‘For all our people’ – Birmingham’s first Free Libraries – their administration and impact on the cultural life of the town, 1851 to 1900.
Doctoral Candidate: Stephen Hewett
Supervisors: Dr Malcolm Dick, Prof Ewan Fernie
The main purpose of this research is to explore the origins and early development of Birmingham’s free library movement, championed by Civic Gospeller, George Dawson. Birmingham was already well-endowed with a range of different library types before the first Public Libraries Act became law in 1850. They included the well-known proprietary subscription library that William Hutton called the ‘Public Library of Birmingham’, and numerous commercial circulating libraries. This suggests that a strong culture of reading together with the associated practice of book lending, existed in the town before the arrival of Birmingham’s first rate-funded library in 1861.
This study also investigates why Birmingham’s first attempt to adopt the Public Libraries Act in 1851, championed by the charismatic Dawson, failed whilst a comparable town, Manchester, campaigning at the same time, was successful. Those individuals responsible for its eventual establishment and for its governance will be highlighted, notably the town’s first chief librarian, J. D. Mullins who served from 1864 to 1898. Other aspects to be investigated are the extent to which the public library built-form, including interior design, reflected the aspirations and motivations of the city's civic and cultural leaders and Victorian social and cultural conventions. Birmingham’s Shakespeare Memorial Library, the world’s first publicly owned library dedicated to the life and works of William Shakespeare will be used as an example of the cultural aspirations of the town’s civic elite.
