THE PUBLIC LIBRARY.
[Illustration: KING’S LIBRARY, BRITISH MUSEUM.
_Photo by Donald Macbeth_
]
THE
PUBLIC LIBRARY
By ERNEST A. BAKER, D.Lit.
PUBLISHED IN LONDON
BY DANIEL O’CONNOR
90 GREAT RUSSELL STREET,
W.C.1. 1922.
France and England literally, observe, buy panic of each other; they
pay, each of them, for ten thousand thousand pounds’ worth of terror,
a year. Now suppose, instead of buying these ten millions’ worth of
panic annually, they made up their minds to be at peace with each
other, and buy ten millions’ worth of knowledge annually; and then
each nation spent the ten thousand thousand pounds a year in founding
royal libraries, royal art galleries, royal museums, royal gardens, and
places of rest. Might it not be better somewhat for both French and
English?
RUSKIN: _Sesame and Lilies_.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PREFACE
I.--HISTORICAL SKETCH 1
II.--WHAT IS A LIBRARY SERVICE? 32
III.--LIBRARY EXTENSION 96
IV.--RURAL LIBRARIES 135
V.--A NATIONAL LIBRARY SERVICE 169
VI.--TRAINING IN LIBRARIANSHIP 211
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
KING’S LIBRARY, BRITISH MUSEUM Frontispiece
_To face page_
LAMBETH PALACE LIBRARY 12
CENTRAL PUBLIC LIBRARY, NOTTINGHAM 22
READING ROOM OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM 44
GUILDHALL LIBRARY 52
READING ROOM, STEPNEY PUBLIC LIBRARY 56
PATENT OFFICE LIBRARY 74
LIBRARY OF THE INSTITUTE OF ACTUARIES, STAPLE INN HALL 90
LIBRARY OF THE SOUTH-EASTERN AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE, WYE 162
READING ROOM OF THE GENERAL LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 178
THE ORATORY LIBRARY 200
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, GENERAL LIBRARY 214
READING ROOM OF THE GOLDSMITHS’ LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 226
PREFACE.
Our Public Libraries are entering upon the critical period of their
history. They have been saved by the Act of 1919 from imminent
bankruptcy; but the efforts of the Adult Education Committee to find a
place for them in a national scheme of reconstruction seem to have come
to naught. An Act which it was hoped might have been a new charter, and
have ensured their utilization as a chief instrument of adult education
and the intellectual and spiritual development of the people, did away
with two heavy grievances the abolition of which was long overdue; it
left a programme of constructive reforms unfulfilled.
In this brief account of our public libraries, the work they have done
and the far greater work they are capable of doing, many points have
been suggested that call for more comprehensive legislation. The one
hope now is that the urban and rural libraries already existing or soon
to be may be co-ordinated into a national system, or group of systems,
worked on economic lines, and empowered to act the part they were
surely destined for in a civilized world.
Sociologists, including those treating of education in the widest
sense, have paid scant attention to the part played by the public
library in social life, in the present or the future. Even such an
inventory of our intellectual assets as the Cambridge History of
English Literature has in its fifteen big volumes no reference to the
effects of the Ewart Act or to the vast collections of literature
amassed and thrown open to the people through its operation. This book
will be a small addition to a very small group of works on various
sides of a momentous subject.
The author is deeply indebted to Mr. W. C. Berwick Sayers, Chief
Librarian, Croydon Public Libraries, for his kindness in reading the
proofs and for many useful suggestions, and to his daughter, Miss Ruth
Baker, for indexing the book.
E. A. B.
I.
HISTORICAL SKETCH.
In the period of reconstruction after Waterloo, there was, among other
analogies with the present time, a keen popular desire for education
and opportunities for self-culture. It met with both encouragement and
discouragement from the governing classes, more of the latter than
the former, much more of direct opposition than dare show its head
to-day. The state of the universities and the public schools had been
since the middle of the last century more backward than ever before
in history. Both universities still shut their doors to Dissenters.
They had no sympathy with and probably no consciousness of the needs
of the masses for self-improvement. In spite of earnest writers on
education, and manifold discussions of Rousseau’s doctrines, even in
the ingratiating form of fiction, nothing could stir the sullen apathy
of the ruling powers; and in educational machinery and practice England
lagged far behind both Germany and France. Samuel Whitbread introduced
an Education Bill in 1807 which was rejected by the Lords. After his
death, Brougham became leader of the group of educationists in the
House of Commons, and in 1816 secured the appointment of a Select
Committee to inquire into the education of the lower orders of the
metropolis. The report of this committee furnished material for two
Bills. The first, for the reform of educational charities, passed in
1818, after its best features had been pruned away by the Government;
but the Education Bill of 1820, which would have extended to England
the excellent parish school system of Scotland, was thrown out. Not
until 1833 was the work already being performed by voluntary agencies
approved, by the grant of an annual sum of £20,000 to assist in the
erection of school buildings. Not until 1839 was there any recognition
of the national responsibility for primary education. In that year,
a committee of the Privy Council was appointed to superintend the
application of grants for educational purposes. This was the forerunner
of the Education Department to be established in 1856. Roebuck in 1833
had failed to carry a resolution in the Commons in favour of universal
compulsory education. On the eve of the Education Act of 1870, it was
computed that there were nearly as many children without any kind of
schooling as there were attending all the state-aided and private
schools put together. So slowly had education advanced.
