeler and into the Vern and Bonnie Collection on Sex and Gender, the scrapbook’s provenance makes visible hidden relationships. This collection reveals interests in corseting, cross-dressing, bondage and domination, and body modification, among others. One illustration in the scrapbook came originally from the 29 July 1933 issue of London Life, featuring a high-heeled woman dressed in black kid leather and holding a crop. The caption advertised that she wore a corset designed by Laurence Lenton, the same corsetière from 1912 who advertised male corsets and female impersonation goods in New Fun.72 The scrapbook demonstrated the collector’s range of interests, including amputees, rubberwear, tattooing and forced feminisation. Frequent references to girdles for men and tight gloving fall easily into the category of trans interests but, as the content of Stays and Gloves demonstrated, materials on discipline and corsets could feed an interest in cross-dressing and trans culture even if they did not overtly speak about men dressed as women. Columns about bd/sm, forced feminisation, and stories and advertisements about corseting could speak to erotic desires across gender. The Harris/Wheeler collection and the Louise Lawrence collection demonstrate a sort of community knowledge-building about trans issues. The passage of materials across time and space show how people learned about sexuality and how ideas could percolate across generations and between regions. Rather than mysteriously arriving at similar ideas about sexuality, individuals collected objects about sex and its relationship to gender and passed them along to others.

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The shift to online access allowed new technologies to deliver similar sorts of stories that were simultaneously crowd-sourced and crowd-read. Susan Faludi’s father took a lively interest in online story boards, as noted earlier in this chapter. Since she downloaded her favourites from FictionMania, the site has continued to grow. By June 2017, a total of 29,516 stories had been uploaded.73 The site organises stories by theme: the single largest theme is ‘Cross­dressing/ TV’, with 13,095 stories to its credit. The second largest subset is ‘Femdom, Authori­ tarian’ (6,100 stories), which broke away from ‘Bondage’ (2,736 stories) on 10 December 1998. Other themes include ‘Caught with Consequences’ (3,415), ‘Bad Boy to Good Girl’ (2,424 stories) and ‘Deals, Bets or Dares’ (2,990). Relevant to this chapter, the site also contains 224 stories set in ‘Victorian Times’ as well as 374 ‘­Historical Stories’. Ideas from older pulp publications and clipping files continued to influence fantasies. The earliest story loaded into Fiction­Mania (24 January 1999) under the category of Victorian Times was entitled ‘The Importance of Being Juliette’. Elaine, the author, knew her British literature and included references to Tom Brown’s School Days and The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as references to Shakespearian casting practices. However, the greatest impact on Elaine seems to have been made by Gynecocracy. Like Gynecocracy, this story featured a main character named Julian, who was sent to an English boarding school in the 1890s. According to the online tale, sixteen-year-old Julian grew enamoured with his French teacher, Leila, who decided to ‘take him down a peg’ through forced feminisation. Corseted, tightly laced into high-heeled boots, renamed Juliette, emasculated through a type of chastity belt, and fed oestrogen, Julian became fully feminised. The story builds upon the conventions of Victorian forced feminisation, including the setting, domination by female teachers, conventions of flagellation, wayward adolescent boys and punishment by cross-dressing. Here, too, clothes make identity rather than vice versa, and in this story, like Gynecocracy, a love for women leads to men’s cross-dressing and feminisation. Both Julians ultimately become feminised because their love for women leads them to being clothed as women, which in turn brings with it a female identity. In both sets of stories, the fantastic removal of volition has a sort of liberatory potential. These materials let us see the metaphors that people used to construct an erotic imaginary. The modelling of new fantasies based upon older stories shows the continued salience of the originals. Authors remade British classics like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, Oliver Twist and

200   Lisa Z. Sigel

Pygmalion into ‘Heidi’, ‘A Study in Satin’, ‘Olivia Twist – The True Story’ and ‘Pygmalion Revisited’ respectively. To be fair, most stories on the message board did not reimagine Victorianism. Even in the historical category a wide range of settings and circumstances fired people’s imaginations, from ‘All Hitler, All the Time’ to Westerns like ‘The Ballad of Jessie Hanks’. Stories set in historic and more contemporary settings made use of forced feminisation as a theme, although, with almost 30,000 stories in the archives, it is impossible to do more than provide the crudest kind of data analysis. Nonetheless, the proliferation of stories on online storyboards underlines their importance. Writing and reading such stories mattered to a large number of people. Novels like Gynecocracy and Stays and Gloves, clipping files from Photo Bits, New Photo Fun, London Life and others, and uploaded stories on message boards like FictionMania circulated widely, influencing fantasies for generations. As this chapter has shown, these materials had complicated journeys through time and space. Books like Gynecocracy were sold and resold multiple times in the erotic-book market. One copy of a book might be seen by dozens of readers over the span of century. Similarly, certain hot-button items recirculated in the ephemera market. Correspondence columns about cross-dressing boys could be sold, saved, resold, scrapbooked, passed along and then archived. The origins of the collections considered here highlight the extent of recirculation. Louise Lawrence collected stories and materials from across her community. What has been labelled her archive (and surely she deserves credit) in fact comes from dozens or even hundreds of individuals. Looking at the Lawrence collection allows researchers to view fantastical material collected by a wide variety of people. The Harris/Wheeler collection came from multiple individuals as well: five people have their names attached to the collection’s provenance. Further, the collection houses clippings generated from contributor letters sent to pulp magazines. A single scrapbook, like one at the Harris/Wheeler collection, documents the fantasies from hundreds of correspondents that circulated through at least five people’s hands before landing in an archive. The practice of crowd-sourced writing that started with pulp magazines continues into e-fiction message boards: hundreds of people have written stories for FictionMania. To consider the impact of fantasies of forced feminisation, we first need to consider the thousands of people who contributed the array of materials. Writing, reading and saving can all be read as testimony to the importance of these stories to individuals.

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Trans people from the 1890s through to the 1980s found community in the practices of shared storytelling and story collection. Though marginalised and silenced in other venues, they managed to maintain an erotic life through erotic stories. Forced-feminisation fantasies form a hidden line running from Victorian Britain to twenty-first-century America and from small-print-run publishing to the online message boards. These stories connected communities across generations and regions, circulating across the British Empire, Europe and North America for more than a century. Trans people like Louise Lawrence, Al Harris, Peter Farrer, the volunteers at FictionMania, including Mindy Rich and Carol Collins, invested time, money and love in erotic stories, and they fought to archive these fantasies rather than let them disappear. They did so because they valued the voices of the community, even the erotic ones. As Carol Collins of FictionMania wrote, ‘The newbies coming on the Internet and finding FM simply do not realize how lucky they are. It used to be very difficult to find TG stories. Here, we have thousands available for free.’74 Though it might be easier to construct a version of transgender emergence that devalues sexuality and eroticism, such a model would privilege an elided and asexual past and ignore the labours of writers, collectors, readers, archivists and activists. The provenance of erotic forced-feminisation materials allows us to see the importance that trans people placed on sexuality and erotic desires. Their continued existence constitutes a labour of love that deserves to be written into the histories of trans community formation. Notes  1. National Geographic magazine featured its first transsexual cover in the January 2017 special issue entitled ‘Gender Revolution’. USA Today reported on the cover: Susan Miller, ‘Trans Girl, 9, Makes History on National Geographic Cover’, USA Today, 19 December 2016.   2. Janice M. Irvine, Disorders of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Modern American Sociology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005); Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008); Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah, ‘Gender Editor’s Introduction’, Trangender Studies Quarterly, 1:4 (2014), pp. 467–8.   3. Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016), p. 64. As of 19 July 2017, FictionMania still existed but Sissy Station did not.

202   Lisa Z. Sigel   4. Ibid., p. 67.   5. Ibid., p. 136.   6. Ibid., p. 138.   7. Scholars have treated the alignment of biological sex and gender before the advent of sexological categories in a wide variety of ways. For example, Randolph Trumbach demonstrates the importance of molly culture in eighteenth-century London in Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); anthropologists have considered variations in sex/gender alignment in Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (New York: Zone Books, 1996); contributors to Thomas A. Foster (ed.), Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 2007), consider the berdache as a historical category as well as other sorts of gender/sex alignments.  8. As much as possible, this chapter makes use of the language and terminology from the sources under discussion to avoid the anachronistic mislabelling of people’s desires. Thus, at times it uses the terminology of cross-dressing, at others the term ‘transvestite’ and at others ‘transsexual’ and ‘transgender’ because these terminologies changed over the course of the period. The recognition of the diversity and historical specificity of desires has been the project of queer scholarship for a generation. As part of that larger project, this chapter articulates people’s desires as they experienced them in the past rather than collapsing language into current categorisations that assume essential categories of desire or identity.   9. Barry Reay, ‘The Transsexual Phenomenon: A Counter-History’, Journal of Social History, 47:4 (2014), pp. 1042–70 (p. 1042). 10. Jonathan Ned Katz, ‘The Invention of Heterosexuality’, Socialist Review, 20 (1990), pp. 6–30; and Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 11. Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, pp. 16–21. 12. Stryker, Transgender History, p. 45. 13. Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed. See also Reay, ‘The Transsexual Phenomenon’, p. 1043. Liam Oliver Lair claims that the focus on Christine Jorgensen ‘elides not only multiple trans*narratives that existed within the same historical context but also . . . denies the complexity of the relationship between sex and knowledge production around historical and contemporary understandings of sex, gender, and other aspects of identity’. Lian Oliver Lair, ‘Interrogating Trans* Identities in the Archives’, in Amy L. Stone and Jaime Cantrell (eds), Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), pp. 233–54 (p. 234). 14. Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, p. 255. 15. Reay, ‘The Transsexual Phenomenon’, p. 1044.

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16. Robert S. Hill, ‘“As a man I exist; as a woman I live”: Heterosexual Transvestism and the Contours of Gender and Sexuality in Postwar America’, PhD dissertation (University of Michigan, 2007), p. 17. 17. Susan Stryker quoted ibid., p. 32. 18. Quoted in Reay, ‘The Transsexual Phenomenon’, p. 1046. 19. Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, p. 158. 20. Quoted ibid., p. 159. 21. Reay, ‘The Transsexual Phenomenon’, p. 1059. 22. Richard Ekins and Dave King, ‘Virginia Prince: Transgender Pioneer’, in Richard Ekins and Dave King (eds),Virginia Prince: Pioneer of Trans­ gendering (Binghamton: Haworth Medical Press, 2005), p. 7. 23. Hill, ‘“As a man I exist; as a woman I live”’, p. 125. 24. Janet Thompson [Louise Lawrence], ‘Transvestism: An Empirical Study’, International Journal of Sexology, 4:4 (May 1951), pp. 216–19 (p. 216). 25. Susan Stryker calls Lawrence the ‘crucial interface between medical researchers and transgender social networks’. Stryker, Transgender History, p. 44. 26. Julian Robinson, Viscount Ladywood (pseudonym), Gynecocracy (1893; Paris: Olympia Press, 2007), p. 17. 27. Ibid., p. 42. 28. Ibid., pp. 240–1. 29. Ibid., p. 277. 30. Peter Mendes, Clandestine Erotic Fiction in English, 1800–1930: A Biblio­graphical Study (London: Scolar Press, 1993), p. 247. 31. Gershon Legman, ‘Introduction’, in Patrick Kearney (ed.), The Private Case (London: J. Landesman, 1981), p. 42. 32. Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 86, 182 n. 97. 33. Mendes, Clandestine Erotic Fiction, pp. 246–50. 34. The National Archives (TNA), Public Records Office (PRO) at Kew, London, HO 45/9752/A59329, ‘The Stoppage of Letters to or from Dealers in Obscene Matter’, 1898. See also Elisabeth Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2007); Celia Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Adam Parkes, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Lisa Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Allison Wee, ‘Trials and Eros: The British Home Office v. Indecent Publications, 1857–1932’, PhD dissertation (University of Minnesota, 2003). 35. British Library, London, Prospectuses and advertisements for erotica in various languages collected by Dr. Eric John Dingwall, ‘Catalogue of Rare and Voluptuous Reading, 1897’, p. 4. 36. British Library, London, Album 7, Catalogues and prospecti, ‘List of

204   Lisa Z. Sigel Rare and Curious Books’ (London: Carrington, 1905). See also P. J. Cross, ‘The Private Case: A History’, in P. R. Harris (ed.), The Library of the British Museum: Retrospective Essays on the Department of Printed Book (London: British Library, 1991). 37. British Library, London, Album 7, Catalogues and prospecti, ‘Up-ToDate Sample List of Very Voluptuous Reading’ (London: Carrington, in pencil next to indexer’s list, 189?), number 32. 38. It is also worth noting that evidence from catalogues comes from a series of elite collections and collectors. E. J. Dingwall organised the collection and the catalogues of erotic materials at the British (Museum) Library. Educated at Cambridge University, Dingwall became a library volunteer, eventually being named honorary assistant keeper of the British Museum Library. Apparently he did not need remunerative employment. H. S. Ashbee contributed the nucleus of the Private Case collection in his will; Charles Reginal Dawes and Alfred Rose made later additions, as did Beecher Moore. Dingwall also sought out volumes from the Milford-Haven collection during the Profumo affair. See Cross, ‘The Private Case’; Christopher Josiffe, ‘Dr. Dingwall’s Casebook, A Skeptical Enquirer, Part Two: “Dirty Ding”’, Fortean Times, 300 (May 2013), pp. 50–4; Kearney, The Private Case. 39. Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana, Louise Lawrence collection (hereafter Lawrence collection), Louise Lawrence to Alfred Kinsey, 13 February 1950. 40. Lord Kidrodstock (pseudonym), Stays and Gloves: Figure Training and Deportment by Means of the Discipline of Tight Corsets, Narrow High-Heeled Boots, Clinging Kid Gloves, Combinations, etc. etc. (1909; London: Birchgrove Press, 2011). 41. Ibid., p. 7. 42. Ibid., p. 43. 43. Ibid., p. 57. 44. For a discussion of Carrington, see Colette Colligan, A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890–1960 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), p. 86. 45. Mendes, Clandestine Erotic Fiction, p. 394; Colligan, A Publisher’s Paradise, pp. 155–6. 46. British Library, London, Album 7, Catalogues and prospecti, Unnamed catalogue (London and Paris, 1919). 47. Mendes mentions the translation. I have not had the opportunity to examine the volume entitled Education Anglaise, but descriptions of the two, written by Lord Kidrodstock, seem to suggest that they might be the same work. 48. TNA, PRO, CRIM, 1/234, Exhibit 80. For a fuller discussion of the arrest, see Lisa Z. Sigel, Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), ch. 4.

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49. Sale catalogue listing Stays & gloves: figure training and deportment by means of the discipline of tight corsets, narrow high-heeled boots, clinging kid gloves, combinations, etc., etc. (Westminster, CA: Centurion Publishing, 1978), p. 1, no. 1. 50. The corset correspondence could be read as a discussion of contemporary problems with fashion or a sign of an emergent kink. See, for example, David Kunzle, Fashion and Fetishism: Corsets, Tight-Lacing, and Other Forms of Body Sculpture (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), pp. 216–18; Helene E. Roberts, ‘The Exquisite Slave: The Role of Clothes in the Making of the Victorian Woman’, Signs, 2:3 (spring 1977), pp. 554–69; Margaret Beetham, ‘“Natural but Firm”: The Corset Correspondence in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine’, Women: A Cultural Review, 2:2 (1991), pp. 163–7. 51. Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 147–8. 52. Pisanus Fraxi (H. S. Ashbee), Catena Librorum Tacendorum (1885; New York: Documentary Books, 1962), pp. 242–3. 53. New Fun, 6:77 (3 January 1914), no page number. 54. Fun, no. 71 (3 March 1917), no page number. 55. ‘Alleged Obscene Picture’, The Times, 17 February 1917, p. 5. 56. The Newspaper Press Directory (London: C. Mitchell & Co., 1927). 57. Peter Farrer, Confidential Correspondence on Cross Dressing, Part II 1916–1920 (Liverpool: Karn Publications, 1998), p. 16. 58. New Fun, 1:8 (new series) (24 August 1912); for a similar advertisement in London Life, see the one for ‘Gentlemen’s Corsets’, London Life, 4 October 1930, p. 26. 59. See the contents of Lawrence collection, Box 3, Series IIB, Folder 46. See also Hill, ‘“As a man I exist”’, p. 29, for a discussion of the magazine Transvestia and the relationship with other sorts of fetish publications. 60. ‘Experienced’, ‘Filing Your Cuttings’, London Life, 25 November 1939, p. 96. 61. Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality, p. 86. 62. Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 112, 114–15. 63. Lawrence collection, Box 3, Series, II, Manuscripts, Mr C. E. Preston, ‘The Art of Female Impersonation’, Photo Bits, 18 December 1909; ‘Velvet, Female Impersonator Not So Good’, Photo Bits, 11 December 1909. 64. Back advertisements, Little Bits of Fun, 23 November 1918. 65. Madame Dowding, ‘History of the Corset’, Society, 3 December 1898, p. 1020, and 17 December 1898, p. 1060. 66. Lawrence collection, Louise Lawrence to Alfred Kinsey, 21 September1950.

206   Lisa Z. Sigel 67. Lawrence collection, Louise Lawrence to Alfred Kinsey, 23 November 1950. 68. Lawrence collection, Louise Lawrence Papers, Series II, Folder 46, Book title/Authors with male transvestite subject matter. One selection lists a ‘General Article on Tvism’, which seems to be a clipping file. 69. William Edward Beck, Happenings: The Story of Bessie, ed. Peter Farrer (Liverpool: Karn Publications, 2012), p. 9. 70. Email, Tony Gardner to Lisa Sigel, 27 January 2010, ‘Re: Harris/Wheeler Collection’. 71. Lawrence collection, Louise Lawrence to Alfred Kinsey, 5 May 1951. 72. Harris/Wheeler collection, Special collections, California State University, Northridge, Box 2, Folder 1, ‘A Selection of Pertinent Pages from London Life’, p. 2. 73. FictionMania, accessed 29 June 2017. The site offers a history and a description of the website. 74. Carol Collins, ‘A Brief History of FictionMania’, Index of FAQ, FictionMania Info, at (accessed 29 June 2017).

Chapter 10

Reading History, History Reading in Modern Iranian Literature: Prison Writing as National Allegory or a World Literary Genre? Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

Reading in modern Iranian literature, far from designating a merely solipsistic act or space of aesthetic pleasure, invariably entails historicisation, trauma-translation/transference, and a hermeneutic of personal-political truth and identity.1 To write of reading in modern Iranian literature is to touch a fraught place where its intense concerns with a crisis-ridden contemporaneity and historicity converge with the versions of identity, memory and nationhood it articulates. Reading, in such a historical context, ineluctably involves a situated act which has history as its ‘untranscendable horizon’.2 An act which, in its own turn, involves considerations of the discursive sources, production and dissemination of the structures of meaning, truth, authority, value and identification – either sedimented in the text as its political unconscious or consciously registered in the text as epistemological and sociocultural schemas to be concretised by the reader-citizen.3 These dimensions gain urgency and critical relevance particularly in relation to Iran, given the attempt to perpetuate a univocal mode of the dominant political discourse and historical narration in modern and contemporary Iran. It can thus be argued that, in such politics of cognition, reading proves a praxis in de- and re-territorialisation,4 an act of emancipatory re-subjectivation, community formation and cognitive reconfiguration of, or an intervention into, history. It also transpires as an exercise in a certain political form: democracy – through voicing and listening to difference, dissonance and dialogicity inherent in the double structure of reading. What compounds this overdetermined condition is these modern Iranian literary works’ conscious act of situating themselves in a world (literary) history. 207

208  Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

Reading in modern Iranian literature, as such, entails tackling a cognitive zeugma, where memory (past oriented) and desire (future oriented) are held in an aporetic or contradictory tandem and tension with each other; and it is the attitude and means adopted for resolving this aporetic relation that determines the historical meanings, discursive positions and narrative structures of literary texts in Iran. As will become evident, an analysis of Iranian prison writing is not only able to reveal parts of contemporary reading practices otherwise hidden, lost or neglected, but also reveals the broader psychic and emotional operations of the act of reading itself. Prison writing – in its various permutations – is a critical site which, arguably, more than any other genre illustrates the aforementioned issues. Scrutinising a century (1910–2012) of prison writings (based on books, memoirs, notes, letters and reviews), this chapter focuses on the production-reception history and translation-compositional politics of prison writings (Habsieh) in Iran. As regards the scope, methodology and analytical treatment of its material, the thrust of the argument is fourfold. First, the pivotal argument established by the exploration of data is that the act of prison writing is perceived as a situated act of reading for both the writer and the reader, entailing an aesthetics of empathy and a politics of compassion. Such an approach also reveals how, through choosing this genre, the writers themselves become readers in the imaginative, global, transcultural community of writers and readers of prison writings, a third space where those excluded from the differing dominant discourses meet/intersect and have a dialogue in absentia. Given the way the generic space of prison writing enables both the writer and the reader to traverse and transcend both historical-geographical limits and the ideo­logical restrictions of dominant discourses, it will be demonstrated how an act of local writing/reading proves simultaneously an act of global writing/reading. Secondly, it is argued that the prison space apparatus is as much repressive as it is productive of new emancipatory, non-normative subjects and subject positions, of literary techniques and styles, new visions of history and the logic of s­patiality and relationality which extend beyond both local and national time and borders. I am deriving my premise here from F ­ oucault’s arguments regarding the not necessarily negative and repressive relation­ ship between power, knowledge and embodied subjectivity.5 Thirdly, it will be demonstrated that while prison writing in Iranian modernity can and should be read as what Jameson (in relation to Third World literature) calls ‘national allegory’, more importantly, it resituates the author/narrator and the narrative in a scene of world history

Reading History, History Reading in Modern Iranian Literature   209

and global modernity, thereby revealing the contemporaneity of non-synchronous yet interconnected carceral-traumatic histories. As Jameson explains: Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic[,] necessarily project a political dimen­ sion in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-​ world culture and society.6

The ‘world’ in world literary history is never neutral, but rather informed with a capitalist and colonialist mode of combined and uneven development.7 This latter move is enabled through acts of dialogical imagination coalesced with transcultural and transnational modes of community-formation and history-reading. Crucially, in prison writing, such a possibility is realised primarily through the space of prison and prison writing, coupled with the mode of historical consciousness, ethos and community this produces. Fourthly, it will be demonstrated how prison writings consciously seek to determine the mode and history of their reception – in effect, to create the ideal, politically sensitive reader. Crucially, it will be demonstrated how the self-determination and consideration of the Third World text as national allegory afford readers means of ‘cognitive mapping’ through which they can gain insight not only into the political and historical totality of the dominant discourse but also its normative narratives dominant in their country; it also purveys ‘a conceptual instrument for grasping our new being-in-the-world’ and the ‘latent’ totality of the world-system.8 Modern Iranian poetic and prose prison writings Traditionally, the genre selected for prison writing in pre-modern Persian literature was poetry – particularly couplet and ode. The most conspicuous examples are those by Naser-Khosro Qobadiani (1044– 88), Masud Sa’d-r Salman (1046–1122), Khaqani Shervani (1122–90) and Ayn-Al-Quzat Hamedani (1098–1131).9 In modern Iranian literature, however, while poetry is still utilised as an effective medium, the prevailing genres are prose and prose fiction. It will be illuminating to discuss briefly the most prominent modern poets who made a foray into prison writing before undertaking a detailed investigation of modern prison writing in prose. There are six modern Iranian poets

210  Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

in whose poems the themes of prison and prison space feature prominently. These poets can be divided – both historically/chronologically and aesthetically/stylistically – into two principal groups. The first three belong to the era of Constitutional Revolution (1905–11) and post-Constitution (1911–41). They are Mohammad Farrokhi-Yazdi (1889–1939), Mohammad-Taghi Bahar (1886–1951) and Mirzadeh Eshghi (1893–1924). What renders these poets note­worthy for the purposes of this study is the way – due to the exceptional historical juncture which they inhabit – they find themselves as readers in world political and literary history. As a scrutiny of the politically and prison-oriented poems by these poets attests, what all three share is not only their historical context – which is a highly liminal and transitional period when Iran was occupied by the Allies and the Iranian parliament was barraged with artillery and dissolved, a trend later culminating in the collapse of the Qajar monarchy. They also share their postulation of sociopolitical freedom and rational autonomy as inherent and divinely endowed rights of the human. This poetic discourse, however, is intermittently inflected with references to social-personal freedom as natural right as well as legal-political right. This issue attests to the emergence of Iranian modern consciousness in consequence of its encounter with European Enlightenment’s thesis of natural right and European modernity’s discourse of human right, individual autonomy and political rationality (propagated variously by Locke, Rousseau and Kant) – particularly given that all three were public intellectuals and journalists who considered themselves to be sociopolitical enlighteners, and the Constitutional Revolution as the Iranian Enlightenment.10 This belief, however, was profoundly informed by a critical awareness of the colonial-imperial implications of the Eurocentric narrative of modernity and Enlightenment discourse. Consequently, these writers insisted on developing a nativist version of them.11 The second group whose work evinces a pervasive preoccupation with the theme of prison and torture belong to the modern period (post-1963) and comprises Mahdi Akhavan-Sales (1929–90), Ahmad Shamloo (1925–2000) and Shams Langroodi (1950–). To all three, prison experience proved to have a formative influence on the creation of the highly effective and determining works of literary criticism and history of literature. A conspicuous example is Langroodi, whose encounter with challenging questions concerning world and Iranian literary and cultural history, posed to him by his fellow prisoners, was conducive to the creation of his four-volume An Analytical History of Modern Iranian Poetry (1994–6). As both Shamloo’s and L ­ angroodi’s

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accounts of their prison times attest, they found prison as salutary and instructive as ‘a school’.12 What a fleeting survey of these poems concerned with various historical periods and sociopolitical conditions demonstrates is that the stylistic and intellectual history of prison writings (of various genres), upon closer inspection, appears to be concomitant and correlative with a history of reading and translation in national and world literature and culture – made possible in the transversal space of prison. Without their reading, these prison writers could not have mounted a challenge to traditional forms and repressive politics. Five thematic complexes – intertwined with five clusters of images – can be seen to recur throughout the prison poems of Akhavan-Sales, Shamloo and Langroodi – evincing striking affinities with (translated) poems by Neruda, Paz, Hikmet, Celan and many others (see below). These five themes are the execution spectacle, the dismembered or martyred body, the uncanny hauntology of the night, a nocturnal nomadology across an alienated world, and the cathartic transformative effect of love in its various guises (Storge, Philia, Agape and Eros). Although all the aforementioned poets (and later the prose-writers) differed in their moral values and social ideals under various ideological rubrics (socialism, Islamic or secular humanism and an idealist puritan Persian cultural tradition), what they shared was their revolutionary aesthetics and their political ethos of parrhesia or free speech, ex­plicitly arising out of their reading. The first modern Iranian prison memoir, composed almost contemporaneously with Bahar’s prison poems, is Prison Days (1921) by Ali Dashti (1894–1982). Prison Days appeared in the wake of the coup of Reza Khan against the Qajars in which many public figures, including Dashti, were arrested and imprisoned. Prison Days was the first work to introduce to modern Persian prose the prison as a site of reflection.13 However, it is Bozorg Alavi (1904–97) – a writer-thinker of Marxist leanings – who is considered by some to be the ‘founder of [Persian] prison literature’.14 Alavi’s main contributions to the genre of prison memoir are Scrap Papers from Prison (1941) and Fifty-Three Persons.15 As the title of the former indicates, the contents of this book were ‘scribbled on old sugar and cigarette packets or on small scraps of paper the author could lay hands on while in prison’.16 The book comprises five short stories (‘Padang’, ‘The Comet’, ‘Antici­ pation’, ‘General Amnesty’, ‘The Dance of Death’), each dealing with a protagonist in the prison. Fifty-Three Persons comprises an autobiographical account of the prison days, the lives and the court procedures of Alavi in conjunction with fifty-two other comrades, all promoting counter-authoritarian values under the rubric of

212  Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

communism. Interestingly, the cause for which Alavi was imprisoned proved triumphal, since Alavi’s time in prison coincided with the collapse of the second Pahlavi regime (1978–9). Having been released, Alavi resumed his sociocultural editorial tasks and duties in a leftist newspaper. Significantly, one of the recurrent motifs in both books is the parallel drawn between the psychology and politics of the space, or, more lucidly, the way the disciplinary space of the prison is supposed to confine and redefine the psychic space of the prisoner.17 Further­ more, Scrap Papers includes two climactic moments which are revealing with regard to the subjectivising effect of the disciplinary discourse of prison. One example is the prisoners’ attempt to learn foreign languages (English, French, Arabic and German); the second is Taghi Arani’s trial and his incendiary speech as a tribunal/­testimonial moment. In the preface, accentuating the historical reception of the book as a document, Alavi also articulates his intention in terms of tribunal/testimonial discourse: I want to vividly show the nuts and bolts of the society of this black period to my readers. The accusation and charging of these 53 persons in the court in such an ignominious way, which will be counted as one of the disgraceful and scandalous moments in the history of Iran, is the consequence of conditions that this black period had established.18

In an interview with the novelist and critic Donné Raffat, when asked about the impetus behind his conversion from an apolitical writer to a politicised one, Alavi is initially laconic: Alavi: (Patiently.) In prison. In prison. Raffat: In prison. Alavi: In prison, yes. There one was involved in politics whether one liked it or not.19

Unconvinced by Alavi’s reply, days later Raffat insisted on some elucidation of the reasons underlying this cataclysm in Alavi’s social-aesthetic consciousness during his time in prison: Raffat: I would still like to know what happened in prison that turned you into a politicized man [. . .]. Alavi: (Softly cutting in.) Mr. Raffat. Raffat: Yes. Alavi: They threw us into a tub full of scalding water, so that we were thrashing around with our arms and legs. Do you follow? This thrashing around of the arms and legs was, in itself, a political act.20

Reading History, History Reading in Modern Iranian Literature   213

The perceived effects of the prison space and apparatus are not confined to the politicisation of the politically neutral and purely literary author (as the reader of prison history and space). In fact, a significant effect of imprisonment which is shared by most writer-­ prisoners both in Iran – Langroodi, Alavi, Shamloo and Baraheni, as well as Ehsan Naraghi – and beyond is not only their confirmation of ‘the intellectually stimulating atmosphere in the cell, where daily discussions took place about literature, culture, politics, and religion’,21 but, equally decisively, the questions and challenges posed to writers-intellectuals by their inmates or their personal experience in prison, questions which prompt them to take new sociopolitical future paths and engage in new cultural-intellectual projects. Translation as a transversal space for reading world literatures In this section I will explore how the translation of prison writings and translation as a dialogical space, in certain historical discourses or circumstances, have been deployed by readers as a mediated means of national or personal or collective representation of political oppression and an expression of protest. Here, the history of prison reading features as prison writing; put otherwise, this category is an example of translation as autobiographical prison writing, or the subversive expression of otherwise prohibited sociopolitical statements. The earliest example in modern Iranian literary translation of prison writing is Nosrat-Al-Dowleh’s translation of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (1897). Nosrat-Al-Dowleh (1889–1937) was a member of the Qajar nobility who – when the Pahlavi dynasty, dethroning the last Qajar king, rose to power intending to found the modern Iran – was initially appointed as finance minister to Reza Shah. He later fell out of favour and was imprisoned and sentenced to exile charged with bribery, treason and collusion during the 1919 Anglo-Persian Agreement with the British government and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC). He was sentenced by the court to return the bribery money he had received and later had a suspicious death in exile. In his notes on his translation of De Profundis, as well as his own spiritual autobiography explicitly inspired by Wilde’s book, he invokes an implicit analogy between his dehumanised and abject state and Wilde’s. He is the victim of an oppressive sociopolitical system, but he also portrays his spiritual transformation. The most distinctive fact about Nosrat-Al-Dowleh’s translation, notes and

214  Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

memoir is the manner in which he wields the literary-translational space for staging a shared history of personal-cultural traumas by carceral subjects divided by historical-geographical borders. But he also treats it as a dia­logical space, underpinned by aesthetics of empathy, for therapeutic projective identification, spiritual purgation and regeneration as well as ascetic self-disciplining of the soul. It is the conjunction of these two dynamics that leads to the production of a new selfhood in the prison writer as the truth-teller: in the case of Wilde’s persona as someone who tells the truth to himself, and in the case of Nosrat-Al-Dowleh as someone who speaks the truth to power – he is the subject of parrhesia. In Nosrat-Al-Dowleh’s notes on Wilde’s De Profundis, we can witness the interplay between local and global political as well as cultural-literary histories, but also that between personal histories.22 More recently, over the last five decades (1969–2011), due to the dominance of certain restrictions that preclude the possibility of the publication of writings in Iran ‘by or on’ imprisoned (non-conformist) thinkers or activists or common people, non-imprisoned thinkers have resorted to translating novels, memoirs and semi-autobiographical works that express Iranian problems indirectly. Translations of the works of Kafka, Camus, Neruda, Nazim Hikmet and Lorca (particularly those concerned with prison-related themes and socially stifling or politically totalitarian regimes), in conjunction with a whole host of other works by writers from Latin and Central America (Gabriel García Márquez) and Europe (Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading), are salient cases in point. The translators are by definition readers, but readers of a particular type. Below I consider one paradigmatic example. Mohammad Mokhtari’s most salient work for our purposes here is his edited collection of his translations of 150 poems by twelve European poets – evocatively entitled Born of World’s Angst (1999) – where the selected poems mainly revolve around the themes of sociopolitical freedom, love, imprisonment, torture, suicide, death, nomadic exile and humanistic values, in conjunction with condemnations of authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe, Russia, Latin America and elsewhere.23 The poets include Marina Tsvetaeva, Vítězslav Nezval, Peter Huchel, Vladimir Holan, Cheslaw Milosh, Johannes Bobrowsky, Paul Celan, Zibigniew Herbert, Joseph Brodsky and Ingeborg Bachmann. As Mokhtari explains in his preface, the justification underlying his choices, apart from aesthetics, is the moral-ideological values the poems promote coupled with their common thematic preoccupations: the dehumanisation of individuals,

Reading History, History Reading in Modern Iranian Literature   215

exile, torture and persecution of non-conformists, the contradictory facets of authoritarian systems and revolutionary movements. As is evident through his choice of poems and poets, Mokhtari is tacitly levelling a criticism at the movement and ideology that led to the Iranian Revolution in 1979. These narratives illustrate how, notwithstanding the revolution’s liberating claims and ideological values of freedom, equality and fraternity, it yielded contrary results in practice. Significantly, most of the poems take as their setting major historical upheavals in Europe, including the World Wars, the Cold War and the Yugoslav civil wars. Accordingly, Mokhtari refers to the ‘Human Condition’ – a charged term at the time – demonstrating his knowledge of the revolutionary and decolonising movements in the 1950s and 1960s along with the relevant works of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Camus, Foucault and Arendt.24 Here once more the allegorical aspects of Third World literature and translation, as indicated by Jameson, are foregrounded. The act of translation is driven by a critical consciousness of the fraught relationship between local and global history – as an interconnected network of economic flows, sociocultural meanings, political events and moral values. As such, translation is undertaken as a material-semiotic practice in diagramming an interconnected network of works of ostensibly national literature, thereby revealing their ‘worldly-worlded’ nature or, as Moretti puts it, their being ‘an elliptical refraction of national literatures’. Among the other poets whose work (embodying similar themes) was translated in Iran were Nazim Hikmet, Mahmoud Darwish, F. G. Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges. Apart from Shamloo and Mokhtari, Ahmad Mir-Alayi was the most prolific and prominent translator active in this area. His most renowned translation, apart from a whole host of novels by Borges, Graham Greene, Rudyard Kipling, V. S. Naipul and Milan Kundera, is the long, politically charged poem by Paz The Sunstone (1957). The common thread that links all the aforementioned figures of world literature is the way they tackle existentially or socio­ politically tragic situations such as war, imprisonment and exile. Their other binding trait is their promotion of an inherently cosmopolitan politics and poetics of identity – one that transcends the boundaries of nation, race, language and class. Significantly, both Mokhtari and Mir-Alayi were among the victims of the ‘chain murders’ planned and conducted by the so-called rebel members of the Ministry of Intelligence, who were claimed to have been the far-right members of that ministry who had wilfully taken the law into their own hands. And finally, while incarcerated, they were bound by a specific type of

216  Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

reading experience, one that enabled politicised forms of remediation when few other means of protest were available to them. Metafictional historiographies and prison narratives: Baraheni, Golshiri and others Prison looms even larger as a space of simultaneously penal discipline, moral-existential re-subjectivation and literary-communal production among the modern Iranian novelists. Ahmad Mahmoud’s Hamsayeha (The Neighbours) (1975) and Dastane Yek Shahr (The Story of a City) (1980), Mahmood Dowlatabadi’s Kelidar (1984), Ali Mohammad Afghani’s Lady Ahoo’s Husband (1961), Ebrahim Younesi’s The Art of Novel-Writing (1962) and Najaf Daryabandari’s translation of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy (1961) were all partly or entirely written during their imprisonment. Crucially, their common thread is the use of literary-translational space as a counter-discursive and anti-institutional space. The very gesture of the choice of dialogical or heteroglossic form (literature and translation) and themes (exile, imprisonment, national decline, colonisation of Iran, social suppression and personal alienation) confirms their act of silent defiance. In this regard, Golshiri, Shamloo and Baraheni form a triumvirate in modern Iranian literature and culture. Shamloo has written prison poems, Golshiri’s novels and short stories are permeated by the themes of prison/imprisonment and Baraheni has written prison-centred poems and novels. What distinguishes the works of these three is the way they intertwine the significance, scope and meaning of their imprisonment with a long history of socio­ political prisoners and tradition of prison writing in Iranian history as well as with movements and figures in both local and global modernity. These are, above all, profoundly readerly works. The Crowned Cannibals (1977), the prison memoir of Reza Baraheni (1935–), and his What Happened After the Wedding? (written in 1974 and published nine years later) – which recounts the story of tortures and imprisonment inflicted on the revolutionaries fighting against the shah and humanitarian crimes committed by the Savak (the shah’s intelligence service) – attest to his belief that political dissent, as captured in literary form, can effectively contest despotism.25 One of the climactic moments in both these books transpires when Baraheni was asked by his interrogator in Evin what he would do if he had the power to punish his jailer in the way he himself was being punished. Baraheni responded:

Reading History, History Reading in Modern Iranian Literature   217

I would give you a thousand sharp pencils and thousands of pages of blank paper and let you write your version of the story of this prison, the prisoners and the torture chambers, and I would publish it in millions of copies so that everyone would know what our nation passed through when you had power.26

Baraheni’s Zel Allah Sh’er-ha-ye Zendan (God’s Shadow: Prison Poems)27 is a collection of poems written in Qasr Prison. Insisting on realism, truth content and historical factuality, notwithstanding the literariness of the poems, Baraheni significantly reveals how the boundaries between reality and imagination (categorical/conceptual distinctions that are valid in normative reality) lose their validity under duress. In one of his most revealing passages he explains: The truth is that in these poems I did not try to use my imagination. Because the inferno in which the prisoner lives is the product of an evil and infernal imagination; the imagination of the Shah’s executioners. There is no need for you to imagine. This inferno has been created in such a way that if you report its facts, you have made the greatest imaginations.28

This is reminiscent of Gramsci’s caveat that ‘I did everything to give you a precise idea of both my physical and psychic conditions. If you thought that this was just literature you were wrong.’29 Crucially, in the long preface to the volume, Baraheni delves into the formal history not only of prison poems but also of various other forms of sociopolitically critical poetry, including parody, socialist realism, black humour and satire, accentuating the concomitance between aesthetic revolution and radical or reformist sociopolitical stances. He also consciously situates his poems in a local–global literary conjuncture. On the one hand, linking his formally linguistically innovative approach with the moves initiated during the Constitutional Revolution and further developed by the revolutionary aesthetics of Nima, Akhavan, Shamloo, Hedayat, Behrangi, Golestan, Saedi and Farrokhzad, he seeks to explain how he is deploying certain modern literary and linguistic conventions and yet departing from them in a bid to adapt the form to the historical requirements of his own prison and institutional and discursive conditions.30 On the other hand, Baraheni invokes the literary revolutions on the global scene in a post-colonial context – referring to such figures as Aimé Césaire, Pablo Neruda, Leon Trotsky, Allen Ginsberg, Jerome Rothenberg, the French symbolists and Concrete Poetry, as well as literary movements in Palestine, in the Caribbean and among black Americans.31 Furthermore, Baraheni (referring to figures such as Franklin Roosevelt, Allen

218  Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

Dulles and Norman Schwarzkopf) explicitly situates both his poetry (and the Persian literary tradition) as well as non-Persian literature within the context of global history, traversed by political-economic circumstances determined by global capitalism (and its principle of combined and uneven development) and its concomitant dynamics of cultural imperialism. The history of literary modernity – which in Iran was inextricable from the politicised cultural discourse (including censorship), oil exploitation, occupation (by Britain, the Allies and Russia) and political oppression – resides at the hub of an interconnected network where American capital (the dollar), control of information via intelligence services, Iranian/Middle Eastern oil and military industries establish an indelibly interwoven network of unequal production, exchange and consumption. Importantly, Baraheni is one of the first to discern the link between Iranian literary and cultural history and this colonial-imperial history on the global scene on the one hand, and the complicity of the colonial-imperial history in the persistence of the ‘phallogocentric’, or patriarchal, political order and history in Iran on the other. Further, Baraheni incisively delineates the determining role of newspapers and magazines (literary or otherwise) in determining not only the history of the reception of various politically charged literary works, but also their sociocultural influence – particularly given the rampant censorship during the reigns of both Pahlavis. Another aspect of prison writing is the possibility it provides, through its invocation of a non-hegemonic world literary community, for developing and extending rhizomatic rather than arborescent traces and roots between the literatures and cultures of various locations across national and geographical boundaries. These rhizo­matic traces and arboreal links are where radical aesthetics and radical politics are inextricably entangled.32 These Iranian writers were charged with writing politically provocative and subversive works, and they were incarcerated for long periods because of their allegedly radical ideologies. In Shamloo, Golshiri and Baraheni we find Iranian modernist literature at the intersections of formal revolutions in literary techniques, radical politics and state curtailment of free speech. The complicated relationship between reading, literature, history, historical consciousness and the state is evident in the effects of incarceration on the formal redirection of these writers’ work while they were in prison. One of the most prominent and recurrent traits of the prison memoirs is the peculiar temporality of prison life and prison psyche instilled in the prisoner. This temporality – foregrounding human evanescence and mortality on both a phenomenological-psychological

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and a historical level – is intended to diminish the individual’s grasp of or relation to personal and social history and memory. This condition is vividly depicted in numerous prison narratives with a particular focus on the precarity of subjectivity and the fragility of the relationship between memory, temporality and identity – targeted in prison as a repressive-disciplinary apparatus.33 This is evident in the images of fragmentary passages and words inscribed on transitory objects that dominate prison literature from its earliest modern iterations. These include the use of scrap papers and cigarette rolls by Alavi and others, coupled with the inscriptions and graffiti on the walls of Ghasr and Evin prisons, thereby joining a tradition that has gestated for centuries – dating back far beyond Gramsci’s notebooks to at least Tudor prisons.34 This specific spatial-temporal mode of ex­pression and presence (self-perception) comes to affect the writer’s style too, leading to the emergence of a new aesthetics. Golshiri’s ‘Khane Roshanan’ (‘Dwellers of the Lit House’, 1993) – where the narration is conducted by the objects of the house, which, as they affirm, ‘lack long-term memory’ – emblematically illustrates this effect.35 Golshiri, a vigorous sociopolitical activist during the 1960s and 1970s, was arrested on political charges in 1961 and again in 1974. Both times he was imprisoned for six months, experiences which left an indelible mark on him, discernible in the formal features and thematic preoccupations of some of his fictional works. The prison experience, however, proved formative, particularly in relation to his aesthetics. As Abbas Milani notes: ‘His lifelong aversion to Soviet-style Marxism had its genesis in this prison experience, where he saw how “comrades” treated literature only as a tool of propaganda and a weapon in a pervasive class struggle’.36 Accordingly, representations of prison experience constitute one of the vexing concerns of his work. Many of his short stories pivot around prison space and the psychological-moral complications of prison experience. As if in an attempt to circumvent censorship or to convey the self-censoring mentality instilled in the carceral and panoptic subjectivity, the incorporation of prison-centred themes, narratives and characterisation by Golshiri is treated subtly and cryptically. And, crucially, it is entirely dependent on its readers’ prior knowledge of certain tropes and formal conventions, and in itself becomes suggestive of reading practices under censorship. Mainly in his short stories, Golshiri depicts the complex psychological and moral effects of imprisonment on his characters. What distinguishes Golshiri’s narratives, however, is the way he moulds formal and characterological features in conformity with the

220  Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

psychic-affective state of his characters. These stories, pervasively characterised by strains of abstraction, expressionism and surrealism, are spatio-temporally convoluted, historically fragmented, and morally and epistemologically ambivalent. Golshiri concentrates on the prison in a number of short stories: ‘Do Rooye Yek Sekkeh’ (‘Two Sides of the Same Coin’), ‘Ma’sum-e Pnjom ya Hadis-e Mordeh bar Dar Kardane-e an Savar ke Khahad Amad’ (‘The Fifth Innocent or the Story of Hanging the Dead Body of the Rider Who Will Come’), ‘Aroosake Chinie Man’ (‘My Porcelain Doll’), ‘Aksi dar Ghab-akse Khali-e Man’ (‘A Picture in My Empty Frame’), ‘Dakhmei baraye Samoure Abi’ (‘A Vault for the Otter’) and ‘Dehliz’ (‘The Catacomb’).37 Golshiri’s style, in keeping with the carceral psychology and topography, is elliptical, intertextual and allusive – where gaps and resonances between figure and person, history and myth, accrue deep dimensions. Golshiri’s self-commentary confirms the point at issue: ‘I only hint and make fleeting references, and I count on the innate knowledge of my careful readers to afford the words, and the story, their meanings’.38 Thematically, these stories abound in the issues revolving around prison life: betrayals, confessions, obsessions, a nexus of moral consequences and co-implications where families, children and innocent people are involved. Moreover, Golshiri does not necessarily sympathise with the prisoners. He is scathingly critical of the moral values and conduct of some intellectual prisoners and the kind of aloof life they later adopted, which contradicted the cause for which they fought and were imprisoned. What can be elicited from his short stories is that, in addressing his readers’ prior knowledge, he subtly and secretively deconstructs some of the fundamental monarchical and Islamic convictions and traditions that have been deemed sacred, metaphysically grounded values and truisms (including the divinely appointed nature of king–populace relations, and messianism). And in their dependence on this knowledge, the stories are also concrete evidence – lacking elsewhere – of contemporary reading practices and cultural knowledge accrued through reading. As regards the productive aspects/dimensions of the imprisonment experience and the institutional/disciplinary space (discourse) knowledge-power, a salient field or dimension in which this productivity manifested itself was in the field of literary production, and more specifically literary styles and techniques. These repressive discursive measures engender a complicated mise-en-abyme of the act and nature of writing by an authorial subject absent (or voided) from his own subjective position within the discourse: a literalised version of the death of the author enacted and aesthetically crafted by writers.

