Archive Advent Calendar: 16 December 2013

We continue our archival countdown to Christmas by opening another window on the Library’s literary past with the joining form to the Library of the master mariner and master novelist Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (1857-1924) – better known as Joseph Conrad. Conrad is without question one of the greatest writers of Fiction in the canon and “probably the greatest political novelist”[i] in the English language.

Conrad joined the Library in 1897 two years before The Heart of Darkness (as it was called in serial form) appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.  Blackwood’s was a leading Victorian periodical which had early established itself under the talented editor and publisher John Blackwood (1818-1879). Over thirty years Blackwood both established the periodical as a market leader and published the works of George Eliot, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Lever, Charles Reade, George Henry Lewes and Margaret Oliphant to name a few – all  of whom are also present in the Victorian membership ledgers of the Library.

The date of Conrad’s joining form is revealing:  1897 marks the beginning of the major phase of his literary career.  His milieu included Ford Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells and R.B. Cunninghame Graham amongst others who were all also subscribing members.

Many of Conrad’s seminal works made a staggeringly successful transition to film. Lord Jim, Victory, The Secret Agent, and Heart of Darkness are just a few that made the leap – Heart of Darkness was the inspiration behind Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 masterpieceApocalypse Now.

Beyond the sparkle, glitz and John Lewis adverts that saturate the nation’s sensibilities during the ‘festive’ period, The London Library’s fifteen miles of shelving offer a glimpse into the more forgotten, obscure customs and ideas surrounding the theme of Good Will.  As well as Christmas with Rumpole, Poirot, and Nancy Mitford nestled in the Literature stacks, transcriptions of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and poetry on the Christmas Truce of The Great War, we’ve picked some of the seasonal shelfmarks well worth exploring at The London Library.

S. Christmas &c.
This lean yet fascinating shelfmark is a rich seam of seasonal surprises. ‘Cakes and Characters, An English Tradition’ is Bridget Ann Henisch’s examination of how the once ubiquitous, now historic ‘Twelfth cake’ became the plain old Christmas cake. ‘Kings and Queens, Lovers and Ladies, Captains and Dandies’ once played an important role in the construction of this giant symbolic bake once adorned with ‘characters’ who originated from the ancient Saturnalia festival, celebrated on 17 December. You’ll also discover that Dickens and Thackeray, key figures in London Library history, played an important part in this delicious story… (More on Saturnalia can be found in Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius’s writings from the fifth century in his compendium of ancient Roman religious and antiquarian lore in L. Greek & Latin Lit., Trans!).

Chapters on Christmas and Materialism, The Rituals of Christmas Giving and Cinderella Christmas: Kitsch, Consumerism and Youth in Japan provide different food for thought in Unwrapping Christmas, a collection of comforting anthropological essays to keep close to hand when the pressure to consume gets too much…Furthermore, topics such as Victorian Miscellany, The Strange History of Father Christmasand Christmas Under the Puritans from The Englishman’s Christmasmight be helpful for the revival of old customs.  In the Spirit of ‘Make do and Mend’, try making a beautiful wartime Anderson Shelter in cake form in Mike Brown’s Christmas on the Home Front!

Christmas is cancelled; ‘Prophane Customs’ in Puritan New England
A particularly terrifying volume can be found nestling in R. Religious & Theol. Lit.  Written by the fantastically named Increase Mather, Rector of Harvard College, Massachussets in 1687, this discourse against Having Fun over the ‘festive’ period covers the Profane and Superstitious Customs practised in New England at the time. Enjoy the anti-pious activities of ‘health-drinking, dicing, cards, and Christmas-keeping’ at your peril!

Testimony against prophane customs : namely, health drinking, dicing, cards, Christmas-keeping, New Year’s gifts, cock-scaling, saints’ days, etc / Reprinted from the 1687 ed., with an introd. and notes by William Peden, and a bibliographical note by Lawrence Starkey.  You have been warned!

R. Druids, R. Paganism
By way of introduction to the Library’s volumes on the alternative rituals to keep the spirits at bay and ensure the return of the light, the world of paganism at the Winter Solstice is beautifully explored in Diane Maclean’s article on the role of Scottish druids

Mummers
If the thought of entertaining your favourite small people as the school holidays get underway fills you with fear, then we recommend you come to the 6th floor, borrow Juliana Horatia Ewing’s The Peace Egg, A Christmas Mumming Play and stage an alternative Christmas production! ‘Written expressly for all Mummers, to commemorate the Holy Wars, and the happy Festival of Christmas. No scenery is required.” Dragons and Knights replace shepherds, Wise Men and donkeys – much more fun for dressing up than the customary Nativity tea-towels/dressing gown costume creations!

More on the wonderful English Mummers tradition can be sourced by finding The English Mummers Play, Alex Helm’s publication in Societies, Folk-Lore Soc., 4to., or Sidney Oldall Addy’s 1907 publication Guising and Mumming in Derbyshire in T. England, Derbyshire. In L English Drama, find Thomas Hardy’s 1923 (not so)famous tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Titagel in Lyonesse : “a new version of an old story arranged as a play for mummers in one act requiring no theatre or scenery.”

Perhaps combine it with some readings from 1960s classic anthology Our American Holidays, Christmas its origin, celebration and significance’ as related in prose & verse ed. by Robert Haven Schauffler.

