The London Library Magazine Issue 33 Autumn 2016

MAGAZINE AUTUMN 2016 ISSUE 33

ÂŁ3.50

hidden corners

Christina Hardyment explores the Library’s holdings on the River Thames

power and prejudice The Victorian circulation libraries and their strict moral code, by Eileen Horne

JUST THE WORD

Robin Blake on getting the language right for his historical novels

JULES VERNE Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 1873 First American edition, first issue

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The London Library Magazine / issue 33

14 Robin Blake’s crime novels are set in the same decade that Johnson began work on his dictionary. In his search for the right words, Blake relies heavily on this prime authority, as well as more surprising models, such as contemporary pornographic writers of the period.

Contents 7 FROM THE chairman 8 Contributors Engraving of Samuel Johnson from A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), 1785 edition.

18 The poet Nick Drake describes his collaboration with United Visual Artists to create a light sculpture for the Paddington Central development inspired

by Alan Turing’s ideas and legacy. This unique poem is ‘fed’ into a computer algorithm so that passers-by can watch a machine ‘think’ like a poet.

The French orientalist and travel writer Louis Felicien de Saulcy inspired a character in Michael Arditti’s forthcoming novel

14 just the word

Alan Turing in Guildford, 1934. Image courtesy King’s College Library, Cambridge.

A look at some of the oddities and surprises the historical novelist Robin Blake has come across while researching contemporary vocabulary

18 message from the unseen world Nick Drake on his latest poem, part of a remarkable art installation that pays tribute to Alan Turing

22 power and prejudice ‘Circulating morals’ in Victorian England by Eileen Horne

26 hidden corners Circulating Library and Reading Room, Bath.

26 The remarkable prose, poetry and illustration inspired by the River Thames over the centuries are reflected in the Library’s books on the subject. Christina Hardyment has spent many years sailing and punting on the river and offers her highlights of the Library’s collections.

Jessie Childs tracked down some fascinating Library books on Elizabethan Catholics for her famiy saga God’s Traitors

13 MY DISCOVERY

22 Mudie’s Select Library boasted that a Mudie’s novel would contain ‘nothing of objectionable character’ to offend women’s sensibilities. George Moore’s bohemian novel A Modern Lover (1883) was blacklisted by the circulating library, and Eileen Horne relates the story of the writer’s furious and public revenge.

10 BEHIND THE BOOK

Christina Hardyment on her pick of the Library’s literature on the River Thames

31 MEMBERS’ NEWS

Illustration of Alexander Pope’s villa, Twickenham, from John Fisher Murray’s A Picturesque Tour of the River Thames in its Western Course (1845).

p

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5

The Long, Long Life of Trees A Little History of Religion

The Edge of Reason

Fiona Stafford

Richard Holloway

A Rational Skeptic in an Irrational World

A lyrical tribute to the diversity of trees, their physical beauty, their special characteristics and uses and their everevolving meanings.

For curious readers young and old, a rich and colourful history of religion from humanity’s earliest days to our own contentious times.

Julian Baggini

‘Elegant, engaging, impeccably written and packed with interest.’ – John Carey, The Sunday Times

‘His is a mind too large, too curious and far too generous to be confined within any single religious denomination.’

– Philip Pullman

‘Julian Baggini has written a masterpiece, and what a timely masterpiece it is.’

– Patricia S. Churchland, author of Touching a Nerve: Our Brains, Our Selves

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The Maisky Diaries

Medieval Europe

The Voynich Manuscript

The Wartime Revelations of Stalin’s Ambassador in London

Chris Wickham

Raymond Clemens

A spirited and thought-provoking history of the vast changes that transformed Europe during the 1,000-year span of the Middle Ages.

With an Introduction by Deborah Harkness

Edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky

Highlights of the extraordinary wartime diaries of Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to London from 1932–1943.

An urgent defense of reason, the essential method for resolving – or even discussing – divisive issues.

Explore firsthand the world’s most mysterious book, the Voynich Manuscript.

‘A fascinating, rich volume, brimming over with insights.’ – Niall Ferguson

‘Fascinating, judicious, authoritative: by far the best single book about the Middle Ages.’ – Paul Freedman, author of Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination

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from the CHAIRMAN

On the cover

Oxfordshire photographer and mapmaker Henry Taunt on his houseboat, which is topped by a camera on a tripod, 1895 (detail). From Christina Hardyment’s Writing the Thames (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2016), image courtesy of Bodleian Library, Oxford.

It is a pleasure, as a still – quite – new Chair of the Trustees, to introduce this latest edition of the London Library Magazine.

In the financial markets, where I have a day job, we talk of share prices following a ‘random walk’ with, over time, a very gradual tendency to rise. The term could also be used to describe the pleasures of losing oneself in the Library stacks.

Jessie Childs recalls a similar experience in her Behind the Book piece, when she talks of ‘Faustian fossicking’ in S. Devil &c., where she found material for God’s Traitors, her recent book on Catholics in Elizabethan England. Michael Arditti stumbled on the inspiration for his forthcoming novel Of Men and Angels in Topography, as he explains in My Discovery.

Christina Hardyment, in her Hidden Corners piece on the Library’s collection of books on the Thames, quotes Horace Walpole’s description of random encounters. His princes of Serendip ‘make discoveries, by accident and sagacity’ , of things they were ‘not quite in quest of’ , while Eileen Horne, who writes on the circulating libraries in Victorian Britain, describes finding a tattered copy of The Catcher in the Rye on a bench in Hyde Park. Robin Blake compares the OED with ‘a garden of forking paths leading from word to word in an odyssey that draws you ever further from the one you began with’ . By contrast, Nick Drake, in his tribute to Alan Turing, celebrates a man whose great contribution to our national life was to find patterns in randomness, which allowed us to read the Germans’ Enigma messages and win the Battle of the Atlantic.

I hope that a random walk through these pages will throw up many similarly interesting encounters. I look forward to seeing you at the Library’s 175th AGM at 6pm on Wednesday, 9 November. Do join us in the Issue Hall for a drink before the meeting.

Howard Davies Chairman

Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec.

Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 7 September 2016 © 2016 The London Library. ISSN 2398-4201 The opinions in this particular publication do not necessarily reflect the views of The London Library.

All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication.

Editorial Publishers Jane Grylls and Kim Jenner Editor Mary Scott Design and production Catherine Cartwright Picture research Charlotte Burgess

Editorial committee David Breuer Emma Marlow Helen O’Neill Peter Parker Philip Spedding Erica Wagner

Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658 Charlotte Burgess 020 7300 5675 Development Office, The London Library 020 7766 4704

Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to magazine@londonlibrary.co.uk THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 7

CONTRIBUTORS

Bringing Heaven to Earth: Silver Jewellery and Ornament in the Late Qing Dynasty

Michael Arditti joined the library in 1982 Michael Arditti is a novelist, short story writer and critic. His novels include Easter (2000), The Enemy of the Good (2009), Unity (2005), The Breath of Night (2013), Jubilate (2011) and, most recently, Widows and Orphans (2015).

by Elizabeth Herridge

Robin Blake joined the library in 1996 Robin Blake is a novelist and writer on art.

His books include Anthony Van Dyck: A Life 1599–1641 (1999), George Stubbs and the Wide Creation (2005) and four ‘Cragg and Fidelis’ historical mysteries, of which the latest, Skin and Bone, was published in 2016.

Jessie Childs

joined the library in 2007

Jessie Childs is the author of God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England, which won the 2015 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History. Her first book, Henry VIII’s Last Victim, a biography of the Tudor poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography in 2007. She reviews regularly and is a judge of this year’s PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.

Nick Drake

joined the library in 1986

Nick Drake’s first poetry collection, The Man in the White Suit (1999), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. The Farewell Glacier (Bloodaxe Books, 2012) grew out of a visit to the Arctic. He wrote the libretto for Tansy Davies' opera Between Worlds, which premiered at the Barbican in 2015. All the Angels, a play about Handel and the Dublin performance of Messiah, opens in December at the Globe Theatre.

Christina Hardyment joined the library in 1978

A unique publication in a little known area of the Chinese decorative arts

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ELIZABETH HERRIDGE Elizabeth-Herridge.com

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Christina Hardyment’s interests range from domesticity (Dream Babies, 2007, Behind the Scenes, 1997) to literary geography (particularly that of Arthur Ransome) and the Middle Ages (Malory, 2005). Time off is spent in her camping punt Dulcibella or her sailing dinghy Gipsy. Her most recent book is Writing the Thames (Bodleian Library, 2016) and her next is to be an apian cultural history.

Eileen Horne joined the library in 2014 Eileen Horne was born in California and has lived in Italy and London for 35 years. She spent two decades as a television drama producer in the UK independent sector. She now combines writing, including adaptations for radio and television, with teaching, translation and editing. Her first book, The Pitch, was published by Faber in 2006. Zola and the Victorians (Maclehose Press, 2015) is available in paperback.

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Comus – A Masque in Honour of Chastity by John Milton The Little Matchgirl and Other Happier Tales

by Hans Christian Andersen, written and adapted by Joel Horwood and Emma Rice

All the Angels by Nick Drake The White Devil by John Webster Othello by William Shakespeare

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 9

Behind the

Book

Jessie Childs describes the Library volumes that were invaluable when she was researching her book God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England (Vintage, 2015)

‘

At its heart, God’s Traitors is a family saga, a look at late-Tudor England through the eyes of a group of individuals who had the misfortune of being Catholic in the age of Gloriana. My research took me up and down the stacks, from exploring multi-volume church histories to Faustian fossicking in S. Devil &c.

 Vaux of Harrowden: A Recusant Family by Godfrey Anstruther (Newport, Monmouthshire, 1953). Biog. Vaux.

I owe a great debt to Godfrey Anstruther, who spent 20 years on this splendid chronicle of the Vaux family. He researched it as a schoolmaster in Northamptonshire, drafted it as a missionary in Grenada and nearly lost it during an air raid on Norwich, where he served as an army chaplain. It’s out of print and hard to find, but of course the Library has a copy.  Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham by F.W. Brownlow (Newark, Delaware, 1993). S. Devil &c.

I was lured to S. Devil &c. by a series of exorcisms performed in 1585–6. The details are horrendous, but they show that Catholicism was not disappearing down a priest-hole. Shakespeare was aware of the exorcisms. The devils named by the 1580s demoniacs (‘Flibbertigibbet’ and co.) would return to assail Poor Tom in King Lear. Brownlow provides excellent context and analysis, as well as an annotated edition of Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures of 1603, which accused the exorcists of fraud.  The Letters of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, ed. Glyn Redworth (2 vols., London, 2012). Biog. Carvajal y Mendoza, Luisa de.

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Jessie Childs’ God’s Traitors (2014), 2015 Vintage edition.

Luisa de Carvajal was a Spanish noblewoman who came to England in 1605 and hated everything: the weather (‘very damp and overcast’), the bread (‘so heavy’), the vegetables (‘almost tasteless’), the people (‘no regard for propriety’) and London (‘incredibly expensive’).

She was desperate to become a martyr, but, to her dismay, the Spanish embassy kept protecting her. Redworth’s excellent biography of Luisa, The She-Apostle (2008), is also in the Library.  John Gerard: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. Philip Caraman (London, 1951). Biog. Gerard.

John Gerard was a Lancashire-born Jesuit missionary priest sheltered by Eliza Vaux at Harrowden Hall in Northamptonshire.

A born storyteller – Evelyn Waugh likened him to John Buchan – and something of a Pimpernel, Gerard made it out of England to the Continent after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. His autobiography, written in Latin in 1609, thrillingly conveys the tension and drama of life on the run.  Historical Essays by Hugh Trevor-Roper (London, 1957). H. Historical Essays.

All the essays here are worth reading, but especially ‘Twice Martyred’ , an excoriating review that accused several mid-twentieth-century Jesuit historians (though not Anstruther, a Dominican) of

writing hagiographies of their Elizabethan missionary forebears. Our ancestors ‘sent the priests to the scaffold, to cold storage, or back to Flanders, ’ he wrote; ‘we send their biographies to oblivion, the shelf, or back to Boots’ – a reminder that the chemist once had a lending library and, since its books were especially popular with women, Trevor-Roper’s implication was that the Jesuit biographies were romantic and lightweight.  Elizabethan Casuistry, ed. P.J. Holmes, Catholic Record Society. Publications (Records series), vol. 67 (London, 1981).

