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News, events, and reviews
CECS at BSECS 2012
Members of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies attended the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies annual conference held January 4-6 at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. Professor Mark Hallett gave one of the conference’s keynote lectures, and a number of the Centre’s current and former postgraduate students presented papers on their research. Those in attendance (pictured) included Professor Mark Hallett, Dr. Corinna Wagner (CECS PhD, now Senior Lecturer at Exeter and Academic Coordinator for BSECS), Dr. Pete Denney (CECS PhD, now Lecturer at Griffiths University in Australia), Darren Wagner (PhD student), Dr. Alison O’Byrne (CECS PhD, now Lecturer at CECS), Adam Perchard (PhD student), Beatrice Bertram (PhD student), Dr. Jim Watt (Senior Lecturer at CECS), Dr. Mary Fairclough (CECS PhD, now Senior Lecturer at Huddersfield), Ian Calvert (PhD student, Bristol, former CECS MA student), Lucy Hodgetts (PhD student), Graeme Callister (PhD student), Ruth Scobie (PhD student), Jo Wharton (PhD student), and Harold Guizar (PhD student). Absent from photo are Matthew Jenkins (PhD student), Jacqueline Riding (PhD student), Dr. Claudine van Hensbergen (Post-doctoral Research Assistant on the AHRC-funded project Court, Country, City: British Art, 1660-1735, led by Professor Mark Hallett), Dr. Elizabeth Edwards (CECS PhD, now Research Fellow on the Wales and the French Revolution project at the University of Wales), as well as Ruth Mather (PhD student), Sophie Coulombeau (PhD student), and Ryan Hanley (PhD Hull student, former CECS MA student), who were off in the pub toasting the success of their panel!
Papers given at BSECS by current CECS staff and students:
Graeme Callister: “The City and the Creation of the Revolutionary Dutch Nation, 1780-1800”
Sophie Coulombeau: “‘Nothing the Nearer our own Hearts and Interests’: The Point of the Name in Burney’s Cecilia”
Mark Hallett (Keynote Lecture): “Faces in the Library: Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Streatham Worthies’”
Lucy Hodgetts: “‘Strong recollections of my former pleasures’: Reading Nostalgia in the Urban Landscape in William Hone’s Every-Day Book (1825-6)”
Matthew Jenkins: “Antiquity and Improvement: The Landscape of Polite Shopping in Georgian York”
Ruth Mather: “Politicising Personal Experience: The Addresses of the Female Reformers of Lancashire, 1819-1820”
Alison O’Byrne: “Calton Hill: Tourism, Topography, and National Identity in Edinburgh, 1750-1830”
Adam Perchard: “Oriental and Occidental Despotisms: Reading Montesquieu and Voltaire in the Light of the Rushdie Affair”
Jacqueline Riding: “‘Suitable to the Place for which they were designed’: Joseph Highmore’s Foundling Hospital Paintings”
Ruth Scobie: “Cannibals and Palm Trees on the Drawing-Room Wall: Reading ‘Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique’”
Claudine van Hensbergen: “‘The Wicked have enclosed me’: The Birth, Life, and Decay of Queen Anne’s Statue at St. Paul’s Cathedral”
Jim Watt: “Gothic Sociability”
Darren Wagner: “‘Slawkenbergius’s sensorium’: Genital Nerves and Sexual Scenes in Sensibility”
Joanna Wharton: “Lasting Impressions: Nervous Psychology in Hays and Barbauld”
CECS Festivities 6th December 2011
Christmas Open Evening/Xmas party
Ho Ho Hogarth: Students at CECS, directed by the redoubtable Adam Perchard, presented a modern take on Hogarth during this enjoyable event. Hogarth (MS PowerPoint 
, 32,161kb)
It was an wonderful opportunity for staff, present student and future applicants to meet up informally, to find out about the activities of the Centre, and to chat about the programmes on offer. The event was arranged to tie in with the Postgraduate Open Day at the the university on the following day.
