Imperial Reading?: The East India Company’s Lending Libraries for Soldiers, c. 1819–1834

Britain enjoyed unparalleled overseas expansion in the years between 1780 and 1830, consolidating her rule over India and parts of Canada, and developing or adding greatly to her colonial possessions in Australia, South Africa, and the Caribbean.¹ During this same period, “a new cultural and social phenomenon known as ‘the rise of the reading public’” emerged, with readers avidly consuming the prose fiction that rolled off the nation’s printing presses.² That this prose fiction, in particular the novel, crucially facilitated the spread of empire has been persuasively argued by theorists and critics who suggest that the form worked in complex ways to prepare readers to imagine and, hence, “accommodate” Britain’s imperial expansion. Works such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Mansfield Park (1814), it has been suggested, contributed to the naturalization of a sense of England’s cultural and military power, and promoted notions of racial identity that made a British Empire seem both inevitable and necessary to the reading public. This is not to say that writers like Daniel Defoe or Jane Austen self-consciously set out to promote imperial ideology in their writing, but rather that their works illuminated “the far from accidental convergence between . . . patterns of narrative authority constitutive of the novel on the one hand, and, on the other, a complex ideological configuration underlying the tendency to imperialism.”³

Despite the attention that has been paid to the link between the novel and empire, critics have devoted strangely little effort to identifying the types of fiction that may have been read by actual soldiers or sailors, the British Empire’s most immediate agents. They tend to take it for granted that the “reading public” lived and worked in the British Isles.⁴ Even Gauri Viswanathan’s pioneering study of the introduction of English literature in nineteenth-century India and how it facilitated imperial ideology focused on the colonized subject rather than the colonizer. Its analysis of “the Englishman actively participating in the cruder realities of conquest, commercial aggrandizement, and disciplinary management of natives” assumed that this Englishman was the producer rather than the consumer of the type of “knowledge that empowers him to conquer, appropriate, and manage” other lands.⁵ A crucial issue thus largely unaddressed by critics is what happened to the English text when it was read by an English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish man in a place such as nineteenth-century India; that is, by readers who were sustaining Britain’s imperial presence. Viswanathan contends that, for Indian readers, such texts functioned “as a surrogate Englishman in his highest and most perfect state, [becoming] a mask for economic exploitation”: was this ideological effect in some way diluted, erased, or reversed when English, Scots, Welsh, or Irish were the consumers?⁶ A further issue that arises here is whether those responsible for overseeing “the imperial mission of educating and civilizing colonial subjects [in India] in the literature and thought of England” realized this mission could or should be extended to British soldiers; whether there was a recognition that this, too, might “in the long run [serve] to strengthen Western cultural hegemony in enormously complex ways.”⁷

This article will raise such questions by examining the East India Company’s decision to establish lending libraries for soldiers at its stations in India during the early 1820s and 1830s. Historians Peter Stanley and Linda Colley have provided tantalizing glimpses of this evidence, pointing out that, by the 1830s, these institutions contained works like Robinson Crusoe as well as “religious tracts in abundance.”⁸ As we will see, though, East India Company records provide real insights into the motivations and responses of those who established, operated, and/or used the libraries, as well as into holdings and borrowing patterns at some of the stations.⁹ Close study of the records thus enables us to understand conflicting responses to literacy and to fiction, without falling afoul of what has been called “the receptive fallacy”: that is, the way in which much literary criticism tries “to discern the message a text transmits to an audience by...