The London Library Magazine: Winter 2019

MAGAZINE WINTER 2019 ISSUE 46

£3.50

WHAT SURVIVES US Rediscovering forgotten writings from the past by Gillian Tindall

HIDDEN CORNERS Dunia García-Ontiveros on sixteenth-century gems in the Library

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE FRENCH COURT Memoirs and what they reveal of the lives of women at the centre of power by Philip Mansel

We believe in bringing people closer to arts and culture.

Through our partnership with the British Museum, we’ve helped over 4 million people gain a deeper understanding of world cultures with BP exhibitions, displays and performances. bp.com/arts The next BP Exhibition Troy: myth and reality is at the British Museum from 21st November 2019 to 8th March 2020.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE / ISSUE 46

12 The transformative effect of the passage of time on our perception of written material and its value is examined by Gillian Tindall, who has uncovered some hitherto unconsidered treasures in the course of her work as a biographer

CONTENTS 5 FROM THE DIRECTOR 6 CONTRIBUTORS Page with uncial script from the St Cuthbert Gospel, late seventh century. © British Library Board.

16 From the first popular gardening books

by Thomas Hill to a work by the socalled ‘founder of occultism’, who was – surprisingly – a Catholic theologian, the Library’s collection of sixteenthcentury titles reveals the breadth of literature available at the time, as Dunia García-Ontiveros reveals

The Library titles that informed Oliver Soden’s biography of Michael Tippett

11 MY DISCOVERY The Projection of England (1932)

by Stephen Tallents and its influence on Alan Powers’ recent book on the Bauhaus

12 WHAT SURVIVES US Gillian Tindall examines the arbitrariness of what remains to tell stories of the past Illustration from the 1533 edition of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De occulta philosophia (1510).

20 Philip Mansel assesses the memoirs of Madame de Motteville during Louis XIV’s reign and the royalists Mesdames de Boigne and de la Tour du Pin at the time of the Revolution, which reveal much about the power and freedom of women in their respective periods

8 BEHIND THE BOOK

16 HIDDEN CORNERS The Library’s sixteenth-century titles are enjoyed by Dunia GarcíaOntiveros

20 WOMEN WRITERS OF THE FRENCH COURT Philip Mansel on the insights into life at court offered by women’s memoirs

24 FAMILY GATHERING The September conference of independent libraries at The London Library Engraving of La Grande Mademoiselle (Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans), cousin of Louis XIV, from the portrait by Pierre Mignard.

26 MEMBERS’ NEWS

24 The London Library hosted a conference for independent libraries from the UK and the USA in September, where there were encouraging discussions on the future of the sector Some of the delegates at the conference for independent libraries at The London Library.

p

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 3

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London Library members may be surprised to find a different source of reference material in their immediate neighbourhood; The Foster & Son archive of beautiful heritage shoes is a working collection on permanent display at the Jermyn Street shop, and has provided a source of design and craft inspiration for many of the styles found in every gentleman’s wardrobe.

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4 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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p FROM THE DIRECTOR

On the cover

This year’s Christmas card, designed by London Library member Roland Chambers (see page 30 for details about purchasing the cards).

Welcome to the winter edition of The London Library Magazine, with festive treats in the form of articles by Library members Oliver Soden on Michael Tippett, Alan Powers on the Bauhaus, Gillian Tindall on discovering forgotten writings, Dunia García-Ontiveros on the Library’s sixteenthcentury titles and Philip Mansel on women writers in the French court. The range of our members’ work continues to astonish me, and I can think of few places where such a breadth of creativity and ideas can be found under one roof.

Starting a career as a writer can be a daunting task and we are determined to do all we can to encourage and support writers at an early stage in their careers. It was therefore wonderful to see our recent Gala fundraising event (covered in Members’ News) raise over £60,000 in ticket sales and donations for our Emerging Writers Programme. We all look forward to inviting applications for a second year of the Programme in the New Year.

2019 has been a very positive year for the Library and our plan to ensure its long-term sustainability. We have done a great deal to raise awareness of the Library and, as a result, have seen our number of members grow every month. Growth has been especially strong among young people, which is excellent news for the Library’s future.

I am also delighted that we have been able to restrict the annual increase in membership fees to very low levels. In 2020, the fee for a full member paying by annual direct debit will stay the same as it has been since 2017. This has been made possible by our progress in growing membership and raising donations, and I am enormously grateful for the vital support from all those who have responded to our various fundraising initiatives throughout the year.

2020 promises to be another exciting year for the Library and also for The London Library Magazine. After over a decade in the same format we’ll be introducing a new look, designed to reflect the wide-ranging feedback we received from members in the focus groups and research survey conducted over the summer. Thank you to everyone who took part and I hope you enjoy the new format when it arrives in spring.

With very best wishes for Christmas and the New Year.

Philip Marshall Director

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

Printed by Tradewinds London. Published November 2019. © 2019 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 Publisher Jane Grylls Editor Mary Scott Design and production Catherine Cartwright Picture research Catherine Cartwright

Editorial committee Julian Lloyd Peter Parker Philip Spedding Erica Wagner

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Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to magazine@londonlibrary.co.uk THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5

CONTRIBUTORS

"A work of Boundless Genius..."

Dunia García-Ontiveros JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2007

Dunia García-Ontiveros is the newly appointed Head of Library and Museum Collections at the Society of Antiquaries of London. Before that she worked at The London Library, which she joined in 2007.

As Head of Retrospective Cataloguing and later Head of Bibliographic Services she spent over 12 years leading the team responsible for exploring and describing the Library’s riches.

"Fit only for the shelves of a Brothel!"

Philip Mansel JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1978

Philip Mansel’s books include Louis XVIII (1981); The Court of France 1789–1830 (1989); and Paris Between Empires 1814–1852 (2001). His latest book is King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV (Allen Lane, 2019). He is a co-founder of the Society for Court Studies and the Levantine Heritage Foundation. In 2012 he received the London Library Life in Literature award.

Lord Byron's poem Don Juan has always been controversial, this is part of its appeal, making it one of the greatest satiric poems in the English language.

The Byron Society is marking the 200th anniversary of the

Alan Powers

publication of one of Britain's most notorious poems by

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1982

one of its most scandalous poets with a one-day conference

Alan Powers has worked as a writer, university teacher, curator and occasional artist (including the Library’s Christmas card for 1994). His field is visual arts and their social background, primarily in Britain, since 1880, including books on Eric Ravilious, Edward Ardizzone and Enid Marx. His most recent book is Bauhaus Goes West: Modern Art and Design in Britain and America (Thames & Hudson, 2019).

Join us on the 7th of December 2019 in Nottingham.

With a plenary lecture by world-famous Romantic scholar Professor Jerome McGann, a packed programme of excellent papers by leading academics, a guided tour of Newstead Abbey, a champagne reception, and a threecourse dinner, this will be a truly magnificent day.

For more details visit www.thebyronsociety.com or email contact@thebyronsociety.com.

Oliver Soden JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2013

Oliver Soden is a writer and broadcaster, and the author of Michael Tippett: The Biography (2019), which was acclaimed

by Gramophone as ‘nothing short of miraculous’ and chosen as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. He is currently working on a biography, the first in 25 years, of Noël Coward. He grew up in Bath and Sussex, read English at Clare College, Cambridge, and lives in London.

This is just one of the many events which the Byron Society organises each month, predominantly in London, including talks, poetry readings, book launches, concerts, and dinners at the East India Club and the House of Lords. Members also receive biannual copies of the prestigious The Byron Journal.

Join us, and discover more about the life and works of this poet, novelist, playwright, traveller, revolutionary, and lover.

Byron Society Membership, the perfect Christmas Gift.

THE BYRON SOCIETY 6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Photograph © Sara Lee.

Gillian Tindall JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1972

Gillian Tindall began her career as a prize-winning novelist. Her non-fiction, which is renowned for being brilliantly evocative of place, includes The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village, which first appeared 40 years ago and has rarely been out of print; and Célestine: Voices from a French Village (1995), for which she was decorated by the French government.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 7

BEHIND THE BOOK

‘

Oliver Soden trawled the Library’s wide-ranging collection for his recently published biography of Michael Tippett Oliver Soden’s Michael Tippett: The Biography (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019).