CECS Summer 2011 Newsletter
, 208kb)Review of CECS Postgraduate Conference 11th June 2011
Placing Faces: the Portrait and the Country House in the Long Eighteenth Century
By Sam Smith
Art history sure does make for better conferences than English lit. You can while away the stuffy hours staring at digital images of paintings holed up many miles away in some under-visited country house, unfairly (or not!) forgotten by the world at large. Or at least you can intend to do so and then someone like Kate Retford starts speaking and ruins the whole thing by being interesting.
Dr. Retford’s paper, entitled The Topography of the Conversation Piece - A Walk around Wanstead, took for its subject The Tylney Family in the Saloon at Wanstead House, a conversation piece by Joseph Francis Nollekens made for Richard Child, the absurdly rich owner of Wanstead House. Dr. Retford demonstrated through meticulous reasoning and research that the painting was an accurate depiction of the interior. She continued by showing us through the open door at the back Nollekens’ image into a Hogarth of an adjacent room made ten years earlier. From here she took us outside into the magnificent grounds that would have been visible from the saloon window and that are described in Flora Triumphant and in an engraving. Dr. Retford argued that her own tour of Wanstead, achieved through pictures and poetry, in many ways closely paralleled the experience of contemporary visitors to Wanstead: a tour that would have allowed them – and now allows us – a glimpse into the world of one of the centuries richest men.
Following Dr. Retford was Leslie E. Johansen. Also speaking on the theme of the portrait and estate, Johansen gave a paper entitled A Look into the Prospect Beyond: The Portrait and the English Designed Landscape. As closely as the previous paper had followed standard art historical methodologies was as far as Johansen’s papers differed from them. Coming from the Council of British Archaeology she determined to take the room through a variety of canvases and into the actual landscape that had inspired them, revealing the hoax that images of landscapes often are. Through archaeological methods Johansen determined to show that, at places such as Boyton Hall, the wealthy – but not too wealthy – used painted imagery to redefine themselves through semi-fictional representations of their estates. The paper highlighted the need for art history to engage with fast developing archaeological technology that can accurately map the sites of the past. Importantly though Johansen never lost sight of the need to interpret archaeological findings through academic study and methodologies in order to better understand not simply what but why events occurred and occur.
Following the mid-morning break came perhaps the most expected treat of the day: Desmond Shawe-Taylor’s George IV as a Collector of full-length Portraits. Shawe-Taylor is not only an art historian of great repute but also Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, which grants him full access to the Royal collection. He used the contents of George IV’s collection to demonstrate how the creation of an artistic canon controlled valuing and collection. To start with he told us how the King had paid a jaw-dropping and bank-vault-emptying 1500 guineas for The Young Thief by Paulus Potter. The painting itself is a genre-piece – then considered the lowest of art forms – of an extraordinarily lowly subject: without Potter’s signature the piece could only have hoped to occupy wall space in a country tavern. From here Shawe-Taylor showed, through the work of Joshua Reynolds, that when a name from the canon was united with a high style –Reynolds’ ‘grand manner’ – the effect on valuing and collecting was immense: an artist could gain admittance to the canon through association with another artist’s style. Besides style Shawe-Taylor also showed the importance of subject matter when considering public display as the majority of the works the King displayed to all visitors in his palace were military portraits, creating for himself a more masculine identity. Ultimately the paper displayed that the art world was controlled by various interconnected factors found both within the art itself but also outside it. Looking through recent arts news it is clear that the concerns of early nineteenth century Britain remain today. A minor work by George Stubbs has just sold for over £22 million, doubling the record for a Stubbs, clearly demonstrating the effect that a canonical name can have on art collectors and subsequently the market: one shudders to think how much a major work by Stubbs, such as Whistlejacket, would make should – God forbid – it ever be sold at auction.
Up next was Professor Marcia Pointon paper simply entitled The Woburn Abbey Portraits. Someone like Professor Pointon would probably struggle to give a bad talk and her trip through the Woburn collection in the first half of the eighteenth century was brilliantly done: indeed the only bad thing that could be said about the paper was the title lacked something in imagination. She demonstrated with ease how the collection was built up from family members and persons of national historic importance and the resonances this had with the family’s contemporary situation and how their collection helped to define themselves. This aside the real highlight of her talk was an all-too-brief discussion of Isaac Whood, whose work frequented the Woburn walls. Whood is a little known copyist/portraitist whose life and works still await reappraisal. Research into them would surely reveal complicating factors in modern discussions of ‘copies’ and the general assumption of their inferiority – with Shawe-Taylor’s talk in mind it would also give greater insight into how canons of artists, styles and subject matter operated early in the eighteenth century. It was Pointon’s discussion of Whood that sparked the most questions of the day and, alongside contributions from the room, her answers led to a sense of bewilderment that he has managed to slip into relative obscurity.
