Prior to the twentieth century, there were no immigration laws. People were free to live and work where they wanted when they wanted. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley took full advantage of their ability to live and travel throughout Europe and their work would not be so interesting or challenging if they hadn’t.
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Mary Shelley was the first in a long line of nineteenth-century literary writers to depict the Arctic and to do so with the intention of interrogating male networks of science, camaraderie and control. I want to find out more about how she became familiar with these networks outside the conventional assumption that she learned all her science from Percy Shelley and his colleagues.
Regardless of the frequent mentions of places in North Yorkshire, Downton Abbey was filmed almost entirely in the South. The North has therefore missed out Downton Abbey themed tourism, and the series has failed to meaningfully represent the North, but we can still imagine how Yorkshire might have been successfully showcased.
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Of all the Brontë novels, Wuthering Heights is most dedicated to depicting the Yorkshire Moors and their influence on the people that live in them. Victorian reviewers accused Emily Brontë of representing a repulsive spot populated with repulsive people but her depiction of the people and places of Yorkshire are actually very balanced, representing both the positive and the negative.
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William Morris was fascinated with Iceland for much of his life, spending many years studying Icelandic and collaborating on translations of the sagas. In 1871 and 1873, when Morris trekked through the interior of Iceland, he experienced intense episodes of wonder that would come to influence his thinking for the rest of his life.
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