Issue 18: Winter 2012

MAGAZINE WINTER 2012 / ISSUE 18

ÂŁ3.50

Satirical gems Judy Rudoe on the significance of Victorian jewellery in Punch

sheer decadence Matthew Sturgis examines the books that defined the English Decadent movement

bibliography Michael Leapman shines a light on an idiosyncratic collection

The London Library Magazine / issue 18

15 Jewellery was a highly effective form of display in Victorian times, indicating love, loss, belonging and status. Judy Rudoe describes how Punch magazine exploited this visual device in its cartoons.

C ontents 5 FROM THE librarian 6 Contributors 11 BEHIND THE BOOK

A piece of Victorian imitation jewellery, sometimes known as ‘mosaic gold’. Private collection.

19 J.K. Huysmans’ A rebours (1884), with its depiction of a world of amoral aesthetic pleasure, was the book that distilled the essence of Decadence.

Several other books acted as personal sacred texts to the movement’s followers, as Matthew Sturgis reveals.

Aubrey Beardsley’s cover design for the Yellow Book, 1894.

One hundred and fifty years since George Eliot’s novel Romola was serialised in the Cornhill Magazine, Jonathan Clarke celebrates its anniversary and describes the dedicated research Eliot undertook, both in Florence and in London, to ensure the book’s historical accuracy.

24

In the remote fastness of the Bibliography shelfmark on the fifth floor, Michael Leapman discovers an unexpected diversity of volumes, from the lavishly illustrated Books of King Henry VIII and His Wives (2009), examining royal reading habits, to the alarmingly titled The Enemies of Books (1880).

Eric Gill’s bookplate for Thomas Lowinsky, 1922.

13 bibliotherapy Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur was Jane Shilling’s spellbinding guide to her first experiences of love

15 SATIRICAL GEMS Judy Rudoe examines the way Punch magazine employed jewellery in its cartoons to make profound social and political comments on Victorian society

19 SHEER DECADENCE

22 George Eliot, London Stereoscopic Company. © Rob Dickins Collection at Watts Gallery, Guildford, Surrey.

Hallie Rubenhold on the memoirs that were key to her understanding of England during the period of the French Revolution, the setting of her recent novel

Matthew Sturgis on the volumes that, for the Decadent writers of the 1890s, acted as guidebooks to a new and dangerously exciting way of life

22 GEORGE ELIOT AT THE LONDON LIBRARY George Eliot’s historical novel, Romola, was thoroughly researched in Florence and using the Library’s resources, as Jonathan Clarke explains

24 HIDDEN CORNERS Michael Leapman highlights the particular literary treasures of the Bibliography collection

29 MEMBERS’ NEWS 35 EATING OUT

p

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 3

•

FROM THE LIBRARIAN After many months of major public events and startlingly inclement weather, the arrival of the festive season may be cause for some relief this year: crisp nights and quiet, wintry indulgences suit many of us better than soggy summer afternoons and reminders of our negligible athletic prowess!

We hope you will find few better quiet indulgences than this issue of The London Library Magazine, featuring as it does matters of the heart (Jane Shilling’s moving Bibliotherapy on the Morte Darthur, page 13), literary decadence (Matthew Sturgis on the ‘golden books’ of the 1890s, pages 19–21) and an inspiring account by Jonathan Clarke of the genesis of George Eliot’s Romola (pages 22–3).

Since cold weather is so conducive to reading, many of you will be intrigued by Michael Leapman’s exploration of our Bibliography collection, where he finds a great deal more than lists of books. His Hidden Corners (pages 24–6) unearths volumes relating to engraved bookplates, falconry and cookery, among many other surprises.

On the cover The Peacock Skirt, 1893, by Aubrey Beardsley, from Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1894).

In Members’ News (pages 29–34) you will find a final chance to purchase London Library Christmas cards, alongside a range of gift ideas for your fellow bibliophiles. Rather than buying gifts for others, you may also consider dropping hints to those buying for you – Library gift vouchers have proved to be a popular way to offset upcoming subscription renewals.

Members’ News also includes several important announcements, including the very great honour of our first ever Vice-Patron and the appointment of three eminent new Vice-Presidents.

We are immensely grateful to all who provide support to the Library, and the financial support of the Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation (page 30) is another example of extraordinary generosity that will allow the Library to move ahead with its plans for the future.

Those plans for the future – namely, Phase 3(a) of the Library’s redevelopment – will be covered in more detail in the next issue of the Magazine. In the meantime, we thank you, our members, for your ongoing support, and we wish you a peaceful, restful Christmas and New Year.

Inez T.P.A. Lynn Librarian

Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 16 November 2012 © 2012 The London Library.

The opinions in this particular publication do not necessarily reflect the views of The London Library.

All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication.

Editorial Publishers Jane Grylls and Kim Jenner Editor Mary Scott Design and Production Joyce Mason Picture Research Sarah Bolwell and Mary Jane Gibson Proofreader Sarah Bolwell

Editorial Committee David Breuer Lottie Cole Aimée Heuzenroeder Peter Parker Erica Wagner

Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658 Hannah Jackson 020 7300 5675 Development Office, The London Library Aimée Heuzenroeder 020 7766 4734

Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to development@londonlibrary.co.uk

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5

CONTRIBUTORS

Jonathan Clarke

joined the library in 2007

Jonathan Clarke is a computer programmer.

He studied Mathematics at Worcester College, Oxford, and set up his first software business in 1985. He has worked for the Lloyd’s of London insurance market, the Getty photo library and on the BP oil-spill clean-up. He also runs a website for residential landlords and develops data-mining applications for mobile phones. He lives in south London and in Wellington, New Zealand.

Judy Rudoe

joined the library in 1987

Judy Rudoe is a curator at the British Museum and has written on many aspects of the decorative arts, especially jewellery. Her books include Decorative Arts 1850–1950 (1991), Cartier 1900–1939 (1997) and Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World (2010), written jointly with Charlotte Gere, which won the William M.B. Berger Prize for British Art History in 2011.

Michael Leapman joined the library in 1984

Jane Shilling joined the library in 1983

A journalist for more than 50 years, Michael Leapman’s longest service was with The Times, where he was New York correspondent and Diary editor. His 18 books include biographies of Rupert Murdoch and Thomas Fairchild, the eighteenthcentury nurseryman. His Companion Guide to New York won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1983. His latest publication is The Book of the British Library (2012).

Jane Shilling was born in Sittingbourne and educated at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She lives in Greenwich and hunts with the Ashford Valley.

She has published two books of memoir, The Fox in the Cupboard (2004) and The Stranger in the Mirror (2011). She writes for publications including the Daily Telegraph and Prospect magazine, and is currently brooding about her next book.

Hallie Rubenhold

Matthew Sturgis joined the library in 1983

joined the library in 2010

Hallie Rubenhold is a historian and broadcaster, and an authority on British eighteenth-century social history. She has worked as a university lecturer and a curator, and often acts as a historical adviser for documentaries and dramas, including Channel 4’s City of Vice. She has written two works of non-fiction to critical acclaim: The Covent Garden Ladies (2005) and Lady Worsley’s Whim (2008). Mistress of My Fate (2011) is her first novel.

6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Matthew Sturgis is steeped in the 1890s. His book, Passionate Attitudes: the English Decadence of the Eighteen Nineties (1995, re-issued 2011), has been described as ‘by far the best and most comprehensive introduction to the period’. He has written acclaimed biographies of Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Sickert, and appears briefly (in the background) in the film of The Importance of Being Earnest (2002). He is currently working on a major new biography of Oscar Wilde for John Murray.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 7

8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 9

10 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

BEHIND THE

BOOK

Hallie Rubenhold turned to the memoirs of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century figures in the History and Biography stacks to inform her novel, Mistress of My Fate, set in England at the start of the French Revolution.

‘

Hallie Rubenhold’s Mistress of My Fate (2011), 2012 paperback edition.

’

I’ve always found memoirs to be compelling reading. The events detailed in them don’t have to be turning points in history; in fact, sometimes the mundane incidents shed more light on the human experience than the great events.

It was the memoirist’s particular insights into life that I sought to capture in my novel Mistress of My Fate. There seems to be a wealth of novels about the adventures of men during the period of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, and relatively few written from a female perspective.

 Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,

trans. Angela Scholar, ed. Patrick Coleman (Oxford, 2000). L. French Lit., Trans.