So it was with the feeling of work to be done the conference broke for the bustle, noise and sandwiches that never fail to nicely fill a long lunch hour.
Post-lunch and a few chairs previously filled were left empty and mores the shame for those that had somewhere else to be. The subject for the afternoon was ‘Gendered Displays.’ First up was Professor Gill Perry giving a paper entitled Dirty Dancing at Knole: Portraits of Giovanna Baccelli and the Performance of 'Public Intimacy. Perry spanned centuries in her talk, starting with Virginia Wolfe’s description of Knole as ‘a gay old woman.’ The focus of the paper though was a plaster statue of dancer Giovanna Baccelli commissioned and displayed by her then lover and owner of Knole, John Frederick Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset. Perry showed how the placing of the statue and its subsequent relation to the interior of the house – specifically the changing views offered by the staircase – defined its meaning. Based on a relatively simple premise Perry brilliantly transcended the boundaries her subject seemed to set by revealing a series of in-jokes that surrounded the statue and its reading by contemporaries. By showing how a statue and architecture (plus a little insider knowledge) came to define each other and the men and women that used the space, Perry brought a specific period and relationship to life. No doubt the laughter that punctuated her talk was not so different from the laughter that used to echo around Knole itself.
The final talk of the day was given by York PhD student and co-organiser Jordan Vibert, Lady Anne Stanhope and Sir Francis Blake Delaval at Ford Castle: Female Sociability, Military Masculinity and the Seven Years’ War. The paper utilized a variety of sources alongside a close reading of the portrait itself to explore the expression of public roles in private contexts. Through the portrait the paper showed not only the blurring of the lines of public and private but also of femininity and masculinity as Lady Anne attempted to transcend the passivity thrust upon females during the seven years war, a time of masculine activity. Vibert’s paper was the perfect conclusion to the day uniting themes of gender and privacy and adopting various methodologies but maintaining art history at its heart.
In the end the real test of a conference is whether or not the sum is more or less than its parts. As filled as it was with fascinating arguments, brilliant interpretations, and nice light-hearted jokes Placing Faces did offer more than this. In a relaxed and well-organized setting the presenting scholars gave papers with ease and questions and doubts could be raised and explored with friendliness, as well as intellectual vigour. The diversity of ideas at a conference can sometimes have negative results by stopping any discussions that relate papers to each other, but the structure of the day, as well as the speakers themselves turned the diversity into a positive way to discuss broader themes. In the end then the day must be given over to the two organizers, Hannah Lyons and Jordan Vibert, both postgraduates at York, who brought together a stellar line-up and ensured the day flowed smoothly and logically from beginning to end.
Sam Smith, CECS Summer 2011
Review of CECS conference 8th January 2011
Writing Marginal Lives, or a medley of characters
A review by Rose Hendrie and Ruth Mather
On Saturday 8th January, students, staff, and those drawn from further afield, emerged bleary-eyed (and perhaps taut-bellied) from the Christmas period, for the Writing Marginal Lives conference at King’s Manor. Professor Harriet Guest, the convenor, immediately tickled the curiosity of the colloquium-goers by outlining the concern with, ‘recovering the life stories of relatively hidden people; subjects whose voices may have been obscured by differences of class, gender, or religion’.
