Australian butchers in the 19th century preferred to read thrillers, miners loved novels about horse racing, while the most popular author among doctors – and the Adelaide working class in 1861 – was Charles Dickens.

These are just some of the insights gleaned from the Australian Common Reader, a publicly accessible database of historical library borrowing data launched this week by the Australian National University.

The database tracks the borrowing habits of mostly working-class Australians between 1861 and 1928, and contains circulation records from six mechanics institute libraries, pre-dating most Australian public libraries. The project was first established by Curtin University professor Tim Dolin in 2008 before being acquired by ANU in 2013.

Julieanne Lamond from ANU, who manages the project, told Guardian Australia that it was her goal to make the “revolutionary” database easily searchable and publicly accessible.

“There’s been a real difficulty getting this kind of data anywhere in the world,” Lamond said. “I think we’re very lucky in Australia that we have so much of it and that someone had the foresight to digitise it.”

The libraries were based in regional areas with an intensive industry presence – coalmining, logging, wheat farming and exporting. Most of the records come from South Australia but there is also data from institutes in New South Wales, Western Australia and Victoria.

Members of the public could join the libraries, despite them often being set up by companies to placate their workers. While male borrowers far outweigh women, Lamond she does not believe this is a reflection of literacy but rather the origins of the institutes themselves.

“The ostensible aim for these libraries really was workers’ education,” she said. “They were often set up by the big employers in these towns, often mining companies, to give the workers something to do, to try and educate them and edify them. And of course the workers used them for their own purposes, and the women in the communities used them too.”

Miners are the most abundant profession represented in the data, making up 12.95% of borrowers, followed closely by those whose occupation was home duties – both men and women – at 10.79%.

Adam Bede by George Eliot was one of the most popular titles in the Australian Common Reader. Photograph: UniversalImagesGroup/Getty Images

The data shows that our modern assumptions about men and women’s different reading habits can’t be readily applied to the past, Lamond said. “The data that we have shows that men and women read very widely across all these kinds of genres that now we think of as being quite gendered.”

Fiction was vastly preferred to nonfiction by all. The most voracious reader was a South Australian miner named John Pellew, who borrowed 877 books during his time with the Port Germein Institute.

“People’s reading was very diverse, much more diverse than I think most of our reading is now,” Lamond said. “These people just read incredibly widely. They were reading sporting novels and political thrillers, they were reading George Eliot and Jane Austen at the same time.”

Many of these communities had migrants from mining communities in Cornwall and Wales, places with a very strong culture around reading and self-education, Lamond said.

That may explain why Cornish Christian novelist Joseph Hocking was the most popularly borrowed author, followed closely by prolific genre novelist Edward Phillips Oppenheim, and Henry Rider Haggard, who wrote adventure stories, with Charles Dickens coming in fourth. Periodicals and magazines were also circulated widely.

Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch by Alice Hegan Rice was the most borrowed book by those whose occupation was listed as home duties – possibly due to the clear preference shown for it by borrower Alice Maud King, who loaned it out 20 times in 1906. The novel is a comic depiction of a family struggling with poverty.

“This was a period before there were widespread public libraries in Australia,” Lamond said. “So all libraries around this period were subscription libraries, and most of them were fairly expensive.”

Lamond hopes to acquire funding to digitise more records to give a broader insight into the reading habits of the past.

“We don’t have good data about metropolitan reading at the moment,” Lamond said. “It’s not really in existence. The stars have to align for these kinds of records to survive because often they were run by volunteer management committees, and they sat in boxes in people’s attics; they threw them out; they burnt down – a lot of historical library records have gone up in smoke, literally.”

Most popular titles

Household Words (magazine)

New Monthly Magazine

What Will He Do with It? by Bulwer Lytton

Bentley’s Miscellany (literary magazine)

Tales from “Blackwood” (short stories)

Waverley by Walter Scott

Fraser’s Magazine

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Adam Bede by George Eliot

Most popular authors

Joseph Hocking

Edward Phillips Oppenheim

Henry Rider Haggard

Charles Dickens

Silas Kitto Hocking

Ellen Wood

Marie Corelli

Frederick Marryat

Thomas Mayne Reid

Guy Newell Boothby

