The diary of William MacEwan: Part II

This instalment of the Diary describes the first stage of the journey from Quilimane to the interior, then the most convenient and practicable way to the British territory of Nyasaland, and the way by which both people and goods entered and left that country. This is all changed ; the route has been abandoned by the African Lakes Corporation, and Maruru, the first place where the Diarist saw African village life, probably no longer exists. When the Diary is completed, it is hoped to publish an article describing the country MacEwan saw as it is at the present day. Much has been done to improve the condition of the natives under British rule since then, but it is more difficult to ascertain their condition under the Portuguese ; much more, however, remains to be done. Transport, of course, has been improved out of all comparison, and it will be interesting to compare it with the means by which MacEwan entered the then Darkest Africa—improvement which has taken place well within a single lifetime.     

The Cables and Cablets of the Mary Rose (1545)

Henry VIII's warship Mary Rose sank in the Solent on 19 July 1545, during an engagement with a Franco/Papal invasion fleet. During excavation between 1979 and 1982, four cable coils and a number of lengths of cable and cablets were discovered. Direct study of these, combined with the excavation, finds, and conservation records, have established the number of cables found on the wreck, their spatial organization on the vessel, and their function at the time of the wrecking. Analysis of the cables has illuminated 16th‐century rope‐making techniques. The possible presence of Tudor salvage cables is also discussed.     

The Gothic-Romantic Hybridity in Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales

ABSTRACT

Mary Darby Robinson is well known for writing her final volume of poems, the Lyrical Tales (1800), as a direct answer, sometimes poem by poem, to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads. What has been less studied is how deliberately hybrid in style and allusions her response-poems are in the Tales, especially how prominently they foreground Gothic imagery, theatricality, and hyperbole in poems that also ape the emerging “romantic” mode of the Ballads themselves. Part of that “cheekiness,” I argue, stems from the condemnation of the Gothic that both Wordsworth and especially Coleridge had articulated in print, while also echoing it, albeit in highly modified ways, in their poetry. Most of what Robinson attempts with her hybrid Tales, though, develops the penchant in Gothic for symbolizing deep and unresolved ideological conflicts in Western culture. Her answers to Wordsworth and Coleridge, which I exemplify with selected Robinson Tales, therefore, bring out those very conflicts underlying, haunting, and even tormenting the speakers and the subject-matter in the original Lyrical Ballads.