Part 1
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.