03 July 2015
Remembering the 4th of July...
Additional MS 46700
Tomorrow sees the anniversary of the now world famous boat trip on the River Thames in Oxford, when the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics don at Oxford University, rowed up the river with the three young daughters of the University’s Vice-Chancellor. The middle child was Alice Liddell, then aged ten.
Dodgson recorded the trip in his diary for 1862, one of nine volumes of his diaries that are held at the British Library. The details of the rowing trip itself are recorded on folio 15 of his diary:
Additional MS 54343
but the page opposite records why the trip turned out to be so important in the history of English literature. As he rowed up the river Dodgson began to tell the girls a story about a bored child called Alice who follows a white rabbit and ends up having a series of surreal adventures. The story, as recorded in Dodgson’s diary, was initially called ‘Alice’s Adventures Under Ground’. One year later, under his pen name of Lewis Carroll, the story was published in an expanded form with the new title Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Additional MS 54343
After the trip, Dodgson had written up the story, painstakingly added his own illustrations, and presented the manuscript to Alice Liddell as a gift, with the dedication: ‘A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer’s Day’. This manuscript is now one of the British Library’s treasures; however, its journey from its original creation to its home in the Library is quite a marvellous tale in itself. Alice Liddell kept the manuscript until 1928 when she was forced to sell it to pay death duties after the death of her husband. The manuscript was sold at auction at Sotheby’s for £15,000 to an American dealer, Dr Rosenbach, who in turn sold it to Eldridge Johnson upon returning to America. Following Johnson’s death in 1946 the manuscript was again sold at auction. This time, however, it was purchased by a wealthy group of benefactors who donated the volume to the British people (and the British Museum) in 1948 in gratitude for their gallantry against Hitler during World War Two.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice in Wonderland and gives us a chance to celebrate and to reflect upon the continuing influence of this much-loved story. The Alice manuscript has just taken a trip back across the Atlantic to be the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Later in the year it will have a short sojourn at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia before returning to us and going on display as part of our Front Hall exhibition which will explore the many ways that the story has been adapted, appropriated, reimaged and re-illustrated since its conception. The exhibition curators will be blogging later in the year as we work towards the launch on 20th November.
Though if you can’t wait until then to find out more, you can explore this manuscript and much more besides on the British Library’s Discovering Literature website, which you can find at http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/alices-adventures-under-ground-the-original-manuscript-version-of-alices-adventures-in-wonderland
19 May 2015
Podcast of 'A Celebration of Anthony Trollope' at the British Library
On 23rd April the British Library held 'A Celebration of Anthony Trollope', an evening event to mark the writer's bicentenary. The event which was held in the Library’s conference centre featured panel discussion between Trollope’s biographer, Victoria Glendinning, the writer, Victoria Trollope and the actor, Edward Fox, chaired by editor of the Mail on Sunday, Geordie Greig. There was lively discussion between the participants on a range of subjects relating to Trollope’s life and work from his involvement with the Post Office to his difficult childhood and his relationship with his wife, Rose.
As the event provided so popular we were keen for a recording to be made available as a podcast for anyone who was not able to attend. The podcast can be downloaded for free from the British Library website. Trollope fans may also like to know that a display on Trollope and novel writing mentioned in an earlier blog posting on 4th March remains on show in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures of the British Library gallery until June 7th. You can also find out more about Trollope on the Library's Discovering Literature website.
16 December 2014
Jane Austen and the ‘very horrid’ Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen, whose 239th birthday is today, has another anniversary this month – at the very end of December 1817, after her death, her novel Northanger Abbey was published.
Northanger Abbey is a joyously playful satire on the gothic novel of the 1790s, and was written in around 1798-9, when Austen was in her early 20s. It was the first of her novels to be submitted for publication, and was bought by a London publisher for the princely sum of £10 in 1803 – but for unknown reasons lay unpublished until 1816, when Austen’s brother bought it back for her. She made a few revisions, changing the heroine’s name from Susan to Catherine Morland, and also the title (which had been ‘Susan’) perhaps to tie it more firmly to the gothic tradition it pastiches.
