Sheffield Reading History: Unitarians, Book Societies and some Extraordinary Women

A talk by Sue Roe and Loveday Herridge

Reading Sheffield members Sue Roe and Loveday Herridge gave a talk on 9 September as part of the Heritage Open Days (HODs) Festival 2018.

Part One by Loveday

Part Two by Sue

Loveday and Sue have researched the history of Sheffield’s first libraries for Reading Sheffield. The focus of their talk was four book organisations which flourished in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the Sheffield Subscription Library, the Vestry Library, the Sheffield Book Society and the Sheffield Book Club.

The venue – the Unitarian Upper Chapel in Norfolk Street – was a perfect choice. Unitarians had long held education and reading in high regard for both men and women, and there were strong connections between the Chapel’s ministers and congregations and the various book groups.

Loveday and Sue looked at the origins of the four organisations, their membership, their choice of books and the roles they played in Sheffield. Picking up the HODs theme for 2018, Extraordinary Women, they explored in particular the lives and work of well-known female Unitarian writers, such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Elizabeth Gaskell, whose books were bought by the libraries.

Sue’s and Loveday’s extensive research is published in Before the Public Library: Reading, Community, and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850, edited by Mark Towsey, University of Liverpool, and Kyle B. Roberts, Loyola University Chicago (Leiden, Brill, 2017). The book, with contributions from eighteen experts, explores the emergence of community-based lending libraries in the Atlantic World in the two centuries before the public library movement of the mid-nineteenth century.

Before the Public Library