Dear all,
Our latest BARS Digital Event is now available on Youtube!
Why not visit our channel to watch a talk from Dr Yasser Shams Khan on “Tippoo Saib at Astley’s Amphitheatre”?
Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu6p2gQ2jIA
Best wishes,
BARS Digital
In December 2024 I received the fantastic news that I had been awarded a Stephen Copley award by BARS, allowing me to travel to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to explore their extensive Blake collection. As my thesis was due to be submitted at the end of March the following year, this information came at an opportune moment: offering the promise of a break from writing which would also be extremely beneficial to my research. I certainly couldn’t think of a better way to reinvigorate my PhD project as it approached its ending than immersing myself in some of Blake’s manuscripts, preparatory sketches, and completed illuminated works. It would certainly be more useful than the endless coffees, and the increasingly long sessions staring out of the window, that had punctuated my writing sessions at the time.
By mid-February 2025 I found myself walking to the Fitzwilliam in the morning sunshine, still cold but hinting towards the end of what seemed like a particularly long winter. After navigating the museum’s exhibition spaces, making a mental note to return to them at the end of the working day, I arrived at the research room. Waiting there was Blake’s An Island in the Moon manuscript, completed sometime between 1784 and 1785, which would occupy me for the first day’s research.
Some of the poems which would make their way into Songs of Innocence (1789) began in this work, including ‘Holy Thursday’ and ‘The Little Boy lost’. Blake’s earlier manuscript, however, stands in stark contrast to the pastoral quality of the Songs. An Island satirises the company the young Blake encountered at gatherings held by Reverend and Mrs Mathew in the early 1780s and is characterised by a polyphony of voices and by various references to London’s intellectual, political, and cultural life. In my thesis, I contend that the Songs are more consciously constructed than often stated, that Blake’s immersion in various visual modes as a commercial engraver in the 1780s and the pre-existence of the London-centric An Island allows us to view the Songs in a metropolitan as well as pastoral context. By looking through the manuscript of An Island in the Moon, I was hoping to find textual or visual which would provide an illuminating counterpoint to the highly finished nature of the Songs.
Strikingly, in the section where Blake articulates ‘Holy Thursday’ for the first time (via his character “Obtuse Angle”), Blake erased a significant section of the text by utilising a swirling line which, when viewed in the context of the poem’s description of thousands of charity school children descending upon St Paul’s Cathedral, evokes the idea of a crowd. Where in Songs of Innocence, Blake’s visualises the children as distinct beings, supported by the vine-like sinews of the poem’s text, the manuscript creates the sense of an indistinguishable mass. This visual transformation – the extraction of distinct individuals from a faceless crowd between the two versions of the poem – reflects in various senses my argument that Blake’s Songs stage “picturesque” snapshots of urban society which downplay their economic or social underpinning. This detail in the manuscript counterposes the visual aspects of ‘Holy Thursday’ in the Songs, undermining the self-contained quality of this later work and opening it to other textual and contextual influences.
Reading through this manuscript also reinforced how immersed Blake was in the cultural and social energies of London in the period. Unflattering references to Sir Joshua Reynolds, passing mentions of the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, and depictions of contemporary scientific demonstrations at the Royal Society all combined to reinforce that Blake’s manuscript emerged from the pen of someone fully engaged in the life of the capital. After spending hours working through the flowing lines of An Island in the Moon, I left the Fitzwilliam with a fuller sense of Blake as a figure situated in a particular time and place, whose illuminated works tell only a partial story of his engagements with his contemporary London.
After a good night’s rest (and a questionable croissant) I returned to the Fitzwilliam the next day, ready to explore Blake’s preparatory sketches for his Book of Job engravings (1823-26). These works were sketched from two sets of earlier watercolours based on the same theme, one for Thomas Butts completed in 1805 and 1806 and one for John Linnell in 1821. Blake’s later engravings differ from the original watercolours in various ways, not least in the intricate borders traced around the images themselves. In viewing these preparatory sketches, I was hoping to gain a better understanding of how the later engravings (which I discuss in Chapter 4 of my thesis) came to find their final form. Seeing these works, roughly sketched in pencil by the elderly Blake, was fascinating in itself, but of particular interest was Blake’s sketch for ‘Job and his Daughters’.
In Blake’s initial watercolour for Butts, Job sits surrounded by his daughters in an outdoor setting. In his later watercolour for Linnell, however, Job sits in a shadowy room, where we can faintly discern some artworks on the furthest wall behind him and his daughters. Blake’s final engraving, however, reveal these artworks fully, showing them to be distinctly Blakean in their composition and encouraging us to draw parallels between Job’s struggles and Blake’s life-long attempts to realise his visions artistically. The preparatory sketch of this final engraving, which I saw up close at the Fitzwilliam, represents the moment in this sequence when Blake seems to pay close attention to this back wall for the first time. This sketch, despite its apparent hastiness, represents an integral moment in Blake’s self-mythologising, it is an important iteration in a series of images tracing the power of the creative act.
After finishing pouring through these sketches, and spending lunch looking through the Fitzwilliam’s wonderful public displays, I returned to the research room to focus on Jerusalem (1804-c.1820), Blake’s longest illuminated poem. I have a particular interest in its frontispiece, which in Copy E depicts the central figure (often identified as Blake’s prophetic figure Los) as a London Watchman. The Fitzwilliam holds two alternative printings of this plate, which allowed me to explore differences between Los as Watchman in Copy E (which I discuss in Chapter 2 of my thesis) and these other renderings of the image. Strikingly, one of these frontispieces (an early printing which has an impression from Europe on the verso) retains various words which are missing from later printings. One quote, stating that Los enters the “Door of Death for Albions sake Inspired”, directly addresses the pictorial aspects of the frontispiece, a discovery which was allowed me to utilise Blake’s own words when describing the significance of this print in my thesis. After some time tracing the differences between these frontispieces, I turned to Copy H of the full poem. Although I was familiar with many of the images in this work, seeing a bound copy of it (printed in 1832 after Blake’s death) was a singular experience. Page after page of intricate textual and visual detail, often interweaving one within the other, washed over me as the day declined outside and my research trip came towards its end.
Overall, this research trip was incredibly useful in allowing me to consult rare archival works which added another dimension to my doctoral research, and which will prove immeasurably useful as I attempt to publish my findings. I would like to thank the BARS committee for making this journey possible, and to all at the Fitzwilliam Museum who were so helpful during my stay in Cambridge.
