London Library Magazine Issue 31 Spring 2016

MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 ISSUE 31

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THE LOST LIBRARY Jono Jackson on the forgotten library of the English Club in Zanzibar

TELLING THE WOOLF STORY

Virginia Nicholson recalls the scholarly labours of her parents working on their publications on Virginia Woolf

POETRY, HISTORY AND THE UNIVERSITIES

Blair Worden on the separation by academic institutions of history and literature into different departments

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE / ISSUE 31

15

Virginia Nicholson celebrates the literary achievement of her parents, Quentin and Anne Olivier Bell, whose research has contributed so much to our knowledge of the life and work of Virginia Woolf. Her father’s biography of Woolf and her mother’s 5-volume Diary were the result of 30 years of painstaking work.

CONTENTS 5 FROM THE LIBRARIAN 6 CONTRIBUTORS Quentin and Anne Olivier Bell, 1976.

20

For more than a century, universities have divided the study of literature from the study of history. The historian Blair Worden shows how the separation came about and argues that it has impoverished and distorted our perception of the literary achievements of the Renaissance, when poetry and history had common aims and features.

How to be an Alien by George Mikes (1946) showed Erin Moore the way when she was struggling with writing her first book

15 TELLING THE WOOLF STORY William Stubbs, Oxford’s Regius Professor of Modern History, 1866–84. © Trinity College, University of Oxford.

Virginia Nicholson on the years of research conducted by her parents in the pre-internet era for their publications on Virginia Woolf

20 POETRY, HISTORY AND THE UNIVERSITIES The relationship between the academic disciplines of English literature and history is analysed

by Blair Worden

24 THE LOST LIBRARY Titles from the library of the English Club, Zanzibar.

27

From Glasgow School of Art needlework projects in Educational Needlecraft (1913) to patterns for curtains and runners in Eivor Fisher’s Swedish Embroidery (1953), the Library’s Needlework and Embroidery shelfmarks offer fascinating glimpses into the past, as Sally Goodsir has discovered

Alan McNee’s research for his book The Cockney Who Sold the Alps relied not only on an ascent of Mont Blanc, but also on various titles in the Library

11 MY DISCOVERY

24

Behind a locked door in the former English Club of Zanzibar, now a hotel, a library remains as a forgotten relic of the country’s colonial past. Jono Jackson describes the important role played by the Club and its library in the lives of the expatriates and visitors from the 1890s to the 1960s.

8 BEHIND THE BOOK

Jono Jackson on the library of the English Club of Zanzibar, which still exists decades after its closure

27 HIDDEN CORNERS The Needlework and Embroidery collections in the Library are explored by Sally Goodsir

31 MEMBERS’ NEWS

Needle-Craft: Artistic and Practical, from the Metropolitan Art series (New York 1889).

p

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 3

Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

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FROM THE LIBRARIAN

On the cover

Shangani Streeet, Zanzibar, 1900s. The door of the English Club is indicated by the pair of lanterns behind the striding European. Produced by Pereira de Lord Brothers, Zanzibar.

The contents of this issue are as varied and interesting as the Library’s own collections. Indeed, a journey through the Library in search of these topics would take you from S. Mountaineering to Periodicals, from L. Wit & Humour to Philology, and from Topography to Art via Literature and History.

It is 75 years this month since Virginia Woolf died, and Virginia Nicholson reveals the meticulous work carried out by her parents Quentin and Anne Olivier Bell to prepare both a 2-volume biography of Woolf and the 5 volumes of her diary for publication. It is a vivid reminder of the painstaking methods required for such research without the aid of digital tools.

Throughout his academic career Blair Worden has worked at the intersection of history and literature. In this issue he looks back on the way in which these subjects, once studied together, came to be regarded as separate disciplines and observes what has been lost in the process.

Further afield, Jono Jackson takes us to Zanzibar where he chanced upon the remnants of the long-forgotten library of the English Club, founded in 1888 for the use of English residents and naval officers stationed in the vicinity.

Our Hidden Corners feature for this issue is that most domestic form of art: needlework.

Sally Goodsir has been exploring A. Needlework and A. Embroidery and guides us through the highlights she has found. Further discoveries are revealed in Behind the Book, where Alan McNee introduces us to the bizarre world of the great Victorian showman Albert Smith, and in My Discovery Erin Moore tells how she found George Mikes’s book, How to be an Alien, and describes its influence on her writing.

With our 175th anniversary year now underway, this is also a bumper issue for Members’ News. Do turn to pages 31–33 for more information on how we will be celebrating, from Words In The Square (5–8 May) to the publication of the first volumes in our ‘Found on the Shelves’ series. We are inviting members to share their memories of the Library or of interesting discoveries in the stacks (page 31) and it is also time for our annual call for Trustee volunteers (page 35). This year we must find a new Treasurer as well so there are many different opportunities for members to get involved. Above all, I hope to meet very many of you in the marquee at Words In The Square – it is not to be missed.

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 11 March 2016. © 2016 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 Tina Hall Picture research Charlotte Burgess

Editorial Committee David Breuer Emma Marlow Helen O’Neill Peter Parker Philip Spedding Erica Wagner

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

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5

CONTRIBUTORS

Sally Goodsir

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2014

Sally Goodsir is Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts at Royal Collection Trust, and is part of the team responsible for the interpretation of the collection and the care of the decorative arts across the royal residences. She co-curated The Queen's Gallery exhibition Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden (2015). She is currently researching the history of the gardens at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh.

Jono Jackson

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2010

Jono Jackson studied History & Swahili at SOAS, followed by a Master’s in African Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He has travelled extensively in East Africa and writes on historical and contemporary Zanzibar. Work on his first novel – primarily set on the island – is underway.

He also hopes to publish a new translation and recontextualisation of a nineteenth-century collection of Swahili tales.

Alan McNee

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2009

Alan McNee is a former journalist, who completed his Ph.D. on Victorian mountaineering at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2013. While researching his new biography of the Victorian journalist, novelist and showman Albert Smith, McNee climbed Mont Blanc to experience the difference between the ascent today and when Smith undertook it in 1851. The Cockney Who Sold the Alps (2015) is his first book. He lives in London.

‘This exhibition may return a lost hero to art’

Erin Moore

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2011

Erin Moore is the author of That’s Not English: Britishisms, Americanisms and What Our English Says About Us (2015), which was published in both the US and the UK by Penguin Random House. An American expat and former book editor, she lives in Islington with her husband and two young children. (erinmoorebooks.com)

The Guardian

Virginia Nicholson

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1998

Virginia Nicholson's father Quentin Bell wrote the first biography of his aunt Virginia Woolf, and her mother Anne Olivier Bell edited Woolf’s diary. Virginia studied English Literature at Cambridge. Her books include Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s (2015). She is Deputy Chairman of the Charleston Trust, which owns and runs the home of her grandmother the painter Vanessa Bell.

Blair Worden 12 March – 5 June 2016 The Sackler Wing royalacademy.org.uk Friends of the RA go free Additionally supported by Giorgione, Portrait of a Young Man (‘Giustiniani Portrait’), detail. Oil on canvas, 59.2 x 47 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz.

With kind permission of the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. © Photo: Jörg P. Anders.

6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE London Library.indd 1

04/02/2016 16:39

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1976

Blair Worden’s books have been on the political, intellectual and literary history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. They include The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (1996) and Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (2007). He taught for most of his career at Oxford, where he is now Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall.

He has been a Trustee of The London Library.

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BEHIND THE

BOOK

Alan McNee’s research for his biography of the Victorian writer and traveller Albert Smith led him to explore the Mountaineering and Exhibitions shelfmarks in the Back Stacks, as well as the more familiar Biography and Fiction sections of the Library

‘

Alan McNee’s The Cockney Who Sold the Alps (2015).

’

The Cockney Who Sold the Alps (2015) is my biography of Albert Smith, the comic novelist, travel writer and journalist. He climbed Mont Blanc in 1851 and turned the experience into a phenomenally successful stage show, The Ascent of Mont Blanc, which played at the Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly through the 1850s and involved Smith narrating while a moving panorama showed scenes of the ascent. My research took me from Smith’s birthplace in Chertsey to the summit of Mont Blanc, but much of it took place in the Library.

 The Story of Mont Blanc by Albert Smith

 The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury and his

 The Baron of Piccadilly: The Travels

(London 1853). S. Mountaineering &c.

Smith wasn’t the first to climb Mont Blanc, but he was the first to exploit its publicity value. He wrote this account of his ascent before adapting it for the stage. It includes the extraordinary list of provisions he took up the mountain, such as dozens of bottles of alcohol and almost 50 chickens.  Narrative of an Ascent to the Summit of Mont Blanc, on the Eighth and Ninth of August, 1827 by John Auldjo (London 1856). S. Mountaineering &c.

First published in 1828, this book caught Smith’s imagination when he read it as a child, sparking his ambition to climb Mont Blanc. The dramatic and sometimes hair-raising tone is complemented by illustrations of ‘perilous positions’ , including one of climbers calmly eating breakfast on a precarious ice-bridge.  Punch, or The London Charivari (1841–4). Periodicals, 4to.

Smith was a contributor to Punch from its launch in 1841, although he later fell out of favour with his colleagues and left under a cloud. His contributions to the early numbers include material he would later adapt into books, such as his ‘Natural History’ series and satirical portraits of medical students.

Friend Jack Johnson (London and New York, 1856) and The Pottleton Legacy (London 1856), by Albert Smith. Fiction.

Smith’s first and last novels, first published in 1844 and 1849 respectively, have fallen out of fashion, but they retain a comic zest and linguistic inventiveness that can still entertain. His prolific output between these two books included more novels, journalism, comic prose and stage plays.  A Month at Constantinople by Albert Smith (London 1850). T. Turkey.

This book set the scene for Smith’s first successful one-man show, The Overland Mail, performed on King Street, off St James’s Square. It is also where Smith faces his critics head on: ‘A Cockney?’ he writes.

‘I don’t deny it’ . Accusations that he was a vulgar Cockney followed Smith throughout his career, but rarely worried him.  The Natural History of Evening Parties,

by Albert Smith (London 1849). Safe.

This is the last title in Smith’s bestselling ‘Natural History’ series – others included Stuck-Up People and The Gent. Smith borrowed the idea from the French physiologies genre, such as Balzac’s Physiologie du mariage (1830), in which trivial phenomena of modern life were analysed in pseudo-scientific terms.

and Entertainments of Albert Smith, 1816–1860 by Raymund Fitzsimons (London 1967). Biog. Smith.

This biography of Smith is an entertaining read and was an important source for my own research. The only other Smith biography was written in the 1930s by J. Monroe Thorington.  Glances Back Through Seventy Years

by Henry Vizetelly (2 vols., London 1893). Biog. Vizetelly.

A subject’s enemies can be as interesting to a biographer as his friends, and the writer and publisher Vizetelly absolutely loathed Smith. This may partly have stemmed from the fact that Vizetelly turned down the chance to publish Smith’s ‘Natural History’ series, thus missing out on considerable profits. ‘Quite a small fortune must have been made from these wretched little books, ’ Vizetelly observed glumly.  The Shows of London by Richard D. Altick (Cambridge, Mass., and London 1978). S. Exhibitions, 4to.