In the first half of the book, set in fashionable Bath, Catherine meets with a new friend, Isabella Thorp, a flighty young woman. When Catherine opines that she wishes she could spend her whole life in reading Ann Radcliffe’s hugely popular and influential Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Isabella replies that she has “made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you… Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries.”
For some time in the 19th century, it was generally believed that Austen may have made up these titles, so preposterous did they sound to later, non-Gothic readers. However, later scholarship revealed that the novels did all exist, and they are on display together for the first time in Terror and Wonder. You can read more about the seven horrid novels on the British Library European Studies blog here.
The second half of Northanger Abbey features Catherine’s visit to the Abbey itself, the home of her friend Eleanor Tilney and her brother Henry. On the journey Henry teases Catherine about what she expects the house to be like (as it is called an Abbey, Catherine has of course imagined a full-on Radcliffian dark, brooding, mazelike building stuffed with secrets): "And are you prepared to encounter all the horrors that a building such as 'what one reads about' may produce? Have you a stout heart? Nerves fit for sliding panels and tapestry?" Henry then proceeds to distil various key plotlines from the complete work of Ann Radcliffe into a single, very entertaining narrative at what is to happen at the Abbey during Catherine’s visit. His intention is to entertain, but Catherine is both frightened and immediately expects the worst – or, the most exciting – to happen.
Austen draws the line between the gothic novels of the 1790s (usually set centuries in the past, in continental Europe) and England in the 1790s when Henry reminds Catherine that she should “Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians…. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them?” By the end of the novel, Catherine has at last learned not to take novels (or herself) so seriously.
Another theme of the novel which, perhaps strangely, links to our exhibition Terror and Wonder, is that of consumerism. Isabella Thorp, when she recommends the seven horrid novels to Catherine, admits that she hasn’t read them herself but has in turn been given the list by Miss Andrews. Isabella’s interest seems to be more that she keeps up with the fashion and is able to make these recommendations than in her own enjoyment of novel-reading. Amongst many other references to the consumer culture of the 1790s (whose lace trimmings are nicer, whether a muslin will wash well) one stands out – the fact that Northanger Abbey itself has a Rumford fireplace. Designed by Count Rumford in the mid- 1790s, this new style of fireplace increased the heat to a room by narrowing the vent. On display in Terror and Wonder is a parody of an advertisement for a Rumford, in which a young lady reading the scandalous gothic novel The Monk by Matthew Lewis, has a lovely time by her RumPford fire. Scandalous indeed.
Terror and Wonder is on till the 20th January, and you can buy tickets here
Read more about our Jane Austen collections here
Final image courtesy of British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings, 1935,0522.7.12
14 November 2014
History at Stake! The Story Behind Vampire Slaying Kits
One particular item in the British Library's Terror and Wonder exhibition has inspired more cries of amazement, shivers of fear and gasps of delight than any other. I refer, of course, to the vampire slaying kit which is on loan to the British Library from the Royal Armouries for the duration of the exhibition. In this guest post the curator who looks after the item, Jonathan Ferguson, talks about the origins of the kits and the strange history that lurks behind them.
Above: The vampire slaying kit, on loan from the Royal Armouries and currently on display at the British Library.
