Edward Lear (1812-1888) is best known for his nonsense verse for children, but letters recently acquired by the British Library (Add MS 89254) contain information about events in Lear’s real life, and demonstrate his letter writing capabilities. In 1873, Lear and his servant Giorgio Kokali ventured to India (partially for Lear’s health- he was suffering from bronchitis in a rainy London winter). They travelled the width of India and the length of the subcontinent, before settling in San Remo where Lear worked on his Indian commissions: ornithological and landscape paintings for Lord Northbrook. During this time, he wrote letters to his friend, Lady Mary Wyatt, wife of Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt, architect and art critic.

The period which these letters come from pre-date the financial insecurities which plagued Lear’s later years. These letters comprise correspondence pertaining to real events, for example Lear’s wishes that Lady Wyatt’s husband recovers from a minor illness, alongside a healthy dose of nonsense. One describes an ‘accurate history’ of the tale of 401 cows and 183 dogs. Upon hearing the cries ‘the 401 cows filled the ambient air with their laments… numbers of the cows not only shed tears, but that the little dogs actually dried their eyes with their tails’. The figures of the cows and dogs can be seen drawn on the letter in ink, in a similar style to the illustrations for Lear’s other nonsense works.

The letter from 24 January 1874 includes many puns, which Lear has underlined:

 ‘I shall send Digby no Delhineations of Delhi, not having been there- nor of Agra- for it would only Agravate him, & he would Be-neer-as happy as he was before… If you had but seen the Elephums & me ariding a top of one! (Which I would not do, as it was in the procession, & I thought it I might be sick just as I came up to the Viceroy)…’

His nonsensical letters also reference Tennyson in relation to the chaotic community of 183 dogs and 74 calves, whilst punning on various words for cattle:

‘All at once the 183 little dogs by a Nimpulse, swam across the swollen flood, warbling in chorus the beautiful words of the poet, ‘Flow down cold revulet to the sea’ – &c &c, – till on reaching the 74 calves they seized their noses, ears, & tails, and… dragged the whole party to the shingly banks of the shore opposite where their almost despairing parients, cowed by their recent affliction and bullied by the impendious oxident which had occurred, were heiferlastingly stamping in the melancholy mud’.

Whilst some may think these letters unreadable out of their original context, it is probably more enjoyable to embrace them as a case of the crossover between the Lear’s real life and his nonsense. They capture Lear’s delight in wordplay and nonsense, which span his works, both literary and epistolary.

by Emily Montford, Modern Archives and Manuscripts Intern

To mark International Zines Day we have a guest post by Michael Nicholson about his 'bio auto graphic' series, recently added to the Library's collections.  The Library collects a very wide range of zines and other independent publications, and we are keen to raise the profile of zines in the Library.  Zines have real value for social and artistic research; they can be an inspiration to others looking to write or create their own publications; they can be a space for sharing issues and experiences where readers can find support; or they can work as part of a force for change, contributing to networks and activism. This post gives an insight into the context and motivation for producing the 'bio auto graphic' series.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My name is Michael Nicholson and I draw pictures alongside words I write.

Since 2004 I have created an entirely subjective response to what I see and hear around me in the form of pictures and words, held in a series of self-published editions that many think of as zines.  The work – most recently collected by the British Library I am delighted to say – has been exhibited, collected and purchased around the world. People have said some kind things about it.

The tension between contradictory things gives the series energy; I grew up in the Lake District but chose to live in London; I trained as an illustrator but actually begin the creative process most commonly by writing; I relish company but also solitude.  The core fact of my life – that I am an only child – first allowed me to maintain a safety perimeter between my self and what I see around me. A blast-zone beyond which I am free to observe, assess and consider options before deciding on the right moment to step closer. I like time to think.

 My imaginative life really began with books. The allure of storytelling hooked me very early, as I could read before I went to infant school.  Mere words in a certain order on a page carry an extraordinary potency, and the conventional book format – allegedly diluted by digital usurpers – remains elegant and profoundly interactive (to shamelessly appropriate a bloodless modern term).  Immersion in a new book, either in the company of a familiar author or while getting to know an unknown one, remains a delight.