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One of the most accomplished and narratively-formally complex instances is Golshiri’s short story ‘Khaneh Roshanan’,39 distinguished by an innovative narrative voice and structure which is unprecedented in Iranian literary history. Lacking a human narrator, the narration is voiced variously by diverse objects: a table, chair, mirror, telephone, a typewriter and even concepts such as darkness and light. The reader is also dependent on the narration of these solid, inanimate, tongue-tied, but personified objects; we are constantly on our toes to capture one more clue from the story to complete the plot design. The narrators confess they have no memory: they remember something, but then forget it and again recall it when something new comes to substitute the previous one.40 The narrators express their sensuous impressions regarding the mood and psycho-spiritual conditions of the characters and, accordingly, the reader has to discover the events between the lines of these mute narrators’ accounts. Of course, these narrator-objects have preserved their physical limits and features; they admit they have no long-term memory and they have momentary impressions to which we are exposed. Unlike human beings, they are not impressed by their feelings, and their impressions are fixed and immutable. Importantly, the story deploys archaisms and poetic imagery: for instance, the objects call the protagonist ‘Kateb’ (scribe), an obsolete term, instead of the common term ‘Nevisandeh’ (author/ writer). These not only foreground the surreality of the historical situation and uncanniness of a de-familiarised reality for both a persecuted/imprisoned writer and a reader; they also links the acts and identity of a sociopolitically committed contemporary writer with the long-standing sacred tradition of noble writers (katebs) who sacrificed their lives for the sake of truth and justice. The story also involves characters entangled in a recondite political situation. There is a poet who seems to have already been murdered and a writer – whom the narrators call Kateb – who has unwittingly discovered certain political secrets. Then he decides to report and reveal his observations, almost knowing that he is thus jeopardising his life. He is constantly haunted by scenes and images he has observed, and hesitates to do what he wants to do; he even burns his manuscripts.41 Finally, he leaves his wife and children a note, whose last statement – ‘We left and took our corpse with us’42 – implies he has probably committed suicide. As more details are unravelled, it becomes clear that all the major and minor characters have had long terms of imprisonment. The story ends on an ambiguous note, where we glean hints of the possible suicide of Kateb. This particular act of reading demanded by the text ensures that the reader – through the sheer effort of comprehension

222  Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

required by this narrative – is unavoidably implicated in the hermen­ eutic politics of truth and the politics of the incarceration. However, we have to capture evidence of reader engagement from the text itself in instances such as this, where records of reading experiences are sparse or entirely unavailable. The second most conspicuous example is Reza Baraheni’s Avaze Koshtegan (The Song/Voice of the Murdered) (1983).43 Avaze Koshtegan is a Kafkaesque story – both atmospherically and narratologically – that depicts the life of Mahmood Sharifi, an erudite Tehran University professor of comparative literature, who has been im­ prisoned for his anti-regime writings under the second Pahlavi regime. Deprived of a teaching position, he is now in charge of the library’s reference room as an ordinary employee.44 His chief pre­occupation now, apart from his desperate attempt to eschew any brush with the Morality Guards and Intelligence Institutions, is the writing of his novel. This novel – which is an allegorical figuration of his situation at the university, where he is surrounded by a host of hypocritical and treacherous colleagues – comprises a story of wolves’ attack on his hometown, Tabriz. However, the writing is hindered as its process is constantly punctuated by his paranoid ideas and obsessive-compulsive remembrance of his prison days and torture. In the meantime, he is still resolute about writing his prison memoir and compiling the results of his joint research with his wife about the conditions of prisons in Iran, with the aim of broadcasting them through inter­ national human rights organisations. Having a traumatised memory of the first phase of his imprisonment and torture, Mahmood is haunted by the fear of falling prey to the Savak, manifest in the opening sentence of the novel: ‘This time if they come, it will be the last time; he knew it and it couldn’t be simpler than this’.45 Due to his previous record, he and all his acquaintances know he is a suspect. He metaphorically describes his precarious life as ‘huge pieces of rocks rushing down towards him from all sides, and if he survives, it will be just an accident’.46 He remembers when strangers broke into and ransacked the house, beating him and threatening that if he concealed anything, they would take his wife with them too. He recalls the nightmarish degradation and torture; there are still the sores where burning cigarettes where placed on his body. Therefore, with every ringing of the bell or the phone, the whole family is morbidly alarmed. Mahmood’s apprehension of the impending catastrophe turns into a neurotic obsession gnawing at his soul, affecting his physical health47 and leading to a nervous breakdown.48

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Baraheni strives to debunk the myth of the noble political prisoner as freedom fighter by illustrating how society itself is perceived by Mahmood as a prison. Even when he is free, people stigmatise the political prisoner as if, through an exclusionary psychodynamics of projective identification and abjection, they felt threatened by his contaminating proximity. His ‘friends’ and relatives shun him.49 Here, Baraheni implicitly addresses contemporary readers, thereby indicting their complicity in political oppression. For the supposedly educated bourgeois and even working-class people reading this work, he exposes their responses to prisoners, thereby debunking their allegedly enlightened and humanistic morality.50 When Mahmood is free, he contemplates what it means to be a political prisoner, ex­periencing profound and unending loneliness and alienation. It is only when he is arrested and imprisoned that he feels himself a political subject: ‘the feeling of being a stranger did not mean anything . . . it was out of prison that he discovered he was a political prisoner indeed’.51 Ironically, in prison he discovers not only a sense of community but also ‘intimacy and congeniality; as soon as a newcomer entered, other prisoners befriended him’.52 Mahmood’s imprisonment angst is cumulatively intensified into masochism. He constantly reproaches himself for involving his wife in his activities and feels guilt-ridden.53 But his wife, Soheila consoles him by reminding him of Sa’di’s line of poem he used to recite: ‘lovers are murdered by the beloved [who can symbolise God in Persian literary traditions] – but no [lamenting] song is heard from the murdered’54 as well as the moral and sociopolitical values of his struggle. Assuring him that ‘all the tortured, executed, crestfallen and the abject wanted a song. You became their song. You became the “song of the murdered”’,55 Soheila adds: ‘revelation of torture and oppression/suffocation is more effective than any bomb’.56 Furthermore, Mahmood’s dread of prison drives him towards a collapse into fantasy and the memories of his past. This melancholic withdrawal and affective detachment gradually become his protective mechanism, so much so that towards the end of the novel, during his second term in prison, when he is under the intolerable cable lashes, he again tries to distract himself by imaginatively travelling to his own past, particularly his father’s participation in historical events, including the 1953 coup d’état. He prefers to be blindfolded so that he is not restored to reality.57 To tolerate the torture, he invokes the memory of Ishigh’s brave withdrawal in confrontation with the security forces as a psychological bulwark for sustaining the torture.58 He resorts to the same psychic mechanism in the novel’s last pages when he conjures up

224  Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

the memory of his family and while he symbolically tries to kiss the earth, which (as the tacit allusion to the Quran adumbrates) has been promised to thousands of the oppressed and the tortured youth falling dead on this earth: ‘He stuck his face to the ground. He put his lips on the brick. He meant to kiss it. He did not realise whether he could kiss or not. He whispered “earth!” and he remained in the same state.’59 The novel’s conclusion provokingly juxtaposes two Iranian-Islamic traditional discourses: firstly, Persian literary humanism (through the allusion to Sa’di) where a masochistic economy of ecstatic self-sacrifice in a love relationship with the One (at once the Beloved and God)60 is presumed the norm; and secondly, the Islamic tradition (through the allusion to a Quranic verse), where, in the Messianic time of the End of History, the earth is promised to the wretched and abject of history. Given the ambivalent conclusion of the novel, where neither of these discursive truths is affirmed, the novel can be argued at least to deconstruct these two ingrained traditional discourses as teleological justifications for the sacrifice and suffering of the writer-prisoner.61 In sum, what is evident in both fictional-autobiographical narratives by Golshiri and Baraheni, in conjunction with almost all the other instances of prison writing in other media delineated above, is the way prison writing raises not only the question of the mode and economy of representation of prison experience, but also the possibility of narrating singular personal trauma in a local and global context. What compounds the preceding questions is that prison writing not only raises the question of the reliability and veridicality of memory and testimony, but also entails the representation of what remains an invisible space (prison) and an experience invisible to the public.62 This invisibility (of prison space/experience) demands the representation and witnessing (by the reader) of an unrepresentable history, since it is uncanny and traumatic. Scrutinising the modes of reading implied or demanded by the history of Iranian prison writings, what can be inferred is a model of history as trauma. This is derived from the belief/argument that the traumatic experience implants itself in the psyche (of the narrator and reader) without mediation and yet is never entirely available to consciousness.63 What binds both groups is the view of history as trauma.64 On this premise, generally all these prison writings can be divided into two categories: mimetic and non-mimetic conceptions and representations of trauma. Put succinctly, the mimetic view of trauma, positing traumatic events as permanently unverifiable, contends that the victim, like a hypnotised imitator, unconsciously identifies him- or herself with the event. Anti-mimeticism, predicated on an unrealistically positivist conception

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of memory, considers the victim as a coherent and self-present witness to the traumatic event, who is capable of offering a realistic representation of that event.65 On this premise, the prison narratives by Alavi and Shamloo arguably belong to the anti-mimetic category, whereas those by Golshiri and Baraheni illustrate only a partially mimetic approach. Some of the most recent prison memoirs published outside Iran (see below), problematically presuming either ‘traumatropism’ (‘the founding trauma as the myth of origin’)66 or the realism of the traumatic memory, hold that the traumatic memory encodes the real in a distinct and quasi-veridical way. This stance can be detected in the work of prison writers and critics who believe that individual traumas (such as imprisonment, torture and rape) exceed representation al­together. The paradox of such a view, however, resides in its postulation of the traumatic event as structurally determining and yet ‘utterly inaccessible: a pure vanishing point of experience always and in­evitably betrayed by the fall into language’.67 More incisive writers, such as Golshiri and Baraheni, adhere to a view of vexed referentiality. In other words, they are acutely cognisant of the retro­ active mechanism of traumatic memory – which entails repetition compulsion, elision, repression, retroaction and a Nachträglichkeit (‘afterwardsness’) mode of temporality of trauma: hence their repudiation of both the existence of an original founding trauma (or traumatic memory) and the possibility of access to the fullness and immediacy of traumatic memory. This narrative acuity in relation to the nature of history and memory alerts the reader (cognitively and morally), on the one hand, to the hermeneutic reconstruction as an inevitable component of narration and remembering in such historical experiences, and, on the other, to the psychological mechanisms inherent in any act of historical narration or eye-witnessing, along with its concomitant claims to truth(fulness), objectivity and authenticity. Gender, contemporary prison memoirs and the global reader What distinguishes recent prison writings is primarily their being predominantly written in English, hence taking the Anglo-American and (by extension) the global reader as their primary audience. The flurry of prison memoirs published over the last two decades are mainly by émigrés and political refugees – former political prisoners. Many of

226  Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

these authors are now diasporic Iranian women, and the majority of these prison narratives are humanitarian narratives or testimonial litera­ture. The most prominent instances are Marina Nemat’s Prisoner of Tehran (2007), Camelia Entekhabifard’s Camelia: Save Yourself by Telling the Truth (2007) and the collection We Lived to Tell: Political Prison Memoirs of Iranian Women (Agah, Mehr and Parsi, 2007). These were followed by Zarah Ghahramani’s My Life as a Traitor (2008), Haleh Esfandiari’s My Prison, My Home: One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran (2009), Roxana Saberi’s Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran (2010) and Shahla Talebi’s Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran (2011). While most of these accounts are replete with graphic details of torture and psychosomatic suffering, the historical and representational accuracy of them remain contentious. This issue particularly stems from two determining points. Firstly, rather than situating themselves in an Iranian literary-cultural genealogy and traditions of socio­political activism, they implicitly or explicitly take the Western reader as their main addressee/audience and invoke the humanitarian appeal to the global, post-Enlightenment, neoliberal valorisation of individual freedom. This is the salient feature that distinguishes these prison memoirs from those written in Iran over the last hundred years. While ostensibly serving the function of political and national pedagogy, these prison narratives are too floridly rhetorical and consciously fabricated in their deployment of well-worn fictional tropes and generic conventions of humanitarian, testimonial and quest narra­ tives to be taken as unmediated reflections of personal ex­perience. Secondly, contention surrounds their medium and intended readers. Almost all of them have been written in English by political refugees and asylum seekers. Indeed, as Nima Naghibi demonstrates, the factual-historical veracity and personal authenticity of these prison memoirs remain suspect.68 In a discursive move, some of these prison memoirs ‘take pains to signal to readers that they are writing about Iran from minority positions’ – either in religious respects or in their secular Westernised identity – to appeal to the Western reader as less other, thereby winning their cognitive or affective favour (that is, credibility and sympathy). Equally notably, the majority of the aforementioned works of prison literature ‘emphasize their Persianness as opposed to a Muslimness mistrusted in the West, positioning themselves as “other” enough to represent their subject authoritatively’.69 On the other hand, being propelled by a memory – or more strictly, a mnemonic or retro­spective dynamics – that is allegedly traumatised, how are we, as readers, supposed to determine the, otherwise possibly unconsciously

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inflected or manipulated, veracity of these accounts? This question gains further traction if we recall the amnesia, cognitive dissociation and mnemonic rupture caused by trauma, as argued by Freud, Caruth and Leys. It is hardly determinable to what extent these narratives are inflected by retroactive re-membering of traumatic memories.70 However, two sets of prison memoirs have been written in a different register. We briefly dwell on one of them. Shahrnush Parsipur is an accomplished feminist novelist. Critically acclaimed for her anti-patriarchal novels, including Touba va Manaye Shab (Touba and the Meaning of the Night, 1989) and Zanan bedun-e Mardan (Women without Men), Parsipur chronicles her prison ex­ perience in her extended book Khaterat-e Zendan (Prison Memories, 1996).71 The last of these, while consciously taking both the native and the global reader as its intended audience, is written in Persian and consciously situates itself at the intersection between the Iranian prison memoir tradition and the world tradition. Prison Memories is less rhetorically driven and more realistic. Parsipur recounts how, while not affiliated with any specific political party or agenda, as she claims, she was arrested and imprisoned for four years (1981–5). Her memoir presents a psychologically inflected description of this period coupled with a detailed account of various means and methods of wresting confession, forcing ideological-moral conversion and rectification/­ reformation of the prisoner. In the following passage she vividly recounts a transformative moment of excruciating pain and moral-existential crisis when she is subjected to Dastgah – a cage-like cubicle intended to instil the sense of being in a grave. This experience culminates in her refashioning, or, rather, in breaking her into a new mould: While I was sitting in the ‘dastgah,’ I was gradually changing. New worlds were appearing to me. Little by little I felt that, as a communist, I was filthy. Finally, one day I found the Truth. I told the sister pasdars [revolutionary guards/prison patrols]: ‘Bring me new clothes.’ I bathed and cleaned myself. I begged them to burn my clothes because they were filthy. Then I prayed. I became fresh and new. I became a human being. Oh God, how wrong I had been. I told the sisters: ‘My name is filthy; it should be changed. . . .’72

This is a process of abjection where ‘abjection is edged with sublime’73 – where, due to the loss of existential anchoring points in the socio-symbolic order (reality), coupled with relentless interrogations, inculcations, torture and solitary confinement, the prisoner loses the narrative continuity of her identity and history along with her defence mechanisms, consequently either collapsing into an imploded psychic

228  Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

state or resorting to radical conversion as a mechanism of survival. This is a process of dehumanisation perceived as rehumanisation. While the foremost problem of such prison memoirs, for a reader, is the ‘problem of witness testimony, and of memory’,74 the recent wave of prison memoirs (with the exception of Parsipur’s) persist­ ently deploy and appeal to the Western generic conventions of an aesthetic of empathy and the politics of compassion. Thus they take Western readers as their primary audience and derive their premises from humanitarian narratives rather than human rights imperatives.75 As such, they barely manage to serve the politically or culturally pedagogical function for their intended readers. Conclusion The other key component of the prison writings, under scrutiny above, is their self-conception – not only with respect to their generic and representational-formal mode, but also in terms of their truth content. Predicated on their history of reception, implied or demanded modes of reading by the texts, in conjunction with the textual-historical evidence delineated above, four distinct ways of envisaging prison writing and prison reading as a genre can be articulated. First, prison writing is a revelation of human history as a traumatic history, recasting trauma as a model of personal-collective history. As such, prison writing is an exercise in cross-cultural empathy and dialogical imagination. Second, prison writing illustrates a shared global history as the history of incarceration and carceral subjectivities. Third, prison writing can be tribunals, testimonials and humanitarian narratives. And fourth, prison writing is a praxis in a politically oriented refabrication of the self. Another common trait among both poetic and prose prison writings discussed above is the symbolic description of the prison in terms of a hauntological, phantasmagoric sub-historical space stretched between night and day, the conscious and unconscious realms, where the evocation of an aesthetics of empathy is pursued through a symp­tom­atology of the carceral subject and the fabrication of an identity through the creation of a quasi-autobiographical persona in quest for freedom constitute the chief aims of the narrative. (Other aims include a politics of identification and instilling socio­political consciousness.) These narratives strive to make their audience reimagine their embedded ideas of history, identity and nation on a global scene of modernity; encouraging their audience to

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conceive, by means of dia­logicity and transcultural and transnational imagination, a different possibility of history and historical connection and subject formation. The most salient distinguishing feature between earlier instances of prison writing and later ones – while both categories embody attributes that characterise them as at once national allegory and world literary work – is that the former tends to evoke its ontological vision within a religious or metaphysical framework and its sociopolitical vision within the traditional political structures (monarchy/ autocracy) embedded in Iranian history, thereby pleading for further tolerance, justice and freedom within that framework; whereas the latter is inclined to evoke a less religiously oriented ontology as its framework and more modern sociopolitical concepts (such as human rights along with secular epistemes and definitions of justice, govern­ mentality and freedom). Furthermore, while the former category tends to posit the political ruler (autocrat/monarch) or the nation as its addressee/audience, the latter sees at once the national and international community at its addressee. This can be argued to stem primarily from the changing readership of their work. In this regard, a crucial point that a historical scrutiny of the reception/reading of Iranian prison writing reveals – compared with generically similar works arising from Central and South America as well as Anglo-American countries – is their disproportionate readership (Iranian compared with non-Iranian) in terms of the quantity and scope of dissemination, translation and reception. This indeed reveals the political economy and cultural hegemony of prison writing as a genre in world literary history. In other words, the prison literature coming from Iran (as a semi-peripheral country in the world economy) occupies a peripheral position with the world canon of this subgenre. Moretti’s incisive statements in this regard are illuminating: I will borrow this initial hypothesis from the world-system school of economic history, for which international capitalism is a system that is simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery (and a semiperiphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality. One, and unequal: one literature (Weltliteratur, singular, as in Goethe and Marx), or perhaps, better, one world literary system (of inter-related literatures); but a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because it’s profoundly unequal.76

It has been my argument that prison writing provides a para­ digmatic case/space where the dialectical aesthetic-ethical dynamics involved in the act of reading become evident. We have explored how

230  Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

various discursive, stylistic, historical and ethical features, including the choice of language, historical framework, historicised voice, intended community of readers, narrative techniques and allegorical allusions, among others, are embedded in the text as implied semantic and historical schema as well as horizons of meaning, modes of consciousness and moral values to be concretised by the reader. This is starkly manifested in the prison narratives under scrutiny here, either as their political unconscious or a thematic or historical stratum in them. These dialectical dynamics are particularly discernible in the fact that Iranian prison writing straddles the national allegory and a locally inflected genre of world literary histories and systems. The ‘world’ in the phenomenon/term of ‘world literary history’, far from designating a flat, neutral, or equally distributed phenomenon, involves a world organised by the political-economic principles of an American-European late-capitalist world system.77 Notes   1. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), pp. 2–13.   2. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (New York: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 11.   3. Ibid., pp. 11–15.   4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 3, 9–15, 35, 173–85.   5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 5–17, 73–8, 201–17; see also Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, Lectures at the Collège de France 1970–1971 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 1–13, 42–7, passim.  6. Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text, 15 (autumn 1986), pp. 65–88 (p. 69).  7. Neil Lazarus et al., Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), pp. 3–14.   8. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 3.   9. Vali-Allah Zafari, Prison-Literature [Habsieh] in Persian Literature: From the Beginning/Emergence of Persian Poetry Until the End of the Zandieh Dynasty (Tehran: Amir Kabir Publications, 1985), see pp. 22–47, 158–87. Translations of Persian titles and textual quotations here and below are the author’s.

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10. Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 5–12, 18–46. 11. See Mirzadeh Eshghi, Complete Illustrated Poems, ed. Moshir Salimi (Tehran: Amir Kabir Publications 1980); Farrokhi Yazdi, Collected Poems (Tehran: Javidan Publications, 1360/1981); Nazim Hikmet, Four Prisons, trans. Jalal Khosroshahi and Reza Seyedhosseini (Tehran: Negah Press, 1999); Mohammadtaghi Bahar, Poet Laureate, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Chehrzad Bahar, 2nd edition (Tehran: Toos Press, 2001); Zafari, Prison-Literature, p. 484. 12. As Shamloo asserts: ‘Prison was a primary school for me’. See Ahmad Shamloo, ‘An Interview with Bahman Niroomand’, Tajrobeh Art Magazine (1988). 13. Ali Dashti, Ayyam-e Mahbas: be-enzemam-e yad-dashththa-ye jadid-e nevisandeh darbareh-ie, sevvomin doreh-ie habs-e khod dar salha-ye 1314 va 1315 [Prison Days: Supplemented by the Author’s New Notes Concerning the Third Era of His Incarceration During the Years 1935 and 1936] (Tehran: Bongah-i Matbooat-e Safii-Alishah, 1327/1948); Hassam Kamshad, Modern Persian Prose Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 69–73; see also J. E. Knörzer, Ali Dashti’s Prison Days: Life Under Reza Shah (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 1994). 14. E. Abrahamian, Tortured Confession: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 50. 15. Bozorg Alavi, Varagh-Pareha-ie Zendan [Scrap Papers from Prison] (1941; Tehran: Amir Kabir Publications, 1978); see also Bozorg Alavi, Fifty-Three Persons (1978; Panjah-o Se Nafar: Javidan Publications, 2007). 16. Alavi, Preface to Scrap Papers. 17. Alavi, Scrap Papers, pp. 22, 37, 53, 85. 18. Ibid., p. 4. 19. Donné Raffat, The Prison Papers of Bozorg Alavi: A Literary Odyssey (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985), pp. 66, 67. 20. Ibid., p. 95. 21. Ahmad Rā‘if, Bu‘d al-khāmis: masrahīyah [The Fifth Dimension: A Play] (Cairo: al-Zahrā lil-I‘lām al-‘Arabī, 1987), pp. 45–6. 22. Elham Maekzadeh, In the Profundities of Time: The Political Biography of Firooz Mirza Nosrat-Al-Dowleh (Tehran: Tarikh Iran Publications, 2017); see also Nosrat-Al-Dowleh’s notes on Wilde’s De Profundis in his translation of the work; archival material held at National Library of Iran. 23. Mohammad Mokhtari, Born of World’s Angst (Tehran: Toos Publications, 1999) (in Persian). 24. See Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 37–48, 209–20, 223–39, 269–85. 25. See Reza Baraheni, The Crowned Cannibals (New York: Vintage Books,

232  Alireza Fakhrkonandeh 1977); Reza Baraheni, Ba’d az Arousi Cheh Gozasht [What Happened After the Wedding?] (Tehran: Persian year 1361/1982; reprinted Negah Publications, 2009). 26. Baraheni, The Crowned Cannibals, p. 138. 27. Reza Baraheni, Zel Allah Sh’er-ha-ye Zendan [God’s Shadow: Prison Poems] (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1975). 28. Ibid., p. 38. 29. Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison, ed. Frank Rosengarten, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 306. 30. Baraheni, Zel-o Allah, pp. 6–17. 31. Ibid., pp. 17–24. 32. See Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013), p. 20; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 20. 33. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 30–3. 34. Ruth Ahnert, The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 33. 35. Hooshang Golshiri, ‘Khane Roshanan’ [‘Dwellers of the Lit House’], in The Dark Side of the Moon: Collected Short Stories (Tehran: Niloofar, 1991). 36. Abbas Milani, Eminent Persians: The Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941–1979 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008). 37. All these short stories are contained in Golshiri, The Dark Side of the Moon. 38. Milani, Eminent Persians, p. 864. 39. Golshiri, The Dark Side of the Moon. 40. Ibid., p. 408. 41. Ibid., pp. 412, 419. 42. Ibid., p. 411. 43. Reza Baraheni, Avaze Koshtegan [The Song/Voice of the Murdered] (Tehran: Nashr-e No Publications, 1983). 44. Ibid., pp. 15–16. 45. Ibid., p. 5. 46. Ibid., p. 7. 47. Ibid., pp. 165–6. 48. Ibid., pp. 195, 239. 49. Ibid., pp. 17–19. 50. Ibid., p. 42. 51. Ibid., p. 20. 52. Ibid., p. 26. 53. Ibid., pp. 238, 243. 54. Ibid., p. 246. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., p. 248.

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57. 58. 59. 60.

Ibid., p. 427. Ibid., p. 461. Ibid., p. 520. This relationship between the lover and the beloved is psychodynamically akin to the Western myth of the sirens, albeit in a radically different metaphysical-ontological framework. 61. There are a number of verses in the Quran where this idea is invoked. The two most prominent ones are: (1) ‘‫‘ ’و لقد کتبنا فی الزبور من بعد الذکر ان االرض یرثها عبادی اصالحون‬The Sura of Prophets 105’) (2) ‘‫‘( َونُرِي ُد أَ ْن نَ ُ َّن َع َل ال َِّذي َن ْاستُضْ ِعفُوا ِف ْالَ ْر ِض َونَ ْج َعلَ ُه ْم أَ ِئَّ ًة َونَ ْج َعلَ ُه ُم الْ َوا ِرثِ َني‬The Book of Stories 5’) 62. Katherine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (eds), Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 99. 63. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 59; Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown (eds), Humanitarianism and Suffering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 4–5, 11. 64. See LaCapra, Writing History, pp. 1–42. 65. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 1–40. 66. LaCapra, Writing History, p. xiv. 67. T. J. Lustig, ‘“Moments of Punctuation”: Metonymy and Ellipsis in Tim O’Brien’, Yearbook of English Studies, 31 (2001), pp. 74–92. 68. Nima Naghibi, Women Write Iran: Nostalgia and Human Rights from the Diaspora (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 54–7. 69. Ibid., p. 52. 70. Leys, Trauma, pp. 6–19, 138–56. 71. Sharnush Parsipur, Touba va Ma’nay-e Shab (Tehran: Spark, 1989). English translation: Touba and the Meaning of the Night, trans. Hava Houshmand and Kamran Talatoff (New York: Feminist Press, 2006). See also Sharnush Parsipur, Zanan bedun-e Mardan [Women Without Men] (Tehran: Noqreh, 1989). 72. Sharnush Parsipur, Prison Memories (Stockholm: Baran Publications, 1996), p. 289. 73. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 11. 74. Hodgkin and Radstone, Contested Pasts, p. 99. 75. Naghibi, Women Write Iran, pp. 67–76. 76. Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1 (January–February 2000), pp. 54–68 (pp. 55–6). 77. See Lazarus et al., Combined and Uneven Development, pp. 3–16.

Chapter 11

Beyond Mein Kampf: Bestsellers, Writers, Readers and the Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany Christian Adam

Before the Second World War, the German publishing industry was one of the largest and most important in the world. After the Nazi takeover of 1933 and the devastating war of 1939–45, nothing was the same. As some American publishers put it: ‘In a space of less than two decades, therefore, the personnel of German publishing has undergone two very severe screenings: nazification and denazification’.1 These publishers had been invited to post-war Germany by the Office of Military Government for Germany US (OMGUS) ‘to survey and study the German book publishing industry’2 and the work of the Information Control Division of the US Army in the American occupation zone. There was no doubt that books played a central role in Nazi propaganda and in Germany as a whole, as ‘books have always been regarded in Germany as the spearhead of German science and technology, the vanguard of German culture, and the cursors of German trade’.3 But how was the world of readers and publishers transformed after the book burnings in Germany, and which books did the Germans read instead? This chapter surveys the publishing business and the lives of authors and books in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, not only highbrow fiction, but also mass-market publications, including pulp magazines, war novels and popular non-fiction. One obvious question might be, which books were bestsellers – if there were any in Nazi Germany, beyond Mein Kampf? Some National Socialists, preoccupied with politics of literature, used a simple metaphor from the world of gardening: the unwanted books and authors had to be eradicated (ausgemerzt) and then a new literature suitable to the Nazi ideology should be cultivated. In eradica­tion the Nazis were quite successful: books were burned, 234

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authors were persecuted and publishing houses closed. The book burnings, which took place in several German cities in May 1933, were the most obvious signs of the so-called Gleichschaltung. That could be translated as ‘alignment’ or ‘regimentation’, involving all aspects of state and society, including the book market. Students influenced by National Socialist ideology had gathered and collected books in libraries and elsewhere. They burned the books of Heinrich Mann, Erich Kästner, Sigmund Freud, Erich Maria Remarque and others. In Berlin, Joseph Goebbels himself took part in the book burnings. Although they were not organised by the Nazi Party, he used these demonstrations as a platform, one of the most visible signs that the Nazis were willing to take over the broad field of culture and litera­ture. Many of the best writers were forced into exile after that: Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Oskar Maria Graf, Siegfried Kracauer, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Anna Seghers and many others. Several famous publishers had to leave the country, including Gottfried Bermann Fischer, the Ullstein family and Paul Zsolnay from Vienna. One of the most important institutions responsible for controlling the book market was the Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda), led by Joseph Goebbels, who tried to influence every field of culture in the Third Reich. At first, in 1933, there was no dedicated office for literature and writing; then, in October 1934, a separate Literature Department (Abteilung Schrifttum) was founded. This department coordinated the work of the Reich Literature Office (Reichsschrifttumstelle), later renamed the Promotion and Advisory Office for German Literature (Werbe- und Beratungsamt für das deutsche Schrifttum), which organised readings and book exhibitions, and issued reference lists of recommended books for librarians and the book trade. Goebbels was at the same time president of the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer). Everyone who wanted to work as a musician, actor, journalist, publisher, writer or painter had to be a member of this body. People who were not accepted, because of their political orientation or because they were Jewish, were not allowed to work in the cultural professions. The Reich Chamber of Literature (Reichsschrifttumskammer, or RSK) was part of the Reich Chamber of Culture. The various literary professions – authors, publishers, book dealers, librarians – were all forced into this one organisation, despite their different interests. The chamber represented an attempt to get absolute control over cultural production. Ideally, pre-censorship would be needless. And one principle of the Nazi politics of literature

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was that censorship – if needed – should be invisible at all times. In effect, self-censorship was the most important measure for controlling the book market. That there was pre-censorship for every book is a common misconception of Nazi politics. In fact, until the war, pre-censorship was established only for special genres, such as pulp magazines or so-called National Socialist literature (‘nationalsozial­ istisches Schrifttum’). A vast and often confusing array of institutions tried to influence the written and printed word in Nazi Germany.4 There were ongoing bureaucratic battles for control of books, writers and readers. Perhaps the most important counterpart (and rival) of Goebbels was Alfred Rosenberg, who saw himself as chief ideologist of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP). As the Führer’s Representative for the Supervision of the Entire Intellectual and Ideological Instruction of the NSDAP (Beauftragter des Führers für die gesamte weltanschauliche Schulung der NSDAP) he felt himself to be responsible for all kinds of literature. He set up a huge apparatus of readers who surveyed books of any genre, which they recommended or rejected. Their surveys appeared in Rosenberg’s monthly magazine, Die Bücherkunde (Book Lore). A third (but not last) institution was the Party Examination Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Writings (Partei­ amtliche Prüfungskommission zum Schutze des National­sozialistischen Schrifttums, or PKK), led by Philipp Bouhler. He had to survey all publications which ‘in book title, presentation, ads or in their topics refer to National Socialism’.5 This was one field of publication where pre-censorship had been established to control the ideology of the party and its own history. Bouhler was powerful because he was close to Hitler. If there was any discussion about a book that Bouhler wanted to stop, he could claim a so-called Führer’s decision, because he, as chief of the Führer’s Chancellery (Kanzlei des Führers), had direct access to Adolf Hitler. Important instruments of censorship and cultivation were various indexes and several lists of recommendations. In autumn 1935, List 1 of Harmful and Undesirable Literature was compiled by the Reich Chamber of Literature. This index was confidential and for official use only. One reason for that secrecy was to forestall criticism of Germany from abroad. Another was that book dealers would be forced to cooperate with the authorities to get information about banned books. And last, they had to guess which books were allowed: the most effective instrument of censorship would be self-censorship. The list later was updated every year. ‘Over 1000 books were banned by 21

Bestsellers, Writers, Readers and the Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany   237

Figure 11.1  List of Publications Unsuitable for Young People and Libraries, compiled by the Propaganda Ministry, 1940

agencies of the new state’,6 one book dealer had claimed in December 1933. One result of the sometimes covert, always polyphonic praxis of indexing books was uncertainty for writers and publishers. Another important index was the List of Publications Unsuitable for Young People and Libraries, which came out in 1940 (Figure 11.1). This list, compiled by the Propaganda Ministry, contained not less than ten pages of novels written by Edgar Wallace (who was indeed a prolific author). These books were not absolutely banned, but it was forbidden to exhibit and sell them –– which in fact came close to a total ban. Still, in 1939 Goebbels himself attended a play staged in Berlin based on a Wallace novel: The Ringer (Der Hexer). ‘A fabulous crime potboiler [‘Kriminalschwarte’], but well played’,7 the minister wrote in his diary.

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This index, which, in contrast to List 1, was published and distri­ buted by the publishers association, showed that, once the war started, the authorities were determined to fight Anglo-American influence on the book market. English crime novels and English-sounding pen names were very popular at the time, but Nazi leaders feared that influence and tried to push back. One official working in Goebbels’s ministry wrote in a magazine that crime novels would make propa­ ganda ‘in an irresponsible manner for the English way of life and English living habits’.8 Those lists reveal not only the books that were forbidden but also those that were still available. For example, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was not banned in the English original long after the German version had been banned on List 1 in 1935.9 This was made possible by publishing houses like Tauchnitz and the Albatross Press, which (long before the Nazis came to power) specialised in distributing English and American literature in the German and European market. And the National Socialist government kept these businesses alive as long as they were able to earn foreign currency, which was needed for the state budget. ‘Demand for Anglo-American culture remained strong across Nazi-occupied Europe, especially in Hitler’s Germany’, notes Michele Troy, and ‘censorship of Anglo-American books was idiosyncratic, shaped as much by international trade and political infighting as by ideo­logical measuring sticks’.10 In the Third Reich, economic priorities often trumped political and ideological constraints. Adolf Hitler was a dedicated fan of Karl May’s adventure novels of cowboys and Indians. Some fighters for a higher German culture thought that with the Nazi takeover the time had come to eradicate this ‘trash and obscenity’ (Schund und Schmutz) literature. But then in April 1933 a journalist for a Munich newspaper visited the Führer at his resort in the Bavarian Alps and revealed to his readers: the Führer is reading Karl May! ‘How humanly close to us is this man . . . who still finds the time to read the books of his adolescence’.11 This was how Nazi propaganda wanted to portray Hitler: as a man of the people. It is said that during the early part of his regime he had managed to reread nearly all seventy of Karl May’s novels. Did the Reich Chancellor really have the leisure time to do so? Nearly all b ­ iographers have characterised Hitler as well read. And for propaganda purposes the most important thing was that he and other leading Nazis were regarded as well read. The part of Hitler’s library that survived the war included no Karl May books.12 Truly well read was Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the Schutz­ staffel (SS) and the architect of the Holocaust. There is a list where

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Himmler registered not less than 346 books he read between 1919 and 1934, with a lot of remarks on each book.13 Born into a middle-class, Catholic royalist family in Bavaria, Himmler grew up with books, and what he listed seems fairly typical of that time: not that much modernist literature, here some Thomas Mann, there some Hermann Hesse. But the list does include Mein Kampf, which he studied for two years: ‘There is a lot of truth in it’, he noted.14 Himmler also got to know the works of Jack London, Oscar Wilde, Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Nikolai Gogol and Jules Verne. Later on, during the war, there was not so much time for a good read, given that Himmler was busy organising the annihilation of the European Jews. At that time he cultivated a friendship with Hanns Johst, a German writer and dramatist, who was president of the Reich Chamber of Literature. Himmler regarded their correspondence as a gift: ‘your letters are so precious to me. They are heralds from a world which I love endlessly’ – which meant the world of books and the spiritual world. But ‘because fate has put me on that spot – this world is sealed off for me and a big part of my life. The more I enjoy getting greetings from that spiritual world of our blood. . . .’15 While his hands were literally stained with the blood of his victims, in his letter to a friend he evoked the blood-and-soil ideology of his National Socialist Party. Joseph Goebbels had a PhD in literature, was called ‘the Doctor’ by his party comrades, and was a busy writer himself. In his diaries he cultivated a self-portrait of a well read homme de lettres. He placed remarks about his readings everywhere in his notes. He knew literary modernism, because it was his profession. In his later days he preferred a mixture of entertainment and education, reading thrillers as well as non-fiction. Goebbels was very aware that readers want not just to be educated, but first of all to be entertained – especially in wartime. As he pointed out in a speech, addressing representatives of the book industry at the annual so-called Kantate convention in May 1936: ‘It was important to us to cultivate light fiction as such. We were convinced that the more people have to worry about everyday life, the greater is the need for relaxation and recreation.’16 While Goebbels was open to some kinds of modernist literature and light fiction for popular entertainment, his counterpart, Alfred Rosenberg, saw things differently. Especially in wartime, Rosenberg was sure that only poetry and highbrow fiction could keep people on the right path. Light fiction was ‘the big seduction’17 which would weaken the power to fight and work. But despite all the political and ideological pressure, the book industry remained organised around economic markets. After the war

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began with Germany’s attack on Poland, there was increased demand for light fiction and non-fiction. Even one representative of the Propa­ ganda Ministry talked about ‘a flooding with simple light fiction’.18 The struggle between Rosenberg and Goebbels did not come to an end, but for the moment, it seems, Goebbels prevailed. Readers got what they wanted, possibly only for pragmatic reasons. We do not know (fortunately) whether Goebbels or Rosenberg would have kept the upper hand had the Germans won the war. The bestselling books of that period naturally included much propa­ ganda. Number one was Mein Kampf, selling more than 12 million copies. Of course, not every single copy was read, but many historians have come to the conclusion that the contents of the book were very well known to most Germans.19 Philipp Bouhler’s own manifesto, Kampf um Deutschland (Struggle for Germany), had nearly 2 million copies in print. And there were millions of copies of propagandistic collectors’ albums like Deutschland erwacht (Germany’s Awakening), designed to hold a collection of cigarette cards. The term ‘bestseller’ had already been introduced in Germany when the Nazis came to power. It was used, for example, by journalist Irene Seligo in a review of Margaret Mitchell’s global success Gone with the Wind (Vom Winde verweht), which appeared in Germany in 1937, soon after its triumph in the United States and Britain.20 Though the term was well known, literary theorists sympathetic to National Socialist ideology tried to avoid it. These theorists believed that a truly valuable book (das gute Buch) would be successful and attract readers by itself. In their eyes the ‘bestseller’ belonged to the ‘Systemzeit’ – their term for what they viewed as the decadent culture of the Weimar Republic. Bestsellers (according to Alfred Rosenberg and his followers) were artificial. The first goal of the book dealer had to be education, not entertainment or profit. Joseph Goebbels, however, was more ready to accept that a book was a product like other products. He pragmatically defined a bestseller as a book that a lot of readers actually wanted to read. His Propaganda Ministry used marketing tools to highlight books it wanted to promote: it introduced ‘the six books of the month’ with special displays in bookshops. And National Socialist propagandists liked to compare Germany’s impressive book production statistics with those of other countries (Figure 11.2). That (they claimed) proved that Germany was the Reich of culture. Hitler himself earned a fortune from Mein Kampf. In October 1947 American prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials interrogated a former adjutant of Hitler, who reported that ‘The royalties [for Mein Kampf]

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Figure 11.2  German book production (numbers of titles), compared with other countries, 1934. From Hellmuth Langenbucher (ed.), Die Welt des Buches (The World of the Book), 1938

had been left on the royalty account. He himself didn’t have a bank account. Because he didn’t want to have one. If the Führer needed some money for his own purposes, I just called the Eher Verlag.’21 According to Max Amann, director of the Nazi publishing house Franz Eher, Hitler had earned, up to the end of the war, 15 million Reichsmarks, 8 million of which he withdrew.22 Here Hitler was not alone. Alfred Rosenberg’s Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts had sold only 70,000 copies by 1933, but in 1942 the book cracked the 1 million mark. In 1934 he earned not less than 40,000 Reichsmarks in royal­ties,23 compared with an average worker’s income of 1,800–2,400 R­eichsmarks per year. In the early 1920s Joseph Goebbels had failed as a journalist and novelist, which may explain his hatred of what he called the ‘Systempresse’ (the media of the Weimar Republic). But later he drew on his diaries to publish a first-hand account of his own struggle for power, Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei, which sold nearly 660,000 copies.24 Though the Third Reich burned books, persecuted authors and censored the media, and some of its leaders professed to despise bestsellers, it was a dictatorship of writers – some Nazi leaders obtained more money from their writing than from any other source, and a few, such as Hitler, made a fortune from their books.25

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If so many books were banned, what did readers read instead? Empirical market research was still in its infancy at that time, although there was, until 1937, an Institute for Reading and Book Research (Institut für Leser- und Schrifttumskunde) in Leipzig, founded by ­librarians. The intention was not primarily to find out what readers wanted to read, but to lead them to better reading, though of course the librarians had to start by determining what kind of literature their customers actually preferred. Their data were based on library borrowing records, but what they revealed was not so positive for the new rulers: the working class was not as familiar with National Socialist literature and studies of race as they wished. The most popular books dealt with the Great War.26 This was not what the Nazis wanted to hear, and that is probably why they put a stop to the work of the Institute. Articles in contemporary newspapers and magazines are our most reliable sources on reading habits in Nazi Germany, though they are of course not representative. In 1933 a survey published in the Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel, the periodical of the German Publishers’ and Booksellers’ Association (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels), revealed that in July, half a year after the Nazi seizure of power, reading habits had not changed much. When 255 young people were asked about their favourite authors, the responses included Karl May and Edgar Wallace, Jules Verne and Aldous Huxley, as well as Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque and Alfred Döblin.27 One of the most popular genres of the 1930s was war literature, both fiction and non-fiction. Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) by Erich Maria Remarque was published in 1929 and sold more than a million copies in its first year, one of the first German novels to break that record. Nazi leaders regarded it as dangerous: ‘A vicious, a subversive book’,28 Goebbels wrote in his diary. Throughout the Third Reich, it seemed as if right-wing authors had to fight Remarque and his novel over and over again. Paul Coelestin Ettighoffer’s novel Verdun: Das große Gericht (1936) sold more than 400,000 copies. Ettighoffer and his publisher, C. Bertels­mann, made a fortune with his novels. The author had an annual income of about 100,000 Reichsmarks in 1942.29 Initially a small theological publisher, C. Bertelsmann became one of the big players in the 1940s and is now the nucleus of Random House Bertelsmann. Verdun was a journalistic piece of work. The author emphasised that he himself was a soldier in the battlefields, who knows the story he wants to tell. After 1939 Ettighoffer again joined

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the Wehrmacht. Now he was part of a propaganda unit, drawing a portrait of a new World War. Starting in September 1939 with the German attack on Poland there was once again a great demand for war literature. The memoirs of Günther Prien, a highly decorated submarine commander who, in October 1939, entered Scapa Flow and sank HMS Royal Oak, sold more than 900,000 copies. It was published by Deutsche Verlag, the Aryanised successor to the Jewish firm Ullstein Verlag, and Prien was very likely assisted by a ghost writer. The first print run of Mein Weg nach Scapa Flow sold out on the first day of publication. Prien told the story of a small boy, from poor circumstances, who becomes a well known war hero – thanks to National Socialism. Deutsche Verlag, like the whole publishing industry, capitalised on the war and the growing craze for reading after 1939. The publisher was able to increase sales by 50 per cent compared with the same month the year before, partly on account of Günther Prien.30 There were mainly two reasons why people were keen on books during the war: everybody was looking for distraction and there were few other goods to buy without a ration card. For those publishing houses which had not been shut down for political reasons, these were golden times. Sales doubled or even tripled, and the average print run went from 11,000 in 1940 to 18,000 in 1941.31 Soldiers were a new large target audience. Publishers produced special field-post editions, books that by measure and weight perfectly fit the military mail service, and so-called frontline editions, books produced solely for the military. Some of these books were bought by soldiers’ relatives and sent to the front as gifts, while others were distributed by the Wehrmacht. There were special permanent frontline bookshops and mobile bookstores on buses – a total of sixty permanent shops in France alone (Figure 11.3). A veteran frontline bookseller remembered that the soldiers asked for ‘novels, funny books and biographies’.32 Those publishing companies that survived beyond 1945, like Bertelsmann, were truly war profiteers. There was no doubt at the Ministry of Propaganda that soldiers needed distraction above all, not propaganda. A memorandum to Joseph Goebbels in 1942 suggested that 95 per cent light fiction and just 5 per cent ideological books should be delivered to the frontline.33 That was just a proposal, and it might not have been carried out, but the general direction was clear: light fiction and humour were top priorities. Heinrich Spoerl was one of the most successful writers in the Third Reich. Nearly all his books sold more than 100,000 copies: Die Feuerzangenbowle, Der Gasmann, Wenn wir alle Engel wären, Der

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Figure 11.3  Frontline bookstore on a bus in occupied France. Author’s collection

Maulkorb. His collection of short stories, Man kann ruhig darüber sprechen, sold 1 million.34 Most of his novels were filmed soon after their first release and were real blockbusters in Germany – and still are. Spoerl’s stories, like most of the successful light fiction of that time, were set amid ageless scenery. Except for the novel Der Gasmann,35 which is without doubt located in the Third Reich, the books are staged somewhere in Germany in the first decades of the twentieth century. The novel Die Feuerzangenbowle and the ensuing screenplay are up to the present day part of Germany’s common culture. They can be because they contain no signs of National Socialist ideology, no flags, no parades, no party comrades. There are two main reasons for that absence. First, even Goebbels granted that people should be able to relax by reading books and watching movies, and should not be subjected to endless propaganda. Moreover, while there was no general pre-censorship of literature, any book that referred to National Socialism had to be submitted to the Party Examination Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Writings, which criticised and rejected many books in the early years of the regime on the grounds that the presentation of the Party was unsuitable. Writers and publishers soon learned that they could avoid trouble by simply not mentioning National Socialism. The Nazis forced hundreds of writers, publishers and book dealers out of their profession and out of the country, but they were not so

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Figure 11.4  ‘The People Live Through the Book’, from the Ministry of Propa­ ganda’s Die Woche des Deutschen Buches 1936 (German Book Week 1936). Author’s collection

successful in replacing them with a new National Socialist literature. They were convinced that only ‘people of German blood’36 could contribute to a truly völkische Literatur (Figure 11.4), but if we look at the (virtual) bestseller listings 1933–45, we find far fewer Nazi writers than we might have expected.37 So-called Blut- und Boden-Literatur (blood–and-soil literature) is largely missing – although literary historians once regarded it as the most typical product of the Third Reich. The most popular book of that kind was Kuni Tremel-Eggert’s novel Barb, Der Roman einer deutschen Frau (Barb, Tale of a German Woman), of which 750,000 copies were distributed. Barb tells the story of a woman between the Weimar Republic and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. She works in the fields, and is presently sowing seeds: ‘It is a feast of blood, a feast of intimate affinity with the brown soil’.38 She leaves her hometown and finds her way back to her roots, just when in Berlin, far away, the swastika flag begins to rise. Not just for political reasons, but also because it lacked literary talent, the work of Kuni Tremel-Eggert disappeared after the war. Today she is known only as a minor regional poet in Franconia. This was the typical fate of writers who gained popularity during the Third Reich just because of their political orientation.

