BARS Blog

Goldney Hall, Bristol

I arrived in Bristol on a rainy Sunday. Fortunately, the summer weather soon returned and by Monday morning on the 29^th July I was in the beautiful surroundings of Goldney Hall, Clifton, feeling thoroughly inspired by the talks at the conference on ‘Romanticism and the South West’. It was a day that reminded me just why a non-sentimental evaluation of the significance of place for Romantic authors is so important. As the conference blurb explains:

The South West is sometimes no more than a tableau for Romantic writers, a wild region of myth and mystery, exciting because so different from the urbanity of London. But for other writers the region is essential to their writing, less a concept than an active element in how they thought and wrote.

The day was organised by Ralph Pite and his doctoral students and colleagues. The conference incorporated a wide range of papers on both established and lesser-known connections between the Romantic period and the South West (including Bristol, Devon, Somerset, and South Wales). There was a clear focus throughout on well-researched discoveries of connections, on crucial insights and on the appreciation of the texts written by the authors discussed. There were some fantastic readings of poetry given in detailed context revealing just how important this area of the world was for the Romantics, and still is to the study of Romanticism.

The conference’s legacy is embodied in an exciting new app called ‘Romantic Bristol: Writing the City’. This can be found on Apple’s App Store and downloaded for free (just search ‘Romantic Bristol’). The app features an interactive map of Bristol locations associated with Romanticism. If you allow the app to see your location, the app will also ‘supply GPS data […] to a secure database in the University, that will show users’ pathways through the environment, their choices, preferences and explorations.’ This will allow researchers to ‘study how people choose to walk through a city, with raised awareness of its history and culture but not following a guidebook track’. I’ve already had a go: it’s easy to use and full of detailed information about the city and its links to this period in history.

The first plenary talk at the conference was by Nick Groom, and he discussed the Bristolian writer Thomas Chatterton as a Gothic/Romantic author but not in the traditional sense of Walpole’s Gothic; instead he considered Chatterton in the context of the Gothic of antiquarian political/social history (therefore less the Gothic of medievalist terror). This was an interesting reading of the poetry Chatterton wrote as he began his (albeit very short) poetical career in the West Country before moving to London.

The panel following this considered ‘Landscape and Verse’: Adrian J. Wallbank discussed S T Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and the Valley of Rocks near Lynton, Exmoor. Could this ‘desolate’ landmark have been a vital inspiration for the astounding imagery in that poem, written during Coleridge’s residence in Somerset? Sites like this in the West Country allowed Coleridge to explore his study of science (it being a natural phenomenon) and also his interest in the supernatural. Wallbank’s talk was taken from a chapter that will appear in the forthcoming book Romantic Sustainability. A joint paper by Catherine Boyle and Phil Vellender followed, discussing the materiality of P B Shelley’s verse: in particular his sonnet ‘On Launching Some Bottles Filled with Knowledge into the Bristol Channel’. There were some fascinating close readings here, as after considering the early materialism in Shelley’s poetry (in contrast to his later immateriality), Boyle and Vellender considered the concept of the Romantic sonnet and the links to Leigh Hunt’s writing circle, and Shelley’s experimentation with poetical forms. Sue Edney concluded the panel with a discussion on Chatterton and William Barnes. She considered ‘semantic redundancy’, the purity of language as a suitable medium for classical expression, and the paradox of Romantic ideas of purity and the Gothic. Her talk also included prose from Ruskin and concluded with Coleridge’s stunning lines from ‘Frost at Midnight’, composed of course, at Nether Stowey, a small town less than 40 miles from Bristol, and the birthplace of Lyrical Ballads:

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God

Utters, who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Attention to the Gothic and landscape in this panel conjured up the image of the South West as a wild, untameable place, and a definite contrast to London.

The afternoon plenary talk (after an al fresco lunch in the stunning gardens of the venue) was by Tim Fulford. One of his many academic roles is editor of the letters and works of Robert Southey. Entitled ‘Oxygenating Romanticism; or, Humphry Davy goes to Tintern’, this paper considered the eighteenth-century scientific experiments in ‘vital air’ or oxygen and how this corresponds to stimulation as a factor in poetic inspiration: i.e. inspiration revitalises the mind of the poet, and ‘over-stimulation’ and ‘under-stimulation’ were considerations in the progressions of health science. Fulford considered Humphry Davy’s excursion to the Wye and his experiments with a eudiometer. In going to Tintern Abbey, Davy wanted to back up Wordsworth’s enthusiastic nature-worship with objective measures – this would also validate his own poetry. Fulford reminded us that the great Romantic lyric is a creation of the 1790s in the West Country. Coleridge appeared in this paper too: in Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798’ the poet echoes Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ by being soothed in nature, a consequence of being over-stimulated by the city:

