Floating Libraries, floating hospitals
Image description: a photograph of a group of children in late nineteenth century clothes, sitting on board a deck of a boat, in a line, holding books. A woman leans over them. On the left of the image, a young woman holds an open basket containing books.
Researching the history of children’s hospital libraries – part of my current research project on The Child in the Library – I came across this image – ‘A Traveling Library on the deck of a St. John’s Guild Floating Hospital Boat’. The Floating Hospital is still buoyant today, not as a seafaring entity, but as New York Healthcare charity. Its initial incarnation was, as the picture suggests, really floating. It began nineteenth century charitable venture which provided serious medical care, as well as recreation and education, to disadvantaged children and families in New York. Initially the brainchild of the managing editor of the New York Times as ‘barge excursions for newsboys and bootblacks’[i], the boats soon transformed into something between a floating hospital and health centre, which combined attending to the serious medical needs of New York’s poor children (on the lower decks), with preventative medicine, education and recreation (on the upper decks)– with a particular emphasis on ‘the full benefit of the sea-air’.[ii]
As Palmer notes, there were ‘three landings daily on each side of the city and in Brooklyn. The first is made at eight a.m., and as the hospital approaches the pier one sees in line hundreds of anxious mothers carrying the sick children, who have patiently awaited the approach of the hospital for some time, for many leave their homes very early to get out in the free, open air. ... All cases which are too ill to be sent to the upper deck are immediately given either a dispensary or ward ticket, and between landings receive a re-examination by the hospital physician, who prescribes accordingly’.[iii] The ward ticket would allow entrance to St John’s ‘Seaside Hospital’ on dry land.
The ‘Traveling Library’ in question, here, takes the form of the young woman on the front left of the image, who is holding an open wicker suitcase containing a collection of books, along with a small notebook – this sometime maritime librarian was part of the ‘Traveling Library Department’ of the New York Free Circulating Library, whose annual report, produced in the same year this photo was taken, gives a detailed account of the connection between the Circulating Library and the Hospital Boat scheme. The report, written by Mary J. Pierson, notes the good work done by the ‘Floating Hospital of St John’s Guild’ in the face of what she calls ‘the human problem’.[iv] Early in the morning, Pierson went around the boat, announcing that books might be ‘had’, and also distributing cards to advertise the location of the permanent Circulating Libraries Centres in New York. The picture above shows what Pierson refers to as a ‘reading or circulating station’, stationed ‘at one end of the boat’.[v] From her account, it’s likely that the images in the background were part of an educational installation to demarcate this area of the ship as a place for reading words, and - for those who could not read words – for reading pictures.
While there are many detailed nuances of bibliographic and library history to pursue here, there are a few things that intrigue me in ways that are less easy to pin down. I’m fascinated by the intense mobility of this library – a library which is ‘circulating’, ‘travelling’ and ‘floating’, all at once. (More broadly, I just really love the idea of a Floating Library - and note that Coventry’s plans for their time as UK City of Culture will involve one…. Artist Beatrice Glow’s recent conception of a Floating Library on board a steamship was conceived as ‘a public space “conducive to fearless dreaming.”’)
I’m also drawn to the painful awkwardness of this scene of performed reading. The reports of the interactions between the Traveling Library Department and the Floating Hospital are self-congratulatory and condescending – and absolutely convinced of the good that this library work is doing. We hear of the interest of mothers, of the delight of children, the support of the nurses. Reading is seen as straightforwardly redemptive. The reading that we see onboard, here, look more ambiguous – although, of course, one of the pleasures of reading (and one of the difficulties for reading historians) is that what someone is doing, while reading, is always pretty inscrutable. While one might presume the entire shot was posed, some of the children might have enjoyed the experience of looking at the books – some might have been co-opted into the picture — some might be experiencing a bit of both. The one piece of freedom one feels that they might have here, is in the relative distance or proximity between themselves and the book. One child holds her book close to her face. Another holds his out flatly, staring down at its surface, rather as if were a suspect dinner tray. A third child keeps the book in her lap, and looks straight at the camera. Perhaps she’s more interested in writing her own story. Perhaps not. As historians of reading, we are left, as ever, at sea.
[i] See Sarah Bessie Palmer, ‘The Floating Hospital of St John’s Guild, New York City, The American Journal of Nursing. 4.1: 2-8, (October, 1903), 5 doi:10.2307/3401605. JSTOR 3401605
[ii] Palmer, ‘The Floating Hospital’, 7.
[iii] Palmer, ‘The Floating Hospital’, 6.
[iv] Mary J. Pierson, ‘Special Report by Miss Mary J. Pierson on the Books Supplied the Floating Hospitals of St John’s Guild through the Traveling Library Department’, Twentieth Annual Report of the New York Free Circulating Library, 37-40, 37 1899.https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015035385809&view=1up&seq=348&q1=hospital
[v] Pierson, ‘Special Report’, 38.