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As Curator of Firearms at the Royal Armouries I deal with everything from medieval hand cannon, through finely decorated works of art, to the latest military assault rifles. But some of my favourite objects are the unusual; the technological dead ends, the experiments, and the whimsical pieces. In parallel with my professional interest in arms and armour is a fascination with the paranormal, though I am not myself a believer in its objective reality. As much as I grew up with Dracula, Ghostbusters and Beetlejuice, I am by nature a sceptic, tending toward the debunking of extraordinary claims. It was in this capacity that I came across my first 'vampire killing kit' on the internet some seven years ago. It was essentially a cased Victorian percussion pistol with accoutrements for loading; so far, so typical. However, this also included a hammer, stakes, a crucifix, and other classic tools of the fictional vampire slayer. It purported to be 19th century in date, but was rather obviously of recent manufacture. Nonetheless, it attracted a lot of interest and intrigue online. Looking into it, I discovered that there were many more of these kits (over 100 are known to exist), and many of them quite professionally made and wholly antique in appearance.
I decided to use my museum training to investigate these unusual pieces, in particular those labelled as having been created by a 'Professor Blomberg'. It is usually stated that these, and vampire kits in general, are late-Victorian novelties or souvenirs, sold to tourists travelling to eastern Europe in the wake of the publication of Dracula in 1897. Some sellers and media outlets even claimed that they were made for believers in vampires, for self-defence purposes. I suspected that they were indeed novelty items, but were rather more recent than many believed. I conducted a survey of the folklore surrounding 'real' vampires, that is, dead bodies exhumed by a troubled community and ritually 'killed' as scapegoats for whatever malaise might be affecting people. Nowhere was there evidence to support real vampire slayers carting about one of these kits. I persisted, revisiting the fictional stories and movies of my childhood and beyond, noting the development of the various ingredients in the typical vampire killer's toolbox. It became clear that the 'Blomberg' kits, with their focus upon silver bullets, were very unlikely to have existed prior to about the 1930s at the earliest. Though constructed from antique boxes and contents, they were most likely not produced until the era of the classic Hammer vampire movies. Other kits are harder to pin down in terms of date and could be older, but there is as yet no evidence of this.
Above: An illustration from Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (1845 - 47). Varney was actually susceptible to bullets, but would be revived by moonlight. The situation with Count Dracula was rather different.
To some this might come as a disappointment, or even as a reason to decry the kits as fakes as some do. Would-be buyers should certainly not purchase under the apprehension that they are buying a Victorian antique as my own research has shown. So why acquire such an object regardless? Museums do collect deliberate fakes as comparators and for their own artistic and cultural merit, yet vampire kits are not fakes per se, because there is no evidence of a Victorian original. In the case of historical artefacts for which the original does not survive, we will also display reproductions. In this case, there very likely isn't an original. Self-defence against the supernatural was for many in history (and indeed today) a matter of life and death, but the weapons they used were ephemeral. The wooden stakes, guns, and agricultural implements that they attacked vampires and other revenants with either no longer survive, or have lost their provenance and are unable to tell us their story.
So, if they're not fake, and not reproductions, what are they? The answer is that they are 'hyperreal' or invented artefacts somewhat akin to stage, screen or magician's props. They can also be regarded, and indeed have been sold as, pieces of modern art. Formerly the preserve of art galleries and of course libraries, contemporary collection is now also a staple of museum collecting policies. Our profession collects the artefacts of modern war, of medical science, communications technology, even of people's pastimes. 'High art' in the form of contemporary artworks has been joined in museum collections by 'low art' props fabricated for our favourite movies and plays, just as Twilight takes its place next to Dracula in the British Library's stacks. Curators and visitors alike now recognise that objects do not have to be ancient to be interesting and important, as the Were-Rabbit also displayed as part of Terror and Wonder shows! Such immediate and intriguing pieces can also attract new audiences to our respective fields; in the case of the Royal Armouries, that of arms and armour. For all these reasons, we at the Armouries sought to acquire the vampire killing kit that you can now see on display at the British Library.
So, although I had set out to 'debunk' their very existence, I came to realise that these enigmatic objects transcend questions of authenticity. They are part of the material culture of the gothic; aspects of our shared literary and cinematic passions made physical. Lacking any surviving artefact of vampirism either folkloric or fictional, fans of the gothic had created one to fill the gap. So whilst we at the Armouries still plan to scientifically test our vampire kit, and there is the possibility that it's early rather than late 20th century in date, for me the outcome has almost become moot. Vampire killing kits are genuine artefacts of the Gothic fiction that still provides sustenance to our most beloved monsters.
