 Well, welcome everybody. I think we still have a few people just coming in, so we're just going to wait a moment until they've all arrived in the digital room for more taking in. So welcome everybody. Good afternoon. My name is Cara Rodway. I'm the interim head of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and it gives me great pleasure to welcome you to our event today. This is the first in a series of, first in a series of three talks are looking at the Mayflower myth in Britain and the easy to remember because the next, the next events are already exactly this time on the next two Mondays and we'll share some more details later to give you a list of those events if you haven't seen the others. So you can, if you're interested, you can follow up. I'm really excited to welcome our speaker today, Dr Ed Downey, who's a postdoctoral researcher specialising in the history of popular culture. His doctoral thesis examined the social and political context that informed the development of print culture during the French Revolution and the Romantic period. And he has been the research associate on an AHRC funded project called Voyaging Through History, the Mayflower in Britain, 1620 to 2020, which he, and through this project he's been recovering examples of the long and protein legacy of the Mayflower story in British cultural history. And so it's that, that work which he's going to be drawing on today. And the Eccles Centre has been a partner on the Voyaging Through History project and we've been really excited to help facilitate the work of Ed and his, his colleagues on the project. And I know that there's an awful lot of British Library material which has made its way into, into this presentation and I'm really excited to be able to share with you some of the ways that, that this North American, this British and North American transatlantic relationship has, has been understood in Britain. And obviously it's very interesting in, in this, you know, 400th anniversary year as we commemorate the, the sailing to think about what it's, what it's meant for British audiences, particularly at different moments and kind of what elements of the story have been preserved and what elements have, have fallen away because they didn't perhaps serve the, the particular cultural moment that they arose in. So I'm going to stop rabbitting on now because you're not actually here to hear me, you're here to hear Ed. So Ed is going to, to share his screen, he has a power point that he's going to, to speak to. And then he's going to talk for about, I hope, 40, 45 minutes. I will have to rugby tackle him at the 45 minute point in a virtual sense to ensure that, that we stick to time because we want to have some questions and answers. You're very welcome to type your questions into the Q&A or to the chat box as we go along. And I, the, the digital elves in the background will collate your questions and then I will put those to Ed as we go. So, well, sorry, at the end, but you're welcome to ask the questions as we go along. And so I'm going to, to hand over now to Ed who is going to start talking. Okay, can you see my screen there? Is everything okay? I'm getting the, yep, that's fine. We're good. Brilliant. Okay. Thank you, everybody for joining. So this is Novelist Poets and Pilgrims, the Mayflower in British Literature. So first of a series of three talks, as Cara mentioned, and yeah, most of the materials that I'll be showing you guys today are available to view in the British libraries. If you want to trace and track any of them down, it's very easy to do that. I'll give you just a summary of the structure of today's talk. So what I'm going to do initially is introduce our project and explain a little bit about the methodology behind what we're doing. Then I want to consider the first popular references to the new Plymouth story in British, in the British press during what's often returned termed as the American crisis of the 1760s and the 1770s. Then I'm going to move on and examine the growth of myth making around the Pilgrim fathers during the Romantic period. And we're going to be looking specifically at Felicia Hemmins, a very important author for popularizing that term, the Pilgrim Fathers. It wasn't always attached to this story of New Plymouth and the founding of the colony in 1620. Then we're going to look on at some other 19th century references from chartists, abolitionists and evangelical writers. And finally, we're going to be taking a more in depth look at one particular Mayflower poet, John Boyle O'Reilly. He was an Irish revolutionary. I've put this in to show you the various ideological variants that are encapsulated within the story. You have everything from ultra-conservative Christian evangelicalism and right wing sort of conservatism, all the way to very, very revolutionary forms of writing and poetry. So it's an interesting myth from that perspective in terms of its different variants. So our project, we've got a project page which I should promote, which is voyaging through history.exeter.uk. We've also got a Twitter, which is twitter.com slash Mayflower Brits and a Facebook page, Facebook slash Mayflower Brits. So if you want to join in with conversations about what we're doing on this anniversary year, please feel free to get in contact of our social media and have a look at our web page. We've also recently very excitingly launched the Mayflower