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The most successful novel in Nazi Germany in fact lay on the borderline between non-fiction and fiction. Karl Aloys Schenzinger’s Anilin was a ‘Tatsachenroman’, meaning a dramatisation of facts in a novel, or simply ‘faction’. First released in 1937, Anilin had sold nearly 1 million copies by 1945, and by 1951 more than 1.6 million. Faction and classic non-fiction books were perhaps the most innovative genres in the Third Reich. Books like those were already popular in the 1920s, when the American author Paul de Kruif and his Microbe Hunters (in German Mikrobenjäger) scored a big success in Germany and became a model for Schenzinger. As the National Socialists tried to promote scientific education, they appreciated Schenzinger’s stories about the lives of famous scientists and their inventions. The text also had a very strong Anglophobic slant. On the one side, there was a German scientist who wanted to help mankind with his inventions; on the other side, there were the British corporate raiders who just wanted to maximise their profits. This book continued to sell into the 1950s, but it had to be adjusted to the new climate after the war. There were no longer pejorative remarks about the British, who were now part of the occupation forces. And where you could read before 1945 ‘Synthetics are a question of survival for the Germans’,39 you now had the less militant phrase ‘Synthetics are the base for the future of the German economy’.40 Eugen Diesel, writer and son of the famous designer and engineer Rudolf Diesel, published a biography of his father, simply called Diesel. It sold more than 160,000 copies. The papers called it ‘one of the most exciting books of our days’.41 The Nazis admired Rudolf Diesel as a pioneer of advanced technology. Even the very orthodox Bücherkunde of Alfred Rosenberg recommended the book.42 Nevertheless, Eugen Diesel was the subject of investigation. The Security Service of the SS staked him out in summer 1944 in the small Bavarian village where the Diesels lived with their children, trying to figure out ‘how the writer Eugen Diesel [. . .] conducted himself in past times politically and temperamentally’.43 One local party comrade reported that Diesel seemed suspiciously cosmopolitan, but no actual misbehaviour was known. His wife was said to have talked from time to time unfavourably about the Nazi regime. At least both children were in the Hitler Youth. Diesel was suspect because he kept his distance from Nazi ideology, but all the same he enjoyed an annual income between 20,000 and 30,000 Reichsmarks for the years 1940–42, far beyond the national average. Selling the movie rights of Diesel generated 12,500 Reichsmarks, working as adviser at the shoot another 5,000.44 Suspicion and criticism alone would not prevent economic success in the literary marketplace.

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Another misconception is that after 1933 the Germans were totally cut off from any international literary input. While some banned books remained in private hands long after the book burnings, a lot of foreign literature was freely available. Of course there were always foreign authors on the index, and the literature of other countries came into the focus of book censors parallel to the course of war. At first, American authors were highly regarded, but that changed suddenly when the United States joined the war on the side of Britain. In the Third Reich the share of translated fiction was between 7 and 12 per cent.45 By comparison, in 2016 of all new releases in Germany 13.6  per cent were translations.46 The most popular foreign writers were Trygve Gulbranssen and Knut Hamsun (Norway), Warwick Deeping (Britain), Hervey Allen and Margaret Mitchell (United States), John Knittel (a Swiss author who wrote in English), Axel Munthe (Sweden), Felix Timmermans (Flemish) and from France Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.47 Considering the Third Reich as a whole, translations from English were dominant (1,378 books from Britain and 173 from the USA), followed by France (438), Norway (418), Denmark (244) and Sweden (234).48 The 1,000 pages of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (Vom Winde verweht) sold more than 300,000 copies in Germany, after 1.5 million in the USA and merely 110,000 in Britain. The German publishers, Eugen Claasen and Henry Goverts, learned about the book from British newspapers and bought the translation rights from an agency. Starting in July 1935, translations were subject to pre-censorship: before signing a licence agreement, publishers had to ask the Reich Chamber of Literature for permission.49 With the beginning of the war, book dealers were forced to take French and English books out of their shop windows,50 though they were still allowed to sell them. By summer 1941 all Russian authors and from December 1941 American newspapers, magazines and books would follow.51 But Nazi censors were always willing to allow exceptions, especially when books could be useful for propagandistic reasons. In 1943 the Ministry of Propa­ganda recommended translations of the following, all of which portrayed America or Britain in unflattering terms: Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Jack London’s In den Slums (People of the Abyss), John Steinbeck Die Früchte des Zornes (The Grapes of Wrath), Eric ­Linklater’s Juan in Amerika (a satire on prohibition and gangsterism) and Liam O’Flaherty’s Skerrett: Ein irischer Freiheitskämpfer.52 The other side of the coin of the banned and burned books – and propaganda literature – was the everyday reading of normal citizens, which had not changed much from the times before the Nazis came

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to power. In the 1920s and on into the 1930s, many pulp magazines where circulating among younger people. Here we had superheroes, clever detectives and handsome cowboys. One of the most interesting series among them was ‘Sun Koh: Der Erbe von Atlantis’. The author, Paul Alfred Müller, using the English-sounding pen name Lok Myler, told the story of Sun Koh, son of a mysterious dynasty. At his side were Hal Mervin, a rascal from England, and the black prize fighter Nimba. These three guys had a lot of technical means at their disposal, which were invented by German engineers in the Mexican jungle. Their goal was to make the legendary lost continent Atlantis reappear. The series appeared weekly between 1933 and 1935, and so mirrored the increasing censorship of light fiction (Plates 2 and 3). While in the first volumes there is harsh criticism of racial segregation in the USA, the narrator later has to admit that there are people ‘of different value’: Nimba, the dark-skinned friend of Sun Koh, is ‘carrying alien blood’.53 Originally such genres often used strange locations and exotic people, because the readers wanted to escape from their normal lives. But in volume 139 Nimba had to die. ‘The glorification of alien races’54 had to be rejected from an ideological point of view, as Will Vesper, a famous National Socialist writer and reviewer put it. After the beginning of the war in 1939, many pulp fiction series were banned. But the characters were still very popular, even among young people who had been educated as good National Socialists. The reading of such magazines was described as ‘epidemic’.55 But because these magazines were so successful, Nazi propagandists adapted them for their own purposes. After the sale of many popular magazines had been stopped with the release of the List of Publications Unsuitable for Young People and Libraries, new series like Erlebnis-Bücherei (1940–45, 105 volumes) and Kriegsbücherei der deutschen Jugend (War Library of German youth, 1939–45, 156 volumes) were thrown on the market. But it is very likely that the banned magazines were still circulating even among the Hitler Youth at the time. It was even possible for a critical journalist to become an author of bestsellers in Nazi Germany. The proof: Ehm Welk. Working as a journal­ist in the former Jewish-owned Ullstein publishing house, he dared to criticise Goebbels. The paper he worked for was banned for some months and Welk was sent to the concentration camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, but only for a few days. After that Welk had to retire from journalism, so, making a virtue of necessity, he reinvented himself as a novelist. His Die Heiden von Kummerow, first released in 1937, was one of the most successful novels in the

Bestsellers, Writers, Readers and the Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany   249

Third Reich. After the war his books became for decades a part of popular culture in both East and West Germany. In 1967 Die Heiden von Kummerow was made into a movie and was one of the few co-productions from East and West Germany during the Cold War. Very similar to much of Heinrich Spoerl’s work, Welk’s story is located somewhere in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century, still under the rule of Kaiser Wilhelm. It concerns a young boy living in the countryside in north Germany. His adventures with his friends involve a confrontation between the worlds of adolescents and those of teachers, priests and policeman. But it is not a Heimatroman nor a piece of ‘blood and soil’. It takes a socio-critical direction, as the adolescents fraternise with a poor cowherd living in their village who has been accused of a crime he had not committed. First of all it is puzzling that a book strongly criticising authority was allowed to be such a success in an authoritarian regime. In the novel, the priest, Pastor Kannegießer, says to the children: I tell you, the spirit will win finally, certainly if you have an honest heart [. . .] human beings who strive for higher ideals don’t know friend and foe. They just know good and bad people, [. . .] who will be judged, whether they do others good or harm.56

What clear and true words in dark times. Ehm Welk shows in a nutshell how complex the relation between literature and the regime was. Die Heiden von Kummerow had sold more than 730,000 copies by the end of the Third Reich, and helped the author not only to survive but to prosper. Published by the Aryanised Ullstein Verlag, now called Deutscher Verlag, and belonging to the National Socialist Party Press Trust, its success increased the Party’s earnings. On the mental level, reading could be likewise a complex and am­ biguous process. While it was possible to read between the lines and to take the criticism of the Wilhelmine era in the novel as a substitute for criticism of Nazi leaders, it could also be read as soft propaganda. Victor Klemperer was a Romance languages philologist and a Jew who had converted to Protestantism, who survived the Holocaust with his ‘Aryan’ German wife. In his diaries he observed that Welk was ‘basically apolitical, in any case not fanatic, not ­Nazistic’.57 But Klemperer was nonetheless curious about what made Welk acceptable to the Nazi leaders. Klemperer thought his love of the countryside and his emphasis on faith being worth more than knowledge would be the most important reasons. And last but not least: the Nazis needed entertaining stories, because their soldiers and workers needed distraction.

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In 1944 Ehm Welk’s sequel novel, Die Gerechten von Kummerow, won a prize for light fiction of 15,000 Reichsmarks offered by the Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.58 What an honour for the former dissident! Maybe Goebbels saw the safety-valve function of entertainment and therefore was willing to accept some critical accents in popular literature. One of the most unusual bestselling novels in the Third Reich was Dinah Nelken’s Ich an Dich (From Me To You), from 1939.59 It is a love story, a well designed book that was a perfect gift. The story is not narrated in the conventional way, but told with short texts, lyrics and collages of pictures, as the preface sets out: It is the story of a true love, so trivial and so tragic, so simple and so sublime as any other love, in letters, notes, tickets, telegrams [. . .]. A picture book? No, it is a reading book, which is telling us – while smiling, not crying – the story of two lovers.60

Ich an Dich was an ancestor of all those stacks of books designed as beautiful gifts only. Their success is based on a brilliant idea and an inspired title. The content is secondary. After the beginning of the war, many couples suffered involuntary separation, as most of the younger men had to go into the army. This presented an opportunity to exchange romantic gifts! Through to the end of the Third Reich, more than 200,000 copies were sold, and the book’s success continued after 1945. Meanwhile, Dinah Nelken kept her distance from the Nazi regime. Being a single mother, she was dependent on her income as a writer. In the late 1930s she left Germany for Vienna, and in 1943 went to live in Italy. Only in the 1950s did she return to West Berlin. Some readers also kept their distance from the Nazis. While the radio, the press and the movies were easily controlled by National Socialist propagandists, it was hard to tell what and how people would read within their own four walls. Books, after all, are long lasting, and can be kept and hidden. It is a misconception that all the banned books were collected and burned: that has only ever been the case in Ray Bradbury’s fictional Fahrenheit 451. Most private book collections were not touched. As Marcel Reich-Ranicki, later a famous literary critic in West Germany, said in his memoirs, he was reading Emil und die Detektive and other books of Erich Kästner after they had been banned: indeed, at that time it was possible to buy them very cheaply, because second-hand book-dealers wanted to get rid of them.61 That is what countless contemporary witnesses remember: on their private shelves as well in the backrooms of some book dealers, banned books were still available.62

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And reading itself was and is still a private issue. Nobody could control everyone’s thoughts. And besides books like Ehm Welk’s novels, containing some elements of insubordination, there were unexpected works, like Ernst Jünger’s Auf den Marmorklippen, from 1939.63 It can be read as an allegory of the Third Reich, including the regime’s crimes against humanity, and its frankness is striking. Jünger was a frontline fighter from the Great War and so was respected by Hitler; moreover, his book did not become a bestseller, but special editions were printed for the army. Jünger proves that it was possible to find some privacy between the lines, even in a totalitarian regime. Coming back to those American publishers who visited occupied Germany after the war: they had no doubt that books had been a central instrument of Nazi propaganda, and that they would play a central role in re-educating the Germans as well. They recognised that books ‘are a long-range social instrument and [. . .] book publishing programs must be considered in the light of a long-term span’.64 Rebuilding the publishing industry in West and East Germany would be the next chapter for the German book trade. But as the American visitors emphasised, in the end ‘it was Hitler and not the RAF [Royal Air Force] and the AAF [Army Air Forces] who dealt the mortal blow to German book publishing’.65 The damage and the violence that the Nazis brought to writers, publishers, readers and finally their books was beyond measure – except for some small islands, where some writers and readers were able to cultivate remnants of free thought in dark times.

Notes   1. Visiting Committee of American Book Publishers, German Book Publishing and Allied Subjects (Munich and New York: American Book Publishers, 1948), p. 16.   2. Ibid., preface.   3. Ibid., p. 13.   4. The basic works on the politics of literature in the Third Reich and all the associated institutions have been published by Jan-Pieter Barbian since 1993. Available in English is his crucial study The Politics of Litera­ ture in Nazi Germany: Books in the Media Dictatorship, trans. Kate Sturge (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).  5. Verleger-Mitteilungen der Parteiamtlichen Prüfungskommission, cited in Jan-Pieter Barbian, Literaturpolitik im Dritten Reich: Institutionen, Kompetenzen, Betätigungsfelder (Munich: dtv, 1995), p. 298.

252  Christian Adam  6. Wilhelm Jaspert to Propaganda Ministry, 6 December 1933, cited in Joseph Wulf, Literatur und Dichtung im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1963), p. 189.  7. Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil 1. Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, Band VII, July 1939–March 1940, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich: Saur, 1998), p. 31.  8. Sebastian Losch, ‘Unterhaltungsschrifttum – so oder so?’, Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel, 107 (16 April 1940), p. 137.   9. As seen in the catalogue under ‘English literature’, in Bücher-­Verzeichnis 1939 der Leihbücherei Fritz Borstells Lesezirkel (Berlin: Nicolaische Buch­handlung, 1938), p. 53. 10. Michele K. Troy, Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 327. 11. Oscar Robert Achenbach, ‘Auf dem Obersalzberg, Ein Besuch im Berchtes­gadener Heim des Führers’, Sonntag Morgenpost, 23 April 1933. 12. Philipp Gassert and Daniel S. Mattern, The Hitler Library: A Bibli­ ography (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001). 13. Bundesarchiv/Federal Archives (BArch), Himmler estate, N 1126/9, Lektüre (Himmler’s reading list). There is a handwritten and a type­ written version of this list. I worked with the typescript. 14. Ibid., p. 61. 15. Rolf Düsterberg, Hanns Johst, ‘Der Barde der SS’: Karrieren eines deutschen Dichters (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004), p. 301. 16. ‘Dr. Goebbels spricht von den Erfolgen des Buchhandels’ [‘Dr Goebbels talks about the success of the book trade’], Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel, 103 (12 May 1936), p. 424. 17. Hans W. Hagen, ‘Um den Unterhaltungsroman’, Die Bücherkunde, 11:3–4 (1944), p. 43. 18. Losch, ‘Unterhaltungsschrifttum’, p. 137. 19. Sven Felix Kellerhoff, ‘Mein Kampf ’, Die Karriere eines Buches (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2015), p. 241. 20. Irene Seligo, ‘Vom Winde verweht, Die Geschichte eines Best Seller’, Literaturblatt der Frankfurter Zeitung, 5 December 1937. 21. Hoover Institution Archives, German Subject Collection, Box 44, File: German Subject, Post WW II, Nuremberg Prosecution, Interrogation of Julius Schaub, 27 October 1947. 22. Othmar Plöckinger, Geschichte eines Buches: Adolf Hitlers ‘Mein Kampf ’ 1922–1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006), p. 184. 23. Ernst Piper, Alfred Rosenberg, Hitlers Chefideologe (München: Blessing, 2005), p. 293. 24. Joseph Goebbels, Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei, Eine historische Darstellung in Tagebuchblättern (Munich: Eher Verlag, 1934), 1 January 1932–1 May 1933. 25. Christian Adam, Lesen unter Hitler: Autoren, Bestseller, Leser im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Galiani, 2010), p. 128.

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26. Erich Thier, Gestaltwandel des Arbeiters im Spiegel seiner Lektüre, Ein Beitrag zur Volkskunde und Leserführung (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1939), p. 94. 27. Karl Ludwig, ‘Was liest die Jugend?’, Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel, 100 (22 July 1933), p. 538. 28. Joseph Goebbels, Tagebücher, Band II: 1930–1934, ed. Ralf Georg Reuth (Munich: Piper, 1999), p. 390. 29. Adam, Lesen unter Hitler, p. 139. 30. Ullstein Archives, Deutscher Verlag, Bericht über wichtige Geschäftsvorfälle im Oktober 1940 (report concerning important business transactions in October 1940). 31. ‘Stolze Bilanz der Buchproduktion’, Großdeutsches Leihbüchereiblatt, 4:11 (1942), p. 161. 32. Telephone interview with Franz Hinze, 24 March 2009. See also Franz Hinze, Frontbuchhandlung Paris: Erinnerungen eines Beteiligten (Friedrichs­dorf: Hardt und Wörner, 1999), p. 30. 33. BArch, NS 18/483, Proposal for Goebbels regarding literature for the frontline, 27 February 1942; see also Barbian, Literaturpolitik im Dritten Reich, p. 720. 34. Tobias Schneider, ‘Bestseller im Dritten Reich: Ermittlung und Analyse der meistverkauften Romane in Deutschland 1933–1944’, Vierteljahrs­ hefte für Zeitgeschichte, 52:1 (2004), p. 77. 35. Heinrich Spoerl, Der Gasmann (Berlin: Neff, 1940). 36. Hellmuth Langenbucher, Volkhafte Dichtung unserer Zeit, 3rd edition (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1937), p. 27. This was a standard reference work for literary theory at that time. Hellmuth and his brother Erich were powerful figures in the book market during the Nazi era, and their influence did not stop in 1945. See Christian Adam, Der Traum vom Jahre Null, Autoren, Bestseller, Leser: Die Neuordnung der Bücherwelt in Ost und West nach 1945 (Berlin: Galiani, 2016), p. 322. 37. Adam, Lesen unter Hitler. 38. Kuni Tremel-Eggert, Barb, Der Roman einer deutschen Frau (Munich: Eher Verlag, 1938), p. 27. 39. Karl Aloys Schenzinger, Anilin (Berlin: Andermann, 1937), p. 375. 40. Karl Aloys Schenzinger, Anilin (Munich: Andermann, 1949), p. 378. 41. Review by Paul Fechter in Berliner Tageblatt, 31 October 1937. 42. Die Bücherkunde, 5:8 (1938), p. 433. 43. BArch, Former Berlin Document Center, PK, Letter of the Security Service (SD) of the Reichsleiter SS to the Kreisleiter of the NSDAP Rosenheim, 19 July 1944, Diesel, Eugen, 3 May 1887. 44. Ibid. 45. Kate Sturge, ‘The Alien Within’: Translation into German During the Nazi Regime (Munich: Iudicium, 2004), p. 57; Kate Sturge‚ ‘“Flight from the Programme of National Socialism”? Translation in Nazi Germany’, in Christopher Rundle and Kate Sturge (eds), Translation Under Fascism

254  Christian Adam (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 53. Only in 1944 was the proportion not higher than 4 per cent. 46. Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels, ‘Übersetzungen ins Deutsche 1951–2016’, at (accessed 1 October 2017). 47. Adam, Lesen unter Hitler, p. 229. 48. Sturge, ‘The Alien Within’, p. 60. 49. Jan-Pieter Barbian, ‘Die politische Kontrolle des Buchmarkts’, in Die Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Drittes Reich (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), vol. I, p. 143. 50. Ibid., p. 144. 51. Ibid., p. 145. 52. Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, Das Buch ein Schwert des Geistes: Grundliste für das deutsche Leih- und Werkbüchereiwesen (Leipzig, 1943), vol. III, p. 105. 53. Lok Myler, Gesetz über Leben und Tod (number 98 in the series Sun Koh: Der Erbe von Atlantis) (Leipzig: Bergmann), p. 37. 54. Will Vesper, ‘Unsere Meinung’, Die Neue Literatur, 40:2 (1939), p. 102. 55. Alfred Müller, ‘Rolf Torring, Tom Shark und andere “Helden”’, Jugendschriften-Warte, 44:5 (1939), p. 69. 56. Ehm Welk, Die Heiden von Kummerow (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag, 1937), p. 188. 57. Victor Klemperer, Die Tagebücher 1933–1945 (Berlin: Directmedia, 2007, Kritische Gesamtausgabe CD-ROM), entry for 4 February 1945. 58. Ullstein Archives, Deutscher Verlag, Bericht über wichtige Geschäftsvorfälle im Oktober 1944 (report concerning important business transactions in October 1944). 59. Dinah Nelken, Ich an Dich (Berlin: Weise, 1939). 60. Ibid., preface. 61. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Mein Leben (1999; München: dtv, 2003), p. 39. 62. Adam, Lesen unter Hitler, pp. 61–3. 63. Ernst Jünger, Auf den Marmorklippen (1939; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1995), p. 46. 64. Visiting Committee of American Book Publishers, German Book Publishing, p. 9. 65. Ibid., p. 15.

Chapter 12

Reading Spaces in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia: The Project to Create and Translate a Japanese-Language Library Atsuhiko Wada, translated by Edward Mack

There are various methods and materials that might be employed to recover the history of readers; for that reason, the historian must first determine what precisely he or she wishes to illuminate about that history, and what methods and materials might accomplish that. This chapter will attempt to understand readers through tracing the birth of, expansion of, and changes in distribution systems for Japanese-language books and magazines. That is, it will consider readership through the lens of the spatial distribution of texts. We might note here that the publication of texts does not necessarily ensure the existence of readers, nor explain how readers might have interpreted those texts. Readers have traditionally come into contact with texts at points determined by the expansion of shipping networks and postal systems, and in such venues as bookstores, libraries and schools. The specific focus of this chapter will be the birth of one such space that resulted from this expansion: a reading space for Japanese-language texts in Indonesia when it was occupied by the Japanese army during the Asia Pacific War (1931–45). In February 1942, the Japanese invaded Indonesia, which had been a Dutch colony, and placed it under military control until the end of the war. A collection of Japanese-language texts assembled during the occu­ pation exists today in the National Library of Indonesia, in Jakarta, in an almost unaltered state. These roughly 1,200 volumes would have been brought to the country from the home islands of Japan.1 How was the flow of these texts to Indonesia related to Japan’s military invasion of the country? What was the significance of the construction of a space for reading Japanese in Indonesia, when it was under Japanese military rule? This chapter will attempt to answer these questions, even as it describes the objectives for which this collection 255

256  Atsuhiko Wada

of texts was created and identifies the distribution routes that brought them to the country. This is the first research that has been done on this collection, which is still not open to the public. The assembly of this collection was closely linked to the ‘cultural activities’ (bunka kōsaku) of the Japanese military in Indonesia, which were projects undertaken in the hopes of managing the local population. This fact allows us to speculate, based on the contents of the collection, about the type of reader the Japanese government hoped to create in this occupied territory. The books do not simply reflect the reading habits of the time. It is possible that the collection was not open to the public even at the time of its creation, or that, if it were, the texts were not read. Nonetheless, the catalogue does show us the type of reading – and reader – Japan hoped to foster in its empire. To start, we should consider the state of Indonesia under the Dutch administration that preceded Japanese military rule, particularly as it related to literacy, and then more concretely describe the reading environ­ment for Japanese there, with reference to the state of publishing in Japan at the time. According to a contemporary survey, only 6.3 per cent of the Indonesian population – roughly 3,750,000 people – possessed some degree of literacy in 1930. Of those, only 5 per cent were able to read Dutch.2 The educational system was bifurcated, with one track conducted in Dutch for the higher classes (of Indonesians) and the other conducted in local vernaculars for the lower classes. As a result, a diverse body of printed texts was published, some in local vernaculars, some in Dutch and some in Chinese for the ethnic Chinese population. Ishizawa Yutaka, who was posted to Indonesia as the Japanese consul general immediately before the war, wrote of Java, ‘there are primary schools in even the remotest corners of the country, and libraries in every village’.3 Nakamura Takashi of the East-Asiatic Commercial Intelligence Institute at Tokyo wrote in great detail about these cultural institutions and the region’s publishing culture. According to Nakamura, Balai Pustaka (Indonesia’s Bureau of Litera­ ture), which was responsible for producing low-cost editions of important works, ‘published at least 1,300 titles in seven vernaculars (including Javanese, Malay, Sundanese, and Madurese), producing over two million volumes a year’.4 These books were distributed to more than 2,300 libraries throughout the Dutch East Indies; they were also sold at the many bookstores in the region and through catalogue sales conducted via the postal system. In Java and Sumatra, vehicles loaded with these texts ‘went to cities and villages in every part of the region as traveling bookstores, for the convenience of the local

Reading Spaces in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia   257

people’, Nakamura writes. Newspapers were also popular, with ‘81 dailies, 205 weeklies, and 493 monthlies produced in Java, more than 50 of which were considered to be quite serious publications’.5 There were newspapers not only in Dutch but also in vernaculars targeting both Indonesians and the ethnic Chinese. Now let us turn to Japanese-language publications. The wartime publishing and distribution industries in Japan were undergoing consolidation in order to maximise control by the state and utilisation of resources. In 1940, the Japanese Publishing Culture Associ­ation (Nihon Shuppan Bunka Kyōkai) was established under the leadership of the Information Bureau (Jōhōkyoku). All publishing companies joined the Association, to which they had to submit requests to publish new texts. If approved, the publishers would receive the necessary ration of paper. Publishers, bookstores and distributors were consoli­ dated to form the Japanese Publishing and Distribution Company (Nippai), which centralised control of the distribution of texts. In 1942, roughly 30,000 titles were published in Japan, totalling more than 120,000,000 individual volumes. While this was less than the pre-war peak, reached in 1932, the publishing and distribution industries remained strong because the rationalisations imposed on the wartime publishing system had minimised returns of unsold stock.6 These figures included books distributed in the gaichi, the ‘outer terri­ tories’ of the Japanese empire, as well as the naichi, the Japanese home islands. In 1942, around 20 per cent of books and magazines were sold in the gaichi.7 A record of bookstores in the outer territories at that time lists 598 in Korea, 159 in Taiwan, 306 in Manchukuo and 250 in other areas. Around 1,300 employers or owners (and even more who worked as their employees) were involved in the business.8 In recent years, an increasing amount of research has been done on the reading and publishing of Japanese-language texts in these colonial areas. How did these texts circulate out to the territories seized and occupied by the Japanese military? The case of Indonesia helps us to answer that question. So, how was a Japanese-language reading public created in Indo­ nesia? The first Japanese consulate there was established in 1909, after which the Japanese population in the country grew, primarily with the arrival of people involved in commerce. That population was 2,422 in 1913, rising to 6,598 by 1935.9 Large trading companies and banks from Japan established branches there, and schools were created for the Japanese population, first in Java, from 1925.10 The first Japanese-language newspaper, the Jawa nippō (Java Daily News), appeared in 1920. In 1934 the Nichiran shōgyō shinbun

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(Japan-Dutch Business Newspaper) was launched. The two papers merged in 1937 to become the Tō-indo nippō (Dutch East Indies Daily News), which continued until 1941, the year before the Japanese invasion. According to Taniguchi Gorō, its editor, the circulation of Tō-indo nippō was 1,500, and it ran news stories from Japan that it received by intercepting the shortwave transmissions from the Dōmei News Agency.11 I surveyed the local publishing and bookselling advertisements that appeared in the pages of this newspaper, having learned from earlier research how much valuable information can be gleaned from them about reading habits in the Japanese colonies and diasporic communities.12 The results of this survey were revealing, largely because the publisher of the Jawa nippō was itself engaged in distribut­ing texts published in Japan. Advertisements show that in 1929, the Jawa Nippōsha was selling Japanese-language books and acting as a sales agent for major newspapers and magazines from Japan.13 By the late 1930s, these advertisements often included phrases along the lines of ‘Available at bookstores throughout the area’, which suggest that a number of such stores existed.14 We can presume, then, that well before war came to Indonesia, magazines and other published matter from Japan were being consumed by at least the Japanese community in the urban centres of Java. That reading community, however, came under pressure as Dutch– Japanese relations deteriorated. In July 1941, the Dutch East Indian government, in response to Japan’s incursions into French Indochina, announced that it would freeze Japanese assets, in line with the economic sanctions imposed on Japan by the UK and the USA. From 1940, Japanese citizens in Indonesia had begun returning to Japan, but after the de facto banning of their economic activity the exodus accelerated. By October 1941 nearly 40 per cent of those citizens had returned.15 The Japanese Sixteenth Army, which invaded Java, contained a propaganda unit made up of well known journalists, authors and artists, among others. Modelled on the Propagandakompanie (Propa­ ganda Company) set up under Joseph Goebbels, the Japanese unit dedicated to Japan’s Southern Operations was formed in 1941 and assigned some 150 individuals to each of the armies despatched to Java, Malaysia, the Philippines and Burma.16 Japanese forces landed on Java on 1 March 1942, and Holland declared unconditional surrender a week later, bringing an end to Dutch control of Indonesia. For Japan, which needed Indonesia’s resources and facilities, the cooperation of the local population was vital; in order to achieve that, the military’s propaganda unit launched

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a media campaign soon after it took control, utilising newspapers, radio and film. Famous novelists such as Takeda Rintarō (1904–46), Abe Tomoji (1903–73) and Kitahara Takeo (1907–73) were despatched to Indonesia as part of this propaganda unit. The critic Asano Akira (1901–90) and the poet Ōki Atsuo (1895–1977), who produced a poetry anthology titled Unabara ni arite utaeru (I Can Sing on the Sea), published in both Indonesia and Japan, were also involved.17 Other individuals who participated in this unit’s activities included the famous journalist Ōya Sōichi (1900–70) and the cartoonist Yokoyama Ryūichi (1909–2001), who was known at the time for his Fuku-chan series. The propaganda unit was a part of the General Staff Office, the central administrative body in charge of the strategic operations of the Japanese army. Working alongside the military administration, which was in charge of running the occupied territory, the propaganda unit was in charge of its educational policies. Concretely, it cultivated Japanese-language reading and writing among the local population, while also launching local Japanese-language publishing projects. That is, it aimed to create not only Japanese-language reading material, but also Japanese-language readers. The author Ōe Kenji (1905–87) described the early period of the occupation, when soldiers were being recruited to teach in Japanese schools, in novels and in his book Jawa Nihongo gakkō kensetsu-ki.18 Asano Akira, mentioned above, wrote his Nippongo no hon for edu­cational purposes, with Nakatani Yoshio providing the portions translated into Malay.19 It was published using a local printing press that the army had seized. Early trial activities such as these led to more substantial developments in systematic educational policies put into effect by the military administration’s education bureau.20 These activities expanded Japanese-language literacy and created new Japanese-language readers in the territory. The propaganda unit seized the printing factory and offices of the Japanese-language Tō-indo nippō, and used them to start a new newspaper on 9 March 1942 titled Sekidōhō (Equator News, renamed Unabara the following month). From 8 December, it became the Jawa shinbun (Java Newspaper), which was run by staff sent from the Asahi Shinbunsha and overseen by the army.21 In January 1943, Jawa Shinbunsha launched a biweekly illustrated magazine titled Djawa Baroe (bilingual in Japanese and Malayan), followed by the Japanese-language monthly Shin Jawa from October 1944. The circulation figures at the time were 12,000 for the Jawa shinbun and 3,000 for Shin Jawa.22

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The Keimin Shidōsho (Center for Public Edification) was estab­ lished in August 1943 to introduce Japanese culture to the local population. The writers Takeda Rintarō and Yoshida Momosuke, who were tasked with organising local cultural leaders, organised lectures, had novels such as Mugi to heitai and Tōjūrō no koi translated into Malay, and promoted the writing of film scripts.23 Ōya Sōichi, also a member of the propaganda unit, wrote ‘It is common knowledge that literature, with the depth and breadth of its cultural permeation, is the greatest of all forms of propaganda’.24 Tomisawa Uio and Asano Akira, among others, engaged in projects designed to introduce and translate works of Japanese literature into local vernaculars.25 For such projects to succeed, a diverse array of Japanese publications had to be available locally. While local publishing was quite active, insufficient local papermaking facilities led to limitations on the print runs of those texts.26 The occupation authorities had to direct vast quantities of material published in Japan proper to Indonesia. The previously existing distribution networks had been disrupted by the war, meaning that reconstructing these networks was essential for any long-term strategic ‘cultural activities’. Asano Akira, of the propaganda unit, wrote, ‘One thing that we learned was that wherever there are Japanese, there must be books from Japan.’ He continued, ‘In areas like Java and Singapore, where military opera­tions have been completed for the time being and infrastructure projects are moving forward quickly, it would be desirable, if possible, to establish a standing distribution system to acquire quality books with relative ease’.27 Elementary education in Indonesia was reorganised into ele­ mentary national schools (shotō kokumin gakkō) and national schools (kokumin gakkō). Some 14,347 public and private national schools existed in Java in 1943, when Japanese became a required subject for each grade at every one of those schools.28 It was difficult to meet the demand for Japanese-language texts generated by all of these schools, as well as secondary schools, Japanese-language classes and Japanese schools. In February 1943, some 20,000 Japanese-language textbooks arrived, following an order the military administration placed with publishers in Japan.29 Even an order as large as this, however, could not come close to meeting the demand. One measure of the importation of such books is the Japanese collection at the National Library of Indonesia, which, as noted at the start of the chapter, comprises some 1,200 items gathered during the Japanese military rule of the country from 1942. Given that the importation and sale of Japanese-language books had already been

Reading Spaces in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia   261

underway since the 1920s, is it possible that part of this collection is made up of texts brought in before the war? That is not likely. Analysing a catalogue of the collection makes clear that 76 per cent of the books (including reprints) were published between 1940 and 1945. The texts produced before that time were primarily educational sources consulted in the creation of Japanese-language textbooks and foreign-language materials on the Japanese language and Japanese culture. The great majority of texts in the collection, therefore, were published during the Second World War and shipped from Japan to Indonesia, more than 3,000 miles away. As mentioned above, just prior to the opening of hostilities, most Japanese people left Indonesia and ceased their economic activities. The routes by which Japanese-language texts were imported were shut down. As a result, new routes for the importation, sale and distribution of books from Japan had to be established in occupied Indonesia. To understand how this was accomplished, we turn once again to newspaper advertisements for books and bookstores, specific­ally in the Jawa shinbun. While Japanese-language advertisements for bookstores do appear in its pages towards the end of 1942, they are few in number, perhaps because it was still difficult at that time for bookstores to acquire new stock. The distribution of books had by then been consolidated under the Nippai company, which did not set up a distribution network in the South Pacific until the following year.30 Nippai was what was termed a ‘national policy concern’ (kokusaku kaisha), a type of company, part private, part public (and directly under the control of the government), that was established during the Second World War with the goal of pursuing the development and expansion of Japan. In April 1943 it established a formal branch in Singapore, and in 1944 Nippai sent employees from Japan to launch local branches in Java and Sumatra. In addition, the bookstores Kikutake Kinbundō and Maruzen, both military-designated retailers, despatched employees to Java. The Nippai employees sent to Singapore, who were treated as military officers, worked closely with the army’s pacification activities, which had taken an interest in the distribution of Japanese-language textbooks to Southeast Asia. Nippai referred to these activities as ‘distribution with no regard to profits or losses at all’.31 The project to promote Japanese culture overseas expanded into the creation and supply of printed materials. The Society for Inter­national  Cultural Relations, which was tasked with promoting Japanese culture overseas, had begun to focus on China and Southeast Asia after the entrance of the USA into the war. The Southeast

262  Atsuhiko Wada

Asia Activities Advisory Committee, established by the Society in May 1942, was renamed the Greater East Asian Cultural Activities Committee in 1944, after which it focused on Japanese-language instruction and Japanese cultural projects in Southeast Asia.32 The Society for International Cultural Relations produced dictionaries (including one for Malay), Japanese-language textbooks, books introducing Japan, films and magic lantern slides. In 1943, the Society – using the military’s information unit as a mediator – signed a memorandum with Nippai to distribute these materials in Southeast Asia,33 which contributed to the creation of a network for distributing other books and magazines. As a result, the number of advertisements for bookstores appearing in the Jawa shinbun gradually increased in 1943. There were advertisements for Kaimei Shoten, Shanhai Shoten and Pasar Baru Shoten in Jakarta, as well as for Taisei Shoten in Surabaya. Given the advertisements for new bookstores published in December of that year, it seems that the distribution system for texts had stabilised to some degree.34 It is not until 1944, however, that Japanese materials were widely available for purchase. A June advertisement for the Java branch of Nippai announces that ‘a large number of texts have arrived from Japan to aid in the important national mission of propaganda and pacification’. The advertisement also lists a number of monthly magazines, including the popular general interest magazine Taiyō. The advertisement announces that they will be arriving regularly from here on, and will be available at bookstores throughout Java.35 In October the Java branch of Nippai introduced nine bookstores that had opened there (Figure 12.1).36 Letters from readers like the one below vividly reveal this emergence of a new reading environment, in which recently published Japanese-language books appeared on the shelves of bookstores: I deeply appreciate the fact that today, at a time when all available space in ships is precious, heavy and bulky books of all sorts – specialised technical books, scientific books, books for edification and books for entertainment – are being sent from Japan. When I see them lined up on the shelves in bookstores, I can’t help but feel as though I were encountering an old teacher or a close friend.37

While this does clarify how Japanese books reached Indonesia, it does not explain how they came to be held in the National Library. Who created this collection? The National Library of Indonesia was established in 1980, having been built on the collections from a number of other libraries and museums, including that of the

Reading Spaces in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia   263

Figure 12.1  Advertisement for the Nihon Shuppan Haikyu ¯ Gaisha (Nippai), Shin Jawa, 1 (October 1944)

National Museum.38 The National Museum was established in 1778 by the Royal Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences; by the time of the Japanese occupation, it already had a collection of more than 500,000 volumes. The Japanese army, thinking to promote cultural propaganda in the occupied territory, placed cultural and educational facilities such as the museum under its direct control. Machida Keiji, a leader of the propaganda unit who visited the museum during the occupation and commented on its ‘strategic biases imposed by the Dutch’, argued that ‘the museum must be reorganised with an Asia-centred or a Japan-centred historical perspective’.39 That is, from Machida’s perspective, the museum presented the country’s culture from a Eurocentric perspective, based on European values. The Japanese military, by contrast, would shift the reading space from one based on a European perspective to one curated with Asia (or, more accurately, Japan) at its centre. This space, as imagined by the propaganda unit, would be utilised to educate the local popu­ lation. In October 1942, a report stated that the unit ‘had begun re­organising the museum, as an institute of social education, into a

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facility dedicated to the inculcation of Greater East Asian culture’.40 In December that year, the Jawa shinbun revealed that the museum ‘was under­taking a variety of reforms to allow it to become the key institution in cultivating Javanese intellectuals as part of the Greater East Asian community’.41 According to a report from the military administration, by the end of 1943 the museum had ‘created a book division and was making those books available for reading by the general public’.42 In fact, there was a plan to make this collection independent as the military administration’s library, but this was not realised due to shortages in staffing and resources. In the report, however, there is also a note saying: at present, our plan is to provide good books from Japan via the book department in the post exchange, and in so doing nurture the intellects of not only common citizens, but also members of the military, civilian employees of the military, and other Japanese.43

This is likely the origin of the Japanese collection in Indonesia today. The books in the National Museum were not originally gathered with the intention that they be used by Japanese people; despite having some 500,000 volumes prior to the arrival of the Japanese army, none of the books in the library’s collection at that time would have been in the Japanese language. As a result, it must be the case that the Japanese collection now held by the library is primarily made up of books, newly published at the time, that were assembled with the clear intent of creating such a Japanese-language collection. This collection was not made up of texts that readers read on their own initiative. Rather, it reveals the reading environment that the Japanese military thought desirable for the occupied territory. Given that, what sort of reader does the collection lead us to imagine? It contains newly published books on a variety of subjects, but there is one notable tendency visible in the collection: the centrality of the popular genre known as kōdan. In the modern period, the term kōdan can refer to a variety of texts, such as lectures and speeches. In this case, however, the meaning is more specific: a type of storytelling performance. This form of narrative emerged from an earlier form, known as kōshaku, which presented Buddhism, Shintō, literary classics and military chronicles to non-specialists in a way that made them easier to understand. Already in the early part of the Edo period, in the seventeenth century, there were entertainers specialising in it.44 Kōdan peaked in popularity as a performance style around 1880–90 but continued to exist after that in transcriptions that appeared in newspapers and magazines – that is, as a literary form.45 As both a

Reading Spaces in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia   265

form of entertainment for the general population and a means for edification and education, the genre exerted a broad influence through a variety of modern media, including newspapers, magazines, plays, films and textbooks. In terms of content, the works often focused on such topics as loyal retainers, filial children and chaste wives. They came to be closely tied to the education and ideology of modern Japanese thought and virtue. The storytellers who performed the genre were actually given a position in the early educational policies of the state, as ‘teachers’ responsible for the education of the citizenry.46 Following an 1879 imperial rescript on education known as the ‘Principles of Education’, emphasis had been placed on humanity, justice, loyalty to one’s master and filial piety, as well as on the hierarchical relationships between lord and subject, parent and child. The 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education reinforced a national polity based on these Confucian virtues and worked to cultivate loyalty to the emperor. Kōdan, which made such virtues easy to understand by using concrete examples, were consumed and reproduced throughout the modern period as materials suitable for moral education. In Japanese-occupied Indonesia, the propaganda unit focused on this genre as a concrete way to advance its ‘cultural activities’. Asano Akira, a staff member of the unit when it was trying to decide what works of ‘authentic Japanese literature’ to introduce in the vernacular journal Asia Raya, argued that it should be ‘kōdan literature, and literature about faithful retainers in particular’ that they translate.47 Two of the titles chosen were Mito Kōmon man’yūki and Akō gishi meimeiden, which are still regularly remade for film and television today. This policy affected the contents of the Japanese collection in Indonesia. Alongside a variety of specialised texts from various fields, the collection included a large number of kōdan texts. In fact, the writer with the most titles in the collection is Takagi Giken, an author of kōdan. His works – Kan’ei gozen shiai, Ōishi Yoshio and Tsukahara Bokuden – were all produced by the publisher Dai Nippon Yūbenkai Kōdansha, which continues to this day as one of the largest publishers in Japan: Kōdansha. These kōdan are often not held by academic libraries in Japan. As manga are today, kōdan were treated as pulp fiction. The works of Takagi Giken, for example, are held by very few libraries in Japan; more copies of his books are held in the Japanese collection in Indonesia than in any Japanese library. However, to complicate matters further, these works were not actually written by Takagi Giken. Takagi Giken was the brother-in-law

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of Kōdansha’s founder, Noma Seiji. Originally an employee in the Ministry of Communications, Takagi took a position at Kōdansha in 1919, where he originally worked in accounting. He later became a director, continuing at the company until the mass resignation of executives at the company in 1945.48 In 1928, as anthologies of inexpensive ‘one-yen books’ were overwhelming the marketplace, Kōdansha published its Shūyō zenshū and its Kōdan zenshū. After that the company published a number of kōdan anthologies with Noma Seiji listed as either editor or author. Kōdansha evaded copyright laws by making modest changes in the texts and then substituting Noma Seiji for the name of the original author.49 In the case of one children’s kōdan series, published from 1932, Noma Seiji was initially given as the author, but this was changed to Takagi Giken in later printings. This series is part of the Japanese collection in Indonesia. Therefore, attributions of authorship to Takagi Giken actually reflect the fact that the text was produced by the company, Dai Nippon Yūbenkai Kōdansha. In Indonesia, these new kōdan for children were under consideration as a source material for translations. This genre was judged useful for ideological education, and not only in Indonesia. Kōdansha thought these books could serve the empire in its ‘state of emergency’ (the Second World War) as a pedagogical tool. Journalist Tokutomi Sohō referred to Kōdansha as ‘the private sector’s ministry of education’ and lieutenant general Horiuchi Shinsui (Bunjirō) had declared that ‘the magazines produced by Kōdansha are contributing to the defence of the nation’. Takahashi Tetsunosuke, who made this observation, also wrote in his ‘Thoughts on Magazines’ that those produced by Kōdansha were ‘spiritual ammunition’.50 One document produced internally at Kōdansha at the time, ‘The State of Emergency and the Vital Role of Magazines’, stated that ‘loyalty at Kōdansha is at a peak, as is filial piety. In short, our willingness to sacrifice ourselves to save the people is at its zenith’, and its magazines were a ‘prophylactic against foreign propaganda’.51 For Noma Seiji the Kōdan zenshū was a ‘tool for guiding the thought of the people’ and a ‘resource for self-cultivation’ that offered the virtues of the Imperial Rescript as ‘truths that anyone can easily absorb’.52 The Kōdan zenshū and the Shūyō zenshū, both published from 1928 by Dai Nippon Yūben Kōdansha, sold more than 3,000,000 volumes. The company also published a number of versions for young readers. The Kōdansha no ehon series, which began in 1936 and carried many kōdan directed at youths, had sold more than 70,000,000 volumes by 1959.53

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Despite the genre’s broad impact during the modern period, it has attracted little research in the field of Japanese literary studies. This is partially because kōdan have appeared in a variety of forms, including non-print media such as recitations and theatrical performances. Even in print, many of the stories have appeared in multiple versions by a variety of authors, making it difficult to establish a single authori­ tative text. As a mass didactic genre, kōdan have been marginalised as objects of academic research or as materials worthy of collection by research institutions. When considering the Japanese collection in Indonesia, however, the importance of the kōdan genre cannot be ignored. The reader the military hoped to create through these texts from Japan in the reading space of occupied Indonesia would have been one who sympathised with the characters and shared the value system of that genre. Works such as Mito Kōmon man’yūki and Akō gishi meimeiden have been and continue to be reproduced in a variety of media, including film, television and manga, and have reinforced character archetypes and narrative patterns that are deeply rooted in the reading space of Japan even today. The key conclusion of my survey is that the mass cultural form of the kōdan genre may have played a very important role in both the combat zones and the occupied territories during wartime. For this reason, among others, the genre demands further research and analysis.

Notes  1. S. W. Massil has discussed the founding of the library, but not the Japanese collection. See S. W. Massil, ‘The History of the National Library of Indonesia: The Bibliographical Borobudur’, Libraries and Culture, 24:4 (1989), pp. 475–88.   2. Ran’in Keizaibu Chūō Tōkeikyoku, in Ōe Kōtarō and Nakahara Yoshio (eds), Ran’in tōkeisho: 1940 nenban (Tokyo: Kokusai Nihon Kyōkai, 1942).   3. Ishizawa Yutaka, Ran’in Genjō Tokuhon (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1942).   4. Nakamura Takashi, ‘Ranryō Tōindo no bunka shisetsu’, Kokusai bunka, 18 (1942), pp. 54–9.   5. Kadota Isao, ‘Jawa Boruneo no shinbun’, Kokusai bunka, 27 (1942), pp. 56–62.  6. Kyōdō Shuppansha Henshūbu, Nihon shuppan nenkan: Shōwa 18 nenban (Tokyo: Kyōdō Shuppansha, 1943).  7. Ibid.

268  Atsuhiko Wada  8. Kouri-ten meibo (Shōwa 17nen 12gatsu genzai), as reproduced in Toya Makoto (ed.), Naichi gaichi shoten meikan, vol. III (Kanazawa: Kanazawa Bunpokaku, 2015).   9. Gaimushō Chōsabu, Kaigai kakuchi zairyū honpōjin jinkō hyō: Shōwa 10nen 10gatu tsuitachi genzai (Tokyo: Gaimushō Chōsabu, 1936). 10. Hanaoka Yasuji, ‘Jawa no zaigai shitei Nihonjin shōgakkō’ (contained in Jagatara Tomonokai, Jagatara kanwa [Tokyo: Jagatara Tomonokai, 1978], pp. 261–3). 11. Taniguchi Gorō, ‘Senzen no hōjishi’ (contained in the Jagatara kanwa, pp. 223–7). 12. Edward Mack, ‘Diasporic Markets: Japanese Print and Migration in São Paulo, 1908–1935’, Script and Print: Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, 29 (2005), pp. 163–77. 13. Jawa Nippōsha, ‘Eigyōbu kōkoku’, Jawa nippō, 1 January 1929. 14. ‘Ehon de kitaeru Nihon seishin’, Tō-indo nippō, 8 February 1938. 15. Gotō Ken’ichi, Shōwaki Nihon to Indoneshia (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1986). 16. The recollections of propaganda unit’s leader, Machida Keiji, can be found in Tatakau Bunka Butai (Tokyo: Hara Shobō, 1967) and Aru gunjin no shihi (Tokyo: Fuyō Shobō, 1978). 17. Further information on authors drafted to work with the military in Southeast Asia can be found in the Nanpō gunsei kankei shiryō: Nanpō chōyō sakka soshō (Tokyo: Ryūkei Shosha, 1996–2010), which contains materials related to the military administration in Southeast Asia. 18. Ōe Kenji, ‘Jawa Nihongo gakkō kensetsu-ki’, Nihongo, 4:8 (1944), pp. 40–3; Ōe Kenji, ‘Ryōgen chū’, Seiki, 1:4 (1944), pp. 66–75. 19. See Asano Akira, Jawa kantei yowa (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1944). 20. Jawa Gunsei Kanbu Chōsashitsu, Jawa ni okeru bunkyō no gaikyō (­Tokyo: Ryūkei Shosha, 1991). This is a reproduction of a report com­ piled in December 1943 and published in 1944. 21. Machida Keiji, Tatakau Bunka Butai. 22. Kadota Isao, ‘Jawa Boruneo no shinbun’. 23. ‘Marai-ban Mugi to heitai: keimin bungaku-bu no jigyō keikaku’, Jawa shinbun, 16 April 1943. 24. Ōya Sōichi, ‘Nanpō to bunka senden’, Nihon hyōron, 19:1 (1944), pp. 56–61. 25. Ōya Sōichi, ‘Jawa de no senden katsudō (ge)’, Tōkyō shinbun, 15 November 1943. 26. Tomizawa Uio, Jawa bunka-sen (Tokyo: Nihon Bunrinsha, 1943). 27. Akira, Jawa kantei yowa, p. 142. 28. Jawa Gunsei Kanbu Chōsashitsu, Jawa ni okeru bunkyō no gaikyō. 29. ‘Jawa no shōnen shōjo e’, Jawa shinbun, 5 February 1943. 30. ‘Nippai nanpō shucchōjo’, March 1943, reproduced in Shōji Tokutarō and Shimizu Bunkichi (eds), Shiryō nenpyō jidaishi: Gendai shuppan ryūtsū no genten (Tokyo: Shuppan Nyuusu-sha, 1980).

