The Gaskell Journal invites submissions from PhD and MA students for its biennial Graduate Student Essay Competition. The winning essay (6,000–7,000 words) will offer an original contribution to Gaskell studies, and will be published in The Gaskell Journal. Its author will receive £200 from the Gaskell Society, and a complimentary copy of the journal. Essays will be judged by members of the Gaskell Journal Editorial Board, with the final decision being made from a shortlist by a leading scholar in Gaskell studies.

Submissions should be sent to the journal’s editor (and founding member of the Nineteenth-Century Research Group at Lincoln), Dr Rebecca Styler <rstyler@lincoln.ac.uk>, by the deadline of 10 February 2016. (Please note the amended deadline.)

Further details are available here.

Claudia Capancioni (Bishop Grosseteste University), ‘At Poggio Gherardo with Janet Ross: Literary Legacy and Intellectual Communities’

On the 15th Arpil 2015, Dr. Claudia Capancioni spoke to us about Poggio Gherardo, a Tuscan villa and site of literary and scholarly tourism. Dr. Capancioni explored the legacy of Poggio Gherardo as a space for intellectual encounters and collaborations in the late nineteenth century.

Author of the acclaimed Letters from Egypt, 1863-65 (1865), Janet Ross settled with her husband in Tuscany in 1869. Contrary to many Anglo-American settlers, the pair preferred the countryside to the city of Florence. They bought Poggio Gherardo, a villa ‘nearly two miles due east of Florence, above the Settignano road, […] overlooking the valley of the Arno.’

Dr. Capancioni is studying Poggio Gherardo as the space of renowned Sunday receptions attended by John Addington Symonds and his daughter, Margaret Symonds, Henry James, Marie Corelli, Alfred Austin, Robert Browning, Mark Twain, Caroline Waterfield, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. In the late nineteenth century, Ross’s villa was the place to discover rural Tuscany, absorb the hostess’s knowledge of Tuscan costumes and folklore, and be inspired by the same landscape that inspired Boccaccio.

This was a suitably warm and sunny talk for our final research seminar of the year. We welcome proposals for papers and other activates for 2015-16.

On the 11th March, Dr. Katherine Mullin (University of Leeds) gave a fascinating talk on the topic of ‘Barmaids and Reading’.

The paper described how moral anxieties around drinking and reading were suggestively aligned in the closing decade of the nineteenth century and into Modernism. It considered the contested and troubling figure of the barmaid during this period, the focus of much moral panic, and suggested that she became an oblique figure for the imperilled young woman reader. The paper focussed on Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), reading both novels alongside contemporary cultural representations of the barmaids they describe.

Dr Mullin’s research is soon to be published in a book entitled Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality, and the Modern, 1870 – 1922 (Oxford University Press).

Suitably, once the talk was over, we went for a drink.

There are two events taking place in Lincoln next week that may be of interest to our readers. On 11 February, Margot Finn will deliver a paper at Lincoln concerning her recent Leverhulme-funded project on the East India Company in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And the next day, Alice Crossley is offering a Valentine’s-themed talk uphill at Bishop Grosseteste. Please see below for details.

Wednesday 11 February 2015, 4.15 p.m., MC0024 (University of Lincoln)

Professor Margot Finn (UCL)

‘The East India Company at Home: New Pathways to Old Histories’

Thursday 12 February 2015, 4 p.m., Hardy Building – Teaching Room 2 (Bishop Grosseteste)

Dr Alice Crossley (Bishop Grosseteste)

‘Victorian Valentines: From Sentiment to Satire’

Last Wednesday we heard from four newly minted PhD candidates in the College of Arts. Tasked with explaining their topic in five minutes just a few months into their doctorates, the students produced a number of suggestive research questions and fruitful lines of discussion.

Ben Perkins (English) began with the paradoxes that characterise Tennyson’s handling of the non-European subject—at once peddling mysticised dreams of religious tolerance and propagating racist stereotypes.

John Davies (History and English) took us through his labours in the Tennyson Research Centre, including rarely seen examples of Tennyson’s annotations and doodles, as a way of introducing questions both curatorial and theoretical.

Grace Harvey (English) persuasively spoke of the male experience of sociability in the late eighteenth century, triangulating philosophy, literature, and biography in her account of William Godwin and his circle.

Finally, Tom Kupper (Art History) is working on amateur ecclesiastical design and decoration between 1830 and 1880. Tom poignantly evoked the forgotten amateurs who furnished Britain’s churches, such as Æneas B. Hutchison, vicar in a number of parishes during the Victorian period, of whom we know little more than his (magnificent) name and his enthusiasm for restoration.

Thanks to all presenters for their thought-provoking contributions. We hope to have each of you back for an extended research paper further into your projects.

Below: A number of Tom Kupper’s examples of amateur ecclesiastical design were drawn from St Mary and All Saints, the parish church of Bingham—less than an hour’s drive from Lincoln.