british library and museum

Today I finally got to go on a field-trip for class! (For weeks I've listened as my friends told me about the cool places all over London their professors have taken them, while I've sat in a classroom being lectured at. My turn at last!)

My professor for Contemporary British Literature met us at the British Library today, just outside the Kings Cross Station. (I'll have to head back there because I missed Platform 9 3/4.) The library had art placed about it, like this book bench. Don't ya wish you had this in your library mom?

They have a room dedicated to various historical texts and recordings, from literature and music to politics and religion. I saw Jane Austen's writing desk and spectacles. I listened to the Beatles' Christmas recording from 1964. I read letters from Queen Elizabeth I to her sister Mary while Mary was basically kept captive in an old decrepit castle. I saw Buddhist texts that were thousands of years old. And oh yeah - I saw the Magna Carta. (The closest thing the UK has to a constitution...) Such a great (free!) exhibit!

After the British Library, our professor led us through Bloomsbury on a literary tour. And we saw the house of William Butler Yeats:

And the site where Charles Dickens' lived for a bit (now it's home to the British Medical Society):

We walked through a peace park. The plaque below is dedicated to conscientious objectors during wartimes. It reads "To all those who have established and are maintaining the right to refuse to kill." This  hit home as members of my family have fought for the right to be pacifists. A statue of Ghandi sits in the middle of the park, and flowers are placed at his feet year round.

This park has special meaning because when the three suicide bombs went off in London a few years ago, one was on a crowded double-decker bus on a street parallel to the park. The bomber had tried to get on the Underground but all stations were closed as two bombs had gone off earlier. He boarded a crowded bus and exploded the bomb in front of the British Medial Society building, blowing the top off of the double decker. The building, usually filled with secretaries and administrative types was on that day, by chance hosting a surgical conference was taking place. The building was filled with surgeons. One of the first to respond to the bombed bus was a trauma surgeon. Eleven people died, but it would have been dozens more if not for this weird coincidence. I got chills when my professor told us this.

Around the corner is a house where Virginia Woolf lived before she married a "Woolf," with her sister Vanessa.

A bit further down the road is the building where T.S. Elliot lived and worked with his crazy wife:

Across from the T.S. Elliot building is this imposing building on a college campus. This used to house the Ministry of Information during the war. George Orwell worked in this building, and despised his job so much that when he wrote 1984, modeled the Ministry of Truth after this institution.

It looks Orwellian, doesn't it?

And just around the corner from the dystopian building is the British Museum. This is the main atrium, with the second largest dome in Europe. (This first is St. Paul's apparently.)

This round building in the center of the atrium is the British Museum reading room. Inside this building is where Marx endlessly researched for his monumental 'Das Capital.' (Which I've read!!) It was unfinished at the time of his death, he was still researching in this room. I was in awe. I could just imagine him, disheveled and crazed bent over economics texts spread over a table in this room. I wonder if people knew what he was up to.

In the ancient Egypt/Assyrian/Greece section I stumbled upon this - The Rosetta Stone!!! See the three different writings that allowed us to translate hieroglyphs?!

There were so many marble pieces on display, taken from Greece by British "anthropologists" and explorers. 

This particular piece really stopped me in my tracks. I remember sketching it from a fuzzy slide shown in my AP Art History class in high school. The way the fabric drapes and flows is particularly notable, considering its made of hard stone. Even though these figures were placed at the top of a temple up against a wall, the figures were formed complete front and back. That's because they were made by the artist for the gods, who have all seeing eyes.

And that concludes my informative literary/historical field trip to the British Library and British Museum!