The London Library Magazine Issue 35 Spring 2017

MAGAZINE SPRING 2017 ISSUE 35

hidden corners

Victorian tales of African exploration in Topography are celebrated by Tim Jeal

the memoirs of JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS Amber Regis discusses details of Symonds’s private life as revealed in his manuscript memoirs

hay & oats in the age of steam

The impact of horse-drawn traffic on London is assessed by Gavin Weightman

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The London Library Magazine / issue 35

12

Contents

Under the terms of a donation, the manuscript of John Addington Symonds’s memoirs has been sealed in the Library’s Safe since the 1920s. Amber Regis has now edited the memoirs in their entirety, including previously unpublished details about the writer’s homosexuality, and describes the happy hours she spent at the Library studying the manuscript.

5 FROM THE librarian 6 Contributors 8 BEHIND THE BOOK

John Addington Symonds (1840–93). University of Bristol Library, Special Collections (DM377).

The Library’s social and economic titles were essential background reading for Elain Harwood’s book, Space, Hope and Brutalism

11 MY DISCOVERY The late Victorian journal of a Brazilian girl, which Julia Rochester found in Biography, transported her back to the country’s interior

16

12 the memoirs of john addington symonds

The Library’s exceptional collection of books on pre-colonial and colonial Africa – by explorers, travellers, district commissioners and civil servants – occupy the same shelves in Topography as when they were first catalogued a century or more ago. Tim Jeal describes some titles of particular interest, including classic works by David Livingstone, H.M. Stanley and John Hanning Speke.

Amber Regis offers an insight into studying the handwritten Memoirs of the writer at the Library

16 HIDDEN CORNERS The Library’s collection of exploration titles on the African shelves of Topography, by Tim Jeal ‘A Phalanx Dance by Mazamboni’s Warriors’, (detail), H.M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa (1890).

20 hay and oats in the age of steam Gavin Weightman describes the impact of horse-drawn transport on the streets of London

20

25 MEMBERS’ NEWS

Far from being the romantic vision depicted in contemporary costume dramas, London in the age of horsedrawn transport was in reality squalid and pungent. The streets were chaotic and filthy with muck, and the amount of fuel, in the form of hay and oats, required to feed the huge number of horses was astonishing, as Gavin Weightman has discovered.

Horse-drawn cabs, the Strand, London, c.1901.

Granger Historical Picture Archive/ Alamy Stock Photo.

p

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 3

LOCK WOOD KIPLING ARTS AND CR AFTS IN THE PUNJAB AND LONDON Supported by the Friends of the V&A

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Principal Entrance to the Mosque of Wazir Khan, by Mohammed Din, ca. 1880 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

19 May — 1 Jul

LEONARD BERNSTEIN BETTY COMDEN ADOLPH GREEN

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4 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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11 Aug — 16 Sep

p f rom the L I B R A R I A N

On the cover

Detail of map from volume 1 of Henry Morton Stanley’s In Darkest Africa (2 vols., 1890). Image by Louis Porter.

It is always intriguing to catch a glimpse of another world, whether the otherness be of time or place, or personal perspective, and this issue of the magazine does not disappoint.

Since the 1920s, the Library has been the custodian of the manuscript memoirs of John Addington Symonds (1840–93), and successive Librarians have been required to exercise ‘the greatest possible discretion’ over access to it as demanded by Horatio Forbes Brown, Symonds’s executor. Now, almost 125 years after his death – and in a very different world – we have authorised the first full critical edition of the manuscript. Its editor, Amber Regis, reveals something of the challenges of the task and why the manuscript itself will remain of lasting interest.

Next, Tim Jeal introduces us to Africa as revealed in the writings of the Victorian explorers, traders and missionaries contained within our Topography collections, and then Gavin Weightman gives us a fascinating account of the lives (and deaths) of the horses powering London’s nineteenthcentury transport system. Having read it, I, for one, shall never pass a petrol station again without wondering about the prevailing price of hay and oats.

Julia Rochester’s ‘discovery’ comes from nineteenth-century Brazil by way of a twentiethcentury American poet, and we break definitively into the twentieth century with Elain Harwood’s reading list on post-war British society and the economic and social climate behind the architecture of the period.

In Members’ News, we have included a summary of the main findings of our Membership Survey in November. I should like to thank everyone who took the time to respond; the information you have provided will be invaluable as we plan for the future. And, speaking of the future, this seems a good moment to tell those who have not yet heard that after 15 years as Librarian (and almost 30 years of service to the Library) I have decided to retire in September 2017.

I am immensely proud of the Library – for what it is and for the way in which it has grown and adapted to a new century. Helping it to do that has been a privilege, and leaving will be hard, but I feel the moment has come for me to allow more time for other aspects of my life.

As I write, the trustees have just started the search for my successor. I know my final year will go very quickly but I look forward to working with all who love the Library in preparing for the future during these last and most important months of all.

Inez T.P.A. Lynn Librarian In memory of Kim Jenner (1957–2017) of Royal Academy Enterprises, who worked on the London Library Magazine from its very first issue.

Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 10 March 2017. © 2017. The London Library. ISSN 2398-4201.

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 Publisher Jane Grylls Editor Mary Scott Design and production Catherine Cartwright Picture research Charlotte Burgess

Editorial committee Emma Marlow Helen O’Neill Peter Parker Philip Spedding Erica Wagner

Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 Charlotte Burgess 020 7300 5675 Development Office, The London Library 020 7766 4704

Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to magazine@londonlibrary.co.uk THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5

CONTRIBUTORS

Elain Harwood

Joined the Library in 1998

“MR IAN FLEMING has proposed the terms of the competition and a Book Token to the value of five guineas will be awarded the competitor who evolves a twenty-seventh character to add to the twenty-six which form the alphabet...”

Elain Harwood is a historian at Historic England, and between 1996 and 2004 was responsible for a research programme into post-war architecture that led to many buildings being listed. She has since completed a Ph.D. on London’s South Bank and is now writing about the architects Ernö Goldfinger and Chamberlin, Powell and Bon.

Tim Jeal

Joined the Library in 1963

That was in 1947, five years before he wrote Casino Royale and launched The Book Collector. Today, on its 70th anniversary, we’re resurrecting the competition. Entrance is free to anyone, anywhere. All you need do is come up with a 27th letter that fulfills a distinct purpose that the present alphabet lacks.

For details go to www.thebookcollector.co.uk/the-27th-letter

Tim Jeal has written biographies of Livingstone (1973, revised 2013), Baden-Powell (1989) and Stanley (2007), which was the Sunday Times Biography of the Year and in America winner of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Biography. Explorers of the Nile was published in 2011. His memoir, Swimming with my Father (2004), was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize.

Amber Regis

joined the Library in 2012

Amber Regis is a Lecturer in NineteenthCentury Literature at the University of Sheffield. She has written essays and reviews for Life Writing, the Journal of Victorian Culture and the Times Literary Supplement. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, which she edited, is published this month by Palgrave Macmillan.

Julia Rochester

joined the Library in 2001

Opens March 15, closes April 25.

To be judged by Sir Peter Blake.

Julia Rochester is a writer and novelist based in London. She is the author of The Candelária Massacre: How Wagner dos Santos Survived the Street Children's Killing that Shook Brazil (2008) and The House at the Edge of the World (2015).

Gavin Weightman joined the Library in 1988

www.thebookcollector.co.uk

6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Gavin Weightman is a journalist and documentary film-maker who has written more than 20 books on a range of historical subjects. The Making of Modern London, his TV series for LWT, was widely acclaimed and made into a book of the same title. His most recent volumes include The Industrial Revolutionaries: Creators of the Modern, 1776–1914 (2007) and Eureka: How Invention Happens (2015).

22 April – 15 October

public booking now open

#SummerOfLove

AUTHORS’ FOUNDATION GRANTS AND K BLUNDELL TRUST AWARDS The Authors’ Foundation gives grants to authors whose project is for a British publisher The K Blundell Trust gives grants to British authors under the age of 40 whose project is for a British publisher.

The project must aim to increase social awareness, and can be fiction or non-fiction NEXT CLOSING DATES: 30 APRIL 2017 30 SEPTEMBER 2017 Full guidelines available from www.societyofauthors.org /grants-and-prizes

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 7

Behind the

Book

‘

Elain Harwood on the Library titles she found most useful while researching her book, including some works on arcane subjects in Science & Miscellaneous

’

Elain Harwood’s Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945–1975 (Yale University Press, 2015).

