a guest blog by Milena Borden, who has been engaged with the Evelyn Waugh Society, the University of Leicester and the British Library in research for the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. and has published on the topic ‘Evelyn Waugh and the Second World War’. She completed her PhD at UCL and is interested in perspectives of intersections between history and fiction. These papers, and many more by Evelyn Waugh, are available to consult, for free, in our Reading Rooms.

 

Evelyn Waugh, photographed in about 1940

Post Office

Telegram

19 July (19)57

 

PTY 12.25 SLOANE

 

PRIORITY EVELYN WAUGH CARE FOLYLES 119 CHARINGCROSS ROAD WC2=

 

HOW WONDERFUL WE ARE GOING TO SEE YOU TODAY YOU

KEPT ME AWAKE NEARLY ALL NIGHT LAUGHING AND

CRYING AT YOUR MARVELLOUS BOOK LOVE = VIVIEN +

Add MS 81067

Vivien Leigh (famous for playing Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, 1939) sent this telegram a few hours before the Foyle’s Literary Luncheon dedicated to Evelyn Waugh’s novella, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957). [1] It is preserved in a collection of three related items at the British Library, and offers a glimpse into the celebrity milieu which both sender and receiver inhabited at the time (although Leigh’s husband, Sir Lawrence Olivier, who was implied in the 'we' of Leigh's telegram didn't turn up to the party, in the end). Despite its short length, this SMS-like burst of twenty-five words is packed with energy. One can almost see Leigh dictating it enthusiastically to the Sloane Square Post Office -- no-punctuation; cigarette in hand.

But what information can we glean from these papers about their friendship and the book? Leigh cabled that she had spent the night before reading and laughing and crying. Inevitably one wonders what did she, who suffered from a bipolar disorder from around the age of 25, find funny or not so funny in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold - a semi-biographical account of a deeply disturbed human being based on Waugh’s own experience with psychosis.

Gilbert is a carefully constructed character underpinned by a single and powerful belief, which is also a hallucination, that he is persecuted; because he is a German and a Jew; a Roman Catholic and a fascist; a communist homosexual and a suicidal drunk. Gilbert is more or less the same as Waugh. His hallucinatory conversations with imaginary enemies are full of distinctly autobiographical features.  Like Waugh, Gilbert is somebody who “abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz”, a member of the S.O.E. during the Second World War and a fake aristocrat who allegedly sympathized with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.

Medically inclined readers of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold often find Waugh’s self-parodying style unconvincing as a description of a clinical psychosis or delusion, although they recognize that there might be an element of alcohol induced hallucinatory experience in it. Alexandra Pitman argues that the novel illustrates “the difficulty in distinguishing alcoholic hallucinations from psychotic illness” but proves that in the case of the former if one stopped drinking the problem would resolve quickly, as in the case of Gilbert.[2]

Maybe Leigh could laugh and cry with laughter at the fictionalized telescopic look Waugh took towards his own character because it had very little in common with her own highly volatile life, which behind the scenes was dominated by  battles with mental illness. Ten days after the Foyle’s event Leigh discovered that Olivier was having a affair and slashed him across the eyes with a wet face cloth while hitting her head on a marble bedside table.[3]Her depressive and aggressive drinking habit drove her professionalism but also aggravated her illness and eventually killed her at the age of 53. She would die ten years later, a victim of her illness, at her flat at 54 Eaton Square, the very same place from which she'd sent the breezy telegraph to Waugh. What the actress Maxine Audley said about Leigh could probably be said about Waugh too: “When she was good, she was very good, but when she was bad, she was awful!” [4]

Also included in the collection is an earlier Leigh letter addressed to Waugh, dated 21 February 1955. This letter spreads over three square pages of blue letter-headed paper of enlarged handwriting, and thanks Waugh for his Spectator review of Peter Brook’s Titus Andronicus (1955). [5] “I am quite unaccustomed to such very pleasant laudatory language”, Leigh writes. She also asked Waugh if he would be going to see Macbeth, a production directed by Glen Byam Shaw in the same year in which she played Lavinia, offering to book seats and inviting him to dinner with her and Olivier afterwards.

The third item is a handwritten telegram dated 21 February 1957 addressed to Combe Florey House: “Hurray we are so delighted for you Vivien and Larry”. This is catalogued as being sent by Olivier and presumably congratulated the Waughs for the move to their new home in late 1956.

