Discovering Literature

The British Library recently launched an excellent new educational website, Discovering Literature, which collects together over 8000 pages of information on a selection of Romantic and Victorian texts. Featuring 25 short documentary films, 165 specially-commissioned articles, and 30 lesson plans, the site draws on the expertise of leading academics to create a compelling and rich resource.

Designed to provide introductions to a variety of writers and their works, the site also offers an extensive range of contextual material such as photographs of artefacts, artworks, letters, manuscripts, and newspapers. Accessible to those completely new to these periods of literature, the articles and short films also have the advantage of being thought-provoking, leaving the site’s users not only with the desire the explore the texts further, but also with ideas about how they might approach these works.

At present, the site has 22 featured authors, spanning some of the big names of the Romantic and Victorian periods: Austen, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Dickens, Tennyson, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Hardy, and Wilde are all represented. I was pleased to see H. G. Wells included in the list, with links to related articles on degeneration, the end of the world, and contemporary imaginings of the future. Marcus Waithe’s article on Victorian utopias was particularly interesting, taking readers beyond Wells into Morris’s News from Nowhere, Butler’s Erewhon, and – a particular favourite of mine – Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race. Rather than separating the Romantic and Victorian periods, these articles consider the Romantic heritage upon which the Victorians drew, referencing Humphry Davy and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man.

Jane Austen, by her sister Cassandra

The site is intuitive to use, so it’s easy to locate relevant information, but it really comes into its own as a space to browse and explore at leisure. The biography of Jane Austen, for example, leads onto some fantastic articles on Austen’s juvenilia, courtship, love and marriage in her work, and the impact of the Napoleonic Wars in Britain. The user can then look at a variety of high-quality photographic images of artefacts (including Austen’s needle case), browse the manuscripts of selected letters, and watch the videos ‘Jane Austen: Class and Marriage’ and ‘Jane Austen: Gender and Morality’.

Discovering Literature also includes a collection of carefully-designed teaching resources, including lesson plans on Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion; Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ and ‘The Chimney Sweeper’; and Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. While these downloadable PDF packs, aimed at those teaching GCSE and A-level students, are not suitable for undergraduates, academics may well find them useful when planning outreach activities at their institutions.

A lively, engaging, and – crucially – free resource, Discovering Literature will make Romantic and Victorian literature more accessible for non-academic readers. It should also be useful for undergraduates studying these periods in detail for the first time, with an afternoon spent browsing the site introducing students to some key authors, texts, themes, and contexts. The project is earmarked for expansion, with the site promising to incorporate other eras – including the twentieth century – in the future. I'm very impressed with the quality and breadth of the material available so far, and look forward to seeing where the project goes next.

Two New Romanticism Blogs

There are some superb Romanticism blogs available on the web, and I thoroughly enjoy reading the latest news from a range of academics who are passionate about sharing their research. It's great to read posts on authors and topics outside of my own areas of specialism, and to keep up to date with what's going on in the Romantic studies community.

The problem with a lot of academic blogs is that they're often written by a single researcher. This frequently results - and I know I'm guilty of this! - in blogs remaining stagnant for weeks or months at a time while various teaching and research commitments are met; it can also mean that posts are rather narrow in focus.

Two new Romanticism blogs that seek to address these issues have recently launched: The Wordsworth Trust's Wordsworth and Romanticism Blog and the Romantic Textualities Blog. Both hosted by thriving Romanticism sites, these blogs are updated regularly and feature posts from teams of contributors. This results in a range of lively and varied posts on a startlingly wide array of topics; I've really enjoyed reading up on global Romanticism, Harriet Shelley, and the Gothic and travel writing so far, to name but a few.

The Wordsworth and Romanticism Blog

Officially launched on 7 April this year to coincide with Wordsworth's birthday, the Wordsworth and Romanticism blog provides introductions to a range of Romantic figures and topics, some very well known, and others less so. So far, posts have covered P. B. Shelley in revolutionary Ireland, Byron's exiles, Claire Clairmont, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Harriet Shelley, as well as a rather playful post speculating on the positions various male Romantic poets would play on a football team! The beauty of these posts is that they make their content accessible for those with no previous knowledge of the subject, yet also engage those readers who have a more long-standing interest in Romanticism.