When writing my book Space, Hope and Brutalism (2015), about the development of English architecture from 1945 to 1975, I wanted to explore the conditions that prompted each type of building, from schools and public housing to power stations. The Library provided invaluable background material, on subjects ranging from economics and agriculture to electricity generation and railway nationalisation.

 The Welfare State by Pauline Gregg

centres were built between 1967 and 1969.

(London 1967). H. England, Social &c.

This book includes facts and figures about subjects such as Green Shield stamps, sherry parties and fish fingers, the last of which were first added to the cost-of-living index in 1962. It gives an indication of what the early 1960s was like for ordinary people.  Housing and Local Government by J.B. Cullingworth (London 1966). S. Housing.

Cullingworth helped me understand the way in which local authorities commissioned public housing. Most of these local bodies were small and rural without their own architects, which is why I decided to concentrate in my book on the more innovative housing designs commissioned by the councils in larger cities such as London and Sheffield.  The Health Services Since the War by Charles Webster (vol.1, London 1988).

S. Health.

Webster’s epic survey reveals the lack of government interest in building hospitals and health centres before the 1960s. In 1962, the Ministry of Health promised 90 new hospitals, although only a third were realised by 1979. A greater change came in the building of health centres, as in 1966 the Labour Government offered to meet private doctors’ rents if they moved into local authority premises; as a result 97 new

 A History of English Christianity,

8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

1920–1985 by Adrian Hastings (London 1986). R. England, Eccles. Hist.

In this lively narrative, Hastings describes how church design changed around 1960 when the altar was placed closer to the congregation, sometimes even set at the centre of the building, leading to churches that were often square or polygonal rather than long and narrow.  The Survival of the English Countryside by Victor Bonham-Carter (London 1971). S. Agriculture.

After decades of neglect, arable farming enjoyed a resurgence during the Second World War, prompting the need for more and better housing for farm labourers.

Subsidies after the war initiated a second change, towards greater mechanisation and the use of fertilisers to make British agriculture competitive against imports.

Bonham-Carter predicted a countryside of two halves, with the more fertile eastern England given over to hedgeless prairie farming, and the hills of the north and west mainly used for recreation, integrated with conservation and forestry.  Twenty Years of Nationalisation: The British Experience by R. Kelf-Cohen (London 1969). S. Industries.

I was shocked to discover that the

industries nationalised by the Labour Government between 1947 and 1950 spent as much on power stations, rail improvements and coal mines as did all the local authorities put together on schools and housing during the same period. Although rationalisation of the energy industry had begun with the development of the national grid in the 1930s, new, more efficient power stations were still required. Kelf-Cohen offers a comprehensive and clear overview of this transformation.  The Birth of British Rail by Michael R. Bonavia (London 1979). S. Railways &c.

Bonavia was an economist who had a long career with British Railways. In this book, he stresses the importance of high-voltage electrification on the West Coast Main Line, where new stations and signal boxes followed the company’s modernisation plan in 1955. Yet costs soared while income dwindled. In 1961 Dr Richard Beeching was appointed Chairman of the British Railway Board, and identified 2,363 stations and 5,000 miles of track for closure in his infamous Beeching Report of 1963. His curtailment of new building typified the stop-go policies that ensured that Britain’s post-war building programme was often underfunded and rarely completed.

 Ian Fleming came up with this sample copy for our

Spring 1957 issue.

Since then The Book Collector has firmly established itself as the most lively and influential journal.

Each issue offers new and original insights into the world of books.

Ian Fleming launched The Book Collector in 1952, the year he created James Bond. Our Spring 2017 issue celebrates his life as a bibliophile. £60, €90, $125 for four issues a year plus free digital access back to 1947.

NEXT ISSUE March 2017

Ian Fleming Special: 288 brilliant pages www.thebookcollector.co.uk

See London with a different Eye. Spend a day exploring the artistic riches of London, in the company of one of our experts. Martin Randall Travel London Days focus on many fascinating themes.

Exclusive and special arrangements feature: visit Transport for London’s historic headquarters at 55 Broadway or enjoy a private organ recital in a West End church. Sip champagne at the Savoy or cocktails at the Walkie Talkie. Admire the Spanish Golden Age with Dr Xavier Bray or the works of Hogarth with Dr Lars Tharp. Delve into hidden corners with Professor Gavin Stamp or large-scale landmarks with Sir Jeremy Dixon.

The London Backstreet Walk From Hyde Park to the Tower 18 May, 1 June, 15 June & 5 July 2017 Led by Professor Gavin Stamp, Sophie Campbell or Barnaby Rogerson ‘Offering a cornucopia of delights – even to a Londoner’

There are over 40 unique itineraries, with more added regularly – a small sample is listed here. You can take them as a taster for our wide range of cultural tours or as an add-on.

London Gardens Walk | The Ever-Changing City Skyline | The Tudors The London Squares Walk | Great Railway Termini | Interwar Interiors

Contact us: +44 (0)20 8742 3355 martinrandall.com/london-days

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 9

A DIFFERENT KIND OF MEMBERS CLUB The Royal Over-Seas League is a unique, not-for-profit, private membership organisation. For over 100 years we have encouraged international friendship and understanding through arts, social, music and humanitarian programmes.

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10 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

30/01/2017 12:21:59

MY DISCOVERY The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’ (1958)

by Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant, translated By elizabeth bishop A Brazilian girl’s journal from the 1890s captures the spirit of the country for Julia Rochester, who found the book in the Biography stacks Brazilians often talk about ‘the interior’ as if it were a single destination. Yet it refers to a vast unknowable swathe of continent; of hills, forests, savannahs, mining towns, plantations and ranches. What the word ‘interior’ describes is not so much place, as the inner life of a nation more popularly associated with its coastline and rainforest and the violence of its mega-cities. The interior is a destination, but one of the heart.

I spent a year in the 1980s living at the most far-flung edge of back-land Brazil and have been trying, for the novel I am currently writing, to recall how it felt to inhabit that part of the world before my ideas of the country were coloured over by the flamboyance of its more visible face.

Trawling The London Library catalogue for Brazilian writing that captures this inner life I came across The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’ , the journal of a 12-year-old girl growing up in the mining town of Diamantina in the late nineteenth century. Slightly disappointed not to find it in its original Portuguese, I pulled it from the stacks. It was only when I returned to my desk that I understood that this translation was a four-year labour of love by Elizabeth Bishop, a poet I knew only as a name.

‘Helena Morley’ – a pseudonym taken from the English ancestry of the writer, Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant (1880–1970) – dislikes school, is constantly in trouble for giggling at guests, cheating at exams and inventing her best ever game, which is sliding down a bank on a cowhide.

She causes a panic when she disappears, having fallen asleep in the branches of a mulberry tree, where she has climbed to find a quiet place to do her homework.

‘Mama’s sorry for me, ’ she writes, ‘because she says I’m never going to be happy in life as long as I keep wanting to enjoy everything; life is made up of suffering. But I’m not going to be so foolish as to make such a wonderful life into a life of suffering. ’ And enjoy everything she does. With her unsentimental child’s eye she records the gossip of her huge extended family and of the small town in which her father attempts to scrape a living out of an exhausted diamond mine. Trained-thief monkeys, hysterical pregnancies, jailed husband-beating ex-slaves, dead children, murdered brides, corpses that come back to life, are all set against a background of family squabbles, domestic chores and innumerable religious feast days. Even the most magical of magic realists could not have made it up.

The diary begins in 1893, only five years after Brazil’s Act of Emancipation, and is a fascinating insight into the strange symbiosis between ex-slaves and their former owners. The ex-slaves of Helena’s grandmother have all stayed on as her dependants, and Helena’s anecdotes reveal the enormous complexity arising from contradictory attitudes of deep affection and equally deep prejudice. No less fascinating is the detail of domestic life: sand and coffee leaves strewn on the floor on feast days, chicken fat used to keep hairstyles in place, a suckling pig prepared for a party with a rose in its mouth. Religion is central to everything, and Helena, who is woken at four on Sunday mornings to go to church, envies her grandmother who, being old and overweight and living next to the church, has received dispensation from the bishop to listen to Mass through her

Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant, c.1910. Photograph courtesy familiadayrell.uaivip.com.br.

open window and receive the Eucharist in her sitting room.

