Images and information from manuscript MM62/18/6388 courtesy of Tim Causer, Bentham Project, UCL Faculty of Laws.
This 1852 handwritten list of books in the library of the penal settlement on Norfolk Island contains 887 entries. As is to be expected of a library intended for convicts, many of the books are religious in content, but the library also contains biographies, histories, voyages and travels, natural histories, and some selected works of fiction, such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Elizabeth Barber’s Tales of Modern Days, and Walter Scott’s, The Antiquary, The Monastery, The Abbot, The Pirate, The Black Dwarf, Old Mortality, and Guy Mannering. Available poetry includes Edward Young’s Night Thoughts and William Cowper’s The Task. There are numerous listed issues of Penny Magazine, Saturday Magazine, and Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal. The final pages of the list contain borrowing records for slates, school books, miscellaneous library books, tracts and religious books, and an index. Some information is therefore available regarding the men who borrowed books from the library.
It is likely that the library was established by Alexander Maconochie when he became Commandant of Norfolk Island in 1840 and instituted a number of policies aimed at prisoner rehabilitation. By 1846, the then commandant was the rather more brutal John Giles Price, who was known for his extreme corporal punishments. Price nonetheless claimed to believe that suitable reading material was of ‘vital importance to the quiet demeanour of the Prisoners’. He was concerned enough about the ‘character’ of the books available in the library that he asked the Anglican chaplain, Rev Thomas Rogers, to report on the catalogue in 1846. Rogers found that the library then had around 500 volumes, of which 200 were ‘mere collections of penny tracts of a very miscellaneous and paltry description’. Rogers noted that Saturday Magazine and Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal were ‘sought for and read with avidity’, and that the convicts’ attention was held best by ‘Narratives of Travels—Voyages—Biographical notices of celebrated characters—modern works of fiction—History, and Historical novels … Magazines of all kinds’ (from Rogers to Price, 2 September 1846, MM62/18/6388, TAHO). Rogers eventually became a critic of Price’s unduly harsh methods and was removed from his post by Price in 1847.
PF
