Learning and leisure

de British Library

During the nineteenth century, literacy flourished throughout the Western world. In the second half of the century, with shorter working hours for the working class and the push for compulsory education of children, a mass readership emerged as men, women, and children with newfound leisure time devoured newspapers, magazines, and novels. As greater importance was placed on education, opportunities slowly expanded for lower-income children and those living in rural areas. This societal change was clearly a boon for the publishing industry. The bulk of this collection is made up of English-language titles, many written for pedagogical purposes. These range from addresses made to college students, such as Liberal Education: Its Objects and Methods; An Address Delivered at the Opening of Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, to obscure pamphlets like Greedy Ben, the Naughty Boy Who Wanted Cherries and Who Got None, credited to an author simply named "Ben." Feminists will be happy to see Mary Wollstonecraft's late-eighteenth-century anthology titled The Female Reader; or, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse; Selected from the Best Writers, and Disposed under Proper Heads; for the Improvement of Young Women To Which Is Prefixed a Preface, Containing Some Hints on Female Education-- a book significantly ahead of its time considering that the education of girls, regardless of social rank, was secondary to the education of boys for the duration of the nineteenth century. The collection also includes examples of leisure books written for children, such as Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy, originally published as a serial novel in St. Nicholas Magazine between November 1885 and October 1886, as well as folk and fairy tales. French, German, and Russian works are also represented.