                                         And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

The two final panels entitled ‘Landmarks’ and ‘The Radical South West’ presented four more fascinating papers. Annika Bautz gave a history of Plymouth Public Library, built in 1811-13. Plymouth’s geographical location produced a need for such an establishment so that people could access key texts. Julia S. Carlson discussed Wordsworth’s ‘The Discharged Soldier’: I found this talk particularly interesting in the way in which it considered Dorothy’s role as a collaborator in 1798 and the start of the Alfoxden journal. Dorothy’s prose response to a place would later initiate Wordsworth’s developments in blank verse. John Williams continued the discussion on Wordsworth with a paper on The Ruined Cottage and the influence of William Crowe, an eccentric public orator at Oxford who wrote ‘Lewesdon Hill’. Crowe’s work referred to areas around Racedown, Dorset that Wordsworth knew well. Kerry Sinanan’s talk on John Stedman’s ‘Tiverton connections’ considered the role of irony and satire in abolitionist and anti-slavery texts, and how this links to Tiverton, a town in Devon, where Stedman eventually settled with his wife and children.

The keynote address was given by Tim Dee: writer and BBC radio producer, editor of The Poetry of Birds (with Simon Armitage) and author of ‘The Running Sky – A Birdwatching Life’. His talk, entitled ‘The Mild, Mild West’, is difficult to sum up because of its range: its content included personal recollections, an ‘album of snapshots’ attempting to capture the concept of ‘Romanticism in the South West’. As Bristol PhD candidate Rachel Murray put it on Twitter:

Highlight of @RomanticismSW was @TimDee4 keynote on The Mild Mild West, part love letter to Bristol, part elegy to the ‘placeyness of place’

— Rachel Murray (@murrayrachel89) June 30, 2015

Dee considered Bristol in a tender and engaging way as the most rurally inflicted of the UK’s major cities. Dee’s work and time spent with Simon Armitage links to Armitage’s own 2015 expedition of the South West Coast Path, documented in his book Walking Away and recently featured on Radio 4’s ‘Book of the Week’.

Coleridge was again the star of the show here, as Dee’s favourite Romantic poet. Coleridge’s ‘The Nightingale’ is the first recorded reference to a nightingale in the West Country – it is not a bird usually found in those parts. Dee has lived in Bristol most of his life, and therefore his talk included comic notes on ‘romantic’ (i.e. personal) love and affection which were very touching and clever, but he also included serious comments on the ephemeral nature of life. Dee placed emphasis on the brilliant effects one can experience if they visit a favourite poet’s former abode – such as Coleridge’s house in Clevedon where he wrote ‘The Eolian Harp’ – and how amazing it feels to be there and be surrounded by the same air as that which the poem was written in. Though Dee’s talk was very broad and touched on so many subjects, it also felt at times like we were tracing a part of Coleridge’s journey through the West Country in the years leading up to the creation of Lyrical Ballads. Dee’s talk included one of my favourite quotes from Coleridge’s notebooks, on the inquisitiveness of his first-born son, Hartley:

Tuesday – Hartley looking out of my study window fixed his eyes steadily & for some time on the opposite prospect, & then said – Will yon Mountains always be?

Overall, the day represented for me a recent focus in academia/Romantic studies on the importance of literary places – by focusing on the South West, this conference took us from Pre-Romanticism and Chatterton to Shelley and Coleridge and beyond. Don’t forget to download the app (‘Romantic Bristol’)!

– Anna Mercer, PhD Candidate at the University of York

BARS recently provided support for the Military Masculinities in the Long Nineteenth Century conference at the University of Hull, organised by Anna Barry and Emma Butcher.  We’re very grateful to Elly McCausland and Tai-Chun Ho (who were awarded conference bursaries) for the following reports on what sounds to have been a really fascinating and useful event.

—

Military Masculinities in the Long Nineteenth Century, University of Hull
20 – 21st May 2015

Day One – Report by Elly McCausland

Held to commemorate the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo, the Military Masculinities conference at the University of Hull offered a fascinating range of papers on subjects ranging from children’s literature and war trauma to heroism and Napoleonic song, exploring the multiple manifestations of the military man in the long nineteenth century and the ways in which he was appropriated, questioned and critiqued by diverse forms of literary, material, visual and musical culture.

