Westminster Abbey Wreath-laying- June 18th 1988

In June 1856 George and Marian Lewes (for it would not yet be right to call her \u27George Eliot\u27) were staying in North Devon. While George was collecting specimens on the beach, Marian was preoccupied with work for the Westminster Review, her \u27Belles Letters\u27 column and her famous article on W. H. Riehl, \u27The Natural History of German Life\u27, which, she wrote, \u27I worked at considerably a contretemps, despairing of its ever being worth anything\u27, But by this day, the 18th June, she was enjoying a splendid sense of freedom and a desire to turn to a different world, as she explains in her journal; \u27When at last, by the 17th June both my articles were dispatched, I felt delightfully at liberty and determined to pay some attention to sea-weeds which I had never seen in such beauty as Ilfracombe.’ She describes, with a sense of excitement, and with typical attention to detail and to the processes of change and growth, the beautiful forms of algae in the rock pools, which were new to her, for she had previously explored only chalky or sandy shores. Now, having finished her work, she was at last able to look deeper, beyond the commonplace, \u27I had not yet learned to look for the rarer Rhodospermiae under the olive and green weeds at the surface. These tidepools made one quite in love with sea-weeds, in spite of the disagreeable importunity with which they are made to ask us from shop-windows Call us not weeds , so I took up Landsborough\u27s book and tried to get a little more light on their structure and history.’ But even while she had been tied to her article, seaside scrambles were interspersed with \u27delicious inland walks\u27. Marian\u27s favourite walk was across the hills to Lee with its spreading views of crouching tors, golden furze, cliffs, moors and sea. But almost more fascinating than the broad sweep of skyline was the enclosed lane leading down to the hamlet nestling in its deep valley, \u27the great charm of this road, as of all Devonshire lanes, is the springs that you detect gushing in shady recesses covered with liverwort, with here and there waving tufts of fern and other broad leaved plants that love obscurity and moisture. Springs are sacred places for those who love and reverence Nature\u27. This tiny passage is like a foretaste of her fiction, with its accuracy, sensitivity and awareness of living organisms clustered together, dependent on their habitat and, beyond that, on deeper, mysterious springs. Her novels too were to widen out from tales of \u27unfashionable families\u27 living, like the ferns in relative obscurity, and crying out, like the sea-weeds Call us not weeds . In Ilfracombe she took pleasure in learning the names of each plant, of probing into the history of species, and examining their relationship within a wider pattern

Book Review: George Eliot

When I first heard that Virago were to pubIish a book about George Eliot (the author sought my help in locating certain photographs) I was a Iittle apprehensive. I feared that this might be a militant feminist view of a lady who concerned herself deeply about the \u27Woman Question\u27 but who did not align herself with the growing Victorian feminist movement. But a first reading allayed my fears, for Jennifer Uglow treats her subject with sympathy and understanding and does not try to prove that George Eliot was an active feminist when she was not. The book opens with a useful chronology linking George Eliot\u27s life and work with events and publications which affected the position of women in society - the passing of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, the formation In 1859 of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women and, in 1866, the presentation of the first Women\u27s Suffrage Petition. G. H. Lewes \u27s publications are also included, showing his own output while he was so successfully nurturing hers. George Eliot did not make a defiant claim for independence and personal fulfiIment although she was keenly aware of sexual exploitation and the low status of women. In the 1850\u27s she knew many of the leading Victorian feminist campaigners and Jennifer Uglow devotes a most Interesting chapter to this gallant band of women who were trying to obtain recognition for their sex

Predicting the effects of climate change on south-west UK fisheries

Climate change, caused predominantly by rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, is changing the function and composition of marine communities. This thesis considers the past and potential future effects of warming seas, on the fish assemblage of the south-west UK. Using fishery-independent data, this research aims to identify trends in the abundance and diversity of key fish species over the past three decades, and predict how these trends may continue over the 21st century, according to forecasted climate scenarios. The oceans have absorbed over a quarter of anthropogenic carbon dioxide since the Industrial Revolution, as well as over ninety percent of the Earths excess heat which has helped to mitigate the impacts of climate change. However, carbon dioxide emissions, and the subsequent rise in air and sea temperatures, have reached unprecedented levels in recent decades. Consequently, oceans are becoming more acidic, sea levels are rising, and weather events such as storms are increasing in both frequency and severity. Due to the complex and integrated nature of marine ecosystems, climate-induced changes are likely to affect organisms and communities at all levels, both directly and indirectly. This could mean changes to the composition of fish assemblages, which consequently will affect human populations reliant on them for food and income. Whilst fish stocks are prone to natural fluctuations and variability, there is a growing body of literature demonstrating that anthropogenic activity is having a significant, and perhaps irreversible effect on some fish populations. The first part of the research conducted here demonstrates that since the mid-1980s there has been a significant increase in the species richness and diversity of the south-west UK fish assemblage, likely driven by an increase in the abundance of warm-water adapted species. In addition, some commercially important fish species typically associated with colder waters have decreased in abundance. The second part of the research in this thesis uses a data-driven predictive modelling approach to forecast how key species of the UK fish assemblage may respond (in terms of abundance and spatial distribution) to the latest predicted climate scenario. The results demonstrate that, according to a “best case scenario” of carbon emissions, many of the warm water species shown to have increased in abundance over the last three decades will continue to do so. Similarly, many cold water species will continue to decline, such that some economically valuable species may be absent from south-west UK waters by the end of the century. The results also suggest that by the end of the century, the fish assemblage is likely to be characterised by species that currently have a lower latitudinal preference, smaller mean body size and lower trophic level. The ability to predict and anticipate how fish populations may respond to a changing climate will be essential for the successful continuity of the fishing industry. As such, management plans and fishing practices will need to be adaptive and flexible in order to exploit new opportunities, as well as protecting and preserving the stocks most threatened by climate change