But, whilst Parliament was engaged in repressing or ignoring
educational demands, or debating whether it was wise or safe that
the commonalty should be educated at all, the people, headed by those
who had faith in an educated nation, were establishing the requisite
machinery for themselves. There had been elementary schools of a
sort in existence in most parts of the country for nearly a century.
The academies set up by the Dissenters after the Toleration Act,
the charity schools of the Society for the Promotion of Christian
Knowledge, the schools founded by the Methodists and the Society of
Friends, provided a general education based primarily on the principle
of moral and religious instruction. Many of these schools catered for
grown-up persons as well as children; the Sunday Schools, for instance,
which sprang up after 1780, taught reading and sometimes writing to the
illiterate of all ages. There were also private schools in the towns
and many villages where the rudiments were imparted, unsatisfactorily,
for a few pence. These organized efforts were mainly the work of
middle-class evangelicals and philanthropists intent on the moral and
religious improvement of the people. But new motives came into play
in the new century, and the people themselves began to take an active
part in the movement, with far-reaching results. Political agitation
might be repressed, but an intellectual awakening could not be
extinguished. Knowledge was demanded for its own sake; it was demanded
also for economic reasons. The artisan who saw wonderful mechanical
inventions enabling him to perform his operations with undreamt ease
and efficiency, or depriving him of his job, was roused to an intense
interest in science and a desperate desire to fit himself for a place
in the new industrial order. The country was flocking into the towns;
the major part of the population was becoming industrial. Education was
perceived to be a necessity of life, and a necessity that concerned,
not merely the rising generation, but even more momentously the adult
workman. A passionate demand for education was faced with a sporadic
supply, and it was a demand for education in other directions than had
been contemplated by the promoters of charity schools and Dissenting
academies.
Whitbread and Brougham, Bentham, Place, and Mill encouraged and
directed these aspirations. Philosophic Radicalism affirmed the right
of every citizen to an elementary education, which the State was in
duty bound to provide. Further, such education must be unsectarian; and
here were the beginnings of the age-long strife between the advocates
of secular education and the defenders of voluntary schools, which
were now being planted all over the country by the National Society
and the British and Foreign Society. Throughout the nineteenth century
the history of education was chequered by these conflicts over the
rights and wrongs of religious teaching. Another thing that hampered
progress was the temptation to provide schooling on the cheap, by the
monitorial system and other contrivances, which were maintained for
reasons of economy long after they had been discredited. We shall find
this British failing again and again crippling the finest schemes, and
entailing costs in the long run incalculably greater than the saving at
the outset. It is a form of economy that is not economic.
How deep and sincere was the working man’s desire for enlightenment
is illustrated most tellingly by the co-operative institutions which
it now brought into being in almost every industrial centre. The
Mechanics’ Institutes were not gifts from a railway company or a large
firm to its employees, but the creation of the operatives themselves,
established and kept up mostly from their own unaided resources.
Apart from the schools and classes for children and adults carried on
by the religious bodies in the eighteenth century, these Mechanics’
Institutes, with their lectures, classes, study-circles, debating
societies, libraries, and other educational activities, were the real
beginnings of adult education in this country. They were the immediate
forerunners of the municipal library, and, at a further remove, of the
modern technical college and the polytechnic. Thus adult education
begins in a spontaneous movement, ready for large self-sacrifices to
achieve its practical ideals; and, at the outset, the library is
recognised as an integral part of its scheme. The great mistake in
the Public Library Acts, we shall find, was that they failed to build
on the combination of reciprocal activities in this promising model,
and thus divorced the library from the other departments of adult
education. Conversely, the weakness of many admirable schemes for adult
education has been neglect or omission of the library as an essential
part. Once the separation had taken effect, it became very difficult
to establish relations again. Librarians have since learned the
impossibility of making one part of the social machine work properly in
detachment from the rest. The Mechanics’ Institutes were not troubled
with unprepared and indifferent readers. They led their horses to the
stream and had no difficulty in making them drink. The troughs provided
by their municipal successors were larger and handsomer, but the
excellent supply of water was too often unappreciated.
