Local Literature
Our area’s affordability and proximity to central London has attracted a variety of characters over the years, especially artists and writers. These have included Mary Shelley (born in Somers Town in 1797 and daughter of the early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecroft), Madame Tussaud (who exhibited her waxworks in the now-demolished London Horse and Carriage Repository), William Thackeray, Dr Roget (of Roget’s Thesaurus), George Gissing, Paul Nash, and the Bloomsbury Group which began in Gordon Square before the First World War.Several members of the group, which took its name from the area, lived in neighbouring houses. Some of the group's residents , who had a great influence on the English modernist movement in art and literature included Leonard and Virgina Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and Duncan Grant. Virginia Woolf lived in Mecklenburgh Square for a few months, being bombed out in 1940.
http://www.camden.gov.uk/ccm/content/leisure/local-history/kings-cross-voices.en?page=4
In this section of our website we are going to recommend literature set in Holborn, and/or with characters with a local connection. We all know about Dickens, but there are others to consider: read Joanna Briscoe’s Sleep with Me and you may never see Mecklenburgh Square and Marchmont St in the same light again.
If you have recommendations please let us know by using the CONTACT US form. It's the blue button up in the top right.
Visit Ben & Harriet at our neighbourhood bookshop in Lambs Conduit Street, or give them a call and they'll order the books for you to collect. 020 7405 6536
They have set up a book group. Drop into the shop and ask about it, or email: readinggroup@thelambbookshop.co.uk http://www.thelambbookshop.co.uk/reading-groups.html
www.thelambbookshop.co.uk
Scamp, by Roland Camberton
London by night in the 1940s. The decaying back streets of Soho and the then sad but elegant squares of Bloomsbury provide the backdrop for a range of characters, making a living – or not making a living – in dubious way in this satirical novel. Ivan Ginsberg tries to escape his failure and his rat-ridden digs in Guilford Street by setting up a literary magazine, Scamp.
The book is introduced by Iain Sinclair who spent decades trying to trace the mysterious Roland Camberton, whose life was as strange as many of his characters.
Real Bloomsbury, by Nicholas Murray
Birthplace of Christian Socialism. Site of the British Museum, University College, RADA, the Friends House, the BMA, Great Ormond Street Hospital. Bloomsbury is crammed with history and with contemporary decision-making. But there is also working class Bloomsbury and, now, Bengali Bloomsbury in the east.
Biographer and novelist Nicholas Murray walks this crowded square mile or so, among the locals, the students, the tourists, alone or in the company of local characters, to give Bloomsbury the 'Real' series treatment of history, memoir, 'psychogeography' and oblique approaches to the familiar. His entertaining and informative text is accompanied by equally oblique images, the sort you won't find in either tourist guides or regular history books. All of which present Bloomsbury as it's never been portrayed before: intimate, contemporary, exploratory and occasionally downright strange.
Sleep With Me, by Joanna Briscoe
'We lived in Bloomsbury, among the green shadows to the right of the city's heart, where no one but students and strange old ladies of forgotten Mitteleuropean origins lived; the transient and the dying beneath a crust of American tourism.
I insisted on staying in Bloomsbury out of some misplaced metropolitan imperative that was, beneath it all, a parochial terror of mud and small-town people. Then the country boy in me made a village of London WC1, so my daily life was strung between the limits of seven dog-marked squares, and newsagents beneath blue plaques, and strip-lit rip-off shops. ...
Our cramped, lovely flat was in Mecklenburgh Square, up three flights of stairs, overlooking the private garden on one side, with its improbable airy tumblings of green, and an Art Deco monstrosity on the other, with washing lines and crumbling metal balconies above the muted roar of traffic"
Reviews:
'Elegiac, beautiful, evocative ... Sleep With Me works in much the same way as an obsession ... you may wish to escape, but have already become addicted' Anita Sethi, Daily Telegraph 'A beautifully written and emotionally candid novel which also happens to be a page-turner' Jonathan Coe, Guardian 'Briscoe is a vivid and passionate writer. She plunges headlong into sticky themes of desire, love and hatred, uncovering the unpalatable parts of the psyche with an unflinching eye. Mice are, indeed, to be avoided at all costs. In fact, having sex at all is probably ill-advised' Sunday Times 'Seductive, scary and almost frighteningly readable' Julie Myerson . Jonathan Coe, The Guardian 'It's a beautifully written and emotionally candid novel which also happens to be a page-turner.’
