CfP: Romantic Voices, 1760-1840, the 2016 BARS Early Career and Postgraduate Conference

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Please see below for the Call for Papers for our next Early Career and Postgraduate Conference, which will take place in Oxford next June.

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Call for Papers

Romantic Voices, 1760-1840

The Early Career and Postgraduate Conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies

22nd – 23rd June 2016, Radcliffe Humanities Building, Oxford, in association with TORCH, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

Keynote Speakers:
Dr Freya Johnston (University of Oxford)
Professor Simon Kövesi (Oxford Brookes University)

‘The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers’ (William Hazlitt)

‘Thus did I dream o’er joys & lie / Muttering dream songs of poesy’ (John Clare)

‘Coleridge came to the door. I startled him with my voice’ (Dorothy Wordsworth)

‘[Mary Wollstonecraft] is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living’ (Virginia Woolf)

Although the meditative insights of the “Great Romantic Lyric” have often been considered to be the voice of Romanticism, this conference will also explore and uncover different types of voices in Romantic literature, ranging from the loud chatter emanating from coteries and coffee-houses, to the marginalised voices of the disabled and dispossessed. It will understand ‘voice’ from a variety of perspectives: as the sound of communication; as the oral and written word; as a mode that anticipates an audience, even if only that of an internal listener; as the fashioning of the self, and the forming of communal identities; as a tool for disseminating knowledge and political opinions publicly and privately. We invite proposals for themed panels, as well as proposals for the traditional individual twenty-minute paper. Applicants might reflect on some of the following areas, though we also encourage you to interpret the theme more widely:

  • The self-constructed image of the poet as Bard
  • The lyric form
  • Dissenting voices
  • The rise of the periodical press
  • Voicing national and regional identities
  • Disjunctions between the oral, written, and published word
  • The politics of conversation and debate
  • Forums of exchange – from intimate and close-knit communities to literary salons and public institutions
  • Literary inheritance – the interplay between first- and second-generation Romantics, the impact of eighteenth-century voices on Romanticism, and the afterlife of Romantic thought
  • Non-linguistic modes of communication, and their relation to aesthetics, sensibility, morality, and politics
  • Reform debates and the relationship between literary and political representation
  • Narrative voice

As well as the plenaries and panels, we aim to include seminars led by early career scholars on some of the following: political dissent, poetics, letter-writing, the periodical press, scientific voices. We also anticipate that delegates will have a rare opportunity to see some Romantic manuscripts from the Bodleian Library.

Please send abstracts of up to 750 words for themed three-person panels, including details of all proposed speakers, and 250 words for individual papers to: romanticvoices@gmail.com. The deadline for abstracts is December 20th. We aim to notify successful speakers by the end of January 2016. More information will appear on the BARS Blog (http://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/) and website (http://www.bars.ac.uk/) in due course.

Organisers: Honor Rieley (Oxford), Matthew Ward (St Andrews), Jennifer Wood (Oxford).

Five Questions: Susan Valladares on Staging the Peninsular War

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Susan Valladares - Staging the Peninsular War

Susan Valladares is Junior Research Fellow and Lecturer in English Literature at Worcester College, Oxford.  Her work focuses on political history, gender, autobiographies, Romantic-period theatre and print culture, and she has published book chapters and articles on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Remorse; Wordsworth and the Convention of Cintra; Walter Scott’s Don Roderick; and Anne Lister and the Ladies of Llangollen.  She is also the editor of The BARS Review, the autumn number of which will be published shortly.  Her first monograph, Staging The Peninsular War: English Theatres 1807-1815, which we discuss below, was published by Ashgate last month.

1) How did you first become interested in representations of the Peninsular War?

When I first began researching the Peninsular War, I was often asked whether I was a fan of Sharpe.  But although I knew of the TV series by name, I had yet to watch an episode.  My interest in the war thus resists the memorable answer that Sean Bean and his fellow cast members might otherwise have provided.  I can trace it back, instead, to my time as a Masters student, when I found myself intrigued by the distance between the revolutionary 1790s and later Napoleonic period.  The war in Spain and Portugal – described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria (1817) as the war that ‘made us all once more Englishmen’ – seemed to offer an ideal starting point for my inquiry.  I soon decided, however, that it marked a point of arrival in its own right; that I was eager to delve deeper – to discover, among other things, how Napoleon’s opportunistic invasion of Portugal developed into a major struggle involving entire populations, and to understand why overwhelming public support for Britain’s military intervention in Spain and Portugal dissolved, in less than a year, into dangerous partisanship.

2) What were the principal ways in which the war changed the manners in which Spanish and Portuguese characters were presented on the stage?

For most of the eighteenth century, the stage Spaniard was more often than not a comic don, easily identifiable by his large whiskers and behavioural idiosyncrasies.  He invariably appeared in sixteenth-century dress, as did most Portuguese characters (which made it hard to distinguish the two nations, at least visually).  But the fact that Portugal was England’s oldest ally and Spain its inveterate enemy made a crucial difference.  Watching the Spanish don move across the stage in his breeches and slashed doublet helped ensure that Spain remained the national bugbear, firmly associated, in the popular imagination, with the Armada of 1588.  In May 1808 this image was unexpectedly and dramatically challenged by Napoleon’s attempt to install his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on the Spanish throne; a manouevre that resulted in a series of popular uprisings against French rule.  Across the Spanish provinces, civilians took to the streets, often armed with nothing more than makeshift weapons.

Britain responded by entering into an alliance with Spain that would have made the English theatres’ damning portrayal of Spanish characters seem at odds with government policy.  Yet, although attempts were made to revise the anti-Spanish stereotype, any success was, at best, short-lived.  As the war progressed, the Anglo-Spanish alliance, which had been shaky from the outset, received fatal blows from reports of Spanish inefficiency, poor co-operation and political intrigue; reports, in short, that are likely to have convinced the war’s growing party of detractors that the negative depiction of the Spanish nation did not, in fact, need to undergo any significant re-writing.  At the same time, interestingly, the Irish soldier began to acquire a new presence on stage.  Approximately 28% of the British army in the Iberian Peninsula consisted of Irish recruits, which helps explain why so many of the Irish characters in the plays, entertainments and song arrangements of this period are celebrated for their patriotic spirit and physical hardiness.