Ewart and his coadjutors in 1850 concentrated on the single object,
libraries; and libraries they got, their bare object--bare at first
in the literal sense of the word, till they were later on allowed to
spend money in furnishing them with books. As a consequence of this
policy, libraries and art galleries, schools, technical education,
university extension, tutorial and continuation classes, have carried
on their work on separate lines, though labouring for identical ends,
and though they might have worked in unison much more effectively and
economically. The problem now is to bring them into harmony again.
Perhaps the time was not ripe for such a comprehensive alliance.
Perhaps, also, had such an idea been realized it would have had
to undergo the blighting influence of the examination system and
payment by results. On the other hand, a popular institution might
have contained the antidote to those delusions. At all events, it
is a matter for lasting regret that a great opportunity was missed.
Nationalized Mechanics’ Institutes, cured of the imperfections due to
their dependence on the voluntary support of the unwealthy, with their
numerous activities developed, their technical and utilitarian classes
supplemented by humanist, non-vocational teaching, and the recreative
side fully expanded, would have been an invaluable instrument for
the great social effort which was then and is now required. And the
initiative would have come from below, not from above; the danger of
bureaucratic and academic projects for other people’s welfare would
have been avoided. A central part of this many-sided organism would
have been the library, a part ministering directly to every other
part. Such a conception is still useful. In town life the different
agencies may have to work side by side, though there need not be dense
partitions between. In the villages, where there are no museums or
picture-galleries, and the club is too often only a well-meaning but
aimless substitute for the public-house, institutes of such a composite
and elastic type are obviously the very thing required.
The first of these promising institutions came into existence in 1823.
George Birkbeck had given free courses of lectures to artisans at the
Andersonian Institution in Glasgow, where, after his removal to London,
there had been a schism. The seceding members set up for themselves
the Glasgow Mechanics’ Institution, and elected Birkbeck their first
president. Next year, the London Mechanics’ Institution, now Birkbeck
College, was started in emulation, speedily enrolling some 13,000
working men as members. That same year saw the establishment of an
institute at Manchester, which had had a Literary and Philosophical
Society since 1781, an offshoot of this, the College of Arts and
Sciences, being a sort of prototype of the new working men’s
institution. Huddersfield, Leeds, and other industrial towns followed
suit next year; and by 1837 the West Riding had so many that a union of
mechanics’ and similar institutions was formed, to be followed in 1839
by a Metropolitan Association, and by a Lancashire and Cheshire Union
in 1847. “In 1851 it was estimated that there were 610 institutes in
England with a membership of over 600,000, that the number of lectures
delivered in 1850 was 3,054, and that the number of students attending
classes was 16,029.”[1] In 1849, four hundred Mechanics’ Institutes had
between three and four hundred thousand volumes, with a circulation of
more than a million.
In his Practical Observations upon the Education of the People,
Brougham, one of the four trustees of the London institution, announced
the programme of what Peacock in _Crotchet Castle_ nicknamed the “Steam
Intellect Society.” Lectures and conversation classes, on the lines of
a modern tutorial class, libraries and book-clubs, were to be provided;
and, as a more extended enterprise, elementary primers and other cheap
works on science and the useful arts were to be published for the
benefit of the working classes. Brougham was the first president of
the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, founded in 1827 to
give effect to this second part of the scheme. Dr. Folliott tells the
company at Crotchet Castle how his house was nearly burned down by his
cook taking it into her head to study hydrostatics, in a sixpenny tract
published by the Steam Intellect Society, and reading what he calls
“the rubbish” in bed. Other persons, besides Peacock, were disturbed by
this portentous “march of intellect.” The Mechanics’ Institutes spread
to all parts of England and Scotland, but they failed, from lack of
means, to find the qualified lecturers and experienced teachers that
their well-meaning but ambitious aims required. Good teachers were very
scarce in those days. It was more than combinations of the lower middle
classes unaided by public funds could be expected to achieve. When, in
the course of two decades, the first enthusiasm faded, the buildings
fell more and more into the hands of those who could afford to maintain
them as comfortable lounges and literary clubs. This educational
failure and the secular nature of the education that they sought made
them unsatisfactory in the eyes of the Christian Socialist group,
who in 1854 founded what they considered a better type of mechanics’
institute in the Working Men’s College. But the Mechanics’ Institutes,
though most of them were transformed or absorbed into a different
kind of institute, did not cease to exist; a number have survived to
this day or the eve of it, and some have carried on work of priceless
importance, side by side with the public libraries, which were now
about to arise.
