As a young col­lege stu­dent, I spent hours wan­der­ing through my university’s library, look­ing in a state of awe at the num­ber of books con­tained there­in by writ­ers whose names I knew or who seemed vague­ly famil­iar, and by hun­dreds, thou­sands, more I’d nev­er heard of. Always con­tent to immerse myself in seclud­ed cor­ners for days on end with a good book, I could­n’t have felt more at home.

The inter­net was in its infan­cy, and my online life at the time con­sist­ed of awk­ward, plain-text emails sent once or twice a week and the occa­sion­al clunky, slow-load­ing web­site, promis­ing much but deliv­er­ing lit­tle. Excitable futur­ists made extrav­a­gant pre­dic­tions about how hyper­text and inter­ac­tiv­i­ty would rev­o­lu­tion­ize the book. These seemed like intrigu­ing but unnec­es­sary solu­tions in search of a prob­lem.

To the book­ish, the book is a per­fect­ed tech­nol­o­gy that can­not be improved upon except by the pub­lish­ing of more books. While inter­ac­tive texts—with linked anno­ta­tions, biogra­phies, his­tor­i­cal pre­cis, crit­i­cal essays, and the like—have much enhanced life for stu­dents, they have not in any way improved upon the sim­ple act of read­ing for plea­sure and edification—an activ­i­ty, wrote Vir­ginia Woolf, requir­ing noth­ing more than “the rarest qual­i­ties of imag­i­na­tion, insight, and judg­ment.”

Though Woolf would like­ly have been unim­pressed with all that talk of hyper­tex­tu­al inno­va­tion, I imag­ine she would have mar­veled at the online world for offer­ing some­thing to the read­er we have nev­er had until the past cou­ple decades: free and instant access to thou­sands of books, from lit­er­ary clas­sics to biogra­phies to his­to­ries to poetry—all gen­res upon which Woolf offered advice about how to read on their own terms. With­out the anx­ious admis­sions process and cost­ly tuition, any­one with a com­put­er now has access to a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the aver­age col­lege library.

And now any­one with a com­put­er has access to a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the British Library’s rare col­lec­tions as well, thanks to the ven­er­a­ble institution’s new online col­lec­tion: “Dis­cov­er­ing Lit­er­a­ture: 20th Cen­tu­ry.”

Read­ers of our site will know of Open Culture’s affin­i­ty for 20th cen­tu­ry mod­ernist lit­er­a­ture, like that of Vir­ginia Woolf, and for the dystopi­an fic­tion of George Orwell. These authors and greats of more recent vin­tage are all well-rep­re­sent­ed in the British Library col­lec­tion. You’ll find such trea­sures as a scanned first edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses, first Amer­i­can edi­tion of Antho­ny Burgess’ A Clock­work Orange, and first edi­tion of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. These are just a few of the clas­sic nov­els avail­able in the “over 300 trea­sures” of the col­lec­tion, writes the British Library.

The online library offers a par­adise for read­ers, cer­tain­ly. And also a heav­en for schol­ars. Includ­ed among the rare first edi­tions and crit­i­cal essays and inter­views on the site’s main page are “online for the first time… lit­er­ary drafts… note­books, let­ters, diaries, news­pa­pers and pho­tographs from Vir­ginia Woolf, Ted Hugh­es, Angela Carter and Hanif Kureishi among oth­ers.”

Some incred­i­ble high­lights include:

• Type­script of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with Ezra Pound’s Hand­writ­ten anno­ta­tions
• George Orwell’s Notes for 1984
• T.S. Eliot’s Faber & Faber Let­ter Reject­ing Orwell’s Ani­mal Farm (fea­tured on Open Cul­ture pre­vi­ous­ly)
• Type­script Sec­ond Draft of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar
• Let­ters on the Print­ing of James Joyce’s A Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses
• Type­script Notes of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, with a Draft of the Nov­el
• Note­book Drafts of Vir­ginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dal­loway
• Note­book of Research and Ideas for Angela Carter’s Wise Chil­dren
• Ezra Pound’s 1914 Poet­ry Anthol­o­gy Des Imag­istes

And as if all this—and so many more 20th cen­tu­ry lit­er­ary treasures—weren’t enough, the col­lec­tion also tucks in some won­der­ful arti­facts from pre­vi­ous eras, such as a col­lec­tion of man­u­script poems by John Keats, includ­ing the Odes and Robert Burton’s ency­clo­pe­dic 1628 study of depres­sion, The Anato­my of Melan­choly.

“Until now,” says Anna Lobben­berg, the Library’s Dig­i­tal Pro­grammes Man­ag­er, “these trea­sures could only be viewed in the British Library Read­ing Rooms or on dis­play in exhibitions—now Dis­cov­ery Lit­er­a­ture: 20th Cen­tu­ry will bring these items to any­one in the world with an inter­net con­nec­tion.” It tru­ly is, for the lover of books, a brave new world (a book whose 1932 orig­i­nal dust jack­et you can see here).

