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2024-09-28 - Context Part 2 : England

Executive Summary

At the outset of the 19th c., England was rapidly industrializing and urbanizing, leading to worsening conditions for the working and lower class; Political participation was available only to the peerage and wealthy landholders. The ill-considered 1834 New Poor Law spurred increasing political agitation, and in the decade leading up to the 1867 Second Reform Act, Parliament enacted several public education reforms in hopes of having a more educated electorate as suffrage expanded.

The British public library system was enabled by these educational reforms; but by midcentury, the price of print had declined enough that private libraries were also common and accessible for working-class patrons. The 1850, ’55, and ’66 Library and Museum Acts enabled municipalities to create local libraries funded by a “penny rate” tax. The makeup of public libraries administrations, and particulars of their collection development and exhibition designs raise worthwhile questions about “national identity formation” and paternalist classism.

In the 1880s and ’90s, living conditions were improving from new social welfare programs and private charitable organizations. This period saw an uptick in public library establishment, and expanded outreach strategies like lecture series and library bulletins. The Great War paused much domestic library activity, as librarians and others in the “adult education” movement were active in building “war libraries” (a fertile area for modern scholarship). The 1919 Public Libraries Act removed the “penny rate” funding restriction, paving the way for increased expansion of the library system.

Ranganathan’s 1924 arrival in England coincided with a period of enthusiasm in the Library field, while the general intellectual climate, deeply scarred from the Great War, viewed Western Culture in various states of crisis and decline.

England Hatches into the Modern Age

The shock of the industrial revolution was coursing through England at the opening of the 19th century. In 1801, 44% of the population lived in cities; By 1911, the population had roughly quadrupled and this share was up to 89%. (Goodman, 2013, p. 200) The swiftness of industrialization and urbanization created a nexus of problems eating away at the living conditions of the working and lower classes: Food shortages; Dense, chaotic, unsanitary cities; Unpredictable and declining incomes from unregulated industry and automation; And worsening health from hazardous factory work, unregulated medicines (read: widespread opiate use), and air pollution so severe it “could be withstood only by the hardiest [plant] species.”1 (Goodman, 2013, p. 187) “Crime had risen sevenfold in England and Wales between 1805 and 1842, despite savage punishments. Its principal victims were the lower classes.” Working men took to drink to endure their environment: “Between 1810 and 1840 consumption of gin rose from a gallon per head per year to a gallon and a half.” (Heffer, 2022 p. 113)

Though the ownership classes reaped the benefits of this new working environment, the well-meaning among them saw these worsening conditions and pushed the government to act. But political enfranchisement at this point was available only to the peerage and wealthy landowners; both in the context of voting and of office-holding (for which no stipend was provided). Electing to ignore direct input from working and lower-class organizations, these upper-class legislators instead looked toward Individualist and Utilitarian philosophies, and laissez-faire economic structures to form the 1834 New Poor Law, “which overturned a system dating back to the time of Elizabeth I.” (Charing, 1995; Besley, Coate, & Guinnane, 2001) Under the New Poor Law, Britons would no longer receive aid directly, but must enter a Workhouse:

Workhouses were large, centralized institutions, built and maintained by the Poor Law Union and staffed with more or less professional employees. Workhouse advocates wanted to ensure that the pauper had a less enjoyable life… than another poor person who was not receiving relief… [which] was accomplished not only by making workhouse inmates labor, but by enforcing a strict regime of waking hours, limiting inmates to a monotonous diet, and forbidding small pleasures such as tobacco. (Besley, Coate, & Guinnane, 2001, p. 10)

Consignment to the workhouse was often the beginning of a torturous bodily attrition, as the meals provided could easily fall below caloric replacement, given the demands of the labor. A recipe for “Mrs. Beeton’s Useful Soup for Benevolent Purposes calls for 4 pounds of beef trimmings, 4 pounds of pearl barley, about 8 pounds of onions and a sprinkling of herbs to make ten gallons of soup.” (Goodman, 2013, p. 168) (The paucity and high price of food in general was a significant problem for the lower classes; Compared to the Medieval period, Victorians’ skeletons were typically two inches shorter. The 1845 Potato Blight exacerbated the food shortage, and “by most estimates” killed over a million in Ireland, where potatoes “formed well over 80 per cent of the people’s total diet”. (Goodman, 2013, p. 170, p.164))

