‘On This Day in 1816’: Report from the July 2016 Frankenstein Bicentenary Events

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A report on the bicentenary events to celebrate 200 years since the composition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, July 2016

by Anna Mercer (University of York)

 

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In May 1816, the Shelleys moved to the beautiful setting of Lake Geneva. They were accompanied by Mary’s step-sister, Claire Clairmont, who in London had begun an affair with Lord Byron. Percy Shelley had originally thought of leaving England for Italy, but Claire’s involvement with Byron led them to Switzerland instead. On 13 May 1816 the Shelleys and Claire arrived in Geneva, followed on 25 May by Byron and his companion Dr. John Polidori. By June, both parties had taken residences close to each other on the shores of the lake; Byron stayed at the Villa Diodati. Incessant rain often prevented them from going out on the water in the evenings, and even stopped Percy, Mary and Claire from returning to their own lodgings. Mary would later recall the evenings at the villa:

We often […] sat up in conversation till the morning light. There was never any lack of subjects, and, grave or gay, we were always interested.

What followed – the proposal made by Lord Byron that each of the party at Diodati write a ghost story, and the subsequent composition of Frankenstein – is now infamous. But what of Mary Shelley’s toil and dedication to writing that novel, in the days and months after experiencing ‘the grim terrors’ of her ‘waking dream’?

On 24 July 1816, Mary Shelley notes in her journal, ‘write my story’: this is her first reference to the composition of Frankenstein. Mary’s soon-to-be husband, Percy Shelley, was also writing his great poem ‘Mont Blanc’ on this day. Percy Shelley also contributed 4,000 to 5,000 words to Mary’s 72,000-word novel (this number was identified by the scholar Charles E. Robinson). The Shelleys’ productivity, and their creative collaboration, was thriving in 1816.

Mary worked on the book throughout the summer, and began redrafting after the Shelleys returned to England in the winter. It was Percy Shelley who encouraged Mary to expand her narrative; as she later recalled in 1831, ‘He was for ever inciting me to obtain literary reputation […] but for his incitement, [Frankenstein] would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world’.

2016 provides the opportunity to celebrate many Romantic bicentenaries, engaging with the work of both the first and second generations of Romantic authors. Presentations of Romantic scholarship can utilise an engaging tagline – ‘On This Day’ – when considering the remarkable events that occurred exactly 200 years ago. Combining my personal interest in reading the Shelleys’ works side-by-side, and my experiences of the success of other public events that include recitals from Romantic texts, or poetry in general, I set out to organise an event series that marked this momentous occasion in Romantic history: the composition of the period’s most iconic novel, Frankenstein, in 1816.

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The events took place in two locations. On the evening of the 23 July (the date before that note ‘write my story’ in Mary Shelley’s journal), we presented an evening of readings and two academic talks (by David Higgins and myself) at the Keats-Shelley House, Rome. The house, which overlooks the Spanish Steps, was the final dwelling place of John Keats, who died there aged just 25 in 1821. It is now a beautifully curated and intimate museum of manuscripts, books, paintings and relics, dedicated to remembering the English Romantic poets in the Eternal City. Although the Shelleys did not live there, their Roman residence is only a short walk away, above the Spanish Steps, on the Via Sestina.

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The event began with a reading of the first paragraphs of Vol I, Chapter IV of the 1818 Frankenstein, beginning with that haunting sentence, ‘It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils’. This opening (Mary Shelley’s words never failing to provide atmosphere!) then led on to short talks about the Shelleys’ collaboration and also the impact of environmental catastrophe on the works composed in and near Geneva in 1816. Extracts from the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley were also read to the audience: sections from ‘Mont Blanc’ and his preface to Frankenstein (written in the guise of Mary Shelley), as well as another section from Mary Shelley’s introduction to Frankenstein written many years after the Diodati summer in 1831. We finished with prosecco on the terrace, which gave us the opportunity to talk to our friendly audience.

A week earlier, on 14 July, we had presented the same event in York in the Huntingdon Room at King’s Manor. The University of York and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies assisted us in promoting this free event (including a press release). We were very grateful to have a positive turnout, selling out all our tickets a few days beforehand and then extending the ticket numbers to 70.

I am greatly indebted to our funders; without their support we could not have made the event in York free to attend, and their contribution also supported costs incurred when the event team travelled to Rome. We received funding from the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies and the F R Leavis Fund at the University of York, and also from BARS and BSECS. The event was affiliated with the ‘Romantic Bicentennials’ network, and supported by the KSMA at the Keats-Shelley House, as well as the Keats-Shelley Review.

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I’d also like to thank Giuseppe Albano (curator at the Keats-Shelley House), Clare Bond (the CECS administrator at York), the other members of the event team (David Higgins, Lucy Hodgetts and Duncan Robertson), and Alys Mostyn for stepping in to help in Rome.

Overall, I would argue that it is worth taking advantage of the 200th anniversary of the Shelleys’ creative activities to now rethink our understanding of their works, and draw further attention to the poignancy and longevity of their achievements as progressive authors. It is important to use the bicentenary celebrations of the composition of Frankenstein to remind us of the egalitarian intellectual community that existed in 1816. This supportive environment allowed the story to not only be conceived, but also developed, and refined. Perhaps now, 200 years later, we can really harness the usefulness of understanding the Shelleys as a literary couple to appreciate how intellectual collaborations – even with regards to such a typically solitary creative pursuit as literature – can produce such marvellous creative outcomes.

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The event will be reprised at Chawton House Library in November. See the website here.  

In November 1816 Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein, and therefore this event also commemorates the novel’s composition exactly 200 years ago. On the 24th November 1816 Mary records in her journal: ‘Write’. During the period from September 1816 – April 1817 Percy Shelley was also acting as editor, making corrections or additions to the draft. As Charles E. Robinson observes, the manuscript evidence suggests ‘that he made his comments not on one reading near the end of the process but on separate readings of individual chapters as [Mary] continued to draft the novel’. The event at Chawton House Library acts as a celebration of the bicentenary of this creative and collaborative period in 1816 that brought Frankenstein to completion.

 

References:

Charles E. Robinson, ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Text(s) in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein’ in The Neglected Shelley ed. Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb (London: Ashgate, 2015).

Mary Shelley (with Percy Bysshe Shelley), The Original Frankenstein ed. Charles E. Robinson (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2008).

BARS PG/ECR Conference, ‘Romantic Voices’: Conference Report

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Here is a report by Michael Falk (PhD Candidate at the University of Kent) on the Early Career and Postgraduate Conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies, ‘Romantic Voices 1760-1840’. The conference was held on the 22nd-23rd June 2016 at the Radcliffe Humanities Building, Oxford, in association with TORCH, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. The keynotes were Dr Freya Johnston (University of Oxford) and Professor Simon Kövesi (Oxford Brookes University). You can see the CFP here.

 

‘Romantic Voices 1760-1840’: Conference Report by Michael Falk

The steamy atmosphere of the referendum had descended, and we were all a little queasy. Few had escaped the national mood of uncertainty and division, even if for many it was offset by a frisson of hope and rebellion.

Well, there we were, a group of young researchers with uncertain prospects ourselves, come to rifle through the treasure-chest of British culture and uncover some new trinkets if we could. And many unexpected treasures there were. We were treated to an encomium of Jane Marcet’s dialogues, an analysis of Anna Barbauld’s childrens’ books, and a digital map of Romantic sounds in the Lake District. Yearsley was extolled as a great mystic, Clare as a protean and mischievous talker, and Southey as a bizarrely inaccurate (though politically rather interesting) writer of kangaroo poetry in newspapers. The old titans were all there too, and it was a welcome relief from some months of mendacity and ill-temper in the public sphere when Wordsworth, Blake or the Shelleys opened their mouths and some real English came out.

The ‘Voices’ theme, unlike so many conference themes, really set the tone. The keynotes and workshops were an opportunity for us young’uns to reflect on our academic voices. How to talk to bureaucracy? How to talk to our students? How to talk to the public? How to talk to each other?—these were the big questions posed by Watson, Kövesi and Johnston. The papers, meanwhile, explored voice as a formal structure (How did Byron’s notions of translation shape his voice in Don Juan? What are the ins-and-outs of the conversational form in didactic literature?) and voice as, well, the tool real people speak with (How did the Shelleys talk to one another about Mary’s prose and Percy’s poetry? Which women did Helen Maria Williams talk about?).

The conference dinner was also rather cacophonous, though the Turl Street Kitchen has a good acoustic and it wasn’t unpleasant. The Scotch Eggs were the big hit of the night, and next I’m in Oxford I’ll demand a truckload.

It was a strange thing to wake up the morning after, and feel a hangover despite my nocturnal sobriety. My phone informed me that my team had lost, and it filled the world with a hollowness it took some days to shatter. At the station, however, I saw a lady marvelling at the newsstand. She picked five or six different papers off the shelves, and as she queued to pay, she couldn’t help shuffling through them, drinking in the front pages with an irrepressible grin. People used to think the universe had a voice, and that the only real truth was whatever it happened to say. I think I’m more content to live in a world of many voices, even if it’s sometimes a rather difficult and frustrating place to be.

& some tweets from the conference…

Copley Report: Colleen English

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Colleen English was one of a number of BARS members who were awarded Stephen Copley Research Awards earlier this year.  Below, she gives an account of the research that the award assisted her with completing.

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The Stephen Copley Research Award partially funded my research trip to London in mid-June 2016 to consult manuscript and print materials in the British Library and the Wellcome Library. The Award enabled me to consult material crucial both to my monograph project, “Writing the Dead: Epitaphs, Elegies and Communities of Sentiment in Romantic Ireland” and to an article I am preparing for publication on John Keats’s poetry and the scientific process of embalming corpses.

My monograph project, based on my PhD thesis, examines how the preoccupation with grief and loss in Irish poetry of the Romantic and early Victorian periods is informed by shifting historical contexts as well as by intellectual history, especially British empiricist philosophy. In moving away from the strict taxonomies of elegy toward a modal understanding of the poetics of mourning, this project focuses on the ways in which Irish poets, namely Mary Tighe, Thomas Moore, and James Clarence Mangan understood grief as a type of sympathy that enabled cross-cultural exchange between Ireland and England.

Since the project is focused on the cultural and political importance of mourning, the debates in the House of Lords in the 1820s surrounding the burial of dissenters and Roman Catholics in Protestant churchyards in Ireland is especially relevant. The Irish Burial Act is discussed in some detail in the correspondences of Lord Wellesley, who was the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland 1821-1827 and 1833-1834, and whose letters (many of which are unpublished) are held in the British Library’s collection. The opportunity to consult these materials, which include a copy of the amended Burial Act with Lord Wellesley’s remarks in the margins, greatly enhanced my understanding of the contested space of the churchyard in Ireland during this period.

I also consulted E.R. Moran’s papers concerning Thomas Moore. Included in the material was a book of newspaper cuttings about Moore’s poetry with Moran’s annotations in the margins. The book is organized by poem, so that the entry for Moore’s “Oh! Breathe Not His Name” also includes other poems written either in response to the poem or its subject, Robert Emmet’s final speech, making it possible to clearly see the reception of Moore’s poetry both in Ireland and England.

