When I was an undergraduate I spent a semester at the Florida State University London Study Centre. The Centre is housed in a series of interconnected Georgian style buildings dating back to the 17th century. It is the perfect location, particularly for a young student with a literary bent. The Centre is in the middle of Bloomsbury, in the theater mecca of the West End. It is a five minute walk to SoHo. The British Museum is a block away.

I spent a great deal of time that semester in the British Museum. I walked through the galleries, haunting the Greek and Egyptian galleries, the Anglo-Saxon Hall, and any other corridor that wasn’t barred. I wrote most of my papers on my laptop in the Reading Room, and felt awed that I was working in the same space once frequented by Oscar Wilde, Karl Marx, Bram Stoker, Virginia Wolfe, and numerous other luminaries.

The British Library Reading Room photo by Dillif via Wikimedia Commons.

In the decade since then I have graduated from college, gone to graduate school for an MA and then a PhD. I’ve focused my academic work and interests significantly on the nineteenth-century, far afield in many ways from those Greek and Roman galleries. Distant from the Sutton Hoo relics that invoke Beowulf and “The Dream of the Rood.” And yet, I’ve found that the museum has stayed with me. I’ve found it throughout the work I’ve studied, whether it has been in Keats’ ruminations on the Elgin Marbles or Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s invocation of the “Winged beast” being brought in through the museum’s doors. I teach some of these works in my survey of 19th century literature and I’ve been continuing to think about the resonances of the British Museum in the literature of the period.

I think an entire course could be organized around the topic, using the museum as a way of opening up the discussions about art and history as represented in literature. Such a class would ideally take place in the vicinity of the Museum and would use the exhibits both to open discussion, but also to provide a sense of continuity. Keats, Shelley, and Rossetti (amongst others) saw some of these same sights and found in them inspiration, sources for commentary, and aesthetic objects that would outlast the poets themselves. Such a course could begin with Beowulf and Sutton Hoo, and wend its way throughout British literature. And of course, this current discussion has not even touched the way in which such a course could address the museum in the colonial context, as both product of and promoter of Empire.

I plan on spending the next few blog entries examining a few of the pieces of work related to the British Museum, primarily from my own area of interest. There is something fascinating about finding places and objects where literature that lies centuries in the distance can be brought together with our own material experiences of the world.