Here we have the latest report from Amy Wilcockson, the most recent winner of the Stephen Copley Research Awards, for more information about how to apply, please see here.
Thanks to the generosity of BARS and their Stephen Copley Research Awards, I was thrilled to be able to visit the Bodleian Library in Oxford for five days. I used the funding in order to spend time amongst the Bodleian’s outstanding collections; undertaking research for the final stages of my PhD thesis, and for essays that I am currently working on.
My work centres on the Scottish Romantic poet, Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), and my thesis is the first scholarly edition of his letters. As such, I was eager to revisit some of the Campbell letters in the Bodleian and access the wider collections in which they are situated. I am also interested in Campbell and his friendships with Thomas Moore and Lord and Lady Byron. I therefore examined many boxes of material from the Dep Lovelace Byron collections, primarily archival letters, diaries, fragments, and transcripts of Lady Byron’s. In doing so, I am attempting to untangle some of the dynamics of Campbell’s friendships in my thesis, in a forthcoming article, and in my conference paper at the upcoming BARS PGR and ECR Conference, ‘Romantic Boundaries’.
Amongst the archival items I consulted include items from Dep Lovelace 116, which holds letters from Lady Byron to unidentified correspondents, Dep Lovelace Byron 129, which contains papers concerning the separation of Lord and Lady Byron in 1816, and Dep Lovelace Byron 118, which contains various papers authored by Lady Byron, including notes on visiting Newstead Abbey, and her notes on the destruction of Byron’s memoirs.
Part of my research into Lady Byron’s relationship with Campbell relates to a letter published by Campbell in the New Monthly Magazine, of which he was editor from 1821 to 1830. This letter was written by Lady Byron to refute Moore’s claims in his 1830 text Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life. Lady Byron was dismayed to find that Campbell published her private correspondence to a public audience in the pages of the New Monthly. The fallout of this, and the response of all parties involved is something I wished to uncover more about. I did not previously realise (and was fascinated to find) that Lady Byron consistently wrote and recorded her thoughts on herself, notes on her friends and lists of who these friends were, notes on ‘happiness in society’, and notes concerning her marriage. Many of these notes provide valuable insights into her innermost thoughts and provide interesting contextual material to her response to Campbell’s violation of her privacy, and her thoughts towards her wayward husband. I will be using these documents as contextual evidence in my thesis and as key sources of evidence in the essays I am writing.
I also discovered a number of holograph Campbell poems that I had not studied previously, including ‘Hallow’d Ground’, and a contemporary copy of ‘The Friars of Dijon’ that contains humorous illustrations. Letters in the MS. Abinger collection from Claire Clairmont to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and in the MS. Eng. Lett archives from Maria Edgeworth to Joanna Baillie also shed light on public opinion of Campbell and Moore in 1830 and will be used as evidence in my ongoing work.
Whilst diving into the depths of the Bodleian’s Byron holdings, I also was privileged enough to be able to access unique items including original pencil drawings by Lady Byron, including of Ada, Countess of Lovelace on her deathbed in 1852, annotated copies of Lady Byron’s books, including Thomas Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron (1824), and an astounding commonplace book that contains pressed leaves and flowers from the cloisters of Newstead Abbey. Even more excitingly for me, on this commonplace book’s first page was a transcription of Campbell’s stirring poem ‘The Exile of Erin’!
After a profitable and stimulating trip to Oxford, I will be continuing this work into the Campbell, Byron, and Moore friendships at the British Library and Newstead Abbey. I look forward to sharing my research with BARS and my fellow Romanticists as soon as possible! I am very grateful to BARS for the Stephen Copley Research Award and their support of my research and encourage everyone to apply and take advantage of this excellent opportunity.
Amy Wilcockson is a PhD Researcher in the final stages of her thesis, creating the first scholarly edition of the selected letters of the Scottish Romantic poet, Thomas Campbell (1777-1844).