In the end, these telegrams -- constrained as they are by form and function -- can only gesture towards the deeper friendships between those that wrote them. Nevertheless, if we're willing to look at them more closely, certain currents become more visible; of shared troubles and triumphs; laughter and tears. 

[1] Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City 1939-1966, London: Dent,

1992, pp. 390-91

[2] BMJ, 337: a2791, issue 7683, 2008

[3] Hugo Vickers, Vivien Leigh, London:Hamilton, 1988 pp. 250-260

[4] Ibid., p.2

[5] Spectator, 2 Sept. 1955

By Laura Walker, Lead Curator of Modern Archives and Manuscripts 1851-1950. The Sir John Ritblat Treasures Gallery is a free exhibition space at the British Library, which will feature a one case display on George Eliot until 26^th January 2020. 

Today (22^nd November) George Eliot celebrates her 200^th birthday. To mark her bicentenary a one case exhibition in the British Library’s Treasures Gallery displays five items relating to Eliot’s life and work.

Eliot was born near Nuneaton, Warwickshire and her contrasting experiences of rural and urban life during her childhood in the Midlands inspired many of her novels. Following a good education and the freedom to pursue her own scholarly interests, Eliot grew up well read, intellectually curious and a was gifted writer. She moved to London in 1851 to pursue a journalistic career, where she met and fell in love with the critic George Henry Lewes –  a married man who was estranged from his wife. From 1853 Eliot lived with Lewes openly and started referring to herself as Marian Evans Lewes, in defiance of Victorian notions of propriety.

She began writing fiction in 1856, publishing all of her novels under the pseudonym George Eliot. She took her partner’s first name, George, and chose Eliot as 'a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word'. Female authors did not need to write under a pseudonym, but Eliot wanted the freedom to write outside the romance genre. She was also a known radical living in an anomalous social position with a married man, Mary Evans Lewes as such, was compelled to protect her identity. 

Letter from Charles Dickens to George Eliot, 18 January 1858, Add MS 41667 B

 

Following the publication of Eliot’s collection of short stories entitled Scenes of a Clerical Life in 1858, there was much speculation over who the author could be. Soon after publication Charles Dickens wrote to Eliot partly in praise of the author’s ‘extraordinary merit’ but also to propose that the writer was a woman. Dickens felt that there were ‘such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me, even now’. Eliot revealed her identity as Marian Evans Lewes in June 1859 over a year after this letter was written, after persistent rumours that a Midlands man called Joseph Liggins was the author of Scenes of a Clerical Life and her first novel Adam Bede (1859).

Mill on the Floss was the second and the most autobiographical of Eliot’s novels. The characters of Maggie and Tom Tulliver greatly resemble Marian Evans (Eliot) and her brother Isaac. In the extract on display Maggie is visiting Tom at school where they discuss women's' education. Tom’s teacher, Mr Stelling, describes how he believes that women are ‘quick and shallow’, which leaves Maggie feeling ‘mortified’.

 

George Eliot, Mill on the Floss, Add MS 34023 f.291

 

Within the British Library’s collections are over 200 letters written to, by or about George Eliot and her partner George Henry Lewes. One correspondent of Eliot’s was Emilia Francis Strong (known as Francis), a writer, advocate of women’s rights and a close friend. Francis married Mark Pattison, a priest and Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford in 1861. There was speculation when Middlemarch was first published, that Francis was the model for Dorothea Brooke due to her strong religious views and unhappy marriage to a much older man.

Letter from George Eliot to Emilia Francis Pattison, 16 December 1872, Add MS 43907 f.56v

 

One volume of Middlemarch is currently on display at the Library alongside a letter from Eliot to Emilia Francis Pattison from 16 December 1872. This letter offers a glimpse into Eliot’s life with her ‘husband’ George Henry Lewes.

‘But it is a holiday to sit with one’s feet at the fire reading one’s husband’s writing- at least when, like mine, he allows me to differ from him’.