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library Puts Over 1,000,000 Images in the Pub­lic Domain: A Deep­er Dive Into the Col­lec­tion

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

Vir­ginia Woolf Offers Gen­tle Advice on “How One Should Read a Book”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

I don’t know about you, but I’ve sort of always asso­ci­at­ed Charles Dick­ens with the kind of humor­less moral­ism and didac­tic sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty that are hall­marks of so much Vic­to­ri­an lit­er­a­ture. That’s prob­a­bly because the work of Dick­ens con­tains no small amount of humor­less moral­ism and didac­tic sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty. But it also con­tains much wit and absur­di­ty, inven­tive char­ac­ter­i­za­tion and rich descrip­tion. While nov­els like the short Hard Times, pub­lished in 1854, can seem more like thin­ly veiled tracts of moral phi­los­o­phy than ful­ly real­ized fic­tions, oth­ers, like the strange and whim­si­cal Pick­wick Papers—Dick­ens’ first—work as fan­ci­ful, light­heart­ed satires. The big, bag­gy nov­els like Great Expec­ta­tions, Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities (find in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks) man­age to skill­ful­ly com­bine these two impuls­es with his own twist on the goth­ic, such that Dick­ens’ work is not over­whelmed, as it might be, by ser­mo­niz­ing.

For all of this tidy sum­ma­tion of that giant of Vic­to­ri­an let­ters, one adjec­tive now comes to mind that I would nev­er have pre­vi­ous­ly thought to apply at any time to the writer of A Christ­mas Car­ol: Bor­ge­sian, as in pos­sessed of the scholas­tic wit of 20th cen­tu­ry Argen­tine writer Jorge Luis Borges. I’m not the first to note a resem­blance, but I must say it nev­er would have occurred to me to think of the two names in the same sen­tence were it not for an extra-cur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ty Dick­ens engaged in while out­fit­ting his Lon­don home, Tavi­s­tock House, in 1851. Let­ters of Note’s sis­ter site Lists of Note brings us the fol­low­ing anec­dote:

[Dick­ens] decid­ed to fill two spaces in his new study with book­cas­es con­tain­ing fake books, the wit­ty titles of which he had invent­ed. And so, on Octo­ber 22nd, he wrote to a book­binder named Thomas Robert Eeles and sup­plied him with the fol­low­ing “list of imi­ta­tion book-backs” to be pro­duced.

You can see the complete—completely Borgesian—list below. Borges is of course well known for invent­ing titles of books that have nev­er exist­ed, but seem like they should, in anoth­er dimen­sion some­where. His inven­tion of alter­nate real­i­ties, and pub­li­ca­tions, man­i­fests in most all of his sto­ries, as well as in odd­i­ties like the Book of Imag­i­nary Beings. Like Borges’ made-up books, Dick­ens’ con­tain just the right mix of the self-seri­ous and the ridicu­lous, so as to make them at once plau­si­ble, cryp­tic, exot­ic, and hilarious—both Pick­wick­ian and, indeed, pro­to-Bor­ge­sian.

His­to­ry of a Short Chancery Suit
Cat­a­logue of Stat­ues of the Duke of Welling­ton
Five Min­utes in Chi­na. 3 vols.
Forty Winks at the Pyra­mids. 2 vols.
Aber­nethy on the Con­sti­tu­tion. 2 vols.
Mr. Green’s Over­land Mail. 2 vols.
Cap­tain Cook’s Life of Sav­age. 2 vols.
A Car­pen­ter’s Bench of Bish­ops. 2 vols.
Toot’s Uni­ver­sal Let­ter-Writer. 2 vols.
Orson­’s Art of Eti­quette.
Downeast­er’s Com­plete Cal­cu­la­tor.
His­to­ry of the Mid­dling Ages. 6 vols.
Jon­ah’s Account of the Whale.
Cap­tain Par­ry’s Virtues of Cold Tar.
Kan­t’s Ancient Hum­bugs. 10 vols.
Bow­wow­dom. A Poem.
The Quar­rel­ly Review. 4 vols.
The Gun­pow­der Mag­a­zine. 4 vols.
Steele. By the Author of “Ion.”
The Art of Cut­ting the Teeth.
Matthew’s Nurs­ery Songs. 2 vols.
Pax­ton’s Bloomers. 5 vols.
On the Use of Mer­cury by the Ancient Poets.
Drowsy’s Rec­ol­lec­tions of Noth­ing. 3 vols.
Heavyside’s Con­ver­sa­tions with Nobody. 3 vols.
Com­mon­place Book of the Old­est Inhab­i­tant. 2 vols.
Growler’s Gruffi­ol­o­gy, with Appen­dix. 4 vols.
The Books of Moses and Sons. 2 vols.
Burke (of Edin­burgh) on the Sub­lime and Beau­ti­ful. 2 vols.
Teaz­er’s Com­men­taries.
King Hen­ry the Eighth’s Evi­dences of Chris­tian­i­ty. 5 vols.
Miss Bif­fin on Deport­ment.
Mor­rison’s Pills Progress. 2 vols.
Lady Godi­va on the Horse.
Mun­chausen’s Mod­ern Mir­a­cles. 4 vols.
Richard­son’s Show of Dra­mat­ic Lit­er­a­ture. 12 vols.
Hansard’s Guide to Refresh­ing Sleep. As many vol­umes as pos­si­ble.

As Fla­vor­wire reports, design­er Ann Sap­pen­field cre­at­ed her own fake book­bind­ings with Dick­ens’ titles (see some at the top of the page, cour­tesy of the NYPL). These are part of a New York Pub­lic Library exhib­it called Charles Dick­ens: The Key to Char­ac­ter that ran in 2012–13. You can read Dick­ens orig­i­nal let­ter to Thomas Robert Eeles in The Let­ters of Charles Dick­ens here.

via Lists of Note/Fla­vor­wire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Charles Dick­ens Gave His Cat “Bob” a Sec­ond Life as a Let­ter Open­er

Charles Dick­ens’ Hand-Edit­ed Copy of His Clas­sic Hol­i­day Tale, A Christ­mas Car­ol

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness