Portsmouth Public Libraries: the first fifty years

Abstract

BRITISHPUBLICLIBRARYHISTORYhas several surprising features. To begin with, the provision of local, rate-supported public libraries was sanctioned by Parliament remarkably quickly. Furthermore, the campaign to secure legislation was not initiated by a public figure, but by a supernumerary assistant on the staff of the British Museum Library, Edward Edwards, a name known to the compilers of the Dictionary of National Biography, but not to social historians of the Victorian age. More surprisingly, the first Public Libraries Act (1850) was passed twenty years before the first Education Act. For over a century the Public Libraries Acts (this low-powered service was regulated by an extraordinary number) were permissive. Local authorities were not obliged to provide a library service or, if they did, to maintain it at a minimum level of efficiency. From 1855 until 1919 there was a statutory rate limit of a mere penny in the pound (thus William Munford's admirable short history of the British public library movement is called Penny rate). About thirty of the larger cities went to the trouble and expense of promoting a Private Bill by which Parliament gave them permission to levy more than a penny. Portsmouth was not one of them. Thomas Kelly has shown that towns most eager to provide a library service were those where useful community libraries already existed? These were usually learned subscription and popular circulating libraries provided by enterprising booksellers, and the humbler libraries of Mechanics' Institutes, also, in effect, subscription libraries. The early establishment of public libraries in large, developing cities, such as Manchester and Sheffield, came about because it was felt that the benefits enjoyed by the privileged few should be extended to all. A vital feature of the early Acts was that they required a majority poll of the ratepayers in favour. A simple resolution of the local council was not enough. As ratepayers were a select minority, drawn from the classes who could afford to belong to subscription libraries, the establishment of a public library meant that they had to be charitably minded enough to vote for an increase -in their rates so that the poorer members of the community could have a library service they themselves might not use. The rate limitation, so tiresome to committees and chief librarians, was an encouragement to adoption when this depended on the goodwill of the ratepayers. But the strangest feature of all in the early history