Introduction
Much has been written about the book trade and development of libraries in Scotland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was a period of rapid growth in numbers of imprints and venues supporting reading. Relatively high literacy rates compared to other parts of Britain, together with good provision of education in schools at a local level, led to a highly literate and engaged population.Footnote 1 This was further enhanced by strong religious beliefs among Scottish people, leading to a population of parishioners eagerly reading religious texts, as well as other books.Footnote 2 Yet little attempt has been made to consider the trade as a whole in a wider social and cultural context, in particular the myriad ways in which reading was supported in an evolving and developing urban hierarchy.
This article considers which types of Scottish towns supported various facilities for reading at this time, and how such facilities spread throughout the Scottish urban hierarchy, from the largest cities down to the villages. Throughout the article, the book trade is studied through the lens of urban history and urban hierarchy. Here the ongoing debate about the nature of Scottish urbanization is relevant. At this time Scotland was urbanizing rapidly, with a growth of towns and facilities that has been little explored outside the largest cities.Footnote 3 Harris and McKean have argued for the relatively late development in urban facilities in Scotland, but one that, when it did start, often happened more rapidly than in England.Footnote 4 Also relevant is the common perception that Scotland at this time was a nation of readers, a view often expressed by modern historians, but also by visitors to Scotland in this historical period.Footnote 5
The article uses as its main primary source a single trade directory, one of the first detailed trade directories covering all of Scotland. Published in London in 1825, its title page describes it as:
PIGOT & CO’S
New Commercial
DIRECTORY OF SCOTLAND
FOR
1825–6
Containing comprehensive and accurate Directories
of
EDINBURGH, GLASGOW,
AND EVERY OTHER TOWN, SEA-PORT, & VILLAGE IN THE KINGDOM
To which is prefixed
Separate Historical and Descriptive Sketches, each of which has been written, revised, and authenticated on the spot, exclusively for this Work.
Information for each town is considerable, based on a list of tradesmen and preceded by a detailed description of the town and its situation and facilities. On the downside, local entries were compiled by different people, which means that information recorded, particularly in the descriptive sections, can vary in depth of coverage. However, the information is still useful and, with care, can be analysed. These methodological challenges will be returned to in a later section. In terms of book and reading history the directory records information about a variety of reading venues available, not just the more typically studied libraries. In addition, it records the spread of booksellers and printers.
In terms of historiography the article builds on a somewhat incomplete picture of the Scottish book trade as documented by past book historians. While Towsey and Crawford have written extensively about library development, the wider book trade and venues for reading remain largely uncovered.Footnote 6 Even with libraries, most attention has been paid to individual libraries and their development, with far less coverage of the broader national picture.Footnote 7 Notable exceptions are Manley’s excellent listing of early circulating and subscription libraries, and the recent Books and Borrowing project at Stirling University, which draws in part on the work of past historians, to transcribe and build a searchable database of library borrowing records across Scotland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote 8
The nationwide picture is also under-explored in relevant volumes of The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland series.Footnote 9 Instead, its chapters tend to focus more on individual case studies, both specific aspects of the book trade and local geographic area case studies, particularly for the Edinburgh area. There is a notable lack to date of a Scotland-wide survey of the book trade, let alone one that adequately takes into account the complexities and nuances of the Scottish urban hierarchy.
More useful to this article are the writings of urban historians, including Harris and McKean in Scotland, who chart the different types of towns and cities at this time, the types of facilities they provided and the change over time.Footnote 10 International historiography is relevant too, especially that of the larger neighbouring country of England, which provides a comparison so often in Scottish historiography. In England the classic treatment is Borsay’s Urban Renaissance, which includes much about reading culture in eighteenth-century England, and demonstrates the variety of reading opportunities at the time, not just bookshops or libraries.Footnote 11 Also highly relevant are the writings of academic historians who have used directories before.Footnote 12 These often caution about inherent problems of directories as sources, because of how they were compiled. Yet the overall assessment is a generally positive one, concluding that, with care, directories can be useful sources, even if they cannot be assumed to be completely accurate, especially for statistically based studies. Raven’s concerns about directories under-recording poorer, and especially female, trades are less likely to be a factor in this article’s research, given the occupations and trades sought.Footnote 13 More relevant are Corfield’s writings about the many ways in which trades and occupations could be recorded.Footnote 14 Close page-by-page reading of Pigot’s minimized this, revealing references to booksellers not just under that category or similar, but also under miscellaneous listings of trades, especially in smaller towns. Close reading also found libraries in lengthy opening descriptions of towns, as well as in subsequent directory listings of local services and occupations. This article uses a mixture of quantitative and qualitative techniques, the former most notable in the discussion of bookseller provision across Scotland, and the latter particularly for understanding the varied provision of venues for reading.