A magisterial survey of London shows over the centuries. Despite its huge scope, the book is impressively detailed about Smith’s Egyptian Hall show as well as the various panoramas, dioramas and other visual spectacles that preceded and influenced it.

8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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MY DISCOVERY

Erin Moore describes how a guide to the British way of life by the humorist George Mikes, which she came across in the Library, helped her find her own voice when writing her book on the British and their language

HOW TO BE AN ALIEN

BY GEORGE MIKES (1946) The American journalist Joe Queenan once wrote that ‘Anglophilia, like pornography, is one of those things that are hard to describe but you know when you see them’ . I’ve always been that sort of American. Having lived in London as a student, married into an English family and worked as an editor with many British authors, I was chagrined, when I moved to London from New York nine years ago, to find I was not actually fluent in English.

A difficult transition ensued, and my friend and fellow Library member Lynne Truss encouraged me to write about it, in the form of a book on British (versus American) English.

I skipped over to The London Library and, for the sake of pure masochism, started my research with a deep dive into every book anyone else had written on my subject in the past 238 years. I spent a lot of time in ‘Foreign Impressions of England’ and ‘Philology’ , getting more and more intimidated and further away from my goal. Having been an editor and ghost writer, channelling other people’s voices for so many years, I couldn’t find my own.

That’s when I stumbled upon George Mikes’s How to be an Alien: A Handbook for Beginners and Advanced Pupils (1946).

Mikes was a Hungarian journalist who was sent to London to cover the build-up to the Second World War, and never left.

A bit of a national treasure by the time he died in 1987, Mikes was completely unknown when he wrote How to be an Alien. He was thirty-four years old and had only lived in London for eight years.

Yet his observations of England pleased

the English inordinately, and still do.

Mikes swore ever after that he hadn’t intended the book to be funny, and maybe he hadn’t. Nevertheless, he was a natural comic writer. He could make a whole chapter of a one-liner, like this one on Sex: ‘Continental people have sex life; the English have hot-water bottles. ’ He knew how to compliment the English without pandering, as he did in his chapter on the Civil Servant: ‘On the Continent rich and influential people … may have their requests fulfilled. In England there is no such corruption and your obedient servant just will not do a thing whoever you may be. And this is the real beauty of democracy. ’ He felt all too keenly the pathos of the immigrant: ‘The verb to naturalize clearly proves what the British think of you. ’ And the anxiety of the expat: ‘Study these rules, and imitate the English.

There can be only one result: if you don’t succeed in imitating them you become ridiculous; if you do, you become even more ridiculous. ’ Nicolas Bentley’s illustrations, such as his bus queue of one, did nothing to dispel readers’ impression that Mikes was a humour writer.

How to be an Alien inspired me and (indirectly) answered a lot of pressing questions I’d had about how to begin to write about my own experience: how to find the universal in the specific; how to be sharp without being cutting; and how to make an old subject new again – truly my own.

Mikes made me see the value in not choosing a side, but playing each

Illustration by Nicolas Bentley, from George Mikes’s How to be an Alien (1946).

side off against the other. Some of his observations remain remarkably fresh and relevant 70 years later, but it’s his tone that impressed me. All at once I saw how to write my book without fear: not by imitating Mikes, but by being myself in print for the first time.

At the end of last year, Penguin reissued the title How to be a Brit: A George Mikes Minibus, which includes three of Mikes’s classics – How to be an Alien, How to be Inimitable and How to be Decadent. I found my book, That’s Not English: Britishisms, Americanisms and What Our English Says About Us, next to his in all the shops at Christmas. I couldn’t have asked for finer competition.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 11

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TELLING THE WOOLF STORY Virginia Nicholson recounts the laborious research undertaken by her parents to produce the biography and diary of her great-aunt Virginia Woolf, who died 75 years ago this month Virginia Woolf is public property. Recent years have seen re-imaginings in the form of novels, fashion designs, a screen adaptation, an exhibition, a ballet, and other stage and musical interpretations of her life and work. How easy it is to forget that we owe this accessibility almost entirely to 30 years’ work by a couple of conscientious and indefatigable toilers in the field: my parents, Quentin and Anne Olivier Bell, authors, respectively, of Virginia Woolf: A Biography (2 vols., 1972) and The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols., 1977–84). At the same time, the dissemination of her story could not have been achieved without the resources of The London Library.

This is appropriate, as my family’s connection with the Library is a historic one. I still get a frisson of ownership from seeing the engraving of my greatgrandfather’s portrait on the Library stairs, prominently displayed on the main staircase on the way to the Reading

Volume 1 of Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf: A Biography (1972).

Room. In 1892 Virginia Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, succeeded Tennyson as President of The London Library, and oversaw the redevelopment of its building in St James’s Square from 1896 to 1898.

But perhaps his daughter found this connection oppressive? Her letters and diary frequently refer to the ‘L.L. ’ , where she is forever rummaging for references or meeting friends. But she found the clubbish male environment hostile. In her diary entry for 21 January 1915 Virginia describes it as ‘a stale culture smoked place which I detest’ . The Library was a necessity, but intimidating. ‘My blood creeps at the thought of losing a LL book; it haunts me. I think I should jump off Waterloo Bridge if I ever did such a thing, ’ she wrote to a friend in April 1906.

It seems that the imperious Mr Cox, legendary keeper of the issue desk, also took a dim view of Virginia. In 1918 another friend of hers asked Mr Cox for a copy of The Voyage Out (1915). Virginia describes his reaction in a letter to Vanessa Bell: ‘“That’s by Virginia Woolf isn’t it?” he said. “She’s a sister of Mrs Clive Bell. Strange whats come to those two girls. Such a nice home they had. Sir Leslie our President. But of course they weren’t baptised!” ’ Mr Cox would surely have shuddered had he read Virginia’s diary entry for 26 November 1917, in which she reports how Leonard Woolf and Desmond MacCarthy took down the Dictionary of Slang from the Library’s shelves and together looked up the word f---. ‘[They] were saddened & surprised to see how the thumb marks of members were thick on the page. ’ Years later, Virginia Woolf was still encountering narrow-mindedness at The

Engraving from the painting of 1878 by G.F. Watts of Sir Leslie Stephen, President of The London Library from 1892 until his death in 1904. From F.W. Maitland’s The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, 1906).

“My blood creeps at the thought of losing a London Library book; it haunts me,” Woolf wrote in April 1906 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15

A collection of boxes arrived … here was the basis for the work which would take my mother the next 20 years Quentin Bell, 1972.

London Library. In 1935 an explosion of rage was ignited by an encounter with E.M. Forster as he and Virginia stood chatting at the issue desk. Forster told her that the Committee of the Library had confirmed a decision to bar women members from its ranks. Virginia instantly imagined that she had been proposed, then rejected. What had they been saying? ‘No no no, ladies are quite impossible . ’ In a ferment of anger she unleashed a torrent of indignant feelings about female exclusion in her diary entry of 9 April: ‘See how my hand trembles. ’ This episode would feed into her feminist essay Three Guineas (1938).

But the story had a satisfactory ending

Anne Olivier Bell, c.1976. © Clive Boursnell.

16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

five years later when Forster actually did invite her on to the Committee, as she records in her diary for 7 November 1940: ‘Rather to my pleasure I answered No …

This was a nice little finish to a meeting with EMF years ago in the L.L. He sniffed about women on Cttee. One of these days I’ll refuse I said silently. And now I have. ’ The days of exclusion have long vanished, and by 1972, when my mother started her research for the Woolf diary, the family connection with The London Library would prove only beneficial.

My parents’ joint effort to make Woolf’s life public had begun earlier, in 1964. That year Leonard Woolf wrote to Quentin Bell with a suggestion: ‘I think that far and away the best person to [write her life], if it is to be done, would be you.

What would you feel about this?’ Having agreed, my father’s obvious starting point was Virginia’s diary. That might have been straightforward, but wasn’t.

Leonard Woolf had sold the originals to the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, to be surrendered to them after his death. Meanwhile, he had the entire diary transcribed by a typist. He retained the top copies, but the carbon copies were scissored up and sections omitted, and in 1953 he published that chopped-out selection as A Writer’s Diary.

Leonard packed the carbon-copy remnants into manila envelopes and despatched them to my father in Leeds.

He explained to him that all he had to do was to reconstitute the published with the unpublished sections, and the result

would be the whole diary from 1915 until her death in 1941. Simple.

I should point out here that though my father was a man of great intellect, scholarship was not his forte. Happily, his wife was a highly trained art historical researcher with a passion for exactitude.

Thus a loving marriage developed into a remarkable professional partnership of complementary qualities. At once, my mother began meticulously piecing together the ticker-tape jigsaw puzzle of Virginia’s cut-up diary. For the duration, her raw material was a patch-together done with scissors and Bostik.

In 1967, having moved to Sussex, my parents started reading Virginia’s diary and organising her correspondence, bundles of which they collected from Leonard. My father purchased box files and a primitive photocopier, while my mother began to create what today we would call a research database. First, she had customised coloured cards printed, each one representing a month, with 31 ruled lines, and spaces to insert date headings. She put these ‘month cards’ in chronological order in an open box beside her desk, with divider tabs for the 59 years of Virginia’s life. On them, information from the many and various sources was inserted, day by day. White cards were used for information from Leonard’s appointment diaries. Pink cards contained information gathered from letters between other people, referring to Virginia’s doings.

The cards placed the big events of Virginia Woolf’s life in context. For example, To the Lighthouse was published on 5 May 1927. The card index shows us that the night before publication the Woolfs dined with the newly-wed journalist Douglas West and his wife Kitty in Chelsea. The following day Vita Sackville-West returned from Persia.

Alongside this my mother developed another card index: an alphabetical catalogue of everyone Woolf had ever named in her diary or letters, with brief but scrupulously legible biographical notes on their roles, whether walk-on or starring, in Virginia’s life. Leonard himself was able to help with identifying many of them.

The Life was starting to take shape, drawing almost entirely from unpublished sources. A great struggle then ensued, using scrolls of paper, on which – with

TELLING THE WOOLF STORY innumerable rubbings-out – my parents assembled the Stephen family genealogy as far back as the early eighteenth century.

Later, when the galley proofs arrived, they snipped them up, laid out painted letters from A to Z, and created a huge living index the length of our dining-room floor.

In 1972 the two volumes of biography were published, winning the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, and gaining my father his reputation as a biographer and expert on Bloomsbury.

But that was just the start. The biography had provided the scaffolding.

Now the bricks had to be put in place. It was decided that my mother’s familiarity with the material more than qualified her for the monumental task of making

Woolf’s diary available in print.

One day a collection of boxes, strapped together with parcel tape, arrived at our house. Piled in a ziggurat by the front door, they contained photocopies of the 2,317 pages of manuscript of Virginia Woolf’s 27 volumes of diaries, shipped from the Berg Collection in New York.