I wanted to tell stories, having realized I could draw, and images – in the televisual age that was my 1960s childhood – then swirled around my head along with words. Simplistic notions of morality and relationships embedded themselves from a variety of sources: J.P. Martin’s exquisite, subversively English ‘Uncle’ series (illustrated by Quentin Blake) and the giddy Manhattan of Stan Lee’s ‘Marvel Comics’, to the spinning police box of Patrick Troughton’s ‘Doctor Who’ and the sinister hills and woods of Tove Jansson’s ‘Moominland’.  Well-crafted stories with characters to care about, whether they be in Milch & Bochco’s ’NYPD: Blue’, Phil Rickman’s excellent ‘Merrily Watkins’ series or David Mitchell’s ‘The Bone Clocks’, continue to involve me to this day.

What some regard as the dubious lowlands of popular culture always enticed me, and the irreverence of comedy in particular led me to the cheap seats. A sense of humour inspired me, whether it be ‘Monty Python’, Spike Milligan’s war memoirs, the bracing stand-up sermons of the late Bill Hicks or the current withering asides of Stewart Lee. Realising the absurdity of institutions, elites and ourselves - and pointing it out in ways that allow similarly helpless people to laugh at it - is an intelligent coping mechanism. Can laughter topple dictators? Comedy can be visionary, and those who do it wordsmiths and pioneers in my opinion, from Stan and Ollie to Jacques Tati and Tommy Cooper, Les Dawson and Victoria Wood.  Cruelty makes for easy comedy, but it’s the humanity in it that is most memorable.

All these factors shape me; how I see the world, how I step forward to meet it, how I step back to regroup after a blow.   How I phrase what I draw and write in ‘bio auto graphic’.  It was a challenge to tell the story closest to home, but humour helped.

Having worked professionally as an illustrator since graduating from St. Martins School of Art in 1985 – and also as a storyboard artist in TV and film from the early 1990s – by the 2000s I was ready to set out my own ideas instead of interpreting those of others.  It was time to act, in fact, and words as well as pictures would be my tools in doing so.

Having begun to exhibit early work at artists’ book fairs with my partner Mette Ambeck, I produced what I called ‘Issue Zero’ of a strand of editions based on my own life, an idea first suggested to me by a friend, comedy writer/performer Charlie Higson, in a serious moment.

I called the series ‘bio auto graphic’ (lower case, yes) and it was A5 size, produced from A4 artwork of inked pencil line and entirely hand-lettered, without colour. Two staples held an issue together. In this way it was positioned on a through-line from the simplest of medieval chapbooks to – though it was several years before I realised this – what are called ‘zines’ (these being the product of intense enthusiasm and low budgets, cheaply produced and direct in format).  Being the equivalent of a 17^th century door-to-door chap book salesman appealed to me. I liked the sheer chance involved in some complete stranger coming up to the table and finding the work.

Stylistically, I adopted some of the conventions of my beloved childhood comic books (speech balloons and frames) but also drew vague influence from concrete poetry and the power of spoken language, overheard conversations, the beat and repetition of joke-telling, verbal double-meanings and the unsettling damp hand of our dreams.  The overall visual approach across the series to date is fluid, responsive to whatever the current theme is, loose enough to try new approaches in composition or format.  Pages lack the confinement of a dense field of ‘panels’, and narrative can be achieved via the creation of a cumulative mood rather than a strictly sequential ‘story’.

Whether in stand-alone issues, or in linked sequences, the editions explore all manner of threads; identity and how it changes; the things that bind and separate us as communities; being fictional or factual; the local and the global.  My mood obviously impacts upon what the reader sees, and the series can be variously angry, bemused, confused, sad, obscure and joyous.  It has certainly helped me chart the blind spots in what I think and who I think I am - and I gladly align it to the notion of the personal as the political.  I am in the process of identifying as myself.

 

 

Hugely influential practitioners in this diaristic field exist, and my own influences certainly include Will Eisner, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Harvey Pekar, Eddie Campbell and Joe Sacco.  Of course, while this list doesn’t reflect it, the notion of strip artwork that draws from life – and zines reflecting it – has also been a strong thread through the recent decades of feminist thought.

The experience continues to satisfy, and there’s genuine anticipation and excitement when I begin to fill in a workbook page, not generally knowing where things will lead. Later the not knowing is replaced by the knowing as things are completed.

Am I merely navel-gazing? Quite possibly, but amidst the increasing velocity of our society I realize I am determined to fight a corner for a quiet reflective voice, away from the bear pit of anti-social media. I don’t have a faith in God, and science can sometimes reflect the hubris of humankind far too easily.

