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For many years Gladstone’s Library (then named St Deiniol’s) served a very particular community. The average user was a clergyman from anywhere in the world, who had often become acquainted with ‘St D’s’ during his training. The collections were understood to be theological; William Ewart Gladstone, a devout Christian, was understood to have valued theology above all other subjects and to have founded his library for the pursuit of ‘divine learning’. Above all, it was a library, holding only printed books.
Now, however, clergy form perhaps only one third of the Gladstone’s Library demographic. Writers of all kinds, poets, students, researchers, academics, freelance workers, curious readers and more make up the rest. Materially, our collections have changed only a little, and our spaces even less. What has changed entirely is our understanding of the collections at Gladstone’s Library, and in turn the public’s understanding of what is available to them. This talk explores some of the research and work that has contributed to that change.
Louisa Yates is a writer and academic who works as both Director of Collections and Research at Gladstone’s Library and as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester. In her role at Gladstone’s she heads the team who run the Reading Rooms, open to all and home to one of the world’s great nineteenth-century collections. Louisa writes and teaches on women’s writing, neo-Victorian literature and Victorian material culture, and she’s one of the Festival Directors of Gladfest, hailed in the Huffington Post as a ‘great small literary festival’. In 2022 she’s working with the Gladstone’s team as they recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is one of the nine presentations at the ILA’s annual conference in 2022, at the Birmingham and Midland Institute. Please click here for details of that conference and for details of forthcoming events.