One of the highlights of my visit to the British Library was the opportunity to view one of the fifty privately printed copies of Mary Tighe’s epic poem Psyche (1805). The book also contains manuscript copies (written in an unknown hand) of two of Tighe’s poems in addition to a letter from Tighe to Mrs. Fox.

In the Wellcome Library I consulted books and manuscripts relating to the embalming process as it was practiced in the early nineteenth century, as well as texts pertaining to John Keats’s medical training. The anatomists John and William Hunter and their nephew, Matthew Baillie are important figures in my study as they made great advancements in the practice of embalming in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The opportunity to consult their letters gave me a fuller sense of their accomplishments and collaborations. The lecture notes of an anonymous student of John Hunter’s served to expand my understanding of the way that Hunter conceived of the communication between different nerves and organs in the human body as a kind of physiological sympathy.

Thanks to the generous support of BARS I was able to benefit from the rich array of manuscripts in the British Library and Wellcome Library collections, deepening my understanding of the affective properties of these texts and of the historical context in which they were produced, resulting in significant revisions to my monograph project and great advances made towards the completion of my essay on Keats. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to BARS for awarding me the Stephen Copley award, without which this research would not have been possible.

Dr. Colleen English, University College Dublin

On This Day in 1816: 18 July, apocalypse, and Byron’s ‘Darkness’

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July’s ‘On This Day’ post is by Patrick Vincent, Professor of English and American literature at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. With Angela Esterhammer and Diane Piccitto, he recently published Rousseau, Romanticism, Switzerland: New Prospects (Palgrave 2015). This year he helped organize the “Byron is Back! ” exhibition at Chillon Castle as part of the bicentenary commemoration of the summer of 1816.

In the post below he considers the way in which the idea of apocalypse shaped the writing of those present during the 1816 Geneva summer, and the extant sources (including the weather reports) that tell us about early July 1816.

We are looking for future contributors to this series, which seeks to celebrate the 200th anniversaries of important literary/historical events of the Romantic Period. Please contact anna.mercer@york.ac.uk if you are interested.

 

On this Day: 18 July 1816

by Patrick Vincent

 

When the last sunshine of the expiring day

In summer’s twilight weeps itself away,

Who hath not felt the softness of the hour

Sink on the heart—as dew along the flower?

– Byron, “Monody on the Death of the Righ Honourable R.B. Sheridan”

 

On 18 July 1816, the world was expected to come to an end. As Jeffrey Vail and others have noted, an astronomer in Bologna had predicted that the sun would die out on that day, an event often associated with Byron’s composition of the deeply pessimistic “Darkness.” Although we are unsure when the poet composed his apocalyptic dream vision, we do know that he wrote another poem thematizing the sun’s disappearance, the “Monody on the Death of the Righ Honourable R.B. Sheridan” sometime between 7 July 1816, when Richard Sheridan died, and 22 July, when Byron sent the poem to Douglas Kinnaird. Possibly inspired by a Lake Geneva sunset, this lesser known work rehearses many of the same themes as the summer’s other literary productions, most notably its strange atmospheric conditions. The poem’s controlling symbol, the sun is represented as “a Power” that “Hath pass’d from day to darkness”, yet whose “Promethean heat” will forever continue “to cast its halo” in spite of the “public gaze”, which makes “Hearts electric—charged with light from heaven / Black with the rude collision”.

In 1826, the painter William Edward West reported an anecdote in which Byron apparently attributed the composition of “Darkness” to a “celebrated dark day, on which the fowls went to roost at noon, and the candles were lighted as at midnight.” I have come across no other evidence that such a day occured on or around 18 July, or ever at all, yet the story has contributed to 1816’s gothic reputation. Byron’s prodigious literary productivity during his time in Switzerland, in particular in July when he composed the “Monody,” “Prometheus,” “Stanzas to Augusta” and perhaps also “Darkness” in addition to finishing and correcting Childe Harold III and The Prisoner of Chillon, strikes me as more significant than the Genevan summer’s overly rehashed gothic incidents. It is as if the poet refused to allow the weather, European politics, or even his exile extinguish his own Promethan heat. And while the “Monody” suggests the sun’s extinction may indeed have been a topic of conversation at Diodati, the opening lines’ calm, elegiac tone better captures villa’s daily routine and largely unremarkable incidents than do the many dark and doomsdayish accounts of 1816.

Primary sources for the month of July 1816 are scarcer than for the rest of the summer: Polidori had stopped keeping his diary on 2 July, Mary only began hers on the first day of their Chamonix excursion on the 21st, and Byron was either too depressed, or more likely, too busy writing and sailing to keep a regular correspondence. Through Lady Frances Shelley’s diary and several other contemporary accounts, we know that the poet’s nemesis, Henry Brougham, had arrived in town along with 1100 other English visitors, some of whom enjoyed playing cricket at Plainpalais, others spreading gossip on Diodati’s scandalous household. We also know that Byron and Polidori went to Coppet for the first time on 12 July, where the second Duchess of Devonshire pretended to faint and the poet discussed Glenarvon with Madame de Staël. In Geneva’s register of foreigners, we can read that the two men received their permis de séjour the next day. Claire’s two undated notes in July reveal that things between her and Byron had soured—her attemtps at finding a pretext to see him, notably by fair copying his poems, are sure signs of his rejection. Finally, in a lesser known anecdote recorded by a town magistrate and discovered by Claire Eliane Engel, we learn that thieves tried to break into Diodati on 17 July, inciting the Cologny mayor to make an inquiry.

