LIBRARIES

The political, economic, social, and cultural movements of the eighteenth century laid the groundwork for the rapid expansion and development of both public and private libraries in the nineteenth century. More numerous and varied, more public and accessible than in previous centuries, they were intimately connected to many of the broader cultural, political, and economic changes that were reshaping European societies.

In the case of public libraries, the most visible change was the accelerated transformation of princely or court libraries into public institutions. A fundamental shift occurred in the conception of such collections. They ceased to be repositories for the personal benefit of rulers and their courts. By declaring them open to the public, rulers recognized the right of a wider audience to study and enjoy their content. In addition, material support for these libraries moved from the princely purse to state or public funding.

Numerous factors contributed to this transformation. A growing sense of national identity required monuments to national culture and greatness. Opening them to the public encouraged national pride and—it was hoped—a loyal, educated citizenry.

State libraries grew through collecting, conquest, and purchase. In addition, the confiscation of ecclesiastical libraries, notably those of the Jesuit order following its dissolution in 1773 and of monasteries secularized in the wake of the French Revolution, vastly increased state library holdings. For example, the Hofbibliothek (Court Library) of Bavaria, in Munich, which opened to the public in 1790, added some 480,000 volumes, including 20,000 manuscripts, between 1799 and 1817.

Other political and cultural trends hastened the transition to state and national libraries. The foundation of learned societies and the spread of literacy to the middle classes by the mid-1700s had created a clientele for libraries. Liberal and republican ideals and the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries weakened monarchies and expanded the image of state libraries from symbols of national pride and culture to institutions for the service and education of citizens.

The modern sense of a national library as an institution performing national functions began to evolve during the nineteenth century with the recognition that its principal task was collecting the nation's publications. The earliest library to attempt this was the Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library) of France, which had benefited from legal deposit since 1537. It was the first library to call itself a national library, having been renamed during the French Revolution (1795).

A British national library was proposed in 1707 but did not emerge until 1752, and then it took the form of the British Museum Library; opened to the public in 1759, it only changed its name to the British Library in 1973. By 1800, nearly all European countries had recognized national libraries.

The use of public and national libraries was at first generally restricted to scholars and then, increasingly, to the university students, whose numbers expanded dramatically during the eighteenth century. The consumer revolution of the eighteenth century had, however, created increased leisure, expectations, and demand for goods and activities (including books and reading) that denoted social status. The dramatic increase during the last third of the nineteenth century in both secondary education and literacy (which by 1900 was above 50 percent even in the less advanced countries) created an expanding reading public. To meet its needs, the number and variety of popular reading institutions increased.

Popular libraries had antecedents in the feebased eighteenth-century circulating libraries run by booksellers and the reading rooms that emerged in coffeehouses. In addition, private citizens and social associations had started subscription libraries for the growing merchant and trade classes. These libraries continued to flourish, giving important stimulus to the book trade. By the century's end, the dramatic rise of popular literature in the form of newspapers, periodicals, and novels resulted in the creation of a new type of library: the public lending library, which emerged in 1780 in Germany. By 1800 most large cities and many smaller municipalities had libraries of this sort.

Private, commercial, and public circulating libraries persisted into the nineteenth century, expanding their scope and democratizing their appeal. Lending libraries were started not just in bookstores but in barbershops and in tobacconists', confectioners', and stationers' shops. As society industrialized, libraries for workers emerged. Nineteenth-century bourgeois national consciousness, linked as it was to moral reform, self-help, and the education of responsible citizens, shaped their development. The rich associational life of Europeans also played an important role. Educational and self-help societies like the mechanics institutes of the 1820s in England provided lectures, reading rooms, and lending libraries as a way of educating skilled workers. In France, where the public library system developed slowly, from 1862 onward the bourgeois Franklin Society advocated the formation of popular collections of "instructive works" to make French working men sober and responsible and to avoid social unrest. Chafing at restrictions on dress and on the type of literature in these libraries, however, unskilled workers often founded their own reading rooms. Cooperative societies of workers also founded libraries, and their numbers exceeded the number of public libraries before 1880. Between 1836 and 1854, the English workers of Carlisle established twenty-four reading rooms with 4,000 volumes and 1,400 members. Workers' libraries appeared in Germany during the revolutions of 1848 and again among local Socialist Party and trade union chapters in the 1890s.

Libraries for women also emerged in the late eighteenth century and expanded their scope in the nineteenth. The earliest rented, often by mail, those books deemed suitable for women. Women were avid readers of novels and the new magazines about women's issues. Despite heated debates about the propriety of women reading novels and going to public libraries to do so, by the century's end reading rooms had been established for women in public libraries and libraries for women had been established in factories.

Fueling the development of these libraries were not only the desires of working-class men and women for status and direct access to religious, political, and recreational literature, but also the anxieties of the upper classes about what they considered the dangerous classes and the upper-class desire to inculcate the values of what they considered responsible citizenship. The British Public Libraries Act of 1850 was the work of social reformers rather than the government. In France, the Ligue d'enseignement (Instructional League) persuaded employees to establish workers' libraries in factories in 1866. The Borromäus Verein was founded in Germany in 1845 as a society to promote good reading and establish libraries for Catholics of all classes. The convergence of the popular education and popular library movements resulted in the establishment of additional free, popular municipal libraries, and consequently commercial and private lending libraries declined.

Expanding access to libraries was accompanied by the steady development of ways to access library collections, from printed and card catalogs to uniform cataloguing rules and classification systems. With the professionalization of librarians, library science emerged as a distinct field of learning.

See alsoEducation; Literacy; Museums; Popular and Elite Culture.

bibliography

Secondary Sources

Blasselle, Bruno. La Bibliothéque nationale. Paris, 1989.

Dalton, Margaret S. "The Borromäus Verein: Catholic Public Librarianship in Germany, 1845–1933." Libraries and Culture 31, no. 2 (1996): 409–421.

Everitt, Jean. "Co-Operative Society Libraries." Library History (Great Britain) 15, no. 1 (1999): 33–40.

Garrett, Jeffrey. "Redefining Order in the German Library, 1775–1825." Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. 1 (1999): 103–123.

Hammond, Mary. "'The Great Fiction Bore': Free Libraries and the Construction of a Reading Public in England, 1880–1914." Libraries and Culture 37, no. 2 (2002): 83–108.

Stam, David H. International Dictionary of Library Histories. 2 vols. Chicago, 2001. Extensive coverage of types of libraries as well as of individual libraries; useful bibliography.

Sturges, Paul. "Great City Libraries of Britain: Their History from a European Perspective." Library History (Great Britain) 19, no. 2 (2003): 93–111.

Tedder, Henry Richard, and James Duff Brown. "Libraries." In Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information. 11th ed. New York, 1911. A detailed treatment of libraries, especially in Europe and the United States; includes statistics from contemporary sources.

Susanne F. Roberts