I do meanwhile have a faith in what best expresses our flawed state of being: small actions, gentle kindnesses, connections, hopes and occasional braveries, to which the series bears witness.

We are told what can make us happy every waking moment by the media-sphere – and usually at a price – but I suspect it is a lot simpler than that.

Look in the mirror and ask the person you see: ‘What makes you really happy?’

These editions that I make are zines, episodes in my life, a map, a window and a mirror.

If you said that ‘bio auto graphic’ is about finding what makes us happy, there might be some truth in that.

 

Related sites: Ensixteen Editions blog.

 

 Michael Nicholson 2017

 

 

The tag line for the British Library’s Gay UK exhibition is ‘Love, Law and Liberty’. One could add another ‘L’ to the alliterative list and make the tag ‘Love, Law, Liberty and Literature’. Literature, and the way it has been used for and against the gay community is a revealing thread running throughout the show. The very first display case in the exhibition examines the downfall of Oscar Wilde and the way his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray – fit for ‘none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys’ in the words of one reviewer – was used against him during his trial for gross indecency. Wilde himself realised he had gone too far in the original version of the story, published in Lippincott’s Magazine in the summer of 1890, and for the first novel publication in 1891 he rewrote the book. In the new version the passionate expressions of Dorian, Basil Hallwood and Sir Henry Wotton are recast in aesthetic terms, removing the original’s emphasis on male relationships. The damage was done though and in the eyes of the prosecution lawyers the Lippincott’s version revealed Wilde’s true, criminal, nature. He was, in their eyes, condemned by his own work.

(Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, July 1890. The first appearance of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray in print)

This need to either rewrite a novel, or to modify it in order to avoid moral outrage (or indeed to not publish it at all, as E. M Forster did with Maurice) is a common theme. Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) was prosecuted for obscenity, and banned, almost as soon as it appeared. By today’s standards the novel is tame but the line ‘and that night, they were not divided’, which referred to two women, was enough to have James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express, raging with disgust. He wrote: ‘I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel’. Further comments by Douglas made a direct link back to Oscar Wilde and the decadence that was a key part of the Victorian fin de siècle – ‘It is a seductive and insidious piece of special pleading designed to display perverted decadence as a martyrdom inflicted upon these outcasts by a cruel society. It flings a veil of sentiment over their depravity.’ The trial caused a sensation, with both sides being easy prey for satirists.

(An illustration by Beresford Egan for The Sink of Solitude (1928), a satire on Radclyffe Hall, her novel and the case brought against her book. Hall is being martyred on the cross; the Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks looks on; Cupid makes an insulting gesture and Sappho leaps joyously across the centre).

Perhaps Radclyffe Hall’s real offence was to root lesbianism in the English countryside, as much a fixture as the fox hunt and the Saturday-to-Monday house party. She drew attention to it and she defended it. Just as she pointed out and defended the fact that many women ambulance drivers on the Western Front during WWI had been lesbians. This was something a large part of the establishment did not wish to hear; it didn’t tie in with their old-style vision of muscular Christianity and their sense of order.

This open hostility towards literature that addressed gay life lasted well into the 20^th century. Terence Rattigan conceived his play The Deep Blue Sea (1952) as a one-act piece revolving around a love affair between two men. Knowing this would never get past the censors however he had little option but to place a heterosexual relationship at the play’s heart if it was to be performed. A few years later however things were beginning to change. Following the publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957, which recommended the decriminalization of homosexuality, and the subsequent rise in campaign movements and pressure groups such as the Homosexual Law Reform Society, attitudes were finally starting to relax. On 31^st October 1958 the Lord Chamberlain issued a memorandum to his staff stating that plays about homosexuality, or including homosexual characters would no longer be subject to an automatic ban. The language of the document is grudging and of its time (“We will not allow embraces between males or practical demonstrations of love”) but all the same it was progress and plays like Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958) soon brought sympathetic portrayals of gay men and women to the London stage.

