I have a room where into no one enters
Save I myself alone:

There sits a blessed memory on a throne,
There my life centres
Christina Rossetti, Memory

I did not forget. Was it my own wrong I remembered?
Mrs Clennam, in Dickens’s Little Dorrit

I really enjoyed this conference - it’s the first English one I’ve been to in quite a while, and a great way to start off the academic year. Considering the numbers (about 30ish) there was an excellent mix of disciplines and some of the papers were really inspiring - I have lots of notes, and several ideas that I’d like to pursue later.
Events like this are always brilliant for energising and inspiring, whether it’s an academic conference or a writing workshop and coming out of them all you want to do is go straight to the library/computer and start work!

I think there’ll be some more detail here in the days to come, as I get to organising the notes I made, and thinking some more about the papers I’ve heard.

To remember or to forget? In their respective works Dickens and Rossetti can be seen as participating in a wider discussion, taking place during the Victorian era, focusing on the role memory plays, both positively and negatively, in our lives. The Victorians were fascinated by the concept of memory and repeated attempts were made to discover why and how one remembers and forgets. But why is the notion of memory so important to the Victorians? And, as if the concept of memory itself could not be forgotten, why do the Victorians constantly return to analyse, theorise, and explore its possibilities?

1st Keynote Speaker: Professor Elisabeth Jay

Charlotte Brontë and Memory
Chair: Lizzie Ludlow (Warwick)
Alexandra Lewis (Cambridge): “Dim as a wheel fast spun”: Recovering (from) Memory, Writing Trauma in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
Jennie Hann (Birkbeck): Reading and Remembering Jane Eyre

Faith and Memory (Lecture Theatre)
Chair: Serena Trowbridge (UCE)
Lizzie Ludlow (Warwick): The Materiality of Memory in Christina Rossetti’s Poetics
George Simmers (Oxford Brookes): Kipling and Amnesia

Archive and Memory
Chair: Ryan Barnett (UCE)
Daniel Koch (Oxford): “The Burning” at Oneida: The willed destruction of the records of Victorian America’s most successful experiment in Utopian Socialism
Dianne Lawrence (Lancaster): Reconfiguring Home: deconstructing colonial memoirs to examine female gentility within the imperial project

The Victorians in Memory
Gemma Palmer (De Montford): “Spent memories that slink through the world and breathe”: Augusta Webster’s forgotten vision of memory and gender at the fin de siecle
John Morton (UCL): Virginia Woolf and Tennyson: remembering the Victorians

Childhood Memories (Lecture Theatre)
Chair: Gemma Palmer (De Montfort)
Leilani Serafin (California State): Memorializing Childhood: Peter and Wendy and Anxiety Over Endings
Vivian Kao (Rutgers): Childhood’s Dream and Memory’s Nightmare: Lewis Carroll’s Alice Stories and Jan Švankmajer’s Něco z Alenky

2nd Keynote Speaker: Professor David Amigoni