You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello, and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblad, and today my guest is Peter Ackroyd.

He's the author most recently of a novel, The Trial of Elizabeth Cree,

the author as well of several previous novels, English music, First Light,

Chatterton, Hawksmore, the Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, the Great Fire of London.

He's done magisterial biographies of Dickens and T.S. Eliot as well.

I wanted to begin by asking you about the British Museum Reading Room, which seems to provide the locus for much of the evil doing that pervades

London in the course of this novel.

Can you give me an idea you've placed there, Gissing, Karl Marx, an English musical comedian,

others as well.

It starts to sound like a train station of the famous. an English musical comedian, others as well.

It starts to sound like a train station of the famous.

What was its role in the 1880s where the novel was set?

Well, George Gissing called it the Valley of the Shadow of Books,

which gives you some indication of its reputation of the end of the 19th century.

It was, it is and was a vast repository of learning, as you know,

in a bibliophile's paradise on some levels at least.

It was also a vast furnace of knowledge.

...