'Among These Dark Satanic Mills?'

One of my absolute favourite places in the world is the British Library. It's the opportunity to look at books, then buy them. (Not the manuscripts, they have a very nice bookshop. If I could buy the manuscripts, I'd be bankrupt right now.) I haven't been properly for ages, however, so when I saw that they had an exhibition called Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands, I knew I had to go. Thankfully, some of my favourite bibliophiles were as eager as I was, so we decided to meet up, be intellectual, and then progress to copious consumption of cider. We definitely know how to make a plan, don't we?

The weather was absolutely stunning, but at about 29°C, going into the exhibition was wonderful because it as air-conditioned. This may sound trite, but as my friend Rowan pointed out, it's too hot for goths! Thankfully we forgot about the heat once we started looking at the objects on display.

 [Mss of Our Mutual Friend. Taken from the British Library Facebook page.]

It started off quite slowly because it's divided according to chronology and geographical location, so the starting exhibitions are pastoral, moving into the Industrial Revolution, then discussing the appeal of the wildest places to the Victorian psyche (Scottish moors, for example). It was interesting, but compared to the section on London, which housed some objects pertaining to my favourite books of all time, it naturally paled slightly.

[*]

Everyone found me a bit hilarious because I became so over-excited when I discovered that they included Alan Moore's From Hell, the graphic novel of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, adapted my Mike Carey, and Neil Gaiman's Sweeney Todd, a parody of a penny dreadful which I've never seen a copy of before. All three are some of my favourite storytellers, so to see them recognised as writers who exemplify London was really thrilling for me.

 [Mss of Jane Eyre. Taken from the British Library Facebook page.]

My friends did not hold back in telling me what a geek I am, but they all found their own things to obsess over: Vic over the original manuscript of Jane Eyre,  Rowan over the 10th-century Exeter Book and Candy over BS Johnson's Albert Angelo, a rare book she'd used in her undergraduate dissertation, and one of the first books to use cut-out pages. One of the most wonderful things for me is finding people who love to read as much as I do, but it's even more wonderful to find people who both love to read and just love books as ornamental objects of beauty.

[Mss of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Taken from the British Library Facebook page.]

Some of my personal highlights would be the first draft manuscript of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which was a lot racier than the published book, and Dickens' manuscript of Our Mutual Friend which was rescued from a train crash (and it shows, as you can see in the photograph above.) It was wonderful seeing original manuscripts of some of my favourite classics such as Tess of the D'Urbevilles and Wuthering Heights, but it was also excellent that they included much more recent works. Seeing Virginia Woolf's handwriting in her original pages of Mrs Dalloway and E. M. Forster's in his A Room with a View was quite a thrill for me, but a particular highlight was seeing John Galsworthy's own family tree for his epic The Forsyte Saga, as it's entirely necessary to read the book, let alone write it!

[*]

One of the things I particularly admired about this exhibition was the juxtaposition of well-known and obscure, and the opportunity to delight in one's own knowledge of obscurity was also something which appealed strongly to the geek in me, as I do love seeing books I like acknowledged. I studied The Beetle at my undergraduate, since one of my lecturers had an interest in Victorian fiction and it's a text very indicative of classical resonance on fin-de-siecle culture, so he invited a scholar working on the text to give us a lecture on it. It was published in the same year as Dracula, and initially out-sell it, but it has since fallen out of favour because it's become dated in a way which Dracula has not. It's a wonderful, oft-overlooked book and it's great that it was mentioned in this exhibition. Dr Victoria Margree, who gave me a lecture on the book at Warwick, also gave an interview about the book here, if anyone's interested.

[Mss of Wise Children. Taken from the British Library Facebook page.]

Much has been made of JK Rowling's manuscript of the first Harry Potter novel, but there were also manuscripts from Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and Angela Carter's Wise Children. Rowan was very happy to see Tolkein's The Hobbit, but it was especially good to see it surrounded by other wonderful works, such as Brideshead Revisited, Stella Gibbons' hilarious Cold Comfort Farm, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel The Stranger's Child. What made this collection particularly fun to view was that there was a nice mix of manuscripts, visual imagery and first editions, and it was a very full experience. I'd thoroughly recommend it to anyone who has an interest in books and writing.

[*]

 Having spent a few hours at the exhibition, we left in search of tea and cake, although not without a quick trip to the gift shop. It sounds incredibly trite to recommend a museum based on its gift shop, but I do love the BL's, since it's a cross between a bookshop and a shop which celebrates literature in items which aren't books. They sell lovely jewellery and postcards and all sorts of glorious things which make me realise that my future house is going to be very well-decorated indeed! I bought this poster of The Master and Margarita, which is both one of my favourite books and also a gorgeous design.

We also discovered this book, which spoke to us all. We're all grammar obsessives, at the end of the day!

[*]

Having indulged in bibliomania, we went into Bloomsbury to visit the London Review of Books Cafe, which is both a wonderful bookshop and a lovely cafe. Their cake is sublime, their coffee excellent, and on such a hot day I definitely appreciated being given a glass of ice water the second we walked through the door. I'm so tempted to get a subscription for the LRB for my birthday, just for the discount in the bookshop.

['The sock gap never dies'!]

This was followed by an evening in The Cider Tap in Euston, drinking delicious alcohol and discussing many strange things, including Vic and I having a similar dental issue in our families, Candy and I making geeky Coupling references at each other, and Rowan getting us to write a group poem based on Judi Dench, and all terrible rhymes thereof. ('I lost my wrench, when I loosened my clench in the stench of Judi Dench's trench...')

[Candy's doing her sexiest pose in front of a gorgeous house in Bloomsbury. I'm aroused.]

In short, the BL exhibition is a wonderful display of literature and culture, the LRB is a delicious cafe with many excellent books, but what makes them even better is spending time with people who make you laugh, indulge your geekiness, and occasionally blurt out 'Oh my god...I just imagined we were different types of chaffinch!'