York’s Professor John Barrell, of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, began proceedings with the – perhaps misleadingly titled – paper, ‘Edward Pugh: Not Much of a Life’. I was not alone in being unfamiliar with this artist and topographer – famous for miniatures and landscape paintings, and even exhibited, multiple times between 1793 and 1808, at the Royal Academy. Though, neither was I alone in being won over by the charms of Pugh’s extraordinary (and ultimate) work, Cambria Depicta: a tour through north Wales illustrated with picturesque views by a native artist. John Barrell walked us through Pugh’s life and in particular this book, which provided a pictorial and narrative view of Wales from the perspective of a native Welsh-speaker, rather than an alien traveller. Cambri Depicta included interjections of gossip, amusing incidents and idiosyncratic musings, providing a personal and insightful tour of the surrounding area. Some of the images also posed challenges – for example, one scene showed a widow weeping, a political symbol in a time when criticism of the Napoleonic Wars focused upon the common tragedy of families who lost their menfolk to the conflict. However, Pugh had himself attempted to contribute to the war effort by joining a militia regiment composed of artists, although this was not a success. That there is insufficient evidence to resolve this apparent contradiction in Pugh’s political ideology is just one of the difficulties which Professor Barrell highlighted in discussing his attempts to build tantalizing glimpses of a life into a more complete picture using scant evidence.
Professor Colin Jones, from Queen Mary at the University of London provided the second paper, entitled Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin, a Voltairean Embroiderer at the Court of Louis XV. Brought to court by the patronage of the King’s official mistress, Madame de Pompadour, Charles-Germain appeared rather pompous in his portrait, in which he looks the image of the successful bourgeois courtier. Little did we know that this paper would descend into a bizarre – and frankly rollicking – tour of unusual caricatures and engravings, ranging from curiously ‘humanised’ butterflies in Essai de Papilloneries Humanies, to satirical, scatological images. The pièce de résistance comprised of the Livre de caricature tant bonnes que mauvais, compiled collectively by the Saint-Aubin brothers between the 1740s and 1770s, and familiarly known as their ‘livre de culs’: ‘book of arses’. The key target of this work was Charles-Germain’s former patron, the Madame de Pompadour, who the ungrateful royal embroiderer lampooned for her excessive political maneuvering, deemed to have a destructively emasculating effect on the king. Had it become publicly known in the eighteenth century, this politically dangerous humour would probably have caused the book to be burnt, and its authors placed in the Bastille. Though, scatological tittering aside Colin Jones’s paper illustrated how ‘marginal lives’, with their straddling of both the public and private spheres, could become a vehicle for political exploration and (albeit private) challenge.
From private betrayal, we moved to a character who launched a much more open attack on his former friends. Professor Jon Mee of Warwick discussed the work of Charles ‘Louse’ Pigott, apparently given his less-than-flattering nickname by his Jockey Club comrades due to his rather relaxed attitude to hygiene. Nevertheless, these friends – who included such Whig luminaries as Charles James Fox – were happy to sub Louse whenever his gambling got him into financial difficulties. It must therefore have come as quite a shock, when Pigott published a series of exposes entitled The Jockey Club, or a Sketch of the Manners of the Age in 1792. His motivation was political – the radical Pigott had become disillusioned with the Whig party, who he felt were failing to live up to their reformist credentials. While the violent turn taken by the French Revolution in 1792 caused many former supporters to temper their enthusiasm for similar political change in Britain, Pigott became even more staunchly republican, suggesting that George III should share the fate of France’s luckless monarchs. He shared none of the respect many within the popular radical movement had for the virtues of the ancient British constitution. Thus, dissatisfied with the lukewarm enthusiasm of the Whigs for radical reform, Pigott used his personal knowledge of the leaders of the party to undermine the moral authority of their rule, littering his account of drinking, gambling and general debauchery with such crude sexual puns that he was criticized for publishing a work as scurrilous as the tittle-tattle it contained. Following the three-part original, Pigott went on to publish The Female Jockey Club in 1794, in which he criticized the public display of Whig elite women such as Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. His works not only challenged the Whig party’s moral laxity and networks of patronage, but advocated an alternative morality based on challenging the evident sexual energies of the group into companionate marriage. Facing prosecution for libel, Pigott attempted to flee the country but eventually faced his trial, at which he made another spectacular volte-face, defending himself in the language of patrician Whiggism by invoking his right to liberty under the Bill of Rights and the very system of constitutional monarchy he had proposed destroying. Whether this reflects a genuine change in his political sympathies is not known – his ability to change his ideas is evident from his earlier rejection of Fox and Sheridan as the champions of reform. Thus, while his radical ideals may have been marginal within the wider campaign for popular reform, Pigott reflects the struggles of a movement trying to find its ideological foundations in the political upheaval of the late eighteenth century.
