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

Roundabout Papers

 (London, 1860), pp. 349-50.

---

7

The Reading Room in Literature

eBLJ 2019,  Article 5

the list of ‘premonitory symptoms’, it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

     I sat for a while, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again 

turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever – read the symptoms – discovered that 

I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it – wondered what 

else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance – found, as I expected, that I had that too, – 

began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started 

alphabetically – read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute 

stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to 

find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for 

years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been 

born with.  I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady 

I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee. […]

     I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit 

wreck.

13

 

The dreary lives of the hack writers who were such a feature of the life of the Reading 

Room in the latter part of the nineteenth century are vividly evoked by George Gissing in the 

following extract from his novel 

New Grub Street

.

The days darkened.  Through November rains and fogs Marian went her usual way to the 

Museum, and toiled there among the other toilers. […]

     One day at the end of the month she sat with books open before her, but by no effort 

could fix her attention upon them.  It was gloomy, and one could scarcely see to read; a 

taste of fog grew perceptible in the warm, headachy air.  Such profound discouragement 

possessed her that she could not even maintain the pretence of study; heedless whether 

anyone observed her, she let her hands fall and her head droop.  She kept asking herself 

what was the use and purpose of such a life as she was condemned to lead. When already 

there was more good literature in the world than any mortal could cope with in his 

lifetime, here she was exhausting herself in the manufacture of printed stuff which no 

one even pretended to be more than a commodity for the day’s market. […]

     The fog grew thicker; she looked up at the windows beneath the dome and saw they 

they were a dusky yellow. Then her eye discerned an official walking along the upper 

gallery, and in pursuance of her grotesque humour, her mocking misery, she likened him 

to a black, lost soul, doomed to wander in an eternity of vain research along endless 

shelves. Or again, the readers who sat here at these radiating lines of desks, what were 

they but hapless flies caught in a huge web, its nucleus the great circle of the Catalogue?  

Darker, darker. From the towering wall of volumes seemed to emanate visible motes, 

intensifying the obscurity; in a moment the book-lined circumference of the room would 

be a featureless prison-limit.

     But then flashed forth the sputtering whiteness of the electric light, and its ceaseless 

hum was henceforth a new source of headache.

14

We now come to the story of Enoch Soames, written by Max Beerbohm. This is an account 

of a minor and unsuccessful poet of the 1890s who described himself as a Catholic diabolist, 

and wrote books with titles such as