 

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Marc-Auguste Pictet, Tableau des observations météorologiques faites au Jardin Botanique de Genève, July 1816, in Bibliothèque universelle, Sciences et Arts, volume 2 (Genève: Bibliothèque britannique, 1816).

 

Another important source, the daily meteorological recordings published in the Bibliothèque universelle indicate the weather that month was not as dramatic as often portrayed: a recent meteorological study based on this data argues that it was the summer’s climate that was extreme, not its weather. The sky was indeed overcast, the temperature lower than the seasonal norms, and it rained an unusual amount, causing flooding around all Switzerland’s lakes, yet the summer also had its good days. On July 17th, for instance, it was 10 degrees and raining, on the 18th it warmed to 16 degrees at 2pm but was still overcast, and the next day the temperature climbed to 20 degrees, allowing Lady Shelley to complain in her diary of the excessive heat. Apocalyptic fears nevertheless did make some headway among Geneva’s well-educated and usually staid populace. In his less than reliable memoirs published in 1883, for example, Jean-François Vernes-Prescott recalls that “sermons were attended assiduously” (“les prédications sont très suivis”). Furthermore, a brief article on the first page of the local Gazette de Lausanne on 19 July (the same day that Sheridan’s death and Brougham’s arrival in Geneva were reported) cites Parisian astronomer Charles Rouy’s popular demonstrations at the Muséeum uranographique in order to help dispell these superstitions:

 

 Les taches actuellement visibles sur le soleil, le froid, et les pluyes extraordinaires dans cette saison étant devenus l’objet de toutes les conversations et d’une crainte presque générale de la prochaine extinction de ce flambeau de notre système planétaire, et par conséquent de la fin du monde, M. Rouy a cru devoir contribuer à dissiper les craintes chimériques que la malveillance et la superstition se plaisent à propager. C’est dans ce but qu’il ajouté aux démonstations qu’il fait chaque soir dans son muséum uranographique le représentation des sudites taches sur le disque du soleil, en y ajoutant l’explication de ce phénomène (p. 1)

 

[Translation: The spots currently visible on the sun, the cold, and the rain that is out of the ordinary at this season have become the topic of all conversations and an almost universal source of fear that the planetary system’s flame will soon die out, hence ending the world. As such, M. Rouy has thought it necessary to help dissipate these chimerical fears propagated by malevolence and superstition. With that goal in mind he added a representation of these sun spots to his evening demonstrations at his Muséum uranographique, together with an explanation of this phenomenon.]

 

As he noted in his 20 July letter to Kinnaird, Byron intended his “Monody” to be delivered with “Energy” at Drury Lane. One may argue that poem likewise shares Rouy’s skepticism regarding the possibility of the sun’s extinction, and might be read as a hopeful counterpoint to “Darkness,” dissipating the forces of superstition and fear that belittle man’s genius.

 

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La Gazette de Lausanne et Journal Suisse, Friday 19 July 1816

 

Far more worrisome than these imaginary apocalyptic warnings was the all-too-real suffering, already much discussed in this blog, brought upon by the end of the wartime economy, the rain and the cold, but also poor government planning, as historian Daniel Krämer has recently shown. These elements are arguably more important to the genesis of “Darkness” than the Bologna prophecy itself. The Gazette de Lausanne regularly reported the hardships but always in its backpages, stating on 16 July for example that snow fell in the Bernese Alps and that cattle had to be killed because of lack of feed. The Bibliothèque universelle in July commented that all the harvests were late, and potatoes rotting. Unlike in other regions of Switzerland, the Genevan government was able to avoid a famine thanks to its emergency storehouse of grain and government intervention in the sale and pricing of flour. As Lady Shelley commented, “Scarcity, owing to the destruction of crops, has been felt here also, and white bread is forbidden, under an amende of eight louis d’or.” Thanks to a letter that emerged at an auction in 1975, we know that Byron and Shelley were also aware of the situation. Writing to his friend Peacock on 17 July to describe his tour around Lake Geneva with Byron, Shelley adds at the end of the letter as a sort of afterthought: “Affairs here are rather in a desperate condition. The magistrates of Geneva have prohibited the making of white bread.—all ranks of people are in the greatest distress.—I earnestly hope that England at least will escape.” The passage was curiously cut from the published version of the letter in History of a Six Weeks Tour, however, as if these problems were not important enough to impinge on their memories of the Swiss summer. On 17 September, to his credit, Byron donated three hundred francs to the pastor of Cologny in order to help the poor. He then took off on his tour of the Alps, the weather having at last turned warm and sunny.

 

Works Cited

Auchmann, S. Brönnimann, L. Breda, M. Bühler, R. Spadin, and A. Stickler, “Extreme Climate, Not Extreme Weather: the Summer of 1816 in Geneva, Switzerland,” Climate of the Past, 8 (24 February 2012), pp. 325-335, http://www.clim-past.net/8/325/2012/

 

Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 13 volumes (London: John Murray, 1973-1984), vol. 5.

 

Lord Byron, Monody on the Death of the Righ Honourable R.B. Sheridan, London: John Murray, 1816.

 

Claire Clairmont, The Clairmont Correspondence: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont, and Fanny Imlay Godwin, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking, 2 volumes (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), vol. 1.

 

Claire-Eliane Engel, Byron et Shelley en Suisse et en Savoie, mai-octobre 1816 (Chambéry: Dardel, 1930).

 

Daniel Krämer, ‘Menschen grasten nun mit dem Vieh’: Die letzte grosse Hungerkrise der Schweiz (Basel: Schwabe, 2015).

 

Gazette de Lausanne: http://www.letempsarchives.ch/

 

Marc-Auguste Pictet, “Tableau des observations météorologiques,” Bibliothèque universelle, Sciences et Arts, volume 2 (Genève: Bibliothèque britannique, 1816).

 

Registre des permis de séjour. Archives de l’Etat de Genéve. Cote D. Etrangers, n. 3

 

Lady Frances Shelley, The Diary of Lady Shelley, ed. Richard Edgecumbe, London: John Murray, vol. 1.

 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Unpublished letter to Thomas Love Peacock, 17 July 1816.” In Donald Reiman and Doucet Devin Fischer, eds. Shelley and his Circle 1773-1822 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1986), vol. 7, pp. 28-34.

 

Jean-François Vernes-Prescott, Causeries d’un octagénaire genevois (Geneva: Jules Carey 1883).

 

Jeffrey Vail, “ ‘The Bright Sun was Extinguis’d’: The Bologna Prophecy and Byron’s Darkness,” Wordsworth Circle 28 (1997), pp. 183-192.

 

William Edward West, “Byron’s Last portrait,” The New Monthly Magazine, vol 16 (1826), pp. 246-247.

 

 

 

Five Questions: Michael Bradshaw on Disabling Romanticism

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Disabling Romanticism

Michael Bradshaw is Professor and Head of the Department of English, History & Creative Writing at Edge Hill University.  He has previously taught at a number of different institutions in Britain and Japan and has published on a wide range of Romantic-period subjects, including Thomas Hood, the poetry of the 1820s and 1830s, Walter Savage Landor, Romantic drama, George Darley, fragment poems and Thomas Lovell Beddoes.  His latest publication is a collaborative endeavour: the essay collection Disabling Romanticism, which has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.  Below, we discuss the contexts for this collection and the new intellectual contributions that it makes to the field of Romantic Studies.

1) What first made you want to put together a collection on Romanticism and disability?

Critical disability studies (DS) is an expanding field; its impact is being felt across the full range of arts and Humanities disciplines.  I was particularly interested in the potential of critical DS to re-contextualise and re-interpret historical literature.  Being a Romanticist, I thought it was time this connection was made more explicit and visible.  I was also curious to find out how much independent scholarship was already going on ‘out there’; there seemed to be a timely opportunity to create a more prominent conversation in our subject about how bodily and mental difference is represented, and to co-ordinate an emerging theme.  The intersection of Romanticism and disability was established in Andrew Elfenbein’s well-regarded issue of European Romantic Review devoted to Byron’s lameness (2001).  Fifteen years later, it must be time to take stock again, and extend the debate to a more diverse range of texts and authors – Coleridge and addiction, Darley and speech therapy, Frankenstein and autism, Mary Robinson’s paralysis, and so on.

In terms of my own previous research, I have interests in ‘anatomy literature’ and critical / theoretical themes which foreground the body, which are conducive to a DS approach to texts.  I recently wrote an article on the poet Thomas Hood which observes his apparent fascination with amputation and prosthesis; although it fell outside the scope of that particular discussion, which was about anxiety and laughter, I thought there was another story to tell there, that texts and images which represent bodily difference for whatever apparent purpose should be put into contact with the historical lived experience of disability in the Romantic period.

2) How did you set about gathering your contributors?

I put out a brief CFA via subject networks such as BARS and NASSR.  There were one or two colleagues whose work I knew, whom I was able to contact directly.  But in general the team came to me, in response to the CFA.  I wanted this to be an edited collection from the outset, so I didn’t go through the preliminary stage of building a network with a themed conference.

3) Your introduction opens by contending that ‘dominant critical practices associated with Romantic studies continue to marginalise and disable the different in body and mind’.  What do you think are the most significant benefits to be gained through working to counter this marginalisation?

Historicist scholarship has had a lot to say over the years about race and ethnicity, about gender and sexuality, about nation and empire, and about socio-economic class as well; but a proper re-assessment of literature and criticism in terms of disability has been much slower to emerge.  Hopefully, this book will be a step forward in that process: it will help to raise awareness, and accelerate further development.

The introduction tries to give a sense of how intrinsic concepts of disability, incompleteness, and deformity are to many of the distinctive themes of Romanticism; and consequently, it draws attention to how marginalised and hidden disabled experience has been.  For example, the fragment poem – one of the signature forms of Romantic writing – connects transcendence with incompleteness.  The fragment projects beyond the arbitrary boundaries of the text into an ideal space, but it’s the present experience of incompleteness or brokenness which makes this possible.  The theme of disability has always been latent in critical debates about fragmentary texts, it seems to me.

Re-reading literature from a DS approach also involves interrogating our reliance on metaphor.  Disability metaphors are very widespread, but sometimes seem to pass almost unnoticed.  So when an instance of blindness is said to evoke a sense of ‘inner vision’ or spirituality, a DS critic might want to question that in terms of symbolic appropriation, and to test the idea in terms of the historical lived experience of blindness.  Cognitive difference and mental illness are already better established in Romantic studies, I would say, in that the Romantic cult of the creative mind has long been connected to alternative mental states.  But in terms of physical and sensory impairment, there is a lot of work still to be done – a lot of re-reading in terms of challenging negative images, and reclaiming agency.

These are just examples, of course; it’s a big and diverse field.

4) To what extent do you conceive of the collection as providing a series of discrete case studies sensitive to the individualities of the people and works it considers, and to what extent you think that larger narratives about the history of disabilities and attitudes to them can be traced within it?

