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Introduction
In the nineteenth century, in an increasingly industrial and democratic society, a novel institution appeared in both towns and villages throughout England. This was the reading room, which was founded as an organisation for educational and social purposes. Little research on this subject has been carried out, although Jeremy Burchardt has suggested that reading rooms foreshadowed the future village halls, by accommodating 'gatherings of a cross-section of the population'.1 This article will argue, with particular reference to Norfolk, that this is debatable, in that the people catered for by reading rooms were restricted in terms of gender, finance and class and it will explore the thinking behind the foundation of reading rooms.
The movement to establish reading rooms was an extensive national phenomenon during the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but the concept was known even before Victoria came to the throne. One of the earliest references is in a Parliamentary Paper of 1834 on the administration of Poor Laws:
In the parish of Edgbaston Dr. Johnstone . . . established an adult school, with the view, by teaching the labourers to read, of affording them a rational occupation and diverting them from mere sensual indulgence; . . . nearly 80 adult persons are now subscribers to a room which he has provided for them, and where they are engaged during their leisure moments in reading. Not one of these men now ever apply to the overseer for relief, though many amongst them were formerly paupers and notorious drunkards. . . . they do now maintain themselves, and subscribe to the reading room instead of the alehouse.2
This sounds like an ideal state of affairs, with the reading room as the answer to the social problems of poverty and drunkenness. But not all reading rooms received an enthusiastic reception. Many men objected to being dictated to, as in this example from Yorkshire:
I have a reading-room open one night in the week, where the members have access to a number of cheap monthly and weekly periodicals. . . . Though I have chess-boards, &c., in the reading-room, some of the young men say they would rather give 2d. for a pint of...