Here was the basis for the work which would take my mother the next 20 years: a mammoth editorial task that would turn her into a pre-eminent literary and social historian, and the world’s living expert on Bloomsbury. Eventually the five volumes of published diary would earn her two honorary doctorates and an MBE. When I remember my teenage years, I see my mother sitting at her desk,

with the index boxes encroaching ever further across her workspace, while at the other end of her small study, a pile of unironed washing mounts ever higher.

In 1976 Andrew McNeillie, an Oxford contemporary of my brother, joined Team Woolf as editorial assistant. A working space was found for him in an upstairs bedroom, where he was to be trained in the intricacies of Bloomsbury scholarship, for the diary was now generating a surfeit of riddles and obscurities.

Nothing escaped my mother’s eagle eye: the frequent inconsistencies between the transcripts and the photocopies, compressions, abbreviations and slips of the pen. I find a fascination in the juxtaposition of Virginia Woolf and

Olivier Bell’s card index, with divider tabs for the 59 years of Virginia Woolf’s life, created as part of her research database for The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols., 1977–84).

This page of the transcript of Woolf’s diary clearly shows how Olivier Bell glued Leonard Woolf’s unpublished excisions together with the published selection to form a complete version. It also shows her copyediting annotations.

One of the ‘month cards’ created by Olivier Bell to record Woolf’s activities. This card for May 1927 includes the publication of To the Lighthouse on 5 May. THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

her editor. Across 26 years of entries, my great-aunt couldn’t write a dull word. She is funny, intelligent, brave and imaginative. Her accounts of her daily life career between wild fantasy, meticulous observation, sheer bravura and meditative musing, all with what my mother has described as ‘that swift and lovely flight of words’ .

And here at her elbow is Olivier Bell, the professional pedant and perfectionist, with loving and impeccably respectful care untangling the strands of Woolf’s life for our gaze, capturing, defining, elucidating, explaining. My mother’s watchwords, drawing-pinned above her desk, were ‘accuracy, relevance, concision, interest’ . For example, who is Woolf referring to in her diary entry of 28 August 1930, when she broods on ‘the young Eton master who lies crushed beside his Mary Irving at the bottom of a crevasse in Switzerland’? The footnote explains. He was Vincent O’Connor, the classical master who had tutored Vita Sackville-West’s young sons the previous summer, before he and his fiancée were killed in a climbing accident in the Alps on 21 August 1929.

Another instance. In 1921 Virginia reports that the Maids of Honour shop had burned down. As editor, my mother never assumes that readers on both sides of the Atlantic will pick up all references, so she gently clarifies: Maids of Honour were sweet spicy tartlets, a local speciality in Richmond, where the Woolfs were then living. They were named after the ladiesin-waiting of George II’s wife Caroline of Anspach, whose summer residence was in that west London district. The burneddown shop, she adds, was Billett’s, 3 Hill Street, Richmond. As for the incessantly barking dogs which annoyed Virginia and Leonard in Rodmell in 1934 – these belonged to their neighbour, Miss Emery, who bred fox terriers.

But how did she find it all out? Today we have Google. In the 1970s my mother had The London Library. Once a week she would travel from Sussex on the train, Thursday being the Library’s late-opening day. I remain awestruck by her exertions in unearthing information. Today, if I want to find a reference in a back copy of the Times, it is available at the click of a mouse through the eLibrary resource on the Library website. In the 1970s 18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Anne Olivier Bell’s pamphlet Editing Virginia Woolf’s Diary (1989).

there were no such short cuts, and as a researcher my mother was emphatically ‘hands-on’ . Often she would emerge from St James’s Square, dusty and dishevelled from heaving vast bound copies of the Times from their basement shelves to source an obituary or the programme for a concert. From these she was able to take handwritten notes of salient biographical details, or identify the performers and programme at the Wigmore Hall, when Woolf had been in the audience. At other times she’d be blinking from an afternoon spent fumbling among the stacks in the Topography section, triumphant from some discovery about the ‘tremendous words’ that so moved Woolf over the door of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, or disappointed at her failure to identify the annoying, ‘brackish’ American, Mr Parker, whom Virginia met at a party on 21 July 1920. Maybe better luck next week?

Today’s researcher would turn straight to Wikipedia. But then, as now, the Library had all the obsolete maps, superannuated street directories, back copies of Who’s Who, periodicals, gazettes and bibliographies my mother needed.

Scholarship can make unexpected demands. One evening she got locked in the ladies’ lavatory in the Library basement, and – her cries unheard – was only able to escape, shortly before closing time, by scaling the partition of the flimsy cubicle, quite an athletic feat for a stoutish woman in her sixties.

She also embarked upon serpentine

correspondences with archivists, experts and professionals of all kinds to elicit their help with identifying Virginia’s wide-ranging allusions: literary, social and historical. A month’s work of this kind might result in a footnote of just five lines. Perhaps readers under the age of 30 should be reminded that most of this communication was done by letter.

She despatched these to her various correspondents in envelopes, and filed carbon copies. The morning post brought replies – along with our daily Times, which my mother, wary of Virginia’s occasionally disparaging descriptions of her contemporaries, would scan for the Deaths notices, often remarking: ‘Oh good, so-and-so has died. I can include that entry at least. ’ Gradually, thanks to her indefatigable labours, Woolf was giving up her secrets.

Astonishingly, my mother combined editing the diary with launching the Charleston Trust, a project that would have swallowed up the energies of any average person full time. But somehow she kept up the publication strike rate.

In a fascinating pamphlet, Editing Virginia Woolf’s Diary (1989), my mother evaluates the importance of working in libraries: ‘The element of luck, of serendipity, in research is very arbitrary but often immensely valuable … The great and inestimable advantage of having actual contact with books is the freedom to pick and dip: to take them off the shelf, sample the index, scan the introduction, the illustrations, the information. ’ In Volume 1 of the Diary, my mother acknowledges The London Library, ‘for which establishment and its staff I feel an almost devout gratitude’ . Today, like other members, I too feel gratitude – not only for its collection, but also for its steadfast modernisation of catalogues and electronic resources, not to mention its building improvements (including, no doubt, the locks on the ladies’ lavatories).

Olivier Bell will be 100 years old this year. Her work on Woolf’s Diary is unlikely ever to be superseded. Revisiting my mother’s research methods, it’s hard not to conclude that, today, something has been lost. Spoilt as we are by the internet, will future researchers have the same tenacity, patience and perfectionism – or reap the same joy as she did in her pursuit of the perfect footnote?

.

Eugène Delacroix, Lion Hunt (detail), 1861 © The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois

Until 22 May 2016

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Stockholms Auktionsverk Rare Books, Maps & Manuscripts

Viewing 17 – 20 June • Auction 21 June Catalogue: www.auktionsverket.com Enquiries: +46 8 453 67 49 Stockholms Auktionsverk Nybrogatan 32 Sweden

Thursday 25th February - 26th March 2016

An illustrated catalogue with text by Alex Kidson is available on request.

Macbeth, The Banqueting Scene (Act III, Scene 4). Pencil. 1792. 14x23 cms.

GEORGE ROMNEY (1734-1802) Heroic drawings inspired by Shakespeare, Milton and Howard

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21/01/2016 17:43

POETRY, HISTORY AND THE UNIVERSITIES Blair Worden considers the relationship between the study of history and the study of literature, which were only divided into separate academic disciplines in the nineteenth century ‘What subject are you taking?’ people ask university students. These days, when joint-degree courses have proliferated, there may not be a single answer. Even so, the division of academic life into subjects and disciplines and departments is something we take for granted. It was a nineteenth-century creation. It goes deeper in this country than elsewhere, because we specialise at an earlier age, on the principle that at A-level or university you learn most from getting your teeth into a limited range of material.

The departments have their practical point, for learning has to be divided up somehow. They also suit the remorseless bureaucratisation of academic life, which needs a distribution of organisational units and academic peer groups. But bureaucracy cares less for the content or purpose of learning than for its management. It does not count the intellectual cost. What have we done to the subjects themselves by placing walls between them?

I have a professional interest in the matter, having repeatedly come up against one wall among the many. I have spent my career in history departments, but a fair proportion of my work has been on English literature, which belongs elsewhere. In the period which I have studied most, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and which for shorthand I shall call the Renaissance), imaginative literature is an important 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

historical source, and can itself be better understood – in some cases only understood – when placed in its historical context. The distinction we make between history, which explores fact, and poetry, which explores the imagination, was understood in the Renaissance, and in the seventeenth century was increasingly asserted. Yet more united the genres than divided them. Historians and poets or

Title page of Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Historie of the World (1621), 1652 edition.

playwrights mingled freely. Significant writers of imaginative literature – Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, George Buchanan (in Scotland), Samuel Daniel, Thomas May, John Milton – wrote substantial and in some cases landmark works of history. History was understood to be an act of imagination. Historians often wrote in verse and, like dramatists, invented speeches for their characters.

History and poetry shared a purpose: the improvement of the world by the instruction, or counselling, of rulers and subjects. So both activities had a practical relevance. Today we are more conscious of the differences than the similarities between past and present. In the Renaissance the reverse was true. History was a database of examples of wise conduct, to be imitated, and of foolish conduct, to be shunned. Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State Sir Francis Walsingham, who urged the application of historical reading ‘to these our times and states’ so as to ‘frame better courses both of action and counsel in public government’ , turned to Livy for guidance in the conduct of Elizabethan foreign policy.

Poetry taught virtue, which by common consent was the foundation of all good rule. The end of poetry, explained Sir Philip Sidney famously in his A Defence of Poetry (c.1582), is the inculcation of ‘virtue’ by ‘delightful teaching’ . To Ben Jonson ‘the office and function of a poet’ are to ‘inflame’ men to ‘virtue’ . Milton

Significant writers of imaginative literature – Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, John Milton – wrote substantial works of history Title page of John Milton’s The History of Britain (1670).

took the ‘abilities’ of a poet to be ‘of power, beside the office of a pulpit, to imbreed and cherish the seeds of virtue’ . Winning monarchs to virtue might be a tall order, but at least they might be moved to recognise the evil propensities to which power is always subject. ‘Tragedy, ’ explained Sidney, ‘maketh kings fear to be tyrants’ . Hamlet, who knows a thing or two about the drama, remembers, with King Claudius in his sights, that ‘guilty creatures sitting at a play/ Have, by the very cunning of the scene/ Been struck so to the soul that presently/ They have proclaimed their malefactions. ’ So it proves. Another play written at the same time, Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix, brings an actor of tragedy on to the stage, the power of whose performance purges a tyrant of his wickedness and saves the realm from dissolution.

Not all poetry was political, but the career of writer after writer in the Renaissance is unintelligible without an alertness to their political concerns. A host of active poets were royal advisers or MPs, whose poetry offered political instruction. Towering authors – though not Shakespeare, whose innocence of didacticism is almost as exceptional as his stature – offered political prescriptions.

We hail Jonson (another poet who also wrote narrative history) for his comedies,

but the plays he cared most about were his tragedies, which anglicised the themes of ancient Roman politics and offered them as lessons for an age of political corruption and latent tyranny.

Milton was as conscious as any writer has been of his own poetic powers.

Yet, when his achievement still lay far short of them, he set poetry aside for most of the central era of his life, the two decades of the Puritan Revolution.

