The Reading Room in Literature
P. R. Harris
This is a celebration of the Reading Room which was built in 1854-57. It was however preceded by a number of other reading rooms in the British Museum. The British Museum was founded in 1753 and opened to the public in 1759 in Montagu House which stood on the site of the forecourt of the present British Museum. During the interim period the Trustees drew up rules for the new institution, and one of these concerned the Reading Room.
The manner of admitting persons, who desire to make use of the MUSEUM for study; or shall have occasion to consult the same for evidence, or information. THAT a particular room be allotted for the persons so admitted, in which they may sit, and read or write, without interruption, during the time that the Museum is kept open: that a proper Officer do constantly attend in the said room, so long as any such person, or persons, shall be there: and that any Book, or other part of the Collection, so far as is consistent with the safety thereof, and the attendance necessarily required from the Officers upon the other parts of their duty, be at their request brought to them by the Messenger; who is likewise to furnish them with pens and ink, if desired.1
The first Reading Room was in the NW corner of the basement of Montagu House, looking out on to the garden. Not only books were consulted in this room but also MSS, prints, coins and antiquities. It was placed under the supervision of a Keeper who was required to be present all the time that the room was open. The first occupant of the post was not happy with the conditions imposed upon him and only stayed for two years. The following is from Barwick’s history of the Reading Room:
The first Keeper of the Reading Room, as the title then ran, was ‘the ingenious Dr. Peter Templeman’, who received a salary of £100 per annum. […] After much correspondence with the Trustees respecting the inadequacy of the apartments allotted to him, and the injury to his health from the long attendance of six hours daily required of him, he resigned in December 1760. […] An entry of 30 August 1759, in his official note books, shows how he felt the dreariness of his task. ‘On Wednesday all the company going away a little after one of the clock, the Room being cold and the weather likely to rain, I thought it proper to move off too. Nothing material has happened that I know of.’ At this period only some five or six readers visited the Room in the course of the month, and it must have been a great temptation, on a fine day, to a gentleman nervous about his health and evidently bored, to step out into the open air and enjoy one of the best gardens in London. There was a story told of him that finding it more healthy and agreeable to walk in the garden than to look after his small flock of readers, he on one occasion came across a Trustee who was severe about exacting attendance to duty and who startled him with a peremptory ‘Go back, sir’.2
Editor’s note. The typescript of this previously unpublished talk is dated in pencil 1/11/93. It was delivered twice, in 1990 and in a slightly modified version in 1993. Internal references show it was intended to be given at the British Museum, perhaps to the Friends of the British Library, with readings by Gabriel Woolf. For further references to this subject, see Edward F. Ellis, The British Museum in Fiction: A Check-List (Buffalo, 1981). 1 Statutes and Rules to be observed in the management and use of the British Museum (London, 1757), pp. 9-10. 2 G. F. Barwick, The Reading Room of the British Museum (London, 1929), pp. 23-4.
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Soon after the Reading Room opened Templeman was reprimanded for supplying more than one book or MS at a time to a reader. He asked for clear guidance on the subject, and pointed out that one reader had already asked for 48 MSS in one day. So although the readers were few, some were very demanding. In July 1759 the poet Thomas Gray was granted a reader’s ticket, and he wrote to friends in Cambridge as follows:
I this day passed thro’ the jaws of a great Leviathan, that lay in my way, into the belly of Dr. Templeman, Super-Intendent of the reading-room, who congratulated himself on the sight of so much good company. […]
[The Museum] (as you will imagine) is my favourite Domain, where I often pass four hours in the day in the stillness and solitude of the reading room, which is uninterrupted by any thing but Dr Stukeley the Antiquary, who comes there to talk nonsense, and Coffee-house news. The rest of the Learned are (I suppose) in the country; at least none of them come there, except two Prussians, and a Man, who writes for Lord Royston. When I call it peaceful, you are to understand it only of us Visiters, for the Society itself, Trustees, and all, are up in arms, like the Fellows of a College. The Keepers have broke off all intercourse with one another, and only lower a silent defiance, as they pass by. Dr Knight has wall’d up the passage to the little-House, because some of the rest were obliged to pass by one of his windows in the way to it. Moreover the trustees lay out 500£ a year more than their income; so you may expect, all the books and the crocodiles will soon be put up to auction.3
As a resident first of Peterhouse and then of Pembroke College, Gray could speak from personal knowledge of disputes in academic communities. In the case of the British Museum, friction between senior members of the staff (all of whom lived on the premises) must have been exacerbated by their constant proximity to each other, and by resentment when one colleague had a better set of apartments than another. In 1763 one of the first women readers was admitted. This was Catharine Maccaulay who published an eight-volume history of England. After her death in 1791, her husband complained that Isaac D’Israeli (from whom we shall hear in a moment) had circulated a story that she had been excluded from the Reading Room because she had torn four leaves from one of the Harleian MSS. The records do not disclose the outcome of this matter. But the Trustees were curiously indulgent in 1779 to John Brooke who admitted cutting pieces from two Harleian MSS. He pleaded that he had done this years before when he was a boy, and unaware of the seriousness of the matter. The Trustees decided to take no action against Brooke, who was by this date Somerset Herald. (The DNB reports intriguingly that he was crushed to death in February 1794 when attempting to get out of the pit of the Haymarket Theatre.) The second Keeper of the Reading Room, Richard Penneck, complained frequently that the basement was damp and cold. So in 1774 two rooms at the west end of the ground floor were converted into the Reading Rooms. These were the rooms which Isaac D’Israeli (who was a reader from 1786 until his death in 1848) used in the 1790s.