But staying out of the workhouse wasn’t easy either. Employers hired and fired as needed, and day-work was common, meaning workers bore the brunt of market fluctuations and could no longer plan for a stable income. To make ends meet, most working-class families expected their children to be earning a wage by age ten, and in extreme cases as early as five. This was the case in both rural and urban areas, and in all lines of work (agriculture, factories, offices, etc). Legislation eventually began to curb child labor’s most visible transgressions, particularly in the mines, and textile mills where “from 1835 up to 1850, half of all the workers… were under the age of 18.” Even so, owners and workers alike often turned a blind eye to restrictions, and child labor was common into the 20th century. (Goodman, 2013, p. 197)

Both children and adults navigated nightmarishly unsafe work environments: Factories originally designed for manual labor became haphazardly packed with unguarded machinery that could easily maim or kill; Agricultural machinery was typically pulled by livestock that could spook and bolt; Dangerous chemicals were used with no safeguards; etc etc etc. Workplace safety legislation arrived piecemeal throughout the century, often in forms we’d now consider parodically baseline. The intersection of 12-hour workdays, inadequate food, and poor sleeping conditions meant severe accidents and deaths were common. (Goodman, 2013, p.197)

Chartism and the 1867 Second Reform Act

Recall the makeup of Britain’s government: No one to whom the 1834 New Poor Law applied had any influence in the legislative process. Two years prior, the government made its first halting steps toward broadening democratic participation with the 1832 Reform Act (which itself was hotly contested in Parliament). The Act included reapportionment of MPs and the creation of new constituencies; But enfranchisement was broadened only a smidgen, to include “small landowners, tenant farmers, and shopkeepers,” and “all [male] householders who paid a yearly rental of £10 or more”, but still left “five out of six working men without a vote.” (UK Parliament, n.d.a; Heffer, 2022, p. 114)

The one-two punch of these 1832 and 1834 Acts turned up the heat on simmering progressive movements, most notably the Radicals. A few rounds of obligatory leftist infighting – per usual, around whether reform should come incrementally or wholesale – led to the emergence of the Chartism movement in 1836. (National Archives, 2022) Chartism takes its name from the People’s Charter, “which listed six main aims,” and was presented to Parliament thrice, in 1839, 1842, and 1848:

Chartist rhetoric at times explicitly advocated for revolution, and occasionally led to direct action like strikes, sabotage, and rioting. The movement ebbed and flowed along with the working class’ economic fortunes, and “was most active between 1838 and 1848.” (National Archives, 2022) Though the Chartist movement sputtered out, pressure for male suffrage persisted and intensified, until the 1867 Second Reform Act was finally passed “by an aristocracy largely paralyzed with fear at the prospect of an assault on its property and status, and an uprising by the working class.” (Heffer, 2022 p. 114) The 1867 Act “roughly doubled the electorate in England and Wales from one to two million men.” (UK Parliament, n.d.b)

But paternal classism was still the order of the day, and as Parliament slowly realized the inevitability of expanding suffrage in the 1850s, a wave of panic about the educational state of the electorate swept through the chambers. The general aristocratic sentiment was (impolitely) summarized by Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, who described the 1867 Second Reform Act as “the call-in of new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribeability, amenability to beer and balderdash” into the political process. (Heffer, 2022, p. 579) Such a shift, (more politely) insisted MP Robert Lowe, meant that public education had “become paramount to every other questions that has been brought before us. From the moment that you entrust the masses with power their education becomes an absolute necessity.”2 (Heffer, 2022, p. 413)

Thus, a small cadre of MPs and select committees who’d been compiling reports, forming recommendations, and drafting unread education-related bills were suddenly ushered from the political hinterlands into the spotlight. It’s from this context that England’s public library system emerges.