’

When, years ago, I first visited The London Library, I bemoaned the gap on the shelves where ‘Biog. Tippett, Michael’ should have been. It wasn’t the Library’s oversight; no biography of this great twentieth-century composer existed. He proved a perfect biographical subject, one whose life (1905–98) was a lens through which the whole shifting panoply of a century could be considered. The research strayed into so many areas – Trotskyism in the 1930s; conscientious objection to the Second World War; the work of T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, E.M. Forster – that a lending library of the scope of The London Library was essential to my work. u The Vote: The Organ of the Women’s Freedom League (London 1909–33).

Michael Tippett was born in 1905 and raised in Suffolk. His mother, Isabel Kemp, devoted herself to the fight for female suffrage, and spent much of her time campaigning for the Women’s Freedom League (whose members opposed the violent methods of protest used by Christabel Pankhurst and her followers).

I was hunting, in particular, for an article that Tippett had published in the WFL magazine at the encouragement of his mother. Down, then, to the subterranean shelves of old periodicals, turning the tissue-thin pages to the peaceful whirr of the rotating stacks. ‘Extremely fragile paper, ’ warns the catalogue. ‘Please handle with care. ’ And eventually I found what I was looking for: Tippett’s first published work. ‘Michael, aged 8, speaks in public unflinchingly thus … “I do not think that it is fair that the women should not have the vote. ” ’ u History of British Trotskyism by Ted Grant (London 2002).

One of my major discoveries about Tippett’s life was the extent to which he had covered up his left-wing political activities in the 1930s. He was briefly a

8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

member of the (Stalinist) Communist Party of Great Britain, but soon switched his allegiance to Trotskyism, believing that a revolution in England was the only way to bring down the iniquities of capitalism and empire. Ted Grant’s partial but fascinating political history discusses Tippett’s involvement with one of the major Trotskyist parties in Britain, the Youth Militant Group, and sets the scene of the internecine battles that erupted in the shadow first of the Spanish Civil War and then of global warfare. u A Child of Our Time by Ödön von Horváth (London 1938).

Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time (1939–41), which responds to the events leading up to the Kristallnacht pogrom and is memorably punctuated with five African-American spirituals, is his most famous work. He took his title from Ödön von Horváth’s novella, of which the Library holds one of the few publicly available copies, musty and unborrowed. The central character is a young Nazi lancecorporal who becomes easy meat for the Fatherland’s ideals and, brainwashed, turns to murder. ‘Don’t revile him’ , says the narrator. ‘Just think, how could he help himself? He was a child of his time. ’

u Challenge

of Conscience: The Story of the Conscientious Objectors of 1939– 1949 by Denis Hayes (London 1949).

Faced with the very real threat of war, Tippett soon abandoned Trotskyism for an ardent and absolute pacifism. He registered as a conscientious objector, but refused to comply with the terms of his exemption from military service, serving two months in HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs. The bureaucracies and complexities of conscientious objection are explained and unravelled in Denis Hayes’s sympathetic study, which draws on the author’s first-hand experience. u The Poems of T.S. Eliot, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London 2015).

T.S. Eliot was Tippett’s friend and mentor; they discussed collaboration, and Tippett considered the poet to be nothing less than his ‘spiritual father’ . This astonishing two-volume edition of Eliot’s poetry appeared in the year I began work, and I was grateful indeed for its existence, and the way in which, through its extensive commentary explicating Eliot’s allusions, it offers us a literary equivalent of the Human Genome Project, mapping Eliot’s boundless and labyrinthine intellect.

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Connect with us: Institute of Advanced Legal Studies / ials.sas.ac.uk Institute of Classical Studies / ics.sas.ac.uk Institute of Commonwealth Studies / commonwealth.sas.ac.uk Institute of English Studies / ies.sas.ac.uk Institute of Historical Research / history.ac.uk Institute of Latin American Studies / ilas.sas.ac.uk Institute of Modern Languages Research / modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk Institute of Philosophy / philosophy.sas.ac.uk The Warburg Institute / warburg.sas.ac.uk

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10 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

MY DISCOVERY The Projection of England by Stephen Tallents (1932) A 1932 pamphlet in H. England, Social &c., urging England to market its values to the world through design and culture, inspired a major theme of Alan Powers’ book on the Bauhaus This year marks the centenary of the foundation of the Bauhaus, the German school of art and design whose reputation far exceeds its 14-year existence. This name is so well known that it scarcely needs explaining, but whether it is well understood is another matter. My book Bauhaus Goes West (Thames & Hudson, 2019) was in part an attempt to seek the evidence for awareness of the Bauhaus in Britain during and after the period of its actual existence. Having a unique keyword to use for searches is a great advantage, and arguably the reputation of the school has benefited enormously from this neologism coined by its first director, Walter Gropius – disyllabic in place of the long compound German name it might otherwise have had.

Relating the state of design and the discussion around it in Britain in the midtwentieth century to what was happening in Germany was one of the aims of my book. While one can find plenty of writing from the 1930s about better teacups or curtain fabrics, the wider role of design is less often discussed. In this respect, a slim pamphlet, The Projection of England (1932) by Stephen Tallents, which I located in H. England, Social &c., was an extraordinarily far-sighted polemic. Tallents, a civil servant who wrote the essay while he was secretary of the Empire Marketing Board, suggested that our national identity in future will no longer depend on extractive industry and manufacturing but on marketing our culture, tradition, history and language to the rest of the world. In support of his argument, Tallents, who was shortly to establish the GPO Film Unit, cited the German Pavilion by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich at the Barcelona International Exhibition of 1929 – which he had visited and commented on in the

Stephen Tallent’s The Projection of England (Faber & Faber, 1932). © Simon Rendall.

Spectator at the time – praising its nonliteral portrayal of modern but eternal values in a calm, uncrowded way, in contrast to the mediocre muddle then typical of British design shows abroad.

The content of Tallents’ short essay could hardly be more relevant to the current situation in Britain, anticipating the decline of Empire and the need for ‘soft power’ in its place. He lists qualities such as ‘a reputation for coolness’ , fair dealing and fair play; self-deceiving, perhaps, but fundamental to a new national self-image, exemplified by such war-time films as Humphrey Jennings’ Listen to Britain (1942). In his study of Tallents, Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain (2012), Scott Anthony concludes that ‘the radical crux of the argument … was not that Britain needed

to master the new media arts, but the recognition that mastering these arts entailed a profound reorganisation of government, science and society’ .

Tallents’ theme can be traced in the Festival of Britain in 1951 and in post-war public organisations such as the Design Council, the Arts Council, nationalised transport and New Towns.

The Projection of England, which features a cover designed by Edward McKnight Kauffer that I was able to use as an illustration in my book, was one of my guiding lights for the concept of Bauhaus Goes West. I asked myself whether the fame of the Bauhaus had distorted our understanding of how people were thinking in our remote island, and what kind of design culture awaited the Bauhaus émigrés who came to England, including Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy. Even though German Modernism owed much to the English Arts and Crafts movement, the evidence of historically styled buildings and products in Britain between the wars suggested a failure to develop. In fact, British art schools had continued to operate across fine art, craft and design since 1900 and, although relatively few of their products looked like what was coming out of the Bauhaus, the principles of learning by doing and valuing the quality of Sachlichkeit, or objectivity, were on similar lines. The London Underground (on Tallents’ check-list of Englishness) had developed a form of ‘total design’ by looking judiciously abroad, and other artists and designers, now mostly forgotten, had begun to push back the kitsch. The truth, as ever, was more complicated and nuanced than the received version. The Bauhäusler had an impact, but it was more reciprocal than most people suppose.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 11

WHAT SURVIVES US Gillian Tindall considers the life cycle of written material and the discoveries she has made during her time as a biographer, from letters in an empty house in France to neglected books waiting for her on the Library shelves It is several years ago, and I am sitting – no, not for once in The London Library, but in the British Library, and not in one of the reading rooms but in an office. The room’s regular occupant is a near contemporary, known to me for decades through our shared interest in urban history and cartography and now a distinguished figure in the Library’s hierarchy. I have come for a conspiratorial chat about a committee we are both on, but while I am there he says ‘I’ve got something you might like to see’ . And places it in my hands.

It is a small, compact book, bound in red goatskin with an embossed formal design reminiscent of a flower on the front. It is hardly bigger than an old-style British passport but considerably fatter.

