A Commission Appointed to Inquire Into the Condition and Workings of Free Libraries of Various Towns in England (1869)

Abstract

The story of the public library movement in Darlington, County Durham, revolves around Edward Pease (1834-1880), grandson of the railway pioneer of that name. Pease was a Quaker philanthropist who in 1869, at his own expense, commissioned Revs. William A. P. Johnman, a graduate of Edinburgh University, and Henry Kendall (1832-1900), a Congregationalist minister, to spend a week visiting public libraries, mostly in the north of England and the midlands. Their extremely subjective, and at times amusing, report on the condition of the institutions which entertained them is a fascinating account of public libraries at a crucial early period in their development. Their paper represents a rare and personal eye-witness account of a number of municipal libraries which had been in existence for less than twenty years, and some of them for less than ten. Their own findings are interspersed with the comments of librarians and users, and they end with a series of wise conclusions on the advantages of public libraries. (The report itself on their travels was drawn up by Johnman and the conclusions by Kendall.)

Previously unpublished, the report deserves to be compared to the various official Returns on public libraries presented to Parliament. 1 Sadly, their travels were to no avail, at least in the short term. They presented their findings to a public meeting in Darlington on 19 October 1869, but a subsequent vote of ratepayers produced only defeat. Part of the reason seems to have been because there existed already a thriving private subscription library and a Mechanics' Institute. 2 After Pease's death the trustees of his estate offered to provide funds for a library building, if the Public Libraries Acts were adopted. Not surprisingly the Acts were hastily adopted, and the Edward Pease Free Library was opened in 1885.