Research

Reading Across Colonies: Fiction Holdings and Circulating Libraries in the British Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1870

Image: State Library of NSW archive.

Dr Karen Wade and Prof Porscha Fermanis (UCD)

This study analyzes the fiction holdings of thirty library catalogues from twenty-three discrete circulating libraries in colonial Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Singapore from 1820 to 1870. It investigates which novels were available to colonial readers before the market was flooded with colonial editions in the later nineteenth century, and the extent to which fiction holdings either coincided with holdings in metropolitan libraries and/or were determined by the demands of colonial regional interests. The study draw inferences about the holdings of sample libraries by making internal comparisons—that is, by comparing the library holdings against one another, and against the complete set of titles—but also by comparing them against sources of information relating to wider trends in the circulation and consumption of nineteenth-century fiction; for example, the holdings of Mudie’s Select Library in London and gender patterns established by large databases of nineteenth-century fiction. It is therefore less concerned with the mechanics of the imperial and local books trades than with the regimes of value constructed by circulating libraries, including the relative throw and breadth of circulation of frequently listed and other kinds of culturally significant texts.

In some ways, the study’s findings confirm the longstanding view that circulating libraries in the colonies primarily held books imported from Britain. Yet it also complicates tidy conclusions about the derivative nature of early colonial libraries and simple diffusionist models of book circulation by showing the extent to which colonial libraries attempted to collect fiction relating to themes and settings of regional and local interest, as well as focusing on gender patterns and trends. Notwithstanding the existence of an Anglocentric reading model and a preference for popular British books, early library holdings provide important information as to how literary value and prestige were measured in the southern colonies, as well as revealing the extent to which colonial libraries held novels of local and regional interest, and constructed their own early or nascent forms of national literary identity.

Publications and Presentations:

• Wade, Karen and Porscha Fermanis, ‘Reading Across Colonies: Fiction Holdings and Circulating Libraries in the British Southern Hemisphere’, Book History (accepted, forthcoming 2022).