MAGAZINE AUTUMN 2014 ISSUE 25
TALES FROM THE CRYPT The Library’s Gothic literature by Phil Baker
STEP FORWARD, MR BOSWELL James Knox on the first modern literary biographer
I name this man Chuzzlewit Fictional names by David McKie
Why the american dream is here to stay The London Library Annual Lecture by Sarah Churchwell
£3.50
The London Library Magazine / issue 25
12
C ontents
The diaries of James Boswell record the internal conflict of a man torn between patriotism and the appeals of the international circles of the Enlightenment. Such emotional and intellectual vacillation was an early manifestation of what Scotland is interrogating itself about in the current independence debate, as James Knox explains.
5 FROM THE CHAIRMAN 6 Contributors 8 BEHIND THE BOOK James Boswell, 1765, by George Willison.
16
11 bibliotherapy Reading David Sylvester’s Interviews with Francis Bacon helps Marcel Theroux when he feels gloomy about his own work
David McKie considers how writers arrive at the names of the characters in their novels. Dickens’s genius for inventing names that have come to embody character types – Uriah Heep, Scrooge, Mr Micawber – is widely celebrated, but other novelists employ sometimes surprising methods to dream up names.
12 STEP FORWARD, MR boswell
George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody (1892).
20 A search for Gothic literature in the Library yielded some interesting finds in S. Psychology and S. Superstitions for Phil Baker, as well as in the more obvious shelf marks. The subject has been explored in many genres since the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), widely held to be the first Gothic novel.
The Library’s nineteenth-century Baedekers and travel memoirs provided important research material for Wendy Wallace’s latest novel
James Knox on why James Boswell, author of the celebrated biography of Samuel Johnson, deserves to be more widely recognised
16 I NAME THIS MAN CHUZZLEWIT How novelists select the names of their fictional characters, by David McKie
20 hidden corners Phil Baker describes the wealth of Gothic titles to be found in the Library’s collections
24 The London Library Annual Lecture Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), 1993 edition.
Sarah Churchwell on ‘Why the American Dream is Here to Stay’
30 MEMBERS’ NEWS
24
39 EATING OUT
Sarah Churchwell explores why the American dream, a national obsession born during the Depression, is a metaphor that needs to be examined in its historical context and reinterpreted for the modern age Photograph © Brian Allen.
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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 3
Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Dirty Old London
Gothic Wonder
Imprudent King
The Victorian Fight Against Filth Lee Jackson
Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style, 1290–1350 Paul Binski
A New Life of Philip II Geoffrey Parker
‘So much meticulous research packaged into such a vividly readable narrative. I loved it.’ – Liza Picard, author of Victorian London
175 colour + 100 b/w illus. Hardback £40.00
Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
40 b/w illus. Hardback £20.00
In this wide-ranging and eloquent book, Paul Binski offers groundbreaking arguments about the role of invention, making, and the powers of Gothic art and architecture.
George Frederick Bodley & the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America Michael Hall
20 colour + 36 b/w illus. Hardback £25.00
Owning the Past
Passions
Why the English Collected Antique Sculpture, 1640–1840 Ruth Guilding
Giacomo Leopardi Translated by Tim Parks
With impeccable scholarship, this lavish volume is the first book to examine the work of an influential and visionary architect of Gothic Revival and Victorian design.
In a lively re-examination of the British collectors who bankrupted themselves to possess antique marble statues, Owning the Past chronicles a story of rivalry, nationalism and myopic obsession with posterity.
150 colour + 60 b/w illus. Hardback £50.00
100 colour + 200 b/w illus. Hardback £55.00
YaleBooks 4 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Geoffrey Parker’s extraordinary archival discovery – a trove of 3,000 documents, unread since the reign of Philip II – inspired this compelling new biography. It presents a revised portrait of Spain’s most famous king, reviews his challenges and explains his successes and failures.
Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Lee Jackson takes us through the filthy streets, slums and factories of Victorian London, encountering those who fought against the grime.
This up-to-date translation of selected entries from Leopardi’s acclaimed intellectual diary shines light on his frequently disdainful musings on the human passions and illustrates how his work anticipates such later thinkers as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Beckett and others. Hardback £16.99
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On the cover
Wood engraving by Abigail Rorer, from the Folio Society edition of Dracula by Bram Stoker, 2009. foliosociety.com
f rom the C H A I R M A N What’s a library for? That wasn’t a question that much puzzled Thomas Carlyle in 1841, but we all know that these days digital technology and changing habits both of reading and of research make this a question no librarian can ignore. So with the AGM coming up on 5 November and our annual accounts being published, I thought it was time to ask Inez Lynn some questions about the Library’s Strategic Plan in Members’ News in this issue. She also provides a brief summary of our finances in 2013–14, which showed a small surplus thanks in part to generous legacies left by members, for which we are extremely grateful. Elsewhere in this issue, Wendy Wallace describes how she used the Library to provide inspiration for her novel about three women travelling to Egypt in the nineteenth century. James Knox, Chairman of the Boswell Trust among much else, tells us of his hero’s journey to Corsica a century earlier in order to track down the leader of the island’s freedom-fighters, with intriguing implications for what James Boswell might have thought about the referendum on Scottish independence on 18 September. Andrew Marr evidently found Boswell’s mausoleum more ghoulish than he would have liked, when James Knox showed him round, but do you like your literature Gothic? If so, Phil Baker offers a tour of our rather terrifyingly extensive Gothic collection in Hidden Corners. Marcel Theroux describes how he finds David Sylvester’s Interviews with Francis Bacon endlessly inspiring for his own writing in Bibliotherapy, and David McKie explores the often surprising significance of surnames in fiction. And we have great pleasure in publishing here an abridged version of Sarah Churchwell’s London Library Lecture at Hay in May about the history of the ‘American Dream’ . I think by now you will have worked out what libraries are for.
Bill Emmott Chairman
Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 12 September 2014 © 2014 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 Catherine Cartwright
Editorial Committee David Breuer Chloë Brookes 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
Subterranean London CraCking the Capital Bradley l. garrett
Phil Baker
a unique assemblage of unauthorised material from twelve photographers infatuated with underground spaces. the most comprehensive photographic account of subterranean london ever produced – every single photo taken without permission from anyone.
Joined the Library in 1988
Phil Baker’s books include Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist (2011) and The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley (2009), as well as an academic book on Samuel Beckett, Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis (1997). He has recently co-edited, with Antony Clayton, the forthcoming Lord of Strange Deaths: The Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer.
Sarah Churchwell
Joined the Library in 2013
Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of ‘The Great Gatsby’ (2013), The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004), and the co-editor of Must Read: Rediscovering the Bestseller (2012). Raised in Chicago, she lives in London.
James Knox
Subterranean London Cracking the Capital Bradley L. Garrett With a foreword by Will Self hardback, 160 pages with 120 colour illustrations 978-3-7913-4945-9
September 2014 available in all good bookshops or prestel directly t: + 44 (0) 20 7323 5004 F: + 44 (0) 20 7323 0271 e: sales@prestel-uk.co.uk www.prestel.com
£22.50
Joined the Library in 1994
James Knox, who is currently managing director of the Art Newspaper, is author of the biography of pre-war travel writer, Robert Byron (2003), Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster (2008) and The Scottish Country House (2012), all of which benefited hugely from the collections of The London Library. The next Boswell Book Festival will take place from 8 to 10 May 2015 (boswellbookfestival.co.uk or boswelltrust.com).
David McKie
Joined the Library in 1988
David McKie was a Guardian journalist for more than 40 years – Deputy Editor for 9, and at other times a political correspondent, chief leader-writer and columnist. For the past decade he has been writing books, which include Jabez: the Rise and Fall of a Victorian Rogue (2004), Great British Bus Journeys (2006) and What’s In A Surname: A Journey from Abercrombie to Zwicker (2013).
Marcel Theroux
Joined the Library in 1996
Marcel Theroux is the author of five novels, including the Somerset Maugham Awardwinning The Paperchase (2001). His book Strange Bodies (2013) won the 2014 John W. Campbell Award for the best science-fiction novel and has just been published in paperback by Faber. His 2008 novel, Far North, recently came out in Japan in a translation prepared by the celebrated author Haruki Murakami.
Wendy Wallace
Joined the Library in 2011
Wendy Wallace is a journalist turned novelist. Her second novel, The Sacred River, published in paperback in April, is set in Egypt in 1882; her first, The Painted Bridge (2012), won the English first novel prize of the 2014 Festival du premier roman de Chambéry, France, and was longlisted for the 2013 Desmond Elliott Prize. Other books include Daughter of Dust (2009) and Oranges and Lemons (2005). She lives in London. 6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE Subterranean Ad.indd 1
15/07/2014 14:19
A collection of Penguin first editions, 1935–1965
Bernard Quaritch Ltd 40 South Audley Street London, W1K 2PR www.quaritch.com 020 7297 4888 Rare books, manuscripts, and photographs. Auction commissions, and valuations.
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sa m wa na m a k er p l ayhouse
W inter Se ason October 2014 – April 2015 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore The Knight of the Burning Pestle The Changeling Farinelli and the King The Broken Heart Dido, Queen of Carthage
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 7
Behind the
Book
The Library’s set of Baedekers from the nineteenth century, along with memoirs of Victorian women travellers, offered important clues about everyday life for Englishwomen in Egypt to Wendy Wallace when she came to research her latest novel
‘
Wendy Wallace’s The Sacred River (2013), 2014 paperback edition.
My novel The Sacred River, published in paperback in April this year, is the story of three women who flee a fog-bound London in January 1882 for the light and heat of Egypt, in a bid to escape a prophesied death. My research took the form of a trip to Luxor, a haunting of the Petrie and British Museums, and the extended borrowing of a number of inspirational books from The London Library.
Handbooks for Travellers, Lower and Upper Egypt, ed. Karl Baedeker (2 vols., London 1878, 1892). Guide Books, Egypt. Most obviously, I wanted a travel guide to Egypt of the time, one that my fictional women might actually have consulted. Baedeker recommended certain Cairo hotels as ‘tolerable, though of moderate pretensions’; suitable in other words for women of modest means travelling alone. He advised packing a supply of magnesium wire for lighting ‘caverns and dark chambers’ , as well as writing materials and one’s own firearm. My ladies took all of this advice to heart. It was an added bonus when the Baedekers – kept on the Guide Book shelves high above the Issue desk – proved to have been bequeathed to the Library by Sir Ernest Wallis Budge, eminent Victorian Egyptologist and Keeper at the British Museum. Last Letters From Egypt: To Which Are Added Letters from the Cape by Lucie Duff Gordon, With a Memoir by Her Daughter, Mrs Ross (London 1875). T. Egypt. Like one of my fictional travellers, Lucie Duff Gordon (LDG, as she was known) went to Egypt in an attempt to save
8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
her life. Despite or because of LDG’s impending death from tuberculosis, her delight in Egyptian life suffuses her letters. She quotes her interactions verbatim, as, for instance, when a man wishes to sell her some paint: ‘behold the brilliancy of the white paint, like milk, like glass, like the full moon. ’ Her 7-year stay in Egypt may not much have extended her life – she died at 49 – but her letters make clear how greatly it enriched it. Ragged Life in Egypt by Mary Whately (London 1862). T. Egypt. Miss Mary Whately, daughter of Archbishop Richard Whately and trained from girlhood in Christian service, spent 30 years in Egypt as a missionary; she also began the country’s first schools for girls. She was well connected, lived in the slum quarters of Cairo herself, knew the society from top to bottom and, despite at first being ‘cursed as a Nazarene’ and pelted with dust in the alleys of the city by the very children she wished to enrol, never lost her doughty faith or her respect for the Muslim people with whom she worked. Like LDG, Miss Whately ended her days in Cairo, dying there in 1889 of a fever caught during a chilly trip up the Nile.
’
A Thousand Miles Up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards (London 1877). T. Nile. Victorian women had a penchant not only for travelling in Egypt but for writing about it. Most famously, Amelia Edwards popularised Nile travel and displays in her work the deep fascination the Victorians had with the culture of ancient Egypt, as well as her own erudition. The book, wonderfully, contains ‘upwards of seventy illustrations engraved on wood by G. Pearson after finished drawings executed on the spot by the author’ . Edwards has time for recounting everyday details, describing how, aboard the dahabeah boat, she and her companions exchanged gifts with the Bey of Erment; ‘pots of English jam’ on their side and on his ‘a funereal statuette in the rare green porcelain and a live turkey’ . The Orientalists: Western Artists in Arabia, the Sahara, Persia and India by Kristian Davies (New York 2005). A. Painting, 4to. Victorian artists were enthralled by the life they saw in the East, and by life in the harems or women’s quarters that male painters could not see but only imagine. The beauty, tenderness and drama of the paintings in this book were a joy.
