The Politics of Reading at the Subscription Library in Britain in the Age of Reform, 1789-1832

Abstract

This thesis integrates a study of the politics of reading and political reading into an analysis of the politics of Georgian Britain between the French Revolution in 1789 and the passage of the first Reform Act in 1832. It does so by examining a type of reading association that was widespread across the English-speaking Atlantic world, the subscription library. These libraries played a substantial role in the politics of Georgian Britain, and their political significance was multi-faceted. It was intellectual, by enabling the spread of printed material amongst a politically active membership; social, by providing a space within which members could connect with each other; and finally ideological, in the sense of the civic identity it imparted to a politically active middling class. Two libraries, the Bristol Library Society and the Leighton Library, Dunblane, are examined as case studies to demonstrate the political importance of the subscription library within different contexts. This thesis uses the books and manuscript records of both libraries, alongside a range of other sources, to examine the roles the subscription library and political reading played as instigators of political thought and action. It engages in a study of political reading and political readers through a series of different methodological approaches, examining the subscription library within the wider context of associational culture, as well as its use by the individual reader, a community of readers and reading during a time of crisis. Individuals turned to books throughout this period to make sense of the changes occurring around them, and their use of the subscription library partly constructed the intellectual and ideological context in which they read and participated in political events. These libraries were also venues of social politics themselves, their administration combining both democratic and constitutionalist features. Participation within the managed and ordered library space was socially prestigious and provided a sense of worthiness and respectability for a political class, as well as practical experience in the bureaucracy of committee governance and the art of politics.