Untold lives blog

To celebrate the birth of the visionary poet and artist William Blake #onthisday in 1757, I’ve chosen to write about one of his most beautiful yet bleak poems, London.

    I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
    Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
    And mark in every face I meet
    Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

    In every cry of every Man,
    In every Infants cry of fear,
    In every voice: in every ban,
    The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

    How the Chimney-sweepers cry
    Every black’ning Church appals,
    And the hapless Soldiers sigh
    Runs in blood down Palace walls

    But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
    How the youthful Harlots curse
    Blasts the new-born Infants tear
    And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

I always seem to turn to this poem just after the clocks go back and London seems particularly dark, damp, busy and cold.

London was first drafted in 1792 and published in 1794 as part of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience which showed ‘two contrary states of the human soul’.

Title-page to Songs of Experience by William Blake, London, 1794. Plate 29. Relief etching with hand-colouring. British Museum 1856,0209.365.

The poem forces the reader to follow narrow, dark and unfriendly London streets while contemplating the brutal nature of the city. Streets and rivers alike are ordered by man, blackened churches loom while palace walls run with blood.  Soldiers sigh, harlots curse and babies cry: even the sounds described allude to desperation and woe. Blake’s London is a near-apocalyptic vision of the rotting heart of a nation.

The British Library owns the original manuscript for London which shows Blake developing the imagery within the poem. Here, Dr Linda Freeman explores the manuscript further.

The notebook of William Blake (Rossetti Manuscript) showing the draft of London in the upper left-hand corner. 1792. Add MS 49460.

The published poem was accompanied by one of Blake’s relief-etched illustrations which depicts a blind and aged man led by a small child. This version in the British Museum is hand-coloured and printed in a red-orange ink.

 
London, plate 46 from Songs of Experience by William Blake, London 1794.  Relief etching with hand-colouring. British Museum 1856,0209.382.

Blake’s place of burial is marked in Bunhill Fields which despite once being semi-rural, now sits between the financial district near Liverpool Street to the south and the oppressive Old Street roundabout to the north.

William and Catherine Blake’s gravestone in Bunhill Fields, London. Photograph taken by the author.

William Blake's London has inspired so many artists, writers and musicians but probably the most heart-breaking and beautiful example is Sparklehorse’s London of 1995. Sparklehorse was led by the musician Mark Linkous who tragically committed suicide in 2010. The combination of Blake’s words and Sparklehorse and Tuli Kupferberg's haunting melody bring the poem alive.

#WilliamBlake #London #OTD #OnThisDay #Sparklehorse #Linkous

Alexandra Ault, Curator, Modern Archives and Manuscripts 1601-1850 @AlexandraAult @BL_ModernMSS

Cats put in their first appearance early on in Animal Tales (our Entrance Hall exhibition running until 1 November 2015) in the shape of a wonderful doodle of a cat drawn by Pieter van Veen in the margin of his copy of the 1602 edition of Montaigne’s Essais.

Marginal picture of a man with a cat, drawn by Pieter van Veen in his copy of Montaigne’s Essais (Paris, 1602) British Library C.28.g.7. 

Then we have Nicola Bayley’s glowing double-spread illustration in Antonia Barber’s re-working of a Cornish tale, The Mousehole Cat, with the tiny image of Mowzer tossed about in a boat in the grip of the Great Storm-Cat, before we reach T.S. Eliot’s cats and SF Said’s Varjak Paw. I first heard about Varjak – rather than read about him – around seven years ago, listening in my car to a cassette borrowed from my local library. Varjak, a Mesopotamian Blue, has to leave the safety and comfort of his home, and find a dog (yes, a dog) to help his family. Said’s novel celebrates friendship and loyalty and, perhaps most of all, the willingness to be open to everyone and every experience. Beyond that, of course, it is a cracking story – with pace, action, adventure and tension, as Varjak bravely ventures forth and finds new friends and self-reliance - and the book itself is enhanced by Dave McKean’s striking illustrations.

   
SF Said, Varjak Paw. Oxford: David Fickling, 2003. Nov.2003/1912. Image © Dave McKean

As for T.S. Eliot and cats, there are three ways to encounter them in the exhibition – we are showing the opening of “The Song of the Jellicles” from the edition of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats illustrated by Nicolas Bentley in 1940 together with a letter Eliot wrote describing the way cats attach themselves to you and you can listen to him reading about Macavity on one of the sound points.

More menacing cats appear in an issue of Funny Aminals from 1972, the first appearance of Art Spiegelman’s portrayal of his parents’ experience of the Holocaust, and finally we include William Burroughs’ The Cat Inside (1986) – a melding of memory and story about cats.

Then there are all the ‘big cats’ – lions, tigers, leopards - but what of the cats that got away, the ones we couldn’t include?

You will all have your own favourites – but here are some of mine from children’s literature. First, Carbonel by Barbara Sleigh, originally published in 1955 and known to me in the late 1960s. Carbonel, a cat with a fine, disdainful, turn of phrase, is a usurped prince who meets his match, and his emancipator, in the person of Rosemary, whose wealth of imagination and tenacity make up for her lack of material riches. More recently, I have pored (should that be purred?) repeatedly with small children over the board-book publications featuring Judith Kerr’s Mog and we have enjoyed the antics of Six Dinner Sid by Inga Moore (the clue is in the title…).

