Telling Stories: The Novelisation of The London Library

The Library has made an appearance in fiction as well as film, in titles dating back to the Victorian era...

The London Library in David Hare’s film Heading Home is intimate, a place where good manners, common sense and kindness prevail. The Issue Hall and Back Stacks are instantly recognisable but are depicted in a world where computers are confined to Bletchley Park, and neatly arranged bundles of paper record the loan and return of books. Historically captivating, the film is also a record of archival significance.

The Library has been similarly captured in a genre that rose to prominence during the Victorian era. A Library notice from the 1840s catches the novel in mid-flight. Signed ‘by order of the Committee’ it announces that ‘this Library does not undertake to supply the various novels of the day, and any attempt to do so would not be consistent with the objects for which the Library was instituted’ .

This did nothing to quell demand, deter novelists from joining, or prevent the Library’s appearance in the genre. From Mrs Oliphant to Haruki Murakami, the Library has been part of the story over three consecutive centuries.

Two prolific Victorian novelists, Mrs Oliphant in A Rose in June (1874), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon in To the Bitter End (1872), record the arrival of boxes of books from the Library. In her novel of sensation, Braddon gives the contents an airing: ‘the last volume of Froude and Motley, the newest thing in metaphysics, a dark blue octavo filled with questionable verse, the latest French novel. ’

Braddon had tired of writing ‘penny dreadful’ stories because of the ‘crime, treachery, murder, slow poisoning and general infamy required’ , but later generations have shown no such scruples in dispatching protagonists on Library premises. The rolling stacks do the trick in Harriet Waugh’s The Chaplet of Pearls (1997), and a lethal combination of arsenic and the Pre-Raphaelites see off a postgraduate student in Barry Maitland’s Dark Mirror (2009).

Seduction, betrayal and arsenic feature in Aldous Huxley’s short story ‘The Gioconda Smile’ (1922), in which a philandering husband is hanged for murdering his wife – a crime in fact committed by a woman with whose affections he had toyed. Contemplating his fate he ponders the things he will miss, including the ‘narrow lanes between the book shelves in the London Library … exploring the fringes of vast domains of knowledge’ .

In the case of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story ‘ The A dventure of the Illustrious Client’ (1921), Dr Watson is instructed by Sherlock Holmes to gen up on Chinese pottery, and seeks books and advice from the sub-librarian. In 1963 Ian Fleming sends James Bond into battle with Blofeld in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service with little more than Burke’s General Armory, albeit stamped ‘Property of The London Library’ . J ohn le Carré’s George Smiley takes up occupation of his ‘habitual desk in the London Library’ in 1980 in Smiley’s People, and a decade later A.S. Byatt opens her Booker Prize-winning novel Possession in the Reading Room with the discovery of a Victorian letter secreted in the leaves of a rare book. Joe Rose is seated in one of the leather armchairs in the Reading Room in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (1997), when he is filled with apprehension that the exiting member who had been fidgeting behind him is his stalker.

In Alan Bennett’s novella The Uncommon Reader (2007), the Library supplies books in abundance to the Queen and deals with their destruction by attendant dogs: ‘Patron of the Library, though she was, Her Majesty regularly found herself on the phone apologising to the renewals clerk for the loss of yet another volume. ’ The l atest depiction of the Library is not in the text of the story but is infused through the visual and visceral aspects of the book. From marbled end-papers to mottled and waterstained pages, Murakami’s The Strange Library (English edition 2014, translated by Ted Goossen) is a statement about the book as a physical medium. His novella engages through illustration with book and library history. The London Library is the acknowledged source for much of the ‘rich treasury’ of the illustrative matter, and its iconography is unmistakably present too.

Donating his novel Headlong to the Library in 1999, Michael Frayn inscribed the following fitting tribute: ‘To The London Library, with my thanks for being both the source and the setting of so much that follows. ’ .