To say that there were no free libraries for the people before 1850
is practically though not literally true. Those interested in the
history of libraries can point to many older examples, certain of which
were open to all comers. Long before the nineteenth century idealists
schemed to provide every reader in the nation with access to books,
as for instance the Scottish grammarian James Kirkwood, author of a
pamphlet in 1699 entitled “An Overture for Founding and Maintaining of
Bibliothecks in every Paroch throughout the Kingdom,” and of a project
for erecting a library in every presbytery or at least county in the
Highlands. The project was approved by the General Assembly, but had no
great results. In the Middle Ages, many of the monastic libraries were
nominally open to the public; but as a reading public hardly existed
the fact does not amount to much. Nor is it of more than antiquarian
interest whether London had a public library as far back as the early
fifteenth century, the joint foundation of Sir Richard Whittington and
William Bury. Readers did exist at the beginning of the next century,
wherefore the appearance of a city library here and there is of more
significance. Norwich claims to have the oldest of these that has never
perished, founded in 1608 and preserved in the public library there
to-day. The library founded at Bristol in 1615 came under the operation
of the Public Library Acts when these were adopted by that city in
1876. The venerable Chetham Library at Manchester dates from 1654,
when the books were placed in the quarters they still occupy in the
college built in 1421. The number of volumes is vastly greater, but the
Chetham Library has not changed in character or in the atmosphere of a
still remoter antiquity that it had at its beginning. Dr. Bray and his
associates established 78 parochial libraries and 35 lending libraries
between 1704 and 1807, which were meant for the use of poor clergymen.
He also secured an Act “For the Better Preservation of Parochial
Libraries;” but this in time became a dead letter. The British Museum
was established by Act of Parliament in 1753, opened to the public
in 1759, and gradually absorbed various royal and other collections,
forming a great storehouse of books for scholars and other literary
workers. London, nearly a century later, when the public library
agitation was in progress, had four public or semi-public libraries,
those at Sion College and Lambeth Palace, and Dr. Williams’s and
Archbishop Tenison’s libraries. In a number of large towns, readers of
the better class enjoyed the advantages of good reference and lending
libraries belonging to the Literary and Scientific Institutions.[2] The
library work of the Mechanics’ Institutes has already been described.
But the libraries of various kinds that were in existence, most of
them subscription libraries or otherwise restricted to a narrow class
of users, served only to whet the appetite of the ardent seeker after
knowledge, and to provide the apostle of popular culture with an
illustration of the possible.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Langley & Sons._
LAMBETH PALACE LIBRARY.]
The campaign which led to the Public Library Acts of 1850 and 1853
opened in 1844, when Richard Cobden presided at a public meeting in
Manchester to consider the means of improving popular taste. Joseph
Brotherton, the member for Salford, laid the proposals carried at this
meeting before the influential William Ewart, member for the Dumfries
Burghs, a rich, well-educated, much-travelled person, who was an old
parliamentary hand, with a general desire to see his country provided
with library facilities at least equal to those which he had found on
the Continent. Brotherton, a Liberal of the Manchester school and a
strict Nonconformist, had a profound belief in an educated people, and
a special confidence in the Lancashire operative; he was returned again
and again for Salford, holding the seat continuously 1832-57. These two
public men found an energetic and well-informed coadjutor in Edward
Edwards, a supernumerary assistant in the British Museum, who had cut a
prominent figure in the parliamentary inquiry into the administration
of that library, writing pamphlets and appearing as an expert witness
before the second Select Committee in 1836, after forcing himself
into notice by his severe handling of the evidence laid before the
committee of 1835. His wide knowledge of libraries at home and abroad
and his thorough acquaintance with the methods of the British Museum,
particularly on their defective side, together with the freedom and
far-sightedness of his criticisms and suggestions for reform, impressed
the committee, and led, rather surprisingly, to his being given his
post in the Museum in 1839. Later, his independent attitude led to
friction with his chief Panizzi, and he left abruptly in 1850.
Edwards was broad-minded enough not to pin his faith on libraries alone
as an engine of intellectual progress; he took part as a pamphleteer
in the warfare over London University in 1836, persistently maintained
that libraries and schools were complementary to each other, and
pointed out that libraries should fulfil a very definite function in
promoting the intellectual life of all classes. His radical views on
the extension of hours and the opening of the reading room in the
evening, on branch libraries for the utilization of duplicate books,
on improved catalogues, the better supply of foreign literature and
materials for research, and on numerous points of administration at the
British Museum, have been fulfilled in large part since his time; yet
some still remain a counsel of perfection.
His aid was enlisted by Ewart and Brotherton after he had published
some long articles, packed with statistics, on the inadequacy and
inaccessibility of the library resources of Great Britain and Ireland,
and on the liberal provision enjoyed on the Continent, which had a
great deal to do with making converts and securing votes when public
library legislation was before Parliament. Edwards probably exaggerated
his case, and painted too glowing a picture of the wealthy Continental
libraries, at any rate in the freedom of access said to be enjoyed
by every citizen. But his instances of British scholars put to undue
expense and compelled to live abroad in order to have libraries of
historical material at hand were relevant enough. Gibbon complained
that he had the greatest difficulty in consulting books and had to
obtain them from abroad at a heavy expense; he found himself better
provided when living in Switzerland or France than in his own country.
