18th century – Arts of Place

Reading Group: The Lunar Men

Niamh Lawlor on 18/03/2025

Monday 19th May 2025, Arts Building, Lecture Room 5

2-4pm

Refreshments provided

The Arts of Place network would like to invite you to a reading group which will revisit Jenny Uglow’s group biography and classic of Midlands history The Lunar Men ahead of her upcoming summer lecture on 17th June.

The Lunar Men explores the lives and legacies of the many members of the Lunar Society, a group of curious and enthusiastic men on the cutting edge of discovery. From James Watt and Matthew Boulton’s exploits with steam engines, to James Keir and Joseph Priestley’s experiments in chemistry, collaboration was at the very heart of their work. Uglow’s group biography is the perfect way to chart this, intertwining details of their personal and family lives with their professional exploits. Birmingham became their hub, their home, and the Midlands on the whole provided the perfect backdrop for their work, from Erasmus Darwin’s medical practice in Lichfield to the group’s adventures exploring the minerals of Derbyshire’s caves. This group of men revolutionised Birmingham’s history, and their legacy should be celebrated.

In anticipation of Jenny’s summer lecture about her new book A Year With Gilbert White, we will be hosting a reading group exploring this earlier work so closely intertwined with Birmingham’s history. The afternoon will consist of talks from Birmingham’s Dr Louise Curran and Dr Malcolm Dick as well as The Lunar Society’s own Dr Peter Borg-Bartolo – experts from the fields covered by this expansive text and enthusiastic readers themselves. These talks will then be followed by discussion.

We invite you to read especially the ‘Prologue’ and the initial section: ‘First Quarter’.

Access the book via FindIt. Or access these PDFs for PROLOGUE and FIRST QUARTER. But no prior knowledge is required and all are welcome to take part!

If you have queries about this event please contact Lucy Snow: lrs103@student.bham.ac.uk.

Image: Anonymous artist, Birmingham by Moonlight, c. 1800, Birmingham Museums Trust

‘Standing on the verge of another world’: Romanticism on the Volcano

Niamh Lawlor on 12/02/2025

With guest speaker Professor Simon Bainbridge

Seminar

Wednesday 19th March, Arts Building, University of Birmingham, Arts Room 201, 3-5pm

Arts of Place is delighted to welcome Professor Simon Bainbridge expert in Romanticism, the politics of place and mountaineering in this seminar hosted in collaboration with the Nineteenth Century Centre at the University of Birmingham. Simon will give his talk during the first hour; followed by refreshments and conversation.

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 will hear 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

Common Land in English Painting, 1700-1850

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

Ian Waites (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012)

Recommended by Catriona Paton

Examining how artists such as Peter DeWint and John Constable depicted common land during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Waites sketches a picture of a little-known, unenclosed landscape from England’s past. While enclosures had been impacting the countryside since the fifteenth century, this book charts a period of fast-paced parliamentary enclosure activity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which transformed many remaining common field systems. Waites examines cultural artistic developments, such as the Picturesque, Naturalism and rural nostalgia, alongside socioeconomic debates surrounding parliamentary enclosures, including ideologies of improvement and the independence of the commoner. Studying the landscape art, literature and contemporary commentary of the period c.1700-1850, this book makes a strong case for the importance of common land in English landscape painting, wider culture and history.

David Cox, The Cross Roads, 1850, oil on panel, Birmingham Museums Trust

Image: public domain.

David Cox, The Cross Roads, oil on panel, 1850, Birmingham Museums and Art Galleries.

David Cox’s (1783-1859) atmospheric painting of an unspecified location is one of a number of artworks analysed by Waites in his chapter on English Naturalism. In a scene dominated by tempestuous sky and an unbounded expanse of apparently common land, figures and their animals trudge onwards into the wind guided by a time-worn signpost. As Waites highlights, Cox memorialised an open, common field landscape becoming increasingly rare with parliamentary enclosures during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

John Barrell (Cambridge, 1972)

Recommended by Jessica Fay

This book gives a lot. It taught me how to recognize and describe the compositional patterns of seventeenth-century landscape painting (which were epitomized in the work of Claude Lorrain), how these patterns became standardized in English landscape art, and how, in turn, they inflected the structures of eighteenth-century topographical poetry. Barrell’s close reading, showing how the syntax of James Thomson’s The Seasons encourages the reader’s eye to move across the page in the way that the eye surveys a landscape painting, reveals how eighteenth-century readers looked at real landscapes. This builds to a foundational study of John Clare’s unique poetic representation of place.

Local Attachments

Alexandra Harris on 19/07/2020

Fiona Stafford (Oxford, 2010)

Recommended by Alexandra Harris

One of the many remarkable things that happened towards the end of the eighteenth century was that local feeling and the life of particular places became great literary subjects. You wouldn’t expect to find a Jacobean poet writing about the River Duddon (unless perhaps it was a symbol of national prosperity), but of Wordsworth you would expect nothing less. Paying close attention to the changing cultural status of local particularity, Stafford asks how and why this came about, and how Romantic writers, poem by poem, made places matter.

Read the introduction on the OUP website

The History of Myddle

Alexandra Harris on 19/07/2020

Richard Gough, ed. David Hey (London, 1981)

Recommended by Alexandra Harris

A pioneering work of local history. Richard Gough was a Shropshire yeoman who wanted to write about his parish community: its past and its present. In 1701 he published a study of the antiquities in Myddle, following more or less the newly established conventions for antiquarian place studies. But he wanted to write about more than the pedigrees of manorial lords and the relics of monastic houses, so he invented a form to suit him and embarked on his ‘Observations concerning the Seats in Myddle and the families to which they belong’. By ‘seats’ he meant pews in the church. He drew a plan of St Peter’s, labelled the pews, and wrote a portrait of each member of the congregation, seat by seat. Though he was imagining them all in church, he was writing lives that strayed far from the orderly Sunday formation, into fields and towns, into bedrooms, backrooms, affairs, and quarrels. It was a simple and evocative method of group biography; no-one seems to have used it before, or since.