Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic

Lead Research Organisation: University of Liverpool
Department Name: Sch of History

Abstract

This project investigates the contribution of books to social, cultural and political change in the 18th century. It does so by exploring in unprecedented range and depth the role played by voluntary subscription libraries in the reading lives of communities and individuals across the Anglophone Atlantic between 1731 and 1800.

Organised and funded by the state, libraries are today valued as a vital social good and a fundamental plank of liberal democracy. Yet the modern Public Library (originating in the mid-19th century) is only the most recent solution to the problem of how communities provide themselves with books. Before then, there existed a flourishing, unregulated library culture built not by the state but by groups of autonomous individuals acting from a range of motivations, including libraries built and sustained through private subscriptions.

The first formal subscription library was the Library Company of Philadelphia (LCP), begun in 1731 by printer's apprentice Benjamin Franklin and a group of like-minded artisans as a means of acquiring expensive books to provoke conversation and inspire intellectual change. Thereafter, subscription libraries rapidly became a major part of the urban landscape, with at least 350 founded in towns and villages across the British Isles and North America by the turn of the 19th century. These libraries were quite different from commercial operations known popularly as 'circulating libraries'. Subscription libraries were essentially private membership clubs, in which subscribers pooled their resources to acquire a wider choice of books than they could afford individually. Their collections - captured in the library catalogues that are the main focus of this project - constituted material instantiations of readers' shifting interests, helping to reveal the role of newly enfranchised readers in reorganising and extending literary, intellectual and political culture.

Although scholars have long been aware of the emergence of subscription libraries in 18th-century Britain and America, no study of this scale has been possible before. The project will use cutting-edge digital techniques to capture, interpret and make freely available online surviving documentary evidence relating to the books acquired and circulated by more than 80 libraries, founded by communities ranging from tiny rural settlements like Wigtown in Scotland and Fredericktown on the Pennsylvanian frontier, to rapidly growing industrial centres like Belfast and Leeds, and bustling transatlantic ports like New York, Dublin and Bristol. This material will provide unprecedented insights into the dissemination and reception of books across the Anglophone Atlantic in a crucial period marked by Enlightenment, Revolutions, global encounters and technological change. Our findings will be disseminated to a wide range of audiences through scholarly books and articles, online resources developed to support users of the open access database, and a varied programme of public workshops and exhibitions co-designed in collaboration with nine Project Partners - including many of the subscription libraries that survive from this period, such as the LCP.

The team of 8 investigators drawn from the UK, Australia and the USA is extremely well qualified to conduct this research, having published more than 20 books and 80 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters between them on related topics. The proposed approach has been extensively trialled through the PI's successful AHRC-funded Research Network on Community Libraries, while the Digital Humanities Research Group (DHRG) at Western Sydney University is a global leader in pioneering large-scale digital research on book history, library history and the history of reading. As such, the DHRG is uniquely positioned to provide instant connections with related datasets such as co-I Burrows's award-winning French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe database, originally funded by the AHRC.

Planned Impact

One of the main aims of this project is to bring tangible benefits to libraries and those interested in the social, cultural and political contributions that they make in society. An ambitious but achievable impact strategy has been co-developed with a wide range of Partners in the library sector across the UK, the USA and Australia, each of which will benefit in specific ways tailored to their own needs and user groups. These include surviving libraries from the period under review, including the Library Company of Philadelphia, the New York Society Library, the Union Library of Hatborough and the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, as well as a smaller number that incorporated earlier subscription libraries - including the Birmingham & Midland Institute (a cultural organisation which subsumed the original Birmingham Library of 1779), the Liverpool Central Library, the Bristol Central Library (both Public Libraries which inherited documentation from now defunct subscription libraries) and the State Library of New South Wales (first established in 1826 as the Australian Subscription Library).