Buckle, later on, and, still later, Lecky and Acton had to seek their
material in Continental libraries. One telling point Edwards made, that
England was unrivalled in its private collections, though so poor in
those open to the public--a state of things by no means wholly remedied
yet.
Meanwhile, Ewart and Brotherton having put their heads together,
a piece of legislation was secured that would and did ensure the
establishment of a certain number of public libraries, rate-aided if
not entirely rate-supported. This was the Act of 1845 for “Encouraging
the Establishment of Museums in Large Towns,” first-fruits of the
proposals passed by the Manchester meeting of the previous year. It
authorized the levy of a halfpenny rate, in towns of not less than
10,000 inhabitants, for the erection of museums of science and art;
it did not allow public funds to be used for purchasing books or even
exhibits; and it was supposed that salaries and other maintenance
charges would be defrayed out of the penny-fees for admission. Timid
and inadequate as such measures were, the Act was followed at once by
the opening of museums at Warrington, Salford, Canterbury, Liverpool,
Leicester, Dover, and Sunderland, the first three towns forming
collections of books as well. In 1848 Warrington provided the first
free reference library under the Act, and also a lending library for
the use of subscribers. Brotherton, with the aid of a local benefactor,
saw to it that a library and museum were opened at Salford in 1850.
Thus, although looking back we may think it strange that museums should
be started before libraries, they did prove a stepping-stone to the
greater necessity.
Ewart now applied himself to inducing the House of Commons to appoint
a Select Committee on the question of public libraries, and availed
himself of the services of Edwards in preparing evidence and framing
proposals. Edwards was the chief witness before the first Committee
appointed, in 1849, and a special motion of thanks for his services
was appended to their Report. He gave an account of the resources,
conditions, and relative accessibility to the public of 35 British
libraries, the majority of which were university or college foundations
and only two, the Warrington and Chetham libraries, public in a true
sense; he drew an elaborate comparison with 383 libraries of not less
than 10,000 volumes apiece which, he affirmed, were open to every one
on the Continent, and with about a hundred in the United States. In
his examination by the Committee, he pleaded for grants from the Privy
Council to supplement local contributions, as were already being given
for elementary education; the inspection of libraries by the Committee
of Council on Education, and the institution of a Ministry of Public
Instruction charged with the control of public education and the
supervision of public libraries; the establishment, not as a tax on
publishers but at the national expense, of public depositories for all
books published in the United Kingdom; the international exchange of
books for the encouragement of libraries. Edwards urged other advanced
ideas, some of which, such as the provision of a different class of
public libraries for country parishes, have generations later begun to
be put into actuality. A second Select Committee was appointed early
next year to report on the best means of extending the establishment of
free public libraries, and Edwards was again in request as a witness.
An article of his in the British Quarterly for Feb., 1850, had no doubt
considerable influence on the passage of the Public Libraries Act on
March 13th, in spite of damaging criticisms of his statistics.
The Ewart Act, as it is often called, “for Enabling Town Councils to
Establish Public Libraries and Museums,” was purely permissive. A poll
of burgesses was required before the Act could be put in force, and
a two-thirds majority was prescribed. The promoters believed that if
buildings were put up, suitable contents would be forthcoming from
local benefactors. Accordingly, no power was granted to buy books. The
rate levied must not exceed a halfpenny, the same as had been allowed
by the Museums Act, of which this was merely an extension. The debate
on the second reading is remarkably interesting. The arguments of
Ewart, Brotherton, the father of Labouchere, and even John Bright,
were essentially utilitarian. “Nothing,” Bright was sure, “would tend
more to the preservation of order than the diffusion of the greatest
amount of intelligence, and the prevalence of the most complete and
open discussion, amongst all classes.” Brotherton said, “Here were
£2,000,000 a year paid for the punishment of crime, yet honourable
gentlemen objected to tax themselves a halfpenny in the pound for the
prevention of crime. In his opinion it was of little use to teach
people to read unless you afterwards provided them with books to which
they might apply the faculty they had so acquired.... He was satisfied
that expenditure upon this object would be productive not only of
immense moral good but of very material public economy in the long
run.” The adverse arguments were likewise utilitarian and, as a rule,
economic in the purely mercenary sense. Roundell Palmer, afterwards
Earl of Selborne, “was most truly desirous to see learning extended,”
but protested against compulsory rating, which he loftily said would
put a positive check on the “voluntary self-supporting desire for
knowledge which at present existed amongst the people.” One obstructor,
who “did not like reading at all, and hated it when at Oxford,” said,
“However excellent food for the mind might be, food for the body was
what was now most wanted for the people;” and that he would have been
“much more ready to support the honourable gentleman if he had tried
to encourage national industry by keeping out the foreigner.” Summed
up, the objections were four: that increased taxation was undesirable;
that it was unjust if not unconstitutional to make non-users pay
for the upkeep of the new institution; that too much knowledge was
a dangerous thing; that there were ulterior objects in the project,
and that libraries might become centres of political agitation, awake
feelings of discontent, and encourage economic unrest. The same
arguments, observe, were heard in the brief debates accorded to the
abortive amending Bills in the decade before the last Public Libraries
Act. Yet the Ewart Act, at this interval of time, looks a timid,
experimental, and by no means far-sighted enactment, defended against
excesses by clauses that could scarce fail to make the very existence
of the institutions it brought forth precarious and unfruitful. Such
clauses could hardly have been accepted had not the framers of the Bill
contemplated further legislation at an early date, and concentrated
their efforts on making a small but irrevocable beginning.