Rousseau’s Confessions is the mother of all eighteenth-century memoirs, first published in 1782, four years after the philosopher’s death. In this work, Rousseau lays down the history of his life as a sinner, and documents his experiences as a human being, prone to weakness and temptation. The prose is sumptuous, while his unapologetic tone is striking, even to the modern reader.  Memoirs of My Life by Edward Gibbon, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London, 1966).

Biog. Gibbon.

The publication of Rousseau’s memoirs in the 1780s inspired others to bare their souls in a similar way. Gibbon left his memoirs unfinished on his death in 1794, and the first edition was published in 1796. They offer a moving account of his life – his heartfelt friendships, his disappointment in love, and his sense of his own decline – and provide a surprising and poignant picture of the great historian.  Memoirs of William Hickey, ed. Peter Quennell (London, 1960). Biog. Hickey.

The memoirs of the lawyer William Hickey (1749–1830) provide a gripping record of his sordid experiences as a man about town in London during the second half of the

eighteenth century. Unfortunately, they are often overlooked in favour of Boswell’s better-known reminiscences on the same subject. However, I feel Hickey’s offer something more candid. Where Boswell can be posturing and self-conscious, Hickey’s memoirs feel quite genuine and read like the uncensored storytelling of an old roué.  Journal of My Life During the French Revolution by Grace Dalrymple Elliott (London, 1955). Biog. Elliott.

First-hand accounts of great moments in history make for a powerful read, and Elliott’s remembrances of her life in Paris at the time of the Terror, first published posthumously in 1859, are no exception. As the Scottish mistress of the doomed duc d’Orléans, she often found herself at the centre of events. Unfortunately, it is believed that her record of history, and the role she played in it, has been largely embellished, either by her nineteenth-century editor or

by Elliott herself.  Memoirs of the Late Mrs Robinson, Written by Herself, edited by her daughter, Mary Elizabeth Robinson (London, 1830). Biog. Robinson.

Memoirs are fascinating for the way they manipulate the reader into thinking they are reading an entirely truthful account of a life,

rather than a selective one. Mary Robinson (1758–1800) was an actress, poet and courtesan, and her telling of her history is more surprising for what has been omitted, such as the true nature of her relationship with the Prince of Wales, than for what she’s decided to include. Thankfully, subsequent biographies by Paula Byrne and Sarah Gristwood have filled in the blanks.  The Memoirs of Mrs Leeson, ed. Mary Lyons (3 vols., Dublin, 1995). Biog. Leeson.

Just the opposite is true for Mrs Leeson, a woman in a similar profession to Mrs Robinson. Unlike her, Leeson provides a frank description of her life as a Dublin prostitute and brothel-keeper. Leeson’s work is one of the few of its genre to present a picture of the grim realities of life faced by such women.  The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, Written by Herself (London, 1924).

Biog. Wilson.

Somewhere between these two accounts lies Harriette Wilson’s kiss-and-tell memoir of how she came to be one of the most notorious courtesans of the early nineteenth century. More than anything, it is her teasing and beguiling voice that I find remarkable. This was part of a courtesan’s act, the role she played around men, and to find it recorded so vividly is a real treat.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 11

BIBLIOTHERAPY

Jane Shilling on how a chance encounter with Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur introduced her to the complicated world of love

MORTE DARTHUR sir Thomas Malory I arrived at university aged 18, in the autumn of 1976, equally ill prepared for the study of literature and of life. I had come from a girls’ grammar school in Sittingbourne, Kent, which prided itself so fiercely on its respectability that we were taught Chaucer from editions that replaced dubious words with asterisks. It played merry hell with the rhyme scheme and convinced me that Middle English was not for me.

About love I felt much the same. At school we rarely came into contact with the opposite sex, and in any case I had thick glasses and plaits, and was not considered a catch. Unpacking my belongings in the chaste surroundings of my all-women’s college, with its pungent miasma of floor polish and boiled greens, I did not entertain much hope that I would find the low door in the wall that was supposed to lead to Oxford’s rich enchantments of mind and spirit.

One day, in the dank offices of the university newspaper, which occupied a disused lavatory at the bottom of the Oxford Union’s garden, I met a scholar of Trinity. His name was Hargurchet Bhabra.

He was shortish, with a noble profile, and metal-framed glasses that made him look like a nineteenth-century composer. He

wore a blue velvet jacket and thought a good deal of himself – with some justification.

He took me back to his rooms, where he announced that he was going to read me the most beautiful sentence in the English language. He was given to this sort of hyperbole. We were very young.

I sat humbly on his carpet – for I had already realised that everyone at the university was cleverer than me, and my only hope of not being found out was to keep my mouth firmly shut – and listened as he gave a rapid précis of the story of Sir Urry who, you recall, arrives at the court of King Arthur suffering from festering wounds that only the best knight in the world can heal.

Every half-decent knight in Arthur’s court has a go, but none succeeds. Then comes Lancelot, who knows he is not the best knight in the world, because he is a sinner and loves Arthur’s Queen Guinevere, and she him. He prays, and then he heals Sir Urry. And while everyone rejoices, ‘Sir Lancelot wepte, as he had been a chylde that had been beaten!’ read Hargurchet, with tears in his own eyes, and in that instant I fell in love with him and with the Morte Darthur, Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century retelling of the Arthurian legend, from which he had been reading.

The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (detail), 1881–98, by Edward Burne-Jones.

The first of these things was a bad idea.

I was not the only girl to whom he had read this passage, and they all fell in love with him – except for the girl he loved, which is the way these things work. Malory’s book, on the other hand, never caused me a moment’s mortification. Instead it taught me a great many things I urgently needed to know about love, and friendship, and getting them badly wrong, but not giving up and trying to do better.

The graceful cadences of Eugène Vinaver’s 1977 Oxford edition of Malory’s text sounded sweetly after the bristling incomprehensibility of the Old English with which I had spent my first term grappling. And as I read the account of Sir Ector, his son, Sir Kay, and Kay’s foster brother, Arthur, and their adventure with the sword in the stone, I realised that I knew Malory already; that I had known him, in fact, since childhood, when T.H. White’s Arthurian tetralogy, The Once and Future King (1958), which is based on the Morte Darthur and faithfully echoes the beautiful dying fall of Malory’s style, cast its spell over me.

The relationship between Arthur, his wife Guinevere, and his best friend Lancelot, who is also Guinevere’s lover, is knotted and tangled with misunderstanding and quarrels. ‘What aileth you, ’ says Arthur, exasperated, to the Queen in one of her periodic scrapes, ‘that ye can nat kepe sir Launcelot uppon your syde?’ But he is on her side, and to the very end he loves her and hopes that she will come to him. But she never will, though she loves him too.

Hargurchet died sadly and too soon.

But whenever I re-read the Morte Darthur, which I do quite often, I remember that moment in my old friend’s rooms, when the door to life suddenly sprang open.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13

Satirical Gems

The range of Punch magazine caricatures involving jewellery is extraordinary. Its social and political significance would have been obvious to a Victorian readership, as Judy Rudoe explains.

The harnessing of jewellery as a potent vehicle for satire predates the Victorian age.

Queen Charlotte was frequently caricatured wearing lavish diamond jewellery, especially during the scandal over the impeachment in 1786 of the Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings, whose gifts of enormous diamonds to George III and the Queen were widely seen as the purchase money for his acquittal after being accused of corruption.

Punch cartoons have of course appeared in the literature on Victorian jewellery, to demonstrate the popularity of certain types of ornament; a cartoon in Punch meant their use was so widespread that a joke would be immediately intelligible. But the use of jewellery in satire goes much further, often making piercing social and political comment.

Beyond depictions of people wearing jewellery is a whole raft of humorous writing in Punch that is purely verbal. When read in conjunction with The Times, the speed of response by Punch is remarkable; the report that prompts the satire is not only obvious but sometimes copied line for line. The issues of Punch from the 1840s and 1850s provide the richest pickings for jewellery.

From the mid-1860s, satire is much more focused on the excesses of clothing.

When it was first launched in 1842, Punch was socially and politically radical; the sometimes hard-hitting cartoons had ‘Mr Sponge at a country dinner party’, illustration by John Leech, from Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour by R.S. Surtees (1853).

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15

p

much to say about modern Victorians. They poked fun at soft targets like provincials and women, but championed the oppressed and exposed the exploitation of governesses and brutally over-worked seamstresses.

This was often done by featuring pairs of contrasting satires. Two such satires appeared facing each other in 1849: ‘Pin Money’ and ‘Needle Money’ . One depicts the woman at her toilette with all the pin money (i.e. spending money) she needs, about to don her snake necklace that she has lovingly taken from its box labelled Hunt & Roskell, a renowned Bond Street jeweller, placing her in a very well-to-do class.