I think it has to be both these things.  I like the specific case study approach, and don’t feel the need to subsume studies of specific texts and authors, or make them obedient to a meta-narrative or agenda.  I felt it was important for the collection to be a ‘broad church’ and to include some different methodologies.  So there are some chapters written from a very committed DS / disability theory perspective, and others which are less ideological in approach, contextual studies of disability themes in Romantic writing.  I thought there should be space for all these things.  I think breadth of methodology is important for a book like this to stay current, and to achieve its aim of promoting further debate; I would like to reach not only professional academics, but also students of Romanticism looking for new challenges and possibilities.

Having said that, the book can be seen in the context of a larger ongoing project to challenge the exclusion of disabled experience in academic discourse.  David Bolt and Claire Penketh’s Disability, Avoidance and the Academy (London: Routledge, 2016) gives a good overview of this debate.

In terms of content, I’m really pleased that we’ve not only managed to cover some of the key canonical texts and authors – we have our Byron chapter, our Frankenstein chapter, our chapter on Lyrical Ballads, etc. – but also some less familiar figures, such as George Darley, Richard Payne Knight, and Mary Robinson.

5) You and Essaka Joshua write in the introduction that you see the book in part as a means ‘to promote further research and discussion’.  Are there particular directions that you think could fruitfully be further explored, or particular works or figures that you think could be re-examined using the critical tools that the collection provides?

At this point, that’s for other to decide.  But I think the book shows that a DS approach to Romantic literature can be very comprehensive, working in terms of historical / social context and author biography, and also at the level of close analysis of textual form and genre.  I would be interested to see some interdisciplinary work analysing literary texts and visual images of disability themes, perhaps facilitated by the Romantic Illustration Network.  Disabling Romanticism is specific to Romantic literature; there are equivalent complementary studies of eighteenth-century literature, Gothic, and Victorian culture also ongoing.  I’m sure we’ll see some exciting new scholarship on these themes in the coming years.

I hope the book can also help readers to look at familiar texts afresh.  As Peter Kitson and Tom Shakespeare generously write in their Foreword: ‘Who, after reading the essays in this collection, will ever read the opening lines of Percy Shelley’s ‘England in 1819’ with its vivid depiction of George III as an “old, mad, blind, despised and dying king” in quite the same way?’

Nineteenth-Century Matters: Chawton House Library 2016-17

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Please see below for an exciting opportunity for early career researchers who do not currently hold a permanent position.  This is a new collaboration between BARS and BAVS, brokered by Jo Taylor and Matthew Ward, with the help of Gillian Dow.

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Nineteenth-Century Matters: Chawton House Library 2016-17

Outline

Nineteenth-Century Matters is a new initiative jointly run by the British Association for Romantic Studies and the British Association for Victorian Studies.  It is aimed at postdoctoral researchers who have completed their PhD, but who are not currently employed in a full-time academic post.  Nineteenth-Century Matters will offer these unaffiliated early career researchers a platform from which to organise professionalization workshops and research seminars on a theme related to nineteenth-century studies, relevant to the host institution’s specialisms.  The focus should be on the nineteenth century, rather than on Romanticism or Victorianism.

For the coming academic year Nineteenth-Century Matters will provide the successful applicant with affiliation in the form of a Visiting Fellowship at Chawton House Library and the University of Southampton.  This fellowship includes a University of Southampton e-mail address, and access to its library and electronic resources for the full academic year.  It will also provide accommodation at Chawton House Library throughout January, where the fellow will be free to develop their research and make the most of the wealth of resources held in the library.  In return, the ECR will organise a research and professionalization event on a theme relevant to Chawton’s collections, participate in a ‘state of the field’ session to be held at Chawton during the tenure of their fellowship, and acknowledge BARS, BAVS, and Chawton House Library in any publications that arise from the fellowship.

Application Process

Interested parties should submit their CV, along with a two-page proposal on their research topic, details of the event they would organise at Chawton House Library, and an outline of why they would benefit from the fellowship.  Applications should be sent to mw498@st-andrews.ac.uk, or j.e.taylor1@lancaster.ac.uk by 12th August.

A .pdf of these details can be downloaded here.

Conference Report, ‘Summer of 1816: Creativity and Turmoil’, University of Sheffield

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Summer of 1816: Creativity and Turmoil (24-27 June, University of Sheffield)

Conference report by Carly Stevenson

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On an aptly stormy weekend in June, the University of Sheffield hosted an international conference commemorating the bicentenary of the infamous summer of 1816, when P.B. Shelley, Mary Godwin (later Shelley), Lord Byron, John Polidori and Claire Claremont gathered to share ghost stories at the Villa Diodati in Geneva. Organised by Professor Angela Wright and Dr Madeleine Callaghan, this conference celebrated the extraordinary literary output of this circle with a diverse array of papers from scholars in the fields of Romanticism, Gothic, eighteenth and nineteenth century studies.

Jane Stabler

Jane Stabler

On the Friday, keynote speakers Jerrold Hogle, Jane Stabler and Michael O’Neill lead a series of masterclasses for postgraduates and early careers researchers before the conference began in full the following day. After the first day of papers, Michael O’Neill gave a plenary lecture that examined the ways in which Byron and the Shelleys influenced each other in 1816-17. Afterwards, delegates headed over to 99 Mary Street for the conference dinner and drinks. This event was followed by another full day of parallel panels on the Sunday, rounded off with Jane Stabler’s poignant plenary lecture on Mary Shelley’s transcriptions of Byron’s poems. After Stabler’s keynote, the winners of the ‘Creativity and Turmoil’ ghost story competition were announced. Delegates were then given some free time to explore the city before the final day of the conference. After the last panel on Monday morning, Jerrold Hogle delivered his closing plenary lecture on the ‘Gothic Image’ as manifested in the ‘hideous progenies’ produced from the Diodati gathering in 1816. Hogle’s lecture crystallised a recurring theme of this conference: the fraught yet undeniably interwoven relationship between Gothic and Romantic literature, which the Diodati party were instrumental in shaping.

