Please see below for details of a symposium and evening event exploring the history of authorship using the archive of the Royal Literary Fund; these will be held at the British Library on Friday 9th May. I feel that I should declare an interest here (I’m one of the organisers and the most junior of the speakers), but I’m pretty excited by the line-up and think that it should be a really interesting day.
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The Royal Literary Fund and the Perils of Authorship
The British Library Conference Centre
Friday 9th May
10:30-17:45 (followed by a wine reception, then an evening event from 18:30-19:30)
The dissenting minister, philosopher and educationalist David Williams (above) founded the Royal Literary Fund in 1790 in order ‘to withdraw those apprehensions of extreme poverty, and those desponding views of futurity, which lead Genius and Talent from the path of Virtue’, which in practice meant providing confidential financial aid to struggling writers. More than three thousand six hundred writers applied to the Fund prior to 1939, including luminaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Clare, Leigh Hunt, Joseph Conrad, Bram Stoker, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and Dorothy Richardson, but also hundreds of less familiar figures. Their stories of their difficulties, as preserved in the Fund’s archive, stand testament to the enduring difficulties of making a living by the pen in the period between the French Revolution and the end of the First World War.
At this symposium, four noted scholars will each bring their particular expertise to bear on the Fund’s records, exploring the perils of authorship in the long nineteenth century from a range of perspectives:
Professor Jon Mee (University of York) – ‘General science, Political Disquisitions, and the Belle Lettres’: The First Decade of the Literary Fund
Dr Jennie Batchelor (University of Kent) – UnRomantic Authorship: The Case of Women in the Royal Literary Fund Archive (1790-1830)
Professor Josephine McDonagh (King’s College London) – Forms and Rituals of Giving and Receiving at the Royal Literary Fund
Professor Max Saunders (King’s College London) – Fund of Stories: Modernism, Life Writing and the RLF
The symposium will also feature an introduction to the Royal Literary Fund Archive by Dr Matthew Sangster (British Library) and a roundtable discussion to close the proceedings.
To register, please visit the British Library’s ticketing website. The fee is £15 (or £10 for concessions) and includes tea breaks, lunch, a wine reception after the conference, and entry to the subsequent evening event, ‘The Royal Literary Fund and the Struggling Author’, hosted by the Fund’s President, Sir Ronald Harwood; this will take place between 18:30 and 19:30.
This symposium is a collaboration between the British Library, the Royal Literary Fund, and the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York and is generously supported by the Royal Literary Fund.