During them he wrote prose, ‘wherein I know myself inferior to myself’ . Much of it was polemical, prompted by the urgency of events he wanted to shape.

But in the midst of the revolution he also wrote a longer and more meditative prose work, The History of Britain (published 1670) which, by analogy, reflected despairingly on the shortcomings of the parliamentarian cause. In his mind prose and verse were complementary instruments. When he returned to ambitious poetry after the Restoration he meditated, in Samson Agonistes, on the parliamentarians’ collapse. To Milton’s friend Andrew Marvell, too, prose and verse were alternative means to a political end. Marvell turned from his youthful lyric verse to the political poetry that is best known for his Cromwell poems and his Restoration satires. Later he moved to polemical prose, which drew on historical

material to assail the misgovernment of church and state.

There is every scope for debating the extent and intent of the political ambitions of Renaissance poetry, but far too much is lost when we ignore them.

Until the later nineteenth century there were no institutional impediments to the exploration of them. The formal teaching of English literature grew up in the Dissenting academies of the eighteenth century and took wing in the new universities and institutions of adult education in the nineteenth. Literature and history were commonly taught together. At King’s College London, where the teaching of English blossomed in the early nineteenth century, the subject was in the hands of a Professor of English Literature and History, whose startingpoint was the expression of the character of society in the literature it produces.

One holder of the chair was J.S. Brewer, whom today’s historians know as an editor of documents in the Public Record Office. The famous critic of Shakespeare A.C. Bradley taught literature and history at University College, Liverpool. The great historian of the English Civil Wars C.H. Firth taught English at his uncle’s foundation, Firth College, later Sheffield University.

In the departmentalisation of universities, history got in ahead of literature and developed a professional disdain for what it judged Eng. Lit.’s lack of

Engraving of Sir Philip Sidney, from Henry Holland’s Heroologia Anglica (1620).

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

William Stubbs (1825–1901), Oxford’s Regius Professor of Modern History, 1866–84, and Bishop of Oxford, 1889–1901. Painting by Charles Wellington Furse, 1892, © Trinity College, University of Oxford.

C.H. Firth (1857–1936), Oxford’s Regius Professor of Modern History, 1904–25.

Artist unknown, dated 1928, reproduced by permission of the British Academy.

rigour. History and literature might have grown up as a single faculty at Oxford in the 1870s had not the then Regius Professor of Modern History, Bishop Stubbs, vetoed the proposal, declaring that the recently founded History School would suffer ‘great harm’ if it were ‘hampered with dilettante teaching, such as the teaching of English literature’ . Eng. Lit. made its institutional breakthrough with the foundation of the Oxford English Faculty in 1894, but struggled for respectability. If pupils were to study language and literature, it was argued, then let them take the proper subject of Classics. Eng. Lit., which some Classics dons taught in their spare time, seemed too easy. ‘Chatter about Shelley’ became a familiar jibe, though Firth, who became Oxford’s Regius Professor of Modern History in 1904, gave the fledgling faculty his support.

He also helped give it an initial historical flavour. To begin with, the faculty set exam questions that required 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

a knowledge of historical background, for example of the relationship of Milton’s great tract against the licensing of the press, Areopagitica (1644), to the intellectual movements of its time. Yet as Eng. Lit. grew in academic confidence, so it gradually separated itself from historical knowledge, especially the knowledge of political history. The spirit of the discipline was shaped by the era of the faculty’s foundation. The aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century disdained the banality of political fact.

The onion-peelers of private experience Henry James and Marcel Proust put the drawing-room before the council-board.

Poetry, it was agreed, ought to be above the corrupting and demeaning arena of public life. Another change of mental climate made its mark. Amid the waning and crisis of Christian faith, the study of literature and art supplied a new kind of unworldly devotion (and distanced itself from the old, which is perhaps why those glories of Renaissance Christian literature,

the Prayer Book and the Authorised Version and the sermons of John Donne or Lancelot Andrewes, did not get into Eng. Lit. syllabuses).

The new mood brought a fast and radical transformation of literary preferences. We can see it, for example, in the abrupt alteration, just around the time the Oxford English Faculty was founded, of the reputation of Marvell. Between his death in 1678 and the early 1890s, Marvell had been known and admired much less for his poems than as a political role model: as an MP and pamphleteer who, in an age of political and religious reaction that followed the Restoration, argued courageously for constitutional and religious liberty. He provided ‘a pattern to all freeborn Englishmen, in the life of a worthy patriot’ .

From the early 1890s, however, critics rebuked him for having betrayed his vocation. He had sacrificed, in middle age, the writing of lyric poetry to his parliamentary activities and his

POETRY, HISTORY AND THE UNIVERSITIES polemical prose. So, in the words of the critic A.C. Benson, ‘the singer of an April mood, who might have blossomed year after year in young and ardent hearts, is buried in the dust of politics, in the valley of dead bones’ . His attacks on the Restoration regime were judged ‘peculiarly distasteful’ . It was a point of view, but one which preferred modern priorities to Marvell’s own. In 1901 a critic invoked ‘the recent rise into fame of the lyrical verse of Marvell’ to support the argument that ‘our generation is markedly superior to its predecessors in poetical taste’ . Finalists at Oxford were invited to discuss Marvell’s prose in the first year the exams were set, but never again in the next century.

When British universities expanded in the 1960s it was mostly graduates of Oxford and Cambridge who staffed them.

Eng. Lit. had come later to Cambridge than to Oxford, in 1919, but more boldly.

It was confidently unhistorical if not antihistorical. The formal study of texts, or ‘practical criticism’ , was what mattered.

That leading light of the faculty, I.A. Richards, remembered that in reading for a history degree he ‘couldn’t bear history’ and ‘didn’t think history ought to have happened’ . Formalism did not monopolise the faculty. Among the array of remarkable critics in Cambridge were two who wrote influentially on the intellectual background to literature, E.M.W. Tillyard on the sixteenth century, Basil Willey on the seventeenth and eighteenth. But it was for the commitment of the faculty’s polemical heavyweights, Richards and F.R. Leavis, to textual exposition that Cambridge English was publicly known. The ‘New Criticism’ of the middle decades of the twentieth century had no time for the historical or contextual interpretation of literature.

There was less evangelism, and less analytical muscle, at Oxford. Instead came an equally unhistorical purr, which encouraged the aesthetic or ethical approbation of poetry. Finals candidates between the later 1940s and the earlier 1960s were invited to identify ‘the finest achievements’ of one of a list of poets; or to discuss the proposition that ‘there is something about Andrew Marvell that compels admiration’; or to say whether ‘Don Juan is a great poem’; or to ‘Write on the humanity of Dr Johnson’ .

Then, from the 1960s, came the reaction. The very notion of literary value, indeed of literature itself, came under attack. What mattered about books or texts, it now appeared, was not their aesthetic or moral instructiveness but their ‘cultural meaning’ , particularly what they tell us about social and political relationships. In its most extreme form the new approach proclaimed that the print on bus tickets was as much ‘literature’ as Shakespeare was. Politics, hitherto excluded, now pervaded what was called the ‘New Historicism’ . The trouble was that for the most part it wasn’t historical.

Historical insight was taken to derive not from the labour, so consuming of time and industry, of discovering what happened in the past, but of deducing from the logic of Karl Marx or Michel Foucault or Jacques Lacan what must have happened. Instead of historical investigation came history without tears.

To appearances, the New Criticism and the New Historicism were as opposed as could be. Eng. Lit. became divided by a social war. In the early stages of the discipline Oxbridge professors had worried lest the subject might become so successful that their maids would acquire a taste for it. By the late twentieth century literature was being used to settle scores of class or race or gender. Yet the two approaches were insensibly united by their hostility to the real political world. In the first case politics were

deemed a contamination of literature, in the second an instrument of social oppression. The condescension of the Right yielded to the condescension of the Left. Neither approach engaged with the political realities which had preoccupied Renaissance poets.

New Historicism withered. Even while it caught the headlines, something quieter but more positive was going on, of which we now feel the benefit. Many literary critics are now alert to historical contexts and open to the findings of historical scholarship, to which indeed they often contribute. Yet the more obvious it becomes how much the two subjects share, the more conspicuously the departmental dividing lines, and the practical and mental habits they foster, get in the way. Anyone who tries to cross the frontier encounters a pattern. You accept an invitation to lecture in either a history or a literature department in the hope of saying something of interest to both, only to find on arrival that the host department either has forgotten to inform its neighbour or isn’t on speaking terms with it. It has been common to hail recent advances as ‘interdisciplinarity’ , which sounds, or for a time sounded, excitingly innovative. Yet all the word means is the traversing of barriers which only the departmentalisation of universities has erected in the first place. We may have to live with them, but we should be alive to the obstacles they pose.

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Title-page spread from The Works of Andrew Marvell, Esq. (2 vols., 1726).

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23

THE LOST LIBRARY

Jono Jackson on his remarkable discovery of the forgotten library of the English Club in Zanzibar, which can still be visited, even though the Club, founded in 1888, has long ceased to exist

to one subject are so often gloriously peppered throughout the stacks, and therefore show how research into one place is a journey of its own.

Zanzibar sits six degrees south of the Equator and some twenty-five miles from the East African coast. To give a sense of its size to an English readership, Major F.B. Pearce wrote in Zanzibar: The Island Metropolis of Eastern Africa (1920, T. Zanzibar) that the island is ‘about the size of Hertfordshire’ and that its length from north to south is equivalent to the distance as the crow flies between London and Eastbourne. Similarly, Robert Nunez Lyne in ‘Section of Map of East Africa Showing Zanzibar Island’ (detail), from Zanzibar in Contemporary Robert Nunez Lyne’s Zanzibar in Contemporary Times (1905).

Times (1905, H. Zanzibar) imagined Zanzibar as being ‘very much It is nearly ten years since I first sat on like the Isle of Man in shape, though the terrace of the Africa House Hotel nearly three times the size’ . in Stone Town, Zanzibar, and waited Zanzibar is in fact an archipelago, expectantly for the sun to meet the ocean. consisting of two main islands – Unguja I was talking to the manager, who asked and Pemba – as well as numerous islets. whether I knew that the building once It is this first island that is historically and housed the English Club, and that its popularly referred to as Zanzibar, with original library still existed if I would Stone Town as its metropolis. Seasonal like to see it. I forgot the sunset in an monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean instant. We left the terrace and descended brought trade to its verdant shores for the grand staircase to the ground floor, centuries, and from this long-standing where the library can be found behind an trade between Asia and the East African unassuming locked door. littoral emerged Swahili society. This was Some years later I was drawn back literate, culturally rich, ethnically diverse, to the English Club library and went on adherent to Islam and complex in its to research its collection and history for composition. my M.Sc. thesis. The London Library ‘s Today Zanzibar is a semi-autonomous collections on African history, and constitutional part of Tanzania and has particularly those on East Africa and a fascinating history. In 1698, after a Zanzibar, proved to be invaluable. I have period of ineffectual Portuguese rule, included London Library shelfmarks control fell to the Sultanate of Oman, the below, to illustrate how books that relate 24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

capital of which was moved from Muscat to Zanzibar in 1832. Commercial treaties were made afterwards with the USA, Great Britain and France. Consulates followed and it became the base from which David Livingstone, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke began their pioneering journeys to the African interior.

