British Museum

The British Museum is a cultural institution in London, England, established in 1753, that collects and displays artefacts from around the world. Until 1973, it was also home to the British Library, the largest library in the world. It plays a role in the Cthulhu Mythos as one of just five libraries in the world that H. P. Lovecraft named as being in possession of a copy of the Necronomicon. (The British Museum alone is said to have a copy of the earlier, 15th century printing of the Latin translation.)"History of the Necronomicon," H. P. Lovecraft. Other Mythos writers have made use of the Museum to lend authenticity to eldritch lore. 
==In the Real World==
The museum was established by an act of Parliament in 1753, establishing a museum based on the collection of curiosities bequeathed by Sir Hans Sloane, an Anglo-Irish physician and naturalist. It was initially housed in Montagu House, a grand mansion in London's Bloomsbury neighbourhood, and opened to the public in 1759. The building that currently houses the museum occupies the same site, greatly expanded; its earliest wing dates to 1827 and its last major reconstruction was in 2000. 
The museum houses cultural artefacts from around the world, brought back by British archaeologists and adventurers from Capt. James Cook to T. E. Lawrence. Some of its most famous holdings, like Egypt's Rosetta Stone and Greece's Parthenon sculptures, are regarded as stolen property by their nations of origin. 
The museum's natural history collections were spun off into a new British Museum of Natural History in 1887 (which was not legally separated from the museum until 1963). The British Library was part of the British Museum until 1973, and was not moved into its own building until 1998; the library's Reading Room at the British Museum has been a haven for writers like Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and Arthur Rimbaud, and political figures like Karl Marx, Sun Yat-sen, Mahatma Gandhi, Vladimir Lenin, Marcus Garvey, and Friedrich Hayek. It has perhaps the largest collection of books in the world today, rivaled only by the US Library of Congress; it holds a vast collection of rare books, including the only surviving manuscript of Beowulf. 
==In Lovecraft's Fiction==
In "History of the Necronomicon," composed in 1927 to provide a consistent background for his favorite tome, Lovecraft wrote: Of the Latin texts now existing one (15th cent.) is known to be in the British Museum under lock and key, while another (17th cent.) is in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. A seventeenth-century edition is in the Widener Library at Harvard, and in the library of Miskatonic University at Arkham. Also in the library of the University of Buenos Ayres. Lovecraft evidently drew on this passage for The Dunwich Horror, written in 1928, when he described Wilbur Whateley's attempts to obtain a copy of the Necronomicon: Correspondence with the Widener Library at Harvard, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the British Museum, the University of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of Miskatonic University of Arkham had failed to get him the loan of a book he desperately wanted. The British Museum is also consulted as a potential source for arcane knowledge in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, in which the title character writes to his family of his securing good quarters in Great Russell Street, London; where he proposed to stay, shunning all family friends, till he had exhausted the resources of the British Museum in a certain direction. 
==Other Mythos Writers==
The British Museum is frequently name-dropped in the work of Brian Lumley, whose Cthulhu Mythos stories are largely set in England. In "The Caller of the Black" (1971), the story that introduced his occult investigator Titus Crow, Crow "spent almost a week in the pursuit of certain singular volumes in dim and equally singular archives at the British Museum" to investigate the eldritch phenomenon known as the Black. In "Name and Number" (1982), Crow remarks, "I contacted a friend of mine at the British Museum, the Curator of the Special Books Department, and asked him to search something out for me in the Necronomicon." He describes this friend as "a marvellous chap. Not quite all there, I fancy—he can’t be to work in that place." 
In "What Dark God?" (1975), Lumley places a copy of an arcane tome, the Tuscan Rituals, at the British Museum. Seeing a collection of forbidden books in Hungary, a character in "The Second Wish" (1980) muses, "“I wonder what the British Museum would offer for this lot? They must be near priceless!” The narrator of "The Thing From the Blasted Heath" (1971) says he used to boast of having "the finest collection of morbid and macabre curiosities outside of the British Museum." 
Another major English Mythos writer, Ramsey Campbell, has also used the British Museum as a prop. In "The Room in the Castle" (1964), it's at the Museum that the narrator first learns of the legend of Sir Gilbert Morley, which leads him to an encounter with an ancient evil at Severnford. The hero of "The Horror from the Bridge" is Philip Chesterton, a librarian at the British Museum who takes a job at Brichester University to keep better tabs on Lionel Phipps, who aroused Chesterton's suspicions when he came to the Museum to consult the Necronomicon and the Book of Eibon. 
==References==
Category:Locations Incorporated From the Real World
Category:Structures