Jake Elliott is an ECR who has just submitted his PhD thesis at the University of Roehampton. His work explores how William Blake’s depictions of London reflect and resist other contemporary visualisations of the city. He has recently returned from a three-month, UKRI funded fellowship at the Huntington Library in California, and his article “Blake’s ‘Watchman’: Los and the London Police” was published in the European Romantic Review in August 2024.
Gerard McKeever is Lecturer in Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His research is particularly concerned with discourses of improvement; space, place and regionalism; and book history and material culture. His first monograph, Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786-1831, won the 2021 BARS First Book Prize. His second book, Regional Romanticism: Literature and Southwest Scotland, c.1770–1830, which we discuss below, was recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.
1) How did you come to realise you wanted to write a book about regional writing in the Romantic period?
The book emerges out of the ‘four nations’ complication of Britain that has been so fruitful for Romantic studies in the last few decades. That work has done a fabulous job of ‘devolving’ our literary history beyond a narrowly Anglocentric model, and in Scotland has shown how essential figures like James Macpherson, Robert Burns and Walter Scott must be to any useful notion of Romanticism as a literary phenomenon.
With that said, there’s a potential limiting factor implicit in the ‘four nations’ turn. In Scotland, at least, the very act of making the case for a distinctive national experience may (and sometimes does) work to suppress or flatten a more detailed sense of regional difference within Scotland.
I think that literary studies as a whole remains bound to national frameworks in a way that isn’t so true of, for example, history. We still tend to move between hyper-local individual studies of authors, on the one hand, and national canons on the other.
At the same time as we pay further attention to the colonial and the transnational, then, I’m suggesting that we also need to dig down into the regional in Scotland. Those aren’t mutually exclusive – as I try to show in my book, attending to the regional unlocks a new sense of transnational cultural exchanges, many of which were founded in regional networks of patronage and were reckoning with regional identities.
2) What does focusing on a region let us see that focusing on categories such as the local, the national or the global might cause us to overlook?
To some extent it’s just about fleshing out the sometimes quite circumscribed geography we engage with as literary scholars. Regional perspectives in literary studies tend to be limited to a select few hallowed areas (such as the Lake District) associated with canonical literary authors/works. My book pays attention to a relatively under-appreciated region and tries (as much as seemed feasible in a single book) to sketch out the heterogeneous literary field this presents.
At the same time, I do think that the scalar phenomenon of regions present some distinctive qualities here. Many of the most dynamic things happening in the literary field in Scotland in this period concerned themselves with regional distinctiveness – from Burnsian poetics to the Blackwoodian regional tale to Scott’s Waverley Novels. In quite a bit of the material I look at, the regional inhabits a strange position because it (rather than the nation) is conceived as the actual medium of collective experience. So, on the one hand, it’s presented as the container of a phenomenological sense of place, but on the other it’s a wildly imaginary construct full of irrational ideas about home and belonging.
Precisely where the regional shades into the local is up for debate, and I draw on both analytical categories at different moments in the book. But for me the slightly larger frame of the regional is more helpful than the local in trying to think about fully formed systems of cultural production that dissect the nation. The turn of the nineteenth century is the period that many accounts of nationalism identify with the rise of its modern form – famously, for Benedict Anderson, this was an effect of the proliferation of vernacular print. I don’t disagree, but what I’m saying in this book is that these same processes were also actively producing regional cultures, and those regional cultures weren’t always (or ever) merely uncomplicated subsidiary components of national cultures.
3) How did you pick Dumfriesshire and Galloway as your case study?
I was asked recently whether a version of this project would be possible anywhere in Scotland, and I think it probably would be, although you’d end up with very different books. For that reason, I’m a bit guarded about the terminology of a ‘case study’ here, because it suggests a relatively arbitrary example of something more general. For me, regional culture has replicable, general aspects, but it also manifests quite idiosyncratically in different places.
To outsiders – notably English tourists – Dumfriesshire and Galloway provocatively seemed to fall through the cracks of the available frames of reference. It was different enough to them to seem exotic and alien, but it failed to deliver certain stereotypes of Scottishness that were based on the ‘romantic’ Highlands or the major cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. There’s a sense in which the region generated (and still has today) a peculiarly regional consciousness precisely because of this perceived neither/nor condition, a kind of coherence through exclusion. That sentiment was shared by some insiders, and my book also works to recover their perspectives by tracking the evolution of print culture within the region itself. The process by which print spread outside of Britain’s major cities certainly had generic aspects, but southwest Scotland’s experience was distinctive in, for example, the very early growth of a regional periodical press there.
In general, what I’ve tried to do in the book is offer a rigorous new way of thinking about Romantic-era literary culture. But this is also what Laurence Sterne would call a hobby-horsical sort of a book in that it’s focused on a part of Scotland I know and love. I’m not shy about that even if it’s mostly submerged in the book – so much (all?) academic work is infused with scholars’ lives and interests.
4) Which are your favourites among the regional texts you examine closely in the book?
That’s easy. My favourite without a doubt is John Mactaggart’s Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia (1824), which I discuss at length in my chapter on ‘Subversive Antiquarianism’. It’s an extraordinarily weird book – think Tristram Shandy meets Robert Burns, except in an encyclopaedia (of Galloway). I’m really interested in sui generis literary works in general, and the Gallovidian Encyclopedia also has a puerile sense of humour that I enjoy.
I’m also very fond of the Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song collection edited by R. H. Cromek, notionally a collection of traditional material but (as we know) substantively authored by Allan Cunningham. One of the claims I make in the book is that we need to rethink how we talk about that book – I don’t think that the conventional narrative of Cunningham having foisted his forgeries on an unsuspecting Cromek holds water. The process seems to have been more complicated and collaborative. Perhaps more importantly, though, lots of the poetry in the collection is really good.
There’s more widely known things in the book too, notably novels by Walter Scott and poetry by Burns. But one of the interesting things about taking Dumfriesshire and Galloway as my case study is that those two, arguably the major figures in this period of Scottish literature, both emerge in slightly oblique ways. Burns was based in Dumfriesshire from 1788 but never returned to the distinctly regional poetics he had developed earlier in Ayrshire, and Dumfriesshire took on a difficult reputation posthumously as the place where he came to an untimely death. Scott’s core regional imaginary was also slightly adjacent to Dumfriesshire and Galloway, in the central Borders region around Melrose and Selkirk, although he set Guy Mannering (the period’s single bestselling novel and one of my leitmotifs in the book) as well as Redgauntlet in the southwestern area that I’m focused on.
5) What new projects are you currently working on?