Stephen Gill's post on Wordsworth is a particular highlight, capturing the essence of the poet for those new to his work while also reminding those of us who are familiar with his poetry why he is such a fascinating writer and how we can never truly consider our readings of his texts finished. Wordsworth is a poet, Gill argues, who 'offers us continual renewals of pleasure', living many lives and covering numerous themes yet ultimately always displaying a determination 'to try to understand what it means really to live'.

Claire Clairmont, by Amelia Curran

Written by a selection of big-name academics, early career researchers, and non-academic writers, these posts are invariably well-written and engaging. Sinéad Fitzgibbon describes the wonderful moment when P. B. Shelley, with youthful enthusiasm and zeal, threw his 'Address to the Irish People' from a window onto the heads of passers by during a visit to Dublin in 1812, while Andrew McConnell Stott shows us how Byron not only experienced exile himself, but also banished friends and acquaintances from his company. Lesley McDowell's post on Claire Clairmont reconsiders this intriguing figure who was part of the Shelley circle while never quite seeming to belong. Educated and independent without being rich, Clairmont was a woman whom Byron 'hadn't a clue how to handle'.

It's one of the great strengths of this blog that it strives to introduce its readers to a range of lesser-known Romantics, publishing posts on female writers and cultural figures alongside those that consider the male Big Six. This site is definitely one to bookmark.

The Romantic Textualities Blog

Aimed more at a specifically academic audience than the Wordsworth and Romanticism Blog, the Romantic Textualities Blog offers some wonderfully varied posts covering cutting-edge research, pedagogical reflections, conference reports, and introductions to topics. Part of the wider Romantic Texualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840 site, there's always something interesting to be found on this blog: I've recently enjoyed posts on Burke and Hare (Sarah Sharp), Wordsworth's poetic development (Elias Greig), and global Romanticism (Manu Samriti Chander).

The scholars writing for this site often consider a topic or theme across several posts; one particularly successful (and useful) set of posts has been Daniel Cook's 'Teaching Romanticism' series. Beginning with a consideration of how we teach Romanticism in terms of setting period boundaries, Cook reflects upon designing a Romantic and Gothic Literature paper at the University of Dundee. Later posts then turn to examining Romanticism modules, Scottish literature, and Taught Masters programmes.

The Villa Diodati

Another compelling series is written by Maximiliaan van Woudenberg, who introduces us to the Fantasmagoriana: the collection of gothic stories, read by the Shelley circle at the Villa Diodati in 1816, which inspired the famous ghost-story writing contest. I've been meaning to look at these stories for a long time, and after reading van Woudenberg's wonderfully enthusiastic posts I'm now determined to make time to look at them; who could resist the lure of a tale called 'The Spectre-Barber', which tells the story of a ghost who must be shaved bald in order to be set free?(!). As well as providing plot summaries and introductory information, van Woudenberg also considers the influence of each tale on Frankenstein. I'm really looking forward to reading the rest of the posts in this series, and highly recommend that Mary Shelley fans should keep an eye out for them in the coming months.

New Mary Shelley Letters Discovered

I can't say that I'm a regular reader of the Chelmsford Weekly News, but earlier this month I found my Facebook and Twitter feeds filled with links to an article in this publication concerning a very exciting discovery for Mary Shelley fans. While searching the archives at the Essex Records Office for information about an obscure nineteenth-century novelist known as Miss Crumpe, Professor Nora Crook (Anglia Ruskin) serendipitously came across a record for thirteen unpublished letters from Mary Shelley to Horace Smith and his daughter Eliza. Written between 1831 and 1849, the letters promise a fascinating glimpse into this period in Shelley's life.