map and this is charting all the different places in Britain that have celebrated the Mayflower or have some form of connection to the pilgrim fathers over the last 400 years. So that's a new sort of initiative that we've recently launched online. So I'll give you a brief summary of what the project is and what it's intending to do. So we're exploring how the story of this famous voyage and the pilgrims that transport us has impacted on British culture over the last 400 years. The project is considering a rich range of novels, planes, films, alongside memorials, statues and curated historical buildings as testament to the cultural, political and religious significance of the Mayflower in Britain. It's part of what we might term the historical culture discipline of its history and we're looking at how history is created and reimagined to fulfill different needs over time. So we're looking at the Mayflower as an example of modern myth making and examining the cultural afterlife of the story of New Plymouth. So we're not necessarily so interested in what really took place in 1620. Many historians have already looked at that. We're interested in the legacy of the myths of the stories of the poems and the paintings that have come afterwards which we think are a greater sense of history for different people in different centuries. And the code for our project is really based on our colleague Martha Van Dray's text Queen Boudica in Historical Culture in Britain, An Image of Truth. This is looking at again Boudica's cultural legacy. We know very little about her as a figure but she's had an awfully significant afterlife in terms of paintings, poetry and songs. And Van Dray talks about the emergence of a popular culture of history really in the 18th and 19th century and we're aiming to redraw the boundaries between what we conventionally recognise as fictional and factual genres. Often in terms of history we may refer to things we think as fictional in terms of our understanding of the past. So I'll give you a quotation from the text which I think is very significant. Van Dray says my argument here rests on the idea that to create a historical product ranging from an authoritative text to imaginative history paintings, historical pageants and films is to engage to varying degrees in a series of actions of knowledge gathering, of synthesis, of interpretation, of negotiation, of narration, of assumption and supposition. That is to engage in a process of making and all the authors that we're going to address today are engaged themselves in a process of making history around the mythology of the Mayflower. So this is our source base. I'm not going to spend too long discussing this with those who aren't familiar with the story of the Mayflower celebrating its 400th anniversary this year. This is essentially what took place four centuries ago. A group of brownist dissenters, the religious separatists relocate to Leiden and Holland in around about 1607, 1608 after a rest and persecution in England. They make a decision to emigrate to America in 1617. They find the rather permissive atmosphere of Holland a little bit too lax for their liking so they decide they need their own religious community separate for what's going on in Holland. So in August 1620 they finally leave from Portsmouth arriving in New England on the 11th of November 1620. This is quite possibly the worst time that you could ever wish to found a colony and it was rather a disaster for the group around half the members of the voyage perish in the initial winter from malnourishment, cold weather and disease. And this story is actually ignored for a very long time. It's originally referred to as the brownist emigration. The group later become known as the Pilgrim Fathers but that's really a modification of writers and authors. So for a very long time no one really pays attention to this story which I think is quite significant. In the colonial era you have texts such as Mort's Relation or Good News from New England rather ironically named texts considering the disaster of the first winter and these texts try to celebrate and encourage more emigration to the colony to make sure it's a success. So already the first initial publications they're dealing in fictional content as much as factual but we're not going to be looking so much at that work today. We're going to be looking more towards the 18th and the 19th century and this is where you get the concept of forefathers day that starts to be celebrated in New England and memorial and commemorative publications. You have statues and of course the living village in New Plymouth today and in Britain the same sort of attention starts to be paid around this time and it's the concept of the origin of the United States which starts to take place at this moment in the late 18th century. Paul Heikers called this a story of American beginnings characterized by religiosity, idealism, sacrifice and utopian vision based on theology. Later associations with the Thanksgiving celebration also are very important but again this isn't until the 19th century that this association between Thanksgiving and New Plymouth is even really made. The settlements of course this is Jamestown pre-existing New Plymouth so a question I want us to think about as I proceeded this talk today is why do you think the New Plymouth was settled on for an origin story and some of the authors I think