3) How rigorous were the systems of state and establishment control regulating the different theatres during the war with France?

The Licensing Act of 1737 gave the patent theatres (Covent Garden and Drury Lane; the Haymarket, as of 1766; and the provincial Theatre Royals thereafter) a monopoly on the spoken word.  This resulted in a split between legitimate (i.e. patent) and illegitimate theatrical cultures (the latter being represented by minor theatres, such as Sadler’s Wells, where managers were confined to performances based on song, dance and spectacle).  The office of the Lord Chamberlain was made responsible for licensing all playhouses, and an Examiner of Plays appointed to censor any new or amended play script, which had to be submitted up to two weeks prior to an intended representation.  While politics and religion were deemed taboo subjects, the creativity of playwrights, managers, actors, and audiences ensured that the theatre remained a politically charged public space.

Allegorical readings of the nation’s drama allowed for political commentary to be carefully unpacked by knowing audiences, while plays also frequently took on topical meanings simply by virtue of their performance dates.  There were also advantages to be gained by a geographical distance from the centre of law-making: while a play such as King Lear was excised from the London theatres’ repertoires between 1810 and 1820 (the years of George III’s so-called ‘madness’), it continued to secure packed auditoriums in provincial Theatre Royals, such as that of Bristol, for example, where the role of Lear was performed to acclaim by the star actor John Philip Kemble.

4) To what extent were the advances and reversals of the Peninsular campaign subjects directly addressed on stage, and to what extent did they shape theatrical productions in less obvious ways?

In the Calendar that serves as an appendix to the book, I use bold font to help readers identify the plays and entertainments performed at the patent theatres between 1807 and 1815 that featured Iberian settings or characters.  Coleridge’s Remorse (1813) is a prime example; but even plays that lacked obvious references to Spain or Portugal could be seen to speak to Peninsular politics, as was the case, for instance, with the Shakespearean repertoire.  While censorship exerted undeniable pressure on what was available, the Peninsular War received direct address in several plays and entertainments.  Managers of the minor theatres openly competed to stage spectacular re-enactments of recent military victories.

In 1812 Charles Dibdin the Younger (the writer-manager of Sadler’s Wells) put on an impressive production called The Battle of Salamanca, boasting not only new music and scenery, but a carefully choreographed ‘bayonet charge’, which was performed by soldiers awaiting deployment.  It is important to underline, however, that the programme on offer at the minor theatres was not as straightforwardly triumphalist as this description might suggest.  As I argue in my book, by the early nineteenth century, English theatres provided spaces for military celebration and contestation.  On both the legitimate and illegitimate stages, it was a question of reading between the lines; of understanding how plays, both old and new, came to acquire urgent meanings during the war, as I argue through my detailed reading of Sheridan’s 1799 tragedy, Pizarro.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I continue to explore Anglo-Hispanic relations through my work for the ‘Anglo-Hispanic Horizons, 1780s-1840s’ network, which I helped set up in 2013.  This international, interdisciplinary research group sets itself the target of recovering Britain’s conflicted literary, political and visual constructions of Spain (and its empire) during the long nineteenth century.  We are currently working towards the publication of our first collection of essays, for which I am contributing a chapter that explores how the Peninsular War afforded new opportunities for British female novelists of the time, such as Anna Maria Porter, Susan Fraser, Augusta Amelia Stuart, and Mary Meeke.  I am also writing on James Gillray’s representations of Elizabeth Farren, the actress who was courted by and then married Edward Smith Stanley, the 12th Earl of Derby; and working on my next book project, a study of the patent theatres’ eighteenth-century repertoires.

Report from Writing Lives Together (University of Leicester, 2015) – Lucy Johnson

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Alfred Tennyson with book, by Julia Margaret Cameron

The 2015 Writing Lives Together: Romantic and Victorian Biography conference was held on the 18th September at the University of Leicester.  Organised by Dr Felicity James and Dr Julian North, the day provided fascinating papers and stimulating discussion (along with a fabulous lunch!).

The opening keynote lecture, ‘Adventures of an Unromantic Biographer’, was delivered by Dr Daisy Hay (University of Exeter), in which she discussed the ‘creative potential of life-writing’ for women who have been ‘erased from history’.  In this compelling lecture, Hay framed life-writing as an empowering act that can give voice and autonomy to those who might otherwise have been silenced.

The first panel I attended was Women Writing Together, and it was opened by Dr Amy Culley (University of Lincoln).  Her paper, titled ‘Ageing, authorship, and female friendship in the life writing of Mary Berry and Joanna Baillie’, examined the life writing of Mary Berry (1763-1852) through the lens of her friendship with Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) during the two writers’ later lives.  Culley discussed the processes of supporting each other as older literary women, and provided a fascinating reading of rry’s desire to leave a legacy of sorts that might inspire creative acts in other older women.   Culley’s discussion of the ‘gendering’ of the experience of old age gave an especially interesting and unique perspective on the perhaps overlooked complexity of an older woman writer’s role in eighteenth and nineteenth century literary communities.

Next up was Dr Catherine Delafield (Independent), with her paper ‘“I attempt no memoir”: Austen family values and the letter as life writing’.  Delafield examined the two-volume edition of the letters of Jane Austen published by her great-nephew Lord Brabourne in 1884 as an ‘answer’ to James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of Jane Austen (1870), and discussed how the two texts formed a dialogue on the ‘ownership’ of Austen as a figure.  As Delafield demonstrated, Austen herself has been frequently marginalised in the various attempts to write her life.