Societies, Catholic Record Soc. This book is fascinating on the rules that missionaries were allowed to bend when working undercover in Protestant England.

There was no leeway on the issue of Eucharistic vestments, but common sense prevailed on chalices. To the question ‘May a tin chalice be used for saying Mass in England at the moment?’ came the resolution: ‘In cases of great poverty, a chalice should at least be made of tin. But chalices should not be made of bronze or brass because they react with the wine to form a mould, which can cause vomiting. No one has dared to sing Mass with a wooden or glass chalice … It may be made from tin, especially in England where the most perfect tin is to be found. ’ And so the faith survived.

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The project must aim to increase social awareness, and can be fiction or non-fiction NEXT CLOSING DATES: 30 SEPTEMBER 2016 30 APRIL 2017 Full guidelines available from www.societyofauthors.org /grants-and-prizes

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 11

12 Oct 2016 –15 Jan 2017 Book now Members go free nationalgallery.org.uk Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ (detail), 1602. On indefinite loan to the National Gallery of Ireland from the Jesuit Community, Leeson St., Dublin who acknowledge the kind generosity of the late Dr Marie Lea-Wilson. Photo © The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE MANUSCRIPTS Catalogue 1434

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A heavily-studied portable Bible manuscript, Northern France or Flanders, third quarter of 13th century.

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My DISCOVERY

Michael Arditti recalls how the Topography shelves yielded up a lively account of a trip to the Holy Land by a French orientalist, who inspired a character in his forthcoming novel

Narrative of a journey round the Dead Sea and in the Bible Lands in 1850 and 1851 by Louis Felicien de Saulcy (1853) Louis Felicien de Saulcy was a French amateur orientalist who visited the Holy Land in the mid-nineteenth century.

While excavating in Jerusalem, he believed that he had unearthed King David’s tomb; while circumnavigating the Dead Sea, he believed that he had discovered the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah. In both cases he was mistaken, but his account of his travels, rich in local detail, arcane scholarship and derring-do, has proved invaluable in formulating my new novel.

The divine vengeance wreaked on Sodom is one of the most influential and enduring myths of all time. My work in progress, Of Men and Angels, is a fictional account of the creation of the myth and its application and promulgation in four pivotal historical eras. It opens in Babylon, where many scholars believe that much of the Old Testament was codified, and where I posit that the ancient Hebrews’ revulsion from local religious rites and sexual practices led to

Louis Felicien de Saulcy.

the homophobic tone of the Sodom story.

The second episode centres on the performance of a mystery play of Lot’s Wife in thirteenth-century York, setting the myth against the full panoply of medieval Christianity (that such a play was performed, albeit not in York but in Sherborne, is another discovery I made in The London Library). The third episode takes place in Renaissance Florence, where a specially designated court, the Office of the Night, was established to hear cases of sodomy, and focuses on my one real-life protagonist, Sandro Botticelli.

The fifth and final episode features a Hollywood actor filming a biblical epic about the destruction of Sodom in the late 1980s, when many religious commentators viewed the advent of AIDS as a further instance of divine judgment.

The fourth episode has always been the most problematic. I knew that it had to be set in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when Western religious certainties were coming under threat.

Having fictionalised Jewish, Christian and humanist attitudes to the Sodom myth, I was eager to provide an Islamic perspective, not least because Lot is a far more prominent figure in the Qur’an than in the Bible. I initially researched Sir Richard Burton, whose trip to the Dead Sea, pilgrimage to Mecca and penning of the first extensive account of homosexuality in English in a long essay at the end of his translation of One Thousand and One Nights (1885), all served my purposes. But whereas Botticelli fitted neatly into my scheme, Burton stubbornly refused to do so.

In frustration, I scoured the

Topography stacks in The London Library for other nineteenth-century travellers to the Dead Sea and hit upon de Saulcy. Until the Ottoman Sultan opened up Palestine to the West, largely in gratitude for British and French support during the Crimean War in the late 1850s, only a handful of Europeans had visited the Dead Sea since the Crusades. De Saulcy, taking the trip to recover from the death of his wife, was one of the first and, undoubtedly, one of the richest of the new influx. Later travellers complained bitterly that the Frenchman’s largesse had prompted the Bedouin guides to inflate their prices.

Amid lengthy reports of the hazards of the journey, the splendour of the scenery and the corruption of the Bedouin comes de Saulcy’s startling claim that, by relating the Genesis story to traditional Arab place names, he has discovered the ruins of Sodom (Kharbet-Esdoum). The publication of his account, followed by a triumphant tour of Britain, offered muchneeded solace to Victorians experiencing the familiar ‘crisis of faith’ . The triumph was, however, short-lived, for his claims were swiftly demolished, not least by the Revd Albert Augustus Isaacs in The Dead Sea: or, Notes and Observations Made During a Journey to Palestine in 1856–7 on M. De Saulcy’s Supposed Discovery of the Cities of the Plain (1857).

Nevertheless, for all his spurious reasoning, casual racism and grandiloquent style, I owe de Saulcy a huge debt of gratitude for inspiring the creation of my missing protagonist, a Victorian evangelical clergyman seeking to affirm his faith in the biblical landscape, and thereby rescuing my book.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13

Just the

Word Robin Blake describes the challenges he faces as a historical novelist in getting the language right for the 1740s, the period in which his mystery series is set

Jonathan Swift’s advice in his essay ‘Letter to a Young Gentleman Lately Entered into Holy Orders’ (1721) was that ‘proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style’ . Behind this succinct formula lies a more complicated truth.

To be an effective writer it is necessary to grow the antennae of a grasshopper, acutely attuned not only to the aptness and music of words, but also to their potential dullness and clunkiness: the jargon noun, the cliché verb, the mixed metaphor and the unfeasible slang.

But, if all writers have to keep their phraseology under surveillance, when you write in a historical voice the language must be policed with special strictness. I write historical fiction in the first person of Titus Cragg, a bookish lawyer and coroner in eighteenth-century provincial Lancashire. To make Cragg’s voice convincing and enjoyable for the modern reader I must walk a fine line between linguistic anachronism and the obstructively archaic – no one swooning, or saying ‘I would fain’ or ‘methinks’ , or exclaiming ‘Gadzooks!’ My choice of words has to stick to the lexicon of the period while being easy on the modern ear: words proper for the time in an order proper for any time.

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The Georgian period had its fair share of mandarin prose, littered with self-important Latinisms. But there was no shortage, either, of straight, pennyplain writing. Surprisingly useful models are pornographic writers such as John Cleland, author of Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748). Their books were written with less highly educated readers in mind – servants, for example – while the nature of the genre tends in any case to favour the use of a plain, direct style. It is also, incidentally, a useful source of terms for dress and fabric, the shedding of clothes being not infrequent in erotica.

Anachronism is harder to suppress than archaism and I am constantly addressing such questions as whether

‘

Cragg would write that someone ‘giggles’ or alternatively ‘titters’ . Can he say ‘cock a snook’ or should he prefer ‘thumb his nose’? And what about the dialogue? In what period might a character ask another to lend him a ‘quid’ so he can ‘wet his whistle’? And at what point do people start greeting each other with a cheery ‘hello’?

Fortunately, help is close at hand. My stories are set in the 1740s, the very decade that Samuel Johnson began work on the English language’s first great dictionary, which was finally published in 1755. It is a prime authority on permissible words for the period, as well as being, of course, a pleasure to use in its own right. Very occasionally the definitions can seem a bit loose – fart is defined ambiguously as

Johnson’s “mouse” may be inaccurate but

’

it is delightful: “the smallest of all beasts; a little animal haunting houses and cornfields, destroyed by cats”

Left Engraving of Jonathan Swift, from the portrait by Charles Jervas, c.1710, on the frontispiece of John Forster’s The Life of Jonathan Swift (vol.1, 1875).

Above E.H. Shepard’s illustration showing Johnson’s team of six amanuenses at work on the Dictionary, from James Boswell’s Everybody’s Boswell, Being the life of Samuel Johnson abridged from James Boswell’s complete text, and from the ‘Tour to the Hebrides’ (1930).

‘wind from behind’ – or need checking for accuracy. Johnson tells us confidently, for example, that a knacker is a ‘ropemaker’ , whereas in reality this trade in the eighteenth century was a sub-specialism in saddlery, the making of straps and harnesses (it wasn’t until later that knacker became a word for a horse-slaughterer).

Johnson’s approach to word definition, however, also gives many enjoyable surprises. Lunch is ‘as much food as one’s hand can hold’ , the buttertooth is one of the ‘great broad foreteeth’ , and a kissingcrust is ‘crust formed where one loaf in the oven touches another’ . I also like his occasional asperity. A sty isn’t just a pig’s house but ‘any place of bestial debauchery’ , and a favourite is ‘a mean wretch whose whole business is by any means to please’ .

There are also a few pointedly personal definitions, the most famous when he writes that a lexicographer is ‘a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words’ . Johnson leaves us in no doubt of his opinion of import duties when he defines excise as ‘a hateful tax adjudged not by common judges of property but wretches hired by those to whom excise

is paid’ . But Johnson is not only a master of tart grumpiness. He soars at times to attain Swift’s standards in phrase-making.

His mouse may be inaccurate but it is delightful: ‘the smallest of all beasts; a little animal haunting houses and cornfields, destroyed by cats’; and his sun is in all simplicity ‘the luminary that makes the day’ .

Johnson is handy in pointing out cases where a word has fallen out of use or is ‘not now understood’ . He can sometimes appear judgmental when he tags an entry as a ‘bad’ , ‘barbarous’ or ‘burlesque word’ , or says that ‘the sense is ludicrous’ . In fact, in these cases he is usefully indicating low or ‘cant’ language. Some words do attract his disapproval, though, as when he says a term is ‘not now in elegant use’ . Of the clumsy epithet writative (as opposed to ‘talkative’), he warns that this is ‘a term of Pope’s not to be imitated’ .

Johnson’s dictionary is freely available on the internet, which is a great thing, but a more detailed, more rigorous, more universal online guide for the writer is the Oxford English Dictionary. This Herculean work is in continual progress and, although pay-walled, is free to members of The London Library as well as public libraries that subscribe (which

most of them do). The OED is firmly based on ‘historical principles’ , and its first-use dates are specially valuable. So, to address some of the queries raised earlier, the verb giggle originates from the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign, and is first recorded

by Alexander Barclay in The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde (1509), his translation of Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff (1494), where he writes ‘some gygyll and lawgh without grauyte’ . For titter the earliest quoted use is from a century later, in John Fletcher’s comedy Wit Without Money (c.1625).

The phrase cock a snook may have a nice medieval ring to it but, to a writer of Chaucer’s time, a snook was merely a topographical word for a promontory of land. By the late seventeenth century it was applied to the sergeant fish, having been adapted from ‘snoek’ , the Dutch word for the pike (we are now, after all, in the reign of the Dutchman William III). Down at the Cape, both Dutch and English colonists applied the term to the snake-mackerel, a Southern Ocean fish that would later become notorious in Britain during the Second World War for its disgusting taste. However, ‘cocking a snook’ has nothing to do with cooking a fish. It began to be used in reference to THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15

Illustrations from Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et métiers, par une societé de Gens de Lettres, vol.8 (11 vols., 1762–72), showing bob-wigs, top left pair, a bag-wig, fig.3, and a silk bag from a bag-wig, fig.9.

a derisive thumb-on-the-nose gesture at the end of the eighteenth century, too late to be in Titus Cragg’s vocabulary. On the other hand, quid for 20 shillings (‘origin uncertain’) was in use in the seventeenth century, when it meant a sovereign or a guinea. So, with a quid in your pocket, you

could probably wet the whistles (mouths in the seventeenth century) of all the customers in the tavern, and trouser some change. As for hello, it is a terrible trap for writers of historical dialogue. The word first appears only in the late eighteenth century, and then only as an exclamation

of surprise. Novelists should not on any account let characters greet each other with ‘hello’ until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Use of the OED does come with a warning. It is a garden of forking paths, leading from word to word in an odyssey that draws you ever further from the one you began with. I keep an alphabetical list of random discoveries made along the way; largely obsolete but always with plenty of flavour. The flavour of a word is an elusive quality. I don’t know why some words make better seasoning than others, but loppered milk for milk that’s turned, aduncity meaning crookedness, and a flickermouse for a bat (as in Die Fledermaus) are a considerable pleasure to meet with.