It’s never easy to be the last act before lunch, but Oxford’s Dr. Mark Philp managed to silence any rumbling tummies with a fascinating insight into the private life of William Godwin. Dr. Philp showed us how the digitized diaries of Godwin can be used to indentify patterns in his communication and visits from friends. Doing just this revealed an unusually intense period of visits from and to a lady by the name of Sarah Elwes. Even more interesting, for the gossipy among us, the pattern of these visits is very similar to those of two other women – namely Mary Wollestonecraft and Mary Jane Clairmont. One can only speculate as to whether Elwes also shared a more intimate relationship with Godwin, while the other details of her life offered further scope for mystery: Elwes’ previous husband prosecuting for adultery but failing to claim the damages won. Perhaps the tale of Sarah Elwes would be better documented had her possible relationship with Godwin become official, but instead it has been left to our imaginations to answer the questions posed by Dr. Philp’s ability to turn dry statistics into a potential love story.
While the morning’s characters were marginalized by accident or circumstance, Dr. Emma Major’s talk, Exemplarity and Anonymity: women and praise in the long Eighteenth Century, detailed the way in which women writers in the late eighteenth century deliberately marginalized themselves. The afternoon continued with Dr. Kate Fullagar from Macquarie University giving a paper entitled Writing Indigenous Biography: The Parallel Lives of Ostenaco and Mai. This was complemented by Professor Iain McCalman, from Sydney, providing the ultimate ‘marginal life’: In search of pre-contact Indigenous lives. The narrative of the Barrier Reef castaway Barbara Thompson. Both talks rounded off the conference with a more exotic feel, highlighting interactions between British people and indigenous cultures. Dr. Fullagar showed that Ostenaco reached sufficient celebrity in London to be painted by Reynolds, whilst Professor McCalman discussed how the story of castaway Barbara Thompson, who was rescued and adopted into an aborigine tribe, were sidelined in the early Victorian period in favour of nationalist accounts of primitive savages.
This account provides a fairly base outline of what was an incredibly rich set of biographies by the eminent academics – or should I say detectives – of this colloquium. In fact, writing so briefly on ‘Writing Marginal Lives’ appears to be a curious adherence to ‘the problems of producing biographies of obscure, incomplete or fragmentary lives’, as outlined by the conference programme. Yet, this fascinating subject certainly illuminated a ‘Medley of Characters’ of the eighteenth century that would perhaps otherwise remain ‘off the beaten track’.
Review of Cecs Day Conference on 4th December 2010
London Scenes Conference
A review by Sophie Coulombeau
‘The Metropolis is now before me. POUSSIN never had a more luxuriant, variegated and interesting subject for a landscape; nor had SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS finer characters for his canvas than what have already had a sitting for their likenesses to embellish LIFE IN LONDON.”
So wrote Pierce Egan in his phenomenally popular nineteenth-century series Life in London, which is just as well-known for its vivid illustrations by the Cruikshank brothers as for its hectic, phantasmagoric descriptions of ‘the Highs, Lows, Ins and Outs of Life in London’. Having recently studied Egan for my Popular Romanticisms class, I was interested in the ways in which visual representations of London in the early nineteenth century interact with literary depictions to form contemporary concepts of the capital’s possibilities, innovations and dangers. The London Scenes workshop, run by CECS and held in King’s Manor on Saturday 4th December, came at the perfect time to help this English Literature student plunge into the murky waters of some largely unfamiliar disciplines to develop these ideas in new directions.
The workshop, attended by over 65 staff and students from York and further afield, aimed to blend art history, architecture, literature and cultural geography to provide new perspectives on visual depictions of London from the late seventeenth to the mid nineteenth century. As Dr. Alison O’Byrne, the workshop’s convenor, explained at the beginning of the day, the intention was to explore whether a narrative or tradition could be established in the sequence of disparate images addressed by our speakers. The format of the workshop (ten minute presentations, each followed by twenty minutes of discussion) would allow for significant participation from all staff and students present, and hopefully some helpful feedback for the speakers themselves.