The final paper on this panel was delivered by Professor Valerie Sanders (University of Hull).  In ‘The Many Lives of Elizabeth Fry’, she analysed how women write together as editors after the subject’s death, and asked whether editors could be considered writers or collaborators.  Sanders looked at the vexed issue of family members editing other family members’ lives through the prism of Fry’s daughters’ decision to write their mother’s life, asking who ultimately ‘owns’ or ‘controls’ life-writing.

Following the aforementioned fabulous lunch, the second round of panels took place.  I was presenting on Collaborative Suppressions and Experiments, which was opened by Dr Emily Paterson Morgan (Independent) with her paper, ‘Repackaging Peacock: The Collaborative Censorship of The Life and Works of Thomas Love Peacock’.  In this compelling and diverse paper, Morgan examined Peacock’s deconstruction of his own life and explored how this potentially conflicted with the ‘repackaging’ of Peacock’s reputation by the friends who wrote his life.  In particular, Morgan highlighted Peacock’s antipathy towards biography, and discussed how Peacock’s granddaughter  Edith Nichols’ provided a ‘deceptively’ edited version of his life.

Following my own paper, Dr Jane Darcy (UCL) closed the panel with ‘Contemporary portraits of Tennyson’.  Darcy explored the conflict between Tennyson’s disregard for fame and the desire of his circle of friends who wished to record and memorialise aspects of their life with the poet.  In particular, her paper focused on the link between Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait photographs of the poet and the ‘biographical narratives’ of Tennyson’s daughter Anny Thackeray Ritchie.  This paper was a genuine highlight for me, bringing to life the unique and vivid character of Anny Thackeray in particular, complemented by some of Cameron’s stunningly intimate photographs. Darcy also drew our attention to two upcoming exhibitions of Cameron’s work to mark the bicentenary of the artist’s birth: Julia Margaret Cameron at the V&A, running 28 November 2015 to 21 February 2016, and Influence and Intimacy at the Science Museum, running 24 September 2015 to 28 March 2016.

The third and final panel I attended was Women Writing Together II, and was opened by Rebecca Shuttleworth (University of Leicester) with her paper ‘The Domestic Politics of Life-Writing: Elizabeth Heyrick, Susanna Watts, and Rewritten Identities in Dissenting 19th Century Biography’.  Shuttleworth examined the various tensions inherent in how these women chose to present their identities versus how they have been depicted by Victorian biographers, and the ways in which this contrasted with how Watts and Heyrick presented themselves as activists and anti-slavery abolitionists.

Next was Dr Amber Regis’s (University of Sheffield) paper, ‘Canine collaboration: memory, reflection, and human-animal voices in Lucy Thornton’s The Story of a Poodle (1889)’.  In this lovely and engaging paper, Regis examined how Thornton ‘made didactic use of Gaston’s [the poodle] life’, exploring the analogy between children and animals.  This is, Regis told us, the only example she knows of human-animal autobiography and biography, and she explored the concept of dog and mistress as ‘literary collaborators’.

The third and final paper was given by Dr Rebecca Styler (University of Lincoln), ‘Finding Vocation Through the Lives of Others: Josephine Butler’s Spiritual Auto/Biographies’.  She discussed how feminist and reformer Butler ‘overcame her fear of ‘unfeminine’ public discourse’ in order to lead the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act that placed her in direct opposition to the establishment of the later Victorian period.

The closing keynote lecture was given by Professor David Amigoni (University of Keele), and was titled ‘Writing Lives Together in the Darwin Family, 1804-1876: gender, heredity, and authority’.  Amigoni discussed Gwen Raverat’s memories of her grandfather Charles Darwin in Period Piece, and highlighted how those writing lives on the Darwin family conceptualised sympathy as a ‘key moral category in life writing’, particularly in how it influences readers’ perceptions.  Amigoni also discussed Nora Barlow’s publication of Darwin’s Beagle diary as a focal point in the construction of his afterlife persona.

Many thanks to the organisers Dr James and Dr North and to all involved in making this a genuinely fantastic, friendly, and diverse day!

– Lucy Johnson, University of Chester.

On This Day in 1815: William Wordsworth and a Sonnet for a Season

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This is part of a new series of On This Day posts edited by Anna Mercer.  If you’re interested in contributing to the series, please contact her on anna.mercer@york.ac.uk. We are currently looking for contributions about literary/historical events in 1816.

September’s post is contributed by Katherine Fender, who is a PhD student at the University of Oxford.

Benjamin Robert Haydon, “Wordsworth on Helvellyn”, (1842) – oil on canvas, National Portrait Gallery, London

Benjamin Robert Haydon, “Wordsworth on Helvellyn”, (1842) – oil on canvas, National Portrait Gallery, London

…I have never been so moved as I was on reading your exquisite sonnets…I must say that I have felt melancholy ever since receiving your sonnets, as if I was elevated so exceedingly, with such a drunken humming in my brain, that my nature took refuge in quiet humbleness and gratitude to God.

– Benjamin Robert Haydon in a letter to William Wordsworth, 29th December 1815

On 12th September 1815, in a letter to painter Benjamin Robert Haydon – who he had befriended on his visit to London in May-June 1815 – Wordsworth declared that:

I have not forgotten your Request to have a few verses of my Composition in my own handwriting, and the first short piece that I compose, if it be not totally destitute of merit, shall be sent you.

Close to many key Romantic figures such as Shelley, Hazlitt and Keats, Haydon had already taken a plaster cast of Wordsworth’s face on 12th June 1815 in order to make a life mask of the poet. Haydon was determined to ensure that – as Wordsworth phrases it in a later letter (of 13th January 1816) – “my [Wordsworth’s] merits as a Poet might be acknowledged during my life-time.” True to his word (albeit slightly later than anticipated), Wordsworth sent the sonnet below to Haydon a few months afterwards:

September, 1815

 

While not a leaf seems faded; while the fields,

With ripening harvest prodigally fair,

In brightest sunshine bask; this nipping air,

Sent from some distant clime where Winter wields

His icy scymetar, a foretaste yields

Of bitter change, and bids the Flowers beware;

And whispers to the silent Birds, “Prepare

Against the threatening Foe your trustiest shields.”

