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The WPHP Monthly Mercury is the podcast for the Women’s Print History Project, a bibliographical database that seeks to provide a comprehensive account of women’s involvement in print in a long Romantic period. The podcast provides us with an opportunity to develop in-depth analyses of our data. In the August 2020 episode, “Black Women and Female Abolitionists in Print,” the entire team of the WPHP joins hosts Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt to speak to the Black Women’s and Abolitionist Print History Spotlight Series published on the WPHP website between June 19 and July 31, 2020. The WPHP team cameos are followed by a discussion between the hosts about the common themes of the spotlights produced. We then analyze some of the common threads across the spotlights, including how the people, firms and titles featured were documented and framed within a predominantly white transatlantic print culture. We conclude by considering some strategies for working within the constraints of the resources that we rely on and adapting our own data model to be more transparent and inclusive. This textual supplement includes a description of the episode, links to all records in the WPHP database referenced in the episode, resources relevant to this topic, our works cited list, and suggestions for further reading.

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This article discusses the pioneering medical activities of Thomas Beddoes, in two contexts that the Covid epidemic has made topical: oxygen treatment and its efficacy; epidemiology, including tracking and tracing infection. I ask what we, in a time of pandemic, can learn from Beddoes and the advances he made in treating respiratory diseases and in tracking and tracing epidemics.

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Juxtaposing two very different poets—Claudia Rankine and John Keats—this essay seeks a descriptive poetic practice that responds to our current moment in the long history of American anti-Black racial injustice while addressing the value of poetic work and public feeling in terms of discourses of public health. I reintroduce a sociolinguistic practice of discomfort into Keatsian “Negative Capability,” arguing that the outlook taken from Keats’s famous December 1817 letter risks becoming a disembodied ethic of skepticism, one based on uniformly available and distributed empathy. As it offers escape into a negatively creative mode of mobile non-identity, this space of being represents a universalized mode of social imagination that draws from, and hence requires analysis informed by, the philosophy of modern racial ontologies and ideas of Blackness. Against the ingenuously “universal” tradition of philosophical skepticism, drawn here from Descartes and Hume, I frame analysis through a fugitive alternate tradition of Black skepticism. Through reading that aims to provide both close thematic comparison and a critical allegory, the essay shares extended discussion of Rankine’s volumes Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen alongside the poetry of late Keats, focusing on miseries—not simply mysteries—of knowledge. Rankine’s two “American Lyric” works explore the possibilities not only of impersonal lyric but of a sympoetics of misery. This lost situational discomfort of Keats’s Negative Capability proves useful to feel and think with only if it keeps reference to “a poetry of and between bodies,” in the words of Anthony Reed.

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The WPHP Monthly Mercury is the podcast for the Women’s Print History Project (WPHP), a bibliographical database that seeks to provide a comprehensive account of women’s involvement in print in a long Romantic period. The podcast provides us with an opportunity to develop in-depth analyses of our data. The December 2020 episode, “1816 and 2020: The Years Without Summers,” explores women’s writing in the WPHP inspired by 1816, known as the Year Without a Summer, when abnormally cold weather, exacerbated by the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, led to crop failures and typhus and cholera epidemics. Often remembered as the cold and fog-laden year in which an 18-year-old Mary Shelley came up with the idea for Frankenstein, 1816 was a year of catastrophe more generally. In this episode, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren explore how the bibliographical metadata contained in the WPHP can uncover a wider range of voices writing about catastrophe. Our findings, which include political writing, travel memoirs, and poetry, reveal the lived experiences of women in a tumultuous time. We conclude by meditating on the nature of literary production during catastrophe, and how our own experiences during the upheavals of 2020 influenced our approach to the books that we uncovered.