In H.M. Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone (1872, T. Africa, Central), he writes that Zanzibar is ‘one of the fruitfelest islands of the Indian Ocean’ , to which foreign vessels arrive loaded with ‘American sheeting, brandy, gunpowder, muskets, beads, English cottons, brasswire, china-ware’ and depart with ‘ivory, gum-copal, cloves, hides, cowries, sesamum, pepper, and cocoa-nut oil’ .

However, as it was also the chief entrepôt for the Indian Ocean slave trade in the eighteenth century, this ‘principal emporium of the eastern seaboard of Africa’ was not so benign. The movement for the abolition of the trade further developed British interest in Zanzibar and its suppression brought a greater naval presence. A treaty was signed in 1873 that ostensibly brought an end to the trade, yet it continued illicitly and the treaty required zealous enforcement by the Royal Navy.

Zanzibar became a British Protectorate in 1890. The rights and territories of the Sultan were guaranteed and placed under the immediate protection of Great Britain, which led some observers to perceive the British as colonial masters in collaboration with the Arab aristocracy. Two years earlier, the English Club was founded in Stone Town as a facility ‘for the association of an unlimited number of English Residents, together with officers of the Royal Navy stationed in these waters’ , and later for ‘any British subject or American citizen of European extraction’ . With its bar, billiardtables, card-playing rooms, bedrooms and library, it was a bastion of Albion abroad.

The Club was not racially so

much as socially exclusive, and the various communities constituting Zanzibar’s motley population were similarly provided with clubs that exercised congenial discrimination.

Cosmopolitanism was lauded and, by virtue of Zanzibar not being an imperial colony in the same vein as Kenya or Rhodesia, for example, society was not initially permeated by the same ideologies that brought destructive stratification.

However, that is not to say that racial and social tension did not exist.

Arab and Indian influences abounded, particularly evident in the architecture of Stone Town, its labyrinthine network of narrow streets and, most strikingly, in the hundreds of elaborately carved wooden doors that still exist today. The English Club building features a particularly substantial and elegantly carved door, embellished by numerous weighty brass studs which are purely decorative and are Indian in origin as a defence against batterings from war elephants.

Those who were eligible to join the Club are described by G.H. ShelswellWhite in A Guide to Zanzibar (1932, T. Zanzibar): ‘members of certain East African Clubs may use the English Club on certain conditions, and officers of British and foreign men-of-war may become Honorary Members whilst stationed at Zanzibar.

The Committee may extend the privilege to officers of other ships. ’ Furthermore, ‘Any stranger may, on the proposition of two members and at the invitation of the Committee, become an Honorary Member for a period not exceeding 7 days or a Temporary Member for a period not exceeding one month upon payment of Rs. 5 per week or part thereof’ .

It would have been as an Honorary or Temporary Member that Evelyn Waugh stayed at the Club during his visit to Zanzibar in 1930. In Remote People (1931, T. Africa Gen.), he recalls how he lived at the English Club and battled the intolerable December heat: ‘I go up to the library and read local history. I try to smoke. The fan blows fragments of burning tobacco over my clothes. ’ Driven to distraction by tropical discomfort he continues: ‘I make notes … the ink runs in little puddles of sweat that fall on to the page; I leave hot thumb-prints on the history book. The plates have all come loose and the fan

Entrance door of the English Club, Shangani Street, c.1908. Image courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovitz Library of African Studies Winterton Collection, Northwestern University.

scatters them about the library. ’ In 1935, shortly after Waugh wrote of his time spent in the English Club library, a new survey on the book trade was published entitled The Book World (Bibliog. Books, Booksellers &c.). The chapter ‘English Books Abroad’ begins by describing how books are not necessarily regarded by many people in England as necessities, but that they are so regarded, fortunately for the British book trade, by many people abroad. ‘To the isolated dweller in the more distant parts of the Empire, ’ it continues, ‘books often afford an indispensable link with the old country as well as an indispensable source of happiness and comfort, and thus become a necessity’ .

Even after the Suez Canal opened in 1869, Zanzibar still lay some 8,064 miles from London by ship. Sir John Kirk, Britain’s first Consul in Zanzibar and quoted in General Rigby, Zanzibar and the Slave Trade (1935, Biog. Rigby), wrote in 1868: ‘We have no mails for four

months – a more out of the world place never existed. ’ Waugh also wrote of his own wait for immeasurably tardy mail, despite direct steamship communication with London having been established in 1910 and steamships from Europe and India continuing to make Zanzibar a regular port of call.

From the 1920s the English Club’s new acquisitions for their ever-growing library collection were mainly works of contemporary literature and current periodicals. Certainly after the arrival of the first airmail, it was conceivable that a book published in London on a certain day could arrive in Zanzibar between two and three weeks later.

The books that occupied the shelves of the English Club library offer a fascinating insight into the characteristics, interests and preoccupations of its members.

Some titles have an obvious relevance to members, such as David Lloyd George’s Is it Peace? (1923) and Richard Jebb’s The Empire in Eclipse (1926). Others reflect THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

Printed label with extracts from the English Club library’s byelaws, on the inside cover of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s ’My Novel’, or Varieties in English Life, by Pisistratus Caxton, Vol. I (1874).

more leisurely aspects of life on the island, such as E.W. Payn’s Tennis, Topics and Tactics (1907), Charles Roberts’s The Complete Billiard Player (1921) and A.P.F. Chapman’s The Game of Cricket (1930). The establishment of recreational facilities and a clubhouse for members of the English Club began in the 1890s.

Formation of a cricket ground was first on the agenda, followed by a football pitch, a golf club and provisions for tennis, hockey, squash, bowls and croquet. The Old Fort in Stone Town – an impressive, castellated structure built in the seventeenth century to defend the island against attack – was appropriated for use by the Ladies’ Tennis Club. The library’s copy of E.F. Benson’s Winter Sports in Switzerland (1913) presumably served as a form of escapism from the fierce equatorial sun.

An oasis of European culture in the colonies, the Club with its library served to reproduce the comfort and familiarity of ‘home’ as well as to reconstruct the outward forms of a social life to which members were accustomed. Indeed, pasted inside the front cover of every volume was a label on which ‘Extracts from Library Byelaws’ were printed, some of which closely resemble The London Library’s own.

This was not the only library in Stone Town, and as well as a government library there existed many within community organisations. One alternative library – to which membership was open to all – was 26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

the Zanzibar Book Club, founded in 1904

by Alfred Spurrier, who was Medical Officer of Health at the time. Books were also lent and borrowed within the European community which, considering their scarcity, often led to polite reminders and requests for their return.

Many years later, the foreign correspondent Richard Beeston recounted his stay at the English Club on the eve of independence from Britain in 1963. In Looking for Trouble (1997, Biog.

Beeston), he remarked that the rules of a Victorian gentleman’s club were still applied with vigour by the Secretary and derided the incongruity of dressing for dinner despite the tropical climate. Such practices may have seemed outdated to an outsider in the early 1960s (Beeston describes the Club as a ‘faded nineteenthcentury relic’), but their purpose was integral to the form and idiosyncrasies of such an institution. Despite the number of European residents in Zanzibar scarcely exceeding a few hundred at any one time throughout the first half of the twentieth century, not all residents who were eligible to join the Club would have done so. In contrast to settler colonies this was largely a transient community, with some residents only staying for a few years. For those who wholly embraced the English Club, their sense of connection with social clubs at home could be strengthened by an afternoon spent with its copy of Ralph Nevill’s London Clubs: Their History & Treasures (1911).

A month after Beeston witnessed Zanzibar’s independence from Britain, a revolution overthrew the Sultan and a People’s Republic was declared. The English Club was ultimately abandoned, its purpose rendered obsolete by the absence of the coterie for which it catered.

For the remainder of the century the building fell into disrepair and a number of the library’s books were inevitably pilfered. Many were taken abroad, and others found their way to local curio stores and became mildewed miscellanies rife with bookworm.

The building was first reincarnated as the Africa House Hotel in 1988, and happily much of the original library collection remains intact today. Initially there was no access to the library, but after an extensive renovation of the building, completed in 2008, guests could request

Happily much of the original library collection remains intact today a key and browse the collection. Later the library was used as a storeroom for a brief spell before being restored once again. It remains closed to the public, with access granted to hotel guests.

Despite its preservation, it is still a somewhat withered and diminished collection. It is arguably a lost library, forgotten and uncelebrated, existing as an unintended survivor of a colonial past.

It is also peculiar to think that a library with books that were so highly valued by its readers for over 75 years should subsequently lie unused for 40.

While it is true that the readers for whom these books were transported to Zanzibar have long gone, the discovery of the books after a prolonged absence of readers only highlights their latent potential. For books without readers are merely dormant, and there is arguably no difference between a book in the Back Stacks of The London Library that has not been read in half a century and its equivalent in the library of the former English Club on Zanzibar.

I am reminded of John Milton’s 1644 polemic, Areopagitica, in which he declares that: ‘Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. ’ So as the spirits of their authors are present in all books, we might remember that Evelyn Waugh’s inky thumb-prints remain preserved in others.

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Detail showing letterhead from the English Club’s Statement of Account, 30 June 1932.

HIDDEN CORNERS

STITCHES IN TIME Sally Goodsir recently discovered the small but select Library collections of the Needlework and Embroidery shelfmarks, and describes some of her personal highlights A. Needlework and A. Embroidery form two relatively small sections split between T.S. Eliot House and the Art Room. The majority of the books are octavo, their small size suiting the medium. Most of the titles date from the early twentieth century, and their clothbound covers are deceptively plain when compared with the beautiful work that is illustrated inside, often in colour plates.

The section A. Needlework begins with one of the earliest books on the subject in the Library holdings. Marian Alford’s Needlework as Art (1886) is a classic survey of the subject, and covers most aspects of the design and history of the craft, as well as combining several different methods of illustrating so visual an art form. Byzantine vestments are illustrated with linen-backed plates on fold-out pages, and photographs of Japanese opus plumarium (long embroidery stitches in silk threads) are carefully attached to the paper.

Alford was a lecturer in the 1870s and 1880s at the Royal School of Art Needlework in South Kensington (founded in 1872) and dedicated her volume to Queen Victoria, thus neatly encapsulating some of the common themes to be found in the A. Needlework and A. Embroidery shelfmarks. One of these is the predominance of female authors in the collection: all of the books published before 1897 were written by women, and almost 90% of them after that date. This may reflect the fact that needlework dominated women’s domestic lives, although many of the books, such as Alford’s, were also the result of public teaching or historical study. It is interesting to note, however, that the crafts of embroidery, needlework and knitting have also been practised historically by men. Fair Isle and Shetland knitting, so essential for warmth on those

islands and when fishing in the North Atlantic and North Sea, was produced by men as well as women. The textiles produced by the Bloomsbury Group’s Omega Workshops in the 1920s were designed and created by both men and women. There are few titles in the Library, or indeed available more widely, that reflect men’s contribution to these crafts.