If it were a hundred and fifty years old, one would say it was in good condition, considering its age; only the spine is a little battered. In fact, it is over thirteen hundred years old, and is the oldest book in the Western world to survive in its original binding. It is a copy of St John’s Gospel in Latin, written, possibly in the Venerable Bede’s monastery in Northumbria, in late seventh-century pure uncial script. But the really extraordinary thing about it – as some readers will already have guessed – is that it spent most of the first eight hundred years of its life in the coffin of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne.

St Cuthbert died in 698, and when his monks opened up his coffin some eleven years later, expecting to find a skeleton to enclose in a new casket and venerate with gifts such as this missal, they found his intact body, miraculously preserved, either

by Cuthbert’s saintliness or by the dry, sandy soil in which he had been buried.

He was given the missal to lie upon his chest anyway, and thus it was, when the monks had to flee from repeated Viking 12 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

raids a century and a half later, carrying St Cuthbert in his coffin with them, the little book went too, finally to fetch up, still coffined, in Durham Cathedral in 1004.

Centuries later, at the desecration of the cathedral relics at the Reformation, the book somehow missed being thrown out with the rest and took on an obscure, clandestine existence. It was probably passed from one secretively Catholic family to another, till it eventually, by a circuitous foreign route, ended up with the Jesuits of Stonyhurst. It was once again precious but still fairly secret when I held it briefly in my hands, for the British Library was then negotiating its purchase for a very substantial sum. In 2018, however, it had a place of honour

in the Library’s exhibition Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War. From its remote origin as a nice but fairly standard work of skilled calligraphy, valuable just because all manuscripts were rare and valuable then, it had been transformed into something touched by the magic of corporeal preservation, then as something vulnerable to be hustled out of sight, then as a still-rather-secret object that I was allowed briefly to hold. Now, in its glass case, well protected from my touch, it assumed again for the first time in hundreds of years a gloriously public role, venerated anew, this time for its unique survival.

The survival over centuries of any book, manuscript, letter, parish record,

Opposite St Cuthbert Gospel, late seventh century. © British Library Board.

Right Célestine (seated) in old age.

recipe or commonplace craftsman’s bill, is very much a matter of arbitrary chance.

Almost anything handwritten or printed has a transitory utility or value of some sort at the moment of its production, but nearly always that value ebbs: in days, in months, over the course of years, after a lifetime. The sheer passage of time and the turnover of generations creates a relentless destruction of the material evidence of humankind’s preoccupations and achievements; and this happens even in relatively peaceful societies that have not suffered repeated strife, revolution or invasion. If this were not so, we would all drown in paper (or parchment).

Most precious hoards of letters – or, say, childhood comics or theatre programmes – preserved by someone for whom they hold lasting meaning, inevitably end up in skips. (Or these days, let us hope, in recycling bins.) Many official records of long-term potential value are junked, usually in the interregnum when they are thought not to be of current relevance but have yet to acquire the patina of history.

The first several decades of British census returns were only saved in the nick of time by the intervention of a prominent civil servant called Francis Turner Palgrave – he of the Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861).

For there is a cycle in the life of written material, as indeed there is in any other initially valued article: clothes, furniture, houses. There is a natural downward progression from being prized, for whatever obvious or personal reason, to becoming out of date, out of fashion, disregarded and finally worthless, thrown away or just allowed to disintegrate.

Only then is a point reached at which examples of that particular kind of letter, book or object have been reduced to a small number and thus acquire the

quality of rarity. So, gradually, they begin to remount the scale of value. Which of us would not like to discover – perhaps even between the pages of some longunopened book pulled out from one of the remote basement engine-rooms of The London Library – jotted notes for a sermon bearing a date soon after 1800? Or even a Georgian laundry list?

Collections of love letters, as found sometimes stashed away in lofts, tied up with ribbon, when the hands that tied them so carefully are dead along with the writer and probably everyone known to them, are particularly apt for this transformation into something wider in meaning than their original intent. The young man who writes ‘I will be yours forever’ is thinking of himself and of the girl he loves and of their future lifetime.

Yet a hundred years on, if the letters survive, ‘forever’ means something different. The couple’s fragile love (which may not even have lasted to develop into a marriage) has by the sheer passage of time been transmogrified into something more durable, fixed like a photograph, and become undying evidence of the vanished society in which they lived.

I have had the enormous good fortune, for a writer, to come across such a small hoard of letters in an otherwise empty house in central France. The girl to whom the letters had been written in the 1860s was then, a hundred and twenty years later, just on the point of slipping from living memory into that oblivion which will cover most of us. Those in the neighbourhood who, in their youth, had known her as an old lady, were by then THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13

Letter to Célestine from a young man, discovered in a house in France.

ageing themselves. Today, as I write, they are almost all gone. But when I could talk to them they were able to pass on information about the one-time girl who, as the saved letters showed, had been loved by several different young men.

I was also able to research in official records the outlines of her long life. This project became a book, Célestine: Voices from a French Village. First published in England in 1995, and in France and Belgium in 2000, it still sells today. I know from correspondence I have had from the USA, from Canada and Australia, from France and the francophone parts of Africa, from the Netherlands and from South Africa (think, Flemish = Afrikaans) that I have unwittingly endowed Célestine with a posthumous and enduring renown of which, in life, 14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

she can never have dreamed.

Printed books, too, can become part of the obscurity-to-rubbish-toprovidential-recovery cycle. In an era of mass publishing such as our own, a very great many books, produced with however much care and expense, get pulped within a few years. George Gissing, the late nineteenth-century novelist whom writers themselves love for his dismally vivid evocation of the old British Library and its occupants – see New Grub Street (1891) – wrote in an agonised tone towards the end of his life ‘my books lie dead’ . It was both semi-true and untrue. He was not religious, but ‘resurgam’ might have been engraved on his lonely grave in south-west France, for a new destiny was in store for him.

My first non-fiction book, published in

1974, was a biographical study of Gissing, and it turned out to be one of the fortunate first of what has now become something of a deluge. When I was researching my book, most of his novels were indeed still only obtainable in what George Orwell, an early Gissing admirer, called ‘soup-stained public library editions’ . Of course I made tracks for The London Library, which proved indeed to have copies of nearly all Gissing’s novels except the very rare first one. They weren’t even soup-stained, just sitting there quietly waiting for me, and thanks to the Library’s relaxed and understanding attitude I had lots of them in my house for months. By the end of the 1970s, the situation was beginning to look very different. A number of other people after me (all of us, no doubt, responding to some mysterious zeitgeist) had become aware of Gissing’s unique voice and of the quality of his best works. New paperback editions began to multiply. One or two of the novels were taken up as emblematic of an early stirring of a modern cause; The Odd Women and In the Year of Jubilee come to mind. Today, almost everything that he wrote – and, due to one particularly dedicated admirer, all his correspondence too – is fairly readily available.

A technical revolution in printing, and the extraordinary and habit-changing rise of the internet, as personified in the book world by the opposing but complimentary forces of e-books and Amazon/ Abe Books, has now, of course, changed the whole picture. Quantities of out-of-print works, that 25 years ago had to be searched for as laboriously as the Holy Grail through specialised catalogues, are now available at a few clicks. But more significant, I think, in the longer term, is that long-forgotten books can now be fairly easily resurrected, both on paper and online. A world of forgotten, deeply asleep novels and long-ago travel sagas are finding a new afterlife that is often, given the passage of years, freighted with more meaning than they were originally thought to contain. From being once ‘light, amusing … modern’ or perhaps ‘adventurous … daring’ , these tales have now become messages from the world we have lost.

Two relatives of mine, both long dead, whose respective novels I had assumed to be dead too, or at any rate in a hopeless coma, have recently had their

WHAT SURVIVES US

books resurrected by a reprint firm. What’s more, they are selling: not in extravagant numbers, but sufficient to justify the whole exercise and to make me (their sole copyright owner) the recipient of a modest cheque each quarter. More importantly, they are clearly providing interest, entertainment and possibly instruction to

a generation of readers born long after the period they depict. I just wish the authors (both of whom suffered in their lives, in different ways, from a sense of failure) could know now that their books are, after all, alive, and carrying new messages from the past to the present.

But of course some books are

Top George Gissing (1857–1903) in the 1890s.

