The deadline for registration for the ‘Writ from the Heart’ Conference has now been extended to Friday the 21st January. Please see the link below for a registration form and for conference programme details.
Again, please feel free to get back to me if you have any queries regarding the conference.
Best wishes
Lisa Crawley
I am delighted to post the links below for the Programme and the Registration Form for the forthcoming ‘Writ from the Heart’ Conference to be held at The John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester, on the 29 January 2011.
Please feel free to get back to me if you have any queries regarding the conference.
I look forward to seeing you there.
Lisa Crawley
You may already be aware that a one-day conference is being organized at John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester to celebrate the cataloguing of the Mary Hamilton papers – Writ from the Heart? Women’s Life Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century 29 January 2011.
Details are still being finalized but the day is likely to run from around 9.30 to 5.30 and there will be a social event for all those who wish to join us on the 28th January (the evening before the conference). For now you may be interested in a list of participants and papers (there will be two parallel sessions running).
Key note speaker Claire Harman – ‘”My immense Mass of Manuscripts”: Fanny Burney as archivist, biographer and autobiographer’.
Further information will be posted shortly but in the meantime please get back to me at lisa.crawley@manchester.ac.uk if you have any questions.
Lisa Crawley
Besides the Mary Hamilton papers the John Rylands University Library holds a number of significant eighteenth century collections including the Thrale-Piozzi Manuscripts, which includes over 150 letters from Hester Thrale-Piozzi to Samuel Johnson, letters from Elizabeth Montagu, letters from the poet Anna Seward and from Frances Burney amongst others. [The following link will direct you to the online catalogue to the collection: http://archives.li.man.ac.uk/ead/]
We also hold many of the printed works of Samuel Johnson including Johnson’s personal copy of the 4th edition of his Dictionary printed in 1773 (Ref: /2922) which he bequeathed to the artist Sir Joshua Reynolds and which includes numerous manuscript corrections and annotations written by Johnson.
Within the Mary Hamilton Papers, a letter written to Hamilton by her friend, Lord Francis Napier aptly displays the interrelationships and social connections of these three collections. Written in 1784 Napier notes the death of Samuel Johnson:
“I could not resist the inclination I felt to condole with you and the rest of the Indigo tribe on the death of Dr Johnston (sic). Alas poor Mary he fell a victim to Signora Piozzi’s marriage therefore I insist if you are not already married, that you will not by a pretended cruelty run the risk of sacrificing Mr Dickenson. It would certainly make a fine subject for a Poem for the blue stocking tribe that one of the society had murdered a deserving young man”. (20 December 1784, HAM/1/20/90)
Lord Napier suggests, somewhat in jest, that Johnson died of a broken heart because of Hester Thrale’s marriage and teases Hamilton about her own forthcoming marriage to John Dickenson.
Lisa Crawley
The image below is taken from Diary No 7, (23 April-24 June 1784). Hamilton socialised with many well known figures of her day including Samuel Johnson. The diary entry for 14th May 1784 describes a dinner that they both attended and it demonstrates what rich a resource Hamilton’s writings offer for the study of prominent figures in society during the late eighteenth century.
At a dinner with guests that included Eva Maria Garrick, Frances Burney, Hannah More and Elizabeth Carter, Hamilton recorded Samuel Johnson’s unflattering description and characterisation of the author Oliver Goldsmith.
Hamilton writes that Johnson (she spells his name ‘Johnston’ in her diary) noted that he ‘never knew a Head so unfurnished [as Goldsmith’s]; he gave him credit for being a Clerical Scholar so far as he had learnt at school, but that he knew very little of any subject he ever wrote upon…upon the most common subjects he was most ignorant, of which he gave many and daily proofs; he had the habit of lying to such a degree that the Club to which he belonged and the society he lived in never scrupled to tell him they wanted Faith for what he advanced. [He continued noting that he] was the most envious of Men; he could not bear to hear the praise of any one, nay! even the Beauty of a woman being praised he could not endure’.
According to the diary, Johnson did note that Goldsmith had many ‘good qualities’ before listing his ‘many failings’. Of his book on the History of England, Johnson noted that Goldsmith ‘knew nothing more of it than turning over two or 3 English Historians & abridging them’.
This description of Goldsmith covers four pages of the diary and also includes Elizabeth Carter’s view of him and a story by Mrs Garrick of Goldsmith being often at her house when her husband, [the actor, David Garrick] was alive and that he was never ‘happy if he did not gain the attention of the Whole Company to himself’.
Lisa Crawley.
Diary entry for 14th May 1784
An interesting letter written to Hamilton by her relation, Mrs Wilhelmina Murray (HAM/1/5/2/11), provides an entertaining insight into gambling amongst high society in the eighteenth century.
Murray wrote that at the Duchess of Cumberland’s the previous Thursday, a Lady Ferrars ‘took her luck at the Faro table as usual’ but being an invalid she did not want to stay until the fashionably late hours and so she left some guineas on the table and said that she would be much obliged if some one would play for her. ‘[S]he was no sooner gone that the Prince of W[ales] sat down & said he would play for her’. By three in the morning the Prince had won about 100 guineas and was so excited by this that he wanted to go straight to Lady Ferrars to give her the money.
After repeatedly knocking at her door a servant stuck his head out of a window and asked where the fire was. When the door was finally opened the Prince ran in to the house but ’had the grace to stop at the bedchamber door’ while a Lady who went to Lady Ferrars with him, entered her room and threw the money on the table. They both then left ‘leaving the whole house in an uproar’.
In the same letter Murray also reported that Lady Hopetoun had told her that the Prince was so drunk he could not stand and that he was ‘making indecent love to the Duchess of Argyle…[stating] that she was still handsomer than all the d….d young things’.
Lisa Crawley
The header to the blog is taken from one of Hamilton’s diaries (No.10, 3-17 August 1784). It shows a sketch she made of Lunardi’s air balloon – one of the first air balloons to be launched in England.
On the 13 August 1784 Hamilton went to see the balloon at the Lyceum. This was the first opportunity she had had to ‘see one of these curious vehicles’. She describes in detail the construction of the balloon and the entry also notes that Lunardi and an Englishman were to ascend in it and that the King and Queen were to watch. Tickets to view the balloon at the Lyceum on the day of its launch were priced up to 1 guinea. A later entry notes that that the balloon was launched but that a dog and a cat ascended with Lunardi rather than an Englishman. It also notes that the dog and cat were later exhibited at the Pantheon and Pall Mall.
There are further references to air balloons in the diaries which reveal the excitement they created in society at that time. One of Hamilton’s friends spent 5 hours in a coach going to see the balloon at Chelsea and all she managed to see was the top of it. The ‘mob’ was so enraged that the balloon was not allowed to ascend because it was raining ‘that they set fire to it & destroy[e]d what cost some hundred[s] of pounds’. Another friend, Lady Herries, also went to see a balloon and doubted that it would succeed getting off the ground as ‘it was an old one that had failed in France’. She told Hamilton that the owner of the balloon had collected £2000 worth of subscriptions and that it was a ‘miracle that he escaped the fury of the mob’.
Lisa Crawley
Balloon sketch
