Lecture Programme 2025-2026
Jane Austen
Unknown engraver after Cassandra Austen (about 1810), published by Richard Bentley, 1870
Stipple engraving on paper
Bequeathed by (Frederick) Leverton Harris, 1927; NPG D13873
© The National Portrait Gallery
25 October 2025
Dr Lizzie Rogers
Jane Austen and “a most beloved sister”
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Abstract:
Every full novel of Austen’ – and much of her other writing, features sisterhood and female friendship – whether to good or bad effect. It is hard not to see this separately from her relationship with her own sister Cassandra. This bond has received more attention than ever in Austen’s 250th birthday year, with the adaptation of Gill Hornby’s novel Miss Austen. Using Austen’s fictional writings, letters and period drama adaptation, this talk will explore the sisters’ relationship, how the support between Jane and Cassandra can be seen on the page, as much in history, and the way the two siblings have been portrayed since their deaths.
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Biography:
​Dr Lizzie Rogers is an historian, curator and writer who specialises in women, collecting and historic houses of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and their depiction in popular culture. Her work has appeared in academic and popular presses; she is a regular contributor to BBC HistoryExtra on the subjects of Jane Austen and Regency England.
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‘Anna Letitia Barbauld (née Aiken)’, published 1798
by John Chapman (active 1792-1823), after an unknown artist
Stipple engraving on paper; NPG D4457
© The National Portrait Gallery
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8 November 2025
Professor Mary Fairclough
Anna Laetita Barbauld, eighteenth-century polymath, two-hundred years on
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Abstract:
Anna Laetita Barbauld (1743-1825) was a poet, educator, polemicist and a leading British author of the late eighteenth century. She was celebrated after her death as ‘unquestionably the first of our female poets, and one of the most eloquent and powerful of our prose writers’. Marking the 200th anniversary of her death, this lecture will investigate Barbauld’s rich and varied literary career, the critical backlash that she faced in her life and after her death, and her connections with the Dissenting protestant communities of Yorkshire and York.
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Biography:
Mary Fairclough is Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her work investigates the intersection of literature, science, politics and religion in the eighteenth century and Romantic period. She is the author of The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy, and Print Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Literature, Electricity and Politics: ‘Electrick Communication Every Where’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). A book currently in progress – supported by the Leverhulme Trust – is on Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Hays, reading, and devotion.
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The North Front of Beningbrough Hall, 1751
by J. Chapman and J. Bouttats
Oil on canvas; NT1191214
© National Trust
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10 January 2026
Matthew Constantine
‘Beningbrough Hall: The Rise and Fall of the House of Earle’
Abstract:
Beningbrough Hall near York is one of two major early 18th century country houses in Yorkshire now cared for by the National Trust. Making use of new research into Beningbrough – a house long mis-characterised as having ‘no history’ – this talk will draw upon a scattering of letters, archive documents and physical evidence. It will outline how and why Beningbrough and its extensive original estate was subject to a major legal tussle in the early 1760s. The eventual winner’s social ambitions would lead to a later crash, the fall-out of which remains reflected in the nature of the site today.
This story will be compared and contrasted with similar contemporary events at the other National Trust 18th century country house site in Yorkshire – Nostell, near Wakefield – and will illustrate how the lens of family finances can offer a significant insight into the histories of such noble homes.
Biography:
Matthew Constantine is a regional Cultural Heritage Curator for the National Trust, working with a portfolio of sites across much of Yorkshire, including Beningbrough. He joined the Trust in 2017 after almost 20 years working in a variety of collections, curatorial and managerial roles in museums in Lancashire, Derbyshire, Cumbria, Greater Manchester and Leicester. He has a particular experience and interest in the challenges and opportunities of unlocking the social history that is bound up within places now presented as public heritage spaces.
Coast with Cliffs and Boats by an unknown artist, early C19th
Oil on paper
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B2001.2.43
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14 February 2026
Dr Adam James Smith
Winifred Gales & Radical Print Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Sheffield
Abstract:
The Hartshead Press operated in Sheffield during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, providing the city with a printer, bookshop and the Sheffield Register and Sheffield Iris newspapers. Founded by Joseph Gales in 1784, the press was later run his apprentice James Montgomery, following Gales’s flight to America in 1794 having been charged with treason and sedition. This is a narrative cemented decades later by the heliographic Memoirs of the Life and Writing of James Montgomery (1855), which doubles as a panegyric, self-congratulatory history of the Hartshead Press.