Three main questions are explored in this article using evidence from the directory. First, which types of Scottish towns and cities at this time had printers, bookshops, libraries and other venues for reading? Secondly, what does the spread of the Scottish book trade and venues for reading tell us about the speed and nature of Scottish urbanization? Finally, does the evidence in the directory support the perception that Scotland at this time was a nation of readers?
The article is split into four main sections. The first examines evidence in the directory for the extent of printing throughout Scotland. This is followed by an analysis of evidence for bookselling, before a third section looking at evidence for reading venues, including libraries, newspaper rooms, reading rooms and athenaeums. As such, the article traces the book trade from production, through to distribution and the retail network, to reception. The final section introduces detailed case studies of a town and a region of Scotland, providing a different perspective on the evidence in the directory. Throughout the article, evidence for the book trade and reading venues is considered in terms of the Scottish urban hierarchy, providing an urban history, rather than a purely book history, context. Table 1 collates the Pigot’s 1825 directory evidence for numbers of printers, booksellers and reading venues throughout villages, towns and cities across Scotland.
Table 1. Collating Pigot’s 1825 directory evidence for numbers of printers, booksellers and reading venues throughout Scotland. Source: Pigot’s New Commercial Directory for Scotland 1825–6 (London, 1825)
The urban context
Scotland’s population in 1821 was 2,091,521.Footnote 15 The largest cities were Edinburgh (population 138,235 in 1821, including Leith) and Glasgow (population 147,043), with smaller cities such as Aberdeen (population 44,796) and Dundee (population 30,575). Further down the urban hierarchy was a mix of county towns, often important elite centres, as well as a number of growing manufacturing towns. Below this were smaller towns and villages.Footnote 16
Establishing the extent of urbanization in Scotland in this period is problematic, because of the various working definitions available. For example, De Vries and Devine use the population threshold of at least 10,000 to define a town, permitting comparisons with similar research across Europe.Footnote 17 Yet in Scotland many burghs – and what would generally be thought of as towns – had populations below this, with many even below the lower population threshold of 5,000 that might be used instead.Footnote 18 Harris and McKean also grapple with this question in their study of Scottish towns, discussing some of the different measurement techniques that can be used, while at the same time demonstrating effectively the growth of towns through changing populations.Footnote 19 This was an era when much Scottish urban growth was driven by industrialization, leading many rural dwellers to move to the expanding towns.
Although population is a useful measure of size, the status of individual towns must also be considered. County towns in Scotland were relatively high status, associated with courts and legal professionals, generating business for the print trade. Yet county towns were not always the largest by population in a given geographical area. Likewise, elite and fashionable towns in provincial Scotland, often but not always county towns, could have a relatively high concentration of wealthy inhabitants, with more money to spend on books and reading, and the leisure time to participate in literary culture locally. Similarly, rapidly growing manufacturing centres, often younger towns, provided ample business for printers, as well as a local population keen to follow the latest news.
By all measures Edinburgh dominated the Scottish urban hierarchy until the nineteenth century, when the rapidly growing city of Glasgow overtook it in terms of population. Yet Edinburgh retained its dominance of the Scottish print trade. But other Scottish towns also had book trade links, as will be explored in the next sections.
