1 - Introduction: the changing world of libraries – from cloister to hearth

Summary

In 1846 Punch expressed concern at one of the many inconveniences of modern metropolitan life – traffic congestion in public thoroughfares. Rather than introduce a congestion charge, Mr Punch proposed a novel (in more ways than one) expediency: the construction of a large omnibus, two or three storeys high, in which commuters could pass the time spent in traffic jams usefully. There would be compartments for letter-writing, hair-cutting, shaving (during dead stops, of course), and:

There will be a refreshment-room in connection with the boot, and a circulating library near the top, so that a passenger on entering may subscribe either for the whole or a portion of his journey.

The variety of library facilities available to the man (and woman) on the Clapham omnibus of the mid-nineteenth century was becoming bewilderingly diffuse. Libraries existed to cater for all tastes and communities, from common circulating libraries to London clubs, from parish lending library to cathedral library, from local literary society to university. All classes read, whether for amusement or instruction, and at all possible opportunities. Punch’s plan for an omnibus library was really very sensible.

One hundred and twenty years earlier, in 1728, Revd Robert Wodrow (himself a former librarian of Glasgow University) had vigorously deplored the social implications of the foundation of Britain’s first circulating library by the elder Allan Ramsay:

profannes is come to a great hight, all the villanous profane and obscene books and playes printed at London by Curle and others, are gote doun from London by Allan Ramsey [sic], and lent out, for an easy price, to young boyes, servant weemen of the better sort, and gentlemen, and vice and obscenity dreadfully propagated.