I passed two years in agreeable researches at the British Museum, which then (1790) was so rare a circumstance, that it had been difficult to have made up a jury of all the spirits of study which haunted the reading-room. I often sate [sic] between the Abbé de la Rue and Pinkerton, between Norman antiquity and Scottish history. There we were, little attended to, musing in silence and oblivion; for sometimes we had to wait a day or two till the volumes, so eagerly demanded, slowly appeared.4
3 Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibly (eds.), Correspondence of Thomas Gray, 3 vols (Oxford, 1935); letter to William Mason, July 1759 (vol. ii, p. 629); Letter to James Brown, July 1759 (vol. ii, pp. 632-3). 4 Isaac D’Israeli, The Illustrator Illustrated (London, 1838), p. 5.
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The first American reader (a gentleman from Philadelphia) had been admitted in 1765. In 1815 his compatriot Washington Irving described the Reading Room of that date. The following extract comes from his work entitled The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon.
I was one summer’s day loitering through the great saloons of the British Museum, with that listlessness with which one is apt to saunter about a museum in warm weather; sometimes lolling over the glass cases of minerals, sometimes studying the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian mummy, and sometimes trying, with nearly equal success, to comprehend the allegorical paintings on the lofty ceilings. Whilst I was gazing about in this idle way, my attention was attracted to a distant door, at the end of a suite of apartments. It was closed, but every now and then it would open, and some strange-favoured being, generally clothed in black, would steal forth, and glide through the rooms, without noticing any of the surrounding objects. There was an air of mystery about this that piqued my languid curiosity, and I determined to attempt the passage of that strait, and to explore the unknown regions that lay beyond. The door yielded to my hand, with all that facility with which the portals of enchanted castles yield to the adventurous knight errant. I found myself in a spacious chamber, surrounded with great cases of venerable books. Above the cases, and just under the cornice, were arranged a great number of black looking portraits of ancient authors. About the room were placed long tables, with stands for reading and writing, at which sat many pale, studious personages, poring intently over dusty volumes, rummaging among mouldy manuscripts, and taking copious notes of their contents. The most hushed stillness reigned through this mysterous apartment, excepting that you might hear the racing of pens over sheets of paper, or occasionally, the deep sigh of one of these sages, as he shifted his position to turn over the page of an old folio; doubtless arising from that hollowness and flatulency incident to learned research. Now and then one of these personages would write something on a small slip of paper, and ring a bell, whereupon a familiar would appear, take the paper in profound silence, glide out of the room, and return shortly loaded with ponderous tomes, upon which the other would fall tooth and nail with famished voracity. […] My curiosity being now fully aroused, I whispered to one of the familiars, as he was about to leave the room, and begged an interpretation of the strange scene before me. A few words were sufficient for the purpose. I found that these mysterious personages […] were principally authors, and were in the very act of manufacturing books.5
In 1827, after the completion of the east wing of the new British Museum building designed by Robert Smirke to accommodate the library of George III, the Reading Rooms were moved from the decaying Montagu House to the rooms at the south end of the new wing – now the Middle and South Rooms of the Department of MSS. They held about 120 readers, but soon became very crowded and, it is reported, very smelly. It was these rooms which Dickens used after he obtained a reader’s ticket on 8 February 1830 (the day after his eighteenth birthday). In the following extract from Sketches by Boz he describes a well-known type of reader.
We were once haunted by a shabby-genteel man; he was bodily present to our senses all day, and he was in our mind’s eye all night. The man of whom Sir Walter Scott speaks in his Demonology, did not suffer half the persecution from his imaginary gentleman-usher in black velvet, that we sustained from our friend in quondam black cloth. He first attracted our notice by sitting opposite to us in the reading-room at the British Museum, and what made the man more remarkable was, that he had always got before him a couple of shabby-genteel
5 Washington Irving, ‘The Art of Book Making’, in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (London, 1820), vol. i, pp. 152-5.
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books – two old dogs’-eared folios, in mouldy worm-eaten covers, which had once been smart. He was in his chair every morning just as the clock struck ten; he was always the last to leave the room in the afternoon, and when he did, he quitted it with the air of a man who knew not where else to go for warmth and quiet. There he used to sit all day, as close to the table as possible in order to conceal the lack of buttons on his coat, with his old hat carefully deposited at his feet, where he evidently flattered himself it escaped observation. About two o’clock you would see him munching a French roll or a penny loaf; not taking it boldly out of his pocket at once, like a man who knew he was only making a lunch, but breaking off little bits in his pocket, and eating them by stealth. He knew too well it was his dinner.6
Dickens was very appreciative of the Reading Room, whatever its defects of ventilation (a problem which also affected the rooms at the north end of the King’s Library which were used from 1833 to 1857). But another famous writer, Thomas Carlyle, was very critical of the room and of the readers. This is part of his evidence to the Royal Commission on the British Museum which sat from 1847 to 1849.
There are several persons in a state of imbecility who come to read in the British Museum. I have been informed that there are several in that state who are sent there by their friends to pass away their time. I remember there was one gentleman who used to blow his nose very loudly every half hour. I inquired who he was, and I was informed that he was a mad person sent there by his friends; he made extracts out of books, and puddled away his time there. A great number of readers come to read novels; a great number come for idle purposes, – probably a considerable proportion of the readers. And, on the whole, a vast majority come to the reading-room chiefly to compile and excerpt; to carry away something which they may put into articles for encyclopaedias or periodicals, biographical dictionaries, or some such compilation. I do not suppose it to be very urgent that much more accommodation should be afforded to all those various classes of people.7
Carlyle was of course notoriously irascible, and never forgave Antonio Panizzi, who became Keeper of Printed Books in 1837, for refusing to allow him the use of a private room in which to study. Indeed he was so irritated by the failure of the British Museum to grant him the special facilities which he demanded, that he founded the London Library in order that he might not have to rely to any extent upon the British Museum. Even so, he could not entirely do without its resources, and so he employed an amanuensis to devil for him there. The following extract is from the memoirs of his friend, the journalist Francis Espinasse, who was for two or three years in the 1840s on the staff of the Department of Printed Books.