The opening panel, ‘Heroes and Hero-Worship’, explored changing definitions of heroism in the literature of the nineteenth century and the role of choice and agency in heroic activity.  Helen Goodman from Royal Holloway began by examining the ways in which the novels of Rider Haggard promote inter-generational masculinities centred around imperial violence, suggesting that the Crimean war shaped an idiom for boyhood imagination and literary style focused on the adventures of daring heroes and the violent pursuit of animals and native peoples.  My own paper examined the presentation of adventure in Arthurian novels for boys in the early 1900s, concluding that such texts render chivalric military masculinities accessible to their young readers through the promotion of considered risk-taking, reinventing idealized masculinity as the ability to deal with adverse circumstance and the unknown.  Michael Gratzke, from the University of Hull, concluded the panel by exploring the concept of renunciation in Theodor Fontane’s Der Stechlin, suggesting that Fontane promotes heroism as the conscious choice not to act in certain circumstances.

In the second session, ‘War Trauma’, Emma Butcher from the University of Hull examined the juvenilia of Charlotte and Branwell Bronte and their surprisingly astute recognition of the psychological and domestic effects of war trauma upon masculine identity, including the role of alcoholism as a method of escaping from mental horrors.  She suggested that military masculinity presented both a coping mechanism and a liability for the men of the nineteenth century, opening up the potential for damaging physical and psychological strain.  Janine Hatter, also from the University of Hull, concluded the panel by exploring the ways in which Victorian sensation fiction, specifically the work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, destabilizes masculine as well as feminine identity through its presentation of the military man, suggesting that domestic dangers can be as potent as those on the battlefield.

Following lunch, panel three brought to life its topic of ‘Napoleonic Song’ through recorded and live renditions of popular music from the period.  Oskar Cox Jenson from King’s College London explored the use of Napoleonic song to critique the departure of the military man from his perceived role in the home, expertly performing some examples of song to unanimous applause.  Anna Maria Barry, from Oxford Brookes University, examined how the ‘unmanly’ and ‘foreign’ enterprise of opera was redeemed by British singers in the nineteenth century through its association with the Navy and patriotic military pride.  Finally, Isaac Land, from Indiana State University, offered a fascinating discussion of the ‘afterlives’ of the works of Charles Dibdin, and how they came to be associated in the later nineteenth century with a glorified age of British military excellence.  He displayed some fascinating examples of the material migration of Dibdin’s songs in the later nineteenth century, appearing on domestic objects, in Jane Austen’s songbook, and even featuring in the circus.

In the panel ‘Masculine Identity and the Home’, Tai-Chun Ho from the University of York demonstrated how Victorian writers such as Tennyson refashioned their role as war poets in the mid-nineteenth century following the Crimean War.  Responding to criticism of their ‘sitting at home at ease’ while soldiers suffered, poets begun to emphasise not their engagement with combat, but their civilian distance.  Ho offered the example of Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ being sent to the real-life soldiers of the conflict as enabling the poet to assert the legitimacy of a civilian voice.  Peter Newland from Leeds Trinity University then examined the ‘flight from domesticity’ by the Victorian bachelor, a figure who became the representative hero in Victorian adventure fiction, suggesting that factors such as the rise of the new woman (perceived as evidence of the failure of masculine authority) and a desire to escape the domestic and mundane prompted men to seek solace in the homosocial military environment of empire.

The keynote address, ‘Reparative Militarism? The Victorian Military Man of Feeling’, was provided by Holly Furneaux from the University of Leicester.  Furneaux explored the legacy of the eighteenth-century ‘man of feeling’, suggesting that these ideals were frequently developed by Victorian writers to explore the sympathetic side of the soldier, offering him as a morally reforming figure, an adoptive father and a homemaker.  She examined Victorian narratives that focused not on the physical horrors of war but re-routed awareness of wounding and suffering into narratives of preserving, nurturing and caring for the fragmented body.  The military man of feeling, she concluded, performed contradictory cultural work, endorsing healing and recuperation but also legitimizing the wars that created the need for it.  Her discussion was accompanied by several beautiful illustrations of the Victorian military man of feeling, poignantly juxtaposed with strikingly similar images from our modern military culture.

Following the keynote address, a wine reception took place in the University Art Gallery, during which we had the opportunity to examine some fascinating objects presented by Kate Compton, Activities Officer at York Army Museum, including several scrapbooks of photographs and watercolours created by British soldiers, offering a tangible insight into the interrelation of the military and the domestic in the period.