I can’t really call the book ‘my discovery’ , because it was a great success in Brazil when it came out in 1942 and, having been rendered into English by Bishop’s perfectionist poet’s voice (first published in 1958), it has been regularly reissued by various publishers. But it has been a double discovery to me, in that it also brought me to Bishop who, without intending to, spent a decade and a half living in Brazil, finely observing it and capturing it in her poetry. Through Helena’s words and hers, I catch at longforgotten sensations from my own time in the country. Last night I read the poem ‘Arrival at Santos’ (1952). The final line reads: ‘we are driving to the interior. ’ I know exactly what she means.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 11

the memoirs of john addington symonds Amber Regis describes her editing of the Memoirs of the historian, poet and essayist, whose handwritten autobiography, with all its secrets, has been secured in the Library Safe since 1926

John Addington Symonds in his study at Am Hof, his house in Davos in the Swiss Alps, where he lived during the winter with his wife and their three daughters, from 1867 until his death in 1893. University of Bristol Library, Special Collections (DM377).

12 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

In the basement of The London Library, there is a bust of Edmund Gosse. This work,

by William Goscombe John, was promised to Gosse by many of his friends on the occasion of his seventieth birthday and unveiled a year later, in 1920, at a grand ceremony at the home of Arthur Balfour.

Literary critic, biographer and poet, Gosse was elected Vice President of The London Library, his bust’s future home, in 1922. In this capacity he would negotiate one of the Library’s most extraordinary acquisitions.

In late 1926 Gosse found himself the joint custodian, with Charles Hagberg Wright (Librarian, 1893–1940), of several boxes filled with letters and manuscripts entrusted to his care by Horatio Forbes Brown, minor poet and historian of Venice, recently deceased. These boxes did not contain Brown’s own papers, but rather were filled with material he had long preserved and protected: the papers of John Addington Symonds (1840–93), including his loose-leaf, handwritten Memoirs.

Symonds had been a famous man of letters: a historian of the Renaissance, biographer of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Michelangelo, translator of Benvenuto Cellini and Carlo Gozzi, poet and essayist.

On his death he willed his autobiography away from family hands, bequeathing the manuscript to Brown (as his literary executor) with special instructions to ensure its preservation: ‘I want to save it from destruction after my death, and yet to reserve its publication for a period when it will not be injurious to my family. ’ The Memoirs recount Symonds’s experience as a homosexual man living subject to Victorian social mores and legal

repression, written without hope of an immediate readership but with a strong conviction of the text’s utility as a case study for medical and scientific enquiry, and a testament of his daily struggles to square conscience with desire, to live what he considered to be a good life.

The Library accepted the Memoirs with certain conditions imposed under Brown’s will: ‘the greatest possible discretion’ was to govern access, and publication was prohibited for 50 years.

The manuscript was sealed and locked away in the Library’s Safe, but some of its secrets were already known. On receiving the text after Symonds’s death, Brown mined it for raw material, building and compiling an authorised biography of his late friend. Though dutifully sanitised, clues to the autobiography’s sexual content were present in Brown’s published work, though only accessible to those with the knowledge required to decipher Symonds’s coded discourse: his references to ancient Greece and Walt Whitman, to ‘passing strangers’ and l’amour de l’impossible.

The manuscript’s seals were broken in 1949 when the Library Committee granted permission for Katharine Furse, Symonds’s youngest daughter – a decorated military nurse and Dame Grand Cross – to read her father’s autobiography. Already familiar with his sexual struggles, Katharine was far from shocked by its revelations; instead, she found it a comfort and relief to read her father’s story in his own words. But one thing seemed to trouble her: Symonds’s account of his childhood sexuality. She feared this section, with its frank treatment of prepubescent sexual fantasies and practices, might shock potential readers, and wrote to the Library’s President, Lord Ilchester, suggesting a few pages be lightly edited. The request was politely refused.

During the 1950s, Symonds’s looseleaf manuscript was bound into two large volumes and a typescript copy prepared – preservation measures taken by the Library in response to its decision to relax restrictions on access. Scholars were now able to consult the manuscript, and one of the first to take advantage of this opportunity was E.M. Forster (himself a member of the Library Committee).

Forster copied sections of the Memoirs into his commonplace book, bemoaning the impossibility of publication under Brown’s embargo: this would expire in

Pages from Catherine Symonds’s diary form part of her husband’s manuscript, ‘The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds Written by Himself’, which is located in the Safe at The London Library.

1976 but, he asked, ‘Would anyone who reads this remember that?’

Forster’s fear that Symonds would be forgotten, the victim of an enforced silence outlasting his readers’ curiosity, proved unfounded. In 1961 the Canadian biographer Phyllis Grosskurth advertised in the Times Literary Supplement, seeking information on the fate and whereabouts of Symonds’s letters and manuscripts.

She was researching a doctoral thesis at the University of London on Symonds’s literary criticism, and was determined to uncover the surviving paper traces of his life. Stanley Gillam (Librarian, 1956–80) responded to the notice, inviting Grosskurth to the Library to read the autobiography. Soon after, she was commissioned to write a new biography, the first to deal frankly and openly with Symonds’s homosexuality.

Brown’s embargo was still in place, and Grosskurth was unable to quote directly from the manuscript (unless material had previously appeared in Brown’s censored biography), but she succeeded in bringing the Memoirs, irrevocably, to public notice.

In the years that followed Grosskurth returned to Symonds’s life and writing, this time as his editor. Once Brown’s embargo had expired, she prepared an abridged edition of the Memoirs, published in 1984, removing some 50,000 words to produce a streamlined narrative of sexual development. (The American

edition was sensationally subtitled, ‘The secret homosexual life of a leading nineteenth-century man of letters. ’) Symonds had spent three intensive months, from March to May 1889, writing and compiling his manuscript.

Ninety-five years later, the resulting text was scattered: part-published by Brown, part-published by Grosskurth, his autobiography remained locked in the Safe at The London Library. This is how matters stood until the publication this month of my book, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). This volume is the culmination of happy hours spent in the Writers’ Room at The London Library, punctuated by fleeting visits to Gosse’s bust in the basement. It is the first edition to reproduce the autobiography entire, reuniting and combining the narratives made public by Brown and Grosskurth, interspersed with material left unpublished by both, hidden and closeted until now. It was a privilege to work on Symonds’s autobiography as its third editor, but it is important to acknowledge that my labours were collaborative. I am truly indebted: to Symonds’s bravery in committing his life to paper; to the work of Brown and Grosskurth as previous editors; to the Library as custodian; and to the patience of Library staff who sat across from me, day after day, supervising my use of the manuscript.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13

There is one thing, however, that a print edition cannot do. It cannot recreate our haptic encounter with the material object: the sight and feel of Symonds’s handwritten pages. Print smoothes; it gives the impression of order, coherence, completion. But the manuscript is not a seamless text; it is replete with eccentricities and contingencies. My edition is not a surrogate; it is an artefact in its own right, a distinct version of Symonds’s text. As its editor, I hope the book will encourage readers to seek out the manuscript, to leaf through its pages, to discover its loquacious materiality.

14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Here I cannot hope to do full justice to the manuscript-as-object, but some brief forays, appropriately digressive and disjointed, might serve to pique interest (and the curious are reminded that permission to read the manuscript can be sought from the Enquiries desk in the Issue Hall).

Towards the end of his Memoirs, Symonds pauses to reflect on the problems of writing a life. The egotism required for autobiography, far from beautifying the sitter, likely results in ‘the artistic error of depicting a psychological monster’ .

For Symonds, ‘The report has to be

‘

The manuscript is not a seamless text; it is replete with eccentricities and contingencies

’

supplemented indeed, in order that a perfect portrait may be painted of the man’ .

A significant portion of material in the Memoirs is supplementary, of a different order to the broadly linear, retrospective narration that forms its backbone. Symonds assembled the manuscript, collecting letters, diaries and poems to include among its pages. Many are the work of his own pen, his younger self: homoerotic poems, set in type and privately printed, are cut and pasted into the text; passages of lyrical prose are transcribed from letters and diaries. These extracts and documents provide an important counterbalance to autobiographical hindsight, with its unifying, simplifying and forgetful gaze.

