Philobiblon

A much-delayed report – you can find the first one here.

(Note, these are my thoughts and collected snippets from the sessions I attended, and should not necessarily be taken as a full reflection of what the speaker said. And I think they are accurate, but it was an intense two days. Caveat rector.)

Ryan Stephenson (University of Ottawa) A “Headachy Tomb” in the Heart of London: Women’s Writing and the British Museum in George Gissing’s New Grub Street

Marion is the only female writer in the book who uses the Reading Room, but she finds it gloomy and headache inducing “a taste of fog in the warm, heady air”.

Writing in 1891, an author for the British Library Association said that women readers entered with the air of an intruder. Throughout Britain there were separate entrances to libraries for women!!!, and separate desks; in public libraries there were separate issue desks.

This was mostly it seems to “protect” the men – it was often claimed that women were distracting, prone to gossip, giggle, even, shock horror, rustle their skirts. An article in the Saturday Review of 1886 portrayed the woman reader: “she flirts and eats strawberries behind the folios”.

A measure from 1889 in the Reading Room, that readers could not be supplied with novels within five years of publication except by special written application was seen as a measure for keeping out frivolous women.

By contrast women’s writing can be agreeably domestic and unthreatening. In the novel Dora writes from her boudoir, wears light colours, keeps up appearances, is “feminine”.

Suggested reference: Flint, The Woman Reader

Nora Nachumi (Yeshiva University) Women Novelists and the Eighteenth-Century Stage
(An article by Nachumi covering some of this ground, and she has a book out, Acting Like a Lady: British Women Novelists and the Late Eighteenth-century Stage, discussed below)

There are two main critical views of women novelists – that they “sold out” by writing in acceptable non-threatening ways, weakening the link between feminism and women’s writing; or that the conduct book and the novel were suggesting that this was all performance – that you could act in “appropriate” ways while allowing your private self underneath.

Nachumi’s thesis is that the stage challenged the idea that a lady’s true nature always shone through in her behaviour. It could be that women were always acting, performing, and this was something anyone could learn.

Her book lists women novelists and about a quarter are playwrights or actress, while others have relatives involved. Almost all would at least have been theatre-goers.

But the novelists tended to keep the two forms of writing separate. They don’t mention the plays in the prefaces where they fashion an image for their readers. Writing novels was more respectable than writing for the stage, even if still problematic.

Frances Botkin (Towson University) “Performing the Colonial Caribbean: Three-Finger’d Jack in London
The star character was an escaped slave who evaded capture for months and ended up with a price on his head, and such fame that more than 20 biographical accounts were produced in the early decades of the 19th-century. This paper focused on a pantomime that ran for nine years in London and who was hugely popular. Much of its excitement came from its focus on his being an Obi (traditional magic/medicine practitioner.)

(There’s another paper on the play here.

Susan Morrison (Texas State University, San Marcos) Disciplining Excrement: London, Southwark and Medieval Filth
Studying “shit” is a return to the materiality of the body, correcting the decorporealisation of the medieval body. Bodies defecate in socially determined ways. Excrement is associated with impurity and disorder, the carnivalesque and grotesque, but also sees a substantial shift from public to private over time.

Our varying words for excrement are taken from languages with varying status. Dung (associated with animals) comes from Old English shit from the old English word scite (dung) and sciten (to defeceate).

But this was also valuable stuff – a 1456 probate inventory valued the dung in a cowshed at one shilling and eight pence.

Adam Hanson (Queen’s University, Belfast) Estranger in the Night: William Haughton’s London in Englishmen for my Money
Written in 1598 this is the first single-authored play. Plot: a Portugese usurer living in Crooked Friars (near Aldgate) has three daughters who want to marry Englishmen, but he wants to match them to Portugese. He tries a “bed trick” to get them with his countrymen, but in the end they outwit him and all ends happily.

This was “the first commercial play that showed Elizabethan London to Elizabethan London, unmediated by historical or geographical distances; could be called the first city comedy. It works by defamiliarising workaday places, the characters are often confused about where they are.

A very strong streak of xenophobia reflects the problems with “strangers” in the city at the time.

Professor Jonathan Schneer, Georgia Institute of Technology: Mutiny at the Boat Race
This compared two “mutinies” by Oxford boat crews in 1959 and 1987, which were all tied up wiith British/US relationships and understandings, professionalism versus amateurism, “science” versus “art”, with a bit of class thrown in. I won’t provide a full account, but it was much more interesting than initial thought suggested.

Kevin Berland (Penn State, Shenango) Frances Brooke’s Old Maid

A writer with whom I was previously unacquainted, 1724-1789, she wrote poems, essays, did translations of French novels and histories, novels of her own, and operas, finishing her career managing theatres.

At the age of 21 she came into £500 and property from her father’s estate. She sold up her property and from 1748 sought to set herself up on the literary stage. Her novel The Excursion (1777) is about this period of her life. She became editor of the periodical Old Maid just before she married. Fanny Burney described her as “short and fat and squints”, but praises her “understanding”.

The editorial stance is omnipotent, with many voices and viewpoints, and it has a wonderfully arch, mocking tone.

(A biography.