Dear blog,

I’m in Chetham’s Library in Manchester (http://www.chethams.org.uk/), which is bloody lovely, if a bit on the cold side, though I’m sure that’s about keeping the books here in a temperature controlled environment. It’s the only place that I could find a particular edition of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Zanoni, which I need for this essay I’m writing for the Ashgate Research Companion to C19th Literature and Science. I originally downloaded the novel for free from Amazon, which I thought was pretty cool (there are loads of these kinds of novels to be downloaded for free from Amazon) but you get no sense of the edition that you are reading, no publication details, no page numbers etc etc. Probably everyone out there already knows this but I didn’t. It’s been a right pain to find the edition that I need. Another contributor to the collection has used this novel (Bulwer-Lytton has never been so popular!) and the British Library didn’t have the right one. So, I used COPAC (http://copac.ac.uk/) to find out which libraries did have it and here I am at Chetham’s, a very beautiful library, and I’m sitting just by the very spot where Marx and Engels did their research for The Condition of the Working Class in England.

I’m very pleased to have been awarded the funding for an AHRC NW Partnership training day at the Ruskin Library in Lancaster University on Weds 20th May (http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/english/events/visual-verbal.htm). We’ll be using Ruskin’s manuscripts (in their many forms) plus paintings and photographs to think about interdisciplinarity, how to do manuscript and archival work, and the relationship between the visual and the textual. I hope we get some takers for this – both AHRC-funded and non-AHRC-funded PhD students can apply. We’ll give priority to those nearing the end of their degree. I’m hoping that we’ll offer something like this every year, with a slightly different emphasis, maybe literature and science next year? The Ruskin collection is so diverse and interesting that you can use it to discuss all kinds of things.

Right, on with my essay which I have to finish by 5pm when two of my lovely colleagues have offered to read it for me. We’ve formed an ‘essay club’ so that we can read and comment on each others’ work. How ace is that!

More soon,

Sx

Dear Blog,

So, since my last post I have reduced the emails in my inbox from 105 to (currently) 18! This may seem daft but I can’t tell you how much of a relief it is to me. I once again feel some semblance of control over my life and as if there’s a chance I may get back on top of things. I’m also up to date with the reading of draft essays that have been submitted for the Ashgate Research Companion to C19th Literature and Science and have even managed to find some time to look at my own essay.

I do worry that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew for my essay which is on ‘Chemistry’. I really only know about the first 20 years of the C19th and in a 7000 word essay it would be impossible to give any kind of comprehensive sense of chemistry during the entire century. I have read some excellent essays for this collection that have done just that though — really impressive surveys of both the primary and the secondary materials on their subject. Instead, I’ve had to build parameters into my attempt to do justice to this. I’ve decided to expand the essay to take in Alchemy too since many of the literary responses to chemistry are couched as novels about alchemists rather than chemists it seems. And I’ve selected three main texts, written across the century (though, interestingly, they are all historical novels that are set much earlier than their date of publication): Frankenstein (1818), Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842), and Balzac’s The Alkahest. My argument is that the link between alchemy and modern chemistry in these novels is that both are interested in the transformation of matter and that these disciplines study (and can effect) such transformations. I have managed to get today and Friday to work on this so I’ve turned off my email and am going to get on with it. Wish me luck.

I should mention that I went to London yesterday to see Prof Frank James’s inaugural lecture at UCL, which was just wonderful. He spoke about Davy and there was lots of good new stuff in there. Frank is one of the advisory editors on the Davy Letters project and he’s been finding new letters all over the place. See the news section of our website for details (http://www.davy-letters.org.uk/) or follow us on Twitter (@davyletters), though, we have yet to send our first tweet!

More soon,

Sharon