Eliot goes on to write that ‘I hope we are not the happiest people in the world, but we are amongst the happiest’. Eliot led an extraordinary life, full of difficult decisions and challenges, but she also found happiness and love. She took a strong interest in the world around her, which inspired the strong sense of  the ‘ordinary’ and the attendant realism of her novels. The letters and manuscripts on display give a sense of the interrelationship between her life and her work. Eliot is one of the rare authors to achieve both critical and commercial success during her lifetime. She is undoubtedly one of the greatest novelists of the Victorian age and beyond.

by Zoë Wilcox, Curator of Contemporary Performance and Creative Archives

In tribute to Peter Nichols who sadly died in September, Trafalgar Studios is staging an afternoon of readings on 27 November to celebrate his theatrical legacy, generously supported by the British Library Collections Trust. Directed by his grandson, George Nichols, and starring Roger Allam and other special guests to be announced, the event will take a look at Peter Nichols’ vast literary contribution with excerpts from his much-loved television and stage plays including Promenade (1959), The National Health (1969), Forget-Me-Not-Lane (1971) and Poppy (1982), as well as passages from his personal diaries and rare unproduced plays from Nichols’ archive at the British Library.

Peter Nichols, photo courtesy of Trafalgar Studios

Also on show in the Trafalgar Studios’ bar is a display about the evolution of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, Nichols’ most famous play which is currently being revived by the Trafalgar in a new production by Simon Evans. You can see reproductions from Peter Nichols’ archive in the Studio Bar, tracing the play’s difficult birth from initial doubts over the first draft, to wranglings with the Lord Chamberlain’s censors and its ultimate glowing reception at its premiere in 1967.

'The Evolution of Joe Egg', display curated by the British Library for Trafalgar Studios' Studio Bar, until 30 Nov. Photo courtesy of Trafalgar Studios. 

If that has whetted your appetite for further research, the wider archive is available to consult at the British Library. Acquired 20 years ago this month, the Peter Nichols Papers comprises 256 volumes of personal and professional papers from 1945 to the 2000s. You can listen to Peter Nichols reflecting on his career on BL Sounds, and various other interviews and theatre recordings are available to listen to onsite at the Library (search our Sound & Moving Image catalogue for details).

In light of Peter’s recent passing, it’s difficult not to read fresh significance into his words. In the programme for the current production of Joe Egg, Jamie Andrews from the British Library recalls one particular email exchange amongst many:

I see that at one point, feeling the physical challenges of ageing, his subject line was a typically self-deprecating ‘Petering Out’; but that a few emails later, it had changed to ‘Anything But Petering Out’…. A far more accurate assessment of his later years.

Just as Peter’s words will live on in all who knew him, his work survives in the archive he left behind and the potential it holds for many more revivals to come.

Peter Nichols: A Celebration will take place next Wednesday 27 November at 3pm. Tickets are available from ATG Tickets.

Peter Richard Nichols CBE, playwright, born 31 July 1927; died 7 September 2019, aged 92.

A celebratory conference placing Andrew Salkey’s legacy in the modern moment and exploring the Caribbean diasporic networks of today will be held at The Knowledge Centre, The British Library, London on Saturday 20th June 2020.

Keynote speakers:

• Professor Robert A. Hill, leading scholar on Marcus Garvey and Research Professor, Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles
• Professor Nadia Ellis, author of Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora, English Department, University of California, Berkeley

Writer and broadcaster Andrew Salkey became a central figure in a circle of Caribbean writers, artists and intellectuals when he moved to London from Jamaica in the 1950s, later co-founding the Caribbean Artists Movement and dedicating his life to literary activism across the Caribbean diaspora. While his achievements and influence were widely acknowledged in his own lifetime, his name is less-well-known today. Twenty-five years on from Salkey’s death, this conference seeks to retrieve his legacy and to open up questions about today’s Caribbean diasporic networks. How have they changed? Are the same questions from the past still important today?

Born in Panama in 1928 and raised in Jamaica, Andrew Salkey was a novelist, poet, editor, broadcaster and academic. He embodied the Black Radical Tradition as a member of the League of Coloured Peoples and the Movement for Colonial Freedom; as an author and folklorist; and in his support for revolutionary Cuba and the freedom struggles of Guyana and Chile. Salkey was the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service giving a platform for a generation of writers including Sam Selvon, George Lamming and V S Naipaul through its ‘Caribbean Voices’ programme. He was influential in the British publishing industry, recommending V S Naipaul and Wilson Harris to Andre Deutsch and Faber & Faber respectively, championing women writers such as Beryl Gilroy, and supporting Bogle L'Ouverture and New Beacon Books in their pioneering roles as the first publishing houses for Black writing in Britain. In 1966, he co-founded the Caribbean Artists Movement alongside Kamau Brathwaite and John La Rose. From 1976 until his death in 1995, Salkey lived in the US and worked as Professor of Creative Writing at Hampshire College in Amherst. His life and work have been seen as embodying the Black Radical Tradition.

