Chapter and Verse
1000 years of English literature
British Library 10 March - 15 October 2000

Munira Mirza

To plan an exhibition around a thousand years of English literature would require a certain amount of consideration...

You would need to conduct some careful research and think creatively, about arranging the writers and their works in a way that illustrates both their uniqueness and their position in the literary tradition. You would have to grapple with the complex ideas and present them in an approachable display.

It seems, however, that the British Library's latest exhibition, Chapter and Verse, does not feel too troubled by this daunting task and has in fact sidestepped it completely. The exhibition is not, as one might hope, about the story of English literature, but is mostly a showroom of curiosity and antiquity. Visitors go to see the original manuscripts and get rare snippets of writers reading their own work. But beyond that novelty, there is nothing else offered. No explanation is given for this remarkable corpus of literature and how it has come about.

The exhibition is arranged to explore the universal themes of Imagination, Identity, Conflict, Love, Humour, Belonging, Time, Faith and Place. At first, these seem like fruitful ways to approach the diversity of work across the ages. Interesting comparisons could be drawn and patterns of similarity might emerge. But the arrangement of what literary work went where soon began to appear arbitrary. William Wordsworth was stuck in Identity with Sylvia Plath, King Alfred and Daniel Defoe's Crusoe, although much of his lifetime was spent writing about the imagination.

The Imagination display made interesting comparisons between Romantic and Gothic fiction, but then moved onto children's literature and slipped in Gulliver's Travels because, 'above all [it is] a highly imaginative work". Could this not be said of most classics? It is also unclear why Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles should get a whole display cabinet and Shakespeare only half a cabinet in the Love section, for his sonnets. Someone should tell the organisers that he wrote some cracking good plays as well.

It is not because some of my favourite writers got short shrift, that I express slight disappointment, but because literature overall seems to have been dealt a dud card. The collection reminded me of the Tate Modern, where diversity is emphasised above everything, because it shows the many different ways in which a subject can be approached.

However, this trend often neglects the value of viewing culture in its development and as part of a tradition that constantly talks about itself and the problem of how to represent the common experience of being human. When the exhibition says that Eliot's poem The Waste Land is about the 'loss' experienced in modern Europe, it ignores Eliot's poetic dialogue with his literary ancestors.

The display text that accompanies the collection is sometimes helpful, and no doubt a valuable resource to those unfamiliar with the works. But how much do you actually appreciate, when you are told that Gower's Confessio Amantis and Yesterday by the Beatles both explore the theme of love, despite being centuries apart? The comparisons become so shallow that rather than giving you a sense of a millennium's tradition and development, these writers appear to have no real place or origin through which we can understand them.

Admittedly, it is an enjoyable experience to see the real-life originals of the works you have grown to love. There are marvellous moments of discovery: Plath's neat and childlike handwriting jarring uncomfortably against her terrifying lyrics; the chair on which Dickens composed many of his works; the brilliance of Richard Burton reading Kubla Khan; the chill of reading 'the clock struck thirteen' in the first edition of 1984; the manic yet precise scribbling of Joyce's manuscripts; and many more things besides. I also liked the quiet library corners, where you could sit down and linger on the quoted passages a little longer.

But overall, the compilation album style approach does little to inspire the imagination. Apart from giving you a slight voyeuristic eye into the paraphernalia of the famous, Chapter and Verse will not reveal anything new about this old canon.