"Children who read good books usually behave better, and have good manners": the founding of the Notre Dame de Grace Library for Boys and Girls, Montreal, 1943.

ABSTRACT

The founding of the Notre Dame de Grace Library for Boys and Girls in Montreal in 1943 provides a unique and interesting case study in Canadian library development. It was founded and operated by an umbrella group of local community organizations, using money raised locally, initially to combat a perceived rise in juvenile delinquency during the Second World War. The arguments made in favor of the library by the general public and the organizers were widely reported in the local press. The documentary record provides a rare account of the beliefs held about the efficacy of reading and libraries to shape children, a neglected aspect of children's library development in Canadian historiography.

INTRODUCTION

In 1942 a number of community groups in the Notre Dame de Grace district of Montreal came together to discuss a matter of great common concern. The Second World War had been raging for three years, and many felt that one of the major consequences of this on the home front had been a rapid increase in juvenile delinquency. Frightened by newspaper reports of increases in youth crime in Britain, the United States, and Canada, including incidences occurring locally that were being reported in the weekly district paper the Monitor, over forty groups joined together to create the Notre Dame de Grace Community Council. The community council was formed to tackle youth crime and other problems. Their first major undertaking was to raise funds to open and run a library for local children and youths up to age sixteen. After much effort and support from the local community and Montreal's newspapers, the Notre Dame de Grace Library for Boys and Girls was officially opened on November 8, 1943.

This brief description of the founding of a children's library in wartime Montreal raises the question as to why a community group would feel that a children's library was a relevant way to combat juvenile delinquency. This is a difficult question to answer because of the paucity of studies on children's library history in Canada. In his articles on Canadian library historiography, Peter F. McNally notes the almost complete absence of works dedicated to children's libraries (1986a, 1986b, 1986c, 1996a, 1996b). This is in keeping with the trend in American historiography identified by Christine Jenkins (2000). She points out the general lack of work that analyzes children's library development within a larger social, political, and cultural context, or that considers the opinions and attitudes toward children's library services held by nonlibrarians (Jenkins, 2000, pp. 127-29). The insular approach of much children's library history is reflected in and reinforced by the prescriptive statements made by librarians and others in the past who did not examine the documentation that could have provided a much-needed context for library history (Jenkins, 2000, pp. 123-24). There is also a lack of literature related to the Canadian home front during the Second World War. Wartime jitters over juvenile delinquency is an ill-remembered and, in Canadian writings, virtually ignored aspect of the home front experience (Brannigan, 1986; Keshen, 1997, 2004). In this sparse material there is no mention of Canadian libraries. The primary material relating to the foundation of the Notre Dame de Grace Library for Boys and Girls, especially newspaper accounts, gives a clear picture of the beliefs people held about the power of books to shape character. This episode in Canadian library history suggests the numerous factors that motivated a community to develop a children's library, one that was in keeping with the public library movement in Great Britain and the United States. This study of the creation of the Notre Dame de Grace Library for Boys and Girls will draw on a variety of primary and secondary sources, adopting what Michael Harris calls an externalist approach, in which developments in libraries are placed within the broader social and political context (1975, p. 107).

THE PUBLIC LIBRARY MOVEMENT AND CHILDREN'S SERVICES

Generally, the development of public libraries and children's services in them is explained as a response to societal problems. Writers concerned with the founding of public libraries in nineteenth-century America and Britain usually describe how an underlying belief in the power of books to affect profoundly people for good or ill lay behind the development of the public library movement (see, for example, Robson 1976; Black 1991; Harris, 1973; Harris and Spiegler, 1974; and Dain, 1975). (1) There also seems to be a similar pattern to the explanations offered by leading scholars of the emergence of children's library services in the United States (Long 1969; Jenkins, 2000; Garrison, 1979; Parker, 1997). These services were considered to have developed as part of the child welfare movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A number of organizations were founded or expanded at that time to improve the lot of children, such as Children's Aid Societies, settlement houses, and the YMCA/YWCA. Many of these early organizations included among their services the provision to their charges of what they considered to be good, uplifting reading, as well as attempting to shelter them from harmful "trash." This resulted in child welfare agencies and public libraries eventually making common cause, and the two groups often worked together to reach children. By the early twentieth century serving children became one of the principle activities of public libraries.

But how relevant is this U.S.…