First up was Amy Todman from the University of Glasgow, whose paper was titled Vivarium Grenovicanum: Francis Place’s Views in and around the Royal Observatory. The paper placed a series of prints of Greenwich Observatory in context of that site’s chequered history as a site of diverse cultural phenomena from astronomy to necromancy to drainage. Questions from the floor addressed a range of topics, including the relationship between prediction and royal prerogative, the significance of the portraits depicted in some of the interior scenes, and the relation of Greenwich to London in some of the prints with longer perspectives.
York’s Professor Mark Hallett, Head of the History of Art Department, presented a paper titled Hogarth’s Vision of London, which focused on the pictorial structure of Hogarth’s Four Times of Day series from the 1730s. He read this sequence in relation to contemporary ‘medley prints’, which are built up of layers of densely overlapping representations that blend ‘high’ and ‘low’ subject matter and challenge a stable vertical pictorial order. Similarly, Hogarth’s images employ a series of overlapping, overlaid human and architectural figures, a cacophony of high and low connotations which upset internal stability and sobriety. Particularly interesting was the discussion of how Hogarth patterns his images with tilted and populated ‘internal frames’ – windows, doorways, archways and signs – that often multiply within one another to ‘puncture facades’ and allow incisive and intrusive views into conventionally private spaces.
Professor Markman Ellis, from Queen Mary at the University of London, spoke about Samuel Scott’s Thameside River Views, 1746-1764. His intention was to map the location of Scott’s London paintings along the river to ‘trace the relationships between labour and leisure, delight and vulgarity’. I found his discussion of Thames watermen and the spaces they inhabited as sites of ‘interaction between polite and plebeian culture’ particularly thought-provoking. The audience asked a number of questions around the issue of idealization versus reality – were waterside roads as tranquil as Scott suggests? Were customs inspections so benign and picturesque? And why does a cloud in A Danish Timber-Bark Getting Underway appear so threatening, perhaps connoting arson and destruction?
Idealization was also a strong theme in the paper given by Dr. John Bonehill from the University of Glasgow, “The centre of pleasure and magnificence”: Paul and Thomas Sandby’s London. He explored a series of collaborative prints between the Sandby brothers, depicting various London scenes in a blend of classical and Biblical styles that recall the Solomonic notion of kingship often associated with the Stuarts. Some of the audience’s questions focused on how bridges and other structures are presented as appropriate forms for the viewer’s gaze within themselves, rather than being presented as edifying frames for a prospect or view of other, more conventional visual matter.
York’s own John Barrell, Professor of English Literature, presented a paper on Edward Pugh in Modern London. In the preface to his book, Modern London, in which Pugh’s prints appear, Richard Phillips undertook to describe ‘the very soul of London in a way which has never before been attempted’. He also promised to present ‘London as it is’ and ‘things as they are’, which terms recall the radical novels of Robert Bage and William Godwin. The presentation explored how depictions of the crowd – rather than the popular contemporary notion of the ‘mob’ – can be seen to work within these images to present the “real” London, with an unusual focus upon the private family unit in a public space. I was particularly interested by the reading of The Entrance to Hyde Park on a Sunday, which seemed to me to highlight a series of subtle interactions between disparate social groups and perhaps even link the crowd together as a community; one could perhaps compare these with the Hogarth images presented by Mark Hallett, in which dynamism seems to be more contained within isolated groups that fracture the attention of the viewer rather than encourage them to link these groups together with any depiction of interaction.
Professor Stephen Daniels from the University of Nottingham presented a paper called The New Meridian: Turner and Greenwich. This paper performed a close reading of an unusually satirical Turner painting that portrays contemporary architects Sir Frederick Trench and John Flaxman surveying the Thames and making plans for London. The texts and maps in the detailed foreground of the picture came under particularly careful scrutiny, not least a surprising detail painted very faintly into the sandy ground at the very front of the picture. This is a rough map of the river’s course, depicted in a ‘serpentine’ manner that resonates with the name of Elizabeth I on one of the bolder and more obvious maps held up for Flaxman’s inspection. Much discussion of the paper focused on this puzzling image, particularly on how it invites the viewer, like Flaxman, to look closely and to value the opticality of the painting, and how the way in which legibility is deliberately scrambled may indicate that this is a private rather than a public image.