Le Carré (John) A Murder of Quality, 1962, first edition. Sold for £3,720
Fleming (Ian) Casino Royale, 1953, first edition. Sold for £24,180
Tolkien (J.R.R.) The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again, 1937, first edition. Sold for £18,600
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THE ANNOTATED WUTHERING HEIGHTS Emily Brontë EDITED BY JANET GEZARI
“This is a superb edition. The annotations bring the text to life in a new way, and, with its many illustrations, it is a pleasure to look at and to have in one’s library.” —Beth Newman, Southern Methodist University The Annotated Wuthering Heights provides those encountering the novel for the first time—as well as those returning to it—with a wide array of contexts in which to read Brontë’s romantic masterpiece. Handsomely illustrated with many colour images that vividly recreate both Brontë’s world and the earlier Yorkshire setting of her novel, this newly edited and annotated text will delight and instruct the scholar and general reader alike. Released September 2014 | Belknap Press | 9780674724693 | £25.95
www.hup.harvard.edu | twitter: @Harvard_Press | email: info@harvardup.co.uk 10 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
BIBLIOTHERAPY
DAVID SYLVESTER’s
Interviews with Francis Bacon Francis Bacon’s frank and physical analysis of his working method when painting offers Marcel Theroux relief from feelings of despondency about his own writing Over the past 20 years, I’ve accumulated a small library of books that are intended to guide and inspire the would-be writer of fiction. Some propose to explain the universal principles of story with maths and diagrams (Georges Polti’s The ThirtySix Dramatic Situations of 1916, Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale of 1928 or Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots of 2004); some bark advice like a sergeant-major urging conscripts round an obstacle course; others offer the flailing writer the literary equivalent of a bosomy cuddle. And I think I’ve taken something from most of them, even the ones I eventually consigned to the charity shop. But the book that I’m most likely to turn to when in a deep gloom about my own work is not a book about writing at all. Interviews with Francis Bacon was first published under the title The Brutality of Fact in 1987. It’s a collection of interviews that the art critic David Sylvester conducted with Bacon over a period of 25 years and is especially good for dipping into when your own work has ground to a halt. Sylvester questions Bacon in minute detail about his method of working. Bacon’s answers speak to anyone who’s tried to make a sincere work of art in any medium. He is funny, and bracingly frank. Bacon paints when he’s drunk, he paints when’s he bored, and he paints with terrible hangovers. Sometimes he feels incapable of painting figures, so he paints landscapes instead. Often he flings paint haphazardly at the canvas in the hope that it will spark an idea. And his best work, he
says, seems to come when he’s teetering on the edge of total despair. His appetite for work borders on obsession. The paintings are the product of a lifetime’s passion for visual images, for looking at other art, and manipulating paint on canvas. ‘You see, I have looked at everything in art, ’ Bacon says at one point, and it doesn’t sound like a boast. Alongside Bacon’s connoisseurship and hard work, there is something else: a recurring preoccupation with the importance of chance and instinct. ‘I can quite easily sit down and make what is called a literal portrait of you, ’ Bacon tells Sylvester, but that’s not what interests him. He’s driven to find ways to make images that feel fresher and more immediate, to create art which seems ‘to come straight out of what we call the unconscious with the foam of the unconscious locked around it – which is its freshness’ . The two men return to this subject again and again, and it’s some of the most thought-provoking material in the book. These sentences, like Bacon’s paintings, imply much more than they tell. They’re pregnant and suggestive, quite unlike the specious formulations of most creativewriting textbooks. ‘The hinges of form come about by chance seem more natural and to work more inevitably, ’ Bacon explains. It’s a throwaway remark, but it contains a deep idea about not relying on mere intelligence, or intelligence alone; to have faith that darker, stranger avenues will lead you to ‘a vividness that no accepted way of doing it would have brought about’ . Most importantly of all, the book
David Sylvester’s Interviews with Francis Bacon (first published as The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon in 1987), 1995 edition.
administers first aid to the zone that is most likely to be afflicted in a blocked writer: that is, the inner conviction that there’s any point in making art at all. Bacon doesn’t elaborate his theories about art in a systematic way, but the same phrases recur across the interviews. He talks about the power of art to ‘thicken life’ , to ‘unlock the valves of feeling’ , and bring things ‘onto your nervous system more strongly’ . It’s a less portentous and more convincing version of Kafka’s idea that art is an axe to smash the frozen sea inside us. I’ve read the book many times, and not once have I closed it without feeling revitalised. THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 11
STEP forward,
Mr boswell To understand the conflicting and complex passions behind Scotland’s vote, James Knox suggests we look no further than the compelling diaries of the Enlightenment writer of genius, James Boswell It is a typical spring day in Ayrshire, heavy rain with an easterly wind giving it a wintry edge. The broadcaster Andrew Marr has arrived in the village of Auchinleck to make Andrew Marr’s Great Scots, a BBC2 TV programme exploring Scottish literary identity, to be broadcast in the run-up to the independence vote. Focusing on three key writers, the programme starts with James Boswell. As Chairman of the Boswell Trust my role is to let him into Boswell’s mausoleum in the churchyard of Auchinleck. ‘This is a pretty dilapidated place, ’ he says, surveying the dank chamber. ‘It’s odd, don’t you think, that one of our greatest writers has no memorial?’ We were about to descend into the vault where a columbarium (literally the pigeon-house)
contains the remains of Boswell and his immediate family. A stone stairway leads down to a wall of loculi (niches), each bearing the initials of the occupant roughly scrawled in chalk. Boswell’s father, mother, stepmother, wife and a daughter surround him, all of whom in life and death are described with such unflinching honesty in Boswell’s journals. The stone seal of one of the loculi has been smashed, exposing a skeleton. For Gothic shivers the experience takes some beating. Marr emerges from the mausoleum wreathed in fire and brimstone. ‘So this is literally a come-down. ’ He fumes to camera. ‘The last burying place of a man who has been scandalously overlooked in his own Scotland. Poor Bozzy. This is just not right. Down there are the mortal
Auchinleck churchyard, showing Boswell’s mausoleum, centre, with pyramid stone roof topped with urn. Photograph by Walter Johnston, 2014. 12 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
remains of one of the greatest journalists who ever lived; the man who invented the modern literary biography. He should be surrounded by the most extraordinary Baroque building you’ve ever seen, full of noise and dancing and laughter and the clinking and breaking of glasses, not the silence, not the rain. ’ Marr’s outrage is fed by a lifelong passion for the man, first lit by his mother’s gift of a copy of the London Journal (1762–1763), ‘when I was still very young and impressionable, and ever since then I’ve been compelled by his ambition, by his wide-eyed naïveté, his enthusiasm and by his courage. And, of course, I can relate to a man torn between patriotism and the excitement of the big city. In our case, between love of Scotland and lust for London. ’ Boswell’s split loyalties may explain his neglect in Scotland. But his occlusion in recent years has not just been in the land of his birth. Since the high point in 1950 when his scandalous London Journal was first published, knocking Ernest Hemingway off the US bestseller list, Boswell’s reputation has slipped from view. One reason is the sheer brilliance of his Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), which is so ripe, so larger than life, that its creator appears sentenced to walk in his subject’s shadow. No better illustration was The London Library’s decision not to acquire a copy of the 2010 revised edition of the London Journal, edited by the General Editor of the Yale Boswell Editions, Dr Gordon Turnbull, on the wholly reasonable grounds of cost given that the Library already had
the Journal in several other editions and reprints. But would a revised edition of Samuel Pepys’s diaries with much new scholarly material have elicited such a response? The Boswell Trust was founded in 2010 with the mission to bring Bozzy (as Johnson referred to him) back into the limelight. Founded by a group of literary activists, including Boswell’s senior direct descendant, Margaret Boswell Eliott, the trust has taken on the responsibility of restoring the neoclassical mausoleum and transforming the adjoining seventeenthcentury church into a fitting monument to Boswell and his works.
‘
Was Boswell’s energetic campaign to win British support for Corsica’s independence a sublimation of his own support for Scottish sovereignty?
’
The trust’s charitable aims also include the promotion of non-fiction writing in schools, especially those around Auchinleck, one of the most deprived districts in Scotland, and the celebration of contemporary biography and memoir. Out of these ambitions sprang the Boswell Book Festival, now in its fourth year, the only festival in the world dedicated to biography and memoir, and the only known one to be held in an author’s own home, the Palladian seat of the Laird of Auchinleck, James Boswell. Turnbull appeared at this year’s festival to discuss Boswell’s daring journey to Corsica in 1765 where he tracked down the leader of the island’s freedom fighters, General Pasquale Paoli. Did his journey represent a romantic hankering after the Jacobite cause, which had been crushed at Culloden 19 years earlier, and whose leader, Prince Charles Edward
James Boswell, 1765, by George Willison. National Galleries of Scotland.
Stuart, still lived in drunken exile on the Continent? And was Boswell’s energetic campaign to win British support for the island’s independence from Genovese rule a sublimation of his own support for Scottish sovereignty, which at that time was tantamount to treason? Such questions alluded to Scotland’s looming independence vote without the festival becoming mired in a political slanging match. Four months on from the festival and with only days to go before the vote on 18 September, what did we learn
from Turnbull’s analysis of Boswell’s motives? To put it crudely, which way would Boswell vote today in the polling booth at Auchinleck: Yes or No? The question had already been asked of his Ayrshire neighbour and contemporary, Robert Burns, by the Scottish Makar, Liz Lochhead in the Guardian, and Burns’s biographer, Robert Crawford, in his book Bannockburns (2014), both claiming Burns for the Yes camp. ‘My gut feeling, ’ writes Lochhead, ‘is that (och, just read him!), as a libertarian, a democrat, a lover of freedom and autonomy, a revolutionary THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13
caption caption caption caption caption caption caption caption caption
James Boswell in the dress of a Corsican chief (detail), 1769, line engraving by J. Miller after Samuel Wale. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
and a romantic, of course he’d be voting for independence’ . Anyone looking for such clarity in Turnbull’s nuanced portrayal of the young Boswell in search of a cause will be disappointed. His summary of Boswell’s attitudes towards independence, taken from his lecture, deserve to be quoted in full as a masterclass in conveying the elusiveness of a great literary personality with all its contradictions and convictions. ‘True it is, ’ he says, ‘that Boswell, in his youthful involvement with Corsica, was expressing on a national and even international canvas his own personal desire for a filial liberty and individual independence. And while his interest in the Corsican cause had an early stimulus in his encounter with Rousseau in Môtiers in December 1764, he had had, more recently, encounters with the expatriate Scottish Jacobites in Rome. Indeed, on his way back to Britain, as part of his copious campaign of puffing his Corsican travels and his planned book about them with some teasing “inventions” for the 14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
British newspapers, he even included one mischievously implying that he had worked on a scheme to sound out Paoli on the idea of installing the “Young Chevalier” as King of Corsica. Over time, the pull of Jacobitism on him, and the appeal of Charles Edward, both remained strong, but he continued conflicted, vacillating, even muddled. At the personal level, his own rebellion against his father’s wishes and the pressure of social expectation, was a failed one, and he entered with great reluctance into the Edinburgh legal profession. And in late life (in the 1790s), his hopes for an independent Corsica outlived even Paoli’s. ’ Turnbull concludes: ‘Taken all in all, Boswell’s diaries record an earlier stage of what Scotland is interrogating itself about now: the shifting, imprecise and often unstable relation between politico-national allegiance and personal identity. ’ There is no better place to understand Boswell’s intellectual and emotional vacillation than in the library at Auchinleck House where one of the most famous rows in literary history took place, between his father, Lord Auchinleck, who as judge of the Court of Session was a pillar of the Hanoverian state, and his father figure, the High Tory, Dr Samuel Johnson. ‘The contest began, ’ Boswell recorded in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786), ‘when my father was showing him his collection of medals; and Oliver Cromwell’s coin unfortunately introduced Charles the First, and Toryism. They became exceedingly warm and violent; and I was very much distressed by being present at such an altercation between two men, both of whom I reverenced, yet I durst not interfere. ’ The episode proved too painful even for Boswell’s unyielding pen, and he refused to confide the details in his journal.
At one level, Boswell adored Auchinleck. ‘I felt a kind of exaltation, ’ he wrote, ‘in the consciousness of a line of ancestors, and in the prospect of being laird myself, and ruling over such a fine Place and such an extent of country’ . His rootedness in Scottish history and culture emerged in a discussion at the festival on the Scots language, in which Dr Susan Rennie, who discovered the lost manuscript of Boswell’s unpublished Scottish dictionary, spoke of his influence on her translation into Scots of the Tintin adventure The Black Isle, published in 2013 as The Derk Isle. Boswell had begun the compilation to record words that in the 1760s were already dying out. ‘Only, of course, Scots didn’t die out!’ said Rennie. ‘Boswell was writing 20 years or so before Burns published his first poems and started a new literary revival. ’ She illustrated the endurance of the Scots dialect with words from Boswell’s dictionary, which she had used in The Derk Isle and are still spoken in Ayrshire today: ‘There! Jist in time an aw! Yon pyot micht hae flewn awa wi’t!’ [when a magpie steals the key to the local fire station]. ‘A man lowpit [jumped] aff the train. We maun follae him!’ ‘Nae time tae swither [doubt]!’ However, Boswell’s devotion to Auchinleck had its limits. He was after all a child of the Scottish Enlightenment who had attended Adam Smith’s lectures at Glasgow University, mixed with the greatest writers, artists and scientists of the age, and who through tenacity and deep reserves of charm had become the first celebrity interviewer, nailing for posterity revealing portraits of Rousseau, Voltaire and David Hume. His incorrigible curiosity was the
diaries record an earlier “ Boswell’s stage of what Scotland is interrogating itself about now: the shifting, imprecise and often unstable relation between politico-national allegiance and personal identity
”
STEP FORWARD, MR BOSWELL
Auchinleck House, built mid-1750s, architect unknown, influenced by the Adam brothers. Photograph by Walter Johnston, 2014.
starting-point for a talk at the festival on the definition of travel writing. Cavalier assertions that the genre was little more than a branch of fiction evaporated when reminded of Boswell’s example not just as one of the first modern travel writers, with his accounts of Corsica and the Hebrides, but also with his interrogation of the ‘extraordinary traveller’ , James Bruce of Kinnaird, as recorded in his journal, 9 August 1774, published in Boswell for the Defence (1959). Boswell encountered Bruce in Edinburgh in 1774, recently returned from Abyssinia (Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile was published in 1790), and recorded their exchange as follows: ‘I asked what kind of architecture they had in Abyssinia. Bruce: Architecture, Sir, in a barbarous, mountainous country! Boswell: What kind of houses have they? Bruce: Huts. Boswell: Of what are they made? Bruce: Why, of branches of trees – of mud – and of mud and stone together. Boswell: Has the King no better house than the rest?
Bruce: Yes. He has a large palace built by the Jesuits of stone, in which he might defend himself against all Asia, were it not that they have chosen a place where there is no well.’ Boswell concludes: ‘In this manner was information dug from him, as from a flinty rock with pick axes. ’ For once Boswell found his interviewee a hard nut to crack. But the encounter reveals both men as true figures of the Enlightenment, where facts are all important and where intellectual, political and geographical boundaries are challenges to be overcome. One of the charms of book festivals, particularly in remote districts, is the opportunity for like-minded people to indulge in ‘social glee’ , to use one of Boswell’s favourite phrases. He loved entertaining at Auchinleck, on one occasion recording his party’s consumption at supper and dinner of seven bottles and two pints of claret, three of port, one of Lisbon, two of madeira, one of mountain (white wine) and one of rum. ‘I was as sound and happy while this company was with me, ’ he wrote, ‘… that I wrote several letters with satisfaction, and in particular one to Dr Johnson’ .
