Guided Tour of Fairfax House

On the morning of Saturday, 13th October a group of CECS postgraduate students met on the steps of Fairfax House for a guided tour of the house. The visit was organised as part of the CECS Postgraduate Forum to welcome the new students to York and to provide more context for one of the seminars…

Postgrad Forum Away Day: Harewood House

This year, on 21 June, we had our first Postgraduate Forum Away day. Our destination was Harewood House, built in 1759. The finest craftsmen were involved in building Edwin Lascelles’ family home: York-born architect John Carr, interior designer Robert Adam, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, and Thomas Chippendale. Photo Credit: Harewood.org Situated just outside Leeds, the Harewood…

Trip to the Bowes Museum

Early in the morning of Friday, June 15, a group of intrepid early risers set off for (what we think was) the first joint day trip for CECS and CREMS postgraduate students, organised by The Cabinet of Curiosities. Students were joined by Dr Simon Ditchfield (CREMS), Dr Chloe Wigston Smith (CECS) and Brittany Scowcroft, the…

Maria Edgeworth and the ‘Irish Education Bill’ (1799) Pt.2

By Susan Manly (The first part of this post can be found here.) Having spent several years now reading through the manuscript notes and letters in the Edgeworth family papers held in the Bodleian and the National Library of Ireland, I’ve become ever more convinced that Marilyn Butler was quite right: collaborative exchange underpins Richard…

Maria Edgeworth and the ‘Irish Education Bill’ (1799) Pt.1

By Joanna Wharton Last summer, I visited Dublin to follow up on a hunch about a manuscript. In truth, it was barely even a hunch, but it was a good enough excuse for my mother and I to do some travelling together: neither of us had ever been to Ireland, though we’d often talked about…

Jon Mee and an Amphibious Animal

I was lucky enough to be involved at a Library Day at the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne yesterday. Thanks to the good offices of the President Paul Gailiunas and the Librarian Kay Easson I was able to get access to the archives. Paul showed me this page from the minute book for…

Trip to British Library

Posted by Kaylee Peelen, photo credit: Marissa Bolin On 7 March, three MA students sponsored by the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York caught a train to London to spend the day perusing the British Library’s Georgians Revealed exhibition. Armed with plenty of coffee, empty notebooks, and a dangerously nerdy level…

Book indigestion from Jon Mee

I spent most of yesterday in the Sheffield Archive tracing literary clubs and societies in the city after1800. Interestingly, it was mostly a constellation of the same group of people, usually involving the poet James Montgomery, who finally came together to form the Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society at the end of 1822. Among the…