‘No autobiographical resumption of facts after the lapse of twenty-five years, ’ he claimed, ‘[was] equal in veracity to such contemporary records’ .

A small number of Symonds’s supplements, however, are the work of other hands: a letter from his sister’s governess, Sophie Girard; a letter from his former pupil and lover, Norman Moor; 9,000 words taken, quite literally, from his wife’s diary. Hearing these voices interrupt Symonds’s narrative is remarkable – wives and governesses do not often take centre stage in the written lives of Victorian men, and the figure of the male lover is all but absent. What is more, the sight and touch of these handwritten documents enables a different kind of encounter: contact, and imaginative re-embodiment.

Moor’s careless, hard-to-read script, dealing frankly with the sexual culture of the British public school, bespeaks the confidence and privileges of his middleclass masculinity. Girard and Catherine Symonds, by contrast, write with looping precision in a legible hand, their letters well formed, and there is a pathos in the care taken over the writing of these

the memoirs of john addington symonds

Opposite A privately printed copy of Symonds’s poem, ‘The Song of the Swimmer’, pasted into the manuscript.

Left The (w)hole story of Harrow and its headmaster, from the manuscript.

documents. Girard’s letter was composed at Symonds’s request, an account of his childhood character, penned by a woman once in the family’s employment who continued to depend upon his annual contribution to her income. Catherine’s diary, taken by unknown means and without assurances of permission granted, recounts the young couple’s courtship and first year of marriage, her private reflections placed before an unlooked-for public readership.

The Memoirs manuscript comprises more than six hundred pages of varying size, colour and contents, the work of different hands, drawn from the memories and paper traces of more than 50 years. As such, the manuscript-asobject is a work of collage, of assemblage.

There is a hole in the manuscript – not the work of some archival stowaway feasting on paper, but the work of a knife or razor: ‘There is no doubt that Dr. [ ] passed for an eminently pious man. ’ Luckily, the editor does not have to search far to fill the blank. Just above this hole, a name is written in what appears to be Symonds’s hand: ‘Vaughan. ’ Charles John Vaughan was headmaster at Harrow until his sudden resignation in 1859. In chapters of the Memoirs dealing with school and university, Symonds claimed to have been the confidante of a pupil, Alfred Pretor, as he engaged in a

clandestine relationship with Vaughan.

Towards the end of his first year at Oxford, Symonds confessed this secret to a tutor, who persuaded him to tell his father.

According to the Memoirs, Symonds senior forced Vaughan’s resignation and withdrawal from public life.

Symonds inscribes Vaughan’s name upon his manuscript pages, over and over again. But only once is the name cut out, obliterated, before re-inscription – the return of the repressed. In print, my edition can only note and describe this eccentricity, with an accompanying photograph buried in an appendix. But when turning the pages of the manuscript, this presence (or rather, absence) tempts one to speculate. I see in (or through) the hole an image of Symonds as self-censor, distractedly taking a knife to the body of his work, removing Vaughan’s name to ease, albeit momentarily, a guilty conscience – guilt at the broken confidence that precipitated Vaughan’s fall; guilt at the sympathy he felt for a man whose desires he shared; and guilt at his own ‘passing’ through life, a respected man of letters, husband and father, forced to hide or deny the men he loved.

The paper bearing Vaughan’s cut-out name is not the only missing piece of the Memoirs. Promised pages and supplements are absent: white, unfilled spaces mark the place where passages from letters and diaries might have been transcribed, if

Symonds had finished the task; and five leaves are missing from the page-number sequence (MS 550–5). Fixed in print, these lacunae disappear from the text. But an encounter with the manuscript-as-object reveals the unfinished, fragmentary nature of Symonds’s self-portrait.

Symonds spent the last years of his life reading and revising his Memoirs.

Emendations litter the text: deletions and substitutions, passages struck through with revisions above and below.

Symonds appears to have worked through the manuscript with a blue pencil (or standard pencil, when the editor’s tool was not close at hand), sometimes reinscribing his corrections in ink. My new edition records significant changes in endnotes, but otherwise the text appears static, immutable, as if Symonds could only have told his story in these very words. But the manuscript tells things differently, variously. These handwritten pages reveal the work-in-progress, shaped by the difficulties experienced in choosing words to speak the unspeakable, to write about same-sex desire in a way that resisted blame and disapproval – on different occasions, Symonds substitutes ‘self-indulgence’ for ‘sin’ , ‘malady’ for ‘infamy’ , for example.

Symonds’s editing pencil is not the only one to mark the manuscript – his pages still bear the trace of Brown’s editing. Sections of text are closed off in brackets and marked for deletion: sometimes these interventions are signed ‘HFB’ , and sometimes they can be identified as Brown’s work by their correspondence to his published biography. These lines and marginal notes animate the manuscript’s contested legacy and the competing versions of Symonds’s life that have been extracted from its pages. Reading the manuscript-as-object, therefore, was an uncanny experience for this particular editor. Constantly reminded that I walked in dead men’s shoes, the ghostly trace of Brown’s pencil proved my own future obsolescence. One day, most likely, another editor will sit down with the Memoirs manuscript and begin a new chapter in its history.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15

HIDDEN CORNERS

The AFRICAN SHELVES in topography Tim Jeal celebrates some classics of African exploration and unearths some obscure gems too I once supposed, in my ignorance, that the Library’s Topography collection only contained dull books stuffed with descriptions of the physical features of arbitrarily chosen countries and regions.

Being a new member I had not yet ventured beyond the Times Room to the murky underground realm of the rear stacks. But in 1970 I decided to write a life of David Livingstone, and soon learned from the red leather-bound volumes of the catalogue that though many relevant titles were listed under Biog. Livingstone, many more – both by Livingstone and about him – were housed in T. Africa.

So, while writing my first biography, my ‘hidden corner’ centred on the basement shelves containing T. Africa, Central and T. Africa, South. (Decades later my research

16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

for other books would lead me to T. Africa, East, T. Uganda, T. Congo and T. Nile.)

I was 25 when, for the first time, I lifted down from its shelf in Topography a copy of Livingstone’s great bestseller, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857). It seemed extraordinary that I would soon be taking home this first edition. Although the book boasted a fold-out frontispiece of the Victoria Falls (a Livingstone ‘discovery’), its title gave no hint that the greater part of the book was concerned with Livingstone’s epic journey of 1853–6, the first recorded crossing of sub-Saharan Africa by a European, during which he travelled 3,500 miles – allowing for detours and doubling back on himself.

Danger, rather than topographical detail, bulks large in many volumes in

T. Africa, and Missionary Travels is no exception. On one occasion, in eastern Angola, gun-toting Chiboque men surrounded Livingstone and a warrior ‘made a charge at [his] head from behind’ , obliging the explorer ‘quickly to bring round the muzzle of [his] gun to [the man’s] mouth, forcing his retreat’ . Often his reception was friendly, as when naked Batoka men greeted him by rolling energetically on their backs, shouting ‘Kina Bomba’ . In the name of decency, he begged them to stop, ‘but imagining that I was dissatisfied they only tumbled about more furiously’ . During his missionary years, Livingstone was attacked by a lion which ‘crunched the bone of [his] left arm into splinters’ . There is an excellent line drawing of this attack. As the first white man they had ever seen, Livingstone was

a great curiosity to Africans living in the continent’s far interior. ‘Is that hair?’ some villagers asked him, studying his head. ‘It is not hair at all, ’ they decided, ‘but a wig of lion’s mane’ .

The shelves of T. Africa may be dimly lit, but open a volume at random, and shimmering savannahs or dazzling cataracts may well leap out at you.

Beauty and misery feature prominently in explorers’ accounts of their travels.

Livingstone suffered over 30 bouts of malaria on his great journey and nearly died. Henry Morton Stanley lost all three of his white companions during his trans-Africa journey and half his African porters, some killed by hostile people, some dying from disease and others drowning while navigating cataracts.

Although the 1857 edition of Missionary Travels and Researches was removed to the Safe some years ago, T. Africa, Central still contains many treasures. Thirty years after the appearance of my Livingstone biography in 1973, I would return to Topography and become familiar with many of them when writing my life of Stanley, published in 2007, and then Explorers of the Nile (2011), a study of all the river’s explorers. Stanley’s three classic books are all there: How I Found Livingstone: Travels, Adventures, and Discoveries in Central Africa (1872), Through the Dark Continent (2 vols., 1878) and In Darkest Africa (2 vols., 1890).

