ABSTRACT
Lieutenant Colonel J.H. Lefroy was appointed as Inspector General of Army Schools in Britain in 1857 and, within two years, published a report that provides a crucial insight into the reading habits of Her Majesty’s forces during the early Victorian period.1 Entitled Report on the Regimental and Garrison Schools of the Army, and on Military Libraries and Reading Rooms (1859), the 80-page report is primarily concerned with the state of education in the army, as its name suggests, but its analysis of military libraries and reading rooms reveals both the types of books that were supplied to soldiers at an official level and the way in which the reading of these works was viewed by those responsible for providing such facilities to the men. The overwhelming emphasis of the report is that the libraries and reading rooms are beneficial for soldiers; at the very least, Lefroy remarks, they offer a further means of persuading ‘young soldiers’ to ‘withdraw from the temptations of the town’.2 That said, though, Lefroy’s report reveals that he entertains a very particular anxiety in relation to the libraries and reading rooms: that is, they are inculcating a desire for inappropriate reading among the men. This emphasis is variously marked throughout the report, as we shall see, and so close study of Lefroy’s report further facilitates our understanding of prevailing attitudes to literacy – and, especially, to fiction – at this period.
