the man who came to dinner in libraries around allendal emichigan allendale township library

The Allendale records provide a rare chance to consider collective library borrowing habits in the mid-Victorian period. This article looks at the reading culture and the library records in the lead-mining district of Allendale in Northumberland, using previously unstudied archival materials. They encouraged other forms of associational culture to emerge-literary societies, mutual improvement societies, debating societies-and these in turn supported miners to become involved in writing and journalism. Kitt, John Hume, and James Brown from Earsdon (village reading room from at least 1857) or Thomas Cochrane, Albert Keyho, Ralph Dowey and George Hall from New Delaval (Mechanics’ Institute and Library, from 1872).Ģ Reading rooms and libraries did not, however, simply support reading activities. By the 1880s, many Northumberland collieries had at least one active poet or other writer, and many of these poets had grown up with access to a local colliery-sponsored reading room, such as F. J. But with the rapid growth of workplace sponsored reading rooms and libraries during the 1840s and 1850s, as part of the wider early-mid Victorian culture of ‘improvement’, the involvement of local coal miners in literary activities also grew exponentially.

The North-East of England already had a lively literary culture centred on pit life, with broadsides, songs, and poets like Thomas Wilson of Gateshead commemorating mining work and leisure. This was an ambition which, over the next two decades, was at least partially achieved. ‘One of the most important things which could be done would be the establishment, for the adult, of reading rooms, with books of amusing though instructive character, as “Chambers’s Journal”, “The Penny Magazine” and others of that class’, he added ( Children’s Employment Commission 719).

Day of Houghton-le-Spring, Durham, told mining inspector J. R.

‘The few who have had a little education are fond of reading, but they are mostly without the means of obtaining works, there not being circulating libraries, reading rooms, or mechanic institutions,’ J. W. The 1842 Commission Reports, which reported on access to educational opportunities, tended to agree.

1 ‘Books were scarce, and newspapers and magazines were a positive luxury’, miner and trades unionist Edward Rymer wrote about his child and early adult life in Northern collieries in the 1840s (5).

The man who came to dinner in libraries around allendal emichigan allendale township library