are going to give us clues to this encapsulation of the beginnings of a nation within one narrative. So the first real attention that's paid towards New Plymouth happens during what's often termed as the American crisis so during the 1760s and the 1770s the first popular attention is paid to this in the press in Britain and this is way before the terms Mayflower or Pilgrim Fathers were in usage at all and the stories used as a way of showing popular support and sympathy for the Americans in their battle with the British government over taxation and borrowing of course the term from Thomas Payne here the famous pamphlet the American Crisis begins with the sentence these are the times that try men's souls and of course Payne is born in Norfolk and he's representative of substantial British sympathy for the plight of the American colonists in Britain and you see this in newspapers so I've done a lot of work looking at newspapers from this period because this is where the first references to New Plymouth have really made in terms of a popular association between American independence and the founding of New Plymouth so the Gazeta was a long-running British newspaper known for its pseudonyms and its use of political debate usually on the first and second page and these engage in in discussions about politics so I'm going to look at one contribution from he calls himself BET in initials a plain citizen and he makes an argument for greater autonomy for the North American colonists that centered around the settlement of New Plymouth and of course citizen rather than subject had a radical anti-monarchical connotation so even within a pseudonym he's assuming quite a radical identity so he says the first settlement made in the province of New England was by a company of poor persecuted private adventurers without any expense to assistance from the crown these men were not transports rebels or traitors they were not banished from their country for evil practices there were a set of sober conscientious men willing to endure any hardship rather than act contrary to the dictates of conscience he goes on to say is it not only lawful by the duty of every Englishman to resist such power and defend his right and is this privilege this duty confined to England surely no it extends to every kingdom every state every province inhabited by rational beings in the whole world it is not a law a right of England only is a law of nature equally binding on all it is a right bestowed by the great creator himself which it would be sacrilege to part with um so in part this argument put forth in the Gazeta and the New Daily Advertiser is based on natural rights theory which is an enlightenment concept of government by consent developing from the work of Hugo Grotis and expanded on by John Locke and finding most popular expression in Rousseau's The Social Compact and while this article is significant for its connection of new Plymouth to revolutionary 18th century political ideas we also see this emotive component they're poor persecuted people willing to endure any hardship they're not called pilgrims yet but they are will be very soon and this is a component that's used again and again in the Mayflower myth the idea that these are poor people that are persecuted and they have to go to New England to escape this persecution of course again they often ignore the element of Holland here apart from John Adams and this is reported in major newspapers in Britain and in pamphlets and he uses this story to celebrate a disconnection from Britain which is significant because later poets use it to create or engender this special relationship idea that we have in America this doesn't really exist in the late 18th century so John Adams says I say the inhabitants of America broke forever the ties which unite them to the empire great Britain the first emigrants who laid the foundation of the four northern states of America found in Holland and asylum against religious persecutions now I want us to consider how much this changes throughout the 19th century so before the 19th century in Britain you have a narrative to support the American colonists during the American crisis you have New Plymouth use an example of religious fanaticism and it's very much a footnote quite literally a footnote in many texts in the histories of North American colonization in America the story grows and importance during the 18th century as four fives a day and it's a justification for independence in Britain and it's an origin story for a new nation so this is quite a nice extract from a newspaper from the very early 19th century some account of the fanaticism of the early settlers in America takes a very negative view of the dissident Puritans in New Plymouth says the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut were originally settled by Brownists and other Puritans and were for many years an asylum for dissenters of all denominations who fled from persecution in Europe to exercise a still greater degree of intolerance themselves when in power in America a law was passed to prohibit under a severe penalty the smoking of tobacco which was compared to the smoking of the bottomless pit the drinking of health health sorry and the wearing of long hair also forbidden under the same penalty so you can see a collection here of sort of very negative details about these Puritans who have soon become these sort of