Up next was Professor Jon Mee from the University of Warwick, who spoke about “Mutual intercourse” and “licentious discussion” in The Microcosm of London 1808-1811. This paper examined several prints from the colour-plate book published in three volumes by Rudolf Ackermann. The depictions of social interaction within these prints were explored in light of the notion of conversation as a harbinger of anxiety about the full flow of information and its political ramifications. Again, there was substantial discussion around the interactions between subjects within the images – can they be seen as attempts to represent numerous distinct groups as part of a greater social flow? It was noted in particular that the representation of the ‘Debating Society, Piccadilly’ is perhaps unexpectedly well-ordered – no irrelevant detail in an era that was so concerned with who had a right to voice political opinions in public, and how far such license could stretch without danger.
Dr. Alison O’Byrne from York’s Department of English and Related Literature presented on George Scharf’s London. She wanted to ask two broad questions: What is Scharf doing in his images of London’s shops? And is he developing a narrative – if so, what kind of narrative – about change in the city? Discussion focused on the images of decline and improvement within Scharf’s scenes; shops burning or being demolished but sometimes also thriving in the midst of decay. Some members of the audience read a certain melancholy into these depictions; others thought they represented a more neutral or perhaps even hopeful sense of transformation. Attention was also paid to differences between national shopping conventions at this time such as browsing and window shopping.
Closing the conference was Dr. Elizabeth Grant, Curator of Education at the British Architectural Library of the Royal Institution of British Architecture. She presented a paper on John Tallis’s London Street Views, which explored what Tallis’s Street Views show about how he and his contemporaries viewed and conceived London. The formal, static drawings of houses, shop-fronts and public buildings contrast with the scenes of dynamism, change and popular motion in Scharf’s images. Tallis’s London is a London made for strangers, but hauntingly devoid of people or of organic matter. The audience was interested in the question of what Tallis’s images were used for – as an actual map, they appear alienating and disconcerting to the modern viewer. Were they largely symbolic or aesthetic? Or more a practical tool for identifying the appropriate shop or service, a sort of early Yellow Pages? The commercial element of the images, by which businesses could buy a depiction, or even splash out to have their name inscribed above it, seems to support this latter approach.
Largely due to the enthusiasm within the audience for asking questions of the speakers, there was unfortunately no time at the end of the day for a broad overview of the themes that linked these presentations. I found the workshop a rich and thought-provoking experience on a wide disciplinary level, as well as with regard to its specific content. For an English Literature student without any training in art history, it’s illuminating to observe how colleagues from different disciplines parse their texts for meaning. For example, I had never considered the fact that one artist could ‘quote’ from another with a derivative image, just in the same way that one writer can recall another with a direct or indirect verbal quote.
Understanding the parallels between visual and verbal culture is essential for anybody working in the 18th-19th century period, when words and images, in works by writers so diverse as Burney, Blake, Egan and Dickens were inseparably tangled in their meaning. The workshop was a great opportunity for students at CECS to develop that understanding.
Is it an accident that so many of these writers, who conflate their words with imagery, set both types of text in London? Perhaps the form lends itself particularly well to that hub of cacophonic sights and sounds; maybe one could argue that it was felt you could not properly experience the burgeoning, multisensory chaos of London properly unless the reader/viewer was engaged in multiple ways. For me, the most interesting themes to emerge from the day were the issue of interaction between individuals or discrete groups within these images (is London – that microcosm of the nation – a city of isolated egotists or a community of fellow men and women?) and the idea of how ‘internal frames’ and family units both modify our understanding of the relationship between public and private spaces. It’s probably no coincidence that these themes are the ones that most directly touch upon my own research interests. Other attendees will doubtless have taken different interests and conclusions away, but certainly won’t have left without food for thought.
New acquisitions
2010. The university library is pleased to announce the acquisition of a new electronic research resource, "The Grand Tour". The collection comprises manuscript, visual, and printed works giving an insight into the English abroad from 1550 to 1850.
Honorary degree awarded
Professor John Barrell, a founder member of CECS, is to be awarded a second honorary doctorate on 5th July 2010. The first was from Chicago for his work in literary history. The second is equally prestigious, from the Courtauld Institute, the College of the University of London devoted to Art History.