These books record, respectively, the most famous scoop of the nineteenth century – when Stanley found and interviewed

Dr Livingstone on the banks of Lake Tanganyika; the greatest African journey ever accomplished by a European and his African retinue – when Stanley crossed the continent and solved the mysteries of the Nile and Congo; and one of the strangest rescue expeditions ever attempted. This last was Stanley’s expedition 1887–90, tasked with rescuing Emin Pasha, Britain’s only colonial governor in southern Sudan to have survived the jihadists’ bloody onslaught that had swept away General Gordon and his garrison at Khartoum.

Many of the books in T. Africa, Central have unexpected connections with one another. Not far from Stanley’s In Darkest Africa is a volume attributed to James S. Jameson, The Story of the Rear Column of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (1890).

In fact, it was collated posthumously by members of his family, the owners of Jameson’s Irish whiskey, who had been outraged that Stanley, the expedition’s leader, had included in his book some mild criticism of Jameson, who had died from Blackwater fever, and of his friend, the Rear Column’s commander, Major Edmund Barttelot. Unknown to Jameson’s widow and other relatives – but uncovered by a horrified Stanley a year after the event when he opened the recently deceased man’s tin-lined box – Jameson had bought a young girl and had paid cannibals to butcher, cook and eat her so that he could watch and sketch the ghastly proceedings.

Also known to Stanley – thanks to William Bonny, the Rear Column’s medical assistant – but not to Barttelot’s relatives,

Opposite Frontispiece with fold-out illustration of Victoria Falls, from David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857).

Above, from left ‘The Missionary’s Escape from the Lion’, from Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857); ‘Rescued!’, John Tenniel’s illustration of Emin Pasha’s rescue by H.M. Stanley, from Punch, 14 December 1889.

was the fact that while in charge of the 260 members of the Rear Column, he and his friend Jameson had allowed scores of African servants and porters to starve to death and had shot others for stealing small amounts of food. At the time of these murders, Stanley had been 500 miles to the east at Lake Albert with Emin Pasha, and only managed to return to the Rear Column’s camp 14 months after he had first left Barttelot and his men there.

Eventually Barttelot (whose posthumous memoir can be found in Biog. Barttelot) was murdered by the outraged husband of an assaulted woman.

Stanley did his utmost to stop any of this horror from leaking out. He was appalled by Barttelot’s crimes, for which no blame attached to Stanley, although this was no help to him when the press sniffed them out in November 1890, seven months after his return to England.

Stanley’s glorious repute as the rescuer of Emin Pasha did not survive the public’s fury with him for employing men like Barttelot and Jameson – though the former had been recommended by Lord Wolseley, AdjutantGeneral of the British Army. Books by Dr Thomas Parke, the expedition’s medical officer, and by Stanley’s closest friend on the expedition, Arthur Mounteney Jephson, THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

are also near at hand in T. Africa, Central, as if bringing these men – both friends and enemies – together posthumously. Dr Parke, I would discover from manuscript sources, had also committed murders.

Entirely ignorant of this, Stanley liked and trusted him, employing him as his doctor after his return to England in 1890 when Stanley was already a very sick man.

Also to be found on these shelves are modern books about the Emin Pasha relief expedition. Iain R. Smith’s book of that title was published in 1972 and has not been bettered. Simon Gray’s play, The Rear Column, is loosely based on the events leading up to Barttelot’s murder and can be found in L. English Drama. It was first performed in London in 1978.

T. Congo is several stacks away from T. Africa, Central and contains a first edition of the book by Stanley that he least liked to remember, The Congo and the Founding of its Free State (2 vols., 1885). The title is now conserved in twin grey boxes and will remain a lasting testament to Stanley’s folly in conceding to King Leopold II of Belgium the right to edit the manuscript as he pleased. The impression given throughout is that Stanley agreed with Leopold on everything, whereas he had fought him

18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

hard on the all-important matter of treaties, only obtaining land from Congolese chiefs by rental agreement, and never by seeking permanent ownership as the King had wished him to do. Stanley had ended the book’s manuscript with a touch of irony: ‘I have no reason to believe that His Majesty was displeased with the results of these long years of bitter labour but I certainly never received any letter conveying his sentiments, and I must therefore leave each reader to form his own conclusions. ’ Leopold deleted this and instead inserted a sycophantic ending in which Stanley rapturously praised the King’s ‘wisdom and moral courage’ . Stanley was cast aside as the King’s chief agent in Africa in 1885 (the year in which the book was published), and within a decade was telling Leopold, in person, that he had no choice but to admit an international commission to investigate atrocities in the Congo. Leopold angrily declined and refused to see Stanley again, demanding to know why, since Britain had never admitted such a body to a disaffected Ireland, he should admit one to the Congo?

There is a fascinating small volume a shelf away by Bula N’Zau, Travel and Adventures in the Congo Free State and its Big Game Shooting (1894). This was the

pseudonym of an English ivory trader, H. Bailey. It contains the only detailed word portrait of Anthony Swinburne, whom Stanley had known since he had been a schoolboy at Christ’s Hospital. Swinburne would become one of his most trusted friends in the Congo, eventually being put in charge of Kinshasa, which he established as a major trading station without a shot being fired. Showing great bravery and tact, he prevented the famous French explorer Pierre de Brazza from snatching Kinshasa and the whole southern bank of the Congo by force. Yet Leopold never acknowledged his immense debt to Swinburne and deleted Stanley’s praise for him from his book about the Free State. Leopold had feared that if Swinburne’s low-key heroics were ever made public, the humiliated French might be angry enough to send a military force to take Kinshasa. Swinburne loved the Congolese, spoke the local language fluently and had a Congolese ‘wife’ by whom he had an adored child.

After Leopold sacked him from his post at Kinshasa, he worked for an ivory company and died from flesh-eating ulcers when he was little more than 30. Stanley defied Leopold by insisting that Swinburne should be the only person, apart from the King

hidden corners Opposite ‘The Author’s Escape From the Somali’, from John Hanning Speke’s Journal of the DIscovery of the Source of the Nile (1863), 1906 edition.

Right ‘The Last Charge’, from vol.1 of Samuel White Baker’s The Albert N’yanza (2 vols., 1866).

himself, to have a full-length picture in The Congo and the Founding of its Free State.

T. Nile was once the home of the first edition of John Hanning Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863), which is now in the Safe, leaving a 1906 edition on the shelf. The volume deals with the journey Speke made to Uganda (the first by a European) with the Scot James Grant, who was too ill to accompany Speke when he reached a powerful river flowing out of the northern shore of the immense lake he had previously named Victoria. This river, he correctly surmised, was the Nile. But he was still some distance from proving this, not having circumnavigated the lake. On his return to England, Richard Burton – with whom Speke had travelled to Lake Tanganyika between 1856 and 1859 – rubbished his claims to have found the Nile source.

Burton’s hatred of Speke dated back to their shared journey when Burton was too sick to travel and Speke had marched north-east on his own to become the first European to visit Lake Victoria. Even after Speke’s death in a shooting accident, a jealous Burton did everything he could to discredit him. My own book, Explorers of the Nile, is in T. Nile, too, and contains new material about Speke and his love affair with a wife of the former Kabaka (King of Buganda), and presents Speke’s side of the long quarrel with Burton.

As the title of Burton’s Zanzibar, City, Island and Coast (2 vols., 1872) suggests, topographical chapters can be found within concerned with fauna and flora, architecture, history and ethnology. The volumes of the publication, which was in T. Zanzibar and is now in the Safe, are only read these days, however, for a chapter in Volume 2 entitled ‘Captain Speke’ , which is a remarkable hatchet job on the dead explorer. Burton describes with sly irony his first impressions of Speke: ‘To a peculiarly quiet and modest aspect – aided by blue eyes and blonde hair – to a gentleness of demeanour, and an almost childlike simplicity of manner which at once attracted attention, he united an immense and abnormal fund of self-

esteem, so carefully concealed, however, that none but his intimates suspected its existence. ’ This essay was in part a response to various mild criticisms of him made by Speke in Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, which has a wonderful frontispiece depicting Speke running for his life after an attack by Somali spearmen that had left him with 11 wounds to his legs. In the same attack, a spear was thrust through Burton’s cheek into his mouth, where it smashed out two molars and lodged in his palate. All this had happened in Speke and Burton’s first unsuccessful attempt to reach the Central African lakes.

