Salisbury Circulating Library

Salisbury Circulating Library – Circulating libraries were appearing in numerous towns and villages in the West Country in the last quarter of the 18th century and early decades of the 19th, including one by a Mr. Kendal in Salisbury in the 1780s. In a letter to the editor of The County Magazine for the Years 1786 and 1787; particularly dedicated to the inhabitants of Berkshire, Dorsetshire, Hampshire, Somersetshire, and Wiltshire (Salisbury: B. Collins, 1788), vol. 1 (May, 1786), p. 68, the writer, from nearby Dorset, pays a visit to his friend, ‘a bookseller, in a market-town in this county, who keeps a circulating library’. The visitor is surprised to witness a young woman approaching his friend’s shop on a Sunday after church, knocking on the door, and asking if he had obtained for the library a copy of Goethe’s Eleonora; not long afterward, another young woman of about the same age knocked and asked if a copy of Smollett’s Roderick Random had arrived. To the writer of the letter, however, the actions of the young ladies did not provoke admiration about the expanding reading public that was occurring in the West Country; instead, he cited the incident as an instance of the prevalence of ‘immorality, and contempt of the Sabbath’ pervading the youth of his county! He could only wonder if such goings on would have occurred in that village fifty years previously. In Steele’s home county of Hampshire, circulating libraries began to appear in the late 1760s and proliferated thereafter in such cities as Southampton, Winchester, and Portsmouth. Like the one in Salisbury, these libraries purchased a ‘high proportion of novels, romances, and plays, the standard fare of circulating libraries’. Subscribers, like Mary Steele, ‘expected to be kept abreast of the latest fashions and to be able to read new titles almost as soon as they were published in London.’ As John Oldfield contends, though ‘dismissed and ridiculed by nineteenth-century commentators because of its association with the passion for popular romances, this simple innovation [of circulating libraries] nevertheless played a crucial role in the dissemination of ides among the leisured classes’. See Oldfield, Printers, Booksellers and Libraries in Hampshire, 1750-1800 (Hampshire County Council, 1993), 17, 20.