Left French stonemason Martin Nadaud, author of Histoire des Classes Ouvrières en Angleterre (1872), as a young député in 1849.

destined to remain forever obscure (‘rare’ is the dealers’ more complimentary term). A number of these are harboured

by The London Library, and not always recognised as such. Another biography I have written, The Journey of Martin Nadaud (1999), is that of a French stonemason who, in the midnineteenth century, became France’s first parliamentary député of workingclass extraction. In 1852, at the start of the Second Empire, he along with others escaped to England, and in his case had to take up pick and shovel on London building sites. During his 18-year exile he gathered material for a book, Histoire des Classes Ouvrières en Angleterre, which he finally published when he was at last able to return to a newly Republican France in 1870 and became once again a significant public figure. You will not be surprised to hear that this book, being in French, was never a big seller in England, nor, being concerned only with Brits, a runaway success in France. I was naturally delighted, when working on Nadaud, to find a copy, in a rather tattered state, in a crevice of the Library.

Like the Gissing novels earlier, I had this otherwise unwanted book in my house for many months. When I returned it to the Library I did point out that I happened to know that the only other extant copy in England was in Manchester and that, by the way, it was not me who had reduced this one to such a sad physical condition.

I was duly thanked for bringing the book’s rarity to the Library’s attention.

Hah, I ought to have known better.

The book was sent off for repair, but when I needed it again, a year or two later, to check a few passages because my own book on Nadaud was being translated into French, I was told that, goodness me, there was no question of my taking such an important and irreplaceable volume home with me, or perhaps even touching it. It was now, I was given to understand, guarded in a special mausoleum by the Library equivalent of six fierce eunuchs.

Only by fervent pleading – ‘But it’s me who told you ’ – did I get permission to sit in a designated cell in the Library and look through it. I was watched over, if not by eunuchs, certainly by a firm librarian.

Not, I am sure, what Nadaud himself, let alone his classes ouvrières, could ever have dreamed.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15

HIDDEN CORNERS: BRANCHING OUT Dunia García-Ontiveros explores the Library’s sixteenth-century titles, which range from accounts of voyages to the New World to satirical tales of lovers’ behaviour and an early volume on magic and the occult

Sometimes the genius of a single human being can transform the world forever.

Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in 1439 was the catalyst for an information revolution even more profound than the one we’re living through now. Book production burst out of the monastic scriptoria where for centuries words had been painstakingly scratched on to parchment, and in the space of a few years it was transported to thousands of workshops all over Europe.

Entire books could now be printed with incredible speed, making mass communication possible. New ideas could be spread quickly, and often refuted just as fast. Literacy levels rose dramatically and printing in vernacular languages grew in order to reach and influence new audiences. Long-established religious, political and economic structures were challenged and, in some cases, overthrown. The power of the printed word to influence, educate, amuse and delight seemed limitless and book production branched out into new genres.

In the most hidden of the Library’s hidden corners lie some two and a half thousand books printed in the sixteenth century. Together they illustrate how rich, widespread and diverse book production had become only a few decades after Gutenberg starting using his new printing press. While Latin still dominates in this collection, 15 other languages are represented. The books come from workshops spread over 130 cities, from Portugal to the Ukraine and from Finland to Greece. Almost two-thirds were printed 16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

in either Germany or Italy, and multi-faith, cosmopolitan Venice stands out as the most important centre of book production.

It is followed at a distance by Paris, London and Basel, but Wittenberg, Martin Luther’s base, also features prominently. This is no surprise, given Luther’s prodigious output and his talent as a propaganda pioneer.

Reformation literature and religious texts loom very large among the Library’s earliest books, yet there is plenty of evidence that sixteenth-century readers had other preoccupations. They had an appetite for a much wider selection of reading material, ideally accompanied by striking illustrations, and popular books were translated and reprinted many times.

Adventurers and missionaries were venturing ever further to remote and exotic places, and the people back at home liked nothing better than to read about these voyages. Nicolas de Nicolay was a mercenary, diplomat, royal cartographer, artist and, according to some, a spy who travelled to Turkey as part of the French embassy to the court of Süleyman the Magnificent in 1551. He was tasked with surveying the lands he visited, but what is most remarkable about his Vier Bucher von der Raisz und Shiffart in die Turckey (Four Books on Travel and Navigation in Turkey) are the 60 woodcuts of men and women he encountered. They include an image (often mutilated in surviving copies of the work) of a scantily clad member of a religious sect displaying an astonishing chastity device. The Library’s copy is a German translation printed in Antwerp in 1577 of the French edition of 1568. Shakespeare

scholars believe the English edition, which was based on the Antwerp version, was a source for The Merchant of Venice.

In Il devotissimo viaggio di Gerusalemme we read about the pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1586 by Jean Zuallart, a traveller from the Low Countries, who was also a historian, judge, Knight of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre and self-taught artist. His book was printed in Rome in 1587 with romantically depicted but architecturally accurate cities. His domes, minarets and palm trees nestling in sun-scorched sand dunes became the template that many other artists imitated.

Fans of travel literature were perhaps even more fascinated by accounts of the New World, such as that of Jean de Léry in Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil, autrement dite Amerique. The French Calvinist pastor tells the story of his ill-fated mission to Brazil. He spent over a year living with the cannibal Tupí tribe, and his experience became a journey of self-discovery. While he never fully understood or condoned all of the Tupí customs he did grow to admire and respect their beauty, self-reliance and honesty. Although he continued to refer to his hosts as ‘savages’ , he did remark upon the humanity and compassion he

Opposite Member of a religious sect depicted wearing a chastity device, from the 1577 German edition of Nicolas de Nicolay’s Vier Bucher von der Raisz und Shiffart in die Turckey (1568).

Top, left Illustration of the ancient city of Rama or Ramma, near Jerusalem,

by Jean Zuallart, from his Il devotissimo viaggio di Gerusalemme (1587).

Top, right Illustration of a Tupí funeral from the 1594 edition of Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil, autrement dite Amerique (1578).

Above Leriano on his deathbed, from the 1530 Italian edition of Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor (1492).

witnessed during a Tupí funeral.

When Léry realised he couldn’t convert the Tupí he decided to return to France. During the voyage the ship’s food supplies were exhausted and the men on board were reduced to eating the parrots and monkeys Léry was bringing back with him (the parrots were to serve as recordings of the Tupí language), as well as every scrap of leather they could find.

The manuscript recounting his fascinating story of failure was lost and Léry had to write his adventures again from memory.

The book was finally printed in La Rochelle in 1578, over 20 years after the journey took place. The Library’s copy, printed in Geneva in 1594, is a third edition, ‘revised, corrected, and enlarged greatly’ , complete with a printer’s note praising the work, and including several testimonials.

Judging by the books in the collection, for sixteenth-century readers the highs and lows of love were just as fascinating and mystifying as tales of adventures in remote lands. Cárcel de amor (The Prison of Love) is a Spanish novel in the best tradition of courtly love. Written by Diego de San Pedro, it was first printed in Seville in 1492 and became an international bestseller.

The London Library copy, printed in Venice in 1530, is the first Italian translation of this tragicomic story of unrequited love.

Leriano is besotted with Laureola, daughter THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

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of the king of Macedonia, and professes his love to her in numerous letters. Laureola does not return his love but she does accept his letters and even writes back.

When a love rival tells the king that his daughter has dishonoured herself with this correspondence the furious father locks her away. A swashbuckling Leriano fights the guards and rescues Laureola from her prison but she remains indifferent to his attentions. Rejected and desperate, Leriano commits very slow suicide by refusing food and drink. Lying on his deathbed Leriano, who cannot bear to destroy Laureola’s letters or to leave them behind, tears them up, places the pieces in a cup of water and drinks the mixture. With his dying breath he proclaims his love for Laureola and his admiration for all women.

Other authors were not so sentimental.

Martial d’Auvergne was a French jurist and poet who displayed his wicked sense of humour in Arrêts d’amour (Love Arrests).

In this parody of both love and the judicial system, 51 cases are tried in a fictitious court of love. Many of these, such as the case of the young woman who complains that her lover objects to her choice of clothes for being too revealing, would not be out of place in a modern-day reality-TV show. The book was first printed in the early 1460s, but the Library’s Latin edition from 1544, Aresta amorum, proves its longlasting popularity. If d’Auvergne uses satire to poke fun at lovers’ behaviour, Battista Fregoso carries out a frontal attack on love itself in his Anteros (Anti-Cupid). The Genoese Doge warns of the harmful effects of erotic brooding, which he likens to a disease. To prevent falling prey to the illness he advocates an avoidance of ‘lascivious sounds’ , bawdy songs and love stories, which may cause dangerous sensual stimulation. The work was first printed in Milan in 1496 and once again our 1581 Parisian edition, Contramours: l’anteros, ou, Contramour, attests to its lasting appeal.