Dubbed the unofficial archivist of the Caribbean cultural scene by his friend Sam Selvon, he preserved not only his own literary drafts, diaries and wide-ranging correspondence, but also rare printed ephemera, news cuttings, project files and sound recordings. The Andrew Salkey Archive will be open to researchers at the British Library from autumn 2020.

We are currently accepting abstracts for 15-minute papers from scholars and early career researchers with an interest in Caribbean diaspora studies. We encourage paper proposals from a wide variety of institutions. We also welcome papers from writers, artists, performers, activists and archivists.

Themes to consider:

• The works of Andrew Salkey
• Literary and cultural networks across the Diaspora – past and present
• Women’s writing and activism
• The Caribbean Artists Movement
• Diasporic communication, languages and idioms
• Expressions of home, belonging, exile, transnationality
• Radical Politics, Black Radical Aesthetics, human liberation
• The politics of the archive, memory and erasure, the ethics of dispersed and contested archives, Decolonising the Archive
• New media, broadcasting, publishing, literary festivals

A British Library conference in collaboration with Goldsmiths Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies, Goldsmiths MA in Black British Writing and The Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library

Access bursaries of up to £250 will be available to delegates not in permanent employment to help with travel and/or childcare costs. Details of how to apply will be shared with applicants once paper acceptances have been circulated.  The bursaries have been made available through support from the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library.  Any enquiries about the bursaries should be sent to [email protected].

Abstracts for papers and enquiries should be sent by e-mail to Eleanor Casson, [email protected]

Deadline for abstracts: Monday 27th January 2020

Decisions announced: March 2020

by Giulia Carla Rossi Curator of Digital Publications @giugimonogatari. Find out more about the New Media Writing Prize here. For more information about the Library's Emerging Formats project, click here.

On 18 July, The British Library hosted a Digital Conversations event to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the New Media Writing Prize. Digital Conversations is a series of events that explores the way in which technology is changing how we experience our life and how we communicate. New media writing perfectly fits within this theme as an example of the impact innovative technologies have on how we tell stories and express ourselves.

Now in its 10th year, the if:book UK New Media Writing Prize (NMWP) started as a one-off event in a literary festival in Poole. After realising its great potential, the event was moved to Bournemouth University (where it’s based today), with the help of co-founder and organiser Jim Pope. The 2019 prize is now comprised of five strands: the if:book award is the main award and the Dot Prize is an award for project proposals connecting literature with the digital; both are sponsored by if:book founder Chris Meade. The Unicorn Training Student Award, the Journalism Award and the Skylab innovation award round out the compliment, making 2019 the first year where these groups and mediums will be explicitly and separately recognised.

In ten years of the prize, words have always been at the centre of these works, combined with all sorts of new media, in constantly changing and innovative ways. New media writing is not identifiable with a single practice: it’s a whole range of forms that happens across disciplines and cultures. Genres have also been extremely varied since the beginning of the award: journalism, poetry, games, fiction, non-fiction, digital connected to non-digital. The constant element throughout the years has been the different way of writing (and reading) which this combination of digital and literature creates, giving the reader new agency and allowing for things that cannot happen in print. 

New media writing to engage diverse audiences and preserve obsolete technologies

The event kicked off with a presentation by Andy Campbell, Co-Director of arts organisation One-to-One Development Trust, and judge of the NMWP since its inception. Andy talked about working with technology and people from a variety of backgrounds to tell stories both fictionally and factually. One-to-One Development Trust is involved in a range of different projects – some of the most ambitious ones are created in their in-house digital fiction studio, Dreaming Methods. 

The studio began as a personal exploration on writing and new media; with the rapid changes in technology, Dreaming Methods has now shifted into the realm of playable narratives and immersive experiences. The studio produces works that use game mechanics to improve readers’ engagement and draw them to new forms of storytelling. One example of this is Wallpaper (2015), a VR sci-fi ghost story that explores reading and immersion. Following game dynamics, readers will get a score once they finished the story, depending on how much of the narrative they managed to uncover – this encourages readers/players to come back to the narrative to try and improve their score. Another example is All the Delicate Duplicates (2016): defined as literary videogame, it explores family relationships and mental health. 