Another treasure in T. Nile is Samuel White Baker’s The Albert N’yanza, Great Basin of the Nile, and Explorations of the Nile Sources (2 vols., 1866), in which Baker describes how he became the first European to reach the Nile’s second great reservoir, which he named Lake Albert.

He omitted to mention that Florence, the teenager whom he had abducted from a Bulgarian slave market and secretly married on reaching England, had been his mistress during their journey.

Though formidably self-confident and opinionated, Baker could write humorously, stating that in the depths of Africa the sight of Florence combing her blonde tresses caused ‘as great a stir as a gorilla would have done on a London street’ . Both lovers nearly died from malaria, with Florence being unconscious for four days and so lifeless that Baker dug her grave. Unexpectedly she recovered.

The Victorian and Edwardian books in Topography are still in their places just as they were catalogued a century and a half ago. All around are works by explorers, travellers, district commissioners, settlers, medical officers, colonial civil servants, even governors, which form an extraordinary pre-colonial and colonial assemblage of books whose authors have given their own unique perspectives on the nineteenth-century European encounter with Africa and with other far-flung regions of the world. These are mainly white voices possessed by men, whose ‘fault’ , in Stanley’s phrase, was to go ‘into the heart of Africa uninvited’ .

Indeed, Topography contains very few books written from the perspective of the indigenous peoples who were at the receiving end of this invasion (such works are elsewhere in the Library), but this does not, in my opinion, detract from the importance of a collection put together at a particular time in the capital of a country at the forefront of exploration and of the imperial advances that followed. Although many of the shelf names are anachronistic – T. Zululand and T. Mashonaland to name but two – it would be a great shame, in my opinion, to recatalogue the collection and break it up. Later titles have been added, certainly, and by some remarkable authors, as varied as Albert Schweitzer, Karen Blixen and Dervla Murphy. But the uniquely impressive core of Victorian exploration classics is what makes the contents of this timeless underworld unforgettable.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19

hay & oats in the age of steam Gavin Weightman looks back to a time when London’s streets were crowded with horse-drawn traffic Back in the early 1980s, a documentary film-maker, as I was, had a budget which allowed him to take an academic out to lunch. It was also a time when you and your guest could settle down at a restaurant table and light up. From his jacket pocket the historian F.M.L. Thompson produced a pouch in which he kept his pipe. We were discussing his witty and original paper entitled ‘Victorian England: The Horse-Drawn Society’ . It had been his inaugural lecture in 1970 when he took up the Chair of History at Bedford College, at that time part of the University of London until it merged with Royal Holloway College in 1985. His paper was of special interest to me as I was researching a six-part history series for London Weekend Television on the development of London since the early nineteenth century, and one of the programmes was dedicated to transport in the capital.

We had barely scanned the menu in the Trattoria Verdi in Southampton Row when a thought occurred to me which was quite startling. ‘What, ’ I asked Professor Thompson, ‘would have been the main source of fuel for London transport in 1900?’ He patted down the tobacco in his pipe and did not reply for some time. I thought I had asked a stupid question and was about to rephrase it when he smiled and replied: ‘Hay and oats, I suppose. ’ This was a revelation. So much emphasis had always been put on the steam-engine and the railway in histories of nineteenth-century Britain and Victorian London that the far greater importance of horse-drawn traffic had been obscured. The point was well made in Thompson’s lecture: ‘Without carriages and carts the railways would have been like stranded whales, giants unable to 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

use their strength, for these were the only means of getting people and goods right to the doors, of houses, warehouses, markets, and factories, where they wanted to be. ’ The railway had not replaced horse-drawn traffic: it had greatly increased the demand

Above Hansom cab, London, 1910, from The Silver Jubilee Book: The Story of 25 Eventful Years in Pictures, 1910–1935 (1935). Photograph Alamy.

Opposite Horse-drawn tram, London, 1913.

Photograph Alamy.

‘

Charlotte Bonham-Carter recalled: “The hansom cabs were adorable, with the spanking horse trotting along in front, and they always had a bell”

for it. Only the long-distance stage-coaches fell into disuse when the railways were laid. Local traffic increased enormously, the railway companies themselves owning thousands of horses which hauled the goods wagons. The British Library, next to St Pancras railway station, is built on the site of a multi-storey horse park.

In his lecture Thompson said he was prompted to consider the place of the horse in history when he found himself helping to unload enough fodder to feed a single pony for one winter: two tons of hay and oats. Fuelling and running the horsedrawn society was cumbersome and expensive. From time to time there would be a ‘hay crisis’ , when feed was short and had to be imported.

I left the lunch excited by the prospect of exploring an entirely new aspect of London’s history. From a film-maker’s point of view it was a dream, as I knew there would be a wealth of archive footage which captured the heyday of horsedrawn London before, and just after, the

’

First World War. We went in search of interviewees but could find only one or two who had vivid memories dating back to the first decades of the twentieth century.

Charlotte Bonham-Carter recalled: ‘We often travelled in four-wheelers or hansom cabs – these were only for people who could afford them. The four-wheelers, which would be going around the West End streets waiting to be called, would be summoned by one whistle. Then there were two whistles for the hansom, which took only one or two people. They were adorable, with the spanking horse trotting along in front, and they always had a bell. ’ The cabs might have been delightful, but the roads were covered in muck, and if there was no crossing-sweeper to clear a way across, your smart clothes could be ruined. Lady Bonham-Carter’s white suede shoes turned black on a visit to St James’s Palace when a sudden shower churned up the dust on the road and there was no crossing-sweeper in sight.

While Lady Bonham-Carter recalled

the most expensive means of transport in London, Ted Harrison from Hoxton could just remember the trams when they were still horse-drawn before the electrification of the routes in the early 1900s. ‘The old trams used to be drawn by two horses. To get up steep hills like Stamford Hill, they would stop, and there would be a chain horse waiting at the bottom, and they’d attach it to the front to give them extra power. Then the chain horse would be led back down to the bottom of the hill to wait for the next tram. As the tram was going along the driver would ring a bell to clear the street and to warn carts in front to get out of the way. But sometimes they didn’t … and there would be a real slanging match between the drivers. ’ These interviews were among those broadcast in the programme we called ‘The Horse and the Train’ . They are also in the book I wrote with Steve Humphries that accompanied the television series, The Making of Modern London 1815–1914, which can be found in T. London, 4to. on the London Library shelves.

After that lunch with Thompson I never lost my fascination with conjuring up the world of horse-drawn London. A favourite question I had for London blackcab drivers in the days when I could afford to flag one down was: ‘Why was Holborn Viaduct built in 1869?’ It looks so like a cast-iron railway bridge that it is a surprise to learn it was put up to make it easier for horse-drawn wagons going into the City to negotiate the steep sides of the Fleet River.

Hills were a problem for work-horses, which were driven mercilessly for much of their lives. When they were too old or weak to be of any use, they were destined for the knacker’s yard. With his penchant for statistics, the journalist Henry Mayhew made a stab at reckoning the death toll of work-horses in London around 1850, in Volume 3 of his London Labour and the London Poor (1851, also in the Library, S. Capital & Labour). He estimated that around 720 horses a week, or 37,500 a year, were put to death in the slaughter-houses. The doomed horses were blindfolded so they could not see the slaughterman who wielded a pole-axe.

Everything from the carcass was made use of, the meat boiled in large copper vats which could take the flesh of four cabhorses. Chopped up, the horse meat was a popular pet food for cats and dogs, and THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

Street scene in the early twentieth century, showing various types of horse-drawn vehicles outside Whiteley’s department store at its original location in Westbourne Grove, London W2. Photograph Alamy.

was sold around London from carts which toured the streets daily. The meat dealers – Mayhew reckoned there were around 1,000 in London – sold their pieces of meat impaled on wooden skewers, rather like pet-food kebabs. It was a profitable trade which allowed the more successful dealers to retire early, often to farms in the countryside.

