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Sugden Institute Oration with Phyllis Weliver
The Master/Head of College, Dr Stewart Gill OAM warmly invites you and your partner/guest to the next event in our Sugden Institute series. We are delighted to have Professor Phyllis Weliver who is our Sugden Fellow delivering the 2024 Sugden Oration.
‘with music loud and long’: S.T. Coleridge’s Liberalism, the Cambridge Apostles, and Gladstone’s Essay Society
Professor Phyllis Weliver
Wednesday 21 August 2024
5:30pm arrival for 6pm oration followed by
drinks and canapés
Junior Common Room, Queen’s College
Business attire
RSVP to Michele Mulder at rsvp@queens.unimelb.edu.au
Onsite parking is not available; Uber, taxi, trams recommended.
Oration Synopsis
Poet-philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s dynamic influence on the spirit of radical political traditions, philosophy and literature in Victorian Britain would have surprised second-generation literary Romantics who never forgave Coleridge’s politically conservative turn in later life. Nevertheless, his combination of morality with the individual’s imagination as an active force that bridged aesthetics and public good led to W.E. Gladstone’s admiring paraphrase of Coleridge in 1838: ‘There must be a soul, underlying and animating […], a cultivation of the inward man, which is the root, the corrective, and the safeguard of civilisation’ (original emphasis). Gladstone went on to become four-time British prime minister (between 1868–94) and the embodiment of liberalism to his contemporaries.
The 2024 Sugden Oration sets out Coleridge’s ideas and traces their spread through influential undergraduate conversation societies in England (the Cambridge Apostles and Gladstone’s sister society at Oxford). It focuses on the role of sound in Coleridge’s prose writings and his poems, ‘The Nightingale’ (1798) and ‘Kubla Khan’ (1816). In so doing, the lecture lays out Coleridge’s thinking on a nest of ideas that influenced developing liberal ideologies in England. At the center of the argument lies a recovery of the vital role played by music – a largely overlooked subject in studies of liberal behavior and in scholarship on Coleridge.
Phyllis Weliver—Professor of English and Research Institute Fellow at Saint Louis University (USA) and Fellow of Gladstone’s Library in Wales—is Macgeorge Fellow at University of Melbourne and, jointly, Sugden Fellow at Queen’s College. 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). Her current monograph, from which this lecture is drawn, examines British literature, music, and liberalism from 1810 to 1910.