The ‘Lower Classes Are Very Hard Readers’: Kidderminster Municipal Library 1855–1856

Teresa Gerrard · Alexis Weedon

3 citations0/0 files storedLibrary & Information History

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Library Science and Administration Libraries, Manuscripts, and Books Library Science and Information

Abstract

This article looks at the library borrowing records of Kidderminster Municipal Library at a time of economic decline in the main industry of the town — carpet weaving. It illustrates the limitations of the early libraries following the 1850 Public Libraries Act through a local study. It examines how the borrowing records recorded in a surviving issue book reflect trends in the popularity of reading materials and, in particular, growing interest in migration to London and emigration abroad.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

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

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

References

1973A history of public libraries in Great Britain, 1845-1965 2014Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, 1760-1860 1894Public libraries: a history of the movement and a manual for the organization and management of rate-supported libraries 2014The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland 1994Founding Mothers: The Contribution of Women's Organizations to Public Library Development in the United States 1992'The fiction nuisance' in nineteenth-century British public libraries 1991The Public Library 2007In Their Own Image: The Public Library Collection as a Reflection of Its Donors

Explore the map →

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

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.