All the Delicate Duplicates. © One to One Development Trust - Dreaming Methods and Mez Breeze

New media writing, like any discipline dealing with emerging technologies, is closely linked to the question of digital preservation. Some of the submissions entered in the first years of the NMWP have been successfully preserved by the Internet Archive thanks to their Wayback Machine, while others have now vanished. The latest Dreaming Methods project stems from this very issue: Digital Fiction Curious is a virtual museum created to house and preserve Flash works in VR. Flash will disappear in 2020, which makes the risk of loss very real for a great number of interactive narratives. Digital Fiction Curious uses three early Flash literary works created by the founders of One-to-One Development Trust and Dreaming Methods as a proof of concept. The access to all source code made possible to retain all the original Flash features and interaction patterns in VR. 

The virtual museum was conceived as an archive, but it has become more of an artwork in its own right. It gives its audience the possibility to not just experience obsolete works in their originality, but to also explore them in new ways: Digital Fiction Curious includes a VR-within-VR function, which allows us to imagine the different shape these work could have taken had VR technology been available at the development stage. 

Digital Fiction Curious © One to One Development Trust – Dreaming Methods in association with Sheffield Hallam University

This project has proven that a VR environment can successfully support Flash technology – the aim is now to create a comprehensive archive of different authors. Flash appears quite frequently among the submissions to the NMWP, especially in the early years – in 2010, 70% of the entries were created using this tool, and they’re now at risk of becoming inaccessible. 

New media writing to represent the multitude of our emotional landscape 

One example of new media writing that uses Flash, is the very first winner of the NMWP, Underbelly, by Christine Wilks. Underbelly revolves around a woman sculptor working on the site of a former colliery in the North of England. The work mixes audio and video, overlapping the inner dialogue of the sculptor (expressing her most hidden desires and fears) with the sepulchral voices of 19th century women who used to mine on the site. The result is a haunting of voices, reflecting on womanhood and on how much control can women have over their own lives.

Revealing what is hidden under the surface is one of the main concerns of Underbelly – there is a variety of themes and historical remnants buried within the work, as layers for the reader to excavate, mirroring the mining process as well as the sculpting itself. Readers search the map for elements that trigger narrative events: historical images of mine workers inhabit the same space of old anatomical drawings of dissected bodies. Gynaecological imagery is also recurring as yet another example of excavation, in the anatomical sense of cavity in the human body. The map itself is reminiscent of a anatomical drawing, an adaptation of the medieval Hereford Mappa Mundi, with the colliery tunnels and cavities taking the shape of the womb of Mother Earth.

Underbelly © Christine Wilks

Christine also discussed a few of her new projects.Writing New Bodies is an international research project on bibliotherapy, currently in the process of being developed. It’s a work of interactive digital fiction which aims to address body-image issues, where her own  text-driven game engine works to develop interactive narratives focused on the characters' psychology through a rich vocabulary of emotional states.

New media writing to democratise language and escape censorship 

Amira Hanafi won the main prize in 2018 with A Dictionary of the Revolution. This work was driven by Amira’s desire to understand the language that was developing around her in Cairo during the Arab Spring: people were talking politics in the streets, openly expressing themselves in a way that hadn’t been possible before they took control of public spaces in 2011. Originally conceived as a book, A Dictionary of the Revolution took almost 5 years to reach its current form.

The writing of this work can be divided into two main steps: the first step consisted of collecting the words people used when discussing politics into 320 cards. Cards allowed for a fluid narrative that could be shuffled and recombined and were the perfect tool to spark conversation around how the meaning of words can change after great social and political events. The second step was to interview people interacting with the cards, and then use these recordings (of almost 200 interviews) to form a dictionary of language as a process – the aim was not to define terms, but to represent language as something that’s alive, pliable material that we revise and remake as collective. Amira’s process involved listening to interviews by term, not by interviewee, so that different voices could mix and provide multiple perspectives.

The final step was to assemble the text to understand the collective language, and find a way to organise the data and show the hidden patterns. Amira wanted her work to be available in Egypt first, but by the time she finished transcribing her audio archive the political atmosphere had changed, and it was hard to imagine the text would make it through censorship unchanged (if at all). Online publishing began to seem the best option, especially in terms of making the book accessible. Digital tools also opened up new possibilities for analysing the text and organising the narrative. She chose to visualise data through a core diagram, which represents connections between nodes (words) in a circular layout, using line weight to indicate the closeness of the relationship.