celebrated eulogized figures in British history and the big change which takes place is a poem published by Felicia Hemmonds called The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England I'll just read a couple of stanzas from Hemmonds work and she really changes the cultural connotations of what's taking place in New Plymouth the breaking waves dashed high on a stern and rock bound coasts and the woods against the stormy sky their giant branches tossed and the heavy night hung dark the hills and water earth when a band of exiles moored their bark on the wild New England shore not as the conqueror comes they the true hearted came not with the rolling strings of drums of rolls of the stirring drums and the trumpet the sings of fame so what Hemmonds is doing here is celebrating the story as a one of a pilgrims of conscience seeking freedom in the new world it's first published in the morning post and then very quickly the New Monthly magazine in 1825 and quite quickly the words are set to music by Hemmonds sister and this is a huge success so within the British Library I found 46 editions already by 1845 it's only 20 years after Hemmonds originally published this this text so it's an example of popular music it's a parlor song for the 19th century very popular both in Britain and America as Kelly has commented The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers becomes virtually a national anthem has a very large influence on the emergent national culture from the public to the private sphere so suddenly you have this shift from negative stories about the Pilgrim Fathers more radical interpretations to a much more celebratory religious and perhaps conservative interpretation of the story so yeah this is an example these are some of the sheet music I found up in the British Library there's many many different editions of this song and hopefully if the tech doesn't fail me today I'm going to play for you just a very quick extract of the music itself for those of you hoping that I was going to sing along sorry if you're disappointed I've a terrible singing voice I hope that worked okay that was a pop pop song basically in the 19th century very very popular both in Britain and America so just moving on yeah so sorry about that moving on to the next text that I want to look at today so this is an example of just how popular and well known the Pilgrim Fathers was by Hemons so this is a beautiful gif book by Anne Lydia Bond who illustrates this text she calls it three gems in one setting and you have the poet's song by Tennyson you have the field flowers by Campbell when you have the Pilgrim Fathers by Hemons I'll give you some more examples of just how beautifully illustrated this work is but I also want to think about how canonical this poem is in the mid 19th century so it's set alongside some of the best known British poets of the era so it's not very well known today but at the time it was one of the most well-known celebrated poems really in in British literary history for the 19th century and I want to zoom in on this image right on the left here of this stern and rock bound coast the opening lines from the poem so this is quite significant as I'm going to talk about today this isn't an accurate representation of the geography of New Plymouth at all but it becomes highly symbolic as a form of description over the 19th and 20th century so three gems in one setting just to give you some more detail about this text it's a selection of Hemons poem at a popular and celebrated gem so it speaks to its value and its status in the Victorian marketplace it's a very high value text of 15 shillings it was expensive reflecting its high production costs and its use of chromo lithograph printing it's highly intricate in its design the images are presented with interlaced floral borders which imitate medieval illuminated manuscripts the style popularized by the pre-Raphaelites and quite common in mid-century Victorian art and bonders of very successful artists and author in our own rights as you produce an illustrated edition of Tennyson's the Lady of Shalott as well as writing and illustrating our own our own children books such as The Child's Natural History and this is very much a text that you might see given to a child in a middle-class family and again the Victorians like to use this story to instill values of religiosity and hard work within childhood literature and this is true in America as well this is a Boston text from 1887 this is illustrating a heaven's poem and it's just titled The Breaking Waves Stashed High from the first line of the poem and you see these pensive and emotional scenes of people landing a new preliminary for beginning a new colony again this is a British example from the same sort of period this is a very small delicate children's book that I found in the British library it had to be rebound actually after I found it because it was in such a poor condition but it's a wonderful example of the sort of the ways in which this story is reset and resold and reimagined over the 19th century so here are some some images from the text itself and again you can see the same emotional component that's used again and again in retelling the story of the Mayflower pensive brave pilgrims traveling to a new world in the name ostensibly of freedom uh again you have beautiful illustrations of individual scenes all set alongside Hemmins Hemmins