Display of Ernest de Selincourt Materials: 2026 marks the centenary of the publication of the thirteen-book version of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. The poem, completed by the poet in 1805, was unearthed and edited by the University of Birmingham Professor, Ernest de Selincourt. Its appearance in 1926 has shaped a century of Romantic studies. The conference will feature a display of de Selincourt’s papers from the University of Birmingham’s Cadbury Archives, which will also be made available online.
John Constable, Sky Study with Rainbow, 1827, Yale Centre for British Art
Simon Bainbridge is a Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster. Simon’s extensive work in the field of Romanticism has involved close research into the relationship between the movement and the historic contexts that surround it. He is the author of Napoleon and English Romanticism (1995) and British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (2003). In this seminar we heard about Simon’s recent research exploring global mountaineering in the Romantic-period, focusing on accounts of ascending Hawaii’s highest volcanoes.
Simon introduces his subject here:
‘This paper will examine the Romantic-period phenomena of global mountaineering through a focus on accounts of the climbs of Hawaii’s highest volcanoes (Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea). These climbs by western travellers began in 1779 with attempts made by crew members of Captain Cook’s third voyage and culminated in 1840-1 with a 400-strong ascent made by the United States Exploratory Expedition as part of the first American government sponsored scientific expedition to the Pacific. As these contexts would suggest, the ascents were very much linked to the scientific and imperial agendas of the voyages of which they were a part. The paper will examine the extent to which the exploration of what were seen as physical, psychological, geographical and imaginative extremes in Romantic-period global mountaineering undermined or reinforced the climbers’ conceptions of the self, the aesthetic, the world and the divine. It will particularly examine the question of whether western climbers’ attempts to understand and appreciate the Hawaiian volcanoes were influenced and informed by the knowledge and beliefs of the indigenous peoples who played such a crucial role in their ascents or whether the western climbers used their ascent narratives to reinforce wider imperial and colonial power structures.’
Image: Johan Christian Dahl, Eruption of Vesuvius, 1826, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
“From towers of joy to sickroom gardens: revisiting Dorothy Wordsworth’s dwelling-places of the mind”
At the confluence of nature-writing, life-writing, and disability studies, Atkin’s work is underpinned by a rich understanding of the Lake District and expertise in Romantic literature.
Atkin is the author of Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021), a ground-breaking biography that focuses on the mental and physical illness that Dorothy Wordsworth suffered in the final decades of her life.
Atkin’s most recent book, Some of Us Just Fall: on Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre, 2023) is a profound reflection on the experience of inhabiting a body and a place in the context of disability and illness. She is also the author of poetry collections including Much With Body (2021), Basic Nest Architecture (2017), and Shadow Dispatches (2013), as well as works of literary criticism, biography, and short form non-fiction.
Atkin introduces her subject here:
“This talk will take a wander through places both of the earth and the mind as Dorothy experienced them, with a focus on the parallels between her acute sensory experience of material place, and her ability to conjure places from her imagination, both remembered and created. I trace her ability to inhabit both real and unreal places from the dream cottages she imagined as a unsettled young woman without a home of her own, to the gardens she brought into her sickroom when she was housebound later in life. During those housebound years, writing and reciting poetry becomes a way of both reigniting memories, and bringing the natural world into her mind and her room, even when she cannot leave her bed. She brings the outside in, literally, and in memory and poetry. In this talk I bring those late imaginative travels back into parallel with her youthful attempts to ‘build castles’ or ’tower(s) of joy’ as she dreamt of a home in which happiness might arise from ideal company, ‘retirement and rural quiet’. In doing so, I question whether everything we value about her place-writing – her intense attention to the intricacies and particularities of place – is what enables her to travel so satisfactorily through the many mansion of her mind too.”
Daphne Astor was a writer, publisher, philanthropist, farmer, and environmentalist with an extraordinary gift for encouraging and enabling others. Daphne was a loyal supporter of Arts of Place from the first, coming regularly to our online seminars and championing the work of speakers she heard. Her punchy and insightful contributions always brought a new perspective to the subject at hand, whether she was urging us to think more about contemporary farming or to visit the places of the poet George Crabbe. Even when she was ill and knew her time was limited, she logged on, listened, and shared her knowledge. Daphne died in July 2024 and she is remembered with deep appreciation by the Arts of Place community.
Hazel Press, which she founded, continues to publish new work with a focus on environment and the arts.
Tuesday 18 June 2024, 5pm, University of Birmingham
Our annual lecture, a collaboration between Arts of Place and OCLW, brings together thinking about place with some of the most exciting current work in the fields of biography and life-writing. Lives happen in places; places shape lives and have lives of their own.