Reading Spaces in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia   269

31. Kyōdō Shuppansha Henshūbu, Nihon shuppan nenkan: Shōwa 18 nenban. 32. Kokusai Kōryū Kikin JFIC Library, Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai, ‘Dai 126-kai rijikai’, 4 February 1944. 33. Kokusai Kōryū Kikin JFIC Library, Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai, ‘Dai 114-kai rijikai’, 15 January 1943. 34. ‘Kinkoku: Kuru 23 nichi yori shoten kaigyō’, Jawa shinbun, 22 December 1943. 35. Jawa Shuppan Haikyūsha, ‘Kōkoku’, Jawa shinbun, 13 June 1944. 36. Jawa Shuppan Haikyūsha, ‘Dokusha no minasama ni oshirase’, Jawa shinbun, 16 October 1944. 37. Tanimura Junzō, ‘Dokusho o tanoshimu kokoro’, Jawa shinbun, 6 October 1944. 38. Massil, ‘The History of the National Library of Indonesia’. 39. Machida Keiji, Tatakau Bunka Butai. 40. Nomura Hideo, Jawa nenkan (Jakarta: Jawa Shinbunsha, 1944) 41. Sendenbu-nai Nanpō Bunka Kenkyūshitsu, ‘Jawa gakujutsu bunka kenkyū kikan: ichi’, Jawa shinbun, 20 December 1942. 42. Jawa Gunsei Kanbu Chōsashitsu, Jawa ni okeru bunkyō no gaikyō. 43. Ibid. The post exchange was a retail store on a military base. 44. Ichiko Teiji and Ōkubo Tadashi (eds), Zōtei-ban Nihon bungaku zenshū 4: Kinsei (Tokyo: Gakutōsha, 1990). 45. Yoshizawa Hideaki compiled an overview of foundational research on the genre. See Yoshizawa Hideaki, Kōdan sakuhin jiten (jō) (Tokyo: Kōdan Sakuhin Jiten Kankōkai, 2008). 46. From a ministerial ordinance (Ministry of Religious Instruction proclamation number 10) from 1873, issued on the heels of the proclamation of the Three Educational Ordinances I (1872). 47. Asano Akira, Jawa kantei yowa. 48. Shashi Hensan Iinkai, Kōdansha no ayunda gojūnen: Meiji/Taishō-hen, Shōwa-hen (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1959). 49. Ibid. 50. Takahashi Tetsunosuke, ‘Zasshi ni tsuite no ichi kōsatsu’, Shanaihō, 55 (17 June 1939) (copy held at Kōdansha). 51. Kawamura Shinjirō, Hijō jikyoku to zasshi no jūdai shimei (Tokyo: Dainihon Yūbenkai Kōdansha, 1939) (copy held at Kōdansha). 52. Noma Seiji (ed.), Kōdan zenshū, Dai ikkan (Tokyo: Dainihon Yūbenkai Kōdansha, 1928). 53. Shashi Hensan Iinkai, Kōdansha no ayunda gojūnen.

Chapter 13

Just Send Zhivago: Reading Over, Under and Through the Iron Curtain Jessica Brandt

‘If we are asking too much, just send Doctor Zhivago.’ Thus concludes a letter from a Soviet listener to Radio Liberty (henceforth RL) in July 1968, requesting a host of reading material from the US government-sponsored surrogate radio station.1 Each year throughout the 1960s, hundreds of similar letters were received, at times in direct reply to a giveaway offer of reading material and at other times seemingly unsolicited. These letters evince an engagement with texts that, in many cases, had never been experienced as physical objects by the listeners. Instead, they lived as words broadcast over the air, or as books free to circulate in the West but only the object of fantasy in the Soviet Union. RL became a purveyor of these texts for its listeners in the Soviet sphere of influence, thus fulfilling a need both physical and spiritual. The dramatic story of Doctor Zhivago’s publication abroad is the stuff of le Carré or Fleming (with a literal dash of Isaiah Berlin).2 The book is an iconic example of the Western perception of what mattered to Soviet readers at the height of the Cold War: the bold defiance of Soviet censorship in the name of a conflicted but devoted patriot. So sure was the fledgling CIA of Zhivago’s anti-communist message, the spy agency undertook to publish and distribute it directly to citizens of the communist bloc at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958.3 This action was a showpiece of a larger publication-distribution scheme pursued by the CIA to get books directly into the hands of people behind the Iron Curtain. The book programme – or, as John P. C. Matthews deemed it, the ‘Marshall Plan for the Mind’ – targeted intellectuals and elites, at least in its early years.4 And with the close involvement of the organising committees associated with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the connection between these books and their potential listening audience was always at the forefront. 270

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What developed over the middle and later Cold War years was a sophisticated feedback loop between the CIA-backed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and their listeners in both the subject nations of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself. Intelligence planners in the post-war USA focused on the potential for radio to speak directly to an audience that was physically and ideologically remote. In so doing, it could model the type of freedom that was meant to be key to a democratic society, and that was suppressed in zones of Soviet influence. With the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, the American intention to support the people of states under Soviet influence in Eastern Europe was made public. The pertinent policy objective was the ‘support of free peoples who are resisting attempted subjection by armed minorities or by outside pressures’.5 In a document drafted for the National Security Council in April 1948, the director of policy planning at the State Department, George Kennan, advocated the establishment of a covert operations directorate within the government. This arm of the security apparatus would engage émigrés from nations under Soviet domination, as well as known anti-communist elements in other countries, and foster support for their causes. Kennan’s intent was to foment intellectual resistance to communist (particularly Soviet) incursions. He termed this endeavour ‘organised political warfare’ and claimed it as a logical peacetime extension of Clausewitz’s doctrine.6 Thus, clandestine activities, including targeted broadcasts, became war by other means. There has been much work done on the history of RFE/RL as an institution and on its role in the downfall of the Soviet bloc.7 But relatively little has explored the transmediated experience of ‘reading’ over, under and through the Iron Curtain by means of radio. Using the RFE/RL Corporate and Broadcast Archives at the Hoover Institution, with a focus on listener mail, I explore the relationship of readers and reading that RL in particular cultivated during the Cold War. As one of the staff programme evaluators at RL declared in 1962, ‘it is one of the laws of broadcasting that sometimes it is more important how material is presented than what this material represents’.8 The value of books to a public that already considered itself the most avid readers in the world (‘samyi chitaiushchii narod’9) could still be enhanced (or manipulated) when those books were divorced from their physical form. As a result, RFE/RL became an aggregator and outlet for a vast collection of samizdat, self-published works of fiction and non-fiction that were forbidden in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. These works found a reading audience in sound. Employing the former

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nationals of these subject states lent legitimacy to the message that the CIA wanted to get out: on the other side of the Curtain, information flows freely, without fear of reprisal. The samizdat phenomenon has been the focus of a great deal of attention in the post-Cold War era, much of it extolling the influence of underground political literature in the eventual crumbling of the Soviet state. As the subject of academic research over the last decade, however, samizdat has received a more complex and nuanced treatment.10 Rather than simply the tangible evidence of the triumph of liberal thought, it is seen as a multifaceted response, by many sophisticated actors, to a practical problem. Doctor Zhivago and its author were, in many ways, the first internationally known celebrity examples of samizdat. In Boris Pasternak’s wake would follow Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. By the late 1960s, the floodgates had opened on samizdat as a political act and, for Soviet listeners, RL was the primary source. Given the attention already paid to the dissident movement(s) and the world-stage quality of much of the samizdat material of the 1970s, I have chosen to focus on the more everyday reader-listener of the early 1960s. The interchange of this period was certainly coloured by the Khrushchev Thaw, and in that sense there is perhaps more optimism in the correspondence than there would have been a decade before or a decade after. But this was the audience that proved simultaneously that a thirst existed for what RL could provide, and that partially quenching it could lead to greater engagement. And perhaps most importantly, that the thirst was not confined to the intelligentsia, or to any particular elite. The relationship that these listeners entered into with RL over literary material would help to lay the groundwork for the democratic movements of the 1970s. Rather than eagerly devouring the latest open letter from Elena Bonner and seventeen concerned scientists (for example), or a proclamation from Solzhenitsyn in exile, as their later counterparts would, the majority of letter-writers to RL in the early1960s who did address reading material in some way fell into two basic categories. They either engaged with the prospect of receiving an actual book, or they requested that some specific work be read aloud on air. Among the first group, requests for a copy of the Bible in various languages were quite common, and most others were seeking picture books or informational catalogues, typically the result of giveaway offers, or related to such offers. This was reading material that would either provide visual entertainment or some kind of instruction. In that sense, they were not unlike the new Soviet readers of the 1920s, who

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sought usefulness in what they read.11 The second group demonstrated awareness of literary works as oral texts, for in many cases they would have come to know the requested works only through previous on-air readings. All of these listeners sought in RL not so much a kinship with underground movements (though that did, of course, sometimes happen) but, in the main, a utilitarian satisfaction of a need: access to printed matter that was otherwise unavailable to them. These two strands can, and did, overlap at times, as that printed matter was often restricted on political or ideological grounds within the USSR. But the audience with which I am concerned here fell more readily in the category of kramola, the kind of seditious behaviour that has less to do with ideological dissent, and more to do with the everyday frustrations of a citizen in a rapidly modernising society.12 In her exploration of the recently opened archives in the mid1990s, Sheila Fitzpatrick examined the letters sent to public officials, agencies, newspapers and magazines in the early Soviet period. She remarked on the almost euphoric glee with which some letter-writers penned their missives, revelling in their newfound literacy.13 The population whose letters she was analysing had another twenty years of literacy under their belts by the time RL hit the airwaves, but there are still similarities in the correspondence of the 1930s between citizens and Soviet bureaucracy and that of the early 1960s between listeners and RL. Of particular interest is the way the writers exhibited faith in the social interchange into which they had entered. In each case, a large portion of the letters used a public method to address a private concern. Fitzpatrick described the phenomenon as ‘incomplete publicn­ess’, and saw in it vital evidence of what could pass for a ‘public sphere’ in the Stalinist era.14 The letter-writers of that earlier period sought engagement with public officials on topics of great interest to themselves as individuals (complaints and grievances, domestic disputes, all manner of injustice). They sought to have their issues addressed by an outside audience, though they most likely saw that audience as limited. If their complaints were aimed at some function (or functionary) of the Soviet regime, they would have risked repercussions for ‘speaking’ out, and they would not have expected broad publication in most cases. The RL audience who chose to write to the station, however, did so knowing that their letters could very well be acknowledged, if not read outright, on the air, though RL was extremely cautious not to reveal identifiable details. The social practice of the RL–audience feedback loop relied on assurances from both sides, the station to its listeners and vice versa, that they were in fact being heard.

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The story of broadcast sound is one of intersecting publics and combined and competing goals. Radio has represented in many countries the confluence of democratic and authoritarian impulses, of bourgeois capitalist consumerism and community-minded collectivism. It is at once the discussion board of the people and the megaphone of the Führer. It is through the radio that citizens may be engaged, enraged, comforted or controlled. Radio as the ‘tribal drum’ in Marshall McLuhan’s formulation allows human behaviour to return to a pre-literate world, before the Enlightenment and its attendant domination by the printed word and linear thought.15 The mid-twentieth century came to be defined by the growth of this medium and its employment in commercial, religious, political and military realms. And yet, as Kate Lacey has argued, radio is a medium that is routinely, if unfairly, subordinated to visual and tactile media.16 Such privileging of one sensory experience over another is directly refuted by the continual reassociation of the written and the spoken word in the work of RL. By establishing the connection between the two for its audience, RL reawakened the notion of reading as collective listening.17 The ‘imagined community’ of RL listeners may be subdivided into specific interest groups, but it includes the station and its employees in a larger whole. Sound is not the only thread binding this community together, but it is the principal link and, as such, the key determinant of all interactions within the community. In order for the source to be relevant, it must be audible. How telling, then, that the RL signal was the target of sustained jamming for the bulk of its existence, even at times when other foreign radio broadcasts into the Soviet Union were not jammed.18 The quality of the sound and its accurate representation of the message being conveyed have repercussions in the listening audience that then reverberate through the community. We typically refer to the quality of sound as ‘fidelity’, suggesting the faithfulness of the end product to its original (whether that original is a recording or a live broadcast). Jonathan Sterne draws our attention to the inter­active and practice-oriented nature of this idea, though: ‘[s]ound fidelity is much more about faith in the social function and organization of machines than it is about the relation of a sound to its “source”’.19 The true role of the jammed signal (and the interplay of ‘original’ output and corrupted, ‘jammed’ reception) is in the social ramifications of cultural practice. In the contentious Cold War atmosphere, jamming validated both the message and the messenger, at least to that segment of the audience which was already predisposed to listen. Sterne’s conception dovetails nicely with the vision of Soviet literate society proposed by Stephen Lovell. In his examination of print in

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the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, Lovell describes reading as ‘an inherently social activity’, and invokes Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ as an apt description of a reading public.20 The image applies twofold in the case of a reading public that is also a listening audience. RL listeners were drawn into a community around the station, which reinforced membership in that community by reading letters aloud, or at least acknowledging receipt of them. These listeners were also members of a Soviet reading community, who valued the very act of reading, for various reasons with various goals. These goals could be met in conjunction with radio and with each other. Lovell’s research establishes that the stage was set for the kind of reader that RL sought as a listener. Soviet society had restratified in its reading tastes in the post-Stalin years, and the growing reading public represented a rediscovery of private life.21 A combination of an increase in income and migration to the cities resulted in a greater awareness of books as transmitters as well as markers of culture. Urban life was perceived as a higher cultural status, and this status could be bought with books.22 The demand for books as items of culture contributed to the ‘book hunger’ (knizhnyi golod) that took hold in the 1960s.23 Added to that was the inability of the state publishing system to meet demand. Government publishing policies had led to a scarcity of some titles that did not necessarily reflect demand for them, nor did it neces­sarily indicate any official sanctions against them on political or ideological grounds.24 Unavailable literature was not always forbidden. And while the desire for forbidden literature may have reflected a thirst for knowledge of the Western, non-Soviet world, it may also have been a thirst for markers of social status. Having a copy of Zhivago in one’s collection in the mid-1960s may have presented little threat, while at the same time telegraphing a certain sophistication. Radio broadcasts of inaccessible literature served to make the Soviet audience aware that certain works existed, and to make them believe that these works might be obtainable after all. RL was not the only game in town, of course, nor was it the only station to curry favour with its listeners by engaging with them as readers. By the time RL launched its first large-scale book giveaway, RFE had already been engaged in its extensive publication programme targeting intellectual elites through personal contact, and the BBC’s External Services already had fifteen years of experience with mail solicitation across the Iron Curtain.25 RL was able to learn from the BBC’s successes and failures, and incorporate specific policy practices for greatest effect. Among these was the use of ‘microphone trailing’, the creative presen­tation of giveaway announcements meant to spark the listener’s

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interest. A subspecies of this practice was ‘cross-trailing’, planting teaser announcements of a different programme at a specific future time, promising more information about a giveaway to come.26 The BBC had also learned that it was more effective to offer a small gift to everyone who responded to a particular solicitation, rather than to offer a large prize to a few lucky listeners.27 Thus, the promise of a simple book for every postcard or note received was a recipe for engagement. RL’s first foray into the giveaway world was the offer of the World Radio and Television Handbook in 1962. This reference work was published by UNESCO and listed stations worldwide, including Radio Moscow, their wavelengths, broadcasting hours and identification signals.28 It enabled ham radio operators and other technologically savvy listeners to make the most of their equipment, but it also encouraged radio neophytes to explore the broadcast possibilities. RL recognised that an informational catalogue such as this was a kind of gateway drug. The efficacy of this approach was proven in the fourth-quarter report for 1962, when RL logged 191 mail items – the most received in any three-month period to that point, more than four times as many as in the preceding quarter, and almost ten times more than in the fourth quarter of 1961.29 Throughout 1962–3, RL issued explicit book offers and entertained requests for other works. In addition to the continued availability of the World Radio and Television Handbook, the station began offering the works of Pushkin and Mayakovsky, including an English translation.30 It had also branched out into language instruction texts with its ‘Learn-a-Language’ giveaway. One dissatisfied listener criticised the books he received, however, claiming that they seemed to be intended for Americans learning Russian, while he was trying to learn English. He entreated them to ‘send an English grammar book for Russians, I repeat, for Russians’.31 The notion of reciprocal intellectual exchange was often suggested in these letters. One writer addressed the station as though writing to an acquaintance, inviting the recipient to read After Bread by the Polish author Henryk Sinkiewicz, and ‘when you’ve read the book let me know what you think of it’.32 There were further requests for works to be read aloud, such as one from a Russian traveller on his way to Riga, who claimed to like the Russian classics. He asked RL to broadcast excerpts from ‘Merezhkovsky, Bal’mont, Severyanin, G. Ivanov, Gumilev, Hippius, Mandelstam, and others’.33 Audience research was the backbone of the RL project. As an outgrowth of the surge in social science research in the mid-twentieth century, the station pursued a sincere belief in the effects of broadcast media. Hadley Cantril, a pioneer of public opinion research and of

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the influential power of radio, visited the station in Munich in 1962.34 Building on the work of Cantril and under the direction of Gene Sosin, RL conducted surveys and interviews with recent émigrés and Soviet citizens travelling abroad throughout the 1950s and 1960s.35 These reports were thought to be the best way to glean the true reach of the station and its reception, in both the technological and the sociological senses. As the years passed, however, RL received an ever-growing number of direct letters. This trove of listener opinion was meticulously catalogued, given explanatory cover sheets, and translated into English (if not written in English to begin with). There is a complicated web of interlinguality in these letters. Based on the addresses to which they were sent, it can be reasonably assumed that their writers were listening to the Russian service broadcasts, and RL’s Audience Research noted in the cover sheets when that was not the case.36 Among the letters examined for 1961–3, a substantial portion originated in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Poland or Czechoslovakia. While most letters were written in Russian, many were written in Ukrainian, Polish, Belorussian, German or English, and occasionally included a request for a reply in a specific language (or one of a selection), due to the writer’s poor Russian skills. The persistent question, which may never be answered, is whether these listeners preferred the Russian-language broadcasts of RL to the broadcasts in their apparently preferred languages. RFE was broadcasting in Polish and Czech, and there was a Ukrainian service at RL, yet these listeners engaged with the Russian service.37 It may just be that, despite the jamming, the RL signal was the most audible the most often in specific localities. On a sociological level, a decision was made to use private addresses, rather than PO boxes, for both giveaways and general mail. This choice was thought to create a more personal connection between the station and its listeners.38 Contributing to that connection was the respect paid to the comments received from listeners regarding the handling of the mail: The policy of regular acknowledgment and playback of audience mail has, undoubtedly, produced results. Indeed, several listeners claim that they were inspired to write after hearing our replies to both friendly and unfriendly letters.39

The willingness to share the opinions of its listeners, even the hostile ones, gave credence to the RL project, and invited the reluctant or dubious listener to join the conversation.40

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There is further evidence that the sound quality of the broadcasts was no hindrance to the desire for the reading and listening material being offered. Writing from Poland in 1965, a listener expressed the difficulty he had hearing the station through jamming, but he had gathered enough to know that by writing to this address, he might request a wide array of giveaways. In his long list, he included ‘a book of stories about Romik Romtomtomik’, but admitted that that may not be the title, because he ‘could not hear it properly’.41 So, even though he was only dimly aware of the book on offer, he wanted it enough to write the station for a copy. In the unique circumstances of clandestine broadcasting, Audience Research at RL often looked for correspondents to be communicating in code, attributing to listeners a desire to throw off the censors. There are numerous references to ‘camouflage’ in the cover sheets, often with a handwritten label (‘Camouflage’ or ‘Cam.’) penned neatly across the top of the page. In several instances, the letter itself employed reading metaphors to refer to listening. This took an interesting turn in a letter from December 1961. In this instance, Audience Research interpreted comments about books and reading as coded reference to broadcasting reception. The text reads: ‘We thank you for the books. We received everything; it is precisely what we had asked for.’42 The cover sheet plainly states that the message is likely code for audibility. This, even in the midst of RL’s own repeated book giveaway offers. It is of course quite likely that some of the correspondents were carefully evading the censors. There are examples of letters using long lists of names to apparently spell out a word or message of support, as in a New Year’s greeting from 1961, where the initials of all of the ‘friends’ sending their holiday wishes spell out ‘SVOBODA’ (‘­LIBERTY’).43 However, the idea that boldly admitting to receiving books from a foreign address would be less dangerous than admitting to listening to foreign radio by describing reception quality is somewhat questionable. But just as the act of jamming lent credence to the RL project among the listeners, the perception of the necessity for subterfuge on the part of the audience invigorated the station itself in its efforts to communicate. RL needed some portion of its audience to speak in code. The broadcasters were acutely aware of the need to protect their correspondents’ anonymity, so they studiously avoided revealing personally identifiable information on the air. Likewise, the copies of correspondence and analysis circulated within the station, and preserved in the archives, were stripped of identifying details. The

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power of the on-air acknowledgement lay in the perception of openness and shared community it created among listeners. A further benefit was the assumption that the letter-writers would be able to recognise references to their own letters, or infer recognition of their letters based only on date and place of origin. If the station received ten letters from Dnepropetrovsk on or around 15 June, but mentioned only one on air, all ten listeners would likely assume that the letter was theirs and feel duly acknowledged. The archival records make it possible for us to take a close look at a particular web of literary interactions involving the station, specific listeners, contemporary Soviet authors and the social practice that allowed them all to belong to one community of readers. A note received in January 1962 from a listener in Ukraine made (in Ukrainian) a direct request for literature in response to a programme, as opposed to a giveaway offer. He identified himself as a twenty-six-year-old worker, and referred to having heard the poems ‘About the Angry Young Men’.44 He asked that the station send him the verses, so that he might learn them by heart. The poems were part of a broadcast on 31 December 1961 (a rebroadcast of a programme from 5 November), in which host Vladimir Yurasov played excerpts of a reading at Harvard University by Yevgeny Yevtushenko.45 Among them was Yevtushenko’s ‘The Angry Ones’ (‘Serditye’), which refer­ ences John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger and explores the seething undercurrent of disaffection in the mid-twentieth century. Yevtushenko had achieved celebrity in 1961 with his poem entitled ‘Babi Yar’, about the massacre of the Jews of Kiev during the Second World War. He was one of the rare Soviet authors who successfully straddled the line between Soviet conformism and dissent. Many of his works were not repressed, but that did not necessarily mean they were easy to obtain. The listener clearly found in their recitation a kindred idea, and one that he wished to study and interpret on his own. Where other correspondents requested that poems be recited again, this one was inspired to read the original. In the same programme in which Yevtushenko’s Harvard readings were aired, presenter Vladimir Yurasov interviewed Nina Berberova on her own writing and that of her husband, Vladislav Khodasevich, and their circle of émigré writers and friends. Yurasov asked her to describe her latest book, which was a collection of Khodasevich’s poems, criticism and commentary, pointing out that literary circles in the Soviet Union were familiar with him as a poet, but only with his work up to 1922, when he and Berberova left for the West. He then asked whether she thought this book would reach the Soviet Union,

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and Berberova related a story she found encouraging. A friend of hers had recently been to Leningrad, where he met a pair of young people who called themselves ‘Russian beatniks’. These ‘angry young men’, as they further described themselves, asked about Berberova, proving that, even after years in exile, she remained known in her homeland. She announced that she had written some verses about the encounter, entitled ‘Broadcast to the Other Side’ (‘Peredacha na tu storonu’). Yurasov concluded by hoping that these ‘unknown young friends’ would hear this conversation. Yurasov’s turn of phrase is telling. It captures the oxymoronic nature of surrogate broadcasting as a whole. The ‘unknown friends’ (‘neznakomye druz’ia’) were the lifeblood of the station; RL had to portray itself to its listeners as a member of the family, while remaining, in fact, quite unknown. Another request for a reading of Yevtushenko’s works came in a letter from a group of frequent listener-writers from Prague in March 1962.46 The correspondence between this group and the station was remarkably sustained and engaged: these listeners wrote to the station at least seven times in less than a year (they claimed to have written other letters, but RL never received them). They also bridged the gap between the (primarily) apolitical giveaway respondents and the fledgling activists of the late 1960s. These correspondents knew that at least some of their letters had been received, because they heard the acknowledgement on air in the ‘Letters from Our Listeners’ segment.47 This particular missive requested that RL have their latest letter published in a Russian newspaper abroad, ‘after having edited it with your usual brilliance, please’. They threw their hats into the tamizdat (publication abroad) ring, hoping to find a foreign reading audience for themselves. Such would be the common practice of writers of open letters in the democratic movements of the next decade. In a postscript, they circled back to the role of appreciative listeners with a request for Yevtushenko’s ‘Weddings’ (‘Svad’by’) to be read aloud on the air. They looked to RL to satisfy their needs as both educated readers and savvy commentators. In some instances, even apparently hostile listeners requested reading material, and the wealth of specific denunciations they hurled at the station evinced frequent listening habits. An example from 1963 had a listener assuring the recipient: Although the radio station which broadcast your address is in bad repute over here, I do not think this will prevent my receiving the handbook; we have complete freedom of correspondence. Our ideas are stronger than yours, and we have no fear of competing in this world, too.48

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This same listener went on to include a note for the censor, ‘should they exist’ (‘esli oni konechno sushchestvuiut’): Dear comrades, if for some reason or other my letter isn’t passed, and I cannot receive the handbook, why? Do tell me please the reason if it should be impossible to allow the letter or the handbook to pass through. Should I receive neither the handbook nor a letter from you, I shall begin to doubt whether there is freedom and democracy in our country.49

The boldness of the challenge to the censors suggests confidence and certainty. (Although on some level this writer’s stance might have been tongue-in-cheek, RL’s audience research department took it at face value, judging by its commentary). The book this listener requested was the World Radio and Television Handbook, which could be seen as a conduit to increased exposure to the Western world. The station went to great lengths to evaluate its broadcast product, routinely preparing ‘Evaluation Reports’ on its programmes and scripts. For each consolidated report, a panel of evaluators was employed, consisting of station staff and Soviet émigrés. Their comments were anonymous, though their constituency was not (and in the case of the émigrés, their occupation or social status was in­ cluded).50 The array of comments this panel provided on programming that involved either listener mail or literary content is a fascinating study in itself. A representative sample from mid-1962 reveals more about the assumptions and biases of the evaluators, perhaps, than about the programming itself. Their comments on the ‘Letters from Our Listeners’ segment of 27 March 1962 ranged from ‘extremely important’ and ‘[v]ivid, interesting – and not only for the writers of the letters’ to ‘[o]f little interest’ and ‘[n]o original thought or real interest in the letters or their authors’.51 Interestingly, the comments were not split along staff/émigré lines. An equal number of each expressed opinions at each end of the spectrum. Similarly, when tasked with evaluating a broadcast about J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, the reactions ran the gamut from high praise to utter contempt. The segment featured Joan Beecher, a descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a journalist and scholar of Russia with advanced Russian language skills. She read excerpts of the novel translated into Russian, just as any of RL’s regular presenters would have with other works. One of the rural rank-and-file reviewers criticised the heroes of the novel for having too much spare time, ‘so they can indulge in dwelling on their complexes’.52 Beecher herself was the focus of the most salient criticism of the programme.

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The very fact of her taking on the role of presenter caused indignation. One staff member asked, ‘[i]s it really a good idea to have the review read in stylistically flawless Russian but with a strong American accent?’ Another voiced the unique demands on RL in the Cold War atmosphere, where attempting to connect with Russians through an obvious American, no matter how educated or sympathetic, would likely become a source of ‘gotcha’ ridicule in the Soviet press: I want to note the unforgivable negligence which undermines the entire conception of Radio Liberty. It is inadmissible when a person (moreover, an American writer and literary critic) who is introduced as ‘our guest’ suddenly addresses the listeners as ‘our listeners.’ Even those listeners who share our convictions would say: ‘Oh, that’s how it is,’ and in Pravda an article could appear entitled ‘The Mask Is Off’ or something similar.53

The offence identified in this comment is a social one. The staff member recognised that the guest was an outsider and would be thought of as such by the audience. The boundaries of the imagined community of literary listeners/readers were flexible, but not permeable. Beecher was not a Soviet citizen, regardless of her literary credentials and pedigree. Presenting her as ‘one of us’ was a clear violation of the community’s rules. By the end of 1963, at least 517 responses to listener giveaways had been logged for that year. The station began offering copies of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in its first English translation, helping to launch the next celebrity of samizdat.54 One particular request from Kaluga came from a couple who were avid poetry readers. Addressing the station in English, they wrote about their own small library, which included some rare books, but none by ‘Keepling’ (Kipling) or ‘Vion’ (Villon). ‘We consider that our library will lose a half of its significance without the books of these authors.’55 They went on to request an English translation of a collection of Tsvetaeva’s work, which they already owned in a Soviet edition, ‘but it is not the entire one, of course’.56 This nod to the realities of Soviet publishing signalled the writers’ willingness to flout the restrictions on content and established a solidarity with the Western broadcaster. Their literary tastes demonstrated an awareness of the ‘kul’turnost’’ of a private library.57 The request, along with the detail about their library’s holdings, suggested a self-image that involved the station as a collaborator in the crafting of their domestic status. Many of the letters received in 1964 and early 1965 were in direct response to the giveaway offer of a John F. Kennedy memorial album on the first anniversary of his death. The requests for this work often

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included expressions of grief and admiration for the president. One such writer from Poland asked for the album to add to his collection of newspaper clippings and other books and journals, as he was interested ‘in both the life and death of Kennedy’.58 Another sought the book as a token of the life of a ‘progressive fighter for peace’.59 Offers of condolence to the Kennedy family were also not uncommon in conjunction with the book request.60 One poignant note dated 22 November 1964 declared: One year ago, all mankind grieved over the premature death of a man who did a great deal, not only for his own people, but also for all humanity. And it is clear to me, an ordinary citizen of my country, that the working people of America and the USSR long for the same well-being and peace, and hope that there will be no conflagration on our planet.61

The Kennedy album emphasised the potential for the readership of opposing nations to join, if only briefly, in a community of readers. One could say that all of the giveaway items contributed to that potential, but this one felt more tangibly successful. After receiving the book, listeners also often felt moved to write to the station to acknowledge and thank RL, in much the same way that RL acknowledged the letters it received from its audience. By 1965, RL was offering books on art and theatre, stamp collecting, fashion and film. It continued to receive requests for works by both Russian- and English-speaking authors to be read aloud, and to receive praise for the dramatic readings of contemporary Soviet short stories. Among them was appreciation for the presentation of Yuli Daniel’s ‘Atonement’, broadcast on 13–14 November 1964. One listener declared, ‘I should greatly like to read this book, but I do not know whether it is freely on sale in the Soviet Union’.62 That comment seemed innocent enough, but Daniel and his fellow author Andrei Sinyavsky (pseudonyms of Nikolai Arzhak and Abram Tertz) would face arrest and prosecution for the publication and broadcast of their works abroad. Their trial in 1966 would become a watershed moment for the role of samizdat in Soviet culture and in American broadcasting. Zhivago is a thread that runs through the correspondence of the 1960s, periodically reappearing in listener requests, often with the tone suggested at the opening of this chapter: even if the rest of my demands are excessive, surely you can spare me a copy of Zhivago. Pasternak’s novel had come to represent accessible (and acceptable) insubordination. The author and his protagonist were frequent topics on the station up to the 1990s. Beginning in 1957, with a broadcast

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relating the dramatic story of the novel’s publication in the West, RL’s programmers regularly reintroduced the Civil War hero and his equally heroic creator.63 When Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for this work the following year, excerpts were again read re­peatedly.64 And in 1966, shortly after the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, the bulk of the novel was presented in a series of broadcasts from April to June, purportedly ‘by popular demand’ (‘po mnogochislennym pros’bam slushatelei’).65 As the Thaw came to a close, a new era of listener-reader engagement with RL began, founded on the access the station could provide to the most basic of literary needs, be they handbooks of radio frequencies or literary masterpieces, sure to convey a host’s status to visitors. Whether that access came through oral/aural delivery and reception, or through publishing-house giveaways, this very public engagement with the very private Soviet citizen, the ‘unknown friend’, proved the power of a reading community forged in sound. Notes  1. Hoover Institution Archives (HIA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) Corporate Records, Box 540, Folder 1, Listener Mail Report (LMR) #175-68.  2. Berlin played a role in transporting the novel to the West. With the growing declassification of relevant documents from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Zhivago story has received extensive treatment. For the full tale of intrigue, see Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book, Kindle edition (New York: Pantheon, 2014); and Paolo Mancosu, Zhivago’s Secret Journey: From Typescript to Book, Kindle edition (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2016).   3. Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, loc. 2149.   4. The programme’s activities in Eastern Europe are more well researched than those in the USSR, due to the unavailability of archives for the Bedford Publishing Company, which, working with the Radio Liberty committee, was the arm primarily responsible for book distribution to the Soviet Union. See John P. C. Matthews, ‘The West’s Secret Marshall Plan for the Mind’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 16:3 (2003), pp. 409–27; and Alfred A. Reisch, Hot Books in the Cold War: The CIA-Funded Secret Western Book Distribution Program Behind the Iron Curtain (New York: Central European University Press, 2013).   5. Quoted in G. J. A. O’Toole, Honorable Treachery: A History of U.S. Intelligence, Espionage, and Covert Action from the American Revolution to the CIA (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991), p. 434.

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  6. Wilson Center, Cold War International History Project, e-Dossier No. 32: Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, ‘Document 1 – Organized Political Warfare’ at (accessed 1 December 2017).   7. See A. Ross Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); A. Ross Johnson and R. Eugene Parta (eds), Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (New York: Central European University Press, 2010); A. S. Kolchina, Radio Svoboda kak Literaturnyi Proekt: Sotsiokul’turnyi fenomen zarubezhnogo radioveshchaniia (Moscow: Izdatel’skii Dom Vysshei Shkoly Ekonomiki, 2014).   8. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records Box 536, Folder 1, Consolidated Evalu­ ation Report #17-62, 30 May 1962, p. 3.   9. Stephen Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 47. See also Kathleen F. Parthé, Russia’s Dangerous Texts: Politics Between the Lines (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 2; Richard Stites, Passion and Perception: Essays on Russian Culture by Richard Stites, ed. David Goldfrank (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2010), p. 220. The phrase is a commonplace among scholars and commentators of the Soviet period. 10. See Ann Komaromi, ‘Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics’, Slavic Review, 71:1 (spring 2012), pp. 70–90, available at (accessed 10 December 2019); and Friederike Kind-Kovács and Jessie Labov (eds), Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond: Transnational Media During and After Socialism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015). A special issue of Cold War History (13:2, May 2013) was dedicated to the topic of broadcasting during the Cold War, with particular attention to samizdat in its various incarnations. 11. Jeffrey Brooks, ‘The Breakdown in Production and Distribution of Printed Material, 1917–1927’, in A. Gleason et al. (eds), Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 159. 12. For a thorough explanation of this concept, and its application to the mid-Soviet years, see Vladimir A. Kozlov, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Sergei Mironenko (eds), Sedition: Everyday Resistance in the Soviet Union Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, trans. Olga Livshin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). The editors use the language of subaltern studies to define the phenomenon of ‘everyday resistance’ by the ‘us’ against the ‘them’ of an oppressive regime. They focus on the period after Stalin’s death, when punishment returned to more predictable legal norms, rather than arbitrary elimination of ‘enemies of the people’. 13. Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s’, Slavic Review, 55:1 (1996), pp. 78–105 (p. 92). 14. Ibid., pp. 79–80.

286  Jessica Brandt 15. Marshall McLuhan, ‘Radio: The Tribal Drum’, AV Communication Review, 12:2 (summer 1964), pp. 133–45 (p. 134). 16. Kate Lacey, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age, Kindle edition (Malden: Polity Press, 2013), loc. 610. 17. Ibid., loc. 467. Lacey suggests the original nature of reading as an aural activity. 18. R. Eugene Parta, Discovering the Hidden Listener: An Assessment of Radio Liberty and Western Broadcasting to the USSR During the Cold War, Kindle edition (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2007), loc. 381. 19. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 219. 20. Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution, p. 1. 21. Ibid., p. 55. 22. Ibid., p. 56. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., pp. 49–50. 25. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Box 524, Folder 2, ‘“Microphone Trailing” by the External Services of the BBC’, Analysis Report #3-63, 25 February 1963. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Box 524, Folder 2, Analysis Report #1-63, January 1963. 29. Ibid., Analysis Report #2-63, 7 February 1963. 30. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Box 538, Folder 1, LMR #162-63. 31. Ibid., Folder 2, LMR #281-63. 32. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Box 536, Folder 7,LMR #84-62. 33. Ibid., LMR #82-62. 34. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Box 131, Folder 2, Public Affairs. 35. Gene Sosin, Sparks of Liberty: An Insider’s Memoir of Radio Liberty (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). Sosin had been a student and colleague of another heavyweight of radio research while at Columbia, Paul Lazarsfeld. 36. There are some instances where the letter was actually mailed from a Western city, not the reported location of the writer, and so was possibly posted by an intermediary. In cases where the content of these letters is rather generic, or they deal with a major global news event, it cannot be completely ruled out that the intermediary was really the RL listener. 37. LMR #59-62 is a fascinating example of interlinguality. This listener from Chortkov in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic addressed the station in Polish, but in his letter suggests that he had learned Russian, if reluctantly: ‘I used not to be able to write or speak Russian, but after so many years, a convict will get used to the whip.’ 38. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Box 524, Folder 2, ‘RL Listener Evidence – 1st Quarter 1962’, Analysis Report #3-62, 12 April 1962.

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39. Ibid. 40. Interestingly, one of the staff evaluators for RL expressed misgivings on this point: ‘It seems wrong to me to exploit the reply to a letter for propaganda and to dwell on the obvious.’ Consolidated Evaluation Report #17-62, p. 13. 41. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Box 538, Folder 7, LMR #189-65. This writer’s other requests ran the gamut of common giveaways, including the JFK memorial album, a catalogue of ‘non-state Ukrainian postage stamps’, a book on Ukrainian traditions, records of Ukrainian liturgical music and a ‘Teach Yourself English book in the Ukrainian language, with pictures’. 42. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Box 536, Folder 6, LMR #15-62. 43. Ibid., LMR #11-62. 44. Ibid., LMR #17-62. 45. Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest, Radio Liberty (Radio Svoboda) Russian Broadcast Recordings, HU OSA 297-01-96444, Radio Liberty’s news programme, 5 November 1961, Electronic record, at (accessed 27 April 2018). 46. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Box 536, Folder 7, LMR #85-62. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., Folder 4, Listener Giveaway Response (LGR) #118-63. 49. Ibid. 50. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records Box 536, Folder 1, Consolidated Evalu­ ation Report #17-62, 30 May 1962. The categories for the ‘Outside Panel’ of non-staff reviewers included ‘managerial class’, ‘intellectual’, ‘student’, ‘engineer’, ‘officer’, ‘urban rank-and-file’ and ‘rural rank-and-file’. 51. Ibid., pp. 12–13. 52. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records Box 536, Folder 1, Consolidated Evaluation Report #16-62, 25 May 1962. 53. Ibid. 54. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Box 538, Folder 1, LMR #139-63. 55. Ibid., Folder 2, LMR # 302-63. 56. Ibid. 57. Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution, p. 67. 58. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Box 538, Folder 7, LMR #202-65. 59. Ibid., Folder 4, LMR #411-64. 60. Ibid., LMR #410-64. 61. Ibid., LMR #409-64. 62. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Box 538, Folder 3, LMR #314-64. 63. ; Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest, HU OSA 297-0-1-96447, Radio Liberty (Radio Svoboda) Russian Broadcast Recordings, Radio Liberation’s news programme, 19 December 1957, Electronic record, at (accessed 27 April 2018).

288  Jessica Brandt 64. Ibid., HU OSA 297-0-1-56284, ‘Boris Pasternak Is Awarded the Nobel Prize’, 24 October 1958, Electronic record at (accessed 27 April 2018). 65. Ibid., HU OSA 297-0-1-97161, ‘Special programme/Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago. Part 1’, 29 April 1966, Electronic record at (accessed 27 April 2018).