There are loads of threads from this project that I might pick up again someday – I had to leave out so much material to avoid it becomes an unmanageable sprawl. I didn’t really say anything about Thomas Carlyle, for example. He’s back in Dumfriesshire at the tail end of my period writing one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century literature, Sartor Resartus. Aside from considerations of sprawl, a work like that (it’s about a fictional German philosopher) slipped outside the principal rubric of Regional Romanticism, which is looking at literary figurations of the southwest within an emerging world-system. But it does raise an interesting question about how we define a regional or national literature – whether it’s about content, authors’ birthplaces, residences, publishing houses, and so forth.
Anyway, at the moment, I’m continuing to work on Scottish regionalism in different ways – I’ve been collaborating with a colleague at Edinburgh, Professor Hayden Lorimer, on a collaborative network called ‘Scotland’s Regional Condition’ that is proving really exciting. I’m also editing the autobiographies of John Galt for Edinburgh University Press, and keeping busy co-running EDITION, which is Edinburgh’s book history and textual editing group.
Clay Franklin Johnson is the author of A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems (Gothic Keats Press, 2021). His collection’s eponymous poem was presented at “Ill met by moonlight”: Gothic encounters with enchantment and the Faerie realms in literature and culture, a conference organized by the Open Graves, Open Minds Project (OGOM) with the University of Hertfordshire. In December 2024, Clay’s poem “The Faery Wood” won the Highly Commended Award, one of two prizes given for the Brian Nisbet Poetry Award in Huntly, Scotland. His writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Rhysling Award, Elgin Award, received Honorable Mention in The Best Horror of the Year, and has appeared in publications such as Nightingale & Sparrow, The Fairy Tale Magazine, Abyss & Apex, and Gramarye, among others. Clay has writing forthcoming in Fairies: A Companion from Peter Lang, Oxford in 2025.
Clay’s contribution includes five poems (with background) and I will include links to some longer poems below the verse. We at BARS hope you enjoy these Keatsian explorations of memory, location, loss, and much else beside. And a brief reminder that we are still open for further poetical/artistic contributions to our series, which I hope will continue throughout the year!
“Keats Stone” — Brief background behind the poem:
“Keats Stone” was written on the bicentenary of Keats’s death. Besides the refrain (and epigraphs) of violets and daisies throughout, the most important inspiration behind the piece was Fanny Brawne’s sewing stone of polished white carnelian (the “love-charm”) that she gave to Keats before he left for Italy, as well as her letters that he just could not bear to read — letters which were “too worldly”, as Joseph Severn wrote. In honor of Keats, I have also included allusions (some direct quotes, written in italics) to “Ode to a Nightingale”, Endymion, Lamia, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, “This living hand” fragment, and a line from both Keats’s first known letter to Fanny and one of his last that he ever wrote (addressed to his friend Charles Brown, but very much about Fanny).
Keats Stone I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave—thank God for the quiet grave—O! I can feel the cold earth upon me—the daisies growing over me—O for this quiet—it will be my first. Violets were his favourite flowers, and he joyed to hear how they overspread the graves. He assured me that he seemed already to feel the flowers growing over him. The letters I put into the coffin with my own hand. Buried like a burning bright star beneath Elfin seas of deepest blue violets, Breathing deep to drink an Orphean sleep Of whispering enchantments nepenthean, Sibilant and serpentine, listening For liminality in quiet breathing, Coiling, creeping between each and every Melting shade of Lamian glamoury, Pouring spell-craft into a melody Captured deep within a white carnelian— A love-charm from Endymion’s brilliant queen, Love-touched with bewitcheries and love-dreams Like love-deaths from nightingale ecstasies, Sight-reading skies of opal and pearl Singing to the stars of another world Buried like a burning bright star beneath Untamed grasses of wild white daisies, Winding entwined through elfin seas Of deepest blue violets, breathing deep To drink its Lethean sleep, emerging From the glamoury of perilous shadow As dreamy ghost-paths glistening like snow, Slithering lucid and luminous Through faerie-song of silver voices, Melodies from noctilucent clouds As if the moon melted into the echo Of its own interlunar music, And the skies dripped liquid moonlight Like tears frozen and spellbound By astral visions of liminal shine Buried like a burning bright star beneath Elfin seas of deepest blue violets, Beneath ghostly paths of wild white daisies Glistening like a meadow of snow Lies in the earth a pale carnelian stone, Oval-shaped, a fragment of cloud-lightning Cradled within a hand of bone, Dry of blood but never once cold, Changed by death and decay But untouched by the quiet grave, For deep within that living piece Of feverish liminality streams Red life born from death of a single star-beam: Burning eternal as a buried love-charm Singing one song of two broken hearts Beneath violets and daisies Restless atop a poet’s grave, Rests in the earth the mortal remains Of an immortal name, for when inwrapt In the hour of crepuscular embrace Fate cut his thread of liminality, Silver-spun by incorporeal light When the Queen-Moon wept ecstasies Upon Endymion’s eternal sleep, He welcomed the air of quiet death By smiling on his own despair, grasping In his still living hand his brightest star, Brighter than bright, fairer than fair, Whispering with Orphean charm Soft words of his dying last breaths Touch has a memory: eternity. Shall I awake and find all this a dream? But when he fell into a sleep Of unapparent immortality, Slipping beneath the elfin seas Instead of into her arms, it was her Sewing-stone of polished white carnelian That captured the echoing shards Of two self-consuming stars, Tracing each shape of cold mortality Between two ever-beating hearts, Voicing their voiceless memories Upon visions of spring that never came: For if Life let two hearts divide Then may Death let love reunite Was it a vision, or a waking dream? For not even breathing deep to drink Of his Lethean sleep could unsee And forget what can never be unseen, Thus, placed lastly within his winding-sheet, Unopened and unread, were feverish Love-letters that he could not bear to read— Do I wake or sleep? No, there is no music, There is no extinguished spirit beneath, For he has journeyed far beyond the reach Of his Orphean liminality, Where her loving last words are too worldly For a heart that once loved with otherworldly scars: His whose name was writ in water And captured by the stars.
“Lines Written by Moonlight at Whitby Abbey” — Brief background behind the poem:
“Lines Written by Moonlight at Whitby Abbey” was, like the title suggests, mostly written in situ during a full moon at Whitby Abbey, or “in the wild”, to go with one interpretation of your theme. It leans more toward the Gothic, tinctured heavily with a Draculaean sort of influence (not surprisingly), but it somewhat “lightens up” near the end, so to speak. The main influence that I want to highlight here was my beloved dogs, both of whom I lost within a year of one another. As an animal lover who has never got on well with people, their deaths had a profound influence on my life and writing at the time, and for years after.