The spread of printers
The starting point for book production at this time were printers, both those serving a national market and those operating more locally. Pigot’s reveals that printing in Scotland was largely centralized in Edinburgh, with 29 per cent of Scottish printers recorded in Pigot’s located in the capital. Edinburgh by this time supported a well-established printing trade and associated activities such as publishing. There was even a printing press manufacturer, so essential for supporting such a vibrant local industry, recorded in Pigot’s in Edinburgh: John Ruthven in the Canongate. But by the early 1800s Glasgow was starting to approach Edinburgh for the number of imprints published, and this transitionary period is reflected in the directory, with 29 printers recorded for Glasgow, compared with 42 in Edinburgh at the same time.Footnote 20
Elsewhere in Scotland printers were much less numerous, but nevertheless found in many towns. Most county towns had one or more printers, needed to support local sheriff courts and a range of associated professions and trades. For example, Stirling and Haddington each had two printers. More printers were evident in growing manufacturing centres across Scotland, especially in towns around Glasgow, such as Paisley (three printers), Greenock (three) and Kilmarnock (two). Further down the urban hierarchy, printers were scarcer, but do appear rarely, sometimes with tradesmen doing multiple jobs at once. It is unlikely that on its own each trade would have supplied enough business to be viable.
The relatively high number of printers recorded in Pigot’s for Dumfries (four) and Montrose (three) merits further discussion. Neither was a major population centre: Dumfries had a population of 11,052 in 1821, and Montrose, 10,338. Dumfries was a county town, so needed local printing facilities to support the infrastructure associated with county status, but it was located in a largely rural area, far from urban society. Montrose, by contrast, was not even a county town, so had no sheriff court and no concentration of legal professionals. Yet both were two of the wealthiest elite centres in Scotland, providing a local focus for a substantial number of wealthy or aristocratic inhabitants, living in the towns or on nearby estates. Such elite centres by this time had a wide range of services and shops available to inhabitants and visitors. All of these shops and services could have used printers, to print receipts, invoices or advertisements. Likewise a rich social calendar of events to cater for the wealthy local elite would generate printing work, such as tickets and programmes.
Furthermore, representing local printing activity, but not recorded explicitly as such, are various publishers recorded in Pigot’s directory. Some published local newspapers, for example, John Mennons in Greenock, publisher and editor of the Greenock Advertiser. Any printing press associated with a newspaper could also produce other publications, for example those needed by local businessmen, as well as small-run local books. The directory also records facilities closely related to the printing trade, such as a periodical publication warehouse in Barrack Street, Dundee.
The dominance of Edinburgh among Scottish printers is unsurprising, especially when contemporary advertisements from provincial booksellers are examined. Typically these emphasized how readily provincial booksellers could obtain the latest books from Edinburgh and London, reinforcing the impression that these were the books to aspire to own. Books were printed elsewhere in Scotland, particularly those of local interest, but the spread of printers throughout the urban hierarchy probably reflects more the day-to-day business of printers beyond books. Indeed, it is likely that for most provincial printers, non-book printing work was their main source of income.Footnote 21
The spread of booksellers
Having printed the books, the next step was to distribute them to customers. Sometimes this was done by subscription, whereby customers ordered a book before publication.Footnote 22 More frequently book sales involved local booksellers as middlemen. As well as stocking books in their bookshops for people to browse, booksellers could order in other titles, as noted above. For people at a distance from bookshops, especially wealthier country gentry, orders could be sent to booksellers by post, with books delivered to the customers in the same way, albeit with additional carriage costs.Footnote 23
Booksellers are by far the most visible element of the book trade in this directory, revealing that bookselling was widespread and that there were a great number of them, reaching far through the Scottish urban hierarchy. Again Edinburgh and Glasgow have the highest numbers of booksellers recorded for Scotland, largely due to the sheer numbers of people in these larger cities. Some of the Edinburgh booksellers specialized in specific subjects, such as John Sutherland in Calton Street who sold music. Likewise, Charles Ferrier in West Register Street ran an ‘old book shop’, and James Walker in Grassmarket was described as a ‘book broker’. Glasgow’s bookseller lists record four different booksellers in Bazaar in Candlerigg Street who sold ‘old books’, indicating a concentration of second-hand bookselling. Other booksellers probably sold a mix of new and second-hand books, and others would sell just new titles.