The connection between royal life and the crafts of needlework and embroidery is emphasised in various titles in the collection. Mary, Queen of Scots is well known as an accomplished needlewoman, and her small piece A Catte, illustrated in Michael Bath’s Emblems for a Queen: The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots (2008), is for me one of the most endearing objects in the Royal Collection. Sophie Caulfeild’s The Dictionary of Needlework, published in 1882 (the Library has an 1896 edition and a 1972 facsimile copy), was dedicated to Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Louise, who was a talented sculptor and artist, ‘in acknowledgement of the great services which, by means of her cultivated taste and cordial patronage, she has rendered to the arts of plain sewing and embroidery’ . Louisa Peel’s

Mary, Queen of Scots, A Catte, c.1569–84, embroidered canvas panel. © Royal Collection Trust/ © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016.

Practical Canvas Embroidery (1929) is dedicated to Queen Mary, wife of George V, herself a skilled needlewoman.

Queen Mary gifted 1,400 books to The London Library in 1954, which were chosen by the Library from Queen Mary’s collection at Marlborough House and included Mediterranean and Near Eastern Embroideries from the Collection of Mrs. F.H. Cook by A.J.B. Wace (1935).

My use of this section of the Library began two years ago when I was researching tapestries and embroidery for inclusion in the catalogue for The Queen’s Gallery exhibition Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden (2015, A. Art, 4to.), in my capacity as Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts at Royal Collection Trust. A. Embroidery has four books

by Thomasina Beck, whose beautifully illustrated volumes connect the worlds of gardening and needlework. Embroidery motifs and designs have reflected contemporary tastes in flowers and plants since the simple Tudor blackwork designs of the sixteenth century, through the three-dimensional stumpwork of the seventeenth and, probably my favourite type of embroidery, the long stitches of needlepainting in the eighteenth, which were so suited to the blowsier, colourful depictions of flowers then in fashion.

One of the great joys of the time span of the Library’s collections is the way the volumes reflect changing taste and style in embroidery and needlework.

The advantage of the Library holding multiple copies of Thérèse de Dillmont’s late nineteenth-century Encyclopedia of Needlework is that you can gauge the popularity of the book over the years, as the number of copies previously issued is given opposite the title page of each edition; 560,000 in an early edition, rising to 940,000 in a later volume. The books themselves, small, fat and no doubt THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

Diagram from Thérèse de Dillmont’s Encyclopedia of Needlework (1890?).

utterly impractical to consult whilst sewing, have tiny diagrams, with some of the stitches larger than life-size. It is one of the few guides to start with the basic techniques for beginners, including threading a needle and positioning the hands, and it quickly goes on to explain complex techniques such as macramé, tatting and netting, all forms of knotted fringing which evoke a sense of heavily decorated Victorian interiors.

Elizabeth Glaister’s Needlework (1880) is similarly evocative: as well as familiar chapters on curtains and tablecloths, advice is included on chimneypiece hangings, for which is suggested ‘a gentle gradation of tone and quiet harmony and colour’ using ‘gold brocatelle silk, with a pattern in this style applied in crimson velvet edged with a fine cord’ . Piano fronts are also championed: ‘an upright piano may be much improved in a decorative sense by taking out the fretwork and putting in a piece of embroidery. ’ One exhaustingly complex design suggests using ‘bronze green satin, the design being sprays of convolvulus springing from a grey satin vase in the centre. The flowers are worked in blue and white, the leaves in various shades of green. To relieve the whole, three or four sulphurcoloured butterflies are introduced hovering over the flowers; the whole is inclosed in a very simple border of green and blue. ’ From a New York publisher in 1889 came Needle-craft: Artistic and Practical, one of a series of books devoted 28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

to home art, which includes instructions on making crocheted lambrequin, a type of knotted fringing.

Among the authors some names stand out. Decorative Needlework (1893) was written by May Morris, daughter of the designer William, published under her maiden name although she was married at the time. May, like Marian Alford, was involved with the Royal School of Art Needlework, but she also took commercial decisions when she became head in 1885 of the Morris and Co. embroidery workshops. Thérèse de Dillmont, whose Encyclopedia of Needlework is referred to above, opened her own needlework shops in Vienna, Paris, Berlin and London. Her book was published in Italian, French, German and English, and she formed a business alliance with the French thread company Dollfus-Mie et Cie, which is still trading today as DMC. The actress Siân Phillips’s Needlepoint (1987) is a practical guide to the subject and includes some behind-the-scenes anecdotes and examples of work by other actors.

A group of books published in the early twentieth century reflects the teaching of needlework as an educational subject at the time. Needlework was the lesson for girls, whilst woodwork tended to be the timetabled equivalent for boys, the quality and type of teaching for both subjects depending on the intended destinations of the pupils in adult life.

However, a group of young women graduate teachers attempted to change this convention. Joan Drew’s Embroidery and Design: A Handbook of the Principles of Decorative Art as Applied to Embroidery (1915) is addressed directly to teachers; as the foreword by Mary Miller Allen, first woman principal of Homerton College, Cambridge, states: ‘It is to be hoped that the present volume will get into the hands of teachers in Girls’ Clubs, Continuation Classes, and the Upper Classes in the Elementary Schools.’

Margaret Swanson and Ann Macbeth, needlework tutors at the Glasgow School of Art, in their book Educational Needlecraft (1913), expressed the hope that ‘in becoming good craftswomen girls may become something more … that winged power in them, the unresting creative energy, must find a new field for its labour’. The basic designs included in the book are traditional in form, such as yoked pinafores and Edwardian blouses, but the embroidered designs worked on to them are obviously influenced by the authors’ Aesthetic training at Glasgow.

Macbeth’s mentor at Glasgow, Jessie Newbery, is believed to have designed the ‘Glasgow Rose’ , a circle of fabric with the petals created from lines of satin stitch.

This is perhaps most recognised today as the signature design of Newbery’s friend Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Macbeth became the principal

Ann Macbeth wearing a collar embroidered with the ‘Glasgow Rose’ design, from Margaret Swain’s Scottish Embroidery (1986). Reproduced with kind permission of B.T. Batsford, part of Pavilion Books Company Ltd.

Embroidered collar and front of blouse featuring the ‘Glasgow Rose’ design, from Margaret Swanson and Ann Macbeth’s Educational Needlecraft (1913).

HIDDEN CORNERS embroidery instructor at Glasgow in 1908 after Newbery retired, and the new curriculum she devised with Swanson emphasised the importance of developing a sense of colour. They created a formula where each project resulted in useful finished articles, such as table mats, bags and needlecases. In institutions where the teaching of embroidery survives today, this is still the usual method. A photograph of Macbeth in Margaret Swain’s Scottish Embroidery (1986) shows her wearing one of her pieces, a wide collar embroidered with the Glasgow Rose. Macbeth’s successor, Anne Knox Arthur, published An Embroidery Book in 1920, in which the designs and projects are still very much those of her predecessors.

Later in the twentieth century, the embroidery historian Margaret Swain wrote about Scottish types and designs of embroidery and needlework. Her book Scottish Embroidery includes the Glasgow School’s designs, but also earlier domestic and ceremonial embroideries, as well as the results of her own research on the tapestries and embroideries at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh.

I find the illustrations in some books particularly fascinating. Modern Needlecraft (1932), edited by Davide Caroline Minter and with contributions by a galaxy of dressmaking, millinery, knitting and professional teachers from across England, contains plenty. The millinery chapter features cloche hats, in felted wool or straw, shaped closely to the head. The curtain chapter is illustrated with valances, the dressmaking chapter with various ways of pressing using nonelectric irons. The author Agnes Miall illustrated her books with images of made objects in domestic settings. In Patchwork Old and New (1937), the crazywork patchwork of the pouffe is very much of its time. As such work was for everyday use, little has survived and these images are therefore even more important to us now. Weldons Encyclopedia of Needlework (1939?) includes a design for a candlewick bedspread, the cotton required for the tufts measured, rather painfully, by weight.

In the mid-twentieth century a return to more traditional home and fashion design resulted in evocative reworkings of traditional patterns. I had not been aware of Eivor Fisher’s Swedish Embroidery (1953) before writing this article, but it

just predates the introduction of modern Swedish design into Britain, showing finished products such as a runner pictured with Swedish glass and ceramics, and the typically Scandinavian ‘Ships’ door curtain. The book is part of a series published by the Scottish thread company Clark’s (perhaps better recognised today under the tradename Anchor and still a major rival to DMC), and comes with a folio of patterns. A few decades later, Designer Needlepoint: 25 Exclusive Designs from the Royal School of Needlework to Kaffe Fassett and Susan Duckworth (1987), edited by the tapestry designer Hugh Ehrman, includes a history of the School.

Completed pieces are photographed in historically dressed interiors created for the book, featuring antique furniture, stripped floorboards or Lloyd Loom furniture. Ehrman’s eponymous company is still a major supplier of tapestry kits.

The Library’s most recent acquisitions are similarly practical guides with some historical context. They include Gail Marsh’s Early 20th Century Embroidery Techniques (2011), which looks back at the work of the Glasgow School of Art as well as more individual creators. Recent surveys of the major textile collections at The Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Rothschild collection at Waddesdon Manor and those at Hardwick Hall and the Victoria and Albert Museum reflect the enduring interest in this popular craft.

Hardwick Hall’s textile collection brings us neatly back to where we began; Mary, Queen of Scots’ jailer was the Earl of Shrewsbury, and his wife, better known

Candlewick bedspread, illustration from Weldons Encyclopedia of Needlework (1939?).

as Bess of Hardwick, would sew with the captive queen. Works by both women feature in Hardwick’s collection.

It has been fascinating to explore these two areas of the Library’s collection, and to realise the strength of the sections, particularly in the area of early twentiethcentury design, and the quality of the illustrations and information. It has also been a great joy to discover several pattern books, which I will now have to borrow for my own personal enjoyment of these crafts.

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Illustration of a runner, from Eivor Fisher’s Swedish Embroidery (1953). Reproduced with kind permission of B.T. Batsford, part of Pavilion Books Company Ltd. THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29

Medici_advert_Replacement_v2.indd 1

03/02/2016 11:37

Rare Books London 2016 26 –28 May

London International Antiquarian Book Fair Olympia National – Thursday to Saturday ILEC International Fair ibis Hotel, Earls Court – Friday and Saturday

Register for free tickets at www.rarebookslondon.com

30 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

MEMBERS’ NEWS CALLING ALL MEMBERS As all members will now be aware, talk last autumn of a large marquee in St James’s Square in which to celebrate our 175th anniversary has turned into reality with Words In The Square: Celebrating 175 Years of Inspiration at The London Library set to take place from Thursday, 5 May to Sunday, 8 May 2016

This event would simply not be possible without all the generous support we are receiving from sponsors, partners and speakers and from all those who are signing up for tickets and day passes and the special evening gala events. We see this long weekend of celebration as an opportunity to step outside our corner of the Square and show the world what the Library helps our amazing members to do. We hope that the programme so carefully curated

by James Runcie and David Kynaston will give all those who attend the event fresh insights into how people think, write and create, and generate a real sense of the value of the Library for its members and for the world at large. For our 175th anniversary is not just a moment for us to celebrate the past, but a launch pad for securing our future. We need to attract more members and we need to raise the funds to enable us to create vital additional reader-spaces and improve conditions for our hard-working books.

