Elegy for Our Public Libraries

Civitas, 17 February 2009

Last week, Merseyside’s Wirral Council announced the planned closure of almost a half of its 24 public libraries. Many other local authorities are soon likely to follow suit as they seek to reduce public spending in wake of the country’s current economic down-turn.

The library closures form part of a wider trend which has seen their numbers contract along with the size of their book-stocks. These library closures and contractions take place in face of their increasing public use. In the past five years, the number of annual visits to them has undergone a six per cent increase, and it is set to rise further as unemployment mounts with the deepening recession.

Central Government seems little exercised by the run-down of this valuable national asset which is justified by those overseeing it by reference to what they claim is the public’s declining public demand for library books in comparison with that for electronic facilities such as computers and DVD’s that libraries have increasingly come to house in place of books.

While doubtless recreational book-reading is facing stiffer competition from electronic media, once lost the cultural capital formerly represented by the country’s public libraries will be hard to replace.

Not that the country’s educational system these past several decades has done much to encourage young people to acquire a taste for good literature. Contrast the healthy state of their appetite for books nearly a century ago with the attitudes towards their reading good literature teachers are being encouraged to adopt by those responsible for their training.

In its 1921 report ‘The Teaching of English in England’, the Newbolt Committee gave details of the literary tastes of London’s elementary schoolchildren based on their selection of books to borrow from the 2,000,000 volumes made available at their schools on a regularly rotating basis every six months. In descending order of popularity, their ten most favourite choices were: Tales and Stories from Shakespeare; Robinson Crusoe; Arthurian Legends; Peter Pan; David Copperfield; Tale of Two Cities; Christmas Carol; Water Babies; Ivanhoe; Tales of Robin Hood.

Contrast the good taste evidenced by that selection from what was recently written about the relative merits of Shakespeare and the Beano as children’s reading material by the Head of the School of Curriculum at London University’s Institute of Education. In a book he edited about the school curriculum published in 2006 he wrote:

‘I am often asked in relation to my objection to the standard inclusion of Shakespeare in the English Literature curriculum if I think that it would be equally justifiable for students to study a children’s comic like the Beano… My response to this is that… huge numbers of young students might, indeed, gain more pleasure, more instruction and more enduring knowledge and understanding from studying contemporary comic books than from studying Shakespeare’s plays…’ [Alex Moore, ‘Curriculum as culture: entitlement, bias and the Bourdieusean arbitrary’ in Moore, C. (Ed.), Schooling Society and Curriculum (Routledge, 2006), pp.94-95.]

It is enough to make you weep.

Where is the latter-day John Ruskin who will spring to the defence of public libraries and the priceless gems they eventually came to contain, not least in part because of the following that he once wrote on their behalf?

‘You will grant that moderately honest men… would wish to associate rather with sensible and well-informed persons than with fools and ignorant persons….And… you will admit that according to the sincerity of our desire that our friends may be true, and our companions wise, — and in proportion to the earnestness and discretion with which we choose both, — will be the general chances of our happiness and usefulness… But… life is short… Do you [not] know, if you read this, that you cannot read that – that what you lose today you cannot gain tomorrow? Will you go and gossip with… house-maid and stable-boy, when you may talk with queens and kings;… when all the while [an] eternal court is open to you, with its society, wide as the world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen and the mighty, of every place and time? Into that you may enter always; … from that, once entered into, you can never be outcast but by your own fault; by your aristocracy of companionship there, your own inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested…

‘No nation can last, which has made a mob of itself, however generous at heart… Above all, a nation cannot… with impunity, — it cannot with existence, — go on despising literature… concentrating its soul on Pence. I say… we have despised literature. What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?… How much do you think the contents of the book-shelves of the United Kingdom, public and private, would fetch, as compared with the contents of its wine cellars?… Bread or flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey,… in a good book… All these pleasures then, I repeat, you nationally despise… Our national wish and purpose are only to be amused…’ (John Ruskin, ‘Of King’s Treasuries’ in Sesame and Lilies)

Ah, well, Gordon, just let betting shops keep raising the stakes of the slot machines your government has allowed them to install. That will bring you in a bit more revenue to squander before the country shows you its appreciation for all your masterly stewardship of the economy these last dozen years.

In the meantime, let local authorities close and dismantle public libraries or turn them into internet cafes and lenders of DVDs. It will save your government the fuel bill for the flame-throwers you would otherwise have had to use to destroy the country’s stock of public books. Who would have thought New Labour could so effortlessly have managed to succeed in providing us with the plots of Fahrenheit 451 and 1984? That shows a literary prowess one would not have expected of it and also obviates the need for public libraries come to think of it.