Taking Liberties

Notes from a bubbly world

For the last few weeks, the experience of the exhibition has been ever more closely focused: should this object be placed up a bit, or to the left; a comma here, or a semi-colon there? Should we alter this caption? Does this light reflect on the case too much? Truffle-hunting, rather than the parachutist’s overview. It’s been rather like living in a bubble.

But last night, the bubble was popped and it was time to look outwards, which is, after all, what an exhibition should do – engage with the wider world. And it popped in fine style, with readings by RSC actors from many of the documents, such as Milton’s 1644 defence of free speech; a tastefully-lit King’s Library; and, not least, a visit from the Prime Minister.

In his speech Mr Brown made the case for a very British strand of liberty, from Magna Carta to the present day, linking religious toleration to political freedom. During the speeches, which included an introduction from the guest curator, Professor Linda Colley, that freedom was also expressed by a brief verbal intervention by one of the guests, Peter Tatchell. I think some of the crowd wondered for a moment if this was even part of the planned proceedings.

This morning provided another chance to see the exhibition through new eyes, this time during a short visit by members of the Kenyan Ministry of Culture. As well as being curious about the written – or uncodified – nature of the UK constitution, they were struck by the way the past could illuminate the present day search for liberty, even if revealing some challenging contours. Two of the documents they commented on in their whistle-stop tour were Hogarth’s series of election satires, which shows voters being bribed by food and drink; and the accounts of an the election of one 18th-century MP. This records the expenses incurred, from hiring the Town Beadle and laying on music, to the payment of a ‘mob’; the going rate was a guinea, or over a week's wages for a skilled worker.

I spy

Spooks are currently hitting the big and small screens. The Coen brothers' latest black comedy Burn After Reading threw an ex-CIA analyst, a retired Secret Service officer, and gym workers into a Potomac of confusion. Sir Harry and co return this evening in Spooks and in the latest James Bond film premieres on Wednesday in Leicester Square (which clashes with the Eccles Centre debate on the US Presidential elections).

The careers section of the website of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Bond's purported employers, suggests that life is not all DB5s and baccarat: on offer is a 'virtual administrator', which allows hopeful Moneypennies the chance to "find out more about being an Administrator in SIS and test [their] skills". The mundane side of spying - the collating, processing and assessing of data - is ever more important. Eavesdropping activities, such as those that take place via GCHQ can hoover up a vast amount of electronic chatter, placing huge demands on the technical ability to separate the intelligence wheat from the coincidental chaff. And, currently, there is a debate about the safeguards, such as the European Convention on Human Rights, that can be placed on such activities and how they may be expanded in the light of encryption, secure email, online chatrooms, pay-as-you go phones, and internet telephony. The interactive in the Taking Liberties exhibition touches on these issues.

All this may make one wish for a bygone age of espionage. However, things weren't always simple then, either. A snippet of this is on display in the exhibition's section on 'Freedom of speech and belief'. In 1932 Sir Compton Mackenzie, warmly remembered not least for Whisky Galore, revealed the existence of the SIS for the first time. This was done in his memoirs of his time in the Aegean intelligence service, Greek Memories, at the start of the Great War. Although Mackenzie was correcting another account, and most of the people named were either retired or deceased, he was found guilty under the Official Secrets Act. The book was withdrawn until 1940. Mackenzie was a keen Scottish nationalist, and there is an interesting link with the writer John Saunders Lewis, who authored one of the early Welsh nationalist pamphlets on display in the 'United Kingdom?' section: in 1919, he served under Mackenzie at Athens. Someone should make a film about it all...

It's crunchy. But is it Art?

The American writer Jonathan Franzen was on the radio this morning getting excited about the end of the credit boom. He was pleased at this particular correction, not only because it meant that the market was reflecting reality, but also because money-worries are a powerful source of human stories: pain, Franzen suggested, equals art.

I was also lucky enough to be invited to a private view of the current National Gallery exhibition, Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, which was notable not just for reuniting a series of works (including portraits of van Eyck and his wife) but also a fantastic trio of two paintings and a sculpture of Philip II of Spain – stunning examples of patronage. (I was also trying to pick up some tips on how to conduct a gallery tour.)

These two things – the Renaissance and the connections between money and art – were the subject of two good presentations during the seminar at Birkbeck on Tuesday. Did the wealth created by bankers in 15th century Florence lead to the leap in creativity in sculpture, illumination, painting and fresco; or, as some art historians suggest, had art become a safer ‘asset class’ during a recession?