Fregoso was not the only author dishing out advice at this time. There was a healthy market for books on physical, emotional and even social well-being.

Timothy Bright began his academic career at Cambridge and later travelled to the Continent to train in medicine.

Bright had a brilliant mind but seemed to lack the self-discipline to train it on one subject at a time; while holding the title of Chief Physician at the Royal Hospital of 18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

There was a healthy market for books on physical, emotional and even social well-being

’

St Bartholomew in London he neglected his patients, spending most of his time devising a new system for shorthand or ‘characterie’ and writing on the nature of melancholy. A Treatise of Melancholie: Containing the Causes thereof, & Reasons of the Strange Effects it Worketh in our Minds and Bodies, with the Phisicke Cure, and Spirituall Consolation for Such as Haue thereto Adioyned an Afflicted Conscience … was printed in London in 1586 and may have been written from tragic personal experience. Bright and his wife had lost one of their seven children only a few months before the book appeared. Bright understood that the reasons for depression could be physical as well as psychological, and in the book he covers the role of both drugs and diet in the management of this

devastating condition.

Another author interested in wellbeing was Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera, the most senior physician of the Spanish Armada. During his naval career he played an active and heroic role in many sea battles, capturing several enemy flags and surviving being shot through the shoulder, but he was also a witness to the horrific conditions suffered by galley slaves and it had a profound effect on him. After leaving the Armada he devoted himself to charitable works and wrote several treatises on improving the lives of the most vulnerable people in sixteenth-century Spanish society. In 1598 he published Discursos del Amparo de los Legítimos Pobres, y Reducción de los Fingidos: y de la Fundacion y Principio de los Albergues destos Reynos (Discourses on the Protection of the Legitimate Poor, and Reduction of those Feigning: and on the Foundation and Principle of Shelters in these Realms).

In it he describes the ideal of a shelter in Madrid where the poor could live in clean and healthy conditions, be taught good examples and given daily structure to engage them in useful occupation.

An intriguing illustration in his book has the caption ‘with eyes in their hands and [hands] busy with work they will have better habits’ . He wanted to help the genuinely needy: wounded and disabled war veterans, the sick, the elderly, prisoners, orphaned children, impoverished students and ‘vagabond and delinquent women’ . He spent the rest of his life fundraising, even begging when necessary, in order to realise his vision in the Atocha district of Madrid.

His shelter later became the site of the first general hospital in the Spanish capital.

Pottering about in the garden is also great for the body and soul, and the sixteenth century saw the publication of the first popular gardening books printed in the English language. They were written

by Thomas Hill, who appears to have been more of a literary entrepreneur than a true scholar. He himself admitted to having been ‘rudely taughte’ , but he evidently knew enough Italian and Latin to select and translate the works of many classical authors. These translations formed the basis of Hill’s work and while some have accused him of not contributing new knowledge to the subjects he wrote on, he did at least have enough of an understanding of these disciplines to choose his sources carefully,

HIDDEN CORNERS

Opposite Illustration from Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera’s Discursos del Amparo de los Legítimos Pobres, y Reducción de los Fingidos … (1598).

The caption reads: ‘with eyes in their hands and [hands] busy with work they will have better habits.’

Right Illustration from the 1586 edition of The Gardeners Labyrinth … (1577) by Thomas Hill, writing under the pseudonym Dydymus Mountaine.

the necessary skill to render them into clear English and sufficient integrity to acknowledge his sources. The undated A most briefe and pleasaunte treatise, teachyng how to dresse, sowe, and set a garden was probably printed around 1558 and was a great hit, running to nine editions. After its notable success it was revised and expanded as The proffitable art of gardening (1568).

Hill’s star was rising when his life was cut relatively short in 1574. His second gardening book, The Gardeners Labyrinth: Containing a Discourse of the Gardeners Life, in the Yearly Travels to be Bestowed on his Plot of Earth, for the Use of a Garden …, published under the facetious nom de plume of Dydymus Mountaine, was printed posthumously in 1577.

The book lists the ‘the physicke helpes’ or medicinal properties of herbs, fruits and vegetables: ‘parcely thrown into fish-ponds doth revive and strengthen the sick fish’ and melon seeds ‘eaten or drunk doe cause urine, and purge the lungs and

kidneis’ . It also offers tips for getting rid of pests such as moles, characterised as ‘a disquiet and grief to gardeners’ .

Those seeking advice on matters beyond gardening could venture down more esoteric paths. Jean de Meun was the thirteenth-century French poet and satirist best known for writing a continuation to the Roman de la Rose.

His Le dodechedron de fortune, printed in Paris in 1556, is an instruction manual for telling fortunes and it requires the use of a 12-sided die to provide answers to a list of set questions. The reader only needs to roll the die to get answers to questions such as whether a horse one is thinking of buying will prove a good investment, whether a prisoner of one’s acquaintance will be released soon, or whether a particular person will come to a bad end.

An author who was even more unorthodox in his search for answers was Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, a secretary and counsellor

to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. He was also a Catholic theologian, a royal physician, a philosopher and a soldier, but is best known for being the most important early-modern writer on magic and the occult. He completed his most significant work, De occulta philosophia, in 1510; an enlarged version was published in Cologne in 1533. This is the work that earned him the title of ‘founder of occultism’ , and while he had a most eventful life travelling around Europe, being banished from Germany after a theological clash and imprisoned in France for his unwise remarks regarding the royal family, he was surprisingly never persecuted for his writings on magic, which in his later life he dismissed as the product of misguided youthful curiosity.

Our collection shows that thanks to Gutenberg, sixteenth-century readers across Europe would have been spoiled for choice when trying to satisfy their curiosity, whether misguided and youthful or otherwise.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE FRENCH COURT Philip Mansel describes the revelations recorded in the memoirs of women at the centre of power in France at some of the most dramatic moments in the nation’s history The artistic glories of the French court from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries are well known: the Sainte Chapelle, Fontainebleau, Versailles and the Louvre speak for themselves. Its literary achievements are less familiar.

Yet the French court, more than any other, was a machine for writing. Official accounts of campaigns and festivals poured from the presses of the Imprimerie Royale. For entertainment the king and the royal household commissioned plays by, among others, Molière, Jean Racine and Voltaire – all of whom were also working court officials, as gentilhomme ordinaire (Racine and Voltaire) or valet de chambretapissier (Molière) ‘du roi’ .

The literature of power, however, and memoirs in particular, were the forms of writing most appreciated at the court of France. Independence of spirit or the desire for revenge led courtiers to challenge the official version of events recorded in royal histories. Indeed one of the earliest and most prominent women memoir writers, a servant of Queen Anne of Austria called Madame de Motteville, whose work I used frequently in my life of Louis XIV, claimed that ‘the words of kings and their actions are almost always blamed’ by courtiers. Courtiers writing in private analysed characters, motives and events without the constant references to God or the king of the official histories.

French memoir writers fulfil Graham Greene’s first requirement for a writer, as expressed to V.S. Pritchett in 1948: disloyalty, freedom from accepted opinions and a taste for treason. The pen was, if not mightier than the sword, certainly sharper. While often claiming that they were writing only for their family, publication (if not in Paris, then 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

in Amsterdam beyond the reach of the French government) was usually the memoir-writer’s intention.

The first person to write memoirs in France was called Philippe de Commynes.

A chamberlain and diplomat of Louis XI who had previously served Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and was inspired by their rivalry, he wrote in 1489–97 during a period of disgrace at the French court. His memoirs were

published posthumously in 1524–8 and were more influential in France than Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532).

By 1643 there had been 120 editions and they had been translated into Italian (the first French book to be so), English, Dutch and German. They were accurate as well as popular. Louis XIV himself would read them and, to show his level of practical skills as part of his education, set a page in type.

Opposite Engraving of Louis XIV, 1670, by Robert Nanteuil. © Yale University, New Haven.

Left Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, known as La Grande Mademoiselle, c.1666.

Right Engraving of Anne of Austria, Queen of France and mother of Louis XIV (1601–66), 1660, by Robert Nanteuil.

Thereafter more memoirs were written in France than in any other country; the first English memoirs were not written until the seventeenth century,

by Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the Earl of Clarendon, who had both lived for long periods in France. Not only the influence of Commynes, but also the need to justify the writers’ acts in the many revolts and conspiracies against the king that devastated France between 1559 and 1659, may explain the popularity of memoirs there. As the historian Albert Sorel later wrote: ‘there is no battle lost which cannot be won back on paper. ’ At their best, these memoirs display a grasp of character, the telling detail, and the dramatic scene, which any novelist would envy. Indeed, while novelists often borrowed scenes from life, memoir writers frequently invented them.