Jonathan Ferguson
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The vampire slaying kit will be on display at the British Library until 20th January 2015. There's an opportunity to learn more about vampires as depicted in Victorian literature via our Discovering Literature website. Also, on the British Library's website, you can help conserve a classic Gothic novel for future generations via Adopt a Book and discover more about our series of Terror and Wonder Gothic Events to tie-in with the exhibition.
08 November 2014
Happy Birthday Bram Stoker!
The 8th of November is always an occasion for celebrations within Gothic literary circles, marking as it does the anniversary of Bram Stoker's birth. And yet, at first sight, when you look at the details of Stoker's life it seems odd that he should have produced so many fine Gothic novels. Indeed, with Dracula, he produced arguably the most enduring and influential Gothic horror story of them all.
(Bram Stoker - mathematician, athlete, theatre manager and a creator of fine Gothic horrors)
The details of Stoker's life are interesting in themselves but give little insight into why his imagination should have produced so many dark, supernatural tales. He was born in Dublin on the 8th November 1847, the third of seven children. His childhood and youth were a paradoxical mixture of extreme illness (he was largely confined to bed until the age of seven) and vigour (he was a noted athlete during his time as a student at Trinity College Dublin, from where he graduated with a degree in Mathematics). It was during his time as a student that he became interested in the theatre and it is perhaps here that the darkness creeps in. For a while he was the theatre critic for the Dublin Evening Mail, co-owned by the author Sheridan Le Fanu whose novels such as The House by the Churchyard (1863) and Uncle Silas (1864) contributed so much to the popularity of Sensation Fiction during the 1860s, and whose short story 'Carmilla' (1871), telling the tale of a predatory female vampire, was undoubtedly an influence on Dracula. It was while working as a theatre critic that Stoker first met the actor Henry Irving, a man whose charisma and brooding presence is often thought to have been in Stoker's mind when he created the character of the Count.
In 1878 Stoker married the celebrated beauty Florence Balcombe. One of her previous suitors had been Oscar Wilde and although Wilde and Stoker, who had known each other at Trinity College, fell out over the marriage Stoker was ultimately able to resume his friendship with Wilde in later years. Oscar Wilde, of course, went on to write one of the few Gothic novels able to bear comparison with Dracula - namely The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).
(Florence Balcombe, society beauty and, from 1878, the wife of Bram Stoker)
Upon moving to London after his marriage Stoker became acting manager, and then business manager of Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre, a post he held for 27 years. Through Irving Stoker met Arthur Conan Doyle, the future author of such Gothic tales as 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band' (1892) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). While he was at the Lyceum Stoker oversaw a stage adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's brilliant novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The play, which began its run on the 3rd September 1888, caused controversy due to its perceived similarities to the Whitechapel murders carried out by Jack the Ripper, murders which began at almost exactly the same time. The more you look into Stoker's life, and the more you look at the people with whom he built friendships and working relationships, the more you begin to see the all-pervading air of Gothic drama that fed into Dracula.
Of course Dracula rather overshadows the rest of Stoker's work as an author. To some extent this is inevitable, it is, after all, by some distance his most powerful work. Even so his other novels deserve respect. In particular I have always had a soft spot for The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), a novel about an archaeologist's attempts to revive Queen Tera, an ancient Egyptian mummy. Like Dracula the novel offers valuable insights into fin-de-siècle themes such as the rise of the New Woman; Imperialism and the way in which the old world of tradition and superstition clashes with the new world of scientific progress. The book was also the basis for one of Hammer's finest and most under-rated movies - Blood from the Mummy's Tomb. The title may be daft, but with its striking lead performance by Valerie Leon and its distinctive visuals the film is most definitely a gem.
