1558-1837
Current Programme
Click here for an outline programme in Word format
Venue: Room 273, Stewart House, Russell Square, London
Please note:
Each session will start at 2:00 pm and close at 5:30 pm. All meetings are on Saturdays in Room 273. There will be three or four speakers per session (with a maximum time of 40 minutes per presentation). Therefore we should like to start each session promptly at 2 p.m., so arrive a little early if you can. Time has been allowed for general discussion at the end.
September 24, 2011
Caroline Watkinson: ‘English nuns and the “Glorious Revolution”, 1688-1715’;
ABSTRACT: In May 1688 Mary Wigmore, prioress of the English Carmelites convent in Antwerp, wrote to Mary of Modena, the wife of James II, offering prayers for the safe birth of a Stuart heir. Six months later William III conquered England, James II and Mary departed for the court at St Germaine, and a new wave of British émigrés joined the English convents in exile in France and Flanders. This paper considers the English convents’ response to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ during a period of political conflict which would culminate in the Jacobite uprising of 1715. Through a study of correspondence, political tracts, convent annals, and state legislation I examine the strategies employed by convent communities in contesting the 1689 political settlement. Firstly, I explore the construction of an ‘imagined community’ in exile centred on the Stuart court and framed in opposition to Williamite ideology. Secondly, I examine nuns’ involvement in the public contestation of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and ask how far nuns were able to counter anti-convent polemic to build support for the Stuart cause. Thirdly, I consider the extent to which convent ideology manifested itself in direct political engagement and support for the 1715 uprising. By so doing I hope to show that exiled convents were politically engaged communities integral to political conflict in the wake of 1688.
Georgina Lock: ‘Mrs Riot on The Dining Room Table: Kitty Clive as a Model for (Fine) Ladies’;
ABSTRACT: The soft-paste porcelain figurines of Kitty Clive and of Edward Woodward in the roles of The Fine Lady (Mrs Riot) and the Fine Gentleman in David Garrick's farce Lethe; or Aesop in the Shades (1740) offer an elusive missing dimension between public theatres and private theatricals. Bow Factory advertised these figurines, 25cm tall and dated by incised marks to '1750,' for display on 'mantel-pieces'; but they were also put on dining tables to accompany the dessert.
Recent studies (Dahn 2000, Sloboda 2010) have emphasised networks of sociability amongst elite women who collected ceramics, for example the Duchess of Portland, whose famed collection meandered between a rococo aesthetic curiosity in the shapes of Chinese and Japanese porcelain and an Enlightenment interest in natural history - especially shells. In an era in which shell was still believed to be an essential component of porcelain, shells were connected with the essential feminine, so that 'the delicate and decorative qualities of porcelain itself were strongly associated with the docile female body.' (Sloboda).
My paper will suggest that the Bow Factory Kitty Clive, displayed on the dining room table, invited convivial comment not only about newly emerging ideas of celebrity but also about actresses challenging notions of female behaviour. A Derby factory copy edition of the Bow figurine testifies to its national popularity. Records of early to mid Georgian private theatricals are sparse but William Hogarth's A Performance of Dryden's 'The Indian Emperor or the Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards' (private collection 1732- 1735) declares the presence of women and children at early private theatricals and Garrick's Lethe figured even in the British military festivals held in Philadelphia in 1778.BIOGRAPHY: Georgina Lock teaches English and Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University, where she leads the script writing option for the MA in Creative Writing. Her own scripts include four short films, two of which " Short, White, Pleated' (2002 - a favourite at LBGT film festivals) and "The Pick Up" (2006) she directed. She also wrote the award winning short radio play, "Heroines", based on one of Thomas Carlisle's maids. Before decamping to academia, Georgina was an actress, who wrote, directed and produced musical stage plays - including parts for herself - which fuels her current research into women's performances on stage and their representation in history and literature.
Andrew Pink: ‘Robin Hood and her merry women: Modern Masons in an early eighteenth-century London pleasure garden’;
ABSTRACT: In February 1737 the Lancashire Journal announced that a lodge of 'masons', "has lately been founded in Cold-Bath Fields; their Number is already increased to nine hundred and they admit Women as well as Men, who they call Sisters. They hold a Lodge every Night, but Sunday Night is the greatest Meeting. They are govern'd by a Grand Master and Warden".
