The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland: Three Volumes

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland: Three Volumes", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 4, pp. 331-335. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710743561

The history of libraries has, in a sense, always been there, and now it is here in an even more tangible sense. So how does this new work define itself? In an introductory note to Volume II, it says that it “does not set out to be an exhaustive history of individual libraries: it is, rather, a general history charting the various trends and patterns of development, which studies different types of libraries and individual libraries as part of that broader view. In this way, it aims to illuminate not only libraries and their users but also the wider history of the British Isles. Only in understanding their purpose and their context can the role of libraries be properly comprehended”. This claim can be made by all three volumes.

The likely market for such a work is the academic and scholarly library, above all one serving institutions and users who seriously study library history, the history of the book and book illustration, publishing and printing, social and political history and the history of ideas. The focus is England and Scotland, Wales and Ireland. It draws on a wide range of official and historiographic sources throughout, bringing together (above all in the earlier periods) a wealth of relevant historical analysis and research, and rising above method and evidence to suggest over‐arching themes that can and should be inferred from the study of library history.

Among these are the structural shift from libraries for the privileged to libraries for the people, the close engagement throughout of libraries with social and cultural and political ideas, the ways in which they have responded (well and less well) to technological change, prestige associated with having and endowing libraries, and the complex relationships libraries have had with the church, with the wealthy, and with the state. For anyone interested in these perennial issues, the work will offer a great deal of evidence, at times (more in Volume II than in the others) offered with a fuller sense of controversy.

Anyone interested, too, in that conception of history that argues for progressive improvement will find, even in some of the drier “official” accounts (for instance of the national libraries), evidence that the vagaries of history impact on libraries as much as on everything else. In addition, there is much food for thought as to “why libraries?” – belief in the value of knowledge, utilitarian concerns about social inclusion and educational change, civic pride and national identity, display of bibliophilic ostentation, an ideology of class, and an understandable outcome of the rise of printing and the democratization of literacy.

These themes and issues cut across all three volumes of this work. For readers keen to look at individual topics – like national or ecclesiastical, university or children's libraries – this can be easily managed by checking lists of contents and the individual indexes to each volume. Such indexes, too, help readers search for topics like legal deposit and library design where they have a specialist interest in them. Library‐related issues and evidence are placed in the wider social and cultural, educational and political and technological context at points throughout the work, though some chapters (like II.18 with intellectual background and II. 23 with literacy and popular education) gives greater emphasis to that background.

John Feather provides a chapter on the book trade (II.19) that points to the wider challenge any reader of this work will want and need to take up – that of cross‐checking with The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (with two titles so far in the series, covering the years 1400‐1557 and 1557‐1695), a work with which the History of Libraries has several contributors in common. Anyone seriously studying or teaching the history of libraries cannot ignore the history of the book – in Britain and anywhere else – and so it can and should safely be presumed that the library keen enough to want the work under review will also want (and even have) the history of the book as well (and works like it).

Another over‐arching theme in the work as a whole is that of the “librarian”. Readers interested in tracing the history of this practitioner/professional will find plenty of evidence here – from the custodian of books and manuscripts in the monastery to the political entrepreneur in Panizzi of the British Museum Library. On the way, we have scholars and amateurs, the growth of managerialism (something topical in Volume III), and the many duties and tasks librarians have had and still have in arranging, cataloguing, keeping secure and ensuring access. Sententiously at the end of Volume III, in a chapter on libraries in the information age, we find the sentiment – “the neoliberal ascendancy seems set to swing the balance far away from the foundations of service on which libraries have operated for many years”.

This is not necessarily a conclusion to the work as a whole, although one such possible conclusion to it would be “plus ça change … ”: for all the differences in social fabric and intellectual perspective across the centuries, challenges like dealing with change, being diplomatic to sponsors, balancing ownership with access, finding enough secure space for stock, and opening up services to the many as opposed to the few (or indeed the few as opposed to the many) pervade the librarian's role throughout history. For readers interested in the arrangement and classification of knowledge, and the important bibliographic role of catalogues, activities which advertise the combined scholarship and managerial competence of librarians but which also shed important light on the organization of knowledge itself, there is also much in this work.