Each May, Auchinleck House is filled with social glee as the authors, actors and performers come to stay for the festival weekend. But they are not the only guests, it seems. Last year, the author Sophie Parkin, chronicler of bohemian London, who is normally a sound sleeper, was disturbed in the night by a voice telling her to get up. Awakening with a start, she padded down the corridor, only to hear the chatter, laughter and clinking of glasses of a party going on downstairs, while a great shaft of light poured down the staircase into the hall below. Thinking it rather odd that people were still up, she retreated to bed. The next morning she discovered that no one had stayed up late – she had heard a phantom party. It appears that Boswell’s shade had stirred from the mausoleum, in circumstances that echo Marr’s impassioned plea for a suitable monument to his achievements. With Boswell back on the party circuit and his reputation in the ascendant, perhaps it’s time for The London Library to reconsider its decision and acquire the latest edition of the London Journal.
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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15
i name this man
chuzzlewit From Dickens’s Melchisedech Howler to Fleming’s Auric Goldfinger, names in fiction frequently have a significance that is not obvious to the reader, as David McKie has discovered in his work on the subject
In The Diary of a Nobody (1892) by George and Weedon Grossmith, the home of Mr and Mrs Charles Pooter – The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway – is visited by a person called Padge. He has been brought to the house, without any forewarning, by Pooter’s friend Gowing. Padge promptly bags the best armchair and remains there all evening, puffing away at his pipe and contributing nothing to the proceedings except to say, when addressed: ‘That’s right. ’ The following night, he appears again, this time on his own and, to Pooter’s disgust, repeats the performance. But why was this fellow named Padge? So often when reading I pause to wonder just how a writer arrived at the name of a character. By what process did F. Scott Fitzgerald decide that perhaps his most famous character should have been born a Gatz and then should have changed it to Gatsby? And what drove him to give his protagonist in Tender is the Night (1934) – clunkingly, as it seems to me – the name Dick Diver? We know exactly how the brothers Grossmith envisaged Padge, since Weedon also illustrated the book, and there he is, in Chapter 11, exuding fumes and indisputably padge-ish. George Grossmith died in 1912 and Weedon in 1919, so we may never know how they chose the name. Perhaps they had once met a Padge, though this seems unlikely. The book appeared 11 years after the 16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
1881 census; all the names in the latter have been analysed by Steve Archer and published by him on CD-Rom as The British 19th Century Surname Atlas (2011). This tells us that a mere three Padges were found by the census takers. Nor does the name refer, as such names in fiction sometimes do, to a definition in everyday dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary says a padge is a barn owl, although the use of the term appears to have been quite minimal. Pooter’s particular friends Cummings and Gowing have names that are much less memorable. Would it be mean to suspect that the Grossmiths chose them in order to squeeze in a joke that Pooter maintains is the best he has made in his life? ‘Doesn’t it seem odd, ’ he says, ‘that
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Pooter’s name has entered the language, evoking a kind of selfimportance and punctured pride
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Gowing’s always coming and Cummings’ always going?’ Carrie, his wife, he proudly records, collapses into ‘fits of laughter’ while, ‘as for myself, I fairly doubled up in my chair, till it cracked beneath me’ . Pooter’s own name, however, has entered the language, evoking a kind of selfimportance and punctured pride. Like Padge, this surname existed in 1881, but in no great profusion: the census takers found 12 of them, all in Lancashire. The word pooter is defined in dictionaries as ‘a bottle for collecting small insects and other invertebrates’ or, alternatively, as ‘an instrument for curling the folds of a ruff’ . It’s unlikely that the Grossmiths had either definition in mind. The safest conclusion is that one of the Grossmiths said to the other one day: ‘Why don’t we call him Pooter?’ , and his brother agreed. The same goes for Padge. Two cases of sheer inspiration. The writer whose naming procedures have been most thoroughly documented is Charles Dickens. He must constantly have been searching for fresh ones, since in The Chambers Dictionary of Literary Characters (2004) the count of names listed book by book in the works of Dickens comes to 989. This falls short of the 1,288 entries for Anthony Trollope, and is not far ahead of Walter Scott (872). But this is to underestimate Dickens, since some of the tales he wrote as a journalist do not figure here; and to overestimate Trollope, whose
favourite characters are repeated in book after book. A phenomenal book called Everyone in Dickens (3 vols., 1995), edited and compiled by George Newlin, puts Dickens’s total at somewhere near 13,000. Eat your heart out, Trollope: in his Everyone and Everything in Trollope (4 vols., 2004), Newlin scores you at around 4,500. Unlike George Eliot, whom Newlin has also dissected, these three great writers, Dickens, Trollope and Scott, regularly mix mundane names with ones you don’t meet every day, or even at all. Scott’s The Fortunes of Nigel (1822) has a Sir Mungo Mallagrowther, an Andrew Skurliewhitter and a Benjamin Suddlechop. Trollope does much the same: the world of the Thornes, de Courcys and Greshams in Doctor Thorne (1858), the third novel in the Chronicles of Barsetshire series, is also home to a doctor called Fillgrave (geddit?) and another called Omicron Pi, a law firm called Gumption, Gazebee and Gazebee, and dilatory Chancery clerks called Slow and Bideawhile. That’s a long tradition in English fiction, mixing in, among conventional names, names that nudge you – and even dig you vulgarly in the ribs. You could hardly have a plainer name than the eponymous hero of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), but his selfless benefactor is called Allworthy and two of his teachers are named Square and
‘Mr Padge Seated at his Chair’ by Weedon Grossmith, from George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody (1892).
Thwackum. Dickens, as usual, outstrips all comers, even going as far as introducing a preacher called Melchisedech Howler in Dombey and Son (1848). Curiously, however, some of his more unlikely names did exist at about that time in real life. The census in Steve Archer’s CD appeared around a decade after the death of Dickens, but it’s still the best source for comparisons. As one might expect, there aren’t any Sweedlepipes in the 1881 census, or Micawbers, Gradgrinds, Jellybys, Cheerybles or Chuzzlewits, but there is 1 Gamp (in Surrey), a couple of Murdstones (in Middlesex), 5 Dedlocks (mainly in Lancashire) and 18 Howlers, as well as no fewer than 67 people called Heep, alongside 5,089 called Heap. Dickens again is well ahead of the field. Just the mention of the word Micawber, or Havisham, Scrooge or
Fagin (a name, oddly enough, which he purloined from a friend in the blacking factory), now speaks immediately for itself, though here we also need to remember William Shakespeare, through whose agency such names as Hamlet, Falstaff or Shylock came to embody a strand of humanity. In my book about surnames I singled out three popular methods that authors use to dream up names for their characters. Some writers are accumulators: they dutifully keep a note of names they have seen in newspapers, on gravestones, or even on the sides of passing lorries, for use later on; or they plumb the same sources at a time when inspiration runs low. Henry James, who kept a close eye on the births, marriages and death columns of the Times, berated the practice of mixing the real and surreal, THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17
Left to right Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth (2012), 2013 edition; Eleanor Updale’s Montmorency Returns (2014).
pasting Trollope for using the name Quiverfull for the father of 14 children. Yet among the hundreds of names, mostly unused, found in his notebooks (An Index to Henry James’s Notebook Name Lists, 2002–9, by Adrian Dover, henryjames. org.uk) are such off-beat suggestions as Bandidge, Bleat, Marfle, Shum and Wiffin. The second class, whom I call calculators, sometimes plot their crucial names, syllable by syllable. In his book The Art of Fiction (1992), David Lodge describes how he came by the name of Vic Wilcox, one of the two most dominant characters in his masterly novel, Changing Places (1975). ‘I was looking, ’ he says, ‘for names that would seem “natural” enough to mask their symbolic appropriateness. I named the man Vic Wilcox to suggest, beneath the ordinariness and Englishness of the name, a rather aggressive, even coarse, masculinity (by association with victor, will and cock), and I soon settled on Penrose for the surname of my heroine for its contrasting connotations of literature and beauty (pen and rose). ’ The third are those I call the inspirationalists : a name comes to them out of the blue, or they may see it on a shop front, overhear it in a conversation, or spot it in a cast list in the Radio Times. Some writers mix all three techniques, of course, Dickens among them: in John Forster’s life of the writer (1874) there’s 18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
an astonishing list that Dickens made of names for possible use, some even more bizarre than the ones he adopted. There are cases in Dickens where the nudge is surreptitious: names such as Merdle and Murdstone suggest an echo of merde. Yet sometimes what looks like calculation may not be calculation at all. The internet is awash with theories so erudite and far-fetched on why writers chose some of their character’s names that the writers themselves might find the account of their motives surprising, having believed the name had simply come to them in an idle moment on top of a bus. In Ian McEwan’s novel Sweet Tooth (2012) there’s a scene where the two central characters meet for the first time. He knows her name is Serena Frome, but how is Frome pronounced?
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Should it rhyme with Rome or room? Ah, I thought to myself, clever old McEwan has called her Frome to make their relationship start on a note of ambiguity. So much for tidy-mindedness: when I asked McEwan if this reading was right, he came up with something more complex. He had wanted a solid English name for his heroine. Serena was the name of a woman who owned a house that he and his wife Annalena had considered buying. The character was to have been Serena Carlisle, after the town of that name, but the names Serena and Carlisle had already been used in a novel by the Headof-MI5-turned-novelist Stella Rimington. So he took Frome from the name of a town where he and his wife had stayed while house hunting. (Though he does say the fact that its pronunciation was at odds with the spelling was an added attraction.) Does any of this really matter? These are simply names on a page. And though it’s true, according to much research, that a person’s name is likely to have an immediate impact when you first encounter it (an appointment to meet Mr Hollywood may seem more engaging than one to meet Mr Nufty), those impressions mostly swiftly abate when you encounter the name’s possessor. Yet one only has to contemplate the huge sums of money invested by studios (and even by some publishers) to give their stars (or writers) a grabby name, to understand that a choice of name can be crucial: ‘Herbert Lom’ was surely a better name for a Hollywood star than the one he was born with, which was Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich Schluderpacheru. Names certainly mattered to Dickens, who as a story developed would keep changing them to fit a developing
The playwright Simon Gray, who from time to time had suffered at the hands of theatre critics, used their names in a play, in which they all got murdered
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I NAME this man chuzzlewit character. Mr Murdstone began as Harden. Chuzzlewit was at various stages Sweezleden, Sweezleback, Sweezlewag, Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig and Chuzzlewig. David Copperfield at one stage might have borne the name Mag. Apply that to Padge: would the character in the armchair with his constant repetition of two mechanical words have been as real, as rounded, if the Grossmiths had called him something simple like Lindsay or Hudson? In some cases, too – the second wife in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), or the ghostwriter in Robert Harris’s novel, The Ghost (2007) – the writer finds it necessary not to reveal the character’s name at all. Sometimes a novel is named for one of its characters, and may even thereafter have to sustain a whole series. In Eleanor Updale’s Montmorency novels, which began life as stories made up for her children, the focal character assumes dual identities: he’s Montmorency, respectable man of the world, and he’s also Scarper, whose criminal practices finance a lifestyle appropriate to somebody named Montmorency. I assumed Montmorency was selected to sound a bit posh, and Scarper in reference to scarper, a slang term meaning making a quick escape. Again, this was rather too tidy. Updale thinks the name Montmorency probably came to her as she made up the story at bedtime from a forgotten childhood addiction to a comedy series in which Charlie Drake had a sidekick called Montmorency. And although Scarper did echo making a dash for it, it is also a hint at the scars which, because of a dreadful accident, cover the hero’s body. There are other ways in which the choice of name undoubtedly matters. Novels have had to be pulped because of the coincidence of an invented character with a real person. That happened with a book by Tom Sharpe in which a dastardly TV presenter had inadvertently been given a name identical with that of a man who worked for the BBC. There is also an occasional practice that might be called revenge naming, where someone who has slighted an author ends up being unfavourably evoked in a book. The playwright Simon Gray, who from time to time had suffered at the hands of various theatre critics, used their
Illustration by Fred Barnard of Mr Pecksniff, from Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), c.1890 edition. Courtesy of the Dickens Museum, London.
names in a play, in which they all got murdered. Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, chose the name Goldfinger for one of his villains because he so much disliked houses near his Hampstead home designed by the architect of that name. The publishers settled the case out of court and subsequent printings insisted that Fleming’s Goldfinger was pure invention. So names in novels need to be closely considered. Yet occasionally novelists lapse. Sometimes, even in a book by a well-ordered writer, a character’s name will alter at some point in the tale. While
researching the decline of the house of Peel after the great Sir Robert, I came across a novel by his disreputable grandson (seven times bankrupt, unpaid bills at hotels and elsewhere, cynical pursuit of heiresses, rotten treatment of women), in which two of the characters had varying forenames at different points in the story. The book was titled A Bit of a Fool (1897), which might have been better kept back for his autobiography. It does however have one distinction. Of all the books I have read from The London Library in 26 years of membership, the book was by some distance the worst.
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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19
HIDDEN CORNERS
tales from the
crypt
Phil Baker marks the 250th anniversary of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto by selecting his pick of the vast range of titles in the Library that feature the Gothic theme In an ideal world the Library’s Gothic books would be in a dungeon of their own, but in reality they can be found straightforwardly enough in Literature and Fiction – as well as a few more unexpected places. It’s not easy to define or limit Gothic, although everyone knows roughly what is involved: ruined buildings, aristocratic decay, family secrets; persecuted heroines, secret tunnels, unspeakable deeds; demonic doubles, old manuscripts, Catholic sensibilities; trance states, lightning flashes, living death; madness, the supernatural, and the heavy legacies of the past. Terror is important, but not all terror is Gothic. Gothic has been defined as a literature of excess, but not all excess is Gothic either; orgiasts sliding about on great piles of fruit wouldn’t necessarily be Gothic. The dead hand of the returning past – the Shock of the Old, we might call it – is more specifically Gothic, as is the combination of transgression and decay identified by contemporary Gothic novelist Patrick McGrath in his contribution to Christoph Grunenberg’s Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth-Century Art, 1997 (located in A. Art). The Gothic novel is usually held to begin with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), now enjoying its 250th anniversary. It is almost ludicrously full of what would become Gothic clichés – prophecies, living portraits, ghosts, old castles, vaults, monks, dynastic tangles, reluctant brides – along with a gigantic helmet that falls and kills a
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man. Not wanting to own up to authorship, Walpole pretended it was a medieval Italian manuscript, and this spurious antiquity matches his house, Strawberry Hill, with its inauthentically castle-style crenellations – symptoms of a desire for the more barbarous and passionate period before the Enlightenment, showing a discontent that at the same time looks forward to Romanticism. In one of the most traditional readings of the Gothic phenomenon, Gothic is viewed as bridging the Romantics and Edmund Burke’s treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Plate VII from the Carceri (prison) series of engravings, 1745, by Giambattista Piranesi.