Without going into too much detail (it’s still difficult to write about), one year after I lost my chocolate lab, Blue, I was living abroad and on a particularly fine day in Nottinghamshire I found myself at Newstead Abbey. This was no accident, for besides my interest in Byron, my foremost desire was to visit Boatswain’s Monument, to honor both my Blue as well as Byron’s own beloved dog. So, first thing in the morning, I walked directly to the monument and paid homage to the memory of my dear Blue, then, after wandering the grounds for some time, returned to pay my respects to Boatswain. However, as I wandered the gardens that afternoon, I received news from back home that my dear basset hound, Anna, had died. Thus, unexpectedly and in a sort of tragic coincidence, I made one final visit to the monument.
Lines Written by Moonlight at Whitby Abbey “Full of the dark resolve he took his sullen way.” —Thomas Warton Within the shadows and madness of Night, Where each whisper floats upon moon-silver And soft voices breathe upon me like ice, I wait impatient for Her haunted eyes, For Her look of poetry without words That speaks to me Keatsian without verse, Without living warmth, touched by the cold hand Of Death, sick with suicide-whisperings Lingering on each disembodied breath, Listening deeply I hear no sweeter mystery I thus breathe in each poisonous thought, Each sugary strand of silent silver, Ice-mists of cold enchantment, frosted moon-glow, Wreathed upon my throat like an amulet Of whispering witch-crystal, awakening My eyes to the night-creatures of moonlight: The skeletal-fingered bat, slithering Things of opal serpent-scale, eyes of white, And the silent shadows of the night-wolf, Dripping living rubies for the blood is the life And yet, as I trace each silent shadow, Each deathless whisper of cold persuasion, Floating on each silver-slithering beam Shimmering with dreams of waking illusion, I am consumed by Her frozen witch-flames, Consumed by moonlight, each creature of Night, And as I absorb Her deathly light, I too Feel myself absorbed,—changed—metamorphosed By Her all-intoxicating madness, Beloved to all that is shadowful and strange My eyes at once embrace this change, alive Yet unalive, living yet death-dreaming, Moon-changed until ice-stones become my eyes, Yorkshire-frosted like ghost quartz, crystalized, Capturing the death-sparkle of black moonstone— Raven feather black, corpse-black, a black ice Consuming my flesh like witches’ frostbite: The creeping Night inspiring death to all life, Until only a beam of cold moonlight Tracing the traceries of Gothic stone remains alive And yet it does not live, it does not breathe, It has no eyes and thus it does not see— But something exists, something watches me, A pale ghost-light, a shadow lingering, Capturing the cold night-glow of moonlight, The frosts of midnight, dark ephemeral Fleeting as Night’s transience immortal: Yes, It is the night eternal, the darkness, It is the spirit of night-existence Watching without eyes Its children of the night As It watches, I feel Its cold gaze, I feel Its seduction and I again change: My eyes, still silvered, materialize, Appear before me like eyes of corpse-light, A self-reflection of the demon-self, The face behind the glass, pale and grave-cold, Captured as magic-lantern necromancy, Sapphire-flames of the plague-dead, the death-fires, Dancing as phantasmagoria ghost scenes Blending two phantasies of one reality These ghastly eyes, moon-spun with gossamer Thread of glowing decay, are my very own, And yet, not my own, too pale, much too cold As if plucked by the skeletal fingers Of Death, ripped and torn out like vile jellies Of living sapphire, living emerald, Taken from the light and given to Night— She, Her, It, the Darkness, the true Night Spirit, Possessing my once warm and living eyes Within a single beam of haunted moonlight Then, from a passing shadow of night-mist, Glistening wet like vitreous black opal, Fleeting by upon a floating ghost-cloud Carrying each color of pestilence, There came a change: within the imprisoned Beam of moonlight, and around those ghastly, Still-watching eyes, there appeared a strange face, Yet familiar as it took shape in the mists, As if gazing into polished moon-glass And finding the gaze of my own self-eclipse The incessant, never-ending windchill Of the North Sea’s ever-deepening cold, Gathering its breath for eternities, Where even Death exists with frost in its bones, Was nothing to the ice I felt when that face Materialized, for I knew it was mine, Like those ghastly eyes, ever watching me— And yet, still anguishing with self-regret, I felt a cold peace pierce my still-living heart And I closed my eyes to this beautiful night-world I open my eyes and find the night changed: No longer do I see those ghastly eyes Watching me in that haunted beam of moonlight, Nor that face,—that face—a self-reflection Of all the calms and comforts of the grave— No, I see myself now captured within A moon-shadow, colder than its beams of light, Between two Gothic arches of intricate Stone-craft, and beneath the many-petalled rose, Lying still in the silent darkness, my eyes closed I have now self-possessed that hideous thing Imprisoned in that most singular beam, But, as I examine each familiar Feature, I realize a beautiful truth: My flesh is not grave-cold, nor touched by decay, But instead glows otherworldly glacé, Ethereal silver, a cold eternity Touched by Night’s incurable moon-cancer, Eating away each living impurity Until Death has left its pale immortality As I look with new eyes, in macabre Curiosity, I realize a new change: The night-creatures exist in a new light, Living in harmony as any life— The bat, no longer skeletal-fingered, Caresses the midnight-air with leathered Softness, and the opal-scale slithering Of the serpent now glistens amethystine, Crescents noctilucent, emerald-rich, And vivid eyes of azurean argent The night-wolf, most beloved of all, dissolves Into ghosts of my beloved dogs lost: I see my chocolate Blue watching me With his sublime eyes of otherworldly fire, Joyous, amber-like, wild as volcanian light— I remember these eyes, always and ever, For once they closed, and closed forever, Holding him in my arms as he died, They would come to haunt my each and every night, But now they live again, with all joy of living light And my droopy-eared hound, Anna, freckled With patches of cream and soft brown, cow-like, Whom I lost while I wandered heart-broken At Boatswain’s tomb in honor of my Blue, Missing my last chance at one last good-bye, Now greets me again with her same languid Yet ever-loveable curiosity— And thus Night reveals another secret: The silent shadows, ever watching me, Have been my faithful friends, ever waiting for me Within the shadows of Night, I exist Only as a haunted beam of moonlight, For the shadows are no longer silent, And each whisper sings within me a sleep- Persuading melody—but I cannot sleep, I cannot die, nevermore to close my eyes Upon all that is shadowful and strange, For to Her there is no death, there is no change, And no more each night do I listen deeply, For I now hear Her, and I hear no sweeter mystery.