Chapter 14

African Readers as World Readers: UNESCO, Worldreader and the Perception of Reading Ruth Bush

As ample research ranging across academic disciplines has demonstrated, African readers have a long and multifarious history: from hieroglyphs in Egypt to early Ge’ez inscriptions in Ethiopia; from the founding of Al-Karaouine University in Fez in the ninth century to thirteenth-century Islamic manuscripts in Timbuktu and Ajami texts which transliterate African languages into Arabic script.1 The material presence of the ‘colonial library’ is a very recent incursion alongside these reading traditions.2 In most instances, European languages, Latin orthography and technologies of lead print production were introduced into certain regions of the continent only within the past 200 years.3 With these physical manifestations of a colonial library came European imperialist attempts to impose languages, modes of thought and belief, especially in the domain of education and religion, and the appropriation and redeployment of these modes of print technology by local populations. The ensuing dialogue between North and South took the form of conflict, exploitation and the creation of strategic alliances. The cultivation of a local elite depended on teaching literacy in European languages, galvanising the nineteenth-century ‘literacy myth’.4 This ‘myth’ propped up ‘the orthodoxy that reading and writing have a necessary interrelation to urbanization, in­dustrializ­ ation and modernization’, and asserted that ‘participation in the modern social texture is primarily, and properly, conducted in and through writing and reading’.5 In other words, across the varied contexts of colonial Africa, literacy in European languages both depended on and consistently imposed a strong association between reading, writing and power, with only limited strategic recourse to established and diverse indigenous and Islamic modes of reading.6 It is against this backdrop that early notions of ‘development’ emerged, spurred by teleological Enlightenment rhetoric and normative 289

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ideas of progress and modernity. As Joseph Slaughter explores in his study of the connections between human rights discourse and Bildungsromane, the association of literacy with modernity enabled the material and ideological cultivation of a mode of behaviour – a ‘humanitarian interventionist posture of the literate, industrialized world toward the illiterate peoples of the Third World’.7 In the nineteenth century, such postures justified the use of forced labour to build extensive communication and transport networks, and the creation of new borders, as well as the spread of European languages and formal education through Christian missionaries and public institutions. This imperial process has long been critiqued for failing to attend adequately to existing local contexts of knowledge production and circulation, indigenous governance systems and epistemologies. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as will be argued here, these same ideas have continued to resonate in the discourse of development linked to book production and reading on the African continent.8 The act of reading printed text written in European languages against this world historical backdrop is bound up with larger issues concerning agency, colonial violence and its structural consequences. In that light, this chapter contributes to building a ‘plausible account of the reader’ which confronts the structural and institutional conditions of reading on the African continent in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.9 In particular, it will explore the materially productive yet ethically vexed relationship between reading and ideas of development as they have unfolded on the African continent over the past sixty years. At the heart of that relationship lies a sizeable question: how do acts of reading and reception, in particular reading as a form of self-fashioning or individual subject formation (as it has been theorised in Western Europe), relate historically to the structural inequities and rhetorical strategies that undergird print production and reception on the African continent? This question evokes central issues of readerly agency, and the ways in which that agency is perceived, whether by academics, the publishing industry, supra-governmental agencies such as UNESCO, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) managing book and e-reader donation programmes, or by schools, universities and those charged with developing curricula within those institutional settings. The perception of readers occurs at different scales, from global policy initiatives and international publishing platforms underpinned by large amounts of financial capital, to local reading initiatives and the fine-grained individual and collective processes of reception which have been the subject of recent empirical scholarship discussed below. These scales of perception

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have had consequences for the genres of reading material that are made available to readerships. They range from specific local niches for thrillers, romance, detective, technical and self-help books, to imported textbooks and canonised African fiction published primarily in the global North, what Eileen Julien terms the ‘extroverted African novel’, which ‘speaks above all [. . .] to a nation’s “others” and elites in terms (which is to say, about issues and in a language and style) they have come to expect’.10 Without making any futile claim to exhaustiveness, my chapter uses the signifier ‘Africa’ in full view of the discursive sedimentation which surrounds it. This signifier has a symbolic weight which frequently exceeds or bypasses local realities, but which nonetheless retains resonance in the myriad ways it is deployed on the continent and circulates in the global imaginary. The discussion that follows draws on a range of existing research on reception and reading across various African contexts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It takes particular note of the recurrent methodological questions and challenges raised by that scholarship. This interdisciplinary work has led to renewed reflection on reading publics, the public sphere and the imagined communities formed through print culture across very different African contexts.11 In turn, my analysis of two key examples – UNESCO’s literacy programmes and the Worldreader digital literacy initiative (funded in part by Amazon) – will consider the impact of the buzzwords ‘literacy’ and ‘development’ on the perception of African readers at a macro scale.12 To conclude, and by way of deliberate contrast, I will briefly consider an independent, small-scale reading initiative based in Côte d’Ivoire, Abidjan Lit, in order to reflect on the parallel contribution of grassroots digital and in-person reading networks to this discussion. Overall, I suggest that ‘world readers’ on the African continent are present beyond the often reductive image offered by dominant terms of development discourse, while world literature scholars cannot overlook the ongoing structural effects of that discourse on book production, circulation and reception. This requires in turn an empirical, as well as ethical, methodological commitment on the part of researchers. African readers and literary criticism: the question of method In the field of literary criticism from which I write, it has been noted that ‘professional readers’, including academic critics of what came

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to be described as post-colonial fiction in the 1980s and 1990s, risk obscuring the attitudes and reactions of ‘lay readers’ located in the places described by that fiction, or from which that fiction emerged. This oversight, shaped by centre/periphery and North/South frameworks of analysis, has encouraged a critical focus on the touristic gaze of readers in the global North, as well as a rather stale account of African writing within Eurocentric accounts of the novel in the twentieth century. In turn, the material contexts in which African literature is produced and read have only gradually been incorporated into discussion of how those texts might be interpreted, or what they might mean to differently sited readers. This material turn has drawn successfully on methods of book history and a sociology of cultural production, including archival research, interviews, genetic criticism and ethnographic observation. To cite an influential, if now dated, example, Graham Huggan’s theorisation of the ‘anthropological exotic’ critiques Western (Euro-American) readers’ tendency to commodify difference in post-colonial scholarship, through analysis of the Heinemann African Writers Series.13 This series, founded in 1962, crystallised a canon of African classics in English and in English translation following the period of formal independences from colonial rule. It used paperback technology and the financial capital and concomitant distribution networks sustained by an established publishing house based in the UK to monopolise the rapidly expanding school books market across Anglophone Africa.14 Critical accounts of this series, and more recent analyses of how ‘African classics’ are created, have built on Huggan’s theoretical argument to reinstate the active role and interpretations of African readers on the African continent as an integral element of ‘global’ modes of consecration.15 This work has sought to overcome limited empirical material, an impersonal, undifferentiated perception of a mass schools readership, and persistent reluctance to register how texts might be perceived differently across different readerships. To give a further example, Bethan Benwell and James Procter’s recent study of Anglophone reading clubs addresses the question of readerly location in a global (Anglophone) context. The project draws on qualitative analysis of 3,400 pages of transcripts from over thirty reading groups across the UK, Nigeria, India, the Caribbean and Canada. Instead of a ‘deterritorialised audience’ for so-called cosmopolitan literary texts (their case studies include novels by Chinua Achebe, Monica Ali and Salman Rushdie), the authors propose to look at the ‘precise location [of reading acts] within specific social, institutional, discursive and geographic settings’. In the case of Achebe,

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for example, they demonstrate through analysis of physical and online book clubs that: To focus on different readers of Things Fall Apart is to be reminded of the ways in which reading is not simply ‘there’, nor straightforwardly subjective, but becomes operative and meaningful through the institutions, genres and ways of speaking, communities and regimes of value that shape reading both inside and outside the academy.16

This study provides an important indication of the kind of approach that can inform research on readers in African contexts, while not overstating default validity for empirical evidence. The authors acknowledge instead that knowing details of readers’ sociocultural identity or location is not meaningful in and of itself. Rather, they ‘seek to uncover what of these identities are significant to readers themselves by paying attention to the ways in which they are topical­ ised, performed or worked up in book group discussions’.17 These critical approaches address significant blind spots in theoretical debates among literary scholars, or so-called ‘professional readers’. They also point to larger issues at stake concerning the relative positioning of highbrow and ‘world’ literary texts in relation to other modes of reading (including periodical culture, ephemera and non-fiction), and the kinds of exceptionalism that literary scholarship risks asserting in its analysis of readers. Reading the discourse of development Underpinning my argument in what follows are the implied limits of development rhetoric in relation to complex actual reading practices – both past and present – in the global South, and on the African continent in particular. Critical theorists and development practitioners have long acknowledged that the discourse of development policy reproduces abstract and universalised notions of progress dating back to the European ‘Enlightenment’. In turn, it tends towards the construction and expression of development problems in terms that aim primarily to justify the policy approach taken. Buzzwords risk becoming ‘fuzzwords’, sheltering multiple agendas and obscuring local agendas and priorities.18 Seen in this light, the term ‘literacy’ (alphabétisation in French) can be unpacked as shorthand for ideo­ logically shaped notions of education via the written word and the incorporation of that mode of learning into the construction of

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‘modern’ nation states. Literacy, like other development buzzwords such as ‘good governance’, ‘civil society’ and ‘capacity-building’, is projected (whether consciously or not) as a tool for the growth of liberal democratic institutions in the same mode that facilitated the growth of capitalism in the West. Seen in this way, ‘literacy’ also becomes a default goal for initiatives which, for all good intentions, depend primarily on the strategies and evaluative mechanisms determined by lucrative funding opportunities and which aim to meet indexes of socio-economic growth.19 There remains, as a result, some distance between the agency and visibility of individual readers as active interpreters and the perception of readers as anonymous, passive consumers of texts. This gulf is even more apparent in the light of development rhetoric as it has emerged in academic and policy documents over the past sixty years. Only minimal attention has been paid to the discursive effects of such documents in contrast to the potential effects of fictional texts.20 As Cornwall notes, ‘today’s development is all about the quanti­fiable and measurable. Best practice – with its implicit assumptions that practices can be found that are “best” for all – is part of this ever more homogenising world of development prescriptions, indicators, and “results”.’21 Within such a results-oriented model of literacy, what space remains for other forms of reading, whether radical, emancipatory critical reading (such as that proposed by anti-colonial activists), or reading for pleasure, titillation, horror or fantasy? Where do readers on the continent challenge, subvert or reinvent the kinds of readerliness projected by literacy initiatives, dating from colonial education systems to contemporary e-book donation schemes such as Worldreader? To what extent might large-scale literacy initiatives depersonalise and thereby potentially depoliticise the act of reading? To be clear, my concern here is not with the ‘ideal’ or implied readers found in literary texts, ‘implicated readers’ who hover ‘between the fictional world and the realm of real readers’, or with the many evocative representations of scenes of reading in African fiction and non-fiction, and their ethical consequences.22 The history of reading on the African continent requires acknowledgement of how African readers make the worlds they imagine and project through reading, and thereby exert their agency as ‘world readers’ within the structural and institutional conditions of their individual or collective act of reading. Within this critical line of questioning, African readers exert their agency across porous categories of age, gender, ethnic and national affiliation, race and social class. Readers here are not necessarily self-conscious, critical, suspicious or vigilant, but are perceived

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as active agents within the space of textual production and reception at local and global scales. One of the frequent methodological obstacles in research on African readers is that there is far more archival material detailing the creation and maintenance of the colonial system and its discursive ‘library’ than traces that might record how individual local subjects thought about and responded to that system. It is only more recently that scholars have begun to address that lacuna. Karin Barber has shown how private ‘tin trunk archives’ provide keys to understanding local forms of ‘everyday’ reading and writing in Nigeria; archives of the press, in particular readers’ letters in this press and the work of key journalists, have given another key area for considering reader response.23 The research of Aissatou Mbodj-Pouye on ‘pragmatic literacy’ in rural Mali used ethnographic methods to record indi­ vidual responses to the act of reading and writing in both French and Bambara between 2002 and 2009. In her detailed empirical study of literacy in a single village in a Bambaraphone region of southern Mali, Mbodj-Pouye explores how the prestige of literacy relates to different forms of individual and collective being, further informed by her close analysis of personal notebooks kept by those who live in the village. Whether recording economic transactions, transcribing sports results heard on the radio or describing family events, these notebooks signal the ways in which the act of writing and safeguarding that writing for readers (whether reading silently, or hearing through another person reading aloud) function at an everyday, pragmatic scale and contri­ bute to formation of the self. Mbodj-Pouye notes astutely that ‘the challenge is to account for these dynamics [i.e. the transformation of the self through literacy] without producing a new grand narrative which would associate the development of writing and the rise of indi­ vidualism’.24 Such granular work, which seeks to give visibility to the individual autonomy and complex cultures of reading and writing on the African continent, remains vital in order to offset theoretical grand narratives concerning reading and human development.25 In turn, a fuller understanding of readerly agency within dominant humanit­ arian discourses of (il)literacy in the global South begins to emerge. UNESCO, ‘new literates’ and human capital UNESCO reports and charters from the period of decolonisation signal that learning to read and write continued to be considered an essential dimension of economic, political and humanitarian

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investment on the African continent. The 1972 Charter of the Book asserted both that ‘Everyone has the right to read’ and that ‘Books serve international understanding and peaceful cooperation’. UNESCO funded a wealth of research into the use and production of books in the developing world, contributing to what Sarah Brouillette terms ‘book developmentalism’.26 Reading was mapped to an idea of economic development via formal, Western modes of education and an associated improvement in living conditions across domains of agriculture, healthcare, urbanisation and industry. Such instrumental ideas of reading seem removed from the rhetoric associated with critical thought and European humanist education (via the realisation of individual freedom) or the ‘singular’ nature of literary reading, which remains the domain of literary critics.27 Within those intellectual traditions, reading is an attuned means of developing active reflective capacity, rather than passively delivering and receiving technical information. In anticipation of the Charter of the Book and building on the immediate post-war calls for universal ‘fundamental education’, a 1959 UNESCO report described a framework for training initiatives for ‘new literates’ in the global South. New literates are adult learners who have undertaken initial short literacy courses and now require specialist material to further develop their competence in reading and writing. According to the report, these initiatives would provide popular reading material for adult learners in the ‘developing world’ (Southeast Asia and Central America are the focus of the report) who do not yet have complete fluency. This equipping of readers aimed to enable them ‘to take their full place as participants in the affairs of their community and their country’.28 The report describes key criteria of availability (cost and distribution of printed material), readability (including vocabulary, style, use of colour, illustrations and typography) and subject matter which affect readers’ engagement with reading matter. In terms of subject matter, the report reflects on readers’ tastes in relation to the perceived functional relevance of their reading material.29 Its authors suggest that an interest in reading correlates directly and urgently to material needs, taking precedence over any recreational modes of reading.30 Certain broad patterns of interest are constant throughout an adult’s life span. Security, both economic and social, is a need felt by adults throughout their lives. Similarly, most adults are interested in matters pertaining to health and hygiene, family and recreation. But these categories can be misleading, since information must have immediate relevancy to the reader in terms of his way of looking at things.31

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This argument evokes the perceived need at this point in time to distinguish between implied universal readers, and instead acknowledge each reader’s particular ‘way of looking at things’. Within the context of literacy as development, it raises questions concerning readers’ self-interest as a means to self-advancement or self-improvement through reading. To give one example, it is noted that ‘anything that helps people make decisions, whether they be short term or long term, will motivate interest. Furthermore a person who is dissatisfied will be interested in reading about whatever it may be that is worrying him.’ The report then acknowledges, citing the example of a farmer who may not know, or believe, that there are techniques available which would increase a crop yield, that, ‘in order to produce interest in a subject about which there is no dissatisfaction, it may be necessary to produce the dissatisfaction’.32 In other words, reading texts about a topic of relevance may also depend on stimulating the impulse to read, itself rooted in the realisation (and implied assumption here) that there is a ‘better’, more ‘modern’ way of doing things. The report goes on to detail means of testing reading interests and ‘priorities of interest’ in order to produce improved popular or fundamental educational reading materials which seek in turn to ‘raise social, civic, economic and cultural competencies’ among people ‘at a low standard of material culture’.33 It signals a scientific approach to preparing reading materials adapted to different adult learners within the context of the ‘developing world’. By raising the issue of ‘relevance’, however, it simultaneously betrays the ambivalence of this task, its ambition and its inevitable limits in generating a holistic understanding of individual readers’ tastes as meaningful at scales other than that of macro socio-economic development. A second UNESCO report published before the 1972 Charter and based on a summit organised by UNESCO in Accra, Ghana, in February 1969, discussed the provision of reading material on the continent. This report highlights perennial issues concerning book distribution, including the need to coordinate foreign publishers’ investment on the continent with the work of indigenous publishing houses. It returns to the issue of cultivating reading publics through educational material, while maintaining the enthusiasm of readers through provision of adequate ‘general’ reading material. Its emphasis is on educational material because of ‘the urgent need for skilled manpower to stimulate economic and social progress’.34 The Addis Ababa Plan (created in 1961 by the Conference of African States on the Development of Education in Africa) envisioned universal primary education by 1980. Consequently, a massive increase in the market for

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school textbooks was anticipated. By 1980 it was estimated that there would be 0.25 million university students on the African continent, heralding further opportunities for book producers. The 1969 report reiterated that ‘in Africa today new literates seek books that have practical applications, the experts said, with the incentive to read residing in the possibility of economic or social betterment’.35 Together, these two reports give a glimpse of how the act of reading was articulated, by ‘experts’, in the context of development agendas, and their economic and social consequences. These agendas hinge on the instrumental value of literacy across the African continent, low levels of literacy in European languages, and the high cost (and potential profit margin) of reading materials. Following the independences of the late 1950s and 1960s, investment in literacy, education and mass-communication technologies intensified significantly. Yet, to return to the insights of Mbodj-Pouye and Barber, the rhetoric of these reports bypasses the potential idiosyncrasies of individual readers’ autonomous behaviour, emphasising instead a dominant idea of literacy as associated with socio-economic development and as investment in human capital. Non-governmental organisations, humanitarianism and Worldreader To shift this line of discussion to the more recent context, notions of reading as an instrument for social and economic development have continued, to varying degrees, to be reproduced by NGO and humanitarian discourse concerning African readers. This has been the case particularly since the 1980s, a period which has seen a drastic reduction in state investment in literacy programmes. Structural adjustment policies implemented by the World Bank led to reduced government budgets for education development, with an increase in international tenders for school textbook contracts.36 This period also saw a shift at the supranational level, from investment across the entire education sector in the developing world to a focus on primary education. According to influential research by the World Bank which shaped policy in the early 1980s, primary education offered the optimum ‘returns to investment in education’.37 This shift led to a dramatic decline – of as much as 82 per cent – in spending on African higher education, which came to be seen as a ‘luxury’.38 The school-books market remained a hotly contested area among publishing professionals, while African publishers gradually developed

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networks to address this situation, reductively dismissed as ‘book famine’, following the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and 1990s. The language of economics dominated high-level discussions of education in this period, leaving little space for the nuance provided by studies of reading and, in particular, of African readers’ tastes within the market dynamics of book production and circulation. Non-governmental organisations have gradually taken a key role in advancing development agendas pertaining to literacy and reading. These agendas were previously the domain of international state cooperation and of newly independent governments, but they now operate in a complex ecology between local and transnational modes of publishing, the education sector and humanitarian aid. Large-scale donation initiatives such as Book Aid, Books for Africa and Biblio­ thèque sans frontières operate alongside federating publishing structures such as Afrilivres, Cultures et Développement, the Alliance des éditeurs indépendants and the African Books Collective (the latter serve as agents for independent African publishers in Francophone and Anglophone spaces, respectively). The Worldreader non-profit organisation has worked since 2009 to cultivate literacy in the developing world through digital technology. It was founded by Colin McElwee, an economist and ‘social entrepreneur’ based in Barcelona, and David Risher, American former manager at Microsoft and former vice-president at Amazon. According to its website, ‘Worldreader is on a mission to create a world where everyone is a reader’. It does this via the donation of Kindle e-readers (donated by Amazon) to school pupils across the global South, the creation of reading apps (Whispercast, designed by Amazon) for mobile devices, the curation of reading content (including by local authors) and conducting fieldwork with the aim of enabling large-scale, sustainable digital literacy. As of April 2018, according to its website, Worldreader provided apps and reading technology in forty-six countries, with over half a million monthly readers, and had reached a total of 7.6 million readers since 2010. The app provides access to over 40,000 book titles, in forty-three languages. Depending on their existing level of sales, authors and publishers are paid rights for making their books available through the platform.39 African authors whose work is available via this platform include Tierno Monénembo, Chuma Nwokolo, Stanley Gazemba and Nnedi Okorafor, and since 2012 Worldreader has maintained a partnership with the Caine Prize for African Writing. Worldreader also offers to digitise books produced by local publishers and, in some instances, provide a translation service.40 These initiatives function within the logic of non-profit, humanitarian

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ideals – what Slaughter terms sceptically the ‘writing man’s burden’, or the obligation to transmit literacy from those who can read to those who cannot – as well as the impulse to measure the results of such work in quantitative terms.41 Worldreader is generating large amounts of data concerning readers and reading patterns on the continent, raising fresh questions about how readers’ agency is perceived within the global book market, and how the corporate giant of that market, Amazon, uses such work to bolster its brand identity.42 Such data-gathering resonates with Amazon’s business model, which has depended since its inception on revenue generated by privileged access to users’ data and by algorithms that steer readers to products based on that data.43 Worldreader’s data underpinned the 2016 UNESCO report Reading in the Mobile Era, which suggests that of the 7 billion people on earth, over 6 billion have access to a mobile device, making this device ‘the most ubiquitous information and communication technology in history [. . .] plentiful in places where books are scarce’.44 The report is based on: a survey of 4,000 readers in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, India and Pakistan; statistical analysis of users of the Worldreader mobile platform; and qualitative telephone inter­views. According to the report, ‘mobile reading is not a future phenomenon but a right-here, right-now reality’.45 It goes on to acknowledge that exposure to reading material is not a direct route to increased literacy, which depends on a more complex investment in education and the development of interpretive tools. My specific interest here is in how Worldreader’s discourse and branding appear to avoid the more instrumental aspects of reading as a means to social and economic development seen in the earlier UNESCO reports cited above. Instead, the profusion of big data generated by Worldreader is framed by two rhetorical tropes: firstly, that of ‘empowering readers’; and secondly, the importance of readerly pleasure.46 These promise potentially different material consequences. The pleasure of African readers has been a recurrent topic in scholar­ ship on African reading publics. In particular, this work has indicated the historical importance of ‘popular’ genres in the African book market beyond the perceived economic and developmental p ­ riorities of school textbooks. It has also highlighted the slipperiness of the term ‘popular’, given disparities in literacy levels and access to different languages. Lydie Moudileno’s study of the Adoras Romance series in Francophone Africa, for example, highlights the ‘troubling’ effect of its mass popularity on perceptions of African critical reader­ship and reified categories of post-colonial African writing (often correlated to

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established hierarchies of ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature).47 The recycling of the generic conventions of Harlequin or Mills and Boon novels by Adoras authors, with concomitant requirements regarding location and characterisation, is far from the radical gestures of anti-colonial writers seeking to confront and resist alienation and, to varying degrees, reinstate elusively ‘authentic’ modes of expression. Launched in 1998 by Nouvelles Éditions Ivoiriennes (Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire), the Adoras series aimed to quench the apparent thirst on the continent for ‘sentimental’ fiction in an Africanised mode. The books were sold for 1,500 CFA – the equivalent of a tube of lipstick – and began with print runs of 10,000 copies. The impressive sales figures across the region, as well as in France, led to film and television adaptations and encouraged critical rethinking of African reading publics.48 The avail­ability of Adoras novels online is paralleled by the popularity of romance series elsewhere on the continent.49 Recent statistics from Worldreader have corroborated the huge appeal of romance genres across its apps and the e-reading public, though this quantitative evidence requires further qualitative nuance (via interviews, ethnographic observation etc.).50 What this evidence does, nonetheless, is to challenge the critical categories (social realism, subversion, political commitment, privileged – though rarely straightforward – access to forms of empathy) by which African fiction has often been appraised in global contexts of academic criticism and cosmopolitan readers. The presence of real readers with real effects on the types of fiction reaching the African literary marketplace – especially apparent in the era of e-publishing and distribution methods – cautions against any a priori assumption of how and why people read on the African continent. The current ecology of book production and circulation is not a perfect system. Worldreader enters into this arena by apparently offering readers more choice and more agency over what they read, while also implicating readers (and readers’ data) within a world system of digital reading technologies that remains unbalanced by Amazon’s weight in the global book marketplace.51 Book donation has been a recurrent feature of book circulation on the African continent since the era of independence.52 In its early incarnation, this phenomenon centred on supplying a large network of small-scale public libraries with reading material. To give one example, since 1986, the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) has created 305 Centres de Lecture et d’Animation Culturelle (CLAC) in rural regions across twenty-one countries in sub-Saharan Africa, each offering 1,500–2,500 books. This was a Senegalese-led initiative, funded by OIF (France, Canada, Belgium), originally conceived to

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include locally produced books. In practice, such initiatives revealed the need for specific policies on ‘correct’ book donation, given the tendency of some donors (libraries based in the metropole and, in particular, publishers with excess printed stock) to prune their stock and send books to the developing world based on their physical weight, rather than calibrated relevance or potential interest to intended readers.53 Book donation has also been seen as a means of retaining soft power in the region, symptomatic of the highly institutionalised dynamics of Francophonie. Recurrent problems have hindered the updating of stock at the CLAC, while public reading initiatives have not consistently interacted with local publishing structures.54 This led to the publication of the Charter of Book Donation in 1996, signed by thirteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa (together with Haiti – recipient of massive book donations since the 2010 earthquake). The Charter sought to formalise book donations, control their quality and quantity, and work to make these donations appropriate to local readerships. The aim was to manage multiple diffuse initiatives and forge an idea of ‘correct donation’, but the Charter was not signed by publishers, signalling a missing link in the connection of book donation to local and transnational publishing enterprise.55 Book donation remains embedded in the ethical motives and language of recycling, but simultaneously disrupts and at times impedes the develop­ment of local book economies. Since 2000, there has been increased private sponsorship of NGOs linked to book donation and literacy programmes, again contributing to a dispersed system, and responding to funding priorities dictated at macro scale.56 Worldreader has come later to Francophone Africa. The scheme now houses an office in Côte d’Ivoire and active projects in Senegal, Mali, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo and Benin. According to an interview with the director of Worldreader’s Francophone operation, these initiatives are intended to work in partnership with local publishers, enabling book distribution and better availability of locally published titles.57 This production-focused discussion does not entirely confront the question of readers’ choices in what and how they read, though it is clear that Worldreader implicates a large number of readers in an ecology which is global in scope, wedded to the promise and speed of new technology, and in turn more complex than ever. The economic model of Worldreader can be distinguished from the philanthropic aims of book donation programmes, and yet continues to raise questions concerning local, political, social and intellectual impact, as subjectively experienced by authors, publishers, booksellers and readers.

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Partnerships between Worldreader and local publishers (such as Farafina in Nigeria) have helped to overcome some practical problems in book distribution. However, it is as yet too early to say how the kinds of data generated by Worldreader will be used, and to what extent the humanitarian ethic of the scheme will continue to benefit local authors and publishers longer term, beyond the findings of the 2016 UNESCO report on mobile reading. Academic analyses of digital reading technology and literacy have been driven by social scientific approaches to information and communication technology (ICT) and education, and often aim to monitor the ways in which the new technology’s effectiveness can be measured. Alongside that research, however, it is worth pausing at this stage to reiterate that such large-scale reading initiatives (where scalability and m ­ easurability remain vital concerns) continue to coexist with small-scale, local projects and literary networks spurring intellectual enquiry and aesthetic innovation on the continent. To give just one brief example, Abidjan Lit (Abidjan Reads) is a small-scale literary collective based in Côte d’Ivoire and founded in 2016.58 It launched with a website, Twitter and Facebook presence, and regular (three or four per year) themed meetings (‘chapters’) of readers in Abidjan. Inspired by the success of grassroots initiatives and magazines located elsewhere on the continent, and with pan-African ethos (such as Writivism Festival in Uganda; Kwani? in Kenya; ­Chimurenga Pan-African collective in South Africa; Jalada collective in Kenya), Abidjan Lit takes local, face-to-face and online reflection on reading and contemporary ideas as its primary motivation, rather than any instrumental approach to increasing readership. The chapter meetings last three to five hours and have covered topics including ‘Bad genres’, ‘No more dreams’ and ‘Ivorian literary classics’. They have taken place in person, in downtown Abidjan, and via online social networks. Participants read extracts (from paper and from phone screens), comment on books they have read, and respond in writing, speech or, in one recent instance, through live painting on a tablet computer.59 One of the founders, Edwige-Renée Dro, describes the event’s significance in a recent period of military tension: We held the last chapter on Twitter; the plan was to have a physical meeting as well but on the day we were supposed to hold the chapter there was a mutiny. We decided that the sounds of guns were not going to overwhelm the sounds of literature, and in the end we were heartened by having so many people, and a newer audience, participate in that conversation. It was wonderful to be discussing the classics of Ivorian literature amid all that military tension, and that all those people who chose to engage with us online would not be held hostage by a few disgruntled soldiers.60

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This work of generating a social world of readers which stretches across different spatial geographies, from hyper-local meetings in Abidjan to amorphous online spaces, makes use of new media and the possibilities it offers for simultaneously local, pan-African and global dialogue around specific texts. Informal reading communities, often driven by young university graduates and pan-African networks, are using digital technologies to foster fresh conversations about literature and literary reading. Reading is here recuperated as leisure and pleasure, as political intervention, and as a mode of social connectivity. As current research on the cusp of digital reading practices on the continent has begun to suggest, the online generation is creating anew – generating compound genres, social modes of writing and reading, rather than acquiescing in the structural conditions of print production which have shaped book production and reception since the period of decolonisation.61 Conclusion The visibility of African readers in discussions of world literature and the history of reading continues to depend on a consecrated ignorance of new intellectual and creative activity taking place on the African continent, and risks reinscribing limiting stereotypes. The media storm generated by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s live interview in Paris in 2017, as part of La Nuit des Idées, is an example of this. When asked by a prominent French journalist whether her books were read in Nigeria, and whether there were bookshops in that country, Adichie responded pointedly that it did not reflect well on the French people that the interviewer needed to pose such a question in 2018. While anecdotal, and at risk of conflating the paternalistic views of the interviewer with those of ‘the French people’, this occasion signalled the permitted attitudes towards readers on the continent, and the lack of awareness, even if deliberately or provocatively feigned, which obtains even within ostensibly the most cosmopolitan of settings. The ‘ethical’ dimension of reading as an activity which brings the world closer together is distinctly undermined by such structural, epitextual blind spots.62 As this chapter has suggested, readers on the African continent in the twentieth and early twenty-first century have been present and been perceived in different ways and for different purposes. A critical tradition of intellectual readers has shaped incisively the theor­ etical work of reorienting ‘the idea of Africa’ in the contemporary

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world. This has been most apparent through periodical publications in particular, from Black Orpheus, Abbia and Staffrider to multimedia initiatives such as Kwani?, Chimurenga, Bakwa and – more recently – Abidjan Lit. Such critical work usually circulates at some remove from the dominant, most lucrative circuits of book production and reception, which depend on government contracts, supranational publishing conglomerates, NGOs and bodies such as UNESCO, as well as local publishers based on the continent. Where development discourse has historically focused on literacy as a fundamentally necessary and functional skill, there is an evident need to attend simul­ taneously to the critically active process of reading. Here, reading, and in particular the question of taste, is far from predictable in the contemporary moment, shaped by late capitalism, neo-liberalism and forms of aesthetic ‘extroversion’ to be navigated by readers. The capacity of reading to change both individual and collective ways of being in the world remains. Understanding the different structural and ideological contexts in which reading occurs is necessary in order to understand how readers – and not only what one critic terms the ‘Western reader-cum-explorer’ situated primarily in the global North – consume fiction concerning Africa and its populations, and thereby contribute to the continent’s ‘dense and fraught symbolic role in the global’.63 This chapter has addressed these issues by surveying a range of existing scholarship on readers based on the African continent, and signalling critical connections to the ongoing effects of development discourse and related ideas of literacy on the perception of readerly agency. A book industry which produces, or reproduces, certain ways of reading hinged on a dominant discourse of economic, social or cultural development via self/collective improvement makes certain assumptions regarding readers’ tastes. Yet, as much of the empirical work on African readers demonstrates (including research carried out by Worldreader), reading often surprises. This research reveals dynamics of playfulness, glossy self-fashioning, community cohesion, the erotic, and uncritical, overtly social modes of reading. There is ample evidence of the need for qualitative recognition of African readers’ critical interventions within potentially woolly notions of world literature, or structural theoretical accounts of the global literary marketplace. As Karin Barber has argued, African readers insert cultural texts into their own structures of meaning-making. These structures are rarely completely local and tied to any sense of authenticity which might straightforwardly be labelled ‘African’; nor – given challenging material situations of textual production and reception across much of the continent – are they defined

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by cosmopolitan spatial and temporal ideals. ‘World’ readers operate across and between these scales, signalling the ideological power of literacy and development as those terms have operated historically in the global South, while disentangling such discourse from any reductive, instrumental application.

Notes   1. Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne (eds), The Meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town: Human Science Research Council of South Africa Press, 2008); Caroline Davis and David Johnson (eds), The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).  2. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).   3. Key exceptions here include the Kingdom of Kongo, where there is contemporary documentary evidence of indigenous political leaders and merchants producing written texts in Portuguese to engage with the Atlantic economy from the early sixteenth century onward. See John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).   4. Harvey J. Graff, The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth Century City (New York: Academic Press, 1979).   5. Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 280. Under European colonialism this literacy myth was inherently biased towards European languages.  6. See David Robinson and Jean-Louis Triaud (eds), Le Temps Des Marabouts. Itinéraires et Stratégies Islamiques En Afrique Occidentale Française, v. 1880–1960 (Paris: Karthala, 1997).   7. Ibid., p. 280.  8. For influential broader critiques of the practice of development, see Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990).  9. James Procter, ‘Reading, Taste, and Postcolonial Studies. Professional and Lay Readers of Things Fall Apart’, Interventions, 11:2 (2009), pp. 180–98 (p. 180). 10. Eileen Julien, ‘The Extroverted African Novel’, in Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel, Vol. I: History, Geography and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 2006), pp. 667–700 (p. 683).

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11. Derek R. Peterson, Emma Hunter and Stephanie Newell (eds), African Print Cultures: Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). My thinking emerges from an ongoing project on the reading cultures surrounding glossy magazines in Francophone Africa and the Francophone African diaspora from the 1950s to the 1980s. The project is funded, incidentally, by the Global Challenges Research Fund – a funding stream in the UK which depends on compliance with Overseas Development Assistance criteria and responds to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This project has been led in partnership with Dr Claire Ducournau (Université PaulValéry Montpellier 3), the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire-Cheikh Anta Diop (Dakar) and the Musée de la Femme-Henriette Bathily (Dakar). It led to the digitisation of one of the earliest Francophone African women’s magazines, AWA: la revue de la femme noire (1964–73), a multimedia exhibition on that magazine held in Senegal and in France, and academic publications. My thanks to Claire Ducournau, Madhu Krishnan, Edwige-Renée Dro and Kate Wallis for their comments on the current chapter. 12. For a helpful related overview of African book historical research (focusing primarily on book production), see Beth Le Roux, ‘Book History in the African World: The State of the Discipline’, Book History, 15 (2012), pp. 248–300 (p. 250). 13. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). 14. James Currey, Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2008). The publisher Hachette has played a similar role in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa, where, according to one 2010 report, it retained 85 per cent of the school books market, via its subsidiaries Edicef and Hatier International. See Hans Zell and Raphaël Thierry, ‘Book Donation Programmes for Africa: Time for a Reappraisal? Two Perspectives’, African Research and Documentation: Journal of SCOLMA, 127 (2015). Available at (accessed 3 January 2020). 15. Caroline Davis, Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 6–7; Claire Ducournau, La Fabrique des classiques africains. Écrivains d’Afrique subsaharienne francophone (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2017), p. 17. 16. Bethan Benwell and James Procter, Reading Across Worlds: Transnational Book Groups and the Reception of Difference (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 50. This further supports Stephanie Newell’s insightful analysis of Things Fall Apart in West African Literatures: Ways of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 17. Ibid., p. 14.

308  Ruth Bush 18. Andrea Cornwall, ‘Buzzwords and Fuzzwords: Deconstructing Development Discourse’, Development in Practice, 17:4–5 (2007), pp. 471–84 (p. 473). 19. For insightful discussion of the teleology of ‘development’ and literacy (in European languages), asserted influentially by Jack Goody and Walter Ong, see Slaughter’s analysis of functional literacy as an ‘instrumental modern(izing) technology’ with ambivalent meaning in Calixthe Beyala’s Loukoum: The ‘Little Prince’ of Belleville. Slaughter, Human Rights Inc., pp. 270–316. 20. Lewis et al. offer a helpful discussion of this knot of problems and the relative value of different representational modes (in particular the value of literary fiction) for understanding and expressing ‘development knowledge’. Their article retains, however, an aporia in its understanding of how readers based on the African continent might respond to both fiction and non-fiction texts concerning themes of development. See Daniel Lewis, Dennis Rodgers and Michael Woodcock, ‘The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge’, Journal of Development Studies, 44:2 (2008), pp. 198–216, doi 10.1080/00220380701789828. 21. Cornwall, ‘Buzzwords and Fuzzwords’, p. 477. 22. Slaughter, Human Rights Inc., p. 371. For a useful discussion of how fictionalised scenes of reading relate to ideas of subject formation, see Sarah Nuttall, ‘Reading, Recognition and the Postcolonial’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 3:3 (2001), pp. 391–404. 23. Karin Barber, Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Emma Hunter, ‘Komkya and the Convening of a Chagga Public, 1953–1961’, in Peterson et al. (eds), African Print Cultures, pp. 283–305. 24. ‘Le défi est de rendre compte de ces dynamiques sans produire un nouveau grand récit qui associerait développement de l’écrit et montée de l’individualisme.’ My translation. Aissatou Mbodj-Pouye, Le Fil de l’écrit. Une anthropologie de l’alphabétisation au Mali (Lyon: ENS Editions, 2013), p. 189. Here, Mbodj-Pouye draws an explicit contrast with Roger Chartier’s influential association of reading, and in particular private individual reading, with the rise of Western modernity. 25. Two problematic, yet influential, examples of such grand narratives are: Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982) and Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 26. The Charter finds further echoes in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, notably number 4 (‘Quality Education’). For further recent critical work on UNESCO as literary institution and in particular its more radical influence on ideas of book development and publishing, see Sarah Brouillette, ‘UNESCO and the Book in the Developing World’, Representations, 127:1 (2014), pp. 33–54. Brouillette makes the important

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point that many of UNESCO’s book programmes were also ‘about the fact that part of the world had an inordinate hold over resources, including intellectual resources; it was about the pressing realities of a complete disparity in control over communications activated during the colonial period’ (p. 49). The current chapter builds on Brouillette’s arguments by foregrounding the active presence of readerly subjectivity, thereby nuancing her productive political reading of UNESCO’s involvement in book development. 27. Such active reflective capacity has a long theological and philosophical lineage (e.g. the Socratic method of gaining knowledge through questioning; the critique of religious dogma and monarchical authority which emerged gradually through the Restoration and the Renaissance, leading to the Enlightenment). Elsewhere, by contrast, in Sufi traditions, which that have long influenced education in the Sahelian region, self-knowledge is gained through mnemonic learning, through reading, writing and oral recitation of the Qu’ran, leading to transcendence of earthly, material conditions. 28. Charles Granston Richards (ed.), The Provision of Popular Reading Materials (Paris: UNESCO, 1959), p. 9. 29. Local, popular print production in Anglophone West Africa is absent from this report. 30. Similar ideas have also underpinned the work of Bible translation initia­ tives on the continent, such as SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) or CABTAL in Cameroon, which pair their faith-based work of developing local language orthography for Bible translation with the task of developing functional health and agricultural guides in African languages. 31. Richards (ed.), The Provision of Popular Reading Materials, p. 250. 32. Ibid., p. 249. 33. Ibid., p. 253, 274. 34. UNESCO, Book Development in Africa: Problems and Perspectives, ‘Reports and Papers on Mass Communication’ (Paris: UNESCO, 1969), p. 12. 35. Ibid., p. 13. 36. Walter Bgoya and Mary Jay, ‘Publishing in Africa from Independence to the Present Day’, Research in African Literatures, 44:2 (2013), pp. 17–34 (p. 20). 37. George Psacharopoulos, ‘Returns to Investment in Education: A Global Update’, World Development, 22:9 (1994), pp. 1325–43. 38. Nico Cloete, Peter Maasen and Tracy Bailey, Knowledge Production and Contradictory Functions in African Higher Education (Cape Town: African Minds, 2015), p. 8. 39. Worldreader, Reading Programs in the Digital Age: The Case for Print/ Digital Format Neutrality (2017), p. 7, available at (accessed 5 April 2018).

310  Ruth Bush 40. Publishers based on the African continent listed as publisher partners on the Worldreader website include Kachifo (Nigeria), Kwani Trust (Kenya), Longhorn Publishers (Kenya), Modjaji (South Africa) and Weaver Press (Zimbabwe). Publishers and authors receive a royalty each time their title is uploaded to an e-reader. Eghosa Imasuen confirms regular receipt of royalty statements for his book Fine Boys in an interview with Kate Wallis, March 2016 (private communication). Further evidence is needed to support the case that Worldreader provides a valid means of generating revenue for independent publishers such as Kwani. Ruth Sorby, UK Development Manager for Worldreader, outlined its business model during a panel discussion at Africa Writes 2017, British Library, London, available at (accessed 20 November 2018). 41. Slaughter, Human Rights Inc., p. 281. 42. On the optimism surrounding online book distribution platforms in Africa, including locally produced alternatives focused on school textbooks such as Opon Imo in Nigeria and eLimu in Kenya, see Emma Shercliffe, ‘Digital Future: The Changing Landscape of African Publishing’ (2013), available at (accessed 20 November 2018). 43. On Amazon’s problematic impact on independent publishing at a global scale, see: John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), pp. 40–5; George Packer, ‘Cheap Words’, New Yorker, 17 and 24 February 2014, available at (accessed 20 November 2018); Jorge Carrión, Against Amazon (2017), available at (accessed 20 November 2018). For a more positive account, focusing on literary culture in the USA, see Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 44. UNESCO, Reading in the Mobile Era (Paris: UNESCO, 2016), available at (accessed 20 November 2018), p. 16. 45. Ibid., p. 16. 46. Ibid., pp. 3, 17. 47. Lydie Moudileno, ‘The Troubling Popularity of West African Romance Novels’, Research in African Literature, 39:4 (2008), pp. 120–32 (p. 127). 48. Moradewun Adejunmobi extends this argument with reference to the importance of local textual spaces, exploring the case of one key author in the Adoras series, Isaie Biton Koulibaly, who previously achieved visibility through Amina, a glossy women’s magazine. Moradewun Adejunmobi, ‘African Writing and the Forms of Publicness’, keynote presentation at the symposium Small Magazines, Literary Networks

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and Self-Fashioning in Africa and Its Diasporas, University of Bristol, January 2018. See also Moradewun Adejunmobi, Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2004). 49. For example Soyayya (love) books, published in Hausa in northern Nigeria since the mid-1980s; or, more recently, the Ankara Press imprint of Cassava Republic Press in London and Lagos. 50. The most-read titles on the Worldreader platform for schools and libraries in sub-Saharan Africa in 2017 were romance books from Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana. These statistics are based on ‘reader ratios’ (the rate of readers who click on a book’s title and read past p. 3). See (accessed 6 April 2018). 51. Though it is important to note that Amazon still has very scarce presence on the African continent. 52. On the earlier history of book donation and its link to Cold War cultural politics, see Brouillette, ‘UNESCO and the Book’, pp. 48–9. 53. Zell and Thierry, ‘Book Donation Programmes for Africa’. 54. Ibid., p. 30. 55. See (accessed 3 April 2018). 56. A successful alternative model is offered by the African Poetry Book Fund Library project. See (accessed 20 November 2018). 57. Zell and Thierry, ‘Book Donation Programmes for Africa’. 58. See (accessed 21 November 2018). The founders are Edwige-Renée Dro, Sarah Mody, Sophia El Hajaj, Laure Bledou and Cyriac Gbogou. 59. See (accessed 3 January 2019). 60. Efemia Chela interview with Edwige-Renée Dro, Johannesburg Review of Books, 7 August 2017, available at (accessed 25 November 2018). 61. For further discussion of digital reading and online literary networks, see in particular Kate Wallis, ‘Literary Networks and the Making of
21st Century African Literature in English: Kwani Trust, Farafina, Cassava Republic Press and the Production of Cultural Memory’, PhD dissertation (University of Sussex, 2016) (book forthcoming); Stephanie Bosch-Santana, ‘From Nation to Network: Blog and Facebook Fiction from Southern Africa’, Research in African Literatures, 49:1 (2018), pp. 187–208; Shola Adenekan, ‘New Voices, New Media: Class, Sex and Politics in Online Nigerian and Kenyan Poetry’, Postcolonial Text, 11:1 (2016), pp. 1–21.

312  Ruth Bush 62. Full interview available at (accessed 20 November 2018). 63. Madhu Krishnan, ‘Affect, Empathy, and Engagement: Reading African Conflict in the Global Literary Marketplace’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 52:2 (2015), pp. 1–19 (p. 1).

Chapter 15

The Kindle Era: DIY Publishing and African-American Readers Kinohi Nishikawa

The posts came in a flurry on Monday, 31 August 2009. That day, Takerra Allen, a twenty-five-year-old African-American woman from New Jersey, published press releases for three inter-related business ventures on the online platform Blogspot. The first was for H.I.M.M., a modelling agency that welcomed bookings and enquiries for ‘young fresh beauty Brandee and sexy exotic vixen Tara C’.1 The second was for Pink Diamond Angels, a marketing company that offered ‘promotional services from flyer distribution and Internet promoting to event planning, promo models, and unique advertising assistance’.2 The third was for Angelic Script Publishing, a press set up to issue Allen’s debut novel, Thicker Than Water. Described as a ‘powerful tale of four spitfire vixens hailing from the infamous Brick City – Newark, NJ’, Thicker Than Water was touted for its ability to bridge seeming oppositions in the world of contemporary romance: ‘Street meets Chic, Hood meets High Fashion, and Urban Fiction meets Sex and the City!’3 All three ventures – H.I.M.M., Pink Diamond Angels and Angel Script Publishing – fell under Allen’s umbrella enterprise, Heaven Inc. Urban Entertainment. Thicker Than Water may have been the highlight of the three, but the timing and shared platform of the releases suggest that Allen conceived her book as part of a larger brand, one that she was trying to build from the ground up. Much of what Allen did on that day in 2009 defied conventional notions of authorship, publishing and book promotion. Authors are not supposed to be their own press agents. Publishers are not supposed to do the bidding of authors. And marketers are not supposed to promote books by offering the same ‘goods’ as another product (‘vixens’ in the above). Allen must have missed the memo, because she took on the role of all three, enacting a mode of do-it-yourself publishing that has become widely popular in the twenty-first century thanks to advances in digital technology. In Allen’s case, having access 313

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to online printing services only magnified the degree to which she had to market her own work. Indeed, the available evidence suggests that the 2009 Thicker Than Water honed what had been a localised, small-run trial of the book’s release in 2008. Printed by the online service 48HourBooks, the 2008 original set the stage for what was in fact a later release of Thicker Than Water, featuring a redesigned cover, a more reader-friendly layout and a mail-order form at the back of book.4 The substance of the book had not changed, but its packaging certainly had. As a DIY author-publisher, Allen learned that writing was tantamount to branding (‘Urban Fiction meets Sex and the City!’), and that promotion itself (Heaven Inc.) was as much for sale as the literary commodity known as Thicker Than Water (Heaven Ink, perhaps). As our reading practices have become more digitally transacted over the past decade, DIY publishing has established itself as an important player in the book market. Self-published, or ‘indie’, authors released nearly half a million books in 2013, while self-published works accounted for just over 10 per cent of bestselling titles in 2015.5 The numbers reflect broad social and infrastructural shifts within our communications environment. Advances in digital technology have not only lowered the barriers to entry for publication but also multiplied the points of access for reading. On a cultural level, these shifts have been felt as a collapsing of the distance between author and reader. Just as social media have made it easy for celebrities to appear as companions to their fans, so has DIY publishing made authors highly available to readers and even receptive to their input. That democratising impulse may sound good on paper, bypassing as it does the traditional gatekeeping functions of editors, publishers, reviewers and critics. But since DIY publishing assumes the burden of moving one’s own product, the lack of institutional gatekeepers has allowed a culture of self-branding to take hold, such that any piece of writing is only as good as its marketing campaign. The pressure to advertise is real for DIY authors. All of which suggests that what Takerra Allen did for Thicker Than Water was less a one-off curiosity than a sign of things to come. Still, for many authors, the potential rewards of DIY publishing are enough to induce them to take the plunge. At the heart of Allen’s enterprise, for example, was the question: How could a non-credentialed, first-time author connect to prospective readers, to black women like herself? In this, Thicker Than Water was and is part of the larger story of urban fiction. Urban fiction features black women protagonists chasing after love and financial success while

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navigating various aspects of the criminal underworld. Alternatively known as hip-hop novels and street lit, urban fiction has been around since the mid-1990s, when readers identified a need for black-oriented romance that fused the grittiness of rap’s urban imaginary with the pleasures of women’s formula fiction. ‘What if Terry McMillan could write like Ice-T?’ was the question of the day for a generation of young business-savvy women. Mainstream publishers were unwilling to give the proposed hybrid a shot, so the earliest authors of urban fiction – Philadelphia-based Teri Woods and Columbus, Ohio-based Vickie Stringer, most notably – became DIY publishers, combining emergent print-on-demand technologies with tried-and-true direct sales, often hawking books from the trunks of their cars. The combination was a hit as independent authors built up a loyal base of fans, relying on mail-order forms for sales beyond their localities. In turn, a number of those fans, inspired by what they read, became writers themselves, usually signing contracts with their favourite authors’ publishing companies. Before long, urban fiction percolated up to the mainstream, catching the attention of the very editorial apparatus that had rejected it in the first place. Finally recognising the success of this market, New York’s top publishing houses created imprints for urban fiction, incorporating it into the well defined niche that it is today.6 Takerra Allen is the focus of this chapter because her career has mirrored the genre’s trajectory from its DIY peak to its present manifestation. Thicker Than Water was an instant classic of the genre: the story of four friends, Sasha, Tatum, Neli and Kim, who have a lot going for them (college education, designer clothes and, as Allen emphasises, child-free lives) until money and men drive a wedge between them, threatening to ruin it all. An inner-city romance featuring a main cast of black women characters, Thicker Than Water hit all the right notes: loyalty and betrayal, from the high life to the underground. Allen published a sequel, Still Thicker Than Water, along with a new book, Heaven’s Hell: An Urban Fairytale, in 2010. TTW 3, or Thicker Than Water 3, appeared in 2011, as did Restricted: An Urban Soap Opera. Angelic Script Publishing hummed along in the early 2010s, increasing its fan base beyond the Tri-State Area as online and traditional media covered Allen’s work. The success of the DIY operation was enough to catch the attention of romance publisher Kensington. In 2015 the New York-based company republished the Thicker Than Water series under Dafina, its African-American-oriented imprint. The series has had a print run as mass-market paperbacks, but it has also been made available as e-books, readable on apps and hardware licensed by Amazon, Apple, Google, Rakuten and Barnes & Noble. This scaling

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up of Thicker Than Water’s marketing and distribution has not had the effect of attracting new types of readers (say, white women or any group of men) to Allen’s work. Instead, it has maximised her reach to her fan base: black women like herself – almost as many as online communications will allow. As the quintessential DIY publishing phenomenon of the new century, urban fiction reveals how authors and readers are negotiating a rapidly changing book market. In particular, it highlights the convergence of branding and accessibility, markets and readerships, with and alongside advances in digital technology. If that was the case just ten years ago, it is even more so today, as e-books make up an increasing share of overall book sales. Here, one name towers above the rest: Kindle, by Amazon, the world’s most popular e-reading software and device. From the perspective of media economics, there is no greater mediating agent between author and reader than Amazon, whose e-commerce empire extends from goods and services to data aggregation and entertainment. Kindle is but one node in that vast network, yet it has quickly become the prime format for DIY publishing in the digital age. In fact, Kindle has folded the market into the format, collapsing even further the distance between author and reader. Where Allen once had to outsource printing to an on-demand firm and advertise on her own time/dime, Amazon and Kindle have turned printing, promotion and distribution into a one-stop shop. Yet insofar as that conglomeration is really a scaled-up version of Allen’s hustle, it may be most accurate to say that urban fiction and Kindle are ushering in a new era of literary production, where authors are always, in some sense, writing for the market. To refer to this as the Kindle Era is of course to distinguish it from the Program Era that Mark McGurl taxonomises in his 2009 study of the same name. In that book, McGurl contends that the push for mass higher education in the mid-twentieth century had a profound effect on the production of self-consciously literary fiction. He focuses on how the novel was taught as craft, arguing that newly established programmes of creative writing institutionalised modernism in ways that could be learned and redeployed by MFA students hoping to turn authorship into a career. As more and more writers were credentialed through these programmes, the university itself became ‘the indispensable and all but omnipresent institutional mediator’ between post-war American fiction and its audiences.7 From an aesthetic perspective, the most celebrated novels of the Program Era have been those that reflect on the conditions of their own making – that is, on the paradox of finding one’s voice by submitting to the discipline of

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craft. In fact, the point, for McGurl, is generalisable: every narrative of this period is, in some sense, a narrative about learning or unlearning the intricacies of institutionalised creative life. And since writers, in 2009, continue to train in, earn a living through, and teach new students at ever-increasing numbers of creative writing programmes around the country, McGurl avers that the Program Era could be thought of ‘as having just recently gotten fully underway’.8 As period and concept, the Program Era centres on the university as a base from which creative writing is issued and an audience to which the contemporary novel addresses itself. Yet as much as it has reshaped our understanding of the institutional milieus of modern fiction,9 the university-centrism of McGurl’s analytic can also be read as a bulwark shielding the very idea of aesthetic reflexivity from the market. A key moment in The Program Era outlines a distinction between credentialed literary writing and industrialised formula writing: By contrast to popular genre fiction, autobiographical self-expressivity would remain an essential element of the late modernist writing program aesthetic, providing a dialectical counter to the professional impersonality of craft. Whatever else this does, it has the effect of managing an uncomfortable proximity between the high-art fetishization of craft (or ‘technique’) and the shamefully (from the modernist perspective) ‘formulaic’ nature of non-autobiographical genre fiction, which is as ‘impersonal’, in some ways, as Henry James could have wished.10

In the schema accompanying this passage (Figure 15.1), McGurl inserts a dividing line between fiction of the Program Era (left)

Figure 15.1  Schema from Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 103. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press

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and fiction of the market (right). The former, despite being a commercial product, seems to exist in the rarefied realm of ‘craft’ and ‘ex­perience’. Genre fiction, meanwhile, appears as an ‘impersonal’ game of mix-and-match, as ‘creativity’ is channelled into meeting market demand through ‘formula’. Thus, though unlabelled in the schema, the line of demarcation could just as well stand for ‘the university’, except here it functions less as a mediator between a work and its audience and more as a separator of different kinds of readers. We get a sense of the readers McGurl’s analytic overlooks by returning to the ‘Special Edition’ of Thicker Than Water, published the same year as The Program Era. The opening of the book contains a surprisingly direct address to its readers. After noting that ‘most people like me don’t even read the introduction!’,11 Allen goes down her list of acknowledgements – to friends, family members, mentors – before concluding with this: To all of my fans (and hopefully soon to be fans ☺ ) – Thank You. I hope you enjoy this book, if you are reading this now you are about to experience something that I’ve worked very hard on. I hope you enjoy it and please know that although it may be controversial, urban fiction is a market, and it is for entertainment value. However all of the things I speak about are depicted every day in the streets and in the lives of many, just be fortunate that you can just read it, and not necessarily have to live it. . . . I try to relate to the people I know, the people like me. I try to make the characters as real as possible. I also try to put a message inside of my work so hopefully it reaches all of you. Please take from it what you can, and most of all, look forward to future works. Because all of my hard work, blood, sweat, and tears is for you. Yes, you! You, reading this! Yes, you!12

In a neat reversal of the age-old question, ‘What do readers want?’, Allen’s preface practically hails the reader into responding to the question, ‘What does this book expect out of me?’ If you are turned off by the approach, it is a sure sign Thicker Than Water was not written for you. But if you recognise yourself in Allen’s preface, then you make up one member of what Stanley E. Fish would call the book’s ‘interpretive community’.13 The wording of the preface, including the projective ‘hopefully soon to be fans’ and the constative ‘Yes, you!’, ensures that readers see themselves as part of that community. And given Allen’s admission that she is usually not one to read these openings, the preface even accounts for those who cannot be bothered and prefer to dive right in. While it is entirely possible for you to put the book down at any point, the wager seems to be that once you have picked up Thicker Than Water, you are already in it.