(The Jewel of Seven Stars - not as iconic as Dracula, but a fine book all the same)
There is, of course, plenty more to discover about Bram Stoker and Dracula in our major exhibition Terror and Wonder; and there is a wealth of information about Gothic novels and themes on the British Library's Discovering Literature website. There is also an opportunity to help conserve an iconic Gothic novel via Adopt a Book.
So, in conclusion, happy birthday Bram! For those of us who love Gothic literature he really was one of the finest exponents of the chilling tale and, on his birthday, perhaps we should raise a glass of something dark and red in his honour. Thank you for the novels, and thank you for all those dark, hauntingly beautiful memories.
03 September 2014
The Secret Life of Books (at the British Library)
A new series, which celebrates some of the most influential works of fiction, began yesterday evening on BBC Four.
‘The Secret Life of Books’ will examine original texts, manuscripts, letters and diaries to uncover the story behind the creation of six classic books. Look out for the British Library in the following six weeks of the series, as we examine Shakespeare’s First Folio with Simon Russell Beale (9 September), get an insight into Virginia Woolf’s writing of Mrs Dalloway with Alexandra Harris (16 September) and explore the childhood writings of Charlotte Bronte with Bidisha in the Jane Eyre episode (30 September) with my colleague, curator Helen Melody.
To mark the start of the series with the BBC, we opened up our doors and shot a special behind-the-scenes tour of of the Library's literature treasures for a short film on BBC Arts.
The first episode of ‘The Secret Life of Books’ was broadcast last night on BBC FOUR, and featured Great Expectations, presented by Tony Jordan.
For full programme details visit BBC Arts.
You can discover more treasures from the British Library’s literary collections, including works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, the Brontës and many more, on our Discovering Literature website.
15 August 2014
Living the Victorian Nightmare: The Damnation of Theron Ware
The Devil, so the theory goes, has the best tunes. In literature it is probably fair to say he also has the majority of the best books. Even when he doesn't take centre stage himself the Devil's calling cards - lust, envy, temptation, the lure of wealth and power - usually make for fascinating themes with which to drive forward plot and character. In such a diabolically crowded field it is hardly surprising that certain elegant Faustian tales have slipped through the net and fallen into undeserved obscurity. One such tale however, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) by the American author Harold Frederic is surely ripe for rediscovery. Not only is it an excellent story in itself, it also reveals a great deal about the anxieties, doubts and fears - as well as the glorious freedoms - of the Victorian fin de siècle. As a one-volume summation of troubling late-Victorian themes the book can hardly be bettered. After all, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) featured a meddling scientist; Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) depicted a man in thrall to his own brilliant potential and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) featured, in the figure of Lucy Westenra, a predatory New Woman capable of seducing men at the drop of a neat little handkerchief. The Damnation of Theron Ware, on the other hand, features all three.
(Above: the original cover for The Damnation of Theron Ware. If you only read one unfairly neglected masterpiece in your life, make it this one)
What makes The Damnation of Theron Ware so brilliantly perceptive is the way it plays upon doubt, temptation and the desire to experience the intoxicating pleasures of life to the full. In the course of his work as a Methodist pastor in small-town America Theron Ware comes into contact with people very different, and to his mind considerably more exciting than he is himself. Take Celia Madden for example (that's her on the cover above): flame-haired, free-spirited and stunningly beautiful. Unsurprisingly when Celia takes Theron back to her heavily-draped rooms full of religious art and erotic sculptures and plays him Chopin nocturnes on her piano he emerges, sometime later, bewitched, bothered, bewildered and besotted. The poor chap is never quite the same again: at one point he even has a mystical vision of Celia's face overlaid upon that of the Virgin Mary in a stained glass church window.