Education

In the first half of the 19th c., British primary education was in a bad state.3 There was scarcely any national education policy or oversight; And with the exception of workhouses and reformatories [“youth detention centers” in the modern US context], each school was a privately-run endeavor. In 1855, one MP estimated that only one in eight children attended school. No standards existed for curricula, teachers, or administrators; An 1851 survey of school headmasters found them a motley crew of mostly down-on-their-luck tradesmen biding their time while gameplanning their next move. Factories employing children were required to have schools; The level of instruction here was aggressively remedial. (Heffer, 2022, p. 419-421)

Higher education was similarly bleak: English colleges focused almost exclusively on classics; Teachers were underpaid and often nepotistically-appointed; And there was little in the way of academic standards. At Eaton, a student’s prestige was gained or lost on the cricket field or rowing circuit rather than in the classroom. (Heffer, 2022, p. 451) “An Oxford examiner testified” that of the 168 candidates who took the University Examinations, 47 failed – 43 of them spectacularly. (Heffer, 2022, p. 450)

In 1861, Parliament began an inquiry, headed by Lord Clarendon, into the state of England’s nine leading universities, “Eaton, Harrow, Charterhouse, Westminster, St Paul’s, Whichester, Rugby, Shrewsbury, and Merchant Taylors.” (Heffer, 2022, p. 446) The commission’s damning 1864 report led to several curricula reform mandates, and culminated in the 1868 Public Schools Act, which took the nine universities “out of the hands of either the government or the Church and made them independent.”4 (Heffer, 2022, p. 416) In the lead-up to the 1868 act, Clarendon needed to make the case that State control of educational standards was neither overreach or “akin to pauperism.” (Heffer, 2022, p. 467)

Thereafter, collegiate administrative duties were increasingly divorced from (mainly Anglican) religious orders, expediting a shift towards rationalist pedagogy that had been underway since the 1840s. (Heffer, 2022. p. 446) Universities began offering modern languages like French and German, and introduced science and math courses. As Oxford don Goldwin Smith later reflected, with these changes, “Liberalism soon took the practical shape of an effort to reform and emancipate the university, to strike off the fetters of medieval statues from it and from its Colleges, set it from the predominance of ecclesiasticism, recall it to its proper work, and restore it to the nation” (Heffer, 2022, p. 448)

The prioritization of adult education reflects Parliamentary concern with the electorate, but reforms to public education at the primary level were eventually enacted with the 1870 Education Act, which created school boards; the 1881 Mundella Act, which “compell[ed] attendance for children aged between five and ten”; And the Fee Grant Act of 1891, which rendered this mandatory education free of charge. (Heffer, 2022, p. 415) Secondary education was nationalized in 1902. (Fraser, 2003)

Libraries

From the outset, Parliament saw education as extending beyond the classroom. Earlier, in the 1830s, Parliamentary concern about the state of the lower classes led to a series of commissions aiming to figure out how to discourage drinking and encourage pursuits like physical fitness and cultural edification. Though the recommendations therefrom “produced few tangible results, one recurring theme emerged in the investigations–a belief in the manifold virtues of education.” (Fletcher, 1996)

Prior to the mid-1800s, the expense of printed material meant library subscription fees were feasible only for the wealthy. But by the midcentury, with the dropping price of print material, a proliferation of small private libraries were accessible to the working class. These private libraries were often associated with “various institutions of rational recreation” like “the Mechanics Institute… temperance societies, trade union clubrooms,” and occasionally workplaces, like “several of the larger cotton mills.” (Hewitt, 2000, p. 65) These spaces sometimes also served as meeting spaces for working- and lower-class political groups like the Chartists; Consequently, “the most powerful forces tending to promote free and public libraries… originated in the developing pressures experienced in growing urban communities” (Fletcher, ref. Jones)

William Ewart headed the 1849 Select Committee on Libraries, and used his earlier 1845 Museums Act as a stepping stone for the Public Libraries and Museums Act of 1850. This first Act was focused primarily on establishing procedures for creating a library; Two additional Public Library Acts in 1855 and 1866 rounded out the resources needed to fully implement a nation-wide library system.5 Though the rhetoric around uplifting the poor and working classes proved historically stickier, Libraries could also serve as a venue for civic pride and beautification for the upper classes; Particularly in well-to-do outlying cities whose industrialization had bolstered already established economies. (Fletcher, 1996)

The framework of these Library Acts is that a municipal legislature would put forth a bill to create a public library, whose structure (land purchase, construction, or space rental) and operation would to be funded by a “penny rate” tax. Sequentially, these 1850, 1855 and 1866 Acts loosened requirements to put forth a local bill: This was limited at first to municipalities with 10,000 residents, then 5,000, then open to all. Revisions after 1850 lowered the threshold required for a passing vote from two-thirds to a simple majority. Even so, these proposals weren’t always a shoe-in: The incentives of still-exclusively upper-class legislatures prior to the 1867 Second Reform Act didn’t always align with the conceptual aims of the library movement.