Paris was called the paradise of women, since they were so free there, and nowhere else did so many women write memoirs. Between 1660 and 1690, Louis XIV’s older, unmarried first cousin Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, generally known as La Grande Mademoiselle, was writing her memoirs, at the same time that the king – with the help of his secretaries – was glorifying his power and campaigns in his own. Mademoiselle was trying to assert her independence, and to justify both her rebellion against the crown during the civil wars of 1648–52 known as the Fronde, and her love for a younger courtier called the Comte de Lauzun.

Disillusion was her theme: ‘Since the

veil has fallen from my eyes, I have known that all the grandeur, all the vanity and all the pomps and pleasures of the world have been illusions … we are only actors who play a role in the theatre. ’ She claimed, as was by then a standard posture: ‘I am not trying to be an author, not having enough skill for that, and the role does not suit me in any way. ’ Little respect for the king is evident in her disabused accounts of his behaviour. She implicitly criticises the king for allowing Cardinal Mazarin’s nieces to sit beside him at table as his equals, and thus displaying too much ‘familiarity’ towards him, further commenting that ‘he did not like ceremonies’ . She also reveals secrets of the king’s love life, describing the removal of sentries to facilitate his access to Madame de Montespan’s bedroom, although both were married to someone else. According to her account, during a ball one of the king’s favourites, the Comte de Guiche, kicked in the bottom Monsieur, the brother of the king, ‘qui trouvait tout bon de lui’ (who liked everything he did). In 1670, yielding to pressure from the royal family, Louis XIV, having first agreed to her marriage to

Lauzun, changed his mind and forbade it.

He wept but, according to Mademoiselle, said: ‘Kings should satisfy the public’ – a form of self-definition which confirms that he was less authoritarian than most of his subjects believed.

More reflective and less self-centred are the memoirs of one of Mademoiselle’s correspondents, Madame de Motteville.

She came from the minor nobility and served as one of the four premières femmes de chambre of the Queen, Anne of Austria, widow of Louis XIII and mother of Louis XIV. It was a post which gave Motteville greater intimacy, although lesser status, than a lady-in-waiting: in England she would have been called a dresser or woman of the bedchamber (as Mrs Masham was to Queen Anne). Her marriage to a wealthy octogenarian had lasted only two years before he died in 1641. There were no children.

Thereafter her emotions were, as far as is known, centred on the queen. In her opinion Anne of Austria was both a great beauty and a great monarch, worthy of ranking with the most famous in history.

Motteville wrote her memoirs ‘to repay the THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

Left Rossline de Suedois’s 1828 engraving of Marie Antoinette, after a painting by Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, c.1778. © National Trust/ Christopher WarleighLack.

Opposite Lucie Dillon, Marquise de la Tour du Pin (1770–1853).

honour she has done me by introducing me to her intimacy’ , and she claimed she was always looking for the exact truth when describing events and characters.

She recalled of the queen: ‘I have never in my life known a person less avid for glory or applause’ , despite the repeated humiliations she suffered during the revolts of the Fronde. When she told her mistress she was writing her memoirs, the queen expressed not indignation, but the desire not to be praised more than she deserved: ‘I was constrained to promise her seriously that I would tell the truth as much against her as in her favour. ’ Her love for the queen did not stop Motteville calling Mazarin – the queen’s chief minister and probably her lover – a rogue whose ‘fripponnerie’ (dishonesty) was the 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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During the Revolution the shock of exile and shadow of the guillotine added astringency to the style of women’s court memoirs

main cause of the revolts of the Fronde.

For Motteville, as for Mademoiselle, the court was not only a power centre but also a market. ‘The household of kings is like a great marketplace where it is necessary to go for the needs of daily life’ , including pensions, rewards, jobs and news. It was also a theatre of emotions and an education in how to control them. Like Mademoiselle, she tells stories about Louis XIV’s affairs: his ‘violent passion’ for Marie Mancini, his love for Louise de la Vallière, and the attempts of a discarded favourite, the Comtesse de Soissons, to alert the queen about his feelings for Louise. Of the Comtesse de Soissons – one of Mazarin’s nieces – Motteville wrote: ‘no longer being able to please the king herself, she wanted to keep his favour by all the ways her ambition could inspire in her … ambition, love and jealousy, the three great passions in the soul, did a lot of work in her own soul. ’ Like Mademoiselle, she depicts Louis XIV as weaker, more emotional and less awesome than his reputation suggests, describing him begging the queen’s forgiveness on his knees and in tears, and being manipulated by the Comtesse de Soissons. The king, she wrote, was ‘not always wise nor always just’ . Motteville also said, unjustly: ‘he was so avid for glory that he did not want to leave even the crumbs to the queen his mother; he wanted everything for himself. ’ Motteville had a courtier’s view of history. She believed that public events were driven by personal feelings. The

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE FRENCH COURT Fronde had been fuelled by popular hatred of taxation, royal absolutism and the hyper-corrupt Mazarin. But for the terrible warning – as most Frenchmen considered it – of England, where Charles I was executed in January 1649, the movement might have become more revolutionary. But in Madame de Motteville’s view it was caused by the private ambitions of a few great nobles. Some ‘great movements in the world which destroy or establish empires’ were in reality due to the ‘secret intrigues of a few people’ , she wrote. Some were women, such as the Duchesse de Longueville or the Princesse Palatine, Anne de Gonzague, described

by Motteville as the honour of her sex, adroit, intelligent, capable of winning the confidence of all sides.

For Motteville obedience to ‘the supreme and unique power of kings’ was part of the divine order. Kings shared the power of God. The people, by contrast, were ‘a wild beast which never grew tame’ . She was horrified by the barricades the people erected throughout Paris on 26 August 1648 in what she saw as a crazed attempt to seize power, and by their insistence on filing through the king’s bedroom on 9 February 1651 and drawing his bed curtains to check he had not fled Paris. According to her, they were converted by the sight of the sleeping 12-year-old and, ‘recovering their feelings of love, gave him a thousand blessings’ .

Motteville’s masterpiece is her description of the death of the queen, a scene comparable to the finest moments in better-known memoirs such as those of the Duc de Saint-Simon or FrançoisRené de Chateaubriand. She spares no details of the Queen’s cancer, gangrene, ulcers and abscesses. During the first stages of his mother’s cancer in April 1663, Louis XIV visited her eight or ten times a day. Other witnesses confirm that he was present in her bedroom at all consultations, treatments and bleedings (the usual seventeenth-century treatment for all illnesses), devoted most of the day to her, and at night would send messengers to obtain the latest news.

Three years later, in the final stages, he slept fully dressed on a mattress at the foot of his mother’s bed. ‘He helped her always with unbelievable application, he helped to change her bed, and served her better

and more adroitly than all her women. ’ Praise indeed since one of them, Madame de Motteville, is writing. She also recalls the king saying of his dying mother: ‘look how beautiful she is. I have never seen her looking so beautiful. ’ Clearly his mother was one of the loves of his life.

After the queen’s final confession and communion, she begged her sons and daughters-in-law to love each other ‘for love of me’ . When told that she was leaving an earthly for a heavenly crown, she said that she had always considered her earthly crown ‘as mud’ . Louis XIV wept ‘furiously’ and fainted. She died on 20 January 1666. Having finished her memoirs, Motteville followed her mistress to the grave 23 years later. The first edition of her memoirs was published in Amsterdam in 1728; the most recent in Paris in 2003.

Later traumas in France would produce even more memoirs. Over 3,300 memoirs covering the years from 1780 to 1830, with the changes from monarchy to republic to Empire and back to monarchy again, have been published so far. In his youth Honoré de Balzac was one of many ‘teinturiers’ or ghosts of such memoirs: he was, for example, author or part-author of the memoirs of one of his mistresses, Laure Junot, Duchesse d’Abrantes. In 1831 Chateaubriand, whose memoirs are among the greatest of all, lamented: ‘There is nobody who has not become, at least for 24 hours, a personage who does not consider himself obliged to give the world an account of the influence which he has exerted over the universe. ’ Some of the best court memoirs continued to be written by women.

