From Tintern Abbey to Hobbiton - Celebrating Literary Britain

Retrospective on Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands

British Library, May - September 2012

Reading The Casual Vacancy got me thinking about British types and stereotypes, and about visiting Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands at the British Library last month. The very experience of wandering through the exhibition made me feel inescapably British... Averting my eyes when the mobile ringtone splintered the almost unnatural hush of the sacred exhibition space. Stoically shivering against the cold of the air temperature control systems, set low enough to preserve both the precious manuscripts and the icicled visitors. But most of all, I felt British because the displays brought alive something essential in our nation: its idealised celebration of the countryside, its quiet outrage at and adaptive acceptance of industrial revolution, its unexpected subversion in the secretive vitality of the suburbs.

The themes of Writing Britain (Rural Dreams, Cityscapes, Wild Places, London, Edges and Waterlands) led you on a purposeful meander through the contours of Britain’s literary identity, and showed how that identity has been sculpted and eroded by the spaces and places in which our poets and writers have moulded their words.

The most appealing elements of the exhibition for me were the manuscripts and artworks on display, and the often symbiotic relationship between the two. Visitors do not suffer from the blindness Wordsworth fears in ‘Tintern Abbey’, as the curators have provided two evocative paintings to enhance our appreciation of his pantheistic masterpiece. Lewis Carroll’s manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground is wonderfully illuminated by his illustration of a grotesque, full-lipped, squat-limbed Queen of Hearts.

It was a shame that these sometimes weren’t exploited to their full potential. JRR Tolkein’s picturesque watercolour evocation of Hobbiton (see image at top of page) would have benefitted hugely from the presence of the text next to it, even in published form in the absence of a manuscript from the library’s archives. The modern take on Heart of Darkness as a graphic novel would have been enriched had Conrad’s text been laid next to it for direct comparison.

The absence of transcriptions next to some manuscripts also detracted slightly from the exhibition, often from a purely semantic point of view. Possibly the rationale was to present the historical artefact as it existed at the time of creation, but the effect of this was to frustrate when you couldn’t actually read the beauty of Keats’s words in ‘To Ailsa Rock’ as clearly as you could perceive it in the accompanying artist’s rendering.

But what struck me most potently was the surprisingly ephemeral quality of the contents of the exhibition, a sense of their fragility and their existence very much as entities of the past. And perhaps this is indeed because of the absence of those anchoring transcriptions, providing liberation from our constant need for modernisation, clarification and easy-to-digest information.

Because I visited the exhibition with the expectation of being faced with resoundingly physical objects which would impress upon me the fundamental endurance of literature, embodying its original inscription on the page. And of course the endurance of literature was palpable, but I emerged with an irresistible sense of wonder at the relative insubstantiality of these works of art; it is the simple jotting of a few lines on a piece of paper that have transmuted into the monumental printed texts we read today. It overwhelmed me to see Blake’s ‘London’ and ‘Tyger Tyger’ crammed into opposite corners of one battered notebook leaf, poems that were to become some of the most famous of the Romantic age.

So, to come back to the stereotypes of the British: comical, bathetic and, in the case of the social condemnation embodied in Rowling’s new novel, sometimes unpleasant. This exhibition reminded me that there is counterbalance to the stereotype, a multi-faceted culture of literary celebration and experimentation that the British Library honoured in this, quintessentially nostalgic, understated and considered exhibition. 

For what was included in the exhibition, see here.