Romantic Circles Blog

Romantic Circles recently received a correspondence alerting us to the state of disrepair into which the headstone of Margaret King Countess Mount Cashell, a pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft and friend to Mary Shelley, has fallen (see photo). Buried next to her husband, George Tighe, in the Old English Cemetery at Leghorn in Livorno, Italy, King’s grave site, along with most others in the cemetery were, until recently, covered with vegetation, earth, and roots. A group of volunteers began cleanup of the entire cemetery last year. The graves span the years 1600 to 1838 when the cemetery was closed. The chief volunteer, Matteo Giunti maintains a blog chronicling their restoration efforts.

More information about King can be found on her Wikipedia entry.

We here at Romantic Circles recently received an intriguing email we thought was worth passing on, from one Vicki Parslow Stafford:

I would like to bring to the attention of Romantic scholars, historians and biographers a collection of letters held by the Somerset Record Office which establishes the identity of the father of Mary Jane ‘Claire’ Clairmont, daughter of Mrs. Mary Jane Godwin (nee Vial) and stepsister of Mary Shelley.

The letters span the period from 1797, when Mary Jane Vial’s daughter was conceived, until early 1814.  They were formerly held by Dodson and Pulman, Solicitors of Taunton, Somerset, UK.  The collection comprises holograph letters from Mary Jane Vial to her former lover John Lethbridge, of Sandhill Park, Somerset; to his lawyer Robert Beadon; and to several others.  It also contains letters from Lethbridge to his lawyer, and sundry file notes and correspondence from Mary Jane Vial’s lawyer William Lambert White, of Yeovil.  The correspondence is concerned with securing financial support for Mary Jane, Vial’s daughter with John Lethbridge.  It includes a number of letters written by Vial between April and August 1799, when she was imprisoned for debt at Ilchester.

The documents are archived at Somerset Archive and Record Service http://www1.somerset.gov.uk/archives/, catalogue reference DD\DP 17/11, Papers of Dodson and Pulman, Solicitors of Taunton, Lethbridge estate papers (correspondence concerning Mary Jane Vial).

The Somerset County Archives and the depositors have kindly granted me permission to transcribe the letters and make the transcriptions available to scholars and interested persons, through publication on a web site.  The transcriptions can be viewed on my website Claire Clairmont, Mary Jane’s Daughter, at https://sites.google.com/site/maryjanesdaughter/home

Please be aware that I am not a Romantic scholar or historian (I am an alumnus of the the University of Queensland but my professional experience is in disability policy and program development).  I have a keen amateur interest in genealogy, and came across this collection while researching an ancestor also named Mary Vial.  As a consequence, my website may well not meet the Romatic Circle’s rigorous standards for electronic resources.

Nevertheless, I would be pleased if you would take whatever steps you consider appropriate to advise your members and readers of the existence of this previously unpublished material. I am sure it will be of interest to many.  I would also be very glad to receive any criticisms of the content of the website and suggestions for its improvement.

With regards,

Vicki Parslow Stafford

vpstafford ~[at]~ optusnet.com.au

Romantic Circles is please to announce the publication of Editing and Reading Blake, a new volume in our Praxis series. Co-edited by Wayne C. Ripley and Justin Van Kleeck, this collection of essays looks at the profound challenges William Blake poses to both editors and readers. Despite the promises of the current multi-modal environment, the effort to represent Blake’s works as he intended them to be read is increasingly being recognized as an editorial fantasy. All editorial work necessitates mediation and misrepresentation. Yet editorial work also illuminates much in Blake’s corpus, and more remains to be done. The essays in this volume grapple with past, present, and future attempts at editing Blake’s idiosyncratic verbal and visual work for a wide variety of audiences who will read Blake using numerous forms of media.

