The Reading Room in Literature

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. 1 eBLJ 2019, Article 5 The Reading Room in Literature 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. 2 eBLJ 2019, Article 5 The Reading Room in Literature 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.

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