P. R. Harris This is a celebration of the Reading Room which was built in 1854-57. It was however preceded

A Man from the North

 (London, 1898), pp. 69-70.

17

  E. M. Forster, 

The Longest Journey

 (1907), p. 223.

---

11

The Reading Room in Literature

eBLJ 2019,  Article 5

     In the centre of the room are three concentric circles of yellow wooden counters; 

behind the inmost and smallest is the citadel of the administration, the second holds 

the catalogue of musical works, the third and largest the general catalogue with its 

thousand volumes. From these circles, like spokes in a wheel, radiate the tables for the 

readers which are distinguished by letters of the alphabet.  Running down the middle 

of each table is a partition high enough to prevent a reader on one side from seeing his 

opposite number on the other. Each side is divided into numbered rectangular spaces, 

giving comfortable room for one reader to spread his books, manuscripts and so forth. To 

facilitate working, each rectangle is provided with a movable stand for books, an inkpot, 

blotting-paper, two pens – one with a steel nib, the other a goose quill. […] The steel 

one is for use; the quill as a mark of respect to the spirit of the past.  As a matter of fact, 

some present-day readers actually write with a quill.  In front of each compartment is a 

comfortable, solid chair which positively invites you to sit down and lose no time over 

starting work. Everything about you – the vast, light room, the countless bookshelves 

round the wall, these black tables under the soft light of electric lamps, the great names 

you see under the windows – all incites you to give of your best in the search for truth 

and in the service of advancing human thought.

18

 

In 1929 the Reading Room achieved fame in a new medium – it featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s 

film 

Blackmail

 (which was the first British sound film). The villain, who is fleeing from the 

police, is seen to run into the British Museum, race through the Egyptian galleries, and then 

pass through the Reading Room into the bookstacks. He climbs the iron ladder up the outside 

of the dome, with the police close behind, loses his footing and crashes through he lantern.  

Typically (and rightly) Hitchcock does not show the nasty moment when the fugitive hits the 

floor of the Reading Room. I have never heard of anyone falling the 106 feet from the top of 

the Reading Room. But I do remember when an electrician working in the lantern dropped a 

transformer through the glass. It hit the floor of the Reading Room just beside the catalogue 

desks – luckily this occurred before the Reading Room opened one morning, so there was no 

unfortunate person consulting the catalogue to provide the transformer with a soft landing.

It was in 1929 that Virginia Woolf published what has been described as a classic of the 

feminist movement – the essay entitled 

A Room of One’s Own

.

That visit to Oxbridge […] had started a swarm of questions. Why did men drink wine 

and women water?  Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?  What effect 

has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art? – a 

thousand questions at once suggested themselves. But one needed answers, not questions; 

and an answer was only to be had by consulting the learned and the unprejudiced, who 

had removed themselves above the strife of tongue and the confusion of body and issued 

the result of their reasoning and research in books which are to be found in the British 

Museum. If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked 

myself, picking up a notebook and pencil, is truth? […]

     The swing-doors swung open; and there one stood under the vast dome, as if one were a 

thought in the huge bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names. 

One went to the counter; one took a slip of paper; one opened a volume of the catalogue, and 

[…] Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one 

year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, 

perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?  Here had I come with a notebook and 

pencil proposing to spend a morning reading, supposing that at the end of the morning I 

should have transferred the truth to my notebook.  […] How shall I ever find the grains of 

truth embedded in all this mass of paper? I asked myself, and in despair began running my 

eye up and down the long list of titles. Even the names of the books gave me food for thought. 

18

  Ivan Maisky,