The opposite illustration shows the poor seamstress sewing in her attic for ‘needle money’ , with no ‘pin money’ at all.

Class itself as a subject of mockery features frequently during these early years of Punch’s history, especially the aspiring lower-middle classes, who were able to shop for domestic luxuries and accessories for the first time.

Here, Punch took its cue from the novels of the day, by Charles Dickens, a master at the use of jewellery to create character, and also by the sporting novelist R.S. Surtees. Both authors saw the display of expensive ornaments as a hallmark of vulgarity.

For Mr Merdle, the pretentious railway speculator in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–7), marriage was a form of speculation, his wife no more than a ‘capital bosom to hang jewels upon. Mr Merdle wanted something to hang jewels upon and he bought it for the purpose . . .

The bosom, moving in Society with the jewels displayed upon it, attracted general 16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

‘Pin Money’ (left) and ‘Needle Money’ (right), Punch, 22 December 1849.

admiration. Society approving, Mr Merdle was satisfied. ’ Surtees created the character of Mrs Jorrocks, in Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities (1838), a woman not constrained by any considerations of moderation in her choice of dress or her taste for an abundance of imitation jewellery: ‘Across her forehead she wore a gold band, with a many-coloured glass butterfly, and her neck, arms, waist (at least what ought to have been her waist), were hung round and

studded with mosaic gold chains, brooches, rings, buttons, bracelets, &c., looking for all the world like a portable pawnbroker’s shop … In the right of a gold band round her middle was an immense gold watch, with a bunch of mosaic seals appended to a massive chain. ’ Mrs Jorrocks’s trinkets may have been in the mind of the author of a piece that appeared in Punch in the summer of 1848.

Titled ‘Sketches in salt and fresh water’ , it pokes fun at two neighbouring seaside towns, the ‘very vulgar’ Margate and the ‘very genteel’ Ramsgate, noting: ‘it is a curious fact that no lady is complete at a watering place without a watch. At Margate the watches grow to a very large size. At Ramsgate, however, … they are rarely bigger than fourpenny pieces. They are so small that you imagine they must be sold, like shrimps, by the pint. I should say, thirty Ramsgate watches make one Margate ditto. ’ Punch’s great caricaturist, from 1841 till his death in 1864, was John Leech, who emerges as the most inventive of the jewellery humorists in the 1850s. He was a friend of Dickens and an exact contemporary of Surtees, whose works he illustrated, and the view of the potential absurdity of jewellery held by both illustrator and novelist is much of a piece. Their mockery was applied to men just as much as women. The year 1853 saw the publication of Surtees’s novel Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, illustrated by Leech. Here is the fox-hunting Mr Sponge, making himself ‘an uncommon swell. He put on a desperately stiff starcher [slang for a hunting neckcloth], secured in front with a large gold fox-head pin with carbuncle eyes; a fine, fancy-fronted shirt, with a slight tendency to pink, adorned with mosaic-gold-tethered studs of sparkling diamonds (or French paste, as the case might be); a white waistcoat with fancy buttons; a blue coat with bright plain ones, and a velvet collar, black tights, … and patent leather pumps with gilt buckles. ’ A plethora of cartoons satirising men’s fashions appeared in Punch that same year. The first is a sketch by Leech; titled ‘Taste’ , it shows a smart man about town wearing a gruesomely large Queen Victoria, 1845, by F.X. Winterhalter, wearing a wreath of poppies and wheat-ears, possibly the same as the one she wore to the Guildhall in 1851.

Royal Collection Trust/ © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012.

SATIRICAL GEMS stick-pin in the form of a skull, alongside his companion, and is captioned: ‘First Swell: That’s a deuced neat style of pin, Charley, ’ who replies: ‘Ya-as – it’s a pretty thing.

A’ve got a set a shirt studs – and aw – waistcoat buttons to match – look stunning at night – ’sure yah!’ Stick-pins with death’s heads did indeed exist. You could even have the kind that gnashed their teeth and rolled their eyes at the touch of a tiny battery, hidden in the wearer’s waistcoat pocket.

These electric versions were introduced a decade later by Gustave Trouvé in Paris, in the 1860s, but they demonstrate that Leech’s cartoon is not as far-fetched as it may seem.

The Court Circular column in The Times was always good fodder for Punch, especially for send-ups of costumes and jewels worn at the fancy-dress balls held by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. But jewellery worn by the Queen was used in much more subtle ways by the magazine for political purposes. In July 1851 the Queen attended a Grand Ball at the Guildhall in the City. According to The Times of 10 July, she wore a white satin dress richly ornamented with gold and silver thread and diamonds, and her ‘head-dress was composed of poppies, golden oat and wheat ears, ornamented with diamonds’. It was no doubt intended as a seasonal tribute. But Punch seized the opportunity to stand up for the Protectionists against the disciples of free trade, making fun of the precious

materials implied in ‘golden oat and wheat ears’. The Protectionists had broken with Prime Minister Robert Peel over his repeal in 1846 of the Corn Laws, which had been established to protect cereal producers in Britain from cheaper foreign imports, and as the Conservatives tried to consolidate their position it was still a live issue. A letter, written by ‘Protection’, quotes The Times passage in full, denouncing the head-dress as an insult to agricultural interest: how Above Battery-operated electric jewels invented by Gustave Trouvé, Paris, c.1865. From La Nature, 1879.

Left ‘Taste’, sketch by John Leech, Punch, 23 April 1853.

could the Queen wear golden oats and wheat ears, with oats and wheat at their present ‘no’ prices?

The Crimean War of 1853–6, especially Britain’s bungling of its part in the military campaign, was a particular bugbear of the Punch editorial team. One of the Crimean cartoons includes a joke about chatelaines, belt hooks from which depended all manner of ornaments, useful or otherwise. Titled ‘Mr Bull wants to know “The Reason Why”’, it appeared in 1855, and shows Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty, dressed as a housekeeper whose chatelaine bears appropriate symbols: a large anchor hanging from a lifebelt, along with a key. The caption refers to the calamity of the charge by the Light Brigade of Dragoons at the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854. Graham was implicated in the failure of the Naval campaign in the Crimea, and here he is depicted resisting the inquiry ordered by the Government.

The line ‘The Reason Why’ is a deliberate misquote of ‘Theirs not to reason why’ , from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ , published in December 1854.

Throughout the nineteenth century, there is only one cartoon of someone wearing jewellery, with accompanying text, which takes up a whole page of Punch. Appearing in July 1859, it is a cruel jest at a gullible young visitor to the shop of the jewellers, Castellani, in Rome. The THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

p

’A Young Lady on the High Classical School of Ornament’, Punch, 16 July 1859.

story of how one of the most respected jewellery families of Rome devoted their entire production to a political cause is a unique case. The discovery of ancient gold in Italy in the second quarter of the nineteenth century occurred at a critical time in the development of the Risorgimento. Against a background of papal antipathy towards the nationalists, the Castellani family developed an astute scheme to promote the cause of unification by reproducing Italian jewellery of the past, inspired by the archaeological finds, from the Bronze Age onwards, to create a vision of a unified Italy and its history, through jewellery. Among the firm’s most original inventions were enormous caskets containing all the jewels that an Etruscan, Roman or Byzantine lady might need, carefully separated into different caskets for the different periods. Aside from their obvious novelty value, a ready-made collection absolved the client purchasing it from having to make a choice and risk getting it wrong. Poor Imogen, the subject 18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

‘

Punch gives Imogen a complete muddle of Etruscan, Greek and Roman ornaments, and depicts her wearing all of them at once

’

of the cartoon, does precisely the latter.

Punch gives her a complete muddle of Etruscan, Greek and Roman ornaments, and then depicts her wearing all of them at once, which was surely never intended by Castellani. The title, ‘A Young Lady on the High Classical School of Ornament’ , has a double meaning, alluding to contemporary discourse on reproductions of classical works.

This centred on the appropriateness of the ancient works being copied, whether jewellery or other objects, which had to be beautiful, not merely curious, and on the

idea that the correct principles of design could only apply to adaptations as opposed to faithful reproductions. The cartoon appeared three years before Castellani first displayed their jewels in London at the International Exhibition of 1862, yet their work was familiar enough from jewellery and reports brought back by British visitors to Rome to prompt such a well-informed satire.

