Monthly Archives: June 2010

Letters and Life Writing

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Dear blog,

As planning gears up a notch for event 3 of LitSciMed, I’ve instigated a new discussion group ‘Using Manuscripts in LitSciMed Research’, which I hope lots of people will join and contribute to.

I’ve had a busy week, which began with my giving a paper at the Institute of Advanced Studies in London on a ‘Correspondence Projects’ panel. The panel consisted of Professor Lynda Pratt talking about The Collected Letters of Robert Southey (see http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters/), Dr Paul White talking about the Darwin Correspondence Project (http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/home), and me talking about The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy and his Circle. Our Davy Letters project is very much in its infancy compared to the other two (the Darwin project was founded in 1974) and is a much smaller correspondence (Southey’s letters would run to an estimated 70 volumes if they were printed!). It was very interesting to hear about these other projects and start to think about the next questions we shall be mulling over – particularly the issue of whether we should try for an online or a print edition.

Today I spent the afternoon with the Manchester Feminist Network and thoroughly enjoyed Alison Light’s paper ‘Missing Persons: Writing a Family History of the English Poor’. Alison talked about perceptions that the past is a kind of mourning and history some kind of restitution; she noted that much family history or life writing begins with missing or missed persons. She wondered whether the proliferation of both family history and life writing suggest a morbid, deathly, museum culture – we keep going back to the past and to history in attempts to find out about ourselves. It was all fascinating and nothing at all to do with any of my research, and all the more interesting for that.

Over the next week I need to finish the special issue of Romanticism that I’m editing on Thomas de Quincey. I’ve just read Confessions of an Opium-Eater again and enjoyed it hugely. He presents himself as a kind of explorer: speaking of the alleys and passageways he discovered on his wanderings in London he writes: ‘I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terræ incognitæ’. He presents himself too as an explorer in new realms of the imagination, investigating mind-altered states of consciousness, and describing them with great relish whilst rubbishing the medical accounts of the drug.

All best,

Sharon

Periodicals training

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Dear Blog,

I urge everyone to see the two brilliant entries in the LitSciMed Film competition: http://litscimedvideocompetition.litscimed.org/film-clips/ or you can watch them on Youtube. Please do watch them and post your comments online.

We’ve had another great round of applications for event 3, with a real variety (again) of PhD topics from students in many different Universities across Britain and the world. Successful students should hear by Tuesday 8th June that they have a place and the reading list is being posted on the website as I write. Paul Craddock has already started off a discussion topic connected to event 3 on the social space – you need to click on ‘Newest’ in the Groups section of the social space and then you can join and comment.

I had a lovely time in Dove Cottage last week, with some real discoveries made on the final few days. It turns out that John Davy was the Wordsworth family doctor and there are lots of letters to and from William Wordsworth concerning the health of their daughter Dora. After Wordsworth’s death, John Davy was indefatigable in efforts to secure funds for the memorials in Grasmere and Ambleside Churches and there were lots of letters about this too. It seems that John Davy lived in Ambleside because his wife’s mother had links there and she settled there too. I need to find out lots more about his mother-in-law, Eliza Fletcher, who was an author in her own right (I need to read her 1875 Autobiography, which is clearly a text already known and studied by eighteenth-century scholars) and she was a close friend to the Wordsworths, Arnolds, and other literary families. I didn’t get through all of the material that the Wordsworth Centre have by these figures, but I guess that just means that I’ll have to go back!

This week has mainly been dominated by exam marking (finished at 6pm last night!) but yesterday I did attend the excellent ‘Periodicals Research’ day organised by two of my colleagues in English at Salford, Peter Buse and Kristin Ewins. There were some really useful workshops where we looked at the artefacts themselves, periodicals ranging from The Idler to The Illustrated London News, Plays and Players and Our Time. We considered how to read illustrations, how to find out about readerships, distribution, how to evaluate content, discover the authors of anonymous articles, and much more, under the expert tutelage of Brian Maidment and Margaret Beetham. Amusingly, the final periodical I looked at, something called Good Words, from 1879, had a serial feature on Humphry Davy, complete with a page of pictures of him and a detailed biography!  The day was attended by people from all over the North-west and from many different disciplines; it was great to be the other side of the desk again and be taught lots that I didn’t know.

Finally, we’ve had lots of interest in the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award ‘Transmission and Reception of P.B. Shelley in Working-Class Journals’ but there’s still some time before the deadline (25th June). It’s being advertised on jobs.ac.uk and in the The Guardian next Tuesday. If you know anyone who might be interested, please encourage them to apply!

All best,

 

Sharon