 

(Lord Chamberlain's memorandum from 31st October 1958 outlining what can, and what cannot, be permitted on the stage with regard to the portrayal of homosexuality)

Although the pace of change has been gradual the positive advance in attitudes over the twentieth century is encouraging. Seventy years after the banning of The Well of Loneliness Sarah Waters’ novel Tipping the Velvet (1998) achieved impressive sales and critical acclaim. A racy television adaptation was broadcast four years later. Waters’ novel is immeasurably more daring in its depiction of lesbianism than The Well of Loneliness. It is graphic, sexy, bold, joyous and brilliant. The fact it was also available to buy in high-street bookshops and to borrow from libraries up and down the country is indicative of how far attitudes towards same-sex relationships have progressed since the dark days of Oscar Wilde and Radclyffe Hall.

Gay UK: Love, Law and Liberty runs until 19th September 2017. The events programme to accompany the exhibition can be seen here.

 

 

by Jerry Jenkins, Curator of Emerging Media, Contemporary British Printed Collections

It won’t be long until the Infinite Library Summer School. In preparation for this I’m considering choices. What will I speak about? Where will my session led?  How should I introduce my subject?  What is too much?, Where to begin?  

When I say considering choices, what I actually mean is I am considering how narratives take twists and turns, and how great stories can pivot on a single choice which leads the protagonist to the enviable ending. Do these so called choices actually influence the destination or simply the route?

The Infinite Library

In literary crime and historical fiction the doctoring of the historical narrative as a device often used to present a rich fictional world in which characters meander through historical events into fictional events. Two such examples constructed around an alternate history of the Second World War are SS-GB by Len Deighton and Richard Harris’s Fatherland.  Such a literary method opens an avenue of free agency for the personae dramatica allowing them to operate in an alternative universe, but one which is tied to recognised conventions of good and evil.   

A fundamental of shifting the lens from the historical is under pinning its transition of familiar waypoints in a recognisable environment.  For instance Harris references Albert Speer’s architectural plans and models of a post war reconstruction of Berlin when his fictional protagonist Xavier March travels around the composite Berlin of 1964 in the course of his investigations. Harris himself describes Fatherland as a ‘huge geopolitical "what if"’ thereby raising wider questions relevant historical questions by using alternate history.  

Map of Berlin 1964 from the 1993 edition of Fatherland interesting  the first edition does not contain this map.     

In making these choices and blending the historical and the fictional it is possible to take the next logical step and give the reader agency in the creative process.  One of the finest examples of this is 80 Days, by innovative Cambridge based games developer, Inkle. They completely reimagined Jules Verne’s travelogue classic Around the World in Eighty Days.  This work literally puts the reader in the driving seat for a trans-continental race against time.  Where the reader is presented with a range of choices on how to proceed, who to interact with and what to read within the narrative.

Over recent years the British Library has taken an interest in interactive works; as part of last year’s International Games Day @ your library (now International Games Week for 2018) we hosted a WordPlay festival, to showcase of some of the best current international interactive fiction and earlier this year, as part of the London Games Festival fringe, we ran Off the Page: Literature and Games, looking at how the fictional worlds of our favourite novels and plays are represented in games and in return what games bring to the written word.

The Wondering Lands of Alice by Off Our Rockers

Continuing on from these initiatives, next month, the Library is teaming up with award winning poet Abigail Parry to run an Interactive Fiction Summer School. So if you have aspirations to lead your readers down the rabbit hole of the infinite library into stories where they choose the outcome, then you may wish to drink me….

  

UNDERCURRENT THEATRE ANNOUNCED AS BRITISH LIBRARY’S FIRST ASSOCIATE THEATRE COMPANY

Undercurrent Theatre are an innovative and research based London theatre company, who have today been announced as the British Library’s first Associate Theatre Company. In a year-long residency, the Associateship will open up the British Library’s unparalleled collections to a diverse range of users, through innovative engagement with the Library’s public, cultural and creative audiences. Working closely with Library curators, Undercurrent Theatre plan to facilitate and generate new cross-cultural opportunities.

Laura Farnworth, photographed by Sophie Cornell

Undercurrent will research eight topics whilst in residence and host opportunities for artists to delve into this research, opening up the possibility of future partnerships. It is our aim that this research will not only lead to new productions for Undercurrent, but will also be a source of inspiration for many other artists in developing creative projects. The residency will culminate in mid 2018 with two public performance events at the British Library.

