13 - Radical reading? Working-class libraries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Summary

Introduction

Had you conducted a library audit in many towns in the industrial North of England between 1860 and 1880, or the mining communities of South Wales between 1895 and 1914, you would have encountered numerous libraries, which were not part of the public library system, but instead belonged to the local Co-operative Society or Miners' Institute respectively. Why should that have been? Why, when the legislation allowing for local authority provision had been passed in 1850, should these alternative libraries not just be flourishing, but have been established in the first place?

This chapter investigates the phenomenon of independent working-class libraries in Great Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, looking for broad explanations as to their origins. Were they a conscious attempt by this newly emerging and, then, increasingly self-confident class to break clear of middle-class hegemony? Could their existence in part be understood by the phenomenon of ‘radical reading’, i.e. that the reading practices of the working class involved materials that were politically, economically, socially and culturally radical in their outlook? Were there more mundane reasons for their existence?

The discussion concentrates on those libraries associated with working-class organisations and groups; libraries that arose from a collective response to reading needs based on either a common group identity or a shared ideological position. It does not attempt to deal with those countless libraries assembled by individual working people, acting on their own. These organisations and groups were many and varied, but to come within this chapter's parameters the libraries must essentially be self-administered and self-financed by the working class, and not provided for them via some external agency.