Rural Reading in Northwest England: The Sedbergh Book Club, 1728-1928

Abstract

The survival of minute books for an English book club dating from the 1720s is an important and unique source for a phenomenon that has been little studied. Country book clubs represent a critical link in the development of public libraries. They mark a transition between the informal lending of books among friends and neighbors and the desire to institutionalize and formalize such a practice. They emerged in an era when truly public libraries did not exist and before commercial circulating and private subscription libraries proliferated. The educated person with an enquiring mind who might once have enjoyed access to the college or university libraries of Oxford or Cambridge either had to rely on his own purse to furnish a personal library or had recourse to an institution, such as a college, school, or parish library. Institutional libraries are by their nature exclusive as regards both clientele and stock, while parish libraries, where they existed, were generally small and selective; it was never their function to furnish current publications. Reading is a personal and intense experience, but the book club added a social, and sociable, dimension. The circulating library had a commercial purpose, though some enterprising booksellers did set up book clubs themselves; naturally they supplied the books, for example, John Munby of Beverley, Yorkshire, in 1741,1 and William Pritchard and others in Derby in the 1790s.2 In private subscription libraries, books were voted in by a majority of members or by a committee. Commercial elements were also in play; members would have been shareholders, the value of shares being dependent on the value of the bookstock.