Teachers

Reading Tit-Bits in Kensington Gardens, Virginia Stephen ventured beyond 22 Hyde Park Gate for a momentary escape from its mourning, repression and conventions. As she ventured even further afield – into libraries, classrooms, language – she encountered teachers who encouraged her to go beyond family, beyond Victorian, beyond patriarchal, beyond familiar. Libraries meant new books and research skills; classes at King's College meant multiple pedagogies and an educational structure; and Janet Case meant deepening Greek study and politics. Her new teachers taught lifelong lessons, fostered independence and introduced diverse communities, helping her consider a life beyond 22 Hyde Park Gate.

Libraries’ Bounty

In 1938, Virginia Woolf explains asking Lady Tweedsmuir to support the Women's Service Library by writing ‘I owe all the education I ever had to my father's library … ‘ (L6 234). Her request on behalf of the Women's Service Library implicitly acknowledges, however, that she also owed some of her education to the London Library and the British Museum Reading Room; they moved Virginia Stephen away from Leslie's study, Julia's tea table, Thoby's talk and Aunt Anny's influence. She took full advantage of these libraries, using them to fill out reviews, prepare for teaching and explore. Their implicit pedagogy enlarged her curriculum and taught her research skills as she discovered a larger world of readers, writers and books. She also observed how libraries both include and exclude people, facilitate and regulate learning. She experienced, simultaneously, bounty and exclusion, wealth and scarcity, freedom and surveillance.

Although a public library opened in Kensington in 1888 (T. Kelly, PL 449), Virginia Stephen does not seem to have frequented it, perhaps because public libraries were new in her world. In 1887, ‘only two parishes in all of metropolitan London’, writes Richard Altick, ‘had rate-supported libraries’, and he and Thomas Kelly say London was slower than the rest of the country to establish them (Altick, ECR 227; PL 24). Altick details why free libraries did not spread rapidly after the passage of the Public Libraries Act in 1850, even as the numbers and kinds of reading materials were exploding: the halfpenny on a pound library rates could often purchase and maintain buildings but not books (228; see also Hammond 89–90).