The partnership began in 2016 with the critically acclaimed production ‘Calculating Kindness’. This production was researched over three years using the personal archives of evolutionary biologists George Price and W.D. Hamilton archives which are held at the Library. The play brought to the public the little known true story of George Price, and inspired Price’s own daughters to donate further papers of their father to the British Library and travel to the UK to lay a headstone at his previously unmarked grave. The play ran at the Camden People’s Theatre in London to excellent reviews and plans for a wider tour are currently in progress.

Calculating Kindness, photographed by Richard Davenport

Roly Keating, the British Library’s Chief Executive, said: “We are thrilled to welcome Undercurrent Theatre as our first Associate Theatre Company, following our previous successful collaboration on Calculating Kindness last year. We are committed to exploring the rich potential of the Library’s collections as sites of creative inspiration and are hugely looking forward to working with Undercurrent, through this Associateship, to continue opening up the Library and its collections to new audiences and communities.”

Undercurrent Theatre Artistic Director Laura Farnworth said: “We are delighted to be starting this residency at the British Library. As a company our mission is to uncover and explore extraordinary stories. We see the British Library as the home of all stories, and can’t imagine a better place to reside and be inspired to create future work for new audiences.”

Undercurrent Theatre Executive Producer Sophie Cornell said: “This Associateship and support from Arts Council England allows us precious artistic research time, which is so often over-looked and under-funded. This will ensure we can reach out into the artistic community and test a research-residency model.”

Undercurrent is a London-based theatre company who unearth extraordinary real life stories with fearless imagination. They gather oceans of material which are interrogated, filtered and moulded into exhilarating and aesthetically bold experiences for audiences across the U.K. Specialising in research-based performance, Undercurrent’s artistic process centres around a piece of rigorous research and includes weeks of development time which brings the design team into the heart of the collaborative process. 

Follow the residency @uk_undercurrent, or by signing up to Undercurrent’s mailing list www.undercurrent-uk.com/mailing-list

Jerry Jenkins, Curator of Contemporary British Published Collections writes:

Recently, I was transported far away from my open plan office, by the vivid work of the renowned book artist Natalie d’Arbeloff.

D’Arbeloff was born in Paris of Russo-French parentage. Since settling in London her career has spanned five decades during which she has worked as a painter, printmaker, book-artist, cartoonist and teacher.

Being a novice in the area of artist’s books it is was a great pleasure to meet the artist and to be introduced personally to Natalie’s work. Something extra is added to the interaction when it occurs in person. This was very evident in March when Natalie visited us in the British Library. During her visit she outlined some of the techniques in her printing processes that went into her work. As she presented her works to myself and fellow curators the books seemed to come alive. There was a growing air of excitement in the room.

Seventh of seven poems and etchings from  For a Song.

Everything about the work entitled For a Song intimates accessibility. The texture of the book and its size, being a compact sixteen and a half centimetres square nestles comfortably in your palms. The finely honed poetry all draws you closer and closer into this work. Often inner spaces are so firmly shut away for fear of having those delicate feelings trampled and crushed. Between the soft tactile boards of the full leather binding we are confronted with the raw courage, though gentle language of seven love poems.  These are accompanied by the soft flowing lines of etchings printed in intaglio and relief. The verse is set in juxtaposition with the technique. The text was engraved with a power tool on metal plates before being printed in relief.

Full leather binding of For a Song with blind–embossed panels in a velvet–lined  box.

The title page  of  The Creation from the Book of Enoch (Five and a Half Hours in Paradise)

Published in 1992, The Creation from the Book of Enoch (Five and a Half Hours in Paradise) (copy 9 of 12) consists of twenty loose double leaves printed black from sugar–lift and aquatint plates. This technique enhances the letter press giving it a commanding presence on the page drawing the eye into the starkness.

Double leaf from The Creation from  the Book of Enoch (five and a half  hours in Paradise)  the Garden of Eden. 

Fungus & Curmudgeonly, a title which I cannot say without a chuckle, excites me on a number of levels.  Pointedly a mix of media, the clear comparison for me is with works such as Heuristic Media’s app version of Shakespeare’s Tempest, where it is possible to follow the text while actors, including Sir Ian McKellen, perform the play.  This offers an aural immersion into the play along with the performance.

Fungus and Curmudgeonly is a play by Simon Meyerson illustrated by Natalie d'Arbeloff. It was first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1976 then following that in Stratford-upon-Avon at the Macbeth Room of the Shakespeare Hotel in 1977. Our copy is presented in a maroon cloth-covered double slipcase which incorporates the cassette with a recording of the play with Charles Turner reading the role of Fungus, ageing Shakespearian super-star, and Jack LeWhite as Curmudgeonly, his understudy. 