Some of the words in this personal lexicon give glimpses of the lost social world of Georgian Britain, where a bootcatcher was (in Johnson’s definition) ‘a person at the inn whose business is to pull off the boots of passengers’ and a piepowder court was ‘a court held in fairs for redress of all disorders committed therein’ . A bunter was a woman gathering rags to sell to paper makers, while an even less salubrious recycler was the tomturdman, trundling his barrow through the streets in the hours of darkness collecting

‘

“Hello” is a terrible trap for writers of historical dialogue.

The word first appears only in the late eighteenth century, and then only as an exclamation of surprise

Ledbury Market House, 1860, where piepowder courts were held in the eighteenth century.

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JUST THE WORD

Above Title page of The Ship of Fools, 1874 edition of Alexander Barclay’s The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde (1509).

Right Engraving of a ‘flickermouse’, or vampire bat, from Thomas Pennant’s History of Quadrupeds (1771), vol.1, 1793 edition.

night-soil.

Then there are cases where the job has endured but the word, without obvious reason, has gone. In the eighteenth century a jagger was someone who transported and delivered goods on a cart, and a crocker was, more guessably, a potter. Many of the technical specifics of everyday eighteenth-century objects – the difference between bag-wig and bob-wig or between a cutlass and a hanger – are lost to modern readers. With footnotes not an attractive option, the novelist would have to smuggle a definition into the text, which can be a difficult trick to pull off without striking a clunking, teacherly note.

Yet sometimes the exact though obsolete term remains the most satisfying.

In one of my books I have Cragg writing that ‘the villagers sat before me in their stuff gowns, spit-boots and patched buffin coats’ . These are unfamiliar items to us but were commonplace in that world and

he would not have needed to explain that the gowns were of poor material, the boots were those of a labourer and the coats were of low-grade wool. This makes it hard plausibly to finesse a gloss into a text that Cragg is supposed to have written, but I nevertheless let them stand because they have flavour even without an indication of their exact meanings.

While historical vocabulary has countless strange words, it is also thick with false friends. An exemplary case is buxom, which Johnson says means compliant or obsequious, but by some mysterious alchemy has morphed into big-breasted. Shrewd, which we use admiringly, was once a particularly malicious way of saying clever; to niggle meant to have sex; a go-cart was for teaching children to walk (not to race at speed); and a Georgian cadger, far from being a parasite, was a useful person who came to town selling butter and eggs from

the countryside. Medical terminology has many examples of words that mislead the modern ear. Hectic was an adjective that indicated tuberculosis, a virus was a snakebite and the screws were a case of rheumatism.

So, when hunting for words, the historical novelist must take special care to catch the right ones and avoid getting hold of the wrong. But, of course, all writers have to keep tabs on the swirl and churn, the ebb and flow of language. In the Preface to his Dictionary, Johnson describes the process whereby, like living things, ‘some words are budding, others falling away’ . Words have a rich and variegated life and Swift’s phrase ‘proper words’ must not be misinterpreted as a call for dull propriety. Good writing celebrates the energy of linguistic variety, and for this Johnson had a memorable phrase. He called it ‘the exuberance of signification which many words have obtained’ .

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

MESSAGE FROM THE

UNSEEN WORLD Poet Nick Drake describes his work in progress on a collaboration with art practice United Visual Artists for a light sculpture in memory of Alan Turing How can a life be truly, or properly, told?

The plaque on the Alan Turing Memorial in Sackville Gardens, Manchester, reads: Father of Computer Science Mathematician, Logician Wartime Codebreaker Victim of Prejudice The bronze statue depicts him sitting on a bench, which also carries in relief his name and life dates (‘Alan Mathison Turing 1912–1954’). He is holding an apple, a fruit which carries rich, if obvious, symbolic meaning; Newton’s apple, of course, and the theory of gravitation. Also the fruit of the tree of

the knowledge of good and evil (‘For on that day you eat of it you shall surely die’).

It also variously represents mystical and forbidden love. But for Turing it had other meanings. As recorded in Andrew Hodges’ Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), he loved the scene in the 1937 Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in which the Wicked Queen immerses an apple in a poisonous brew while incanting: ‘Dip the apple in the brew/ let the sleeping death seep through. ’ He talked about the ambiguity of the apple, red on one side, green on the other, ‘one of which gave death, ’ as Hodges writes.

Hodges also tells us that Turing usually ate an apple last thing at night.

When he was found dead in bed by his housekeeper, a slice of apple with a few bites taken out of it lay on the small table beside the bed. The post-mortem concluded Turing died of cyanide poisoning. He had an apparatus set up in his small spare room cum home-lab (his ‘Nightmare Room’) where he was using potassium cyanide in an experiment.

Unfortunately, the apple was not tested for cyanide. But, as Hodges reports, that substance was found in his stomach, bloodstream and brain. The Coroner determined that Turing committed suicide. Turing’s mother – along with others since – have claimed the death as a characteristically careless accident.

Left Alan Turing Memorial by Glyn Hughes, 2001, in Sackville Gardens, Manchester. Photograph © David J. Meadows.

Above Plaque on the memorial.

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The Bombe, the electromechanical device Turing designed at Bletchley in 1939, helped to decipher the Enigma-encrypted secret messages

Hodges thinks (as I do) that Turing committed suicide, and stage-managed the scene to allow his mother to believe his death was an accident. If so, it was both a strangely creative and obviously destructive act. It was also an act of despair. Hodges writes: ‘His total isolation in 1954 is virtually impossible to conceive of in today’s world. ’ In 2015, I was asked by Matt Clarke of the art practice United Visual Artists to write a poem about Alan Turing as part of a permanent new public artwork in his memory to be installed in the Paddington area, where he was born. The project is a commission for Paddington Central in collaboration with cultural urban strategists Futurecity, and the site is under a bridge carrying Bishop’s Bridge Road across the Grand Union Canal. A wide pathway used by commuters and students runs alongside the canal, and the dark wall under the bridge needed light and interest. UVA proposed a light sculpture inspired by Turing’s ideas and legacy. The project offered a rare and exciting way for a poem to have a public life and presence beyond the usual form of a slim volume on a shelf in the poetry section of the bookshops.

By the time I became involved, UVA had already developed two key ideas for the artwork. The first was the physical form. The front face runs the full length of the wall under the bridge, and comprises aluminium panels that display a hard-coded series of extracts from Turing’s groundbreaking paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (first published in Mind in 1950), which are visually represented as patterns based on Baudot code, a nineteenth-century telegraph code which allowed for the transmission of the Roman alphabet,

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punctuation and control signals.

But the key aspect of the artwork lies in the second idea. Matt proposed that my poem would be entered into the artwork’s software, to be perpetually interpreted though an algorithm which would try out, in a constantly evolving, carefully timed sequence, every possible synonym of every word in every line. This creates almost infinitely branching possible new variant lines of poetry – some nonsense, some of beautiful new sense – springing from the original poem. LEDs within the panels would illuminate the line in question verbatim while, below it, five further illuminated lines would show the variant lines evolving. The artwork would offer to the viewer a dynamically visual experience of a machine ‘thinking’ poetically – or perhaps more accurately appearing to write like a poet while thinking like a machine. The visual effect is beautifully timed and choreographed.

The full poem appears on a plaque next to the artwork.

The meeting of the poem and the artwork would create a continuously evolving machine, an ‘engine’ that uses Turing’s key concept of algorithms (or mechanical processes) and his principles of artificial intelligence. For me, the idea opened out to other aspects of Turing’s work: firstly his Imitation Test, which asked whether an ‘imaginable digital computer’ had the ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.

The concept also recalls the Bombe, the electromechanical device he designed at Bletchley Park in 1939, which crucially helped to decipher the German Enigmaencrypted secret messages. It made me think about how a ‘computer’ used to be a person, but through Turing’s work

From top The Bombe, designed by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park in 1939; Turing in Guildford, Surrey, 1934, image courtesy King’s College Library, Cambridge.

became a machine; also, about how his work in computers and AI was absolutely fundamental to the future fabric of our contemporary world, as the relationship between humans and technology evolves exponentially in ways we cannot keep up with. And it reminded me of the poet Don Paterson’s definition of a poem as ‘a little machine for remembering itself’ .

But how to write that poem and gather such a panorama of material into one poem? Research was key, and I began to explore the territory, tracing or tracking Turing through other works inspired THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19

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Artist’s impression of Message From the Unseen World, the light sculpture featuring Nick Drake’s poem in memory of Alan Turing by UVA for Paddington Central, commissioned by British Land in collaboration with Futurecity, due to be completed September 2016. Courtesy UVA.

by, or about, him. Hugh Whitemore’s classic 1986 play Breaking the Code (based on Hodges’ biography) develops the rich connections between Turing’s cryptographic work in the Second World War and his relationship with his homosexuality. It establishes a bravely defiant moral foundation for both: ‘I have always been willing – indeed eager – to accept moral responsibility for what I do.’ Robert Harris’s 1995 novel Enigma features a central character, Tom Jericho, who is a thoughtful fiction dissimilar to Turing in key ways – heterosexual, not least – but whose brilliance reflects Turing’s achievements at Bletchley Park. The 2001 film was adapted by Tom Stoppard from the novel.

Recently, another film, The Imitation Game (2014), offered a socially awkward, rather emotionally chilly Turing, played

by Benedict Cumberbatch. The plot dramatised his relationship with Joan Clarke – a brilliant Bletchley code-breaker who fell in love with Turing, and would have married him knowing he was gay – but in a way that was still something of a whitewash of the true story of his homosexuality. Both films were criticised for their historical inaccuracies. The filmmakers asserted these were necessary fictions, based on dramatic imperatives, devised in order to tell the greater story to a wide audience.

My favourite imaginative work about 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

“Alan” could “speak” in the poem about his work, and the world of codes and secrets, via a machine whose original conception was

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fundamentally his

Turing is Lovesong of the Electric Bear (2003), by the playwright Snoo Wilson.

Turing is woken from his deathbed by his teddy bear, Porgy, who leads him through the story of his life. The writing, with its brilliantly theatrical and surreal lyrical flourishes, captures something elusive, but essential, about Turing: his humour. For secrets and ciphers, along with the element of risk, are not always, or only, deadly serious; they can also be thrilling, ludic challenges, and a source of enormous imaginative and intellectual energy. It reminded me that if we take Turing always too seriously, we risk missing this essential aspect of his character and mind.

There are many books about Turing, including his mother Sara’s memoir, which celebrates her son’s achievements and argues that his death was accidental, rather than suicide. But Hodges’ biography stands far above and beyond everything else on the subject. It is a remarkable work of knowledge, scholarship, detection, fine discrimination and sympathy. It brings together for the first time all the biographical evidence and clues; leads the lay reader through scientific and mathematical realms of extraordinary complexity; recounts the political, social, philosophical and intellectual histories and milieus, including that of gay liberation in his time; pursues fascinating digressions; and explores the remarkable post-war work on morphogenesis and fundamental physics. Most movingly of all, it tells, with a proper indignation, the appalling story of Turing’s prosecution for gross indecency, his chemical castration and his death.

The more I read about Turing, the more the subject unfolded, multiplied and in so many ways perplexed and eluded me; most of all, of course, in the extremely sophisticated areas of his work.

He had a boundless curiosity about the nature of the world, and about profound questions of mind and matter, while finding inventive ways as a gay man to live as free a life of the mind and body as

MESSAGE FROM THE UNSEEN WORLD possible, at a time of serious constraints.

I wanted the poem to honour as much of that as possible, not just celebrating his achievements and legacy – difficult enough – but also the complexities of his private, emotional life, and to show how these things were richly, necessarily interconnected.

One of the first questions in the process of writing is: who is speaking? I realised the poem should be in the first person; the ghost inside the machine Turing invented should address us, the living, in the transience of time, in a kind of soliloquy from the unseen beyond.

So the poem begins with a poetic sleight of hand that I hope responds to his own fascination with the vastly ambivalent relationship between computer and human. As he said: ‘A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human. ’ I wanted to turn that ‘deception’ into a creative idea.

