Building a Charles Dickens escape room

My little hometown library is awesome

Ivoryton Library is a really cool gathering place in our little village. I joined the board a few months after I moved here and it’s been sheer joy to be involved. In addition to doing all the regular library things like not-banning books, we have an incredible staff whose members are usually two steps ahead of library science trends.

In addition, we haunt the library for Halloween, and we decorate it for the holidays — Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa — and children (and adults) can drop off letters to Santa, who actually answers them.

(Answering those letters is something I look forward to every year.)

This year, between the haunting and the elves, we will build an escape room and if you aren’t familiar with the idea (I wasn’t), go here.

The library is in its original Victorian structure built with donations from a dedicated group of Victorian ladies who sewed aprons, baked pies, and did everything they could think of to raise money because they believed in the importance of an educated workforce in this former factory town. For our escape room, we are looking for inspiration from a Victorian novel, “Great Expectations,” with an emphasis on the character, Miss Havisham.

If you haven’t read the novel — or cannot remember it from English Lit — come sit by me. In short, Miss Havisham was jilted at the altar and chose to spend the rest of her days in her wedding dress. She cooks up schemes to hurt others as she has been hurt, but this is a Victorian novel so of course she repents in the end.

I hope I haven’t destroyed the book for you. Anyway, we are coming up with clues that will help people figure out how to escape (and that’s all I’ll say about that) so I’ve been researching the jilted bride so that the clues will be appropriate.

As with so many of my little projects, I intend to take this too far but I hope, during the last weekend of October and the first weekend of November, you’ll come for a visit. It’ll be bang up to the elephant, I promise, which is a Victorian phrase that means “done to perfection.” We should bring that phrase back.