So extensive was this trade in skewered horsemeat that the youthful Charles Dickens made it the subject of one his satirical digs at the statistical obsessions of learned societies. The Mudfog Papers, which first appeared in the monthly literary journal Bentley’s Miscellany in 1837–8 (in the Library Safe), purports to be the ‘Full Report of the First Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything’ , in which Mr Slug ‘stated some curious calculations respecting the 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

dogs’-meat barrows of London’ . Slug had made a startling estimate concerning the sheer number of wooden skewers delivered and discarded in the pet-food trade. Multiplying the number of skewers each barrow disposed of by the number of barrows, he came up with the figure of 62,748 per day. Allowing for some wastage – a voracious dog might devour the skewer with the meat – there would still be 60,000 skewers distributed a day. If these were not thrown away, but stored in a warehouse, within ten years there would be enough timber to build a first-rate vessel of war, to be called The Royal Skewer.

This was a typical Dickensian flight of fancy, and a dig in the ribs for statisticians, but a measure nevertheless of the all-pervasiveness of horses in the nineteenth century. There were still a few horse-drawn vehicles when I was growing up in the 1950s, and the smell of them is still evocative of my childhood.

But the motor car, rather than the railway, inevitably drove them off the roads. In

the case of London transport the change was dramatic and rapid: between 1903 and 1910 nearly all the buses and cabs were motorised. Horse-tram routes were electrified. But the goods wagons had a more stately decline. Now that they have vanished it is not easy to conjure up the London that disappeared with them.

One of the questions Thompson left me with was what would have happened to London if no substitute for the horse had been found. When the motor car arrived, London transport was already grinding to a halt, jammed by slow-moving wagons and buses. Providing feed for the horses used up huge areas of farmland; there was a danger we might starve to death in our efforts to provide fuel for transport. At the same time the quantity of horse dung on the streets was becoming intolerable.

The horse-drawn society, so romantically depicted in costume dramas on television, was in reality squalid. Hay and oats were not less polluting than a tank of petrol, just a more pungent kind of poison.

.

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MEMBERS’ News

MEMBERSHIP SURVEY 2016 In autumn 2016 we carried out a full survey of the Library’s personal members and were delighted that so many of you rose to the challenge, completing the survey online or by post.

In all, 1,515 questionnaires were completed over a 3-week period (1,396 e-surveys and 119 postal surveys), giving a response rate of 25%. Although this was a lower response than our previous survey in 2011 (which attracted a 41% return rate), it was still large enough to give a high degree of confidence in the results for those questions answered by all or most of the respondents. The Audience Agency, which carried out the survey for us, has now reported on their findings, providing statistical analysis of the results and a full anonymised list of all the comments made by members in support of their answers to each question. We were not in the least surprised to see that this list ran to 304 pages, and it has made fascinating reading.

The membership data we hold about all of our members has been showing some polarisation in terms of age profile in recent years. While the number of members under 35 has increased

by 5% since 2003, there has been a sharp fall (14%) in the number aged 35 to 54 and a significant increase (8%) in those aged 75 and over. Naturally, with an eye to the future, we had hoped to learn more about the sort of library those in the under-55 age range are starting to look for but, alas, they are under-represented in the survey results and we will need to find other ways of hearing these missing voices.

SUMMARY OF RESULTS REASONS FOR MEMBERSHIP No one overall purpose of membership dominates, but the top three reasons cited for choosing to be a member are the quality and breadth of the Library’s collections (83%), the ability to borrow books and take them home (83%) and the online resources (50%). For those who use the Library as a place to work or study, the greatest attraction (cited by 88%) is that ‘The atmosphere is conducive to work’.

Despite the considerable marketing efforts we have made over the last nine years, discovering the Library seems to have remained largely a matter of personal recommendation, with 53% of members indicating they heard about it from a friend or family member, 28% from a professional or work contact and 8% from a teacher or lecturer.

USE OF THE LIBRARY While daytime use of the Library remains the norm, there has been some increase in evening and Saturday use and also in the number of members who mainly use the Library remotely, with 6% chiefly using our electronic resources, 3% postal loans, and 4% a combination of the two.

Once in the Library, the majority of members (59%) stay for no more than two hours, but the percentage of those who stay for more than three hours has increased from 15% in 2011 to 19% in 2016 (see graph, p.26). As one might expect there is some correlation between the amount of time spent in the Library and younger age bands.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

We asked members to indicate when they had last used the Library in a number of different ways, and added together the responses relating to activities ‘in the last week’ and ‘in the last month’ to determine how members are most frequently using the Library. Core activities remain much the same as in 2011 but there has been a distinct increase in electronic access, with use of the Library’s website up 10%, use of the e-library up 17%, and use of the Library’s catalogue (now Catalyst) from outside the Library up 6%.

The most-used areas of the collection remain much as they were in 2011, with History at the top of the table (79%), followed by Biography (71%), Literature (56%), Fiction (51%), Art (49%), Science & Miscellaneous (41%), Topography (32%), Religion (21%) and Philosophy (19%).

WHAT MEMBERS VALUE A series of questions probed how important different features of the Library are to members, covering the collections, services, facilities and other benefits of membership. The responses are largely consistent with members’ declared use of the Library. The quality, range and depth of the book collection overall clearly remains of critical importance to members, with 94% choosing ‘very important’ (2011: 95%) for this aspect. Questions about particular aspects of the collections – older materials, very recent acquisitions, periodicals, willingness to purchase books suggested by members – each saw a marginal decline in perceived importance, but there was a notable increase in the importance assigned to electronic journals (where 46% selected ‘very important’ compared to 37% in 2011) and to other databases including JSTOR (57% ‘very important’ compared to 45% in 2011).

Alongside the quality of the collections, the ability to borrow books (92%) and browse the books on open shelves (91%) also scored highly for importance, followed by Catalyst (online catalogue) at 74% and staff assistance with enquiries (50%); none of these questions was asked in 2011. Evening and Saturday opening both saw an increase in perceived importance, from 27% (in 2011) to 38% ‘very important’ for evening opening, and from 35% to 41% for Saturday opening.

Congenial work/study space remains the most important facility to members (59% ‘very important’), with an increase in the perceived importance of free Wi-Fi (39% in 2016 compared to 34% in 2011) and a decrease in that of a separate technology-free work/study space (28% in 2016 compared to 32%). The Members’ Room attracted a ‘very important’ rate of 26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

21% compared to 23% in 2011.

Of the additional benefits of membership, those around member communications were regarded as the most important, with 13% regarding the London Library Magazine as ‘very important’ (2011: 12%), 8% e-newsletters, 7% members’ talks and events, and 4% opportunities to network and socialise with other members and also for discounts at other organisations. For each of these additional benefits there was a considerably larger constituency who regarded them as ‘somewhat important’: 39% (magazine), 32% (e-newsletters), 29% (members’ talks and events), 18% (discounts) and 15% (socialising).

NEW IDEAS In principle, just under two-thirds of respondents (61%) think that the idea of having more talks and debates for members is a good one and, of these respondents, 63% said that they would be likely or very likely to attend such events. Additionally, 75% of the respondents who would attend said that they would be likely or very likely to bring a non-member guest.

In comparison, current members are much less sure (26%) that creating more spaces where members can meet and talk socially or work collaboratively is a good idea. When asked if respondents would like more opportunities to be able to bring non-members into the Library, 25% said yes, 34% said no and 41% had no opinion either way. What is interesting here, though, is that there appears to be something of an age divide, with a higher proportion of the under-60s interested in the idea than the over-60s, making it one we will continue to

MEMBERS’ NEWS

explore in the interests of attracting and retaining future members.

Many of the write-in comments on new ideas drew attention to the current Members’ Room trying to provide for some fundamentally incompatible uses in a single space: a quiet, relaxing place to read; eating and chatting; and the only place to make phone calls. Requests for more or better

catering facilities also recurred, and there was a clear perception of insufficient desk space for members wishing to use laptops.

Otherwise, the range of topics covered was very wide indeed (from opening hours and a need for more lockers to requests for a small sound-proofed viewing cinema and real fires in the fireplaces), so we have plenty of food for thought in the coming months.

HOW ARE WE DOING? When it comes to providing a library service, it is clear that members continue to feel we are doing a good job, with 94% indicating that we are meeting their needs very well or well (2011: 93%) and 81% (2011: 76%) regarding membership as very good or good value for money. Yet we are not attracting or retaining sufficient members in their middle years (35–55) to give us confidence in the longer-term sustainability of the Library without significant adaptation to future needs.

