If you are a bibliophile in London in the second half of the nineteenth century – or if you are any kind of reader at all – it’s likely you spend a good chunk of time at Mudie’s Select Library, where New Oxford Street meets Museum Street, near the British Museum. The annual subscription of one guinea (about £60 in 2022) undercuts Mudie’s rivals, and Mudie’s stocks are vast. In 1855, Mudie buys 2,500 copies of volumes 3 and 4 of Macaulay’s
It is worth noting that New Oxford Street is very much a cordon sanitaire, a 19th century extension of Oxford Street itself, and designed to separate the posh terraces and squares of Bloomsbury, from St Giles, on the south side of the road. This was known as one of the worst rookeries in all of London, an overcrowded quartier of ruinous tenements their broken windows patched with hessian, the gutters strewn with filth. It was home though to many Irish immigrants, especially from Cork, who arrived in London after the Great Famine (my great-grandfather among them), and proudly boasted a notorious pub called the Rat's Castle at its centre. Michael Faber's 2002 novel 'The Crimson Petal and the White' (another Tennyson reference incidentally) uses St Giles as a backdrop for its account of a young prostitute who manages to lift herself out of this squalor. So it is doubtful if Mudie's got much custom from this abject demographic!
"Here" is indeed a remarkable work of imagination, though I confess I find his choice of colours offputting. The interactions of time, space, and multi-generational memory are like ghosts, I think, more often felt than seen, and unpredictably intermittent. You can't seek them out -- "never go back" is excellent advice -- but they will take you by surprise.
It's a subject close to the heart of anyone of an age where practically every site of significance in your own life has been demolished, or transformed beyond recognition. I think something of the sort is what Bowie was aiming at in "Where Are We Now?": "a man lost in time near KaDeWe..." If I may, I'd like to point you at a post from my blog, exploring an attempt to recover one such chunk of lost time and space:
It is worth noting that New Oxford Street is very much a cordon sanitaire, a 19th century extension of Oxford Street itself, and designed to separate the posh terraces and squares of Bloomsbury, from St Giles, on the south side of the road. This was known as one of the worst rookeries in all of London, an overcrowded quartier of ruinous tenements their broken windows patched with hessian, the gutters strewn with filth. It was home though to many Irish immigrants, especially from Cork, who arrived in London after the Great Famine (my great-grandfather among them), and proudly boasted a notorious pub called the Rat's Castle at its centre. Michael Faber's 2002 novel 'The Crimson Petal and the White' (another Tennyson reference incidentally) uses St Giles as a backdrop for its account of a young prostitute who manages to lift herself out of this squalor. So it is doubtful if Mudie's got much custom from this abject demographic!
"Here" is indeed a remarkable work of imagination, though I confess I find his choice of colours offputting. The interactions of time, space, and multi-generational memory are like ghosts, I think, more often felt than seen, and unpredictably intermittent. You can't seek them out -- "never go back" is excellent advice -- but they will take you by surprise.
It's a subject close to the heart of anyone of an age where practically every site of significance in your own life has been demolished, or transformed beyond recognition. I think something of the sort is what Bowie was aiming at in "Where Are We Now?": "a man lost in time near KaDeWe..." If I may, I'd like to point you at a post from my blog, exploring an attempt to recover one such chunk of lost time and space:
https://idiotic-hat.blogspot.com/2017/07/forty-seven-memory-palace.html
Mike