The Nineteenth-Century Research Group

Promoting an interdisciplinary approach to the nineteenth century at the University of Lincoln

Category: Events (page 2 of 19)

C19 Research Roundtable (12pm, 13th Dec 2021)

December 3, 2021 / / 0 Comments

You are warmly invited to attend a lunchtime seminar organised by the Nineteenth-Century Research Group on Monday 13th December, starting at 12pm (ending before 2pm). The meeting will be held on Microsoft Teams and the meeting room will be open from 11.50am. Please email Laura Gill (lgill@lincoln.ac.uk) to register and receive the meeting link.

This event brings together scholars from the College of Arts working in different disciplines to share focused aspects of their current writing and research. Researchers working in English and History will each give a short paper of c. 10 minutes, covering a range of topics related to the nineteenth century:

  • Dr Jim Cheshire (History): Remembering ‘Hodson’s Horse’: Commemoration and the Indian Uprising of 1857–8.

This paper will analyse a memorial to William Hodson in Lichfield Cathedral designed by George Edmund Street in 1859 and question the way that it commemorates Hodson’s controversial military career. I will argue that the aesthetic agenda of the Gothic Revival and the moral agenda of muscular Christianity combined with Anglo-Catholicism to generate an ideologically partisan and inaccurate representation of events surrounding the Indian Uprising of 1857-8 and that the monument has subsequently functioned as a focus of conservative military historians.

  • Dr Rebecca Styler (English): George Macdonald and Human-Animal Fellowship.

The Scottish author George Macdonald (1824-1905) is best known for his fairy tales which embody some of his most cherished theological and moral ideals. In the context of Macdonald’s beliefs about animals’ spiritual consciousness and afterlife, stated in his Unspoken Sermons, I consider the depiction of inter-species sympathy in ‘The History of Photogen and Nycteris’ (1879) as a poetic form of ecotheology, and ecofeminism. Macdonald can be placed among other Victorian ecotheological poets, and a longer Christian tradition of reverencing animals as spiritual fellows and co-tenants of the earth.

[The story can be found at http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/26/69.pdf.]

  • Dr Pietro Di Paola (History): A Furious Champion of Goodness: Anarchist Women and Emotions.

Focusing on the contrasting representations of the revolutionary Louise Michel, a furious champion of goodness, the paper investigates emotions as an analytical tool to reassess the political significance of militant women in the anarchist and radical movements.

Talks will be followed by a Q&A. Please note that the research papers will be recorded, but the Q&A section of the seminar will not be recorded. The event is open to all and you are welcome to join us just for the talks if you are not able to stay for the whole session.

Dr Claire Wood, ‘Charles Dickens and Decadence’ (20th Oct 2021)

December 3, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Our first research seminar of the 2021–22 academic year took place on Wednesday 20th October. Dr Claire Wood joined us from the University of Leicester, to talk about her new research on Charles Dickens and Decadence.

Dr Wood’s research centres on Victorian fiction and death culture, with a particular focus upon the contradictions and complexities inherent in the Victorian ‘celebration of death’. Her book on this subject, Dickens and the Business of Death, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. This explored Dickens’s fascination with the many different ways that you could make money from a corpse in Victorian England, from anatomy to authorship. She is currently working on ‘Dead Funny’, a project that examines death comedy in the work of Dickens and a range of other nineteenth-century writers. She is also co-editing the Edinburgh Companion to Dickens and the Arts for Edinburgh University Press.

nineteenth century rendering of dinosaurs roaming the landscape

Dr Richard Fallon, ‘Literature and Borderline Geoscience’, 28th April 2021

April 23, 2021 / / 0 Comments
The next Nineteenth-Century Research Seminar will be ,online at 4.15pm (for a 4.30pm start) on Wednesday 28th April 2021
We will be joined by Dr Richard Fallon(University of Birmingham), who will be talking to us about ‘Literature and Borderline Geoscience: The Case of Paranormal Paleontology in the Late Nineteenth Century’
You can register for the event using the EventBrite link below, by the end of the day on 27th April

  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/university-of-lincoln-c19-seminar-literature-and-borderline-geoscience-registration-151107543731

Abstract

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, researchers in Britain and North America locked horns over fundamental aspects of planetary prehistory, from evolution to continental drift. Figures both within and beyond the elite scientific community addressed these controversies, frequently relating them to religious belief or exploring their implications in fiction. The story of deep history was far from unified in a climate characterised not only by disputing experts but also by occultists’ claims to see through time and the re-emergence of young-earth creationism. Novelists, meanwhile, took advantage of the most sensational geo-theories, turning lost worlds like Atlantis into literary mainstays – sometimes making more serious truth claims than their fictional garbs implied.

Focusing on print, my current project seeks to map this little-understood culture of ‘borderlinegeoscience’ and to determine how researchers and the general public navigated its amorphous terrain. This paper introduces the project before turning to a case study of clairvoyant visionaries, including the freethinking Anglo-American family of William and Elizabeth Denton. I show how literary techniques formerly developed to encourage imaginative ‘seeing’ through time were literalised in the Dentons’ writings of the 1860s and 1870s. These writings claimed to recount genuine visions of the prehistoric past made through the power of ‘psychometry’.