As those who attend the AGM or read the annual accounts are aware, we are currently operating at a significant deficit. Our challenge, then, is to translate these high approval ratings into the improved member recruitment and retention that is vital if the Library is to be here to celebrate its 200th anniversary in 2041.

Trustees and staff are working hard to identify what changes might be necessary to achieve that goal and you have given us much to think about. You have also been kind enough to give us a great deal of demographic data to work with as we try to understand where and how best to look for new members. We are therefore most grateful to all who took the time to take part in the survey. And, of course, the most valuable action members can take to secure the future of the Library is to encourage someone new to join.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

BOOKS MOST BORROWED Ever wondered which books are being read the most by Library members?

We decided to take a look at what was flying off the Library’s shelves in 2016. Top of the most borrowed lists are those authors with an unfair advantage in the form of ‘Collected Works’ in many volumes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Shakespeare takes the lead here, but who would have thought that the runner-up would be Karl Marx – in German?

Setting these aside, here are the members’ favourites (and they include seven Library members among them):

NON-FICTION

FICTION

1.Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.), The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932–1943 (2015).

2. Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015).

3. Adrian Tinniswood, The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House Between the Wars (2016).

4. Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science (2015).

5. Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails (2016).

6. Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (2013–14).

7. Ruth Scurr, John Aubrey: My Own Life (2015).

8. Laura Cumming, The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez (2016).

9. David Pryce-Jones, Fault Lines (2015).

10. William Waldegrave, A Different Kind of Weather: A Memoir (2015).

1. Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time (2016).

2. Michel Houellebecq, Submission (2015).

3. Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday: A Romance (2016).

4. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1886).

5. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907).

6. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955).

7. The following titles were equal seventh: Eric Ambler, Journey into Fear (1940).

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See (2014).

Helen Dunmore, Exposure (2016).

Walter Kempowski, All For Nothing (2015).

John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963).

Jules Romains, Les hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46).

Francis Spufford, Golden Hill (2016).

Revitalising Damaged Books The Library’s goal is to keep the book collection in suitable condition to be read and borrowed. In pursuit of this our Collection Care team rebind over 2,000 damaged books every year, returning them to the shelves ready to be discovered and enjoyed for generations. With a limited binding budget, external funding is very important in ensuring we can maintain this essential work and begin new projects. In 2016 a number of projects were made possible by grants from charitable trusts, and two recent donations will enable more rebinding work in 2017.

Grants from CHK Charities Ltd and The Viscountess Boyd Charitable Trust allowed the rebinding of folio and quarto books in the Topography and History sections. Another from The Leche Trust enabled the rebinding of some delicate volumes in the Back Stacks published during the Georgian period which, without intervention, were at risk of irreparable damage.

The Patron’s Fund, created in 2016 to celebrate the charitable organisations to which Her Majesty, The Queen acts as Patron, has made a £2,500 gift to the Library which will be used to rebind damaged books from the shelfmark H. England, Kings and Queens. The Queen has been Patron of the Library since 2003, and the rebound volumes will carry a special label commemorating Her Majesty’s 90th birthday.

The Library has also been awarded a grant from the Doris Pacey Charitable Foundation to rebind 72 damaged volumes from the Montefiore Pamphlets special collection. The work will help preserve this unique collection, ensuring it remains as accessible as possible for both Library members and the wider community.

The Library is tremendously grateful for this support.

We welcome any opportunity to speak to charitable trusts, foundations or individuals that may be interested in working with the Library in similar ways. If you would like to find out more, or if you have a connection to a charitable trust, please contact Alasdair Fraser in the Development Office (alasdair.fraser@ londonlibrary.co.uk, tel. 020 7766 4734).

Damaged book before and after rebinding.

28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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MEMBERS’ NEWS

Member Events Member events are free, but places are limited so must be reserved in advance at londonlibrary.co.uk/ memberevents ALEX LA GUMA: THE BLACK DICKENS AND THE POLITICS OF COLOUREDNESS Lindsay Johns Monday, 13 March 2017 6pm – 8pm Members’ Room Lindsay Johns will examine the life and works of one of South Africa’s leading novelists of the twentieth century. A seminal but much overlooked figure in modern African literature, La Guma wrote five novels and several short stories against the backdrop of political turmoil in apartheidera South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s.

A native of Cape Town, he became a prominent freedom fighter as well as a writer, and was the chief representative of the African National Congress in Havana, Cuba, at the time of his death in 1985.

Johns will provide a fascinating insight into the life and art of La Guma and the role that both coloured* identity and anti-apartheid activism played in his work.

Asserting La Guma’s rightful place in the canon, Johns will argue why the so-called ‘Black Dickens’ should be far better known today, both in South Africa and globally.

Lindsay Johns is a writer and broadcaster. He is also the Head of Arts and Culture at Policy Exchange and a non-residential Fellow at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University. *South African usage

HOW TO … PITCH AN IDEA Paul Farrow Tuesday, 28 March 2017 6pm – 8pm Members’ Room SOLD OUT NEW MEMBERS’ WELCOME DRINKS Thursday, 27 April 2017 6.30pm – 8.30pm Reading Room An evening reception for Library members who have joined within the past six months and would like an opportunity to meet other new members over a glass of wine and find out how to make the most of their membership from Library staff.

Members will also be able to discover how the Library conserves its vast collection of books with a special display of work by the Library’s conservation team.

Demonstrations of Catalyst, the Library’s online search tool, will take place throughout the evening, and personalised tours of the Library’s collections can be arranged on request.

All new members joining the Library within the last six months will receive an invitation in due course.

FACE TO FACE: BOOKS FROM EAST ASIA Peter Kornicki Tuesday, 22 May 2017 6pm – 8pm Members’ Room Printing was well established in East Asia long before it became common practice in Europe, with the earliest examples dating from the eighth century. Peter Kornicki talks about the history of printing in East Asia, with a special opportunity to see a display of items from his personal collection of

An idealised scene of courtly reading in a Japanese conduct book for women, published in 1799.

old Japanese and Korean books, the oldest of which is an illustrated Buddhist text printed in Japan in 1278. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to see these privately owned treasures at first hand.

Professor Peter Kornicki is Emeritus Professor of Japanese at the University of Cambridge and Deputy Warden of Robinson College, Cambridge. He was President of the European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS) between 1997 and 2000.

FINDING OUT ABOUT MEMBER EVENTS The Library runs free events for members all year round on a wide variety of topics, from illustrated talks and practical ‘How to …’ sessions to social events. These events are always very popular and almost always sell out quickly.

The best way to find out what events are coming up (and about other Library news) is via the Library’s e-newsletter, which is sent out regularly to all members for whom we hold an email address.

If for any reason you aren’t receiving these emails please contact the Membership Office (membership@londonlibrary. co.uk) with your current email address, and don’t forget to add The London Library to your safe sender list on your email account.

WANTED: MEMBER VOLUNTEER TO BECOME PENSION SCHEME TRUSTEE Although we are not looking for new Library trustees this year, we do have a vacancy for the important role of Trustee of The London Library Staff Superannuation Fund (‘the scheme’).

The Library closed its final-salary pension scheme to further accrual from April 2011, but we still need skilled and conscientious trustees to govern it. To prevent any conflict of interest, the scheme trustees are distinct from those of the Library and their duties are to the members of the scheme (pensioners and current or former staff with accrued deferred pensions). Their role is to ensure that the scheme has sufficient funds to pay its pension obligations as they fall due, that these are paid in accordance with the rules, and that the scheme complies with legislation and regulatory guidance.

One of the present scheme trustees will be stepping down in September and we are looking for a replacement. If you have previous experience as a trustee, actuary, administrator or investment manager for a defined benefit pension scheme and would be willing to consider becoming a Trustee of the Library’s scheme, then we would love to hear from you.

Full details can be obtained from the ‘Work for us’ section of the Library’s website, or from the Finance Director, Peter Hyde (peter.hyde@londonlibrary.co.uk, tel. 020 7766 4713).

The closing date for applications is Friday, 21 April 2017.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31

THE CONTENTS OF GLYN CYWARCH

The Property of Lord Harlech Wednesday 29 March 2017 New Bond Street, London

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