For ordinary copying work at the British Museum and elsewhere Carlyle then employed an amanuensis, a forlorn-looking young Scotchman, whom he called a ‘much-enduring man’, and whom, I observed, he treated with considerable delicacy. For something more than mere copying, however, he had himself often to visit the old reading-room of the Museum, the overcrowding, bad ventilation, and general stuffiness of which had given rise to a malady which Carlyle called ‘the Museum headache’, and had encouraged the propagation of a maleficent organism known to others as ‘the Museum flea.’ To these inconveniences was added a confused and almost chaotic catalogue (since superseded by one far superior to it), full of perplexing cross-references and of innumerable interlineations, made in an attempt to produce something like alphabetical sequence. It was painful to see Carlyle stooping as he groped, perplexed and irritated, in the confused and confusing catalogue trying to find out whether the book which he wanted was in it, and therefore in the library. If it was there, like every one else, he had next to write on a ticket the title of the work and the press-mark,
6 Charles Dickens, ‘Shabby-Genteel People’, in Sketches by Boz (London, 1836), vol. ii, pp. 103-4. 7 Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Constitution and Government of the British Museum; with minutes of evidence (London, 1850), 8 Feb.1849, pp. 272-85 (277).
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given in the catalogue, indicating where it stood on the library shelves. The book was then, and not till then, procurable. With grim humour Carlyle called this indispensable ticket ‘the talisman’, and bestowed anything but a benison on the framers of the regulation which made necessary this, to him, harassing preliminary quest, one, moreover, sometimes altogether unsuccessful. He maintained that all that ought to be incumbent on the reader was to give the name of the book which he wanted, and that it was the duty of the librarian, without more ado, to find it for him. If you go, he argued, into a shop to purchase something, you are not expected to indicate to the shopman the whereabouts of the article to be purchased.8
Espinasse also described James Cates who was in charge of the Reading Room from 1824 until his death in 1855.
Fifty years ago the superintendent of the Reading-room was a venerable and fine-looking old gentleman, who, in his customary suit of solemn black, and with his dignified benevolence of manner, might have passed for a bishop or an archdeacon at least. His antecedents, however, were not at all ecclesiastical. He had entered the service of the Museum, in the opening decade of the century, from the household of the fourth Duke of Grafton, to whom doubtless he owed his first appointment in the Library, whatever it may have been. In his Grace’s household he was known as a pugilist of great skill, and in later years he was fond of reciting incidents of boxing-matches in which he had taken part. Years of service in the Library had made him familiar with the titles of books, but very little with their contents. For those readers whom his dignified appearance deterred from asking the superintendent of the Reading-room for information there was provided a subordinate, whose appearance certainly could not have a similarly deterrent effect. He was a little man with a face like a crab-apple, who eked out his doubtless scanty income from the Museum by copying manuscripts. Consequently any and every fraction of time withdrawn from this employment to satisfy the inquiries of readers involved a corresponding pecuniary loss. Therefore his answers to querists [sic] were brevity itself, and, as soon as the shortest reply was given, his upturned head was down again and his pen resumed its scratch, scratch, scratch! What a transition in the superintendence of the Reading-room from the venerable ex-pugilist and his crab-apple-faced deputy to Thomas Watts and his accomplished as well as courteous successors!9
Espinasse was one of the people who did not like Panizzi. The fact that the Keeper of MSS, Sir Frederic Madden, was at daggers drawn with Panizzi endeared him to Espinasse, who in consequence described him as ‘amiable and courteous’. I find it somewhat difficult to recognize Madden under this description. Panizzi revolutionized the Department of Printed Books during his period as Keeper from 1837 to 1856, but such a strong personality inevitably upset many people. (In the 1840s, seeing a lady reader shake hands with one of the Attendants, he gave her a solemn warning against the risk of familiarity with persons of lower rank.) The fact that Panizzi was a foreigner did not increase his popularity, nor did his belief that he was always right. There are constant criticisms of him in Madden’s voluminous and fascinating diaries. The following extracts from the volume for 1857 illustrate Madden’s contempt for one of Panizzi’s greatest achievements – the construction of the present Reading Room.
21 April. My brother came to luncheon and I shewed him the New Reading Room, which is to be opened on the 8th May. A splendid room, but perfectly unsuited, I think, to its purpose, and an example of reckless extravagance (having cost £150,000) occasioned through the undue influence of a Foreigner. Had Mr P. been an Englishman, the treasury would not have granted £20,000 for such a purpose! […] 2 May. At two o’clock I walked
8 Francis Espinasse, Literary Recollections and Sketches (London, 1893), pp. 72-3. 9 Ibid., pp. 26-7.
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out of the Museum […] in order to escape Mr Panizzi’s ‘company’. In consequence of the Duchess of Gloucester’s death, Prince Albert did not come, which, I suppose, was a sad disappointment to him. I heard afterwards […] that about thirty carriages of Visitors were present, and that they had ices, etc., in the New Reading Room […] It was wholly a private party of Mr P’s, as I rightly interpreted it, and I rejoice much I had nothing to do with it. 9 May. The New Reading Room, the South half of the King’s Library and a passage through my Department were opened to the Public; and this is to continue ’till the 16th inclusive. The crowd was very great and the noise and dash such, combined with the draft [sic] occasioned by the open doors, as to make the Saloon of my Department quite unbearable. 16 May. Went into the New Reading Room, where Mr P. pointed out to me the arrangements he had made connected with the delivery of MSS etc. In common civility he ought to have consulted me before these arrangements were carried into effect. I shall see on Monday how they work. This was the last day that this Room and the passage through my Department was [sic] open to the Public, and the crowd was very great. The dust, noise and smell of the ‘great unwashed’ were terrible.10
Although others had suggested building in the quadrangle at the heart of the British Museum building, it was Panizzi who with characteristic energy and persistence pushed the plan through. His initial sketch was dated 18 April 1852, construction began in May 1854, and the Reading Room opened in May 1857. It immediately became one of the marvels of London and Thackeray expressed the general approval in an article in the Cornhill for February 1860.
