Cathy's Art Diary

Fun exhibition at the British Library on cats in literature. This was a nicely themed show with fun puns as the section titles such as “The Purfect Crime” and nicely laid out with good commentaries. The show included a lot of children’s books and as you went round you kept remembering books from your childhood and saying “of course”. There was a section on pantomime as well as nursery rhymes and cats in ghost stories. Highlight’s included original drawings for Mog by Judith Kerr and Famous Fred by Posy Symmonds. There was a nice section, of course, on T.S. Elliott’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats including his original design for the cover of the book. Closes on 17 March 2019

Interesting exhibition at the Dicken’s Museum looking at his last unfinished novel “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”. Over 250 solutions have been proposed to the unfinished novel in essays, films, books and more. A lovely diagram set out the two crime scenes, Cloisterham (Rochester) and London as the book had been set in real places. These gave maps showing where people lived and an outline of the characters. The exhibition also has the table from the Swiss Chalet on which he wrote the last words. There was a fascinating section on a re-enacted trail of John Jaspars held in 1914 by the Dicken’s Fellowship with G.K. Chesterton as the judge and Bernard Shaw as the foreman of the jury! It seems to have fallen apart as Chesterton held everyone in contempt of court! Other sections looked at film, stage and TV versions of the story and Howard Duffield’s collection of Drood books.    

Fascinating exhibition at the British Library looking at the history of Gothic fiction. It started with the Castle of Otranto and looked at the life and work of its author Horace Walpole. I loved seeing a reliquary of Thomas Beckett he owned shown with a letter by Henry Cole describing it. It then looked at the growth in the genre and showed an early copy of Northanger Abbey with the seven ‘horrid novels’ mentioned in the book. It then looked at the Romantic period including the events leading up to the publication of Frankenstein and The Vampyre. Next came the Victorian era with works by Wilkie Collins but it also included Dickens on the premise that Gothic fiction moved into the ‘modern world’ of slums and poverty rather than an imagined past. Cinema was well covered both from the point of view of films of these early books but also as a medium in its own right for telling gothic tales. All the classics were covering including works like The Birds. Modern gothic was...

Neat exhibition at the British Library to showcase the original scroll version of Jack Kerouac's book "On the road".  The scroll was displayed in a long case with annotations along the edge and passages and pictures on the walls around it. There was also a useful who's who as the names were changed for publication.  There were aLso different editions of the book and other  beat works.  The work was written on a Scroll because Kerouac didn't want to stop the flow of creativity to reload paper so taped pieces together paper to form scroll. It was written in 3 weeks in 1951 based on years of  notes and sketches.  The scroll is am amazing object in itself as it is one continuous script not even paragraph breaks giving a real sense of the flow of ideas! I hate to admit I knew very little about this book other than the basics before the exhibition but as a result of it am off to the bookshop to buy a copy!