These moves into education and culture were a departure from how the government had typically operated and its philosophical alignment toward Utilitarianism and Individualism; As Fletcher (1996) notes, “for much of the nineteenth century central government was not the focal point of educational activity.” These government efforts were merely one of many education-promoting and -providing services provided by private entities, e.g. “Anglican and Voluntary groups” – And the significant historiographic focus on education and library legislation is perhaps due to a backwards projection from our preset-day administrative frameworks. Glasgow, for example “possessed the makings of a complete central library system for a long time before it ever established” its public library in 1899; Three major free, endowed libraries had been operating in the city for decades: Mitchell, Stirling, and Baillie’s Institution. (Najowitz & Hamby, 1999)

Libraries and National Identity

To whit, it wasn’t until the 1855 revision that tax funding could be allocated for collection development: It was expected that well-resourced community members would donate or purchase works for the public libraries. This of course raises questions about what kinds of book were provided, and why.

Peatling (2004) argues that 19th c. libraries were instrumental in the formation and consolidation of a British national identity.6 Libraries play an essential “role in popularizing images of the world onto which constructions of nations, often established nations, are hardcoded… even by ostensibly non-political artifacts such as maps and landscapes.”

Knowledge-organization systems can create or reinforce boundaries; Not just in academic fields (e.g., mathematics, music, spelunking), but in sociological matters.7 During the formative period of 1850-1919, “The structure of libraries and library management often reflected religious affiliations, with local churches, bishops and clergy often represented on library committees”. (Peatling, 2004) Hewitt (2006) notes that “by the 1890s specially installed display cases, in the entrance or adjacent to the borrowing counters, seem to have been becoming common… library services often had exhibitions and displays that had little connection with the library. In other places, such as Birmingham, an organisationally distinct gallery or museum was housed within the library.”

Rejecting “primordialist” interpretations, Peatling instead argues Libraries forwarded a British identity within the “modernist” framework; That is, collection developers, exhibit designers, and library administrators understood they were intentionally demonstrating and promoting a specific British identity.8, 9 In advocating for increased work in this academic area, Peatling suggests the following five lines of inquiry:

  1. Library law and propagation of libraries by the state of local élites
  2. Particular discursive constructions of nations articulated by library administrators and commentators
  3. Censorship and stock control
  4. Targeted indoctrination of particular sets of readers,
  5. And architecture, display and commemoration in libraries. (Peatling, 1996)

Initial scans of material relating to Ranganathan’s perspectives of the role of the Library Movement in India appear to indicate he was keenly aware of a library system’s potential role in national identity formation. Will this surface in the Five Laws? Only time will tell.

The Victorians were a people of layers – but I actually don’t mean this metaphorically: They were stacked with cotton, flannel, silk, and wool; Combinations, crinolines, corsets, drawers, chemises, petticoats, vests, bonnets, bodices, etc etc etc.

In inhabiting the changing dress and living patterns of various 19th c. decades, Gonzo Historian Ruth Goodman notes how clothing alters one’s motion through space and performance of various tasks. Edging a field with a sickle, for example, involves different postures and muscle groups in period and modern dress: An 1870s corset encourages an upright position, where the boning and midsection reinforcement counterbalances the motion of the tool; Whereas modern dress encourages a stooped position with more lateral motion. (Goodman, 2013, p. 92) Simply sitting down requires adjustment when wearing a crinolette or bustle:

Anything that stuck out predominantly at the back required a diagonal approach to chairs. Images of the fashionable lady of the 1870s show that she perched on the very front of the chair at an angle of approximately forty-five degrees, leaning slightly forward. It is a very elegant look, but also an eminently sensible one (Goodman. 2013, p. 76)