The project approaches impact through five interconnected strands, elaborated upon in the PtoI attachment:
1. Library enrichment - including deeper contextualised understanding of each Partner institution's history and collections, catalogue enhancement, student internships, career development opportunities for library staff and curators, closer relationships with sister libraries nationally and internationally, increased capacity for further research collaborations and enhanced profile amongst the international research community;
2. Book of the Month programme - a programme to run throughout 2021 across all Partners, designed to encourage libraries, librarians and library users to make connections between the different Partner institutions, to raise awareness of the project and its website amongst library users, and to promote further public engagement activities in Year 3;
3. Exhibitions - ranging in scope from a single display case through to more ambitious installations depending on the capacities of Partners, these will aim to inform and inspire library users by setting each Partner's institutional history within the wider framework of local history and national/international library development;
4. Workshops - designed to introduce the database and its potential uses, to tell some of the local stories that emerge from the research, and to solicit feedback from the different user groups outlined below on the functionality of the project's online resources;
5. Online resources - the open access website will host a range of resources designed to facilitate access for non-academic user groups, including 'how-to' videos, FAQs, glossaries of key terms, teaching materials, Book of the Month blogs and an online exhibition of marginalia and other primary source materials.

With our Partners' help, these pathways will reach further user groups with a vested interest in the research, including librarians, library users, family and local historians, teachers, library campaigners, policy makers and the media, allowing us to bring largely unfamiliar historical perspectives to contemporary debates about the value of libraries. Non-Partner libraries and librarians will benefit from deeper contextualised understanding of the history of their own institutions and collections, while the project will disseminate best practice advice on exhibiting library history and build capacity towards further research collaborations between libraries and HEIs. Local historians, family historians and teachers will benefit from the project's focus on People, Books, Communities and Concepts to enrich their research and pedagogy, while charities, campaigners and policy makers will be able to use our research to articulate historically-informed arguments for the social and cultural importance of reading and to inform new futures for library provision.

Publications

10 25 50
 
Description The database currently includes well over 250,000 records of books use and library membership between 1731 and 1801. We have so far collated borrowing records for 4 of the 7 libraries for which they survive, including 40,000+ borrowing records each for both Bristol and New York, as well as smaller numbers elsewhere. With the assistance of project partners in Hatborough and Burlington, we have brought to light significant sets of borrowing records which have been hidden from scholarly and public view in bank vaults since early in the 20th century, while the next set to be ingested (again for the US) will be entirely new to scholarship. To complement this, we have so far collated holdings record for 62 of the 80 libraries for which catalogues survive, although most of the remaining catalogues are very large and we have concluded that the scholarly value of holdings evidence diminishes considerably as subscription libraries developed larger collections and aspired to be more comprehensive. We have also collected the names of 14,000 library members so far.

We have only been able to make such good progress through several technical innovations developed specifically for the project in collaboration with Intersect and Heurist, the project's two technical consultants. Most significantly, with metadata shared with us by collaborators at the University of Helsinki, we have been able to semi-automate the collation of bibliographical data on the books held by eighteenth-century libraries which has driven a step-change in the potential scope of historic bibliometric projects because in previous related projects (e.g. French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, led by Co-I Burrows), this data needed to be entered manually.

All of our other findings flow from the database, which is starting to transform our understanding of the book world in eighteenth-century Britain and America in three inter-locking areas:

(1) Members: The database is providing unprecedented detail on the membership of 18th-century subscription libraries, showing that they were a fundamental part of urban civic development across North America and the British Isles. They are starting to provide rich insights into local politics and the role of membership clubs in parliamentary election campaigns. With Commerce and Trade by far the most populous Occupational Area amongst our members (where their occupations are known), it is also becoming apparent how deeply entangled membership libraries and shared reading communities were in the business of empire, not least in the prominence (entirely unnoticed in the scholarship on British libraries) of slave traders and others with a direct or indirect stake in enslavement. This last finding is a major focus of our next planned work.