“The Queen of the Night” — Brief background behind the poem:
“The Queen of the Night”, besides being a poem about the night-blooming cereus and nocturnal pollinators (the long-nosed bat and sphinx moth, in particular), was very much inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft’s brilliant Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), hence the epigraph, and also by all the wonderful creatures buzzing about the area where I was living at the time that summer. Each day brought the constant hum of the annual cicada (most around the area had green eyes), while by night my yard was aglow with the “flickering ghost-lights of fireflies”—sometimes at twilight I both heard and saw a particular kind of owl. Strangely enough, Mary Shelley wrote of a similar experience in her notes to Percy’s poetical works, which somewhat influenced the second stanza of my poem:
“By day, multitudes of ephemera darted to and fro on the surface; at night, the fireflies came out among the shrubs on the banks; the cicale at noon-day kept up their hum; the aziola cooed in the quiet evening. It was a pleasant summer, bright in all but Shelley’s health and inconstant spirits…”
The Queen of the Night “Is not this the witching time of night? The waters murmur, and fall with more than mortal music, and spirits of peace walk abroad to calm the agitated breast. Eternity is in these moments. Worldly cares melt into the airy stuff that dreams are made of.” —Mary Wollstonecraft How enrapturing is the night Whose darkness breeds eternity, Whose voice of immortality Speaks to me within dreams divine, Othering me with ecstasies Of incorporeal light A noctilucent glamoury Lures me to its vespertine life: Flickering ghost-lights of fireflies, Bioluminescent blue ghosts Alive and luciferous; The green-eyed cicadae, rising From a grave-like sleep to sing In swarms of unburied crypsis; And the cooing aziola, The watcher owl, watching For what waits in the fading light Seduced by night-music, nocturnes Of unseen bewitchments, hypnotized By wandering will-o’-wisp light And its illusions of movement, I trace its aerial secrets Into the thickening darkness, And as I creep deeper, deeper Into the sylvan night, I find A lifeless flower withered white But as I watch the moon goddess Rise sublime, I gaze with wondrous Melting eyes as the lifeless flower Stirs with life, night-sick and alive It blooms beneath the moon’s Luminous gaze of lustral light Yet, under the spell of lunacy’s madness, Not even the moon can appease Such leafy malevolence— A lunar-synthesis of Orphic Metamorphosis She exists In other light liminality Diaphanously She dances With Nature’s witchery, scenting The haunted air as Her petals bloom With moon-cancer, a fragrance like Vanilla orchid touched by Phantasmal light, an aphrodisiac For nocturnal pollinators That sleep by day and wake all night: The long-nosed bat flittering In fits of nectar ecstasies, Skeletal-fingered wings glistening In echoes of light, unfurling Its demon-like tongue, numb, dripping With opium on the moon-vine, A Dionysian smile thick with pollen Catching the moonlight like fairy dust And the worm-tongued sphinx moth, White-lined, untouched by the death-mark, Unclothed by the white-witch ghost Whose sole frailty is deathlessness, Yet possessed by fay-wingèd night magic Of the owlet enchantress black witch, Swing-hovering the opening petals In fear of what waits with death’s kiss: In illuminated darkness She blooms, Unveiling a pale, tendrilled creature— On a single night Her white spider renewed, Lustrous and twisted in delicious solitude How enrapturing is the night Whose darkness breeds eternity, Whose voice of immortality Speaks to me in dreams divine, Othering me with ecstasies Of incorporeal light, And as I gaze deeper, deeper, Ascending into visions sublime, I melt away into the darkness And become one with the night.
“My Mélusine Illusion” — Brief background behind the poem:
I am including a fragment (five short stanzas) from my long poem “My Mélusine Illusion”, which is rather Shelleyan in nature and Coleridgean in spirit (see epigraphs to understand that allusion). The piece
itself is a bit mad, to be fair, but beyond the stanzas of somewhat hallucinatory madness, as well as the
literary elements of folklore and legend, it is essentially a metaphysical retelling of the faery Mélusine’s story written in a more positive light. However, the 4th and 5th stanzas below were directly inspired by
lines 47-67 of Keats’s Lamia. The Mélusine of my poem is still a sort of Keatsian femme fatale of
glamourie and spell-craft, but written from a more feminist perspective.
A fragment from “My Mélusine Illusion” Ascending deeper, deeper Into her abysmal deeps, Between the liminality Of an Orphean dream I see, with other seeing eyes, Her visionary unseen — Stranged by sea-change My eyes open to the sublime, Divined, imparadised In visions of luciferous light And there I found Her, (Or was it She who found me?) My darling faery Mélusine, Once worshipped as the Faerie Queen Or some immortal deity, Unlimited, everlasting, An undefined divinity, She was born to find Her own eternity In metamorphosis divine The daughter of faery Présine And the king of Albany, She was never meant to haunt The haunted woods of Coulombiers, Or be a whisperer of dark Like Mephistophelian lies, She is no unknown tower ghost, Alone, forgotten, lost, Known only by its haunting cries No, She is no coiling Lamia Who warms a mortal soul With silver serpent-scale, Glistening amethystine With noctilucent crescents Of venomous green, viperine, An emerald-rich arsenic Cancerous-sick to the kiss, Ruinous as Castleton bleu Fracturing in mercurial blooms The gilt-golden ormolu, Breathing illusion and lies Upon those beguiled By snake-charméd eyes No, She is no snake sorceress, She is no devil of the forest, No seductress water-nymph Inspiring fits of nympholepsy, No poisonous sea-witch bubbling Potions of Circean ecstasy, No illusory fata morgana, No phantom, no shadow, No fairy-tale monster, And She is no demon-lover Who, with wicked arts, charms The artless by enchanted fountains, Reflecting a Narcissean charm In glamouried waters bleu-jaune, Illusioned upon magic lands Of faery castle Lusignan
“Ghosts of 1816” — Brief background behind the poem:
I was hesitant to include this poem for it was written years ago and I no longer write in this more formalized, rhyming structure; however, the piece was indeed inspired by that “haunted summer” of 1816, and it certainly goes with one interpretation of your theme “in the wild” since a part of it was written at Villa Diodati (on the publicly accessible grassy knoll next to it, that is) during my Frankenstein-inspired travels of 2016.