Ripley’s introduction attempts to tell the history of editing Blake from the perspective of editorial remediation. Essays by W. H. Stevenson, Mary Lynn Johnson, and David Fuller, all of whom have edited successful print editions of Blake’s works, reflect on the actual work of editing and explore how the assumptions underlying editorial practices were challenged by publishers, new ideas of editing, new forms of technology, and ideas of audience. Recognizing that editorial work is never done, the volume also includes the indispensable errata to the 2008 edition of Grant and Johnson’s Blake Designs. Essays by current and past project assistants to the Blake Archive, Rachel Lee, J. Alexander McGhee, Ripley, and Van Kleeck, examine the difficulties that Blake’s heavily revised manuscripts, such as An Island in the Moon and Vala or The Four Zoas, and Blake’s illustrations of other authors, have posed both to editors working in print and to the ever-evolving Blake Archive.

Romantic Circles is pleased to announce a new volume in the Praxis Series: The Sublime and Education, edited by J. Jennifer Jones.

http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sublime_education/index.html

The Sublime and Education offers a series of essays on how the concept of education intersects with sublime theory and Romantic aesthetics. Rooted in the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, this diverse collection engages comparatively with Romantic-era literature and cultural theory of the 20th and 21st centuries. One underlying inspiration is the pedagogical theory of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who has thought widely about humanities-based training using Romantic-era texts as principal theoretical and literary tools, formative among them the aesthetic philosophy of Kant.  Spivak’s pedagogical theory can perhaps best be apprehended through the claim that proper pedagogy consists in “the uncoercive rearrangement of desires,” which is to say a pedagogy founded on a notion of an immanent rather than a transcendental sublime. In complementary but nevertheless highly individuated ways, each contributor to this volume offers just this type of reformative work.

This volume of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes an editor’s introduction by J. Jennifer Jones; essays by Christopher Braider, Frances Ferguson, Paul Hamilton, Anne McCarthy, Forest Pyle, and Deborah Elise White; and an afterword by Ian Balfour.

The William Blake Archive <www.blakearchive.org> has announced the publication of electronic editions of Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion copies E and I, in the Huntington Library and Art Gallery and Yale Center for British Art, respectively. They join copies a, A, B, C, J (1793), F (c. 1794), G (1795), and O and P (c. 1818), previously published in the Archive.

Visions, extant in seventeen complete copies, consists of eleven relief-etched plates executed and first printed in 1793. Copies E and I were produced in Blake’s first printing session. Probably to lend variety to his stock of copies on hand, Blake used three ink colors in this first printing: yellow ochre (as in copy A), raw sienna (copies B, C, and E), and green (copies I and J). Like all early copies of Visions, copies E and I have the frontispiece printed on one side of
a leaf, but all other plates are printed on both sides of five leaves.

With the publication of _Visions_ copies E and I, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 75 copies of Blake’s nineteen illuminated works in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies.

Bing Crosby's final album is due for re-release May 18.

An upcoming re-release of Bing Crosby’s final album, Seasons, contains a musical version of Wordsworth’s “Lucy Gray,” along with selections by Kipling and Longfellow. The sung poems are all bonus tracks that Crosby recorded for poetry fan clubs just a month before his death in October of 1977. The album, Seasons (Deluxe Edition), is due out on May 18 and represents the first time it has been issued on CD.

A full article on the album can be found here: http://www2.seattlepi.com/articles/419728.html

Library of Congress

The United States Library of Congress has selected Romantic Circles (www.rc.umd.edu) for inclusion in its historic collections of Internet materials. The Library’s traditional functions, acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and to the American people to foster education and scholarship, extend to digital materials, including Web sites.  Over time, the Web archiving team will make Romantic Circles available to researchers both onsite at Library facilities and though the Library’s public Web site  http://www.loc.gov/webarchiving/.

