Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 detached the library department from the British Museum, but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same Reading Room and building as the museum until 1997. The British Museum Library still exists, but as of 2021, the Reading Room is not open to the public.
Closure and restoration
In 1997 the British Library moved to its own specially constructed building next to
St Pancras Station and all the books and shelving were removed. As part of the redevelopment of the Great Court, the Reading Room was fully renovated and restored, including the papier-mâché ceiling which was repaired to its original colour scheme, having previously undergone radical redecorations (the initial design of the roof was considered excessive at the time).
The Reading Room was reopened in 2000, allowing all visitors, and not just library ticket-holders, to enter it. It held a collection of 25,000 books focusing on the cultures represented in the museum along with an information centre and the
Walter and Leonore Annenberg Centre.
Exhibition space
In 2007 the books and facilities installed in 2000 were removed, and the Reading Room was relaunched as a venue for special exhibitions, beginning with one featuring China's
Terracotta Army
The Terracotta Army is a collection of terracotta sculptures depicting the armies of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China. It is a form of funerary art buried with the emperor in 210–209 BCE with the purpose of protecting the emperor in ...
. The general library for visitors (Paul Hamlyn Library) moved to a room accessible through nearby Room 2, but closed permanently on 13 August 2011. This is an earlier library that has also had distinguished users, including
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, (; 25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a British historian and Whig politician, who served as the Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841, and as the Paymaster-General between 1846 and 184 ...
,
William Makepeace Thackeray,
Robert Browning
Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian poets. He was noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings ...
,
Giuseppe Mazzini,
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin ( ; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended fr ...
and
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian e ...
. The Reading Room is no longer used for exhibitions.
A selection of past exhibitions:
References in art and popular culture
The British Museum Reading Room is the subject of an eponymous poem, "The British Museum Reading Room", by
Louis MacNeice
Frederick Louis MacNeice (12 September 1907 – 3 September 1963) was an Irish poet and playwright, and a member of the Auden Group, which also included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. MacNeice's body of work was widely a ...
. Much of the action of
David Lodge's
1965
Events January–February
* January 14 – The Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and the Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland meet for the first time in 43 years.
* January 20
** Lyndon B. Johnson is Second inauguration of Lyndo ...
novel ''
The British Museum Is Falling Down'' takes place in the old Reading Room. The 'Glass Ceiling' of Anabel Donald's 1994 novel is the ceiling of the Reading Room, where the denouement is set.
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English filmmaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 featur ...
used the Reading Room and the dome of the British Museum as a location for the climax of his first sound film ''
Blackmail
Blackmail is an act of coercion using the threat of revealing or publicizing either substantially true or false information about a person or people unless certain demands are met. It is often damaging information, and it may be revealed to fa ...
'' (1929). Other movies with key scenes in the Reading Room include ''
Night of the Demon'' (1957) and in the
2001
The September 11 attacks against the United States by Al-Qaeda, which Casualties of the September 11 attacks, killed 2,977 people and instigated the global war on terror, were a defining event of 2001. The United States led a Participants in ...
Japanese anime
is Traditional animation, hand-drawn and computer animation, computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside of Japan and in English, ''anime'' refers specifically to animation produced in Japan. However, in Japan and in Japane ...
OVA
, abbreviated as OVA and sometimes as OAV (original animation video), are Japanese animated films and series made specially for release in home video formats without prior showings on television or in theaters, though the first part of an OVA s ...
''
Read or Die'', the Room is used as a secret entrance to the British Library's fictional "Special Operations Division".
In
Sir Max Beerbohm's short story, ''
Enoch Soames
"Enoch Soames" is the title of a short story by the British writer Max Beerbohm. Enoch Soames is also the name of the main character.
The piece was originally published in the May 1916 edition of ''The Century Magazine'', and was later included ...
'', first published in May 1916, an obscure writer makes a
deal with the Devil to visit the Reading Room one hundred years in the future, in order to know what posterity thinks about him and his work.
The British Museum and the Reading Room serve as the settings for ''An Encounter at the Museum'', an anthology of romance novellas by
Claudia Dain and
Deb Marlowe, among others.
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
Woolf was born i ...
made reference to the British Museum Reading Room in a passage from her 1929 essay, ''
A Room of One's Own
''A Room of One's Own'' is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in September 1929. The work is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, women's colleges at the University of C ...
''. She wrote, "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."
Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
Richard Henry Dana Jr. (August 1, 1815 – January 6, 1882) was an American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts, a descendant of a colonial family, who gained renown as the author of the classic American memoir ''Two Years Before the Mast''. ...
visited the Reading Room on 10 September 1860 with his London friend Henry T. Parker, and reported that
Parker calls & takes me to the British Museum, to see the Reading Room, wh. has been built since 1856 ana's prior visit It is the room where students & readers have their desks, & consult the textbooks, cyclopedias, catalogs &c., & from wh. they send orders for books to the Library – the Library not being visited, at all, for study. There is no such room as this in Europe. It is a circle, with a dome, lighted from above, & its diameter is 4 feet greater than that of the dome of St. Paul's. The autographs are now open to the view of all, spread out in glass cases, – as well as much other lit. curiosities. This is the grandest Literary & Scientific institution (not for instruction) in the world. The Reading Room, I told Parker, was a temple to the deification of Bibliology.
The writer Bernard Falk (1882-1960) quotes the British historian
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle (4 December 17955 February 1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher. A leading writer of the Victorian era, he exerted a profound influence on 19th-century art, literature and philosophy.
Born in Ecclefechan, Dum ...
(1795-1881) as having declared that the Reading Room of the British Museum was a convenient asylum for imbeciles whose friends wished them out of mischief's way.
[Falk, Bernard (1951) ''Bouquets for Fleet Street'', London, Hutchinson & Co, p.157]
See also
*
References
Further reading
* ''A History of the British Museum Library, 1753–1973.'' London: British Library, 1998, ,
* Caygill, M. ''The British Museum Reading Room''. London: The British Museum, 2000.
* Wilson, David M. ''The British Museum; A History''. London: The British Museum Press, 2002,
External links
British Museum Reading Room Information
{{Authority control
1857 establishments in the United Kingdom
British Library
Reading Room
Domes
Grade I listed library buildings
Buildings and structures completed in 1857
Buildings and structures in Bloomsbury