Category: Researchers

Stephanie Howard-Smith is researching her doctoral dissertation in the English Department at Queen Mary on the cultural history of the lapdog in eighteenth-century Britain. Over the last year, she has also helped to curate an exhibition related to her research entitled ‘Pug’s Progress: William Hogarth and Animals’ at Hogarth’s House museum. This blog post describes some of her experiences while curating the exhibition.

‘Pug’s Progress: William Hogarth and Animals’ looks at animal life in early Georgian Britain as depicted in the work of the British artist William Hogarth. Hogarth is famous for his close relationship with his pets, especially a pug called Trump. Hogarth’s House is a historic house museum in Chiswick dedicated to the works of Hogarth, who used it as a country home in the last fifteen years of his life. It also has a gallery that holds temporary exhibitions on Hogarth, local history and local contemporary artists.

My intention with the exhibition was to take the animals out of the background of the prints and paintings, and place them in the foreground, as Hogarth did himself in his 1745 self-portrait, The Painter and his Pug. One drawback when exhibiting prints is that the casual visitor may be overwhelmed by a series of similar-sized, monochrome two-dimensional images all positioned at the same height. To break up this monotony, a graphic designer magnified images of animals from other Hogarth prints and these were arranged on the walls (a guide to the original images was also provided by the Chair of the William Hogarth Trust).

‘Pug’s Progress’ is divided into four sections; Hogarth’s Pugs, Animals in the Home, Animal Cruelty and Animals in the Street and Field respectively. The first section of the exhibition, which focuses on Hogarth’s relationship with his pug dogs (and the other animals owned by his family), is closely tied to my own research on the cultural history of the lapdog in the eighteenth century – my PhD thesis, ‘The Enlightenment Lapdog’, looks at the representation of lapdogs and lapdog-owners in eighteenth-century literary, visual and material culture.

Hogarth was exceptional among eighteenth-century lapdog owners (both real and fictional) for a variety of reasons. Whereas lapdogs were synonymous with a feminine obsession with luxury and fashion, Hogarth was both male and he purposefully cultivated an unpretentious persona. He was interested in satirising lifestyles associated with lapdog ownership in his prints, showing them to be excessive, luxurious and corrupting. Hogarth’s affection for his pug, Trump, is shown through one of the objects on display; Hogarth’s House was very kindly loaned a souvenir broadside Hogarth had printed with Trump’s name on it when they visited a frost fair held on the frozen Thames in 1740.

Hogarth is also well known for his opposition to animal cruelty, which he featured in a major print series called The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), which argues forcefully that animal abuse leads to violence against humans. As the series was already on display in its entirety elsewhere in Hogarth’s House, we decided not to include it in the exhibition.  In organizing the exhibition, the museum hoped to attract a younger audience, and this was considered too challenging. I was concerned that omitting The Four Stages of Cruelty might be a lacuna in a consideration of Hogarth and animals, as it makes such an important argument for Hogarth. His view was very influential in the late eighteenth-century, and writers discussing animal welfare frequently referred back to Hogarth’s prints. Instead, The Cockpit (1759) is on display next to a pair of eighteenth-century cockspurs. Whereas The Four Stages of Cruelty largely focuses on the cruelty inflicted on animals by poor children and workers, cockfighting was popular among all social classes and Hogarth’s print reflects this.

Hogarth’s focus on animal cruelty was rather radical during his lifetime, but so too was the manner in which he approached animals in his work generally. He was mocked for positioning Trump in front of his self-portrait-within-a-self-portrait in The Painter and his Pug. Hogarth was perhaps the first British artist to really interest himself in animals – Stubbs only published his first horse anatomy drawings a few years after Hogarth’s death. I hoped that the exhibition would satisfy visitors who find animal history interesting, as well as others who might be surprised how tracing the lives of dairy cattle, pet monkeys or dancing bears in eighteenth-century Britain could shine a light on aspects of Hogarth’s art and its historical context.

The exhibition is open until Sunday the 16^th of October. Entry is free.

For more information visit: http://www.hounslow.info/arts-culture/historic-houses-museums/hogarth-house

All images are copyright of the rights owner and are used here for educational purposes only.

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Isabel Rivers, Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture in the School of English and Drama, has been elected a Fellow of the Ecclesiastical History Society.

The Society’s aims are to foster interest in, and to advance the study of, all areas of the history of the Christian Churches. The number of Fellows is strictly limited to twenty-five of the world’s leading experts in the field. Professor Rivers has been recognised by the Society for her energetic commitment to eighteenth-century religious history throughout her career.

Professor Rivers has worked at Queen Mary for 12 years and recently helped to establish The Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English.

She said:

‘It is a great honour to have been elected a member of the Society, alongside world-famous theologians and religious historians including Peter Brown (Princeton), Diarmaid MacCulloch (Oxford), and Rowan Williams (Cambridge). My research is interdisciplinary, and focuses on literature and religion, intellectual and religious history, and the history of the book in the long eighteenth century.’

Find out more about Isabel’s research

The NSS results are in, and they are very good for English and Drama at Queen Mary. In Drama we scored 96% overall satisfaction, and in English 91% for the same, both up from last year.

But what does all this mean for you?

For the stattos out there, that places Drama in the top 10 nationally, 2^nd in the Russell Group, and 3^rd in London. English is 2^nd in the Russell Group in London. Both departments also did really well on the question asking students how satisfied they are with teaching: 98% in Drama and 94% in English.