The Pigot’s 1825 directory records 369 booksellers across Scotland. These were dedicated booksellers, rather than more general merchants or chapmen, who could also sell print alongside other wares.Footnote 24 This figure represents approximately one bookseller for every 6,000 inhabitants throughout Scotland as recorded at the most recent census.Footnote 25 Yet Pigot’s also shows that the concentration of Scottish booksellers was far higher in urban settings, with, on average, a bookseller for approximately every 2,000 inhabitants in a town setting.Footnote 26 In many towns coverage was even more concentrated. Edinburgh and Leith together had 93 recorded booksellers, on average one per 1,500 inhabitants. Likewise, Kelso in the Scottish Borders had five booksellers catering for a population of just under 5,000. Care must be taken interpreting these ratios, especially for lower numbers of booksellers recorded for many smaller towns. Nevertheless, there appears to be a correlation between number of recorded booksellers and population, seen consistently in the Pigot’s data. It would have been unusual for a town in Scotland at this time not to have had at least one dedicated bookshop. A bookshop was a vital local service to a town’s inhabitants. Some of the highest concentrations of booksellers in Pigot’s are found in old county towns, such as Ayr, Banff and Wigtown. Booksellers are also evident in proportionally large numbers in some of the new manufacturing centres, such as Kirkcaldy, Hawick and Greenock.
Related to bookselling is bookbinding, so vital when books were often sold unbound.Footnote 27 Many booksellers offered bookbinding services to customers, but there were also bookbinders operating independently. Edinburgh had 40 bookbinders listed in 1825–26 in addition to 86 booksellers and stationers, many probably connected to the city’s large publishing trade. Glasgow and Aberdeen also had significant numbers of bookbinders, but elsewhere it was more common for the activity to be combined with related work, such as bookselling and stationery sales.
The spread of libraries and other venues for reading
As with bookselling, Pigot’s directory reveals that libraries and other venues for reading were widespread throughout Scotland by this time, supporting reading locally at all levels of society and in many sizes of community. Here are some examples of the type of information recorded for various towns.
Ayr:
‘A library, containing several thousand volumes, affords recreation to its numerous subscribers.’
Paisley:
‘In the centre of a handsome semi-circular row of buildings, meant to face the castle, it is purposed that an Athenaeum should be erected.’
‘The coffee-room itself is a noble room, amply provided with newspapers, magazines, reviews, &c. and liberally thrown open to strangers.’
‘a philosophical and mechanics’ institution, with an attached library; three public subscription libraries, one of them theological’
‘The inhabitants, even many of the working class of them, possess much of the literary character. by the latter, numerous reading rooms are supported.’
Inverkeithing:
‘There are two subscription libraries, one of which consists of an extensive collection of religions, the other of literary, philosophical, historical and miscellaneous works; and their flourishing condition augurs well of the progress of civil and religious knowledge among the inhabitants.’
North Berwick:
‘In the Market-place is the court house, which is also used as a reading room.’
For public libraries and subscription libraries, the descriptive passages often note these as important local civic amenities, improving a town and its inhabitants. Such libraries were found in most Scottish towns, from large cities to county towns, manufacturing centres and even smaller communities. The directory is not a perfect guide though, and misses some known subscription libraries, including those in Dundee, Aberdeen and Edinburgh.Footnote 28 This is a result of qualitative descriptive accounts that at times could be incomplete. Yet, generally, the directory appears to provide good coverage of libraries, showing that such institutions were widespread and found in most towns.
Another important venue was the reading or newspaper room. These were not places where readers could borrow reading material to take home. Rather they provided reading material to consult on the spot, in particular the latest newspapers from Edinburgh, London and locally. Pigot’s notes for Kilmarnock that
In 1814 an elegant news room was built in the centre of the town; this serves the twofold purpose of a reading room, and a place of general resort, and is supplied with most of the London, Edinburgh, and Scotch provincial papers; in the evening it is brilliantly illuminated with gas.
