Two members of the Nineteenth Century Research Group will be speaking at this event at the Lincoln Guildhall at the end of April, as part of the Lincoln Festival of History.

Welcome to Literary Lincoln: the Early Modern to the 19th Century

Date: Wednesday April 30 2025

Time: 5.00pm – 6.30pm

Location: Lincoln Guildhall

Come join us for a fascinating journey through the literary world of Lincoln from the Early Modern period to the 19th Century. Explore the works of renowned authors and poets who have left their mark on this historic city. Immerse yourself in the rich culture and creativity that have shaped Lincoln’s literary landscape. Whether you’re a literature enthusiast or simply curious about Lincoln’s literary heritage, this event is sure to inspire and captivate you.

>>> BOOK VIA EVENTBRITE <<<

The event will feature three speakers:

• Dr Christopher Marlow – ‘A Very Infamous and Libellous Stage Play’: Dramatic Misrule in Seventeenth-Century Lincolnshire’

Christopher will consider records relating to the lost satirical play ‘The Death of the Lord of Kyme’ (1601), which brought to a head a bitter dispute between Henry Clinton, the Earl of Lincoln, and his nephew Sir Edward Dymoke. The play was preceded by an incident of public unrest in which retainers to the Dymoke family brandished homemade military paraphernalia and ‘did marche on horseback two and two together through the streets’ of Coningsby. By considering the relationship between dramatic satire and mock militarism, as well as paying attention to the way that these incidents have been interpreted by critics, he will reveal the complex relationship between civil unrest and literary invention in seventeenth-century Lincolnshire.

Dr Christopher Marlow (University of Lincoln) is the author of Shakespeare and Cultural Materialist Theory (The Arden Shakespeare, 2017) and Performing Masculinity in English University Drama 1598-1636 (Ashgate, 2013). He has published widely in journals including Shakespeare Studies, Critical Survey, Restoration, and The Journal of Popular Culture.

• Dr Laura Gill – ‘Flooded Lincolnshire Landscapes and the Victorian Literature of Childhood’

This talk discusses two Victorian ‘flood novels’: George Eliot’s well-known The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Harriet Martineau’s children’s book The Settlers at Home (1841). Eliot’s fictional town of St. Oggs is widely thought to be based on Gainsborough, Lincolnshire; Martineau’s historical fiction is set in the early modern Isle of Axholme, during a period of drainage and civil war. In this talk, Laura will first explore how Victorian storytellers relate the landscapes of Lincolnshire to the diluvial culture of the Netherlands. Second, she will discuss the significance of the child in these novels: both look at the watery landscapes of Lincolnshire from the perspective of children.

Dr Laura Gill (University of Lincoln) is a Senior Lecturer in English, specialising in Romantic and Victorian literature. with a focus on image-text relations and the intermedial influence of John Milton. Her first book, John Milton in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Visual Culture, is forthcoming: it explores Milton’s influence on figures ranging from Mary Shelley and John Martin to Thomas Hardy. Gill’s new research project is concerned with nineteenth-century representations of flooding and the Flood.

• Dr Owen Clayton – ‘Tennyson, Federalism, and Empire’

Alfed Lord Tennyson worried a lot about Empire. As Poet Laureate and a proud Brit, he was concerned that the British Empire might one day lose its dominant global position. These worries led him to spend a lot of time thinking about Britain’s political rivals, such as France. But the country that worried him the most was the United States of America. In the USA, Tennyson saw a potential successor to the Anglo-Saxon British Empire, but in its federal political system he also saw a way that Great Britain might fashion itself into a ‘Greater Britain’, one that included seats in Parliament for faraway colonies such as Australia. This talk will examine Tennyson’s worries about Empire, his thoughts about Federalism, and how this all manifested in his poetry.

Dr Owen Clayton (University of Lincoln) specialises in late nineteenth and early-twentieth century British and US American literature. He is the author of two books: Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), and Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos: Transiency in US American Literature and Culture, 1890-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), the latter of which won the 2024 British Association for American Studies (BAAS) Book Prize. He has also edited three books: Representing Homelessness (Oxford University Press, 2021), Roving Bill Aspinwall: Dispatches from a Hobo in Post-Civil War America (Feral House Books, 2022), and The Popular Wobbly: Selected Writing of T-Bone Slim (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming, 2025). He has published on a range of authors and topics, including Alfred Tennyson, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Amy Levy, as well as 1920s blues musicians like Blind Wilie McTell and Memphis Minnie.

Find out more about the Festival of History 2025: www.visitlincoln.com/lincoln-festival-of-history.

As part of the 2025 Festival of History, join Jim Cheshire, cultural historian and Associate Professor at the University of Lincoln, for his public lecture which will explore Alfred Tennyson’s fluctuating relationship with artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Jim is a member of the Nineteenth Century Research Group.

While the Pre-Raphaelites loved Tennyson’s poetry, he was more guarded about the way that they interpreted his poems, which led to an interesting creative tension between artists and author.

This lecture will discuss paintings and book illustrations by J. E. Millais, William Holman Hunt and some lesser known figures associated with the movement. Many of the works discussed will be from the collections of the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln.

Date: Mon, 5 May 2025

Time: 10:00 – 10:45 BST. Doors at 9:30am

Location: MB3201, Minerva Building

REGISTER VIA EVENTBRITE: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/tennyson-and-the-pre-raphaelites-tickets-1310279494239?aff=erelpanelorg

Find out more about the Festival of History 2025: www.visitlincoln.com/lincoln-festival-of-history.

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.