To the detail, now Volume I deals with libraries up to 1640. It is edited by Elisabeth Leedham‐Green and Teresa Webber (both Cambridge authors of works on early libraries and archives). Contributors include David McKitterick, Julian Roberts and Margaret Spufford. An introduction broad‐brushes the medieval library (to 1450) and the early modern library (to 1640). It picks up on the growing amount of research in the field and argues that it is the first full‐scale survey of its period. Sources abound in the many contributions and, as a historiography in its own right, it is a fine work. It constantly asks when does a book collection become a library.

Five sections deal with the medieval library (usually monastic, shifting to universities, with big collectors and revealing sources like inventories and records), new learning at the dissolution of the monasteries and the Reformation (what was lost and salvaged, what drove collectors like John Dee and Cotton and Selden, and a case study of Matthew Parker), a section examining the shift to academic collections, two chapters on schools, a tour of law and medical and heraldic libraries (reflecting how much has been written), another on country house libraries (drawing on extant catalogues, describing book collecting as part of a wider antiquarianism), and a final section on organizing the library itself (evidence of early record‐keeping and acquisition, classification and preservation, ideas from Gesner and Bodley – the beginnings of what we know today as information management!). Two comments – one that many chapters summarize existing research (check then to see current holdings on things medieval (and the other that readers of this particular volume are probably more likely to be historians than library professionals (check then to see whether you have users of this type and/or you yourself know what you are getting here).

Turning now to Volume II, which deals with libraries between 1640 and 1859. It claims that it is “the most comprehensive overview available of … early modern library history up to the 1859 Libraries Act” (introduction). It culminates at the point where pressure was enough on government to legislate for free libraries in the modern sense. It aims “to produce a social history of a vital movement in British cultural history, in particular how libraries – essentially “private” when the volume opens – moved inevitably and inexorably into the truly public domain”. The editors are Giles Mandelbrote and K.A. Manley, and they offer an intellectually convincing interpretation of a lively period when collections grew, urban middle‐class culture grew, changes occurred in concepts of domestic space and reading, and developments in bibliographical control were substantial. Even the coy statement that the volume attempts to explain the spread of treasure‐houses of knowledge (we really can do without this) did not put me off.

This is a strong and intellectually convincing work despite its breadth. Between 1640 and 1750 there was a notable expansion of book collecting, writers like Evelyn taking an interest not only in Enlightenment ideas but also in libraries too (he translated Naudé's Instructions Concerning Constructing a Library, which was the English title in his translation of 1661), and bibliophiles like Boothby and Cavendish and Wheatcroft (and then later Phillipps and Walpole and Roxburghe) gathering collections together and keeping records of what they bought (including fashionable bindings). Book‐collecting was for many part of the larger attraction of antiquarian studies, as we see in the collections of Cotton and Sloane, Harley and Hearne and Hooke. Many of these formed the nuclei of famous national and institutional collections later. Legal deposit accelerated the work of libraries like the Bodleian and Trinity College Dublin.

At the same time, libraries were endowed in towns and cities like Norwich and Manchester, often as matters of civic pride, often by charities and religious bodies like the SPCK. Some like the Dr Williams Library were non‐conformist or dissenting. Subscription libraries were fashionable, too, reflecting increasing middle‐class leisure. In the years 1750‐1860 urban development and changes in social class and in book production increased the scope of many libraries. Case‐studies as different as mechanics’ institute libraries in Huddersfield and the British Museum Library (increasingly perceived by London‐based scholars as the national collection) provide evidence of such change. Robert Adam designed libraries for the rich. Overall a head of steam built up (II.31 is called “engines of literature”) that fed the argument for that state intervention that we find in the 1850 Act.

And so, finally, to Volume III, which deals with libraries between 1850 and 2000. The start is with the early beginnings of the free public library movement and the end is with the digital and electronic age on the horizon. This is probably the volume likely to be most used by students of library history, for whom the journey back further is often regarded as pure history. It is the age, then, of Edwards and Ewart, the succession of public library laws, the debate about libraries were for (a question we are still asking), the great fiction question (that too has not gone away), the supersession of circulating and subscription libraries, the growing importance of national libraries (official accounts on all four here), the growth of libraries for higher education (Robbins, Atkinson, and the rest), the proliferation of specialist libraries (science, medicine, law, theology, government and company), and much else.