This lodge is among the earliest eighteenth-century manifestations of male-female masonic sociability, and yet it has never received scholarly attention. This paper will present the surviving evidence of it: announcements of its meetings in the London newspapers; details of benefit performances that the lodge sponsored in London theatres; an engraving of a meeting; and the lodge's song. The lodge's obscure London pleasure-garden venue in Cold Bath Fields suggests that there was no elite participation in the membership, and that this was very much a local London phenomenon. But, intriguingly, the picture that emerges from the evidence is of a mixed-sex (para)masonic association whose activities echo important elements found elsewhere in Europe in contemporaneous manifestations of such individual masonic groups.So, the lodge's emphasis on sociability, meeting every night, suggests a libertine element found in the mixed French societés bachiques, such as the Ordre de la Felicité and its precursors from the mid 1730s; its motto 'Let honour preside' echoes the appeal to Virtue that was the motto of the Viennese women Mopses who were already active by 1738; the bucolic imagery of the lodge's rhetoric, and its androgynous chivalric elements are also found among the aristocratic female Hermites de bonne humeur, also established in 1739, in Germany; and there appears to be a strong link with the theatre, as there is with the mixed 'Lodge de Juste' established in Holland about 1751. So far, no details of the London lodge's ritual have emerged, and the lodge seems to have ceased in the mid-1740s when all references to it stop.
Susan A. Snell: ‘Enlightenment females and freemasonry: revelations from women's poetical contributions to the Freemasons Magazine, with a rediscovered verse by Anna Jane Vardill (1781 - 1852)’.
ABSTRACT: The first English Masonic periodical appeared in June 1793 under the title, Freemasons’ magazine, or general and complete library, which continued to appear monthly until 1798. Literary works by women poets, amateur and professional, radical and conservative, comprised a small but significant proportion of contributions to this monthly magazine, aimed primarily at a readership of freemasons and their families. One such poem published in February 1797 was by Anna Jane Vardill, the daughter of an American Royalist, spy and sometime friend of Benjamin Franklin. Set to music by the composer and organist, Dr Samuel Arnold, it was performed by girls at the annual fundraising event assisted by the Freemasons’ Female Charity in 1797.
Following the recent deposit of records with the Library and Museum of Freemasonry in London relating to the Royal Masonic Institution for Girls, this presentation aims to reveal new information about these early school girls, usually the orphaned or motherless daughters of freemasons. Those that sung Anna Vardill’s words were among the first to receive help from this charity founded the previous decade by Chevalier Bartholomew Ruspini, under the patronage of the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland. Who were these girls, what circumstances led them to attend the school and where did they go afterwards? Attend this session to find out more about their hidden ‘her’stories.
November 26, 2011
Agnieszka Karch: ‘Gabriel de Foigny's Travelling Hermaphrodite: 17th Century Travel Writing as a Critique of Gender Binaries’;
ABSTRACT: Gabriel de Foigny’s The Southern Land, Known can be classified as a utopian text and a critique of Louis XIV’s monarchy. Written in French in the 17th century, it is a fictional account of a hermaphrodite Sadeur’s travel to and stay in what was later known as Australia. The land, inhabited by androgynous individuals, is intended to contrast sharply with the European model based around gender binaries. Considered an outcast in his homeland, here Sadeur’s sexual identity is seen as a metaphor of perfection: a union of both sexes, which is meant to eliminate corruption, desire and gender inequality. Travel writing becomes for the author a tool for distancing his readers from the established European cultural perceptions of gender and sexual identity. It allows him to challenge the labels attached to the notions of femininity and masculinity, and to construct a new gender model away from the European reality. This paper will analyse the contribution of travel writing to creating positive perceptions of marginalised identities. It will subsequently attempt to answer the question of whether Foigny’s portrayal of gender identity can be seen as truly independent of the European model or if it is corrupted itself, despite its geographic location. Finally, this paper will attempt to establish whether the status of the Australian gender model can indeed be seen as a utopia.
Louise Curran: '“Epistolary Correspondencies, chiefly with Ladies”: Samuel Richardson’s Letters and Women’s Writing’;
ABSTRACT: Samuel Richardson was proud of the letters he exchanged with many women correspondents over several years: The epithets he gave these correspondents include “best Adviser” and “Daughter of my mind”, “one of my best girls, and best judges”, and “Queen of all the Ladies I venerate”. The influence of this coterie of letter-writers and occasional advisers on Richardson’s novel writing has been addressed by Richardson scholars who have emphasised women as readers of his work, and depicted him variously as surrounded by “flattering Eves” or a “female Senate”. In this paper I will explore the less-documented, though related, relationship between Richardson’s correspondence with women and its sustained interest in women as writers themselves of literary criticism and fiction.