Fungus & Curmudgeonly with its maroon cloth-covered double slipcase incorporating the cassette.

The ingenuity of the slip case brings two mediums together in one object providing a practical yet pleasingly simple way to present the work.  

 These and other works of Natalie d’Arbeloff are accessible through Explore the British Library. The internet provides an additional rabbit hole of exploration of d’Arbeloff’s work through her comprehensive collection of web pages which explore many aspects of her work.  

Images are reproduced with the kind permission of  Natalie d’Arbeloff.

Bibliography

For a Song: General Reference Collection RF.2017.a.10

Fungus & Curmudgeonly General Reference Collection EMD.2017.b.8

 

 Chris Beckett writes:

Shock greeted the publication of J. G. Ballard’s Crash in 1973. Cult status quickly followed. Today, the novel is widely considered to be a modern classic, a novel that speaks both of its time – the darkening close of a decade of colourful liberation – and speaks dystopically to us today, connected yet disconnected as we are in a time of digital narcissism, detached 21^st century voyeurs of pleasure and horror at the touch of a screen. Meanwhile, traffic increases – hurtling towards the limits of catastrophic systems failure – by road, and by what used to be called the information super highway. Is Ballard’s novel a Swiftian satire, a ‘cautionary tale’, as the author suggested, or is it, as he also characterised his novel – as if to evoke de Sade – a ‘psychopathic hymn’? Ballard maintained both positions at different times. The novel’s enduring qualities are connected to its moral ambivalence, an ambivalence that is deeply embedded in a richly layered text that resists closure.

Add MS 88938/3/8/1.

There are two drafts of the novel in Ballard’s papers at the British Library, both revised and annotated, intensively so in the case of the earlier draft. This is how the earlier draft begins:

Add MS 88938/3/8/1.

The first sentence of the typescript will remain unchanged (surely echoing the opening of Camus’s L’Etranger): ‘Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash’. Ballard’s novel is a dark conjugation of its opening sentence. The sentence ominously suggests a series of (deliberate) crashes where we expect to read of a single accidental event. But the top left corner of the page, the note in black ink struck-through in red, is where the page as manuscript page begins, with the sketching of a generic setting for Ballard’s writing of the period, the Road Research Laboratory where V[aughan] works: ‘At the RRL at night with girl – they make love as he talks about V., among the wrecks’.

But neither the drafts nor the final form of words – where the text comes to rest, held in creative tension – exist purely, however distinctive, however novel the novel seems. So where did Crash spring from? What is the history of the text?  How is the novel connected to what came before? What else was Ballard writing during the same period?

 I have just edited a new edition of Crash that tries to address these text-led questions by supplementing the familiar published text of the novel with generous selections of unpublished archive material. Crash: The Collector’s Edition (4^th Estate, 2017) places the novel in its writing context. Five chapters in draft are set within the novel. In addition, there are selected stories – the predecessor ‘condensed novels’ – from The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), and Ballard’s two ‘surgical fictions’ (a mammoplasty for Mae West and a face lift for Princess Margaret).

 The new edition also publishes for the first time Ballard’s draft script for the BBC short film Crash! (broadcast BBC2, 12 February 1971), directed by Harley Cokeliss. Ballard appears in the film alongside a mysterious female figure (played by Gabrielle Drake) whose enigmatic presence punctuates the collagist visual essay. She appears and disappears, sometimes inside the car, sometimes in the middle distance. She gets out of a new car in a car showroom, then lingers among the car wrecks at the breaker’s yard. We see the contours of her body in the shower dissolving into the curved forms of a car body, and we see her slumped across a steering wheel, her face bloodied from a collision. The film was made (in the winter of 1970) between writing the first and second drafts of the novel. Its stylised visual language informs Ballard’s final text. The film is a bridgework that looks back to The Atrocity Exhibition (the following passage from the draft script is taken from ‘The Summer Cannibals’), and looks forward to the emerging novel:

Add MS 89171/1.