Can you help us with this? If you are booking for an event, perhaps you could persuade a friend to come too. It would be a great way to introduce someone to the Library. If you are active on social media, your tweet could help boost sales. Or perhaps you are a member of a society or book group that you think might be interested in a particular event – do bring it to their attention.

Your support in all these ways would be warmly appreciated.

While we hope as many members as possible will take part in Words In The Square, even those members now too distant from the Library or too frail to travel might like to get involved in our anniversary in other ways. The Library’s 175-year history is a uniquely colourful one enriched by anecdotes about people and the serendipitous finds they have made. As part of our celebrations we want to compile a Members’ Miscellany of the stories that have shaped the Library and we are inviting our members to share their memories – from discoveries of extraordinary books lying undiscovered on our shelves, to encounters with marginalia that no one meant to share, from memories of extraordinary people, to recollections of events that have helped shape the Library’s past. As the Miscellany develops, we hope to start publishing online some of the contributions we have received.

We’ll be providing more information about this project in May at the time of our anniversary, but if in the meantime you would like to start submitting stories about the Library that have caught your imagination then you can e-mail us at stories@londonlibrary.co.uk.

The London Library seen from St James’s Square. Photograph © James Tye.

MERCHANDISE A selection of postcards featuring images from the Library’s past, together with a new range of handy notebooks, will be on sale this spring.

The popular London Library canvas bag (£10) is now available in two versions (short or long handles) to cater for all preferences. Notecards and envelopes featuring images from the Library are also on sale, priced £1 each.

All proceeds from sales of merchandise support The London Library.

On sale from Reception or online at shop.londonlibrary.co.uk

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31

FOUND ON THE SHELVES As the Library prepares to publish works from its collections for the first time, Inez Lynn and Dunia García-Ontiveros tell us how and why the project came about

One of the most rewarding things about publishing books (especially in a small independent publishing house) is knowing that you are able to bring the thoughts and eccentricities of writers (living or dead!) to a wider audience. It’s a huge pleasure for me and Pushkin Assistant Editor Julia Nicholson to work with the Library in choosing and presenting these discoveries.

I am thrilled that Pushkin is publishing the books in the “Found on the Shelves” series, which are funny, moving, profound and eye-opening.

Adam Freudenheim Publisher and Managing Director of Pushkin Press 32 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

There can be few long-standing members (and certainly no staff members) who have not experienced the delight of coming across something wholly unexpected when browsing in our bookstacks.

For some, that discovery may develop into a lifetime’s study – I’m thinking here of Isaiah Berlin who wrote of chancing upon the work of Alexander Herzen and his contemporaries on our shelves and how it determined a large part of the future direction of his thinking and writing. But for most it offers just a moment of pleasure, a lift to the spirits or an unexpected connection to something already known. Perhaps nothing encapsulates so well the joy of the Library as those moments. So how, we wondered last summer, could we take something of that experience to nonmembers, to those who would surely love the Library if they only came to know of its existence?

In May 2016, you will be able to pick up our answer to that question in a bookshop near you, when a series of small books called ‘Found on the Shelves’ will be published by Pushkin Press and The London Library in celebration of the Library’s 175th anniversary. Each contains one or more discoveries made by staff or volunteers among the books and pamphlet volumes in our collection, and each tells a story. In some cases we have reproduced a single work in its entirety, but in most we have brought together a selection of different shorter works to form a volume or selected parts of a longer work where the original was too lengthy for the format of our series. These are not facsimile reprints but beautifully redesigned and typeset by Pushkin Press with original covers by David Pearson, one of the most widely admired designers working with books today. The series will be issued in two batches, the first to coincide with our anniversary in May and the second in November in time for Christmas shopping.

So what are these books and how did we choose them? Well, first we asked our cataloguing staff to look for things they had come across while retro-cataloguing that were rare or unusual and asked for volunteers to assess them. After much dedicated reading, we were able to set aside a few for further consideration but realised that most were too long or too ‘worthy’ for our purpose.

So we expanded the search, and staff from all round the Library started scanning the shelves to see what caught their eye. Soon we had a very long list indeed, covering etiquette books, travel and exploration, all manner of sports, food and drink, aeronautics, satire, disasters, folk tales, children’s stories, works on women’s suffrage, art, mesmerism, slang … For a while the meeting table in the Librarian’s office was covered with books of all shapes and sizes as we gradually worked through them all, looking for those items you could open at any page and find something entrancing; something that a bookshop browser would pick up out of curiosity and think, ‘Oh yes, I have to have that’.

When we first conceived of this idea we had turned to Library member and former Trustee, Adam Freudenheim, Publisher and Managing Director of Pushkin Press, for advice. While encouraging,

MEMBERS’ NEWS

It has been a joy to read and work with these discoveries from The London Library. From the moment I started reading “Bustle” , in which Sir Alfred Milner talks to his nineteenth-century audience about information overload, I knew this would be a very special and unusual series of books.

Julia Nicholson Assistant Editor at Pushkin Press

he was duly cautious about its commercial viability but offered to come back once we had identified some possible texts to give us a more informed view. So we were absolutely delighted when that return visit saw him become more and more enthusiastic, to the point of offering Pushkin’s involvement. Seeing which books he responded to most enabled us to refine again what we were looking for and we started to put together the material for a series of 12 volumes, researching authors and the context in which the chosen titles had been written.

At this point we began discovering more and more connections between the items themselves, their authors and, indeed, The London Library. This was extraordinary given that we were working with nineteenth-century texts on cycling, human flight, women’s travel and sport, Norway, boxing, dieting, reading, writing, advice to the young, disasters, wine and etiquette. Many of the authors selected turned out to have been members of the Library; others had a more indirect connection or were connected to each other.

For example, one of our authors in On Corpulence, the successful slimmer William Banting, was an undertaker by trade and was responsible for the funeral of Prince Albert, the Library’s first royal Patron. Ned Donnelly, the author of our illustrated treatise on boxing, taught Library member George Bernard Shaw to box, and Shaw was instrumental in helping Lady Colin Campbell (who writes on trout fishing and fencing in The Gentlewoman’s Book of Sports) to earn her living from writing after a society scandal.

When we learned recently that our editor at Pushkin Press, Julia Nicholson, is herself the great-great-granddaughter of Sir Leslie Stephen (President of The London Library, 1892–1904) and thereby also related to one of our authors, Virginia Woolf, we could only think, ‘Well, of course’.

The series exemplifies that writing and reading in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were much more diverse and democratic than one might think. The authors we have selected represent a broad range: from those such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Woolf and E.M. Forster writing great works of literature to relatively unknown enthusiasts who took to writing only once in order to share something of importance to them; from professionals whose livelihood depended on their writing to philanthropists who distributed their words for free. In Donnelly, we even have an illiterate author, whose words were taken down

by a friend and business partner.

If there is one characteristic that unites all these authors it is that they are independently minded, ready to take their lives in unexpected directions. Lady Colin Campbell, for instance, far from retiring to a life of seclusion to escape from gossip, bursts forth as an adventurous travel writer; she is unrepentantly athletic, artistic and witty. The French photographer Nadar may have composed sedate and fashionable portraits in his studio but he cherished a passion for flying which led to some near-disastrous ballooning trips. And our nineteenth-century travellers to Norway made light of the privations of their journeys in their delight in experiencing new lands and peoples. What characteristic could be more suitable to represent the joys of serendipity in The London Library, which remains proudly independent 175 years from its founding?

FOUND ON THE SHELVES FIRST SERIES Cycling: The Craze of the Hour The Gentlewoman’s Book of Sports The Lure of the North On Corpulence: Feeding the Body and Feeding the Mind Life in a Bustle: Advice to Youth On Reading, Writing and Living with Books Published by Pushkin Press, May 2016, £4.99 each, paperback. Six more books in the series will be published in November 2016.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 33

Pushkin Press • The London Library Essays on dieting in the 1860s…

Instructions for gentlewomen on trout-fishing and lawn-tennis…

Remedies for the ill-health caused by the ‘modern’ craze of the velocipede…

And more…

‘FOUND ON THE SHELVES’ All discovered in The London Library, and for sale from May, £4.99 each Cycling: The Craze of the Hour The Gentlewoman’s Book of Sports On Reading, Writing and Living With Books Life in a Bustle: Advice to Youth On Corpulence: Feeding the Body and Feeding the Mind The Lure of the North Six more treasures from The London Library coming in November 34 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

MEMBERS’ NEWS

YOUR LIBRARY NEEDS YOU TOO, MADAME 2016 sees the 175th anniversary of the Library’s foundation, and we hope our initiatives to mark the occasion will raise the Library’s profile and boost our marketing and fundraising campaigns. To make the most of this opportunity we will need clear strategic direction as well as thorough and efficient follow-up, and our trustees have a vital role to play. As we start our search for new trustees for election at the 2016 AGM, we are particularly keen to improve the diversity of the Trustee board.

In accordance with our Charter & Byelaws, trustees are drawn from the members of the Library and each year we are extraordinarily fortunate in the high calibre of those who come forward to volunteer for trusteeship. We recognise that we have some way to go before the diversity of our Library membership is representative of the general population, but we would like to reach a position where the composition of the Trustee board in terms of gender and ethnicity at least reflects that of the membership itself. Can you help us achieve this balance?

Although specialist skills and experience can be very useful on the Trustee board, some qualities are essential for all trustees – most importantly the willingness to engage in a constructive and collaborative manner with all the challenges affecting the Library, and to act as its advocates in the wider world. All trustees elected to serve on the Library’s board are given a full induction to assist them in the role.

We try to ensure that our Trustee recruitment process is thorough but not burdensome or intimidating. It does involve making an application, and not everyone who applies can be selected, so shortlisted candidates are asked to attend an interview.

This is conducted by the Nominations Committee, made up of trustees as well as an experienced independent recruitment professional. It is an opportunity to explore what you might be able to bring to the board and whether you are comfortable with the collective decision-making required of trustees.

We sense that some members who would make excellent trustees hesitate to come forward because they are not confident that they have the necessary expertise or imagine that the time commitment required would be too onerous. We would encourage anyone in two minds about whether or not to apply to attend the drop-in session on Wednesday, 30 March (see Member Events, page 37) or, if this is not convenient, to contact us (see below) for an informal discussion with a current Trustee or a member of the Library’s Executive Team.

A brief guide explaining the responsibilities and commitments involved, with full details of how to apply, is available to download from the Vacancies section of the Library’s website. Please contact Sarah Farthing on (020) 7766 4712 or email librarian@londonlibrary.co.uk if you require any further information.

For consideration this year, please submit applications no later than 6 May 2016

SEARCH FOR A NEW TREASURER The Library’s current Treasurer, Mark Storey, has now completed six years’ dedicated service in the role and he has indicated that he would like to step down at the end of this year once a suitable replacement has been recruited.

