Introduction

The first edition of Thomas Greenwood's Free public libraries, published in 1886, featured a cartoon depicting two well-dressed gentlemen entering a Free Library. Adjacent to the library was a public house; the door of the library led to education and personal improvement, that of the Red Lion to drink and poverty. The public library was clearly a profitable and purposeful place in which to spend free time, while the portrayal of the public house warned of the perils of misdirected leisure. The illustration presents a classic image of the Victorian concept of rational recreation in its promotion of reading as a leisure time activity. Not everyone agreed that it was the role of the public library to provide recreational reading, particularly popular novels with little apparent educational or moral content. Nevertheless, the scale of public demand obliged libraries to provide fiction, thus provoking disagreement about the proper place of leisure in the public library service. The leisure dimension of the service was a contentious issue both within the library profession and in society at large in the period 1850–1914. Throughout the remainder of the twentieth century the public library's treatment of leisure changed as the social context of leisure changed. At its close, libraries provided a broad range of leisure services reflecting increased time and money for leisure, the social validity of popular culture and the introduction of new communications technologies. However, the old divergence between the public library's educational and leisure functions remained in evidence. At the end of the twentieth century the future of the public library service envisaged by librarians and politicians was of globally networked information transfer and lifelong learning.