Lost in translation: transnationalism and the Lady’s Magazine

By ladys-magazine

Screen Shot 2015-11-19 at 20.34.44

One of the great pleasures and well as challenges of working on the Lady’s Magazine and other miscellanies of its day is the extraordinary breadth of content with which you are confronted. My literary training in the period has equipped me with ways of, and contexts in which, to read eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century novels, tales, poems, essays, criminal biographies, reviews, travel writing, news and other, principally prose genres too numerous to mention. My expertise is clearly much stronger in some areas than others, but I’m not going to reveal the chink in my academic armour and tell you which I’m not so hot on. Oh well, as it’s just us, I’ll tell you that basically anything to do with maths or what we could call the sciences makes me sprint for the aspirin jar.

My life-long fascination with material culture means I have strategies for reading fashion plates, reports and embroidery patterns, too, although despite my best efforts, I know that I will only ever be an amateur art or textile historian. I lack the knowledge to situate and fully grasp the context for the magazine’s sheet music, but years of dabbling in lots of musical instruments, none of which …read more

Source:: http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/ladys-magazine/2015/11/20/lost-in-translation-transnationalism-and-the-ladys-magazine/

Devouring the Prolific

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By Joe Fletcher

As the ongoing Phase Four of the Blake Archive’s development – image acquisition – continues, we realize that the excess of Blake’s delights will keep the Archive staff busy for years to come. Since we last posted about acquisitions in March, we have acquired the following works from nine institutions:

Albertina Museum, Vienna

  • Urizen copy J

Auckland Libraries

  • America copy N
  • Europe copy I

Bodleian Library, Oxford

  • 54 images from Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain

Bridgeman/Manchester Art Gallery

  • 18 heads of poets
  • Jeroboam and the Man of God: water color

British Library

  • 2 miscellaneous impressions from There is No Natural Religion
  • 3 impressions from Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy a

Firestone Library, Princeton

  • America copy Q
  • Songs of Innocence copy T
  • Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy j

Fitzwilliam Museum

  • The Ghost of Abel copy B
  • 8 proof plates of Europe
  • 1 miscellaneous impression from of Jerusalem
  • 2 objects from A Small Book of Designs copy B
  • 1 painting (new photography for BUT 673)
  • 3 water color drawings
  • 2 color print drawings (new photography)
  • 1 monochrome wash drawing (for Tiriel)
  • 1 pencil drawing (sketch for Newton)

Morgan Library and Museum

  • 4 miscellaneous impressions from There is No Natural Religion
  • Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy e/K
  • Songs of Experience from Songs copy K

Tate Gallery

Exploring Shelley Manuscripts in the USA: Research Report

By annamercer90

I’ve been away in the USA for just over three weeks on a research trip. As this trip was part-funded by the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS), I’ve written a short report on how the trip has contributed to my doctoral research, which will appear on the BARS website.

I’m also reposting the report here: it includes details of the manuscripts I went to see, and as this is my personal blog I’ve also included some photographs of my trip (unfortunately images of manuscripts can’t be posted online due to copyright, so I’ve used my pictures of the beautiful cities I went to and the libraries I worked in).

At the US Capitol, Washington D.C. (across the road from the Library of Congress)

Report for BARS Stephen Copley Postgraduate Research Award 2015

In October/November 2015 I travelled to the USA to study the manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley housed in American libraries on the East Coast. The BARS Stephen Copley Postgraduate Research Award and the University of York’s AHRC Research Travel Support Grant funded my research trip. My work as a doctoral candidate looks to define the collaborative literary relationship of Percy Bysshe and Mary …read more

Source:: https://percyandmaryshelley.wordpress.com/2015/11/17/exploring-shelley-manuscripts-in-the-usa-research-report/

Romantic Landscapes: Geography and Travel, 23 Nov 2015

By Anthony Mandal Our second CRECS event will focus on the centrality of travel, topography and landscape in the Romantic period. Landscape is perhaps the paradigmatic conceit of the Romantic moment, permeating every aspect of the literature, art and music of the era. It features as more than just a setting, but conveys a complex set of ideas, moods […] …read more

