Chronological Listing of the Letters of Joanna Baillie
Thomas McLean
This chronological listing takes the form of a database, and was compiled and edited by Thomas McLean. It is published in conjunction with the Romantic Circles Praxis volume Utopianism and Joanna Baillie, edited by Regina Hewitt, to which Thomas McLean contributed an essay explaining this chronological listing.
Since the 1999 publication of The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie, some two hundred new letters have been located. This chronology orders all known Baillie letters and provides more accurate dates and identifications for many of the previously published letters. By providing watermarks, the place of writing, and the correspondents' names, the chronology also gives a new vantage point from which to view Baillie's life and times. As new letters appear, they will be added to the chronology.
Chronology of the Life of John Thelwall
Judith Thompson, T.J. McLemore
The most significant obstacle to a full understanding and balanced evaluation of the work of John Thelwall has always been the absence of a complete modern biography. The two early biographies (by Cecil Thelwall 1837 and Charles Cestre 1906) are both out-of-date, and extremely partial; leaving out almost half of Thelwall's life, they leave the impression that his later elocutionary and literary achievements are irrelevant, thereby contributing to the neglect they were intended to overcome. The shorter biographical sketches included in more recent studies have begun to compensate, but are necessarily limited by and to the specific contexts or subjects that they address. As new archival information has emerged, it is finally possible to imagine writing a comprehensive biography of one of the most dramatic, varied and heroic lives in British history, but such a book is still several years away. In the meanwhile, however, there is a urgent need to gather, collate and circulate existing biographical and bibliographical information, in an accessible location and a clear format, to serve the growing community of Thelwall Studies.