Then, of course, there are Kathleen Hale’s Orlando, the Marmalade Cat, who first appeared in 1938, but continued to entertain throughout the Second World War and beyond, and Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat by Ursula Moray Williams, first published in 1942, both of whom I only encountered as an adult. The list seems endless – but what have I missed?

Alison Bailey
Lead Curator, Printed Heritage Collections 1901-2000

Animal Tales (7 August – 1 November 2015) curated by Matthew Shaw, Alison Bailey and Barbara Hawes
Full list of exhibits for Animal Tales

There are now two curators called Alex in the Modern Manuscripts and Archives department here at the British Library. One of us is a political historian looking after manuscripts from 1851-1950, the other is an art historian working with manuscripts between 1601-1850. We both get called 'The Other Alex' when colleagues are trying to differentiate between us.

Despite our historical leanings and the difficulties choosing just one item from our Manuscripts Collection to celebrate #NationalPoetryDay, we decided that as we both adore Samuel Taylor Coleridge's (1772-1834) Kubla Khan we would write a joint post about it. 

Add MS 50847 Fair Copy Manuscript of Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1797-1804.

In 1797 Coleridge was staying at Nether Stowey in Somerset near to his friends William and Dorothy Wordsworth with whom he took frequent walking tours in the surrounding countryside of the Quantocks. According to Coleridge in the published preface to the poem, it was during this time that he composed Kubla Khan. Whilst staying in a ‘lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton’ he took two grains of opium and fell asleep ‘in his chair’ while reading a copy of Purchas His Pilgrimage (1625). This four-volume compilation of travel narratives was written by the English clergyman Samuel Purchas (1577-1626) and contained historical, religious and geographical descriptions of China including  Xandu, the summer palace of the great Chinese Emperor and Mogol ruler, Kublai Khan (1215-1294). Purchas described Xandu as:

‘A marvellous and artificial Palace of Marble and other stones… In this inclosure or Parke are goodly Meadowes, springs, rivers, red and fallow Deere, Fawnes carried thither for the Hawkes… In the middest in a faire Wood hee hath built a royall House on pillars gilded and varnished, on every of which is a Dragon all gilt’.

According to Coleridge, these passages on Xandu inspired the vivid opium dream that followed and that would go on to form the basis of his poem. As he recollected in his preface, ‘he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimes': 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.'

Upon waking, he ‘instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines’ that were inspired by the dream:

‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.’

Before he was able to finish the poem, Coleridge was interrupted ‘by a person on business from Porlock’ and when he returned to his room his visions had ‘passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast’. Clearly, the opium had worn off. As a result the poem remains an unfinished fragment but it is sumptuously rich in its language, meter, and imagery.

Sadly, we don’t own the original manuscript that Coleridge wrote in his opium induced reverie, but the British Library does hold an early fair copy (a neat copy) of the manuscript containing some corrections and later revisions. Coleridge wrote this on two sides of blue-tinted paper, in preparation for sending to the printer. On the manuscript, beneath the poem, Coleridge has described how the poem came into being:

“This fragment with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed, in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium, taken to check a dysentery, at a Farm House between Porlock and Linton, a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church, in the fall of the year, 1797. S.T. Coleridge.”

Although Coleridge recited the poem in the presence of friends on several occasions, he did not publish it until nearly 20 years after its composition. It was Lord Byron who encouraged Coleridge in its publication and it was finally included in Poems (1816), in which Coleridge referred to it as ‘a psychological curiosity’. Despite taking so long to come to press, it has nevertheless become one of the nation’s favorite poems and we in the manuscripts department are very privileged to care for this unique document.

The British Library has an exciting and extensive collection of manuscripts by important British poets many of which have been digitised and include works by John Keats, William Wordsworth, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Alexander Lock, Curator, Modern Historical Manuscripts and Archives 1851-1950
Alexandra Ault, Curator, Modern Historical Manuscripts and Archives 1601-1850

Today is the 306th birthday of Samuel Johnson, compiler of A Dictionary of the English Language and poet and moralist. Johnson was born on 7 September 1709, but after the calendar was adjusted in 1752 he celebrated his birthday on 18 September. Actually 'celebrated' is too strong a word, because Johnson didn't like to be reminded of the passing years.  When his friend James Boswell reminded him of his impending birthday in 1773, Johnson wrote:

The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape. I can now look back upon threescore and four years, in which little has been done, and little has been enjoyed, a life diversified by misery, spent part in the sluggishness of penury, and part under the violence of pain, in gloomy discontent, or importunate distress.

    (from a letter to Hester Thrale, 21 September 1773)

Despite his gloomy thoughts, it was not the case that Johnson had achieved little. He had devoted nine years of his life to his dictionary; it was a brilliant achievement, and before it went to press his friends wanted his academic qualities to be recognised.  As a young man, Johnson had been to Pembroke College, Oxford, but he had not completed his studies and left without a degree.  His friends therefore approached the University of Oxford to seek a Master of Arts for Johnson. The university conferred the MA on Johnson in 1755 in recognition of his work on the dictionary. This was just in time for the letters ‘A.M’ to be added to the title page.

 
Title-page of Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). 70.i.12.  

The university went on to confer a doctorate on Johnson in 1775, which pleased him greatly.

Johnson’s MA diploma is now preserved in the British Library.  After his death it was owned by his friend and biographer James Boswell, and it came to the Library in 1910.

Samuel Johnson’s MA diploma, Add MS 38063 

Sandra Tuppen
Lead Curator Modern Archives & Manuscripts 1601-1850