Jewellery was a powerful vehicle of communication, exploited by those who gave it as much as those who wore it. On a personal level, it reflected the preoccupations and aspirations of its owners, indicating love, loss, belonging, status or beliefs. But a further unexpected dimension is revealed in the pages of Punch. The way in which jewellery was taken up by the magazine as a means of social comment, on topical issues ranging from provincial snobbery to party politics, adds a new dimension to our understanding of the significance attached to jewellery in the Victorian age.

My recent book, co-authored with Charlotte Gere, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World (2010), could not have been written without The London Library. Thanks to the open shelves it is possible to find books never referred to in a jewellery bibliography. The Travel section produced accounts of European tours in the nineteenth century that described the buying of jewellery souvenirs, while we were able to flick through the pages of Punch, the Illustrated London News or the Gentleman’s Magazine with ease in the basement (a task made more comfortable in the newly revamped space with its inglenook desk and lamp).

It was above all the online newspaper archives, one of the most remarkable advances of the digital age, that enabled us to find in seconds information that would previously have taken months if not years to assemble, as well as items we would never even have thought to look for. The Library’s subscription to The Times digital archive and the London Gazette became available in early 2007 just as I was starting to write the book, and transformed the way in which we approached our subject.

Through its pages it is possible to chronicle what Queen Victoria wore for practically every event of her life, and the sheer volume of astonishingly well-informed writing on jewellery at international exhibitions in the news pages confirmed time and again our conviction that jewellery played a central role in the cultural life of the period.

.

Sheer

DECADENCE For the English Decadents of the 1890s, certain ‘golden books’ – from Huysmans’ A rebours to Wilde’s Salomé with its distinctive illustrations by Beardsley – played a central role in defining the movement, as Matthew Sturgis reveals ‘It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.’

In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Lord Henry Wotton presents the beautiful and impressionable Dorian with a slim yellow-backed French novel. This volume becomes Dorian’s guidebook – his Baedeker of Decadence – leading him down a path of ever-more refined pleasures and calculated excesses, towards destruction. The book is not given a title but, as many of Oscar Wilde’s readers would have known – and as Wilde himself later acknowledged – the work was J.K. Huysmans’ novel, A rebours. Published in France in 1884, with English-language editions only appearing from 1922 (translated as Against the Grain or Against Nature), it tells the tale of an effete aristocrat seeking escape from the tedium and crassness of the modern world, in acts of aesthetic selfindulgence and perversion. In the end he abandons even sex, for the more complex pleasures provided by rare perfumes, artificial plants, late Latin literature and a jewel-encrusted pet tortoise.

It was the book that, perhaps more than any other, distilled the essence of Decadence. Drawing on the novel ideas of Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire, it rejected the nineteenth-century cult of material progress, and proclaimed instead a retreat into a realm of amoral aesthetic pleasure; a creed not merely of Art for Art’s Sake (a dangerous enough notion to most Victorians), but of Life for Art’s Sake. The artificial was to be ranked above the natural, the complex above the simple. The Dandy, the Bohemian and the Artist were to be the heroes of the new era. These were arresting new ideas, and they had a particular attraction in the artistic circles of 1890s London. They retain something of their force even now.

Lord Henry Wotton – brilliant, informed, inquiring – would surely have been a member of The London Library, and I did wonder whether the copy of A rebours that he lent to Dorian would perhaps have been borrowed from St James’s Square. (The proscription against lending books to third parties is exactly the sort of rule that, as an inveterate subversive, he would have been delighted to flaunt.) But it seems not. The title is not listed in the Library’s 1888 catalogue, and appears only in an 1897 edition in the 1903 catalogue.

The idea, however, that a particular book might act as the vade mecum to a new (and dangerously exciting) way of life was a pervasive one for the Decadent writers of the 1890s. The novels – and the histories – of the period are littered with such personalised sacred texts. And The

Top left Illustration by Arthur Zaidenberg of the character Jean Des Esseintes, from J.K. Huysmans’ novel Against the Grain (1884), 1931 English edition. Courtesy of Gilden Books Ltd. Above Max Beerbohm’s caricature of himself in a top hat, 1897. Courtesy of Maggs Bros. Ltd. THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19

•

‘

Beardsley’s images of femmes fatales

and ambiguous men became the very symbol of the age: they were entirely new, decidedly unhealthy and tinged with a pervasive aura of sex

Above and right Illustrated title page by Aubrey Beardsley of Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1894), 1907 edition, courtesy of The Royal Academy of Arts Library; Oscar Wilde, c.1890s, photograph by Napoleon Sarony, courtesy of Library of Congress.

London Library would have been able to supply most of them.

Wilde himself nominated as his ‘golden book’ Walter Pater’s 1873 volume, Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Although ostensibly a collection of essays about the artistic flowering of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, its celebrated ‘Conclusion’ prefigured A rebours.

Drawing on some of the same ‘poisonous’ French sources that Huysmans used, it urged its readers – rather than following any higher moral purpose – to seek only the most intense and carefully discriminated experience of each passing moment, and for experience’s sake alone. The book was denounced from the pulpit as the gospel of a ‘New Hedonism’. And, of course, that was what attracted Wilde to it. He claimed never to travel without a copy. It was, he said, ‘the very flower of decadence: the last trumpet should have sounded when it was written’.

In truth, though, there were several other books that he might just as well have plucked as the ‘very flower of decadence’: Mademoiselle de Maupin (Gautier’s 1835 tale of a cross-dressing temptress, and another work that Wilde claimed not to be able to travel without); as well 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

as Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (1857) and Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (2 vols., 1840), both of which Wilde regarded as essential reading.

The English Decadents of the fin de siècle defined themselves through the books they read and the books they owned. Obsessed as they were with surface, with the supremacy of form over content, it mattered to them not merely what the books said, but how they looked.

This was the great age of the ‘book beautiful’ , of the limited edition on handmade paper, the lavishly illustrated de luxe production, and the choice volume bound in coloured boards, gilt vellum or even human skin.

The man who embraced this notion most enthusiastically was John Lane, co-founder with Elkin Mathews of the Bodley Head publishing house. A brilliant publisher in his own right, he was fortunate to have in the service of his vision a bona fide artistic genius: Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley’s arresting pen-drawn images of femmes fatales and ambiguous men became the very symbol of the age: they were entirely new, decidedly unhealthy and tinged with a pervasive aura of sex. (The attenuated unhealthiness of the images was, moreover, a just reflection of their creator: the dandified but consumptive Beardsley would die in 1898 at the age of 25.)

For the public and the press it was Beardsley who gave Decadence its distinctive ‘look’. And it was a vision fixed, almost invariably, to a book. Beardsley created the cruel ‘japonesque’ illustrations for Wilde’s Salomé (1891; English edition published in 1894), the elegant calligraphic design for

’

Ernest Dowson’s Verses (1896), and the cover for M.P. Sheil’s wonderfully over-wrought decadent detective story, Prince Zaleski (1895).

He was also the art editor of and principal pictorial contributor to the Yellow Book, the radical periodical – launched by Lane in the spring of 1894 – that seemed to define the moment. The subversive intent of the publication was announced by the fact that – like A rebours and so many other dangerous French novels – it had a yellow cover, with the Beardsley image of a ‘leering harlot’ further compounding the effect. In the 1890s only shallow people – as Wilde might have said – didn’t judge a book by its cover.

By chance, though, Beardsley did not design what many considered to be the most characteristic volume of the period, Silverpoints (1893), the long slender book of determinedly decadent verse by Wilde’s protégé (and the namesake of Dorian), John Gray. Its apple-green boards, stamped with a motif of gold fleurs-de-lis and wavy lines, and the daringly sparse arrangement of its exquisitely wrought poems, were the work of the artist Charles Ricketts (London Library members can get some faint sense of his design from the 1973 facsimile edition of the book).

It was the restrained beauty of this volume that prompted Ada Leverson (‘the wittiest woman in the world,’ according to Wilde) to suggest that Wilde himself ‘should go a step further than these minor poets … [and] publish a book all margin; full of beautiful unwritten thoughts, and have this blank volume bound in some Nile-green skin powdered with gilt nenuphars and smoothed with hard ivory, decorated with gold by Ricketts (if not [by his companion and fellow-artist] Shannon) and printed on Japanese paper’. Wilde, delighted with the idea, had replied, ‘It shall be dedicated

SHEER DECADENCE

Left Aubrey Beardsley’s cover design for the first issue of the journal the Yellow Book (1894). Courtesy of Dr Rosie Miles.