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Allen can be upfront (if not playfully confident) about this because she knows her community and has written this book for them. But who, exactly, is ‘you’ here? Allen’s invocation of personal experience is not coincidental. The book is an exaggerated portrait of young black women’s quotidian desires – for upward mobility, for the nicer things in life, for a man who takes charge and provides. At the level of narrative structure, the book draws on the kind of ‘impersonal’ (that is, thoroughly industrialised) formulas one associates with genre romance and televisual soap opera. But what keeps readers from putting the book down is the fact that the characters, settings and scenarios are so relatable – not to just anybody but to working- and middle-class black women. Such details, Allen clarifies, are ‘depicted every day in the streets’, and they are rendered felicitously (‘as real as possible’) because of her stated wish to ‘relate to the people I know, the people like me’. In this, Allen writes a highly specific version of what McGurl might call ‘autobiographical genre fiction’, or novels that combine personal experience with formulaic convention. Readers of these narratives would be located above and to the right of the dividing line in Figure 15.1, sidestepping the university and relying on another kind of teacher or ‘expert’ – the fiction writer from their own ranks – to provide them with satisfying stories that brush up against the harsh realities of everyday life. Thus, just as her half-brother Tupac Shakur once spoke truth to power through rap,14 Allen transforms what she has experienced into something where ‘you can just read it, and not necessarily have to live it’. All of which is not to deny the commercial interests that frame the novel – after all, the preface admits that ‘urban fiction is a market’, and that Thicker Than Water must be judged by its ‘entertainment value’. It is to suggest, however, that for Allen and other authors of urban fiction, strategies of marketisation are part and parcel of building a community of readers. For example, it may seem odd to some readers that Allen openly advertises ‘future works’, already presuming they will like this one. Yet she can honestly say that (without sounding like a shill), because she knows how much ‘hard work, blood, sweat, and tears’ went into adapting her personal experience into a pleasur­able reading experience. Another, more striking, example of this duality can be seen in Thicker Than Water’s visual components. The front cover (Plate 4) displays a commercialised tableau of modern black womanhood: four eroticised figures lie on a blood-red blanket or sheet, and, given the objects they hold – a gun, a necklace, a rose and a fan of cash – they appear caught up in either lust and bloodlust. It is the kind of ‘video vixen’ imagery T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting criticises as

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representative of hip-hop’s misogynist cultural politics.15 That reading may be complicated, however, by the fact it that this tableau was staged by and for black women’s pleasure. The preface and front matter reveal that Allen’s girlfriends designed, posed for and took the photo­ graph(s) for the cover. The DIY ethos of the tableau comes through more clearly on pages 107–9, which feature black-and-white photographs of the four models, meant to represent Sasha, Tatum, Neli and Kim, wearing everyday clothes and looking for all the world like the girls next door. Allen’s vixens thus are not so much objects of the male gaze as iterations of black women’s conceptions of self. In this way, Thicker Than Water consciously locates itself between fantasy and reality, commodification and community. Like other authors of urban fiction, Allen conceives her novel as a space of layered discourse and approaches her readership as girlfriends in their own right.16 But if autobiographical genre fiction like Allen’s has to be this savvy about the market, then how realistic is it for McGurl to imply that the university protects creative writers from ‘impersonal’ commercial logics? What if, to return to Figure 15.1, craft and formula were actually two sides of the same coin, appealing to different readers but producing commercially minded genres all the same? That the term ‘middlebrow’ is only sparingly used in The Program Era suggests that the market is McGurl’s critical blind spot, the facet of literary production where even MFAs must admit that their self-reflexive novels are penned for a certain segment of mass readership. Framed through the lens of urban fiction, Program Era aesthetics looks essentially like middlebrow aesthetics in the post-war era, an ‘accessible’ modernism that rewards well educated readers for ‘getting it’ without sacrificing conventional narrative pleasures. This is not a new observation, of course. But what distinguishes McGurl’s book from studies that explicitly theorise the consumer formation of the middlebrow, such as Janice A. Radway’s A Feeling for Books,17 is that the latter acknowledges how literary writers are as deeply enmeshed in the market as their genre fiction counterparts. Just because they tend not to admit it does not mean it isn’t true. Indeed, that is the defining trait of the middlebrow: it cultivates the illusion of being free from market considerations while investing heavily in the accessibility, which is to say marketability, of its art. That illusion might have obtained in the Program Era, but it has not been sustainable in the Kindle Era. As the digital platform for the world’s most popular bookseller, Kindle radically equalises the kinds of products it sells and makes available for readers to enjoy. One can readily grasp the significance of this by taking a look at the

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website’s top sellers in books. In the week ending 25 August 2018, the list contained titles one would expect: genre fiction (new and re-released) by established authors like Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton and Nora Roberts; Stray (2018), the memoir-of-the-moment by Tanya Marquardt; and new and old offerings in self-help, the perennially popular non-fiction genre. But these books shared the same thumbnail-sized screen space with fiction by a slew of lesser-known figures. In fact, the overall top spot went to The Storyteller’s Secret (2018), a novel by former lawyer Sejal Badani, brought out by Lake Union Publishing, Amazon’s imprint specialising in fare for book clubs. Another high spot went to Happy Doomsday (2018), a novel by David Sosnowski, who earned his MFA from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks; it came out with 47North, Amazon’s imprint devoted to fantasy and speculative fiction. And just a bit further down the list were new romances by Memphis-based Whitney G. and Texas-based R. S. Grey, twenty-something women already with multiple bestselling books to their names. Their success as DIY author-publishers had been made possible by the printing, promotion and distribution offered by Amazon Digital Services. Trying to exercise some antiquated notion of quality control over these selections did not substantially change the results. Clicking on Amazon’s ‘Literature and Fiction’ tab, and then the ‘Literary’ tab within that screen, removed the out-and-out romances, but Badani’s and Sosnowski’s books remained, supplemented by other novels from Amazon’s imprints. Jodi Picoult’s Small Great Things (2016), published by Ballantine, and Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere (2017), brought out by Penguin, broke up the run of Amazon-affiliated products. Yet that slight divergence was barely noticeable since every title, including these two from major publishing houses, appeared as a Kindle or Audible (Amazon’s audiobook company) edition. Regardless of where the books came from, then, one was likely to find something to read (or listen to) in a format provided exclusively by Amazon. The in­escapable conclusion from this brief tour is that, in the Kindle Era, literary fiction and the market have been made one with the click of a button. It may be difficult to square this degree of dominance with stories that circulated not too long ago about the death of the Kindle. In fact, after hitting a peak in 2011, sales of e-reader devices have been in rapid decline. Much of that may be attributed to the fact that Kindle has remained an essentially static format, one that has not seen major technological innovation since its debut in the late 2000s. Only about 19 per cent of adults own an e-reader device, a drop-off

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from the 32 per cent who reported owning one in 2014.18 But if the market has spoken on devices, it has not spoken for e-reading as such, which is on the rise as more and more users take to reading on their mobile phones and tablets. The horizon for Kindle is thus devices that 92 and 45 per cent of us (respectively) own already.19 These devices in turn host the Kindle app through which we can download and consume our favourite titles. The rise of the e-reader app explains how there has been a steady increase in e-book sales despite a marked downturn in sales of e-reader devices. Amazon, we might surmise, has essentially conceded that its hardware is not necessary to enjoy its e-books. Instead, it is maximising its app software to bring us into its orbit more firmly. As one can imagine, these developments have been of great concern to Mark McGurl. In 2016 he wrote a follow-up or coda to The Program Era, entitled ‘Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon’. The title encapsulates McGurl’s main point: that Amazon’s ability to deliver (on) practically ‘everything’ has, at least in the realm of literary culture, led to qualitatively ‘less’, or diminished returns. Covering Amazon’s scaling up of the DIY ethos, from its in-house imprints and digital publishing services to its unrivalled sales capacity and exclusive Kindle software, McGurl notes a distinct lack of institutional checks on the market as it overwhelms literary production. With the distance between author and reader reduced by Amazon to its bare minimum (a distance facilitated by an infrastructure epic in scope yet capillary in its effects), can scanning the screen of one’s glowing mobile phone even be called reading anymore? McGurl thinks it is something different: customer service. Following Amazon’s business model to a tee, ‘The author acts as servant, server, and service provider and the reader as consumer, yes, but more precisely as customer, which has an importantly different, because implicitly social-relation, valence’.20 Here McGurl gestures to the retail adage ‘The customer is always right’. Where the discourse of consumerism pivots on what is imposed on buyers from the top down, McGurl theorises a bottom-up self-subservience, in which a kind of ‘corporate populism’21 celebrates agency and choice only to produce more of the same that is qualitatively worse. Worse because it is the lowest common denominator that manages to sell, while still technically being able to call itself a book. ‘If the reader is always right, what’s the point of having authors?’ is the question hovering over his analysis. This pessimistic side of McGurl’s essay seems best encapsulated by the quotation: ‘One way to think about the Age of Amazon is as a possible successor-formation to the Program Era, that is, as foretelling

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its end’.22 Yet the rhetorical hedging of this statement (‘one way’, ‘possible’) hints at an optimistic side to the analysis, one that can provide a way out of Kindle domination. The schema accompanying the essay (Figure 15.2) shows McGurl trying to rescue ‘contemporary fiction’ from the market by distinguishing it further from industrialised formula writing, which this time is not even acknowledged as creative practice but has been reduced to the dictates of ‘mass readership’. Striking, too, is the fact that ‘generic expectation’ now has a powerful ally in Amazon, which stands on equal footing with the university as the dominant influence on literary novels. McGurl signals where his sympathies lie through the spatial organisation of the schema. Where the university literally rises above crass materialism (to its left) and politics (to its right), Amazon is backed by macro late-capitalist forces such as ‘neoliberalism’, ‘the service economy’ and ‘digitization’. Thus, in the battle between the retail giant and creative writing programmes to determine the future of American letters, it is practically a question of the profit motive versus disinterestedness. Though this may not be a fair fight, McGurl makes clear he is not ready to give up just yet. Because as long as the axis connecting contemporary fiction to the university has its champions, there will be holdouts against the onrushing flood of e-reading and Amazon-produced books. But how exactly does contemporary fiction resist the lure of Amazon, to its left? Here McGurl finds a glimmer of hope in the residual effects of the Program Era, and specifically the kind of slow, patient reading associated with Program Era fiction, in contrast to the sped-up serial reading of Amazon’s DIY universe. What reading slowly offers us today, according to McGurl, is access to ‘quality time’. Initially conceived in 1970s child-rearing theories as ‘the time of intimacy, of analog, face-to-face, intersubjective attention’, quality time was steadily adapted into its more familiar conceptualisation as ‘“alone time” or “me time,” which is quality time with oneself – or with a book’.23 One might say it is best known today as a rejection of demands on one’s time, particularly by entities that insist on 24/7 productivity. In a savvy exegesis of the narrative structure of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), the novel said to have inspired Jeff Bezos to create Amazon, McGurl defends quality time as that which halts the relentless flow of (information) consumption in the Kindle Era. Against how Bezos used the book, McGurl reads Ishiguro as quintessentially Program Era: a novel that ‘finds its thematic substance in the narrative dilation of human intimacy and intrigue’, and whose ‘most typical grammatical form – the past tense – indicates its imaginary removal from the real time of the

Figure 15.2  Schema from Mark McGurl, ‘Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon’, Modern Language Quarterly, 77:3 (2016), p. 451. Copyright University of Washington. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press

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reader’s present’.24 Thus, where so much of his 2009 book relied on imagining a spatial divide between creative writing and the market, in ‘Everything and Less’ McGurl, likely noticing that the market is everywhere, falls back on ‘temporal disjunction’25 to insist on contemporary fiction’s specialness, which is to say its apartness, from everything else. No doubt Takerra Allen would be one of those McGurl aligns with consumption flow. Her novels and her business model represent the epitome of the sped-up serial reading he resists. That charge is even harder to deny since Allen integrated her DIY publishing operation into Amazon’s platforms in the early 2010s. While she was wrapping up the Thicker Than Water series (TTW), Allen began to publish her other writing projects on Amazon, making use of its printing, promotion and distribution infrastructure while retaining the Angelic Script brand.26 In so doing, she made all her non-TTW work available on Kindle as she wrote it. Her complete list of such work, as of October 2018, included the aforementioned Heaven’s Hell and Restricted, as well as: • • • • • •

There’s Power in the V (2012) and V2: More Power (2015); Restricted Too: Jordin’s Jewel (2014); The Lonely Pole (2014) and The Lonely Pole Part 2 (2014); Devout (2014) and Too Devout (2017); An Affair in Munthill (2016); Seasons of Fidelity: Season One (2017) and Seasons of Fidelity: Season Two (2018).

Akin to the August 2018 bestselling authors Whitney G. and R. S. Grey, Allen has become a well known brand in and through Amazon. No longer needing to publish print copies of her books, Allen’s is a wholly virtual enterprise today: she uploads her latest offerings to Amazon’s servers, where they are then packaged for Amazon’s customers to enjoy, typically via Kindle. While it may be tempting to dismiss such DIY conglomeration, as McGurl seems to do, it is long past due for critics to try to understand what readers do with these kinds of books in their own time. A survey of Amazon reviews for the TTW series, for example, reveals that while readers are certainly compelled to ‘binge’ on Allen’s books, the practice for them is a rewarding form of ‘me time’. Indeed, readers testify to how reading Allen removes them from the world for hours on end. Of the original Thicker Than Water, one reader confesses, ‘This my first book by Ms. Allen. It was a page turner from beginning to end. I actually went back and bought the entire series and finished all

326  Kinohi Nishikawa

three in less than a week.’27 Of part two, another reader raves, ‘Whew. . . . Takerra’s sequel to Thicker Than Water is fiyah! It picks up right where the other left off at and nothing is left out and everything flows together. I finished this book in 1 day because I could not put it down – it was that serious.’28 And after reading TTW3, the final part, a reader veritably blurts out, ‘I hate that Ms. Allen writes so good. These characters feel so real and have me all in my feelings. . . . Once again another amazing book!!!!!’29 If, according to McGurl, we can speak of a quality time that is experientially reserved for the self, in contrast to the seemingly endless ways work, family and school place demands on our time, then Allen’s ability to draw readers in is no less meaningful than what Program Era fiction does for its readers. The quality of the fiction, however that is determined, does not negate the absolute value of ‘me time’. Which is why McGurl’s account of Kindle Era reading is incoherent. Insofar as he cannot reasonably judge how individuals want to spend or expend their ‘me time’, the idea of quality is transferred to the length of time it takes to read a book. On that count, nearly all genre fiction will be judged a failure, while more ‘difficult’ works of the Program Era, which require more time to read, will emerge as sites of repose and rumination (as his own reading of The Remains of the Day exemplifies). Yet this repackaged modernist formulation is consistently undercut by the thoughtful opinions of Allen’s readers. For example, while reviewers frequently laud the relatability of the characters, that relatability takes many different forms. As one writes of Still Thicker Than Water, [T]his is why I love urban fiction you never know what is about to happen next but in some way you can alway[s] relate to the characters. Now I must say that I am a REE fan to the end I need me one of him in my life like yesterday lmao but them tramps Jayde and Neli I really wanted to smack fire out of them females like that make it hard for real women to get and keep good brothas lol! I’m to[o] involved lol!30

Sympathising with the male character and calling out two unsympathetic female characters allow this reader to playfully muse on her own tribulations. Her ‘lol’ is meant to distance herself from the scenario, though the feelings it has provoked are real all the same. Numerous reviewers temper their praise through such meta-acknowledgements of Allen’s ability to render an immersive literary experience. In this, urban fiction’s status as autobiographical genre fiction allows for precisely the kind of self-reflexive engagement with everyday life that is presumed to be the exclusive domain of literary fiction.

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Perhaps more surprising than this is how readers, often while praising Allen, articulate nuanced opinions about the style and substance of her work. Some are aware enough of DIY publishing to situate its pitfalls in the larger context of what it affords. One reader of Thicker Than Water, for example, observes: This is the first novel by [Allen], which is evident in the editing issues. However, the storyline and character development overshadowed those issues and I was able to see past them. I could not put this 💎 💎 💎 💎 book down, and happily reached for part 2 when I was done. Please go pick this series up, so that you can witness the growth of this writer as well.31

This reader would go on to publish reviews of the two other novels in the series, each noting the development of Allen’s craft as a writer and storyteller (thus earning her more ratings stars or, in the reader’s personalised system, diamond emoji). Contrary to what McGurl has to say about DIY publishing on Amazon, Allen’s readers, like all readers in the Kindle Era, are eager to discuss quality, so long as the terms of judgement are organic to the genre and reading formation of the literature in question. Equally important are readers who discuss the aesthetic limitations of a genre that, by definition, is committed to melodramatic excess. For instance, of the final book in the series, one urban fiction fan writes, This book brought closure but it also brought darkness and never ending tragedy. Although the execution of this trilogy has captivated and enthralled readers, it’s also left me drained. . . . I felt for poor Ree and Tatum, I just thought after a certain point, they should have received a reprieve and much sooner. . . . The gut punches did not stop until the last few pages and the epilogues. I actually started to grimace and skip ahead as no[ne] of the main/supporting characters could really catch a break. I’m not sure if living a street life is indicative of this level of hardship and pain but damn, could these people have caught a break.32

All the twists and turns, surprises and thrills, that other readers enjoy in the TTW series leaves this reader somewhat ‘disturbed’, as the title of her review suggests. Yet far from condemning Allen, what we see here is one reader engaging meaningfully with her work, and in so doing articulating her own literary sensibilities as well as refining her own sense of taste. It is a brief against overworked narrative repetition, but it is not a rejection of urban fiction outright. Repetition is something McGurl associates with mass readership, and any recourse to generic familiarity is construed as selling out to Amazon. He argues:

328  Kinohi Nishikawa Offering tested models of market success, genre is important to indie writers because it implies an audience ready to be pleased again and again within the terms of an implicit contract. In this system success, and even a highly qualified version of originality, is the result of effective variation and permutation within established generic structures.33

In fact, though, Allen’s readers demonstrate the same quality and depth of percipient feeling about the TTW series as McGurl assigns to readers of Program Era fiction. How urban fiction’s fans arrive at such feeling could not be more different from the conditions under which one is supposed to read The Remains of the Day. Kindle app versus hardcover book, recommended by search history algorithm versus recom­mended by a professor or critic, consumed ‘at the gym, in the car, on lunch breaks, in the bathtub’34 versus consumed in the university dorm, library or classroom: the means and mechanisms of reading are as varied today as they have ever been. But where novel-reading ends up taking us, divided as we are by race, class, gender, geography, educational attainment, and any number of other factors, can sound remarkably similar. McGurl’s evident prejudice against genre begs the questions of whether Program Era fiction is entirely original, and of whether its fidelity to craft entails its own narrative conventions. Isn’t the whole point of middlebrow aesthetics (à la the Book-of-the-Month Club) to keep a certain class of readers coming back for more? If so, then the issue for McGurl may lie not with mass readership in itself but with the way contemporary authors are being drawn to that formation. In observing ‘the recent mass migration of otherwise “literary” writers into the space of genre’, McGurl concedes that maybe ‘fiction in the Age of Amazon is genre fiction, a highly gendered and age-differentiated genre system complexly structured by the poles of epic and romance and their characteristic modes of wish fulfillment’.35 By which he means that contemporary authors are trying to appeal more and more to a younger female audience. The dense language is supposed to obscure the bluntness of this conclusion, but, given everything we know about the Program Era and its valorisation of what McGurl in his schema calls ‘the modernist inheritance’ (Figure 15.2), it is the only way to read ‘epic’ (the novel) and ‘romance’ here alongside the invocation of gender and age. This prejudice against genre has a racial component as well. For subtending the trend toward genre-fication is none other than urban fiction. The DIY ethos of the genre has not only made it perfectly suited to Kindle’s software; it has fundamentally changed how

DIY Publishing and African-American Readers   329

readers and authors conceive literary fiction as such in the digital era. Consider a ‘genre puzzle’ presented in a series of slides as part of a 2017 publishing industry online report. The first slide in the puzzle notes that, of the roughly 54.5 million general fiction books published in the USA that year, 78 per cent were e-books and 22 per cent were print. The surprising figures are in the breakdown of who was responsible for putting out all this content. Traditional publishers accounted for 58 per cent, Amazon imprints for 14 per cent and ‘indie self-publishers’ for 28 per cent. The last was an incredibly high number, something the report expresses shock over through mock dumbfoundedness: ‘Isn’t “General Fiction” like . . . literary fiction and stuff? Why is it so indie?’36 The next slide explains the reason for the perceived inflation: African-American fiction ‘lacks a separate Nielsen category . . . but skews very indie’. Because of that category blind spot, African-American novels accounted for up to 25 per cent of sales of general (not genre) fiction, or more than 12 million books.37 Now solved, the genre puzzle goes into greater detail about the statistics for African-American fiction. Indie self-publishers dominated sales, at 71 per cent of the market, while traditional publishers lagged far behind, at 26 per cent, of which the ‘Big Five’ publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster) managed a measly 4 per cent share. But across the entire African-American fiction market, there was one near constant: Kindle, as 96 per cent of sales were of e-books.38 Thus, by the industry’s own figures, the market for contemporary fiction is digital, trending indie and proportionately inclined towards African-American readers. The last point can be surmised from the fact that, although the report does not mention it by name, urban fiction is responsible for the DIY publishing boom in African-American fiction, as well as a good deal of what traditional publishers bring out under that category. Ironically, it is only because African-American fiction was not understood as its own dynamic niche that it came to be included in the general-fiction market. Yet that ended up being a happy oversight insofar as urban fiction has been included in a category otherwise reserved for the credentialed literary and reading class – one that Mark McGurl (and many others in the critical-institutional establishment) would rather be free of the taint of genre, formula and repetition. The fact that it has been there, slowly shifting the numbers from within, has not changed Takerra Allen from being grouped alongside Jesmyn Ward, Colson Whitehead and Paul Beatty, or these latter authors from earning nearly all the literary accolades the English-speaking world can give them. What has changed, though, is the kinds of readers

330  Kinohi Nishikawa

the publishing industry and we, as critics, must recognise as part of the general-fiction market. The real scandal of the Kindle Era is not McGurl’s scenario of wiped-out quality time. It is seeing how much we have in common with readers of Thicker Than Water. After solving its general-fiction genre puzzle, the industry report offers this takeaway: ‘huge opportunities exist for indies in genres under-served by traditional publishers’.39 DIY publishing thrives, in other words, in market niches that tradition-bound institutions cannot or will not serve. Turning the notion of service back on McGurl’s analysis, the report gently exposes how certain institutions have a history of not serving readers, even (and especially) when their presence is undeniable. This point is extrapolated from the African-American fiction example, but it is not exclusive to it, leaving one to wonder: To what extent do all readers, at some point, find themselves underserved by institutions, here a stand-in for credentialed class-structured reading practices? Does reading always have to be so self-consciously literary? Or can a day, a week, a semester, or an entire life be broken up into moments of reading across the spectrum of fiction, according to our immediate and projected wants and needs? Why can’t quality time be distributed so variously, and who says genre can’t be part of that mix? If fiction’s most elemental, most encompassing task is to make one feel like it is directly addressing you – ‘You, reading this! Yes, you!’ – then maybe when Allen hails the reader at the beginning of Thicker Than Water, she is, in a sense, hailing us all. Notes  1. ‘Model Management’, Angelic Script Publishing, 31 August 2009, at (accessed 25 August 2018).   2. ‘Promotion’, Angelic Script Publishing, 31 August 2009, at (accessed 25 August 2018).   3. ‘Publishing’, Angelic Script Publishing, 31 August 2009, at (accessed 25 August 2018).   4. I was unable to locate a physical copy of the first edition to subject to bibliographical analysis. However, Amazon’s webpage for the edition does have a digital preview (‘Look Inside!’) that allowed me to see enough of the book (front cover, copyright page, several pages from the narrative, mail-order form and back cover) to conduct such an analysis.   5. Timothy Laquintano, Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016), p. 3.

DIY Publishing and African-American Readers   331

  6. This synopsis of urban fiction’s origins has been adapted from Kinohi Nishikawa, ‘Black Women Readers and the Uses of Urban Fiction’, in Simone C. Drake and Dwan K. Henderson (eds), Are You Entertained? Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), pp. 268–87.  7. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 284.   8. Ibid., p. 28.  9. See, for example, the essays collected in Loren Glass (ed.), After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016). 10. McGurl, The Program Era, pp. 102–3. 11. Takerra Allen, Thicker Than Water (2008; New Brunswick, NJ: Angelic Script Publishing, 2009), p. iii. 12. Ibid., p. v. 13. Though it is elaborated in later works, the concept was originally laid out in Stanley E. Fish, ‘Interpreting the Variorum’, Critical Inquiry, 2:3 (1976), pp. 465–85. 14. Allen’s father, William Garland, was Shakur’s biological father. The two grew up in separate families. 15. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (New York: New York University Press, 2007). 16. This is why the smiley face Allen includes in her preface – generated after typing colon [:], hyphen [-], and close parenthesis [)] in a word-­ processing program – is irresistible. Calculating or not, the icon hails the reader into Thicker Than Water’s interpretive community at the level of peer-to-peer digital communication (texting, instant-messaging, etc.). 17. Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 18. Derek Haines, ‘The E-Reader Device Is Dying a Rapid Death’, Just Publishing Advice, 17 June 2018, at (accessed 25 August 2018). 19. Ibid. 20. Mark McGurl, ‘Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon’, Modern Language Quarterly, 77:3 (2016), pp. 447–71 (p. 453). 21. Ibid., p. 459. 22. Ibid., p. 452. 23. Ibid., pp. 463, 464. 24. Ibid., p. 465. 25. Ibid. 26. Allen seems to have made the entire TTW series available via Kindle in 2011 around the time when she was finishing the final instalment. Within a matter of three years, then, she had gone from putting out a limited

332  Kinohi Nishikawa print run of her first novel to operating as a full-fledged author-publisher on Amazon. 27. Meesh, ‘Couldn’t put it down . . .’, Amazon, 2 February 2014, at (accessed 25 August 2018). 28. Mocha Kia, ‘Fiyah’, Amazon, 10 March 2011, at (accessed 25 August 2018). 29. Latoya Samuel, ‘Love/Hate’, Amazon, 25 March 2017, at (accessed 25 August 2018). 30. monet, ‘This book was straight FLAME!!!!’, Amazon, 20 July 2011, at (accessed 25 August 2018). 31. Diamonds Literary World, ‘and having fun while doing it’, Amazon, 23 July 2018, at (accessed 25 August 2018). 32. Kokanut, ‘Disturbingly Dark but Good’, Amazon, 13 January 2017, at (accessed 25 August 2018). 33. McGurl, ‘Everything and Less’, p. 460. 34. ArkiaT, ‘off the damn chain’, Amazon, 9 February 2014, at (accessed 25 August 2018). 35. McGurl’, Everything and Less’, p. 460. 36. ‘Print vs Digital, Traditional vs Non-Traditional, Bookstore vs Online: 2016 Trade Publishing by the Numbers’, Author Earnings (2017), slide 69, at (accessed 5 January 2020). 37. Ibid., slide 70. 38. Ibid., slide 71. 39. Ibid., slide 72.

Chapter 16

‘I loved the stories – they weren’t boring’: Narrative Gaps, the ‘Disnarrated’ and the Significance of Style in Prison Reading Groups Patricia Canning

Fiction engages the human mind beyond the cognitive act of reading. Stories provide a means of narrative imagining – a form of thinking before acting, of reflecting on experience (both fictional and real) and ‘our chief means of [. . .] predicting, of planning and of explaining’.1 In this way stories are essential to the human mind. They provide the tools we need to conceptualise experience, and because they are predicated on coherence, they facilitate ‘making sense’. As scholars in cognitive linguistics, philosophy and psychology argue,2 the mind engages in a vast range of (often unconscious) processing to interpret even the most basic information through strategies often considered ‘literary’ (for example, narrative, analogy, metaphor and parable). Given that literature ‘takes its instruments from the everyday mind’,3 literary texts resonate and have meaning for everyone. This is particularly encouraging in prison (and other restricted environments), where lack of or incomplete education is relatively common: 53 per cent of incarcerated women in the Netherlands are poorly educated and 32 per cent have only an average education, whereas 15 per cent are deemed highly educated.4 The transformative benefits of reading literature are often noted through participant feedback (I deal with this later), but there remains a critical lacuna in terms of researching the impact of reading in real-world contexts, particularly in challenging environments. Recent research that focuses on real-world readers’ experiences had analysed, for example, ‘reading group talk’,5 and Patricia Canning’s work on reading in prison goes further, in analysing real-time readers’ responses.6 More specifically for the present context, a special issue of Critical Survey (2011) showcased reading literature in prison as a space for ‘radical pedagogy and social transformation’.7 333

334  Patricia Canning

Reading groups in various guises exist in criminal justice contexts in Britain and Northern Ireland, such as the Prison Reading Groups project at Roehampton University and the Reader Organisation’s ‘Get Into Reading’ project in Low Newton. In Northern Ireland, the Reading for Life project8 and the Reading and Writing for Peace and Reconcili­ ation project made valuable contributions to participants’ wellbeing in marginalised communities. While these worthy community projects are gaining recognition from stakeholders for their transformative potential, there is little focus, if any, on how literary texts actually ‘trigger’ or bring about reported changes in reading group participants in terms of, for instance, enhanced critical thinking, the development of empathy, or perspective-taking. There is, however, a growing body of literature that evidences a relationship between reading literary fiction and demonstrating or developing empathy,9 between fiction and affect,10 and between reading fiction and prosocial behaviour.11 Additionally, researchers have linked reading to increased sensitivity12 by examining the role that different literary genres (romance, science fiction, horror) have on readers. Research into how style contributes to more engaging and affective reading experiences through increased ‘depth of processing’13 examines how foregrounding14 – the stylistic operation of deviation from some perceived linguistic ‘norm’– has a defamiliarising effect and encourages readers to ‘think about what is represented in a text in a new and more detailed way than normal’.15 Such claims have been tested with readers ‘who differed considerably in experience with literary texts’.16 For example, David Miall and Don Kuiken found that foregrounding ‘is a predictor of both reading times and readers’ judgments of strikingness and affect’.17 According to their studies, the evocation of feelings in readers’ responses to foregrounding ‘appeared to be independent of literary competence or experience’.18 Much of the research noted above has explored the cognitive potential of and affective response to reading fiction by analysing readers’ emotional, aesthetic and cognitive/neurological responses to stories. This research has offered illuminating insights into and persuasive evidence for the beneficial effects of reading literary fiction on empathy, sensitivity, personality and perspective-taking. However, its experimental context (readers are almost always academic subjects), post-hoc reporting, the solitariness of the reading experiences, computerised methodological practices (such as under fMRI conditions, or through the use of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test)19 compromise the naturalness of the reading experience.20 Yet the findings are extremely encouraging for real-world readers outside the academy. This chapter, therefore, builds on existing research by focusing on the

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social practice of reading in challenging environments and explores the potential of – and offers empirical evidence for – style and its capacity to function as a catalyst for change in real-world readers. More specifically, it examines key stylistic techniques that act as cognitive ‘triggers’, leading to the dynamic negotiation (and renegotiation) of meaning and, by extension, increased perspective. George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589) writes: There is requisite to the perfection of this art, another manner of exornation, which resteth in the fashioning of our maker’s language and style to such purpose as it may delight and allure as well the mind as the ear of the hearers with a certain novelty and strange manner of conveyance.21

Writing almost 400 years after Puttenham, Wolfgang Iser alludes to the importance of style in motivating and enriching the reading experience when he refers to the reading process as a ‘game of the imagination’.22 He argues that transparent texts, that is, texts in which ‘everything is laid out cut and dried before us’, invariably lead to ‘boredom’.23 It is worth setting out his point in full: If the reader were given the whole story, and there were nothing left for him to do, then his imagination would never enter the field. . . . A literary text must therefore be conceived in such a way that it will engage the reader’s imagination in the task of working things out for himself, for reading is only a pleasure when it is active and creative.24

Like Puttenham, Iser claims that such creativity is ‘steered’ in part by ‘techniques or strategies used to set the familiar against the unfamiliar’, which ‘forces’ readers to reconsider what they previously held to be ‘perfectly straightforward’.25 Invoking the concept of ‘defamiliarisation’,26 Iser is arguing, as I see it, for style as fundamental in determining the richness of a text and, by implication, the reading experience. One of the ways in which style functions in Iser’s thesis is through the concept of the ‘blank’.27 For Iser, the blank or ‘unwritten’ elements of a text invite the reader to ‘actively’ provide what is not written, for it is ‘only through inevitable omissions that a story will gain its dynamism’.28 Indeed, the ‘inevitability’ of narratorial omissions is summed up nicely by Gerald Prince, who writes, ‘if I told a friend what I did yesterday, I would most probably not mention that I tied my shoelaces’.29 There is, thus, a presupposition that every text has, at some level, inferential potential and thus requires inferential work on the part of the reader. So, what is an author to write (and not write), and how do these stylistic choices affect readers?

336  Patricia Canning

Stories, both personal and fictional, can have particular resonance in criminal justice environments as a vehicle for accessing and expressing a range of often challenging personal situations, events, emotions and histories. Moreover, style is a powerful mediator and can extend the interpretative scope or meaning potential of narratives. This was demonstrably apparent in my prison reading groups in Northern Ireland (held between 2010 and 2014), when I read with incarcerated women housed at a young offenders centre (there is currently no separate prison for women in Northern Ireland); groups were also run for male ex-prisoners in a community setting, discussed later in the chapter. The women met weekly in small groups (between three and twelve participants) in a small, unfurnished room in the education block of the prison for around two hours. As group facilitator, I read aloud short stories or extracts from a longer work (a few chapters each session) or poetry, with frequent breaks in reading to hear comments and facilitate discussion within the group. The women had been convicted of crimes ranging from non-payment of fines to murder. Women on remand also attended. The women had a range of reading abilities and educational histories; some could not read much at all while others had a university education, but all attended voluntarily, some for a few weeks, others a few years.30 After each session I recorded in writing any noteworthy comments, discussion topics and any issue that affected the general running of the project. Often, I wrote down what the women said (I was not allowed to use a recording device) and the comments noted in this chapter come directly from my records unless otherwise stated. Primarily established as a wellbeing initiative, the project provided a unique naturalistic context for an exploration of the significance of style in readerly engagement and as a catalyst for meaningful discussion and debate. Research in stylistics and cognitive linguistics has shown that when we read, we import our experiential knowledge to the text in the form of knowledge frames and scripts (or schemas) that are largely text-driven.31 Moreover, authors use style to ‘control’ attention, often directing readers to arrive at certain inferences while ‘suppressing’ others.32 Where this knowledge is missing, it constitutes a ‘blank’,33 also known as the ‘unwritten’,34 and later developed by stylisticians and narratologists as the ‘gap’,35 the ‘unnarrated’36 and the ‘narrative gap’,37 or, more generally, as ellipsis. A gap is essentially a part of the story that is not explicitly narrated, either because it is ‘not worth narrating’38, or because it ‘falls below the so-called threshold of narratability (it is not sufficiently unusual or problematic)’,39or because ‘it transgresses a law’40 or is socially inappropriate (for instance, an

Narrative Gaps, the ‘Disnarrated’ and Style in Prison Reading Groups   337

advertisement for a Christmas turkey might say that the bird was free-range or organic, but not how, or even that, it was killed). Different types of gaps constitute greater or lesser degrees of foregrounding and, as such, require more or less semantic processing, respectively. To offer an example, the negated element in the title of this chapter (from written feedback by one of my nine-year-old readers in the Utrecht International School, Netherlands), ‘[the stories] weren’t boring’, counters an expectation that they would be. What this shows is that when we are told something that did not happen (Prince’s ‘disnarration’), it is foregrounded and thus requires a greater ‘depth of processing’.41 Below is a literary example from epistolary fiction, ‘Uncle Ifor’s Welsh Dresser’, by Pat Lacey (which I read with groups both in the prison and in a mental health hospital) that requires readers to make a ‘necessary’ inference through a gap in narration: Dear David, Thank you for yesterday. Meredith and I both adored our walk. [. . .] Meredith sends his love and says he’s not really afraid of rabbits. But being a town dog, he’d just never seen one before!42

This is the story’s first mention of the walk and the rabbit. The inference drawn here is that Meredith encountered a rabbit while out walking and was ‘spooked’ by the experience because he is ‘a town dog’, leading us to infer causation. This is based on situational knowledge that town dogs don’t often encounter rabbits, so most readers will be able make Meredith’s reaction to his rabbit encounter cohere. Additionally, the negated or ‘disnarrated’ clause (‘not really afraid’), counters (and mitigates) the supposition that he was afraid, which is retrospectively confirmed in the subsequent letter from David, dated the same day as the preceding letter: ‘I’m sorry Meredith was frightened by that rather ferocious rabbit’.43 This particular story is characterised by narrative gaps that are retrospectively filled in and as such was considered by one prison group reader as ‘a kind of game’ (perhaps inadvertently invoking Iser) in which she had to ‘work out’ that the correspondents were falling in love a bit more with every letter. One incarcerated woman was so engaged by the story’s narrative style that she remarked, ‘that . . . was like a breath of fresh air! I feel like I’ve just walked outside’, and another commented, ‘I feel like I was in there with them’. The prison group’s comments and discussion during the reading support the view that style plays a fundamental role in enhancing the level of engagement in the reading process.

338  Patricia Canning

During the course of the prison project, we read a short story by Wanda Burnett called ‘Sand’.44 The story is told in the first person and reflects on the narrator’s experience, as a five-year-old, of moving house. The text below is taken from my reading log for that session (I have changed the names for confidentiality, as indicated by asterisks); excerpts from ‘Sand’ (in italics) have been added for ease of reference: It was really interesting to see the repsonses [sic] to the gaps45 in the story. For instance, in one recollection the speaker [narrator] talks of going to a shop with her dad for cigars and being brought into the back room by the old male shopkeeper where she sees a big doll and a phonograph. ‘Sometimes I went with my dad to buy cigars, but mostly we just went there to talk. . . . Once, when I went there alone, he [the owner] invited me into his parlor. You just stepped down one step from the store and through an old worn curtain and there you were. He always kept the blinds down half way, he said because the dust didn’t show up so much then. I guess he didn’t have a wife. But he had a phonograph that blossomed from its small wooden box in the corner like a huge purple morning glory . . . and way back on the bottom shelf lumped over and dirty, there was a doll with a waxy pale face and hair that fell in yellow-brown strings over its eyes. He didn’t like me to look at the doll. He got nervous when I went near the cabinet and made me sit in the little brown rocking-chair close by the phonograph. I thought it was fine listening to the record played over and over again and I rocked back and forth waiting for the words, ‘Oh, you great big beautiful doll, I’d like to squeeze you, but I’m afraid you’ll break.’ I rocked closer to the cabinet. Then someone rapped on the counter and the old man slipped through the curtain, up the step, and back into the store. I went home. I told my mother about the doll and the phonograph . . . after that my brother went for the cigars.46 Nora* thought it was a negative thing that this man had a doll in his house, yet no wife or kids. I suggested that it may signify a remembrance of a child, either gone or dead, but she remained perturbed by the idea. In the story the speaker tells how she told her mum of the doll and phono­ graph, stating in the next line that ‘my brother went for the cigars after that’. Again, we are left to make sense of this, echoing the child’s lack of explanation. We talked a lot of how, as kids, we never got the ‘whole story’, often being chided for sticking our noses into adult business. Nora thought it was weird that the shopkeeper brought the child into the room at all, but Tracy* and Anne* felt that it could have been innocent and friendly. We talked of how we judge people by what goes on in society, and whether we would let our kids be so free as to go into houses by themselves in this day and age. Anne read the last few pages. We never got time for the poem as the staff officer made us leave a bit early.

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The ellipsis47 in the last line of the source text is foregrounded both graphically and semantically and invites the readers, in this case Nora, Tracy and Anne, to provide the unwritten text. It is in this gap that causality resides that will explain why the brother took over the shop run. If we consider that it might be less unusual for children to be invited into homes where other children live, than to be invited into a house where there is neither mother nor children, Nora’s observation that the man had ‘no wife or kids’ may have led her to interpret ominously what Tracy and Anne suggested might merely be a ‘friendly’ gesture in taking the child into the parlour. The discussion continued on why the man had a doll, why he played the song ‘over and over’ and even raised questions about the lyrics. All of these factors – the text-driven (ellipsis) and the situational (that it is more unusual for five-year-olds to be invited into homes where there is no mother and no children; that men are kind to children; that the man may be in mourning) – contributed to the varied interpretations collectively worked out during the reading process. Noting the ‘dynamism’ afforded by such textual ‘omissions’, Iser writes that a text is ‘potentially capable of fulfilling several different realisations, and no reading can ever exhaust the full potential, for each individual reader will fill the gaps in his own way’.48 Gaps, therefore, arguably provide a creative space for readers to do the cognitive work necessary to reach a (not ‘the’) coherent interpreta­ tion. Additionally, the prison group’s comments suggest that gaps function to invite ethical judgements by seeking motivation for the unnarrated, a kind of ‘reading between the lines’ that amounts to ethical positioning. In our reading of ‘Sand’, the ellipsis implies something unpalatable, and the women’s discussion exhibits an attempt to narrate it by ‘filling in’ (the brother is going from now on because the shopkeeper is sinister, or the mother believes he is sinister). It is, according to Mosher, the act of non-narration that precipitates this move, where the reader is ‘manoeuvred into’ adopting a ‘stance’ on what is not said.49 Attendance at the prison reading group was often inconsistent due to a combination of the women’s personal circumstances and staff shortages, so it was difficult to read a full-length novel with the women. However, as the group grew in confidence we selected Lucy Caldwell’s All The Beggars Riding,50 in which the narrator, Lara, attends a creative writing class in order to write her history into coherence: ‘I wanted to tell my story in the hope that I’d understand something – understand my parents, understand us – and in the hope that things would be put in order, put right, laid to rest’.51

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Lara’s father seems to have a story other than that narrated in the text-world in the early part of the novel, and it becomes clear later that he has in fact two families, two sets of children. His other family lives in Belfast (Lara’s home is in London) and he, a surgeon, is needed in Belfast at the height of the ‘Troubles’ in the 1980s. Early in the novel we are told that the images Lara had of Belfast were what she saw on the news: ‘snarling dogs and faceless policemen in riot gear, the blackened, mangled remains of a bus or shop or a car, the bala­clavas and guns, the loose-faced, glazed-eyed families of the victims’.52 However, she goes on: ‘Behind it was a whole layer of other lives, lives like ours. We mentioned none of it in our house, ever, and so I thought about it for days on end, sometimes.’53 At this point, the women commented on the disnarrated element – ‘We mentioned none of it’ – which, they felt, foregrounded an unwritten reason why they did not speak of it. This led to a discussion in which motivation was sought for the ‘not speaking’: perhaps the mother hated Belfast because it took her husband away, or something bad happened while he was there, and so on. The disnarration prompted Kay* to speak of the fear and suspicion that not knowing generates by mapping the text-world situation on to her real-world situation of being in prison. Referring to the prison officers stationed on the cell landings, she said: ‘sometimes we don’t know who’s on outside our cells at night and we have to tune our senses to pick up what we can’t physically see’. She went on: ‘Sometimes, I can’t go to sleep because I feel so vulnerable with not knowing who’s walking up and down outside that door. If only they’d tell you or say hello. It’s not much to ask for a decent bit of peace at night.’ As Kay’s comments show, narrative gaps are encountered in real, lived experience, and have a similar function as that in the literary stories – they foreground the unnarrated, inviting deeper cognitive processing as we seek to make sense (both of our own lives and of the fictional story) through inference, mapping or ana­ logical reasoning. We talked more of the vulnerability that potentially comes with ‘half a story’ and the discussion returned to the text-world and the mother’s quiet, self-absorbed behaviour as she waits for Lara’s father to join them on their Spanish holiday. Lara states, ‘I think we were scared of her [mother], then, the big brown circles under her eyes; the way she’d crumble her croissant with her fingers into piles of greasy flakes’.54 Margaret* said she felt that ‘the kids are in tune with this sadness, they know their mum has clearly been crying, but they don’t know why’ (and neither does the reader). A few pages later, when dad returns bearing gifts (t-shirts from another part of Spain), the gap-filling takes on a new direction as one of the prisoners exclaimed

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‘He’s off having his own bloody holiday – he’s with someone else and has come to them after he’s had his own fun!’, which indeed turns out to be the case. During this time, I also established a reading group for male ex-prisoners at the Helping Hands centre in Belfast. One of the first stories we read was ‘Sunday in the Park’ by Bel Kaufman,55 about a married couple, the ‘city-pale’ Morton, who works in a ‘factorylike university’,56 his wife (who is unnamed throughout) and their son, Larry. The family’s afternoon in the park is disturbed first by Larry’s encounter with a ‘husky little boy, with none of Larry’s quickness and sensitivity’,57 and then an altercation with the child’s father, in which Morton’s logical reasoning fails to deflect the physical threat of violence: Slowly the other man stood up. He took a couple of steps toward Morton, then stopped. He flexed his great arms, waiting. She [Morton’s wife] pressed her trembling knees together. Would there be violence, fighting? How dreadful, how incredible. . . . She must do something, stop them, call for help. She wanted to put her hand on her husband’s sleeve, to pull him down, but for some reason she didn’t. [My italics]58

Here, the mode of narration (i.e. the third person) shifts to free indirect thought (italicised),59 which has the effect of blurring the boundary between the narrator’s and the character’s point of view. When I reached this point in the reading, one of the ex-prisoners, Alan*, commented on the wife’s reaction: ‘If she really wanted him to walk away, she wouldn’t think it a bit “incredible” – she’s exhilarated by the possibility of her husband getting into a fight here. Secretly she wants him to.’ The gap signalled by the ellipsis generated discussion which elaborated on Alan’s response and centred on the disnarrated element (‘for some reason she didn’t’) as being ‘a clue’ to the wife’s ‘secret’ desire to have the husband ‘knock him out’. Furthermore, the discussion reflected the men’s attempt to extrapolate a personality for Morton based on cues (‘he’s weak’, ‘he probably doesn’t ever stand up for her’, ‘he’s let her down in the past’, and so on). Morton chooses not to engage in violence, however, and a few lines later the fight is avoided when Morton ‘turned his back on the man and said quietly, “Come on, let’s get out of here”. He walked awkwardly, almost limping with self-consciousness, to the sandbox.’60 The ex-prisoners’ group collectively interpreted the wife’s ‘desire’ for violence as signifying an underlying dissatisfaction with her marriage to the ‘city-pale’ Morton, which they later ‘filled in’ by referring to the adverbs used at the beginning of the story as an indicator of this dissatisfaction:

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‘How good this is, she thought, and almost smiled at her sense of well-being’ (my italics).61 They read the disnarrated (that she did not smile) as indicating that the wife is ‘dying for a bit of excitement in her life’, and continued their interpretation with ‘she’s disappointed’ at her husband taking what the ex-prisoners acknowledged was the ‘moral high ground’ (for instance, Frank* commented that ‘it’s much harder [for Morton and for them] to walk away’ yet both he and Alan agreed ‘it’s the right thing here’). Over the course of nine months I read Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time with a group of male ex-prisoners in the Helping Hands centre in Belfast. The novel is narrated by the character Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome (although his condition is not explicitly reported in the novel). Christopher believes (along with readers of the novel) that his mother is dead following an unexpected hospital visit two years previously during which it was ‘discovered’ she had a heart condition. Christopher lives with his father, and the novel begins with the former discovering the neighbour’s dog, Wellington, has been killed, and he decides to write a detective novel to solve Wellington’s murder. Christopher’s father does not want his son to pursue his investigation for reasons that become clear later in the novel. The following conversation occurs between Christopher and his father after Christopher divulges his suspicions about the ‘Prime Suspect’ for the dog’s murder, which Christopher believes is Mr Shears, the neighbour and ex-husband of the dog’s owner: ‘[Father] shouted, ‘I will not have that man’s name mentioned in my house.’ I asked, ‘Why not?’ And he said, ‘That man is evil.’ And I said, ‘Does that mean he might have killed Wellington?’ Father put this head in his hands and said, ‘Jesus wept.’ I could see that Father was angry with me, so I said, ‘I know you told me not to get involved in other people’s business but Mrs Shears is a friend of ours.’ And Father said, ‘Well she’s not a friend any more.’62

The men in my ex-prisoners’ group reacted to this section by working together to try to establish motivation for Father’s dislike of Mr Shears. Alan* suggested that ‘something isn’t right about the way he [Father] found out about her [Christopher’s mother] ending up in hospital before she died, so maybe she had an affair with Mr Shears and was with him when she [the mother] was admitted [to hospital]’.