This is Alan speaking to you who pass by this bridge in the enchantment of time under the echoing arch over the mirror of water on your way to work or home and to other places in the infinity held in the secret dream cave of your magnificent minds One of the ironies of the idea was that ‘Alan’ could ‘speak’ in the poem about his work, and about the hidden world of codes, encryption and secrets, in ways he could not have done during his lifetime, via a machine whose original conception was fundamentally his. At Cambridge he posited the idea of a Universal Computing Machine, which then evolved into the first designs for a digital computer. During the Second World War, as is now well known, he worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park and developed the Bombe. This was able to find settings for the German’s Enigma machine which encoded their military communications, and thus decipher their messages. Turing, along with the rest of the team to varying degrees, is credited with altering the course of the war, and making an essential contribution to the Allied victory. By the end of the war, the Universal Computing Machine

had become the general-purpose digital computer. It was universal because, as Hodges explains, ‘all possible mechanical processes could be implemented on it … His formulation became known immediately as “The Turing Machine” , but now it is impossible not to see Turing machines as computer programs, or software. ’ And so the future was invented.

Turing’s work on secrets necessarily implicated him in secrecy. It was absolutely required in his professional, cryptological life; his extraordinary achievements at Bletchley Park remained secret until the 1970s. But another version of secrecy was playing out alongside that of the work; Turing’s private life as a gay man in the 1940s and 1950s. Gay men learn secrecy and dissimulation very early as necessary emotional and psychological strategies for survival in the worlds of family, work and society. It is important to remember the fearful, repressive world of his time, when gay men were considered degenerate, and homosexual acts were criminalised and usually punished by prison, often with hard labour. Many prosecuted men committed suicide.

So in the poem Alan also speaks, as he could not have done publicly in his own lifetime, about his secret history of love.

Christopher Morcom, a fellow pupil at Sherborne School, was Alan’s first

(and apparently unrequited) love. They shared interests in science, maths and astronomy, and it was a powerful and vital friendship. But Turing’s grief at Morcom’s sudden death in 1930, from bovine tuberculosis, can be said to have catalysed his profound inquiry into mind and matter, which was at the heart of his life’s work. Turing had other lovers, of course.

But post-war there was an undeniably darker aspect to this; after his prosecution for gross indecency, he seems to have felt trapped in an unresolvable contradiction.

As Hodges writes, ‘to be gay in 1953 was in itself to be regarded as a serious security risk’ . Soon after, he was found dead.

I decided to call the poem ‘Message From the Unseen World’ , a slight adaptation of the title of a set of four postcards Turing sent to his close friend Robin Gandy in 1954, shortly before his death. The postcards contained cryptic jokes about quantum physics, and a verse which parodied the form and language of the kinds of hymns sung at Sherborne (‘hyperboloids of wondrous light’), yet alluded to serious new ideas about the geometry of light which anticipate developments in relativity theory. That tone mattered. It seemed to encapsulate something essential about his character, and his resilient response to adversity.

I wanted Alan to speak through the poem to the future he helped to create; to us in the digital age. He would surely have been both thrilled by the invention and potential of it, and yet decisively alert to the grave perils to liberty and privacy which have evolved simultaneously with the exponential developments in technology, from the World Wide Web to the use of hand-held devices and phones which hold more information and reveal more about us, our lives and our desires, than we realise. Socially, that future is one of hard-won equal rights; LGBT people can marry, in front of our families, in church if we choose, and have our loving unions recognised in law on an equal basis with straight couples. We can express our sexuality and affection in public. All of this would surely have amazed and pleased Turing.

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Andrew Hodges’ Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), 1992 edition.

More information about ‘Message From the Unseen World’ by UVA and Nick Drake can be found at nickfdrake.com and uva.co.uk THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

POWER AND PREJUDICE ‘CIRCULATING MORALS’ IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND The nineteenth-century circulating libraries wielded enormous power over the type of books that were published, effectively acting as self-appointed censors, as Eileen Horne explains ‘It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read. ’ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) I recently found a tattered copy of The Catcher in the Rye on a bench in Hyde Park. Maybe it was accidentally left behind, or perhaps it was a gift from the book fairies. Either way, I scooped it up and re-read it, almost 40 years after my first pass. I was both grateful for the boon and relieved to no longer be that adolescent who once so identified with the angst of the book’s hero, Holden Caulfield. How differently I now perceive lines that I once underlined in pen, such as ‘Mothers are all slightly insane’ . But I still identify with and applaud Holden’s thought that when he finished a good book he wished the author was ‘a terrific friend’ who ‘you could call up whenever you felt like it’ . That will never change.

Where did you get the book you’re reading now? Amazon? Waterstones? A Kindle download? Loaned from a friend?

Plucked from a holiday bookshelf as the welcome cast-off of a previous occupant?

Or have you borrowed it from The London Library? Whatever your source, be it begged, borrowed or stolen, and presented in electronic or paper form, there is no shortage of routes to a good book.

I have never given this privilege a

second thought, but such access and choice were unimaginable two hundred years ago, especially for the average middle-class woman like myself. If I had been living in early nineteenth-century Britain, my father or my husband would have owned books, of course, and unlike my grandmother a couple of generations before me, I would almost certainly have had the education to be able to read them: by 1850, half the British female population was literate. My choices might include the family Bible, the ‘lives and letters’ of various great men, light literature and

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Charles Edward Mudie opened his first lending library in 1842, and began to exert an influence over publishers by insisting that the novels he chose for hire were suitable for his readership

cookery books (although Mrs Beeton’s classic wouldn’t be published until 1861). Depending on a man’s resources and interests, the house might contain a selection of history books, some English verse, and a few finely bound volumes in French, which would serve as an emblem of the owner’s education even if he never opened them. Less innocent material would be locked away in his desk or placed on a high shelf. There one might find one of the spoof librettos of the day, such as that favourite ode to flagellation, Lady Bumtickler’s Revels. Like the scandalous relative locked away in an attic or the sensuous table leg covered by a long cloth, anything outside the bounds of what was considered acceptable had to be hidden.

Those who defined ‘acceptable’ in this era were determined to stay in control.

Literacy was rising, while high printing costs made owning books prohibitively expensive: the price of one novel was equivalent to an average middle-class man’s weekly salary. Although Samuel Richardson is generally credited with inventing the novel a century earlier, Victorian newspaper serialisations, combined with the popular appetite for fiction, were increasing demand. The stage was set for the rise of the circulating library.

This was not a new concept. Specialist lenders had offered books for hire since the early part of the eighteenth century, with credit for the original concept given to Allan Ramsay (1684–1758), a Scottish author and

publisher who began renting out books (including his own) from an Edinburgh shop in 1726. Within 50 years, the business model was commonplace. Subscribers could take out an annual subscription and read dozens of books for the price of one. They could feed their appetite for the equivalent of our ‘box set’; an apt analogy, since novels were published in sets of three volumes known as ‘triple deckers’ .

Libraries encouraged this practice because they could lend the volumes one by one, with strict rules about borrowing times so that other members could partake of the ‘next episode’ without delay. When some libraries became publishers themselves, they could even use the revenue generated by the first volume of a popular novel to print the second. Their customers were male, since the man of the house took out the subscription for the family. Catalogues included something for everyone, including offerings for ‘Juvenile Readers’ .

But women were the main consumers of novels, and it was understood that fiction was written for women, and often written by women, even if anonymously or pseudonymously.

The preferred trajectory of a fictional narrative in its mid-Victorian heyday was towards a happy ending, with sympathetic characters and a fine moral that would ‘teach and delight’ the reader, a worthy concept harking back to Horace’s Ars Poetica. We can safely say that Jane Austen complied with this prescription, and many other and lesser authors followed her example, to create similarly ‘aspirational’ stories which centred on the pursuit of love and marriage among the middle and upper classes. The popular fiction of the period was aimed at the emerging bourgeois woman who was neither too busy with housework to read, nor too occupied with the hectic social calendar of the aristocracy.

The largest lender was Mudie’s Select Library, established in London in 1852.

This was a business that dominated the landscape for half a century and helped prompt the dramatic events portrayed in my recent book, Zola and the Victorians (2015). This is a still-resonant story of censorship and hypocrisy that brings to life the trials of a largely forgotten literary martyr, English publisher Henry Vizetelly.

Charles Edward Mudie (1818–1890) started out as a stationer and publisher in

the non-fiction book trade, then opened his first lending library in 1842, situated in premises near the British Museum in London. He soon branched out into fiction, which offered a greater financial return, and began to exert an influence over publishers by insisting that the novels he chose for hire were suitable for his readership. Teach and delight, he

From top Charles Edward Mudie by Frederick Waddy, 1872, from Waddy’s Cartoon Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Men of the Day (1873); ‘Going to Mudie’s, London Society, vol.16, no.95, November 1869.

preached, and he further stipulated that ‘nothing of objectionable character’ must disgrace his shelves. Imagine that Disney was the only film studio in Hollywood: not impossible if you recall the McCarthy era.

Mudie’s high moral tone had a powerful effect both on the publishing world and on story choices made by aspiring writers.

They had little choice. A listing in Mudie’s catalogue was deemed to be the best possible advertisement for a book; and if they refused to stock your novel, you were effectively blacklisted.

Mudie was not a puritanical campaigner, burning with reforming fire; rather, he was an astute entrepreneur and early adopter of the now familiar concept of brand identity. He understood that his customers were protective of their women, and he sold them a promise that a Mudie’s novel would never offend their gentle sensibilities, or put unfortunate ideas into their heads. To further cater to the core audience, Mudie’s library locations became social venues for women, offering genteel surroundings for the discerning book lover; a gathering place where she might meet her friends while making her selection.

A century later, in 1961, in the case of Regina v Penguin Books Ltd, the prosecutor would stand before a jury in the Old Bailey holding aloft the novel that was the subject of the obscenity trial: D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).

In a memorable climax to his summing up, he posed the question, ‘Is this a book you would allow your wife or servant to read?’

That last (and thankfully losing) battle cry of the super-correct was an echo of Mudie’s customers’ sentiments. Unsurprisingly, mid-century Victorians had crafted and supported the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, which stated that no publication should be written ‘for the purpose of corrupting the morals of youth and of a nature to shock the common feelings of decency in any well-regulated mind’ .

Repression and censorship were dressed up as ‘protecting morals’ , both those of the nation’s youth and also, by implication, impressionable women. Thankfully, the jury in 1961 found the prosecutor’s priggish question amusing, and proceeded to acquit Penguin of obscenity.

By the 1880s, Mudie – along with his chief competitor, W.H. Smith, who dominated the railway-station bookselling THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23

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George Moore’s semi-autobiographical novel “A Modern Lover’ follows the amoral adventures of a painter in bohemian Paris. It was blacklisted

by Mudie’s.

From top Caricature of George Moore by Walter Sickert, Vanity Fair, January 1897, Chronicle/ Alamy Stock Photo; Henry Vizetelly in 1863, from the frontispiece to his memoir Glances Back Through Seventy Years: Autobiographical and Other Reminiscences (1893).

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and lending franchises – had effectively controlled the fiction market for 40 years.

In 1883, George Moore, an Anglo-Irish author and progressive campaigner, came to London. The son and heir of landed gentry from the west coast of Ireland, at the age of 18 he had rebelled against his strict Catholic father and gone to Paris to pursue a career as an artist. After little success with the paintbrush, he picked up a pen. Inspired by the bohemian French authors he had befriended, he began to write novels, styling himself as ‘the English ricochet of Zola’ . When he returned to London to see his work published, he was positioned on a collision course with Mudie.

At this time, Émile Zola (1840–1902) was the best-known novelist in France, among the most celebrated in Europe.

He had sold over a million copies of his novels at home, and they were published in translation around the world, although not widely in English. Zola was his generation’s Balzac, Dickens or Tolstoy, with an added fillip of Darwin. He was credited as the founder of the school of French Naturalism, a step forward from Flaubert’s ‘realism’ , writing modern fiction with an unflinching style that eschewed Dickens’s family-friendly approach to tragedy and degradation. Zola set forth his aims in scientific terms, concocting ‘experiments’ with characters of different backgrounds, exploring their ‘chemistry’ and their ‘primal natures’ with a fierceness that might be instructive, but could hardly be said to ‘delight’ in the mode of the English novel. But he had such tremendous descriptive powers and fine dramatic ability that his novels were – and still are – gritty and compelling reading.