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Jerrold Hogle

Finally, the remaining delegates set out on a conference excursion to Castleton to see the ancient ‘Devil’s Arse’ Peak Cavern that Byron had ventured into during his youth. Delegates had the opportunity to glimpse the Peak District countryside and take in the sights before heading back into Sheffield for farewells.

The overall atmosphere at the ‘Summer of 1816’ conference was one of excitement and encouragement. The high calibre of papers provoked stimulating discussions that will undoubtedly go on to bear richer fruit in the form of further research and it was a fantastic opportunity for global scholars to come together and share their enthusiasm for this small circle of writers. In light of recent political turmoil, this conference could not have happened at a better time.

Carly Stevenson is a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield researching Gothic Keats.

 

The Scottish Romanticism Research Award: Result

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(From Daniel Cook, BARS Bursaries Officer.)

The executive committees of the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) and the Universities Committee for Scottish Literature (UCSL) are delighted to announce the winner of their inaugural Scottish Romanticism Research Award: Christine Woody, a recent doctoral candidate and adjunct instructor at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her project, ‘Romantic Periodicals and the Invention of the Living Author’, examines the ways in which the periodical culture of the Romantic period reshapes the meaning of authorship.  Drawing heavily on the Edinburgh Review, Quarterly Review, and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in her research, Dr Woody will spend the duration of the award at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, where she will have the opportunity to consult the Murray Archive, the Blackwood & Sons archive, and other collections pertinent to her work.

BARS and UCSL have established the annual award for postgraduates and early career scholars to help fund expenses incurred through travel to Scottish libraries and archives, including universities other than the applicant’s own, up to a maximum of £300.  A postgraduate may be a current or recent Master’s student (within two years of graduation) or a PhD candidate; a postdoctoral scholar is defined as someone who holds a PhD but does not hold a permanent academic post.  If appropriate, UCSL will endeavour to assign the awardee an academic liaison at one of its partner universities in Scotland (see www.ucsl-scotland.com/members).  Recipients are asked to submit a short report to the BARS Executive Committee, for publication on its website, and to acknowledge BARS and UCSL in their doctoral thesis and/or any publication arising from the research trip.

Applications for the next round will be due by 1st June 2017.  In the meantime, any questions should be directed to the BARS bursaries officer, Dr Daniel Cook, at the University of Dundee (d.p.cook@dundee.ac.uk).

Please join us in congratulating Dr Woody on her award. We look forward to welcoming her to Scotland.

CfP: Reputations, Legacies, Futures: Jane Austen, Germaine de Staël and their contemporaries, 1817-2017

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(From Gillian Dow and Sandy White at Chawton House Library and the University of Southampton.)

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Reputations, Legacies, Futures:
Jane Austen, Germaine de Staël and their contemporaries, 1817-2017

Chawton House Library, Hampshire, July 13-15, 2017

Keynote Speakers:
Benjamin Colbert, University of Wolverhampton
Alison Finch, University of Cambridge
Deidre Lynch, Harvard University

July 1817 saw two deaths – of Jane Austen, an English novelist with a solid but relatively modest success, and of Germaine de Staël, a long-standing superstar of pan-European intellectual, political and literary life. Over the two centuries since, the relative reputations of these two writers have re-aligned in ways that would have astonished their contemporaries, admirers and critics alike.

This joint anniversary provides an unrivalled opportunity to bring scholars together to reflect on the connections, continuities, and contrasts between these two writers’ careers both in their lifetimes and after, and to think about the waxing and waning across Europe and beyond of the literary reputations of eighteenth-century and Romantic-period women writers more generally.

The organisers invite submissions of 20-minute papers. Topics might include, but are not limited to:
• Connections and continuities between Austen and Staël (including, for instance, Austen’s familiarity with/awareness of the writings of Staël and vice versa, or their dealings with the firm that published them both, John Murray)
• The reputations and reception of women writers in Europe and beyond, both in their own lifetimes and subsequently
• Contemporary and subsequent models for the woman writer, thinker and genius
• The celebration of women writers, including portraiture, biography, the fame of associated place, commemorative events
• The sale, import, export, translation, abridgement, extraction, illustration, adaptation of the works of women writers from their lifetimes to the present
• Echoes, influence, and reiterations, especially those women writers described as ‘other’ Austens and Staëls in Europe and America
• The changing relative placement of these writers in relation (for instance) to notions of the centre and the periphery, the cosmopolitan and the national, the hierarchies of genre
• The futures of reading and teaching women’s writing of the period
• Other anniversaries associated with women writers falling in 1817 (such as, for instance, the career-defining publication in London and Paris of Sydney Owenson/Lady Morgan’s France).

Please send 300 word abstracts to Sandy White at the University of Southampton: sw17@soton.ac.uk by Friday, December 2nd, 2016.

Organising Committee:

Dr Gillian Dow (Executive Director of Chawton House Library and Associate Professor in English at the University of Southampton) [Gillian.dow@chawtonhouselibrary.org]
Professor Catriona Seth (Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, All Souls’ College, Oxford University) [catriona.seth@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk]
Professor Nicola J Watson (Professor of English Literature, Open University) [nicola.watson@open.ac.uk]

Further details can be found on the conference website.

