Guest Post: Lisa Vargo (University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada)
As those who study and love the period will know, 2007 is a year of significant anniversaries in Romantic Studies: 250 years since the publication of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry and Gray’s Odes; the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Blake; 200 years since Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes; 200 years since the publication of Madame de Staël’s Corinne, and the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. ‘Emancipation, Liberation, Freedom’ was intended to reflect upon these anniversaries, and to address a variety of approaches and subjects in response to the conference’s stated themes.
The Centre for Romantic Studies (CRS), on the behalf of the University of Bristol, had the honour of hosting the 2007 BARS/NASSR Conference, and I had the pleasure of attending the conference as a delegate. The event combined the conferences of the British Association of Romantic Studies (BARS) and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) for the second time in the history of the organisations (the first time being 1998).
Almost 300 international delegates were in attendance, and the events on offer provided a full and rich programme with a pre-conference workshop on theatre, nine parallel sessions including 88 panels, three plenary speakers, a special presentation on Southey’s letters, trips to the Bristol Empire and Commonwealth Museum and Tintern Abbey, and a banquet featuring a lively speech by Timothy Webb. To consult the program detail, just go here.
With most sessions offering ten panels at once, the possibilities of a full encounter with varieties of freedom were necessarily hampered by a tyranny of choice, and no doubt for some enslavement to an unrealizable desire to attend more than one panel at once!
Thursday 26 July
Having been reassured that it was possible to arrive in Bristol despite flood and rain, my friend and I took the train from London and we made our way up the hill through driving rain from the conference hotel to the conference site, the Wills Memorial Building, an imposing stone structure building built in the early twentieth century in the Gothic revival style. To see what you missed go to http://www.bris.ac.uk/romanticstudies/events/willsbuilding.html. After the delegates assembled in the Great Hall to be greeted by conference organizers Nick Groom and John Halliwall, the business of the conference began with two panel sessions, followed by a plenary.
What quickly became clear about the conference were the wide-ranging approaches to the conference theme taken by delegates. Matters of theatre, economics and commerce, Europe, race, Southey, region, and women and education were topics for some of the first panels. Sadly I can only report on one panel per session in this conference blog and much that was excellent must be omitted from my report. A fascinating panel of papers on ‘Economic Tactics of the Extemporizing Poet’ by Angela Esterhammer (Zurich), ‘The Learned Pig and the Reading Nation’ by Paul Keen (Carleton) and ‘Economic and Moral Obligations in Malthus and Godwin’ (Sharon Twigg, Marquette) articulated a sense of ambiguity in how the romantics viewed the potential that cultural work offered for social liberation. Discussion following the papers considered notions of work and leisure and notes of pessimism in an age glibly characterized as one of unbounded idealism. After a tea break, in the second session the stage, visual freedoms, popular culture, Percy Shelley’s emancipatory politics, and race formed some of the subjects on offer. Papers by Kim Wheatley (College of William and Mary) on Hazlitt’s attacks on Gifford and Kathryn Ready (Winnipeg) on the Aikin Family and Rational Dissenting sociability traced contrasting methods of discourse within the periodical. The ensuing discussion focused on notions of gender in the nature of the two very approaches—one combatitive and polemical, the other documenting a moment of belief in free inquiry of candour and an active mind and a questioning of the family model for periodicals. Like the first session, these papers offered the possibility of an engagement with matters that ranged far beyond their subject, and as happened time and time again in the next few days, a sense that some fundamental matters of the nature of the romantic period and what its ramifications are for how we lives our lives were raised in a significant way.
The kind of excellent scholarship and collegiality found in abundance at the conference were certainly in evidence in the first plenary. Deirdre Coleman (Melborne) delivered the Stephen Copley Memorial Lecture, ‘“Is not she a sister’s child?”: Mansfield Park and the Metaphor of Slavery in Women’s Writing’. Well aware of the opposing readings that Austen’s novel has inspired with respect to the topic of slavery in the novel, Coleman offered a nuanced reading of the work. The lecture fell into three parts. ‘Sameness and Difference’ traced in writing of the period the prevalence of the words on the Wedgwood Cameo: ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ (http://www.thepotteries.org/did_you/005.htm). At the same time Coleman considered the slave metaphor in Austen’s writings with respect to power relations and marriage, which are focused in the novel in Mrs. Norris’s statement about Fanny, ‘Is not she a sister’s child?’ ‘Body Trade and Sisterhood’ explored the marriage market and colonialism, as well as how Austen might be rewriting a key moment in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (the story of the ‘poor negro girl’ in Volume 9) as a critique of the sentimental. ‘The Grateful Negro’ ended the lecture with a careful reading of Austen’s careful, sparing deployment of slavery in her novels, and with the suggestion of cousins marrying and incest in the marriage of Edmund and Fanny, Austen is keeping a number of disturbances raised by the novel at bay.