For me, who under kindlier laws belong

To Nature’s tuneful quire, this rustling dry

Through leaves yet green, and yon crystalline sky,

Announce a season potent to renew,

‘Mid frost and snow, the instinctive joys of song,

And nobler cares than listless summer knew.

The poem initially centres on images of comfort and plenitude: “not a leaf seems faded”, “ripening”, “prodigally”, “brightest”, “bask”. However, by line 3, a chilling wind – “this nipping air”, which spooks the speaker – heralds change. The alliteration in the phrase “where Winter wields” in line 4 – through repetition of the voiced labio-velar approximant “w” – mimics the motion and sound of the blustery onset of the winter wind referenced. Similarly, the repetition of the bilabial “b” in the stressed syllables of “bitter” and “bids” in line 6 reinforces the sharp contrast between the initial potential for gathering – the sheer abundance of autumn at the poem’s opening, highlighted by the reference to harvest – and the comparative emptiness of the winter, signalled by the expulsion of air necessitated by the bilabial sounds. Autumn invites acts of reaping, gathering, taking all inward; the coming winter promises to be cold, “silent”, “threatening”, with all warmth and growth expelled. The speaker’s choice of words hints at warfare: “wields”, “scymetar”, “Foe”, “shields”. The coming season is presented as an adversary to the landscape; it is the “Flowers” and the “Birds” that are warned to prepare for the “bitter change” that the winter shall bring.

However, the whispering wind – the “rustling” of the autumn leaves prompted by the wind, warning of winter’s imminent arrival – highlights the benefits of nature and of natural forces to the speaker. This becomes the focus of the poem’s sestet. Rather than foregrounding the landscape (as in the sonnet’s octave) by detailing its sights and its sounds, the chill in the air contrasting with the autumn sunshine, the emphasis of the sestet from its outset is on the personal, on the individual, in relation to changes in the external world. Opening with the prepositional phrase “For me” – foregrounding the human subject, the speaker – these lines invert the poem’s earlier theme of sterility, typically associated with winter, by highlighting the creative potency of the winter months. Affiliating himself with “Nature’s tuneful quire”, the “rustling” brought about by the winter wind relieves the silence of the birds and the eerie quiet of the landscape for the speaker.

This could, perhaps, be seen as a metaphor for Wordsworth’s own frustration at not having been able to produce as much writing as he had wished to during the preceding summer months. The poem, though set in September, was not in fact penned until December of 1815, when Wordsworth sent it (together with two others, “November 1, 1815” and “To R. B. Haydon, Esq.”) to Haydon. In the accompanying letter, of 21st December, he begins:

My dear Sir,

I sit down to perform my promise of sending you the first little Poem I might compose on my arrival at home. I am grieved to think what a time has elapsed since I last paid my devoirs to the Muses, and not less so to know that now in the depth of Winter when I hoped to resume my Labours, I continue to be called from them by my unavoidable engagements.

Wordsworth informs Haydon that the poem offers an account of a “still earlier sensation which the revolution of the seasons impressed me with last Autumn”. It seems that the sharp, stinging effects of the “nipping air” and “frost and snow” are rejuvenating ones for the speaker, the noun phrase “green leaves” connoting growth, life, potential, bolstered by the phrase “a season potent to renew”. The phrase “instinctive joys of song” suggests that it is these – the joys of song, poetry – which can be revived by the change in season.

In the final lines of the poem, the speaker implies that there is greater creative inspiration to be found in times of adversity than in those of calm and comfort, the latter state conveyed through the phrase “listless summer”:

                                               …this rustling dry

…and yon crystalline sky,

Announce a season potent to renew,

‘Mid frost and snow, the instinctive joys of song… [ll. 10-13]

In The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth (1993), Jared Curtis speculates as to whether the “nobler cares” described relate to Wordsworth’s concerns for Dorothy – specifically, his anxiety about how, given her fragile state of health, she would cope with the bitterly cold winters of the Lake District.

The final word of the poem is a crucial one. End-stopped, and constituting the last beat of the final line of the poem, the sense of finality we may expect is instead replaced by an echo of “renew” in line 12. Rather than simply rhyming with line 12, the last word of line 14 is a homophone of the second syllable of “renew”. Thus, a seasonal and textual end marks a new intellectual and artistic beginning: it is a reminder to create.

Fittingly, the poem was itself recreated. Unsurprisingly, the text was revised by Wordsworth – as well as reprinted in various publications – multiple times. It was published in the magazine Examiner on 11th February 1816, and subsequently appeared in both The Advertiser and, just a week later, Wordsworth’s local paper, the Westmoreland Advertiser.

The publication of the poem in Wordsworth’s local paper seems appropriate given that, like so many of his other poems, “September, 1815” foregrounds the important of locality and community. Firstly, emphasis is on the perception and experience of the external world – the sensory, and the grandeur of nature. Then, the focus shifts to the speaking subject’s personal, emotional and psychological response to it. This is what Geoffrey Hartman has described as “a summons to self-consciousness”: the poet is alone with the landscape.[1] Such a process leads to acts of imagination, whether of recollection or innovative creation. Finally, the speaker turns to consider broader concerns and “nobler cares” – about community, society, faith and family. As David Ferry has observed, and as Frances Ferguson has helpfully phrased it:

Wordsworth learns from his love of nature a love of man that is a love of the idea of man – and that is, in turn, again a love of nature.[2]

For Wordsworth, acts of introspection induced by one’s surroundings afford a depth of thought – and feeling – that in turn engenders nobler cares and even greater imaginings.

Plaster cast of William Wordsworth’s life mask by Benjamin Robert Haydon (1815). National Portrait Gallery, London

Plaster cast of William Wordsworth’s life mask by Benjamin Robert Haydon (1815). National Portrait Gallery, London

Works cited: 

[1] Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787-1814, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 29.

