Jack Kerouac and the Original Manuscript of "On the Road"

A few days ago I journeyed out of the beautiful and sedate countryside of East Sussex and ventured into the vast concrete metropolis of London. Having lived in Islington until I was 13, the novelty of endless traffic, the palpable taste and smell of pollution during inhalation, and the monolithic grey buildings is somewhat reduced upon my return visits. However, all cantankerousness aside, London is an incredible city, and it is the sheer vibrancy, culture, and exhilarating scale I am most envious of.

My visit that particular day took myself and a couple of friends to the British Library - admittedly perhaps not the most frequent destination for three teenagers - and we nonetheless negotiated the woefully disrupted Northern line (due to the apparently endless 'maintenance and repairs') with some excitement. 

We made our way to the library itself, and after meandering through past some of its countless items and artifacts on display we arrived at the incredible exhibition of the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac's seminal On the Road. 

The beginning of the actual manuscript

When I read the novel, it wasn't so much the work itself I found so fascinating, rather than what it represents. The Beat Generation is a literary movement of particular interest to me, and it is arguably epitomized by Kerouac's novel, along with that of his contemporaries, Allen Ginsberg (Howel and Other Poems) and William Burroughs (Naked Lunch).

As a spectacle the manuscript is extraordinary. It is 120ft long, and made of tracing paper and stuck crudely together with sellotape by Kerouac, allowing him to write continuously with no need to change the paper, in the three-week frenzied surge of creativity. It is so long, of course, that it is impossible to display in its entirety, and even with the British Library's ample space, only around half of the manuscript had been carefully unfurled and laid out carefully inside a protected display case, the remainder still coiled tightly in a stained and aged cylinder. 

The novel is one of the most culturally significant of the 20th century, and influenced all mediums of art. It was incredible to observe it in such detail - mistakes, omissions, corrections, and Kerouac's own idiosyncratic scribblings and rectifications.   

This particularly pleasing day was improved even further with the edition of an excellent lunch among great company. So impressed were we by the British Library's absence of an entry fee that, even on modest budgets, we were compelled to donate - not a frequent occurrence for those carefully watching their student loans. 

Only one grievance occurred. As we stood around, admiring the manuscript before us, we harbored a wish to leave with our own modest contribution to the enduring memory of the manuscript - a simple photograph or two. Regarding the stern signs forbidding photography or filming as more guidelines, or perhaps suggestions, rather than strict rules we set about carefully and innocuously taking a picture or two on our mobile phone cameras. 

We were than tapped on the shoulder by an austere and official-looking member of staff, who instructed us to remove all offending images from our mobile phones at once - whilst watching the screens carefully to ensure we had done so. The notion that an apparently unobjectionable (and low resolution) photograph for our own enjoyment would somehow critically breach any copyright or ownership seems slightly inane, and it did not go unnoticed that this humorlessness was particularly in contradiction to the principles and intentions of the Beat Movement itself.