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This particular narrative gap becomes foregrounded later, in the following exchange between Christopher and Mrs Alexander (another neighbour), when, in the latter’s response to his questions about Mr Shears, Mrs Alexander divulges more by what she does not say: She sucked in a big breath and said, ‘Perhaps it would be best not to talk about these things, Christopher.’ And I asked, ‘Why not?’ And she said, ‘Because.’ Then she stopped and decided to start saying a different sentence. . . . Then she sucked in another big breath and said, ‘Because . . . because I think you know why your father doesn’t like Mr Shears very much.’ Then I asked, ‘Did Mr Shears kill Mother?’63

At this point, attention is drawn to the ellipsis marks and the repeated ‘because’, which acts as a kind of pro-ellipsis and thus further foregrounds the gap. Alan suggested here that Mrs Alexander is reluctant to tell him something: ‘She’s thinking what to say here’. This gives rise to discussions about what it is she thinks he should know, whose place it is to tell him (both Alan and Frank claimed she is ‘being kind’ but is ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’) and why they are ‘not on the same track’ with their understanding of each other. This latter point could be explained by considering interpretative ‘frames’.64 In the text-world, Christopher interprets the ‘unnarrated’ or unspoken as fitting a ‘death’ frame; in other words, his ‘knowledge’ of his mother’s death prompts him to make a causal link between it and his father’s dislike of Mr Shears, so that he misinterprets Mrs Alexander’s advice (‘Did Mr Shears kill Mother?’). However, Mrs Alexander does not ‘know’ about the mother’s ‘death’ and so her unnarrated information is predicated on an ‘affair’ frame. In trying to fill the gap, Mrs Alexander creates a greater lacuna, which she acknowledges when she says, ‘I shouldn’t have said what I said. And if I don’t explain, you’ll carry on wondering what I meant. And you might ask your father. . . . So I’m going to explain why I said what I said.’ In so doing, the two ‘tracks’ or frames that are activated in the interaction are reduced to one, both for Christopher and the readers.65 Literary fiction provides ways of seeing, thinking and saying, and may offer one of the most effective ways of developing critical thinking, explained by Tony Anderson and Rebecca Soden as ‘identifying assump­ tions, identifying and dealing with equivocation, making value judgements, analyzing arguments, asking and answering questions of clarification or challenge’, and specifically ‘the ability to . . . propose opinions alternative to one’s own and to know what

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evidence would support these’.66 Their work and the work of others67 show that peer interaction is ‘potentially useful’ for ‘inculcating critical thinking skills’, and indicate that results are better in academic exercises using peer interaction with students if they are consistently applied over time. There are obvious parallels here between ‘peer interaction’ and the reading group discussions in prison (and elsewhere). The latter demon­strate that our readers frequently adopted a range of alternative perspectives when the texts are read aloud in small groups than if they read the same texts alone (as some of the women did with the Caldwell novel, and who later made comments such as ‘I did not get that when I read it myself!’, ‘Wow! I wouldn’t have thought of that’). Moreover, the more stylistically rich the literature is, the more cognitive work the readers must do in order to achieve a coherent interpreta­tion. This work often involves establishing causal relationships (as in ‘Sand’ and The Curious Incident), establishing motivation for and filling narrative gaps, as well as considering alternative stories. As one prisoner put it, reading such fiction aloud in groups ‘helps me to understand people in the stories because I understand what they’re experiencing. I see myself in [them].’ Alan, from the ex-prisoner group, told me that this is a cyclical process because ‘you have to get into their [the character’s] mind and then use situations like hers [Christopher’s mother’s] to put yourself into situations and use that experience [in deciding how to act in the real world]’. Such comments evidence the invocation of knowledge frames and the process of situation-mapping by readers in order to understand what characters and (indeed) people are experiencing. Reading in groups, then, may offer a way of formulating ‘emotional schemas’68 which involve planning, conceptualising and strategising emotional responses. Moreover, reading together and discussing fictional events and states may well help readers to ‘normalise’ rather than ‘pathologise’ their own and others’ emotions.69 While there is common ground among general-knowledge frames, stylistic­ ally rich literary fiction has the capacity to extend, disrupt and invigorate existing knowledge structures as well as establish new ones through a range of stylistic devices, including priming, binding, foregrounding and script or schema deviation and schema reinforcement.70 These are skills that can be – and are – applied in real life. By sharing the reading experience and their personal connections to the literature in read-aloud groups, readers can collectively negotiate these schemas or frames in order to make the fictional stories – and their own narratives – ‘make sense’. As Alan contends, ‘listening to other opinions helps me work out the meaning [and] lets me see how the person

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works – and it gives me mental power to work it out’.71 Furthermore, the sharing of personal narratives is anchored to the fictional stories; thus, the literary texts provide a ‘distancing buffer’72 for prisoners’ own contributions, making the project a ‘safe’ environment in which to engage, assess and reflect on readers’ own often chaotic experiential histories. Indeed, perspective-taking was central to the women’s (self-recorded) accounts73 of the benefits they gained from the reading experiences: ‘things I thought were strange are actually not as it is [sic] shared by others’; ‘Other people’s views can help to understand some things better’; ‘I enjoy listening to other people and can understand other people and most of all I WANT TO ENJOY & UNDERSTAND VIEWS now’ (capitals in original). When writing this chapter, I met again with Alan in March 2018, the ex-prisoner who had read The Curious Incident in my reading group four years earlier. While discussing the novel together, Alan characterised the father character as a ‘controller’, saying ‘If he saw a cup out of place he’d probably go and fix it’. I asked him why he thought that when it is not narrated and he replied ‘But you have to read between the lines’. Speaking about the benefits of reading together, he said ‘This [reading-aloud model] should be taught in school from age five – I learnt more in this group than I did in the thirty-six years before it’. When I asked him to elaborate, he said, ‘It’s because you learn so many opinions’. He then alluded to the dynamism of narrative gaps: ‘In jail, I had to learn to read people but [the] ‘Reading For Life’ [group] was good because what you saw in the story was not how it was’ (he was referring to the way the reading process and the lack of transparency allowed time to consider alternative or unnarrated stories, whereas in prison he had to be decisive – and quick – in reading others). He concluded by saying ‘It makes you re-evaluate, focus more. It gives you social skills, debating skills, confidence, and coming to the meaning [of narratives] lets you see how other people’s minds work.’ Alan’s comments typify what my experience of working with readers in restrictive environments has shown: which is that fiction is not merely a pleasurable activity – it is necessary. It offers a safe space to engage with contextually relevant or analogical ‘stories’, the impact of which is enhanced dynamically by real-time reading and group discussion, and the totality of both leaves an emotional and cognitive imprint on readers, extending well beyond the life (or lives) of the reading sessions.

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Notes   1. Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 4–5.   2. For example, Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach’, New Literary History, 3:2 (1972), pp. 279–99; Michael Burke, ‘Literature as Parable’, in Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen (eds), Cognitive Poetics in Practice (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 115–28; Michael Burke, Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind (New York: Routledge, 2011); Keith Oatley, ‘Why Fiction May Be Twice as True as Fact: Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation’, Review of General Psychology, 3:2 (1999), pp. 101–17; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Anthony J. Sanford and Catherine Emmott, Mind, Brain, and Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).  3. Turner, The Literary Mind, p. 26.  4. Anne-Marie Slotboom, Catrien Bijleveld, Samora Day and Anne van Giezen, ‘Gedetineerde vrouwen in Nederland. Over import – en deprivatiefactoren bij detentieschade [‘Detained women in the Nether­ lands: on importation and deprivation factors in detention damage’] (Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek en Documentatiecentrum [WODC], Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 2008).   5. Joan Swann and Daniel Allington, ‘Reading Groups and the Language of Literary Texts: A Case Study in Social Reading’, Language and Litera­ture, 18:3 (2009), pp. 247–64; Sara Whiteley, ‘Text World Theory, Real Readers and Emotional Responses to The Remains of the Day’, Language and Literature, 20:1 (2011), pp. 23–41; Patricia Canning and Sara Whiteley (eds), Language and Literature, 26:2 (special issue on reader response research) (2017).  6. Patricia Canning, ‘Text World Theory and Real World Readers: From Literature to Life in a Belfast Prison’, Language and Literature, 26:2 (2017), pp. 172–87.  7. Anne Schwan, ‘Reading and Writing in Prison’, Critical Survey, 23:3 (2011), pp. 1–5.   8. Patricia Canning, ‘Poetic Justice: A Narrative of Belfast Breakthroughs’, The Reader, 48 (2012), pp. 59–65; Canning, ‘Text World Theory’.  9. For examples, see: Oatley, ‘Why Fiction May Be Twice as True’; Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006); Raymond A. Mar, Keith Oatley, Jennifer dela Paz, Jacob Hirsh and Jordan B. Peterson, ‘Bookworms vs. Nerds: Exposure to Fiction versus Non-fiction, Divergent Associations with Social Ability, and Simulation of Fictional

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Social Worlds’, Journal of Research in Personality, 40 (2006), pp. 694–712; Raymond A. Mar, Keith Oatley and Jordan B. Peterson, ‘Exploring the Link Between Reading Fiction and Empathy: Ruling Out Individual Differences and Examining Outcomes’, Communications, 34 (2009), pp. 407–28; Maja Djikic, Keith Oatley and Mihnea C. ­Moldoveanu, ‘Reading Other Minds: Effects of Literature on Empathy’, Scientific Study of Literature, 3:1 (2013), pp. 28–47. 10. For example: Gerald C. Cupchik, Keith Oatley and Peter Vorderer, ‘Emotional Effects of Reading Excerpts from Short Stories by James Joyce’, Poetics, 25 (1998), pp. 363–77; Sara Whiteley, ‘Text World Theory’; Canning, ‘Text World Theory’. 11. Richard J. Gerrig and David N. Rapp, ‘Psychological Processes Underlying Literary Impact’, Poetics Today, 25:2 (2004), pp. 265–81; Raymond A. Mar and Keith Oatley, ‘The Function of Fiction Is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3 (2008), pp. 173–92; Maja Djikic, Keith Oatley, Sara Zoeterman and Jordan B. Peterson, ‘On Being Moved By Art: How Reading Fiction Transforms the Self’, Creativity Research Journal, 21:1 (2009), pp. 24–9. 12. Katrina Fong, Justin B. Mullin and Raymond A. Mar, ‘What You Read Matters: The Role of Fiction Genre in Predicting Interpersonal Sensitivity’, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7:4 (2013), pp. 370–6. 13. Anthony J. Sanford and Patrick Sturt, ‘Depth of Processing in Language Comprehension: Not Noticing the Evidence’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6 (2002), pp. 382–6. 14. Jan Mukarovský, ‘Standard Language and Poetic Language’, in Paul Garvin (ed.), A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1964), pp. 17–30; Willie van Peer, Stylistics and Psychology: Investigations of Foregrounding (London: Croom Helm, 1986); Willie van Peer, J. Hakemulder and Sonia Zyngier, ‘Lines on Feeling: Foregrounding, Aesthetics and Meaning’, Language and Literature, 16:2 (2007), pp. 197–213. 15. Sanford and Emmott, Mind, Brain, and Narrative, p. 73. 16. David S. Miall and Don Kuiken, ‘Foregrounding, Defamiliarization, and Affect: Response to Literary Stories’, Poetics, 22 (1994), pp. 389–407 (p. 396); see also David S. Miall and Don Kuiken, ‘The Form of Reading: Empirical Studies of Literariness’, Poetics, 25 (1998), pp. 327–41. 17. Miall and Kuiken, ‘Foregrounding, Defamiliarization, and Affect’, p. 404. 18. Ibid., p. 389. See also van Peer, Stylistics and Psychology, particularly on the correlation between foregrounding and ‘discussion value’. 19. Simon Baron-Cohen, Sally Wheelwright, Jacqueline Hill, Yogini Raste and Ian Plumb, ‘The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test Revised Version: A Study with Normal Adults, and Adults with Asperger Syndrome or High-functioning Autism’, Journal of Child Psychiatry, 42:2 (2001), pp. 241–51.

348  Patricia Canning 20. Canning’s work on real-world readers’ real-time reading responses marks a shift away from the experimental context. See Canning ‘Text World Theory’. See also Whiteley, ‘Text World Theory’. 21. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Wigham and Wayne E. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 221. 22. Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach’, New Literary History, 3:2 (1972), pp. 279–99 (p. 280). 23. Ibid., p. 280. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., pp. 293–4. 26. Mukarovský, ‘Standard Language and Poetic Language’. 27. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 28. Iser, ‘The Reading Process’, p. 284. 29. Gerald Prince, ‘The Disnarrated’, Style, 22:1 (1998), pp. 1–8 (p. 1). 30. The project began as the ‘Get Into Reading’ programme commissioned by The Reader Organisation based in Liverpool, whose aims include ‘improving wellbeing, reducing social isolation and building stronger communities’. See (accessed 13 December 2019). When funding ended, I developed the project with funding from the prison authorities, along with several new projects across Northern Ireland funded by the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust and the Northern Health and Social Care Trust. 31. Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals and Unders­tanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977); Deborah Tannen, ‘What’s in a Frame? Surface Evidence for Underlying Expectations’, in Deborah Tannen (ed.), Framing in Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 14–56; Deborah Tannen and Cynthia Wallat, ‘Interactive Frames and Knowledge Schemas in Interaction: Examples from a Medical Examination/Interview’, in Tannen (ed.), Framing in Discourse, pp. 57–76. 32. Sanford and Emmott, Mind, Brain, and Narrative, pp. 5, 17, 73. 33. Iser, The Act of Reading, p. 107. 34. Iser, ‘The Reading Process’, p. 280. 35. Millicent Bell, ‘Narrative Gaps/Narrative Meaning’, Raritan, 6:1 (1986), pp. 84–102. 36. Prince, ‘The Disnarrated’; Harold F. Mosher, ‘The Narrated and Its Negatives: The Nonnarrated and the Disnarrated in Joyce’s Dubliners’, Style, 27 (1993), pp. 407–27. 37. Donald E. Hardy, ‘Towards a Stylistic Typology of Narrative Gaps: Knowledge Gapping in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction’, Language and Literature, 14:4 (2005), pp. 363–75. 38. Prince, ‘The Disnarrated’, p. 1. 39. Ibid., p. 5.

Narrative Gaps, the ‘Disnarrated’ and Style in Prison Reading Groups   349

40. Ibid., p. 1. 41. Sanford and Emmott, Mind, Brain, and Narrative. 42. Pat Lacey, ‘Uncle Ifor’s Welsh Dresser’, in Steve Bowles (ed.), Stench of Kerosene and Other Short Stories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 70–1. 43. Ibid., p. 71. 44. Wanda Burnett, ‘Sand’, in Whitt Burnett and M. Foley (eds), A Story Anthology: Thirty-Three Selections from the European Years of the ‘Story’ (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), pp. 228–9. 45. Incidentally, I had not been thinking about ‘gaps’ in the sense of ‘narrative gaps’ and their impact at the time either of reading this story or of writing the observation notes. 46. Burnett, ‘Sand’. 47. When ellipses are signalled (as they are here with a series of dots) they draw readers’ attention more explicitly to the unwritten than an implicit gap. In this way, I argue that ‘disnarration’ works not only on a semantic or cognitive level, but on a graphological one. 48. Iser, ‘The Reading Process’, p. 285. 49. Mosher, ‘The Narrated and Its Negatives’, p. 415. 50. Lucy Caldwell, All the Beggars Riding (London: Faber and Faber, 2013). 51. Ibid., p. 123. 52. Ibid., p. 48. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., p. 47. 55. Bel Kaufman, ‘Sunday in the Park’, in Bowles (ed.), Stench of Kerosene, pp. 105–8. 56. Ibid., p. 105. 57. Ibid., p. 106. 58. Ibid., p. 107. 59. Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short, Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, 2nd edition (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007). 60. Kaufman, ‘Sunday in the Park’, p. 107. 61. Ibid., p. 105. 62. Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 63. 63. Ibid., p. 73. 64. Tannen and Wallat, ‘Interactive Frames’, p. 58. 65. I have written elsewhere (Canning, ‘Poetic Justice’) about Alan’s* response to the mother’s letters, which themselves constitute gap-filling. Alan’s reaction constitutes a powerful emotional shift in perspective – having previously considered the mother to be ‘a bitch’ for most of the novel (for leaving her son), his response to her letters indicated that he subsequently experienced an empathic turnaround: he said, ‘she sacrificed the most important thing in her life [her son] to give him a better life’.

350  Patricia Canning 66. Tony Anderson and Rebecca Soden, ‘Peer Interaction and the Learning of Critical Thinking’, Psychology Learning and Teaching, 1:1 (2001), pp. 34–7 (p. 37). 67. For example, Deanna Kuhn, Victoria Shaw and Mark Felton, ‘Effects of Dyadic Interaction on Argumentative Reasoning’, Cognition and Instruction, 15:3 (1997), pp. 287–316. 68. Robert L. Leahy, ‘A Model of Emotional Schemas’, Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 9 (2002), pp. 177–90. 69. Ibid., p. 180. See also the discussion of Mary* in Canning, ‘Text World Theory’. 70. Lesley Jeffries, ‘Schema Affirmation and White Asparagus: Cultural Multilingualism Among Readers of Texts’, Language and Literature, 10:4 (2001), pp. 325–43. 71. Author’s interview record, 2018. 72. Alexis McNay, ‘Diaries of the Reader Organisation’, The Reader, 40 (2010), pp. 104–5. 73. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive. In the thirty-eight collected responses to a five-point self-assessment Likert scale of wellbeing (on which 0 = disagree 5 = strongly agree), the highest mean score (4.4) on any of the six key wellbeing criteria was for ‘understanding others’ views’.

Select Bibliography

The bibliography lists mostly print publications cited in the text as well as suggested further reading. Abel, Trudi Johanna, ‘A Man of Letters, A Man of Business: Edward Stratemeyer and the Adolescent Reader, 1890–1930’, PhD dissertation (Rutgers University, 1993). Adam, Christian, Der Traum vom Jahre Null, Autoren, Bestseller, Leser: Die Neuordnung der Bücherwelt in Ost und West nach 1945 (Berlin: Galiani, 2016). Adam, Christian, Lesen unter Hitler: Autoren, Bestseller, Leser im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Galiani, 2010). Adejunmobi, Moradewun, Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2004). Adenekan, Shola, ‘New Voices, New Media: Class, Sex and Politics in Online Nigerian and Kenyan Poetry’, Postcolonial Text, 11:1 (2016), pp. 1–21. Adkins, K., ‘Convict Probation Station Libraries in Colonial Tasmania’, Script and Print, 34:2 (2010), pp. 87–92. Ahnert, Ruth, The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Allan, Michael, In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). Allen, Takerra, Thicker Than Water (2008; New Brunswick, NJ: Angelic Script Publishing, 2009). Allender, Tim, Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820–1932 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). Alston, Leonard, Education and Citizenship in India (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1910). Anderson, Tony, and Rebecca Soden, ‘Peer Interaction and the Learning of Critical Thinking’, Psychology Learning and Teaching, 1:1 (2001), pp. 34–7. Antoniou, Alex, ‘R v Peacock: Landmark Trial Redefines Obscenity Law’, Sexuality in Focus, 10:1 (February 2013), pp. 85–103, available at (accessed 2 December 2019). 351

352  Select Bibliography Ashbee, Henry Spencer, Catena Librorum Tacendorum: Being Notes BioIcono-Graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books (1885; New York: Documentary Books, 1962). Ashbee, Henry Spencer, Index Librorum Prohibitorum: Being Notes Bio-biblio-icono-graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books (1877; New York: Documentary Books, 1962). Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, The Health of Australia’s Prisoners 2015 (Canberra: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2015). Bailin, Miriam, ‘Victorian Readers’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 44 (2016), pp. 727–39. Barber, Karin, Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Barbian, Jan-Pieter, ‘Die politische Kontrolle des Buchmarkts’, in Die Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Drittes Reich (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015). Barbian, Jan-Pieter, Literaturpolitik im Dritten Reich: Institutionen, Kom­ petenzen, Betätigungsfelder (Munich: dtv, 1995). Barbian, Jan-Pieter, The Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany: Books in the Media Dictatorship, trans. Kate Sturge (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). Barnard, Stuart Wayne, ‘Religious Print Culture and the British and Foreign Bible Society in Canada, 1820–1904’, PhD dissertation (University of Calgary, 2016). Baron-Cohen, Simon, Sally Wheelwright, Jacqueline Hill, Yogini Raste and Ian Plumb, ‘The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test Revised Version: A Study with Normal Adults, and Adults with Asperger Syndrome or High-functioning Autism’, Journal of Child Psychiatry, 42:2 (2001), pp. 241–51. Beetham, Margaret, ‘“Natural but Firm”: The Corset Correspondence in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine’, Women: A Cultural Review, 2:2 (1991), pp. 163–7. Bell, Donald, ‘Reading by Touch’, Typographica, 6 (December 1962), pp. 6–24. Bell, Millicent, ‘Narrative Gaps/Narrative Meaning’, Raritan, 6:1 (1986), pp. 84–102. Bennett, John, Letters to a Young Lady, on a Variety of Useful and Interesting Subjects (Warrington: W. Eyres, 1789). Bennett, John, Strictures on Female Education; Chiefly as It Relates to the Culture of the Heart (London: T. Cadell, 1787). Benton, A. H., Indian Moral Instruction and Caste Problems: Solutions (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1917). Benwell, Bethan, and James Procter, Reading Across Worlds: Transnational Book Groups and the Reception of Difference (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Bgoya, Walter, and Mary Jay, ‘Publishing in Africa from Independence to the Present Day’, Research in African Literatures, 44:2 (2013), pp. 17–34.

Select Bibliography   353

Bongie, Lawrence L., ‘The Eighteenth Century Marian Controversy and an Unpublished Letter by David Hume’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 1:4 (1963–4), pp. 236–52. Bosch-Santana, Stephanie, ‘From Nation to Network: Blog and Facebook Fiction from Southern Africa’, Research in African Literatures, 49:1 (2018), pp. 187–208. Brewer, John, ‘Reconstructing the Reader: Prescriptions, Texts and Strategies in Anna Larpent’s Reading’, in James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 226–45. Brewer, John, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997). Brooks, Jeffrey, ‘The Breakdown in Production and Distribution of Printed Material, 1917–1927’, in A. Gleason et al. (eds), Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). Brouillette, Sarah, ‘UNESCO and the Book in the Developing World’, Representations, 127:1 (2014), pp. 33–54. Brown, David, ‘From “Cotton Lord” to Landed Aristocrat: The Rise of Sir George Philips Bart., 1766–1847’, Historical Research, 69:168 (1996), pp. 62–82. Brown, Richard, James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Bull, Sarah, ‘Reading, Writing, and Publishing an Obscene Canon: The Archival Logic of the Secret Museum, c. 1860–c. 1900’, Book History, 20:1 (2017), pp. 226–57, doi 10.1353/bh.2017.0007. Burk, Carolyn Frear, ‘The Collecting Instinct’, Pedagogical Seminary, 7:2 (April 1900), pp. 179–207. Burke, Michael, ‘Literature as Parable’, in Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen (eds), Cognitive Poetics in Practice (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 115–28. Burke, Michael, Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind (New York: Routledge, 2011). Burt, Charles Thomas, The Moon Society: A Century of Achievement, 1848–1948 (Brighton: Moon Works, 1948). Butler, Judith, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). Canning, Patricia, ‘Poetic Justice: A Narrative of Belfast Breakthroughs’, The Reader, 48 (2012), pp. 59–65. Canning, Patricia, ‘Text World Theory and Real World Readers: From Literature to Life in a Belfast Prison’, Language and Literature, 26:2 (2017), pp. 172–87. Canning, Patricia, and Sara Whiteley (eds), Language and Literature, 26:2 (special issue on reader response research) (2017). Carrión, Jorge, Against Amazon (2017), available at (accessed 20 Nov­em­ ber 2018). Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Cash, Arthur, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Censer, Jack, Prelude to Power: The Parisian Press 1789–1791 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Chambert-Loir, Henri, ‘Muhammad Bakir: A Batavian Scribe and Author in the Nineteenth Century’, Review of Indonesian and Malayan Affairs, 18 (1984), pp. 44–71. Chapone, Hester, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (London: H. Hughs, 1773). Chartier, Roger, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Chase, Frederick, ‘He Invented the Rover Boys’, Christian Science Monitor, 5 December 1942, p. WM7. Chela, Efemia, interview with Renée Edwige Dro, Johannesburg Review of Books, 7 August 2017, available at (accessed 25 November 2018). Clarke, Norma, Dr Johnson’s Women (London: Pimlico, 2005). Cloete, Nico, Peter Maasen and Tracy Bailey, Knowledge Production and Contradictory Functions in African Higher Education (Cape Town: African Minds, 2015). Cohn, Bernard S., Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Colligan, Colette, A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890–1960 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014). Collins, Jim, Bring on the Books for Everybody (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Cornwall, Andrea, ‘Buzzwords and Fuzzwords: Deconstructing Development Discourse’, Development in Practice, 17:4–5 (2007), pp. 471–84. Cott, Nancy, The Grounding of American Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Covernton, J. G., Vernacular Reading Books in the Bombay Presidency (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906). Cram, E., Melanie Loehwing and John Louis Lucaites, ‘Civic Sights: Theorizing Deliberative and Photographic Publicity in the Visual Public Sphere’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 49:3 (2016), pp. 227–53. Croft, Alfred, Review of Education in India in 1886, with Special Reference to the Report of the Education Commission (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1888).

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Cross, P. J., ‘The Private Case: A History’, in P. R. Harris (ed.), The Library of the British Museum: Retrospective Essays on the Department of Printed Book (London: British Library, 1991). Cupchik, Gerald C., Keith Oatley and Peter Vorderer, ‘Emotional Effects of Reading Excerpts from Short Stories by James Joyce’, Poetics, 25 (1998), pp. 363–77. Currey, James, Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2008). Darnton, Robert, ‘Literary Surveillance in the British Raj’, Book History, 4 (2001), pp. 133–76. Davis, Caroline, Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Davis, Caroline, and David Johnson (eds), The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Dawe, S. (ed.), Vocational Education and Training for Adult Prisoners and Offenders in Australia: Research Readings (Adelaide: National Centre for Vocational Education Research, 2007). de Ritter, Richard, Imagining Women Readers, 1789–1820: Well-Regulated Minds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Dennys, N. B., ‘A Contribution to Malayan Bibliography’, Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 5 (1880), pp. 69–123. Ditzion, Sidney, ‘Mechanics’ and Mercantile Libraries’, Library Quarterly, 10:2 (1940), p. 205. Ditzion, Sidney, ‘Social Reform, Education, and the Library, 1850–1900’, Library Quarterly, 9:2 (1939), pp. 156–84. Djikic, Maja, Keith Oatley and Mihnea C. Moldoveanu, ‘Reading Other Minds: Effects of Literature on Empathy’, Scientific Study of Literature, 3:1 (2013), pp. 28–47. Djikic, Maja, Keith Oatley, Sara Zoeterman and Jordan B. Peterson, ‘On Being Moved By Art: How Reading Fiction Transforms the Self’, ­Creativity Research Journal, 21:1 (2009), pp. 24–9. Ducournau, Claire, La Fabrique des classiques africains. Écrivains d’Afrique subsaharienne francophone (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2017). Düsterberg, Rolf, Hanns Johst, ‘Der Barde der SS’: Karrieren eines deutschen Dichters (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004). Errington, Joseph, Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). Finkelstein, David, ‘Book Circulation and Reader Responses in Colonial India’, in Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond (eds), Books Without Borders, Vol. II: Perspectives from South Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 100–11. Finn, Peter, and Petra Couvée, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book (New York: Pantheon, 2014).

356  Select Bibliography Fish, Stanley E., ‘Interpreting the Variorum’, Critical Inquiry, 2:3 (1976), pp. 465–85. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ‘Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s’, Slavic Review, 55:1 (spring 1996), pp. 78–105. Fong, Katrina, Justin B. Mullin and Raymond A. Mar, ‘What You Read Matters: The Role of Fiction Genre in Predicting Interpersonal Sensitivity’, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7:4 (2013), pp. 370–6. Fraser, Charles Frederick, Raised Print Books for the Blind, Origin and History of Embossed Printing, Interesting Facts about the Circulating Library for the Blind of the School for the Blind (Halifax: Halifax Printing Company, 1895). Fraser, Robert, and Mary Hammond (eds), Books Without Borders, Vol. II: Perspectives from South Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Fraxi, Pisanus (H. S. Ashbee), Catena Librorum Tacendorum (1885; New York: Documentary Books, 1962), pp. 242–3. Fröhlich, Elke (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil 1. Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, Band VII, July 1939–March 1940 (Munich: Saur, 1998). Fyfe, Janet, Books Behind Bars: The Role of Books, Reading, and Libraries in British Prison Reform, 1701–1911 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992). Garner, Jane, ‘Experiencing the Use of Australian Prison Libraries: A Phenomenological Study’, PhD dissertation (RMIT University, 2017). Garvey, Ellen Gruber, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Gassert, Philipp, and Daniel S. Mattern, The Hitler Library: A Bibliography (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001). Gelber, Steven M., ‘Free Market Metaphor: The Historical Dynamics of Stamp Collecting’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34:4 (October 1992), pp. 742–69. Gerrig, Richard J., and David N. Rapp, ‘Psychological Processes Underlying Literary Impact’, Poetics Today, 25:2 (2004), pp. 265–81. Gibbon, William, ‘The Blind Student of Greek’, The Mentor, 3:5 (May 1893), pp. 179–81. Gilchrist, J., and W. J. Murray, The Press in the French Revolution: A Selection of Documents Taken from the Press of the Revolution for the Years 1789–1794 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1971). Ginsburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-​ Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Glass, Loren (ed.), After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016). Glover, Katherine, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011).

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Goebbels, Joseph, Tagebücher, Band II: 1930–1934, ed. Ralf Georg Reuth (Munich: Piper, 1999). Goebbels, Joseph, Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei, Eine historische Darstellung in Tagebuchblättern (Munich: Eher Verlag, 1934). Goody, Jack, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Gottschalk, Louis R., Jean Paul Marat, A Study in Radicalism (1927; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Graff, Harvey J., The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth Century City (New York: Academic Press, 1979). Gramsci, Antonio, Letters from Prison, ed. Frank Rosengarten, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Grenby, M. O., ‘The Origins of Children’s Literature’, in M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 9–11. Haddon, Mark, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (London: Vintage, 2004). Hagen, Hans W., ‘Um den Unterhaltungsroman’, Die Bücherkunde, 11:3–4 (1944), p. 43. Haines, Derek, ‘The E-Reader Device Is Dying a Rapid Death’, Just Publishing Advice, 17 June 2018, at (accessed 25 August 2018). Hamilton, Adrian, The Infamous Essay on Woman (London: Deutsch, 1972). Hantisch, R., ‘Raffles Library and Museum, Singapore’, in Walter Makepeace, Gilbert Brook and Roland Braddell (eds), One Hundred Years of Singapore, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1921), vol. I, pp. 519–66. Hardy, Donald E., ‘Towards a Stylistic Typology of Narrative Gaps: Knowledge Gapping in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction’, Language and Literature, 14:4 (2005), pp. 363–75. Hinze, Franz, Frontbuchhandlung Paris: Erinnerungen eines Beteiligten (Friedrichs­dorf: Hardt und Wörner, 1999). Hodgkin, Katherine, and Susannah Radstone (eds), Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (London: Routledge, 2003). Holden, Philip, ‘Colonial Fiction, Hybrid Lives: Early Singaporean Fiction in The Straits Chinese Magazine’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 33:1 (1998), pp. 85–97. Holden, Philip, ‘The Beginnings of “Asian Modernity” in Singapore: A Straits Chinese Body Project’, Common/Plural, 1:7 (1999), pp. 59–79. Hooton, Christopher, ‘A Long List of Sex Acts Just Got Banned in UK Porn’, Independent, 2 December 2014, available at (accessed 2 December 2019). Huggan, Graham, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001).

358  Select Bibliography Hunter, Emma, ‘Komkya and the Convening of a Chagga Public, 1953–1961’, in Derek R. Peterson, Emma Hunter and Stephanie Newell (eds), African Print Cultures: Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), pp. 283–305. Illingworth, W. H., History of Education of the Blind (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1910). Iser, Wolfgang, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach’, New Literary History, 3:2 (1972), pp. 279–99. Jameson, Fredric, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious (New York: Cornell University Press, 1994). Jameson, Fredric, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital­ism’, Social Text, 15 (autumn 1986), pp. 65–88. Jeffries, Lesley, ‘Schema Affirmation and White Asparagus: Cultural Multilingualism Among Readers of Texts’, Language and Literature, 10:4 (2001), pp. 325–43. Jeppie, Shamil, and Souleymane Bachir Diagne (eds), The Meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town: Human Science Research Council of South Africa Press, 2008). Johns, B. G., Blind People: Their Works and Ways (London: John Murray, 1867). Johnson, A. Ross, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). Johnson, A. Ross, and R. Eugene Parta (eds), Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (New York: Central European University Press, 2010). Johnson, Deidre, Stratemeyer Pseudonyms and Series Books: An Annotated Checklist of Stratemeyer and Stratemeyer Syndicate Publications (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982). Johnston, James, Our Educational Policy in India (Edinburgh: John Maclaren, 1879). Julien, Eileen, ‘The Extroverted African Novel’, in Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel, Vol. I: History, Geography and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 2006). Kaestle, Carl F., ‘The History of Readers’, in Carl Kaestle et al. (eds), Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 33–72. Karr, Clarence, Authors and Audiences: Popular Canadian Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000). Kaufman, Paul, ‘The Community Library: A Chapter in English Social History’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 57:7 (1967), pp. 1–67.

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Kellerhoff, Sven Felix, ‘Mein Kampf ’, Die Karriere eines Buches (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2015). Kelly, Jason M., The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2009). Ken’ichi, Gotō, Shōwaki Nihon to Indoneshia (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1986). Kendrick, Walter, The Secret Museum (Philadelphia: Viking, 1987). Kenji, Ōe, ‘Jawa Nihongo gakkō kensetsu-ki’, Nihongo, 4:8 (1944), pp. 40–3. Kenji, Ōe, ‘Ryōgen chū’, Seiki, 1:4 (1944), pp. 66–75. Kind-Kovács, Friederike, and Jessie Labov (eds), Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond: Transnational Media During and After Socialism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015). Knörzer, J. E., Ali Dashti’s Prison Days: Life Under Reza Shah (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 1994). Kolchina, A. S., Radio Svoboda kak Literaturnyi Proekt: Sotsiokul’turnyi fenomen zarubezhnogo radioveshchaniia (Moscow: Izdatel’skii Dom Vysshei Shkoly Ekonomiki, 2014). Komaromi, Ann, ‘Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics’, Slavic Review, 71:1 (spring 2012), pp. 70–90, available at (accessed 10 December 2019). Kozlov, Vladimir A., Sheila Fitzpatrick and Sergei Mironenko (eds), Sedition: Everyday Resistance in the Soviet Union Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, trans. Olga Livshin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Kratz, E. U., ‘Running a Lending Library in Palembang in 1886 A. D.’, Indonesia Circle, 14 (1977), pp. 3–12. Krishnan, Madhu, ‘Affect, Empathy, and Engagement: Reading African Conflict in the Global Literary Marketplace’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 52:2 (2015), pp. 1–19. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Kuhn, Deanna, Victoria Shaw and Mark Felton, ‘Effects of Dyadic Interaction on Argumentative Reasoning’, Cognition and Instruction, 15:3 (1997), pp. 287–316. LaCapra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Lacey, Kate, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Malden: Polity Press, 2013). Ladenson, Elisabeth, Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2007). Lair, Lian Oliver, ‘Interrogating Trans* Identities in the Archives’, in Amy L. Stone and Jaime Cantrell (eds), Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), pp. 233–54. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

360  Select Bibliography Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Landes, Joan B., Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Langenbucher, Hellmuth, Volkhafte Dichtung unserer Zeit, 3rd edition (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1937). Langford, Paul, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman: 1689–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Langmuir, J. W., ‘Ontario Institution for the Education of the Blind’, in Fifth Annual Report of the Inspector of Asylums, Prisons, &c. for the Province of Ontario (Toronto: Hunter, Rose and Co., 1873), p. 56. Laquintano, Timothy, Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016). Lazarus, Neil, et al., Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). Leavy, Hanks W., Blindness and the Blind (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872). Leech, Geoffrey, and Mick Short, Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, 2nd edition (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007). Le Roux, Beth, ‘Book History in the African World: The State of the Discipline’, Book History, 15 (2012), pp. 248–300. Leow, Rachel, Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Lewis, Daniel, Dennis Rodgers and Michael Woodcock, ‘The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge’, Journal of Development Studies, 44:2 (2008), pp. 198–216, doi 10.1080/00220380701789828. Liddington, Jill, Presenting the Past: Anne Lister of Halifax, 1791–1840 (Hebden Bridge: Pennine Pens, 1994). Lim Huck Tee, Edward, Libraries in West Malaysia and Singapore (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaysia, 1970). Losch, Sebastian, ‘Unterhaltungsschrifttum – so oder so?’, Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel, 107 (16 April 1940), p. 137. Lovell, Stephen, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000). Ludwig, Karl, ‘Was liest die Jugend?’, Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel, 100 (22 July 1933), p. 538. Lustig, T. J., ‘“Moments of Punctuation”: Metonymy and Ellipsis in Tim O’Brien’, Yearbook of English Studies, 31 (2001), pp. 74–92. Lutz, Deborah, Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). Luyt, Brendan, ‘Centres of Calculation and Unruly Colonists: The Colonial Library in Singapore and Its Users, 1874–1900’, Journal of Documentation, 64:3 (2008), pp. 386–96.

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Luyt, Brendan, ‘Collectors and Collecting for the Raffles Museum in Singapore: 1920–1940’, Library and Information History, 26:3 (2010), pp. 183–95. Luyt, Brendan, ‘The Importance of Fiction to the Raffles Library, Singapore, During the Long Nineteenth-Century’, Library and Information History, 25:2 (2009), pp. 117–31. Mack, Edward, ‘Diasporic Markets: Japanese Print and Migration in São Paulo, 1908–1935’, Script and Print: Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, 29 (2005), pp. 163–77. Mahmood, Syed, History of English Education in India, Its Rise, Development, Progress, Present Condition and Prospects. Being A Narrative of the Various Phases of Educational Policy and Measures Adopted Under the British Rule from its Beginning to the Present Period (1781 to 1893) (Aligarh: M.A-O. College, 1895). Mancosu, Paolo, Zhivago’s Secret Journey: From Typescript to Book (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2016). Mar, Raymond A., and Keith Oatley, ‘The Function of Fiction Is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3 (2008), pp. 173–92. Mar, Raymond A., Keith Oatley and Jordan B. Peterson, ‘Exploring the Link Between Reading Fiction and Empathy: Ruling Out Individual Differences and Examining Outcomes’, Communications, 34 (2009), pp. 407–28. Mar, Raymond A., Keith Oatley, Jennifer dela Paz, Jacob Hirsh and Jordan B. Peterson, ‘Bookworms vs. Nerds: Exposure to Fiction versus Non-­ fiction, Divergent Associations with Social Ability, and Simulation of Fictional Social Worlds’, Journal of Research in Personality, 40 (2006), pp. 694–712. Marcus, Sharon, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Marshik, Celia, British Modernism and Censorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Martin, Susan K., ‘Tracking Reading in Nineteenth-Century Melbourne Diaries’, Australian Humanities Review, 56 (2014), pp. 27–54. Mason, Michael, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Massil, S. W., ‘The History of the National Library of Indonesia: The Bib­ lio­graphical Borobudur’, Libraries and Culture, 24:4 (1989), pp. 475–88. Matthews, John P. C., ‘The West’s Secret Marshall Plan for the Mind’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 16:3 (2003), pp. 409–27. Maxwell, W. E., ‘Malay Proverbs’, Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1 (1878), pp. 85–98. Mbodj-Pouye, Aissatou, Le Fil de l’écrit. Une anthropologie de l’alphabétisation au Mali (Lyon: ENS Editions, 2013).

362  Select Bibliography McGurl, Mark, ‘Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon’, Modern Language Quarterly, 77:3 (2016), pp. 447–71. McGurl, Mark, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). McLuhan, Marshall, ‘Radio: The Tribal Drum’, AV Communication Review, 12:2 (summer 1964), pp. 133–45. McNay, Alexis, ‘Diaries of the Reader Organisation’, The Reader, 40 (2010), pp. 104–5. Mendes, Peter, Clandestine Erotic Fiction in English, 1800–1930: A Bibliographical Study (London: Scolar Press, 1993). Mercado, Monica L., ‘“Have you ever read?” Imagining Women, Bibles, and Religious Print in Nineteenth-Century America’, US Catholic Historian, 31:3 (summer 2013), pp. 1–21. Miall, David S., and Don Kuiken, ‘Foregrounding, Defamiliarization, and Affect: Response to Literary Stories’, Poetics, 22 (1994), pp. 389–407. Miall, David, and Don Kuiken, ‘The Form of Reading: Empirical Studies of Literariness’, Poetics, 25 (1998), pp. 327–41. Milani, Abbas, Eminent Persians: The Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941–1979 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008). Mirsepassi, Ali, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Moretti, Franco, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1 (January–February 2000), pp. 54–68. Moretti, Franco, Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013). Mosher, Harold F., ‘The Narrated and Its Negatives: The Nonnarrated and the Disnarrated in Joyce’s Dubliners’, Style, 27 (1993), pp. 407–27. Moudileno, Lydie, ‘The Troubling Popularity of West African Romance Novels’, Research in African Literature, 39:4 (2008), pp. 120–32. Mudimbe, V. Y., The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Mukarovsky, Jan, ‘Standard Language and Poetic Language’, in Paul Garvin (ed.), A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1964), pp. 17–30. Murdoch, John, Hints on Government Education in India, with Special Reference to School Books (Madras: C. Foster, 1873). Naghibi, Nima, Women Write Iran: Nostalgia and Human Rights from the Diaspora (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Nathan, R., Progress of Education in India 1897/98–1901/02 (Calcutta: Super­intendent of Government Printing, 1904). Nelken, Dinah, Ich an Dich (Berlin: Weise, 1939). Newell, Stephanie, ‘Articulating Empire: Newspaper Readerships in Colonial West Africa’, New Formations, 73 (2011), pp. 26–42. Newell, Stephanie, West African Literatures: Ways of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Nishikawa, Kinohi, ‘Black Women Readers and the Uses of Urban Fiction’, in

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364  Select Bibliography Phillips, Mark Salber, ‘“If Mrs Mure be not sorry for poor King Charles”: History, the Novel and the Sentimental Reader’, History Workshop Journal, 43 (1997), pp. 110–31. Phillips, Mark Salber, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Piper, Ernst, Alfred Rosenberg, Hitlers Chefideologe (München: Blessing, 2005). Plöckinger, Othmar, Geschichte eines Buches: Adolf Hitlers ‘Mein Kampf ’ 1922–1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006). Pollak, S., The Autobiography and Reminiscences of S. Pollak, M.D. (St Louis: St Louis Medical Review, 1904). Prince, Gerald, ‘The Disnarrated’, Style, 22:1 (1998), pp. 1–8. Procter, James, ‘Reading, Taste, and Postcolonial Studies. Professional and Lay Readers of Things Fall Apart’, Interventions, 11:2 (2009), pp. 180–98. Proudfoot, Ian, Early Malay Printed Books (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaysia Press, 1993). Psacharopoulos, George, ‘Returns to Investment in Education: A Global Update’, World Development, 22:9 (1994), pp. 1325–43. Puttenham, George, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Wigham and Wayne E. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). Quintal, Gustav, and National Library of Australia, [Norfolk Island Register of Books and Slates Issued to the Prisoners] (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1969). Radway, Janice, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Radway, Janice, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Litera­ture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). Raffat, Donné, The Prison Papers of Bozorg Alavi: A Literary Odyssey (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985). Reisch, Alfred A., Hot Books in the Cold War: The CIA-Funded Secret Western Book Distribution Program Behind the Iron Curtain (New York: Central European University Press, 2013). Richards, Charles Granston (ed.), The Provision of Popular Reading Materials, ed. (Paris: UNESCO, 1959). Roberts, Lewis, ‘Trafficking in Literary Authority: Mudie’s Select Library and the Commodification of the Victorian Novel’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 34:1 (2006), pp. 1–25. Robinson, David, and Jean-Louis Triaud (eds), Le Temps Des Marabouts. Itinéraires et Stratégies Islamiques En Afrique Occidentale Française, v. 1880–1960 (Paris: Karthala, 1997). Robinson, E. B. F., True Sphere of the Blind (Toronto: William Briggs, 1896). Robinson, Julian, Viscount Ladywood (pseudonym), Gynecocracy (1893; Paris: Olympia Press, 2007).

