Miners' Libraries & Mutual Improvement

The founding dates, rules and catalogues of the miners' libraries survive, and the modern history of Scottish library provision rests largely on the work of John Crawford, summarised in his chapter on libraries in The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 3 (2007). Jonathan Rose's chapter on reading in the same volume uses the parish reports of the Statistical Account (1790s) and New Statistical Account (around 1840). Those reports were written by ministers, who could exaggerate their parishioners' learning out of local pride or understate it out of snobbery. The claim that Leadhills is Britain's oldest subscription library is widely accepted but depends on how a subscription library is defined. Allan Ramsay's part in its foundation rests on tradition. Rose's earlier book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), draws its Scottish library figures, including the holdings table used below, from Crawford's 1981 Strathclyde thesis. The figures for stock come from catalogues; they show what the libraries owned, not what members actually borrowed. Rose's broader readings of this evidence, that mutual improvement was Scottish in origin and that working readers were conservative in taste, are his interpretations and are labelled as such.

Lead and learning

established Leadhills and Wanlockhead are Scotland's highest villages, set among lead mines worked since the Middle Ages. The Leadhills library had twenty-three founding members in 1741 and owned 1,500 volumes by 1821, eventually reaching 3,000 to 4,000. It is housed in a cottage about thirty feet by fifteen, probably built in 1791 and one of Scotland's oldest library buildings. The room is shelved on three sides. A secretary's table holds the ballot box used to elect new members, and a pulpit-like stand by the door was used by the praeses, or president, to chair meetings. Books were shelved by size rather than subject and listed in printed catalogues. The bookplate shows a column, the dove that was the emblem of the Earls of Hopetoun, who owned the mines, and the miners' pick, shovel and ore tub, with the motto "And leave the rest to heaven".

traditional The poet Allan Ramsay, who was born in Leadhills and opened one of Scotland's first circulating libraries in Edinburgh, is traditionally linked with the founding of the Leadhills library.

shared Why lead miners. Rose offers an explanation for why lead miners, along with weavers, led the way. Both trades were well paid and had short working hours; on his figures, drawn from Crawford, lead miners worked about six hours a day. The mining companies wanted an educated workforce, both trades had a history of friendly societies, and the miners lived in isolated villages with stable populations and a strong sense of independence. Rose compares them with the South Wales colliers who built their own network of libraries more than a century later. The explanation is plausible but it is an argument from circumstances, not something the miners themselves recorded.

established Rules and members. The three earliest working-class libraries, Leadhills, Wanlockhead and Westerkirk, all built mutual improvement into their rulebooks. Members ran them democratically, mostly without middle-class interference, and the subscriptions were small. Women were a small minority or absent. Crawford found that between none and a tenth of members in the early Scottish workingmen's libraries were women, and that they had no part in governance. Wanlockhead barred women until 1812 and Leadhills until 1881, though women might read books brought home by male relatives.

What the miners read

shared What the miners read was more serious than the libraries of the comfortable classes. Rose's Table 4.1, built on John Crawford's catalogue counts, sets the two miners' libraries against a London benchmark and Scottish middle-class libraries:

shared A conservative canon. Rose reads the table as evidence that working-class taste lagged a generation behind middle-class taste, a pattern he traces through the whole industrial era and finds often sat alongside political radicalism. Leadhills was slower than Wanlockhead to move from religion towards fiction, but at Wanlockhead too fiction did not overtake theology until the early twentieth century. Some other Scottish working-class libraries banned fiction outright until the success of Walter Scott forced a change. The Dunfermline Tradesmen's Library, founded in 1808, gave way when it found weavers clubbing together to buy the Waverley Novels; by 1823, 85 of its 290 volumes were fiction, and membership and borrowing rose sharply.

established No controversy. These libraries also kept clear of contentious politics and religion. In 1837 the miners of Leadhills and Wanlockhead refused to accept The Constitution of Man, by the Edinburgh phrenologist and radical George Combe, because they thought it hostile to revealed religion.

A self-governing model

established Leadhills set the pattern for the subscription library: a self-managed institution run by an elected committee that reported to members, buying books from the annual subscriptions. Working-class libraries charged 2s to 5s a year and might take in about £10 annually; middle-class ones charged an entry fee of around a guinea and an annual subscription of about 6s. John Crawford identifies the guiding idea as mutual improvement, "the spiritual and intellectual improvement of the social individual through corporately organised intellectual activity", which he likens to modern lifelong learning. By 1822 he counts fifty-one working-class subscription libraries founded in Scotland, all in the Lowlands and mostly in small south-western towns with a settled artisan population.

established Where people could not support a library they found other ways. In 1796–97 the Scots Chronicle reported thirty-five reading societies in the Glasgow–Paisley area, typically thirty or forty members, often weavers, paying 6d or 9d a month and choosing books by vote. Early in the nineteenth century shepherds in the Cheviots left books in nooks in boundary walls for the next shepherd to borrow and replace, so that each volume travelled a circuit of thirty or forty miles.

