University of Melbourne Events Calendar

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This seminar is presented as part of the Louise Hanson Dyer Colloquia Series.

Louise Hanson-Dyer Colloquium: ‘the life-and-death interest people throw into music’: Musical liberalism, literature, and the late Victorian slum settlement movement

This event is supported by the Macgeorge Bequest.

In Mary Ward’s best-selling novel, Robert Elsmere (1888), Londoners throw ‘life-and-death interest’ into music because of its perceived role in alleviating poverty. This lecture investigates nested ideas of faith, music and liberal ideals in late Victorian Britain through two literary exemplars that reveal how music’s direct appeal to the feeling individual was considered a means of experiencing a tangible faith.

Both case studies emerge from T.H. Green’s influential philosophy, which inspired two divergent liberal circles in Oxford that each established London settlement houses. One aligned with Robert Elsmere’s secular ideas. The other—Church of England in orientation—was associated with The Commonwealth journal (est. 1896).

Like Ward’s novel, The Commonwealth suggested practical applications of Green’s philosophy in settlement projects, but with more explicit linkages to music’s role in ameliorating physical and moral squalor, as seen in literary works, sheet music, printers’ ornaments and connections to composer Hubert Parry.

About the Speaker

Macgeorge Fellow Phyllis Weliver is Professor of English and Research Institute Fellow at Saint Louis University (USA) and Fellow of Gladstone’s Library in Wales.

Twice-funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities (USA), she has given the Annual Gladstone Lecture at Gladstone’s Library, spoken by invitation at the British Academy and Royal Academy of Music, and written and presented for BBC Radio 3’s ‘The Essay’. In addition to her most recent book, Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, she is the author of Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home and The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910: Class, Culture and Nation. Professor Weliver has also edited two volumes of essays (The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry and, with Katharine Ellis, Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century).

Image credit: Thomas Webster - 1. www.vam.ac.uk2. Bridgeman Art Library: Object 26400, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3927932

ACCESSIBILITY

All venues at the Southbank campus are wheelchair accessible. To read more about access services available at our venues, please visit: https://finearts-music.unimelb.edu.au/access-our-events