Monthly Archives: July 2010

Godwin, prizes, and PhDs

Posted on by

Dear blog,

I’m just returned from the Godwin diaries conference in Oxford and am about to go on leave for two weeks, so I thought I should update my blog before my holiday.

I really enjoyed the conference – the project has, over the last three years, made an electronic, fully searchable, and annotated version of William Godwin’s diaries, 1788-1836. You can read about it here: http://godwindiary.politics.ox.ac.uk/. Now nearing the end of the project the team asked individuals to talk at the conference about various aspects of the diary and I concentrated on the scientific and medical aspects. The diary has an awful lot to say on these matters. Godwin was very sociable and seems to have been friends with a great number of surgeons, physicians, natural historians, and chemists, including Humphry Davy, Anthony Carlisle, William Nicholson, John Aikin, and William Lawrence. His diary is also a fascinating account of an individual’s health throughout out his life and the treatments he received from the various doctors he consulted. It seems that Godwin also took the internal temperature of his house every single day for years! The diaries are a rich resource and when the electronic version is made public I urge everyone to take a look. There is a lot there for LitSciMeders.

Earlier this week we appointed someone to the AHRC-funded collaborative PhD that will be co-supervised by the Working Class Movement Library (http://www.wcml.org.uk/) and I’m really excited about that. I also read over the essays submitted to the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association prize competition (http://www.keats-shelley.co.uk/ksma%20awards.html), and there were some really very good ones. It’s a tough job being one of the two judges for the prize.

Finally, can I encourage everyone to take a look at the resources page that Cris da Costa has put together for event three: http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/learning. On this page, you can see Paul Craddock’s excellent filming from the two days, plus reading lists, slides used in presentations, and much more. The website will act as a resource once the face-to-face teaching on the programme has faded into the dim and distant past, and I do hope people find it useful.

All best,

Sharon

Joanna Baillie and Jane Davy

Posted on by

Dear blog,

I’ve been in the Mitchell Library, in Glasgow, for the past few days reading Joanna Baillie’s letters to Lady Davy. There are 29 letters and they cover a lengthy period, from 1815 to 1851, when Joanna Baillie died. Given that Sir Humphry Davy dies in 1829, many of the letters (22 I think?) are from the later period in his wife’s life. In many ways, these aren’t important letters for our Collected Letters edition; while we are presently including Jane Davy in the edition, these are letters written to rather than from her. They have also already been transcribed in Judith Slagles’ edition of Baillie’s Collected Letters.

All of this aside, they are still very interesting letters, written by an important writer (Baillie was a poet and dramatist) and contain a number of interesting bits and pieces. Joanna Baillie portrays herself as a bit of a hermit, ever grateful for the attention that Lady Davy pays her (she always uses her title). She portrays Jane as constantly in a whirl of social engagements, in the country and in town, and as someone who enjoys travelling abroad. In 1816 Baillie goes to Geneva (I wonder whether this was her only trip outside the UK?) utilising the introduction that her friend has given her to a scientific acquaintance, Pictet. Baillie writes of her disappointment in seeing Mont Blanc: ‘I wish Mont Blanc had been as gracious to me as he way to Sir Humphry, tho’ I do not pretent to be so worthy of his favours.’ This makes me wonder whether she had seen Davy’s poem on this mountain, particularly since she certainly had seen others. The letters are often homely, full of news of mutual friends, family and Baillie’s and her sister’s health. But it’s clear that Jane Davy is a far more at ease in certain social circles; Baillie talks tantalisingly of the diaries that she must have kept of her travels, writing that her views of Turkey must be as important as Mary Wortley’s.

There’s so much that I’d like to follow up from this, such as their mutual friendships with Mary Edgeworth, Lady Byron, and Mary Someville (described as doing ‘so much honour in those matters in which we are most supposed to be incapable & deficient that all her sex are in duty bound to bid her God speed! in whatever she writes.’) For now, though, I need to finish my paper for the Godwin Diaries conference due to take place in Oxford next week (http://godwindiary.politics.ox.ac.uk/conference/)!

All best,

Sharon

Event Four

Posted on by

Dear blog,

I had a great time at the third event, and so from what I’ve read on students’ evaluations, did everyone else it seems. We had twenty students at this event from a real range of institutions and disciplines, many of which had not been represented at any of the previous events.

The first day (as hot and sweaty as a day in London in July can be) was at the Royal Institution, starting with a lecture by David Knight, Emeritus Professor at the University of Durham and the author of countless books on the history of science. This was followed by a very nice lunch indeed, and then a hands-on manuscript exercise, where students transcribed pages from original texts such as James Watson’s ‘Double Helix’ and Humphry Davy’s notebooks. The activity led to lots of discussion, which I hope will continue in the discussion group set up to accompany it on the social space, where most people argued for diplomatic transcriptions of manuscript sources. Professor Michael Hunter rounded off the first day with a vigorously argued paper that instead saw merit in non-diplomatic transcriptions for printed editions. To give one example, which was I thought very persuasive, if in a handwritten manuscript, the author abbreviates a word, it is not the case that s/he intended for this abbreviation to pass into the printed version. The abbreviation (particularly ‘ye’ in Michael’s talk) can affect the way that the text is read. It was all highly interested for someone who’s spending more and more time in the company of Davy’s manuscript letters and beginning to think about how we might publish them…

Day two was spent in the gorgeous greenery of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. We had a series of fascinating and challenging talks and discussions, concerning the issues of trust in Conrad’s short stories, the social constructivisim of cartography, how different historiographies can change the way that we look at an object, and we spent some time with the paintings of William Hodges as a particular case study. Richard Dunn in the final session ran through a multitude of different ways of looking at a particular object, a sextant, from thinking of it as a status symbol to thinking about its (machine) production and marketing (it claims to be made ‘by hand’). This led into the final task where, in groups, students had to select from images owned by Greenwich to present on any topic they chose. The presentations were brilliant, especially considering the amount of time people had. I especially liked the one that concentrated on food – using the image of a dried soup cube and a ship’s biscuit – which asked us to think about ephemera and how things survive over time. This was something that chimed with the manuscripts day I thought; where we had talked about how extant manuscript sources can give a skewed sense of the past.

It was all great and lots of fun. I enjoyed meeting all the new people and finding out about some fascinating projects and am looking forward to event four in Manchester and Salford in January 2011. Over the next few weeks we’ll be updating the resources pages for event 3 and adding slides and films (courtesy of Paul Craddock!) and much, much more.

All best,

Sharon