Welsh Journals

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY 'PEMBROKE SOCIETY' ONE of the more neglected aspects of eighteenth-century British social history concerns the provision of reading matter. The statutory establishment of public libraries in 1850 and the subsequent history of the public library movement has tended to overshadow the type of provision which existed before that date. But long before the passing of the Public Libraries Act of 1850 there existed in Britain an astonishing network of reading resources in the form of circulat- ing libraries, subscription libraries, book clubs, reading circles and parochial libraries; and books and periodicals were part and parcel of the idea of the Mechanics' Institutes. The emergence of a reading public is indeed one of the crucial factors of the developing social scene. In Wales the pattern of book provision was not as rich as that in England, but some recent studies have shown that the picture is far from being a barren one.2 The Cowbridge Book Society in particular3 is notable for a continuous but chequered history from 1711 to 1848, and this history is generously documented. But it had from the beginning a strongly clerical base, and a middle period of lay ascendancy in its management makes it something of a hybrid species. The Pembroke Society, on the other hand, conformed, as far as the evidence permits us to infer, to the more orthodox type of book club or subscription library.4 The date of origin of The Pembroke Society is likely to be at least as early as 1741, since in that year the entry 'Society of Clergy and Gentlemen, at Pembroke' appears in the subscription list which prefaced the first volume of Conyers Middleton's History of the Life 1 The definitive studies are Frank Beckwith, 'The eighteenth century Proprietary Library in England', Journal of Documentation, III (1947), 81-98; Hilda M. Hamlyn, 'Eighteenth- century Circulating Libraries in England', The Library, 5th ser., I (1946). 197-222; Paul Kaufman, 'English Book Clubs and their Role in Social History', Libri, 14 (1964). no 1, 1-31, and Neil R. Ker (ed.), The Parochial Libraries of the Church of England (1959). Beckwith and Kaufman, in particular, attempt to unravel the confusing usage of the terms 'circulating', 'subscription', 'book club', etc. Cecil J. L. Price, 'Polite Life in eighteenth-century Wales', Yr Einion, V (1953). 89-98; Paul Kaufman, 'Community Lending Libraries in eighteenth-century Ireland and Wales', The Library Quarterly, XXXIII (1963), no. 4, 299-312; Bob Owen. 'Cymdeithasau Darllen Gan Mlynedd yn Ol', 21st Conference of Library Authorities in Wales & Mon., Report of Proceedings (1954). pp. 30-37. •Rev. Ewart Lewis, 'The Cowbridge Diocesan Library, 1711-1848', Journal of the Historical Society of the Church in Wales, IV (1954), 36-44, and VII (1957), 80-91. The Pembroke Society is only mentioned in passing in Kaufman, ibid., but this article is a further attempt to unravel the conflicting terminology applied to these libraries.