A Library for London

It’s no surprise that I love reading, and libraries have always been one of my favorite places to hang out. So, when I was reading this week and came across a story about the origin of the London Library, I was intrigued. Especially about this statement:

“The London Library was established in 1841 at a time when there were no lending libraries in London.”

Scratches head.

Hatchard’s has been around since 1797 and had a subscription-based lending program that has featured in many a Regency romance. But that apparently wasn’t what Thomas Carlyle was looking for. A historian and author, he convinced literary friends that more was needed. (I am sad to report that he was also a racist—supporting slavery even though friends tried to argue him out of it.) On the literary front, he was joined by luminaries such as Charles Dickens to raise funds from more than 350 founding members for a subscription-based library of books about “all departments of knowledge.” They considered books held in the typical circulating libraries to be in the “lighter departments of literature” and vowed to be “more discriminating” in developing a serious library.

They started out with 2,000 books and the patronage of Prince Albert. Within a year, they were up to 13,000 books. While their first address had been associated with a gambling hell, they moved on to better digs on St. James’s Square and soon attracted the likes of Charles Darwin and William Thackeray. By 1855, Alfred Lord Tennyson had been appointed President.

And Carlyle? According to the London Encyclopedia, he was a terrible patron of the library he’d envisioned. He returned books late and wrote scathing comments in the margins! Maybe that’s why he had to found his own library?

And I will be hiding out in my own library over the next 2 weeks—stepping out to celebrate my wedding anniversary and Labor Day. See you September 11!

The Universal Advertising Sheet, Part 5

Let’s see what interesting shreds of personal and social history we can read about, courtesy this week of the Monthly Compendium of Literary, Fashionable, and Domestic Advertisements from the August 1810 edition of La Belle Assemblée...

WIND-UP SHOWER BATHS

JOHN FELL, sole inventor of the PORTABLE WIND-UP SHOWER BATHS, respectfully informs the Public that he has ready for Sale, a number of the above universally approved Machines, at his Warehouse, 161, High Holborn, near Broad-street. This invention has received, as it is undoubtedly entitled to, unlimited Patronage. There is a Moveable Cylinder, so admirably contrived as to furnish the utmost facility in filling, and afterwards by gradually elevating it, to produce a shock in such proportion as the feelings, age, or habits of Bathers may require. It is, moreover, made to take to pieces, and pack up most conveniently.—Price from Five to Seven Guineas.—N.B. J.F. is Inventor and Vender of the Corking Machines so much in present use.

Showers weren’t so much used for getting clean as they were for a sort of do-it-yourself  health treatment, rather like sea-bathing was done for curative, not recreational, purposes. Interestingly, when I went to look for more information on Mr. Fell, I found mention in 1887 of a John Fell and Co., suppliers of bath and lavatory valves and beer machines and bar fittings—which covers both his shower baths and the Corking Machines mentioned in the ad. 

FORTU-NATE CLUBS

The Clubs met with great success in the last Lottery at HORNSBY and Co.’s, Cornhill; part of the 20,000 l. sold by them, was divided among Thirteen jolly Watermen of St. Catherine’s; besides Shares in the Borough, and many other places in the Metropolis; and also at Liverpool, Bath, Chester, Taunton, Leith, and Deal—Many Clubs are now forming from Gravesend to Richmond, and every other place in the Kingdom; and additional £20,000 in the present Lottery, to be drawn October the 19^th, creates a strong desire of adventuring.

Lotteries were quite the thing at this time, as Regina once posted about here...but I love the “Thirteen Jolly Watermen of St. Catherine’s” touch in this particular ad.

Entertainment,

Rational, Pleasing, and useful.

No. 14, Tavistock-street, Covent Garden.

THE CIRCULATING LIBRARY

Greatly Enlarged.

The Public are respectfully informed, that valuable and expensive Works, in every class of Literature, are daily added to this Library; which now consists of sixty thousand Volumes of modern Publications, really valuable, useful, and entertaining.

Catalogues and Cards of the terms may be had on application at the Library.

Books were expensive to purchase outright; a typical three-volume novel could run upward of several guineas for a heavily illustrated tome. Enter the subscription library, where for a fee books could be borrowed before the free public library became a fixture of philanthropic giving later in the century.  Even small towns and villages could often boast of at least one small one, and London and other cities were rife with them, and advertised their wares frequently...as we can see here.

Books, Part I

In the 19th century, when the only definition of “Amazon” was a mythological female warrior, books and reading were something of a paradox.

Remember, there was no TV, no game systems, no DVDs, no internet. The only forms of self-entertainment you could do when sitting quietly in a chair were needlework or reading (or drizzling!) Yet the actual number of books available to read was small: according to figures I’ve read, in 1830 there were only about 1100 new titles published in England, in editions of about 750-1200 copies. And their cost was in inverse proportion to their availability: by the middle of that decade the average three-volume book cost thirty one shillings sixpence…compare that to the average weekly wage of a laboring man, which was between six and twenty shillings. For the earlier decades of the century, books truly were a luxury item.

So what did anyone who wasn't extremely wealthy do for reading material?

Easy. They joined a reading society or subscribed to a circulating library. For a yearly fee, a subscriber could borrow books from these private libraries, which ranged from small side-line businesses run by shopkeepers in small villages to quite large establishments in larger towns. Jane Austen was an avid circulating library subscriber and had the pleasure of seeing her own (anonymously published) books available there: her niece’s comment on a new book at their local library entitled “Sense and Sensibility, by a Lady” was “It must be nonsense with a title like that.” Aunt Jane was vastly amused.

Books also differed slightly in form from what we know today. Walter Scott made the publication of novels in three volumes popular--one story, divided up into three books. Books were also commonly purchased without a binding: you got the title page and text, and then took them to a bookbinder to be bound in the leather cover of your choice, with or without gilt lettering and embossing. Once you finally sat down to read your book, you had to be armed with a knife. The pages of books were printed two per side on a long piece of paper, and the pages then bound--so you had to slit the pages apart with a paper knife, which is why the edges of the pages of old books are always slightly jagged and uneven. (Look closely at our ladies in the print at left--see the tongue-depressor-like thing in the hand of Pink Dress?) Even today you can run across antique books with uncut pages.

Next week: Fordyce’s Sermons, Mad Monks, and Silver Fork Novels