What Are You Reading?: Charlotte May

For December’s What Are You Reading?, we were privileged to interview Dr Charlotte May. Dr May is currently a Cultural Engagement Fellow on an AHRC-funded project about Robert Southey’s Keswick (PI: Professor Lynda Pratt). This project is in conjunction with Keswick Museum to promote its important and under-used collections relating to the controversial nineteenth century Poet Laureate and historian Robert Southey (1774-1843).

What's your favourite part of working on your current project?

My career has very much focused on the public engagement front of academia, although I have also held various teaching posts. As a literary historian, I have always worked with archives and museums, and it really is such a privilege to do so, especially as the heritage sector has had a particularly challenging year. 

What are you working on at the moment, and which writing informs your ongoing research?

My PhD was an edition of the selected letters of Samuel Rogers, and I am working on articles which include these unpublished letters. With at least six hundred letters catalogued, I have many things on the go! I work on Robert Southey daily in my currently role, and one of the things I really admire about Robert Southey is his work ethic - and although I don’t burn through candles writing letters late into the night, I do like to work on several things at the same time, much like Southey says he does!  Like anyone who works on letters, new editions are particularly exciting, so I’m always looking for new books about letters and letters writing. Mary O’Connell’s Byron and John Murray (2014) was a large influence on my PhD, as Byron can distort Murray’s character and motivations in his letters, so to have the ‘other side’ of the correspondence provided in an engaging narrative was a fantastic template for my own writing about a fairly understudied poet. Romanticism and the Letter (ed. Madeleine Callaghan and Anthony Howe) is one of my favourite contributions to the field of literary studies this year: by taking a cross-section of diverse Romantic period authors, the letter is represented as a fluid space, which can vacillate between the cathartic and the performative, and reveal unconscious biases of the writer. Of course, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey is always a tab on my computer’s browser! I began letter-editing whilst studying under Lynda Pratt, and this edition, and its editors, continue to be a huge influence on my work. 

Can you tell us about letter-editing and how you go about doing it? What challenges do you face? 

To access manuscripts, particularly private letters, is a privilege for the researcher. I am very lucky that Samuel Rogers is a perfectionist writer. His handwriting is consistent and legible. Even when Rogers apologises for his bad handwriting to a correspondent due to illness or injury, the difference is fairly negligible. Deletions are frequently recorded as a straight line through the incorrect word, which means I can read the word underneath, and insertions are recorded neatly and consistently. However, it can be tricky to determine the correspondent as Rogers’s form of address can be fairly anonymous although considerate of rank. Another challenge with Rogers is inaccuracies - sometimes an intentional lie, but sometimes a mistake with the date, for example.  The key to letter-editing is consistency with a robust methodology. Knowledge of the author’s writing patterns is essential to develop this. 

Which new studies of Romantic literature are you reading right now?

Michael Taylor’s The Interest has made my November an extremely interesting one! It may not be a direct study of Romantic literature, but of course literary discourse has always shaped the social, political and economic world. Taylor’s discussion of ‘the literary anti-slavery front’ is explored in great detail. Political documentation can be a literary space too, so I’m currently on my second reading of The Interest with this in mind. 

We know you love teaching and are an excellent lecturer – so which books do you frequently recommend to students, and why? 

William St Clair’s Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, without a doubt! It isn’t just about the brilliant content and appendices which Reading Nation contains, but rather the importance of a quantitative analyses of published texts in the Romantic period. I really want students to question what they study and why: why do we study authors who were not bestsellers? The ability to ask these questions provides students with a wealth of skills and insights into the world we live in, thinking about how information is presented to us and what the motivations behind this might be. The facts and figures in Reading Nation also present us with statistics which are absent, highlighting the immateriality of studies of literature and biases in data which has survived. We manage data all the time in literary studies, but we need to ensure students understand just how integral this is to their studies, and also how it’s a key transferable skill for employability. 

What books are on your “to read” pile? 

Dan Hicks’s The Brutish Museum is on my list next. I want to develop conversation about artefact provenance in my own studies of literary history, and this will provide a fantastic framework for this. The expansion of private and public collections increased in the Romantic period, and how these items came to be where they are is as important as what they are. 

Which books are on your bedside table at the minute?

Chris Naunton’s Egyptologists’ Notebooks is currently one of my favourite relaxing reads: it’s a stunning publication which includes manuscripts, illustrations, and notebooks reproduced to such high quality it is (almost!) like seeing the real thing. The book covers hundreds of years of discovery, and every time I look at a new image there is something new to notice. I am also developing research on some peripheral figures of Egyptology during the Romantic period, so this book has already helped me to develop a few ideas. 

You can follow Charlotte on Twitter here. You can read our other ‘What Are You Reading?’ interviews here. Perhaps you have a new publication in Romantic studies that you’d like to discuss in a future piece here on the K-SAA Blog, or perhaps you’d just like to tell what you are reading! We love to hear from our members and followers. Get in touch.