The Literary Clubs and Societies of Glasgow during the Long Nineteenth Century: A City’s History of Reading through its Communal Reading Practices and Productions

Abstract

This thesis uses the minute books and manuscript magazines of Glasgow’s literary societies as evidence for my argument that the history of mutual improvement groups—including literary societies—needs to be re-written as a unique movement of ‘improvement’ during the long nineteenth century. In foregrounding the surviving records, I examine what it meant to be literary to society members in Glasgow during this period. I discuss what their motivations were for becoming so, and reflect on the impact that gender, occupation and social class had on these. I demonstrate that these groups contributed to the education and literacy of people living in the city and to a larger culture of ‘improvement’. Further, I argue that there is a case to be made for a particularly Scottish way of consuming texts in the long nineteenth century. In Glasgow, there were at least 193 literary societies during this period, which I divide into four phases of development. I provide an in-depth examination of two societies which serve as case studies. In addition, I give an overview and comparison of the 652 issues of Scottish and English society magazines I discovered in the context of a larger, ‘improving’ culture. I offer possible reasons why so many literary societies produced manuscript magazines, and show that this phenomenon was not unique to them. These magazines fostered a communal identity formed around a combination of religion, class, gender and local identity. I determine that societies in England produced similar types of magazines to those in Scotland possibly based upon the Scottish precedent. These materials substantially contribute to the evidence for nineteenth-century mutual improvement societies and their magazines, and for working- and lower-middle class Scottish readers and writers during the long nineteenth century, social groups that are under-represented in the history of reading and in Victorian studies.