Most Londoners – not all – have seen the British Museum Library. I speak à coeur ouvert and pray the kindly reader to bear with me.11 I have seen all sorts of domes of Peters and Pauls, Sophia, Pantheon, – what not? – and have been struck by none of them so much as by that catholic dome in Bloomsbury, under which our million volumes are housed. What peace, what love, what truth, what beauty, what happiness for all, what generous kindness for you and me, are here spread out! It seems to me one cannot sit down in that place without a heart full of grateful reverence. I own to have said my grace at the table, and to have thanked heaven for this my English birth-right, freely to partake of these bountiful books, and speak the truth I find there.12
It was in the 1860s that the Keeper of Printed Books was involved in an incident which caused him grave concern. It was discovered that one of the reference books had been damaged, and the Keeper reported to the Trustees that he had reason to believe that readers took books to the WCs, where they had every opportunity to mutilate them. The pages were so roughly torn out that they were obviously not taken for the information in them. He left it to the appalled imagination of the reader of the report to determine to what purposes the torn-out leaves had been put. Jerome K. Jerome’s account of his visit to the Reading Room in the 1880s will ring bells with all those who have been unwise enough to consult a medical dictionary.
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch – hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into – some fearful devastating scourge, I know – and, before I had glanced half through
10 Sir Frederick Madden, Diary, 1857. 11 I speak … bear with me] crossed through. 12 Thackeray, ‘Nil Nisi Bonum’ in Roundabout Papers (London, 1860), pp. 349-50.
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the list of ‘premonitory symptoms’, it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it. I sat for a while, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever – read the symptoms – discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it – wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance – found, as I expected, that I had that too, – began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically – read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee. […] I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.13
The dreary lives of the hack writers who were such a feature of the life of the Reading Room in the latter part of the nineteenth century are vividly evoked by George Gissing in the following extract from his novel New Grub Street.
The days darkened. Through November rains and fogs Marian went her usual way to the Museum, and toiled there among the other toilers. […] One day at the end of the month she sat with books open before her, but by no effort could fix her attention upon them. It was gloomy, and one could scarcely see to read; a taste of fog grew perceptible in the warm, headachy air. Such profound discouragement possessed her that she could not even maintain the pretence of study; heedless whether anyone observed her, she let her hands fall and her head droop. She kept asking herself what was the use and purpose of such a life as she was condemned to lead. When already there was more good literature in the world than any mortal could cope with in his lifetime, here she was exhausting herself in the manufacture of printed stuff which no one even pretended to be more than a commodity for the day’s market. […] The fog grew thicker; she looked up at the windows beneath the dome and saw they they were a dusky yellow. Then her eye discerned an official walking along the upper gallery, and in pursuance of her grotesque humour, her mocking misery, she likened him to a black, lost soul, doomed to wander in an eternity of vain research along endless shelves. Or again, the readers who sat here at these radiating lines of desks, what were they but hapless flies caught in a huge web, its nucleus the great circle of the Catalogue? Darker, darker. From the towering wall of volumes seemed to emanate visible motes, intensifying the obscurity; in a moment the book-lined circumference of the room would be a featureless prison-limit. But then flashed forth the sputtering whiteness of the electric light, and its ceaseless hum was henceforth a new source of headache.14
We now come to the story of Enoch Soames, written by Max Beerbohm. This is an account of a minor and unsuccessful poet of the 1890s who described himself as a Catholic diabolist, and wrote books with titles such as Negations and Fungoids. One day in 1897 Beerbohm meets Soames at lunch in a small restaurant in Greek Street, just on the other side of Soho Square from here. Depressed at his lack of success, Soames expresses a wish to visit the Reading Room in a hundred years’ time, to examine the catalogue and see how his genius has been recognized – he is sure that the catalogue will contain endless editions
13 Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (Bristol, 1889), pp. 2-5. 14 George Gissing, New Grub Street (London, 1891), vol. i, pp. 193-6.
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of his work, commentaries, prolegomena, and biographies. A flashily dressed gentleman in a scarlet waistcoat accosts Soames and offers to transport him to the Reading Room in 1997, on condition that in return Soames agrees to accompany him home – it is the Devil in person who makes this proposal. Despite Beerbohm’s protests, Soames agrees to the bargain and promptly disappears. In the evening Beerbohm returns to the restaurant, and Soames suddenly materializes.