[2] Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation, (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 125.

2015 Hazlitt Day School

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Please see below for notice of this year’s Hazlitt Day School, which will take place in London on October 10th.  As usual, some excellent speakers.

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William Hazlitt

The 2015 Annual Hazlitt Lecture and the 14th Hazlitt Day School will this year be dedicated to Hazlitt’s journalism, and will take place at University College London on Saturday 10 October 2015.

The Annual Lecture, entitled ‘Hazlitt’s Political Hatred’, will be given by Kevin Gilmartin of the California Institute of Technology from 4pm at the Gustave Tuck Theatre, UCL. Attendance is free of charge.

The Day School precedes the Annual Lecture from 9.30am and provides a rare opportunity for readers and scholars of Hazlitt to explore a whole range of topics relating to Hazlitt and Journalism, as well as to meet each other and exchange ideas. Ian Haywood will give the opening lecture, and shorter papers will be delivered by David Higgins, Lucasta Miller and Ruth Livesey. A small fee applies for the admission to the Day School (£20/£15) which includes morning coffee, lunch and afternoon tea.

After the Annual Lecture, the day will conclude at the Marlborough Arms, Torrington Place, in close proximity to University College, from 5.30pm. For more details, please see the attached flyer or visit www.ucl.ac.uk/hazlitt-society.

CfP: Haunted Europe, Leiden University, 9th-10th June 2016

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Please see below for a Call for Papers for an exciting-looking conference on Europe and English-Language Gothic, which will take place in Leiden next June.

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Call for Papers

Haunted Europe:
Continental Connections in English-Language Gothic Writing, Film and New Media

9 – 10 June 2016
Leiden University, The Netherlands

Keynote speakers:
Professor Robert Miles (University of Victoria)
Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck – University of London)
Professor Tanya Krzywinska (Falmouth University)
Lesley Megahey (director of the BBC film Schalken, the Painter)

The Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) invites proposals for papers that address continental connections in English-Language Gothic Writing, Film and New Media. The aim of the conference is to explore the representation and function of continental European cultures, peoples and nations in English-Language Gothic culture from the 1790s to the present. While the first wave of British and Irish Gothic fictions developed and solidified the idea of continental Europe as a fitting setting for Gothic Romance, little sustained research has been done so far on the ways in which the function and representation of the continent in English-language Gothic culture has developed and changed since the seminal first-wave fictions, and to what extent these developments and changes have had an impact on the formation of British and Irish but also Australian and American national, cultural and individual identities, for instance. The ongoing debate in British politics and society concerning the possibility of an EU referendum in 2017 seems to warrant a scholarly investigation concerning the reputation and representation of continental European culture in Gothic fiction. Such political realities underscore the topicality and relevance of the conference theme, and suggest that now is the right time to explore how, why and to what extent Gothic representations of continental Europe have played a part in the long, complex an often difficult (love/hate) relationship between Britain, Ireland and the European mainland, as well as the still often noted “special relationship” between Britain and the USA. Paper topics can include, but are not limited to:

  • Continental Europe as a socio-political ‘other’
  • Continental magic v. Anglo-American Enlightenment
  • Continental rationalism v. British and/or American Sensibility
  • The revolutionary continent in English-Language Gothic texts
  • The bohemian continent and the British artist
  • Haunting the continent: Gothic Tourism
  • Continental landscapes and the Gothic labyrinth
  • Language barriers in Gothic story-telling
  • Visualisations of and interactions with the Continent in British and American “New-Media” texts

Please send a 200-word abstract, including a working title and brief CV to m.newton@hum.leidenuniv.nl.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 November 2015.
Notification of participation: 21 December 2015.

Two Hundred Years Ago Today: The Lakers celebrate victory at Waterloo (and Wordsworth almost messes it up)

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(This is part of a new series of On This Day posts edited by Anna Mercer.  If you’re interested in contributing to the series, please contact her on anna.mercer@york.ac.uk.)

1280px-Skiddaw_engraving_by_William_Miller_after_Turner_R513

Skiddaw, engraved by William Miller after J.M.W. Turner (1833).

On the 22nd of August 1815, Robert Southey sent the following passage to his friend Grosvenor Bedford for insertion in the Courier:

On Monday the 21st of August, a bonfire was kindled on the summit of Skiddaw in honour of the Battle of Waterloo, the capture of Paris, & the surrender of Buonaparte. It is the first time that any public rejoicings had ever been held on so elevated a spot; & the effect was sublime to a degree which none can imagine but those who witnessed it. A great concourse of people were assembled; inhabitants of the country who had never performed the ascent before, going up on this occasion. {Large} Balls of tow & turpentine were set on fire & rolled down the steep {side of the} mountain. Rule Britannia, & God Save the King were sung in full chorus round the bonfire, accompanied by various wind instruments. The healths of the Prince Regent, the Duke of Wellington, & Prince Blucher were drank over a bowl of punch, each with three times three, & the healths were announced to the vale below by the discharge of cannon from the summit. The company partook of beef roasted & plum pudding boiled on the spot. Among the persons present were Lord & Lady Sunderlin, Miss Barker, Mr Southey & Mr Wordsworth with their families, Mr James Boswell,  Mr Ponsonby,  Mr Fryer  &c &c &c. They began to descend by torch light about ten o clock; & on reaching Keswick at midnight the festivities were concluded by a display of fireworks, & the ascent of a fire balloon on which were inscribed the names of Wellington & Waterloo.

It was intended to have made this commemoration on the birth day of the Prince Regent, but the state of the weather prevented; & early on the morning of the 13th some disorderly persons stole up & consumed the materials which with unprecedented labour had been collected there. No carts had ever before been carried to the summit.

