About the project
Eighteenth-Century Libraries Online is the result of a five-year Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project investigating the contribution of books to social, cultural and political change in North America and the British Isles during the eighteenth century. On this page, you can discover the historical context for this project, our aims and objectives, funding details and acknowledgements
Sensible how much we are at a loss in this new and remote country for every kind of useful knowledge, and convinced that nothing would be of more use to diffuse knowledge amongst us and our offspring than a library, supported by subscription in this town…
- From Niagara Public Library record book, Canada, 1800-1820.
Before the Public Library
Organised and funded by the state, libraries are today valued as a vital social good and a fundamental feature of liberal democracy. Yet the modern Public Library – taxpayer-funded and offering lending facilities for free – originated in the mid-19th century, and is only the most recent solution to the problem of how communities provide themselves with books. Before then, there existed a flourishing, unregulated library culture built not by the state but by groups of autonomous individuals acting from a range of motivations, including membership libraries built and sustained through private subscriptions.
As many kinds of useful and polite Knowledge can no otherwise be acquired than by READING; an Attempt to furnish the Public with an ample Fund of Amusement and Improvement of this kind, at the easiest Expence, can hardly fail of general Approbation. To answer this valuable Purpose, the Establishment of a LIBRARY in Liverpool has often been wish’d for; and to gratify so laudable a Desire, a Scheme has been proposed, and is now carrying into Execution.
- From the Catalogue of the Liverpool Library, 1758.
Historical context
As a string of landmark studies have revealed, the eighteenth century was a period of unprecedented expansion in the market for books, during which reading became a fundamental “necessity” of everyday life for more people than ever before. Books were used for pleasure and for education, providing access to self-improvement and social mobility in the absence of systematic schooling. By introducing new ideas, recasting old ones and disseminating knowledge about ‘new’ worlds ‘discovered’ in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, they created and sustained new forms of identity both for individuals and communities – together with a new form of mass entertainment, the novel. Yet books also remained prohibitively expensive, meaning that a significant proportion of would-be readers relied primarily on borrowing books rather than buying them.
The first formal subscription library (or social library, as they are more commonly known in North America) was the Library Company of Philadelphia begun in 1731 by printer’s apprentice – and future Founding Father of the USA – Benjamin Franklin and a group of like-minded associates as a means of acquiring expensive books to provoke conversation and inspire intellectual, cultural and political change. Thereafter, subscription libraries rapidly became a major part of the urban landscape, with at least 350 founded in cities, towns and villages across the British Isles and North America by 1800. Subscription libraries were essentially private membership clubs, in which subscribers pooled their resources to acquire a wider choice of books than many could afford individually. Crucially, while other libraries reflected market decisions taken by commercial operators or the reading tastes of a single benefactor or religious community, subscription libraries depended by their nature on collective decision making about what books to buy and how those books would be accessed.
The promotion of Literature is no less interesting to those engaged in Trade & Commerce than to any other part of the Community, as besides the improvement of Navigation and the acquisition of foreign Languages whereby Commerce has been greatly facilitated and extended, the perfection to which many of our manufacturers and works of Mechanism are arrived must be ascribed to Scientific Principlines on which they have been founded and improved.
- From the Catalogue of Books belonging to the Bristol Library Society, 1774
Aims and objectives
This project uses cutting-edge digital techniques to capture, interpret and make freely available online surviving documentary evidence relating to the books acquired and circulated by more than 80 libraries on either side of the Atlantic. These were founded by a huge range of communities, from tiny rural settlements like Wigtown in the south-west corner of Scotland and Fredericktown on the Pennsylvanian frontier, to rapidly growing industrial centres like Belfast and Leeds, and bustling transatlantic ports like New York, Dublin, Bristol and Liverpool. By providing unprecedented access to this data, our primary aim was to help scholars and the wider public to think in new ways about the circulation, dissemination, reception and impact of new books – and the ideas they carried – in a crucial period marked by Enlightenment, Revolutions, global encounters and technological change. You can access the results of this research by accessing the database. If you are new to this site, you may find it useful to browse the tutorial videos.
Our Frequently Asked Questions page provides further information on our approach to collating and organising the data. To find out more about our activities, please visit Galleries and Blogs. There will be a 'Further reading' section available in the coming months.
Acknowledgements
The project was funded by a grant of £842,708 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Project ref: AH/S007083/1), held originally between 2019 and 2022, with a non-cost extension through to 2024. A Research Associateship awarded by the Modern Humanities Research Association supported a postdoctoral researcher on the project in 2022-23. Two collaborative doctoral studentships (one funded by the AHRC’s North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership and one funded by the ESRC’s North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership), both in partnership with the Liverpool Athenaeum, have been associated with the project since 2022. Further funding for collaborative work with partners (including events, exhibitions and other impact and enrichment activities) has been awarded by the University of Liverpool’s AHRC-funded Impact Acceleration Account, the Higher Education Innovation Fund, Western Sydney University’s Summer Scholarship Program, and the University of Liverpool’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Internship programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate level. We are immensely grateful to all of our funders, partners and supporters for their help in making this project a reality.
The project has been at least fifteen years in development, with early-stage pilot research taking place during a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Past and Present Society at the Institute of Historical Research in 2007. Since that time, innumerable friends and colleagues have helped bring the concept to fruition, for which I am immensely grateful. In addition to those whose formal roles are listed elsewhere on this website, special thanks are due to Hyder Abbas, David Allan, Rebecca Bowd, David Brazendale, Dominic Bridge, Nick Bubak, Ella Bull, Elaine Chalus, Sophie Coulombeau, James Connolly, Vivienne Dunstan, Alison Fell, Christy Ford, Charles Forsdick, Jim Green, Peter Hoare, Brittani Ivan, Nick Jackson, Teri Kennedy, Robert Koehler, Keith Manley, Kate Marsh, Jon Mee, Alicia Montoya, Angel-Luke O’Donnell, Mark Peel, Andrew Pettegree, James Raven, Isabel Rivers, Eve Rosenhaft, Erin Schreiner, Kandice Sharren, Mark Spencer, Siobhan Talbott, Laura Van Oort, Cassandra Ulph and Abigail Williams.
Mark Towsey (December, 2025)