From 1850 to 1900 the public library movement was dominated by the struggle for ‘extension’ in the sense of new adoptions of the Library Acts, and for the expansion of existing library systems and provisions. Late nineteenth-century librarians were quite capable of conceiving of library ‘extension’ entirely in such terms. This chapter considers extension in its later sense, which, to avoid systematic anachronism, we might term library ‘outreach’.

We still know relatively little about library outreach before 1930. Thomas Greenwood's accounts of the history and current condition of the public library movement, which commenced in 1886, provide us with scraps, and once the British library press was established coverage became fuller. But much of the early literature on library outreach is exhortation rather than description, and the coverage of outreach in existing library histories is rather sketchy.

This is not surprising, because outreach activity for much of this period was itself patchy and uneven. Of course the circumstances of the movement as a whole were not propitious. Given that many libraries were struggling just to stay afloat, the idea of actively increasing demand could quite naturally seem unattractive. In any case, the process of achieving necessary support for the adoption of the Library Acts almost invariably involved a considerable campaign of publicity, and it was tempting for promoters to feel that the library was already, at its foundation, enshrined in the communal consciousness.