Dear blog,

Well, I’m sitting in the common room blogging while the fire burns and others are blogging in the same room. It’s been another great day despite the changes to the programme, and we are on our final evening in St Deiniol’s before our trip to Manchester tomorrow. Let’s hope that the coach can get through the snow to reach us tomorrow morning.

This morning we had the final five presentations from our students, starting with Colin Baker. I learned that no less than 479 medical journals were launched during the C19th, and these have been unfairly neglected by critics and treated as passive ‘mirrors’ of the medical culture of the time. Colin is determined to look at these journals as an ‘active presence within Victorian society’ and I’m really looking forward to seeing the results of his study. Andrew Nightingale was next with a thoroughly enjoyable presentation on his project, a creative study of the Turing Test. The possibilities suggested were really fascinating; Andrew considered the many things he could put in the place of the machine (such as non-human animals and monsters, Mr Punch and the golem) in such an intelligence test. Rachel Russell’s PhD project asks how we understood and treated nausea and vomitting in the C19th. With particular case studies on morning sickness and seasickness, Rachel intends to look at diaries, letters and magazines, and showed some hilarious attempts to treat seasickness, such as a belt to keep the stomach in and a chair to correct the movement of the ship. Sophie Rutland is looking at a subject which is close to my own area of research interest. She’s examining the work of David Hartley, philosopher and medic, whose theory of nerve vibration was so important for the Romantic poets. Concentrating on women writers, Sophie’s work will consider how scientific theories of vitality are synthesised with religious ideas of faith. Finally Samantha Briggs gave a fascinating talk on her project, on marriage and anthropology in Hardy and Eliot. She is alive to the ways that ideas of marriage have changed over time, and intrigued by the fact that in Hardy’s novels, such as Jude, some of the characters who survive have the most pragmatic impression of marriage suggesting that the need to adapt in marriage may be a key notion taken from evolution.

Gowan Dawson gave an excellent plenary lecture, presenting the very detailed and meticulous work he has done on Richard Owen’s serialised science writing and comparing it to the novel serialisation of Owen’s good friend Dickens. Positioning this work as a corrective to the idea that the C19th was ‘Darwin’s Century’ and looking instead at suggestive relationships between literary forms and scientific writing, Gowan used his impressive book history research to map Owen’s reading of Dickens and Thackeray and suggest ways that this reading may have informed his science. The idea of constructing a whole from a part, which Owen famously managed when he reconstructed the dinornis, was likened to the adaptations of Dickens novels for the stage which apparently were staged before the series had even been published, but also to the experience of reading a novel.

Finally, David Amigoni led a workshop on ‘Literary Darwinism’ which caused much animated response. While there was general agreement in the room concerning how people felt about the theory there was much interesting debate about the ideas presented. There was a feeling that the perception of the humanities put forward was outdated and caricatured, that engaging with the debate meant that literary critics had to do so in the terms of the literary Darwinists, and that the science on which is was founded was ‘bad science’. All this was done in a measured and articulate, very polite way, but nonetheless opinions were firm.

Here’s to a most successful week so far with an exciting day ahead of us tomorrow.

Sharon