By the middle of the nineteenth century Scotland had enjoyed well over a hundred years of a distinctive library culture, reflecting its independent legal and education systems, its particular geography and sociology. This culture derived partly from the foundations of the ‘first endowment’ period centred on the years 1680–1720, when endowed libraries such as the Innerpeffray Library and the Leighton Library at Dunblane were set up by individual benefactors in local communities, largely with educational or theological intent. The established Church of Scotland brought its own distinctive views of book use; its policy that library provision in the Highlands should be the product of intervention from the Lowlands was still being applied 200 years later. A final and most characteristic influence came from the climate of community-based activity, influenced strongly by the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, with its emphasis on social philosophy. From these ideas, and earlier social thinking back to John Locke, had developed the concept of mutual improvement, which may be defined as the spiritual and intellectual improvement of the social individual through corporately organised intellectual activity.

Scotland in the mid-nineteenth century had a wide variety of means of access to literature: book clubs and middle-class subscription libraries were widespread (circulating libraries were less common, and were largely concentrated in the towns of the east coast). It also had as many universities as the rest of the United Kingdom put together, and their libraries had long been rooted in the local community, unlike their English counterparts.