Sublime and Beautiful (1757, A. Aesthetics), with its championing of Sublime vastness, darkness, and ‘delightful horror’ . Still in Italy, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) features orphan Emily carried off by her evil uncle Montoni to a castle in the remote mountains, where she survives various threats to her person and virtue. The Italian settings are no coincidence, and the spectre of Continental Catholicism rears its head again in M.G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796), this time set in Spain. A girl named Matilda enters a Capuchin monastery (disguised as a boy, incidentally ramping up the kink factor) and seduces Ambrosio, the devout head monk, setting him on a path of sin, murder and even a pact with the devil. The Monk is memorable for its operatic intensity and sheer nastiness. Pacts with the devil are never a good idea, a simple lesson that emerges again from Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Melmoth has sold his soul for an extended lifespan he no longer wants, and he asks character after character – all troubled with afflictions (and stories) of their own – if they will take over his pact, but no one will. Melmoth is particularly notable for the feverish boxes-within-boxes quality of its inset narratives, and this in itself is formally Gothic, as is Thomas De Quincey’s sublime vision of Giambattista Piranesi’s prisons in his 1821 Confessions of an English Opium Eater. De Quincey’s account of Piranesi’s Carceri (prison) series
The Nightmare, 1781, by Henry Fuseli. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society purchase with Mr and Mrs Bert L. Smokler and Mr and Mrs Lawrence A. Fleischman funds. Bridgeman Images.
of engravings is all the more remarkable because he had never actually seen them, but was relying on a misremembered or garbled description by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They feature ‘vast Gothic halls: on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults &c. &c. expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overcome’ , and he believed them to have been composed in a delirium. De Quincey’s description mounts and mounts, like some crazed organ fugue played by Vincent Price, and it centres on a depiction of ‘poor Piranesi’ himself, ‘groping his way’ up a ‘creeping’ staircase that seems to fail in mid-air – until you look again, and there he is ascending a higher flight, ‘this time standing on the very brink of the
abyss’ . Look higher still, and who should it be but Piranesi yet again, still madly climbing ‘until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall’ . It loses none of its power by the mere fact that De Quincey has it wrong, and Piranesi doesn’t actually figure in the engravings. Melmoth is traditionally reckoned to be the last of the classic Gothic novels, closing a period that contained such wonders as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1816) and William Beckford’s bizarre Orientalist tale, Vathek (1786). It was Beckford who brought me back to Gothic, having studied these novels as an undergraduate and gradually forgotten them until I saw Vathek somewhat dismissively catalogued by a bookseller who, far from trying to sell it, said it seemed
to have been written in an onanistic trance. Before long I was subscribing to the Beckford Journal (which can be found in the Reading Room), and more recently I climbed Beckford’s Tower, its pink interior rising above a graveyard on the outskirts of Bath. Like Frankenstein, Vathek has a Faustian aspect of transgressive knowledge, lusted after by the questing Caliph Vathek. In its day it seemed Arabian rather than Gothic, but the two are fused: ‘there is nothing so pleasing as retiring to caverns: my taste for dead bodies and everything like mummy’ – in the Egyptian sense – ‘is decided’ . Add some singing dwarves, a cache of aromatic woods and rhinoceros horns, and ‘fifty female negroes mute and blind of the right eye … who squinted in the most amiable THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21
Illustration by R.C. Armour, from M.G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796), 1930 edition.
manner from the only eye they had; and leered with exquisite delight at the skulls and skeletons’ and the result is an absurd Wunderkammer of a novel, which now seems to anticipate the aestheticism of a century later: Vathek’s five-winged palace, one wing for each of the senses, has the exquisite artificiality of the liqueur-fuelled musical taste organ in J.K. Huysmans’ decadent 1884 classic À rebours (Against Nature). Gothic is deeply entwined in nineteenth-century writing, including Romanticism (as explored by Mario Praz in his classic 1933 study The Romantic Agony, detailing the movement’s morbid erotic tendencies) and in very different canonical novels from Northanger Abbey, with its comic treatment of Ann Radcliffestyle romance and ‘Horrid Novels’ , to the stormier world of Wuthering Heights, with its isolated house and mad passions. The novels of Charles Dickens contain distinctly Gothic elements, taking the Gothic away from castles and putting it into London. Dickens’s public readings were heartstoppingly sensational, and he probably shortened his own life by continuing to perform them against medical advice. His Guignol speciality was Bill Sikes’s murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist (1838), and he annotated his performing copy ‘Terror to the end’ . Not every Gothic writer is a Dickens or a Mary Shelley, and the sad fact about 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
many Gothic fictions is that they are all but unreadable. Who reads Harrison Ainsworth now? Nor has Otranto aged well. And yet the idea of Gothic remains enticing even when the reality of reading it is not, and it is pleasing to know that there are labyrinthine bibliographies and great abyssal overviews of the subject, including Devendra Varma’s The Gothic Flame (1966) and the Revd Montague Summers’ The Gothic Quest (1938), which opens with ‘The Romantic Feeling’ and continues to a surprisingly contemporary chapter on Surrealism. Summers spent much of his writing career ranting against witchcraft (he would like to have seen witches burned in the twentieth century, partly out of misogyny) and he was a Gothic figure himself: a man who gave others the impression of a diabolically split personality. In one of his books he accuses Beckford of celebrating Black Masses, but in fact the first true Black Mass in England (as opposed to Hellfire Club-style japes) for which there is any real evidence happened much later than you might imagine. It was on Boxing Day in 1918, at a house on Eton Road, Hampstead, and the depraved clergyman conducting it was none other than Summers himself. First-generation Gothic can be stodgy, but its later, decadence-tinged flowering in the Victorian era includes some of the bestloved books in the language. No one could fail to enjoy Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the exquisitely written story of a man with a secret life. It now seems uncomfortably close to Wilde’s own life, leading to a downfall that drove him to the Continent under the assumed name of Melmoth. The split-self theme continues from Robert Louis Stevenson’s magnificent Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), with Hyde seemingly a pun on hidden – ‘If he be Mr Hyde I shall be Mr Seek’ – and both books have a precursor in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Vampire fiction also had a definitive late flowering with Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), continuing a tradition from John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) – with its origins in the same Romantic soirée that produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – and Carmilla (1871), a lesbian vampire story from the ever-readable Sheridan Le Fanu. These late Gothic classics are inseparable from London: Dorian Gray visits an East End opium den, and Jekyll
and Hyde has overlapped with the Ripper murders to create an enduringly Gothic image of London as a place of foggy, gaslit terror. It is an image that builds on Dickens, George W.M. Reynolds’s mid-nineteenthcentury serial The Mysteries of London, and Sweeney Todd (the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, whose murdered customers end up in Mrs Lovett’s pie shop next door). Todd began life in The String of Pearls, a Victorian ‘penny dreadful’ of the 1840s, and has more recently appeared in a definitive edition, The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd: The Life and Times of an Urban Legend, edited by Robert L. Mack (2008). No less than the home-grown horrors of Todd and Lovett, the sinister international figure of Dracula is soon at home in Victorian London; he is sighted walking past Giuliano’s at no.115 Piccadilly, a real-life jeweller’s not far from Hyde Park Corner. London is a Gothic city, something that emerges clearly from Robert Mighall’s A Geography of Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (1999). There have been some distinguished modern overviews, including David Punter’s The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1980), a book that helped put Gothic back on the map; Chris Baldick’s The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (1992); and Richard Davenport-Hines’s Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (1999). For Baldick, definitive Gothic relies on a sinister building with a maiden trapped in it, and old families facing extinction, and he suggests that Gothic is socially progressive in its rational demonisation of medievalism and Catholicism – a very different judgement to Summers, who thought these aspects were precisely what was good about it. Davenport-Hines’s wider-ranging book drew a suitably Gothic review in the Sunday Telegraph from a woman who saw it as the work of a split self, with the crazed ravings of Hines threatening to drown out the saner voice of Davenport. The genre is so vast (Arthur Machen, Angela Carter, Mervyn Peake, M.R. James, Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic Gothic) that it might be worth pointing out a couple of overlooked examples. The weird fictions of Robert Aickman, as in his collection Cold Hand in Mine (1975), are almost in a genre of their own, deviating just slightly and nightmarishly from reality. The work
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tales from the crypt
The late Gothic classics are inseparable from London: Dorian Gray visits an East End opium den, and Jekyll and Hyde has overlapped with the Ripper murders to create an enduringly Gothic image of London as a place of foggy, gaslit terror
of Dennis Wheatley is less subtle, and its ripping-yarn robustness hasn’t generally been considered as Gothic (although he is included in a recent encyclopedia of the subject); but To The Devil – A Daughter (1953) has distinctly Gothic moments, with a man holed up in an attic, relying for protection on a neon pentangle and a savage ape chained on the staircase; and a Satanic clergyman, Canon CopelySyle, feeding homunculi on blood in his basement laboratory while planning to sacrifice a virgin. Copely-Syle is modelled on Summers, whom Wheatley knew. Other arguably Gothic writers include William Burroughs, not just for the general excess of his work but for his vision of human relationships as a vampiric affair of people merging, absorbing and ‘schlupping’ into each other. Georges Bataille, too, has Gothic flashes, like the extraordinary epigraph to his novel My Mother, found among his papers after his death in 1962 and published posthumously in 1966: ‘Terror unendingly renews with advancing
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age. Age endlessly returns us to the beginning. The beginning that I glimpse on the edge of the grave is the pig in me which neither death nor insult can kill. Terror on the edge of the grave is divine and I sink into the terror whose child I am. ’ Exalting terror to the point of mysticism, Bataille’s declaration reminds us that the undying appeal of Gothic, often thought to be sexual, is also bound up with the numinous, as in Peter Redgrove’s memorable insight that the horror story is a debased form of religion. Numerous Gothic variations have now been identified, including ‘Imperial Gothic’ (in Patrick Brantlinger’s 1988 Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914) with its sense of global contamination and strange rites from abroad; ‘Gothic Chinoiserie’ , central to Anne Witchard’s Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (2009); ‘commodity Gothic’ , in which sugar might be haunted by slavery, or a pretty dress haunted by sweated labour; and ‘Museum Gothic’ , a useful concept broached by Roger Luckhurst in The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (2012, in S. Superstitions). This current explosion of Gothic is exemplified by the Wiley–Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2013), located in Lit. Dicts. (Gen.) in the Reading Room. Gothic might have seemed a kitschy and The Library at Prague Castle, 1960s. Photograph by Miroslav Peterka. marginal genre back in
the days of Leavis and liberal humanism, but it has since rampaged through academia – although Summers was already complaining about ‘jejune academics’ getting involved with the subject as far back as 1938. According to the Encyclopedia, the Gothic now includes Coronation Street, the Oprah Winfrey show, terrorism, the news, and the entire post-colonial world, haunted by legacies of injustice. Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud are recruited as Gothic thinkers, and this is particularly convincing in the case of Freud: ‘Gothic’ and ‘psychoanalytic’ can be used almost interchangeably, as in ‘the Gothic [sic] concept of the return of the repressed’ . Freud’s great case histories, such as ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918), more popularly known as the ‘Wolf Man’ case, read like Gothic novels slowly unfolding secrets, and the Freudian psyche has a Gothic architecture, with its hidden, subterranean drives. Psychoanalysts Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham came up with the concept of psychic ‘encryption’ (not as in encoding, but as in an architectural crypt) and put it to compelling use in their book, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy (1986, S. Psychology). It has had a considerable vogue since, and the concept bleeds intertextually back into modern Gothic with Patrick McGrath’s Constance (2013) where the heroine – too constant to her past – is explicitly trapped in her own psychic crypt. Books themselves are Gothic, according to the Encyclopedia (‘What is a text but a haunted site?’) so there should be something Gothic about libraries – and not just a deceptively strait-looking labyrinthine building with extensive basements in the quiet heart of London’s clubland, but perhaps all libraries worth the name, filled with the still vital thoughts of the dead. ‘Dead fingers talk, ’ in the words of William Burroughs, and a similar notion had already occurred to Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, surrounded by books in Ulysses (1922): ‘coffined thoughts around me, in mummy cases. ’ It is an arresting image, but seems positively restrained next to Anthony Mandal’s entry on intertextuality in the Encyclopedia, with ‘antique books that reveal themselves as undead objects, reeking of decay, theatening to vampirically steal the souls of their readers. Such is the fecundity of the Gothic – its intertextuality spiralling into decadent excess – that reading itself is ultimately shown to be a Gothic experience. ’
.
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23
Why the
American dream
‘
is here to stay
The London Library Annual Lecture, delivered at the Hay Festival on 30 May 2014 by Sarah Churchwell America is a land of fables, some of which have morals. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the financial panic of 2008, it was discovered that Bernie Madoff, ostensibly one of America’s most successful investment bankers, had been running a Ponzi scheme on an unprecedented scale. Thousands of investors had been defrauded, and many Americans found themselves inquiring into what, exactly, a Ponzi scheme might be. Answers proliferated, but few considered the genesis of the Ponzi story. The original Ponzi scheme, named after Charles Ponzi, was uncovered in 1920. It was one of the first significant financial scandals of an era that didn’t shirk when it came to fiduciary irresponsibility. America’s ‘golden boom’ in that decade was created largely by market practices that went cheerfully unregulated, and so tended to be thoroughly unprincipled. When the Ponzi story broke, the New York Times published an article headlined ‘The Ponzi Lesson’ – a lesson that America promptly forgot. Ponzi, suggested the article, was merely the latest iteration in the long line of speculators who had defined American history. The Americans willing to believe in Ponzi’s promises of easy money were no different from those who had rushed to California in search of gold, or into Oklahoma for land grabs, or indeed had settled America itself: ‘get-rich-quick promises’ had always brought ‘venturesome souls’ to the land, from Columbus, seeking the shortest route to the wealth of the Indies, to Ponzi himself. The whole nation was little more than a giant get-rich-quick scheme.
