In 1824, Joseph Donaldson published his recollections of his “eventful” life, which until then he had spent “chiefly” as a soldier. The only son of a father who was employed by a mercantile house in Glasgow, as a young man he seemed to have a promising future before him, but unfortunately he made a number of decisions that were to affect the course of his life adversely. Donaldson made the first of these in 1807, when he decided that he would run away to sea with a school companion. The voyage that the pair eventually made, to the West Indies, cured him of his ambition to become a sailor and, tragically, cost his friend his life. Upon returning home after this ill-fated adventure, Donaldson resumed his education at his father’s urging, but in 1809 he decided to run away again. This time, he chose to enlist in the army, a step he noted in his memoir as “the source of constant and unavailing regret”; this was because his experiences in the army exposed him to the harsh realities of a soldier’s existence in the early nineteenth century, and convinced him that everything about military life at that time “conspired to sink [men] to that point where they became best fitted for tractable beasts of burden.” All things considered, he wrote, “if there is one method better than another, to make a man an abject slave to the will of his superiors, without a conscience or a judgement of his own, one calculated to smother every generous and noble feeling, to destroy his morals and his constitution, there could not have been a better school chosen than the army, in the state it was in at that time.”1
Donaldson’s memoir is valuable for several reasons, including the fact that it reveals what he believed was the ultimate cause of his decision to enlist. As he put it, it was his early love of reading that distracted him from his education, encouraging him, firstly, to run away to sea and, eventually, take the king’s shilling. Robinson Crusoe (1719), he declares, was “a great favourite,” presumably in one of the cheaper reprints that ensured the continuing popularity of early eighteenth-century fiction well into the 1800s.2 “I would have suffered shipwreck willingly, to be cast on an island like his,” he remarks. “I have often played truant from school to wander into the fields, and read my favourite books; and, when I was not reading, my mind was perfectly bewildered with the romantic notions I had formed.”3 Here, of course, we find the commonly held view of reading at the time that Donaldson was writing; and, indeed, it was one that took on increasing currency during the Victorian period: namely, the belief that it was an activity that worked “through the subjectivity of the reader, transforming the individual from within” and that, as a result, readers had to be carefully supervised to control the possible consequences of this process.4 The sentiments that Donaldson expresses can be found again and again in the educational treatises and literature of the late 1700s and early 1800s—in particular, in the arguments of those writers who insisted that the reading of young men was of paramount importance for their future development. Writing some 26 years before Donaldson, for example, the Irish writer Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) had subjected the reading of males to scrutiny in Practical Education (1798), and one of her conclusions was that works like Defoe’s novel were a dangerous distraction for certain boys and young men. Works like Robinson Crusoe, she observed, should “not early be chosen for boys of an enterprising temper, unless they are intended for a seafaring life, or for the army. The taste for adventure is absolutely incompatible with the sober perseverance necessary to success in any other liberal professions.”5 Donaldson’s tragedy, in Edgeworth’s terms, was that he was not intended by his father to become either a soldier or a sailor, but the works he read as a boy and young man inappropriately inflamed his imagination and thwarted his father’s ambition to place him in his own profession.