Above Aubrey Beardsley, c.1895, photograph by Frederick Henry Evans. Courtesy of Maggs Bros. Ltd.

to you, and the unwritten text illustrated

by Aubrey Beardsley. There must be five hundred copies for particular friends, six for the general public, and one for America.’

Gray was not, of course, Wilde’s only literary disciple. Many of the young men of the 1890s looked to Wilde and his works for inspiration – young men like Lord Alfred Douglas, Robbie Ross and Robert Hichens (author of the satirical novel The Green Carnation, published in 1894). Few of these neophytes, however, managed to transcend his influence. A conspicuous exception was Max Beerbohm.

In 1894, while still a precocious undergraduate at Merton College, Beerbohm used to shock his Oxford contemporaries by claiming that he had only read three books: W.M. Thackeray’s Four Georges (1860), Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense (1846), and Intentions (1891) by Wilde.

For him Wilde’s collection of essays and ‘duologues’ was a sacred volume. It opened

up a new vision of the world to him. He always referred to it as ‘the Book’, and certainly he learnt much about studied paradox, wit and subversion from its pages.

This learning – absorbed and made personal – he poured into the sparklingly irreverent essays – ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’, ‘A Note on George the Fourth’ and ‘1880’ – that he contributed to the early numbers of the Yellow Book. Although Beerbohm is remembered now, if he is remembered at all, as the author of Zuleika Dobson (1911), the mock-tragic tale of a beautiful young woman causing havoc amongst the undergraduate population of Oxford, he was essentially a figure of the 1890s, and remained one until his death in 1956. It was the 1890s that established his fame, and coloured his outlook on life. He belonged, as he said, ‘to the Beardsley Period’.

He provides, too, the best introduction to the period – to its charm, its absurdity, even its pathos. Seven Men (1919), a

collection of five short stories, provides a wonderfully funny and allusive portrait of the ‘Yellow Nineties’, with its warring minor conteurs, Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton; its doomed poetic dramatist, ‘Savonarola’ Brown; and, best of all, its ‘dim’ poet, Enoch Soames.

The 1890s was an age of minor poets – all-but-forgotten figures such as Theodore Wratislaw, William Theodore Peters and Arthur Symons. Beerbohm’s Soames, author of the critically ignored collection Fungoids, had not, in 1897, achieved even their level of success. He consoled himself, however, with the thought that his genius would be recognised by future generations. Obsessed with his notion, he sells his soul to the Devil in order that he might travel a hundred years into the future to visit the Reading Room at the British Museum, to see if his fame has grown over the course of the decades. He is dismayed to discover that, a century on, he is known only as a fictional character in Beerbohm’s short story.

If Soames had visited St James’s Square, rather than the British Museum, he would have enjoyed a moment of elation. The London Library catalogue does indeed list a volume under his name: Enoch Soames: The Critical Heritage, edited by David Colvin and Edward Maggs (2001). The elation, however, would have been brief. At the bottom of the page, the librarian has added the cruel qualification: ‘Subject: Soames, Enoch (Fictitious Character).’

.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

GEORGE ELIOT

AT THE LONDON LIBRARY

One hundred and fifty years ago, Eliot wrote Romola, a story of fifteenth-century Florence, using the Library’s collections. Jonathan Clarke records the novel’s genesis and the extensive research required to realise this ambitious project.

George Eliot’s Romola was published 150 years ago as a serialisation in the Cornhill Magazine, with the first instalment appearing in July 1862. The opening line, placing it in a historical context ‘more than three centuries and a half ago’ , announces a thoroughly researched novel.

We should celebrate the novel’s anniversary, all the more because Eliot used The London Library collections in her research. Today the Library has many editions of Romola, as well as the complete 115-year run of the Cornhill Magazine.

‘If I could do as I pleased I would much rather become myself a subscriber to the London Library, ’ Eliot wrote in 1853 (The George Eliot Letters, ed.

Gordon S. Haight, 1954–78). But, working as an assistant editor on the Westminster Review, she knew that she could not ‘go to any expense in the matter’ . The success of Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede (1859) and The Mill on the Floss (1860), together with the relative security offered by her relationship with George Henry Lewes, meant that by 1860 she could afford libraries and travel.

The day after submitting the Floss manuscript she and Lewes left for Italy.

Lewes recorded in Florence that ‘while reading about Savonarola it occurred to me that his life and times afforded fine material for an historical romance’ . Girolamo 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

George Eliot, c.1849, by M. D’Albert-Durade.

Savonarola (1452–98) was the radical cleric of his time, critical of the rich and powerful, who was excommunicated and hanged. Eliot and Lewes visited the San Marco monastery where he had been Prior. As a woman Eliot could only see the chapter house, while Lewes was shown the interior. Within a week she was ‘stimulated to entertain rather an ambitious project’ (The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, 1998).

That ambitious project was Romola, which has both romantic and historical characters. As Savonarola’s puritanism clashes with the powerful of fifteenthcentury Florence, Romola cares for her father Bardo, a blind scholar who has spent his wealth on books. She is seduced

by Tito, a man so faithless that he

would not rescue his adoptive father from slavery. Romola attempts to flee Tito rather than face up to him, and Savonarola himself stops her, while Tito’s schemings are hatched with none other than Niccolò Machiavelli. Perhaps it is too much that a sculpture mentioned in passing is ‘modelled by a promising youth named Michelangelo Buonarotti’ .

Bardo’s library is not just a setting but a motivation, a defining source of conflict.

The father dreams of establishing his library as a resource for future scholars: ‘For men, as I hear, will now spend on the transient show of a Giostra [merrygo-round] sums which would suffice to found a library, and confer a lasting possession on mankind’ . On her father’s death, Romola thinks endowing a library is a ‘sacramental obligation’ , but Tito sells the books. Romola finds out and says ‘when you were sure his ear was deaf, and his hand stiff, you robbed him’ .

Eliot knew that such a novel would ‘require a great deal of study and labour’ .

She read histories, guide-books and diaries, books on superstition, gems and surgery, in English, French, Italian, German and Latin, using different libraries for her research as well as books she purchased.

‘If I had Aladdin’s lamp I should certainly use it to get books served up to me at a moment’s notice, ’ she wrote in a letter.

‘

Eliot writes the original bonfire of the vanities , as the rich are shamed into handing their trinkets

’

to Savonarola’s followers

This would have relieved Lewes of some drudgery, as he felt himself ‘a sort of Italian Jackal, hunting up rare books in all the second hand bookstalls of London’ .

On the afternoon of 8 November 1861, for example, Eliot went shopping at Redmayne’s, a silk merchant on Bond Street (now a Burberry store), and then ‘to the London Library where I looked through Selden’s Titles of Honour and brought away Monteil, XVth century’ .

On the evening of 10 November she ‘read Monteil – a marvellous book: crammed with erudition, yet not dull or tiresome’ .

That was praise from a woman who considered Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) ‘not impressive, from want of luminous and orderly presentation’ . The volume of AmansAlexis Monteil’s five-part Histoire des Français des Divers Etats (1843) she borrowed is in the stacks, at H. France.

Eliot wrote that ‘Approximate truth is the only truth attainable but at least one must strive for that, and not wade off into arbitrary falsehood’ . In striving for truth, she conducted careful research into the French troops led by Charles VIII that laid siege to Florence in 1494, and into towns devastated by plague. She writes the original bonfire of the vanities, as the rich are shamed into handing their trinkets to Savonarola’s followers. She uses Italian sayings like ‘I can tell peas from paternosters’ , and ‘I know how many legs go into one boot’ . The wealth of detail allowed Victorian tourists to trace her scenes around the streets of Florence. But Eliot introduces an anachronism or two.

Filippino Lippi’s The Virgin Appearing to St Bernard, c.1480.

Romola enters the church of the Badia Fiorentina and sees Filippino Lippi’s The Virgin Appearing to St Bernard (c.1480).

Unfortunately, that painting came to the church only in 1529.

The publisher of the Cornhill Magazine, George Smith, wanted to publish Eliot’s as yet unfinished novel and to tempt her away from her current publisher, John Blackwood, but she felt ‘hurried and flurried’: ‘26 February 1862: I have written about 60 pages of my romance. Will it ever be finished? Ever be worth anything?

27 February: George Smith made a proposal … it is the most magnificent offer yet made for a novel.

1 March: The project is … finally abandoned. ’ Eliot did not give up on Romola, and nor did Smith. By May, terms ‘handsomer than any ever offered to a writer of fiction’ were agreed. Eliot corresponded with the artist Frederic Leighton, chosen by Smith to illustrate the serialisation. She responded to Leighton’s sketch for the first picture, of Romola and her father, by saying: ‘I meant the hair to fall forward from behind the ears over the neck, and the dress to be without ornament’; her

directions were not followed because, by the time she wrote, the sketch was already being engraved.

