Abstract
‘What is wanted […] is the friendly companionship of a good and kindly book to take the mind away from the contemplation of the terrible environment.’1 So stated The War Illustrated in December 1915, demonstrating that despite publishers’ initial fears that public interest in and purchasing of books would wane in the harsh conditions of war, print culture remained essential to maintaining and bolstering the mood of both soldiers and civilians between 1914 and 1918. Herbert Jenkins for one averred that,
If the war has proved anything it has been the folly of forecast, and in nothing have the prophets been further from the truth than in the anticipation of its effects upon books. People are now reading more than they have read for many years past, and the sale of cheap books has been remarkable.2
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Notes
John Attenborough, A Living Memory: Hodder & Stoughton Publishers, 1868– 1975 ( London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975 ), p. 78.
Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914–1950 ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 ), p. 72.
Joseph Hocking, All for a Scrap ofPaper: A Romance of the Present War ( London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918 ), p. 243.
Mrs Humphry Ward, Missing ( London: Collins, 1917 ), pp. 48–49.
Wilfred Owen, Selected Letters, ed. by John Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985 ), p. 152.
Dominic Hibberd, Owen the Poet ( Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986 ), p. 128.
Roland Mountfort, The Great War Letters of Roland Mountfort, ed. by Chris Holland and Robert Phillips (Leicester: Matador, 2009 ), p. 122.
Theodore Wesley Koch, Books in the War: The Romance of War Library Service ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919 ), p. 205.
Laurence Attwell, Laurence Attwell’s Letters from the Front, ed. by W. A. Attwell ( Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2005 ), pp. 4–5.
Escott Lynn, Oliver Hastings, V.C. ( London: Chambers, 1916 ), p. 8.
Jane Potter, Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War, 1914–1918 ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 ), p. 54.
Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850– 2000 ( London: Reaktion, 2000 ).
Ruby M. Ayres, Richard Chatterton, V.C. ( London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915 ), pp. 276–77.
Joseph Keating, Tipperary Tommy: A Novel of the War ( London: Methuen, 1915 ), p. 315.
Joseph Hocking, All for a Scrap ofPaper: A Romance of the Present War ( London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914 ), p. 191.
Robert Valentine Dolbey, A Regimental Surgeon in War and Prison ( London: John Murray, 1917 ), p. 246.
Betty Maxwell, ‘Cupid Wields a Pen’, The Quiver, 56: 6 (1917), 488–93.
Carol Acton, Grief in Wartime: Private Pain, Public Discourse ( Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 ), p. 20.
Douglas Harfield, A Diary of the Balkan Front, World War 1: 22nd November 1915 to 16th October 1919 ( London: Tessa Harfield, 2003 ), p. 57.
Paul Jones, War Letters of a Public Schoolboy ( London: Cassell, 1918 ), p. 223.
Edmund G. C. King, ‘E. W. Hornung’s Unpublished “Diary”, the YMCA, and the Reading Soldier in the First World War’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 57:3 (2014), 361–87 (p. 375 ).
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© 2015 Jane Potter
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Potter, J. (2015). ‘Khaki and Kisses’: Reading the Romance Novel in the Great War. In: Towheed, S., King, E.G.C. (eds) Reading and the First World War. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137302717_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137302717_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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