We were delighted to welcome Fiona Stafford, FBA, Professor of English at the University of Oxford, scholar of Romantic literature, and author of bestselling books on our relationships to the natural world and our local surroundings.
‘Landscapes, seascapes, skyscapes – seemingly empty spaces often turn out to be full of life and hidden lives. A solitary walk is a chance to listen to waves or leaves, to catch sight of birds and wildlife, to sense the people who once lived and worked there. Writing the long, long life of landscape means attending to what seems odd or out of place, to unexpected openings into the past. A bridge from nowhere to nowhere, an old oak in a birchwood, a red squirrel, a half-submerged church, an echoing sea cave, or an enigmatic placename – cracks in the present, opening the way into other times and other lives.’
In November 2023, for the first research seminar of our new project ‘Pioneers of Local Thinking, 1740-1820’, we welcomed Prof. Peter Davidson to Birmingham for a discussion of John Sell Cotman and John Aubrey. Peter is Senior Research Fellow in Renaissance and Baroque Studies and Curator of the Campion Hall Collection in Oxford. He has authored monographs on the verse of Richard Fanshawe and Robert Southwell, as well a trio of acclaimed texts on landscape art: The Idea of North (2005), Distance and Memory (2013) and a cultural history of twilight The Last of the Light (2015).
Tracing a rich and rangy seam of placethinking, Peter discussed Aubrey’s drawings of his own house (made in 1670 prior to his permanent departure from the area), particularly his set of views of undramatic slopes and ends of fields. These are places which carry the same all-but-secret autobiographical meaning as the views of underbrush and shadowed streams which John Sell Cotman made in the course of his northern tour in 1805. Peter cast back through these English expressions of place to the wider context of Dutch paintings of ordinary time in ordinary corners, and forward to consider their qualities in relation to Wordsworthian romanticism.
Watch the recording of this talk below and read on for a summary.
We were the lucky passengers on Peter’s breath-taking journey through the English countryside, to Aberdeen, then Leiden and the Low Countries, followed by a foray into the Claudian scenes of the Grand tour, and a return to Aubery’s locality in the home counties. Through these composite views Peter shared his account of
“how we see landscape starting through that curious bringing together of north and south”.
On Aubrey’s book of drawings created with the use of a perspective machine in around 1669, Peter noted that they are ‘Place-time-weather specific, mostly dated as late April evenings’. This form of landscape, intensely personal responses to his immediate surroundings, appears as if from nowhere: the sources from which Aubrey could have learned this mode of representing landscape are limited to a very limited number of Dutch prints:
“he’s looking for a way of talking about the place and what it meant to him […] aesthetically there is no precedent”
Peter went on to describe how Aubrey suffered a ‘grievously interrupted education’ due to the Civil War, and he reads these drawings in light of Aubrey’s wistful longing for continuity and his intellectual preoccupation with archaeology, deep time and comparative anthropology, then in vogue amongst his Oxford circle.
Turning next to the dialogue-in-landscape between the landscapists of the Dutch Golden Age and the Norwich School of watercolourists, Peter’s unique way of seeing offers a stream of revelations: we catch Cotman red handed borrowing from Vermeer’s textural attention of brick, pointing, and the flaking render of buildings; we see a visual rhyme between Cotman’s Crambe Beck Bridge (1804) and the rhymical sunlit expanses of Gerrit Berckheyde’s The Golden Bend in the Heerengracht (1671); and we find John Crome joining ‘his master’ Hobbema in newfound uses of water to articulate the local specificity of light and shadow.
Peter ends on the absence of a conclusion. But through these endlessly allusive and deeply felt connections he comes full circle to his thesis of picturing place as an autobiographical tool. Looking with Cotman at a forgotten, formally irresolvable slip of land, On the Greta. he guides us to a moving understanding of how landscape gave shape, colour, and form to lives in the long eighteenth century.
On Monday 5th December at 5pm we went online with the table set for an intriguing Advent treat!
Image: Claude Pratt, ‘Still Life of Newspaper, Pipe, Decanter, and Jar’ (1935, Birmingham Museums Trust)
Dr Heber Rodrigues from the UK Centre for Excellence on Wine Research explored the cultural contexts of wine appreciation, and Dr Will Bowers (QMUL) introduced his new research on the dynamics of eighteenth-century dining circles!
Have a taste of the two talks below! First up, Heber introduces us to thinking about wine, place and terroir. Under the concept of terroir, Heber introduces, the place of wine is not only the place in which the vines are grown, but is also imbibed with the characteristics of their surrounding context—in all its complexity.
