Episode description

19th century industrial revolution times meant brilliant machines, inventions and factories. Workers were leaving rural areas en masse to find work in the city. Bloody hard, low paid and dangerous work mind you. And not only was the work shitty, but there was literally shit everywhere. Pollution, human excrement. Even dead horses on the streets. 

But the worst work of all? Well, that was down on the docks where the ships came in. Every day, floods of seamen would wash in from foreign parts. A “release binge of seamen” one writer termed it; and with their vulgar tongues and unruly behaviour, straight to the pubs and brothels they’d go!

Enter the religious, do-gooder busybodies, the reformers (picture Ned Flanders with a waistcoat and tophat). Knowing they couldn’t convince the seamen to come to church, they formed the American Seamen’s Friends Society and came up with the next best thing: Floating libraries!

Administered by the seaman librarian every Sunday morning, the library (a red wooden crate filled with books) would be opened for the sailors to peruse and borrow. But could books really turn these rascally seamen into upright citizens?

The theory of the Seamen’s Friends Society was that by reading elevating, high-minded literature, the sailors would come to abandon their drinking, rooting and swearing, and choose the godly life.

Whilst at sea, seamen were a captive audience with low standards. They were either doing horrible, brutal, dirty work (ever peeled a whale?), or bored out of their brains with nothing to do. So prior to the floating libraries, seamen entertained themselves by rearranging the contents of a sea chest (Marie Kondo eat your heart out) or reading a year-old newspaper over and over and over again, including every word of every advertisement. 

So of course, the books couldn’t be any old books. Obviously, the seamen were completely void of all virtue, knowledge and self-control! They must only be allowed to read books that were carefully curated by the American Seamen’s Friends Society - meaning mostly Bibles, Bible dictionaries, volumes of sermons, books warning against infidelity and universalism, a little science and history, and because the Seamen’s Friends Society genuinely wanted the seamen to be happy, they threw in a few books that should be of interest to them, like almanacs and shipwrecks. Really? Bit of a dick move there.

So did the books help? Well, as we said, the seamen were desperate for entertainment so they lapped them up. But some books were more popular than others and God forbid, anyone receive any product and/or service without being asked to “complete our quick survey”. 

The Seamen’s Friends Society collected data on what books the sailors enjoyed. It turns out they were less about God and shipwrecks and more about adventure, automobiles and engines. So long as the book was about things on the land and not on water, they were into it. 

And what of the Bibles that would lure these foul seamen into the kingdom of God? All the other books were dog-eared and had evidence of seamen all over them (smirk) but the Bibles? Barely touched.

To the credit of these do-gooder reformers, they came to realise that instead of trying to shove religious texts down the sailor's throats, it was better to simply provide a little joy and recreation into their lonely lives at sea. 

Did the floating libraries help the seamen to stop swearing and commit their lives to Christian ways? Probably not. But boy did it give them something nice and wholesome to do. 

PREVIOUS EPISODE MENTIONED:

• Arctic Cold Case Solved: Who Was First To The North Pole?
  
  

SOURCES:

• The New York Times’ CIRCULATING LIBRARIES OF THE SEA FOR NEARLY HALF A MILLION SEAMEN; An Elaborate System, in Vogue for More Than Fifty Years, by Which 3,000 Libraries Are Kept Afloat. New York Times.
• David M Hovde’s Sea Colportage: The Loan Library System of the American Seamen's Friend Society, 1859-1967, in Libraries and Culture

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