READ LIKE A DIVA

“You have a gift. Now you must build an accomplished person around it.”
That’s what Ella Shane’s mentor, Madame Lentini, told her, soon after she met the little girl with the huge mezzo-soprano voice. For then ten-year-old Ellen O’Shaughnessy, as for so many other striving people, the place she built that accomplished person was her local lending library.
Libraries have been around since Ancient Egypt, but for centuries, they were associated with religious orders, or the elite. But, starting in the late eighteenth century, and gathering more steam in the nineteenth, bringing books to the masses became an important social goal. Victorians loved the idea of reading for self-improvement; there’s an entire literary genre devoted to young people (usually, but not always, boys) who bettered themselves through education. So there were plenty of groups looking for ways to get books into the hands of people who would benefit most.
By the time Ella was a girl, in the 1870s, there were a fair number of lending libraries in New York City, mostly run by various charities. The City did have a huge public library, the Astor Library, a reasonable walk from her Lower East Side home, but it would not have been especially welcoming to a poor girl, even one with immaculate manners and a genuine opera diva pushing her forward.
Madame took young Ellen to a smaller place, with a somewhat suspicious, but welcoming librarian, who gave the girl a stern lecture on treating her borrowed book well. It wasn’t necessary for her, or many other strivers. To them, being able to walk into the building, choose any book they liked, and take it home to read seemed like a fairy tale, and they would treat the book like the treasure it was.
At that time, and for many years after, the collection would have been very heavy on history and literature. Of course, in the nineteenth century, that meant mostly the lives and works of white European men. Women mostly made it into the narrative as helpmeets or victims. Even so, in the works of Shakespeare, and some of the biographers inspired by England’s Queen Victoria, a girl might find some hints that women were good for more than Angels in the House. Let’s just step past the fact that the only time a woman gets to step into an important role is when there are no men left in the line of succession.
Beyond the literature and history, our striving readers would also find plenty of travelogues and exploration narratives. It was the era of “discovering” new places, and the intrepid (usually) men who had been to the remote wilds naturally wrote about them. For people digging ditches, schlepping deliveries, or scrubbing laundry in their tight little neighborhoods, those books opened up an entirely different kind of world: places that actually existed and that they could aspire to see one day.
Whether it was Shakespeare’s words, an explorer’s vivid description of his discoveries, or the story of a Queen, the lending library offered everyone the knowledge they needed to improve themselves, and eventually their lot. To become, as Madame Lentini insisted – and little Ellen O’Shaughnessy ultimately did – an accomplished person. Not bad for a roomful of books!

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