Conference Report: Gender Stereotypes in the Long 19th Century

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Many thanks to Erin Farley for writing the report below on the ‘Gender Stereotypes in the Long 19th Century’ symposium held at Stirling in April.  BARS provided a subvention to help support this event.

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On Saturday 30th April 2016, the University of Stirling hosted a one-day symposium, organised by Barbara Leonardi, on ‘Gender Stereotypes in the Long 19th Century.’ The symposium aimed to examine the effects of gender stereotypes and of challenges to them as the Romantic period shifted into the Victorian, as well as considering identify threads leading into 20th century culture. Furthermore, it explored the intersections between gender, class and race over the period in question– an approach which more than one delegate remarked was still disconcertingly rare in studies of this period.

Holly Furneaux’s engaging opening keynote “Kind-hearted Gunmen? An emotional history of the Victorian military Man of Feeling” examined the ways in which military violence was written out of accounts of war, replaced by the image of the soldier as a kind, loving figure, seen in novels such as Vanity Fair – the ‘domesticated English lion’. Furneaux also identified the legacy of this imagery in contemporary culture – for example, the popularity of ‘Returning Soldier’ videos on YouTube – and considered how these stereotypes may still be shaping popular attitudes to war.

Three main panels made up the central part of the symposium, the first of which had a medical focus: Lena Wånngren’s examination of the ‘unwomanly’ female doctor and the destabilisation of gender boundaries in late 19th century medical fiction noted that early women doctors were often presented as ‘unsexed,’ due to the corrupting influence of the naked and dead bodies their work exposed them to, but also uncovered more sympathetic portrayals such as Margaret Todd’s 1892 novel Mona Maclean, Medical Student. Anne Schwann’s discussion of the gendered, but also nationalised, coverage of the trial of Florence Maybrick, a US native accused of murdering her husband in Liverpool, 1889. Class boundaries were also key in the Maybrick trial – while Florence was a middle-class American, her husband’s working-class Liverpudlian family were seen as having corrupted her. Michael Brown (whose paper was read by Bethan Benwell in his absence) explored medical masculinities and the parallels between surgeons and explorers – conquering body, landscape and culture – in narratives of colonial expansion, both defined by a spatial gaze and identities infused with notions of morality and manliness.

The next panel, on gender, class and race, took us back to the late 18th century with Katie Halsey’s paper on evangelical writer Hannah More’s use of metaphor in her treatise on women’s education. Her description of women’s souls as landscape to be cultivated, and her equivocation of motherhood and the nation state, show that we can benefit from a literary as well as a historical analysis of these instructional texts. Halsey’s paper was followed by Angela Smith’s exploration of Katherine Mansfield’s disruptive fictional experiments with crossing boundaries of race and gender: an author who wrote with the belief that fiction’s role was to ask questions, not answer them. The panel concluded with Ewa Grazynck on the intersection of gender, nation and class in the works of Eliza Orzseszkowa, particularly the novel Two Poles, a love story between an upper-class man and woman who each represent opposing ideologies in Polish culture of the time. Their personal tale becomes a way to discuss and question political activism, the abolition of feudalism and the need for individual sacrifice for the benefit of the community.

The final panel, on motherhood, transgressive identities and queer sexualities, was a highlight for me due to the many connections with my research and personal interests.

Barbara Leonardi’s paper on traditional ballads and the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and James Hogg was revealing in its discussion of ballads as lived, performed works rather than intertextual artefacts within novels, and I feel that this approach has the potential to greatly expand the perspectives on women’s and working-class lives in particular which are available to literary historians. Carla Sassi’s take on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s heroine Chris Guthrie was a refreshing perspective on one of my favourite Scottish canonical works. The figure of Chris has become iconified in Scottish literature, and this has obscured many of the complexities of her characterisation. Sassi questioned the notion of Chris as “the most convincing female character in Scottish literature” and identified a subtle androgyny in her presentation.

Sarah Parker explored queer 19th century experience in practice with her paper “Charlotte is evidently a pervert,” on Charlotte Mew and lesbian identity. While Mew was part of Decadent communities who sparked moral panics about homosexuality, she ultimately distanced herself from these, leading into a fascinating discussion of Mew’s identity as a combination of aspects of the maiden aunt stereotype, the ‘New Woman’ and the androgynous dandy, occupying a liminal cultural space between Victorian and modern culture.

This symposium made academic and social connections inside and outside the conference room: we live-tweeted the papers, with many delegates joining in. Hannah More’s metaphors of reading as consumption – Rousseau was ‘dangerous poison’ – sparked an online discussion about the pervasiveness of such metaphors, which leads into themes to be discussed at this year’s BAVS conference on ‘Consuming the Victorians.’

As a scholar new to this period (having recently moved into 19th century popular culture from a background of contemporary folklore studies) this symposium was an excellent way to begin getting to grips with some of the theories, literatures and ideas in the wider Victorian literary scene, and I found many ways in which the day connected with my own research – as well as introducing me to colleagues in the Gender Studies department at Stirling and making me aware of the overlaps between our research, connections which I will be able to build on in the coming months. Responses both online and in person from other delegates pointed out not just the importance of the intersectional approach to literary studies, but that the day also suggested new ways of reading and looking at presentations of gender in historical texts, which have cross-disciplinary relevance across Romantic, Victorian and contemporary literary studies.

Erin Farley (PhD candidate, University of Stirling)

The Twitter conversations from the day can still be read by searching for #Gender19C.