Soames sat crouched forward against the table exactly as when last I had seen him. It was as though he had never moved – he who had moved so unimaginably far. Once or twice in the afternoon it had for an instant occurred to me that perhaps his journey was not to be fruitless, that perhaps we had all been wrong in our estimate of the works of Enoch Soames. That we had been horribly right was horribly clear from the look of him. […] ‘How was it all,’ I asked, ‘yonder? Come! Tell me your adventures!’ ‘They’d make first-rate “copy,” wouldn’t they?’ ‘I’m awfully sorry for you, Soames, and I make all possible allowances; but what earthly right have you to insinuate that I should make “copy,” as you call it, out of you?’ The poor fellow pressed his hands to his forehead. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I had some reason, I know. I’ll try to remember’ […] ‘That’s right. Try to remember everything. Eat a little more bread. What did the reading room look like?’ ‘Much as usual,’ he at length muttered. ‘Many people there?’ ‘Usual sort of number.’ ‘What did they look like?’ Soames tried to visualize them. ‘They all,’ he presently remembered, ‘looked very like one another.’ My mind took a fearsome leap. ‘All dressed in sanitary woolen?’ ‘Yes. I think so. Grayish-yellowish stuff.’ ‘A sort of uniform?’ He nodded. ‘With a number on it, perhaps – a number on a large disk of metal strapped round the left arm? DKF 78,910 – that sort of thing?’ It was even so. ‘And all of them – men and women alike – looking well-cared-for? Very Utopian? And smelling rather strongly of carbolic, and all of them quite hairless?’ I was right every time. Soames was only not sure whether the men and women were hairless or shorn. ‘I hadn’t time to look at them very closely,’ he explained. ‘No, of course not. But – ’ They started at ME, I can tell you. I attracted a great deal of attention.’ At least he had done that! ‘I think I rather scared them. They moved away whenever I came near. They followed me about, at a distance, wherever I went. The men at the round desk in the middle seemed to have a sort of panic whenever I went to make inquiries.’ ‘What did you do when you arrived?’ Well, he had gone straight to the catalogue, of course – to the S volumes, and had stood long before SN – SOF, unable to take this volume out of the shelf, because his heart was beating so. At first, he said, he wasn’t disappointed; he only thought there was some new arrangement. He went to the middle desk and asked where the catalogue of twentieth-century books was kept. He gathered that there was still only one catalogue. Again he looked up his name, stared at the three little pasted slips he had known so well. Then he went and sat down for a long time. ‘And then,’ he droned, ‘I looked up the “Dictionary of National Biography” and some encyclopaedias. I went back to the middle desk and asked what was the best modern book on late nineteenth-century literature. They told me Mr. T. K. Nupton’s book was considered the best. I looked it up in the catalogue and filled in a form for it. It was brought to me. My name wasn’t in the index, but – yes!’ he said with a sudden change of tone, ‘that’s what I’d forgotten. Where’s that bit of paper?’ […]
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I found it fallen on the floor, and handed it to him. He smoothed it out, nodding and smiling at me disagreeably. ‘I found myself glancing through Nupton’s book,’ he resumed. ‘Not very easy reading. Some sort of phonetic spelling. All the modern books I saw were phonetic.’ ‘Then I don’t want to hear any more, Soames, please.’ ‘The proper names seemed all to be spelt in the old way. But for that, I mightn’t have noticed my own name.’ ‘Your own name? Really? Soames, I’m VERY glad.’ ‘And yours.’ ‘No!’ ‘I thought I should find you waiting here to-night. So I took the trouble to copy out the passage. Read it.’ I snatched the paper. Soames’ handwriting was characteristically dim. It, and the noisome spelling, and my excitement, made me all the slower to grasp what T. K. Nupton was driving at. From p. 234 of ‘Inglish Littracher 1890-1900’, bi T. K. Nupton, published bi the Stait, 1992.
Fr egzarmpl, a riter ov the time, naimed Max Beerbohm, hoo woz stil alive in th twentieth senchri, rote a stauri in wich e pautraid an immajnari karrakter kauld ‘Enoch Soames’ – a thurd-rait poit hoo beleevez imself a grate jeneus an maix a bargin with th Devvl in auder ter no wot posterriti thinx of im! It is a sumwot labud sattire, but not without vallu az showing hou seriusli the yung men ov the aiteen-ninetiz took themselvz. Nou that the littreri profeshn haz bin auganized as a department of publik servis, our riters hav found their levvl an hav lernt ter doo their duti without thort ov th morrow. ‘Th laibrer iz werthi ov hiz hire,’ and that iz aul. Thank hevvn we hav no Enoch Soameses amung us to-dai!
Shortly afterwards the Devil returns and Soames is spirited away. As the Devil pushes him roughly out of the door, Soames pleads with Beerbohm – ‘Try to make them know that I did exist’.15 The final irony (which was not anticipated by Beerbohm) is that if Soames does appear in the Reading Room in June 1997, it will probably no longer be the Reading Room, and there will be no great series of printed volumes of the catalogue to consult. It is difficult to imagine that Enoch Soames would feel at home in the brand-new glory of the Reading Rooms at St Pancras. Like some other diabolists Soames came to an unhappy end. One wonders what happened to the reader who in the late nineteenth century requested the help of the Superintendent for the purpose of raising the Devil in the Reading Room. With that tact so characteristic of Superintendents of the Reading Room, the official appealed to replied that he much regretted that he could not help, because one of the Principal Trustees of the British Museum was the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he would not approve. It was about this time that Arnold Bennett was granted a ticket to the Reading Room. Bennett came to London from the Potteries in 1888, when he was 21, and worked as a clerk before establishing himself as a writer. In 1898 he produced his first novel –A Man from the North.
In the centre of the reading-room at the British Museum sit four men fenced about by a quadruple ring of unwieldy volumes which are an index to all the knowledge in the world. The four men know those volumes as a good courier knows the Continental Bradshaw, and all day long, from early morning, when the attendants, self-propelled on wheeled stools, run round the rings arranging and aligning the huge blue tomes, to late afternoon,
