Palace of the book
Before the mid-19th century there were no public libraries in the sense that we have them today. Apart from those belonging to private individuals or universities, most libraries charged the public a fee to borrow books. Such commercial libraries flourished with the rise of the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the middle classes flocked to the circulating libraries to get the latest Henry Fielding or Fanny Burney. Those amongst the poorer classes who could read were excluded.
This state of affairs exercised those who campaigned for social reform, especially the Chartists, who, as well as agitating for electoral reform and building land colonies, set up reading rooms that were run on a cooperative basis. It wasn’t just the Chartists who did this. The early-19th century saw numerous societies and institutes for working people who, in return for a small annual payment, could attend lectures and borrow books. In Lichfield a Reading and Mutual Instruction Society was set up for just this purpose in 1850, and it soon had over 100 members.
This kind of thing worried the establishment – if the lower orders got hold of too much education, they might rebel, and then where would we all be? But by 1850 parliament passed the Public Libraries Act, allowing local councils to levy a halfpenny rate to fund local libraries and museums. Not many councils rushed to do this, but one of the first was Lichfield, whose Free Library and Museum opened in this Italianate building in 1859.
There was a catch with the halfpenny rate, though. The council could use it t build a library but not to buy books. The money for those had to come from somewhere else, a problem that stymied a few library projects before they got off the ground. In Lichfield, the Reading and Mutual Instruction Society wound itself up and donated its books to the new library. And so, in the city of Dr Johnson and David Garrick, everyone had access to books, and this grand building seems to express pride that literature is available to all.
