Conference | Travel and the Country House
From the conference programme:
Travel and the Country House: Places, Cultures, and Practices
University of Northampton, 15–16 September 2014
Registration due by 31 August 2014
Keynote speakers: Roey Sweet (University of Leicester) and Margot Finn (University College London)
Travel has long played a vital role in shaping the country house, opening up horizons and exposing both house and owner to a variety of external influences. Travel impacted upon values, tastes, material culture and money, and helped to articulate the flow of ideas, information, goods and capital. The importance of the Grand Tour and Empire to the country house has long been recognised, but domestic tourism and travel for more mundane purposes—to visit family or friends, engage in political life or go to town—were also significant. In this conference, we wish to explore a wide range of travel experiences and consider how these impacted on the country house. How were travel choices made and how were impacts articulated? How did new influences mesh with existing tastes and goods? What impact did its status as a place to visit have upon the country house? And how do we communicate the importance of travel to those visiting country houses today?
This conference addresses these questions and others, drawing together research from Sweden, Hungary, the Netherlands and Ireland as well as all corners of England. It thus offers a comparative perspective on the relationship between travel and the country house, and an opportunity for academics, curators and managers to discuss the ways in which travel continues to shape the ways in which country houses are interpreted, presented and experienced.
For more details and a booking form, contact Professor Jon Stobart at jon.stobart@northampton.ac.uk or visit the Consumption and Country House website.
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M O N D A Y , 1 5 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
10.00 Registration and coffee
10.40 Welcome and introduction
10.45 Keynote: ‘The Italian Grand Tour and the 18th-Century Country House’, Roey Sweet (University of Leicester)
11.45 Session 1: The Practicalities and Pleasures of Travel
• ‘Visiting London for business and pleasure in the years 1599–1623: On the road (and the Thames) with William Cavendish, 1st Earl of Cavendish’, Peter Edwards (University of Roehampton)
• ‘Travelling for Pleasure: Carriages and the country house’, Lizzy Jamieson (Independent Scholar)
• ‘“Wintering in the ‘shires”: Foxhunting and travel’, Mandy de Belin (University of Leicester)
1.00 Lunch
2.00 Session 2: European Travel, Networks, and Influences
• ‘The Grand Tour and Episcopal domesticity: The case of Martin Benson, Bishop of Gloucester (1735–52)’, Michael Ashby (University of Cambridge)
• ‘“Antiquity mad”: The Earl Bishop and the translation of continental style in an Irish context’, Rebecca Campion (National University of Ireland at Maynooth)
• ‘Centre and periphery: The world brought to the ironmasters’ mansions’, Marie Steinrud (Stockholm University)
• ‘The English Rothschild family and their country houses: A distinctive style’, Nicola Pickering
3.45 Tea and coffee
4.15 Session 3: Views of England from Overseas Travellers
• ‘The English country house as (proto) museum: Dutch travel accounts explored, 1677–1750’, Hanneke Ronnes (University of Amsterdam)
• ‘“… enjoying country life to the full—only the English know how to do that!”: Appreciation of the British country house by Hungarian aristocratic travellers’, Kristof Fatsar (Corvinus University of Budapest)
• ‘Stourhead: All roads lead to Rome—and back again’, John Harrison (Open University)
• ‘A Dutch view on the English country house and landscape garden’, Hélène Bremer (University of Leiden)
6.30 Reception
7.30 Dinner
T U E S D A Y , 1 6 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4
9.30 Session 4: The Mobile House
• ‘Manors, towns and spas: A household on the move in late 18th-century Sweden’, Göran Ulväng (University of Uppsala)
• ‘The travels of an aristocratic family in the early 19th century: The Braybrookes of Audley End, Essex’, Andrew Hann (English Heritage)
• ‘Moving households: Problems, choices and new possibilities facing the country house family in the 1820s and 1830s’, Pamela Sambrook (Independent Scholar)
10.45 Tea and coffee
11.15 Session 5: Travel, Tourism, and Guides
• ‘Domestic tourism, the country house, and the making of respectability in the travel journals of Caroline Lybbe Powys’, Freya Gowrley (University of Edinburgh)
• ‘Country house visiting and improvement at Herriard House in Hampshire, 1794–1821’, Nicky Pink (Independent Scholar)
• ‘Arthur Young’s Tours: Architecture, painting, sculpture, and the art of adorning grounds’, Jocelyn Anderson (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
• ‘The representation of the country house in individual books and guides, 1720–1845’, Paula Riddy (University of Sussex)
1.00 Lunch
2.00 Keynote: ‘Duleep Singh and the Country House Tradition: Making and Unmaking the Victorian Global Home’, Margot Finn (UCL)
3.00 Session 6: Looking beyond Europe
• ‘Travel to the East- and West-Indies and Groningen country house culture in the 18th Century’, Yme Kuiper (University of Groningen)
• ‘Appuldurcombe House and the ‘Museum Worsleyanum’: Sir Richard Worsley’s forgotten collection’, Abigail Coppins (Independent Scholar)
• ‘Diaries, decoration and design: The Courtaulds’ travels and the effects on Eltham Palace’, Annie Kemkaran-Smith (English Heritage)
4.15 Closing comments and discussion
New Book | Bluestockings Displayed
From Cambridge UP:
Elizabeth Eger, ed., Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 323 pages, ISBN: 978-0521768801, £60.
The conversation parties of the bluestockings, held to debate contemporary ideas in eighteenth-century Britain, were vital in encouraging female artistic achievement. The bluestockings promoted links between learning and virtue in the public imagination, inventing a new kind of informal sociability that combined the life of the senses with that of the mind. This collection of essays, by leading scholars in the fields of literature, history and art history, provides an interdisciplinary treatment of bluestocking culture in eighteenth-century Britain. It is the first academic volume to concentrate on the rich visual and material culture that surrounded and supported the bluestocking project, from formal portraits and sculptures to commercially reproduced prints. By the early twentieth century, the term ‘bluestocking’ came to signify a dull and dowdy intellectual woman, but the original bluestockings inhabited a world in which brilliance was valued at every level and women were encouraged to shine and even dazzle.
Elizabeth Eger is Reader in Eighteenth-Century Literature at King’s
College London.
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction, Elizabeth Eger
I. Portraits
1. Romantic bluestockings: From muses to matrons, Anne Mellor
2. ‘To dazzle let the vain design’: Alexander Pope’s portrait gallery, or, the impossibility of brilliant women, Emma Clery
3. Virtue, patriotism and female scholarship in bluestocking portraiture, Clare Barlow
4. Anne Seymour Damer: A sculptor of ‘republican perfection’, Alison Yarrington
5. The blues gone grey: Portraits of bluestocking women in old age, Devoney Looser
II. Performance
6. Sacred love: Eliza Linley’s voice Joseph Roach
7. The learned female soprano Susan Staves
8. Roles and role models: Montagu, Siddons, Lady Macbeth Shearer West
9. Hester Thrale: ‘What trace of the wit?’ Felicity A. Nussbaum
III. Patronage and Networks
10. Reading practices in Elizabeth Montagu’s epistolary network of the 1750s, Markman Ellis
11. The queen of the blues, the bluestocking queen, and bluestocking masculinity, Clarissa Campbell Orr
12. Luck be a lady: Patronage and professionalism for women writers in the 1790s, Harriet Guest
Enfilade 
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