The trustees appoint the Treasurer from among the members of the Library, and he or she need not already be a Trustee at the time of the appointment. A sub-committee will be set up to handle the search for a new Treasurer, and will produce a shortlist for interview preferably before the next AGM. The new Treasurer’s term will be four years, renewable once.

The Treasurer’s primary responsibility is to lead the trustees in strategic financial management as chair of the Finance Committee. He or she will give sound advice to the Chairman, support the Bursar and the Librarian on financial matters and present the statutory accounts to the members at the AGM. Anyone who would like to apply can do so by writing to the sub-committee, c/o Sarah Farthing in the Librarian’s office, or by email to librarian@londonlibrary.co.uk. So that a decision can be reached within the planned timescale it would be helpful if you would submit your application by Friday, 6 May 2016.

MEMBERS’ AWARDS & PRIZES Congratulations to the following London Library members who have recently won or been nominated for literary awards and prizes. If you have been shortlisted for or received an award, please email to let us know (prizewinners@londonlibrary.co.uk).

Christopher de Bellaigue, winner of a 2015 Foreign Press Association in London award.

A.S. Byatt, winner of the 2016 Erasmus Prize, a major Dutch award for exceptional contribution to the humanities or the arts.

Ben Fergusson, The Spring of Kasper Meier, winner of the Historical Writers’ Association (HWA) Debut Crown 2015.

Tanya Gold, winner of a 2015 Foreign Press Association in London award.

Ruth Scurr, John Aubrey: My Own Life, shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Biography Award.

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, The Lost Hero of Science, winner of the 2015 Costa Biography Award.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 35

lity a u Q ing h ac Te M

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Master’s in the History of Sport c. 1800-2000

Based in London, this groundbreaking Master’s programme offers students unique access to world-class scholars, thinkers and practitioners drawn from the world of sport and its academic study. It is directed by Ed Smith, the distinguished commentator, historian of sport, and former cricketer for England, Middlesex & Kent.

• Mike Brearley OBE, former Captain of the England Cricket Team and former President of the MCC • Mervyn King, Lord King of Lothbury KG, GBE, FBA, former Governor of the Bank of England & Director, Aston Villa Football Club • Ed Smith, prize-winning author and former England cricketer • Sir Clive Woodward OBE, Winning Rugby World Cup Coach • Professor Christopher Young, historian of sport, Cambridge

The course enables the student to undertake research on a specific topic, agreed with the supervisor, in any aspect of the history of sport over the last two centuries. Assessment is by a dissertation, Those wishing to attend the seminars, but not to undertake a written under expert guidance over the course of the year. dissertation, may join the course as Associate Students.

A central feature of the programme is its series of thirteen evening seminars and post-seminar dinners in a London club, at which participants can engage in general discussion with guest speakers. These experts include:

For further details contact: Ms Claire Prendergast on 01280 820204 E: claire.prendergast@buckingham.ac.uk www.buckingham.ac.uk/humanities/ma/historyofsport

THE UNIVERSITY OF

BUCKINGHAM

LONDON PROGRAMMES

36 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

MEMBERS’ NEWS

BOOKS MOST BORROWED We thought it would be interesting to share with you the books that were most frequently borrowed from the Library’s collection in 2015.

NON-FICTION 1. Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes.

2. William Waldegrave, A Different Kind of Weather: A Memoir.

3. Robert Tombs, The English and their History.

4. Eugene L. Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920.

5. Jenny Uglow, In these Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815.

6. Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution.

7. R.F. Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923.

FICTION 1. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant.

2. Ian McEwan, The Children Act. 3. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd.

4. Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread.

5. Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests.

6. Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist.

8. Antonia Fraser, My History: A Memoir of Growing Up.

7. Anthony Quinn, Curtain Call or

9. John Carey, The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books.

8. Elena Ferrante, The Days of

10. Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End.

The Distinguished Thing.

Abandonment.

9. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.

10. Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days.

MEMBER EVENTS Member events are free, but places are limited so must be reserved in advance at londonlibrary.co.uk/memberevents Cleo Roberts is a Ph.D. researcher whose work is part of the UK East Indian Education and Research Initiative’s showcase project, Envisioning the Indian City.

Robert Tait, A Chelsea Interior, 1857, depicting the Carlyles in the front parlour of their house on Cheyne Row. Image: Carlyle’s House.

THE RIVER GANGES RUNNING RED: SACRIFICE AND SANITATION IN COLONIAL CALCUTTA Cleo Roberts Tuesday, 22 March 2016 6pm – 7.30pm Members’ Room What happens when you start a trading empire on the banks of one of the world’s

most holy rivers, whose sacred water is an integral part of a region’s daily routine, linked with ritual purity, eternal health and well-being?

Cleo Roberts takes a look at the East India Company’s continued attempts during the nineteenth century to change the local communities’ relationship with the Ganges.

LONDON LIBRARY TRUSTEESHIP: IS IT FOR YOU? Wednesday, 30 March 2016 6pm – 7.30pm Members’ Room Seen the Library’s call for trustee volunteers? Ever wondered if it might be for you? Come along and meet current trustees Sara Wheeler and Philip Hook for the inside story on what’s involved, how much time it takes and how the selection procedure works.

Who knows, a whole new world could open up for you.

CARLYLE’S HOUSE TOUR Thursday, 7 April and Thursday, 30 June 2016 5.30pm – 7pm

Carlyle’s House, 24 Cheyne Row, London SW3 5HL Free for members This spring marks the 175th anniversary of Thomas Carlyle realising his ambition to open a lending library for London.

To celebrate The London Library’s connection with one of Victorian Britain’s most influential writers, we invite you to join other members for a drinks reception and exclusive tour of his former home at 24 Cheyne Row in Chelsea, which is now a National Trust property.

Thomas and Jane Carlyle came to London in 1834 and rented the house in ‘unfashionable’ Chelsea for £35 a year. It became a meeting place for many of the leading writers of the day including Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray and many others.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 37

p

Cambridge Literary Festival Spring 2016 5–14 April In partnership with

Festival highlights

Sebastian Barry Simon Callow David Hare Howard Jacobson Jackie Kay Ken Livingstone Meg Rosoff Kate Tempest Edmund de Waal Irvine Welsh

1st prize: £2,000

for unpublished short stories of up to 2,200 words on any subject

n’s wome tory s t r o h s ition t e p m co 2016

Judge: Michèle Roberts Closing date: 14 March

1st prize: £2,000 Book free online at www.adcticketing.com or call 01223 300085 student concessions cambridgeliteraryfestival.com Picture by Martin Bond www.acambridgediary.co.uk

38 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

for unpublished short stories of up to 2,200 words on any subject

Judge: Michèle Roberts Closing date: 14 March

www.mslexia.co.uk/ shortstory 0191 204 8860 shortstory@mslexia.co.uk

MEMBER EVENTS MACBETH AND THE NORTH BERWICK WITCH TRIALS Jon Kaneko-James Tuesday, 12 April 2016 6pm – 7.30pm Members’ Room Shakespeare’s Macbeth follows its protagonist’s fall from trusted retainer to insane and degraded usurper, and celebrates the role of James VI’s adopted ancestor Banquo and the inevitable victory of rightful kingship.

However, there is another story within the well-known plot. During the scene when the witches first appear there is a reference to a fraught and bloody phase of James’s kingship, the North Berwick Witch Trials of 1591. Jon Kaneko-James examines the allusion to the trials, the influence on Shakespeare of the sensational pamphlet News from Scotland and the resonance between the character of Macbeth and James’s real-life attempted usurper, Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell.

CHARLES DICKENS MUSEUM TOUR Tuesday, 19 April 2016 5.30pm – 7.30pm Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LX Free for members Visit the only surviving London family home of literary great and former London Library member Charles Dickens, the house where Dickens wrote some of his best-loved novels, including Oliver Twist. As part of The London Library’s 175th anniversary celebrations, we invite you to step back in time to 1837 and experience

Continued

Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street. Photo: Siobhan Doran.

Photography © Charles Dickens Museum.

Dickens’s home preserved in all its Victorian finery. The evening will begin with drinks, followed by a tour of the elegant townhouse, taking in a collection that includes rare editions and original manuscripts.

Please note the tour includes walking up stairs, with very limited lift access.

If you have any mobility problems, please inform us when you book and we will do our best to accommodate your needs.

SOME LIKE IT VERY HOT: THE VICTORIAN TURKISH BATH Malcolm Shifrin Tuesday, 7 June 2016 6pm – 7.30pm Members’ Room Malcolm Shifrin brings to life the hidden history of the Victorian Turkish bath, the dry hot air bath that sprang up in hundreds of establishments across Britain, Ireland and beyond in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The talk, based on Shifrin’s book Victorian Turkish Baths (2015), will trace the rise and decline of this popular

Victorian institution (more accurately called the IrishRoman bath) and include an account of the worldrenowned Jermyn Street Hamman, famously used as a short-story setting by Trollope and, until it was destroyed in the London Blitz, a mere stone’s throw away from The London Library.

Historian and former librarian Malcolm Shifrin has written extensively on the history and sociology of the bath and its impact on popular culture through the decades.

LONDON, 1750: THE YEAR OF EARTHQUAKES Andrew Robinson Tuesday, 21 June 2016 6pm – 7.30pm Members’ Room In 1750 England was shaken and stirred by earthquakes which damaged buildings in central London, including the towers of Westminster Abbey.

They also created panic among Londoners. A rumour that the city was about to

Andrew Robinson’s Earth-Shattering Events: Earthquakes, Nations and Civilization (2016).

be destroyed caused an evacuation of the capital by the wealthy, and a spate of religious sermons and tracts urging repentance. But the natural philosophers of the Royal Society were fascinated and began the scientific study of earthquakes, and so seismology began in stable England, not in seismic Italy, Japan or California. Writer Andrew Robinson tells the history of British earthquakes and describes what happened in London in 1750 in the words of witnesses.

Andrew Robinson is the author of more than 25 books on the arts and sciences. His most recent book, Earth-Shattering Events: Earthquakes, Nations and Civilization, will be published in April 2016.

ROSES AND RAIN: THE LIFE AND WORK OF JAMES ELROY FLECKER Heather Walker Tuesday, 5 July 2016 6pm – 7.30pm Members’ Room Writer and journalist Heather Walker discusses her 2006 book Roses and Rain, the biography of poet, novelist and playwright James Elroy Flecker. She will describe Flecker’s life and work, from his career in the Levant Consular Service and marriage to Greek poetess Hellé, to his attempts to overcome ill-health, homesickness and lack of money and establish himself as a writer. Walker’s research provides an insight not only into Flecker’s short life but also the lives of his contemporaries including Rupert Brooke, Ronald Firbank and Lawrence of Arabia.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 39

FINE BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS Wednesday 15 June 2016 Knightsbridge, London

ENQUIRIES +44 (0) 20 7393 3810 books@bonhams.com Closing date for entries Friday 29 April 2016

Entries now invited

THE TED HUGHES ARCHIVE formed by his friend and manuscript advisor Roy Davids Sold in June for ÂŁ62,000

bonhams.com/books