Eliot’s struggle to finish the manuscript continued right up to the last instalment in August 1863. On 7 June she was ‘ill with hemicrania, unable to do anything all day ’ , and the next day she wrote that she was ‘still suffering from my cough and headache’ . Yet on 9 June she ‘put the last stroke to Romola. Ebenezer!’

Borrow Romola and read it. At 227,000 words you may not finish it quickly, but you can still be ready for next year’s anniversary of its first publication as a book. Be prepared to return the volume if another reader wants it. We know that Eliot was caught out by a hold request letter. While away in Hampshire in June 1871 she had to write to Lewes’s son, asking him to search her bookcases for The London Library copy of Friedrich August Wolf’s ‘Prolegomena’ to Homer (1795).

As she said: ‘All wrong-doing strikes the innocent more than the guilty, and so in consequence of my mistake you are bothered. ’ Read Romola and celebrate how The London Library serves you now and helped George Eliot 150 years ago.

.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23

HIDDEN CORNERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY Most of us think of a bibliography as a list of publications in a book’s endmatter.

The Bibliography section of The London Library, tucked away on the fifth floor, reveals that there is more to the category than this. Michael Leapman presents his pick of the many unexpected delights on the shelves.

I am sure there are some members of the Library who can navigate confidently through all the myriad complexities of its classification system but, even after some 30 years of membership, I do not count myself amongst them. While prepared to concede that the system, though indisputably arcane, is based on logical principles – or at least principles that appeared logical in the mid-nineteenth century – I suspect that most of us get to grips with its component parts strictly on a need-to-know basis.

So it was that I had scarcely been aware of the Bibliography section, let alone ventured into it, until asked to write a book about the British Library, published earlier this year (The Book of the British Library). Browsing The London Library’s catalogue for the books I needed, I tracked several of them down to this remote fastness that shares the fifth floor with Religion.

Like many people I had thought of bibliography simply as a list of books that appears at the end of a work of non-fiction (although nowadays publishers, terrified of words that smack of intellectual elitism, encourage authors to use the term ‘further reading’ instead).

However, the learned devisers of The London Library’s scheme of arrangement were using the word as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (1933 edition): ‘The systematic description and history Title-page spread of James Edmund Harting’s Catalogue of Books Ancient and Modern Relating to Falconry (1891).

24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

of books, their authorship, printing, publication, editions, etc. ’ Although many of the works in the section do take the form of lists – either conventional bibliographies or catalogues of exhibitions and auction sales – some real and surprising pleasures lurk amongst them.

Most of the material I needed for my research was shelved under the classmark Libraries. Here I found an intriguing and highly readable recent work, Libraries Within the Library: The Origins of the British Library’s Printed

Collections, edited by Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor (2009). It is a set of essays by scholars – mostly present or former employees of the British Library – about the major collections on which the institution was founded and the motivation of those who amassed them.

The book sheds light on the literary tastes of a succession of monarchs and of men such as Sir Hans Sloane, whose books formed the basis of the British Museum Library (which achieved full independence as the British Library only in 1973).

More detail about royal reading habits came in the magnificently illustrated The Books of King Henry VIII and his Wives by James P. Carley (2009).

It includes a preface by the historian David Starkey, who begins by setting out what is in effect a manifesto for this section of the Library and indeed for this article: ‘Bibliography has, traditionally, been one of the most esoteric scholarly arts. But recently it has moved from the back workshop to the front window.

Scholars have become interested in the book as object. They have looked at how it was printed and illustrated. They have also examined how it was used. What notes were written in it? Does it show signs of being read at all?’

I decided that if I was to delve thoroughly into these mysteries I needed expert guidance through the section’s complexities.

Susanne Ott-Bissels, a cataloguer at The London Library who specialises in German books, volunteered for the task.

Her first words were not encouraging.

‘It’s incredibly difficult, ’ she affirmed as we stepped out of the lift. ‘It’s organised in a rather idiosyncratic way … but if you’re experienced in the London Library you’ll know that it’s the same in other sections. ’ As evidence, she thrust into my hand a list of the 78 classmarks into which Bibliography’s 18,200 books are divided.

Among the most exotic are Falconry (two books on the relevant shelf ) and Duelling &c. (also two, one of them in Italian, and no clue as to what ‘&c.’ might embrace). There have been two fairly recent changes in the classmarks: Negro has been renamed African &c. and a new category of Women has been added (seven books shelved here, two more than in the adjacent classmark, Welsh).

One title in Bibliography: Women illustrates how assigning books to a particular division of the Library must often involve fine judgements. It is Women in Context: 200 Years of British Women Autobiographers by Barbara Penny Kanner (1997), and its 1,051 pages include not just a comprehensive list of relevant women but potted biographies of each. It must have been a close call whether to shelve it in Bibliography or Biographical Collections.

Of Bibliography’s 78 classmarks, 21 are geographical, based on individual nations and their languages (but in one

Above Eric Gill’s bookplate for Thomas Lowinsky (1922), from The Engraved Bookplates of Eric Gill, 1908–1940, compiled by Christopher Skelton (1986).

Below right Front cover (detail) of The Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books (1975).

case – Oriental – covering a broader canvas).

The French and German sections fill many metres of shelving: they consist chiefly of multiple volumes of catalogues and bibliographies, uniformly bound. Together these take up roughly the same space as Bibliography: English. You might expect the national sections to include all books in the relevant language but, as Susanne explained, it is not as simple as that.

The subject of the book always takes precedence over its nationality: thus the Handlist of Italian Cookery Books by Lord Westbury (1963) is shelved under

‘

Food & Drink rather than Italian, and the Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes et pseudonymes by Gustave Brunet (1889) is in Pseudonyms, not French.

I thought Prohibited Books might provide some guilty pleasures, but most of the volumes here are simply lists of banned titles. An exception is Clandestine Erotic Fiction in English, 1800–1930 by Peter Mendes (1993), which includes some teasing extracts and reproductions of seductive title pages. It appears to have been quite heavily borrowed; more so, at least, than The Forbidden Best-sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France by Robert Darnton (1996), which concerns itself largely with political pamphlets.

More appealing is a charming clutch of works on bookplates. Norma Labouchere’s Ladies’ Book-Plates (1896), given to the Library by HM Queen Mary, begins with this disarming apologia: ‘It may appear to be a work of supererogation to venture another treatise on the subject of bookplates, when the ground has already been so well covered. ’ Some of the volumes alongside it would sit equally well in Art, notably The Engraved Bookplates of Eric Gill, 1908–1940, compiled by Christopher Skelton and published by the Private Libraries Association in 1986. It includes some powerful images and an informative introduction by Michael Renton.

Even the 78 specific classmarks cannot embrace every title in the section, and those that refuse to be pigeonholed are shelved under Bibliography (Gen.). Here I lit upon an unexpected treasure, Historia

Among the most exotic classmarks in Bibliography are Falconry (two books on the shelf )

’

and Duelling &c. (also two)

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

•

Left to right Some of the most decorative books in the section are auction catalogues, such as this for the sale of the Diaghilev-Lifar Library in Monte Carlo in 1975; Thomas Carlyle’s signature on the title page of volume 1 of Historia Bibliothecae Fabricianae (1717).

Bibliothecae Fabricianae, written in Latin and published in 1717, a sixvolume account of the library of Johann Albert Fabricius, a German scholar and bibliographer. The interest is not so much in the book’s content as in the signature on the title page of volume one – that of Thomas Carlyle, who founded the London Library in 1841 after feuding with the librarians at the British Museum. A further inscription indicates that the work came into the Library’s collections in 1860.

The most rewarding shelves for random browsing are Books, Booksellers, &c., a nest of delightful texts about reading in general. I picked out a pocket-sized volume of only 51 pages called The World of Books (1932). It is the transcript of a lecture given in 1931 by Basil Blackwell, son of the founder of the Oxford bookshop, in memory of J.M. Dent, the originator of Everyman’s Library. It is enlivened by striking aphorisms, such as: ‘Idealism makes the Book World go round but, like love in the World of Men, unbridled leads often to disaster. ’ Blackwell sympathises with the travails of authors in a paragraph which, if you inflate the figures, has resonance today: ‘How, in the Book World, does that author fare who is a competent craftsman, who has the gift of writing without the over-riding quality of genius – and has to live by his 26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

craft – the author of a cheap reprint which we may pick up at random from a station bookstall, purchasing for 2s. the entertainment of a day? We must not be surprised to learn that the work of three months lies in our hand; that an advance of £25 or £30 has not been covered by sales after eighteen months; and that the book was written without certainty of acceptance.’