Ghosts of 1816 “My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me...I saw the hideous phantasm...and I wished to exchange this ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around...the dark parquet...the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond. I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me.” —Mary Shelley, Introduction to Frankenstein (1831 edition) Deathlike beneath the cold ray of the moon Bathing in its sinful silver-white shine; Enshadowed in the distance as my gloom- Teased eyes glean over one last sanguine line, Reading by moonlight in wickedness divine. Teeming now with thoughts that God may impugn, I pour the perfumed peridot, And set imagination loose In the opalescent louche, Raising the unhallowed arts in poetic woe. The sky told a story that haunted me As the galvanized air lit up with light; It was a tempest meant so fittingly To raise Death’s shadowy forms of delight. And yet who could say that this dreary night Did not console the ghost-gleamed literati? The livid hues and shades of death Inspired the spark of creation, Infusing life with re-animation To thick my lab-maddened blood with its stifled breath. My dark imagination murmurs in Subtle numbness, a drowsy sense among Sour smells writhed in softened yellow-grey skin As moaning escaped its mold-flowered tongue— To the galvanometer I now clung, Watching its death-plucked eyes and wrinkled grin. The drops of the ice-cold drip Releases the ethereal spirits, Creating dew-frosted ringlets From a pontarlier I now lovingly sip. As I drink I think of Ariel sails, Sleepless gossamers toward my blonde-haired harlot; Her cerulean blue eyes bring back tales Of her sinister-sweet lips, dark scarlet, Made for the tear-soaked attic of my Gothic Charlotte. The poetry of swirling herbal trails Presage my dark seduction: The green anise that did benumb My tongue as a bitter drop of laudanum Brought forth my faery-borne glitter-eyed abduction. Suddenly, in a conscious memory, Solemn, serene, in mysteriousness I gazed upon the ice of Chamonix; Cheating despair in moonless wilderness, Musing and anxious in the calm darkness Upon the peak in awful majesty. Discovering undiscovered solitudes On this wind-swept edge—one more step, never, Yet I wished to fall, and fall forever Through swift vapors in Nature’s breathless altitudes. Dark vibrant colors begin to take me, Jade and emerald gems, light golden hues, Fragrant oils released, death-white and ghostly, With blood reds, Veronese greens and lush blues— An aesthetic paleness in herbal dews Stirs the madness in chilling melody. The licorice sweetness I crave Of delirium and nightmares, Beckoning for other-worldly cares From the enviable qualities of the grave. This elixir of life brings back my ghosts To roam freely in imagination; Visions of the spectre-barked dead that toasts To solemn delights of putrefaction As breasts with eyes watch with satisfaction. Bitter wormwood, its herbaceous taste boasts Of what its poison does to a sweet face, Twisting in Nature’s poetic madness, Brooding over Her loveliness That the sallow effects of Death will one day grace.
Links to longer poems / Conclusion
“The Fires of Ecstasy at Samhuinn”
The piece was inspired by Edinburgh’s Samhuinn Fire Festival that took place atop Calton Hill on 31 October 2018, which, of course, also happened to have been Keats’s birthday (his writing was in mind during the composition). Besides certain imagery taken “in the wild” during the ceremony, the poem has a more mythological influence. I am also attaching the illustration to the email, which represents the metamorphosis of the goddess Brìghde (associated with spring) into the blue-skinned Cailleach (from Old Irish Caillech, “veiled one”), also known in Scotland as Beira, Queen of Winter — this metamorphosis is essentially the very essence of the poem.
“The Hecatean Ides; or, The Dark Spirit of Shelleyan Solitude”
This piece is a bit complicated and perhaps overly esoteric, so I won’t go into obscure detail — I’ve
already written you quite an eyesore of background notes as it is (my apologies for that). I will only add
that it was heavily influenced by Shelley (Laon and Cythna, Alastor and Prometheus Unbound, most
especially), as well as the mythology of Diana of Nemi, and, oddly enough, my wanderings at Castle
Howard in Yorkshire.
Thanks for joining us once again for another Romantic Poets in the Wild. It’s poetry month now (cruelest month, Wordsworth’s birthday, et cetera) so we hope you’re out there reading, writing, and thinking about poems. Join us next time for the photography of Will Sherwood! (and maybe a surprise or two along the way)
Friday 25th July 2025
In 2004, a special issue of Romanticism on the Net brought together existing work on queering Romanticism and proposed a list of suggestions for how such scholarship might expand.1 Despite this, work on queer Romanticism continues to be difficult to find, although a great amount of work is being done which might broadly be called queer due to a focus on liminality, non-normative genders and transgressive sexualities. This symposium on Queer Romanticism aims to bring some of this scholarship together and create a dialogue around what constitutes Queer Romanticism today. It presents an important opportunity for connecting scholars in what is currently quite a disparate field. Indeed, queer approaches to Romanticism can be found within existing scholarship on the Gothic, gender, empire and orientalism, and class, to name but a few.
Whilst participants are very welcome to offer their own definitions of queerness – especially as it relates to Romanticism – we suggest as a starting point Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s definition of queerness as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically”.2 Such a definition encompasses both historical and biographical work on queerness, as well as more textual or theoretical approaches. It also allows for research on Romantic genders and sexualities which may not consider queerness as a primary focus, but which nevertheless challenge heteronormative essentialisms in important and interesting ways.
1 Michael O’Rourke and David Collings, ‘Introduction: Queer Romanticisms: Past, Present, and Future’, Romanticism on the Net, 36–37, 2004, doi:10.7202/011132ar.
2 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Duke University Press, 1993) p.8.
Suggested Topics for Papers:
We invite proposals for short papers of around 10 minutes on any topic related to Queer Romanticisms. Please submit an abstract of up to 200 words and a bio of up to 100 words by 30th April 2025 using this form: https://forms.gle/wApBQ7729ZDukyGX7
If you have any questions or wish to propose a panel (3-4 papers) please don’t hesitate to contact Rebekah Musk: r.musk@lancaster.ac.uk.
On behalf of SWINC (Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century), you’re invited to join us for a research seminar exploring Scottish and Irish Gothic on Friday 11th April 2025, from 14:00 to 18:00 in 50 George Square, Room 1.06. To register for the event, please use our Eventbrite page here.
For further details, feel free to visit the SWINC website. We hope to see you there!
The British Association for Romantic Studies is delighted to announce that the 2026 International Biennial Conference will be held at the University of Birmingham. The theme is Romantic Retrospection. The in-person conference will take place between Wednesday 29th and Friday 31st July 2026, with additional online elements held around the in-person conference.
Romantic Retrospection
29th-31st July 2026
The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston Campus, UK
Delegates will be invited to interpret and explore ‘Romantic Retrospection’ from multiple angles, covering a set of concerns that are fundamental to our understanding of the period: pasts personal, local, national, and cultural; vision and revision; allusion and influence; change and conservation; the reception of earlier literature by Romantic writers; and post-Romantic critical and creative responses to the era that shaped the modern world.