A Dictionary of the Revolution © Amira Hanafi

Machine reading found connections between words that weren’t obvious in print, and the website structure allows readers to explore the dictionary in a non-linear way, through a web of connected concepts, events, and characters. Although analytics tools for one-page websites tend to not be precise, it looks like people only spend a short amount of time on the website. This seems to suggest that most users are interacting with the diagram more than reading the full text. The project has translated into its visualisation; it has ‘gamified’. With the shift to visualisation as the main narrative, the act of reading has also transformed into navigating the web of relationships between words.

New media writing to own your narrative and renew civic identity

The 2018 Dot Award for a digital literature project proposal was won by Kayt Lackie (Burgess) for her VESSEL Project, a transmedia storytelling project and pervasive game set in her hometown of Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada. The project is supported by the Vessel Transmedia Storytelling Lab, an initiative that uses new media storytelling to explore the history and culture of a community.

Elliot Lake was hit by a tragedy in 2012 when the roof of the local shopping mall collapsed causing a number of casualties. Suddenly the town jumped to the front of the news, with this story ending up defining the community to a national audience (and to the town itself), as well as negatively impacting its economy. Kayt’s project seeks to use counter narratives to re-appropriate media representation and progress community renewal and civic identities through multimedia writing and storytelling.

The VESSEL Project (Virtual Experience & Superimposed StoryWorld in Elliot Lake) is a transmedia story set in a fictionalised version of Elliot Lake, mixing folklore, science and environmental conservation. It draws upon the town history, as well as the cultures and languages of its community, bringing people together in a unified story world. The transmedia story will represent the first act of the VESSEL Project, created by a collective of writers through a series of new media and digital writing workshops (like the Ephemera Storytelling Box) and further developed by other participants to the project (artists, creators, schools, etc.) The transmedia story will be hosted online and unfold through a variety of art pieces, such as social media accounts, photos, blogs, art installations, videos and audio file.

The VESSEL Ephemera Storytelling Box © The VESSEL Transmedia Storytelling Lab

The transmedia story will culminate in an alternate-reality festival weekend (scheduled for summer 2021), which will introduce the project to a wider audience. Elliot Lake will become the physical setting of a real world video game, where people can solve puzzles and overcome challenges while experiencing the story created and performed by the local community. A location-based app will also be developed as part of the festival, and hopefully help to preserve it and give it a long afterlife after the festival is over.

This pervasive form of new media storytelling is effective in bringing people together to create counter narratives and tell the story of a place and a community. It allows participants to recognise that powerful stories are all around them and not just controlled by the media – people feel seen through storytelling, which strengthens their sense of civic identity.

The Emerging Formats Project

The British Library, together with the other five Legal Deposit Libraries, is currently researching how to manage collections of innovative digital publications. For this purpose, the Emerging Formats Project was set up, looking at collection management requirements for complex new media.

Many of these publications present challenges linked to their software and hardware dependencies, which might affect long-term preservation as well as access to content. The rapid pace at which new technologies emerge and become obsolete also presents a risk to born-digital publications with no print counterpart. 

The British Library is looking into different collection methods for different formats: we have recently collected files for inkle’s 80 Days, including contextual information that could aid preservation and future access. We are also testing web archiving tools for capturing online interactive narratives: Rhizome’s Webrecorder has proven effective in capturing some examples of early Flash works, and the British Library’s own Annotation and Curation Tool (ACT) has allowed us to create an Interactive Narratives collection on the UK Web Archive, with the option of nominating yours or someone else's work for inclusion.

 

By Laura Walker, Lead Curator of Modern Archives and Manuscripts 1851-1950. ‘Exploring Eliot’s Coventry’ is a free exhibition now open at The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry. The Sir John Ritblat Treasures Gallery is a free exhibition space at the British Library, which will feature a one case display on George Eliot opening on 5 November 2019.

On 22 November 2019 one of the most renowned Victorian novelists celebrates her 200^th birthday. She was born Mary Anne Evans near Nuneaton, Warwickshire and is now more commonly known under her pseudonym George Eliot. Eliot is best known for her novels, including Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861) and Middlemarch (1871-1872) which remain as popular as ever.

George Eliot, by Paul Adolphe Rajon, after Sir Frederic Burton, 1865, from George Eliot's life as related in her letters and journals. Arranged and edited by her husband, J. W. Cross. (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1886), 10854.e.14, Vol 1.