The Ministry of Fear, by Graham Greene
In London, during the Blitz in 1943, Arthur Rowe wins a cake at a rather forlorn wartime charity fête in a gated Bloomsbury garden square under large plane trees. Mecklenburgh Square.
The masterly opening chapter begins with Rowe visiting the fête for old time’s sake and ends with him in a daze looking skywards from the basement of his freshly bombed out house.
At the fête he wins a cake which, slowly, it becomes obvious contains something of great value to the Germans, and a series of strange events lead to him being sought in connection with another, more violent murder, before being admitted to a sinister nursing home having lost his memory.
The action plays out as bombs pound the city, and who is friend and who foe becomes increasingly uncertain.
The story revolves around the relationship between Love and Fear. Whilst adopting the thriller form, with a heritage back to the espionage chase novel that is John Buchan's The 39 Steps, it has considerable depth as it reflects on individual deaths in the midst of wholesale war, memory, fear, love and loss.
EM Delafield's ‘Diary of a Provincial Lady’ rents a flat in Doughty Street which she gets to, with great excitement, by no 19 bus!
E M Delafield's heroine ventures beyond her Devon home to take a flat in Doughty Street. On a visit to a friend in Sloane Square, she runs into her old neighbour, the redoubtable Lady B:
The cold wind causes my nose to turn scarlet and my eyes to water. Fate selects this moment for the emergence of Lady B - sable furs up to her eyebrows and paint and powder unimpaired - from Truslove and Hanson, to waiting car and chauffeur. She sees me and screams - at which passers-by look at us, astonished - and sys Good gracious her, what next? She would as soon have expected to see the geraniums from the garden uprooting themselves from the soil and coming to London (Can this be subtle allusion to effect of the wind upon my complexion?)
I say stiffly that I am staying at My Flat for a week or two. Where? demands Lady B sceptically - to which I reply, Doughty Street, and she shakes her head and says that conveys NOTHING. Should like to refer her sharply to Life of Charles Dickens...she offers to give me a lift to Brondesbury-or-wherever-it-is, as her chauffeur is quite brilliant at knowing his way ANYWHERE. Thank her curtly and refuse. We part, and I wait for a 19 bus and wish I'd told Lady B that I MUST hurry, or should arrive late for dinner at Apsley House.
Reviews:
'I finished the book in one sitting, leaving the children unbathed, dogs unwalked, a husband unfed, and giving alternate cries of joy and recognition throughout' - Jilly Cooper 'I reread, for the nth time, E. M. Delafield's dry, caustic Diary of a Provincial Lady, and howled with laughter' - India Knight 'Glorious, simply glorious' - Daily Telegraph 'She converts the small and familiar dullness of life into laughter' - The Times
In Peter Carey's "Jack Maggs" one character lives in Lambs Conduit Street and visits Great Queen Street in Covent Garden.
Jack Maggs, raised and deported as a criminal, has returned from Australia, in secret and at great risk. What does he want after all these years, and why is he so interested in the comings and goings at a plush townhouse in Great Queen Street? And why is Jack himself an object of such interest to Tobias Oates, celebrated author, amateur hypnotist and fellow-burglar - in this case of people's minds, of their histories and inner phantoms? In this hugely engaging novel one of the finest of contemporary writers pays homage to his Victorian forebears. As Peter Carey's characters become embroiled in each other's furtive desires, and increasingly fall under one another's spell, their thirst for love exacts a terrible, unexpected cost.
Review: I've always had a fondness for crime novels set in Victorian London (the book is set in the first year of her reign actually), but few of the many I've read can equal 'Jack Maggs' for the quality of its plot, characters, and language.
This is one of those rare books where you're torn between the constant urge to read on and the awareness that this selfsame act unfortunately brings you ever closer to the end.