This dissertation deals with the earliest popular education initiative in Sweden apart from the primary school and the traditional religious education: the parish libraries. The study aims at sheding light over the parish library activity of the 1870s, its views of non-formal adult education and the official views thereof. To substantiate the discussion two cases are presented, one of which describes the ideological extremes within the then available literature, whereas the second one presents the book loans at the parish libraries of Nyed and Husie. The Primary School Inspectorate is assumed to be the official agent in the field of adult education, and the foundations of its adult education ideology are mainly laid down in the "Index of books suitable for parish libraries", published in 1870. In the present work, parish library means library activities as defined by the Primary School Ordinance of 1842.

My theoretical perspective is mainly founded on Gramsci's and Williams's doctrines on hegemonic attitudes. The Inspectorate and the parish libraries are seen as two hegemonic practices. The explicit expression of the Inspectorate as a hegemonic practice in this context is its 1870 index of recommended books. The educational content of the libraries is represented by those books that are found in seven or more out of the 50 parish libraries in the research project. Both the recommended literature and the literature that is in reality included in the libraries is studied under the aspect of the knowledge-content of the text, its statements concerning all kinds of issues, from practical ones to views of man and society. The statements are sorted into structures of different complexity, and they are described in terms of fragments of knowledge, elements of knowledge and superior elements of knowledge. By way of this structuring, different texts can be compared to each other. The comparisons between recommended contents and factual contents are in this study expressed in terms of superior elements of knowledge

The material shows, that the Inspectorate's view of adult education contents may be described by 11 superior elements of knowledge and be summed up under the heading: "The Book of Concord and Public Good". Another distinguishing feature is the doctrine that everything can be ordered in hierarchies. The characteristics of the books of the libraries do on the whole coincide with the recommended literature, but there are evident reflections from new strands of thought, such as the liberal movement and secularized science. The overlap in titles between recommendations and library practice is remarkably small, but all of the hegemonic message is contained in the libraries. In the material, same hegemonic tactics are demonstrated. They may be named tactics of neutralization, tactics of modification and tactics of adaptation, and they are extensively presented in the dissertation. The Inspectorate's views on adult education are comparatively conservative, but its real influence on the contents of the libraries seems to have been limited. The cases studied show that the literature of the period was rather more radical than the library literature; in addition, recommended literature was read only to a lesser extent.