1. Oxford College
Today's trip took us to Oxford, the home of Oxford and Christchurch Colleges, and the birthplace of one the most important works in children's literature, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. We left from Paddington Station, and I had to see my pal from "darkest Peru" before we left.
We started off with a visit to Oxford's Bodleian Library. The library has a complex history, which I'll briefly discuss here (but the link gives a much more detailed picture). The first library at the college was housed int he on-site church in 1320, and was only 20 books. Duke Humphreys, in 1439, gave the college another 281 books, which was an enormous collection for the time.
A room where parts of Harry Potter were filmed. See if you recognize it!
During the 1480s, the Central Reading Room housed the books: hours were only 10-3 each day in the winter because that's all the time that people could see indoors, and no candles were allowed among the highly flammable books. In the 17th century, two students died of hypothermia, standing at desks and studying their lives away (no fires were allowed either, which meant no heat).
In between those times, from around 1550-1600, there was no library at Oxford. The King had decided to burn all the books housed there because they had Catholic ideas within them.
In 1602, Sir Thomas Bodley donated 2500 books, and he was instrumental in the four-year reconstruction of the library. Bodley was able to make a deal with publishers at the time which is still in place today: for every book published in England, one copy comes to the Bodleian. Now, they receive 3-5,000 books a DAY.
Many of the books were chained books, which I thought was a Game of Thrones thing, but nope! They really did value books so much that they chained them to the shelves. Bodley also instituted an oath, which each library user must swear to: that they won't take a book out of the library, and that they won't bring a flame into the library. The oath is still in order today, and not even kings can check out books. Part of the reading room is the library in the Harry Potter movies! Some of the other spaces we visited were settings for the hospital and dancing scenes as well.
Eventually, they ran out of space, and the first underground library in storage in Europe was created here, with room for 1 million books. They filled that up. They made another storage space, with 8 underground stories and room for another 3 million books. That's basically full, too. Wow.
Some scenes from The Favorite were shot here:
The court room:
The courthouse was interesting: Oxford had its own court to try students, so that they weren't tried publicly, and Oxford didn't lose face. Oscar Wilde was tried here for not paying for some clothes on time, and Percy Shelley was tried for publishing a pamphlet on atheism.
2. The Bird and the Baby
I'd never been to Oxford before today, and who knows when I'll be back, so a trip to the famed Eagle and Child Pub (which local authors called "the bird and the baby") was necessary. This is the pub where the Inklings used to conduct their own workshops, and where books like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Hobbit were practically born.
I had a cider and a pie, and I loved every bit of it. The place just smells like a pub should smell, and it's a little dark and a little misty, and the scent of hops fills the air. A perfect place to be inspired.
3. Christchurch College
We trekked through the rain to our next destination, Christchurch College. Our guide, Stephen Archer, took us to the college's original library first. It was founded in the 1560s by Cardinal Wolsey, and the printing press had been around for about 100 years by this time, so there were both manuscripts and printed books. The keepers of the library saw it as the last Medieval Library, so they followed some traditions like chaining books to the shelves, but that has since been changed.
The books there were ancient and beautiful, and Stephen had pulled a few gems to show us. What we saw on the shelves around us was exactly what scholars would have seen in the 17th century: even the order of books is the same. Stephen compared it to stepping into a massive time capsule, which is interesting for us, but not exactly ideal for keeping the books safe for future use. However, as he mentioned, they "have to adapt a lot of our practices to the buildings we find ourselves in."
He showed us a tiny book of Psalms in Greek from 1030, which was basically a status symbol that someone could chain to their clothes and carry around with them. Nearly 1,000 years later, it's still a "working piece of machinery," as Stephen pointed out. Books are a technology that has outlasted so many others.
He also showed us an "illuminated" book, which means it has illustrations with real gold as part of the design.
We were able to view an interesting set of musical scores: a table book that faces in four directions, so the four parts of a song can be read and sung by four people at once. Clever!
Finally, he showed us Queen Elizabeth's bible, embroidered in gold and covered in purple velvet.
We left the old library and followed Stephen through a little more of the college. He showed us a spot that's very popular for Harry Potter enthusiasts: the setting of the Great Hall. It's a cafeteria for students and scholars, and the room is lined with stained-glass windows and portraits. One window holds a tiny portrait of Charles Dodgson, or Lewis Carroll, alongside the famed Alice Liddell.
We then followed our guide to his office in the newer library, where students were studying for exams. We had to silently follow him so as not to disturb them, and we cozied into his office. He told us a bit more about the history of the library, some of the changes it went through.
When it was almost time to go, Stephen dropped this bomb on us: we'd been sitting, all this time, in Lewis Carroll's office. This was the spot where he'd looked out on the green and seen Alice and her sisters play below, and the tree where the Cheshire Cat would sit and smile. This was the room where he most likely penned the first draft of Alice's Adventures Underground, and drawn up the first sketches for the book.
On top of that, some of those very sketches had just returned from a stint in Japan, and Stephen allowed us to look, teary eyed, at drawings we had never seen before. I was the last to leave the room—this was an unexpected delight, and it practically screamed, "DRINK ME!"—and the other students said they thought they might have to come drag me out.
I eventually dragged myself out, and we booked it for the train home. A perfect, perfect day for a children's literature and archives lover.
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