According to the Web Archiving Team:

Our Web Archives are important because they contribute to the historical record, capturing information that could otherwise be lost. With the growing role of the Web as an influential medium, records of historic events could be considered incomplete without materials that were “born digital” and never printed on paper. For more information about these Web Archive collections, please visit our Web site (http://www.loc.gov/webarchiving/).

via Elizabeth Denlinger, curator of  The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the NYPL:

The New York Public Library is delighted to announce the availability of up to ten fellowships to support visiting scholars pursuing research in the Library’s Dorot Jewish Division; Manuscripts and Archives Division; Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs; or Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle.  Fellowships will range from $2,500 to $3,000.

Scholars from outside the New York metropolitan area engaged in graduate-level, post-doctoral, or independent research are invited to apply.

Applications must demonstrate how The New York Public Library’s collections are essential to the research proposed, and successful applicants are expected to contribute a report on their findings, suitable for posting to the Library’s website, at the conclusion of their research.

Applicants who are neither United States citizens nor entitled to work in the U.S. will be responsible for arranging their own visas. Fellowships will be handled as reimbursements when this is required due to the awardee’s visa status.

Applications must be received by April 1, 2010, and should include:
Cover letter
Curriculum vitae
Outline of proposed research and indication of Library holdings to be used
(not more than 1,000 words)
Outline budget for travel and per diem expenses
Proposed dates to be spent in residence
One letter of recommendation

Application materials, including letters of recommendation, may be submitted by e-mail in PDF format (the preferred submission method) to jbaumann [at] nypl.org.

Awards will be announced April 30.

The official site (with all the above info and more) is here:

http://www.nypl.org/short-term-research-fellowships

Also, look here for more info on the Pforzheimer.

The diary of John Cam Hobhouse on the Web has undergone some changes. It’s current location at www.Hobby-O.com has moved to the Blog site of Peter Cochran at http://petercochran.wordpress.com/hobhouses-diary/. With the move comes significant new content, including full coverage from the years 1809-1824 and new material from Hobhouse’s time in London and Switzerland.

From the foreword to the Hobhouse diary:

John Cam Hobhouse (1786-1869) was Byron’s best friend. Educated at Westminster and Trinity College Cambridge, he travelled east with Byron in 1809, was Best Man at Byron’s wedding in 1815, travelled across Switzerland in Byron’s company in 1816 after the separation, around Rome with Byron in 1817, and lived with Byron in Venice in the same year. He met Byron at Pisa again in 1822, after Byron’s facetious poem on his imprisonment in Newgate, My Boy Hobby-O, had almost terminated their friendship. As a member of the London Greek Committee he encouraged Byron on his last journey in 1823; and had he insisted, Byron’s memoirs would almost certainly not have been destroyed in 1824.

Hobhouse’s diary was published in heavily truncated and censored form, as part of Recollections of a Long Life, edited by his daughter, Lady Dorchester, in six volumes between 1909 and 1911. He had used it as the basis for three previous publications: A Journey through Albania, and other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia, to Constantinople, during the years 1809 and 1810 (1813), Travels in Albania and other Provinces of Turkey in 1809 and 1810 (1855) and Italy: Remarks made in several visits from the year 1816 to 1854 (1859).

John Cam Hobhouse’s diary is one of the two major texts written about Byron by his contemporaries which has still to see the full light of day – though it is about much more than Byron, for Hobhouse became, as he cast off his Byronic shackles, a significant political figure in his own right. The sections on his two Napoleonic French excursions – on both of which he went without Byron – are worth books in themselves. His weeks in Newgate, just before he was elected MP for Westminster, will be included. However, the extent to which he played Sancho to Byron’s Quixote – Pylades to Byron’s Orestes – Hal to Byron’s Falstaff – Horatio to Byron’s Hamlet – Celia to Byron’s Rosalind – cannot be exaggerated, and will have justice done to it.

We note with sadness the death on Sunday, November 8 of the distinguished scholar of the romantic period, former Mellon Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, Karl Kroeber. A notice and a separate appreciation appeared yesterday in the Columbia Spectator. Here at Romantic Circles, you can read in its entirety a 2007 special issue of The Wordsworth Circle, “In Honor of Karl Kroeber.”