These documents, Professor Crook explains, offer us an insight into Shelley's friendship with the Smiths, revealing her loyalty to the family alongside personal details about her son and her failing health. Shelley consults with Smith about one of Edward Trelawny's manuscripts, and asks if she can have permission to publish some letters written by her late husband, Percy Shelley, in which he expresses negative views about religion.

The letters will be published in a future edition of the Keats-Shelley Journal.

The original article from the Chelmsford Weekly News can be found here.

Halloween Launch of the Shelley-Godwin Archive

A page from the Frankenstein manuscript, showing revisions

It's been a ridiculously long time since I last posted on this site, as I've been busy finishing my doctoral thesis (which has now been submitted - hurrah!). Lots has been happening in the meantime, which I'll be blogging about the coming weeks, but today I want to draw attention to a superb new digital project which will be launching this evening.

The Shelley-Godwin Archive will digitise and publish on the web a range of manuscripts by Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley. I've been lucky enough to work with some of Mary Shelley's manuscripts in the Bodleian, but this project will make these documents available to anyone with an interest in this family of writers, wherever they are in the world.

Let's hope it's suitably dark and dreary tonight, because site goes live at 8.00pm with - yes, you've guessed it - the Frankenstein manuscripts. These manuscripts show how the text was shaped by both Mary and Percy into the novel that we know today, and it really is fascinating to look at the revisions and corrections that were made to these drafts. I'm really looking forward to the launch of this site, and to looking at the manuscripts added over the coming months. If you'd like to be informed of updates to the project, you can join the mailing list by sending your email address to info@shelleygodwinarchive.org

Happy Halloween!

'The Next Time(line)': Creating a Digital Timeline for Wordsworth's 'Prelude'

Back in February, I published a post reflecting on time in Wordsworth's Prelude, a topic I'd been considering in my role as Research Assistant on a project called 'The Next Time(line)'. The aim of this project was to create a new kind of literary timeline for the digital age, using the touch-screen device to offer an interesting, compelling, and ultimately more in-depth experience for the user than a traditional print counterpart could provide.

We considered three great works of literature - Wordsworth's Prelude, Hugo's Les Misérables, and Shakespeare's Henry V - over the course of the project, but for our final prototype app concentrated on Wordsworth. The timeline we produced allows the user to trace the development of The Prelude from its earliest manuscript form through to its final rewriting, with the visualisation on the screen demonstrating how the poem grows and transforms over time. 

The user is able to isolate a single episode from the text and see how it changes across versions; perhaps it moves position within the body of the work, contracts, expands, or splits as the text goes through a series of rewritings. Layered over this are a series of contextual timelines which offer an insight into some of the factors which shaped The Prelude across time, including the biographical, historical, social, and political contexts. It's possible to see, for example, what Wordsworth read in a particular year, and how and where this may have impacted on his revision of the poem. The user can choose which of these timelines to layer on the screen, focusing on certain contexts and isolating particular moments before moving back out and fitting these details into a bigger 'pathway' through the text.

This was a fascinating project to which to contribute, and it was lovely to work with such an innovative and ambitious team. If you'd like to know more about our digital timeline, this 4-minute film gives you the chance to hear the team talk about their experiences of working on the project and to see the app in action.

Romanticism on the web: Two essential sites

During the course of my work on The Next Time(line) project over the past few weeks, I've come across two great websites for Romanticists: 'British Fiction 1800-1829' and 'UK RED'. I'm always keen to encourage my students to explore Romanticism on the web, and both of these sites have gone straight onto the 'electronic resources' section of my undergraduate Romanticism reading list. Simultaneously scholarly and user friendly, these sites are noteworthy because they cater for a variety of needs; whether you simply require a small and specific piece of information, or want to spend more time exploring an author in greater depth, there will be something there for you.