Mutual improvement and its limits

shared A Scottish origin? Rose argues that mutual improvement was Scottish in origin. The phrase was used by Allan Ramsay's Easy Club, founded in Edinburgh in 1712, and became a commonplace of Enlightenment societies. Perhaps the earliest recorded working-class group met at the home of the Kinnesswood weaver Alexander Bruce, born in 1710 and father of the poet Michael Bruce, to discuss literature, history and philosophy. The historian David Vincent found the phrase used in England in 1731, so the Scottish claim is one of priority and scale rather than sole invention. In Scotland, Rose notes, the movement first expressed itself chiefly through libraries.

established Suspicion. Early in the century such reading could be seen as subversive. During the Napoleonic Wars the cotton-spinner Charles Campbell, born in 1793 and earning 8s to 10s a week, paid a few pence to a subscription library and joined a club of twelve men, mostly artisans and mechanics, who met weekly to discuss literary topics. The club barred politics and religion, yet, as quoted by Rose, Campbell recalled that the neighbours "branded us with the designation of atheists, poets, and play-actors". His memoir describes the self-taught reader following Newton, Locke and Reid; those were his ideals, not a recorded reading list for the club.

established The north-east. Mutual improvement kept growing through the nineteenth century. In rural north-east Scotland the sociologist Ian Carter found nineteen societies in 1851 and between thirty-five and fifty by 1897, many with their own libraries, closely linked with the Free Church and the temperance movement. Members were settled tenant farmers, craftsmen and tradesmen; a society at Rhynie in 1846 included five farmers, two merchants, a baker, a miller, three estate workers and five students. Itinerant farm servants were notably absent. The young Ramsay MacDonald was secretary of the Lossiemouth Mutual Improvement Association, which in 1884 debated whether MPs should be paid, whether emigration would relieve the Highland crofters and whether novel-reading was beneficial.

established Into print. The same culture fed the press. The historian William Donaldson has shown that Victorian mutual improvement produced a cadre of editors, among them the weaver William Scott of the Montrose Review and the shoemaker W. H. Murray of the Falkirk Herald. The Dundee People's Journal, founded in 1858 and edited by the Chartist weaver William Latto, printed readers' letters, reports of meetings and thousands of competition entries. It sold more than 100,000 copies by 1866, the largest circulation of any weekly outside London.

shared Respectability. By the Victorian years mutual improvement societies had become widespread and respectable. Rose finds that political controversy had a home in them until about 1850, faded in the mid-Victorian decades and revived in the 1880s, and that the societies were important for adult remedial schooling until near-universal literacy after the 1870s.

established The working-class library could not always survive industrialisation. The weavers' Langloan library, founded in 1794, changed character as industrial labourers moved in. At Newton, near Edinburgh, the colliers' circulating library closed in the early 1830s, its minister blaming an influx of "reckless characters" after the works expanded. Crawford finds that working-class libraries suffered from small incomes and the trade cycle and could not cope with the rapid growth of industrial towns, though they survived in large villages and market towns: eighty-three still existed at the end of the century.

Middle-class rivals

established New kinds of library brought in by the middle classes in the nineteenth century offered more books but less independence. Mechanics' institutes, beginning with the Edinburgh School of Arts in 1821, numbered about fifty by 1851; the largest, in Glasgow, had 6,000 volumes. Parish and church libraries reached a peak of 438 around 1850 and were especially well used by women. Crawford argues that both types limited working readers, the institutes to "value free" science and technology and the church libraries to religious books, and that both were hostile to fiction. Readers pushed back: the Greenock Mechanics' Institute lifted its ban on the Waverley Novels in 1834, and by 1858 novels made up 39.4 per cent of loans at the Edinburgh Mechanics' Library.

Library country

established By about 1840, the New Statistical Account suggests, most Scots, especially in the Central Belt, had access to some kind of library, whether subscription, circulating, parish, chapel or Sunday school. Dumfries alone had three society libraries, four booksellers' libraries, a presbytery library, a circulating library, a mechanics' institute and four reading rooms. Provision was thinnest in the Highlands: only six of the thirty-one parishes in Inverness-shire had libraries, and none at all was reported on Skye.

established Literate craftsmen. The miners were not alone. Using R. A. Houston's research, Rose notes that Lowland craftsmen between 1640 and 1770 had very high literacy: 74 per cent of weavers, against 52 per cent in northern England, and 94 per cent of wrights. At the Innerpeffray Library near Crieff, of 287 borrowers with identifiable trades between 1747 and 1800, twenty-six were weavers and twenty-two were teachers. Other networks were informal: the East Lothian itinerating libraries of 1817 were run in 1825 by twenty volunteer librarians who included shoemakers, smiths, wrights, a weaver, a collier and a labourer.

• Leadhills and Wanlockhead are Scotland's highest villages.
• New members of the Leadhills library were elected by ballot, and the ballot box still sits on the secretary's table.
• Leadhills miners' books were shelved by size, not subject.
• Cheviot shepherds swapped books by leaving them in holes in drystone walls.
• In 1790s Glasgow and Paisley, weavers' reading societies chose their books by democratic vote.
• Members could be fined for returning books late or damaged.
• Women were not admitted to the Leadhills library until 1881, 140 years after its foundation.
• In 1837 the miners refused to accept George Combe's Constitution of Man into their libraries because they thought it irreligious.
• Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, was secretary of a mutual improvement society in Lossiemouth in his youth.

• Do not state flatly that Leadhills is Britain's oldest library; it is generally regarded as the oldest subscription library, and "first" claims depend on definitions.
• Do not present every miner as a scholar; library members were a committed minority.
• Do not present Allan Ramsay as a documented founder; his link with the library is traditional.
• Do not imply women were members from the start; Wanlockhead admitted them in 1812 and Leadhills in 1881.
• Do not present the miners' libraries as radical reading rooms; they were religious in emphasis, slow to take fiction and wary of controversy.
• Do not state as fact that mutual improvement was invented in Scotland; that is Jonathan Rose's argument, and the phrase was also in use in England by 1731.
• Do not say Charles Campbell's club read Newton, Locke and Reid together; that passage of his memoir describes the ideal self-taught reader.
• Do not assume the movement was Scotland-wide; it was strongest in the Lowlands and weakest in fast-growing industrial towns and the Highlands.