Dear blog,

So as the sun shines I sit inside and try to write. I’m sure that everyone’s feeling resentful about the glorious weather outside and the fact that we still have to work… I’ve been trying to write my conference paper this week for the ICHSTM conference to be held here in Manchester (http://www.ichstm2013.com/). It’s the most enormous event, with about 1600 delegates, and a whole suite of sessions on science and literature. I had spent a few days in the Royal Institution archives recently, researching my paper about whether there is evidence of an interest in poetry during the early days of the RI, and I came up with loads of interesting stuff from the General Managers’ Minutes and the Annual Reports. I’ve established that there were significant numbers of lectures on ‘non-scientific’ subjects from very early on in the Royal Institution’s existence. I’ve got lots of data: what the lectures were on, who gave them, how much they got paid, how much money they brought into the RI etc etc. I looked into the people who gave the lectures and have found some reports of them. I just don’t have many conclusions to draw from this, other than, that 1) in some years there are even more lectures on non-scientific subjects than scientific subjects, and that 2) it seems as though Davy had a hand in the whole enterprise. Neither of these are going to set the world alight.

Oh well, I can’t spend longer on the paper because I have to get on with writing my article for the Routledge Critical Debates book on ‘Romantic Transformation’. My hunch is that transformation is used as a metaphor in a number of arenas, political, literary and scientific in the early nineteenth century. In fact, I’ve already found it being used in chemistry, geology and physiology. Transformation means that the essential thing itself remains intact but is changed in shape or form: this would fit the idea of a revolution. It’s not that there are new things involved, but that the old thing has changed its form or appearance. Some transformations are specifically monstrous too. I’m still formulating my ideas on this and now its time for some more reading…

All best,

Sharon