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Whilst the study of song is beginning to appear in work within the field of Romanticism, its performative nature is still largely unchartered territory, in large part due to the challenges in recovering information on the authors, singers and reception of these songs. Published as ephemeral broadsides, songsters, chapbooks or in radical journals, these songs occupy the hinterland between oral and print culture. Through the Road to Peterloo project, in which three renowned musicians from the North West recorded and performed a selection of songs published in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the rightful return to orality of these songs requires reconsideration. Three Peterloo songs are considered in this essay, both in text and performance: the anonymous broadside ballad, “A New Song on Peterloo Meeting,” “Saint Ethelstone’s Day” by the Spencean poet, Allan Davenport, and “Peterloo” by the little-known cotton spinner-poet, John Stafford. Through an examination of these three songs and the contexts in which they were written and performed alongside the significance of the stated tunes, this essay seeks to highlight the significance of song to the wider study of the radical culture of the Romantic period and contribute to the scholarship on Peterloo. Moreover, the songs’ transformation by Coe, Peters and Smyth, which simultaneously pays tribute to the originals whilst enhancing their meaning admirably through their understanding of how these songs can connect with audiences, illustrates that it is only through the mediation of performance that these texts truly come alive.

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I argue that the influence of Byron on Emily Brontë’s poetry is far more nuanced than is sometimes recognised in scholarly discussion. Consideration of the ways in which Byron shaped Emily Brontë as a writer is often in thrall to notions of the byronic. Thus, Byron becomes a way of accounting for Emily’s supposed preference for the outsider and privileging of intense emotional states. Through focussing on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, particularly the third canto, I argue that Byron is present in Emily Brontë’s moments of emotional restraint. Far from being, to use Andrew Elfenbein’s phrase, “an early chapter in the bildungsroman of the Victorian author,” Byron shapes Emily Brontë’s mature consideration, in her later poetry, of the pitfalls inherent in an abandonment to emotional intensity. Byron taught Emily Brontë, to use his own words from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, to “think less wildly.” Byron’s poetry of emotional stress such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Manfred is quite rightly heard in Emily Brontë’s writing; however, in the second half, I discuss how Byron’s more satirical voice is also heard. I use Don Juan to explore how Brontë’s reading of Byron may have helped her to, again using Byron’s phrase, “ponder boldly.” So, Byron helps to shape Emily Brontë’s stoicism and philosophical detachment. Throughout the article, my thinking is alive to the different and, at times, competing Romantic voices that make themselves heard in Emily Brontë’s poetry; however, my main aim is to enrich understanding of the different ways in which Byron’s voice is heard.

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This paper explores Shelley’s complex response to the tradition of the progress poem in Ode to Liberty, a poem published in August 1820 with Prometheus Unbound which celebrates the fall of absolute monarchy in Spain in January 1820. My contention is that Shelley destabilizes the conception of gradual progress which generally underpins the progress poem, ultimately suggesting that the origin of Liberty is not to be found in chronological time, but in human potentiality. I also argue that the poem tends to blur the difference between representing historical events and presenting itself as an event. This makes explicit the ambition of the progress poem to become itself an event in its own right, that is, a revelation of a secret world order that enables us to form a legible history out of the apparent chaos of events. Yet, the order unveiled in Shelley’s poem proves a decidedly personal and poetic one which does not fit the traditional narratives of progress and empire usually associated with this period. In the last part of the article, I rely on Agamben’s reflection on the act of creation in The Fire and the Tale (2017) to give a new reading of the poem’s ending, which has often been interpreted as an example of the unresolved struggle between political idealism and skepticism in Shelley’s poetry.

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In this reflection, we consider the interruptions to archival research caused by COVID-19 and share some of the challenges we have faced moving forward with our digital project on Sarah Sophia Banks’s ballooning scrapbook. We address some of the problems of archival access and explore potential solutions offered by digitized ephemeral materials. In light of recent scholarship that establishes ephemera as a Romantic-era technology that mediates our relationship to various forms of public knowledge, we highlight the scholarly opportunities made available by digital interfaces and tools.