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Coleridge Conference 2022. 25-29 July at Kilve Court

The Coleridge Conference is back – in time for the 250th anniversary of STC’s birth year, and in Somerset, where, in that annus mirabilis 1797-98, he was living alongside William and Dorothy Wordsworth, writing ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’, and welcoming as visitors John Thelwall, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and Thomas Wedgwood.    

Our venue, Kilve Court, is the Georgian country house with ‘broad and gilded vane’ that is mentioned in ‘Anecdote for Fathers’. Its wooded grounds are ideal for strolling between papers or after the conference dinner and bar. They nestle under the Quantock hills and near the ‘smooth shore, by the green sea’. Holford Combe and Alfoxden House are nearby, and we shall walk there in Coleridge’s footsteps.

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As usual, we aim for intense but informal discussion – genial criticism indeed – whether in the lecture hall, the dining room, on the green lawns or in the The Hood Arms, the seventeenth-century inn just across the road.  

Proposals are welcomed for 20 minute papers (the majority of which will be plenary) on all aspects of Coleridge and/or his circle, then and since. Some will be published in the 250th anniversary number of The Coleridge Bulletin.

Cost will be in the region of £390/$540. There will be some part-cost bursaries for grad students and the unwaged.

Send your paper proposal to fulfat62@gmail.com AND TO joanna.taylor@manchester.ac.uk BY 1 JAN 2022. Make sure you WRITE YOUR NAME AND EMAIL ADDRESS IMMEDIATELY UNDER THE PROPOSAL.  ALSO ENSURE YOU PUT ‘COLERIDGE CONFERENCE PROPOSAL’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE OF THE EMAIL. State if you wish to be considered for a bursary and why.

Tim Fulford
Conference Director

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De Quincey at 200 - a conference in Grasmere. A call for papers

The Jerwood Centre at The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, 13–14 May 2022

Keynote lecture by Robert Morrison (Bath Spa University, British Academy Global Professor)

Deadline for proposals: 15 November 2021

In September and October 1821, the London Magazine published a remarkable text. Republished as a book in 1822, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar was an instant sensation, launching its writer, Thomas De Quincey, on a long and richly varied career in literature. Negotiating between London and the Lakes, between prose and poetry, and between a dizzying range of discourses and disciplines, the Confessions invented the genre of addiction literature and redefined what it meant to write Romantic prose. Above all, through his Confessions, De Quincey asserted himself amongst the Lake Poets, particularly situating himself alongside and against Wordsworth and Coleridge.

To mark this singular text’s bicentennial, we invite papers for an international conference on De Quincey, his Confessions, and the Lake Poets. Suggested topics include:

•  De Quincey on the Lake Poets/the Lake Poets on De Quincey

•  De Quincey’s later oeuvre

•  The literature of addiction

•  Romantic (auto)biography

•  The Confessions at 200 in light of other Romantic bicentennials

•  Romantic essay writing: Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Christopher North, etc.

•  Disciplines and discourses in the Confessions and beyond: philosophy, political economy, politics and ideology, the urban sublime, etc.

•  Reception and legacy of the Confessions: Woolf, Baudelaire, Poe, etc.

•  Magazine culture

To mark this singular text’s bicentennial, we invite papers for an international conference on all aspects of De Quincey, his Confessions, and the Lake Poets. We welcome proposals for standard 20-minute conference papers (max. 250 words), as well as for three-person panels (three abstracts of max. 250 words). Experimental formats will also be considered. Please include your name, affiliation and email address in your proposal.

 The conference will take place in De Quincey’s onetime home in the Lakes, on 13 and 14 May 2022. The fee, excluding residence costs, will be in the region of £100. There are many B&Bs and hotels in Grasmere within walking distance of the venue.

 Please send proposals and any queries to dequinceyat200@gmail.com. The deadline is 15 November 2022.

 Organisers: Brecht de Groote (Ghent), Tim Fulford (De Montfort), and Matt Sangster (Glasgow).

David Worthy

David Worthy: a tribute on the occasion of his death on 25 June, 2021

The Friends of Coleridge are very sad to report the death on 25 June of David Worthy. He was 82.

David Worthy: a tribute by Justin Shepherd, Chair, The Friends of Coleridge

David stepped down from the committee of the Friends of Coleridge in 2015 after nearly twenty years of service. Long serving committee members will immediately think of his outspoken views often delivered with waspish humour from an armchair in Shirley Watters’s house in Castle Street, of his geniality of mien and of his mild disdain of ‘academics’.

What more recently appointed committee members may not fully appreciate is that he brought valuable professional and technical skills to the organisation when first invited to join by Reggie Watters, the then Chair, which he then generously used to further the work of the Friends.
David was brought up in Stowey from the age of six, won a scholarship to Dean Close, and went on to attend the College of Estate Management, University of London, duly qualifying as a Chartered Surveyor in the Building Section. He worked in the family business for a few years, but, keen to specialise in Listed Buildings, he set up on his own in London in 1971, and in due course he gained the confidence of the London County Council Listed Buildings department, who would accept proposals for work on buildings up to Grade I status, such as the Inns of Court and Maids of Honour Row, Richmond. Private clients included Eric Newby, the travel writer, the Churchill family, Fountain Court Chambers, Inner Temple, Dan Cruickshank and the Principessa Virginia Scaretti-Borghese.