 

Bio

Richard Fallon is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Birmingham. His collection of nineteenth-century palaeontological literature,Creatures of Another Age: Classic Visions of Prehistoric Monsters, is published this month by Valancourt Books. His monographReimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard’ Became a Transatlantic Cultural Iconwill be published in November by Cambridge University Press.

4.15pm (4.30 start) Tuesday 12th January 2021, Matthew Bayly on ’Rabbits, Wheat and Laudanum: Agricultural and social change on the Lincoln Heath, c.1815-1850’

January 5, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Apologies that the C19 Research Group did not hold a session last Semester. Despite our name, this was not because we were busy researching a COVID-19 vaccine.

 

However, we do have two sessions lined up for Semester B, both of which will take place online for obvious reasons. The first will take place at 4.15pm (4.30pm start) on Tuesday 12th January 2021, when Matthew Bayly will talk to us on ‘Rabbits, Wheat and Laudanum: Agricultural and social change on the Lincoln Heath, c.1815-1850’. If you would like to attend, please email oclayton@lincoln.ac.uk and ask for the meeting link. All are welcome.

 

Please find an abstract and biography below. We hope to see lots of you there!

 

All best,

 

Owen, Alice, Pietro and Annise.

 

 

‘Rabbits, Wheat and Laudanum: Agricultural and social change on the Lincoln Heath, c.1815-1850’

 

A visitor to the Lincoln Heath in 1800 would have been presented with an agricultural landscape dominated by sheep and rabbit warrens; in contrast, by the mid-nineteenth century, the area typified Victorian ‘high farming’, characterised by mixed-agrarian wheat production. Such a change was at its most intense in the decades after 1815 and went far beyond agricultural practice, influencing such things as demography; the built environment; employment structures; social interactions; and the political-cultural landscape of the Lincoln Heath. Indeed, it can be argued that the period 1815 to 1850 was instrumental in defining the socio-economic expression of many areas of rural Lincolnshire until the mid-twentieth century. This paper will explore the development and impact of such changes within ten parishes in the Lincoln Heath, utilising three lenses to do so: rabbits, wheat and laudanum.

Biography

 

Matthew Bayly is a Senior English for Academic Purposes Tutor at the University of Lincoln and currently completing a PhD in History at Nottingham Trent University with a thesis titled ‘The Human Ecology of Need on the Lincoln Heath, c.1790-1850.’ His current research pivots around nineteenth century social history, with a specific interest in the English Poor Laws, the history of welfare and the politics of the parish.

4pm Weds 4th March, Prof David Laven on gondoliers and British gay men (MB2204)

February 26, 2020 / / 0 Comments

 

Prof David Laven (University of Nottingham) will talking us on:

‘Amedeo, Angelo, and Antonio: agency, allure and annuities. Gondoliers, British gay men, and the economics of homosex in Venice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’

This paper looks at a number of well-known British men (Horatio Brown, John Addington Symonds, Frederick Rolfe) who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bought sex in Venice. There has been something of a historiographical tradition – typified by the work of Robert Aldrich – of suggesting the Italian boys and young men who sold their bodies to older north European men regarded their ‘patrons’ benignly and with affection. There is another widespread approach to prostitution that sees it as entirely exploitative. In this paper, I want to suggest another model. I propose an interpretation of the sale of sex by Venetian boys and men to visiting or resident Britons based on the – unsurprising – starting point that it was an essentially economic transaction in which those selling the sex had considerable agency. They were not merely passive victims of exploitation, but rational economic agents, albeit ones with an often limited range of choices. What they were selling, however, was not simply physical gratification but also the chance to transcend class and cultural barriers, offering an understanding of a Venice as a simultaneously exotic and domestic place. British clients sought not simply penetration of the body, but penetration of venezianità. Relationships between British punters and Venetian men – often gondoliers who came to represent an ideal of masculine beauty – who prostituted themselves also built on an imaginary of Venice as a site of hetero-erotic excess, which referenced both art (from Titian to Fildes) and literature (Aretino, Casanova, Byron). I hope my paper will both puncture the Aldrichian myth of the ‘happy rentboy’ – the narratives of love and affection and mutual gratification were artful constructs – and restore some agency to the Venetian men who sold their bodies.

Biography

David Laven is Associate Professor of History at the University of Nottingham. He has held positions in both early modern and modern history as well as in Italian Studies, and has published on Italian history from the late fifteenth to the twentieth century. The focus of his work at present is on the way in which historians – Italian, British, German and Austrian, Swiss, French and American – writing on the Venetian Republic in the 150 years after its fall negotiated questions of identity when addressing Venice’s past. He has also published extensively on Austrian rule of Venice, on Italian identity in the Risorgimento and Liberal period, on British attitudes to Italy. He is engaged heavily in contemporary Italian struggles to challenge state-fostered myths of the Risorgimento as a successful mass movement. He is additionally involved in a project to reclaim the history of southern Italy’s industrial heritage, while addressing the imbalance in Italy’s UNESCO sites which are disproportionately and absurdly clustered in a few regions.

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