words and I want us to think again about this particular resonant phrase the Breaking Waves Stashed High on a stern and rockbound coast because it wasn't actually that that case at all if I flip forward a few scenes this is the beach at New Plymouth it doesn't look anything like a stern and rockbound coast at all and this annoyed quite a few historians so this is Leon Shaman talking about his reaction to the fact this becomes this becomes a very well known phrase it is unfortunate that an English poetess who never even saw a New England should be aided and bettered by American school textbooks and school teachers in fixing an untrue picture in many minds but the time a schoolboy is committed to memory the Breaking Waves Stashed High on a stern and rockbound coast it has become imaginatively impossible for him to think of a pilgrim landed different from the vertical one hundreds of such schoolboys grown to various stages of manhood visit visit Cape Cod every year and come to a knowledge of the truth through a stages of incredulity and perplexity that a poem by Fletcher Hemmins should be popularly accepted in history as the journal written by the pilgrims themselves approach and the journal written by the pilgrims themselves approach of suspicion is a real disgrace to our popular education it's quite an angry attack on what Hemmins has achieved here but you also need to think about how history and fiction are bound up together and what Hemmins has done here is created a sentimental romantic geographical poetic description which carries over the Atlantic and carries on in different generations it may not be accurate in a geographical or geological sense but in terms of instilling a sense of the hardship they went through you can see how it's successful it was. James David Hart goes even further and says though she tortured history and geography in her accounts of the Mayflower Landing she so thoroughly impressed her views upon the American mind that is hardly possible for later generations to think of the Plymouth coast as a stern and rockbound so I just love the idea that you can torture history and geography which Hemmins was accused of and again this is from another illustrated edition so I just want to see the contrast between the artwork that is produced depicting new Plymouth and the actual geographical reality which are very starkly starkly different and Hemmins work goes into influence goes on to influence many different novelists of the periods this is Annie Webb's text the Pilgrims of New England the tale of the early American settlers and they take Webb takes Hemmins poem and extends it into Victorian prose Victorian prose narrative she says it was indeed a stern and rockbound coast it wasn't but that doesn't matter beneath which the Gadot little Mayflower failed her tattered shales and dropped her anchor on the evening of the 11th of November in year 1620 and thus begins an entire novel very well received and very popular during the 19th century that looks at the same story really developing on from what Hemmins has provided poetically and she closes the opening chapter with an extract from Hemmins as well well had these principles and motives being described by a late well-known poet and well maybe conclude this introductory chapter with the last verse of that exquisite song which is the first of which we commenced it what sort they thus afar bright jewels of the mind the wealth of the seas the spoils of war they sought a faith's pure shrine so again Hemmins is presenting them not as mercantile colonialists not as settler colonialists but really people that went out of conscience for freedom and I want to move away from Hemmins to look at other poetic interpretations in the 19th century and one one figure I've been investigating quite a lot is the chartist reformer Ebenezer Elliot very well known figure in his own right so I'm just going to read an extract from Charles Dickens here reflecting on the life of this impassioned political reformer Ebenezer Elliot shortly after his death and Dickens says the name of Ebenezer Elliot is associated with one of the greatest and most important political changes of modern times with events not yet sufficiently removed from us to allow their being canvassed in this place that freedom which would serve more fully to illustrate his real merits Elliot would have been a poet in all that constitutes true poetry had the Corn Lords never existed so Elliot was a great opponent of the Corn Laws which kept food and bread prices artificially high and is known as the Corn Law Rimer so Ra he was a radical reformist and chartist worked in an iron foundry during his childhood seen as one of the most significant influences on chartist verse Nigel Cross has commented Elliot wrote unrepentant political poetry exhorting the working classes to commit themselves the struggle against landlords employers and governments so he writes a poem called The Pilgrim Fathers and it uses what Hemmins has already provided but makes it a much more radical and dangerous political tool if you will in order to engender a sense of the need for reform amongst the British working classes in the readership so he says just give you a couple of extracts from the poem itself a voice of grief and anger of pity mixed with scorn moans over the water of the west through fire and darkness born and fears the voices join it a wild trump yell they speak The