The increased volume of skirts following the 1856 introduction of Crinolines induced a shifting of home decor to higher places to avoid any accidental knocking-over; While the reactionarily-narrow skirts of the 1885 required a new approach to walking:

The trick, I have found, is to adopt a slightly circular gait. At each step, it pays to move the foot outwards, describing a semicircle, rather than just stepping forwards. This ensures that the fabric has no chance to form any folds or tucks that further constrict movement, keeping it at all times taught. (Goodman. 2013, p. 77)

Charles Lyell’s 1830 Principles of Geology carried the work of Geologist Karl von Hoff to its next logical conclusion: The Earth must be much, much older than the biblically-stipulated 6,000 years. Lyell’s work made a significant impact on Charles Darwin, who intuited this extended timescale’s ramifications for biology; The two became close friends and correspondents. Following Darwin’s return from his 1831 Galapagos expedition, Lyell continually pestered him to publish his theories, as Darwin languished in depression and imposter syndrome for the next two decades. His 1858 Linean Society presentation with Russell Wallace, and 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species swung wide the door Lyell had cracked open, precipitating a full reconsideration of the roles of religion and science in British culture as a whole. (Heffer, 2022)

The emergence of religious skepticism into the public sphere (like the 1860 Huxley-Wilburforce debate in Oxford), “can be seen with hindsight as the end of the medieval world, whose ideas were so often rooted in blind faith, and the start of the modern, whose ideas were so often rooted in rationalism.” (Heffer, 2022, p. 200) But just as it does today, a vast terrain existed between the poles of religion and secularity; And eventually we found ourselves in the 20th century, according to Himmelfarb, with the poles paradoxically reversed: “The final irony is to have the old stereotypes, of an enlightened science and a bigoted religion, replaced by new ones: A ‘scientific naturalism’ that was dogmatic, narrow-minuted jealous of its newly-acquired authority, lacking social vision and emotional depth; and a ‘spiritualism’ that was imaginative, open-minded, compassionate, receptive to new forms of consciousness and speculation.” (Heffer, 2022, p. 227)

The practice and institutionalization of science underwent tectonic shifts during the 19th c.; The term “scientist” itself was coined by William Hewell in 1834, in a complaint that fields were becoming too specialized. Particularly in the early 19th c., the membrane between science and esoterica was still exquisitely permeable; The fundamental basis of entire fields of study were sometimes up-for-grabs. The selection of which theories to pursue became freighted with meaning: “Animal magnetism was one of several sciences of life that became political game pieces in the ideological battle between different medical constituencies. The best known example is the field of comparative anatomy in which rival developmental theories were champion at UCL and King’s.” (Winter, 1998, p. 47) Science occupied a similar fraught political space that social, gender, and race theory occupies today.

The Indian Summer

I’ve seen the brief Edwardian period (1901-1910) referred to as the “Indian Summer” of the Victorian in a few places; though I’m unsure if this is from a famous text or just a coincidence. Through the turn of the 20th century, Britain continued its subjagative colonial efforts (mainly in Africa, brushing up against the Dutch and Germans), and incrementally wove its social safety net. (Fraser, 2003, p. 616, p. 625) By the outbreak of the Great War, the percent of residents requiring government relief had declined, due to a confluence of increased private philanthropy and welfare additions like worker’s comp (1908), old-age pensions (1909), and National Insurance (1911) (Boyer, n.d.; Fraser, 2003, p. 632) Standards of living were incrementally rising for the working class, but a chasm of wealth still yawned: “[15%] of Britons were still employed as servants,” and 1% of the population owned 70% of England’s land. (Fraser, 2003, p. 625, p. 635)

Democratic reforms continued inching along: The House of Lords was stripped of its political power in 1910, and the 1918 Representation of the People Act extended suffrage to all men over 21 and women over 30 meeting certain property requirements. (Full women’s suffrage came in 1928.) Along with political advancement, women were also making inroads in the workforce. Good news / Bad news: The illustrative Manchester Free Library began employing women in the 1890s… because they could pay them less than men. However, Librarianship wouldn’t begin it changeover to majority-female until the midcentury: “Even as late as 1910, 3/4 of all British libraries were still staffed exclusively by men.” (AFL-CIO, 2024; Najowitz & Hamby, 1999)