Moore sought to replicate Zola’s

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success in England with his first novel, A Modern Lover (1883). Like Zola’s novel His Masterpiece, Moore’s semiautobiographical story follows the amoral adventures of a painter and his friends in bohemian Paris. It was soon blacklisted by Mudie’s. The furious young author wrote to the Pall Mall Gazette, the influential daily paper ‘written by gentlemen for gentlemen’ , in an open letter titled ‘A New Censorship of Literature’ . He criticised the library for the repression of a new voice, blaming it for the ‘emasculation of British fiction’ . Under Mudie’s censorship, Moore wrote, ‘humanity [in British fiction] becomes headless, trunkless, limbless, and is converted into the pulseless, nonvertebrate, jellyfish sort of thing’ . He called for an end to this tyranny of the anodyne.

Thirty years later, another angry young author would pen a tirade so similar that he must have been familiar with Moore’s outcry. Writing to a mentor and friend in 1912, he cursed the ‘blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters … the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulseless lot that make up England today’ . You’ll find this complaint in The Letters of D.H. Lawrence: The Cambridge Edition (vol.1, 2003) in the novelist’s letter to Edward Garnett, prompted by Heinemann’s recent rejection of ‘Paul Morel’ (later published as Sons and Lovers) on the grounds that its ‘want of reticence’ made it unfit for publication in England.

The pulseless brigade similarly cursed Moore’s second novel. A Mummer’s Wife describes a young seamstress’s adulterous affair and subsequent fall from grace into alcoholism and ruin – a kind of bastard child novel of Flaubert’s Madame

POWER AND PREJUDICE

‘Light Reading With a Vengeance’, Punch, 27 January 1877.

Bovary and Zola’s L’Assommoir. After the very public debacle of his first effort, no publisher would touch it – until Moore met Henry Vizetelly, who agreed to release the book in one affordable volume. He also offered to publish a pamphlet Moore had written as an extension of his furious anti-Mudie tirade in the press. It was titled Literature at Nurse – or Circulating Morals and also served as the foreword to A Mummer’s Wife in Vizetelly’s 1885 edition.

In a no-holds-barred polemic, Moore characterises Mudie as ‘a tradesman’ , ‘scarcely competent to decide the delicate and difficult artistic questions that authors in their struggles for new ideals must raise’ . He relates how Mudie admitted to him that ‘two ladies in the country’ (and possibly their husbands?) had objected to his first novel, which caused the library to drop it from their inventory. To compound the insult, Mudie had encouraged the aspiring author to write another ‘more suitable’ novel, a suggestion that Moore scorned – although, it has to be said, as the heir to a fortune, he was in a position to question such commercial imperatives,

unlike many of his peers. Moore rejected the ‘unknown and irresponsible tribunal’ and the romantic nonsense Mudie seemed to prefer, which he saw as more detrimental to impressionable readers than his ‘realistic’ offering.

In the spirit of Zola, Moore insisted that his writing was rooted in research and truth. He made an interesting argument: realism can be shocking and ugly, but it is not as dangerous as fantasy and escapism for an impressionable readership because fantasy does not accurately represent consequence. When the heroine of A Mummer’s Wife leaves her husband for a travelling singer, she has a rude awakening, realising ‘she had done what she had so often read in novels, but somehow it did not seem at all the same thing’ . In effect, Moore was accusing romantic authors and purveyors of their novels, such as Mudie, as the real ‘authors of immorality’ for misleading women readers, to whom they fed the lie of escapism and a happy ever after.

Moore’s article caused quite a stir, with letters for and against his position filling

the London press for weeks. Battle lines were drawn, but Vizetelly’s commercial strategy was a change of approach: he took his publications (including Moore but also numerous translations of ‘modern European classics’ ranging from Tolstoy to Flaubert) out of range of the circulating libraries. He began issuing novels in affordable single volumes which were sold directly to the public. The response was gratifying.

Moore’s novels were profitable and well reviewed, and he introduced his friend Zola to the firm. Vizetelly went on to buy the English-language rights to Zola’s complete works, and by 1888, he would boast in an interview that he was selling ‘a thousand copies of Zola a week’ . Then came a terrible backlash, which forms the narrative for my book. Although I am a long-time devotee of Zola, I was unfamiliar with Moore’s writing until I began to research the Vizetelly story, in which he features large. It has been a pleasure to get to know him and, to quote Holden Caulfield, I would love to be able to call him up whenever I felt like it.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

HIDDEN CORNERS

OLD FATHER THAMES Christina Hardyment’s quest for literature inspired by the River Thames began in Topography, England, Thames, but she soon discovered that the Library’s holdings on the river were concealed upstairs, downstairs and in the Atlas Cases When I was given the go-ahead to turn my lifelong love of the Thames into a book about its literature, Writing the Thames (Bodleian Library, 2016), The London Library was my first port of call. Which was odd, because I live in Oxford, and have the formidable Bodleian Library a ten-minute bike ride away. But, as all aficionados of our Library know, if one wants inspiration coupled with exercise, there is no better starting point than meandering along the shelfmark devoted to one’s subject. Once there, like Horace Walpole’s princes of Serendip, one will ‘make discoveries, by accident and 26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

sagacity, of things one was not in quest of’ .

Propinquity is as important as serendipity. Unlike coldly blinkered digital library catalogues, which only show you what you ask for, open shelves offer stimulating new acquaintances propped among familiar friends. The Library’s Topography, England, Thames holdings include the two heavy hitters of Thames history, Fred S. Thacker’s The Thames Highway: A History of the Inland Navigation (1914) and Peter Ackroyd’s Thames: Sacred River (2007), as well as a respectable range of books by enthusiasts and specialists.

But to my mind its most interesting

holdings reflect its mid-nineteenth-century beginnings, a time when railways were taking commercial traffic off the river.

Pleasure-boating thus became safer and was hugely popular. Trains also provided convenient holiday transport: frilly-eaved stations along the length of the river meant that sybaritic downstream boating could come into its own. All the requirements of a Victorian cabin library can be found in the Library, mainly in the Thames shelfmark.

The Irish poet and humorist John Fisher Murray completed A Picturesque Tour of the River Thames in its Western Course, including particular descriptions of Richmond,

Windsor and Hampton Court (1845) soon after the Library was founded. It has over a hundred wood-engravings, four maps and a fine aerial view of Hampton Court. At Chertsey Abbey, Murray muses on the fate of the monks whose many monasteries once bordered the Thames, and quotes a macabre discovery described by the antiquary William Stukeley in his 1724 Itinerarium Curiosum (the Library has the 1776 edition in Ant., 4to.). In the grounds of the abbey, he found that ‘human bones of the abbots, monks, and great personages, who were buried in great numbers in the church and cloisters [were] spread thick all over the garden … so that one may pick up handfuls of bits of bones at a time’ .

James Thorne’s Rambles by Rivers: The Thames (1847) is a fat little dark green volume and easily overlooked, but take it out and enjoy its generous illustrations and caustic tone. Cricklade is ‘dull to live in, dull to look at, and dull to talk about’; Faringdon is ‘a wearisome place to spend a wet day’; Cumnor ‘has little to reward the visitor’; Abingdon is ‘quiet, clean and dull’; the ‘peasantry’ of the Chiltern Hills ‘are among the most uncouth in England’ ; and fishing from punts (then a hugely popular sport) is ‘monstrously monotonous’ .

Thorne was much thumbed by Samuel Carter Hall and his wife Anna Maria Fielding while writing The Book of the Thames from its Rise to its Fall (1859). They gratefully acknowledged their many debts to Thorne, ‘a scholar, a gentleman, a close observer, and a lover of nature’ . Carter Hall contributed grandiloquent comments on the river’s picturesque qualities as well as arcane historical and architectural information. A keen fisherman, he offered advice to fellow ‘brethren of the angle’ , and included the names of local experts.

His wife Anna, then a popular novelist, wrote the book’s copious nature notes and its dramatic anecdotes about river folk. A succession of artists travelled with them on their expeditions, and the book is full of intriguing details of Thames life.

The Stream of Pleasure: A Narrative of a Journey on the Thames, from Oxford to London (1891) by the American novelist and travel writer Elizabeth Robins, and illustrated by her artist husband Joseph Pennell, is an account of the couple’s own experiences when they hired a stubby pair-oared skiff from Salters of Oxford, planning to camp in it during a three-week

cruise downstream to Richmond. ‘It had a green waterproof cover which stretched over three iron hoops and converted it for all practical purposes into a small, a very small, houseboat … Salter’s men provided us with an ingenious stove with kettles and frying pans fitting into each other like the pieces of a Chinese puzzle, a lantern, cups and saucers and plates, knives and forks and spoons, a can of alcohol [for the stove] and, for crowning comfort, a mattress large enough for a double bedstead. It filled the boat from stern to bow, bulging out and through the rowlocks. It was clear that if it went, we must stay, and so we said, as if we rather liked the prospect of roughing it, that we could manage just as well and be just as comfortable if we slept on our rugs. ’ They soon discovered that the attractive riverside inns were much more comfortable than sleeping on board. Robins has a sense of humour, as well as being well up in the lore of the Thames, and is amusingly frank about the pouring rain, the perils of negotiating bridges, weirs and locks in a strong current, ‘those river fiends, the steam launches’ , and the unlovely aspects of houseboats on which ‘buckets, brooms and life-preservers were the only ornaments’ .

Since I have a camping punt, my own favourite among early guides to the Thames is George Dunlop Leslie’s Our River: Personal Reminiscences of an Artist’s Life on the River Thames (1888). It is a hymn in part

Opposite Aquatint by J.C. Stadler after Joseph Farington’s painting of Nuneham Courtenay, from William Combe’s An History of the River Thames (1794–6).

Top Bird’s-eye view of Hampton Court showing the Thames, from John Fisher Murray’s A Picturesque Tour of the River Thames in its Western Course (1845).

Below ‘Captain Jinks of the “Selfish” and His Friends Enjoying Themselves on the River’, Frederick Walker’s cartoon of a steam launch, Punch, 21 August 1869.

All images in this article courtesy of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE steam launches grew to be a great nuisance on the river: Frederick Walker’s cartoon for Punch magazine, Captain Jinks of the ‘selfish’ and his Friends enjoying themselves on the river, shows Walker himself fishing (21 august

27

to the Thames, but primarily to the punt.

Leslie’s had a short mast so that he could hoist a lug-sail on occasion. At this time, passengers lounged against the flat sill in the bow, and the punter walked the boat’s length to pole it along. Leslie emphasised the importance of handling the pole ‘like a billiard cue, lightly in the hand’ . ‘Avoid carrying it bodily up the boat after a shove, as this tires you, ’ he continues. ‘The proper way is merely to carry the pole back, with the fingers of one hand loosely holding the thin end, allowing the other to trail in the water, which will bear the main weight. ’ Leslie was part of a circle of Royal Academicians who often gathered at Yewden Manor, the home of Gustav Schwabe, a wealthy patron of the arts, and a splendid group portrait of them by Henry Stamford Wells survives. Behind Leslie, shown elegantly posed in his punt, is Greenlands, a handsome white house which was owned by W.H. Smith. The most famous of all writers about the river, Jerome K. Jerome, refers to it in Three Men in a Boat (1889) as ‘the rather uninteresting residence of my newsagent’ . Finding his book and the similarly legendary Thames novels Alice in Wonderland (1865) and The Wind in the Willows (1908) requires more legwork: across to the Central Stacks Floors 2 (Fiction, Jerome) and 6 (Children’s Books, Carroll and Grahame). Mark Davis’s excellent Alice in Waterland: Lewis Carroll and the River Thames in Oxford (2010) is in

L. English Lit., Carroll.

The most essential Victorian guide was Dickens’s Dictionary of the Thames, from its source to the Nore: An Unconventional Handbook by the son of the famous novelist.

Updated every year between 1880 and 1896 (the Library has the 1888 and 1890 editions), it is an A to Z of quirky information as well as practical details of train and steamer times, special excursions, facilities for anglers, boat hire and inns along the river.