British Fiction 1800-1829

During one of our recent REACT workshops, I got chatting to Dr Anthony Mandal, who is a Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff, and whose Books and Print Sandbox project, Jekyll 2.0, is absolutely fascinating and well worth a look. Another project on which Anthony has worked is the British Fiction 1800-1829 database, a fantastic - and completely free - web resource from Cardiff University which covers the production, circulation, and reception of fiction written in the second half of the Romantic period. The database holds bibliographical records of 2,272 works of fiction written by approximately 900 authors, and also contains some fascinating contemporary supporting materials such as letters by authors and readers, reviews, newspaper advertisements, anecdotal information, circulating-library catalogues, and subscription lists.

Of course, the first book I looked up on this database was Mary Shelley's The Last Man, and despite being in the fourth year of a PhD on Last Man texts I was really pleased to find a couple of references which I haven't come across before. Alongside some familiar references to the novel from Mary Shelley's own letters, I found observations on The Last Man from the correspondence of Washington Irving, Mary Leadbeater, and Lady Louisa Stuart. The list of advertisements for the novel was comprehensive and clearly set out, and the information from circulating-library catalogues was similarly well presented and useful.

Without very much effort at all, undergraduates can use this site to enhance their understanding of an author or specific text, quickly accessing information about the contemporary reception  and availability of a huge number of works. Likewise, postgraduates and other researchers should find it a helpful starting point when approaching a work of fiction from this period. From Jane Austen to Sophia F. Ziegenhirt, this database covers both canonical names and lesser-known authors, and offers some really nice features, such as the ability to browse by publisher. This is definitely one to bookmark; I'm just annoyed I didn't find it sooner!


UK RED

'A Young Girl Reading' by Fragonard (1776)

As part of my role as Research Assistant on The Next Time(line), I've been collecting a lot of contextual data surrounding Wordsworth's production of The Prelude (in its many forms) to go into our prototype app. Wordsworth was a prolific reader, and I've become particularly interested in the impact of his reading in the years 1785-1805 on his writing. Alongside Duncan Wu's superbly researched books on this subject, I've found the website UK RED very useful. This online database, compiled by the Open University, covers the experience of reading in Britain from 1450 to 1945, aiming to 'capture the reading tastes and habits of the famous and the ordinary, the young and the old, men and women'.

Like 'British Fiction 1800-1829', 'UK RED' can be either searched or browsed, and subjects can be looked up as both readers and authors; in other words, I can look at what Wordsworth was reading or, alternatively, I can see who was reading Wordsworth. The downside to this resource is that the data is currently not standardised so, for example, you'd be advised to search 'Austin' as well as 'Austen' in order to access all the information available. Having said that, 'UK RED' is a really rich resource, so is well worth the effort. It goes way beyond published fiction and poetry, covering a range of literature from playbills and tickets to graffiti and prison records; it also has some useful features, such as the ability to compile a marked list and save it as a PDF. I hope that you find something here to interest you!

'The Prelude': A poem through time

MS JJ: How does The Prelude change through time?

I'm currently working as the Research Assistant on a really exciting project led by Dr Bradley Stephens (University of Bristol) and Alex Butterworth from Amblr called 'The Next Time(line)'. As part of the Books and Print Sandbox, funded by the REACT Knowledge Exchange Hub for the Creative Economy, our project is looking at how to redesign literary timelines for the digital age.

At present, the timelines offered by literary apps don't do much more than their paper counterparts, so we're exploring how touch screen devices can be used to offer a more dynamic, intuitive, and ultimately interesting form of timeline. In developing our prototype, we are using three texts - Wordsworth's Prelude, Hugo's Les Misérables, and Shakespeare's Henry V - and, as the resident expert on British Romanticism, I have been spending the past few weeks thinking about how time flows through The Prelude, as well as how the text itself is shaped and altered through (and by) time. 

As part of the project, we have been keeping an online journal detailing our thoughts, questions, and discoveries, and this week I contributed a post, reproduced below, on Wordsworth and time. The original post can be read here, alongside some other fascinating entries from Bradley and Alex on adapting Les Misérables and contemplating pace and time. I hope that you enjoy exploring our project and will follow our blog over the coming weeks to see our work develop.

