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Affairs of the Heart
, published in 1949, Malcolm
Muggeridge gives his impression of the Reading Room.
The following morning I set out for the British Museum. It was a journey often
made and always melancholy. As ever, a vague stale smell, compounded of old paper,
old clothes, and old flesh, pervaded the Reading Room. The same sad company was
at work beneath the coloured dome, listlessly absorbing information – a bearded priest
always to be found there, the usual elderly, untidy women with strands of grey hair
falling over their faces; a bald man, probably a Pole, soundlessly muttering; a Rabbi or
two, and a decayed Guards officer with broken discoloured teeth, a book on the Pyramids
in front of him. It was fitting that so much of the world’s discontent should in recent
times have been drawn to this melancholy place. The flames of rage leapt higher when
dry tinder from these shelves was fed to them. Hither came Marx to charge himself with
knowledge, until his overcharged blood broke out in boils and his overcharged brain
exploded the whole world. Hither came Samuel Butler nursing grievances against his
father, and Lenin nursing grievances against everyone – at once the angriest and most
wretched portion of mankind.
22
It was in the late 1940s that I first became acquainted with the Reading Room. It seemed
to have more striking characters than it does now – but doubtless it is the habit of the elderly
to cast a golden glow over their early days which causes me to say so. However that may be,
I well remember the refugee from central Europe who was so persistent in trying to sell us
rather dull books, and who sadly met his end by falling under a tram in Vienna. Then there was
the famous lexicographer Eric Partidge who for more than 40 years until 1976 occupied seat
K.1. (If another reader beat him to it, he would hover reproachfully.) In an interview in 1977
Partridge spoke of another famous reader – the Benedictine scholar Henri Leclercq, whom
he had known by sight for many years before they were introduced to each other by a mutual
friend. ‘With great formality we traversed the ten feet between our desks and waited until he
had finished his learned sentence. Then the presentation was made. He very graciously rose,
this ponderous bulk,
23
and extended his hand. I said how much I admired his scholarship, and
he said ‘Au revoir’. After that he always gave me a gracious nod of his head – but no more’.
A fuller account of the Abbé Leclercq was given in a book published in 1935 entitled
For
Readers Only
by two writers who used the pseudonym J. Penn. This disguised the identity of
two scholars in the field of Slavonic studies – Professor Elizabeth Hill and Miss Doris Mudie.
20
Louis MacNeice, ‘The British Museum Reading Room’, in
Collected Poems 1925-1948
(London, 1949),
pp. 182-3.
21
Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk.
22
Malcolm Muggeridge,
Affairs of the Heart
(London, 1949), p. 18.
23
this ponderous bulk
crossed through.
14
The Reading Room in Literature
eBLJ 2019, Article 5
The Abbé Leclercq [is] a reader who physically and intellectually deserves the title
‘monumental’. He is enormous and only occasionally moves from a reading desk which
both he and others take for granted as being specifically reserved for him.
As I look across at his broad back where his sides are spreading over the framework
of the chair, I see how heavily he is leaning on the desk. He is leaning heavily on one
elbow and the other arm is curved round a huge volume. I can well believe the legend
that his reading desk has twice protested and that twice it has had to be repaired. Apart
from his own weight, the desk has to support a mountain of books, a pile of papers, and
on top of those, his top hat. As soon as he arrives in the morning, and he is usually the
first to pass through the gates, he exchanges the hat for a black skull cap. He is dressed
in black, but there is nothing funereal about him. Certainly there never was a jollier
looking Benedictine scholar. His face is consistently bright and good-tempered. Now
and again he lifts his unwilling body away from the desk into which it seems almost to
have grown, and walks slowly to the open access shelves to consult one of the eighty
thousand volumes round the walls.
He carries a pen in his mouth like a dog his bone, his eyes are twinkling and his cheeks
are flushed. He works assiduously all day. […]
If ever a man lived up to and surpassed the clerical promise of his name, it is he, for
he is far more than a writer, he is an eminent authority on Catholicism with numerous
entries to his credit in the catalogue. Above all, he is a famous encyclopaedist working
on a twenty-five volume dictionary of Christian antiquities. A great Frenchman whose
erudition is proverbial, who has lived in England for years and refrains from speaking
anything but French, the Abbé Leclercq is adored by his friends for whom he has an
endless fund of fact and humour, and he is revered by strangers for being a perfect
illustration of the scholar reader.
24
Another regular reader until his death in 1978 was Mr Solomon Pottesman, usually known
as Potty, a self-taught antiquarian bookseller, who was never seen without his cloth cap, and
who provided against cold weather by inserting under his shirt two or three copies of
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