By the tide of Humber: Poetry and Flooding in Andrew Marvell’s Hull

A Cabinet of Curiosities seminar

With a focus on Hull poet and politician, Andrew Marvell (1621-78), this paper explores the challenges of living with water in early modern estuary regions, and how living with water leaves its mark in the literature of these ‘green-blue’ zones between land and sea.

Reading Andrew Marvell’s poetry through the records of water management for seventeenth-century Hull and Holderness, the paper offers new insights into the environmental history of this region and its importance as a context for a range of Marvell’s pre-Restoration poems, including ‘To his Coy Mistress’ (c. 1647), Upon Appleton House (1651), and ‘The Character of Holland’ (1653).

The paper argues for the necessity of a new ‘green-blue’ approach to Marvell’s poetry – an approach that recognises Marvell as an estuary poet immersed in the floods and other environmental hazards that were a feature of life, and death, in estuary regions like London and Hull. In so doing, it not only models new approaches to Marvell’s poetry but highlights the important role that the literature and history of living with water can play in improving understanding of flood risk today.

About the speaker

Stewart Mottram is Reader in English at the University of Hull, specialising in interdisciplinary approaches to seventeenth-century literature in its religious, social, and environmental contexts.

Author of Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell (Oxford UP, 2019), his recent publications in the field of English literature and environmental history include ‘Deluge and disease: plague, the poetry of flooding, and the history of health inequalities in Andrew Marvell’s Hull’, published open access in The Seventeenth Century (2022).

Mottram’s interests in the history and literature of flooding are also reflected in his roles as PI on the AHRC/XR Stories By the rising tide of Humber project to virtually recreate a 1640s flood of Hull (2019-20), and as Co-I on the AHRC Risky Cities: Living with Water in an Uncertain Future Climate project (2020-23).

Mottram is Director of Research in the School of Humanities and Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Centre for Water Cultures at the University of Hull.