Unit 1 In the library

世界八大图书馆

　　 1989年，联合国教科文组织在一份报告列出了8个世界第一流图书馆，它们在藏书量
和设备完善等方面是长期被各国人民公认的。它们是下列八大图书馆：
　　1．莫斯科图立列宁图书馆，藏书3000万册（包括期刊和丛书）；
　　2．华盛顿的美国国会图书馆，藏书2200万册；
　　3．伦敦大英图书馆，藏书1500万册；
　　4．列宁格勒图书馆，藏书1200万册；
　　5．美国哈佛大学图书馆，藏书1100万册；
　　6．巴黎的法国国立图书馆，藏书1100万册（一部分图书将转移到预计1995年建成的法 国图书馆）；
　　7．东京的日本国会图书馆，藏书800万册；
　　8．埃及的亚历山大图书馆，藏书400万册；该馆所藏关于地中海地区域及阿拉伯民族史籍为世界之冠。

书卡的写法

　　书卡是借书时重要的查阅资料卡。它首先让借阅者了解一本书的大概信息，借阅者在认 读书卡后，应大致了解了该书是否值得借阅。因此，写好书卡，认读书卡是图书馆的工作部分。下面就书卡几个内容简单作一介绍：
　　一张书卡里，应包括：书名，著作者，以及该书的出版商，有的书卡还注明了书的页
数便于借阅者做出合理安排。在有限的时间内读完。例如：
　　Oliver Twist
　　Charles Dickens (1812～1870)
　　Oxford University Press, 1994.
　　215P

　　书名：《雾都孤儿》
　　作者：查利·狄更斯
　　出版商：牛津大学出版社
　　全书共215页

作家与名著

Charlotte Bronte
Sex: Female
National Origin: 19th Century (Victorian)
Born: 1816
Died: 1855
Annotated Works: Jane Eyre

Gone with the wind
The greatest love story of our times, the story of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler...Margaret Mitchell's monumental epic of the South won a Pulitzer Prize, gave rise to the most popular motion picture of our time, and inspired a sequel that became the fastest selling novel of the century. It is one of the most popular books ever written; more than 28 million copies of the book
have been sold, and in more than 37 countries. Today, almost 60 years after its initial publication, its achievements are unparalleled, and it remains the most revered American saga and the most beloved work by an American writer.

David Copperfield
David Copperfield, Dickens's own favourite among his novels, is the most popular with the mass of readers, with the single exception of The Pickwick Papers. It was published by Bradbury & Evans in monthly parts from May, 1849, to November, 1850, with illustrations by Phiz, and appeared in a complete form immediately afterwards. Its success in the part issue was disappointing, but it soon gained the great popularity that it has ever since maintained. David Copperfield is known to embody many of the early experiences of its author, although it is not by any means an exact autobiography. Many of the characters were drawn from living originals known to Dickens. Micawber, for instance, is partly based upon his own father; Dora, the "child-wife" of David, represents Maria Beadnell, an early flame of the author; Mr. Creakle and Salem House reproduce a former school, Wellington House Academy, attended by Dickens, and its master, Mr. Jones; Mr. Mell had his original in Mr. Taylor, English master at Wellington House Academy; Clara Peggotty owed much to Mary Weller, a nurse of Dickens; Steerforth was an old companion in Ordnance Terrace, Chatham, by name George Stroughill; Miss Mowcher, Rosa Dartle, and others have also been identified with actual persons known to Dickens.

Jane Eyre
　　 For this most acclaimed of novels—"English," "Gothic,'' "romantic," "female"—is always a surprise, in the very authority, resonance, and inimitable voice of its heroine. "I resisted all the way," Jane Eyre states at the beginning of Chapter 2, and this attitude, this declaration of a unique and iconoclastic female rebelliousness, strikes the perfect note for the entire novel. That a woman will "resist" the terms of her destiny (social or spiritual) is not perhaps entirely new in English literature up to the publication of Jane Eyre in 1847: we have after all the willful heroines of certain of Shakespeare's plays, and those of Jane Austen's elegant comedies of manners. But Jane Eyre is a young woman wholly unprotected by social position, family, or independent wealth; she is without power; she is, as Charlotte Bronte judged herself, "small and plain and Quaker-like"— lacking the most superficial yet seemingly necessary qualities of femininity. ("You are not pretty any more than I am handsome," Rochester says bluntly.) Considered as a fictitious character and, in this instance, the vocal consciousness of a long and intricately plotted novel of considerable ambition, Jane Eyre was a risk for her young creator—had not Henry Fielding gambled, and lost, on the virtuous but impoverished and less than ravishingly beautiful heroine of his Amelia, of 1751, arousing the scorn of readers who had so applauded Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones? Jane Eyre, who seems to us, in retrospect, the very voice of highly educated but socially and economically disenfranchised gentility, as natural in her place in the literature of nineteenth-century England as Twain's Huckleberry Finn is in our literature, was unique for her time. She speaks with an apparent artlessness that strikes the ear as disturbingly forthright. (Compare the slow, clotted, indefatigably rhetorical prose of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, of 1818; or the pious and exsanguine narrative of Esther Summerson of Charles Dickens's Bleak House, of 1853; and the melancholy, rather overdetermined self-consciousness of Bronte's Lucy Snowe, the heroine of Villette, of 1853: "If life be a war, it seemed my destiny to conduct it singlehanded. I pondered how to break up my winter-quarters—to leave an encampment where food and forage failed. Perhaps, to effect this change, another pitched battle must be fought with fortune; if so, I had a mind to the encounter: too poor to lose, God might destine me to gain. But what road was open?—what plan available?")
　　One of the reasons for Jane Eyre's authority over her own experience, and the confidence with which she assesses that experience, is that, as the romantically convoluted plot evolves, the reader learns that it is history rather than story. Jane Eyre, who is wife and mother in 1819, is recounting the events of 1799-1809 in a language that is unfailingly masterful precisely because it is after the fact: if the Romantic/Gothic novel be, in one sense, sheer wish, Jane's triumph (wife to Lord Rochester after all and mother to his son—as it scarcely needs be said) represents a wish fulfillment of extraordinary dimensions. The material of legends and fairy tales, perhaps; yet also, sometimes, this time at least, of life. For we are led to believe Jane Eyre's good fortune because we are led to believe her voice. It is, in its directness, its ruefulness and scarcely concealed rage, startlingly contemporary; and confirms the critical insight that all works of genius are contemporaneous both with their own times and with ours.
　　Jane Eyre was written under a pseudonym when Charlotte Bronte was thirty-one years old, a casualty, so to speak, of ten years of servitude as a governess. Though "Currer Bell" was an unknown author and of indeterminate sex, the novel was accepted almost immediately upon being offered to the publishing house of Smith, Elder; it was published within seven weeks and became an instant success. Like Bronte's romantic hero Lord Byron, the new author "awoke one morning to find [herself] famous."
　　"Reader, I married him," Jane announces boldly in the novel's final chapter. The tacit message is that I married him—not that he married me. What greater triumph for the orphan, the governess, the small, plain, and "Quaker-like" virgin? The novel ends with a curious aside to St. John Rivers, away in India "laboring for his race" and anticipating, with a martyr's greed, his "incorruptible crown." It is St. John's grim and exultant language that rounds the story off, however ironically: "'Amen; even so, come, Lord Jesus!'" But those who have love have no need of this particular Lord Jesus.