In the late 19th c., because of their localized funding structures and inability to raise public funding beyond the “penny rate,” library outreach and expansion was sometimes limited by the library’s capacity to provide services. “It was during the 1880s and 90s, however, that a new pattern of organised private philanthropy emerged in Britain which would provide both the motivation and means for previously sluggish or impoverished local authorities to adopt the [1866] Act.” (Historic England, 2016) During this period, promotional efforts expanded from announcements of new book acquisitions in the press, into establishing of lecture series, partnering with local associations, and the publication of library bulletins. The cost of printing bulletins was typically offset by advertising, and “by 1914 it appears that the bulk of library magazines were free.” By the outset of the Great War, “The mythic transformation from the librarian-as-conservator to the librarian-as-missionary was widely celebrated.” (Hewitt, 2006)

Formalization of the Library Field

With the explosion of printing in the late 19th c., “Western countries had experienced such a proliferation of books of all sorts that the nature of the librarian’s work was radically altered.” (Britannica, 2024 April) The UK’s Library Association [LAUK] was founded in 1877, one year after its US counterpart; But unlike the American context, “library education in Britain has, historically, been dominated and even monopolized by the Library Association.”10 (Thomas, 1999)

LAUK established a formal educational program for a Library Association Degree in 1881, and graduated its first cohort in 1885. The syllabus focused on both general-knowledge and library-specific topics, and demanded a working knowledge of at least three languages.

Initially, the Library Association was unable to attract many librarians to its examinations. Those who did decide to take them had a very high rate of failure. In part, this can be attributed to the very poor reception of the Library Association examinations to the fact that, first of all, librarians of this period had a very poor general level of education and were expected to work long, grueling hours that made preparing for the Library Association’s examinations difficult if not impossible. (Thomas, 1999, p. 12)

LAUK’s 1898 Royal Charter coupled with UK librarians’ interest in Dewey’s recently-opened School of Library Economics in the US led to a push for more library education and incremental reforms to LAUK’s educational process. The first library science course available at a UK university arrived in 1902, but it wasn’t until the post-WWI push for expanded library service that a formal library school was established, with a two-year program at University College. This created a professional split, LAUK’s certification graduates tended to gain employment in public libraries, while university graduates tended to gain employment in academic and research libraries, “a point of contention well into the 1960s.” (Thomas, 1999, p. 16)

War Libraries

The creation of “war libraries” from 1914-1919 embodied vigorous debates about what materials should be stocked and why. “By the end of March 1919 the number of books that Britain had sent to the trenches, to war hospitals and to prisoners of war had reached 16 million.” (Sutcliffe, 2016) The material stocked was often designed “to restrain soldiers from straying toward less salubrious forms of leisure: from excessive drink habits to the lure of local brothels”; The assumed lower-class character of soldiers prompted a curatorial shift towards paternal “humanism” in stock selection, which wasn’t always welcomed by readers. “Volunteers soon learnt to tread a thin line between ‘respectable’ books and ‘entertaining’ books for soldiers’ recreation.” The curators’ unusually direct exposure to everyman reading habits doubtless produced some interesting cross-pollination:

In her recollections Mrs Gaskell confessed to her initial ignorance of some of the literature that she encountered when sorting the books. Bringing the librarian Theodore Koch into her confidence, she later admitted to him: “Perhaps your eyes will be opened, as mine were, to new worlds of literature… I confess I was quite ignorant of these books before the war. They are exciting, absorbing, sensational. Detective stories are shouted for and so are all sorts of penny novelettes…” (Sutcliffe, 2016)

But

The war changed everything, and its shadow stretches right through to the [1930s]. On the one hand, frenzied attention to recovery, reconstruction and the post-war economic struggle prompted renewed interest in the potential of the library, and brought the abolition of the penny rate limit. On the other, the disruptions and legacy of the war rendered the new vistas of 1919 a delusion. Not until the later 1920s was it finally possible to discern a new sense of dynamism” (Hewitt, 2006. p.78)