15 Max Beerbohm, ‘Enoch Soames’, in Seven Men (London, 1919), pp. 1-48.
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when the immense dome is like a dark night and the arc lamps hiss and crackle in the silence, they answer questions, patiently, courteously; they are seldom embarrassed and less seldom in the wrong. Radiating in long rows from the central fortress of learning, a diversified company of readers disposes itself: bishops, statesmen, men of science, historians, needy pedants, popular authors whose broughams are waiting in the precincts, journalists, medical students, law students, curates, hack-writers, women with clipped hair and black aprons, idlers; all short-sighted and all silent. Every few minutes an official enters in charge of an awed group of country visitors, and whispers mechanically the unchanging formula: ‘Eighty thousand volumes in this room alone: thirty-six miles of bookshelves in the Museum altogether.’ Whereupon the visitors stare about them, the official unsuccessfully endeavours not to let it appear that the credit of the business belongs entirely to himself, and the party retires again. Vague, reverberating noises roll heavily from time to time across the chamber, but no one looks up; the incessant cannibal feast of the living upon the dead goes speechlessly forward; the trucks of food are always moving to and fro, and the nonchalant waiters seem to take no rest.16
It was in the 1890s that the Superintendent one day encountered a ragged and dirty man walking about the room without his shoes on. When told that it was not proper to behave in this way, he was quite unabashed and replied that he could not help it if his feet were tender. It would be a brave librarian today who would venture to remonstrate with any reader about his style of dress or undress. The next reading is from E. M. Forster’s favourite among his own works – The Longest Journey, published in 1907.
Ansell was in his favourite haunt – the reading-room of the British Museum. In that book-encircled space he always could find peace. He loved to see the volumes rising tier above tier into the misty dome. He loved the chairs that glide so noiselessly, and the radiating desks, and the central area, where the catalogue shelves curve round the superintendent’s throne. There he knew that his life was not ignoble. It was worth while to grow old and dusty seeking for truth though truth is unattainable, restating problems that have been stated at the beginning of the world. Failure would await him, but not disillusionment. It was worth while reading books, and writing a book or two which few would read, and no one, perhaps, endorse. He was not a hero, and he knew it. […] In the next chair to him sat Widdrington, engaged in his historical research. His desk was edged with enormous volumes, and every few moments an assistant brought him more. They rose like a wall against Ansell.17
Political refugees have always made much use of the Reading Room, and so when Ivan Maisky (later Soviet Ambassador to the UK from 1932 to 1943) came to London in 1912 he soon made for the place which had provided sanctuary for, amongst others, Marx, Lenin and Kropotkin, the anarchist.
When you have shown the attendant your reader’s ticket, passed through the narrow corridor separating the Reading Room from the entrance and found yourself under its semicircular vault, you feel that you have entered a world of its own. Above your head is the high, beautiful dome, below which are twenty fine rectangular windows and underneath each the name of some great figure in English culture. […]
16 E. A. Bennett, A Man from the North (London, 1898), pp. 69-70. 17 E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey (1907), p. 223.
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In the centre of the room are three concentric circles of yellow wooden counters; behind the inmost and smallest is the citadel of the administration, the second holds the catalogue of musical works, the third and largest the general catalogue with its thousand volumes. From these circles, like spokes in a wheel, radiate the tables for the readers which are distinguished by letters of the alphabet. Running down the middle of each table is a partition high enough to prevent a reader on one side from seeing his opposite number on the other. Each side is divided into numbered rectangular spaces, giving comfortable room for one reader to spread his books, manuscripts and so forth. To facilitate working, each rectangle is provided with a movable stand for books, an inkpot, blotting-paper, two pens – one with a steel nib, the other a goose quill. […] The steel one is for use; the quill as a mark of respect to the spirit of the past. As a matter of fact, some present-day readers actually write with a quill. In front of each compartment is a comfortable, solid chair which positively invites you to sit down and lose no time over starting work. Everything about you – the vast, light room, the countless bookshelves round the wall, these black tables under the soft light of electric lamps, the great names you see under the windows – all incites you to give of your best in the search for truth and in the service of advancing human thought.18
In 1929 the Reading Room achieved fame in a new medium – it featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Blackmail (which was the first British sound film). The villain, who is fleeing from the police, is seen to run into the British Museum, race through the Egyptian galleries, and then pass through the Reading Room into the bookstacks. He climbs the iron ladder up the outside of the dome, with the police close behind, loses his footing and crashes through he lantern. Typically (and rightly) Hitchcock does not show the nasty moment when the fugitive hits the floor of the Reading Room. I have never heard of anyone falling the 106 feet from the top of the Reading Room. But I do remember when an electrician working in the lantern dropped a transformer through the glass. It hit the floor of the Reading Room just beside the catalogue desks – luckily this occurred before the Reading Room opened one morning, so there was no unfortunate person consulting the catalogue to provide the transformer with a soft landing. It was in 1929 that Virginia Woolf published what has been described as a classic of the feminist movement – the essay entitled A Room of One’s Own.
That visit to Oxbridge […] had started a swarm of questions. Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art? – a thousand questions at once suggested themselves. But one needed answers, not questions; and an answer was only to be had by consulting the learned and the unprejudiced, who had removed themselves above the strife of tongue and the confusion of body and issued the result of their reasoning and research in books which are to be found in the British Museum. If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and pencil, is truth? […] The swing-doors swung open; and there one stood under the vast dome, as if one were a thought in the huge bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names. One went to the counter; one took a slip of paper; one opened a volume of the catalogue, and […] Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? Here had I come with a notebook and pencil proposing to spend a morning reading, supposing that at the end of the morning I should have transferred the truth to my notebook. […] How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper? I asked myself, and in despair began running my eye up and down the long list of titles. Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.
