Abstract
British military authorities harbored reservations about the official provision of books and libraries to rank-and-file soldiers in the Regular Army well into the nineteenth century, believing it was dangerous to promote literacy among such troops for a number of reasons. This chapter explores both why this was the case and the motivations that informed the authorities’ eventual decision to establish garrison libraries for soldiers beginning in the late 1830s; it also examines the reasons military authorities became increasingly convinced of the importance of soldiers' recreational reading of troops. In so doing, this chapter seeks to illuminate the ways in which the history of the garrison libraries is reflective of—and throws further light upon—both contemporary notions of lower-class readers and libraries as sites of contested culture; it also provides another way of thinking about issues such as the “Great Fiction Question” from a perspective different from that commonly pursued by literary critics and historians.
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- 1.
William Taylor, Life in the Ranks, 2nd edn (London: T.C. Newby; Parry, Blenkarn & Co., 1847), pp. 3, 285–87. Taylor’s recollection of this scene reveals the Colonel was particularly alarmed by the fact that the men wished to subscribe to the Weekly Despatch, “which about this time contained a series of excellent articles on corporal punishment” (p. 286).
- 2.
T.A. Bowyer-Bower, “The Development of Educational Ideas and Curricula in the Army during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the Degree of Master of Education, May, 1954, pp. 65–66. Frederick Augustus, the second son of George III, was first appointed as Commander-in-Chief of the army in 1798, but was forced to retire from the post in 1809 as a result of a scandal involving his mistress and her efforts to extract money from officers in return for recommending their promotions. He was reappointed to the post again in 1811, and held it until his death in 1827. See H.M. Stephens, “Frederick, Prince, Duke of York and Albany (1763–1827),” rev. John Van der Kiste. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2007 [http://www.oxforddnb.com.remote.library.dcu.ie/view/article/10139, accessed 10 July 2015].
- 3.
This was the view of Henry Marshall (1775–1851), military surgeon, author, statistician and reformer. Quoted in Peter Stanley, White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India, 1825–1875 (London: Hurst & Company, 1998), p. 43.
- 4.
Quoted in Peter Burroughs,
“Crime and Punishment in the British Army, 1815–1870,” English Historical Review 100: 396 (July, 1985), p. 548.
- 5.
Bowyer-Bower, “Development of Educational Ideas,” pp. 8–9. Wolfe was still a major in 1749.
- 6.
Bowyer-Bower, “Development of Educational Ideas,” p. 10.
- 7.
See Bowyer-Bower, “Development of Educational Ideas,” p. 65, and K.A. Manley,
“Engines of Literature: Libraries in an Era of Expansion and Transition,” in Giles Mandelbrote and K.A. Manley (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. II, 1640–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 520–21.
- 8.
Bengal Hurkaru, 4 July 1840.
- 9.
Victor Neuburg, Gone for a Soldier: A History of Life in the British Ranks from 1642 (London: Castell Publishers, 1989), p. 72. Neuburg notes that “from 1879 it was a statutory offence for a soldier not to attend school if he had been ordered to do so.”
- 10.
Anon. [John Edward Acland-Troyte], Through the Ranks to a Commission (London: Macmillan & Co., 1881), pp. 3, 39–40. Henceforth “Acland-Troyte, Through the Ranks.”
- 11.
Horace Wyndham, The Queen’s Service: Being the Experiences of a Private Soldier in the British Infantry at Home and Abroad (London: William Heinemann, 1899), p. 44.
- 12.
“A Late Staff Sergeant of the 13th Light Infantry” [John Mercier MacMullen or McMullen], Camp and Barrack Room; or, The British Army as it is (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846), pp. 141–42.
- 13.
Bowyer-Bower, “Development of Educational Ideas,” p. 66.
- 14.
Manley, “Engines of Literature,” in Mandelbrote and Manley (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. II, pp. 520–521.
- 15.
J.H. Lefroy, Brevet Colonel, Royal Artillery, Report on the Regimental and Garrison Schools of the Army, and on Military Libraries and Reading Rooms (London: HMSO, 1859), p. 51. Henceforth, Lefroy, Report.
- 16.
Inspectors of Prisons, Great Britain: Second Report (London: HMSO, 1837), pp. 56, 65.
- 17.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trs. from the French by Alan Sheridan (1975; London: Allen Lane, 1977), p. 180. On the introduction of Good Conduct Badges, et cetera, into the army, see Byron Farwell, The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Land Warfare: An Illustrated World View (New York and London: Norton & Co., 2001), p. 359.
- 18.
See Lefroy, Report, p. 51.
- 19.
Reproduced in Bowyer-Bower, “Development of Educational Ideas,” p. 71.
- 20.
The Queen’s Regulations and Orders for the Army,….First of July 1844, 3rdedn(London: HMSO, 1854), p. 253.
- 21.
Peter Burroughs, “An Unreformed Army? 1815–1868” in David Chandler (General ed) and Ian Beckett (Associate ed), The Oxford History of the British Army, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 169.