Pilgrim Fathers speak to ye from their graves for earth have muttered to their bones that we are all soulless slaves so Elliot's using the origin myth of the Mayflower in the United States it's really positioned here as a land of freedom in stark contrast with modern Britain so speaking from the grave The Pilgrim Fathers are disturbed to find the people of their homeland reduced to soul of slaves The Pilgrim Fathers are presented as radical freedom fighters men whose hearts were torches for freedom's quenchless fire so whilst clearly a historical Elliot is fusing the myth of the Mayflower with traditions of British radicalism in order to agitate for parliamentary reform and his works were aimed at a broad and popular audience so it demonstrates the familiarity of the Mayflower for a 19th century British readership and he's really using Heman's fame and the how well known her poem was in order to help in the cause of charters. It's a big success quickly republished in the Leeds Times the Western Times the Brighton Patriot and the Leicester Chronicle the poem went on to be reprinted throughout the century in radical newspapers indeed its suitability is a vehicle for reform was noted by the Leicester Chronicle that reprints the text Leicester Chronicle says in the last number of tapes magazine we have found a voice from the shades of our forefathers who preferred to trust themselves to the uncultivated wilds of America than to the despotism of Stuart this voice was heard by Ebenezer Elliot in one of his moments of poetic inspiration and he has echoed the spirit stirring cry to the millions of these isles clothed in his own immortal verse. I've even found a copy of this poem in the Red Republican from 1850 in this very edition that I'm showing you here this is a highly socialist and revolutionary publication and as you can see this contains actually the first English translation of the communist manifesto on its front page on the last page it contains Elliot's pilgrim fathers so you've already gone from Heman's highly conservative interpretation of the voyage all the way to radical socialism and communism just within 25 years so I'm very impressed with how the pilgrim fathers story can sort of move between these different ideological variants and I'd like to look at another figure from a little bit later in the 19th century this is Elizabeth Barrett Browning and she writes a poem very much in conversation with Heman's and very critical the pilgrim fathers caused the runaway slave at pilgrim's point the manuscript held in the British library for this intended to be published in the Liberty Bell Boston anti-slavery journal so it's a controversial mid 19th century poem that grapples with issues of race slavery and injustice from an explicitly abolitionist perspective written in the form of dramatic monologue which has the element of emotional immediacy so you have the poetic speaker talking to you directly as a reader manuscripts the poem was originally titled the black and mad at pilgrim's point so indicating how foregrounded issues of race were to the work but also the center centrality sorry of Plymouth rock to the narrative speak of the poem an unnamed fugitive slave woman stands at pilgrim's point in an ironic inversion of the history of liberty that had become an integral part of the Mayflower narrative and American national identity the poem opens with the speaker addressing the pilgrims directly I stand on the mark beside the shore of the first white pilgrim's bended knee where exile turned to ancestor and god was thanked for liberty I have run through the night my skin is dark I bend my knee down on this mark I look on the sky and see I pilgrim souls I speak to you I see you come out proud and slow for the land of the spirit's pale as dew and round and round me you go I pilgrim's hive grasped and run all night long from the whips of one who in your name works sin and woe so this poem reads almost as an attack on or an inversion of heaven's the landing of the pilgrim fathers so the poem criticizes rather than praises the pilgrim fathers it's set in the present rather than the past and it deals with an immediate political issue of abolition it considers the end of a journey rather than the beginning of an origin myth and it speaks to a long history of injustice rather than a history of freedom and browning was really the leading female poet of her generation justice hemmons was of her generation so browning is really making an attack on hemmons conservatism here and wants to kind of attack the pilgrim fathers legacy and this concept of them beginning a nation based on freedom by looking at contemporary american slavery even william wordsworth recently discovered publishes a pilgrim fathers poem around about the same time in 1842 this isn't really examined very much by wordsworth scholars but i think it's quite a significant poem in its own right so the three sonnet sequence was first published in poems chiefly of early and late year early of late years and the steven gill notes the last this is the last separate volume of poetry that wordsworth published it's presented in 1842 as a contribution to social healing and wordsworth celebrates the pilgrim fathers and also imagines their return and a reconciliation between britain and america i'm not going to spend too long discussing this work but i just wanted to mention it because it's quite significant in its