Perhaps there's a similarly complicated equation linking rights and the economy. This is particularly true in the 'Freedom from Want' section of Taking Liberties, which looks at how social rights have developed from the vagaries of the Poor Laws to the creation of the Welfare State. But the connection is also apparent in the 'Right to Vote' section: as the cities grew and more people had a financial stake in society, so did demands for the right to elect representatives to parliament. And in 'Liberty and the Rule of Law', the suspension of Habeas Corpus in 1817 takes place against the backdrop of economic dislocation and the demands for pay rises.

There may also be patterns in terms of art and its responses to the political and social situation, especially art that reflects individual’s struggles and hopes and fears for society. Ernest Jones (1819–1869), a Chartist (and acquaintance of Karl Marx) was imprisoned after the great demonstration of 1848. He drew a series of sketches, including an idealised Grecian landscape. In the image shown here, the home of democracy is contrasted with a bleak vision of 'the English Town', with dark factories called 'Bone Grinder & Co', menaced by 'the Army'. Three generations later, Olive Wharry’s scrapbook records, in a cartoon style that doesn’t avoid the horror of incarceration and force-feeding, her experiences as a suffragette in Holloway prison. And, from the generation preceding Jones, William Blake's notebook responds imaginatively to the landscape of London during the repression that followed the French Revolution.

I am not just a number

There have been a lot of numbers in the news. And no blog is complete without a list, so here's a quick Taking Liberties Top Ten Numbers.

1. 5,706,000 and 1,975,496. The numbers of signatures, respectively, that the Chartists and the government claimed to be on the great petition of 1848. When civil servants examined the list, they removed names such as Queen Victoria or the Duke of Wellington, which were obviously forgeries (or were pseudonyms for those wary of signing their own name).
2. 0. Number of pages of the great petition that survive. Petitions were routinely burnt after registration by the Houses of Parliament.
3. 1215. Date of the oldest item in the exhibition: Magna Carta.
4. 78. Earliest possible date for the oldest item not in the exhibition, a first-century copy of the Constitution of Athens (Papyrus CXXXI). Sorry Aristotle, no room.
5. 6. Number of points in the People's Charter (1838).
6. 207. Number of objects in the exhibition (not including sound and video)
7. 140. Length, in seconds, of the introductory video
8. 2. Number of former Levellers performing at the opening Late at the Library on 31 October.
9. 18. Length, in feet, of the Great Reform Act 1832.
10. 39. Clause in Magna Carta that led to Habeas Corpus.

What a difference a day makes to 42 days

A remarkable day, but I'm not going to comment on all that, except to say that I'm startled that no-one has mentioned Suez yet as a paradigm-shifting comparison (nationalisation, the threat of a run on the pound: it's got the lot).

No: while we were all discovering how we had become bankers, the Lords was throwing out the government's bid to introduce up to 42 days' detention for suspected terrorists as part of the Counter Terrorism Bill . Obviously, the exhibition has had to engage objectively with this issue, not least as part of the events programme's series of debates, but also as part of the interactive component. Within a few metres of entering the exhibition, you'll discover when Habeas Corpus became part of English law and whether it applies in Scotland, and be able to offer a judgement on the risks and benefits of such a measure.

I was working on the labels for the section dealing with human rights today, finishing of the story of how ideas that were first expressed with any force in the 18th century (by men such as Thomas Paine and women such as Mary Wollstonecraft) took on the force of 'international customary law' because of the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 20th.

There seemed to be a gap in the story, from the early editions of Paine's Rights of Man and the Foreign Office's deliberations on an international 'Bill of Rights' in 1947. The language of 'human rights' seemed to drop off the agenda. In part, the British response to the French and American Revolutions had some role to play in this, as well as the importance of evangelical and other religious ways of looking at the world in the 19th century; empire, and British self-belief, probably had something to do with it too. In the British context, it seems relatively easy to explain why 'human rights' as a term and a concept dropped off the radar (although this seemed to be the case in the US and the Continent, too), but harder to explain why it resurfaced.

Jay Winter's recent book Dreams of Peace and Freedom (2006) has been especially useful, and is excellent on René Cassin's 'dream of a new human rights regime' during the bleakness of the 1940s. The exhibition is able to show, through some of Cassin's letters to Lord Cecil at the League of Nations, how internationalism and pacifism moved towards an understanding of rights that transcends the state.