However, the handwritten, private memoirs of Joseph’s wife, Winifred Gales, penned in her later years long after their escape to America, tell a different story. In her Recollections, Winfred – ever a fierce defender of her husband’s commitment to radicalism and reform – reveals the extent to which she managed the bookshop, mentored her sisters-in-law when they set up their own bookshop, provided Joseph with entrepreneurial advice and, whilst he was in hiding, managed the printshop by herself whilst also caring for several children. In fact, she describes being interrogated for hours by magistrates, alone, whilst heavily pregnant. In an especially extraordinary sequence during their journey to America, she tells of how the ship was boarded by privateers and – given that Joseph was incapacitated with sea sickness – it was Winifred who negotiates their release. This paper will consider how and why Winifred’s agency has been obscured, and propose means for its recovery.
Biography:
Dr Adam James Smith is an Associate Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at York St John University. His work explores the role played by cheap print in mediating the relationship between citizen and state during the long eighteenth century, with particular interests in works or protest and satire. He co-edited and contributed to Poetry, Conspiracy and Radicalism in Sheffield (Spirit Duplicator, 2016), Print Culture, Agency and Regionality in the Handpress Era (Palgrave, 2022), People of Print: Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2023), People of Print: Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2025) and Impolite Periodicals: Reading Rudeness in the Eighteenth Century (Bucknell University Press, forthcoming 2025). Chief Editor of Criticks, the online reviews hub for the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, he is also an eighteenth-century section editor for the Literature Compass journal and co-director of the York Research Unit for the Study of Satire.
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Portrait of a Woman, Said to Be Emma (1765-1815), Lady Hamilton, 1804
by Adam Buck (1759-1833)
Miniature painting on ivory; 95.14.81
The Moses Lazarus Collection, Gift of Josephine and Sarah Lazarus in memory of their father, 1888-95
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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14 March 2026
Dr Serena Dyer
“Be-Nelsoned all over”: Patriotic Fashion in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Abstract:
Upon Horatio Nelson’s return to Naples after the Battle of the Nile in 1798, Emma Hamilton wrote the victorious Rear-Admiral a letter of sincere adulation. Hamilton declared that “My dress from head to foot is alla Nelson [...] Even my shawl is in blue with gold anchors all over. My earrings are Nelson’s anchors; in short, we are be-Nelsoned all over”. Hamilton’s top-to-toe adornment with
nautical symbolism reflected a brief vogue for maritime dress accessories that gripped the British, from royalty to shopkeepers, in the wake of their naval triumph. While Britannia ruled the waves, the nautical anchor ruled fashion. Sartorial accessories were a crucial site for the public performance of national loyalty, patriotic feeling, and the idolisation of celebrity.
This paper opens with an examination of the National Maritime Museum’s collection of 1790s anchor necklaces, before exploring how these accessories were popularised and disseminated in fashion plates and fashion periodicals. The widespread adoption of these accessories, this lecture argues, reflects a broader move towards the commercialisation of commemoration and celebrity. It was the smallness and fast production of these manufactured mementos that exemplified a
sped-up ephemerality of material commemoration. Crucially, these sartorial anchors commodified Nelson as a conduit of the patriotic zeitgeist of the 1790s.
Biography:
Dr Serena Dyer is Associate Professor of Fashion History at De Montfort University. She is author of Material Lives (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Labour of the Stitch (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and is currently writing her next book, Georgian Fashion: Britishness and Dress in the Eighteenth Century, which is under contract with Yale University Press. She presents the Fashion Through History digital series for English Heritage.
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The Stables and Two Famous Running Horses
Belonging to His Grace, the Duke of Bolton, 1747
by James Seymour (1702-1752)
Oil on canvas; B2001.2.26
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
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11 April 2026
Elizabeth Jamieson
“And who is to look after the horses, eh?”; exploring the duties, accommodation and wages of country house stable servants.
Abstract:
The outdoor servants in country houses are very often overlooked by historians in terms of their role within the elite households they served, and the specific work that they performed. Using images, accounts and documentary evidence drawn from the long eighteenth century, this lecture will examine the roles of the coachman, groom, postilion and stable boy; and then look at how differences in their accommodation, clothing and wages defined their position within the domestic servant hierarchy.
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Biography:
Elizabeth Jamieson is an independent researcher, lecturer and art-historian with a specialist interest in the material culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has worked for the Attingham Trust for the study of the British Country House for over twelve years, first as director of the Attingham Summer School and now as director of the Attingham Study Programmes and Short Courses. In addition, she is the curatorial advisor to the National Trust on horse-drawn carriages and historic stables and part-time tutor at the University of Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education.