18 Ivan Maisky, Journey into the Past (London, 1962), p. 27.
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Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex – woman, that is to say – also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women. […] It was a most strange phenomenon; and apparently – here I consulted the letter M – one confined to the male sex. Women do not write books about men – a fact that I could not help welcoming with relief, for if I had first to read all that men have written about women, then all that women have written about men, the aloe that flowers once in a hundred years would flower twice before I could set pen to paper.19
Whether they were feminists or not, there were a great number of women using the Reading Room in the 1920s and 1930s. One journalist referred rather condescendingly to ‘sweet girl graduates, shingled and Russian-booted, [sitting] with their noses buried in hefty tomes’. No doubt they were as capable of looking after themselves as their Victorian predecessors who scorned the seats specially reserved for ladies. In 1882 a journalist remarked that these seats were always left untenanted – and so in 1907 they were abolished. An episode involving two women readers startled other users of the room in 1938. The then Superintendent, a small rather cherubic-looking man, was greatly admired by two female readers. On the occasion in question one of these ladies was engaging the Superintendent in animated conversation, and the other became more and more enraged until, seething with fury, she removed one of her sandals and belaboured her rival, while chasing her round the room. (Superintendents were not always popular with readers. One lady took a great dislike to a particular Superintendent, habitually referred to him as ‘the white rabbit’, and on one occasion sent him what she described as an appropriate gift – a cabbage.) The poet Louis MacNeice used the Reading Room in the 1930s, and in 1939 he wrote the following lines:
Under the hive-like dome the stooping haunted readers Go up and down the alleys, tap the cells of knowledge – Honey and wax, the accumulation of years –
Some on commission, some for the love of learning, Some because they have nothing better to do Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden The drumming of the demon in their ears.
Cranks, hacks, poverty-stricken scholars, In pince-nez, period hats or romantic beards And cherishing their hobby or their doom Some are too much alive and some are asleep Hanging like bats in a world of inverted values, Folded up in themselves in a world which is safe and silent: This is the British Museum Reading Room.
Out on the steps in the sun the pigeons are courting, Puffing their ruffs and sweeping their tails or taking A sun-bath at their ease And under the totem poles – the ancient terror – Between the enormous fluted Ionic columns
19 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London, 1929), pp. 35-7.
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There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces The guttural sorrow of the refugees.20
One of MacNeice’s fellow readers was a gentleman who claimed the throne of Poland, and made a striking figure in the Reading Room in his voluminous cloak.21 He still adorned the Reading Room after the war, from which the room emerged damaged but basically sound. It had survived the oil bomb which struck the dome in October 1940, and the incendiaries which burned out the adjacent SW bookstack in May 1941. It was closed to readers from1940 because of the danger caused by the vast area of glass in the twenty great windows – a service was provided in the North Library instead. Shrapnel from anti-aircraft shells peppered the dome causing dozens of holes through which the rain filtered. After these had been repaired the Reading Room was re-opened in June 1946. In the following extract from his novel Affairs of the Heart, published in 1949, Malcolm Muggeridge gives his impression of the Reading Room.
The following morning I set out for the British Museum. It was a journey often made and always melancholy. As ever, a vague stale smell, compounded of old paper, old clothes, and old flesh, pervaded the Reading Room. The same sad company was at work beneath the coloured dome, listlessly absorbing information – a bearded priest always to be found there, the usual elderly, untidy women with strands of grey hair falling over their faces; a bald man, probably a Pole, soundlessly muttering; a Rabbi or two, and a decayed Guards officer with broken discoloured teeth, a book on the Pyramids in front of him. It was fitting that so much of the world’s discontent should in recent times have been drawn to this melancholy place. The flames of rage leapt higher when dry tinder from these shelves was fed to them. Hither came Marx to charge himself with knowledge, until his overcharged blood broke out in boils and his overcharged brain exploded the whole world. Hither came Samuel Butler nursing grievances against his father, and Lenin nursing grievances against everyone – at once the angriest and most wretched portion of mankind.22
It was in the late 1940s that I first became acquainted with the Reading Room. It seemed to have more striking characters than it does now – but doubtless it is the habit of the elderly to cast a golden glow over their early days which causes me to say so. However that may be, I well remember the refugee from central Europe who was so persistent in trying to sell us rather dull books, and who sadly met his end by falling under a tram in Vienna. Then there was the famous lexicographer Eric Partidge who for more than 40 years until 1976 occupied seat K.1. (If another reader beat him to it, he would hover reproachfully.) In an interview in 1977 Partridge spoke of another famous reader – the Benedictine scholar Henri Leclercq, whom he had known by sight for many years before they were introduced to each other by a mutual friend. ‘With great formality we traversed the ten feet between our desks and waited until he had finished his learned sentence. Then the presentation was made. He very graciously rose, this ponderous bulk,23 and extended his hand. I said how much I admired his scholarship, and he said ‘Au revoir’. After that he always gave me a gracious nod of his head – but no more’. A fuller account of the Abbé Leclercq was given in a book published in 1935 entitled For Readers Only by two writers who used the pseudonym J. Penn. This disguised the identity of two scholars in the field of Slavonic studies – Professor Elizabeth Hill and Miss Doris Mudie.
20 Louis MacNeice, ‘The British Museum Reading Room’, in Collected Poems 1925-1948 (London, 1949), pp. 182-3. 21 Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk. 22 Malcolm Muggeridge, Affairs of the Heart (London, 1949), p. 18. 23 this ponderous bulk crossed through.
