Adelaide Proctor [also Procter](1825-1864) was a social activist, poet, and contributor to Charles Dickens’s Household Words under the pseudonym ‘Mary Berwick’, and Dickens wrote the foreword to her collected works.

Said Dickens of her, “Always impelled by an intense conviction that her life must not be dreamed away, and that her indulgence in her favourite pursuits must be balanced by action in the real world around her, she was indefatigable in her endeavours to do some good. Naturally enthusiastic, and conscientiously impressed with a deep sense of her Christian duty to her neighbour, she devoted herself to a variety of benevolent objects. Now, it was the visitation of the sick, that had possession of her; now, it was the sheltering of the houseless; now, it was the elementary teaching of the densely ignorant; now, it was the raising up of those who had wandered and got trodden underfoot; now, it was the wider employment of her own sex in the general business of life; now, it was all these things at once. Perfectly unselfish, swift to sympathize and eager to relieve, she wrought at such designs with a flushed earnestness that disregarded season, weather, time of day or night, food, rest.” Like Rev. Smith, the author of the first book by a woman chosen for Sturgis Library was a woman with an expanded social point of view.

Proctor was followed by two other women authors — Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Harriet Beecher Stowe. By the 100th selection, the library trustees had expanded the library’s offerings in literature (the works of Dickens, Hawthorne, Hugo, Scott), poetry (the enormous American reprint of The Aldine Poets), history (William Prescott works, Froude’s England, Palfrey’s New England), exploration, and, with a nod to religion, had added Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

At 100, the Library had not yet purchased in the hard sciences. Other than Washington Irving, and to some extent Dickens and Hawthorne, there was little of interest to younger readers. But, what struck me about the collection was that it was remarkably free of diatribe and parochialism. It did not include the sermons of local preachers, nor the biographies of local merchants. It pandered little, if at all, to any prejudice. Instead, from its onset, the Library was socially progressive, inquisitive, and contained works designed not for memorization, but for open-ended reflection. This was, and remains a precious legacy.

Renée Magriel Roberts can be reached at renee@roses-books.com. Photographs of Sturgis Library courtesy of Robt. Ward (www.robtward.com).