Sometimes a reading or newspaper room was referred to as a coffee room, which, as well as providing current newspapers to read, served coffee to visiting gentlemen. Such venues were found particularly in larger towns, and notably in industrial centres like Hawick, Galashiels and Kilmarnock, allowing local businessmen to keep up to date with the latest news and information from elsewhere. Exemplifying this is the diary of Dundee businessman Thomas Handyside Baxter, which from November 1810 to August 1811 records that he visited Dundee coffee room three or four times most weeks, eagerly reading newspapers and dispatches as they arrived.Footnote 29
The directory reveals that a few towns – Aberdeen, Glasgow, Inverness, Paisley (proposed) and Stirling – even had or were planning to build an athenaeum. An athenaeum could encompass multiple reading venues within one building, such as a library for the town and a reading or newspaper room. Establishing an athenaeum was a bold statement, and an assertion of the importance of reading and literary culture locally. More widely, reading venues were often housed in key civic buildings, such as the assembly hall or a room in the town house, further reinforcing the link between local civic identity and the importance of such facilities to a community.Footnote 30
The other type of reading venue revealed by Pigot’s is the circulating library. This was typically run as a sideline by a local bookseller, and allowed people, for a relatively small charge, to borrow books to read at home. Circulating libraries were particularly strongly associated with recreational reading, especially novels, which were looked down upon by many moral commentators of the day.Footnote 31 Nevertheless, such libraries were very popular with customers, and provided an important means of access to reading material, for all social classes. Customers came to circulating libraries from not just the town, but also from a rural hinterland, as one enthusiastic reader from Renfrewshire in the early nineteenth century recalled:
I early imbibed a taste for reading, and the first trifling sum that lay in my hands … was laid out as subscription money at a circulating library in a neighbouring town. After the trials of the day were past, the little I could snatch from sleep was devoted to the perusal of such books as the library could supply. Often have I trudged, in the dark winter nights, a distance of several miles, through wind and rain, to get my books exchanged. I read much of History, Biography, Voyages, Travels, almost all the old Dramatic Poets, of whom I was passionately fond, and the majority of the English Classics. In this way I laid in a considerable stock of miscellaneous knowledge while yet very young.Footnote 32
Circulating libraries were generally found in larger Scottish towns, especially in cities as well as some county towns. Pigot’s records 16 circulating libraries in Edinburgh alone, a quarter of all circulating libraries in Scotland. But across the country as a whole, circulating libraries were less commonly found than subscription or public libraries, and appear in only half as many towns.Footnote 33 Scotland at this time was strongly associated with subscription libraries, far more so than England, where circulating libraries were more visible.Footnote 34
Detailed local case studies of individual towns and regions
Until now this article has considered the spread of printers, booksellers, libraries and other venues for reading across Scotland as a whole, examining each aspect in turn. Yet different aspects of the book trade and provision for reading also interacted locally. Though this article’s primary focus remains on Scotland as a whole, it is instructive to consider the nature of such local interactions, using two case studies, one of a single town, the other of a network of towns in a small geographical area. The first case study, Perth, considers how these different aspects of the book trade and venues for reading might sit alongside each other – indeed, sometimes literally – within a single town. The second case study, the Scottish Borders, shows how additional social and geographical factors could be involved, and why studying just a single town may not reveal the full picture.
Let us first consider Perth, with a population of 19,068 in 1821. This was an elite centre, and a county town, explaining its relatively large number of dedicated booksellers: seven in 1825, as well as two independent bookbinders. Figure 1 shows an 1823 town plan of Perth, indicating the main streets and general layout. The main shopping areas were in the High Street and around this was a core grid of central streets.Footnote 35
Figure 1. Perth in 1832. Part of Great Reform Act Plans and Reports. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.
Pigot’s 1825 directory for Perth shows that various parts of the bookselling trade were spread around the town. Of the seven booksellers in Pigot’s, two were in the High Street and two each in George Street and St John Street, shopping streets running north and south of the High Street. The seventh bookseller was in Watergate, an old, well-established street parallel to St John Street near the River Tay.Footnote 36 The Watergate bookseller also offered printing services, and there was a second printer in Watergate and a third in nearby High Street. Four Perth bookbinders are listed: two in the High Street and one in St John Street, both central locations, and a fourth in Barrosa Street to the north of the town, near the Academy. This fourth bookbinder, George Somner, may have been away from the central shopping area, but not so far that customers had difficulty employing him as needed.