During the Revolution the shock of exile and the shadow of the guillotine added astringency to their style. Madame Campan, for example, another première femme de chambre de la reine – in this case of Marie Antoinette – may have been inspired to write by her predecessor, Madame de Motteville. The memoirs of Marie Antoinette’s favourite portrait painter, Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, are particularly vivid about her years as an emigrée, during which she painted her way from court to court across Europe.

The most original of these memoirs are those by the Comtesse de Boigne and the Marquise de la Tour du Pin. Their accounts of the impact of the public

dramas between 1780 to 1830 – some of whose principal actors they knew well – on their private lives are enhanced by the outsider edge and double identity, which they derived from their exile in England and their Jacobite blood. Both the mother of the Comtesse de Boigne and the father of the Marquise de la Tour du Pin descended from the famous Irish Jacobite family of Dillon (although some said that the former was ‘a false Dillon’).

The Comtesse de Boigne deserves an English biography as compelling as Caroline Moorehead’s of Madame de la Tour du Pin, Dancing to the Precipice (2009). The financial support (stipulated in their marriage contract) of her husband, General Count de Boigne, who had made a fortune fighting for the Maratha empire in India, had saved the Comtesse’s family from poverty during her exile in London. Back in Paris, however, she froze her husband out of her life. The general retreated to the town where he had been born, Chambery, and died there alone in 1830. In Paris his fortune helped his wife to run a brilliant salon for 60 years.

Both Madame de la Tour du Pin and Madame de Boigne were royalists, and fought the revolution better with their pens than their relations did with their swords. Like those of Madame de Motteville, their memoirs can be as revealing about women’s power, freedom and happiness, or lack of them, and about the dramas of their times, as the most detailed works of research.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23

FAMILY GATHERING We continue our series of features on independent libraries with a look at the recent independent libraries conference, hosted by The London Library in September Delegates at the joint conference of the Independent Libraries Association and the US Membership Libraries Group, held at The London Library in September 2019.

St James’s Square is used to having a Library community in its midst – The London Library has been based here since 1846 – but this September there was a Library gathering with a difference. We welcomed colleagues from across the independent library sector for a threeday conference arranged on behalf of the Independent Libraries Association (ILA) and the US Membership Libraries Group.

Between them these groups represent the bulk of the network of independently funded, membership-based libraries that have grown up on both sides of the Atlantic over the last three centuries, and of which The London Library forms a part. All were originally founded by private individuals (in our case by Thomas Carlyle) and boast fascinating histories alongside their often impressive collections and buildings.

In the UK the founding institutional members of the ILA all began life between 1768 and 1841, at a time when there were no public libraries and no university libraries outside Cambridge, Dublin, Edinburgh and Oxford. Libraries such as the Leeds Library, the Portico in Manchester, Gladstone’s Library in 24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Hawarden, the Newcastle Lit and Phil and Bromley House Library in Nottingham are just some of the representatives of a network of thirty-five institutions that now look after over two million books.

In the same way, the US-based Membership Libraries Group represents a network of libraries set up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before state-funded libraries began to be established after the Civil War. Most are in older cities, many in architecturally significant buildings and many hold collections of special interest to scholars.

The Boston Athenaeum, the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati, and the New York Society Library are familiar examples of the 24 independent US libraries in the Membership Libraries Group.

The three-day conference covered a lot of ground, from a discussion on the future of libraries during the period up to 2050 (unsurprisingly delegates were overwhelmingly of the view that libraries would be needed and relevant) to a presentation by Neil Pearson, President of the Independent Libraries Association, about the collections of independent

libraries. Other sessions covered collections management, digitisation, membership communications and fundraising.

It was particularly encouraging to hear how many independent libraries have been successfully opening their doors to engage with new members and new audiences, with events, exhibitions and creative-outreach work forming an important part of the story. Equally impressive has been the robustness of the membership levels of many of the independent libraries – an experience mirrored here at The London Library, where the last year has seen the first annual increase in membership for over seven years and, excitingly, record growth in membership among young people.

Independent libraries on both sides of the Atlantic share common challenges and opportunities. Bringing them together at this conference provided a highly valuable opportunity to share ideas on how members of this unique network can position themselves, develop their audience and best exploit their extraordinary resources.

l a o c o o n Gallery

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

MEMBERS’ NEWS A GALA EVENING On Wednesday, 6 November we had the pleasure of welcoming guests to a Gala Dinner hosted by our President, Sir Tim Rice.

The event was arranged to raise funds for the Library and in particular for its Emerging Writers Programme, which was launched early this year to support aspiring writers at the start of their literary careers. The programme has proved immensely popular, receiving over 600 applications for the 38 places that were available during the year. Applications for the 2020 programme will be launched in the New Year, with the programme again featuring a package of support including membership of the Library and access to its extensive resources, as well as masterclasses and networking support.

Guests at the Gala event – with the dress code lightly themed as ‘your favourite literary character’ – included Ian and Victoria Hislop, Simon Schama, Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, author and TV presenter Gyles Brandreth, the writers and broadcasters Patrick Marber and Ian Skelly, theatre and film director Josie Rourke, and Daisy Goodwin, author and producer of the international bestselling book and TV series, Victoria.

And we were delighted to welcome Monica Parle, one of the 38 participants on this year’s Emerging Writers Programme.

Over dinner in the Reading Room the Cantabile vocal quartet performed a range of literary-themed songs, including the humorous tribute to The London Library personally written

by Sir Tim Rice. Guests were also treated to readings by actor and comedian John Sessions and by two cast members of the Victoria series, Jordan Waller and Anna Wilson-Jones.

The evening’s fundraising focused on a special auction which included coffee with Bill Bryson; the chance to adopt one of The London Library books that Bram Stoker personally used to research Dracula; a signed, limited edition of John le Carré’s Agent Running in the Field; the chance to appear as a character in William Boyd’s next novel, due to be published in 2020; and, of course, a signed copy of Sir Tim Rice’s London Library song, one of the many moments that had helped make this evening such an enjoyable and memorable occasion.

At the time of this magazine going to press the auction hoped to raise over £60,000, and we are extremely grateful to have received such generous support.

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Over 100 guests helped raise more than £60,000 at our literary-themed Gala event in support of the Library and its Emerging Writers Programme.

MEMBERS’ NEWS

AGM ROUND-UP MEMBERSHIP GROWTH The Library’s 178th AGM took place on Monday, 4 November, approving the following:

Membership Fees The meeting agreed the trustees’ proposal to increase the ordinary annual fee by £5 from £535 (£44.58 per month) to £540 (£45 per month) in 2020. This represents a belowinflation increase of 0.9%. Proportionate increases will be applied for the other annual membership categories. Life Membership will be broadly increased by 1.9% in line with expected inflation. The ordinary annual fee for those paying by annual direct debit will remain at £510.

It was also agreed that the maximum age for Young Person Membership will be increased from 26 to 27.

As we approach the end of 2019 we are delighted to report that the Library has managed to grow its membership every month this year, continuing a trend that began the previous summer. October’s membership stood at 6,850, nearly 6% higher than the previous year and representing the first yearon-year growth in membership that we have experienced since 2013. All membership categories have grown and we have witnessed a 60% increase in the number of young members joining – 273 members aged under 27 joined the Library in the last 12 months. We have some way to go to achieve our Strategic Plan target of 8,500 members by 2022, but this is a very encouraging sign that we are on the right track.

Trustees The meeting approved the election of trustees Howard Davies, Will Harris, Giles Milton and Rick Stroud (who were all eligible for a second, and final, term) and the election of Alain Aubry for his first term.

Vice-President Josie Rourke The meeting also confirmed the appointment of celebrated theatre and film director Josie Rourke as one of the Library’s Vice-Presidents.

Josie has been a London Library member since 2001, joining at the beginning of a theatre career that has encompassed central roles at the Royal Court and the Bush Theatre and a 20-year association with the Donmar Warehouse. She was appointed Artistic Director of the Donmar in 2011, becoming the first woman to hold the role and the first female artistic director of a major London theatre. Her first film, Mary Queen of Scots, starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie, was released in 2018, and her Olivier Award-winning Donmar production of City of Angels will transfer to the Garrick Theatre in March 2020.

As a Vice-President Josie will have a particular focus on developing the Library’s support for emerging playwrights as part of its wider Emerging Writers Programme.

Chairman Howard Davies (left) and Director Philip Marshall welcome theatre and film director Josie Rourke as a Vice-President of the Library.

