Christopher Fletcher

For his 75th birthday, Sir Roy Strong gave himself a personal trainer. For his 80th, he has commissioned a book of portraits of himself by the photographer John Swannell. The fruits of all that training — much of it undertaken on a racing tricycle around the lanes of Herefordshire — can be seen in the six-pack he sports in one of the luscious, technically excellent images. Oh, hold on a mo, it’s the costume of a Roman Emperor, Photoshopped to turn Roy into classical sculpture for his latest garden temple! This magnificently potty book takes us through 30 versions of Roy done after celebrated portraits, or in the manner of various schools. He is swoon-worthy as a Victorian Sir Galahad, masterful as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and bloody terrifying as Rasputin.

Our unrelenting appetite for historical drama is fed by a ceaseless stream of novels and dramatisations - usually, these days, something to do with those naughty Tudors. Perhaps it is how my generation, dosed on pick n’ mix modules and special options (Industrial Revolution or Origins of WW1 anyone?), recovers lost ground. But it is unmediated history taken straight from the page that gives the real jolt. I recently acquired for the Bodleian a journal kept from 1813-1818 by the engraver and antiquary James Basire (1769-1822). His father was the more famous artist, closely associated with William Blake.  Nevertheless, the journal seemed worth having for all the right academic reasons.

‘So.’ So begins Seamus Heaney’s translation of ‘Beowulf’. I know it didn’t come easy to him. The morning after he had been awarded the Whitbread Prize for the work I found myself having breakfast at the Savoy with him and his wife Marie. I’d asked some time before whether I could borrow some of the manuscript pages for a literary exhibition at the British Library. I was a curator there at that time and for a special limited edition of his book had helped get a facsimile image from the original thousand year old manuscript, next to which I now wanted to show his drafts. He tossed an envelope across the table and it landed near me, somewhere between the butter and the jam. ‘What’ s that, Seamus?’ asked Marie.

Writing, as I have done, about the Bodleian’s holdings of Jane Austen or Byron is all very well, but our most prolific author is Anon. He (or she) leaves his (or her) elusive  traces everywhere – in ancient papyrus fragments, clerkly rolls of the middle ages, early-verse anthologies, copperplate accounts of long lost estates. Or, in one case, a manuscript volume of rhymes and songs just acquired from our friendly neighbour, Blackwell’s. The book dates from around 1800 and is barely bigger than a playing card. Its physical format suits the person for whose little hands it was intended, an infant girl in the nursery.

This is the third entry in an occasional series by Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library. You can read the other instalments here. It’s almost two years since the Bodleian celebrated its hard-fought acquisition (nail biting auction) of Jane Austen’s manuscript draft of her abandoned novel, The Watsons. Thank you again National Heritage Memorial Fund, Friends of the Bodleian, Friends of the National Libraries, Jane Austen Memorial Trust and all supporting Janeites everywhere. Once a manuscript has been fetched into the bosom of the Bodleian, repaired, shelf-marked, and safely housed, it needs to be studied.

This is the second article in an occasional series by Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library. You can read the first instalment here. By 1814, two years after he awoke to find himself famous, everyone wanted a piece of Byron. Some got jewellery, several got hair and a fair few got a reputation. Among the most prized of trophies, however, was a sample of verse – not printed, mind, but written out with the warm intimacy of the poet’s hand. In a letter of 23 December 1814, the novelist and society gossip Miss Emily Eden described to Lady Buckinghamshire the febrile hunts she had witnessed at Middleton House, seat of the Jerseys and occasional retreat for Byron.

Does monotropa hypopithys, or yellow bird’s nest, still grow in Mickleham, Surrey, in the woods once owned by Sir Lucas Pepys the celebrity physician who, in ministering to King George III, ‘found the stool more eloquent than the pulse?’ The question is prompted by the Bodleian’s recent acquisition of a ‘Catalogus Plantarum’ kept in the 1790s by an anonymous Botanist who roamed the south of England looking for specimens and noting them down with meticulous care in an exact italic.