Crowd at New York’s American Union Bank during a bank run early in the Great Depression. 24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
The article closed with a deservedly forgotten poem called ‘The Treasure Seekers’ , which might seem to confirm that the dream of America was always a dream of wealth. It describes the ‘lure of gold, and lure of lands’ that inspire the ‘faith of the boy in the power of dream’: ‘seeking the gold we find the dream, and seeking the dream – the gold’ . It could be the motto of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous character, whom he had toyed with calling ‘Gold-Hatted Gatsby’ , the jazz-age hero fatally prone to equating the faith, the gold and the dream. Four years later, in ‘The Swimmers’ , Fitzgerald told another story of America hollowing itself out by worshipping nothing but wealth. Eventually the hero must leave America in order to preserve his sense of it as a place that valued anything other than money. Ten days after ‘The Swimmers’ was published in October 1929, Wall Street crashed. So what is the moral of this story? The boom of the 1920s began in corruption and ended in corruption, and forced America to a reckoning. Out of this came a new idea, called the ‘American dream’ . But we have forgotten the history of this genesis, just as we forgot the genesis of the Ponzi scheme, and there is a reason why the two emerged within a decade of each other. In a very real sense, the phrase ‘American dream’ was invented to respond to Ponzi schemes, and we keep using it to do just that. Our acknowledgement that the most recent boom was based on a new series of Ponzi schemes (the word ‘subprime’ , as it happens, was also coined in 1920) has again elicited near-ritualistic invocations of the American dream. This past year alone has seen the publication of books including The American Dream and the Power of Wealth; The Puritan Gift: Reclaiming the American Dream Amidst Global Financial Chaos; and The New Heartland: Looking for the American Dream, among many others. Very little is exempt from the American dream’s force: everything from the economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century to the American reality TV show Duck Dynasty is held to comment upon it. When Baz Luhrmann’s film version of The Great Gatsby was released last year, it came trailing dreams of America behind, as when the New Yorker described the book, published in 1925, as ‘a classic American novel, which suggests that it must have important things to say about the Twenties, money, love, and the American dream’ . Classic American novels and the American dream are syllogistically linked: if a novel is an American classic, it must comment meaningfully upon the American dream.
‘
In “The Swimmers” , F. Scott Fitzgerald told a story of America hollowing itself out by worshipping nothing but wealth. Ten days after it was published in 1929, Wall Street crashed
’
All of this would have come as news to Fitzgerald when he wrote Gatsby, however: certainly the phrase never occurs in it. Similarly, Google offers five million instances of ‘American dream’ in concurrence with ‘Moby-Dick’. But that novel never uses it, either. It appears nowhere in the complete works of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James or Thomas Jefferson. It doesn’t even appear in the novels of Horatio Alger, whose ragsto-riches stories are supposed to embody it. The New York Times archives, which go back to 1851, identify 18,000 occurrences of ‘American dream’ in the paper’s history. In the eighty years between 1851 and 1931, I was able to find precisely four: two references to the ‘American dream’ of naval supremacy, one to the ‘American dream of representative government’, and one to the utopian social experiments represented by the ‘American dreams of Southey and Coleridge’. The other 17,996 have appeared in the past 80 years. What happened? Between 1931 and 1941, the phrase suddenly explodes, appearing some 200 times in the New York Times alone. Those years also saw a surge of books about the meanings of America. What started it all was the 1931 publication of a book called The Epic of America, by a popular historian named James Truslow Adams, who asked whether what he termed ‘the American dream’ was going to survive the economic crisis. ‘The American dream of a better, richer and happier life for all our citizens of every rank,’ Adams wrote, which had defined America from the start, was under grave threat from the Depression, and suddenly the idea of the ‘American dream’ was defining national discourse. One of the many ironies of the unknown – or rather, unlearned – history of this familiar cliché is simply how recent a coinage it is. Far from stretching back to the founding of America, it sprang instead from the aching head of the Great Depression, and the debates surrounding its inception uncannily predict our own: the corruption of financiers and corporate oligarchies, the problems of socialising risk and privatising reward, the housing crisis, consumer capitalism, economic and cultural breakdown, individual ambition and social responsibility, education and job creation. It has frequently been remarked that the financial roots of the 1929 crash were very different from those of the 2008 crisis. I am no economist, but this seems unarguable; it also seems moot. There is, none
the less, much the two crises have in common, and it is in those resemblances that we may find meanings that have eluded us. The questions they asked about the American dream between 1931 and 1941 were almost exactly the same ones we are asking now. But the answers they offered were rather different. Although the phrase ‘American dream’ did not enter the American lexicon until 1931, there were inklings over the previous decade that America’s national dreams were becoming troubled. Fitzgerald’s intuitions in The Great Gatsby have been the most farreaching, but a few other portents are worth remarking on too. The OED identifies two uses before 1931 of the phrase to mean ‘the ideal that every citizen of the United States should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative.’ A 1916 mention in the Chicago Tribune appears to be urging the US into the First World War: ‘If the American idea, the American hope, the American dream, and the structures which Americans have erected are not worth fighting for to maintain and protect, they were not worth fighting for to establish.’ A year later a popular novel called Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise by David Graham Phillips also equated the national dream with its hopes: ‘The fashion and home magazines … have prepared thousands of Americans… for the possible rise of fortune that is the universal American dream and hope.’ Aspirational consumerism (in the guise of fashion and home magazines) enters the story, never to leave it: whatever Americans are dreaming of, it starts to involve advertising and buying things, the creation of desires that will only make others rich. The other known use of the phrase before 1931 comes from the journalist Walter Lippmann. In 1923 he wrote an astonishingly prescient article for Vanity Fair entitled ‘Education and the White-Collar Class’, which should be required reading for anyone considering the relationship between higher education and youth unemployment today. He predicted that supply for professionalmanagerial jobs would outstrip demand within a generation, because of widening access to higher education. Lippmann had been asked to advise high-school students interested in journalism careers, as they made their selection from ‘the various vocations that are open to them’. He was bemused to discover that there were exactly ‘twenty-two vocations’ available to high-school students in 1923, including teaching, law, medicine and journalism, as well as something called ‘scientific farming’ and ‘six different sorts of engineers’. These were all white-collar jobs, but just how many white-collar jobs awaited graduates? Using the 1920 census, he estimated about 10 million professional-managerial positions existed; however, the country was annually producing half a million graduates. America would thus recruit ‘a new generation of office workers’ before the older generation had reached 50. The competition was already fierce for existing jobs; either experienced people had to be fired to make room for younger ones with modern skills, or younger people would be excluded from the opportunities for which they’d been educated. ‘We cover this tragedy by some phrase about efficiency. We try to forget the anxiety and despair which it represents.’ What should a nation facing such an exigency do? What America had begun covertly doing was trying to limit enrolment in competitive high schools and universities by using standardised examinations such as IQ tests, which had just been invented and were being employed in some quarters THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25
‘
The American dream was not coined as a triumphalist phrase: it was always a way to talk about disillusionment
’
to justify denying ‘inferior’ groups, including Jews and African Americans, access to elite educations. These tests were ‘a heap of nonsense’ , Lippmann argued, as they purported to show ‘that only a percentage of the population is by nature fitted for secondary and higher education’ . The real problem, however, was ‘not the scarcity of intelligence, but the scarcity of jobs’ . And this problem would only grow worse if America continued to insist that higher education had to result in office jobs, instead of believing that educated people could work in ‘skilled manual trades’ . The real remedy, Lippmann maintained, would require demolishing ‘the snobbish association’ between professional-managerial roles and social superiority. Education needed to be regarded ‘as the key to the treasure house of life’ , not as ‘a step ladder to a few special vocations’ . The alternative, to keep ‘higher education confined to a small and selected class’ would ‘mark the end in failure of the American dream’ . Though this early invocation of the American dream has largely been forgotten, its lesson is one we have yet to learn. Lippmann explicitly says that the value of higher education is not that it enables upward social mobility, but that it is a fundamental democratic good. Without widespread access to higher education we are left with ‘a literate and uneducated democracy, which is what we now have’ , Lippmann added, and which was likely to find itself governed by demagogues and fascists, such as Mussolini, who had just come to power in Italy. Anyone wondering if the conditions of 1923 really apply today may be interested to know that Lippmann reports a 1923 population of 2.5 million students in American higher education (which included high school and college); as of 2013, there were 2.35 million in UK higher education. Ten years after Lippmann’s article, the American educational system began debating how to protect something they had started calling the American dream. Suddenly, wrote the New York Times in 1933, it appeared that ‘the poverty of the 1920s’ was to blame for the poverty of the 1930s: they could now see through the fraudulent wealth of the 1920s to its moral poverty. American schools, they understood, ‘like the rest of our philosophy, have overemphasised material success’ , mirroring ‘the average American dream of getting rich quickly’ . But this was not the true American dream, they all agreed. America had discovered that there needed to be a moral to the story. In 1931, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote an essay, ‘Echoes of the Jazz Age’ , in which he noted that the 1920s ‘leaped to a spectacular death in October, 1929’ . Less remembered is that he also marked the birth of the jazz age – with a violent protest against corrupt financiers. It started ‘when the police rode down the demobilized 26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
country boys’ just home from the Great War at the behest of ‘gooselivered business men, ’ during the May Day riots of 1919; it began to seem that ‘maybe we had gone to war for J.P. Morgan’s loans after all’ . Ordinary Americans would continue to pay the price for the 1920s. By 1929, more than half the population lived below subsistence level, while the richest 1 per cent owned 40 per cent of the nation’s wealth: capital had been siphoned to the top. Such a top-heavy system seemed bound to keel over, and the historian James Truslow Adams (among others) predicted, before 1929, that a crash would come. In the same year as Fitzgerald’s essay, Adams wrote a book entitled The American Dream. His publishers didn’t think it a catchy phrase, so they persuaded him to call it The Epic of America instead. By 1931 it was clear that many of America’s wealthiest had survived the Depression unscathed; men like Joseph P. Kennedy emerged from it even richer. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt began implementing the sweeping New Deal reforms, including financial regulations and tax reform, as well as medical, pension and welfare entitlements. The US Banking Act of 1933, better known as the Glass-Steagall Act, limited affiliations between commercial and private banking – which is why the narrator of Fitzgerald’s last, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon (published posthumously in 1941), observes, ‘since 1933, the rich could only be happy alone together’ . By no coincidence the first head of the newly formed Securities and Exchange Commission was none other than Joe Kennedy, whom Roosevelt chose on the stated basis that it takes a crook to catch a crook. It is against this backdrop of attempts at redressing inequality that the ‘American dream’ emerged from Adams’s history as a way to discuss national redemption. The Epic of America was an instant bestseller; over the next decade, Adams continued to write in the mainstream media about the American dream, giving a language and history to burgeoning national debates about socialised education, healthcare, housing, and inequality. For Adams, the American dream included, but extended beyond, economic opportunity: it was ‘the belief in the common man and the insistence upon his having, as far as possible, equal opportunity in every way with the rich one’ . It was about mitigating against privilege, not promising that everyone could be rich. But when the phrase ‘the American dream’ went viral, it mutated – eventually connoting nearly the opposite of what Adams intended. That’s not to say that Adams was a socialist; rather, he hoped that capitalism could become ameliorative. Because businessmen were being forced ‘to consider the good of society’ in order to salvage their businesses, he wondered whether ‘broader consideration of the good of the whole nation’ might emerge once ‘business also finds that that pays better?’ Enlightened self-interest meant that it was ‘possible that society, still acting from the profit motive in a capitalistic and largely individualistic framework, may yet evolve a more beneficent order’ . To save the American dream, corporations should recognise ‘the close correlation of our private good with the public good’ , or what we now call corporate social responsibility. Adams’s ideas were welcomed by a nation that was trying to correct an economic catastrophe by changing its rules; a renewed sense of mutual obligation and commonweal seemed the obvious answer to many, an ethos that they used ‘the American dream’ to indicate. The phrase took off, and was used to proselytise for state-
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subsidised education, public healthcare, public housing, and even, by 1939, the moral imperative to join the war in Europe. Today, the idea that the American dream has been replaced by an American nightmare has become the nation’s favourite way to discuss widespread inequality and downward social mobility. But for Adams and his readers, the nightmare was what had come before: it was in the 1920s, Adams wrote, that ‘the American dream was changed into a nightmare of gambling and corruption and mad spending. ’ Then the crash had come, but what had Americans learned? The nation had since passed through ‘three emotional states’: bewilderment, fear and resentment, ‘directed against the bankers and other leaders who have betrayed their trust’ . Reviewing Herbert Agar’s Pursuit of Happiness: The Story of American Democracy in 1938, the New York Times remarked that few would dispute its premise ‘that vast fortunes are contrary to the spirit and intent of the [founding] Fathers’ , or that for so many Americans to be living in poverty was ‘clearly contrary to “the American Dream” promulgated by Jefferson’ . It surely must come as news to a great many people today that in the 1930s most Americans were assumed to agree that the American dream was opposed to the accumulation of ‘vast fortunes’ . By 1939, the New York Times declared: ‘the dominant note is one of defeat. In its mildest form we have the emphasis on the American Dream, with the implication that American life up to now has been a non-fulfillment. ’ The American dream was not coined as a triumphalist phrase; it was always a way to talk about disillusionment. The vast debates sparked by the Depression ranged across political and moral economies, as well as financial ones. But that’s my point: when its originators discussed the ‘American dream’ , they were recalling ideals that transcended the material. Today our invocations of the American dream focus almost exclusively on individuals’ material prospects – a usage Adams and his contemporaries would surely have viewed as symptomatic of our moral bankruptcy. Given our impoverished understanding of the original meanings of the ‘American dream’ , it should come as no surprise that readings of its most emblematic novel are often similarly inadequate. We project on to Fitzgerald our nostalgic, simplistic ideas about the 1920s as one big party, and assume that Gatsby glorifies the greatest parties of them all. (If you doubt that this is a common take on the novel, just watch Lurhmann’s film adaptation from last year.) A brief example: one of the popular songs that Fitzgerald quotes in Gatsby, ‘Ain’t We Got Fun’ , sounds like a trivial, frivolous tune. It’s actually a song that satirises economic inequality, with the refrain, ‘One thing’s sure, and nothing’s surer/ The rich get richer and the poor get … children. ’ It was a hit in 1921, a year of sharp recession; the American economy began surging in 1922, the year in which Gatsby is set. Gatsby is as much a post-recession novel as it is a boom novel, and it associates boom with corruption. Gatsby is linked to every fraud of a fraudulent era: bootlegging (the equivalent of drug-dealing today), financial swindles, gambling, and even the oil business, which by 1924 was a byword for government corruption in the wake of the Teapot Dome bribery scandal. It has become a cliché that Jay Gatsby allegorises America itself: idealistic, full of promise, easily corrupted, endlessly desiring, endlessly failing. For the novel’s narrator Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s 28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
‘incorruptible dream’ redeems his material corruption, but the novel leaves room for doubt. Just before Gatsby’s death, when he’s lost hope in his dream, Nick imagines him looking out at a frightening ‘new world, material without being real’ . Without the dream to ennoble it, the merely material is ‘grotesque’ and unrealised; not just meaningless, but poisonous. This is the new world that Gatsby discovers, just before Nick turns his F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby attention in the novel’s (1925), 2010 Penguin Classics edition famous closing passage to designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith. the New World, which may also be material without being real, a nation that Fitzgerald has earlier described as consumed by the ‘business’ of serving ‘a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty’ . When Nick imagines Europeans seeing America for the first time, and finding in it ‘something commensurate to [man’s] capacity for wonder’ , he invokes not the Puritans but the Dutch sailors – the merchants. Greeting these commercially motivated aspirants, Fitzgerald writes, the land itself ‘pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams’ . The dreams may be great, but if they are pandered to, then they are also illusions. Fitzgerald never uses the phrase ‘American dream’ in the novel, but he comes close – and suggests in 1925 that it is a lie, or at least a chimera, a false promise of self-empowerment in which we are desperate to believe. Gatsby’s ‘dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it’ , Fitzgerald writes in closing, but ‘it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night’ . But Gatsby always believes in the green light, that entwined symbol of hope, renewal, envy, permission to go, and the colour of money. For Fitzgerald, Gatsby’s vast wealth is a sign of the failure of the American dream, not its success. The metaphor we might consider is foreclosure: to preclude, to end possibilities; and in commercial terms, to block the possibility of redeeming a loan. Redemption becomes foreclosed, the dream is already lost behind Gatsby before he even tries to grasp it. The majesty of the dream means we cannot relinquish it, but its glory is so diminished that we are now blinded to what the dream really was, left only with dispossession – not only of very real American homes but also of the greater dreams they once symbolised, which Fitzgerald elsewhere describes as ‘an effort toward some commonweal, an effort difficult to estimate, so closely does it press against us still’ . Fitzgerald suggests in Gatsby that we keep thinking our dreams should be bigger, when in fact they need to be better. It’s a lesson we have yet to learn, and the more we invoke what we think we mean by ‘the American dream’ , the more the dream recedes before us, just as Fitzgerald predicted it would. This lecture has been abridged for the magazine.