THE LONDON LIBRARY FUND Our thanks to everyone who has donated so generously to The Library Fund, which is an annual fundraising campaign focused on improving the Library in ways that directly impact its users.

This year we have been raising funds for the refurbishment of the toilets in the St James’s building, which are in urgent need of repair and improvement. Donations enable us to cover the costs of the work without diverting resources from our day-today operating budget. So far, we have raised over £56,000 and are well on the way to covering the costs of the project. We are hoping to begin work on refurbishing the St James’s toilets during 2020. Details of how to make a donation can be found at londonlibrary.co.uk/library-fund. Thank you for your support.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

COLLECTIONS NEWS OUR COLLECTION MAKING SPACE FOR THE FUTURE As our Collections Committee reported in issue 43, The London Library’s shelf capacity is effectively full, with occupancy in many areas running at 92%–95%. Space is so tight in places that it is becoming difficult to house and manage the existing book stock, and we are rapidly running out of room to develop the collection with the new acquisitions that are so fundamental to keeping the Library up to date. Each year we are adding around 6,000 new books and require 180m of shelf space to house these.

A detailed Collections Review was carried out in 2017 helping identify how we might prioritise management of stock and relieve shelf space. With the building at capacity we are now considering removing some material that no longer meets members’ needs, is available online, and is not core to our collection strengths. This includes library catalogues and some other bibliographic sources which are now freely available online; Hansard, which is available online, and for which print subscriptions ceased some time ago; some foreign, incomplete government publications; and duplicate monographs where we hold two or more copies which we can reduce without content being lost. It is anticipated that we will remove some material during December.

The Collections team in the Library are investigating the route through which some of these materials can best be removed. In some cases, there may be opportunities for sale or donation to other libraries/ collections/ book dealers; in others, where none of these options are viable or the condition of the books is too poor to warrant sale, disposal by recycling may be required.

Staff in the Issue Hall will be able to assist anyone in using electronic alternatives.

None of the decisions about reorganising our collection are being taken lightly, but by freeing up shelf space we can continue to develop the Library’s outstanding collection and ensure it is housed and managed appropriately.

NEW BOOKS We are delighted to have received a generous donation from the House of Lords Library of a complete set of 17 volumes of The Remembrancer, which will enhance the Library’s historical sources on events leading up to and during the American Revolution. Published in London between 1775 and 1784 for J. Almon and later for J. Debrett, this periodical combines reprints of news reports, editorials and letters from British and American newspapers with expedition journals, court reports and extracts from Parliamentary bills and papers. It includes contributions by Benjamin Franklin.

The London Library’s initial set of The Remembrancer was a casualty of the Second World War bomb that severely damaged the Central stacks in 1944 (the remaining fragments of the periodical were disposed of in 1960). We have been seeking a replacement set ever since and are very pleased to have this title back in our collection after a 60-year gap. The volumes will be catalogued shortly and then made available for reading in the Library.

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A complete set of the influential eighteenth-century American journal The Remembrancer has been donated to us by the Library of the House of Lords.

NEW BOOKS FROM OUR MEMBERS Our members are remarkably productive and, where we can, we like to display some of the fruits of their labours in our Mason’s Yard window once their new works enter our collection.

From Philippa Gregory’s Tidelands to Max Hastings’ Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943; and from Jessie Burton’s The Confession to Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth, 2019 has been a bumper crop. A full list of the books we have had on display this year can be found on our website.

But the Mason’s Yard selection is just a fraction of the new books we have acquired in 2019 – 5,500 new books have been added up to the end of November and, as we have reported in previous issues, we have also added to our extensive online resources, with Early English Books Online, The British Newspaper Archive and Country Life Online just some of the new facilities available for online use.

Our Mason’s Yard window regularly displays selections of books written recently by Library members.

PODCASTS The London Library Podcast series launched this November, and will feature a leading writer or figure in the cultural world discussing the books which have shaped them. Each month the guest will be in conversation with the Library’s Director, Philip Marshall, and will delve into the Library’s archive and collection to uncover treasured books and nuggets of historical detail about the guest’s book choices.

The first guest, in November, is Hallie Rubenhold, social historian, author of bestselling The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper and London Library member. Hallie’s book choices are: The Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder; Les Misérables by Victor Hugo; The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 by Lawrence Stone; Clarissa by Samuel Richardson; and Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.

December’s guest will be the novelist Harriet Evans, and her book choices include: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis; The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend; The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard; and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

Other guests lined up to share the books that shaped them include: rare-books expert and actor Neil Pearson; Jacaranda founder and publisher Valerie Brandes; Dhaka Literary Festival Director Ahsan Akbar; and Rough Trade co-founder Nigel House.

The London Library Podcast can be downloaded on all podcast platforms and from londonlibrary.co.uk. Episodes are 30 minutes long and new episodes will be released in the middle of each month.

Top, right Hallie Rubenhold.

Right Harriet Evans © Johnny Ring.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29

CHRISTMAS AT THE LIBRARY ADOPT A BOOK Still searching for that special Christmas present? Adopting a book at The London Library is the perfect gift for any book lover, and with every adoption you can help develop and preserve the Library’s unique collection.

On adoption, a bookplate with your recipient’s name will be placed inside the selected volume recording the adoption. The recipient of your gift will also receive a London Library Christmas card with your festive message, and a tour for them and a guest to see their book in situ.

Justine Brian, who adopted a new book as a gift last Christmas, said: ‘The bookplate was a great gift … both as a unique and personal present but also because the tour is a wonderful insight into the Library’s history and workings. I can’t think of a better way to see what the Library does.’

To make sure your gift pack arrives in time for Christmas, please order before 12pm on Friday, 20 December. To find out more please visit londonlibrary.co.uk/adopt-a-book-at-christmas or email us at development@londonlibrary.co.uk.

LONDON LIBRARY CHRISTMAS CARDS This year’s London Library Christmas card – entitled Strangers in the Library – depicts a snowy scene in a familiar corner of St James’s Square, and has been specially designed for us by writer, illustrator and London Library member Roland Chambers.

Roland’s work includes map illustrations for Lev Grossman’s bestselling The Magician’s Trilogy, and his books include the Nelly Peabody children’s series as well as a major biography of Arthur Ransome (2009).

A pack of 8 London Library cards and envelopes costs £6 (plus £1.20 per pack for postage within the UK).

The card is available to purchase from Reception and on The London Library website.

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GIFT MEMBERSHIP FOR CHRISTMAS

CHRISTMAS OPENING

Gift membership to The London Library is a great way to share your love of this wonderful literary institution, and to give the book-lover in your life access to our superb collection and online resources. Don’t forget that anyone buying Gift Membership gets a gift themselves – £50 off their next renewal.

Full Membership, Young Person, Spouse Membership, Associate and Remote Access Membership may all be given as gifts and during the Christmas period they will include a London Library bag and postcard for your gift message and will be wrapped with a Christmas ribbon.

To make sure your gift membership is ready in time for Christmas, please place your order by 16 December for postage, or 19 December to collect from the Library.

MEMBERS’ CHRISTMAS DRINKS

Over Christmas the Library will be closed between Tuesday, 24 December and Friday, 27 December 2019 inclusive.

We will be open on Saturday, 28 December. Over the New Year we will be closing at 5.30pm on Tuesday, 31 December 2019 and will be closed all day on Wednesday, 1 January 2020.

The Library will be closed for parts of the Christmas and New Year holiday but our online resources will be available throughout.

GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST

Thursday, 12 December 2019 Reading Room 6.30–8.30pm Join fellow Library members and staff to raise a glass, or several, to celebrate the festive season. Tickets are free, but must be reserved in advance via the Library website – visit londonlibrary.co.uk/about-us/whats-on.

We are looking forward to seeing you there but, owing to high levels of demand, we are giving priority to Library members and are unlikely to be able to accommodate guests.

Above Winston Churchill’s Library membership application form from December 1933.

For most, Christmas and the New Year is a time to settle in, feast and forget the world.

But for others it’s a time to get things done, plan ahead and hit the New Year running. So it proved for Winston Churchill who, on Thursday, 28 December 1933, embarking on the fourth of his ‘wilderness years’, put Christmas festivities behind him and applied to join The London Library.

The Library is open on Saturday, 28 December this year so we’d be delighted if anyone follows his example.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31

WILLIAM BLAKE Illustrations of the Book of Job, 1825 [but 1826] Estimate £10,000–15,000*

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