James Davey, Curator at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, delivered an insightful and engaging final talk, ‘Crossing the Line: Academia and Public Display at the National Maritime Museum’.  He emphasised the role of the museum at the intersection of academia and public history, highlighting how the recent exhibition ‘Nelson, Navy and Nation’ aims to communicate the latest in academic thinking, reflecting a recent explosion in scholarly interest in the Navy in the past twenty years.  ‘The history of the Navy cannot be confined to events at sea,’ Davey emphasized, and several of the exhibition’s key gallery stories aim to highlight lesser-known aspects of naval history, such as the diverse backgrounds of sailors, the relatively good quality of the food and drink, the relationship between the Navy, trade and the British economy, and the role of dockyards as industrial concerns and employers.  He concluded by presenting some images of British sailors from Naval memorabilia, exploring the contradictory cultural representations of sailors as womanisers and family men, patriots and mutineers, straight-talking pragmatists and easily-duped simpletons.  This assertion of the complexity and diversity of military masculinities in the long nineteenth century aptly concluded a fascinating day, during which these identities were subjected to scrutiny and discussion from a wide variety of disciplines drawing on an exciting range of cultural artifacts.

Many thanks to BARS, whose funding enabled me to attend the conference and to spend two days in Hull, exploring its military and maritime history.

Day Two – Report by Tai-Chun Ho

The second day of the conference was a resounding success and provided an example of the exciting work emerging from researchers of military masculinities across disciplines.  Notable themes running through the conference panels I attended included: civilian perceptions of the soldier, war widows, and civilian depictions of the military.

The day began with the ‘The Man Behind the Uniform’ panel, which considered the complex relation between civilians, soldiery and the nation.  Edward Gosling from University of Plymouth explored the extent to which the War Office reform from 1868 to the late 1880s helped transform public perception of the ordinary soldier.  The stereotypical figure of Tommy Atkins, he argued, was a product of a social and cultural rehabilitation.  Focusing on memoirs of the Napoleonic Wars by militia privates, Matthew McCormack from University of Northampton asked the question of whether these militiamen perceived their service as an act of citizenship.  Whilst noting that their use of generic narrative, such as spiritual autobiography, renders it difficult to assess their experience, Matthew concluded that based on their identification with a diverse yet united community, their service could still be seen as a form of citizenship.

In her fascinating keynote address, entitled ‘Village Heroes and Hearts of Oak: the cultural power of the military in constructing English masculine identity 1790-1850’, Joanne Bailey from Oxford Brookes University challenged us to think of military masculinities beyond status and power.  She did so by posing three questions: 1) What did men find appealing in representations of the military men? 2) Why did some particular strands of military masculinities so powerful? 3) How did men appropriate values of military men to construct their identities?  She argued for the interplay between emotion and material culture in constructing military masculinities in the wider society and in individuals.  In doing so, she showcased a wide variety of objects and locations, including jugs, tapestries, and cemeteries, suggesting new methodologies for approaching the subject of military masculinities.

Following the keynote speech, the ‘death and widowhood’ panel dealt with the absence of the soldier, drawing attention to the role and welfare of war widows.  Ashley Bowen-Murphy from Brown University took Virgina Bedor, who looked after her invalid husband returning from the American Civil War and managed a farm simultaneously, as a case study to demonstrate how “caring for civil war veterans challenged assumptions about dependency and masculinity in the late nineteenth-century United States.’  In a similar vein yet in a different context, Simon McNeill-Ritchie, from Cambridge University, discussed the dilemma of the Crimean War widows, entitled to the Patriotic Fund, a royal charity fund established exclusively for the families of those who lost their husbands in wartime.  His account of women’s struggle revealed the gender inequalities at the time and the slow progress of women’s rights even until the end of the Boer War.  Ruth Heholt from Falmouth University examined the ghost body of the soldier in the works of Catherine Crowe (1790-1872).  Whereas the Victorian woman is often depicted as a ghostlike, marginalized figure in literature, Heholt argued that the phantom soldier’s desire to be seen and witnessed in Crowe’s works destabilizes the male, making their bodies subject to scrutiny.

In the ‘Military Domesticity and Families’ panel, Susan Walton from University of Hull traced Charlotte Young’s knowledge of war as a daughter of the military family.  Citing Yuval Noah Harari’s theory of the sublime and ‘flesh-witnessing’, she questioned the assumption that only military men possessing combat experience lay claim to narratives of war.  Emphasizing the military traditions of the Young family both during the battle of the Waterloo and the Crimean War, she suggested that the female novelist had internalized their knowledge of war in her bestsellers.

The conference ended with a roundtable discussion, chaired by Isaac Land. Along with Matthew McCormack, Helen Goodman and Ruth Heholt, Land reflected upon the debates, recurrent themes and key questions of the two-day conference.  I would like to thank BARS for giving me the bursary to attend such an engaging, well-organised conference in Hull.