The British Museum: Is It Human?

Abstract

It was idle curiosity which drove me to trouble the staff of the British Museum for the first time. My pretext was the collecting of material for a long undergraduate essay; I could not presume to be “doing research”, and the object of my visit was to see the copy of the 13th century musical round “Sumer is icumen in”. I was shown into an uncomfortable little room near Magna Carta and within a few minutes was being kindly catechized by a scholarly librarian who was aged about forty. After two sentences from me, he realized that I knew nothing about the manuscript but that I was simply curious. With great courtesy he took me into a little manuscript room where the copy was brought to me at my desk and I could inspect it, under glass, for as long as I liked. But it was only when I was a few years older that I grew to understand a little about the life that goes on behind the great colonnade of the British Museum.