Source:: https://crecs.wordpress.com/2015/11/16/romantic-landscapes/

Five Questions: Ina Ferris on Book-Men, Book Clubs, and the Romantic Literary Sphere

By Matthew Sangster

Ina Ferris - Book-Men, Book Clubs, and the Romantic Literary Sphere

Ina Ferris is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. She has written a series of important and influential contributions to Romantic Studies, particularly in the fields of book history and the history of the novel, for which she has received numerous deserved plaudits, including, most recently, the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Keats-Shelley Association of America. Her major works include the monographs The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) and The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). In recent years, her research has focused on the book cultures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, resulting in works including an edited volume for the Romantic Circles Praxis series on Romantic Libraries and a collection on Bookish Histories co-edited with Paul Keen. One of the culminating achievements of this interest is her latest monograph, Book-Men, Book Clubs, and the Romantic Literary Sphere, which we discuss below and which was published in August by Palgrave Macmillan.

1) How did you first become interested …read more

Source:: http://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=947

News: Earliest image of Chartist rally uncovered in Library of Congress

By marylshannon

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The oldest known drawing of a Chartist rally has been uncovered by RIN member Ian Haywood, after lying untouched in a sketchbook in the US Library of Congress for more than 175 years.

The pen-and-ink sketch from 1839 by Englishman Richard Doyle shows dozens of supporters being strong-armed by the Metropolitan Police who broke up the event. Officers were sent to the Bull Ring in Birmingham by the Government to bring an otherwise peaceful event in favour of political reform and social justice under control.

Doyle did not publish the image as he was only a teenager at the time, although he later went on to become an illustrator for Charles Dickens. There were no ‘respectable’ outlets for visual representations of current affairs in the late 1830s – neither the mainstream press nor the Chartist newspaper The Northern Star were able to publish illustrations at this time, and the famous satirical magazine Punch, for which Doyle later worked, was not launched until 1841.

This is why Ian Haywood’s discovery of the drawing is so important to modern understanding of Chartism. The drawing gives an insight into how observers at the time perceived the movement and the state’s response to it, several years earlier …read more

Source:: https://romanticillustrationnetwork.wordpress.com/2015/11/16/news-earliest-image-of-chartist-rally-uncovered-in-library-of-congress/

Notes on the material periodical, inspired by a workshop in Ghent

By knlc

AMD

Denizens of the Real World often picture researchers of print culture as perpetually cooped up in stuffy libraries, inhaling centuries-old dust and the stale whiff of foxing paper. For a large amount of the time this is a representative tableau (and long may be it so!), but another important part of our job is to venture out and tell others about our findings. If you are as lucky as we are, you get to travel quite a bit when doing so. In my last post, I discussed my inspiring visit to Trondheim, and I announced that we would soon be crossing the Channel for a workshop at Ghent University. As we expected, this event of Friday 30 October was a great success as well, not least because of the warm welcome that we received from our friends at the English section of the Ghent Department of Literary Studies. We heard from fabulous PhD students and postdocs based at Ghent and Kent about their research on periodicals, we presented our own work, and were introduced to the great new Ghent project ‘Agents of Change: Women Editors and Socio-Cultural Transformation in Europe, 1710-1920′, funded by the European Research Council.

…read more

Source:: http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/ladys-magazine/2015/11/13/notes-on-the-material-periodical-inspired-by-a-workshop-in-ghent/

Is That a Rock or a Severed Head? Creating Textual Tags for Blake’s Pen and Ink Drawings

By katherinecal

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The William Blake Archive recently published seventeen pen and ink drawings by Blake that span the majority of his artistic career. As one of the art historians on staff at the WBA, I was tasked with the responsibility of creating XML documents to accompany each of the works—files that we call Blake Archive Documents or BADs. These BADs are incredibly important as they include not only textual descriptions of the drawings but also tagged search terms, which enable the new drawings to be plugged into the existing search function of the WBA.