Charles Dickens
　　English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens's works are charactericized by attacks on social evils, unjustice, and hypocrisy. He had also experienced in his youth oppression, when he was forced to end school in early teens and work in a factory. Dickens's lively good, bad and comic characters, such as the cruel miser Scrooge, the aspiring novelist David Copperfield, or the trusting and innocent Mr. Pickwick, have fascinated generations of readers.
　　Charles Dickens was born in Landport, Hampshire, during the new industrial age, which created misery for the class of low-paid workers and gave birth to theories of Karl Marx. His father was a clerk in the navy pay office, who was well paid but often ended in financial troubles. In 1814 Dickens moved to London, and then to Chatham, where he received some education. He worked in a blacking factory, Hungerford Market, London, while his family was in Marshalea debtor's prison in 1824 - later this period found its way to the novel Little Dorrit (1855-57). In 1824-27 Dickens studied at Wellington House Academy, London, and at Mr. Dawson's school in 1827. From 1827 to 1828 he was a law office clerk, and then worked as a shorthand reporter at Doctor's Commons. He wrote for True Son (1830-32), Mirror of Parliament (1832-34) and the Morning Chronicle (1834-36). He was in the 1830s a contributor to Monthly Magazine, and The Evening Chronicle and edited Bentley's Miscellany. In the 1840s Dickens founded Master Humphrey's Cloak and edited the London Daily News.
　　These years as a journalist left Dickens with lasting affection for journalism and suspicious attitude towards unjust laws. His sharp ear for conversation helped him reveal characters through their own words. Dickens's career as a writer of fiction started in 1833 when his short stories and essays to appeared in periodical. His SKETCHES BY BOZ and THE PICKWICK PAPERS were published in 1836; he married in the same year the daughter of his friend George Hogarth, Catherine Hogart. However, some people suspected that he was more fond of her sister, Mary, who moved into their house and died in 1837. Dickens requested that he be buried next to her when he died and wore Mary's ring all his life. Another of Catherine's sisters, Georgiana, moved in with the Dickenses, and the novelist fell in love with her. Dickens had with Catherine 10 children but they were separated in 1858. Dickens also had a long liaison with the actress Ellen Ternan, whom he had met by the late 1850s.
　　The Pickwick Papers were stories about a group of rather odd individuals and their travels to Ipswich, Rochester, Bath and elsewhere. Dickens's novels first appeared in monthly instalments, including OLIVER TWIST (1837-39), which depicts the London underworld and hard years of the foundling Oliver Twist, NICHOLAS NICKELBY (1838-39), a tale of young Nickleby's struggles to seek his fortune, and OLD CURIOSITY SHOP (1840-41). Among his later works are DAVID COPPERFIELD (1849-50), where Dickens used his own personal experiences of work in a factory, BLEAK HOUSE (1852-53), A TALE OF TWO CITIES (1859), set in the years of the French Revolution. GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1860-61), the story of Pip (Philip Pirrip), was among Tolstoy's and Dostoyevsky's favorite novels. The unfinished mystery novel THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD was published in 1870.
　　From the 1840s Dickens spent much time travelling and campaigning against many of the social evils of his time. In addition he gave talks and reading, wrote pamphlets, plays, and letters. In the 1850s Dickens was founding editor of Household World and its successor All the Year Round (1859-70). In 1844-45 he lived in Italy, Switzerland and Paris. He gave lecturing tours in Britain and the United States in 1858-68. From 1860 Dickens lived at Gadshill Place, near Rochester, Kent. He died at Gadshill on June 9, 1870.
　　Although Dickens's career as a novelist received much attention, he produced hundreds of essays and edited and rewrote hundreds of others submitted to the various periodicals he edited. Dickens distinquished himself as an essayis in 1834 under the pseudonym Boz. 'A Visit to Newgate' (1836) reflects his own memories of visiting his own family in the Marshalea Prison. In 'A Small Star in in the East' reveals the working conditions on mills and 'Mr. Barlow' (1869) draws a portrait of a unsensitive tutor.