An historic suspicion of the centralised state, combined with the rise of the free market and a supporting ideology hostile to extensive state intervention and friendly to self-help, meant that voluntary action remained as important an aspect of library provision in the decades immediately after 1850 as it had become in the ‘associational’ society that had emerged during the Enlightenment and early industrial revolution.

As towns and cities grew, social intercourse intensified. Equally, to counter the anonymity inherent in urban living, citizens became increasingly more ‘clubbable’. The emergence of communities of shared interest – at times, as in the case of mining communities, spatially coherent also – fed through into the establishment and continuing existence of a variety of ‘social libraries’, based on the payment of a subscription or a long-term proprietary investment. Libraries as different as the private and prestigious London Library and the relatively marginal libraries established in working men's clubs would correspond equally to this description. Many social libraries satisfied the credentials of the pure public sphere institution theorised by the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas in his Structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (1989): rational, open, democratic, independent of the state and commercial interest, and supportive of the free expression of ideas and of scientific and intellectual discovery.