Charley, of whose ‘indescribable lassitude’ his father often complained, may have acquired his affection for the river at Eton; he boasts of ‘a practical Thames experience of over twenty years’ . He gives several pages of recipes for ‘Cups, Cocktails and Grogs’ , all of which ‘have successfully passed the ordeal of personal experience’ , and the text often verges on the personal, as in this entry under B for Bathing: ‘Few things are pleasanter on a hot day than a plunge into one of the deep, quiet, shady pools in which the Thames abounds. Few things are more exhilarating than to rise after a scientific header in the rushing waters below some such weir as that at Marlow. ’ In modern acquisitions by the Library, there are many lush colour photographs of the river, but to my mind there is nothing to beat the atmospheric black and white of the images produced by Henry Taunt (1842– 1922). Oxford born and bred, Taunt began with short illustrated guides to villages and towns local to Oxford. You’ll find examples

in Topography, England, under Iffley, Fairford and Goring; the last of these sports a very fine advertisement of Taunt’s wares in the form of a cartoon of Father Thames being photographed. Taunt loved the river, and travelled along it in a houseboat with a camera on a tripod on its roof. Photographs by both Taunt and his contemporary Francis Frith are a feature of John Leyland’s The Thames Illustrated: A Picturesque Journeying from Richmond to Oxford (1920, T. England, Thames, 4to.). Its reproductions seem a little drab at first glance, but there are some gems among them. ‘Kennington Reach: A Sailing Race’ is full of movement, ‘Boulter’s Lock’ predictably chaotic.

Leyland supplies copious curious facts and literary references. I like the idea of Charles James Fox taking his ease in his house overlooking the river at Chertsey, ‘sitting on a haycock, reading novels, and watching the jays stealing his cherries’ .

To find the most interesting preVictorian accounts of voyaging along the Thames, you need to trek far from Topography. One of the earliest is well hidden in Biography, in a diametrically distant corner of the Library. Charles Mitchell’s Hogarth’s Peregrination (1952) is the edited and published version of a manuscript written and illustrated by William Hogarth and four friends; it told the story of a drunken excursion on the Thames which they made in 1732 from the city to the Isle of Sheppey and back.

Left The Oxfordshire photographer and mapmaker Henry Taunt was also the author of local guidebooks; this comic advertisement of his services appeared in his book Goring, Streatley and the Neighbourhood (1894).

Above Title page illustration by C. Lovat Fraser, from Thomas Burke’s The Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse (1920).

28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

hidden corners

Illustration by Marcus Stone showing Gaffer Hexam, from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (serialised 1864).

‘Straw was our bed and a tilt [a hooped awning] our covering … we had much rain and no sleep for three hours. ’ They ate ‘hung beef’ and biscuits, washed down with gin, and admired the naval men-ofwar anchored in the Thames, which had been well defended since the daring raid made by the Dutch in 1667. After a night at Gravesend, they summoned a barber to shave them and powder their wigs, then drank coffee and ate buttered toast before setting off on foot for Rochester Castle. Pickled in liquor, they walked to Queensborough, behaving remarkably badly on the way. They chucked ‘sticks, pebbles and Hog’s Dung’ at each other and, at Hoo, Hogarth ‘untruss’d upon a Grave Rail in an unseemly Manner’ , and was duly punished by being thrashed with nettles ‘on ye part offending’ .

Grandest among books on the Thames is William Combe’s hefty two-volume folio An History of the River Thames, with splendid plates by Joseph Farington (1794–6, Atlas Cases), though sadly the Library’s copy is lacking many of the plates.

Hundreds of other books that relate in one way or another to the Thames are scattered all over the Library. The houses of authors who chose to live by the river include William Morris’s Kelmscott, near Lechlade in the Cotswolds, Alexander Pope’s villa at Twickenham and Horace Walpole’s nearby gew-gaw of a house Strawberry Hill, as well as the homes of Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock and Leigh Hunt at Marlow: details of these abound in both Biography and Art. Poetic offerings are as varied as Thomas Burke’s The Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse (1920, Pamphlet 3579) and J.B. Firth’s The Minstrelsy of Isis (1908, L. English Anthols.). Sax Rohmer’s fiendish Fu Manchu ‘always made his headquarters upon the river … the opium

‘he was a hook-nosed man, and with that and his bright eyes and his ruffled head, bore a certain likeness to a roused bird of prey’: illustration by marcus stone for Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (serialised 1864)

den off Shadwell Highway, the mansion Sykes lives around Bermondsey, and Our upstream … the hulk lying off the marshes’ Mutual Friend opens with Gaffer Hexam (The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu, 1913, sitting in the prow of his boat ‘like a roused former partner rogue riderhood, is himself found Fiction). Izaachis Walton sings the praises of birdbut of prey’ , seeking outdead drowned bodies. the next night, having fallen overboard from his boat reaching the river and its eastern tributary the Lea Henry James had a winter pied-àforAngler; anotherthe corpse. in The Compleat Library has terre in Carlyle Mansions on Cheyne the thames winds through the Walk. whole ‘This book.Chelsea it will claim the this haunt of a lovely 1904 copy illustrated

by Edmund perch, lives of riderhood and Bradley headstone, the two villains H. New in S. Fishing. Horticulturalists sage and seagull, proved,ofeven after a the piece, when during a life-or-death struggle they falljust clinched like John Tradescant and John Evelyn, brief experiment, the thing for me, ’ into in anthe empty lock. But Our Mutualsoon Friend also finds Flat 21 in 1912; both copiouslytogether referenced Library, he wrote after leasing humour inn (identi-eights rowing: gardened on its banks.and hope in the river. an ancient he alsowaterside enjoyed watching fiedLibrary’s as the still thriving Limehouse‘great, pub the Bunch of grapes) birds with Many of the early members white, water-skimming is affectionately drawn as ‘the six Jolly Porters’. were particularly fond of the Thames. eight-feathered wings’ (downstairs again Its founder Thomas Carlyle lived close to find both quotes in Peter Vansittart’s Dead in the WaterCompanion 191 to the river in Cheyne Row; in 1874 he London: A Literary in T. wrote a letter to John Ruskin exulting in London). Another member, Bram Stoker, the completion of Joseph Bazalgette’s whose Dracula crosses the Thames at the embankment: ‘Miles of the noblest tide’s ebb, lived close by James in Chelsea.

Promenade. The Thames pushing grandly A lovely recent addition to the past you, & even at low-water leaving a Library’s Thames holdings is Panorama foot or two of pure gravel; a labyrinthic of the Thames: A Riverside View of [sic] flower-garden, subsidiary walks, & Georgian London by John R. Inglis and grand pavements; Cheyne Walk looking Jill Sanders (2015). Finally, no sweep altogether royal on you through the old across the literature of the Thames would umbrage & the new. ’ be complete without mention of Robert Charles Dickens was a founder member Gibbings’ two much-loved books, Sweet of the Library; he wrote The Tale of Two Thames Run Softly (1940) and Till I End Cities (1859) after Carlyle sent him a bundle My Song (1957), both on the Thames of its books about the French Revolution. shelves. The first was written in wartime, The Thames haunts many of his novels. As and became so popular that it was issued a child, he lived on the southern shores of in a special Forces edition. The second its marshy estuary (immortalised in the celebrates Gibbings’ retirement to Long opening chapters of Great Expectations), Wittenham on the Thames in Oxfordshire. and his experiences in a blacking factory by It ends with the reflection that ‘The quiet Hungerford Stairs by the Strand are recalled of an age-old river is like the slow turning in David Copperfield. Oliver Twist’s Bill of pages of a well-loved book’ .

.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29

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30 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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MEMBERS’ News WHAT’S NEW IN THE NUMBERS? As members will realise, the Library is an organisation that values clear communication, and this is at least as important in the realm of finance as anywhere else. Yet finance has a language of its own that non-specialists may find obscure and, like most things in life, it tends to get more complex before it gets simpler. In this conversation between the Chairman Sir Howard Davies (HD), the Treasurer Mark Storey (MS) and the Librarian Inez Lynn (IL), we aim to penetrate some of the mysteries and explore what the numbers really mean.

HD I can’t help noticing that the Annual Report and Accounts have grown significantly in size since last year. What’s behind this?

MS This is the first year the Library has been required to adopt a new reporting standard, or SORP (Statement of Recommended Practice), for charities, which itself sits within a wider UK accounting framework known as FRS 102. This has certainly had an impact, but it’s not the only factor. Last year the Finance Committee took the decision to re-tender the statutory audit and as a result we appointed a new firm to replace the incumbent who had been doing the job for many years. We did this because we wanted a fresh perspective, but we recognised it would mean a good deal of extra work, particularly for our Bursar who puts the report and accounts together.

HD Why was there so much extra work?

MS Partly it was just the learning curve that all professional advisers need to climb when they take on a new client. But partly it was a review of some of the Library’s existing accounting policies and disclosures, prompted by the engagement of the new auditors.

In the past we took the view that the accounts were complicated enough already and we were reluctant to complicate them further unless we had to. So we didn’t over-elaborate in areas where there was no clear-cut right answer.

HD Such as?

MS The most important and complex area is the building.

We’ve invested around £20m in it over the last 12 years, first in buying what we now call T.S. Eliot House and then in completely refurbishing large areas of the Library. It’s a specialised building so it’s not easy to value, but we knew the insured amount (which is the only benchmark we have) was well above the book cost.

And as we spend substantial amounts each year maintaining the buildings to a high standard, we didn’t believe we needed to record a depreciation charge as well.

HD But that’s now been re-assessed, I think.

MS It has. We started by distinguishing the core structural elements of the building from the equipment and furniture within

it. This in itself was not straightforward because of the way the works were procured and managed. It’s not an exact science but we arrived at a breakdown we felt comfortable with. Then we made estimates of the useful life of each category of asset, in order to work out what depreciation to charge each year. There’s a good deal of judgment involved in this, and our estimates of the useful lives are quite long by the standards of other organisations. But then again, the building itself is a one-off and we’ve already been around for 175 years.

HD And the result of all this is additional expenditure of around £200,000 each year in the accounts. Not exactly welcome when we’re trying to improve the Library’s financial position.

MS That’s true, but it’s important to realise that this is not a cash cost. With maintenance and repairs we can keep the building running for a long time, but eventually some elements will need complete replacement because they are obsolescent. Depreciation is a way of recognising this need over the long term.

HD So what else is new?

MS The new Charities SORP has required us to change the way we report income from large legacies. Essentially this means recognising our full share in the accounts as soon as probate has been granted and we can estimate the value of the estate with reasonable accuracy, rather than waiting till the cash has come in.

This can have quite a significant effect on the statutory accounts for any given financial year, but we don’t normally budget for large legacies so it doesn’t affect our planning. Although the Library is actively encouraging legacies, they inevitably remain something of a financial windfall when they arise.

HD I see there’s quite a bit of information about heritage assets.

What are they?

MS Essentially the Library’s collection. We’ve avoided referring to heritage assets in previous accounts because we saw the phrase as a piece of jargon with potentially a large burden of administration and disclosure attached, if the recommended accounting practice was followed over-zealously. But after discussion with the new auditors we’ve come up with a narrative in Note 9 to the accounts THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31

that we think genuinely adds value for readers, particularly those who are less familiar with the Library and its history. You might almost call this serendipity!

Core income, expenditure and surplus/(deficit)

HD Let’s get back to basics. Allowing for the issues you’ve talked about, what’s the big picture emerging from the accounts about the Library’s financial position?

MS In many ways it’s the continuation of a familiar story. The trend in membership numbers has recently started to improve but not as much nor as quickly as we would like, and our total fee income (around £2.5m) has hardly grown at all in the last five years. Back in 2010–2011 we made some painful though necessary cuts to expenditure, but since then we’ve seen remorseless upward pressure on many of our cost budgets. So in 2015–2016 we’ve seen an operating deficit of £529,000, up from £451,000 the previous year on a like-for-like basis. And in 2015–2016 the value of our investments has been hit by volatility in the markets, but this is less important as we invest for the long term.

HD And new investment managers are being appointed to look after the Library’s portfolio.

Membership income

Other income

Investment income

Total Expenditure

Net surplus/(deficit)

MS Yes, we’ve recently confirmed our selection and we’re starting to make the necessary arrangements. Our current portfolio has delivered pretty good returns over the last few years in quite tough market conditions, but it’s grown up in a rather piecemeal fashion.

Now that we’re actively seeking new endowment donations we felt that a formal arrangement with an external manager would give potential donors more confidence.

decline of public libraries, from the massive growth in literary and cultural events (and the increasing use of subscription models for everything from newspapers to cinemas and bookshops) to evergreater competition for philanthropic support. So it is vital to try to determine what the Library will need to be doing in three, five or ten years’ time to maintain a viable place in that marketplace and then develop our next strategic plan accordingly.

HD Sounds sensible. But the new managers aren’t going to work miracles. And we can’t go on running a half-million pound deficit.