The conference will offer the usual panels alongside specially convened workshops and roundtables; subjects for the latter are likely to include textual scholarship and editorial methods, and a reassessment of Romanticism via the legacy of William Wordsworth’s Thirteen-Book Prelude, uncovered by University of Birmingham lecturer Ernest de Selincourt and published in 1926. Delegates will also be invited to submit their own ideas for special events that respond to the theme of retrospection in critically imaginative ways.
Transport
The University of Birmingham Edgbaston campus is very well connected: the University station has frequent links to Birmingham New Street in the city centre, and Birmingham International Airport is approximately 30 minutes away by either train or car.
Call for Papers
The CfP will be issued in summer 2025, with acceptances sent out by the end of the year.
Contacts at The University of Birmingham: Jessica Fay, Andrew Hodgson, Matthew Ward
The opportunity afforded by the 2024 BARS Open Fellowship dovetailed with the incubation year of a new initiative called The Race and Regency Lab and its first project “Trust in the Archives.” Before I outline how the fellowship supported this work, I want to note that at each stage the BARS Open Fellowship has been generative. The application process was a useful opportunity to move from a vision for the Lab to a concrete plan. Winning the award lent important scholarly credibility to the project and has been essential in securing funding for future collaborations. Reflecting on the work the BARS Fellowship helped fund in 2024 has been especially helpful during a time when the values that inform the Lab are under attack in the United States. The BARS Open Fellowship supported a series of dialogues that served multiple communities and provided financial support for graduate students assisting with this work. Its impact extends beyond 2024 into the Lab’s work in 2025, specifically a seminar on Cheryl Harris’ contribution to Critical Race Studies and its importance to eighteenth and nineteenth-century studies.
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The BARS Fellowship supported my efforts to recalibrate my service to the profession and the public. After more than ten years of coordinating and leading workshops, giving talks, and consulting with departments and colleges to put the research from my edited book Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure to work towards institutional change, I wanted to develop new spaces for thinking about the cultures and ideologies that underscore racial formations. I wanted to connect what I have learned from my diversity work to my research and public writing about Regency-era culture in order to better serve people in and beyond the academy. I believe that communities, and not just experts, make meaning, so I aimed to bring activists, artists, cultural critics, curators, fans, and scholars of color together to reexamine and reimagine how race operates in the Regency era. The Race and Regency Lab’s goal is to serve a set of interconnected communities that includes the general public and educators of all kinds–museum professionals, librarians, and teachers. Its mission is rooted in bell hooks’ assertions about the margins and marginality. In her essay “Choosing the Margins as a Space of Radical Openness” hooks writes about the possibilities to be found for those who occupy subject positions outside of hegemonic centers:
I was not speaking of marginality one wishes to lose—to give up or surrender as part of moving into the center—but rather of a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.
bell hooks
The Lab’s inaugural year focused on how to develop new critical spaces while embracing the notion of radical margins in a series of interlocking activities: listening sessions, opportunities supporting scholars of color, and the project “Trust in the Archives,” a multi-institutional collaboration that focused on new acquisitions at the John Carter Brown Library. The BARS Open Fellowship supported these activities. It also provided research support for an intern funded by the Boston University Center for the Humanities and funded a research trip for the Norton Classic edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park I am currently preparing.
“Trust and the Archives” was organized by an international team of art historians, curators, historians, and literary scholars. We began with a shared understanding that the archive is primarily an edifice of whiteness that reflects its desired users. Sculptures, paintings, portraits, photos, statues, busts and friezes, pamphlets and brochures, maps, catalogs, as well as the faces of staff, and other researchers signal to people of color that the archive is a place designed by and for white users. All of this impacts both who has access to the archives, their experience working with staff and leadership, and how they use its materials. Our goal was to address practices of exclusion. During a planning retreat sponsored by the Scholarly Communications Institute in October 2023 we worked on clarifying the Lab’s mission and our goals for the incubation grant we won from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. We developed a three-year plan and discussed strategies for collaborating with programs and institutes. We planned an event that would contextualize two new John Carter Brown Library acquisitions—”Plan of a Section of Belvidere Estate,” and the first American edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park—and officially launch The Lab on September 13, 2024. We also planned the seminar series to re/reread Cheryl Harris’ Whiteness as Property.
Over five listening sessions that took place during the winter and spring of 2024, the Lab brought together regency fans, critics, curators, and scholars to think about how we can build meaningful connections. Leigh-Michil George (Scholar of 18th and 19th century literature and teacher, Geffen Academy, UCLA) Amanda- Rae Prescott, (freelance entertainment journalist) and Vanessa Valdéz (historian, curator, editor) helped plan and facilitate these sessions. They included discussions about decentering academic hierarchies, maintaining safe spaces where pleasure and expertise can co-exist, discussions about the ethics of collaboration, and the importance of sharing resources. In one listening session, Caroline McCaffrey Howarth (Lecturer History of Art/ Programme Director, Global Premodern Art, The University of Edinburgh) spoke to New Jersey museum curators and administrators about her work at the Victoria and Albert Museum bringing a diverse community of young people into the museum to engage materially with objects in its holdings.
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As a co-editor of the Oxford University Press series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literatures and Cultures, I was thrilled to collaborate with the Folger Institute on a pilot project for a manuscript workshop. One part of the Lab’s mission is to develop the work of scholars of color by providing the kind of support that tenured faculty, especially those at well-resourced, research-focused institutions, have access to. The series’ focus and the Folger Institute’s goals overlapped in generative ways for this project. The Folger is committed to expanding engagement with the library’s archive beyond its Shakespeare-related holding and seeks scholars whose work reveals how race operates in the early modern period; the series is interested in work that brings together critical work on the material and intellectual histories of race in the long nineteenth century. In May of 2024 we hosted a two-day manuscript workshop of Patricia Lott’s (Ursinus) book-in-progress with readers: Kimberly Brown (Dartmouth), Jasmine Nicole Cobb (Duke), and Lara Cohen (Swarthmore).
From June through August 2024, Boston University Center for the Humanities intern Constanza Robles completed researched for a project that provided context for the JCBL acquisitions. Constanza is completing her doctorate in Art History. Co-supervised by Joseph Rezek (Associate Professor of English and recent Director, American & New England Studies Program, Boston University) and myself, she spent the summer reading and researching for the project “Visualizing Property: A Virtual Exhibition.” Funds from BARS allowed Constanza to travel from Boston to New York City where completed research for the exhibit and met with Iris Moon, Associate Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The two discussed methodological approaches to curation that deals with empire and history.
