Available here from Oxford University Press
***Winner of the British Association for Victorian Studies Rosemary Mitchell Prize 2022***
***Winner of the Australian Historical Association Kay Daniels Prize 2022 ***
Crusoe’s Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800-1918
Bill Bell
with a foreword by Alberto Manguel
THIS is a book about readers on the move in an age of empire. It examines the libraries and reading habits of five reading constituencies from the long nineteenth century: shipboard emigrants, Australian convicts, Scottish settlers, polar explorers, and troops in the First World War. What was the role of reading in extreme circumstances? How were new meanings made under strange skies? How was reading connected with mobile communities in an age of expansion? Uncovering a vast range of sources from the period, from diaries, periodicals, and literary culture, Bill Bell reveals some remarkable and unanticipated insights into the way that reading operated within and upon the British Empire for over a century.
“This highly original book takes the metaphorical journey as a key to reading itself and goes on to provide several fascinating field histories of specific readers and reading, from prisoners to polar explorers. Providing several brilliant analyses, Crusoe’s Books is striking in its erudition and its scholarship, offering a fresh reappraisal of the classical questions that have exercised historians of the book and reading. Bill Bell’s book obliges us deeply to rethink the mobility of cultural hierarchies, the practices of popular literacy, and the uses of literature.”
Roger Chartier, Collège de France
“Print is mobile, and where one reads matters. Bell’s compelling study of traveling readers disrupts easy generalizations about what print consumption entails. Whether writing of emigrants or prisoners, explorers or soldiers, Bell brilliantly shows how reading could build community; offer escape or guidance to individuals; and complicate relationship to nation and Empire. Full of surprising and telling examples about the range of available texts and the different, often unpredictable ways they were read, Crusoe’s Books is a major scholarly achievement.“
Kate Flint, University of Southern California
“In this richly rewarding study of the dissemination of books through the contact zones that mark the edges of Empire, Bill Bell explores the waywardness of reading: the propensity of both free and unfree colonial subjects, Antarctic explorers, men and women at sea, and soldiers at the front to read athwart the cultural and political determinations of the libraries they assembled or the books they came across. Crusoe’s Books is a major contribution to the history of Empire and the history of reading.“
John Frow, University of Sydney
“In Crusoe’s Books, Bill Bell presents a unique and refreshing take on convict history combining exceptional scholarship with a gift for language and narrative style. Using the lens of literacy and observing its impact on the development of culture for those incarcerated or displaced, Bell presents the convict not only as the recipient of text, but as a reading subject. Bell traces the multifarious and embodied relationships of convicts to the printed word, placing this story firmly within an international context during a period of significant change in imperial history. The research is of high scholarly calibre and the writing is accessible and skilful. This is a beautifully crafted book.“
Australian Historical Association
Crusoe's Books 