Writing Britain: Literature and place from wastelands to wonderlands

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Mark White looks at how the art of book writing is presented at the British Library

For a small place, Britain has an extremely varied landscape and man has changed it further; from forests to factories to theme parks. That well-known obsession with the weather has its parallel in our writing about the land. Did we appreciate our landscape before the Romantic poet Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and his friend Coleridge strode across the Lake District in the early 19th century? Of course we did, the 1000-year-old Exeter Book describes it, Chaucer’s Pilgrims famously rode across it from London to Canterbury. The British landscape is not just a description, it is a character, from the mediaeval green man who peers out of architecture, a spirit of the woods, to the barren sadness of poet John Clare’s enclosed land, to the many moods of the River Thames. Not just the rural dream, though, as portrayed in the recent Olympic opening ceremony by Danny Boyle. That ceremony opened up into the dark satanic mills, in William Blake’s famous phrase, which drove the industrial revolution. The factory landscape has been another constant theme from the first beginnings in Coalbrookdale through to post-industrial nostalgia. Ted Hughes in 1979, with Fay Godwin’s photography, linked the ‘leaf loam’ silent present to the industrial past and the even earlier Celtic kingdom of Elmet.

Melancholy is the characteristic link between these literary landscapes, from Spenser’s  words ‘Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song’ in 1596 through to Ian Sinclair’s ‘Downriver’ in 1991: ‘The river is time: breathless, cyclic unstoppable…a poultice of dark clay to seal our eyes forever from the fear and agony of life’.

The theme of this exhibition is undeniable; that landscape in all its variety is the load-bearing seam that English literature has mined since such a label could be used. A celebration of more than 1000 years, it is a big show but how do you make manuscripts and book covers visually engaging? By projecting Victorian imagery onto white drapes, by providing audio stations with poetry readings and author interviews. By dividing the rows of glass cases into subjects: Rural Dreams; Dark Satanic Mills; Wild Places; Beyond the City; Cockney Visions and Waterlands.

These extras, the first editions and the 1000-year-old Exeter book were interesting, but the original drafts were the real draw. For example, Claire Tomalin’s recent biography told us that Dickens wrote on small pieces of paper (about 9 x 71/2 inches folded in half) fitting some 45 lines on each side. But to see that visible effort on the paper slip he carried at the time of the 1865 Staplehurst rail crash and notice that it has smudges on it (blood perhaps), what does that do? It turns the abstract process of writing and then reading into a powerful object, with many layers of meaning.

Art historians are concerned with objects, their relationships to the world that produced them and the world that views and has viewed them. This is the fundamental approach of this exhibition, subdued lighting, sacred objects in vitrines to study, lulled by the sound of waves from the Waterlands section. Many things here are objects of veneration, Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal from 1802–3; that organized handwriting marching up to the edge of the page confirming one’s view of her. Blake’s notebook containing a draft of ‘London’ and ‘The Tyger’ showing the tiny handwriting of a wood engraver, pages full of vigorous pencil drawings and revisions and text organized into columns.

It is difficult to avoid graphology and amateur psychology, but there are other aids:  the size of book used, or the way the writer organizes the page and the qualities of the written line make a powerful picture. Look, perhaps, at Ted Hughes letters to Fay Godwin about The Remains of Elmet, the joint work of poet and photographer in in 1979. He negotiates the relationship of poem to photo (‘without your pictures there would have been no poems at all’). Hughes’ black handwriting rolls with vigour in long thick lines across the page. It is not like Sylvia Plath’s handwriting for their earlier joint work Hardcastle Craggs, where the curved letters are so exaggerated that they seem to have been written backwards.

The book, Writing Britain, produced alongside the exhibition is less a catalogue than a summary of English literature about different types of landscape; unlike the show it is not about objects. An art historian would like to know more. Coleridge apparently wrote his earliest version of Dejection an Ode on the top of Scafell early in 1802. But how? How did he carry the ink? The pen? Keep the paper flat? Blot it afterwards, etc? In painting, think of Impressionism, the portability of media affects production and therefore the work itself. Is this also true of traditional writing materials and the newer technologies?

Travel and the post Romantic pyscho-geographers certainly dominate the latter half of the show and the book. Ian Sinclair includes photographs, but the writers shown here mostly recollect their emotions in tranquillity. The most interesting manuscripts clearly display revisions central to the creative process; the draft for J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash’ is so heavily worked, in blue and red and pen and pencil, that it becomes a disquieting image in itself. The neatest script award goes to Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre’, a large book and not a crossing out to be seen, perfectly parallel lines of small italic.

The book is a good summary of the literature, it is not a good summary of the exhibits as things in themselves. The texts shown have no real sense of comparable scale; the minuteness of Blake’s hand or Virginia Woolf’s large unformed italic gives the full sense of the object and its meanings; the different ways you might ‘read’ it.  The book is a good introduction for the general reader, though if you have read around this subject much of it will be familiar, but it is well priced and written, largely avoids jargon and is profusely illustrated. It is particularly good on 18th- and 19th-century London, with wider references than usual. There is only a very brief bibliography and no footnotes, the index is reasonable.

Although the topic was landscape in all its English literary forms, in the end it is the book that sticks to the subject. The exhibition is about something more: those objects, as objects always do, tell us about the different journeys involved in the creative process.

The accompanying book, Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands  by Christina Hardyment is published by The British Library 2012. 192 pp. 100 colour and mono illus. ISBN 978-0-7123-5874-3