Edwards dreams of Alexandria

Abstract

Our paper explores the relationship between Edward Edwards’s Memoirs of Libraries: Includinga Handbook of Library Economy (1859) and 19th-century Britain’s Public Library Movement,especially the Public Library Acts of 1850 and 1855. Focusing on the instrumentalization oflibrary history for the movement’s agenda, we show how Edwards projects the roots of thismovement deep into antiquity and rhetorically creates a narrative of British deficiency setpurposefully at odds with British patriotic and colonial sentiments, deriving from this verticaland horizontal comparison his arguments and advice for the establishment of municipal publiclibraries.