The operation of Ewart’s Act was extended to Ireland and Scotland in
1853, and the same year the Act was amended with respect to Scotland,
raising the rate limitation to one penny. Ewart brought in a Bill
in 1854 for raising the rate limit in England and Wales to the same
figure, and authorizing expenditure of the rate income on books. By
this time thirteen towns had adopted the Act. As the Government opposed
the Bill, it was dropped after the second reading; but next year he
brought in a new Bill, which, after a keen debate on the proposal to
provide newspapers out of the rates, passed with little demur. The rate
limit was now one penny, and places of 5,000 inhabitants or more were
entitled to the benefits of the Act; clauses dealing with borrowing
powers, the acquisition of sites, the mode of adoption by a poll of
ratepayers, and the special circumstances of the City of London, were
included. There were amending Acts in 1866 and later years, but this
remained the principal statute for England and Wales till 1892.
The first town to set up a municipal reference and lending library
under the Act of 1850 was Manchester. A subscription reaching £12,823,
of which £800 was collected by a working men’s committee, was raised;
the Act was adopted by an enormous majority of ratepayers; Edward
Edwards was appointed librarian, and books were acquired in readiness
out of the voluntary fund. The original building in Campfield
was opened on September 2nd, 1852, with great ceremony, Dickens,
Thackeray, Lytton, and Monckton Milnes being among the statesmen and
other personages on the platform. Dickens described the Manchester
undertaking as “a great free school bent on carrying instruction to the
poorest hearths.” Thackeray improved upon Hogarth’s contrast of the
wicked mechanic reading Moll Flanders and the good mechanic reading
the story of the apprentice who became Lord Mayor, by picturing the
Lancashire mechanic reading Carlyle, Dickens, and Bulwer. John Bright
looked forward to when the farmer and country labourer would have a
library service. Norwich and Bolton were actually before Manchester
in adopting the Act, Oxford and Winchester were almost as prompt.
Liverpool obtained a special Act in 1852 to raise a penny rate for
a library and museum. Brighton had got a local Act in 1850, but was
late in establishing its library. Sheffield and Exeter refused at
first to adopt the Act, but reversed their decision in 1853 and 1870
respectively. Blackburn, Cambridge, and Ipswich voted for libraries in
1853; Maidstone, Kidderminster, and Hereford, in 1855. Airdrie was the
first town in Scotland, and Cork the first in Ireland to adopt the Acts
pertaining to those countries. Birkenhead, Leamington, and two parishes
in Westminster adopted the Acts in 1856, Walsall, and Lichfield in
1857, Canterbury in 1858. In London progress was slow and chequered.
Adverse polls were recorded in the City of London, Islington,
Paddington, Marylebone, St. Pancras, and Camberwell, though several
wiped out the stigma later; Hackney, Whitechapel, Putney, Cheltenham,
Bath, Hull, and other places were likewise recalcitrant; but Cardiff,
after voting down the proposal by a majority of one in 1860, adopted
the Acts in 1862. Leicester, Burslem, Warwick, Oldham, Dundee, Paisley,
Nottingham, Coventry, Leeds, Doncaster, and Wolverhampton, were among
the forty-six places that had accepted public library legislation by
1868, the year taken in a parliamentary report dated April 11th, 1870,
from which it appears that fifty-two libraries had been established,
nearly half a million books acquired, and an annual issue of 3,400,000
attained. This was the year of the Elementary Education Act, which
was to do away with the enormous amount of sheer illiteracy that
still prevailed, and to raise up potential readers in their millions,
though it was yet too early to ask for that intimate co-operation
between schools and libraries which would have taught the people not
only to read but also how and what to read, and tended to make the
results of even a brief elementary education deep and permanent.
[Illustration: CENTRAL PUBLIC LIBRARY, NOTTINGHAM.]
The library movement made most headway in the northern counties and
the midlands; the southern towns were slow in coming in. Scotland also
was late in adopting the Acts--a curious fact, probably due to the
way Scotland is used to the private endowment of public foundations.
