HIDDEN CORNERS
OLD FATHER THAMES Christina Hardyment’s quest for literature inspired by the River Thames began in Topography, England, Thames, but she soon discovered that the Library’s holdings on the river were concealed upstairs, downstairs and in the Atlas Cases When I was given the go-ahead to turn my lifelong love of the Thames into a book about its literature, Writing the Thames (Bodleian Library, 2016), The London Library was my first port of call. Which was odd, because I live in Oxford, and have the formidable Bodleian Library a ten-minute bike ride away. But, as all aficionados of our Library know, if one wants inspiration coupled with exercise, there is no better starting point than meandering along the shelfmark devoted to one’s subject. Once there, like Horace Walpole’s princes of Serendip, one will ‘make discoveries, by accident and 26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
sagacity, of things one was not in quest of’ . Propinquity is as important as serendipity. Unlike coldly blinkered digital library catalogues, which only show you what you ask for, open shelves offer stimulating new acquaintances propped among familiar friends. The Library’s Topography, England, Thames holdings include the two heavy hitters of Thames history, Fred S. Thacker’s The Thames Highway: A History of the Inland Navigation (1914) and Peter Ackroyd’s Thames: Sacred River (2007), as well as a respectable range of books by enthusiasts and specialists. But to my mind its most interesting
holdings reflect its mid-nineteenth-century beginnings, a time when railways were taking commercial traffic off the river. Pleasure-boating thus became safer and was hugely popular. Trains also provided convenient holiday transport: frilly-eaved stations along the length of the river meant that sybaritic downstream boating could come into its own. All the requirements of a Victorian cabin library can be found in the Library, mainly in the Thames shelfmark. The Irish poet and humorist John Fisher Murray completed A Picturesque Tour of the River Thames in its Western Course, including particular descriptions of Richmond,
