The Public Library Explosion in Colonial New Zealand

Abstract

The colonies of European settlement in Australia and New Zealand experienced an extraordinary growth of small public library societies beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. A similar development appeared on the gold fields of California at the same time. Australasian colonists and California miners, conditioned by the reading revolution of the late eighteenth century, were demanding a wide range of materials for extensive reading and in conditions of rapid expansion at frontiers adopted the subscription library society to meet their needs. When the reading climate shifted in midcentury toward reading for entertainment, the library societies quickly moved to meet the new demands and in New Zealand degenerated into user-pay fiction reading clubs. After closely examining the evidence provided by the seventeenthcentury colonies of settlement in New England, Jesse Shera concluded that for settlement societies public libraries are one of the grace notes, established only after the society is stable, has begun to generate wealth, and has a well-established infrastructure of education, transport, and effective local government. His pronouncement is magisterial: “But it is known that libraries are distinctly an urban phenomenon, that they flourish only when the economic ability of the region is sufficiently great to provide adequate support, and that they are the product of a mature culture.” 1 He is reflecting the then-received wisdom on cultural development in settlement colonies. In 1743, some sixty-one years after the founding of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, when proposing the formation of the American Philosophical Society, commented: “The first drudgery of setting up new colonies, which confines the attention of people to mere necessities, is now pretty well over; and there are many in every province in circumstances that set them at ease, and afford leisure to cultivate the finer arts and improve the common stock of knowledge.” 2 If one accepted the timescale of a seventeenth-century settlement colony outlined by Shera, New Zealand would not have begun to develop

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.