The Scots are frugal and saving; but no people are so generous in
works for the common weal. Hence it is not difficult to understand the
reluctance of Glasgow to saddle itself with a library rate, when it
already had its Baillie’s Institution and Stirling’s Library, and the
Mitchell Library was coming--it actually came in 1877. Edinburgh also
rejected the Acts, obviously on similar grounds, until in 1886 an offer
of £50,000 from Andrew Carnegie induced the city to change its mind,
at first however, levying only a halfpenny rate. Ireland was very much
behindhand.
The following table shows the relative rate of growth, down to 1909,
of public libraries established under the Acts; it does not include a
number provided by voluntary agencies or under special legislation.[3]
England. Wales. Scotland Ireland. Totals.
1840-1849 1 -- -- -- 1
1850-1859 18 -- 1 1 20
1860-1869 12 1 1 -- 14
1870-1879 38 5 5 -- 48
1880-1889 51 5 9 5 70
1890-1899 121 17 15 8 161
1900-1909 125 29 42 12 208
---------------------------------------------------
366 57 73 26 522
---------------------------------------------------
Accelerated growth from the seventies onwards was due to various
causes, first and foremost the general advance in education, especially
when the effects of Forster’s Act of 1870 began to tell. Successive
amending enactments, down to the consolidating Act of 1892, each
removed some obstacle. Thus the resistance of London ratepayers was
conciliated by an Act in 1877 permitting them to vote a lower limit
than one penny. More libraries were opened as a consequence, but
the handicap of an exiguous income militated against their welfare.
Many gifts of funds, buildings, or special collections of books were
received from time to time, often with a proviso that the municipality
should build and maintain a library. The old objection to the public
endowment of libraries, that it would discourage private bounty, was
thus shown to be against experience as it was against reason; though
British generosity in this respect cannot stand comparison with that
of rich Americans. It was calculated by an English librarian, Thomas
Formby, in 1889, that in the last thirty-five years British libraries
had received a million pounds from private sources, and American
libraries six times as much.
A stimulus of far-reaching effect came into operation towards the
close of the century, when Andrew Carnegie began to make systematic
contributions, first to Scottish and then to other British
municipalities, for the establishment and extension of public
libraries. The benefactions of an English philanthropist Passmore
Edwards, though more modest in amount, had relatively a more salutary
result, because they were more carefully adjusted to local needs. The
policy of Mr. Carnegie was, however, very sagacious. As a rule, he gave
money for buildings and fixtures alone, on the understanding that the
maximum rate allowable should be raised. The expectation was that, once
started, the library enterprise was bound to go on, and that with a
building free from debt it was bound to thrive. The sequels were not
always so satisfactory. Many places were tempted by the free gift to
build more expensive premises than they had the wherewithal to maintain
efficiently. Some embarked on ambitious schemes that left them with a
heavy burden of debt. Large buildings meant, of course, large staffs
and heavy establishment charges; but the income was strictly limited.
Hence many libraries were unable to pay their way, and at the same
time afford a proper service of books. There was a judicious clause in
the Scottish Act which ought to have been inserted in all, by which
authorities were forbidden to raise a loan of more than twenty times
one quarter of the annual rate income.
The insufficiency of the penny rate was early and acutely realized.
It weighed heaviest on places with small incomes. The larger the
establishment to be kept up, the smaller the ratio of establishment
expenses to maintenance. The limitation had been fixed so low that
most towns with a population between 50,000 and 100,000 had to pursue
a hand-to-mouth policy, and content themselves with spending on books
such sums as happened to remain over when all fixed charges had been
defrayed. The main reason for the library books, had to be neglected
for the sake of the building, the mere case that held the books. The
inadequate staff that looked after both cost still more, yet were
overworked and underpaid. Larger towns were better off, not merely
through being able to apportion expenses more economically, but also
because they had more chances of getting legislative concessions.
Furthermore, the civic spirit is usually stronger in big cities: it
is one of the reasons why they are big cities. There, in the great
industrial centres, the old Mechanics’ Institutes were born. They have
been strongholds of educational endeavour; they were the pioneers of
the library movement. Thus it is not surprising to find Wolverhampton,
Swansea, Warrington, Sheffield, Manchester, Salford, Birmingham,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Oldham, St. Helens, Walsall, Preston, Wigan,
Sunderland, and several smaller industrial towns obtaining increased
rating powers and widening their library provision. Many other towns
would gladly have sought the same privileges, but for the cost of
promoting a special Act.
For many years before the great war it was borne in more and more to
the minds of friends of the movement that not all was well with public
libraries, and a series of amending Bills to do away with the obsolete
restriction of income and introduce various constructive reforms were
brought into Parliament and steadily blocked. The various Acts for
England and Wales had been consolidated in the Public Libraries Act of
1892. This harmonized several conflicting enactments, laid it down that
adoption of the Acts should be by resolution of the local authority,
except in London, and allowed neighbouring districts to combine for
library purposes. It left the rate limitation where it was. Some
infinitesimal relief came from the Museums and Gymnasiums Act of 1891,
whereby the upkeep of museums could be charged to a special museum
rate. The Local Government Act of 1894, on the other hand, introduced
some complications into library law, and made it even more impossible
than heretofore for rural districts to come under the Acts. Amending
Acts for Scotland and Ireland passed that year.