Will introduced us to the transformative place of the dining room at Holland House, an essential creative context for Romantic London, facilitating discussion and hospitality between British and European cultural and political figures. This room, Will argues, was a “literary and political space” that “gave coherence to the ramshackle organisation of the Whig party” alongside hosting literary salons at the heart of the definition of taste. It was above all a space of both literary and political opposition.
A chance to get together as the academic year begins.
Whether you’re a regular Arts of Place contributor or new to Birmingham and interested in finding out more, please do come along for this special in-person version of our ‘Monday Conversation’ series. Lucy Shaw (History of Art) and Jon Stevens (English) will be among those giving brief talks about their current work. No booking required: just drop in between 5 and 6 to share your place-related interests, meet other researchers, and enjoy a drink.
An evening of readings and discussion in the Barber Gallery, inspired by the exhibition Taking Root, with Flora Kay, Gillian Wright, Tom Kaye, Alexandra Harris and Jessica Fay
Tuesday 5th July 2022, 5.45pm – 7.30pm, Barber Institute of Fine Arts.
Barbiers, Pieter; A Woodland Landscape with Three Travellers; The Barber Institute of Fine Arts; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/a-woodland-landscape-with-three-travellers-236013
In response to the arboreal work of artists from Gaspard Dughet to JMW Turner, this event considered some of the writers who shaped ideas about trees in seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain. Their powerful imaginative responses illuminate the past and give us new perspectives on the present. After a welcoming drink and tour of the prints on display, we considered the work of tree-thinkers including John Evelyn, who advocated tree planting in the 1660s, and William Cowper, who thought a single oak tree was fit subject for poetic biography.
All levels and abilities are welcome. This talk, is open to anyone 18+ and will be held at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Limited spaces, so booking is essential.
Speakers: Flora Kay is Learning and Engagement Manager at the Barber Institute Gillian Wright is the author, most recently, of The Restoration Transposed: Poetry, Place and History, 1660-1700. Jessica Fay is a scholar of Romanticism and currently writing about relations between poetry and Dutch painting. Tom Kaye is writing a doctoral thesis on forestry in American literature. Alexandra Harris is the author of Weatherland, Time and Place, and is finishing a book on rural history and local feeling.
The meanings and resonances of churchyards are multiple and deep. They are a sanctuary of peace at the centre of the community; a focus for local history; a place for prayer, mourning and memorialization. In the eighteenth century they inspired a group of poets looking for new ways to connect with the land and with the past.
We met for a discussion of exciting new research on churchyards, history and poetry. Ruth Abbott (Cambridge) took us beyond and behind Thomas Gray’s Elegy, introducing the poet’s unpublished Commonplace-Book notes on historical graveyards, tombs, and sepulchres. James Metcalf (King’s) offered a new reading of Robert Blair’s The Grave as a piece of land work.
James Metcalf: ‘This ado in Earthing up a Carcase’: Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743) & Eighteenth-Century Churchyard Georgic
“The churchyard is a place where it is impossible to forget the body. It is a place where bodies continually press upon the consciousness of the solitary figure wandering its enclosure, however abstracted their thoughts might aspire to be in contemplating the afterlife.”
James Metcalf works to rethink the eighteenth-century school of poets and thinkers often known as the Graveyard poets, refocusing our emphasis from graveyard to churchyard based on the study of particular places filled with physical and imaginative resonances. The burial site thus becomes part of a wider landscape in the long eighteenth century. James’ talk for Arts of Place offers an exciting glimpse into his upcoming book, Written in the Country Churchyard: Place and Poetics 1720-1820, where James examines how the georgic is a particularly useful mode for thinking about the poetry of the churchyard.
Ruth Abbott: Churchyard and other Common Places in Thomas Gray’s Antiquarian Scholarship
Ruth Abbott works on the particularly challenging questions of how people make notes and organise their ideas; has recently worked to edit an online edition of Thomas Gray’s Commonplace Book; and is editing an exciting multi-disciplinary volume about Gray composed from a myriad of scholarly perspectives. In this talk, Ruth thinks about churchyards as common places in the mid eighteenth century. She moves backwards from Wordsworth’s writing on epitaphs, which are defined as
“not a proud writing shut up for the studious: it is exposed to all […] it is concerning all, and for all”.
For Ruth, Wordsworth articulates a particular way of thinking about churchyards that appears to originate, in some part, in Gray. Bringing his Antiquarian scholarship into conversation with Elegy, she provides an enlightening reading of the common place of the churchyard in poetry and beyond. She highlights how eighteenth-century antiquarian research frequently depended on common access to sites such as churchyards as it did the sharing of textual resources, suggesting that such processes of historical, poetic, and place “openness” were as important to Gray as they were to Wordsworth when he was musing fifty years later on the epitaph.
