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Lillian H. Smith: the first trained children's librarian in the British Empire

London, Ontario, 17 March 1887. That is where Lillian Helena Smith begins: youngest child of a Methodist minister father who let her roam his library, and an organist mother. She grew up in London, Ontario, the youngest of four children of British immigrant parents. Her father, John Vipond Smith, was a Methodist minister who let Lillian peruse his library, and she became a passionate reader at a young age. The passion was useful. So was the discipline.

After graduating from Victoria College, University of Toronto, in 1910, Smith came across an article about the training school for children's librarians at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She enrolled. She earned a certificate from the Carnegie Training School for Children's Librarians in Pittsburgh, completing her training in 1911. From there, she took a post as children's librarian and branch head at the New York Public Library. She lasted roughly a year before a better offer arrived from Toronto.

Chief Librarian George Locke recruited Lillian H. Smith, a professionally trained children's librarian then working at the New York Public Library, to head Toronto Public Library's newly established Children's Department. She was 25. Born in London, Ontario, Smith was the first professionally trained children's librarian in the British Empire. When she arrived at TPL in 1912, children had only been allowed in the Toronto Public Library for four years. The field she was walking into barely existed yet.

What she built, and how fast

Smith was 25 when she came to Toronto Public Library, and with boundless energy and enthusiasm, she immediately started to improve collections, train staff and expand programs. Within months, she was running weekly staff training sessions and, in 1913, Smith also started instructing future librarians at the Provincial Library Training School, which became part of the University of Toronto in 1928. She would lecture at U of T, continuously, until her retirement in 1952.

The numbers from those forty years are striking. By the end of her 40 years of innovative leadership, children's services were available in 16 branch libraries, 30 schools and two settlement houses, as well as at the flagship Boys and Girls House, opened on St. George Street in 1922. She also extended services to the Hospital for Sick Children, and she helped to create a library classification system that was used for children's collections at Toronto libraries until the late 1990s.

The story hours are worth stopping on. She introduced story hours that frequently attracted audiences of more than 100 children in the 1920s and 1930s. Under Smith's guidance, reading clubs were organized for older children, and children staged plays and puppet shows, held debates, and discussed literary and historical subjects. This is not a card-catalogue operation. This is someone who understood that a library for children has to feel like the best possible use of an afternoon.

Boys and Girls House: a building that meant something

By the early 1920s, the demand had simply outrun the space. The College Street Circulating Branch was particularly busy: operating out of a tiny 36-square-foot space, it circulated more than 100,000 books a year. Something had to give.

In 1922, TPL purchased a residential home at 40 St. George Street for $25,000. After some renovations, Boys and Girls House was born. Called Boys and Girls House, it was the first separate children's library in the British Commonwealth. Surrounding neighbourhoods were densely populated with children, many from recent immigrant families. The building was immediately popular, and word of what Smith had created at 40 St. George travelled far beyond the city.

The most telling measure of Boys and Girls House's reputation came in 1934. An English couple, Edgar and Mabel Osborne, visited Boys and Girls House that year. Boys and Girls House and the work done by Lillian H. Smith impressed the couple. The Osbornes were avid collectors of historical children's books and discussed one day donating their collection to Toronto Public Library. Osborne had been a delegate for the Library Association of Great Britain at a meeting of the American Library Association and travelled on to Canada with Mabel afterwards. They were impressed by what they saw in the Toronto Public Library, and especially by the work of Lillian H. Smith, the head of the children's library services.

When no British library was interested in the collection, Osborne immediately thought of Toronto. He wrote in 1946 to the head librarian in Toronto to offer the books as a tribute to Lillian Smith and to Mabel. The library accepted, and the mechanics of arranging the move of the collection began. In 1949, following Mabel's death, Edgar donated their collection of more than 2,000 rare and notable children's books to TPL. The Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books was born. Since then, the collection has grown to include over 90,000 items. It includes manuscripts, books, book-related art, archives, ephemera and book-related games, encompassing the development of English children's literature from a 14th-century manuscript of Aesop's Fables through Medieval books of manners, Puritan moral tales, 18th-century chapbooks, and Victorian classics of fantasy and adventure. It lives today on the fourth floor of the branch that now bears Smith's name.

The Unreluctant Years

In 1953, the year after she retired, the American Library Association published what remains Smith's most enduring single document. The Unreluctant Years: A Critical Approach to Children's Literature was commissioned by the American Library Association and published in 1953. Regarded as a classic of its kind, the aim of the book was to consider children's books as literature and to discover some of the standards by which they could be judged. The title tells you the argument: there is nothing reluctant about reading for pleasure, and children's books deserve the same rigorous criticism as any other form of literature. Smith said as much plainly: "Children's books do not exist in a vacuum, unrelated to literature as a whole. They are a portion of universal literature and must be subjected to the same standards of criticism as any other form of literature."

That position was not obvious in 1953. Plenty of people in publishing still thought of children's books as a lesser category, pleasant but not serious. Smith disagreed, and she had four decades of evidence behind her. The book is out of print in its original form but has been reissued and is available through the Internet Archive. If you make picture books for a living, it is worth an afternoon.

Parallel work: the guide and the association

The book was Smith's retrospective. The working documents were issued earlier. She edited Books for Boys and Girls, first issued by Toronto Public Library in 1927, which became an indispensable guide for libraries across Canada and beyond. Through several editions, it became the standard selection guide for librarians, teachers and parents in many English-speaking countries. This is one of those sleeper achievements: a bibliography that shapes what children actually read, quietly, for decades.

Smith was instrumental in forming the Canadian Association of Children's Librarians in 1939. She lectured at the University of Toronto from 1913 to 1952, and the Canadian Association of Children's Librarians she helped establish predated the Canadian Library Association. She also served on the executive board of the American Library Association from 1932 to 1936. For someone whose title was Head of Children's Services at a city library, her reach was continental.

Honours, a collection, a branch

In 1962, Smith received the Clarence Day Award from the American Library Association for outstanding work in encouraging the love of books and reading. That same year, the Lillian H. Smith Collection was established to mark the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of children's libraries in Toronto. The collection comprises creative books of literary and artistic merit, published in English from 1910 onward, and includes early and first editions of many modern children's classics.

The Lillian H. Smith branch of Toronto Public Library opened on 16 October 1995 in honour of the first academically trained children's librarian in the British Empire. It sits at 239 College Street, not far from the original Boys and Girls House site on St. George. The branch entrance is guarded by a winged lion and a gryphon in bronze, nicknamed Edgar and Judith, in honour of donors Edgar Osborne and Judith Merril. The building knows its own history.

Why this matters to anyone who makes picture books

Smith's career is sometimes filed under library history, which is accurate but a little narrow. What she actually did was argue, through forty years of institution-building, that children deserve serious, well-chosen books and skilled people to connect them. She believed that the role of the children's librarian was to deliver "the right book, to the right child, at the right time." That phrase sounds tidy, almost corporate, until you think about what it requires: genuine knowledge of books, genuine knowledge of children, and enough humility to know they are not the same child twice.

She developed a system for children's library services that was regarded as one of the best in the British Commonwealth and in North America. The Osborne Collection at the branch bearing her name holds books that publishers, illustrators, and writers still consult for the history of the form. Her 1953 argument that children's literature is literature, full stop, is still the premise every picture-book maker works from, whether they know her name or not.

She died in Toronto on 5 January 1983, at 95. Ninety-five years is a long time to be right about something.

Sources

Hero image: photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash.

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