The Victorian attitude to the New Woman, the generic term for the independently-minded women who came to prominence in the 1880s and 1890s, was curiously contradictory. For her critics, who were by no means all male, she was stereotyped - in an extremely contradictory fashion - as either a mannish, child-hating lesbian or else as a sexually predatory vamp. Celia Madden, with her charm, charisma and disregard for convention, is the embodiment of the latter variety. Similarly Theron's encounter with the atheist scientist Dr Ledsmar, a man who performs sinister experiments upon his collection of lizards and bees and who dopes his Chinese manservant with increasingly heroic doses of laudanum simply to observe the consequences leaves Theron questioning his drearily out-dated notion of morality. The local Catholic priest, meanwhile, Father Forbes, has a very free take on theological doctrine which reduces Theron to feelings of hopeless inferiority. In his attempts to be more like his new friends Theron abandons the very traits - respect, decency, diligence - that first brought him success. In turn Celia Madden, Dr Ledsmar and Father Forbes find Theron's plays at being more progressive both feeble and embarrassing. Morality clashes with amorality; the past clashes with the future; small town America clashes with the birth of the modern and the desire to do good works for the many clashes with the pursuit of individual desire and pleasure.
(Above: Harold Frederic, barely-known author of unfairly-neglected masterpiece. Life can be cruel ...)
The English title for Harold Frederic's book was Illumination. The twist being that the 'illumination' Theron achieves comes at the cost of spiritual and moral decay and only serves to leave the surrounding darkness more profound. As a morality tale on the dangers of temptation it is a fine novel. As a depiction of fin de siècle fear, anxiety and hedonistic pleasure it is up there with the very best.
19 June 2014
Discover more about Jane Austen at the British Library
Jane Austen’s novels about life in Georgian England are now some of the most famous in the English language. The British Library holds two volumes of juvenilia created by Austen, a partial draft of Persuasion and a number of letters sent by the writer to her siblings. All of this material has been digitised as part of Discovering Literature along with contextual material such as published reviews of her work and a number of objects held at the Jane Austen House Museum.
The range of material on the website provides a real insight into both Austen’s life and her work. Austen was the seventh of eight children of Reverend George Austen and his wife, Cassandra Leigh. From an early age Austen wrote stories to amuse her family and friends. One example of this is her parody ‘The History of England’, a comic account of England from Henry IV to Charles I as told by ‘a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant historian’. Written when she was only 16 and including illustrations by her sister, Cassandra, it was a parody of published histories and in particular of the four volume The History of England from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II (1771) by Oliver Goldsmith. Cassandra’s sketches show the monarchs of England looking rather more like the common men and women than they would have wished with Henry VII looking particularly haggard!
It is in the juvenilia that we first find the energetic, spirited heroines who can be seen as precursors for later characters created by Austen such as Emma Woodhouse, Elizabeth Bennett and Marianne Dashwood.
The letters shed light on Austen’s life and her relationships with her numerous siblings including Cassandra and her beloved brother, Frank, who she described as ‘considerate & kind’. In addition to family news Austen often wrote about her work including Sense and Sensibility of which she said that ‘I am never too busy to think of S[ense]&S[ensibility]. I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child; & I am much obliged to you for your enquiries’. Interestingly Austen also made a note of other people’s comments on her work including her mother and sister. Cassandra liked Emma ‘better than P[ride]&P[rejudice] – but not so well as M[ansfield].P[ark]'.
Such comments and contextual information about Austen provides an insight into contemporary views of her work and is particularly striking as the original manuscripts for many of her most famous novels do not survive. Happily the Library does have a draft of chapters 10 and 11 of Persuasion. The closely written, heavily annotated manuscript illustrates Austen’s creative process and hopefully its inclusion on Discovering Literature will enable more people to see Austen’s writing for themselves.
In addition to Jane Austen related content on Discovering Literature anyone with a particular interest in Austen should also look at the website, Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts, created by Professor Kathryn Sutherland, which includes digitised copies of all surviving Austen manuscripts and interesting articles for researchers.
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