The Twilight Years

At the close of the war, the government and public alike saw public libraries as an ideal venue for providing education, retraining, and other services during Britain’s economic ebb. The 1919 Public Libraries Act consolidated and expanded the purview of the public library system. The Act removed the “penny rate” restriction, allowing governments to increase library funding at will, and offered more options for forming library administrations, which had the net effect of benefiting rural and suburban areas, and secularizing administrative bodies. (Historic England, 2016)

Thus, Ranganathan arrived in England at a Janusian time: In the library field, dovetailed legislative and philanthropic enthusiasm was envisioning a bright future; While the broader intellectual zeitgeist, still deeply scarred by the war, was pointed in the exact opposite direction.

Per Overy’s deeply fascinating The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (2009), among Britain’s intelligentsia, the discourse surrounding the trajectory of Western civilization had become overwhelmingly bleak. Publications are rife with references to the broad “decline,” “decay,” or “crisis” which the sudden rupturing of European peace and the unimaginable technological horrors had revealed. Overy’s “paradox” is that this framing occurred even as Britain reached its colonial apex, continually improved its standards of living, and democratized its government.

This tangent is, sadly, one I must abandon due to time constrains. The parallels to our present day are uncanny – One can only speculate about the amorphous future-historical endpoint of our own pessimistic intellectual interregnum; Or for that matter, whether its opening will be considered (e.g.) 9/11, 21st c. Democratic backsliding, nuclear proliferation, or the swiftly-closing period between our foresight of anthropocenic catastrophe and our will or ability to mitigate it.

Propaganda by the Deed

But another surprising modern parallel surfaces as I’m drafting this report: This month saw two assassination attempts on a major-party presidential candidate in as many months. But of course, history enthusiasts will point out this isn’t unprecedented at all: The late 19th and early 20th centuries were absolutely rife with assassination and regicide. This trend emerged from a line of thinking called “propaganda by the deed,” which coalesced from anarchist writers and agitators in the 1880s.

The idea was two-fold: First, to demonstrate to ordinary people that the wielders of power are physically vulnerable and easily dispatched with some gumption and moxy; And second, if caught and brought to trial, one should use the opportunity to advocate for insurrection. These dovetailed acts of violence and eloquence were intended to get the flywheel going, until a critical mass of people understood that governments were actually quite susceptible to revolution. As the anarchist bomber and folk hero Ravachol stated during his trial, “Currently, too many citizens suffer while others swim in opulence; The situation cannot last. Today the anarchists are numerous enough to overthrow the current state of things: All that is needed for that is a shove, and the revolution will take place.” As the guillotine fell, he cried out “Three cheers for the revolution!” (Tancrède, 2016)

Thus, “The Black Peril” swept first over Europe, then across the Atlantic to the New World. After the 1893 bombing of the French National Assembly, and the 1894 and 1897 assassinations of President Carnot of France and Prime Minister del Castillo of Spain, the International Conference for the Social Defence Against Anarchists was held in 1898, leading to the creation of Interpol’s precursor organization. Per Matthew Carr, “The idea of… an international terrorist conspiracy emerged; It was actually the first time the phrase ‘war on terror’ was used.” (Tancrède, 2016)

Despite the repression and state measures, monarchs were falling like flies under attacks from the anarchists. The Russian Tzar, the presidents of Uruguay, Ecuador, and El Salvador, the Spanish Chairman of the Conservative Party, and the Portuguese king and crown prince were all killed. Meanwhile in Geneva, Lucheni stabbed Empress Elisabeth of Austria. In Madrid, the Spanish head of government was assassinated. And so on, right up to the war, when Alexandros Schinas murdered the King of Greece, and Gavrilo Princip, the Archduke of Austria and his wife. (Tancrède, 2016)

That final one is likely the only from this list Americans are broadly familiar with, but we had a smattering of anarchist violence on our side of the pond as well. In 1901, President McKinley was assassinated in by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz; The 1920 Wall Street Bombing killed 40 and injured hundreds; And the home of the judge who had presided over the Sacco and Vanzetti trial was bombed.

