In September 2002 the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust held the second of its one day conferences, on this occasion at the English-Speaking Union, Dartmouth House, London. The conference brought together experts in the history of London and those currently writing about some of our greatest authors to reveal different aspects of the golden age of literary community in Britain. In the evening, by kind permission of the Director, the National Portrait Gallery, St Martin’s Place, Trafalgar Square, hosted a reception in the Eighteenth-century Arts and Literature room. It is hoped to publish an edited volume of essays based upon the papers given at the conference. Announcements regarding this will be made on this website.
Speakers included:
- Barbara Benedict (Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USA), London Haunts: The Literary Footprints of Ghosts
- Sarah Kareem (Harvard University, USA), ‘The Urban Wonderland: Wandering London in the Eighteenth-Century City Diarist’s Imagination
- Sandro Jung (Chairman and Research Fellow of the William Collins Society), James Thomson and Literary Coterie in Early Eighteenth-Century London
- Seth Denbo (Sheffield University), Mysterious Productions: The Circulation of Horace Walpole’s ‘Hidden’ Play in Late Eighteenth-Century Literary London
- Padmini Ray Chaudhury (Edinburgh University), Under the Sign of the Ship (John Murray II)
- Yvonne Cornish (Oxford University), Literary London and its Part in the Construction of Eighteenth-Century Celebrity
- Nigel Hall (Cambridge Project for the Book Trust & Oxford University), Reconstructing the World of the Eighteenth-Century London Book Trades
- Brycchan Carey (Kingston University, Surrey), Ignatius Sancho’s Literary Communities
- Felicity James (Oxford University), ‘Fostering Soil for Genius’: Charles Lamb’s London Letters