Jerome in Antarctica

Bill Bell

The importance of print to the transmission of culture across vast geographical distances has often been recognised, not least in the pioneering work of the Canadian communication theorist Harold Innis and in the more recent formulations of Benedict Anderson. The notion of the library as a means of preserving cultural memory and social identity under strange skies has a provenance going back at least as far as Shakespeare’s Prospero and More’s Hythloday, and is much in evidence in renaissance representations of St Jerome in his desert hermitage. The itinerant library was to remain an abiding trope in the imagination of nineteenth century imperial expansion but was to come under increasing strain as the British empire waned at the turn of the twentieth century. This paper will account for changing representations of the library in exile as well as the experiences of readers themselves insofar as they operated in relation to such representations.