Reading and Print Cultures in Waterford, 1865–1939

David Toms
Additional contact information
David Toms: Independent Scholar, Norway

Irish Economic and Social History, 2022, vol. 49, issue 1, 80-97

Abstract: This article sets out to explore the emergence of reading and print cultures in Waterford over the period from the opening of the city’s Free Public Library to the outbreak of the Second World War in the twentieth century. It is intended to add to the growing body of writing emerging on reading and books in Ireland by honing in on the development of a local reading culture in an era of more democratic access to books, periodicals and other printed matter. By surveying the development of various lending and circulation libraries up to the establishment of the Waterford Free Public Library in 1896 and beyond into the Free State era, the argument will be made that many of the concerns around self-improvement and literacy remained constant despite the shift from member-run libraries to municipal libraries and from Victorian concerns about moral self-improvement to early Irish state concerns about nation-building and Catholic morality in the 1920s and 1930s. The article will also explore the publishing and book trade in the city throughout the same period. This small but significant industry provided employment for some of the very people who were the target of self-improvement and concerns about their ability to consume ‘morally dubious’ literature.

Keywords: bibliography; publishing; printing; book publishing in Ireland; Irish; publishing history; history of reading; Waterford; nineteenth century; Irish history; twentieth-century Irish history; Irish social and cultural history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03324893211034119 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ieshis:v:49:y:2022:i:1:p:80-97

DOI: 10.1177/03324893211034119

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Irish Economic and Social History
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().