Following this first afternoon, the participants adjourned next door to the City Museum and Art Gallery for a wine reception and animated chat, which continued as groups adjourned to restaurants in the area.
Friday, 27 July
The morning began at 9:30 with two panels and a welcome coffee break in between. Panels on religion and censorship, Bristol’s Southey, Burke and Godwin, the Caribbean, Slavery and Abolition, and landscape included those opening the day. A session on Scottish writing was but one instance of papers that moved away from an exclusively English perspective. Murray Pittock (Manchester) on the discourse of slavery and Catholicism, Alan Rawes (Manchester) on Byron’s Scottish Calvinism and Fiona Stafford (Somerville College, Oxford) on Freedom in Obscurity in poetry by Burns offered thoughtful meditations on the conference themes in Scottish writing. Pittock traced the equation of Catholicism and slavery and Rawes likewise presented original scholarship in examining the influence of Byron’s Calvinism on his poetry. Fiona Stafford’s paper was particularly exciting for its consideration of notions of personal freedom in writing: freedom from financial difficulty, escape from social obscurity, posterity of fame, and the psychological independence of self-validation. She delivered a close reading of Burns’s ‘Epistle to Davie’,in which he voices how obscurity might bring a kind of intellectual freedom that is lacking with fame, even as notoriety and being read remain a powerful motivation for writing. Burns’s poem defines a set of conflicting impulses within romantic writing.
The second set of morning panels continued topics on Southey’s Bristol and gender and the gothic, while introducing Liberating Medicine, Transatlantic Agitation, Free Blake, liberalism, and Law and Justice. A session of Wordsworth included Sarah Graham (Rice) on the child in Wordsworth and Emerson and a suggestive reading of ‘Stepping Westward’ by Simon Jarvis (University of the West of English) through biographical and historical contexts of Wordsworth writing from personal bereavement mixed with thoughts about America. Andrew Bennett (Bristol) offered a stunning paper that went beyond its immediate subject to offer a profound challenge to issues germane to the conference. ‘Wordsworth’s Literary Ignorance’ presented a rich reading of a poetics of ignorance, a telling of what is not known, which Bennett carried through a series of readings of representative Lyrical Ballads. This dynamic of unknowing would seemingly have implications for notions of liberation in that a freedom exists if one can’t be known. But if emancipation exists in obscurity, there also lies a tension between this freedom of ignorance and a kind of tyranny of assumption of knowing that involves an appropriation of another. Can there be a community premised on a mutual not knowing is one of the questions the paper evoked for the audience.
Following lunch was the second plenary of the conference, the Trent Editions Plenary by historian Margot Finn (Warwick): ‘Slaves Out of Context: Domestic Slavery and the Anglo-Indian family in the Romantic Age’. If in the past 30 or 40 years the assumption has been to move from an economic consideration of the Anglo-Indian governing class to post-Said studies of race, gender, and alterity, in her talk Finn put these two approaches back together through looking at the family. Her social and economic focus has resulted in the production of a searchable database of information available online at http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/findingData/snDescription.asp?sn=5254. The project combines quantitative and qualitative analysis of primary source data (diaries, memoirs, private correspondence, probate inventories and wills) to provide an integrated analysis of aspects of Anglo-Indians engagement with consumer society. While she has elsewhere looked at book ownership and reading practices, the focus of the plenary was property relations and inheritance patterns among legitimate and illegitimate kin; and the manumission (or not) of Indian slaves ‘owned’ by Europeans. Her discoveries are that domestic slavery in India, unlike the plantation systems in the West Indies, took a form in which the family group included, blood kin, in-laws, as well as family servants and slaves. As the domestic family recognized a sense of kinship with slaves and offspring that resulted from male relations with female slaves, matters of inheritance took a different form than in England. It is through looking at the family unit that economic and cultural methods might be put together, as the fascinating series of case studies presented by Finn offered.
