Atonement Photo Essay

This is a rough copy of Sonnet 152 by William Shakespeare, as seen in the British Library. It seemed that while the Treasures Collection held may genres, poetry was the most common. My thought was that this sonnet and the Magna Carta are similar in that they are mostly important in what they stand for, rather than the literal meaning.

This unnamed painting, done in 1942 by Elsie Hewland, shows children getting ready for nursery school by themselves. Young children like these were affected in that their mothers had to go to work rather than care for them. This shows one of the many sacrifices that children had to make during WWII. 

This is a popular one-person shelter. As the placard says, working men and women would often hide under these when bombs began to fall. This is a prime example of how war changed the lives of everyone. 

A powerful quote from this plaque reads: "The day war was declared we all cried because we knew, all of a sudden, we were not going to see our parents again. We all knew that." These children were evacuated from London at the start of the war. I think that if Briony had been living in central London as a child, she too would have been evacuated to the countryside. This is yet another example of how WWII changed the lives of the British. 

This sign from the Florence Nightingale Museum shows how unheard of it was for a woman of higher social standing to become a nurse. Florence Nightingale left for the Crimean War in 1854; 90 years later, thousands of British women such as Cecelia and Briony, who share a very similar upbringing with Nightingale, were nurses in WWII.