As for the literary agent, he has ‘been likened, perhaps a little unkindly, to a small dog passing down the great avenue of authors and allowing none to escape his attention’ . The publisher?

‘He must recognize literary merit – more, he must discover it – he must have a flair – he must anticipate by just the right narrow margin the changing tastes and interests of the reading public (and in that sense he must have something of the journalist in his make-up). ’ And the reviewer: ‘Too many works of genius are acclaimed from week to week which are soon and properly forgotten. ’ A more recent work is Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet, a confessed bibliomaniac with a library of more than 40,000 volumes. It was published in Paris in 2008 and translated into English

by Siân Reynolds in 2010. Attempting to define his motives in accumulating and keeping so many books, Bonnet writes: ‘A strange relationship becomes established between the bibliomaniac and his (or her) thousands of books.

The same relation as between a gardener and an invasive climbing plant: the

plant grows all by itself, in a manner invisible to the naked eye but at a rate of progress that is measurable after a few weeks. The gardener, unless he is willing to chop it down, can only indicate the direction he wants it to take. In just the same way, prolific libraries take on an independent existence, and become living things …

We may have chosen its themes, and the general pathways along which it will develop, but we can only stand and watch as it invades all the walls of the rooms, climbs to the ceiling, annexes the other rooms one by one, expelling anything that gets in the way. ’ On the shelf I found three copies of William Blades’ The Enemies of Books (1880), suggesting that it was one of the most popular books about books in the late nineteenth century. From them I chose the youngest, the enlarged edition of 1888. Beginning with physical threats to libraries – fire, water, heat, dust, neglect – Blades moves on to the less obvious enemies: ignorance and bigotry, bookbinders, collectors. And for the enlarged edition he added an extra chapter, ‘Servants and Children’ .

Servants are accused of too frequently and roughly handling books on the pretext of dusting them, and of jamming them too tightly into the shelves. As for children, he finds boys more destructive than girls.

‘Who does not fear a schoolboy with his first pocket-knife? … Pleased, too, are they if, with mouths full of candy, and sticky fingers, they can pull in and out the books on your bottom shelves, little knowing the damage and pain they will cause. ’ Blades’ conclusion serves to sum up the raison d’être of The London Library, the British Library and like institutions: ‘The possession of any old book is a sacred trust, which a conscientious owner or guardian would as soon think of ignoring as a parent would of neglecting his child.

An old book, whatever its subject or internal merits, is truly a portion of the national history; we may imitate it and print it in fac-simile, but we can never exactly reproduce it; and as an historical document it should carefully be preserved. ’ Members who share that philosophy will find plenty to sustain it up on the fifth floor.

.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

MEMBERS’ News A VICE-PATRON FOR THE LONDON LIBRARY

Dafydd Jones

The Library is delighted to announce that Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cornwall has agreed to become its Vice-Patron for the next five years.

The Duchess was Guest of Honour at the Library’s Annual Literary Dinner in May. As a great champion of books and reading and a dedicated advocate for literacy, her patronage will be a huge support during the final phases of the Library’s current expansion and redevelopment.

Sir Tom Stoppard, President of The London Library, expressed the Library’s delight at the news: ‘We are thrilled to welcome The Duchess of Cornwall into The London Library fold, where her immense enthusiasm for literature and learning continues a tradition of Royal patronage dating back to Prince Albert.’

HRH The Duchess of Cornwall with Library President Sir Tom Stoppard and guests at the Library’s 2012 Annual Literary Dinner.

Marcus Dawes

We are also pleased to announce three new additions to our group of august Vice-Presidents. Joining Nicolas Barker, OBE, FBA, Mrs T.S. Eliot, Lewis Golden, OBE, Mrs Drue Heinz, DBE, and Jeremy Paxman are: Peregrine Cavendish, 12th Duke of Devonshire, kcvo, cbe Majority shareholder of Mayfair’s famous Heywood Hill bookshop, sponsor of The London Library Life in Literature Award, the Duke is a great supporter of the Library and has assisted in the development of the Library’s US Founders’ Circle. Deputy Chairman of Sotheby’s, Trustee of the Wallace Collection and Trustee of the Derby Museums Trust, the Duke follows in the footsteps of his father, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, who also served as a London Library Vice-President.

Lady Antonia Fraser, DBE Lady Antonia’s distinguished literary career spans both biography and fiction, with her work having received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Wolfson History Prize and the Historical Association Norton Medlicott Medal, among many other honours. A Life Member of the Library and a member since 1957, Lady Antonia has also served as Chairman of the Society of Authors (1974–5) and President of English PEN (1988–9).

Kenneth Rose, CBE, FRSL An esteemed royal biographer and author of, most recently, Elusive Rothschild: The Life of Victor, Third Baron (2003), Mr Rose has received the Whitbread Book Award, the Yorkshire Post Biography of the Year Award and the Wolfson History Prize. Mr Rose has been a member of the Library since 1951 and in 1991 delivered one of seven special lectures celebrating the 150th anniversary of The London Library’s founding.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29

Sue Greenhill

New Vice-Presidents

We are delighted to announce a very generous donation from the Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation towards The London Library’s Capital Campaign. Providing the crucial remaining funding needed to start work on Phase 3(a), and a hugely encouraging start to our fundraising efforts for Phase 3(b), this landmark gift makes very exciting news for the Library as it embarks on the next stage of its biggest redevelopment project in over a century. It is with great pleasure that the Library is counted among the many institutions to which the Sackler Foundation has given vital support, helping secure the UK’s artistic, scientific and cultural heritage for future generations.

Thanks to the Sackler Foundation’s gift, preparations for the work on Phase 3(a) can now begin. During Phase 3(a) the areas of the Library where members are reading and writing will be refurbished. New furniture (yes, including armchairs!) and lighting more suited to modern research will be introduced to the main Reading Room, while retaining its elegant nineteenth-century appearance. The furniture will be designed to be easily cleared away to allow the Reading Room to be used to raise funds for the Library in the evening and at weekends. The North Bay will be transformed into a new Writers’ Room, not dissimilar in look and feel to the Art Room.

The refurbished room will still be dedicated to reading spaces for laptop users, but there will be more of them, with desks at both gallery and low level. These improvements will enhance the experience of members who use the three rooms on the Reading Floor. At the end of this phase of development, the Prevost Room will be renamed the Sackler Study in honour of the generous donation that has made this work possible.

The next issue of The London Library Magazine will contain a full feature detailing the scope of Phase 3(a) and the timing of its construction period, but an overview of the capital project and the completed phases can currently be found online in the ‘About Us’ section of The London Library website. As with the previous phases of the Capital Campaign, the Library will remain fully operational throughout, and only the affected areas will be temporarily closed to members. The estimated construction time is 12 weeks, and we are hopeful that disruption to normal services will be kept to a minimum.

We are hugely grateful to the Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation, and to all our donors who have made Phases 1, 2 and 3(a) possible. We are now actively fundraising for the remaining £3.855 million needed for Phase 3(b). If you would like to make a contribution to the Capital Campaign, the Library would be very keen to hear from you. Gifts of all sizes would be warmly received. To find out more about donating to the Capital Campaign, or for further information on the Library’s capital development plans, please contact Jennifer Black in the Development Office (tel: 020 7766 4796, email: jennifer.black@londonlibrary.co.uk).

Above Dr Mortimer Sackler.

Left The Writers’ Room, currently the North Bay, as it will appear on completion of Phase 3(a).

30 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Norman Parkinson

FUNDING THE FUTURE A Gift from the Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31

32 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

CHRISTMAS CARD 2012 Show your pride in being a London Library member and help others to learn about the joys of the Library by sending our delightful Christmas card.

This year’s card is by award-winning children’s writer and illustrator, Babette Cole. Babette has written over 70 picture books and has worked at the BBC creating children’s programmes such as Bagpuss, Watch With Mother and Jackanory. Her fanciful tales and charming characters have been entertaining children and adults alike for more than 30 years.

Cards are printed in full colour on high-quality card at a standard size (181 x 121mm). The cards are available in packs of 8, together with high-quality peel-and-seal envelopes.

The price is £5.00 per pack, including VAT, postage and handling.

