Monthly Archives: January 2012

Footnotes and Findings

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Dear blog,

I’ve had an interesting day today mostly writing my chapter on Davy (there was an initial hour and a half spent fielding emails of course). Things I have found out today: according to Joseph Cottle (Bristol publisher of the Lyrical Ballads), Davy gave him a copy of James Currie’s Life of Burns before he left for the Royal Institution. This is an interesting text and it’s no real surprise to know that Davy knew of it, though I’m not sure how to read the significance of his giving it as a gift. Nigel Leask, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, and Jane Darcy have all individually written really great essays about this book, which presents Burns as an archetype of the medical theories of surgeon John Brown and the philosophy of David Hume, and which have been explored for their influence upon Wordsworth’s ‘Advertisement’ and ‘Preface’ in the Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge even went to visit James Currie in July 1800 and Davy’s gift of the book reasserts its importance to this circle. I need to mull this over some more.

I’ve also thought again about the fact that some of Davy’s books are published by the radical dissenter Joseph Johnson. This places him in a politically radical circle when he moved to London; there’s nothing new in that, but William Godwin’s diaries show that he continues to attend Johnson’s dinners (perhaps only sporadically) into the 1800s. Davy dines there even in the year of Johnson’s death in 1809. You can see this and lots of brilliantly interesting detail about who William Godwin saw, dined with and read during his life, as well as information about his various medical ailments and treatments online now at: http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Tantalizingly, there’s evidence in a letter dated 1 January 1800 that Coleridge undertook some negotiation on Davy’s behalf for the publication of ‘a Volume’ with Longman, though it is impossible to tell whether this might be a volume of poems. He tells Davy ‘you may of course begin printing when you like. All the tradesman part of the Business Longman will settle with Biggs and Cottle’ (Letters, i, 556). This follows the pattern of other books produced by this circle, including the Lyrical Ballads, which was printed by Biggs and Cottle in Bristol for Longman. Thomas Longman began buying Cottle’s copyright in 1800 after he had retired from business (DNB).

So, it’s been a day of research and footnotes, which I quite enjoy to be honest. I also have a larger argument for the whole chapter now, which I’m trying out to see whether it works.

In other news, I was pleased to hear that my paper has been accepted for the British Society for Literature and Science conference (http://www.bsls.ac.uk/). The conference is in Oxford in April. I’m getting a bit nervous now about the coming semester, where on top of my teaching, I’m giving no less than six research papers (two in Oxford, also in York, Leeds, Edge Hill, and Sheffield). At least I have had a bit of time before term started to develop the ideas that I’m planning to present.

All best,

Sharon

Christmas books and a New Year seminar

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Dear blog,

It’s back to work then after the Christmas break. It was the North-West Long Nineteenth-Century seminar on Wednesday 4th January at the City Library in Deansgate. The speakers were Alan Rawes (University of Manchester) on ‘The Triumph of Life’s “compelling rhyme schemes”’, Deaglan O’ Donghaile (University of Salford) on “Oscar Wilde and Empire”, Paul Craddock (London Consortium) on ‘Transfusion and Vital Principles in the Early Nineteenth Century’ and Gary Butler (Manchester University) on ‘Rightful Places and Useful Places: The John Rylands Library and the Place of the Book in Late-Victorian Manchester’.

I enjoyed Alan’s paper hugely; it was lovely to get back to thinking about Percy Shelley’s last poem ‘The Triumph of Life’ and Derridean approaches to the poem. I haven’t thought about this stuff since my PhD really. Shelley is so suggestive for deconstructionist readings (there are some wonderful essays by Paul de Man, Tilottama Rajan, J. Hillis Miller) and I’m always left thinking that Shelley himself would have been interested in what these readings achieve. My colleague, Deaglan, gave a taster of the new research he’s been doing at the Clark Library in California on Oscar Wilde. It seems that Wilde was a closet (and not so closet) Feenian and his political statements and connections were teased out in Deaglan’s paper. Paul spoke about James Blundell, who is widely credited with performing the first successful blood transfusion in 1818. Paul argued that the instruments developed for such operations suggest a belief in a vitalist understanding of life, where it was the quality or essence of blood that needed to be replaced rather than an exact quantity of blood. It was a shame that for Gary’s paper we weren’t in the John Rylands Library (which were were in October last year) since he focused on the light fittings in this building, arguing that they demonstrated a deliberate aesthetic ideology on the part of Mrs Ryland. The Rylands Library is such a beautiful building and Gary’s talk made me keen to pay more attention to the detail of its construction. I urge everyone who can to go to see it, and visit the standing Treasure’s exhibition, as well as they historic reading rooms (http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/deansgate/).

Over Christmas I read some brilliant books: Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot is such a thrill for those of us who love books, especially Austen and Gaskell, as we as the literary theory of Roland Barthes. I was bought a few beautiful Persephone Books as Christmas presents (http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/). This press publishes neglected women writers of the twentieth century. I read The Victorian Chaise-longue by Marghanita Lanski, a brilliantly chilling tale about a modern, new woman of the early twentieth century who taking a nap on a chaise-longue wakes up to find herself inhabiting the body of a Victorian woman. The novel sets itself interesting parameters: the lead character can think but not articulate ideas and objects that have not been invented yet (penicillin, washing machines, automobiles) and which would prove that she came from the future. Her dawning realization that the TB she is suffering from is fatal in the Victorian period is truly scary.

Exam season starts on Monday and I’ll be marking for the next few weeks though I’m hoping still to get some work done on my book. More soon…

All best,

Sharon