Chetham’s Library
ment that free public libraries could offer, others were more cautious. With such libraries still largely reliant on donations to fill their shelves, “book stocks reflected what middle-class patrons thought the poor should be reading, rather than what they actually wanted to read,” says Dr Towsey. “Also, elites came to support libraries because they were worried about what the working classes would read if left to their own devices, and about what else they might get up to in their spare time. They considered libraries an invaluable tool of social and political control.”
The degree to which free public libraries improved literacy in the second-half of the 19th century is unclear, but Dr Towsey says there is at least anecdotal evidence of their transformative effect. “Several detailed case studies from the Victorian period have shown that libraries tended to be exploited by young readers below their mid-30s who were eager to use books to change their lives, pull them out of precarious work and improve their economic fortunes.
“Public libraries did succeed in bringing some readers to books whose previous opportunities would have been extremely curtailed,” he continues, “but it was not until a new wave of philanthropic support and the reforming Public Libraries Act in 1919 that libraries had truly widespread and consistent national reach.”
By then, of course, the ideas of Marx and Engels – forged in that peaceful Manchester reading room – had similarly reached far and wide.