To celebrate Eliot’s bicentenary two volumes of Middlemarch will be on display from November 2019 until January 2020, one volume at the British Library in London and the other at The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry.

Middlemarch, took Eliot four years to complete and is subtitled ‘A Study of Provincial Life’. The story follows the lives of the inhabitants of a small Midlands town in the early 1830s. It is thought that Eliot’s time living in Coventry inspired aspects of the fictional town and its characters. Marital relations form a key part of the narrative of the novel, which adhered to the idea of realism and the importance of the ‘ordinary’. Central to the novel are two relationships, one between the intelligent and idealistic heroine Dorothea Brooke and the insecure and ineffectual scholar Mr Casaubon. The other is between the talented and naive doctor, Tertius Lydgate and the spoiled and wilful Rosamond Vincy.

Middlemarch was published in eight ‘half volumes’ over 12 months, starting in December 1871. The final manuscript of the novel, which was sent to the printers was initially given by George Eliot to her partner George Henry Lewes along with manuscript copies of nine of her other works including Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Daniel Deronda. After Lewes’s death Eliot bequeathed the ten manuscripts to the Department of Manuscripts, which at that time was part of the British Museum. The manuscripts now form part of the British Library’s collections (Add MS 34034-34037).

The original loose leaves of Middlemarch are now bound into four volumes. The second volume of which is currently on display at the Herbert from Friday, 1 November until Sunday, 5 January 2020, when it will move to Nuneaton Museum to be displayed for a further eight weeks. The loan of Middlemarch forms part of the British Library’s Treasures on Tour programme, working with partners across the UK to share its collection of over 170 million treasures, inspiring the next great idea or moment of joyful discovery. The programme is generously supported by the Helen Hamlyn Trust. The British Library will be announcing additional loans as part of this programme in early 2020.

George Eliot, Middlemarch, Add MS 34035 f.185 on display at The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum

To highlight the famous author’s connection to Coventry, the Herbert will be exhibiting this work alongside other artefacts in a new display, ‘Exploring Eliot’s Coventry’.  The opening of Middlemarch on display features prominent manufacturer and mayor of Middlemarch, Walter Vincy and his daughter Rosamond. Walter Vincy expresses concern that his daughter wishes to ‘marry a poor man’.

"Nonsense, my dear!" said Mr. Vincy. "What has he got to marry on? You'd much better give up the engagement. I've told you so pretty plainly before this. What have you had such an education for, if you are to go and marry a poor man? It's a cruel thing for a father to see."

Vincy goes on to reveal that he won’t give any money to Rosamond’s potential husband.

"I hope he knows I shan't give anything—with this disappointment about Fred, and Parliament going to be dissolved, and machine-breaking everywhere, and an election coming on—"

This extract is one of the few in the novel that mention national events beyond the town of Middlemarch and places the story in the context of the 1830s. It is thought that Vincy may have been based on Eliot’s Coventry neighbour, Abijah Pears, who was mayor of Coventry in 1842 and a ribbon manufacturer.

George Eliot, Middlemarch, Add MS 34036 f.73 on display in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures Gallery at The British Library.

Complicated marital relations feature heavily in Middlemarch and the manuscript on display at the British Library will be open at a disagreement between the other key couple in the story. In this extract Casaubon attempts to persuade Dorothea to fulfil his wishes without first knowing what they are.

"No, I do not yet refuse," said Dorothea, in a clear voice, the need of freedom asserting itself within her; "but it is too solemn—I think it is not right—to make a promise when I am ignorant what it will bind me to. Whatever affection prompted I would do without promising."

Dorothea assumes that her husband is asking her to promise to complete his life’s work, Key to all Mythologies; a hopelessly wide-ranging work which first draws her to Casaubon, but which she comes to doubt as it progresses. This work forms part of her husband’s wishes but he also writes into his will that she will not inherit his fortune and property if she marries his cousin the artist and radical Will Ladislaw. Casaubon, however, dies before Dorothea can make the promise and it is only after his death that the codicil attempting to prevent her marriage to Will becomes known.

The third volume of Middlemarch will feature in a one case display in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures Gallery, which opens on Tuesday 5 November 2019 and runs until Sunday 26 January 2020. The display will also feature amongst other items one volume of Mill on the Floss and letters by George Eliot.