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