Southey’s official account of the festivities balances the scrupulous reporting of the toasts drunk and the company present with accounts of a considerable number of instances of things being set on fire (the blazing balls, the summit-top cannons, the fireworks, the fire balloon).  This was a celebration which blended propriety, license and sublimity, as the personal part of the letter to Bedford which follows Southey’s report makes clear: ‘Oh that you had been with us! The night was very fine, & the track of fire which we left behind us from our streaming flambeaux, had a strange appearance at the town. The scene on the summit itself was one of the wildest imaginable, […] we formed a wide circle round the finest bonfire I ever saw, or probably ever shall see, & round us was a circle of utter darkness; – for our light fairly put out the rising moon.’  The victory at Waterloo was a cause for intellectual celebration for the more conservative inhabitants of the Lakes (there is no room in this account for people like William Hazlitt, who, on hearing that Napoleon had been defeated, turned temporarily to drink and despair).  However, the end of a war that had raged with only brief interruptions since 1792 also called for more visceral kinds of release, and even in Southey’s relatively restrained account for the Courier, the sense that the ascent was an excess which expressed both joy and relief comes through.

The poor weather on August the 13th and the theft of the supplies for that abortive ascent was not the only hitch which the Skiddaw celebrations faced.  In his letter to Bedford, Southey goes on to recount a mistake of Wordsworth’s which almost brought the festivities to a grinding halt.  Southey obviously enjoyed this story, as when he wrote the next day to his younger brother, Henry Herbert Southey, he expanded the account with a series of literary embellishments:

The only mishap which occurred will make a famous anecdote in the life of a great poet if James Boswell after the example of his father keepeth a Diary of the sayings of remarkable men. When we were craving for the punch, a cry went forth that the kettle had been kicked over with all the boiling water! Colonel [Mary] Barker as Bozzy named the Senhora from her having had the command on this occasion, immediately instituted a strict enquiry to discover the culprit, from a suspicion that it might have been done in mischief, – water as you know being a commodity not easily replaced on the summit of Skiddaw. The persons about the fire declared it was one of the Gentlemen, – they did not know his name, – but he had a red cloak on: & they pointed him out in the circle. The red cloak which (a maroon one of Ediths) ascertained him – Wordsworth had got hold if it, & was equipped like a Spanish Don, – by no means the worst figure in the company. He had committed the fatal faux pas, & thought to slink off undiscovered. But as soon as in my inquiries concerning the punch I learnt his guilt from the Senhora, I went round to all our party, & communicated the discovery, & getting them about him, I punished him by setting up singing a parody in which they all joined in – Twas you that kicked the kettle down! twas you Sir you!

One can imagine that Wordsworth was none too pleased about the singing.  Fortunately, the company found a solution to the water problem which preserved the bonds of social privilege:

The consequences were that we took all the cold water upon the summit to supply our loss. Our Myrmidons  & Messrs Rag & Co had therefore none for their grog: they necessarily drank the rum pure, & you who are Physician to the Middlesex Hospital are doubtless acquainted with the manner in which alcohol acts upon the nervous system. All our torches were lit at once by this mad company, & our way down the hill was marked by a track of fire from flambeaux dropping their pitch, tarred ropes &c. One fellow was so drunk that his companions placed him upon a horse with his face to the tail, – to bring him down, – themselves being just sober enough to guide & hold him on. Down however we all got safely by midnight, & nobody from the old Lord of 77 to my son Lunus is the worse for the toil of the day, – tho we had were eight hours from the time we set out till we reached home.

Archives Spotlight: Papers of Anna Eliza Bray (1790-1883)

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We’re very happy to be able to publish a piece by Holly Wright of the West Sussex Record Office exploring their recently-catalogued archive of materials relating to Anna Eliza Bray, which promises to be a really great resource for Romanticists.

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Papers of Anna Eliza Bray (1790-1883)

The papers of 19th Century author Anna Eliza Bray have recently been catalogued at West Sussex Record Office and are now available for researchers to access. The catalogue can be viewed via our Search Online facility at http://www.westsussexpast.org.uk/searchonline/.

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Frontispiece of Anna Eliza Bray’s book The White Hoods (Bray 3/2).

Anna Eliza Bray (formerly Stothard, neé Kempe) was born on 25th December 1790 in Newington, Surrey and died on 21st January 1883 in London. She was originally destined for a career in the theatre; however, this endeavour was cut short as she fell ill days before a much anticipated performance at Bath’s Theatre Royal in May 1815, and subsequently lost the opportunity to appear on the stage again. The archive contains letters from this period between her mother, her brother Alfred John Kempe (the antiquarian) and theatre directors from Bath and Cheltenham.

In February 1818, she married Charles Alfred Stothard (eldest son of the Royal Academy artist Thomas Stothard) and her first book was published in 1820 entitled Letters written during a tour through Normandy, Britanny and other parts of France in 1818. This publication would establish her as a writer and advance her into the literary circles of her day, acquainting her with such notable figures as Sir Walter Scott, Amelia Opie, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, John Murray and the most influential character in her career, the Poet Laureate Robert Southey. Her husband died shortly afterwards in a tragic accident on 28th May 1821, when he fell from a ladder in Bere Ferrers Church in Devon while drawing the stained glass window. In 1822, she married Reverend Edward Atkyns Bray and moved to Tavistock Vicarage in Devon; shortly thereafter her next book Memoirs of Charles Alfred Stothard was published in 1823. The West Country became a significant influence on her writing and it was during her life in Tavistock when most of her literary output was accomplished, including her most well-known work A Description of the part of Devonshire bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy, published by John Murray in 1836. This was a 3-volume descriptive account of the history, customs and folklore of West Devon, the idea for which was first suggested to Mrs Bray by Southey in 1831 and later published as a series of letters she had written to him on the subject. It proved very popular and was reprinted in 1879 in a two-volume edition. Other works included a well-received 10-volume set of historical novels, another travel book entitled Mountains and Lakes of Switzerland, biographies of Thomas Stothard and the composer George Frederick Handel and a children’s book entitled A Peep at the Pixies. After her husband’s death in 1857, she moved back to London and continued to write well into the 1870s, editing and publishing her late husband’s sermons and writing further books on French history and Devon folklore.

