The domed reading room

Text 1: My Reader’s Ticket, by Walter Grimsby

An original essay written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

For three weeks I laboured to obtain my reader’s ticket. I wrote letters; I procured the signature of a householder, who looked at me as though I intended to steal the books; I waited in corridors that smelt of floor polish and disapproval. And this morning, at last, with the precious card in my waistcoat pocket, I passed through the doors.

I do not think I shall ever forget my first sight of the room. It is round, and it is vast, and above it, high above, rises the dome, ribbed in gold and pale blue and pierced at its crown by a great eye of glass through which the daylight pours down upon the readers like grace upon a congregation. The desks radiate from the centre in long spokes, as regular as the lines of a spider’s web, and at the hub sit the attendants in their raised enclosure, watching over all.

And the silence! It is not the silence of an empty place but of a full one: three hundred people, perhaps more, breathing, turning pages, scratching with their pens, and all of it gathered up by the dome and returned as a low, unending murmur, like the sea heard in a shell. A bald gentleman beside me was copying Greek. A young woman opposite was reading a book on the diseases of sheep with every appearance of delight. An old man in a frayed coat had fallen asleep upon an atlas.

Around the walls, rising tier upon tier into the gloom, are the books. I tried to count the shelves and gave it up. Somewhere among them, I am told, is every book ever printed in this country. I felt, sitting there with my one modest volume, like a man standing at the edge of an ocean with a teacup.

I read until the bell rang at closing. I learned very little. But I walked home through the fog with my head full of light.

Explore how Walter Grimsby uses language and structure to present his first visit to the reading room.

Support your ideas by using relevant subject terminology.