While the conference continued, my friend and I took a break to explore Bristol, including a trip to St. Mary Redcliffe, the church associated with the poet Thomas Chatterton and where Coleridge married Sara Fricker and Southey married Edith Fricker. The conference provided a special session by Professor Tim Fulford (Nottingham Trent) and Dr. Lynda Pratt (Nottingham), ‘The Lives, Loves and Letters of Robert Southey’. The presentation included a discussion of what Southey’s voluminous correspondence contributes to knowledge of romanticism, in that it is the correspondence of a writer central to the literary, political and social controversies of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Pratt and Fulford gave an overview of the logistics of an online edition to be produced between 2007 and 2012, (which will appear on the Romantic Circles web site). An evening trip to the Bristol Empire and Commonwealth museum featured opportunity to see ‘Breaking the Chains—The fight to End Slavery’, a Caribbean buffet, and a performance by Bristol poet Ralph Hoyte. I cannot report on that excellent event, but can recommend the potables available at the Zerodegrees microbrewery.
Saturday 28 July
Saturday began with a rare and promising appearance of the sun. The conference reached its fullest day with morning sessions, a coach excursion to Tintern Abbey, and a late afternoon session followed by a banquet and talk. Any choice of the first morning session was precluded by being one of three panelists on a session on Mary Shelley. Other sessions included Liberating Music, further sessions on medicine and on Blake, the Crisis of Phenomenology, Labouring-class poetry, Coleridge, Europe, Seward and Austen and matters of canon. With such choices it was gratifying to have a good audience to hear papers by Caroline Franklin (University of Wales at Swansea) on Matilda and Byron, with the intriguing argument that the novella’s father is a combined portrait of Godwin and Byron, Peter Melville (Winnipeg) on ‘Mary Shelley’s Fugitive Turk’ in Frankenstein which considered hospitality and the shared decolonization of the creature and of Safie’s father, and my own paper on Mary Shelley’s interest in Corinne and improvisation. Madame de Staël received a session in her own right in the next set of panels with papers by Michael Eberle-Sinatra (Montreal) on Staël and Mary Shelley, Orianne Smith (Maryland) on freedom and enthusiasm and the female prophetic tradition, and Naqaa Abbas (Western Ontario) on freedom and its discontents in Corinne. At the same time there were considerations of wheels that enslave, Charlotte Smith’s posthumous works, and further sessions on liberalism, transatlantic agitations, Blake and Coleridge, and panels on philosophy and theory, Scotland, and Bristol’s Chatterton. The sun held on for the afternoon excursion to Tintern Abbey, and fueled by a Welsh Tea of scones, Welsh cakes and Bara Brith, delegates walked around the precincts of a the ruined abbey and the more energetic explored some local paths, though there wasn’t sufficient time to range a few miles above the abbey. While no beggars were seen in the abbey precincts, a wedding party arrived in full regalia (some clutching cans of lager) to be photographed. One wonders what Gilpin would have made of this particular manifestation of an appeal for the picturesque.
Before the drinks reception and conference banquet at the Victoria Rooms, the returned pilgrims took in a final session of panels. One of the most lively panels of the conference must have been that on Free Blake, with papers on Blakean self-annihilation by Mark Lussier, Blake, Religion and Empire from Saree Makdisi and Jon Mee on ‘Mutuality, Converse, and Mental Fight.’ Mark Lussier (Arizona State) proved exuberance is beauty with a paper that looked at Blake’s corrective to selfhood by drawing upon Buddhism. Saree Makdisi (UCLA) noted how Blake refused to participate in orientalism in a manner integral to his life’s works. Jon Mee (Warwick) channeled Elvis (Memphis) to argue for a little less conversation and a little more action. He noted the age’s preoccupation with conversation and the problems when it becomes opposed to action, which is something Blake explores in works throughout his career, including ‘An Island in the Moon’ and Jerusalem. These papers generated some quite heated and engaged conversation in response from the audience, invoking Blake’s ‘Opposition is True Friendship’. At the same time a session to Honour Paul Magnuson, Free Hemans, Polite letters, medicine, Byron, and Moore and Hone offered another full session of intriguing titles.