But there is also a more British aspect to the story, in particular HG Wells, who in 1939 wrote to The Times proposing an international Magna Carta, or Bill of Rights, to help explain 'what we are fighting for'. His declaration, and the Penguin book The Rights of Man, or What are we are fighting?, was translated into most major European languages and dropped behind enemy lines for propaganda purposes (as was the Beveridge report, also on show). A path from Wells's initial letter, via a Committee on the Declaration, a Daily Herald debate, correspondence with Roosevelt, and the State Department, can be drawn to the final UDHR of 1948.

I looked at Wells's initial letter (or, as it turned out, follow-up letter to an initial statement about war aims) on the British Library's subscription to the Times Digital Archive. The date of the reference from an article was wrong: 25 (not 23) October 1939. But the letter did include Wells's initial points for his proposed International Declaration... one of which was that no-one should be detained without trial for a period of more than three weeks.

Shifty laws and slippery slopes

This week is perhaps the biggest push from the curatorial side of things, although the exhibitions team have a couple of hectic weeks ahead, building, installing and testing the exhibition.

While finishing labels, checking text and meeting journalists, I note that this time last year I was up to my knees in snow, walking in the Pyrenees. If you slip down an icy slope, then its time to grab your ice axe from your pack and try and bring your descent to a halt. Or indeed anything to hand: walking pole, shovel, snow shoes…

I mention this because, according to the news, the Icelandic PM Geir Haarde has criticised the UK's use of anti-terrorist legislation to freeze the local assets of some troubled Icelandic banks. Presumably this was not what the framers of this legal implement had in mind.

But such repurposing of legislation is nothing new. The controversial 'stop and search' ('sus') laws that were reformed in the 1980s derived from an 1824 Vagrancy Act, something that Taking Liberties’ interactive element will explore. Current campaigners also worry about how existing legislation can be targeted at peaceful protests, while some complain that the Human Rights Act has unwitting consequences.

More happily perhaps, Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus have been revisited and re-used over time to defend certain rights – again something that the exhibition will explore.

We've also been doing a certain amount of recycling ourselves, comparing labels from old exhibitions, spending time on JSTOR and among the Library's own book stacks, reworking other people's thoughts and facts into bespoke and brand-new labels.

Chartism and naughty bears

This afternoon I popped down to the car park with Barbara, our busy Registrar, to meet Anthony Barnett the co-founder of Charter 88 and founder of openDemocracy.net. He is a little bit surprised that I don't have a beard, as he is going on my appearance on the left of this blog, which seems to depict me en route to a 'wanted' photo. Anthony is kindly bringing in a copy of the original Charter 88 petition from the Observer newspaper which he is loaning for the show. I am reminded that Vaclav Havel visited the Library just last week, since the petition was inspired not just by the Victorian Chartists but by Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia during 1977. It's a shame we couldn't arrange a meeting.

I remember debating Charter 88 in a Portakabin in Somerset at the tail end of the 1980s. It is interesting to see what has changed and what hasn't over the last two decades. Scotland is no longer 'ruled from Westminster', the Lords is half-reformed - but at the moment the central demand of a bill of rights remains moot at best. We are also, of course, delighted to be showing the Bill of Rights from 1689, on loan from the Parliamentary Archives.

It is the big vote in congress this afternoon, on the $800bn, pork-filled bank bill, and my eye is half on NYtimes.com. I am struck by a line in Thomas 'the world is flat' Friedman’s column:

"I've always believed that America's government was a unique political system — one designed by geniuses so that it could be run by idiots. I was wrong. No system can be smart enough to survive this level of incompetence and recklessness by the people charged to run it."

I spend a minute reflecting on the problems of constructing a constitution and how the Founding Fathers' stock has fallen and risen over the years, before returning to the business of labels. Currently, I am reducing the Oz trial to 90 words (we also have a sound recording of the 1971 obscenity trial) and am reading Geoffrey Robertson's amusing account of his experiences as a postgraduate participant in the near-theatrical Old Bailey trial (The Justice Game, 1998).

At one point, the silks turned their attention to the 15-year-old Vivian Berger, and whether his depiction of Rupert Bear's head transposed onto a lewd Robert Crumb drawing was a moment of 'artistic genius' or not. It would have made fascinating television, and indeed there was a BBC drama in the 1990s. 

I note that the Road to Roubaix is sold out at the Bike Film Festival is sold out, and instead head home with a DVD of the film clips that have to be cut for the exhibition.  Not a bad alternative.