The Curative Value of Reading: Hospital Libraries and Literary Therapeutics in Britain, 1919–1946

The War Library was one of the very first charitable schemes raised in Britain in response to the outbreak of the First World War. Devised by the socialite Helen Mary Gaskell in the first week of the conflict and subsequently taken over by the British Red Cross in 1915, the War Library provided books for wounded and sick soldiers and sailors. Publicity produced by the scheme focused on the power of books to make hospitalised soldiers temporarily forget their injuries, as well as to alleviate the mental trauma and suffering associated with wounds and sickness. The War Library occupies a secure position in the historiography of print and reading cultures during the First World War. Much less prominent in the developing literature on the history of bibliotherapy are the efforts of the War Library’s founders to expand it into a library service for civilian hospital patients—as well as disabled military veterans—after the war, as the British Red Cross Society and Order of St. John Hospital Library. Drawing on new archival research in the British Red Cross Archives, this chapter describes how the scheme’s organisers developed the existing rhetoric of the healing book to represent hospital libraries as essential public services and therapeutic interventions in their own right. It also examines how British hospital librarians responded to interwar developments in American bibliotherapy and sought to locate their own traditions of literary-therapeutic practice in relation to it. To what extent, it asks, can we regard interwar British hospital librarianship as a form of bibliotherapy?