Speakers | Abstracts
Last Updated: 2022-09-25 16:00:17


Sibylle Erle  (Lincoln University)
Staging the Face: Joanna Baillie and Johann Caspar Lavater
This paper, which is on Joanna Baillie’s pictorial dramaturgy, examines Baillie’s treatment of the face as a visual aid, illustrating how hatred takes effect and is experienced. It contextualises Baillie’s approach to the actor’s body as a site for legible expression with reference to contemporary acting styles and explores her contribution to the development of dramatic character. In ‘Introductory Discourse’ (1798) Baillie aligns her work with debates about the physiological and psychological qualities of the mind, originating in the Scottish Enlightenment. She shows awareness of the conventions used in sentimental novels. Her intellectual investment in characterisation gains a European dimension once her ideas are considered in relation to Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy (1789–98). As a cultural practice, physiognomy presents the body as central to the production of meaning. Lavater relied on portraits to illustrate his physiognomical interpretations and believed that fleeting expressions distorted the representation of true character. This essay includes discussion of De Monfort (1798), which is unusual in that it appeared in print before it was performed, and of the experience of hatred, horror and despair in De Monfort’s face.
[Programme UK Time]   [Programme EU Time]

Recommended Reading

  • Joanna Baillie, ‘Introductory Discourse’ (1798), in Series of Plays: In which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind: each passion being the subject of a tragedy and a comedy, vol. 1., 5th ed. (London: Longman, 1806), 1–71.

  • Joanna Baillie, ‘De Monfort’ (1798), in Series of Plays: In which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind: each passion being the subject of a tragedy and a comedy, vol. 1., 5th ed. (London: Longman, 1806), 301–410.

  • Johann Caspar Lavater, Visual Resouces: British Museum.

  • Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy: Welcome Collection.


John Guthrie  (Murray Edwards College, Cambridge)
Henry Fuseli’s Drawings of Shakespeare’s Richard III
The paintings and drawings of the Anglo-Swiss Henry Fuseli are amongst the most original transformations of literature into visual art of the late eighteenth century. A large number are based on plays of Shakespeare and on Milton’s Paradise Lost, which Fuseli got to know in Zurich before coming to London to learn painting. Besides the enthusiasm for Shakespeare and Milton, Fuseli assimilated in Zurich ideas on aesthetics from J. J. Bodmer’s teaching: the affective quality of literature, the freedom of the imagination, the justification of the supernatural and an interest in the demonic and the sublime. These interests were developed in London, where Fuseli also acquired a strong interest in the theatre and performance. His painting underwent a gradual transformation after an extended visit to Rome where he studied the great masters. This is illustrated by a close look at a handful of drawings and paintings by Fuseli of scenes and characters from Shakespeare’s Richard III.
[Programme UK Time]   [Programme EU Time]

Recommended Reading

Graham Jefcoate  (Director of Nijmegen University Library from 2005 to 2011)
Henry George Bohn and the British and Foreign Library in York Street, Covent Garden, 1831–1846
In this paper, I shall consider the early years of Henry George Bohn’s bookshop in York Street, Covent Garden. In this period, Bohn established himself as a successor to the bookseller Johann Heinrich Bohte on the latter’s former premises. In 1846, Bohn launched his celebrated ‘Standard Library’ of cheap editions of literary classics. How might Bohn have drawn on Bohte’s pioneering work as a publisher in the early 1820s? And how significant were their connections with the German book trade?
[Programme UK Time]   [Programme EU Time]

Recommended Reading
  • Graham Jefcoate, An Ocean of Literature: John Henry Bohte and the Anglo-German Book Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century (Especially 23.3 'Henry George Bohn in York Street'), (Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 2020), 444-447.


    • Roger Paulin  (Trinity College, Cambridge)
    Romantic Poetry and Cosmological Connections: Tiedge and Keats
    My paper will be picking up the arguments of an article published in German in 2006. There, my concern was to establish links between Novalis’ Hymnen an die Nacht (1800) and older English cosmological and didactic poetry (Young, but also Milton) and to identify parallels. In an appendix I examined the reverse process, the possible influence of German cosmological poetry on an English Romantic. Keats’s famous ‘ When a new planet swims into his ken’ (On First Looking Into Chapmans’ Homer, 1816) appears to be a direct echo of a passage in Christoph August Tiedge’s didactic poem Urania (1801), specifically of a section referring to the newly discovered planet Uranus. There is no evidence-based link between the two, but can the connection be made nevertheless? This question my paper will explore.
    [Programme UK Time]   [Programme EU Time]

    Recommended Reading
    • John Keats,‘On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' (Monograph Online), 1816.