In certain points, the Scottish Acts, which had been consolidated
in 1887, had advantages over the English. The precaution against
extravagant building loans has been mentioned already. Further,
committees must contain not less than ten and not more than twenty
members, half the number being appointed from the local magistrates or
councillors and half from other householders. Many if not most English
authorities draw their committees exclusively from their own body.
The disadvantages are twofold. The ordinary borough councillor is an
overworked person, attending many committees, among which the libraries
committee rarely, in municipal politics, counts as the most important.
He is apt to regard his duties on that committee in a perfunctory way.
The ordinary member of a council, moreover, is elected oftener than not
for very different objects from the welfare of a public library, it
may be simply to keep down the rates; and his qualifications for these
objects may very well tend to disqualify him for enlightened service
on the governing body of a public library. A book sub-committee with
hardly a single member that reads, has, unfortunately, been no rarity
under the conditions that still prevail, with a chairman standing
for an obscurantist and reactionary policy towards this despised
department of the municipal entity. Hence the peculiar desirability
of having outsiders with liberal views, a liberal education, and some
familiarity with books and libraries, added to the representatives of
the council. This question will arise again when the possibilities of a
new regime come in for discussion.
From time to time it was suggested by critics and would-be reformers
that public libraries ought not to remain a series of isolated
institutions, able to co-operate neither with each other nor with the
schools and other intellectual activities. Edward Edwards and also his
biographer Thomas Greenwood, one of the wisest and most disinterested
friends the library movement has ever had, looked forward to the
co-ordination of all these departments of the body politic as a body
intellectual under the supervision of a Government minister. The same
reform was mooted by J. J. Ogle, a public librarian and a secretary of
education, who, in _The Free Library_ (1897), easily disposed of the
argument that State inspection and State grants would mean uniformity
of method. In 1904 the Library Association at their annual conference,
after several sessions had been devoted to considering the pros and
cons, passed a strong resolution affirming “That the public library
should be recognized as forming part of the national educational
machinery.”
Thus the ideas of close interaction promoted by central control and
of intimate correlation of libraries and the other instruments of
public education had been well-debated, long before they were taken
over, along with the more pressing question of the rate limit, as
obvious items for the agenda of the Adult Education Committee, which
was appointed in July 1917 as a sub-committee of the Reconstruction
Committee, to be merged presently in the Ministry of Reconstruction.
How this Committee handled the constructive proposals will be shown
later on. Two of the reforms they recommended were embodied in a
Government Bill, which became law on December 23rd, 1921. Both of
these were, in essence if not in form, the abolition of illogical and
obsolete disabilities, inherited from the early days of the Ewart Acts.
The first grievance to be removed was the rate limit. When even the
advocates of the public library thought it would be mainly the working
classes that would use it, there was some reason for keeping down the
cost, economic reasons as well as reasons of policy. When libraries
had been in existence for more than half a century, and every class in
the community used them without distinction, it was monstrous that a
municipality owning a library should be debarred from keeping its own
property up to the mark if it was willing to pay the bill. Bankruptcy
was already threatening many library authorities even before the war;
before the end of it, some were being shut up, numerous others were
cutting down their services to the vanishing point. Councils were
forbidden by law to pay the ordinary war bonus to their library staffs,
who had before these changes been the worst-paid of their employees. It
was a question of life or death. Relief must come at once, or half the
libraries in the country would cease to exist. Relief was vouchsafed,
and with it a second restriction was ended, that which debarred County
Councils from setting up a library service for the villages. Systems
of rural libraries were already springing up through the monetary
grants of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and were being carried
on, legally or illegally it was doubtful which, by the Education
Committees. To do something to stimulate an intelligent social life on
the land was indispensable, if the dreams of recolonizing Britain and
reviving agriculture were to come to anything.
The Bill passed, without an echo of the strenuous opposition that had
greeted its many predecessors, which had made much smaller demands
on the public purse. It removed two crippling disabilities, but the
constructive proposals of the Adult Education Committee it did not
touch. Two most formidable obstructions had been cleared away: the
forward leap was yet to take. Was it to be deferred indefinitely,
or might the Act be accepted as prelude to a comprehensive library
charter, to be prepared as soon as the Committee’s numerous
recommendations could be reduced to legislative form?
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Adult Education Committee. Final Report, p. 14.
[2] e.g. That at Edinburgh (dating from 1725), London (1749), Liverpool
(1758), Manchester (1781), the Newcastle “Lit. & Phil” (1793).
[3] Professor W. S. B. Adams. Report on Library Provision and Policy
(Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1915).
II
WHAT IS A LIBRARY SERVICE?