(2) Books: With the holdings of more than 60 libraries already collated, ranging from collections of less than 40 books to collections 3000 or more volumes strong, the database is casting considerable new light on the reception of books of all kind - including books related to empire, scientific texts and works of practical utility, histories, novels, travel writing, dictionaries, medical texts and religious literature. The database is helping us to refine empirically Benedict Anderson's concept of the rise of national 'imagined communities' in this period, and conversely the importance of local canon formation and specialist interest groups.

(3) Borrowings: with over 115,000 individual acts of borrowing already recorded in the database, we are putting named books in specific readers hands, triangulating their reading choices against what is know about their lives, interests and livelihoods at the time of encountering these books - with sometimes remarkable results. On a macro level, too, it is readily apparent that Bristol (which has been by far the most well-know set of borrowings records since the work of Paul Kaufman in the 1960s), was a very specialist kind of library and has skewed considerably what scholars have said about reading habits in this period in important ways. Once other libraries' borrowing records are accounted for, novels, periodicals and other lighter literature has started to come much more prominently to the fore. Likewise, the work of women authors like Charlotte Turner Smith and Fanny Burney, who were not generally acquired by Bristol (and who also do not figure prominently in the lists of books held by libraries), but who were borrowed in very large numbers at New York and other libraries for which borrowing data survives. This complicates what we thought we already knew about the perception of the new breed of female author that was becoming such an important part of the market in the final two decades of the 18th century.
Exploitation Route With more than 250,000 records relating to book use and library membership from the age of Enlightenment and Revolutions, the database is likely to have a transformative impact on book history, the history of reading and wider histories of ideas, culture, literature and science - and is already proving of considerable wider benefit to academics interesting in the circulation of books and ideas, with scholars from multiple disciplines currently utilising the test website for their own research before public launch. Two funded PhD studentships co-supervised by the PI (one funded by an ESRC CASE award, the other by an AHRC CDA award) are taking forward the research in specific areas (slavery & abolition; natural philosophy, mechanisation and the industrial revolution), and myriad other future routes are opened up by the data. It is also likely that the database will prove useful to teachers and students in secondary schools pursuing history, politics, philosophy, literature and other subject areas, since many of the books featured in the database are included in core A-Level curricula.

The database will also be taken forward by surviving subscription libraries and public libraries that inherited subscription library documentation and books, informing better understanding of the provenance and historic value of otherwise little known or understood collections.

The technical solutions developed by the project are also likely to be taken forward, both in terms of utilising Heurist as an open source platform and further expanding the semi-automation that we have developed to encompass larger historical datasets. We are tremendously excited about the potential this new methodology holds out for scaling up our understanding of past reading cultures, while there is also considerable potential in linking our biographical data up with other people-based databases from this period.
Sectors Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)

Education

Culture

Heritage

Museums and Collections

URL http://c18librariesonline.org
 
Description ESRC North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership CASE Studentship
Amount £50,000 (GBP)
Organisation University of Liverpool 
Sector Academic/University
Country United Kingdom
Start 09/2022 
End 03/2027
 
Description Harmonised Impact Acceleration Award (AHRC pathway)
Amount £4,889 (GBP)
Organisation University of Liverpool 
Sector Academic/University
Country United Kingdom
Start 03/2023 
End 05/2023
 
Description MHRA Research Associateship: Libraries, Reading Communities & Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic
Amount £25,000 (GBP)
Organisation Modern Humanities Research Association 
Sector Charity/Non Profit
Country United Kingdom
Start 09/2022 
End 09/2023
 
Description North West Collaborative Doctoral Training Partnership CDA Studentship
Amount £50,000 (GBP)
Organisation University of Liverpool 
Sector Academic/University
Country United Kingdom
Start 09/2022 
End 03/2026
 
Description Reese Fellow in American Bibliography awarded to PDRA Dr Sophie Jones
Amount $2,000 (USD)
Organisation The Library Company of Philadelphia 
Sector Charity/Non Profit
Country United States
Start 03/2022 
End 04/2022