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Letter to Anna Eliza Bray from Letitia Elizabeth Landon (Bray 1/1/7).

This archive will, no doubt, be of great interest to Romantic scholars as it contains over 100 letters from Caroline Southey, the second wife of Robert Southey, with whom Mrs Bray was first acquainted in 1840. This correspondence continued over a period of 14 years, which is even more remarkable when considering the fact that they never ended up meeting one another. Not only did Caroline Southey write frequently of her husband and his children, but some of the earlier letters also refer to other Romantic-era figures including William Wordsworth and members of the Coleridge family.

Letter to Anna Eliza Bray from Caroline Southey written after Robert Southey’s death (Bray 1/3/26).

Letter to Anna Eliza Bray from Caroline Southey written after Robert Southey’s death (Bray 1/3/26).

There is also ‘Mrs Southey’s Narrative’, a biographical piece written by Caroline Southey in 1840 regarding her courtship and marriage to Robert Southey, copied by Mrs Bray’s niece from the original manuscript. Other correspondence includes letters from the poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Charles Cuthbert Southey and Edith May Warter (nee Southey), son and daughter respectively of Robert Southey and his first wife Edith Fricker. The most unusual and unique items in the collection are undoubtedly three locks of hair belonging to Robert and Caroline Southey, given to Mrs Bray in 1854.

The archive also contains a wealth of correspondence, travel journals, a scrapbook of drawings and watercolours, printed books and numerous draft manuscripts including the 3 volume manuscript of her autobiography, published posthumously in 1884. This work includes an account of the visit made by Robert Southey and his son Charles to Tavistock Vicarage in December 1836 as well as transcriptions of his letters to Mrs Bray. There is also a handwritten poetry book dating from the early 1820s which belonged to Mary Maria Colling, a maidservant and amateur poet from Tavistock. Mrs Bray bestowed her patronage upon Mary and privately published a selection of her poetry in 1831 entitled Fables and Other Pieces in Verse. This publication also included letters written by Mrs Bray to Robert Southey who assisted in gathering together many notable subscribers for the book, including John Murray and William Wordsworth.

BRAY MONTAGE

Two of Anna Eliza Bray’s travel journals of Cornwall and North Devon (Bray 2/3 and Bray 2/11).

I will be presenting a talk on the Bray archive at West Sussex Record Office in Chichester entitled ‘A Peep at the Pixies’: exploring the life and literary archive of Anna Eliza Bray (1790-1883) on Tuesday 24th November 2015 at 7pm. Tickets cost £7.50 including refreshments, and a selection of documents from the archive will be out on display. If you would like to book a place, please contact our reception on 01243 753602.

For any enquiries regarding the collection, catalogue or the November talk please contact West Sussex Record Office on records.office@westsussex.gov.uk.

Holly Wright
Searchroom Assistant, West Sussex Record Office

All images are reproduced with the permission of West Sussex Record Office.

Review of ‘By Our Selves’: Film Screening at BARS 2015

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We continue our Romantic Imprints retrospective with a review of the special screening of By Our Selves held at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff during the conference. Many thanks to Erin Lafford of the University of Oxford for these thoughts on the film!

‘John Clare was a minor nature poet who went mad’. This statement, uttered in a crisp RP accent, is one of the most memorable soundbites from By Our Selves, a recent film release by Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair that re-traces the steps of John Clare’s escape from High Beech asylum in Epping Forest in 1841, back to his home in Northborough. An 80 mile walk reduced to ten words, which in one sense sum up the story that Kötting and Sinclair are trying to tell as much as they only begin to scratch the surface of the film’s affective and revisionary power. They become a refrain that recurs throughout the film, its frosty enunciation emerging starkly from a sonic patchwork of birdsong, muttered snatches of Clare’s poetry, letters, and journal entries, folk music, the haunting strains of Mary Joyce (played eerily by performance artist and poet MacGillivray), traffic noise, the whir of wind farms, telephone conversations, ominous murmurs of ‘doctors’, and the rustle of a dancing straw bear.

It is the soundscape, mixed and edited by Philippe Ciompi with music provided by Jem Finer (of The Pogues fame) and David Aylward, which is most immediately arresting in By Our Selves. With the skeleton of Clare’s journey from Essex there as a loose structure for each scene, sound becomes one of the most prominent tools for capturing the disorientation and delusion suffered by the poet and subsequently offered out to the audience. One scene close to the opening of the film shows Clare, played here by Toby Jones, in a clearing within Epping Forest. He stumbles across the forest floor and gazes about him as snippets of sound fade in and out – voices, snatches of music, the crackle and fuzz of reverb, some fleeting lines from ‘I Am’, are all blended into each other with the effect that poetry, language and meaning become a messy background noise at the same time as every snap and twang calls out for attention. Kötting seems to want to retrain our ears in these opening scenes, overturning the precise diction of ‘John Clare was a minor nature poet who went mad’ with a more anarchic wash of noise that resists such a neat narrative and therefore tests the boundaries of what this madness might have been, and how we might receive it now.

 

 