The venue for the conference banquet, Victoria Rooms, dates from 1842 and was an important cultural centre in the West of England. In 1848, Jenny Lind the ‘Swedish Nightingale’ appeared on its platform, and four years later, Charles Dickens delivered one of his celebrated readings. In the spirit of Dickens’ reputation to entertain, an after dinner keynote address by Professor Timothy Webb (Bristol), ‘Executing Jemmy O’Brien: The Life, Trial, Public Death and Adventurous Afterlife of an Irish Informer’, mixed archival research, visual images, and the live performance of music. Webb wittily narrated the life of an informer who was executed for murder in 1798. Once liberated from its mortal coil (after hanging and medical dissection), O’Brien’s skeleton was reportedly on display hung from the ceiling in the Anatomical Museum of Trinity College, and offered performances dancing with an Irish giant.
Sunday 29 July
After a night of rain, the final day of the conference began with clear skies and three sessions and a plenary between 9:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. A good number of delegates stayed on until the end of the conference. Sunday began with sessions on Joanna Baillie, animal subjects, orientalism, maternity in Barbauld, more on Blake, periodicals, and Wordsworth, as well as sessions on Bloomfield and Clare, and on emancipatory politics. The session on periodicals had three papers by Alex Benchimol (Glasgow) on the Edinburgh Review and its middle-class perspective on culture, Susan Oliver (Canterbury) on penal reform in the Edinburgh Review, and Christopher Scalia (Virginia’s College at Wise) on a parodic review in Blackwood’s. The cultural power of the periodical to liberate some (the middle class) while regulating the lower orders led to a consideration during the question period about the limitations of the liberal project and anticipated the third plenary of the conference.
After the final coffee break in the Reception Room, the delegates assembled in the Great Hall for the final plenary delivered by Professor Thomas Pfau (Duke): ‘Beyond Liberal Utopia: Freedom as the Problem of Modernity.’ This dense and fascinating talk began with reference to the pessimistic undercurrent evidenced by a jaundiced look at modernity by major figures of the nineteenth century. Pfau traced the failure of liberalism in favour of singularity. His argument unfolded with a thoughtful and at times witty consideration of four flawed axioms of liberalism: 1. the solitary and free individual who can commune with others; 2. moral neutrality as an indispensable way of being; 3. Aristotelian praxis reduced to methodological questions and 4. a single universal template of behaviour. Through a wide-ranging exploration of works by Adorno, Charles Taylor, John Millbank, Alistair MacIntyre, Hannah Arendt, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Blake, Kant, George Eliot, and Flaubert, Pfau exposed the unresolved deficit of modern liberalism’s belief in free will as multiple choice and individual agency. Some vigorous and enthusiastic questions from the audience were answered with good nature and humour by Pfau, who confessed his pessimism and invoked MacIntyre’s observation that people in the academy act as if the project of enlightenment has worked to repeat his appeal to a pressing need for an awareness of the problems of careless optimism.
From this heady discussion a small group of us adjourned for a quick lunch in the garden terrace of the Boston Tea Party café. The final panel session offered free Hemans, Transatlantic Freedom, emancipation in Blake, sentimentality, outsiders, reading freedom, and Wordsworth. I chaired a two paper panel on John Thelwall, with excellent presentations by Colin Harris (Boston University) on Thelwall’s ‘On the Political Prostitution of Our Theatres’ and Judith Thompson (Dalhousie) on Thelwall’s ‘Reading Freedom and Speech’. The papers looked at how through the performance of the lecture, theatre might escape the restrictions imposed upon it and reclaim a political dimension, and how Thelwall’s studies of elocution offers a poetics of speech that goes far beyond what Wordsworth might offer in his sense of poetry as a man speaking to men.
With regret I left my panelists deeply and enthusiastically engaged in conversation, and rushed to Bristol Temple Meads Station for my train. John Halliwall and Nick Groom and the kind and helpful team of conference stewards who assisted us deserve much congratulation and thanks for a wonderfully successful conference. Along with seeing friends and exploring Bristol, ‘Emancipation, Liberation, Freedom’ was especially memorable for how my understanding of romanticism and the topics of freedom, emancipation, and liberation have been complicated and deepened through an encounter with the exciting work being done by scholars from the British Isles, North America, continental Europe, Australia, and Asia.
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Lisa Vargo is the author of Literature Compass article, ‘Mary Shelley Studies: From “Author of Frankenstein” to “the Great Work of Life”‘, Literature Compass 3.3 (2006): 417-428, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00334.x