Reading venues typically clustered in the main fashionable streets. This was particularly so with Perth’s George Street, which held not only the town’s public library, but also its commercial newspaper room, and a circulating library. As Pigot’s says of the newspaper room:
The exchange, coffee or reading room is also situate in George-street; it is a noble spacious room, furnished with a great variety of newspapers, magazines, &c. the exterior of the building is neat and handsome.
Such a building would have fitted in well alongside existing buildings on this street. A near contemporary account of Perth describes George Street having many handsome buildings, including the Glovers Hall, ‘the scene of all public amusements’.Footnote 37 Nearby High Street also housed reading venues: the Reading Society Library and a second circulating library.
Such a concentration of the book trade and venues for reading in the main fashionable and shopping streets is hardly surprising, and was echoed elsewhere in Scotland. Booksellers in particular hoped to attract passing custom. Their integration into shopping streets also reflects their importance locally. Likewise reading venues needed to be easily accessible, so were often in prominent buildings in prime sites. This is particularly true for those regarded locally as important civic amenities, housed in public venues, rather than in purely private ones.
Towns were not isolated though, and regional networks were also important. Consider the Scottish Borders, in south-eastern Scotland, in the old counties of Roxburghshire, Berwickshire, Selkirkshire and Peeblesshire. Here were a number of county towns, but smaller in size and relatively lower in importance than many others in Scotland. In particular, none of the Scottish Borders county towns, such as Jedburgh and Selkirk, was a centre for elite society. By contrast, Kelso in Roxburghshire was an elite centre, with a race course, balls and the seat of the Duke of Roxburghe, one of the wealthiest local landowners.Footnote 38
The Scottish Borders at this time was an area of low-population towns, with none coming close to De Vries’s oft-cited threshold population of 10,000 for a town. An arguably more useful measure of urbanization is to consider which communities were regarded as towns by contemporaries. This assumes that people at the time recognized what constituted a town, or as one researcher put it: ‘a town was a settlement which looked like a town and in which the majority of the inhabitants behaved like townspeople’.Footnote 39 This was the approach taken by a group of researchers investigating small towns in England.Footnote 40 Suitable sources allow a similar approach to be taken in Scotland.Footnote 41
Doing this gives a working list of eight towns in the Scottish Borders in 1825: Duns and Greenlaw in Berwickshire; Peebles in Peeblesshire; Hawick, Jedburgh and Kelso in Roxburghshire; and Galashiels and Selkirk in Selkirkshire. All appear in Pigot’s, as do smaller villages. Five of these ‘towns’ had a population of no more than 3,000 people. Such low population towns in a relatively compact geographical area led to a network of inter-connected communities, supporting a range of services, including the book trade. Figure 2 is part of an 1819 map of Scotland showing the towns in this region and how they related to each other.
Figure 2. Detail of the Scottish Borders counties. From John Thomson’s 1819 map of Scotland. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.
Kelso was a major population centre, with a population of 4,860 in 1821. But rapidly overtaking it were the textile towns of Hawick and Galashiels.Footnote 42 The county towns of Peebles, Selkirk and Jedburgh had about 2,000–3,000 inhabitants each. In Berwickshire the small settlement Greenlaw was still officially the county town, with the county court and other trappings of its status, but the larger elite centre Duns was to all intents and purposes the main town in the county.Footnote 43 Below these towns was a lower level of smaller communities, such as Lauder, Coldstream and Eyemouth in Berwickshire and Melrose in Roxburghshire.
The only official county town in the Borders with a printer at this time per Pigot’s directory was Peebles. Printers were, however, recorded in the elite de facto county centres of Kelso and Duns, and in the rapidly growing and populous manufacturing town Hawick. All could attract customers from an extensive hinterland, including other towns. For example, a Hawick printer could serve customers in Selkirk, who might also use relatively nearby Peebles to arrange to get work done. Likewise a businessman in Jedburgh needing printing done would probably not have had too much trouble travelling to either Hawick or Kelso if need be to arrange it, or may have done so at a distance.
Booksellers were more widespread in the Scottish Borders than printers, appearing in most towns. The largest towns, Kelso and Hawick, had the largest number of booksellers recorded, with five each. By contrast, no dedicated booksellers were recorded in Pigot’s for Galashiels or small Greenlaw. The former is more surprising given its growing population, with over 2,000 people by 1831. But both settlements would have had more informal sellers of books, such as general shopkeepers and merchants, and local chapmen.
