On Wednesday, 20th March 2024, Dr Lucinda Matthews-Jones joined us to discuss her current research project: the talk was titled ‘Walls, Doors and Windows: Urban Homemaking Through Settlement Houses, 1884-1920′. The seminar took place in MB0312, beginning at 4.30pm. 

Lucie is a Reader in Victorian History at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research explores the role of home, gender and class in the British university and social settlement movement. She is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled ‘Settling at Home: The Making of the British Settlement Movement, 1883-1920’. Her research has been published in leading journals including ‘Victorian Studies’, ‘Journal of Victorian Culture’, ‘Women’s History’, ‘Cultural and Social History’, and in the edited collection ‘What is Masculinity? and A Cultural History of Home’. She also has a secondary interest in lived religion. She edited, with Timothy Jones (University of Melbourne), ‘Material Religion in Modern Britain: The Spirit of Things’ and has recently had a book chapter published on working-class religious practices in Jane Hamlett’s edited book ‘A Cultural History of Home’. 

This event was co-organised by The Nineteenth-Century Research Group and the Lincoln School of Humanities and Heritage Research Seminar. 

Time: 5pm-6:30pm

Location: Minerva Building MB0302 (Cargill Lecture Theatre)

Dr. Clare Broome Saunders (Blackfriars, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford) discusses ‘Visionary Medievalism in the Nineteenth Century: William Blake, Phoebe Anna Traquair, and EBB’s Sonnets from the Portuguese’.

Abstract: Both William Blake and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were skilful and politically driven medievalists: like Blake’s illustrations of Chaucer, EBB’s adaptations of medieval texts and forms offer rich social commentary, as demonstrated in the explosive, boundary-bursting Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). When Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852-1936) embarked upon an ambitious and intricate project to illustrate EBB’s Sonnets, in 1892, she found her main inspiration for the project in Blake’s art. Traquair combined this with her love of medieval illuminated manuscripts, generated by childhood visits to see the Book of Kells at Trinity College, Dublin, and used her artistic medievalism to highlight the visionary poetic and socio-political medievalism that she found in Blake and EBB. Using Traquair’s illustrations for Sonnets from the Portuguese as a starting point, this talk will explore the ways in which EBB develops and refines Blake’s medievalist imagination.

Bio: Dr Clare Broome Saunders is The Senior Tutor and Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, and a member of the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include nineteenth-century women’s poetry and nineteenth-century uses of history, as reflected in her books Louisa Stuart Costello: A 19th Century Writing Life (2015) and Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (2009), and in her recent publications on medievalism and politics, and the medievalism of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Organised by Renée Ward on behalf of the Medieval Studies Research Group and the Nineteenth-Century Research Group.

In December, we celebrated the publication of Roving Bill Aspinwall: Dispatches from a Hobo in Post-Civil War America, edited by Dr Owen Clayton (University of Lincoln).

Dr. Owen Clayton is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln. His first monograph, Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915, came out with Palgrave MacMillan in 2015. He is working on his second monograph, entitled Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos: the Literature and Culture of American Transiency. He is the editor of Representing Homelessness, published as part of the Proceedings of the British Academy series (Oxford University Press, 2021).

William ‘Roving Bill’ Aspinwall was all of these things and yet no lone descriptor does him justice. Born one of 23 siblings, married 5 times, wounded fighting for the Union in one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War, kicked out of numerous jobs and soldiers’ homes for drunkenness, and having spent decades wandering as a penniless vagabond, Bill also kept up a 24-year correspondence with John James McCook, Professor of Modern Languages at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. In so doing Bill provided the earliest and best account of life on the road by an American hobo. Written between 1893 and 1917, Roving Bill Aspinwall: Dispatches from a Hobo in Post-Civil War America tells Bill’s story entirely in his own words. Describing experiences on the road, the people he meets, his dalliances with women and his memories of the Civil War, the letters are a rich and unique correspondence. Having been physically and mentally scarred at the 1843 Battle of Champion Hill, Bill details his lifelong battle with booze. He also gives first-hand accounts of men thrown out of work during the economic Panic of 1893, of wandering around the country as an itinerant umbrella-mender, of working in factories, farms and even a circus, as well as his visit to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1903. Bill’s words are the real voice of a nineteenth-century hobo.

Roving Bill Aspinwall is available to purchase here at Better World Books and at other retailers.