- 22.
Richard Holmes, Sahib: The British Soldier in India, 1750–1914 (London: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 221.
- 23.
See page 13 above.
- 24.
Reproduced in Bowyer-Bower, “Development of Educational Ideas,” pp. 72–73.
- 25.
See Addenda to the Queen’s Regulations and Orders for the Army, From the First of July, 1844, to the Thirty First of March, 1854 (London: HMSO, 1854), p. 213.
- 26.
The Bucks Herald, 24 May, 1845.
- 27.
The sense of the editorial overall suggests that garrison rather than regimental libraries are probably meant here.
- 28.
Daily News, 4 June 1846.
- 29.
DailyNews, 7 October, 1846.
- 30.
The Cork Examiner, 3 June, 1846.
- 31.
The Dundee Courier, 1 December, 1846.
- 32.
See Report of a Committee appointed by the Secretary of State for War to inquire into and report on the present state and on the improvement of Libraries, Reading Rooms, and Day Rooms (London: HMSO, 1862), p. 7. Hereafter Report of a Committee.
- 33.
On the protracted history of schools in the army, see Bowyer-Bower, “Development of Educational Ideas,” pp. 10–15; John M. Brereton, The British Soldier: A Social History from 1661 to the Present Day (London: Bodley Head, 1986), pp. 51–53, 69–71; and Neuburg, Gone for a Soldier, pp. 69–72. On reform efforts, see Correlli Barnett, Britain and her Army, 1509–1970: Military, Political, and Social Survey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 272–324; Burroughs, “Crime and Punishment in the British Army,” passim; Edward M. Spiers, The Army and Society, 1815–1914 (London and New York: Longman, 1980), especially pp. 145–76, for the post-Crimean period, and pp. 177–205, for the Cardwell Reforms.
- 34.
William Jowett, Memoir and Diary of Sergeant W. Jowett, Seventh Royal Fusiliers (London and Beeston, Nottinghamshire: W. Kent & Co. and B. Porter, 1856), p. 46.
- 35.
Published on 25 November 1854, quoted in David Murphy, Ireland and the Crimean War (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002), p. 173.
- 36.
Quoted in Michael D. Calabria, “Florence Nightingale and the Libraries of the British Army,” Libraries and Culture 29: 4 (Fall, 1994), pp. 368–69.
- 37.
Calabria, “Florence Nightingale,” pp. 369–70 and 385.
- 38.
Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Regulations affecting the Sanitary Conditions of the Army, the Organization of Military Hospitals, and the treatment of the Sick and Wounded, with Evidence and Appendix (London: HMSO, 1857), p. xiii. The commissioners provided a table entitled, “Deaths per 1000 per Annum at Ages between 20 and 40,” which demonstrated that the mortality of the Horse Guards, for example, stood at 20.4 as opposed to the figure of 10.314 for miners and 6.055 for agricultural laborers, respectively (p. xi). Hereafter Report of the Commissioners.
- 39.
Report of the Commissioners, p. xiv.
- 40.
Colonel the Honorable James Lindsay’s evidence to the Commission on 22 June, 1857, in Report of the Commissioners, pp. 194–95.
- 41.
Not given, Narrative of a Private Soldier in His Majesty’s 92nd Regiment of Foot. Written by Himself. Detailing many Circumstances relative to the Insurrection in Ireland in 1798, the Expedition to Holland in 1799, and the Expedition to Egypt in 1801, and Giving a particular Account of his Religious History and Experience, 2 nd edn, greatly enlarged (Glasgow: University Press, 1820), pp. 5–6.
- 42.
Taylor, Life in the Ranks, pp. 288–89.
- 43.
See John Belchem and Richard Price (eds), The Penguin Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century History, Advisory, ed. Richard J. Evans (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 146.
- 44.
Report of a Committee, p. 13.
- 45.
Kenneth Hendrickson, “Winning the Troops for Vital Religion: Female Evangelical Missionaries to the British Army, 1857–1880,”Armed Forces and Society 23, No. 4 (1997), pp. 617 and 625.
- 46.
See Alan Ramsay Skelley, The Victorian Army at Home: The Recruitment and Terms and Conditions of the British Regular, 1859–1899 (London: Croom Helm, 1977), p. 164. Hendrickson puts it this way: “Prior to 1914, the Homes remained central to army post social life in Britain and the empire” (“Winning the Troops,” p. 624).
- 47.
Report of a Committee, p. 4.
- 48.
On Lefroy’s long and distinguished military career, see R.H. Vetch, “Lefroy, Sir John Henry (1817–1890),” rev. Roger T. Stearn, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, Oct 2005 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16343 [accessed 24 April 2007].
- 49.
Lefroy, Report, p. 59.
- 50.
Lefroy, Report, pp. 52–54.
- 51.
Lefroy, Report, pp. 55–56. The decision to set up libraries for the Artillery and Engineers was approved in 1840.
