Abstract
This article is about the relationship between reading, trauma and responsive literary caregiving in Britain during the First World War. Its analysis of two little-known documents describing the history of the War Library, begun by Helen Mary Gaskell in 1914, exposes a gap in the scholarship of war-time reading; generates a new narrative of "how," "when," and "why" books went to war; and foregrounds gender in its analysis of the historiography. The Library of Congress's T. W. Koch discovered Gaskell's ground-breaking work in 1917 and reported its successes to the American Library Association. The British Times also covered Gaskell's library, yet researchers working on reading during the war have routinely neglected her distinct model and method, skewing the research base on war-time reading and its association with trauma and caregiving. In the article's second half, a literary case study of a popular war novel demonstrates the extent of the "bitter cry for books." The success of Gaskell's intervention is examined alongside H. G. Wells's representation of textual healing. Reading is shown to offer sick, traumatized and recovering combatants emotional and psychological caregiving in ways that she could not always have predicted and that are not visible in the literary/historical record.
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Acknowledgements
I should like to thank those who commented on earlier versions of this article, particularly Edmund King and Neil Vickers, as well as Patrick Parrinder, Max Saunders, and delegates at the Literature at War conference, London, in 2015. The librarians at the Cadbury Research Library, Birmingham, and Karim Hussain, archivist at the British Red Cross, London were of great help during my research. Finally I am grateful for comments received through the JOMH reviewing process.
Endnotes
1 This term was not coined until later in the war, as discussed in a study of twentieth-century UK and US bibliotherapy that I am co-writing with Edmund King.
2 Darnton wrote a new preface for his article’s republication (2014, 152-3). For a sample of work on reading at war see Towheed and King (2015), King (2014a), and Laugesen (2012).
3 When Harold Macmillan was wounded on the Somme in 1916 he woke asking for his mother (Shepherd 2002, 118).
4 Hendley (2012, 4, 13) addresses and genders “organized patriotism” and “associational culture” very differently from Gregory and Grant.
5 Koch mistakenly calls Ruhleben a camp for Prisoners of War in his preface, but this camp, situated 10 kms west of Berlin, did not hold military prisoners.
6 Koch’s research made a direct contribution, via Putnam, to the development of the War Service of the American Library Association, whose members had their consciousness raised as to the importance of what Dr Henry Van Dyck called, in praise of Koch’s pamphlet, “the spiritual munitions of war” (quoted in Koch 1918, preface).
7Richard (1st Viscount) Burdon Haldane had been Secretary of State for War until 1912, when he became Lord Chancellor. Eventually forced from the Cabinet in 1915 by the Harmsworth Press, he had long been an admirer and student of German thought and culture. Field Marshall Douglas Haig wrote to him when he stepped down: “Until you arrived at the War Office no one knew for what purpose our Army existed,” and Asquith continued to consult him in his War Office capacity long after he had left his post. Haldane recommended Kitchener for the job in 1914, even though he felt he was not modern enough (Haldane 1929, 283-4).
8 The Red Cross Archive has some leaves of the typed manuscript of Brassey’s book, along with notes supplied to her by Gaskell (JCO/6/3).
9 Wrench is quoting Dr Halperin, who called Milner “both the moving spirit and the brain” (319).
10 By 1918 income had increased to £17031.3.9½. See London Metropolitan Archives LCC/PC/CHA/4/46.
11 Lionel Bonham’s mention of Kipling is worth noting. May had met Edward Burne-Jones in 1892. They soon had an intense friendship. Burne-Jones was Kipling’s uncle by marriage (Dimbleby 2004, 76, 148).
12 http://blogs.redcross.org.uk/world-war-one/2014/08/first-world-war-centenary-preparing-war-week//. Accessed 8 January 2017.
13 “The Queen And The War Library.” Times [London, England] 4 Dec. 1915: 11. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 16 Oct. 2016.
14 The column was a form of reviews page that appeared regularly in the YMCA Weekly, as it was called from January 1915 to 1916, and then the Red Triangle, as it was renamed.
15 I am indebted to Edmund King for alerting me to these accounts.
16 Kate Adie surmises in her discussion of First World War letters that ‘the very touch of the paper which had come from another hand was the most important element’ in many cases – and also reminds us that 35,000 women were employed by the Post Office in 1914-16 to replace serving men (2013, 169, 167).
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Haslam, S. Reading, Trauma and Literary Caregiving 1914-1918: Helen Mary Gaskell and the War Library. J Med Humanit 41, 305–321 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-018-9513-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-018-9513-5