Knowledge Is Power

Founded as private clubs by leading figures in the city’s professional and commercial communities, the Liverpool Medical Library and the Liverpool Athenaeum allowed their members to pool resources at a time when books remained prohibitively expensive to all but the wealthiest members of society.

The exhibition explains how these two libraries shaped elite culture in the Liverpool, but also traces how the power of books came to be opened up to the wider population in the reforming decades of the early Victoria era.