He retired to Stowey in 1996. Reggie Watters immediately invited him on to the committee to help present proposals to the National Trust for the use of the £20,000 the Friends donated to mark the bicentenary of Coleridge’s arrival at the Cottage. These proposals included the opening of the upper storey of the Cottage to visitors and to develop a display room. Formerly only rooms on the ground floor had been open to visitors. Professional surveying and design skills were required to make the case effectively. These David provided.

The Cottage was duly reopened in the summer of 1998, the bicentenary of the publication of ‘Lyrical Ballads’ and of Coleridge’s departure with Wordsworth to Germany. Since then, David was on hand as an inexhaustible source of expertise and information about the construction of old buildings in general and of the Cottage in particular.

David brought to the Friends not only professional surveying skills but also IT and what used to be called ‘desk-top publishing skills’ at a time when these were far from ubiquitous. He worked with Graham Davidson on the Bulletin for many years, formatting text and laying out the images and, until recently, he produced a series of elegantly designed programmes for the autumn study weekend. Some years ago I went to see him in his house in Over Stowey, which has a wonderful view over the Quantocks, and saw his very well equipped office. There was an up to the minute Apple Mac with a large format screen. It was mostly on this that he produced his series of illustrated books with a Quantock theme. The first one I came across was his little edition of the John Walford story, called ‘A Somersetshire Tragedy’, a scholarly summary of most of what is known about that sad episode, which formed the basis of a lost work by Wordsworth of the same name/title. David acquired over the years a very large archive of photographs and images of the Quantocks, to nearly all of which he added a detailed caption, as he did in his other large-format softback books about the Quantocks and in his book on the Hunts of Exmoor and the Quantocks. All these publications are not only entertaining but are also a mine of accurate, detailed information about the area and of the people who have lived there, particularly since the advent of photography.

However, it is his as yet unpublished edition of the Holland Diaries which will probably prove to be his most important contribution to local studies and, tangentially, to Coleridge studies. His edition of the diaries of the irascible but humane parson of Stowey in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries will be in two volumes, and especially remarkable for its detailed annotation of all the people mentioned. It is to be hoped that this edition is eventually published, because these important and entertaining diaries have only appeared to date in a much shortened form.

My own fond personal memories will include his sympathetic help with my rudimentary computer skills at moments of crisis and his good humour and friendliness at the seemingly endless meetings we attended together, chaired by the ever placid Tom Mayberry, while the National Trust were being gently steered towards a decision to renovate and develop the Cottage into its present state.

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Film: A Commemoration of Coleridge's Death July 25, 2021

Live From The Crypt
July 25th 2021, 3.30 pm

 One hundred and eighty seven years ago this July Samuel Taylor Coleridge breathed his last in an upper room at 3 The Grove, Highgate, north London. “I could almost be witty,” he quipped as he died. After a long spell in a local graveyard he, his wife Sarah, daughter Sara, son-in-law (and nephew) Henry, and grandson Herbert - `Herbie’ as he was fondly known – were re-interred in the rubble strewn, 17th-century wine cellar that lies in the crypt of St Michael’s Church Highgate, not a hundred yards from the scene of his death.

 It’s taken a lot of spadework! Charities don’t find it easy to set up bank accounts. The Charity Commission properly scrutinises application with great care. Most of our trustees have full time work to attend to … But The Coleridge Trust, after some three years of hard effort – and a great deal of help from organisations like the Friends of Coleridge – are pretty close to getting on with some serious fundraising initiatives to realise our simple dream: a rebuilt, sensitively designed crypt area in St Michael’s Church.

 As a promotional film we have enlisted the help of our president Sir Paul Coleridge and the poet’s direct descendant Richard Coleridge; two academics who will be no strangers to Friends: Malcolm Guite and Seamus Perry, and two actors who will help us with some readings of the poet’s work. It will feature what is hoped will be an annual commemoration of the poet’s death in our village.

At the centre of the film Sir Paul takes viewers on a leisurely stroll round the London village showing all the principal places where STC lived, worked, walked, expounded and finally died and was buried. It was from here that 'Biographia Literaria' was finished and published;  where publication of 'Sibylline Leaves' was negotiated; where some of his finest theological works and other lectures were written.. And it was here, where his daughter Sara came – one of the most brilliant women of the 19th century and a poet in her own right - with her friend Dorothy Wordsworth. At the top of Moreton House, where he lived from 1816 to 1823, his elder son Hartley nearly died from typhoid.

So much happened to and for him in this bustling village, yet they are stories which, although told, have seldom been told as loudly or frequently as they ought to be. If part of our effort means that some of that imbalance can be righted, so much the better.

A Bitly version is: https://bit.ly/3707k7z

while, to connect to the finished film on July 25th (3.30 pm) and then speak live to some of the participants, Friends can go to

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82526994062?pwd=MHVnZU1lRDRzTGFiSHZNSVJKVUdudz09

 
I look forward to hearing from you then, when we shall be `Live from the Crypt’.

Drew Clode
Secretary
The Coleridge Trust

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'Coleridge Unbound' – a project focusing on the poet’s stance against slavery, performed through dance, music and film

'Coleridge Unbound' is a powerful and moving project for dance film and site-specific public outdoor performance, focusing on Coleridge’s stance against slavery and his role as an abolitionist in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

The project includes five commissions for new site-specific dance, and features dance films by renowned UK choreographers Michael Joseph, Keisha Grant, Deborah Baddoo, Bawren Tavaziva and Kay Crook. 'Coleridge Unbound’ develops partnerships with Somerset Film, the Museum of Somerset and local community groups.
 
To find out more and to view the first two videos and music visit this link:
https://www.stateoftrust.net/coleridge-unbound

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