Godwin_lives

1. Thanks for the kind words, likes and reposts. I’m turning this into a short thread about Volume 4 of the OUP edition of Godwin’s letters.

A very famous train has arrived in Swanage

Coming soon: History Ireland, November/December 2026! Wolfe Tone’s life and legacy, Gaelic Ireland and the Black Death, Henry Joy McCracken’s uniform and the bombing of O’Connell tower. Plus archaeology, archives, film and book reviews. www.historyireland.com

The latest posts on my blog are a blockbuster two-parter on the Blackett family of Newcastle and their houses across the north-east of England, chiefly Wylam, Newby Hall, Wallington Hall and Matfen Hall: landedfamilies.blogspot.com/2026/10/646-... and landedfamilies.blogspot.com/2026/10/646-...

Afternoon At The Scottish Border. 8°C and windy. Starlings

testimonies of a great poet and teacher.

Wild carrot flowering on Trumpington Road in Cambridge. #WildflowerHour

Rainy morning in North Oxford

Syon House Conservatory, West London: built 1820-27 to the designs of Charles Fowler, architect, and Richard Forrest, head gardener to the Duke of Northumberland. Grade I-listed.

This is a wonderful piece of writing about a railway that was within living memory when I joined in 1986. I loved hearing the old stories, and still do. Although retired, I am still railway, through and through.

#OnePlaceWednesday

Latest piece from me: on my home county of Northumberland, the River Tyne and how far the North Sea's influence runs

Harebells on the driveway. #BlueSkyMonday

Clare Leighton, Ploughing: November (1932). Seen today at Pallant House Gallery.

1st October 2026 07.01

#OnePlaceWednesday

Lovely memoir piece from Pamela Clemit.

Pamela's account of the steam/diesel-electric transition is a recommended read.

27th September 2026 06.26

A good day to share my memoir of growing up on the East Coast Main Line, where I witnessed of the demise of the steam age & the rise of diesel-electric locomotives. #RailwayHistory #SteamTrains #Deltics #Northumberland

A Chilly Autumn Morning. 6°C and a heavy dew. Rooks.

Final proof (let’s hope) has arrived for indexing (620 pages). Thanks to all those waiting & watching. #AmIndexing #TheLongestJourney

a great letter in the times today. perhaps worth sharing in these troubled times. #RNLI #heroes

Kirklees and Calderdale boast some of the finest rural landscapes in Yorkshire. Together, they form a vast green sanctuary where dramatic topography meets historic countryside. Calderdale is dominated by open spaces, with its western two-thirds framed by sweeping high moorlands,

ancient wooded dales, and protected valleys like Shibden and Cragg Vale. Over 60% of the district is designated Green Belt land. Neighbouring Kirklees matches this grandeur, where roughly 70% of the district consists of countryside and Green Belt area. Rolling agricultural pastures merge

seamlessly into the Peak District's northern fringes. These twin boroughs, areas that historically hosted thriving local industry are now part of Yorkshire's magnificent rural heartland.

#OTD 10 Sept. 1797: death of #MaryWollstonecraft, wife of philosophical anarchist #WilliamGodwin; mother of #MaryShelley, author of Frankenstein; pioneering advocate of women's rights; citizen of the world. She lives on in her writings.

Big Donegal skies.

Yesterday we published Mary Ann Lund’s new edition in the Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne - a project known far and wide for its editorial rigour and immaculate presentation, under the general editorship of @mcculloughp.bsky.social global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Reading by Touch: Scotland’s early tactile reading systems Scotland played a key role in the early history of reading by touch, opening new possibilities for blind readers in the #C19. Taylor Hare explores embossed pages, knotted strings & radical alphabets #BookHistory www.nls.uk/collections/...

The Letters of William Godwin, Volume IV (OUP, forthcoming), includes 34 letters to his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (b. OTD 1797), author of Frankenstein (1818), five more full-length novels, & pioneering editor of P. B. Shelley's poems. Posthumous 19c. miniature by Reginald Easton.

The autumn issue of the DRB will appear on Monday. Essays and reviews will include Michael Ignatieff on Avisha Margalit’s ‘Captive Minds’, Emer Nolan on Frank Callanan’s ‘James Joyce: A Portrait’, Graham McCann on Marilyn Monroe at 100 and Maurice Earls on Daniel O’Connell’s liberal Catholicism.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: scholarly editing is an advanced skill; it's not for everyone. Knowing the literature of a field does not itself equip you to be an editor. If you don't have highly developed textual accuracy skills then it's not for you.

Congratulations to the wonderful Mary Ann Lund (Leicester) on publication of her second (!) vol. in the Oxford Donne Sermons edition. Fantastic textual and critical scholarship on his mid-career at St Paul's.

I've just submitted the manuscript for my next book, THE GHOSTS OF CHALK COUNTRY. It's about the loss of England's chalk downland - a tale of flowers, fertility, fascism and freedom. Published by William Collins on 22nd April 2027; pre-order here: uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

Just finished a week of research in Berlin on anti-Nazi resistance networks. Many discoveries but easily the most moving was this: A small paper flower a resistance organiser crafted in Luckau prison and included in a letter to his daughter – 1936

Still life pictures (what Manet called 'the touchstone of the painter,') became very fashionable in the early years of the 20thC - Elizabeth Okie Paxton painted what one critic called 'ravishing still lifes of moments in time.' This work is from 1916.

Today is the Feast of St Rognvald, our dynamic, poetic, adventurous, handsome, cathedral-building Norwegian Earl of Orkney. Skål!

La Place de l'Europe (Rue de Paris), temps de pluie, 1877, by Gustave Caillebotte, born #OTD 1848, innovative French Impressionist artist, and art collector, who owned Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876). The Art Institute of Chicago

August garden blues. #BlueSkyMonday 📷 #photography

Imagine when most of Ireland looked something like this. Now consider that only around 1% remains, almost all wrecked. Few – if any – other places on Earth are in such dire need of rewilding.

Volume IV of the OUP edition of William Godwin’s letters, now at press, includes an extensive description of his 1816 visit to Abbotsford, together with four letters to Sir Walter Scott (b. OTD 1771), all written in 1824, the same year that Edwin Landseer painted this portrait of Scott at home.

15th August 2026 06.07

Godwin & Curran at Glendalough, 7-8 Aug. 1800: 'We arrived at the Seven Churches about 5 o'clock, where we found neither Inn, nor alehouse, but a camp, the officers of which generously spying our distress, & hearing the name of counsellor Curran, supplied us...with dinner, tea, supper & beds.'