But then a funny thing happened – or rather, didn’t happen: “For anarchists, by the end of the 19th century one thing was certain. The strategy of assassination had shown its tactical limitations. Nowhere had it triggered insurrection, and the wave of killing had lost the libertarian cause a great deal of credibility.” (Tancrède, 2016) Thus, the bulk of international anarchists shifted their focus from insurrectionist violence to syndicalism: Labor unions, free education, and mutual aid. Quite the pivot!

Notes

  1. London’s proliferation of Plane trees and Rhododendrons are a vestige of this period.

  2. Lowe is a complex character, now often reviled for his pedagogical insistence on “The Three Rs” at the expense of broader perspectives and his severe resentment of the lower classes.

  3. Interestingly, this state of affairs applied mainly to England and Wales; Scotland had actually gotten its act together on Education back in the 17th c., with a robust system of public education from primary school through college. (Heffer, 2022, p. 413)

  4. This is the linguistic origin of why “public” universities in England are viewed as more prestigious than “private” ones.

  5. One notable early example of urban enthusiasm for libraries was in Manchester, (founded in 1852) which was thoroughly covered in the press, and maintains a bountiful archive of its founding materials. Manchester had earned the nickname “shock city” for its rapid industrialization, and was the center of England’s burgeoning cotton industry. Its deep-pocketed upper class heavily subsidized the library’s construction and collection; and the library was immediately and continually used by the city’s working class. (Hewitt, 2000)

  6. Peatling’s work is a vociferous argument for the integration of more identity politics into library history; Two decades later, most of what she’s arguing for seems common practice. Peatling’s work is now somewhat dated; In the intervening two decades, the type of identity politics and intersectional theories of power she’s advocating for have become commonplace in cultural research. Her discussion of then-current work into how “contradictory discourses can emanate even from national museums” is, like, table-stakes now for curators responsible for writing exhibits’ explanatory text.

  7. For two modern examples, we might ask where books about Taiwan are shelved in Chinese or Taiwanese libraries; or whether indigenous American histories are collected into their own category or shelved alongside their United States counterparts.

  8. The three theories of national identity formation Pealing (2004) considers are :
    • “Perennialist” or “primordialst”: Considers the formation of national identity to predate any formal State-making.
    • “Ethnosymbolist”: “What gives nationalism its power are the myths, memories, traditions, and symbols of ethnic heritages and the ways in which a popular living past has been, and can be, rediscovered and reinterpreted by modern nationalist intelligentsias.”
    • “Modernist”: National identities can be explicitly constructed; e.g. State-theorized depictions of Soviet identity following the Russian Revolution. “Nations are thus seen to be ‘constructed essentially from above’.”
  9. From Peatling’s perspective, national identity is a zero-sum game; These habits, presentations, and concepts “occupy space which might have been filled by alternative formations” creating “images of ‘community’ and of ‘us’ and ‘them’, [thus affecting] individual and collective thought and action in a way which must be regarded as political.” (p. 36) …But must it? Could it not be regarded as artistic? Spiritual? Esoteric? Romantic? Invoking the charged rhetoric of “‘us’ and ‘them’”, Peatling seems to place National Identity inexorably at odds with groups outside one’s own; when there’s no reason identity formation couldn’t be a prelude to cooperation.

  10. In 2002, LAUK merged with the Institute of Information Sciences to form CLIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals: https://www.cilip.org.uk/

References

See here.

Leaves / Pressings

At the Mechanics Institute today, I showed two prospective members to the Chess section; I don’t play chess, but I know where the section is.

“Government and co-operation are in all things the Laws of Life; Anarchy and competition the Laws of Death.” - John Ruskin (Heffer, 2022, p. 615)

Mentions Ruskin’s “The Crown of Wild Olive” as a foundational text in British socialism: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26716/pg26716-images.html

“Justice Jackson [Alied prosecutor for the Nurnberg trails] said, ‘What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatred, terrorism, and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power; They are symbols of fierce nationalism, and militarism, and intrigue and war-making.’ The very same problems we deal with today. The world has not changed as much as the dreamers who brought us the Nurnberg trial had hoped.” - Eli Rosenbaum, Filmmakers for the Prosecution (2021)

The UK Parliament website has ASCII art of their building in the source code!!