Donaldson is not the only nineteenth-century British soldier to have left evidence of his reading habits or preferences, or to have suggested that the works he read—or that were read aloud to him—affected the development of his character or his choice of profession. Sergeant Gowing, for instance, served with the Royal Fusiliers in both the Crimea and India, and revealed that he deliberately selected this regiment as a consequence of “its noble deeds of valour under Lord Wellington, in the Peninsula.”6 He was keen to stress, though, that Wellington was not his only inspiration: “I had read Nelson’s exploits from childhood, studied all his principal battles, and learned how he forced our old enemies the French to tremble before him till his glorious deeds made the nation love and adore him.”7 Scotsman John Pindar came from a family that earned its living working in the mines and, at the age of ten, he was put to “driving a pony in a coalmine for sixpence a day.” Pindar, however, was of “a studious nature,” and so embraced every opportunity for self-improvement that came his way. As his “mind became enlightened by the few books [he] managed to buy or borrow,” however, he became increasingly dissatisfied with his “monotonous life.” “I had now managed,” he notes, “to wander through nearly all the works of the British poets, finding they all therein spoke proudly of the British Soldier, and sang his praise in soul-stirring strains. … Indeed all the poets I had read … had some encouraging word to say in favour of a soldier’s life.” Pindar declared himself finally uncertain as to the extent to which reading poetry influenced his decision to join the army, but it is clear that it crucially informed his determination “to look around … for some occupation more congenial … than that of a miner.... Professions requiring education were closed against me, and I began to perceive I had no prospect of being able to maintain myself in a respectable position above ground unless I enlisted for a soldier.”8 John Fraser also came from humble origins and was keen to stress that literacy was something that had been prized by his parents. When he came to publish his memoirs, he therefore drew his readers’ attention to the fact that certain books had enjoyed pride of place among his family’s possessions, and emphasized that the effects of his father’s reading aloud of the Bible to him and his siblings each evening had stayed with him throughout the course of his life: “the great copy of the Pilgrim’s Progress with its crocheted back lying with the equally large Bible and the copy of Burns’ poems on the table by the window, the china dogs on the mantelpiece, and the old sofa with its curved back. … [M]uch of the reading passed into us and became as much a part of us as do most things learned in childhood.”9
Most soldiers, though, were more like William Lawrence, who was present at some of the “bloodiest and most famous actions” of the Napoleonic Wars. Urged by his friends in later life to record his experiences as a soldier in the early nineteenth century, he had to draw upon the services of an amanuensis because of his illiteracy.10 The majority of the men who became soldiers resembled Lawrence and came from homes where access to reading material was either limited or nonexistent. For many of these men, it is clear, enlistment in either the East India Company’s army or the Regular Army opened up a whole new world in terms of educational opportunities, and access to books and/or libraries was something that they treasured. John Green, for example, published an account of his time in the 68th Durham Light Infantry in the early nineteenth century, wherein he stressed both that he was quickly reckoned “the first scholar” in the school that was set up in the regiment around 1810, and “only regret[ted] that [it] did not commence sooner.” He also recorded his gratitude to a Major Thompson, who gave him “liberty to read the books of the circulating library: even when he was on leave of absence, I had the same privilege allowed me.”11 One private, a Richard Perkes, declared in a letter to his brother in 1841 that he was happier than at any point in his life following his enlistment in John Company’s army because he now had the opportunity of going to school and there were lots of books to read.12
Other men, such as Joseph Hinton, clearly responded in a more complicated fashion to the military environment in which they found themselves, and decided to learn to read in a manner that preserved their independence. Remembering that “every other night [he] had to sit up to turn the gas out in the barracks,” he recalled: “I had been seriously thinking over my ignorance, and one evening I said to my wife, who was living in the barracks with me, ‘My dear, I’m going to teach myself to read and write.’ She said, ‘You’ll never learn at your time of life.’ ‘Won’t I?’ says I. ‘I will, and, what’s more, I’ll teach you too.’ So next morning I went into the town and bought a few schoolbooks, and we stuck to it till I was made lance-sergeant.”13 Hinton was not alone in trying to encourage a loved one to read, and many men like him used their letters to try to convince friends or relatives of the importance of seizing every possible opportunity for self-improvement. Writing to his sister from Salford Barracks in 1854, for example, Sergeant Jowett thanked her for deciding “on a Dictionary as a birthday present for me; a book is always a suitable present, and I am very fond of a book and like to be reading; I find great improvement therefrom, and should advise you to read as much as you can.”14
These are but very brief glimpses of some of the evidence that exists in relation to the reading of the nineteenth-century British soldier, and we shall see below that other sources are represented by army reports and regulations and testimony given to various committees during the 1800s. Despite the existence of such fascinating material, however, the subject of the nineteenth-century reading soldier has received only limited attention from literary critics and historians, with individuals such as Peter Stanley, Jonathan Rose, and Linda Colley leading the way in this regard.15 This critical oversight is a remarkable one, especially as scholars have devoted increasing attention to the history of reading, the book, and libraries in recent years, drawing upon the methodologies of their different disciplines. Historians of the book, for instance, have traced what has been described as the communications circuit that runs between author, publisher, printer, shipper, bookseller, and reader, tracing how the book as a material object makes its way into the world.16 Scholars concerned with reading have moved from the notion of the “common reader” to the significance of individual readers, examining to what extent it is possible to identify “what,” “where,” and “how” they read.17 Library historians for their part have traced how different types of libraries came into being and, in the case of public libraries in Britain, have explored how ideas about the function, holdings, and operation of these institutions were shaped by debates raging outside their walls.18 Literary theorists, too, have built upon the efforts of pioneers such as Richard D. Altick, Stanley Fish, and Wolfgang Iser, to name but three exa...