’
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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29
MEMBERS’ News
UNDERSTANDING THE LIBRARY’S STRATEGY The Library’s Chairman, Bill Emmott, talks to the Librarian, Inez Lynn, about the Strategic Plan and progress made so far BE In these pages a year ago, you told us about work on the Library’s Strategic Plan. It’s available on the website but can you inspire members to want to look at it? IL People have different ideas about what constitutes a ‘Strategic Plan’: some expect a detailed breakdown of what will be done when and why, while others see it as a place to convey the essence of the organisation and the principles which will inform its direction of travel. BE You, I know, belong in the latter camp. IL Yes, I do, and that is reflected in our Strategic Plan. It opens with a statement of our ‘mission’, our charitable purpose (set out in our Royal Charter) and our vision for the future. Then there is a section which attempts to distil the views of staff, trustees and members as to the characteristics and values that make The London Library what it is. I would hope that any member reading these would find themselves nodding in agreement! BE So what are those values and can you explain what is meant by one of them? The London Library is: ... A treasure-trove of knowledge ... A place of learning and enjoyment ... Independent ... Cosmopolitan ... Steeped in history IL Let’s take the second one, ‘a place of learning and enjoyment’, which first states: ‘We believe in the intrinsic value of the life of the mind and its cultural expression so the Library offers facilities conducive to thinking, reading, scholarship and creativity. Membership is open to all and many of our members have no right of access to other loan collections of comparable depth and reach’. It then goes on to summarise the consequences of that belief: ‘We seek to provide a prompt, reliable and courteous service, meeting and exceeding the expectations of users. Our highly qualified and specialist staff operate in a spirit of keen collaboration with members, engaging with their individual research and reading interests whether those interests are professional or personal.’ BE What about the big questions, such as the role of libraries in general in the twenty-first century? Does the Strategic Plan have anything to say about those? IL Yes. There is a section giving context which looks at the evolving nature of library provision elsewhere, especially for those with limited access to the great national and university libraries. Although the situation varies considerably by postcode, in many public libraries lack of funding or other imperatives have led to a diminution of range, depth and longevity in the collections offered. Meanwhile online search tools make it ever easier to identify relevant information sources, raising expectations that a library should be 30 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
able to offer access to them all. A library is no longer merely a physical location but a gateway to sources of knowledge beyond its walls. Opinions differ as to the extent to which digital materials will supersede printed ones and the pace at which such a change might occur. For the present, the number of printed books published each year continues to grow even as e-publishing gains pace, so – especially in the arts and humanities where older publications are never entirely superseded – it seems likely that libraries will need to cater for both formats for the foreseeable future. BE There are those, however, who say that before long every book they need will be available for download online. If true, is there still a future for The London Library’s printed books? IL At the moment, the quality of digitised versions of older material varies significantly. Some are excellent, some are barely readable and any illustrations are essentially lost. So digital versions will not necessarily replace printed books, but offer something new alongside them: the opportunity to search seamlessly across text for the purposes of analysis and discovery. This is the world of the digital humanities and so-called ‘big data’ that we need to ensure we can offer to our members. BE So what are the Library’s strategic priorities? STRATEGIC PRIORITIES 1. Developing and preserving the collections 2. Extending access 3. Supporting research and reading 4. Fostering literary and intellectual community 5. Sharing our heritage IL We identified five priority areas for the period 2012–2017, starting, as ever, with the collections, where our greatest challenge is exactly what we have just been talking about: developing appropriate digital collections alongside the printed ones. We are seeking additional funding to enable a year-on-year increase in the range of digital resources provided, giving priority to acquisition areas where digital format • adds value to content by improving information retrieval (e.g., through full-text indexing or by providing capacity to search across a range of materials) • has a reliable preservation and support infrastructure • provides access to materials not generally available or affordable to individual subscribers. Our strategy is to defer exposure to digital (or, indeed, other nonbook formats) where • content is simply reproduced in another medium • access requires a particular brand of reading device • content is readily available and affordable to individual purchasers, and the purchase/subscription model is unfavourable in comparison with printed books.
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2013 Core Income (Total £3,435,530) Investment Income £271,242 7.9%
Investment Income £217,265 5.7% Events and Merchandising £11,894 0.3%
Events and Merchandising £7,685 0.2% Legacies £348,880 10.2%
Legacies £742,202 19.4%
Revenue Donations £310,754 9% Revenue Donations £323,169 8.5%
Membership income £2,496,969 72.7%
This strategy lies behind decisions taken over the last two years regarding major digital acquisitions. It also explains why we have not moved into provision of individual downloadable e-books. And our principle of making knowledge as accessible as possible means that we try to provide access to such resources from outside the Library as well as within it. The Strategic Plan also highlights our aims to develop the printed collections and clarify our collection development principles, to maximise the space available for the collections and to upgrade environmental conditions for their preservation, not least by reducing the risks from all types of emergencies, from major fire or flood to spilled coffee. BE So much for the collections. What about members and membership? IL From the Library’s founding 173 years ago, membership has been open to all, the only proviso being that members are expected to contribute at some level to the running costs. We believe that membership should not be unduly determined by ability to pay and therefore should be subsidised for all those genuinely unable to afford the full membership fee. Indeed we recognise that many of those who could benefit most from what the Library has to offer are the least able to pay for it, and might never hear of us were it not for our desire to reach them. Our second Strategic Priority, therefore, is about ensuring that anyone who might need our collections and services is aware of them and able to benefit from them. So it’s important that our marketing, PR and communications make clear what the Library has to offer and reach new audiences. Recruitment and retention of members is vital for our financial stability, as subscriptions are and always have been our main source of income. We would also like to increase the range and volume of supported membership options we can offer and this is now a key strand of our fundraising activity. It’s clear that many of our supported members need help more than ever as the financial rewards available to them from writing continue to diminish Priority 3 focuses on developing the effectiveness of our online catalogue as a guide and portal to resources within and beyond the Library. It is about enhancing the utility of browsing, improving our understanding of the changing reading and research needs of the
Membership income £2,528,553 66.1%
Library’s users, and investigating and embracing new technologies in service delivery, selective dissemination of information and Library management. Above all it is about continuing to develop and provide high-quality research and technical support to all members in need of it, not to mention continuing to increase the number and quality of reader spaces available within the Library. BE In recent years we have seen an increasing interest in opportunities for members to engage with each other and with the broader literary and intellectual community, as well as with the collection and staff. Is this covered in the Plan? IL Priority 4 looks at this. Our ambition is to satisfy this interest in ways which help us by promoting awareness of the Library, generating funds, enhancing the recruitment or retention of members and delivering a demonstrable public benefit in line with our charitable status. We are limited as to space and funding but there are opportunities to play a role in ‘virtual’ communities online and develop partnerships with other organisations already providing cultural events and outreach. We are working hard to secure full funding for the final part of the construction master plan which will see an enhanced Members’ Room with its own roof terrace. In the meantime we are carrying out a much-needed interim upgrade of the existing facilities, which should make it easier for members to get to know one another and share mutual interests. BE It would be nice to think there’s a continuity of interests or ethos between the community of members today and their equivalents in the past. Is this something we can develop? IL This is where Priority 5 comes in. For most of its history, the Library has been far too busy just being a library to think much about its heritage and what the past can tell us about its continuing significance today. Our institutional archive contains a fascinating range of materials, from the Minute Books tracing committee decisions, to membership application forms and ledgers, the early catalogues, and the Issue Books in which all loans used to be recorded. This material speaks to us not only about the Library’s own history but a much wider social and cultural context. Our ambition is to explore, preserve and promote awareness of this unique resource, and much needs to be done. At present the archives are not catalogued, making research time-consuming and often inconclusive. Storage conditions do not yet meet archival standards THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31
p
and many items are in urgent need of conservation. We have made a start with the appointment of Helen O’Neill as Archive, Heritage & Development Librarian, and the Strategic Plan outlines the activity needed. Our greatest challenge, though, is to secure sufficient funding to dedicate to the archives, given the many other competing priorities. BE It is notable, indeed, that ‘funding, the need for’, features in every section of the Strategic Plan. Maybe we should break off at this point for a quick review of the year in that regard. IL Perhaps the most important thing to say is that it’s been another good year for legacies, with a total income of over £700,000. About half of this has been or will be applied to the Development Project, and the rest is for general purposes. We would normally aim to Membership changes by month: April 2009 to March 2014
Membership changes by month: April 2009 to March 2014 140
new or reinstated withdrawals net
120 100
designate all the income from major legacies for special projects, but given the staffing difficulties in our Development Office over the last year or so it made sense to keep a substantial amount in the core budget while we re-establish fundraising and marketing momentum. In the longer term we’d like to turn legacies into a more predictable income stream, and we’re developing a cultivation programme which may be a small step in that direction. Donation income for the core budget has increased slightly since the previous year, which is not a bad result in the circumstances, although membership trends are giving some cause for concern. We hope our initiatives under Priorities 2 and 3 in particular will help us turn things round. BE To finish, would you encourage members to look at the Strategic Plan? IL Yes, definitely, and particularly on occasions when you find yourself wondering ‘Why on earth are they doing that?’ or ‘Why now?’ The answer is in the Strategic Plan! londonlibrary.co.uk/strategic-plan
READING THE LIBRARY’S ANNUAL REPORT
80 60
New or reinstated Withdrawals
40
Net
Feb-14
Oct-13
Dec-13
Apr-13
Jun-13
Aug-13
Feb-13
Oct-12
Dec-12
Apr-12
Jun-12
Aug-12
Feb-12
Oct-11
Dec-11
Aug-11
Apr-11
Jun-11
Oct-10
Feb-11
Dec-10
Aug-10
Apr-10
Jun-10
Oct-09
Feb-10
Dec-09
Aug-09
-20
Apr-09
0
Jun-09
20
-40
The Library’s Annual Report 2013/14 will be downloadable as a pdf from the About Us section of the website from late September. If you would prefer a printed copy of the Annual Report to be sent to you in the post, please request one by emailing development@londonlibrary.co.uk or telephoning the Development Office on 020 7766 4795.
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GRADUATION GIFT Inspire a love of knowledge in a young person Gift membership of The London Library makes a wonderful graduation present for young people who no longer have access to a college library or electronic resources such as JSTOR.
Annual Young Person’s Membership is £238 (for the under 25s). London Library Gift Vouchers can also be purchased (£50 & £100 vouchers). www.londonlibrary.co.uk/join
32 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Literary prizes Antony Beevor Winner of the 2014 Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. Oliver Bullough Shortlisted for the Dolman Best Travel Book of the Year 2014 for The Last Man in Russia. Harry Eyres Shortlisted for the 2014 PEN/Ackerley Prize for Horace and Me. Seán Haldane Winner of the 2014 Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel for The Devil’s Making. Robert Harris Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for An Officer and a Spy. Patrick Leigh Fermor Shortlisted (posthumously) for the Dolman Best Travel Book of the Year 2014 for The Broken Road. Charles Moore Winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography 2014 for Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not For Turning. Salman Rushdie Winner of the 2014 PEN/Pinter Prize. Owen Sheers Winner of the 2014 Wales Book of the Year Roland Mathias Poetry Award for Pink Mist. Jojo Tulloh Winner of the 2014 Fortnum & Mason Food Book of the Year and shortlisted for the André Simon Awards Food Book of the Year for The Modern Peasant. Sara Wheeler Shortlisted for the Dolman Best Travel Book of the Year 2014 for O My America! Second Acts in a New World. Niall Williams Shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize for History of the Rain. If you have been shortlisted or received an award or prize, please do let us know. Email magazine@londonlibrary.co.uk.