In September 2024, The John Carter Brown Library hosted the launch of the Race and Regency Lab. As I explain in my summary of the day, the launch brought together a diverse, interdisciplinary group to discuss the significance of Plan of a Section of Belvidere Estate and Mansfield Park. As part of the day’s events, which were livestreamed, Constanza shared her exhibition with attendees. We were particularly thrilled to learn that Juliet Wells (Professor, Department of Visual, Literary, and Material Culture, Goucher College) has included the virtual exhibition as a resource for further information in her forthcoming edition of Mansfield Park for Penguin Random House.
Our plan for a reading seminar focused on Cheryl Harris’ work was revised in response to interest from Amelia Worsley (Associate Professor of English, Amherst College) to co-host the project and an invitation from Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 (SEL) editor Amy Huseby (Senior Lecturer, Rice) to edit a special issue of the journal focused on how Critical Race Theory shapes the way that pre-1900 scholars think about culture and history. With funding from Amherst College and SEL, Amelia, Kim Hall (Lucyle Hook Professor of English, Professor of Africana Studies, Barnard), and I are co-convening a reading series that brings twelve people from England, New Zealand, and the United States together to think about Harris’s work. We have been in dialogue via Zoom with one another and will meet with Cheryl Harris via Zoom over the summer. This seminar will culminate in a series of public events in Amherst over three days in October with roundtables, a book event, and a public forum featuring Cheryl Harris. In 2026 a special issue of SEL featuring work by seminar members will be published. BARS funds have supported Constanza’s work as rapporteur for the seminar.
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The BARS Open Fellowship has provided more than simply funds for these projects, though that has been essential in myriad ways. It allowed me to reflect on the ethics of bringing people of color together to discuss difficult histories and was an opportunity to clearly articulate to potential partners why material support is essential to this work. In rethinking the margins, hooks points not only to the possibility of radical reimagining but the importance nourishing one’s capacity to resist. I have thought carefully about what that means. As I sought funding for the Harris seminar, I argued that it has often been the case that institutions seek the input and work of people of color in support of diversity and equity initiatives. This work, I explained, is challenging in many ways. In the first place, it requires additional emotional energy as we are often writing about traumatic conditions at the very same time as we are encountering them. It exposes us to intense and sometimes targeted blow back. Further, this work cannot happen in an academic vacuum, but inviting activists, community organizers, fans, and freelance scholars, to share their thoughts without providing material support is exploitative. Finally, my goal is to ensure that everyone who joins the Lab for its projects leaves feeling revitalized and valued rather than depleted. The BARS Open Fellowship has been key to providing time and support to think through what this looks like intellectually, politically, and materially with a focus on community building.
Patricia Matthew
Patricia Matthew is an Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University and specialist in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. She has edited and co-edited journal issues (Romantic Pedagogy Commons, European Romantic Review, and Studies in Romanticism); the edited volume Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press, 2016); and is co-editor of the new Oxford University Press series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. In addition to publishing in academic journals, she has written about Regency, race, and popular culture for The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Times Literary Supplement. In 2020-2021 she was a Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar at SUNY Buffalo, and in 2022-2023 she was the Anthony E. Kaye Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Her forthcoming work includes the Wondrium/audible.com lecture “Pride and Prejudice in the 21st Century.” She is currently writing a book about Britain’s sugar boycott, gender, and abolitionist culture for Princeton University Press and editing Mansfield Park for The Norton Library.
You can find Patricia’s university page here, and her personal website here.
Cultivating Connections: Research Opportunities at the Royal Horticultural Society Plant Collector Archive
Workshop: 10.30-3pm, 12 May 2025.
RHS Lindley Library, 80 Vincent Square, London
This one-day workshop seeks to raise awareness among humanities scholars of the rich archival holdings at the RHS. Further details are in the attached Pdf, but the key points to note are that this event is a literal workshop: participants do not need to prepare anything in advance. On the day, we will look at selected early nineteenth-century materials from the RHS archive and discuss them together. The overall aim is to develop ideas for future research and public engagement projects, and funding applications.
We can pay travel expenses (up to c. £150). Interested participants just need to email a short description of their research interests and a CV or brief bio to Sarah Easterby-Smith by 11 April (ses22@st-andrews.ac.uk).
Call for Papers
We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers on all aspects of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, their contemporaries and the Romantic period. We also welcome proposals on all topics related to Romantic period culture and literature and likewise welcome panel suggestions of 2-3 papers).
Papers that identify a bicentenary Wordsworth theme linking the 1820s to the 2020s will be welcomed and, as the 1820s was a productive decade, possible topics might include the Duddon Sonnets and Topographical Description (1820), Vaudracour and Julia, A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes (1822), Memorials of a Tour on the Continent (1820), Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822), Poetical Works (1827), and the Galignani Poetical Works (1828). Further themes for papers might include Dorothy Wordsworth’s writings in the 1820s, the Wordsworth family in the 1820s, the natural world, industry, steam power, and Wordsworthian travels in the 1820s.
Please note that participants presenting papers must attend as full participants for either all of Part 1 or all of Part 2, or the whole ten-day conference.
Papers should not be longer than 2750 words.
All proposals for papers, bursary applications (and references, if applicable) should be emailed by 25 April 2025 to
Regular participants:
200-word proposals for papers of no more than 2750 words, together with a brief autobiographical paragraph, unformatted, should occupy no more than 1 side of A4 in MS Word format. Please remember to include your name, institution and e-mail address on the abstract. Please do not send proposals as a PDF file as they will be copied into a composite MS Word document.
Bursary applicants:
Your application should be in the form of a Word attachment (not PDF) containing a paper proposal of 300 words, together with a short unformatted cv in the same file, the entire application being not more than two sides of A4 (the file will be copied and pasted into a composite file, so please avoid elaborate formatting). Applicants should also arrange for a short letter of academic recommendation to be sent independently to the same email address (see above) verifying the applicant’s academic status and country of residence. Candidates need not specify which bursary they are applying for. They will automatically be considered for any bursary for which they are eligible. **Please be sure to identify your e-mail as ‘BURSARY APPLICATION’**.
Please note that we may award a bursary without having space to include the proposed paper on the conference programme: such papers may, however, be ‘taken as read’, that is, made available in print form at the conference, if the proposer so chooses.
Remember: paper proposals, bursary applications and references should be submitted by 25 April 2025 to proposal.wsc@gmail.com.