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Rogers, Pat, and Paul Baines, ‘The Prosecutions of Edmund Curll, 1725–28’, Library, 52 (January 2004), pp. 176–94, doi 10.1093/library/5.2.176. Rose, Jonathan, Readers’ Liberation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Rose, Jonathan, ‘Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (January– March 1992), pp. 47–70. Rose, Jonathan, ‘The History of Education as the History of Reading’, Journal of the History of Education Society, 36:4–5 (July–September 2007), pp. 595–605. Rose, Jonathan (ed.), The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). Rose, Jonathan, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 2nd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Rosenzweig, Roy, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Rost, Reinhold, ‘Malay Language and Literature’, Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 16 (1885), pp. 99–101. Rutherford, John, William Moon and His Work for the Blind (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1891). Salmon, Claudine (ed.), Literary Migrations: Traditional Chinese Fiction in Asia (17th–20th Centuries) (Beijing: International Culture Publishing Corporation, 1987). Sanford, Anthony J., and Catherine Emmott, Mind, Brain, and Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Sanford, Anthony J., and Patrick Sturt, ‘Depth of Processing in Language Comprehension: Not Noticing the Evidence’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6 (2002), pp. 382–6. Santow, E. M., ‘Essay Towards a Bibliography of Siam’, Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 17 (1886), pp. 1–86. Satthianadhan, S., History of Education in the Madras Presidency (Madras: Srinivas, Varadachari & Co., 1894). Schank, Roger C., and Robert P. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals and Under­ standing: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977). Schneider, Tobias, ‘Bestseller im Dritten Reich: Ermittlung und Analyse der meistverkauften Romane in Deutschland 1933–1944’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 52:1 (2004), p. 77. Schwan, Anne, ‘Reading and Writing in Prison’, Critical Survey, 23:3 (2011), pp. 1–5. Seligo, Irene, ‘Vom Winde verweht, Die Geschichte eines Best Seller’, Literatur­ blatt der Frankfurter Zeitung, 5 December 1937. Sellah, Siti Hawa, Malay Literature of the 19th Century, trans. Quest Services (Kuala Lumpur: Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia, 2010). Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

366  Select Bibliography Sigel, Lisa Z., Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002). Sigel, Lisa Z., ‘Introduction: Issues and Problems in the History of Pornography’, in Lisa Z. Sigel (ed.), International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 1–26. Sigel, Lisa Z., Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012). Sin Tiew, Wai, ‘The History of the Library of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (SBRAS) 1877–1923’, n.p., available at (accessed 21 October 2017). Slaughter, Joseph, Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). Soda, Naoki, ‘The Malay World in Textbooks: The Transmission of Colonial Knowledge in British Malaya’, Southeast Asian Studies, 39:2 (2001), pp. 188–234. Sosin, Gene, Sparks of Liberty: An Insider’s Memoir of Radio Liberty (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). Spedding, Patrick, and James Lambert, ‘Fanny Hill, Lord Fanny, and the Myth of Metonymy’, Studies in Philology, 108:1 (January 2011), pp. 108–32, doi 10.1353/sip.2011.0001. Spencer, Mark G., David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005). Spufford, Margaret, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982). St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Stevenson, David, The Beggar’s Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2001). Stewart, Pamela J., and Andrew J. Strathern, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Stites, Richard, Passion and Perception: Essays on Russian Culture by Richard Stites, ed. David Goldfrank (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2010). Sturge‚ Kate, ‘“Flight from the Programme of National Socialism”? Translation in Nazi Germany’, in Christopher Rundle and Kate Sturge (eds), Translation Under Fascism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Sturge, Kate, ‘The Alien Within’: Translation into German During the Nazi Regime (Munich: Iudicium, 2004). Sullivan, M. G., ‘Rapin, Hume and the Identity of the Historian in ­Eighteenth-Century England’, History of European Ideas, 28:3 (2002), pp. 145–62.

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Swann, Joan, and Daniel Allington, ‘Reading Groups and the Language of Literary Texts: A Case Study in Social Reading’, Language and Literature, 18:3 (2009), pp. 247–64. Talwalker, Clare, ‘Colonial Dreaming: Textbooks in the Mythology of “Prim­ it­ive Accumulation”’, Dialectical Anthropology, 29 (2005), pp. 1–24. Tannen, Deborah, ‘What’s in a Frame? Surface Evidence for Underlying Expectations’, in Deborah Tannen (ed.), Framing in Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 14–56. Tannen, Deborah, and Cynthia Wallat, ‘Interactive Frames and Knowledge Schemas in Interaction: Examples from a Medical Examination/ Interview’, in Deborah Tannen (ed.), Framing in Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 57–76. Thier, Erich, Gestaltwandel des Arbeiters im Spiegel seiner Lektüre, Ein Beitrag zur Volkskunde und Leserführung (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1939). Thomas, F. W., The History and Prospects of British Education in India (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell and Co.,; London: George Bell and Sons, 1891). Thompson, John B., Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). Topdar, Sudipa, ‘Duties of a “Good Citizen”: Colonial Secondary School Textbook Policies in Late Nineteenth-century India’, South Asian History and Culture, 6:3 (2015), pp. 417–39. Towsey, Mark, ‘“An Infant Son to Truth Engage”: Virtue, Responsibility and Self-Improvement in the Reading of Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock, 1747–1815’, Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 2 (2007), p. 77. Troy, Michele K., Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). Turner, Mark, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). UNESCO, Book Development in Africa: Problems and Perspectives, ‘Reports and Papers on Mass Communication’ (Paris: UNESCO, 1969). UNESCO, Reading in the Mobile Era (Paris: UNESCO, 2016), available at (accessed 20 November 2018). van der Putten, Jan, ‘Abdullah Munsyi and the Missionaries’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde (BKI), 162:4 (2006), pp. 407–40. van Peer, Willie, Stylistics and Psychology: Investigations of Foregrounding (London: Croom Helm, 1986). van Peer, Willie, J. Hakemulder and Sonia Zyngier, ‘Lines on Feeling: Foregrounding, Aesthetics and Meaning’, Language and Literature, 16:2 (2007), pp. 197–213. Victorian Ombudsman, Investigation into the Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Prisoners in Victoria (Melbourne: Victorian Government Printer, 2015).

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Wyngaard, Amy, Bad Books: Rétif de la Bretonne, Sexuality, and Pornography (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012). Young, Robert J. C., ‘That Which Is Casually Called a Language’, PMLA, 131:5 (2016), pp. 1207–21. Zafari, Vali-Allah, Prison-Literature [Habsieh] in Persian Literature: From the Beginning/Emergence of Persian Poetry Until the End of the Zandieh Dynasty (Tehran: Amir Kabir Publications, 1985). Zastoupil, Lynn, and Martin Moir, ‘Introduction’, in Lynn Zastoupi and Martin Moir (eds), The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist–Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843 (Surrey: Curzon, 1999), pp. 1–72. Zell, Hans, and Raphaël Thierry, ‘Book Donation Programmes for Africa: Time for a Reappraisal? Two Perspectives’, African Research and Documentation: Journal of SCOLMA, 127 (2015). Available at (accessed 3 January 2020). Zunshine, Lisa, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006).

Index of Methods and Sources

Adolescents: Abel (Ch. 8) Africa: Bush (Ch. 14) African-Americans: Nishikawa (Ch. 15) America: Towsey (Ch. 1), Pearce (Ch. 5), Abel (Ch. 8), Nishikawa (Ch. 15) Australia: Carroll and Garner (Ch. 2) Blind readers: Pearce (Ch. 5) Britain: Towsey (Ch. 1), Watson (Ch. 4), Fermanis (Ch. 6), Nayar (Ch. 7) Canada: Pearce (Ch. 5) Censorship: Hurley (Ch. 3), Watson (Ch. 4), Sigel (Ch. 9), Fakhrkonandeh (Ch. 10), Adam (Ch. 11), Brandt (Ch. 13) France: Hurley (Ch. 3) Germany: Adam (Ch. 11) India: Nayar (Ch. 7) Indonesia: Wada (Ch. 12) Iran: Fakhrkonandeh (Ch. 10) Japan: Wada (Ch. 12) Libraries: Carroll and Garner (Ch. 2), Fermanis (Ch. 6), Adam (Ch. 11), Wada (Ch. 12) Northern Ireland: Canning (Ch. 16) Pornography: Watson (Ch. 4), Sigel (Ch. 9) Prisons: Carroll and Garner (Ch. 2), Fakhrkonandeh (Ch. 10), Canning (Ch. 16) Scotland: Watson (Ch. 4) Singapore: Fermanis (Ch. 6) Soviet Union: Brandt (Ch. 13) Transgender readers: Sigel (Ch. 9) Women: Towsey (Ch. 1), Fakhrkonandeh (Ch. 10)

370

General Index

Page numbers in italics denote display material in tables and figures. Numbers preceded by p refer to plates. Those followed by ‘n’ refer to notes. Chinese names and traditional Japanese names are presented in uninverted form. 47North, 32 48HourBooks, 314 Abdullah Munsyi (Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir), 128, 130 Abe Tomoji, 259 Abidjan Lit (Abidjan Reads), 291, 303 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 304 adolescent readers Nazi Germany, 242 see also Stratemeyer Syndicate books Adoras Romance series, 8, 300–1 African-American fiction, 8–9, 329, 330; see also urban fiction African readers, 8, 291, 304–6 Abidjan Lit (Abidjan Reads), 291, 303, 305 Adoras Romance series, 8, 300–1 book donation, 301–2 development discourse, 8, 289–90, 291, 293–5, 296, 297–9, 300, 305 history of, 289 methodological questions, 291–3 readerly agency, 290, 294–5, 300, 301 structural adjustment economic policies, 298–9

UNESCO’s literacy programmes, 290, 291, 295–8, 300, 303, 305 Worldreader, 291, 294, 299–300, 301, 302–3, 305 Akhavan-Sales, Mahdi, 210, 211, 217 Akira, Asano, 259, 260, 265 Alavi, Bozorg, 211–12, 213, 219, 225 Fifty-Three Persons, 211–12 Scrap Papers from Prison, 211, 212 Albatross Press, 7, 238 Alexander Maconochie Correctional Centre, 36 Allan, Michael, 116 Allen, Charles, 12–13 Allen, Takerra, 8, 313–14, 325, 329 Thicker than Water series 8, 313, 314, 315–16, 318-20, 325–7, 330, p4 Allender, Tim, 139, 140 Alston, Leonard, 145, 146, 148 Alyne, Henry, 39–40 Amazon DIY publishing, 316, 321, 325, 327 global market position, 301, 316 Kindle-era reading, 316, 320–8, 324, 330 publication of Thicker than Water, 8, 315, 325

371

372  General Index publishing imprints, 321, 329 and the Worldreader digital literacy initiative, 291, 299, 300, 301 Ami du Peuple, L’ (Marat), 52–5, 56–7, 58–9, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65–8, 70, 71 Anderson, Tony, 343–4 Angelic Script Publishing, 313, 315, 325 Arani, Taghi, 212 Arbuthnot, Forster Fitzgerald, 92 Aretino, Pietro, Ragionamenti, 83 Asano, 259, 260, 265 Ashbee, Henry Spencer, 4, 88, 89, 91–2, 93 Australian prisons, 2, 31–2, 48–9 Assignment System, 32–3 books, 2, 35, 38–48 new Probation System, 33–7, 47 twenty-first century prison libraries, 2, 36–7, 42–9 authors fan mail and Stratemeyer Syndicate books, 163, 165–8, 169–70, 173–4, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180 narrative voice in Iranian prison literature, 208, 220–1 Worldreader platform, 299, 303 see also DIY publishing autobiographical genre fiction, 317, 319–20, 326 Badani, Sejal, The Storyteller’s Secret, 321 Bahar, Mohammadtaghi, 210, 211 Bailly, Jean-Sylvain, 66 Ballantyne, Tony, 122 Banerjee, Gooroo Dass, 5, 153 Baraheni, Reza, 213, 216–18, 225 God’s Shadow: Prison Poems, 217 prison memoir, 216–17 The Song/Voice of the Murdered, 222–4

What Happened After the Wedding?, 216 Barber, Karin, 295, 298, 305 Barry, John Vincent, 33, 35 Bathurst Free Press, 40 BBC External Services, 275–6 Beatty, William, 141–2 Beaumarchais, Pierre, 61 Beecher, Joan, 281–2 Beggar’s Benison Club, 75, 76, 79–81, 82, 84, 86, 89 Benison Bible, 79, 80, 81 Benjamin, Harry, 187 Bennett, John, 13, 14, 19 Benton, A. H., 142, 145, 146, 148–9, 150 Benwell, Bethan, 292–3 Berberova, Nina, 279–80 Berlin, Isaiah, 270 Bertelsmann, 242, 243 Bezos, Jeff, 323 Bhandarkar, R. G., 142 Bible Australian prisons, 38, 39–40, 42 tactile texts, 99, 102, 108 working-class readers (seventeenth century), 1 Birchen Bouquet, 195 Bits of Fun, 195, 196, 198 blind readers see tangible texts Bolton, James, 175 Bombay Provincial Committee, 138, 141 book clubs, 292–3, 321; see also erotic book clubs Book Donation Charter (1996), 302 Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel, 242 Boston Line Type, 97, 99, 100, 106–7, 109, 111 Bouhler, Philipp, 236, 240 Bouillé, François-Claude-Amour de, 60–1 Boyd, James, 40

General Index   373

Braille, 4, 97, 103, 104–6, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112 Braille, Louis, 103, 104 Brewer, John, 10 Brissot de Warville, Jacques Pierre, 70, 72, 73n Britain women’s reading (eighteenth century), 10–27; see also English education (colonial India); erotic book clubs; Northern Ireland, prison reading groups Brouillette, Sarah, 296 Bücherkunde (Book Lore), 236, 246 Burk, Carolyn Frear, 175 Burnett, Wanda, ‘Sand’, 338–9, 344 Burton, Isabel, 90–1 Burton, Richard Francis, 4, 76, 87–8, 91, 92 Caldwell, Lucy, All the Beggars Riding, 339–41, 344 Cannibal Club, 4, 76, 79, 87–92 Cantril, Hadley, 276–7 Carrington, Charles, 90, 194 Cary, Harriet, 15 Casanova, Pascale, 8 C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 242, 243 cell phones, 299, 300, 303, 322 censorship colonial India, 139 eighteenth century France, 3, 71 Iran, 218, 219 pornography, 6, 76, 86–7, 90, 185, 192 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), 8, 270, 274, 277, 278, 281 and repression in Nazi Germany, 6–7, 234–8, 237, 241, 244, 247, 248, 250 Stratemeyer Syndicate books, 176 Centres de Lecture et d’Animation Culturelle (CLAC), 301, 302

Chalus, Elaine, 20 Chapman, Allen, 162, 163 Chapone, Hester, 14 Charter of Book Donation (UNESCO, 1996), 302 Charter of the Book (UNESCO, 1972), 296 Chartier, Roger, 1 child readers kōdan books, 266 Singapore Library, 118 tactile texts, 89, 101, 102, 105, 106, 107, 109 see also Stratemeyer Syndicate books Chorier, Nicolas, The School of Women, 83–4 Clark, Peter, 78–9 Cleland, John, Fanny Hill, 75 collecting impulse, 174–6, 177 Collingwood, J. Fredrick, 89 Colonial Times, 33–4 Colonne, Charles Alexandre de, 64 conduct books, 11, 12–13, 14, 15, 19, 26 consumerism Amazon, 322 Iran, 218 Stratemeyer Syndicate books, 164, 172, 173–4, 178, 179 Cornwall, Andrea, 294 Cott, Nancy, 168 Covernton, J. G., Vernacular Reading Books in the Bombay Presidency, 138, 141, 147, 153, 154–6, 157 Crawfurd, John, 129–30 critical thinking colonial Indian readers, 152, 153 colonial readers, 116, 294, 296, 300, 301, 305 enhanced by reading, 334, 343–4 French revolutionaries, 72 prison reading groups, 334, 343–4 women readers, 2, 11, 14, 19–27

374  General Index Croft, Alfred, 150, 151, 152 cross-dressing conceptual categorisation, 186–7, 188–9 transsexual pornography, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199 Dai Nippon Yubenkai Kōdansha, 265–6 Daniel, Yuli, 272, 283, 284 Danton, Georges Jacques, 64, 72n Darnton, Robert, 3, 139 d’Artois, Comte Charles-Phillippe, 62 Dashti, Ali, Prison Days, 211 Dashwood, Francis, 76, 82, 83–4, 86 ‘Dave Porter’ series, 171, 172, 173 de Ritter, Richard, 11 De Rozoi, Pierre-Barnabé Framin (Gazette de Paris), 54, 59–60, 62, 63–4, 71 de Staël, Madame, 64–5 Desmoulins, Camille, 53–4, 55 Diesel, Eugen, 246 Diesel, Rudolf, 246 digital publishing services, 313–14, 316, 322 Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, The, 4, 76, 90 disnarration see narrative gaps Ditzion, Sidney, 33, 37 Dixon, Franklin W., 163 DIY publishing, 8–9, 313–15, 316, 322, 325, 327, 328–9, 330; see also samizdat Dro, Edwige-Renée, 303 Drummond, Jean, 24 Dugdale, William, 89, 90, 95 Du’rand, Marion Jeannette, 165 e-books, 299, 315, 316, 320–3, 325, 328, 329 Edgar, Robert L., 175

education in Africa, 290, 297–9, 300 and the American adolescent, 164, 171, 172, 173, 179 Australian prisoners, 2, 33, 35–6, 37, 43, 44–5, 46 blind people see tangible texts Britain’s industrial poor (nineteenth century), 33, 37 creative writing programmes, 316–17, 320, 323 female accomplishment (eighteenth century Britain), 12–19, 27 Indonesia, 256, 257, 259, 260, 265 maternal role (eighteenth century Britain), 13–14, 22, 23 Singapore Library’s mission, 118, 121 see also English education (colonial India) Edward Stratemeyer syndicate see Stratemeyer Syndicate books Elizabeth I (of England), 2, 15–16, 20 Elkhart, Eldon, 174 Ellis, Havelock, 186, 192 embossed letters, 4, 98–102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 109 English education (colonial India), 5, 138–42, 157–8 amenability and improvable native readers, 142–3, 152 citizenship, 139, 140, 141, 142, 151, 152–3, 154, 155, 157 Indian commentators, 153 loss of traditional moorings and discipline, 146–51 vernacular morality, 144–6 vernacular textbooks, 141, 154–7 Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 195, 198 eonism, 186

General Index   375

erotic book clubs, 3–4, 76–8, 92–3 Beggar’s Benison Club, 75, 76, 79–81, 82, 84, 86, 89 Cannibal Club, 4, 76, 79, 87–92 Hellfire Club, 4, 76, 82–6, 89 erotic literature, 76, 77, 86, 190; see also erotic book clubs; transsexual pornography Eshghi, Mirzadeh, 210 ethnicity Australia, 41 gentlemen’s societies (nineteenth century), 87 Kindle-era reading, 328–9 in Nazi ideology, 7, 248 racialised constructions of reading in colonial Singapore, 116, 117, 122–3, 128, 129, 131–2 vernacular textbooks (colonial India), 155 see also African-American fiction Ettighoffer, Paul Coelestin, 242–3 Verdun, 242–3 fake news, 71 Fales, Philetus, 105 Faludi, Steven/Stefánie, 184, 185, 199 Faludi, Susan, In the Darkroom, 184, 185–6, 199 fan mail, Stratemeyer Syndicate books, 163, 165–8, 169–70, 173–4, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180 Farrer, Peter, 197 female readers African-American literature, 8 colonial Singapore, 120 educating girls (colonial India), 156 history books for accomplishment and polite conversation, 12–19, 27 history books and politics, 2, 11, 19–27 Kindle-era reading, 328

literacy (eighteenth century), 2, 10 novels and morality, 10, 14, 26 in prison, 45–6, 47, 336, 338–41, 344 Stratemeyer Syndicate books, 5, 165–71, 178, 180 FictionMania, 185, 199, 200, 201 Fish, Stanley E., 318 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 273 Fleming, C. M., 105 forced feminisation fantasies, 5, 185–6, 189–91, 193–4, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201 Fox, Charles James, 87 Fraser, Charles Frederick, 102 Frazer, Jack, 174 Frederick William II (of Prussia), 62 Frere, James Harley, 103 Garner, Jane, 45–8 Garvey, Ellen Gruber, 177 Gautier de Syonnet, Jacques-Louis (Journal de la Cour et de la Ville), 56, 57–8, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64–5, 71, 72 Gazemba, Stanley, 299 Gazette de Paris (De Rozoi), 54, 59–60, 62, 63–4, 71 Gelber, Steven M., 177 gender see female readers; transsexuality; women genre fiction, 317, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 326, 328 gentlemen’s clubs, 78–9; see also erotic book clubs George III (of England), 86 Germany see Nazi Germany Ghosh, J., 147, 153 Gibbon, William, 111 Ginzburg, Carlo, 1 girls, 5, 15, 89, 156, 165–71, 177–8, 179, 180 Goebbels, Joseph, 6, 235, 236, 237, 239, 240, 241, 242, 244, 248, 250

376  General Index Goldsmith, Oliver History of England in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to His Son, 15 Golshiri, Hooshang, 216, 218, 219–20, 224, 225 ‘Dwellers of the Lit House’, 219, 221–2 Gorsas, Antoine-Joseph, 64 Gramsci, Antonio, 217, 219 Grenville, Louisa, countess Stanhope, 17–18, 19 Grey, Jemima, 2nd Marchioness, 20 Grey, R. S., 321, 325 Grossius, Fannie, 178 Haddon, Mark, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, 342–3, 344, 345 Hamilton, Vyvyen, 167 Hankey, Frederick, 88, 90, 91 Hardy Boys series, 5, 163 Harris, Al, 189, 193, 198, 201 Harris/Wheeler collection, 198, 200 Hartman, Jane, 167 Heathcote, Lady Margaret, 20 Heaven Inc., 313, 314 Hébert, Jacques-René (Père Duchesne), 61–2, 68–70, 71, 72 Heinemann African Writers Series, 8, 292 Heiserman, Robert, 177 Hellfire Club, 4, 76, 82–6, 89 Hikayat Abdullah, 125, 128 Hill, Robert, 187, 189 H.I.M.M., 313 Himmler, Heinrich, 238–9 Hinduism, 143, 145, 146, 147, 149, 151 hip-hop novels see urban fiction Hirschfeld, Magnus, 187 history books colonial India, 156, 157 for female accomplishment, 12–19, 27

and politics for women (eighteenth century Britain), 2, 11, 19–27 reading preferences of Australian prisoners, 46, 47–8 Singapore Library, 122 Hitler, Adolf, 6, 236, 238, 251 Mein Kampf, 239, 240–1 Hobart-town Book Society, 32, 42 Hogarth, William, Portrait of Francis Dashwood, 84 Holden, Philip, 131 homosexual pornography, 89, 93 Hope, Laura Lee authorial identity, 5, 169–70, 171 ‘Outdoor Girls’ series 5, 165–71, 180, p1 Horiuchi Shinsui, 266 Horne, Benjamin, 34 Hose, George F., 120, 125, 126 Hotten, John Camden, 89, 90 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 99, 106–7, 109 Huggan, Graham, 292 Hume, David, 2, 12 History of England, 15–16, 17, 20–1, 22, 23, 24–5 Hume, Hanna, 24–5 Hume, R. A., 141 Hunt, Lynn, 3, 76 Hunter Commission Report see Report of the Indian Education Commission (1882) Huxley, Aldous, 242 Brave New World, 238 India literature exported to Singapore, 122, 125, 126 see also English education (colonial India) ‘indie’ authors see DIY publishing Indonesia see Japanese-language texts in Indonesia

General Index   377

institutional environments (of contemporary US fiction), 316–28, 317, 324, 330 Iranian prison writing, 6, 207–9, 228–30 global readers, 225–8 memoir, 211–12, 213, 216–17, 218–19, 224–5, 225–8 novels and short stories, 216, 219–24, 225, 227 poetry, 209–11, 214–15, 216, 217 translation of world literatures, 213–16 Irish Readers series, 35 Iser, Wolfgang, 335, 339 Ishiguro, Kazuo, The Remains of the Day, 323, 326, 328 Ishizawa Yutaka, 256 Jacobites, 19, 24, 25–6 Jameson, Fredric, 208–9, 215 Japanese-language texts in Indonesia, 7 distribution systems, 255, 256, 258–62, 264 in the era of Dutch administration, 257–8 kōdan, 264–7 National Library of Indonesia, 255–6, 260–1, 262–4 Japanese Publishing and Distribution Company (Nippai), 257, 261, 262 Java daily News (Jawa nippō), 257–8, 264 Java Newspaper (Jawa shinbun), 259, 261, 262 Jawa nippō (Java Daily News), 257–8, 264 Jawa shinbun (Java Newspaper), 259, 261, 262 Jemima, 2nd Marchioness Grey, 20 Johnson, Carol, 178 Johnson, Samuel, 10, 78 Johnston, James, 147

Johst, Hanns, 239 Jorgensen, Christine, 187 Journal de la Cour et de la Ville (Gautier), 56, 57–8, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64–5, 71, 72 Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia (JIA), 117, 124, 126, 127, 128, 132 Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JSBRAS), 117, 126, 127, 128, 132 journals see periodicals Joyce, James, Ulysses, 196 Julien, Eileen, 291 Jünger, Ernst, Auf den Marmorklippen, 7, 251 juvenile series fiction see Stratemeyer Syndicate books Kaestle, Carl F., 177 Kama Sutra, 4, 76, 77, 92, 93 Kansas State Institute for the Education of the Blind, 106 Karr, Clarence, 163 Kästner, Erich, Emil und die Detektive, 7, 235 Kaufman, Bel, ‘Sunday in the Park’, 341–2 Keene, Carolyn, 163 Keiji, Machida, 263 Kelly, Jason, 78 Kennan, George, 271 Kentucky Printing House for the Blind, 100, 107, 112 Kett, Joseph, 164 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 279 Kidrodstock, Lord, Stays and Gloves, 190, 193–4, 197, 198, 200 Kindle books, 299, 315, 316, 320–3, 325, 328, 329 Kindle-era reading, 316, 320–8, 324, 330 Kinsey, Alfred, 189, 193, 197

378  General Index Kinsey Institute archives, 6, 193, 196–7, 198 Kirkpatrick, Edwin A., 173 Kitahara Takeo, 259 Klemperer, Victor, 249 Kneass, Jr, N. B., 111 kōdan, 264–7 Kōdan zenshū, 266 Kōdansha see Dai Nippon Yubenkai Kōdansha Kruif, Paul de, Microbe Hunters, 246 Kuiken, Don, 334 Lacey, Kate, 274 Lacey, Pat, ‘Uncle Ifor’s Welsh Dresser’, 337 Lady’s Magazine, 10 Lafayette, Marquis de (Gilbert du Motier), 57, 66–7 Langroodi, Shams, 210, 211, 213 language African colonial libraries, 289 book giveaways by Radio Liberty, 276 education in the British colonies, 118, 141, 144–5, 154, 155 European languages in colonial Singapore, 118, 120, 121, 123, 125, 127–8, 129, 131 Iranian prison writings, 225 of literacy in Africa, 289, 290 of publication in Dutch Indonesia, 256 RFE/RL broadcasts (Soviet Union), 277 see also Japanese-language texts in Indonesia; Malay language literature (Singapore) Lawrence, Louise, 189, 193, 196–7, 198, 200, 201 Leach, William, 164 Legman, Gershon, 192 Lempriere, Thomas, 37, 38–9 Leopold II (Holy Roman Emperor), 62

libertines see erotic book clubs libraries adolescents’ book collections, 5, 175–6 Adolf Hitler’s book collection, 238 for Australia’s convict population, 2, 34–7, 38–48 for Australia’s free settlers, 32 for blind people (North America), 102, 108, 109 book distribution in Indonesia, 256 colonial Africa, 289, 295 colonial Singapore, 4, 116, 117, 118–25, 126, 132 eighteenth century Britain, 32, 33 National Library of Indonesia, 255–6, 260–1, 262–4 Nazi Germany, 235, 242 private collections in the Soviet Union, 282 Liebman, Herbert, 174 List 1 of Harmful and Undesirable Literature, 236–7, 238 List of Publications Unsuitable for Young People and Libraries, 237–8, 237, 248 Lister, Anne, 21–2 literacy Australian prisoners, 35, 44–5 for blind people see tangible texts European understanding of, 8, 116, 289–90, 293–4, 296, 305 Indonesia, 256, 259 non-government organisations (Africa), 291, 299–300, 302, 303–4 pragmatic literacy (Mali), 295 in revolutionary France, 71–2 Stratemeyer Syndicate books, 175, 176, 177 UNESCO’s literacy initiatives (Africa), 291, 295–8 women (eighteenth century), 2, 10

General Index   379

Logan, James Richardson, 124, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131 London Life, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200 Louis XVI (of France), 54–5, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71 Lovell, Stephen, 274–5 Lowell, Rebecca Amory, 16–17, 19 Lowther, Charles, 108, 109 Luyt, Brendan, 119, 123, 124 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 1835 ‘Minute’, 5, 144–5, 147 Machida Keiji, 263 Maconochie, Alexander, 2, 35–6, 38, 40, 41 magazines see periodicals Mahmood, Syed, 143 Malay language literature (Singapore) British libraries, 4, 118, 122, 123–4, 125, 126 indigenous readers, 117, 120–1, 131 translations for British colonists, 117, 127–30, 131, 132 Mali, pragmatic literacy study, 295 Marat, Jean-Paul (L’Ami du Peuple), 52–5, 56–7, 58–9, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65–8, 70, 71 Marcus, Sharon, 195 Marie Antoinette (of France), 2, 17, 19, 61, 62, 65, 68–9 Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots), 2, 15, 16–18, 19, 25 masturbation, 79–80, 81–2, 83 Mathiews, Franklin, 176 May, Karl, 238, 239, 242 Mbodj-Pouye, Aissatou, 295, 298 McCullough, Colleen, ‘Masters of Rome’ series, 48 McElwee, Colin, 299 McGuire, Betty Lawrence, 166 McGurl, Mark, 316–18, 319, 320, 322–5, 324, 326, 327–8, 329, 330

McLuhan, Marshall, 274 Mehlig, Lloyd G., 174, 176 Mendes, Peter, 192 Mentor, The, magazine, 111–12 Meyerowitz, Joanne, 184, 187, 188 Miall, David, 334 middlebrow aesthetics, 320, 328 Milani, Abbas, 219 Milnes, Richard Monckton, 1st Baron Houghton, 88 Mir-Alayi, Ahmad, 215 Mirabeau, Count (Honoré Gabriel Riqueti), 57, 58, 74n Missouri Institution for the Education of the Blind, 104–6, 107, 110 Mitchell, Margaret, Gone with the Wind, 7, 240, 247 mobile phones, 299, 300, 303, 322 Modern Society, 195, 196 Moffett, Homer, 162, 175–6 Mokhtari, Mohammad, 215 Born of the World’s Angst, 214–15 Monénembo, Tierno, 299 Money, Alice, 15 Monks of the Order of St Francis of Medmenham Abbey see Hellfire Club Moon, William (Moon type), 97, 101–2, 103–4, 107–9, 110 morality Australia’s convict populations, 37, 38, 41 in the colonial Indian subject see English education (colonial India) nineteenth century cult of domesticity, 11, 87 novels and women readers, 10, 14, 26 Stratemeyer’s ‘Dave Porter’ series, 172 see also pornography Moretti, Franco, 215, 229

380  General Index Mosher, Harold F., 339 Moudileno, Lydie, 300–1 Moulton, Ian Frederick, 3, 76 Mudie’s Select Library, 4, 121–2 Müller, Paul Alfred (Lok Myler), ‘Sun Koh: Der Erbe von Atlantis’ 248, p2, p3 Murdoch, John, 146, 147, 149, 157 Murray, John (3rd Duke of Atholl), 23–4 Murray, Lord George, 24 Myler, Lok (Paul Alfred Müller), ‘Sun Koh: Der Erbe von Atlantis’ 248, p2, p3 Mysteries of Verbena House (Sala and Reddie), 76, 89 Naghibi, Nima, 226 Nakamura Takashi, 256, 257 Nancy Drew series, 5, 163 Napier, Letitia, 14–15 Naraghi, Ehsan, 213 Narbonne, Comte de, 64, 68 narrative gaps, 9, 335, 336–7, 345 All the Beggars Riding (Caldwell), 340–1 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Haddon), 342–3, 344, 345 ‘Sand’ (Burnett), 338–9, 344 ‘Sunday in the Park’ (Kaufman), 341–2 ‘Uncle Ifor’s Welsh Dresser’ (Lacey), 337 National Geographic, 184 National Library of Indonesia, 255–6, 260–1, 262–4 National Socialist literature, 234, 236, 242, 244, 245, 245, 249 Nazi Germany book production statistics, 240, 241 international/translated literature, 7, 238, 240, 247

Nazi leaders, as authors, 240–1 Nazi leaders, as readers, 238–9 popular books and reading for entertainment, 6–7, 238, 239, 240, 242–6, 248–50 post-war book industry, 234, 251 pulp magazines, 234, 236, 248 repression and censorship, 6–7, 234–8, 237, 241, 244, 247, 248, 250 Necker, Jacques, 54, 55, 56 Nelken, Dinah, From Me to You, 250 New Fun, 195, 196, 198 New Woman, 168–70 New York Institution for the Blind, 110 New York Point, 97, 103, 104, 110–11, 112 newspapers advertisements in, 261 Australian prisoner-readers, 39, 40, 47 Homer Moffett’s column, 175 and Iranian literature, 218 Japanese-occupied Indonesia, 7, 257–8, 259, 261, 262, 264, 265 letters to (Soviet era), 273, 280 Nazi Germany, 238, 242, 247 Ng, Celeste, Little Fires Everywhere, 321 Nichiran shogyo shinbun (Japan-Dutch Business Newspaper), 257–8 Nigeria, 292, 295, 300, 303, 304 Nippai (Japanese Publishing and Distribution Company), 257, 261, 262 Nocturnal Revels, 84 Noma Seiji, 266 Norfolk Island penal settlement, 35–6, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 47 North, Alfred, 130

General Index   381

Northern Ireland, prison reading groups, 9, 334–5, 344–5 All the Beggars Riding (Caldwell), 339–41, 344 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Haddon), 342–3, 344, 345 ‘Sand’ (Burnett), 338–9, 344 ‘Sunday in the Park’ (Kaufman), 341–2 ‘Uncle Ifor’s Welsh Dresser’ (Lacey), 337 Nosrat-Al-Dowleh, Firooz (translation of Wilde’s De Profundis), 213–14 novels African readers, 8, 291, 292 All the Beggars Riding (Caldwell), 339–41, 344 colonial Singapore, 4, 118, 119, 121, 124 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Haddon), 342–3, 344, 345 dissemination by Radio Liberty, 270, 272, 275, 276, 281, 283–4 erotic book clubs, 75, 88, 89–90, 92, 93 Iranian prison writing, 216, 219–24, 225, 227 Kindle-era reading, 316, 320–8, 324, 330 Nazi Germany, 6–7, 234, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242–6, 247, 248–50 prison libraries (Australian penal settlements), 2, 41 transsexual pornography, 189, 190–4, 196, 197, 198, 200 women readers and morality, 10, 14, 26 see also urban fiction Novetzke, Christian Lee, 140 Nwokolo, Chuma, 299

O’Brien, Karen, 17 obscene libel, 76, 77, 85 Obscene Publications Act (United Kingdom, 1857), 86 Ōe Kenji, 259 Ohio Institution for the Blind, 101 Ōki Atsuo, 259 Okorafor, Nnedi, 299 Onania, 81 Ontario Institution for the Education of the Blind (OIEB), 99, 100, 102, 109 Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), 301 Orleans, Duke Louis-Philippe-Joseph d’, 58 ‘Outdoor Girls’ series 5, 165–71, 180, p1 Ōya Sōichi, 259, 260 Parsipur, Sharnush, Prison Memories, 227, 228 Pasternak, Boris, Doctor Zhivago, 270, 272, 275, 283–4 Patterson, Rodney, 198 Paz, Octavio, The Sunstone (translation by Mir-Alayi), 215 Peakman, Julie, 3, 76, 94n12 Pearce, Susan, 117–18 Pearl, 193 Pearson, Jacqueline, 10, 11, 14 Penang Library, 120 Père Duchesne (Hébert), 61–2, 68–70, 71, 72 periodicals Africa, 305, 307n Australian prisoner-readers, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 47 colonial Singapore, 121, 122, 131 and Iranian literature, 218 Japanese-occupied Indonesia, 7, 255, 257–8, 259, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266 Lady’s Magazine, 10 letters to (Soviet era), 273, 280

382  General Index in Nazi Germany, 234, 236, 238, 242, 246, 247, 248 prison libraries (Australian penal settlements), 41 The Mentor magazine, 111–12 trans issues, 184 Transgender Studies Quarterly, 184 transsexual pornography, 188, 189, 190, 195–6, 197, 198, 200 Perkins Institute, 98, 99, 111 phallus worship, 90; see also masturbation Phi Pi Epsilon, 188, 189 Philadelphia (Glaswegian) text, 99, 100 Philips, George, 22 Philips, Sara-Ann, 22 Phillips, Ethel M., 168 Phillips, Mark Salber, 12 Photo Bits, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200 Photo Fun, 195, 200 Picoult, Jodi, Small Great Things, 321 Pink Diamond Angels, 313 poetry English education (colonial India), 142, 156 Iranian prison writing, 209–11, 214–15, 216, 217 Japanese-language texts in Indonesia, 259 libertine reading clubs, 84–5, 88–9, 90, 93 Malay, 127, 129, 130, 131 Radio Liberty broadcasts, 279–80 Point Puer Boys’ Prison, 34, 37, 38–9, 41 Pollak, Simon, 99, 104, 105 Pope, Alexander, Essay on Man, 84–5 pornography, 76, 77, 86, 190; see also erotic book clubs; transsexual pornography

Port Arthur penal colony, 34, 38, 40, 41 Potter, Thomas, 83 Essay on Woman, 84–5 Priapus, 4, 76, 90 Prien, Günther, 243 Prince, Gerald, 335, 337 Prince, Virginia, 188–9 prisons see Australian prisons; Iranian prison writing; Northern Ireland, prison reading groups Procter, James, 292–3 Program Era fiction, 316–18, 317, 320, 322, 323, 326, 328 propaganda, 65 history education (colonial India), 155 Japanese-occupied Indonesia, 7, 258, 260, 262, 263, 265, 266 Nazi Germany, 6, 7, 234, 238, 240, 243, 244, 247, 249, 251 Soviet, 219 Puttenham, George, 335 Qu’ran, 224, 309n Rabelais, François, 84 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), 271 audience research, 276–7, 278 book giveaways, 7, 270, 272–3, 275–6, 278, 279, 280, 282–3, 284 censorship and signal jamming, 8, 274, 277, 278, 281 and CIA operations, 7, 270–1, 272 evaluation reports, 271, 281–2 imagined community of listeners, 274–5, 277, 279, 282 samizdat, 7, 271–2, 282, 283 Radway, Janice, 1, 320 Raffat, Donné, 212 Raffles, Stamford, 118, 127

General Index   383

Raffles Library and Museum, 117, 123–4, 125, 126, 132 Random House, 242, 329 Rapin, Paul de, 23 readerly engagement see style and readerly engagement reading aloud erotic book clubs, 75, 79, 80–1, 83, 90 prisoners, 36, 38, 336, 337, 338–43, 344–5 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 272, 273, 276, 281, 283, 284 Reay, Barry, 186 Reddie, James Campbell, 88, 89, 91 Reich-Ranicki, Marcel, 250 Reign of Terror, 3, 65, 70, 71, 72 Remarque, Erich Maria, 235 All Quiet on the Western Front, 242 Report of the Indian Education Commission (1882), 138, 143, 148, 150–3, 158 Risher, David, 299 Robertson, William, 2, 12, 23–4 History of Scotland, 16–18, 23–4 Reign of Charles V, 16 Robespierre, Maximilien François Marie Isidore de, 69, 71, 72n Robinson, E. B. F., 100, 103 Robinson, Julian, Viscount Ladywood, Gynecocracy, 190–3, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200 Robyn, Henry, 104, 105, 106 Romance of Lust, 89 romantic fiction Adoras Romance series, 8, 300–1 colonial Singapore, 121, 131 degenerate female novel-readers, 10 From Me to You (Nelken), 250 gendered fiction in the age of Amazon, 328

Kindle bestsellers, 321 in ‘Outdoor Girls’ series books, 166–7, 168, 169, 170, 171 patriarchal values, 1 Thicker Than Water (Allen), 313, 315, 319 Rose, Elizabeth (of Kilravock), 15–16, 21, 22, 23 Rose, Hugh, 22 Rose, Jonathan, 162, 163 Rosenberg, Alfred, 236, 239, 240 Bücherkunde (Book Lore), 236, 246 Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, 241 Rosenzweig, Roy, 179 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 87 ‘Rover Boys’ series, 171, 173, 174 Ryan, Mary P., 169 Sakharov, Andrei, 272 Sala, George Augustus, 88, 89 Salinger, J. D., Franny and Zooey, 281 samizdat, 7, 271–2, 282, 283 Sandwich, John Montagu, 4th earl of, 84, 86 Satthianadhan, S., 145, 147, 150 Sawyer, H. H., 106 Schenzinger, Karl Aloys, Anilin, 246 scrapbooks adolescent girls, 177–8 transsexual pornography, 6, 184, 196, 198, 200 Seiji, Noma, 266 self-published literature see DIY publishing Sellon, Edward, 88, 90, 92 Ophiolatreia, 90 Shakur, Tupac, 319 Shamloo, Ahmad, 210, 211, 213, 216, 217, 218 Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, 319–20 Sharp, Richard ’Conversation’, 23 Shin Jawa, 259, 263

384  General Index Shūyō zenshū, 266 Sigel, Lisa Z., 3, 93 Silverman, Kaja, 1 Singapore, 4, 116–17, 131–2 Malay literature, 4, 117, 120, 124, 125, 126, 127–30, 131, 132 reading for reference or knowledge, 117, 123–6 recreational reading, 116, 117, 118–23 Singapore Library, 116, 117, 118–23, 124, 132 Sins of the Cities of the Plain, The (Solomon and Reddie), 89 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 272, 283, 284 Slaughter, Joseph, 290, 300 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 168 social media, 8, 291, 303, 314 Society of the Dilettanti, 76, 79, 82–3, 87 Society for the Suppression of Vice, 86–7, 90 Soden, Rebecca, 343–4 Soichi, Oya, 259, 260 Solomon, Simeon, 89 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 272 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 282 Sorabjee, Frommurze, 120 Sosnowski, David, Happy Doomsday, 321 Soviet Union ‘book hunger’, 275 see also Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) Spoerl, Heinrich, 6–7, 243–4 Der Gasmann, 244 Die Feuerzangenbowle, 244 Spufford, Margaret, 1 St Clair, William, 11–12 stamp collecting, 177–8 Standard Dot, 112 Stapleton, William, 83 Stepler, Phyllis, 167 Sterne, Jonathan, 274

Steuart, Sir James (of Coltness), 25–6 Stevenson, David, 79, 80, 81–2 Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (SBRAS) library, 117, 120, 124–5, 132; see also Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JSBRAS) Straits Chinese Magazine, 121, 131 Stratemeyer, Edward, 166, 170; see also Stratemeyer Syndicate books Stratemeyer, Harriet, 166 Stratemeyer Syndicate books, 5, 162, 163–4, 179–80 and American consumerism, 164, 172, 173–4, 178, 179 book collections, 174–6, 178 ‘Dave Porter’ and the ’Rover Boys’ series, 171–3, 174 middle class values, 164, 166, 171, 172–3, 177, 179 ‘Outdoor Girls’ series 5, 165–71, 180, p1 street lit see urban fiction Stringer, Vickie, 315 Stryker, Susan, 184, 187–8, 203n style and readerly engagement, 9, 334–5, 344–5 All the Beggars Riding (Caldwell), 339–41, 344 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Haddon), 342–3, 344, 345 ‘Sand’ (Burnett), 338–9, 344 ‘Sunday in the Park’ (Kaufman), 341–2 ‘Uncle Ifor’s Welsh Dresser’ (Lacey), 337 subscription libraries, 32 Raffles Library and Museum, 117, 123–4, 125, 126, 132 Singapore Library, 116, 117, 118–23, 124, 132

General Index   385

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 88, 89, 90 Takagi Giken, 265–6 Takahashi Tetsunosuke, 266 Takeda Rintarō, 259, 260 Talwalker, Clare, 139, 157 Tan Teck Soon, 121, 131 tangible texts, 4, 97–8 Boston Line Type, 97, 99, 100, 106–7, 109, 111 Braille, 4, 97, 103, 104–6, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112 embossed letters, 4, 98–102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 109 Moon type, 97, 101–2, 103–4, 107–9, 110 New York Point, 97, 103, 104, 110–11, 112 Target, Guy-Jean-Baptiste, 58 Tasmania see Van Diemen’s Land Telang, Kashinath Trimbak, 142, 152–3 Tennyson, Alfred, 87 textbooks Africa, 8, 291, 292, 298–9, 300 Australian prison readers, 35, 40 colonial Singapore, 131 Irish Readers series, 35 Japanese-occupied Indonesia, 260, 261, 262, 265 for moral readers (colonial India), 138–40, 141, 142, 144, 148, 150, 151–2, 154–7 tangible texts, 105 textual automony, 1 Thomas, F. W, 145 Tirrell, Hazel, 176 To-indo nippo (Dutch East Indies Daily News), 258 Tokutomi Sohō, 266 Tomisawa Uio, 260 Topdar, Sudipa, 139 Toulalan, Sarah, 3, 76 tranport ships, 35, 36, 37

transsexuality desexed gender narratives, 184, 186, 188–9 medical community, 186, 187–8 trans identity (late twentieth century), 186 trans studies, 184 transsexual pornography, 5–6, 184–5, 200–1 Gynecocracy, 190–3, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200 Harris/Wheeler collection, 198, 200 Louise Lawrence collection, 196–7, 198, 200 magazines, 188, 189, 195–6, 197, 198, 200 online story boards, 185, 199, 200–1 scrapbooking, 6, 184, 196, 198, 200 Stays and Gloves, 190, 193–4, 197, 198, 200 Transgender Studies Quarterly, 184 Transvestia magazine, 188, 189, 195 transvestism conceptual categorisation, 186–7, 188–9 transsexual pornography, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199 Trapnell, Frederica, 166–7 Tremel-Eggert, Kuni, 245 Barb, Tale of a German Woman, 245 Trevelyan, Charles, 141 Troy, Michele K., 238 Tyndale-Biscoe, C. E., 143 Ulrich, Karl, 186 UNESCO African literacy programmes, 290, 291, 295–8, 300, 303, 305 World Radio and Television Handbook, 276

386  General Index United Kingdom see Britain United States of America, 11, 19, 27; see also African-American fiction; Stratemeyer Syndicate books; tangible texts urban fiction, 314–15, 316, 318, 319, 320, 326, 327, 328–9 Thicker than Water series (Allen) 8, 313, 314, 315–16, 318-20, 325–7, 330, p4 Van Diemen’s Land, 32, 38, 47 Point Puer Boys’ Prison, 34, 37, 38–9, 41 Port Arthur penal colony, 34, 38, 40, 41 Vickery, Amanda, 10 Viswanathan, Gauri, 122 Wait, William Bell, 104, 110–11, 112 Wallace, Edgar, 237, 242 Walpole, Horace, 82, 83 Warner, Michael, 116 Welch, James W., 101 Welk, Ehm, 248, 251 Die Gerechten von Kummerow, 250 Die Heiden von Kummerow, 248–9 Wemyss, Francis, 25–6 Wheeler, Richard O., 198 Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass, 90 Whitney G. (Whitney Gracia Williams), 321, 325 Wiggins, Ezekiel Stone, 99, 102, 109

Wilde, Oscar, De Profundis (translation by Nosrat-Al-Dowleh), 213–14 Wilkes, John, 4, 76, 83, 84 Essay on Woman, 4, 76, 84–5 Wilkinson, Richard James, 131 Williams, Abigail, 13, 14 Williams, Elton, 176 Wilson, Virginia, 175 Winstedt, Richard, 131 Winterbottom, Anna, 122–3 women Iranian prison memoirs, 226–8 mothers and the patriotic education of children, 13–14, 22, 23 in revolutionary France, 64, 65 see also female readers Woods, Teri, 315 Woolf, Daniel, 12, 26 World Radio and Television Handbook, 276, 280–1 Yazdi, Farrokhi, 210 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 279, 280 Yokoyama Ryūichi, 259 Yoshida Momosuke, 260 young readers Japanese-language literature in Indonesia, 266 Nazi Germany, 242 see also Stratemeyer Syndicate books Yurasov, Vladimir, 279–80 Zelizer, Viviana, 173, 178