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The Abbé Leclercq [is] a reader who physically and intellectually deserves the title ‘monumental’. He is enormous and only occasionally moves from a reading desk which both he and others take for granted as being specifically reserved for him. As I look across at his broad back where his sides are spreading over the framework of the chair, I see how heavily he is leaning on the desk. He is leaning heavily on one elbow and the other arm is curved round a huge volume. I can well believe the legend that his reading desk has twice protested and that twice it has had to be repaired. Apart from his own weight, the desk has to support a mountain of books, a pile of papers, and on top of those, his top hat. As soon as he arrives in the morning, and he is usually the first to pass through the gates, he exchanges the hat for a black skull cap. He is dressed in black, but there is nothing funereal about him. Certainly there never was a jollier looking Benedictine scholar. His face is consistently bright and good-tempered. Now and again he lifts his unwilling body away from the desk into which it seems almost to have grown, and walks slowly to the open access shelves to consult one of the eighty thousand volumes round the walls. He carries a pen in his mouth like a dog his bone, his eyes are twinkling and his cheeks are flushed. He works assiduously all day. […] If ever a man lived up to and surpassed the clerical promise of his name, it is he, for he is far more than a writer, he is an eminent authority on Catholicism with numerous entries to his credit in the catalogue. Above all, he is a famous encyclopaedist working on a twenty-five volume dictionary of Christian antiquities. A great Frenchman whose erudition is proverbial, who has lived in England for years and refrains from speaking anything but French, the Abbé Leclercq is adored by his friends for whom he has an endless fund of fact and humour, and he is revered by strangers for being a perfect illustration of the scholar reader.24
Another regular reader until his death in 1978 was Mr Solomon Pottesman, usually known as Potty, a self-taught antiquarian bookseller, who was never seen without his cloth cap, and who provided against cold weather by inserting under his shirt two or three copies of The Times. And no talk about the Reading Room can omit mention of Miss Elizabeth McDonald, who died in 1980, and who from the 1930s was a daily user of the Reading Room for nearly fifty years. (How she would have disapproved of the current system of extended closures of the Reading Room at Christmas and other bank holidays.) She was well-known for her white shorts and plimsolls, and for arriving on her bicycle at the British Museum each day to head for her seat at J.8 as soon as the room opened at 9 a.m. In the early 1950s an outstanding personality in the Reading Room was Angus Wilson, the novelist, who was then the Deputy Superintendent and whose taste in neckties brightened the room considerably. He made a point of being friendly to the readers (something which not all his predecessors had done) and introducing people to others who were working in a similar field. One of those whom he befriended was Colin Wilson who attracted great publicity when at the age of 25 he published The Outsider in 1956. This is how Colin Wilson remembered his namesake in an article which he wrote in 1969.
I often saw Angus Wilson walking around the Reading Room – he was deputy superintendent at the time. I’d read his first novel, Hemlock and After, and, while it wasn’t really my cup of tea, been impressed by the quality of his observation. Most of the regulars knew him, because his telephone voice was so penetrating and the conversations often fascinating. ‘Hello, is John Gielgud there please? … Hello John, how are you? Did you get back all right?’25
24 J. Penn, For Readers Only (1936), pp. 181-2. 25 Colin Wilson, ‘Outsider in the Reading Room’, British Museum Society Bulletin, no. 2 (15 October1969), pp. 9-10.
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We are now approaching the end of our story, but before the final reading,26 I should like to recall two or three episodes from life in the Reading Room in the 1960s and 1970s. It was at this time that flocks of young and attractive Italian girls used to invade the Reading Room each summer, allegedly to compose dissertations of some kind. They proved a grave distraction to some of the male readers – curiously enough more particularly to elderly male readers. (In his novel entitled Rates of Exchange Malcolm Bradbury referred to Italian girls shouting hotly for company round tea-time and tempting serious scholars into folly.) In the mid-1960s the book supply service had considerable problems and greatly tried the tempers of many of the readers. One Cambridge academic was so incensed that he expressed a fervent wish to relieve his feelings by punching the Deputy Superintendent in the eye. Then there was the occasion when a reader was discovered using ink and Tippex to amend the text of the book which he was consulting. When challenged he said that he was entitled to do so because the book was his own. It was pointed out to him that the book in question bore the ownership stamp of the Library. ‘I know that’, he replied impatiently, ‘but I wrote the book and I am just correcting some errors in it’. It took a long time to persuade him that he was not entitled to do so. Our final reading is from David Lodge’s novel The British Museum is Falling Down, which was published in 1965.27
Adam passed through the narrow vaginal passage, and entered the huge womb of the Reading Room. Across the floor, dispersed along the radiating desks, scholars curled, foetus-like, over their books, little buds of intellectual life thrown off by some gigantic act of generation performed upon that nest of knowledge, those inexhaustible ovaries of learning, the concentric inner rings of the catalogue shelves. The circular wall of the Reading Room wrapped the scholars in a protective layer of books, while above them arched the vast, distended belly of the dome. Little daylight entered through the grimy glass at the top. No sounds of traffic or other human business penetrated to that warm, airless space. The dome looked down on the scholars, and the scholars looked down on their books; and the scholars loved their books, stroking the pages with soft pale fingers. The pages responded to the fingers’ touch, and yielded their knowledge gladly to the scholars, who collected it in little boxes of file-cards. When the scholars raised their eyes from their desks they saw nothing to distract them, nothing out of harmony with their books, only the smooth, curved lining of the womb. Wherever the eye travelled, it met no arrest, no angle, no parallel lines receding into infinity, no pointed arch striving towards the unattainable; all was curved, rounded, self-sufficient, complete. And the scholars dropped their eyes to their books again, fortified and consoled. They curled themselves more tightly over their books, for they did not want to leave the warm womb, where they fed upon electric light and inhaled the musty odour of yellowing pages.28
So we conclude our account of a building and an institution which has aroused a great deal of affection, irritation and admiration on the part of its users. Members of the staff too have mixed feelings about the Reading Room. A colleague once said to me – ‘This place would be all right if it were not for the readers’. The remark was made at the end of a long, hot and wearisome day, so I knew how he felt. I reminded him however that if there were no readers, he, I, and many others would be out of a job. He saw the point of my observation – but at the time I do not think that it consoled him much.
26 But before the final reading: but before asking Professor David Lodge to read from his novel The British Museum is Falling Down, which was published in 1965, 27 Our … 1965: Now Professor David Lodge will read two extracts from The British Museum is Falling Down. 28 David Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down (London, 1965), pp. 50-51.
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