We are very grateful to all the third year students who filled in the National Student Survey. We take the survey seriously (especially when we do well!), but statistics don’t tell the whole story. There’s so much more to a degree in English or Drama —or one of our joint programmes. Our highest priority is students, their education, and their experience on the degree.

Students need high quality, cutting edge teaching delivered by top researchers in the discipline. But they also need to feel safe, cared for, and supported. They need a space where they can learn about our subjects, and also grow as people, so that they become critical and engaged citizens prepared for the wider world. University is about so much more than what can be measured in the statistics of a survey.

We are delighted to welcome Hetta Howes to our teaching team in September. We caught up with the keen Medievalist to talk Chaucer, her research around water and how to teach Medieval literature to millennials.

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From 10-15  July 2016 QM is hosting the 20th Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society, a forum for teachers and scholars of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400).

Often called ‘the father of English poetry’ because he was one of the first literary authors to write extensively in English, Chaucer was born in London and had close connections with the city, living in a house above Aldgate for some years. His best-known work, The Canterbury Tales, consists of stories supposedly told on a journey made to Canterbury by pilgrims who meet at an inn in Southwark, just south of the Thames.

The New Chaucer Society is an international body, with members from North America, the UK and Europe, Asia and Australasia. Its 2016 Congress will bring together over 500 members for four days of lectures, papers, workshops, and discussion panels. The activities include poetry readings (Lavinia Greenlaw will be reading from her latest book of poetry, A Double Sorrow, which imaginatively recreates Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde); an evening of medieval music by Opus Anglicanum; Patience Agbabi talking about ‘multilingual Chaucer’; and a performance of a medieval play, The Pride of Life, by a theatre company from Toronto (Poculi Ludique Societas).  The paper sessions include talks on torture and violence in the Middle Ages, on digital approaches to working with medieval manuscripts and texts, on Chaucer and medieval science, and on global Chaucer.

Mile End resonates with Chaucerians on a number of counts.  On the main eastern approach route to London, it was close to Aldgate and Chaucer’s place of residence in the 1370s and 1380s.  In 1381 it was the location of King Richard II’s encounter with a large company of Essex rebels involved in what has become known as The Peasants’ Revolt. Queen Mary’s own community of twenty-first century medievalists looks forward to welcoming Congress participants and to introducing them to a part of London rich in Chaucerian associations.

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To explore the new Project website, please click here.

For much of the nineteenth century, Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867) was a ubiquitous figure in London literary life. Sociable Sunday breakfasts at his home in Russell Square were famous, as readers of A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession know. The evening might find the bachelor Robinson at his club, the Athenaeum in Pall Mall. He would often take a very long walk to call on an old friend, such as the novelist Mary Hays in Greenwich. As he walked, he read. And whatever his destination, Robinson talked. Staples of his conversation were the rights of religious dissenters, the abolition of slavery, the genius of Wordsworth and Goethe – and the inability of these two great poets to understand each other. He had many personal memories to recount. If he was less inclined to discuss the provincial, dissenting education he had ‘suffered’ in Bury St Edmunds and Colchester, he would linger on his trip to Germany in 1800-1805. There he had studied at the University of Jena, rapidly becoming the foremost British mediator of the Kantian revolution in German philosophy. In 1804 he had given private lectures on this topic to Madame de Staël in Weimar – now rediscovered and published after 200 years. Then, as the first foreign correspondent of The Times, Robinson had reported on the Spanish Peninsular War from Altona. Travelling under a false German passport as ‘Heinrich Robinson’, he narrowly escaped capture by Napoleon’s troops. He published translations and articles, aspiring to success as a ‘literator’. It was as a solicitor, however, that he made a comfortable living, and gained the social status that enabled him to promote the foundation of the University of London. And almost every night, the indefatigable Robinson described and reflected on his experiences in his diary. Robinson took great care of his own manuscripts, leaving them to Dr Williams’s Library, of which he was a trustee.

The Henry Crabb Robinson Project will publish Robinson’s most important manuscript works with Oxford University Press, both in hardback and on Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. The series editors are Timothy Whelan (Georgia Southern) and James Vigus (QMUL). The Reminiscences, one of the great nineteenth-century autobiographies, is uniquely self-effacing: Robinson arranges the account of his life around his descriptions of the people he encountered and befriended. The enormous Diary (from 1811), including the travel diaries, will be edited in subsequent phases of the Project. The OUP edition will replace all previous editions, which were radically selective. The Early Diaries (pre-1811) are being edited by Philipp Hunnekuhl (Hamburg). A team of special subject area editors, assembled to reflect Robinson’s polymathic interests, will contribute to an edited collection entitled ‘All Our Knowledge is Reminiscence’: Essays on the Reminiscences of Henry Crabb Robinson. Editing and reflecting on Robinson’s prolific manuscript writing is necessarily a team effort.

Friends often upbraided Robinson for his excessive modesty. He spoke out on behalf of many writers and their works, but too rarely for his own. Sara Coleridge, daughter of Robinson’s friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge and one of his many female correspondents, remarked to her diary on his ‘talent and quickness’. My own path has distantly echoed that of Robinson: I worked for three years at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, and have settled in London. This experience has given me a first-hand opportunity to admire Robinson’s achievements as a polylingual producer of ‘informal’ texts. No-one better absorbed, adapted to and embodied the spirit of his age. This unobtrusively brilliant writer has left his 21st-century editors with a challenge, in the best sense.  

From January 2016, the Project will be affiliated with the new Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English.

James Vigus, j.vigus@qmul.ac.uk