America – European Romanticisms in Association

Contributor: Tim Sommer

Location: Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Description: This manuscript notebook contains fair copies of several poems Shelley wrote during his time in Italy between late 1819 and the summer of 1820. It provides fascinating evidence of the process of creative labour and of the different stages of composition a text undergoes before transitioning into the medium of print, and of collaboration between the Shelleys. But it also sheds light on the nineteenth-century canonization of British Romantic writers through both the dispersal and the collection of their material remains, telling the story of the considerable part that North American enthusiasm played in the process.

Continue reading “The Harvard Shelley Notebook”

Contributor: Cian Duffy

Location: Philadelphia, USA

Description: Located on the banks of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, John Bartram’s garden is the oldest botanical garden in America. It was founded in 1728 when Bartram purchased the land in what was then Kingsessing Township, an area originally inhabited by the Lenape people and settled by the Swede Hans Månsson in the mid seventeenth century. Bartram built the stone house which still stands today and laid out the original garden which was later expanded and maintained by his sons William, who made an early sketch of the property, and John junior. The Bartrams helped to shape the estates and gardens of the Romantic period by introducing many American plant species to Britain, and William’s widely-read account of his botanical expeditions in connection with the garden, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulgees, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws (1791), is known to have influenced François-René de Chateaubriand, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. Bartram’s Garden exemplifies not only the increasing prominence of botany as a branch of natural philosophy during the eighteenth century but also the rise of plant collecting as an index of cultural and economic capital.

Continue reading “Bartram’s Garden”