The Scottish Community Library in the Age of Enlightenment

The Scottish Community Library in the Age of Enlightenment

Dr John CrawfordFormer chair: Library and Information History

Group and Trustee, Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals

Some background factors

• ‘Improvement’ not Enlightenment• Scottish society associational• Main function of towns is commerce • Few public buildings or coffee houses• Enlightenment thinkers opposed to Scottish Nationalism • A belief in tolerance and reason• ‘Enlightenment ideas...widely diffused throughout the ranks

of the educated classes in Scotland’• ‘Investment in brain intensive activity in late 17th century’ • Source Devine (1999) and others

A contemporary view

• ‘Is it not strange that at a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliaments, our independent government, even the presence of our chief Nobility ... that in these Circumstances, we shou’d really be the people most distinguished for Literature in Europe?’

• Source: David Hume 1757 quoted in Herman (2001)

Enlightenment (Improvement) values

• ‘...the more general awareness that man is a social being shaped and determined by background, not purely selfish but ruled also by concern for others. The Scottish Enlightenment provided a working model of a modern society not unaware of its precariousness. ‘

• [NB Law and environment critical factors] • Source: Collins Encyclopaedia of Scotland (1994)

A fermtoun (Auchindrain)

Subsistence level living, early 18th c

A planned village c 1800

An 18th c town: Kelso

Prehistory

• The world’s first national public library policy document: An overture for founding and maintaining of bibliothecks in every paroch throughout this kingdom. James Kirkwood 1699

• Embryonic public (endowed) libraries e.g. : Saltoun (1658); Innerpeffray (1680): Kirkwall (1683) Dunblane (1688); Rothesay (1702); Haddington (Gray Library - bequest operative 1729)

Some definitions

• First endowment phase (Libraries founded mainly by individuals between c.1680 and c.1750; the earliest publicly available collections)

• Circulating libraries (Libraries where a subscription was paid to hire books from the library’s owner, usually a bookseller or stationer)

• Subscription libraries (Libraries which were private clubs or societies and which charged a subscription which was used to buy books and defray administrative costs)

• Reading societies (book clubs of intentionally short duration e.g. 5 years. Stock divided among members at end of period)

Innerpeffray Library: an endowed library

Innerpeffray Library Interior

Leadhills Library: an iconic example

Paisley Encyclopaedia Club: a tradesmen’s debating and reading Society c. 1820

Numbers of libraries

• First endowment libraries to 1800 – about 20 • Circulating libraries to 1800 - 30 • Middle class subscription (Proprietary) libraries to

1800 – 43 • Working class reading societies in the 1790s – 52

(about 1800 members in 13 counties)• Working class subscription libraries to 1800 – 14 (but

51 by 1820)• About 107 publicly available libraries in total

Alexander Hay of Drummelzier

• ‘It must give me great pleasure to think that Dunse is in a way of becoming a Seat of Literature, Arts and Sciences, tho’ I must owe I should still more was there a possibility of its becoming a Settlement for Industry, Trade and manufactures’

• Source Record of the laws, regulations and proceedings of the subscribers for a public library at Duns. December 1768. passim

Middle and working class library stocksSubjects Working class libraries Middle class libraries

Fiction 21.7% 14.1%

Religion 15.3% 3.1%

History 11.5% 18.5%

Literature 9.9% 16.8%

Periodicals 9.4% 6.3%

Voyages/travels 9.4% 8.6%

Miscellaneous 8.7% 18.4%

Biography 6.9% 7.4%

Science/technology 3.8% 4.0%

Politics/law 3.4% 2.8%

Source Crawford (1981 p. 249)

Innerpeffray Loans Book

A library society

The Library banner

The Leadhills rules

• ‘We, Subscribers, having agreed to form ourselves into a SOCIETY, in order to purchase a Collection of Books, for our mutual Improvement, did... Condescend upon certain ARTICLES, to be observed by us, for the Establishment and Regulation of this our Society...’

• Source Leadhills Reading Society (1761)

Mutual improvement: an early lifelong learning ideology

• Mutual improvement might be defined as the intellectual and moral development of the social individual through corporately organised intellectual activity, in this case, book use and reflects the Scottish Enlightenment’s preoccupation with social man

‘Improved man’

• ‘To store the minds of the lower classes with useful knowledge, is certainly of very great consequence, both to them as individuals and to society at large. Giving them a turn for reading and reflection, is giving them a source of innocent and laudable amusement; and besides, raises them to a more dignified degree in the scale of rationality’

• Source: A peasant [pseudonym]

A cultural nationalist agenda? Covington, Lanarkshire

• ‘A glance at the catalogue at once shows that the books have been chosen by Scotsmen, from the prevalence of Scottish authors... Ramsay, Ferguson, Hume, Smith, Blair, Robertson, Kames &c. and the recent purchases exhibit an equally brilliant combination of great names: Campbell, Grahame, Scott, Stewart, Wilson, Alison, Hogg &c. ‘

• Source Letters from Scotland (1815)

Scottish imprints

• Wanlockhead Miners’ Library : 40% of the surviving pre 1801 imprints are Scottish

• (Private) • Library of John Howie of Lochgoin: most 18th

century imprints Scottish • Leadhills Library: of 349 surviving pre 1801

imprints, 108 or 31% are Scottish. Almost certainly an underestimate

Book selection aids

• Mainly a committee function• Suggestions book e.g. Greenock• Literary serials e.g. London review, Kirkcudbright• Booksellers’ catalogues, e.g. Lackington and Creech,

Greenock• Copies of other libraries’ printed catalogues • ‘Well read people’ e.g. Inshewan in Perthshire• ‘Library booksellers’? Peter Hill?• Source Crawford (1981, p. 165)

Loans book sources

• Leightonian Library, Dunblane• Innerpeffray Library, Perthshire (limited analysis)• John Gray Library, Haddington (analysed)• Dumfries Presbytery Library (limited analysis)• Sanquhar Library, Dumfriesshire• Westerkirk Library, Dumfriesshire • Wigtown Subscription Library • Data recorded is unstandardised and subject to change • Identification and transcription of data difficult especially in

early examples • Source Crawford (1993, p.337)

Value of printed catalogues

1. Susceptibility to evaluation2. An accounting tool in the 18th and early 19th centuries (32

pre 1801 catalogues) 3. Sometimes describes the library and outlines its services and

history4. Sometimes lists members, rules and subscription rates5. Permits inter – library co-operation6. May promote a philosophy of library provision7. A source of printing/local publishing history8. A tool for historical performance evaluation9. A major source of cultural and intellectual history

A contribution to townscape: Kelso

A contribution to townscape: Selkirk

And 200 years later

• A continuing tradition of social inclusion• The social class composition of ‘public libraries’ defined by

1800 + the emergence of children as a user group • Comprehensive traditions of library provision and a wide

understanding of the characteristics and value of libraries • But• Historically management traditions were amateur and

independent of a tradition of professional expertise• Because library provision was based on small administrative

units it became hostile to bureaucratic organisation and an ideology of professionalism

A continuing tradition

Contact details Dr John Crawford

21 Polbae Crescent,Eaglesham,

Glasgow G76 0LW + 44 (0)1355-302851

[email protected]

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