“New” Giorgione : Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Pater, and Morelli

This thesis concerns a shift in the historiography of the Venetian painter Giorgione (c1477- 1510). In important ways, this change was caused by Joseph Archer Crowe (1825-1896) and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1819-1897) in their A History of Painting in North Italy (1871). This text met seminal reactions from Walter Pater (1839-1894) in his essay “The School of Giorgione” (1877) and from Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891) in his Die Werke italienischer Meister in den Galerien von München, Dresden und Berlin (1880). Following a method of close reading, the analysis will concentrate on the intertextual relationship between these three works. This thesis contends that Crowe and Cavalcaselle comprehensively problematised scholarship on the artist, creating a “new” Giorgione; that Pater responded dialectally to scientific connoisseurship with aesthetic criticism, intellectually justifying and morally absolving his interpretation; that Morelli responded by offering a noticeably different catalogue of paintings, and by making Giorgione function within his anti-authoritarian rhetoric as a validation for his method; however, in so doing, Morelli was conducting an ironic problematisation of connoisseurship in general. The thesis begins with an introduction to the “old” Giorgione, before discussing the concepts of aestheticism and connoisseurship. It is then divided into three studies and a conclusion. The first part considers how the artist was understood in the nineteenth century prior to Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s research, before discussing the nature of the two connoisseurs’ enquiry. The second part focuses on Pater and his relationship with Giorgione, placing his essay in the context of The Renaissance (1873); after this the study follows Pater as he defines his theory of aesthetic criticism and responds to what he understands as scientific history, before analysing his interpretation of Giorgione. The third and final part of this thesis will seek to understand Morelli’s ambiguous text and the function of the artist within it; examining his method, rhetoric, and polemic with Crowe and Cavalcaselle, it will conclude by arguing that irony was an active concept in Morelli’s thinking. By attending to a specific artist’s historiography at a particular time, this thesis indirectly reveals the way art history on Italian painting operated in this period, when the discipline was undergoing the processes of professionalisation and institutionalisation

Antiquity, architecture and country house poetry: Sir John Clerk and the Country Seat

This paper compares Clerk's theories of architecture detailed in his poem, The Country Seat, with his country house near Edinburgh, Mavisbank House

Different Ways of Reading, or Just Making the Right Noises?

What does reading look like? Can learning to read be reduced to the acquisition of a set of isolable skills, or proficiency in reading be equated with the independence of the solitary, silent reader of prose fiction? These conceptions of reading and reading development, which figure strongly in educational policy, may appear to be simple common sense. But both ethnographic data and evidence from literary texts suggest that such paradigms offer, at most, a partial and ahistorical picture of reading. An important dimension, neglected in the dominant paradigms, is the irreducibly social quality of reading practices

The Old Bailey proceedings and the representation of crime and criminal justice in eighteenth-century London

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, published accounts of felony trials held at London’s central criminal court, were a remarkable publishing phenomenon. First published in 1674, they quickly became a regular periodical, with editions published eight times a year following each session of the court. Despite the huge number of trial reports (some 50,000 in the eighteenth century), the Proceedings, also known as the “Sessions Papers”, have formed the basis of several important studies in social history, dating back to Dorothy George’s seminal London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925). Their recent publication online, however, has not only made them more widely available, but also changed the way historians consult them, leading to greater use of both quantitative analysis, using the statistics function, and qualitative examination of their language, through keyword searching. In the context of recent renewed interest in the history of crime and criminal justice, for which this is the most important source available in this period, the growing use of the Proceedings raises questions about their reliability, and, by extension, the motivations for their original publication. Historians generally consider the Proceedings to present accurate, if often incomplete, accounts of courtroom proceedings. From this source, along with manuscript judicial records, criminal biographies (including the Ordinary’s Accounts), polemical pamphlets such as Henry Fielding’s Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), and of course the satirical prints of William Hogarth, they have constructed a picture of eighteenth-century London as a city overwhelmed by periodic crime waves and of a policing and judicial system which was forced into wide-ranging reforms in order to meet this challenge