By drawing on Richardson’s discussions of women’s writing in his letters with female and male correspondents, I will attempt to re-address Richardson’s interest in corresponding with women in particular by examining the links between Richardson’s correspondence and artistic production (aside from the composition of his own novels): Richardson heavily edited a letter he sent to one young correspondent, Frances Grainger, which became a draft of his sole contribution to Johnson’s Rambler (No. 97 in 1751). At least two of his female correspondents wrote letters in the voices of his fictional characters, Anna Howe from Clarissa, and Lady Grandison from Sir Charles Grandison. Richardson used correspondence to distribute and discuss women’s poetry, including that of Susanna Highmore (daughter of the painter, Joseph Highmore), Hester Mulso (later Chapone), and the poets, Martha Ferrars and Mary Leapor.
Related to this evidence, I will argue that by focusing on reader responses to Richardson’s fiction in and through correspondence, critics risk missing an important part of the debate - one that centres around the practices of coterie authorship. With emphasis on the wider context of the social aspect of letter-writing and composition, I will read Richardson’s correspondences with women, from the publication of Clarissa through to Grandison and beyond, as evidence of his commitment to wider debates about literature and the status of women’s writing (literary critical and fictional) in the mid-Eighteenth century.
Felicity Roberts: 'Women and Botany';
ABSTRACT: This talk will consider women’s natural history productions from mid to late eighteenth-century England. It will focus on the collages and novella of Mary Delany (1700-1788) and the children’s natural history books of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), specifically their ‘hybridity’, the fact that they unite scientific understanding with an artistic sensibility. In so doing it will make several claims - firstly, that historically specific ways of understanding the natural world give rise to related modes of figuring this knowledge; secondly, that natural history was the foremost way of understanding ‘nature’ in the eighteenth-century; and thirdly, that the theory and practice of natural history helped normalize gender relations, constrain women's experience, notably their participation in natural history itself, and led to the figuration of natural knowledge in polite artistic productions. Finally, this talk will consider the changing cultural understanding of ‘nature’ over the course of the eighteenth-century, historicizing the differences between Delany’s and Smith’s work, and arguing that whilst both women’s productions represent and respond to ideas of ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’, Delany’s reinforce the ‘natural order’ whereas Smith’s resist it.
There will also be an accompanying powerpoint presentation which will clarify key terms.
Laura Mayer: ‘“Junketaceous” Gothick: Alnwick Castle and the Patronage of Elizabeth Percy, First Duchess of Northumberland’.
ABSTRACT: As 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, Hugh Smithson (1714/15 – 1786) and Elizabeth Percy (1716 – 1776) rose from a scandalously unfashionable love-match to unshakeable social supremacy. Their endorsement of the architect Robert Adam and landscape designer Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was crucial for the stylistic advancement of the eighteenth century.Much has been made of the duke’s conformist classicism at Syon, therefore this paper will examine the advocacy and implementation of eighteenth-century Gothick architecture at their second estate, Alnwick Castle, by the duchess. As a travel writer, scenic tourist and political campaigner, Elizabeth crossed and re-crossed contemporary boundaries of feminine propriety. To date, both her legacy and person have been fiercely ridiculed, most famously by Horace Walpole, who labeled her that ‘Junketaceous Duchess’ and a ‘Jovial Lump of Contradictions’. Subsequently, Elizabeth’s patronage and writings have been dismissed in everything from contemporary guidebooks to recent theses. Twenty-first-century critics have derided her Short Tour, published in 1775, as merely ‘a name-dropping catalogue’.
By refuting the criticisms leveled against the duchess personally, and investigating her appreciation of natural scenery and Romantic sensibilities, this paper reinstates Elizabeth as a responsive antiquarian. Consideration will be given to Adam and Brown’s renovations of Alnwick Castle and the surrounding landscape. It will seek to understand to what extent Elizabeth’s defiant stylistic preferences were a reaction against the prevailing all-male language of classicism, and why Alnwick’s ‘gingerbread gothick’ was continually maligned until its ultimate destruction in the nineteenth century. It presents a positive individual account of Elizabeth Percy, whilst undermining existing myths about feminine creativity, ultimately proving a penchant for Gothic architecture and Picturesque landscape to be a conscious aesthetic choice, not an uninformed transgression of style.