Some booksellers also ran circulating libraries. In the Borders circulating libraries are found in Pigot’s for Hawick, Kelso and Peebles, again showing a tendency towards the largest towns. Other types of libraries were more widespread, particularly public libraries and newspaper rooms. Jedburgh had ‘three public libraries, for the promotion of literature’. Similar institutions were found in Hawick, Kelso, Galashiels and Selkirk, and even village Castleton, 20 miles south of Hawick, with its ‘two subscription libraries, also a friendly society’. Reading facilities in Castleton itself would have been greatly appreciated by the local population, as well as potentially providing a boost for the community’s self-esteem. The Hawick directory entry is particularly informative about the benefits of such institutions, which it claimed ‘evince a taste for literary pursuits and useful knowledge’. The Pigot’s record for this area is incomplete though, and fails to mention a known subscription library in Duns.Footnote 44 Nevertheless what we do have appears to be a generally good guide to the spread of libraries in a region.
Conclusions
This article provides a snapshot of Scotland’s towns in the mid-1820s, revealing a rich, complex picture of the Scottish book trade and venues for reading. At the top level, the largest cities, unsurprisingly, provided the greatest range of services, with a large number of printers (especially in Edinburgh), booksellers and libraries. Below this the situation was more mixed, but most significant towns offered printing services, as well as numerous specialist booksellers and, usually, multiple reading venues, such as libraries and coffee rooms. Larger towns and cities offered more services, as did some elite centres such as Dumfries and Montrose, more than might be expected given their population. Manufacturing towns such as Kilmarnock and Hawick likewise provided services of interest to merchants and tradesmen, including coffee rooms and newspaper rooms where news was readily available. Smaller towns and villages provided more limited facilities, although sometimes more than we might expect, as with Castleton in Roxburghshire with its two subscription libraries. It would be rare to find a Scottish town at this time without at least one bookseller, and most towns and many villages had at least one library. The directory also reveals how public institutions such as certain libraries, reading rooms and coffee rooms could be used to promote a town’s civic identity.
Because the evidence from the directory comes from a single point in time it is somewhat limited in its use for exploring the chronology of urbanization in Scotland. We cannot, for example, use the evidence from Pigot to support the argument for increased retail facilities and cultural activities in Scottish towns in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, and more positively, the evidence does indicate a sophisticated reading culture already in place nationwide by the mid-1820s, ranging from the largest cities through to the smallest towns and even many villages.
The Pigot’s evidence also highlights specific Scottish patterns of library provision, including large numbers of public and subscription libraries. In Scotland public and subscription libraries were often supported by civic authorities, promoted as part of a town’s facilities. Such a reading culture and its associated facilities would have benefited readers throughout Scotland, and is strongly indicative of the importance of reading to Scottish society and Scottish people at this time. Indeed, the Pigot’s evidence supports the perception that Scotland at this time was a nation of readers, both in terms of the widespread and numerous libraries and other venues for reading, and in the army of booksellers found throughout the country’s towns and villages selling books to readers.
An understandable concern about the analysis is the sometimes-sporadic nature of the underlying evidence. It is clear that in some respects certain towns were less well recorded in the directory than others. However, it can be argued that what we have from the directory in terms of evidence is far more useful than what is missing, which, with care, can provide a new and informative perspective. In particular the ability to take a snapshot view at a single point in time provides useful new insights, both cultural and urban, into Scottish society with relatively good coverage of the entire country, well suited to a careful mix of quantitative and qualitative analysis.
Considering the results in the wider context of Scottish reading habits, the directory evidence gives a fuller perspective of all aspects of the book trade at this point in time, and a holistic approach to the spread of venues for reading. In particular it allows us to consider these in the context of the urban hierarchy in the country, and to untangle which types of towns provided which services. As such it is not just a contribution to Scottish book history, but also to Scottish urban history too.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful and constructive suggestions, as well as the editor, Professor Shane Ewen. Thanks also to Professor Bob Harris of Oxford University, for comments on an earlier draft.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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