HD So how do we do that?

MS Quite right. But it’s unlikely we can cut costs further without undermining service levels and our administration is already run on a shoestring, so we will probably need to spend more in some areas. This means the future will be all about income generation.

We have a funding strategy and we have £4m of reserves to keep us going but we certainly can’t afford to be complacent. We are experiencing the biggest technological revolution in the world of education, learning and knowledge since the invention of printing from movable type. The Library is not unaffected by that and, as we are coming to the end of the period of our current strategic plan (2012–2017), work is in hand to develop the next one. Perhaps we should bring the Librarian in at this point to tell us how it is going?

HD Good idea. Inez, you and I have been talking a lot about future strategy. How is the work going?

IL It is going well but it is a big job. We need to gain a greater understanding of any new trends that might be emerging in the ways members join, use and leave the Library and what they seek from it. Even more important, we need to gain a greater understanding of what is happening in the ‘marketplace’ in which the Library operates. We all recognise that, as Mark says, the world beyond the Library has been changing fast in all sorts of ways, from the growth of digital information sources to the 32 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

IL With hard work and a little help from some external consultants kindly provided on a pro bono basis. Since July, trustees and staff have been gathering and analysing an immense amount of internal and external data, reviewing trends, the nature of the financial gap we need to close to achieve financial stability, the strengths we have to draw on, the constraints within which we have to operate, and our priorities for the future. By late autumn we hope to have found some clear signposts to follow and develop into the next strategic plan, so that the Library can continue to develop and thrive in the years ahead. The London Library has been changing to stay the same since it first opened in 1841. Long may it continue to do so.

ANNUAL REPORT The Library’s Annual Report & Accounts 2015–2016 will be downloadable as a pdf from the About Us section of the website (londonlibrary.co.uk/about-us/agm-annual-reports), available from mid-September 2016. To reduce the economic and environmental implications of printing and mailing, the Library now uses a print-on-demand system for those members wishing to receive a physical copy. If you would like a printed copy of the Annual Report to be sent to you in the post, please request one by email (librarian@londonlibrary.co.uk) or telephone (020 7766 4712).

MEMBERS’ NEWS

DONATIONS AND BEQUESTS The trustees thank the following supporters, and our anonymous donors, for their generous contributions to The London Library received during the year ended 31 March 2016.

175TH ANNIVERSARY APPEAL and WORDS IN THE SQUARE DONATIONS

All donations relating to the Library’s 175th Anniversary will be acknowledged in reports on the year ended 31 March 2017.

DEVELOPMENT APPEAL FUND Richard Barber Sebastian Brock Trevor Coldrey The O J Colman Charitable Trust Richard Freeman Michael Gainsborough Alastair Gavin Jane Goddard Professor Isobel Grundy Baroness Hilton of Eggardon QPM The J P Jacobs Charitable Trust The late Rosemary James Peter Jamieson Edward Lam John Maddell Steven and Annie Murphy The Viscount Norwich Janet Rennie Peter Rowland Lord Runciman Sir John Sainty Christopher Swinson Jeremy White Ann Williams

Louis Greig Elizabeth Bennett Herridge Andrew Hine Philip Hooker Dr Sarah Ingham Hugh Johnson OBE Alan Keat Gailen Knox Krug Edward Lam Humphrey Lloyd Alexis and Jane Maitland Hudson Barbara Minto Charles Morgan Philip Percival Peter T G Phillips David Reade QC Alan Russett Sir John Scarlett KCMG OBE and Lady Scarlett Marjorie Stimmel Paul Swain Harriet Tuckey J C Walton Clive Wright OBE Naomi Zimba Davis

FOUNDERS’ CIRCLE UK Dickens Debby and James Brice* Basil Postan Sir Timothy Rice Kim Samuel Mark Storey Philip Winston (with matching gift from Capital Group Companies)

FOUNDERS’ CIRCLE US Dickens Wilson and Mary Braun* John and Kiendl Gordon* Professor William Van der Kloot*

Thackeray David and Molly Lowell Borthwick* Katherine Bucknell and Bob Maguire The Clore Duffield Foundation Mr and Mrs Jerry del Missier Bill Emmott Adam and Victoria Freudenheim David Lough Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE Martineau James Bartos Professor Jenny Bourne Taylor Marcia Brocklebank Consuelo and Anthony Brooke Sir John Gieve

Thackeray Louis and Gabrielle Bacon* Patricia and Tom Lovejoy* Gillian and Robert Steel* Martineau Anne H Bass* Montague and Mayme Hackett* Patricia Holloway Boyd and Nicholas Cary Ruffin* James L Johnson* Carey Adina Karmel* Judith Goetz Sanger* Douglas Smith and Stephanie Ellis-Smith* Mr and Mrs Robert Taubman* Marta Barbeosch Varela*

The Founders’ Circle has received significant additional support in the USA from: Tom and Leslie Freudenheim Judith Goetz Sanger * donation received via The International Friends of The London Library, a registered 501(c)(3) charitable corporation.

BOOK FUND Great Primer The L E Collis Charitable Trust Dr Catherine Horwood Cicero Barnabas Brunner Logos Charitable Trust Sybil Shean James Stitt Nonpareil Dr John Burman Rupert Christiansen Norman Franklin Dr Anthony McGrath James Myddelton The Viscount Norwich John Perkins Brilliant Philip Bovey Sebastian Brock Jody Butterworth in memory of Ian Butterworth Penelope Byrde Alan Gregory CBE Jane Oldfield Professor Henry Roseveare ADOPT A NEW BOOK Dr Bernard Palmer Ann Schlee BOOKBINDING The Anglo-Finnish Society The Viscountess Boyd Charitable Trust Michael Erben John Havard Dr Christer Jorgensen

Peter T G Phillips David Pryce-Jones Alison Sproston Virginia Surtees SUPPORTED MEMBERSHIP A H J Charitable Trust Dr George Beckmann Roberta Berke in memory of Mrs Eva Tucker The Clore Duffield Foundation Malcolm Lambert David Lough Inez T P A Lynn R D Macleod Dr Charles R V More Dr Oliver Padel G T Severin The Reverend Ann Shukman Ricky Shuttleworth Oliver Simmons A Sokolov James Stainton J C Walton GENERAL FUNDS Richard Carter through Populus Research & Strategy James Farha Jenny Joseph Dorothy Louwsma Barbara Minto Dr Ann Saunders Mark Storey The Reverend Dr Terry Tastard LEGACIES Raymond Philip Cordero Anne Marjorie Crosthwait Mabel Dorothy De’Ath George Christopher Hall Patricia Gabrielle Mebes Hyde Rosemary Gordon James Ian William McInnes Alec Brian Schofield Sheila M Streek John A B Townsend Imogen Dulcie Vickers During the year the Library also received a grant from the trustees of the R M Chambers Settlement.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 33

Pushkin Press • The London Library

‘FOUND ON THE SHELVES’ Advice on behaviour at 19th-century dinner parties…

The rise and fall of a Victorian wine-lover…

Remedies for the ill-health caused by the ‘modern’ craze of the velocipede…

And more…

All discovered in The London Library, £4.99 each 1. Cycling: The Craze of the Hour 2. The Lure of the North 3. On Corpulence: Feeding the Body and Feeding the Mind 4. Life in a Bustle: Advice to Youth 5. The Gentlewoman’s Book of Sports 6. On Reading, Writing and Living With Books Coming soon: 7. Through a Glass Lightly: Confession of a Reluctant Water Drinker 8. The Right to Fly 9. The Noble English Art of Self-Defence 10. Hints on Etiquette: A Shield Against the Vulgar 11. A Woman’s Walks 12. A Full Account of the Dreadful Explosion of Wallsend Colliery by which 101 Human Beings Perished!

www.pushkinpress.com

MEMBERS’ NEWS Donations and Bequests continued Royalties The literary estates of Ian Parsons, Robert McNair Scott and Reay Tannahill have provided income from royalties.

ENDOWMENT FUNDs Lewis L Golden OBE JP Mrs Drue Heinz Hon DBE Julio and Maria Marta Núñez MARKING THE 50th ANNIVERSARY OF T.S. ELIOT’S DEATH To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of its past President, T.S. Eliot, The London Library produced two performances of his work. Income from both performances supported the work of The London Library and we are enormously grateful to everyone who bought tickets for them.

For the performance in London at Wilton’s Music Hall on 21 October 2015, a debt of gratitude is owed to Deborah Warner, who staged the evening, Mike Gunning, Gina Gunning, Holly Hooper and the team at Wilton’s for their help in creating the production, and the cast of Sinead Cusack, Jeremy Irons, Simon Russell Beale, Fiona Shaw and Ben Whishaw.

For the performance at the Century Association in New York on 17 November 2015, we would also like to thank Jesse Marchese, who was the Director, and the cast comprising Rob Breckenridge, Katie Firth, Cynthia Harris, Kate Levy, Tony Roach and David Staller.

Finally we would like to thank the T.S. Eliot Estate, whose support in so many different ways was crucial in enabling these performances to happen.

DONATIONS OF BOOKS Thanks are also due to various government and official bodies, learned societies, institutions and firms, and other libraries and publishers which have given their publications, and to the many donors of books and other items who are listed below: Professor John Abecasis-Phillips Académie royale de Belgique Jeremy Adler Akademie der Wissenschaften und

der Literatur, Göttingen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz David Alexander Amazon Publications for The Arthur Ransome Society The Angela Thirkell Society Mirela Anghel in memory of Petre Anghel The Anglo-Hellenic League The Anthony Powell Society The Antique Collectors’ Club ARQA William Arthurs Associazone Culturale Italia-Inghilterra Anthony Astbury Peter Bagwell Purefoy Dr Phil Baker Nicolas Barker OBE Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution Simon Beattie Alan Bell Marjatta Bell Hans Georg Berger Lady Rachel Billington OBE The late John Baxter Black Mark Blackett-Ord in memory of Rosemary Blackett-Ord Robin Blake Michael Bond Grigory Bondarenko Professor Jenny Bourne Taylor Philip Bovey David Boyd Dr Prue Brand Dr and Mrs Nicholas Breach The British Library The British Sociological Association The Browning Society Dr John Burman Christian Busby Annette Carson David Caute Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey, Bt The Charles Williams Society Chris Beetles Ltd Alix Christie Christie’s Nigel Collett Adrian Collier in memory of Mrs Héloïse Collier John Collis MBE David Corcos Corpus Christi College, Cambridge Penelope Craig Robert Cumming Dr Richard Davenport-Hines Charles de Chassiron David Delmonté Eddie de Oliveira in memory of Jader de Oliveira Derbyshire Archaeological & Natural History Society Rodolph de Salis

Elizabeth Drury Andrew Duff Professor Christopher Duffy John Duncalfe Dr Michael Dunne Dr Brent Elliott Michael Erben Estorick Collection Everyman’s Library Anthony Eyre The Fabian Society Nicki Faircloth John Fairley Dr Federica Falchi Michael Fardell Christopher Fettes Aridea Fezzi Fleming Wyfold Art Foundation Benedict Flynn Mary Ellen Foley Dr Rebecca Ford in memory of Jean Fothergill Julian Francis The Francis Brett Young Society Frankfurt Book Fair Committee Arthur and Janet Freeman Friends of the Dymock Poets German Historical Institute London Helen Glanville Charles Glass Susie Green Dr Gill Gregory Groinkers’ Press Loyd Grossman Nevile Gwynne Robert Gwynne Robin Haig Dr Anthony Hamber Robin Hamlyn and family Mathias Hancock Sr Rose Mary Harbinson Robert Harding Raymond Harris in memory of Janine Harris Cate Haste Sir Max Hastings John Havard Philip Healy Karen Hearn Hertfordshire Association for Local History Historic England Horniman Museum Jolyon Hudson John Hussey OBE Carl Huter Professor Kaoru Imanishi The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England & Wales Mark James Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture Lady Deborah Jay John Buchan Society The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)

