Thomas Carlyle and the London Library: Three Unpublished Letters

Abstract

‘A decidedly good Library of good books’, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) told a packed meeting at the Freemasons’ Tavern on 24 June 1840, ‘is a crying want in this great London’. As Carlyle explained elsewhere in his speech, the problems with the British Museum were that it was open only during business hours, it was overcrowded, and it did not allow readers to borrow books, whereas the problem with ‘Circulating Libraries’ was that they pandered merely to ‘the prurient appetite of the great million’. As such, there was a pressing need for a high-quality lending library.1 As early as 13 January 1839, Carlyle had written to his mother lamenting that ‘a Public Library’ was ‘a thing scandalously wanted … here in London’.2 Later that month on 25 January, Carlyle wrote to thank John Forster, the editor of the Examiner, for having agreed to ‘take up this Library Scheme with such prompt zeal’.3 Two days later, on 27 January, the Examiner published a short contribution by Carlyle, in which he informed the paper’s readers that ‘a plan is in agitation for instituting, by subscription, a public library in the western quarter of London, upon the principle of books being lent out to read at home’.4