For example, if a visitor to the WBA is interested in finding all of Blake’s works that illustrate kings, he or she could search the term “king,” and the resulting list would now include two of the newly published pen and ink drawings as they too were tagged with the term “king”: “The Body of Edward I in his Coffin, Two Rough Drawings” and “Saul and David: ‘And Saul Said Unto David, Go, and the Lord Be With Thee.”

We call this process of describing and adding tagged search terms to individual works “markup.” The WBA maintains a comprehensive list of search terms from which all project assistants marking …read more

Source:: https://blakearchive.wordpress.com/2015/11/12/is-that-a-rock-or-a-severed-head-creating-textual-tags-for-blakes-pen-and-ink-drawings/

Image of the Month: ‘Edward the Black Prince; or, the Battle of Poictiers’ (Mariana and Arnold) 1791

By marylshannon

Illustration to William Shirley's 'Edward the Black Prince', scene 3, from Bell's 'British Theatre' series; at the door of a tent, a girl kneels in pleading with a knight turning from her to right, another girl standing behind in round frame with elaborate frame; sheet trimmed and pasted within platemark in imitation of an india proof. 1792. British Museum. Museum no. 1875,0710.3387 http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3041464&partId=1&searchText=edward+the+black+prince&page=1

Illustration to William Shirley’s ‘Edward the Black Prince’, scene 3, from Bell’s ‘British Theatre’ series; sheet trimmed and pasted within platemark in imitation of an india proof. 1792.
British Museum.
Museum no.
1875,0710.3387
http://www.britishmuseum.org/ research/collection_online/ collection_object_details.aspx? objectId=3041464&partId= 1&searchText=edward+the +black+prince&page=1 Used under a Creative Commons License http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

This month, Anne Musset (PhD Candidate, History of Art, University of Warwick/Université Paris-Diderot) discusses an illustration to Bell’s British Theatre:

‘This image, engraved by Joseph Collyer after William Hamilton, is an illustration of William Shirley’s historical tragedy Edward the Black Prince; or, the Battle of Poictiers. It is taken from the 1791 edition of the play in the hugely popular series Bell’s British Theatre. Shirley’s play, “attempted after the Manner of Shakespear”, was first performed in 1750 and remained popular thanks to its combination of romance and heroic action.[1] It is based on the Battle of Poitiers (1356) and stages the Black Prince as a charismatic military leader and a tender friend. A second plot focuses on the tragic love between English knight Arnold and his French prisoner Mariana. The play afforded moments of heroism and of pathos, as well as opportunities for political parallelisms and medieval pageantry.

As an …read more

Source:: https://romanticillustrationnetwork.wordpress.com/2015/11/12/image-of-the-month-edward-the-black-prince-or-the-battle-of-poictiers-mariana-and-arnold-1791/

Blake In Photoshop, Part 3: Recovering Overwritten Text

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By Eric Loy

Blake manuscript image open in Photoshop.

This fall I’ve been blogging about forensic experimentation with Blake Archive images in Adobe Photoshop. The idea is that Photoshop can be a [relatively] cheap, easy, and fast way to either answer transcription questions or allow editors to model alternate views of manuscript images for Archive users. In the last two posts, I’ve used examples of faded, hard-to-read text to illustrate the potential usefulness of digital image manipulation.

Interesting stuff, but also pretty conservative in terms of total image manipulation and Photoshop’s technical abilities. This week, we’re going to push the envelope . . . just a bit.

Rescue Mission

I thought it best to start small, so I located a single overwritten word on my usual Four Zoas test object. Our test site is the overwritten “shall” in the image below. (Click to enlarge.)

This is a good test case because we know what the word is underneath, so our real task is to find a method of modeling that knowledge. My instinct was to use the Clone Stamp tool, which allows users to paint pixels with the color data of a selected site of pixels in the same image. In other words, my plan is to paint in …read more

Source:: https://blakearchive.wordpress.com/2015/11/12/blake-in-photoshop-part-3-recovering-overwritten-text/