‘Two Planks and a Passion’; S. Skating & Skiing
At the top of the dark, cosy 1890s bookstacks you will find a series of guides to Skating and Skiing, with particular focus on these beautifully illustrated volumes from the early 20th Century. How to ski and how not to; the ideal winter travelling companion/cautionary tale from 1911!

Finally, after exploring the treasures of R. Religions of the World and, R. Church Festivals, why not stop at shelfmark R. Fanaticism & Enthusiasm – for those who really do wish it could be Christmas every day…

Make membership to The London Library the ultimate Christmas gift for those who love books. Buying a gift membership – at just over £1 a day, this Christmas present will instil a lifelong love of books and is a richly rewarding way of giving to charity.

Half price for young people and spouses/partners of members – the perfect gift for children, god-children and your ‘better’ half!  Buy online.

Archive Advent Calendar: 13 December 2013

It could only be Virginia Woolf who wrote the piece on George Eliot which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on November 20, 1919.  Woolf reconfigured Eliot’s reputation in the piece viewing Eliot and her literary reputation from a distinctly female perspective and concluding in her final sentence:

“We must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of laurel and rose”.

Woolf’s own joining form to the London Library dates from 1904 when she was 22 years old.  It is richly revealing.  Note her self-described occupation or position “Spinster”.  The £40 she paid for life membership at the age of twenty-two makes a clear statement about her future career direction and the date is significant too.  Virginia took out life membership of the London Library four days after the death of her father, Leslie Stephen who had been President of the London Library from 1892 until his death. Within three years of Virginia signing her joining form she was writing Melymbrosia later published as her ground breaking novel The Voyage Out”.

© Helen O’Neill        Archive, Heritage and Development Librarian

Archive Advent Calendar: 12 December 2013

A year after the success of Scenes of a Clerical Life (1858) George Eliot published her first novel Adam Bede to critical success. During the same year her gothic horror story The Lifted Veil appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine and she was also conducting research for “Mill on the Floss” which was published hot on the heels of Adam Bede in 1860.

“At the beginning of the year [1859] she [George Eliot] had gone into town to the London Library to research ‘cases of inundation’ and found useful examples of widespread destruction in the northeast of England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”[i]

George Eliot’s use of the Annual Register in her research on cases of “inundation” recorded in her journal in January 1859 factually underpins the final dramatic flooding scenes in the Mill on the Floss, one of her most enduring and autobiographically revealing novels.

1859 was also the year Eliot was outed as the female writer behind the pseudonym she resolutely retained. Fiercely intelligent, staggeringly talented and brave enough to weather both social disapproval and whipped-up gossip for her relationship with G.H. Lewes, Eliot was a towering female talent in Victorian literary London.  Three significant men in her life: G.H. Lewes her partner; Dr John Chapman proprietor of the Westminster Review which Eliot contributed to and edited between 1851 and 1854; and her publisher John Blackwood were also all subscribing members.

Check in tomorrow to find out which defining modern novelist resuscitated and reconfigured George Eliot’s waning literary reputation in a piece in the TLS in 1919.

Archive Advent Calendar: 11 December 2013

We continue our archival countdown to Christmas by lifting the curtain on some of the Library’s theatrical members.

I promised a trip to the theatre yesterday and so in four archival records we will whisk through over a hundred years of acting and theatrical heritage evidenced in the Library’s membership records.

One of the earliest playwrights in the records is John Oxenford (1812-1877) author of over 100 plays, an accomplished translator and theatre critic for The Times. His play A Day Well Spent staged at the Lyceum theatre in 1836 was adapted by Johann Nestroy in Vienna in 1845 as Einen Jux will er sich machen.  Nestroy’s play adapted again by Tom Stoppard in On the Razzle which opened at the Lyttleton Theatre on 18 September 1981 and is also the inspiration behind the hit musical Hello Dolly!

No-one did more in the Victorian era than Henry Irving (1838-1905) to elevate the status of the stage and the profession of acting and he was rewarded for his efforts with a knighthood – the first actor to receive the accolade. His wit, verve and humility all in evidence in the description of his occupation on his joining form to the Library: “Comedian”.

The actress Isabel Bateman (1854-1934) came from an American acting family her father Hezekiah Linthicum Bateman took over management of the Lyceum in 1871 and it was he that spotted and recruited the talent of the young Irving who in turn provided the Lyceum with a runaway success with his critically acclaimed performance as Hamlet in 1874. Irving took over the management of the Lyceum in 1878 after the death of Mr Bateman and became the defining actor theatre manager of the Victorian age.

Laurence Olivier (1907-1989) is considered Irving’s natural successor.  He too was knighted for services to the stage and film in 1947: the youngest actor to have received the honour.  His joining form to the Library dates from 1944, a landmark year for Olivier.  His film version of Henry V in which he not only starred in but co-produced and directed was released and it was also the year in which he joined Ralph Richardson and Ralph Burrell in running the Old Vic at the New Theatre – and it is the address of the New Theatre which appears on his joining form.

Join us tomorrow when we find out who used the Annual Registers (currently shelved in the Sackler Study) in her research for one of the most enduring novels in the English language.