Keats Shelley Memorial Association William Keegan Dr Elisabeth Kehoe Dr Julia King The Lord King of Lothbury KG GBE Jenny Kingsley and family The Kipling Society Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab A C Koning Alastair Laing Dr Anne Varick Lauder Jason Lever Joshua Levine Lord Lexden OBE Libris Miriam Lilliu in memory of Giovanni Lilliu Dr Adrian Locke David Longmuir George Loudon David Lough Timothy Lutz Inez T P A Lynn Stephen MacManus Macmillan Stephen Mahony Dr Peter Main Caroline Maldonado Alberto Manguel Isabel Marcoff-Ball in memory of Alex Marcoff Andrew Martin The Massachusetts Review Nicholas McBurney Gavin McCabe in memory of Dr Irena McCabe Dr Penny McCarthy McGill-Queen’s University Press Sir Ronald McIntosh Alan McNee Elma Meredith Humphrey Metzgen Charles Moore John David Morley Simon Morris Ferdinand Mount Peter Mountfield Jamie Muir Edwin Mullins Charles Murray Nicholas Murray Museo Vincenzo Vela Jeremy Musson Pamela Myers Charlotte Nassim The National Art Collections Fund National Trust New Statesman Tim Newton in memory of Hilary Newton Matt Nixon Sebastian Nokes Continued overleaf THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 35

Donations and Bequests continued

Asian Art in London 3 - 12 November 2016

EAST MEETS WEST asianartinlondon.com

The Viscount Norwich Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset Edna O’Brien Dr Paul O’Keeffe Stephen Ongpin The Oscar Wilde Society Österreichisches Akademie der Wissenschaften Our Glass Publishing Sir Richard Packer Peter Parker Anna Pavord Dr Richard Pearson Penguin Group UK Michael Peppiatt John Perkins Professor Markas Petuchauskas Marie-Claire Phélippeau Peter T G Phillips Christopher Phipps Dr Peter Pickering Dr Malcolm Pines Stephen Pochin Louis Porter Russell and Ghillian Potts Christine Poulson Dr Cecilia Powell The Powys Society Privy Council Library ProQuest Prospect Books David Pryce-Jones Anthony Pugh-Thomas Dr Simon Pulleyn Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts Paul Quarrie Peter Quinn in memory of Beatrice Quinn Katrina Quinton in memory of Lord Quinton Random House Stephen Reardon Nicholas Redman Susan Reynolds Hamish Riley-Smith Richard Ritchie The Rothschild Archive Peter Rowland Royal Academy of Arts The Royal Anthropological Institute Royal Collection Trust Royal Horticultural Society The Royal Society Royal Society of Literature The Rupert Brooke Society Dale Russell Jem Sandford Dr Ann Saunders Scholarly Sources Timothy Schroder Christopher Scoble Lord and Lady Scott Mary Scott

36 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE AAIL-London-Library.indd 1

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David Shapiro Jack Shenker David Sherlock Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship Paul Sieveking Gareth Simon Jacob Simon The Simon Digby Memorial Trust Helen Simpson Professor David Skilton Anthony Skyrme in memory of Michael Schofield Society of Antiquaries of London The Society of Authors Society for Psychical Research The Society of Women Writers and Journalists Sotheby’s Alison Sproston St Albans & Hertfordshire Architectural & Archaeological Society Dr Craig Stephenson His Honour Eric Stockdale Dr John-Paul Stonard Jean Stone Dr Richard Stoneman Dr John Sugden The Rt Hon Lord Sumption Caroline Swash Sydney Smith Association John Symons Susan Symons Jennifer Talbot Reverend Dr Terry Tastard Professor Robert H Taylor Sir Richard Thompson Trevor Timpson Tornabuoni Art London Gregory Toth Malcolm Tozer Louisa Treger Lucy Trench The Tucker family in memory of Eva Tucker Dr Frances Twinn Un-Gyve Press Sandor Vaci Ruth Valentine Randolph Vigne Michael von Brentano Jeremy Warren Giles Waterfield Professor Cedric Watts Gavin Weightman Sir Christopher White CVO Dr Paul Williamson Rupert Willoughby Adrian Wilsdon Stephen Wood The Hon Mr and Mrs David Worthy The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Dr Ann Wroe Gwen Yarker

MEMBERS’ NEWS

BE AT THE CENTRE OF KNOWLEDGE AND INSPIRATION The Founders’ Circle is a group of literary enthusiasts whose support provides a vital foundation to ensure that the Library can continue to open its doors and expand and preserve the collection.

Membership fees cover three-quarters of the Library’s running costs, and it is thanks to the tremendous generosity of members and supporters that the Library’s essential resources remain open to all, but philanthropic support has always been crucial.

As a member of the Founders’ Circle, you will gain a deeper insight into the Library and enjoy an exclusive programme of events with prominent writers and arts experts, held at the Library and other cultural institutions, in addition to visits to private collections. Depending upon the level of support, benefits include invitations to the annual Founders’ Circle Lunch, Christmas Party and Chairman’s Dinner as well as the opportunity to enjoy a bespoke tour of the Library for you and your friends on your area of interest, featuring treasures from the Library’s collection.

There are three levels of annual contribution, named after three of the Library’s Founders: Harriet Martineau (£1,500), William Makepeace Thackeray (£5,000) and Charles Dickens (£10,000).* If you would like to play a key role in furthering the Library’s work, please consider joining this wonderful community of supporters and help ensure that The London Library remains a place of knowledge and inspiration for generations to come.

To join or find out more, please email alexandra.davis@ londonlibrary.co.uk or call 020 7766 4719. More details are available online at londonlibrary.co.uk/support-us/founders-circle *Member benefits can be purchased separately. For more information, please see londonlibrary.co.uk/support-us/founderscircle

CHRISTMAS CARD 2016

Events coming up this autumn include: • An exclusive lunch for Founders’ Circle members with our Chairman, Sir Howard Davies • An invitation to the preview of Frieze Masters, including the chance to view a selection of rare books and illuminated manuscripts at galleries including Les Enluminures, Sam Fogg and Daniel Crouch Rare Books • A private tour of the Royal Astronomical Society’s worldclass collection of books and manuscripts in astronomy, with an opportunity to see a recently discovered medieval manuscript charting the movement of stars which includes medieval marginalia of gothic grotesques • The book launch and party at The London Library for Elizabeth Herridge’s Bringing Heaven to Earth: Silver Jewellery and Ornament in the Late Qing Dynasty (Ianthe Press), which investigates a little-known area of the Chinese decorative arts, as part of the Asian Art in London 2016 programme of events • A private out-of-hours tour of the Paul Nash exhibition at Tate Britain (opens October 2016)

The specially commissioned London Library Christmas card will be on sale from October 2016.

This year we are delighted that the card has been illustrated by Sue Macartney-Snape, who has been described by John Julius Norwich as a ‘master of caricature’ whose paintings ‘illustrate the English social scene more brilliantly and with greater accuracy than those of any other painter working today’.

£5.00 (pack of 8 cards & envelopes) Proceeds from sales raise vital funds for the Library.

On sale from reception, or online at shop.londonlibrary.co.uk Frieze Masters, 2015. © Frieze.

A postal order form will be printed in the winter issue of the Magazine.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 37

CLF_LLM_Ad_112.5x83(5).qxp_Layout 1 11/08/2016 11:42 Page 1

What beneficiaries say*

The Royal Literary Fund 

Cambridge Literary Festival Winter 2016 26/7 November In partnership with

Festival highlights

he ‘One of trs of a quiet pill lity.’ our civi

‘A miracl e.’

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‘A ray of lig shining thr ht oug dark cloud.’ h a

iters.’ r w o t t f ‘A life-ra *quotes from RLF beneficiaries during 2013-14

The Royal Literary Fund has been supporting published writers during hard times for over 200 years.

If you need help e-mail eileen.gunn@rlf.org.uk or go to www.rlf.org.uk All enquiries are treated with sympathy and in the strictest confidence.

Registered Charity No 219952

38 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Laura Bates Ken Clarke Richard Coles Margaret Drabble Alan Johnson Deborah Levy Penelope Lively Ian McMillan Jenni Murray Sarah Perry Tony Robinson Ali Smith Francis Spufford

Box Office: cambridgelivetrust.co.uk 01223 357851 Full information: cambridgeliteraryfestival.com Picture by Martin Bond www.acambridgediary.co.uk

MEMBERS’ NEWS

Member Events Member events are free, but places are limited so must be reserved in advance at londonlibrary.co.uk/ memberevents NEW MEMBERS’ DRINKS RECEPTION Thursday, 22 September 2016 6.30pm – 8.30pm Reading Room A special drinks reception to welcome all members who have recently joined or rejoined the Library. This is an opportunity to meet other members socially, view special displays and receive expert advice from staff on how to make the most of your membership. Please note the Library will be closed to members before the event between 5.30pm and 6.30pm.

THOMAS CARLYLE’S HOUSE TOUR Thursday, 13 October 2016 5.30pm – 7pm Thomas Carlyle’s House, 26 Cheyne Row, London SW3 5HL Fully booked but waiting list in operation In May 1841, 175 years ago, Thomas Carlyle realised his ambition to open a lending library for London. In this anniversary year, we celebrate our connection with one of Victorian Britain’s most influential writers and invite you to join other members for a drinks reception and exclusive tour of his former home at 24 Cheyne Row in Chelsea, now a National Trust property.

GAMES NIGHT Tuesday, 18 October 2016 6pm – 8pm, Members’ Room Join our regular Games Night and meet other Library members at a fun

and informal social evening.

Play chess or Scrabble, try your hand at Mah Jongg, or bring along a game you wish to share. No experience is necessary and players of all abilities are welcome.

ROBERT GRAVES AND ‘GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT’ Dr Jean Moorcroft Wilson Monday, 7 November 2016 6pm – 7.30pm Members’ Room Fully booked but waiting list in operation Robert Graves wrote poetry about the First World War as well as prose, but it is his autobiography, Good-Bye to All That (1929), which links him most firmly to one of the most significant events in modern history. Criticised by fellow war-memoirists Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden for its cavalier attitude towards historical facts, Good-Bye to All That nevertheless has enabled generations of readers to re-live a period which now lies a century behind us.

In this talk, Dr Jean Moorcroft Wilson – biographer of Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas and Charles Hamilton Sorley, and currently preparing a book on Graves – will bring fresh research to bear on the writing and reception of what Paul Fussell has called a ‘classic’ memoir of the First World War.

Eric Kennington’s Portrait of Robert Graves, 1921.

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING Wednesday, 9 November 2016 6pm – 8pm Reading Room The Library’s 175th AGM will be held on Wednesday, 9 November. All members are invited to attend. Drinks will be served in the Issue Hall from 5.30pm.

SAVE THE DATE MEMBERS’ CHRISTMAS DRINKS Thursday, 24 November 2016 6.30pm – 8.30pm Reading Room Start off the festive season and enjoy a glass of wine in the Reading Room with your fellow Library members.

Please note the Library will be closed to members before the event between 5.30pm and 6.30pm.

Ph.D. Members’ Group First Wednesday of every month, 6pm – 8pm Members’ Room A meeting is held at the Library on the first Wednesday of every month for any members currently studying for a Ph.D. These informal gatherings offer an opportunity to share information on a variety of subjects including research and funding opportunities.

Contact Cleo Roberts (cleoetic@gmail.com) for more details.

Do you have a subject you are passionate about and which would make an interesting talk or event for other members? Do you have professional experience in an area that you would be happy to share in a ‘How-to’ session?

Or perhaps you work somewhere interesting and would be able to offer a tour to members? If you are interested in contributing to the members’ events programme, or have ideas for a future event, please email: marketing@londonlibrary.co.uk

LONDON LIBRARY GIFT MEMBERSHIP Give a year of bookish joy this Christmas Gift vouchers also available. www.londonlibrary.co.uk

The Treasurer The spring issue of our Magazine included a call for suitably qualified members to apply for the post of Treasurer in succession to Mark Storey. We received applications from a number of strong candidates and are delighted to report that Philip Broadley has been appointed by the trustees to take up this key role after the 2016 AGM. A Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, Philip has been a Library member since 2002 and brings a wealth of experience in both the commercial and charity sectors, particularly in the areas of investment management, risk and governance.

Heartfelt thanks are due to Mark Storey for his sound stewardship of the Library’s finances over the last eight years, not to mention the enthusiasm, generosity and commitment that have characterised his involvement throughout.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 39

FINE BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS Wednesday 9 November 2016 Knightsbridge, London

ENQUIRIES +44 (0) 20 7393 3810 books@bonhams.com Closing date for entries Monday 26 September 2016

Entries now invited

GOYA (FRANCISCO) [Tauromaquia], Madrid, 1855 £15,000 - 20,000

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