MEMBERS’ NEWS
DONATIONS AND BEQUESTS The Trustees thank the following supporters, and our anonymous donors, for their generous contributions to The London Library received during the year ended 31 March 2014 DEVELOPMENT APPEAL FUND Dr Richard Barber Peter Brock Sebastian Brock Margaret Buxton Trevor Coldrey The O J Colman Charitable Trust Curtis Charitable Trust The late Mrs T S Eliot Jane Falloon James Fisher Richard Freeman Michael Gainsborough A D B Gavin Professor Isobel Grundy The J P Jacobs Charitable Trust Rosemary James Peter Jamieson Dr Robert and Mrs Denise Kuehn John Madell Dr Penelope McCarthy Dunja Noack The Viscount Norwich John Perkins Sonia Prentice Janet Rennie Peter Rowland Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Fine Art Society Lord Runciman Sir John Sainty Richard Shuttleworth The Lady Soames DBE Sir Roy Strong Christopher Swinson Maurice Whitbread Jeremy White Ann Williams Philip Winston Reverend Anthony Winter ENDOWMENT FUNDS During the year the Library received a generous donation from Basil Postan to endow a membership awards scheme for students at Westminster School FOUNDERS’ CIRCLE UK Dickens Len Blavatnik* Debby and James Brice* F H Brittenden Adam and Victoria Freudenheim Miles Morland Basil Postan Sir Timothy Rice
Tim Sanderson Mark Storey Philip Winston (with matching gift from Capital Group Companies) Naomi Zimba Davis Thackeray Molly and David Borthwick Clore Duffield Foundation Jerry and Jane del Missier Bill Emmott Anthony Fry David Lough Anne Robbins* Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE Josh and Alisa Swidler Martineau Marcia Brocklebank Consuelo and Anthony Brooke Anna de Chassiron Sarah and Louis Elson Firtash Foundation Sir John Gieve Louis Greig Geraldine Harmsworth Maxwell Andrew Hine Victoria Hislop Louise Hobbs Philip Hooker Sarah Ingham Hugh Johnson OBE Alan Keat Patricia Lennox-Boyd Leonora, Countess of Lichfield His Honour Humphrey Lloyd QC Peter MacDonald Eggers Alexis and Jane Maitland Hudson Kamalakshi Mehta Barbara Minto Guislaine Vincent Morland Philip Percival Maria and Eric Rhode Alan Russett Dasha Shenkman James Stainton Marjorie Stimmel Paul Swain Harriet Tuckey John C Walton Clement Wilson Lady Wolfson of Marylebone Clive Wright OBE FOUNDERS’ CIRCLE US Dickens Wilson and Mary Braun*
Robert Dilenschneider* Thackeray Tim Collins* Patricia and Tom Lovejoy* Robert and Gillian Steel* Martineau Anne Bass* Montague and Mayme Hackett* Judith Goetz Sanger* Douglas Smith* Mr and Mrs Robert Taubman* Marta B Varela* Mrs Charles Wrightsman* * donation received via The International Friends of The London Library, a registered 501(c)(3) charitable corporation BOOK FUND Great Primer John Barney Barnabas Brunner The L E Collis Charitable Trust Dr Catherine Horwood Logos Charitable Trust Nonpareil Dr John Burman Rupert Christiansen Edmund Gray Ashley Huish Terence Jagger CBE Victoria Legge-Bourke LVO Dr Anthony McGrath Dr Jeanne Moore James Myddelton The Viscount Norwich Brilliant Alan Bell Sebastian Brock Adrian Collier in memory of Mrs Héloïse E Collier Graeme Cottam Judy Hillman Professor Henry Roseveare Penelope Ruddock Robert Whelan David White ADOPT A NEW BOOK David Darbyshire John K Hoskin Virginia Novarra in memory of
Peter Gittoes Virginia Novarra in memory of Barry Saxton Dr Bernard Palmer ADOPT MY FAVOURITE BOOK Benjamin Bather in memory of Eric Walcot Bather James Irvine Lady Catherine Manning BOOKBINDING Professor John Abecasis-Phillips James Collett Adrian Collier Michael Erben John Havard Peter Ratzer David Sherlock Esq Virginia Surtees SUPPORTED MEMBERSHIP A H J Charitable Trust R D Macleod Kadee Robbins G T Severin The Reverend Ann Shukman A Sokolov John C Walton The Weinstock Fund Hugh Whitemore Student Prize 2013 The Stanley Foundation Ltd GENERAL FUNDS Bill Emmott James Farha Alison Graham Barbara Minto Rosemary Notley The late Ivor Porter Basil Postan Tim Sanderson The Thompson Family Charitable Trust LEGACIES Anne Marjorie Crosthwait Betty Kathleen D’Alton Mabel Dorothy De’Ath Glenys Dean George Girling Grange Julie Hyde Professor Robert Brendan McDowell Geoffrey Potter
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 33
During the year the Library also received a generous donation from Anne Kriken Mann in memory of Richard Mann, as well as a grant from the trustees of the Mrs R M Chambers Settlement Royalties The literary estate of Reay Tannahill has provided income from royalties DONATIONS OF BOOKS Thanks are also due to various government and official bodies, learned societies, institutions and firms, and other libraries and publishers who have given their publications, and to the many donors of books and other items who are listed below: Professor John Abecasis-Phillips Académie royale de Belgique Jeremy Adler Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Göttingen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz Alor Development Initiative The Angela Thirkell Society The Anglo-Hellenic League The Anthony Powell Society The Antique Collectors’ Club Professor Giuseppe Arena William Arthurs Neal Ascherson Roy Ashwell Anthony Astbury William Atkinson Aubane Historical Society Malcolm Axtell Peter Ayrton Claudia Azzola Peter Bagwell Purefoy Martin Bailey Dr Phil Baker Bernd Ballmann Michael Barber Nicolas Barker OBE Barbara Barnett Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution BBC Research Centre, Bristol David Beattie CMG Antony Beevor Belfast Historical & Education Society Alan Bell Hugh Belsey Philippa Bernard Jessica Berry Ernest B Bigwood Roger Billis Dr Giorgio Boccolari Geoffrey Bond OBE Professor Jenny Bourne Taylor Lucienne Boyce Dr Tom Brass 34 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Dr Edward Brett The British Institute of Florence The British Library The British Sociological Association Consuelo Brooke Penny Brooke The Browning Society Robert Bruce Barbara Bryant Professor Victor Bulmer-Thomas CMG OBE Dr John Burman Vinicio Busacchi Christian Busby in memory of Christopher Busby Roberto Calasso Cambridge University Library Annette Carson Justin Cartwright The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education Rachel Chapman in memory of Jean and Geoffrey Chapman The Charles Williams Society Chris Beetles Ltd Rupert Christiansen Christie’s Professor Andrzej Ciechanowiecki Jeremy Clay James Collett Adrian Collier in memory of Mrs Héloïse E Collier Dr Jonathan Conlin Artemis Cooper The Reverend John Cooper Nicholas Cooper David Corcos Amanda Corp Penelope Craig Jeffrey Currie Daniel Katz Ltd Daunt Books Dr Richard Davenport-Hines David Mellor Design Dr Ross Davies Ian Dearden Celia Dearing Philip de Bay Sarah De Beaumont Count Peter-Gabriel de Loriol Chandieu Derbyshire Archaeological & Natural History Society Amicia De Moubray Rodolph de Salis Bejtullah Destani Sara Di Girolamo Iris Ding in memory of Mabel Pilkington Catherine Donner Downside Abbey Dr Alexander Drace-Francis Professor Christopher Duffy Maureen Duffy Dr Hugh Dunthorne Julian Duplain John Eddowes
Judy Edwards Dr Brent Elliott Bill Emmott English Heritage Michael Erben M Jane Evans The Fabian Society Michael Fardell The late Elizabeth Farrar Barry Fernald Ferriday Enterprises Aridea Fezzi Price Judith Flanders Mary Ellen Foley Alessandro Forte Charles Foster Julian Francis The Francis Brett Young Society David Franks Richard Freeman Friends of Canterbury Cathedral Friends of the Dymock Poets Garrick Club François Gendron Peter Gerosa Goethe-Institut London Goldenford Publishers Ltd Guillermo Gómez Sánchez-Ferrer Robert Gomme CB James Gray MP Peter J St B Green Sheila Green in memory of Lionel Green Dr Eva Griffith A V Griffiths Groinkers’ Press Dr Ana-Maria Gruia Robert Gwynne Daniel Hadas Katie Hafner Professor Peter Haggett CBE Dr Seán Haldane Martin Hall Jill, Duchess of Hamilton Henry Hardy Anne Harvey Sir Max Hastings John Havard Karen Hearn Helion & Company Ltd Richard Heller Hertfordshire Association for Local History Mark Hichens High Commission for the Republic of Cyprus Mr and Mrs Joseph Hillaby Mary Hills in memory of Arnolfo Caraffi William Hobson Terence Hodgkinson Desmond Hogan Philip Hook James Horniman Jolyon Hudson Roger Hudson Lucy Hughes-Hallett in memory
of Penelope Hughes-Hallett Penelope Hunting Maggie Huntington-Whiteley The Institute of Linguists Tom Jaine in memory of Constance B Hieatt John Buchan Society Denis Jones The Joseph Conrad Society (UK) C S Kavadas Keats Shelley Memorial Association Linda Kelly Charles Kemp The Kipling Society Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab Anne Kriken Mann David Kynaston Paul Laffan in memory of Kevin Laffan Alastair Laing Dr David Lawson Michael Lee Dr Barbara Lester The Library of Congress Charles Lister London Borough of Richmond upon Thames Dr R T Longstaffe-Gowan Hin-cheung Lovell Karen Lowther Timothy Lutz Cornelius Lynch Inez T P A Lynn Macmillan Maggs Bros Ltd The late David Mann The Massachusetts Review The Matthiesen Gallery Professor Seán McConville W A M McCosker John McEwen Kinn McIntosh Thomas Miller Giles Milton Francoise Mobbs Dr Charles More Professor Janice Morphet Simon Morris John Moses Harry Mount Anthony Mourek Museo Vincenzo Vela Jeremy Musson Tatsushi Narita Charlotte Nassim The National Art Collections Fund The National Gallery The National Trust Gabriel Naughton Michael Nelson New Statesman Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset Virginia Novarra Sean Stuart O’Connor Stephen Ongpin
MEMBERS’ NEWS Peter Ratzer Nicholas Redman Dr Simon Rees Neil Rhind MBE Dennis E Rhodes Simon Ricketts CB in memory of Ralph Ricketts Andrew Robinson Rockingham Press Royal Academy of Arts The Royal Anthropological Institute The Royal Artillery Institution Royal Horticultural Society The Royal Society Royal Society of Literature The Rupert Brooke Society M F Rusnak Russian Academy of Arts Joseph Rykwert Karl Sabbagh Samuel French Ltd Jem Sandford Clive Saville Lord and Lady Scott Mary Scott Frederic Shearer Robert Shepherd The Reverend Ann Shukman Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship Flavio Silvestrini Gareth Simon
Professor Eric Ormsby Österreichisches Akademie der Wissenschaften Professor William Outhwaite The Reverend Canon Dr Trevor Park MBE Valentin Parmen Professor Charles Pasternak Jeremy Paxman Pembroke College Cambridge Library Pen and Picture Penguin Group UK Michael Peppiatt John Perkins David Perman Andrew Bassett Phillips Christopher Phipps Dr Peter Pickering Dr Cecilia Powell Claire Powell Gary Powell Tristram Powell in memory of Elizabeth Farrar The Powys Society Pro Helvetia Proquest Prospect Books Pushkin Press Paul Quarrie Henrik Randerius Random House
Jacob Simon Kate Smith Smithsonian Institution Society of Antiquaries of London The Society of Authors Society for Psychical Research The Society of Women Writers and Journalists William Solesbury Gwen Southgate S Robin Spark Stacey International Nicholas Stanton Louise Stein Dr Craig Stephenson Dr Winifred Stevenson Kate St John in memory of Mrs Diana St John Richard Stoneman Sydney Smith Association John Symons Dr Lydia Syson Professor Jeremy Tambling Peter Tann Laurence Target in memory of Nick Montgomery Thomas Heneage Art Books Lord Thomas of Swynnerton Trevor Timpson Sophia Tobin The Trollope Society Harriet Tuckey
Dr Barry Turner The University of Dublin Ústav Pamäti Národa Luca Utili Petar Velnic Guislaine Vincent Morland Margaret Voggenauer Michael von Brentano Jeanne Vronskaya Jeremy Warren Steve Weiner Jane Weeks David White Francesca White Margaret Willes Peter Willis Professor Elizabeth Wilson Dr Michael Wilson The Reverend John Witheridge Stephen Wood Dr Christopher Wright Graeme Wright from the Library of Reginald Spink The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain
LONDON LIBRARY GIFT MEMBERSHIP Give a year of bookish joy this Christmas Gift vouchers also available. www.londonlibrary.co.uk
THE MAGAZINE FOR WOMEN WHO WRITE Inspiration, debate and opinion, insider news and interviews, competitions, grants and events – plus an exhilarating selection of new poetry and prose, and lively need-to-know newsletter an essential part of the writer’s toolkit, wherever you are in your career Val McDermid
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‘Stars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains where the common sense should have been’ ANGELA CARTER
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 35
members’ room Anyone who has ventured up to the Sixth Floor in recent weeks may have noticed that the Members’ Room has had a facelift. Gone are the old chairs and the battered table. Instead, we have new dining tables and chairs, and a more relaxed seating area with comfortable sofas and armchairs. The refurbishment gives members a space that could be used as a venue for informal memberorganised talks, or a book group perhaps. If you would like to know more or would be interested in using the room for a self-managed group, please contact the Marketing team by emailing marketing@londonlibrary.co.uk. We hope that you will enjoy having a comfortable, social space within the Library where you can relax and enjoy a brief respite from work.
