Cooperative society libraries and newsrooms - their social, educational and cultural role in the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

Abstract

One of the major changes to the social structure of Britain brought about by industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the creation of the working class. Library provision for the new mass readership was not just through public libraries, but through a number of bodies committed to provide an educational service to the working classes. My research is essentially an examination of one of the institutions committed to provide such a service by the working man for the working man in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century.