Realism, Naturalism, and American Public Libraries, 1880–1914

“If we want intelligent opinions of these books [fictions about lower-class, urban life] they must be sought not from the tidy inhabitants of Fifth Avenue or Ward Eleven, but from the men and women who are in the swim . . . those who are in the main currents, newspaper people, college-settlement girls, and some—only some, alas!—ministers and priests. These are the people whom I would trust not to turn down a book as vulgar which is dealing with the human tragedy in its humblest phases.”

—Lindsay Swift, Boston Public Library (1899)

“It is not for libraries or librarians to act as censors and denounce this or that publication. Yet it is to be remembered that a library which circulates a book helps to promulgate the doctrine which the book contains. And if public libraries circulate books which teach restless, irreverent or revolutionary doctrines, they offer us the incongruity of a municipality aiding in the propagation of ideas which are subversive of social order.”

—Herbert Putnam, Librarian of Congress (1898)

“When in doubt, leave it out.”

—Walter Learned, New London, Connecticut, Public Library (1896)¹

A great deal is known about what inspired individual American realist and naturalist authors in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to create their works, the ways in which they revised these texts during the composition process, the difficulties they had getting their manuscripts published, the numbers of copies printed of the books and periodicals containing these texts, the bibliographical forms these took, and even about their popular and critical reception. In many cases, too, scholars have extensively documented the political and historical events, as well as the ideologies of race, gender, and class, that constituted the larger contexts for readers’ experiences of such fictions. Yet somewhat surprisingly, given their significant impact on literary history, the distribution systems by which physical copies of realist and naturalist texts in periodical and book form were transmitted from publishers and printers to readers have received little scholarly attention. One of the most important of these systems in the United States was the public library. The librarians and governing board members who controlled individual libraries played a major role in determining who had access to works of these genres, as well as in shaping readers’ experiences of them. Nonetheless, beyond some oft-repeated stories about the supposed “censorship” of a few especially controversial texts, almost no research has been carried out on how librarians in general actually treated the extremely broad range of realist and naturalist fictions and how their actions might have influenced library patrons’ access to, and attitudes toward, such works.

Libraries of all kinds—public, mercantile, college, state, circulating, and subscription—proliferated in the United States during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. As for public libraries in particular, at the time of the nation’s centennial celebration in 1876 there were only approximately 187 of them, 127 of them in Massachusetts. But during the next few decades, the number of public libraries and their geographic reach grew very rapidly, due in large part to the philanthropic efforts of Andrew Carnegie. Obtaining precise statistics charting this expansion is not always easy, but to provide a rough benchmark for this study the 1901 edition of the United States Bureau of Education’s Public, Society, and School Libraries reported that in 1900 there were 2734 libraries designated as “free,” a term roughly synonymous at the time with “public.”²

How did these libraries, and specifically the people who ran them, handle works of realism and naturalism between 1880 and 1914? Which fictions and authors did they make widely available to readers across the country, and which did they make not so readily available? How easily could patrons borrow works that provided imagined alternatives to the status quo in terms of political, moral, gender, and racial ideologies? On what grounds were certain texts not acquired or actively excluded? To answer these questions I have conducted an extensive survey of the holdings of 178 public libraries during this era. Analysis of this data confirms some previous hypotheses about the role played by libraries and...