- 52.
Lefroy, Report, pp. 56 and 61.
- 53.
Lefroy, Report, p. 56.
- 54.
Lefroy, Report, p. 58.
- 55.
Report of a Committee, pp. 6–7.
- 56.
Lefroy, Report, p. 57.
- 57.
Anna Maria Porter’s The Hungarian Brothers (1807) is also mistakenly attributed to Jane Porter.
- 58.
“Return showing the Number of Books which have been reported as worn out by fair wear and tear in Military Libraries, from 1st January to 31st December 1858,” Appendix IX to Lefroy, Report, pp. 219–222.
- 59.
John Fraser, Sixty Years in Uniform (London: Stanley Paul, 1939), p. 86.
- 60.
Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–1850: A Study of the Literature Produced for the Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England (London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 10–11.
- 61.
Lefroy, Report, p. 58.
- 62.
John Pindar, Autobiography of a Private Soldier (Cupar-Fife: Printed in the “Fife News” Office, 1878), Pindar, p. 165.
- 63.
Robert Snape, Leisure and the Rise of the Public Library (London: Library Association Publishing, 1995), pp. 22–23.
- 64.
Snape, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Leisure and the Rise of the Public Library, pp. 22–23.
- 65.
Report of a Committee, p. 6.
- 66.
See “List of Books and Periodicals most in request at Home and Foreign Stations, selected from the replies to Question 11,” Appendix No. 2 to Report of a Committee, pp. 16–33.
- 67.
“List of Books &c. most in request at the Sappers’ Library, Royal Engineers [Chatham], for the Quarter ending 31st December, 1860,” in Appendix No. 2 to Report of a Committee, pp. 17–18.
- 68.
The works are listed under “Class C,” “Class D,” and so on, in accordance with the classes assigned to different categories of works by the committee in their survey. See “Dublin, Garrison Library, Royal Barracks, Books Mostly Read” in Appendix No. 2 to Report of a Committee, p. 24.
- 69.
See “List of Books most in Request” and “List of Books often asked for, which are in the Catalogue, but not in the Library” at Winchester in Appendix No. 2 to Report of a Committee, pp. 19 and 20–21.
- 70.
Bremer’s works were introduced into England through the translations of Mary Howitt. See Carol A. Martin, “Mary Howitt” in Janet Todd (ed), Dictionary of British Women Writers (1989; London: Routledge, 1991), p. 336.
- 71.
Report of a Committee, p. 7.
- 72.
In “Summary of Special Reports,” in Appendix No. 3 to Report of a Committee, p. 47.
- 73.
Evidence of Major-General Lawrence C.B. to the Commission on 12 June 1857 in Report of the Commissioners, p. 128.
- 74.
Lefroy, Report, pp. 60–61.
- 75.
Letter of Joseph Reid, 14 May 1854, NAM 1999-03-130, no. 15.
- 76.
John Pine, Letter of 20 April 1852 from Fort Beaufort, NAM 1996-05-4, 3.
- 77.
On the restrictive measures imposed on the early-nineteenth-century British newspaper and periodical industries, see James, Fiction for the Working Man, especially pp. 12–22; William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 309–12; and the Concise History of the British Newspaper in the Nineteenth Century, available on the British Library’s website at [www.bl.uk/…/findhelprestype/news/conscisehistbritnews/britnews19th].
- 78.
Con Costello, A Most Delightful Station: The British Army on the Curragh of Kildare, Ireland, 1855–1922 (Cork: The Collins Press, 1996), p. 126.
- 79.
Report of a Committee, pp. 6–7.
- 80.
First Report by the Council of Military Education on Army Schools (London: HMSO, 1862), p. xvi.
- 81.
See Appendix XV—No. 1 to Second Report by the Council of Military Education on Army Schools, Libraries, and Recreation Rooms (London: HMSO, 1865), pp. 216–221. The three rules cited are on page 219.
- 82.
Third Report by the Council of Military Education on Army Schools, Libraries, and Recreation Rooms (London: HMSO, 1866), p. xxxi.
- 83.
In Appendix XV—No. 4 to Second Report by the Council of Military Education, pp. 235–36.
- 84.
The chaplain reports that the library had two complete sets of Scott’s works, “of whose novels the ‘Fair Maid of Perth,’ (41 [issues]), ‘The Pirate,’ (32 [issues]), and ‘The Heart of Mid-Lothian,’ (31 [issues]), were the favourites.”
- 85.
“Notes on the Working of the Garrison Library … at Canterbury,” pp. 135–36.
- 86.
Third Report by the Council of Military Education, p. xxxi.
- 87.
Brereton also makes this point, and draws upon the memoir below in support. See The British Soldier, p. 71.
- 88.
Acland-Troyte, Through the Ranks, p. 63.
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Murphy, S. (2016). The Regular Army’s Libraries. In: The British Soldier and his Libraries, c. 1822-1901. War, Culture and Society, 1750-1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55083-5_4
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