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.Keywords First world war . Reading . Trauma . Literary caregiving . Helen Mary Gaskell . War library In July 1937, the Book Trolley, the magazine of the guild of hospital librarians, published a brief history of libraries in hospitals. Owing to the writer's (self-confessed) advanced age and poor health, the piece was shorter than it might have been. Mrs. Gaskell, C.B.E., knew that in different circumstances she could have written Ba good deal on the Past.^But she welcomed the opportunity to provide an account of the Bdifficulties and influences^under which libraries in hospitals had begun, and she returned to two international conflicts to do so: the Boer War This article is about Helen Mary Gaskell's War Library and the model of literary caregiving on which it was founded -and so it is also concerned with the early history of what would become known as bibliotherapy.1 Gaskell chose a quotation from Titus Andronicus to head her 1918 pamphlet: BTake choice of all my Library, and so beguile thy sorrow^ (1918, 1). The second half of this article presents a case study which demonstrates, using contemporary evidence, the ways in which books did help to Bbeguile sorrow,^having placed Gaskell and her library accurately in the history of reading during the First World War.This scholarship, a currently vibrant area of book history, mostly adopts the analytical framework first established by Robert Darnton in 1986. We now know more about the Bwhat,B where,^and Bhow^of reading during the conflict than ever before (Darnton 2014, 165). 2 We also know more about the Bwho^-as the historic focus on élite readers (as an extension from élite writers) has been challenged by more inclusive, broader assessments (Sutcliffe 2016, King 2014b, Ja...
No abstract
A guide to London wntmg published by Waterstone's in 1999 includes a section on Ford Madox Ford. He finds himself sandwiched between Conan Doyle and Gissing, both of whom are well-known explorers of London's secrets and vices, perhaps better-known than Ford. And yet his inclusion in this guide is justified, more so than is appreciated by the section editor who claims that Ford 'never really wrote about the city of his birth again' (after 1905 and The Soul of London). I Not so. Throughout Ford's career, when he wrote about cities, it was most often London that he took for his subject or its background. He also loved, lived in and wrote about, for example, Paris and New York, but it was the English capital that he found to be 'the final expression of the Present Stage,.2 Generalizations are and can be made about 'the city' in Ford, or 'the city' as modernist construct. When such abstract notions become concrete in his work it is often the shapes of London that are assumed. Urban EnergyThe view from a palace window in an early Ford tale is, we are told, 'very fine'. 'A dark wood grew in the foreground', and 'far away over the tree-tops were the blue hills, behind which the sun was just preparing to retire'. 3 Though Ford was certainly not averse to telling stories, and even fairy stories, of the country (the subtitle of The Brown Owl is A Fairy Story), it is his stories which draw at least some of their energy from urban sources for which he is best-known. In A Call (1910) and The Good Soldier (1915), for example, that energy springs from the chaotic potential in communications offered by the city, and is manifested in illicit sexual liaisons, or confessions, in its diverseness rendering ambiguous things characters know and say. Affective to a lesser degree, but still present in Parade's End , that energy is associated with institutions for government, commerce, or education, or generated by the crowd. On Armistice Day in London Valentine Wannop is 'jostled by the innumerable crowd', having been 'deafened by unceasing shouts'. She is Sara Haslam -9789401201667 Downloaded from Brill.com03/13/2023 04:32:15AM via free access 'The Modern' promises pleasure too. 'So appealing' is the 'ragout of tit-bits' Ford has just described that we might be justified in identifying an anticipatory dash of futurism in his fulsome prose. (Futurism's Manifesto, published in 1909, exalted speed, 'aggressive action', and crowds. s ) The city in Ford, then, on this first approach seems to be the locus of a force for progressive challenge and change: its energy is liberating, vital, exciting, always new. Fairy tales for Ford were rural affairs -think for example of the anti-city parts of A Call, during which Kitty is cured as well as, more obviously, The Brown Owl, or Ladies Whose Bright Eyes -but G. K. Chesterton published what he called a 'London fairy tale' in 1904, a year before the appearance of The Soul of London. The Napoleon of Nolting Hill is set in the future, towards the end of the twentieth century, but it is plain that Cheste...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.