Wordsworth: The Growth of a Poet's Mind in Time

                                                Many are the joys
Of youth, but, oh, what happiness to live
When every hour brings palpable access
Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight,
And sorrow is not there.

William Wordsworth, The 1805 Prelude (II, 304-08)


The Romantics, writing in an age of revolution and change, were fascinated by cycles of time. My doctoral research has focused on the second-generation Romantics, looking at how writers such as Mary Shelley and Lord Byron were inspired by the latest developments in geology and archaeology, as well as by contemporary thinking on population, empire, and posterity, to look ahead to the end of time and the death of mankind.

As Research Assistant on The Next Time[line], I am excited by the opportunities presented by this project to look at how time flows through texts, and this week have been thinking about the complexities of time in Wordsworth’s Prelude.

Wordsworth around the time that he started The Prelude

The Prelude is a poem obsessed, and enmeshed, with issues of time. Charting the poet’s formative years across some 8500 lines of verse, the text both adheres to a linear chronology and disrupts this order, playing with the flow of time and layering the years in which it was composed (1799-1805) over the years it describes (1770-1798). While the poem maps Wordsworth’s poetic development through time, it is simultaneously aware of the difficulties of transcribing time, and explores how the memory skips over whole years even as it focuses in on small, specific moments in great detail.

Wordsworth inserts markers of time into The Prelude on an almost obsessive level, but these can be as unsettling to the reader as they are indicative of stability and linear progression. Alongside numerous references to measurable hours, days, months, and seasons, Wordsworth scatters disconcerting moments where time can be observed to move at unnatural speeds.

In the dizziness of youth, for example, the solitary cliffs wheel by the young Wordsworth ‘even as if the earth had rolled ǀ With visible motion her diurnal round’ (I, 485-86). The natural flow of time, usually imperceptible, is here transformed into something fantastic which is both exhilarating and terrifying to watch. As the poet proceeds through his childhood, this sense of time rushing before his eyes recurs, and Wordsworth explains how ‘the year span round ǀ With giddy motion’ as he and his friends ran ‘a boisterous race’ through time (II, 48-49).

Wordsworth’s unsettling uses of time can be explored further if we look at the ways in which he revised his poem. Moving between different versions of the text, we can see that sometimes what appear to be definite, grounding markers of time are not always as they seem. ‘Well I call to mind’, Wordsworth states with reassuring certainty of an episode in Book I of the 1805 Prelude, ‘’Twas at an early age, ere I had seen ǀ Nine summers [...]’ (I, 309-10). If we turn to the 1850 rewriting, however, we find this marker corrected to read ‘Ere I had told ǀ Ten birth-days’ (I, 306-07).

Discovering that even seemingly fixed and accurate markers of time in the text can be destabilised in this way can remove the reader’s faith in the ‘authority’ of the poem’s chronology. In this sense, the older Wordsworth writing from memory about time can unsettle us as much as the younger Wordsworth’s giddy and immediate perception of wheeling time.

Taking these ideas forward over the next two months into The Next Time[line], our team will be looking at how The Prelude is shaped through time from its origins as the two-part 1799 version of the poem through to the 1805 thirteen-book text and possibly the 1850 rewriting. Charting how developments in Wordworth’s life and times flow through the text, we will explore possible external taxonomies such as the impact of Wordsworth’s reading on the growth of the poem through time, as well as perhaps looking at how we can categorise markers of time in the text itself into a useable set of data.

Just as it is often the instances of moments and minutes charted by Wordsworth in The Prelude which are most significant in his poetic development, so we hope that in pulling out some of these small strands we will gain a more complete understanding of the poem as a whole.

Having spent the past two days thinking about what some of these strands could be, and considering how they can be combined to form various pathways through the text, the team is excited to move forward to the next stage of the project. Over the next fortnight, we will begin collecting data and planning how this can be developed into a prototype timeline which is both intuitive and illuminating, allowing readers explore how a text is shaped both by and through time.