Anyone else really struggling with hay fever? I always seem to struggle around this time. Whatever pollen is in the air doesn't agree with me.

Excited to deliver my paper--based on fresh work for next book Writing’s Maker—"Hester Thrale Piozzi's Minced Meat for Pyes: Scrapbook Composition as Life Writing"--to
@oxford18thc.bsky.social next Tuesday. Many thanks to @ballasterros.bsky.social and @davidftaylor.bsky.social for the invitation

Can't wait. All welcome!

We're delighted to welcome Barney Ronay @barneyronay.bsky.social, Chief Sports Writer for The Guardian, to the English Faculty on 3 March. He'll be in conversation w/ Prof David Taylor discussing everything from the politics of sport to the changing nature of Britain’s media landscape. All welcome!

Poster for Susanna Centlivre's The Busy Body, showing a masked eighteenth-century woman.

This Tuesday we'll be hearing @gabriellabird.bsky.social & @davidftaylor.bsky.social talk about reviving Centlivre's The Busy Body in a collab between @orangetreetheatre.bsky.social @creationtheatre.bsky.social & Oxford's Cultural Programme.

5.30 @ Seminar Room East, Mansfield College. All welcome!

I (and, I think, the whole audience) had such fun at last night’s performance of ‘The Busy Body’ by Susanna Centlivre, put together by @davidftaylor.bsky.social, @creationtheatre.bsky.social, @orangetreetheatre.bsky.social!! It was kinda like a 1709 version of The Importance of Being Earnest :D

Thanks, Chloe!

Week 4: Tues. 11 Feb., 5.30-7pm DAVID TAYLOR (Oxford) and director GABRIELLA BIRD Reviving Susanna Centlivre’s The Busy Body for the 21st-century Stage Week 6: Tues. 25 Feb., 5.30-7pm KATHARINA BOEHM (University of Passau, Germany) Tangible Pasts: Antiquarian Culture and the Novel in the Eighteenth Century Week 7: Tues. 4 March., 5.30-7pm JULIE PARK (Penn State University) Hester Thrale Piozzi’s Minced Meat for Pyes: Scrapbook Composition as Life Writing * Joint event with the Romanticism Seminar* Week 8: Tues. 11 March, 12.30-1.45pm PETER SABOR (McGill University) “The capital pen of a sister author”: Reading Frances Burney with Jane Austen * Sandwich lunch provided* Weeks 4, 6, 8: Seminar Room East, Mansfield College Week 7: Massey Room, Balliol College All welcome. SEMINAR LEADERS: Ros Ballaster, Christine Gerrard, Nicole Pohl, Tess Somervell, David Taylor, Carly Watson, Abigail Williams.

We're excited to reveal our programme for the term, featuring @davidftaylor.bsky.social, Gabriella Bird Katharine Boehm,
@juliepark.bsky.social, and Peter Sabor.

As always, all welcome!

The ruins of Godstow Abbey amid the frost and freezing fog.

Inscription issue 6 (out spring 2026) is all about cuts / tears. Here is our call for papers. Talk to us if you have an idea for an article!

Are they specifically targeting theatre scholars?! 😆

Back in 2022 Wiley apologized and said their IT dept was aware of the card block issue and were working hard to solve it.

I can only assume those IT people at Wiley still working hard.

Does anyone else have trouble renewing their BSECS (@bsecs.bsky.social) membership with Wiley?

This is the 3rd year in a row that my card has been declined and the process to rectify this is time consuming and infuriating.

Just read Ciaran Carson's Fishing for Amber.

It's an astonishing book. A masterpiece. I can't believe it's not better known.

This sonnet by Gillian Clarke. Beautiful.

Explore an Online Archive of 2,100+ Rare Illustrations from Charles Dickens’ Novels As Christmastime approaches, few novelists come to mind as readily as Charles Dickens. This owes mainly, of course, to A Christmas Carol, and even more so to its many adaptations, most of which draw i...

Good to see Michael John Goodman's The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery getting some festive attention. Completely open-access & reusable & remixable & with a range of Dickens's illustrators beyond the familiar original ones including Fred Barnard, Charles Green & Harry Furniss 👇.

English Faculty / Oxford World's Classics Shakespeare Webinar Series with Professor Emma Smith

Brush up your Shakespeare! Read along with our monthly webinar or just drop in to hear the conversation: english.web.ox.ac.uk/english-facu...
Please repost!

Definitely 'waved'.

Possibly my favourite episode.

To the New Type of the Morning Post (27 January 1800) Ye Sable Legions, here you stand/ A thousand Subjects to command!/ All dimly clad in leaden mail,/ To triumph o'er your Victim pale!/To blur the white and spotless scene,/ And sport your Columns dark between! Ye Sable Legions! Fate decrees// That, 'midst your triumphs, you should please;/ That Mirth and Wisdom should combine/ To regulate each blacking line;/That Wit should in your Ranks appear, And Beauty drop the frequent tear,/When tales of tnender sorrow prove/ That Souls of Lead can yield to Love."

This poem by Mary Robinson, published in The Morning Post in 1800, addressed to that newspaper's "Type," really must be the only poem about a typeface (as well as in a typeface) written in the #19thc.
(But, gosh, I would be happy to hear of others.)
Here are the first 2 stanzas.
#BookHistory

Hansel & Grettel - Creation Theatre Family Christmas show at The North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford from Creation Theatre, specialists in site specific and digital theatre.

Oxford folk - get yourselves to the North Wall to see Creation Theatre's Christmas show, Hansel & Grettel.

It's fabulous. Took our 8yo this evening and we booked to go again as soon as we got home. The final medley is worth the ticket price alone.

Tickets:
creationtheatre.co.uk/show/hansel-...

Pringles are biscuits, not crisps (potato chips).

For the second time this week, a student has blown my mind.

Did you know that Leigh Hunt kept a *Hair Book*? Yes, a *Hair Book*: an album of locks belonging to literary greats.

And the good folk @ransomcenter.bsky.social have digitized it.

Thanks to my student @sadpphicstanza.bsky.social for telling me about this.

Engravings discovered on reverse of copper plates thought to be the earliest produced by William Blake

For those who missed the press around the William Blake discoveries (mentioned in our previous post), catch up here: www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/about/media/...

Luminous Port Meadow

A man walks from right to left. He is wearing a floppy black hat, and a grey coat and trousers. In his left hand is a chair with a rush seat, and in his right hand is a poll resting on his right shoulder, which holds a quiver of rush at his back.

Paul Sandby, c.1759 - Old Chairs to Mend. London Museum.

Text of a sonnet “After the Death of a Child (A Pastoral Heckle)” by Graeme Richardson

(And on the subject of near-perfect sonnets, this — from @ravoon.bsky.social’s Last of the Coalmine Choirboys — is magnificent.

“…the sun has gone / to pieces in the song-forsaken sky”)

Text of a poem “Backalong” by Nia Broomhall.

It’s always life-affirming when you enjoy a reading so much you buy the book the next day, then you re-read properly and it’s even better than you remember. I’m loving @niaandthepoems.bsky.social’s Backalong, and the title sonnet is so close to ideal form you could almost mistake it for perfect.

Fara Dabhoiwala · A Man of Parts and Learning: Francis Williams Gets His Due The only certainty about the picture is that it shows Francis Williams. No one has ever been able to discover who...

This essay by Fara Dabhoiwala is stupendously good. Both scholarly detective work and storytelling of the highest order.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race Cambridge Core - English Literature 1700-1830 - The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race

you could ask your library to order if you want