Archive for June, 2010

A Curious Symmetry

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Have you ever had the feeling that someone was stalking you, 120 years ago? Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911):

francis-galton

I had a vague knowledge of Galton when Natasha McEnroe at the Grant Museum, UCL threw me in his general direction following a discussion at the last LitSciMed event. I’m glad she did, because I’m now writing pretty much an entire chapter of my thesis on the guy. He’s incredibly interesting and provides a crucible in which many of the issues I want to discuss can be examined. About which, perhaps, more anon.

I knew he was from Birmingham when I started, and as a Brummie myself I was naturally drawn to that. In the Galton Archive recently I discovered that had actually attended the same secondary school as me. That was interesting, but it didn’t get unnerving until I found out that he went to KCL as well. Then I learned that he not only went to my school, he also lived in the same area of Birmingham as I used to – Five Ways – and recalls in his autobiography the walk to school down about a mile of roads: the route I cycled every day for seven years. All of this would be fine if I had chosen the coincidence as the reason for looking into Galton in the first place, but it seems to have happened accidentally. Either that, or the good people running UCL special collections are inserting new documents into the Galton archive to mess with my head..!

As well as inventing eugenics, the weather map, fingerprinting and a primitive kind of bicycle odometer, Galton is famous for being one of the subjects treated of in A. S. Byatt’s novel The Biographer’s Tale (2001), in which a scholar is overtaken by the lives of the people he sets out to document. The mind boils.

Posted in The disconcerting feeling that Francis Galton is following me | 1 Comment »

Festival Season

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

I just returned from the Hay festival, where I took this picture. I challenge anybody to look at it and tell me that Book History doesn’t have some interesting things to say:

29052010(004)

This is an honesty bookshop in a castle, and it’s sort of by the way – but I did think it was interesting that the Hay festival, which takes place in a series of marquees just outside the famous ‘town of books’, is not really a site for bibliomania at all. There, apart from the Oxfam tent and a stall selling those (academically very interesting) ‘classic penguin’ mugs and deckchairs, the cult of the author reigns supreme. It’s very much a show for people interested in the personalities behind books – and, because this is the twenty-first century, the personalities behind TV, journalism, film, illustration, politics, music. The ‘literaryness’ can often fade into the background, for all the bookish props and slogans.

Would it be better if this wasn’t so? Certainly, ‘loving books’ feels more like an aesthetic choice than anything else at this event, but I’m not sure how good a festival it would be if we were trying to prioritise literary culture all the time. Living authors are a great resource (that ‘living’ is important – we don’t always see ‘life’ in our field, and perhaps its at the heart of what a festival is), and I went to some really interesting, and moving, talks.

On the other hand, I think a ‘Festival of Literature and the Arts’ could usefully stop to think, if only for a moment, about the extent to which it represents those things, and the extent to which it simply represents the people who create and consume them. I think this is a more serious distinction than it sounds, because there’s an opportunity here to really foreground some of the things that are great about books, and writing, and literature. These things, and the study of them, are increasingly being viewed with some scepticism by culture at large, as I noted in my previous post. Consider the public image of the literary arts which Hay brings – the trope of the Guardian reader – and consider the kinds of arguments which you could make for them, given that platform. Books aren’t (just) intrinsically wonderful – nor are they (just) the status accessories we litter our shelves with. Nor, indeed, are they (just) access points into the interesting lives of the famous people we want to know more about. They have a greater power, and a greater relevance, and some of that is being lost at Hay right now.

Don’t get me wrong – I loved the festival. I saw Quentin Blake live, and he drew the Enormous Crocodile, and I’m really never going to deny that I got a lot out of that. But I think there’s room for a deeper kind of public engagement here, and I think that at the moment there’s still lots to be said for popping back to Hay when the festival isn’t in season and poking around the many fabulous bookshops by yourself.

Posted in Books, Thinking | 4 Comments »