For the documentary material dealing with the beginnings of the public
library movement, the searcher must delve within the thousand pages
of a portly folio volume issued by the British government sixty years
ago. If one possesses patience sufficient to read the immense mass of
dry evidence compiled by a parliamentary commission and "presented to
both houses of parliament by command of Her Majesty," some interesting
facts in library history will be found. A young man of twenty-three,
then an underling in the service of the British Museum, afterwards an
eminent librarian, was one of the principal witnesses. Edward Edwards
had the gift of vision. Half a century before public libraries became
the people's universities, as they are today, his prophetic tongue
gave utterance to what has since become the keynote of library aims
and policies. Badgered by hostile inquisitors, ridiculed by press and
politicians, he undeviatingly clung to his views, and he lived to see
his prophecy realized.
Great libraries there had been before his day; remarkable as a
storehouse of knowledge in printed form was, and is in our own day, the
institution with which he was associated. But in these rich reference
collections intended for the student of research, the element of
popular use was lacking. To have suggested the loan of a single book
for use outside the four walls of the library would have startled and
benumbed everyone in authority--and without authority--from the members
of the governing board to librarian, sublibrarians, and messenger boys.
This stripling faced the members of parliament, and without hesitation
proclaimed his thesis.
"It is not merely to open the library to persons who, from the
engrossing nature of their engagements of business, are at present
utterly excluded from it, but it is also that the library may be made a
direct agent in some degree in the work of national education. Let not
anyone be alarmed lest something very theoretical or very revolutionary
should be proposed. I merely suggest that the library should be opened
to a class of men quite shut out from it by its present regulations."
Then he added: "In such a country as this, there should be one great
national storehouse. But in addition to this, there should be libraries
in different quarters on a humbler scale, very freely accessible."
One of the ablest members of parliament, William Ewart, of Liverpool,
became intensely interested in the views expressed by young Edwards,
and from that day was counted the consistent champion of library
privileges for the common people. Largely through his instrumentality,
aided by such men as Richard Cobden, John Bright and Joseph Brotherton,
parliament passed an act "for the encouragement of museums." Out of
this measure grew the later Public Libraries Act. This notable step was
not accomplished without bitter opposition.
"The next thing we will be asked to do," said one indignant member on
the floor of the House, "is to furnish people with quoits and peg-tops
and footballs at the expense of taxpayers. Soon we will be thinking of
introducing the performances of Punch for the amusement of the people."
Events in England influenced similar movements in the United States. In
a letter to Edward Everett, in 1851, Mr. George Ticknor gave the first
impetus to the establishment of a free public library in Boston--the
first in the new world to be maintained permanently by the people for
the people.
"I would establish a library which differs from all free libraries yet
attempted," he wrote. "I mean one in which any popular books, tending
to moral and intellectual improvement, shall be furnished in such
numbers of copies that many persons can be reading the same book at the
same time; in short, that not only the best books of all sorts, but the
pleasant literature of the day, shall be made accessible to the whole
people when they most care for it; that is, when it is new and fresh."
Sixty years after the date of Mr. Ticknor's letter, and chiefly within
the last two decades of the period, the public library movement has
assumed a place in public education which, relatively, the public
school movement attained only after three hundred years of effort.
When Thomas Bodley died, in 1613, in all Europe there were but three
libraries accessible to the public--the Bodleian, the Angelo Rocca at
Rome and the Ambrosian at Milan. In 1841 the Penny Cyclopedia devoted
about four inches of a narrow column to the subject of libraries,
ancient and modern, and limited its reference to American libraries to
one sentence, obtained at second hand from an older contemporary.
"In the United States of America, according to the Encyclopedia
Americana, the principal libraries are, or were in 1831, that of
Harvard College, containing 36,000 volumes; the Philadelphia Library,
containing 27,000; that of the Boston Athenaeum, containing 26,000;
that of Congress, containing 16,000, and that of Charleston, containing
13,000."
It is only since 1867 that the federal government has deemed it worth
while to compile library statistics, and the first comprehensive
figures were gathered in 1875. It is worth noting that then they
embraced all libraries comprising 300 volumes, and that in 1893 no
mention is made of collections containing less than a thousand volumes,
while the most recent official enumeration makes 5,000 volumes the unit
of consideration. From these official figures may be gleaned something
of the extraordinary growth of libraries, both numerically and in size.
In 1875, including school libraries, there were 2,039 containing a
thousand volumes, ten years later there were 4,026, ten years after
that 8,000, and at this date there are in this class not less than
12,000, while the recorded number comprising three hundred volumes
or more reaches the substantial total of 15,634, and 2,298 of these
catalog in excess of 5,000 volumes each.