Cards are available to purchase via The London Library website or by returning the order form below. Cards will also be on sale in the Library at £4.00 per pack including VAT. MESSAGE INSIDE CARD READS: With best wishes for Christmas and the New Year Please return this form to: The London Library Christmas Card Orders 14 St James’s Square London SW1Y 4LG

ORDER FORM

YOUR NAME (BLOCK CAPITALS PLEASE)

PLEASE SEND ME:

_________________________________________________________

______ pack(s) of Christmas Cards, at £5.00 per pack: £______

ADDRESS ________________________________________________

TOTAL: £______

_________________________________________________________

Please make your cheque payable to ‘The London Library’

_________________________________________________________ ____________________________ POSTCODE ________________

Calling all final-year undergraduates: The London Library Student Prize 2013, supported by The Times and Milkround, is open for entries, with a fantastic package of prizes available for the winner and three runners-up. Entrants need to submit an 800-word piece of writing in response to the theme ‘Gap years – a new form of colonialism?’ for the chance to win £5,000, publication in The Times and this magazine, and for the opportunity to take part in a mini-internship at The Times. More information can be found at londonlibrarystudentprize.com or by contacting Elena in the Development Office (tel. 020 7766 4704, email elena.smith@londonlibrary.co.uk).

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 33

CHRISTMAS GIFTS

FROM THE LONDON LIBRARY Spread the Library cheer to book lovers in your life with our Christmas gift ideas, large and small.

GIFT MEMBERSHIP Give someone you love a million books for Christmas and share the experience of being a London Library member.

Whether a full membership or a half-price Young Person’s membership, you will be sent a new member pack to present to the recipient or, if you prefer, it can be sent to them directly.

SPOUSE/ PARTNER GIFT MEMBERSHIP – HALF-PRICE Don’t forget that Spouse/ Partner Membership is now also half-price (£225, or £18.75 per month). The Membership Office will be happy to help you present Library membership to your significant other this Christmas.

LONDON LIBRARY GIFT VOUCHERS Contribute to someone’s London Library membership, or their membership renewal, by giving one of our London Library gift vouchers. Vouchers are available in denominations of £50 and £100 and are valid for two years from the date of purchase.

LONDON LIBRARY MERCHANDISE – FROM £5 Our striking canvas bags make an excellent stocking filler, or can be used as a stocking with a difference! With gift-card packs starting at £5, there are plenty of small, tasteful gifts in our online Shop, including our Gift Pack (£35 including postage and handling), which gathers together one canvas bag, one note book, one pack of note cards, one pack of pencils and a copy of Library Book, Tony McIntyre’s fascinating history of the Library and its buildings.

ADOPT A BOOK Ensure that a book or books inscribed with your loved one’s name will be on the Library’s shelves by adopting a book on their behalf. An original and lasting gift, as well as a wonderful way to support the Library.

Books can be adopted via the ‘Support Us’ section of the website (click on ‘Adopt Schemes’), or for more information contact Bethany McNaboe in the Development Office (tel. 020 7766 4719, bethany.mcnaboe@londonlibrary.co.uk).

34 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

EATING OUT

DINING OUT NEAR THE LONDON LIBRARY This is an advertisement feature.

2 3 5 9 10

To advertise please call Janet Durbin

4 11

7

6 12 8

on 01625 583180.

1 AL DUCA Serving modern Italian cuisine, Al Duca focuses heavily on bringing out the very best elements of what is one of the most acclaimed gastronomic regions of the world. Simple fresh ingredients are skilfully combined in a wide range of traditional dishes offered both in classic style and with a new twist, all following Pulze’s ethos of reasonably priced good Italian food. Now serving breakfast.

4–5 Duke of York Street, SW1Y 6LA, 020 7839 3090. alduca-restaurant.co.uk

4 DELHI BRASSERIE For over 20 years, the Delhi Brasserie has served outstanding traditional Indian cuisine to the discerning diner. Situated in the heart of Soho on Frith Street and next to Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, we provide a welcoming and vibrant atmosphere. Pre- and post-theatre menus are available. 15% discount for students with ID. Special offer available for group bookings.

44 Frith Street, W1D 4SB, 020 7437 8261. delhibrasserie.com

2 BELLAMY’S RESTAURANT Located in central Mayfair (near New Bond Street), Bellamy’s offers a classic French brasserie menu with an affordable famous-name wine list. The Oyster Bar, among its other dishes, serves Bellamy’s famous ‘open’ sandwiches. Le patron mange ici. Open for lunch Mon–Fri; dinner Mon–Sat. 18–18a Bruton Place, W1J 6LY, 020 7491 2727. bellamysrestaurant.co.uk

3 CUT AT 45 PARK LANE World-renowned chef Wolfgang Puck has made his restaurant debut in Europe opening CUT at 45 Park Lane, an American steak restaurant featuring great food in a contemporary environment. Located in Dorchester Collection’s new Mayfair hotel, CUT at 45 Park Lane mirrors the awardwinning CUT in Beverly Hills, offering outstanding steaks, a superb wine list and impeccable service. 45 Park Lane, W1K 1PN, 020 7493 4554.

45parklane.com/CUTat45ParkLane

1

7 GETTI Jermyn Street A modern Italian restaurant at the fast-paced heart of London’s West End, Getti Jermyn Street is an authentic Italian dining venue in London’s historic tailoring district, dedicated to offering a traditional and memorable Italian dining experience.

A splendid destination for London locals and tourists alike, Getti Jermyn Street focuses on serving simple, regional dishes from mainland Italy.

Private dining available.

16/17 Jermyn Street, SW1Y 6LT, 020 7734 7334. getti.com

10 GUSTOSO RISTORANTE &

5 THE FOX CLUB The Fox Club is situated a stone’s throw from Green Park and the famous Hyde Park. Our Dining Room is one of London’s best-kept secrets and, for those in the know, a lunch-time essential. The modern European menu changes on a weekly basis, offering refined excellence without being pretentious. The effect is a change from the jaded palate of life.

The Fox Club now offers a delightful afternoon tea from 3– 5pm.

46 Clarges St, W1J 7ER, 020 7495 3656. foxclublondon.com

8 GREEN’S Green’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar is a truly British institution that serves world-class food. Simple, well-presented dishes that everyone likes and that allow you to have meaningful conversation.

Fresh fish, meat and seasoned game.

36 Duke Street St James’s, SW1Y 6DF, 020 7930 4566. greens.org.uk

11 HIX MAYFAIR This fashionable restaurant offers an outstanding menu of classic British dishes, using local seasonal ingredients. Mark Hix and Lee Streeton offer a full à-la-carte menu alongside a special set-lunch, pre-theatre and dinner menu of £27.50 for 2 courses and £32.50 for 3 courses. Brown’s is also home to the award-winning English Tea Room and the chic Donovan Bar. Brown’s Hotel, Albemarle Street, W1S 4BP, 020 7518 4004. hixmayfair.co.uk

6 FRANCO’S Franco’s has been serving the community of St James’s for over 60 years. Open all day, the personality of the restaurant evolves from a quietly and gently efficient breakfast venue to a sharp and charged lunch atmosphere, to elegance and romance in the evening. The lunch and dinner menus highlight carefully prepared traditional and more modern Italian dishes. Our service is always relaxed, friendly and personal.

61 Jermyn Street, SW1Y 6LX, 020 7499 2211. francoslondon.com

9 THE GRILL AT THE DORCHESTER Reflecting a passion for wholesome cooking, our menu of modern British cuisine puts a fresh spin on traditional Grill dishes alongside timeless classics. Excellent service combines with the finest organically produced and locally sourced ingredients from the British Isles.

The Dorchester, Park Lane, W1K 1QA, 020 7629 8888. thedorchester.com

12 WILTONS Established in 1742, Wiltons enjoys a reputation as the epitome of fine English dining in London. The atmosphere is perfectly matched with immaculately prepared fish, shellfish, game and meat. Choose from an exclusive wine list. Open for lunch and dinner, Mon–Fri. To make a reservation, please quote the London Library Magazine.

55 Jermyn Street, SW1Y 6LX, 020 7629 9955. wiltons.co.uk

ENOTECA Home-style Italian dining room Ristorante Gustoso is found moments from Westminster Cathedral and Victoria Station. Quietly situated, pleasingly intimate, Gustoso is the ideal place to unwind after work, with friends or to enjoy a little romance.

Cocktails are served from the bar and the menu is based around the Italian classics.

35 Willow Place, SW1P 1JH, 020 7834 5778. ristorantegustoso.co.uk

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 35