The Lives of the Obscure by Virginia Woolf

Five shillings, perhaps, will secure a life subscription to this faded, / out-of-date, obsolete library, which with a little help from the rates, / is chiefly subsidised from the shelves of clergymen's widows, and / country gentlemen inheriting more books than their wives like to dust. / In the middle of the wide airy room, with windows that look to the sea / and let in the shouts of men crying pilchards for sale on the cobbled / street below, a row of vases stands, in which specimens of the local / flowers droop, each with its name inscribed beneath. The elderly, the / marooned, the bored, drift from newspaper to newspaper, or sit holding / their heads over back numbers of _The Illustrated London News_ and the / _Wesleyan Chronicle_. No one has spoken aloud here since the room was / opened in 1854. The obscure sleep on the walls, slouching against each / other as if they were too drowsy to stand upright. Their backs are / flaking off; their titles often vanished. Why disturb their sleep? Why / re-open those peaceful graves, the librarian seems to ask, peering over / his spectacles, and resenting the duty, which indeed has become / laborious, of retrieving from among those nameless tombstones Nos. 1763, / 1080, and 606.

I. THE TAYLORS AND THE EDGEWORTHS