January 28, 2012
Carl Thompson: 'Maria Graham as an Early 19th-Century "Woman of Letters": A Missing Link in the History of Women's Literary Professionalism?';
ABSTRACT: Maria Graham (1785-1842) was in her day a successful and respected author, who was best known for her travel writing but who worked in several other non-fictional genres as well, including art history and children's literature. Today, however, Graham is a largely forgotten figure; and where she is known to modern scholars, they are largely familiar with just one small portion of her multifarious output. This paper will attempt an overview of Graham's career as a whole, and it will argue that by seeing that career as a whole we can see more clearly Graham's significance for the history of women's literary professionalism. Linda Peterson has recently presented Harriet Martineau as a pioneering figure in the history of women's writing, insofar as she was arguably the first woman to carve out a career for herself as a professional 'woman of letters', someone who earned herself considerable respect, intellectual authority and not least, income, whilst working extensively in non-fictional genres. Whilst not suggesting that Graham possesses the same intellectual and literary stature as Martineau, this paper will argue that she was an important precursor for Martineau, and someone who in several regards laid the foundations of a new sort of female literary career.
Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi: ‘Literary Networks: George Eliot, M. E. Braddon and Public Renown’;
ABSTRACT: The material culture of nineteenth-century publishing and periodicals played an important role in shaping literary networks which helped women to establish their prominence as public figures. While Mary Russell Mitford and her circle in the 1830s and 1840s benefited from public renown, this paper aims to address the difficulties that unwanted publicity posed to George Eliot and Mary Elizabeth Braddon in the 1850s and 1860s. A comparative examination of some of the ways in which they tried to control the making of their own reputation will illustrate that, while they embodied rival models of authorship and readerships, as professional women writers, they were affected by the same pressures about respectability, fame and notoriety. There is a growing scholarship on the formation of nineteenth-century female communities, circles, friendships and communication circuits. However, there is much less work on the difficulty that Victorian women like Eliot and Braddon found in belonging to contemporary female networks. When dealing with the literary renown created by the increasingly commercial literary market-place, both Braddon and Eliot sought to imaginatively evoke the critical practices of the late Romantic period and cast themselves as part of the myths of ‘gentlemanly’ authorship and reviewing, and the patriarchal power structures embedded in them. They looked back to the world of Sir Walter Scott and the quarterly Reviews, at a time before the professionalisation of writing, and the opportunities that the expansion of the literary market-place gave women writers. In so doing, Braddon and Eliot interpolated themselves as part of an older-style of literary network, which connected them to other literary figures over time rather than space.
Jackie Mulhallen: ‘Eliza O'Neill and the Art of Acting'.
ABSTRACT: Eliza O’Neill is now almost a forgotten name in English theatre. Yet at one time she was considered the successor to the great Sarah Siddons. Her debut in 1814 as Juliet was a triumph. When she performed, it was almost impossible to get a seat at Covent Garden (and there were 3,000 of them!) It was considered a great loss to the stage when she married W.W. Becher, later to be MP for Mallow, Co. Cork, five years later. During that time she had played most of the major tragic roles for women, for example, Calista in Rowe’s The Fair Penitent and Belvidera in Otway’s Venice Preserv’d as well as Constance in King John. She inspired Shelley to write the part of Beatrice Cenci in The Cenci.
Eliza was primarily a tragedienne, though she also played in Sheridan’s A School for Scandal and Colman the Elder’s The Jealous Wife. Her fellow-actor, William Macready, wrote enthusiastically of her talent.
Like Sarah Siddons and Dorothy Jordan before her, critics suggested that the audiences believed that Eliza was the character she portrayed. However, it is tantalising that we know very little about her working methods: she did not leave any memoirs of her career and we know only how she appeared to others.
Since these actresses lived many years before Stanislavski evolved his techniques, and since the current belief is that early 19th century actors were ‘ham’, it may be timely to consider that perhaps a variety of styles were used, and how Eliza’s would have fitted in with our present-day concepts.
Annual Workshop
Saturday April 21, 2012
One-day workshop: Women, Performance, Portraiture
featuring Professor Gill Perry as keynote speaker:
"Dirty Dancing in Paint: Portraits of the Dancer Giovanna Baccelli and the Representation of Feminine Celebrity"
For further details please visit our workshop page or download a registration form here
Group Outing
~ Details to be confirmed ~
For details of previous year's activity, please click here to view our Archives Page