The earlier draft of Crash is a remarkable document that conveys something of the intensity and the spontaneity of composition. The manuscript is layered over time by the strata of three-coloured revision: annotation-deposits in black and blue and red ink in the margins and over on the backs of pages. The inks codify the rhythms of writing and revision, rhythms that oscillate within the Crash manuscripts, from the drafts to the final text, and oscillate as well, as Ballard pursues his traumatised subject, in the cross-currents of his contemporaneous writing.

For further reading about Crash in draft, see Chris Beckett, ‘The Opening of Crash in Slow Motion’ on the British Library Discovering Literature site: https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/the-opening-of-crash-in-slow-motion

Oh, what a tangled web we weave When first we practise to deceive!

These famous lines from Walter Scott’s poem Marmion (1808) might perfectly describe the plot of Kenilworth (1821), the Scottish author’s historical novel of intrigue and deception set in Elizabethan England. Piecing together Scott’s original manuscript for Kenilworth is also a tangled task. The British Library has recently acquired two leaves of the manuscript, numbered 14 and 15 in Scott’s hand (now Add MS 89229). The larger part of the manuscript (Egerton MS 1661) has been in the British Library’s collections since 1855.

A mounted note bound within the newly acquired volume states: 'Part of the original ms. of Kenilworth given to me Edmond Logan by John Ballantine'. John Ballantyne, Scott’s editor and printer, must have given the leaves to the Scottish-Canadian geologist soon after the novel was printed because he died six months later on 16 June 1821. The volume has been in private collections since then and was purchased by the British Library with a generous grant from the Friends of the British Library at an auction in New York in March.

Engraving of a portrait of Scott, by A. Wivel, after C. Picart, 1824. The portrait faces the title page in the volume of two manuscript leaves of Kenilworth, Add MS 89229, f. 2v.

Kenilworth opens in a drinking establishment, namely Giles Gosling’s Bonny Black Bear. Michael Lambourne has just returned from his travels and is unable to shake off a bad reputation for the misdemeanours and drunkenness that characterised his youth. He wagers with the other guests that he can gain entry to Cumnor Place, a nearby manor, where it is rumoured that a beautiful young woman is being kept captive. Edmund Tressilian accompanies Lambourne to Cumnor Place. The two leaves of the manuscript describe Lambourne’s encounter with the steward of Cumnor Place, Anthony Foster, at the end of chapter three and beginning of chapter four.

The first of the two leaves, numbered 14 by Scott, British Library shelfmark: Add MS 89229, f. 5.

On the second leaf (numbered 15), Lambourne reminds Foster of the convenience of the ‘old religion’ (Catholicism) for villains:

Do I not remember how you were wont to carry your confessio conscience to confession as duly as the [night] ^month^ came round & when thou hadst had it scoured and burnished and white washed by the priest thou wert every ready for the worst villainy which could be devised (page 15, lines 7-10)

The second of the two leaves, numbered 15 by Scott, British Library shelfmark: Add MS 89229, f. 6.

The leaves fill the gap in the manuscript between pages 3 to 13 held by Edinburgh University Library and the larger part of the manuscript, which begins at page 16.

The editors of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels returned to Scott’s manuscript as well as the first edition when creating a critical edition (Edinburgh University Press, 1993). Many changes were made between the manuscript and the first edition. Some of the changes were intentional and authorised by Scott, such as the introduction of punctuation and the correction of grammatical errors. Mistakes were introduced, however, in the interpretation of Scott’s densely packed handwriting as the publishers and compositors (typesetters) rushed to get Scott’s novel to the press as quickly as possible.

Kenilworth was published in Edinburgh on 15 January 1821 and in London on 18 January, only four months after Scott started writing it. Eight of the numbered leaves remain unaccounted for. It is probable that the leaves have never been together as a whole manuscript, as Scott sent completed parts of the manuscript to Ballantyne while he was writing the novel.

By Catherine Angerson, Curator, Modern Archives and Manuscripts

19 January 2018: This blog has been edited to change the number of leaves unaccounted for from thirteen to eight.  Three further leaves were located in the collection at Veste Coburg, Germany and two leaves in a private collection. See: ‘Addenda and Corrigenda’, Sir Walter Scott, Introductions and Notes from the Magnum Opus: Ivanhoe to Castle Dangerous, ed. by J. H. Alexander (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 733-761 (pp. 737-738).

Further reading:

‘Essay on the Text’, in Walter Scott, Kenilworth: A Romance, ed. by J. H. Alexander (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), pp. 395–432