Ever since Harold Bloom dubbed Clare the ‘Wordsworthian Shadow’ in The Visionary Company (1962), there has sometimes been a critical tendency to hold the two poets up as each other’s antithesis. It seemed fitting, therefore, that on Saturday 18th July the biennial BARS conference held at Cardiff University offered two afternoon excursions – one to the Romantic ruins of Tintern Abbey, the other to Chapter Arts Centre for a screening of By Our Selves. This year’s conference theme, ‘Romantic Imprints’, resonated with the motives behind the film. Clare’s journey from Essex to Northborough has become its own kind of imprint on the landscape it covered, traced and re-traced by those who wish to experience the route he trod first-hand. Sinclair’s psychogeographical memoir, The Edge of the Orison (2005), takes up Clare’s walk and, along with the poet’s own account, is the main textual influence behind the film. By Our Selves is constantly alive to the relationship between image, place, and text; this is no straightforward dramatization of one of the most notorious episodes in Clare’s biography, but a self-conscious attempt to recycle and rework the written material through sound and image. Sinclair appears periodically as a goat-masked figure, haunting Clare by reading excerpts from By Himself, an edition of the poet’s autobiographical prose. Alan Moore reads ‘I Am’ from a selected works and also comments on his own graphic novel, Voice of the Fire (1996), in which Clare is a prominent figure. Simon Kövesi, a prominent Clare scholar at Oxford Brookes University who Kötting has dressed in a boxing robe and gloves (a reference to Clare’s own boxing obsession), is interviewed about his own critical essay on Don Juan and, in the midst of conversation, points out a mis-transcription in the edition of poems Sinclair is holding (Matthew Allen has been cleaned up as ‘Dr Bottle Imp who deals in wine’ rather than the original, and more derogatory, ‘urine’). Clare does not just wander silently, but on occasion sits at an anachronistic typewriter or is engrossed in a modern-day boxing magazine.

Such layering of textual responses to and editions of Clare’s work within the film has the effect of destabilizing any idea of textual authority on his journey, even his own. Indeed, the film’s title, By Our Selves, is, as Kövesi also discusses in his essay in the accompanying book, a pluralistic extension of By Himself, the title given to the edition of Clare’s autobiographical prose edited by Eric Robinson and David Powell. Kövesi suggests that this play on the original title evidences Kötting’s inherently collaborative approach to film-making, which is an ideal match for the various identities that make up Clare’s poetic sensibility, a ‘rural plural’ of influences and a fraught need for sociability.[1] The title also contains a nod to the collective process by which the film made it to production, being crowd-funded by a Kickstarter campaign. Yet the collective ‘ourselves’ can also be extended to include the layering of media that Kötting weaves together in order to bring the viewer into his hallucinatory and communal world that Clare is both at the centre and the edges of. The various interviews, textual references and vocal interjections resist offering the viewer a single, authoritative account of the Journey Out of Essex to offer instead a work-in-progress that might continue to grow and change.

Kötting’s directorial risks and innovations make this film in particular a rich site for undercutting and re-presenting that which we thought we knew and understood about Clare’s oft-cited narrative. The camera work in particular, directed by Nick Gordon Smith and operated by Anonymous Bosch, creates some wonderful moments and effects that involve the audience in experiences of delusion and disorientation. Some of the forest scenes are shot through a pin-hole camera, and their rounded, unfocussed and blurry edges echo visually a particular soundbite from Sinclair that floats amidst other noises: ‘They call this a paraphrensic delusion. There’s nothing there […] You find your eyeballs are turning into milk, completely white, no pupils at all’. In another scene, the camera has been attached to a kind of pivot so that it swings, in increasingly longer motions, between sky and forest floor, confusing the distinction between the two. We don’t know what is up and what is down, and one gets the sense that Kötting has an instinct for teasing out the more uncomfortable experiences that lie within Clare’s lines. Readings from ‘I Am’ recur throughout the film, but it is in this scene in particular that the poem’s last lines take on a feeling of bodily displacement and perceptual bewilderment: ‘Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie, / The grass below – above the vaulted sky’.

Another way that Kötting pulls us in, or perhaps pulls Clare out, towards a collective experience in By Our Selves is through the tug of family ties. He interweaves scenes of the journey with scenes of his daughter, Eden, walking on the beach and dressed to look, presumably, like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Towards the end of the film she is met by the straw bear (played by Kötting) that, until this point, has been chained to Clare as he drags it through the countryside, a disobedient attendant that could symbolize the burden of his ‘peasant poet’ status. These scenes recall Kötting’s early film, Gallivant (1996), in which he travels round the coast of Britain with a younger Eden and his grandmother Gladys, so that they might spend some time with each other in the face of their respective life-expectancies: Eden has Joubert Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, and Gladys, at 85, is coming to the end of her own life. The elegiac mixing of footage of British landscape and family interactions in Gallivant carries over into By Ourselves. Kötting has stated elsewhere that ‘my work and Eden are always linked […] she is the very fabric of my life’.[2] It seems natural, therefore, that he should use family connections in turn to explore the fabric of Clare’s. Whilst Toby Jones is cast as the silent Clare who trudges through the changing landscapes from Essex to Northborough, it is his father, Freddie Jones (also cast as Clare in the 1970 BBC production I Am) who becomes his voice, reading and stumbling over excerpts from the Journey, letters, poems, and journal entries. This temporal collapse, where two Clares inhabit the same places, is one of the most effective ways in which Kötting and Sinclair bring the old and the new together, making Clare both past and present. Another memorable line from the film’s vocal soundscape declares that ‘Clare’s asylum foretells our need for asylum. His deprivation foretells our deprivation’. This cuts to the heart of the communal impulses at work in By Our Selves, and what makes it such an arresting and intriguing piece of film-making. The collective serves also to highlight the lonely. The film makes no attempts to rehabilitate Clare’s madness and isolation, but perhaps redistribute them across different times and places so that they might be received as part of our own experience of the world.

As Sinclair suggests in the film, ‘Clare’s fantastically modern, in the sense that he adapts everything’. If we take By Our Selves not as a dramatization, nor as a reconstruction, but as an adaptation of Journey Out of Essex, then we can become immersed in the fantastic and the avant-garde element of Clare’s works that Kötting and Sinclair draw out so effectively. By Our Selves is a must-see for anyone unconvinced that Clare was just a ‘minor nature poet who went mad’.

By Our Selves will be released in cinemas throughout the UK in October 2015.

– Erin Lafford (University of Oxford)

 

[1] Simon Kövesi, ‘The Rural Plural: Andrew Kötting, Iain Sinclair and John Clare’, By Ourselves, ed. Andrew Kötting (Badbloodandsibyl and Andrew Kötting, 2015), pp. 184-187.

[2] Sophie Radice, ‘Cultureshock’, Guardian, 21 October (2006).