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Protestant settlers in the Americas believed it was their duty to convert indigenous peoples to the true Gospel. Yet the task proved unexpectedly difficult. The effort revealed and challenged deep European assumptions about culture and the nature of Christianity itself. From Massachusetts to Chile, Protestant would-be missionaries took roads that were paved mostly, but not entirely, with good intentions. This lecture will show where they led.
From Horace Walpole to Ann Radcliffe, renegade novelists of the eighteenth century wanted to claim back the supernatural for fiction and so invented the Gothic Novel.
In the last ten years of his life Charles Dickens related to his adoring public in a number of different ways; as novelist, as journalist, as public speaker, and in public readings of his own work.
Amelia Dyer was one of the most prolific murderers in Victorian Britain. She made a living as a “baby farmer”, or someone paid to care for unwanted or abandoned infants – except she killed around 400 of them. How could a mother and nurse murder so many defenceless babies?
How do the different versions reflect the politics and culture of their own particular times? What makes a good Carol movie? Is it truth to the original or is it something else?
Today's event
Today's event, The Gresham Festival of Musical Ideas, will not be livestreamed. Recordings of all lectures will be published soon!