Exhibitions

Dreams or Swords
Further themes on social and cultural change

Exhibition Brochure

This exhibition is the second in a rolling display providing an array of insights into works of social and cultural change in the last five hundred years. The exhibition attempts to show how succeeding generations have tried to document and to make sense of their world: to challenge, shape and change opinions.

Originally mounted to mark the London 2002 conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) the exhibition was designed to complement the plenary lecture, by Peter Burke, ‘The book: agent, expression or catalyst of social and cultural change’, developing this theme over five hundred years of the printed word.

The quotation from the American Imagist poet Amy Lowell (1874-1928) had provided a pithy starting point for us to develop our thinking:

All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words

From Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds, 1914

Exhibition Cases

For this, the second phase of the exhibition, we have chosen the following themes:

• Foreign adventures
• English radical publishing in the romantic era
• Print in conflict in seventeenth-century England
• Children’s literature
• Equality for women: milestones and debates
• Biology – Darwin and evolution
• The influence of the Bible

This second phase of the exhibition, taken like the first from the collections of Senate House Library, provides a glimpse into the intellectual powerhouse of books, pamphlets, periodicals, archives, manuscripts and artefacts stored in the Book Tower above our heads. Some material may be familiar, some less so. Collectively, the exhibition exemplifies the rich and extensive heritage of Senate House Library collections and suggests paths for further exploration or study.

Access

Access to the exhibitions held in Senate House Library is free. Please enquire at the Library Membership Desk for an Exhibition pass. For further information call 020 7862 8415