    • Roger Paulin, ‘Romantische Dichtung aus dem Geist der Erbauung. Zitate bei Novalis und Keats’ (1798), in Triangularer Transfer. Großbritannien, Frankreich und Deutschland um 1800, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 56 (2006): 89-97.

    • Christoph August Tiedge, Urania (1801), Neue Auflage (Halle: Regerschen Buchhandlung, 1833).


    Susanne Schmid  (Freie Universität Berlin)
    The Countess of Blessington and Bernhard Tauchnitz
    This paper explores the interaction between Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, a renowned hostess, popular novelist, and writer of travelogues in the 1830s and 1840s, and the firm of Tauchnitz. Due to her popularity, Blessington’s works were reprinted by Baudry and Galignani (Paris) as well as by American publishers. She was among the first whom Bernhard Tauchnitz invited to cooperate when he visited London in 1843 to contact several British authors, asking them to authorize his reprinting. In return, he would pay honoraria and refrain from selling these books in Britain and the colonies. He reprinted five of Blessington’s novels: Meredith (1843), Strathern (1845, reprint dated 1844), Memoirs of a Femme de Chambre (1846), Marmaduke Herbert (1847), and Country Quarters (1850). This paper will look at the early negotiations between British novelists and Tauchnitz, and at some of the legal issues involved. Besides, it will follow the publication history of these five novels, which appeared in the company’s sales catalogues for decades; Tauchnitz sold Blessington’s writings even in the twentieth century.

    Since I recently edited Marmaduke Herbert for the series “Chawton House Library: Women's Novels” (Routledge 2019), I compared Bentley’s original to reprints by French, German, and American publishers, among them Tauchnitz. Although the Tauchnitz edition does not deviate as much from the original as e.g. the American reprint, the variants (spelling, punctuation, occasionally choice of words) are nevertheless interesting to study and help to situate Tauchnitz’s work in the context of that of other reprinters.
    [Programme UK Time]   [Programme EU Time]

    Recommended Reading

    Alessandra Tosi  (Clare Hall College & Open Book Publishers, Cambridge)
    William St Clair and Open Book Publishing
    Abstract TBA

    [Programme UK Time]   [Programme EU Time]

    Recommended Reading

    James Vigus  (Queen Mary University of London)
    ‘Ambition! And the Desire to become a Millionaire!’ Mary Wollstonecraft and Hamburg Capitalism
    Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796) concludes with her visit to Hamburg and Altona. Hamburg was a neutral city in the revolutionary wars and thus an increasingly vital hub of international trade in the 1790s, as well as a common destination for travellers from France, Britain and America. Yet, it is the scene of the emotional nadir of the business journey Wollstonecraft undertook for Gilbert Imlay. She had hoped to be reunited with Imlay, her lover and the father of her child, in Hamburg. In Imlay’s absence, she dined with another writer, Hector St John de Crèvecœur, with whom she shared ‘declamations against commerce’. Wollstonecraft’s bitter denunciation of the speculations of the dominant merchant class of Hamburg and their ‘thirst of gain’ constitutes a central Romantic critique of capitalism. This important passage has been interpreted biographically (notably by Lyndall Gordon); as a form of anti-Burkean aesthetic discourse (by Anthony Pollock); and as paradoxically undermining the text’s affirmation of the stadial progress of civilization (by Christoph Bode).

    My paper examines a fresh context, the one signalled by Wollstonecraft herself. I relate her critique of commerce to the manuscript autobiography of John Parish, the wealthiest merchant in Hamburg, who confesses to a dangerous addiction to speculation caused by ‘Ambition! And the Desire to become a Millionaire!’ Further, I compare Wollstonecraft’s remarks with the contemporary controversy in the Hamburg press about the ethics of commercial pursuits. In this way, I argue that Wollstonecraft’s excoriation of ‘the muddy channel of business’ did exactly what it appeared to: it participated in a philosophical debate that Hamburg’s regional peculiarity had rendered acute.
    [Programme UK Time]   [Programme EU Time]

    Recommended Reading

    Last Updated: 2022-09-25 16:00:17