The Brisbane Literary Circle: a strategy to elevate the communal mind

Abstract

This paper examines the high levels of social connectedness and civic engagement between the [North] Brisbane School of Arts and the local metropolitan newspapers in their eagerness to establish and promote a reading club that would curb what they felt was the local community’s preoccupation with reading popular novels. The Brisbane Literary Circle was charged with placing ‘the best thoughts of the best minds in the way of everybody’ and achieving the ambitious Arnoldian quest of ‘universal culture’. The paper also examines why the Circle failed to attract the interest of the working-classes, which had always been the primary target audience.