Part 2

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?

There is an enormous difference between the library service enjoyed in the more progressive municipalities, where public opinion has been properly educated and the authorities mean to do their best, whatever the financial impediments, and have a clear conception of what is the best, and the perfunctory service in places where the library is an unwelcome addition to the municipal family, which cannot be got rid of but must be prevented from becoming a burden on the rates. The most progressive of librarians and library committee-men would freely admit that no public library in this country is doing all that it might for the community, or anything like what it will do when the library habit has been instilled into the average citizen. The most progressive are but leading the way; the goal is still in the future. Accordingly, an account of the best work now being done by the best libraries will serve two purposes: it will show the possibilities that are actually being attained; it will help the reader to build up mentally a complete type of what a library service might be.

LENDING LIBRARIES.