The framework, in fact, for modern concerns about libraries, and the kind of recent history that has appeared in many disparate places in recent decades and is summarized in what some would regard as handy formats here and others superficial. This will be a work that will never please everyone, despite the great‐and‐good flavour of the contributors. The official accounts of national libraries provide mere background and read like annual reports. Cynics might say that headings like “civic” (for non‐Oxbridge universities) are eccentric and boundaries about links between rare book libraries and archives and museums undeveloped, and even that topics like cooperation are better covered elsewhere and theological libraries may be too marginal to include, but that is a dip‐stick survey of possible, and not wholly justifiable, objections, and more a symptom of likely debate on reading the book.

Of immediate practical relevance to readers interested in library history and in the history of the professional librarian will be a section called “the trade and its tools: librarians and libraries in action”, more a byline to a feature article and something that exposes the semantic ambivalence of library jargon at the present time – part PR and part jokey self‐deprecation. Even so, the chapters in this section are challenging – do practitioners necessarily grow if management grows, is education needed along with training for librarians, do glass ceilings still exist for what is largely a feminized profession, is what is really distinctive about library and information professionals their allegedly unique knowledge of knowledge, and, the really big one, after all the hype about automation and now digitization, will libraries be there in their current recognizable form if, say, a hypothetical fourth volume – libraries 2000‐2100 – is ever published by CUP?

If there is someone to provide a range of information (as the final chapter of Volume III) suggests, and if this someone is a librarian (and it wonders), then the question really ought to be asked whether history teaches us – and the evidence is here before our eyes – that amateurs and scholars, servants and willing dogs‐bodies have played the role of librarian as much as any formally designated professional. If, too, the authors devote a large section to “the rise of the professional society” and describe the growth of “libraries for specialist areas” (like government and companies), the wider remit and challenge of the information and knowledge manager (hints in the text and the index) is not one to leave to the decades after 2000.

What comes across from the work as a whole is that it is an impressive and meticulously edited work, with sure‐footed imaginative scope, good reading lists (to each volume and in every chapter), and clear indexes (each one separate). Looking across it all, historical and professional themes emerge that are important and will go on being so, and some readers will use the work that way. Others will work within chronological silos, for, say, the historical evidence and methodology in investigating early inventories or book trade connections or circulating libraries. These constituencies will not necessarily be the same and this is a factor libraries thinking of buying the work should consider.

Wider than that, too, is the question about the relevance of library history. A lot of research goes on there by people of many backgrounds, and this is amply demonstrated in the citations here. But it is, when all is said, a sidebar to mainstream history, a strand like the book trade itself of great interest but whose importance can easily be exaggerated, and a field of ambivalent interest (for good or for bad) among newcomers to the world of library and information studies/work. An irony which may not be lost on the conscientious reader is that of the hundred‐or‐so contributors, about a third as listed as “former” this or that. I hope that this does not suggest that library history is for that cohort of the profession most likely to have spare time for such work. Revealingly, too, the statistics increase from Volume I to Volume III.

If we are to read the runes, then, on this work, we see a keen eye for evidence and an enviable energy for method, a continuingly fresh approach by experts in the early period to their subject, a love of ideas for their own sake in the middle volume (following their Enlightenment exemplars), and a reliance on the idea that history is necessarily development, or that development is necessarily history (above all in the last volume).

It was famously said that a love of the past is driven by a fear of the future: agnostic comments about management and pessimism about the vagaries of history inspire little confidence at the end. Surely some of the inferences we might all draw from this fascinating history of libraries are that the fee‐free trade‐offs in library and information work are endemic to it, that service is not a sensitive flower easily crushed by technological change or the sinister devices of the free market, and that over‐introspection about gender issues does little for the macro decision‐making needed in and by the profession in Britain at the moment. History teaches us a lot, and one of its main lessons is a proper sense of perspective.