YOU ASKED … WE DID highlights FROM THE SUGGESTIONS BOOK Members feel a tremendous sense of ownership of the Library, and nowhere is this reflected more than in the Library suggestions book. We regularly review your comments and take action where possible.
Topography collection project update If you have ventured down to the Back Stacks basement in recent months, you’ll have undoubtedly noticed changes to our Topography collection. Work began in early June, when our Collection Care team moved the 36-metre-long folio series to the far side of the store and created a new sequence for ‘extra large’ volumes. This first stage of our Topography project has already made significant improvements to the collection’s storage. The formerly congested folio series was carefully respaced during the move, diminishing the risks of damage by abrasion, or of headbands being torn. Oversize books had previously been overhanging the edge of their shelves by quite some length, or been stored on their fore-edge, making them difficult to retrieve and risking distortion to bindings and text blocks. Brought together in the new ‘extra large’ series, these tomes are now properly supported on extra deep shelving, making them far easier to retrieve and shelve. Stage 2 will see our Collection Care team move over 325 metres of quarto volumes to ease tightly packed sections and create pockets of space for future expansion. Preparatory work has already begun, with measuring and shelf re-pitching well underway. We look forward to making similar improvements to the octavo series in Stage 3. Work will continue over several months, resulting in an improved environment for the Library’s topographical holdings. There will inevitably be some noise disruption as trollies are loaded and books moved. We are very grateful to all our members for their patience as we carry out this important collection work. Photographs from the project are available to view online at blog.londonlibrary.co.uk. 36 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
These are some of the suggestions we have addressed recently: Coathangers No longer will members have to struggle with the fixed metal coathangers which were the unnecessary cause of daily frustration. The old hangers have been replaced with removable wooden coathangers and, for those who need them, dedicated hat hooks have also been installed. Wi-Fi signal The structure of the building and the metal bookshelves mean that not all areas of the Library receive reliable Wi-Fi coverage. We have recently installed more power sockets at study spaces around the Library and will be undertaking work that should see a significant improvement to the Wi-Fi signal in the literature stacks and the basement. Lockers We were very aware that with more members using the Library on a regular basis the demand for daily lockers has grown, and while the current facilities were an improvement on the storage facilities in the old Issue Hall, the number of bags behind the Reception desk each day was far from ideal. We have recently installed another 20 lockers in the Issue Hall, bringing the total to 96. In addition, the numbers on the locker doors have been painted to improve the contrast and are now much more visible.
Primo Later this autumn we will be introducing a new discovery tool, Primo, which will offer far more than our current online catalogue. Primo represents a great step forward as it will allow members to interrogate a vast collection of resources with a single search. As well as delving into the Library’s physical holdings of books, periodicals and pamphlets, Primo will enable members to search across most of the electronic resources we currently subscribe to. The same search will also return hits from the Primo Central Index, ‘a megaaggregation of hundreds of millions of scholarly e-resources of global and regional importance. These include journal articles, e-books, reviews, legal documents and more that are harvested from primary and secondary publishers and aggregators, and from open-access repositories’. In addition to Primo the Library will also be adopting SFX, an OpenURL link resolver, which will take members straight from their search results into the full text of electronic journal articles and other online subscription content. Members will still be able to use the online system to request books and to create booklists. Staff will be available should anyone want a demonstration.
DIARY DATE London Library 2014 AGM The 173rd Annual General Meeting of The London Library will be held in the Reading Room on Wednesday, 5 November 2014 at 6pm. Please come and join other members, staff and trustees in the Issue Hall for a glass of wine from 5.30pm.
We helped Coleridge and Joyce and thousands of other not-quite-so-famous writers. Can we help you? For more than 200 years the Fund has provided hardship grants and pensions to published writers at all stages of their careers. If you are a published author of any genre the Royal Literary Fund can offer financial assistance. If you need help, contact: Eileen Gunn 020 7353 7159 eileen.gunn@rlf.org.uk www.rlf.org.uk
Authors’ FoundAtion grAnts And AwArds And
K Blundell trust AwArds (open to writers under 40 years of age)
Next closing dates – september 30 2014 and April 30 2015 Full guidelines available from www.societyofauthors.org 020 7373 6642
All enquiries are treated in the strictest confidence. Registered Charity no 219952
London Library Magazine 14.05.2014
t: +44 (0)20 7862 8675 | e: IESevents@sas.ac.uk w: http://ies.sas.ac.uk | Twitter: @IES_London
Institute of English Studies Autumn Conferences School of Advanced Study, University of London
AnnA KAvAn: HISTorICAL ConTExT, InfLUEnCE, LEgACy 11 September 2014 DICKEnS DAy 2014: DICKEnS AnD ConvIvIALITy 11 October 2014 CELEbrATIng CHInUA ACHEbE’S LEgACy: Arrow of goD AT 50 24–25 October 2014 100 DUbLInErS 31 Oct – 1 Nov 2014 forbIDDEn ACCESS: CEnSorIng booKS AnD ArCHIvES 6–7 November 2014 AnnUAL gEorgE ELIoT ConfErEnCE: MIDDLEMArCH 22 November 2014 MArgInALISED MAInSTrEAM 2014: DISgUISE 28–29 November 2014 Please quote reference LonLibAutumn14 when making an enquiry THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 37
Young Person’s Membership In a recent article in the Financial Times, Harry Eyres commented that to his mind the Library has ‘transformed from a peaceful haven for shuffling scholars into a buzzing hub for twentysomething freelancers’. Whether he is right or not, it is certainly true that developing the next generation of Library members is not just an exercise in cementing the future of the Library, as important as that is. It is about ensuring that the Library continues to play a vital role in shaping and inspiring the knowledge, thinking and creativity of people of all ages in this country. It is for this reason that the Library introduced half-price membership for 16 to 24 year olds in 2006. This proved to be a popular move and has enabled many more young people, students and recent graduates to have the opportunity to use the Library’s resources, particularly benefiting those who no longer have access to a school or university library. The impact is clear, as Harry Eyres has noticed, with over 1,000 joining since the discount was introduced resulting in a 170% increase in young membership over the last 10 years. Young Person’s Membership has also proved to be a popular graduation and birthday gift and it was a natural progression that such gift membership would extend to a broader range of young people still in secondary education. For example, member and Library Trustee Basil Postan has gifted ten Young Persons’ memberships to his old school. Each year the school choses ten deserving pupils to be the recipients of Library membership. It has been wonderful to
see how these students are making enthusiastic use of the Library’s collections since taking up their memberships. Basil explains his motivation for this generous gift: ‘It seemed a great opportunity to help promising young students develop their interests during their last terms at school, in the hope that the experience would be so rewarding that they would in time graduate to joining the Library in their own right, enriching and enlarging our membership from a talented and deserving pool’. One of these students recently wrote to the Library saying: ‘I was very grateful to receive a Young Person’s Membership to The London Library earlier this year. I don’t know what I would do without it: not only have I been able to read books on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British history, such as Lord Blake’s masterful biography of Benjamin Disraeli, but I have also been able to read the parliamentary debates themselves in the Times Room. It is a wonderful gift.’ Another writes: ‘Its shelves are filled with possibility and have helped me to embrace research in a more hands-on fashion. By this I mean that being a member has opened my eyes to all sorts of literature that has now shaped the way I read, write and even criticise literature.’ Similar schemes are being developed by other schools, alumni and parent associations, which have purchased memberships for deserving students. If you would like to learn more about how you can help nurture a love of books, please contact Philip Spedding, Development Director, on 020 7766 4716 or email philip.spedding@londonlibrary.co.uk.
CHRISTMAS CARD 2014
MESSAGE INSIDE CARD READS: With best wishes for Christmas and the New Year
For the past 28 years The London Library has commissioned a Christmas card for sale to members to raise funds for the Library. This year’s card has been designed around the theme of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ by illustrator, sculptor and designer David Lawrence. Over the past 30 years, David has assembled a broad portfolio of work, from wood engravings, watercolour and acrylic to oil paintings and contemporary vector graphics and processed images. His work includes a series of Greenman sculptures reflecting English myths and legends (‘From The Greenwood’), which can be seen in a number of cathedrals and historic sites throughout the country. The price is £5.00 for a pack of 8 cards and envelopes, including VAT, postage and handling. Cards can be bought via The London Library website or by returning the order form below. Cards are also on sale in the Library from Reception at £4.00 per pack including VAT (from late September).
ORDER FORM
YOUR NAME (BLOCK CAPITALS PLEASE)
Please send me:
_________________________________________________________
______ pack(s) of Christmas Cards, at £5.00 per pack: £______
ADDRESS ________________________________________________
TOTAL: £______
_________________________________________________________
Please make your cheque payable to ‘The London Library’ Please return this form to: The London Library, Christmas Card Orders, 14 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LG 38 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
_________________________________________________________ ____________________________ POSTCODE ________________
EATING OUT
DINING OUT NEAR THE LONDON LIBRARY
11 2 3 10
This is an advertisement feature.To advertise please call Irene Michaelides on 020 7300 5675.
6 12 8
7 1
4 5 9
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4 CUT AT 45 PARK LANE Created by chef founder Wolfgang Puck, CUT at 45 Park Lane is a modern American steak restaurant. Enjoy prime beef, pan-roasted lobster, sautéed fresh fish and seasonal salads, accompanied by an exceptional wine list of over 600 wines, featuring one of the largest selections of American wines in the UK. Breakfasts are another highlight and on Sunday relax with brunch as you listen to live jazz. 45 Park Lane, W1K 1PN, 020 7493 4554. dorchestercollection.com
7 GETTI JERMYN STREET A modern Italian restaurant at the fast-paced heart of London’s West End, Getti Jermyn Street is an authentic Italian dining venue in London’s historic tailoring district, dedicated to offering a traditional and memorable Italian dining experience. A splendid destination for locals and tourists alike, Getti Jermyn Street focuses on serving simple, regional dishes from mainland Italy. Private dining available. 16/17 Jermyn Street, SW1Y 6LT, 020 7734 7334. getti.com
10 the keeper’s house The recently opened Keeper’s House is the new home for artists and art lovers in the heart of Mayfair. Run by renowned restaurateur Oliver Peyton, of Peyton & Byrne, the concept is simple: modern British food, cooked using the freshest ingredients. Surrounded by casts from the RA Collection, diners can enjoy seasonal dishes in the restaurant or cocktails in the garden bar. Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, W1J 0BD, 020 7300 5881. keepershouse.org.uk
2 BELLAMY’S RESTAURANT Located in central Mayfair (near New Bond Street), Bellamy’s Restaurant offers a classic French brasserie menu with an affordable famous-name wine list. The Oyster Bar menu includes Bellamy’s famous ‘open’ sandwiches. Le patron mange ici. The restaurant and Oyster Bar are open Mon–Fri lunch and dinner; Sat dinner only. 18–18a Bruton Place, W1J 6LY, 020 7491 2727. bellamysrestaurant.co.uk
5 THE FOX CLUB Situated a stone’s throw from Green Park and the famous Hyde Park, the Fox Club Dining Room is one of London’s best-kept secrets and a lunch-time essential. The modern European menu changes on a weekly basis, offering refined excellence without being pretentious. The effect is a change from the jaded palate of life. The Fox Club now offers a delightful afternoon tea from 3–5pm. 46 Clarges St, W1J 7ER, 020 7495 3656.
8 Green’s Restaurant & Oyster Bar ‘Excellent fish – a most enjoyable place. It reminded me of treats with my father when I was young.’ Elizabeth Jane Howard Established in 1982, Green’s is inspired by seasonality and renowned for classic British fish, meat and game dishes. Quote ‘London Library’ when making a reservation or on arrival and receive a complimentary summer cocktail. 36 Duke Street St James’s, SW1Y 6DF, 020 7930 4566. greens.org.uk
11 sartoria Sartoria, conveniently located on the corner of Savile Row and New Burlington Street, has become one of Mayfair’s favoured hang-outs. The elegant Milanese-style venue is ideal for a quick espresso or light lunch in the informal bar, or for unwinding over a long lunch or dinner in the luxurious restaurant. Sartoria is open Mon–Fri lunch and dinner; Sat dinner only. 20 Savile Row, W1S 3PR, 020 7534 7000. sartoria-restaurant.co.uk
9 GUSTOSO RISTORANTE &
12 WILTONS Established in 1742, Wiltons enjoys a reputation as the epitome of fine English dining in London. The atmosphere is perfectly matched with immaculately prepared fish, shellfish, game and meat. Choose from an exclusive wine list. Open for lunch and dinner, Mon–Fri, and dinner Saturday. To make a reservation, please quote The London Library Magazine. 55 Jermyn Street, SW1Y 6LX, 020 7629 9955. wiltons.co.uk
foxclublondon.com 3 BENTLEY’S OYSTER BAR AND GRILL Since 1916, Bentley’s has been serving its fish and chips and feeding the hungry masses. For almost 100 years, the grande dame of Swallow Street has served fresh oysters, grilled fish, shellfish platters and steaks, sourced from around the British Isles. The restaurant is now under the watchful eye of Michelinstarred chef Richard Corrigan. 11–15 Swallow Street, W1B 4DG, 020 7734 4756. bentleys.org
6 FRANCO’S Some believe Franco’s was the first Italian restaurant in London, having served residents in St James’s since 1942. Open all day, Franco’s evolves and provides a menu for all occasions. The day starts with full English and continental breakfast on offer. The à-la-carte lunch and dinner menus offer both classic and modern dishes. 61 Jermyn Street, SW1Y 6LX, 020 7499 2211. francoslondon.com
ENOTECA This home-style Italian dining room is found moments from Westminster Cathedral and Victoria Station. Quietly situated and pleasingly intimate, Gustoso is the ideal place to unwind with friends or to enjoy a little romance. Cocktails are served from the bar and the menu is based around the Italian classics. 35 Willow Place, SW1P 1JH, 020 7834 5778. ristorantegustoso.co.uk
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 39
Fine BOOks, MAps, MAnusCripTs And HisTOriCAl pHOTOgrApHs Wednesday 12 November 2014 Knightsbridge, London
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