‘The Supposed Paradise of Pen and Ink’: Self-education and Social Mobility in the London Public Library (1880–1930)

ABSTRACTBorrowing from prosopography, collective biography, sociology and genealogy, this article describes the ‘bookish’ workplace experiences of 90 chief and deputy public librarians to revisit debates around the upwardly mobile metropolitan lower middle class in the long nineteenth century. It finds that the border between the manual and white-collar classes was more easily (and enduringly) breached than previously supposed. It also suggests that those moving from the former group to the latter retained elements of their ‘working class’ origins and character across the late-Victorian period. These discoveries complicate historical assessments of the lower middles, but support sociological surveys that propose more fluid and open class borders from the mid-nineteenth century.