own right and henry reed his american publisher sort of encourages wordsworth to write this poem and words of rights back to him i've sent you three sonnets upon certain aspects of christianity in america having as you will see a reference to the subject which you wished me to write so he reads obviously very keen looking at him and success in america for wordsworth to attempt something similar which he dutifully does so i'll give you a brief description of the poems themselves they're an elegiac tribute to the pilgrim fathers and proclaim the men well worthy to be magnified for their accomplishments um wordsworth overtly romanticizes the story of the pilgrims it's a clear focus on the emotions felt by the travelers for their loved abodes and the hallowed ground which their fathers lay they leave england with sad hearts and offer a last farewell to their friends and country the home is for sook in exchange for a newfound world and some sheltering nook which they may worship in freedom and the poem concludes with a combination of natural and religious imagery celebrating the sanctifying christian virtues brought to america by the pilgrims this is a much more sort of celebratory and conservative interpretation of the text in line perhaps of what hemmons had achieved around about 20 25 years before and this is celebrated again and again in in british texts that look at the pilgrim fathers this is two illustrations from the romantic story of the mayflower pilgrims from 1911 and what you have on the left is an illustration of wordsworth's poem and on the right you have an illustration of hemmons poem so they become kind of canonized and very starkly browning's abolitionist poem is kind of ignored by this in this period people want to look back on the celebratory poetry of hemmons and wordsworth and kind of ignore what browning and even what elliot were doing with their more radical poetry and this is something i've been looking at that i'll just touch upon but the contribution of british romanticism to the mayflower story i think is quite significant various reasons for this it's an idealized rural community you have the wilderness of the new england coast you have persecuted exiles bound by faith and conscience you have emotion you have loss and sacrifice you have hardship endured and overcome and you have the founding of a nation romantic nationalism something that hemmons was very interested in all of these components i think meant that the romantic poets themselves became very interested and almost obsessed with this story and it moves on to lots of tourist literature of the early 20th century as you have this beautifully illustrated text the american pilgrims way in england produced for americans tracing their genealogy in in england when it sells again a very romanticized idealized picture of of old england you see some of these watercolors where mary chettle beautifully produced so tracing the homes of the pilgrim fathers became a very important part of the way the story is written about and repackaged over the early 20th century it's another beautiful watercolor of the standish chapel there and the nearby countryside and around about the first world war you have the british national war aims committee used the story to produce this pamphlet the return of the mayflower trying to explain to the british public why america has joined the first world war so if you think back to adams started this talk sort of using the story as one of disconnection from britain about a hundred years later you suddenly have an inversion of that again you have the story used as one of connection between britain and america um and again yeah this this painting hung in roosevelt's office during world war two which is the return of the mayflower which is the the boats coming to britain to help with the first world war so it becomes a very formative part of the special relationship and the last part of this talk i want to look at an irish revolutionary figure called john boilow riley i am conscious i'm slightly running out of time so i might not be able to cover every single point here but oh riley himself is a a fenian revolutionary he writes his own mayflower poetry that i think is quite significant to look at so i'll give you some details of his life uh born in dalh island he was a journalist a writer a poet and a civil rights activist a member of the irish revolutionary brotherhood or fenian brotherhood worked as a recruiter for the fenians while also serving in a british army and in 1866 his activities were discovered by the british authorities and he's charged and convicted of treason um and as wt moody comments the fenians had revolutionary politics at their core the brotherhood was essentially a physical force movement which absolutely and from the beginning repudiated constitutional action more than any other school of nationalism the fenian movement concentrated on a single aim independence and insisted that all other aims were decided the point so iraily is convicted of treason which carries a death sentence but because of his young age at 22 the sentence was later commuted to 20 years penal servitude and transportation to australia and in october 12 1867 iraily was transported uh one of the last convict ships leaving britain um for the penal colony of western australia this is his um writing in the diary at the time he's quite excited by this opportunity rumour went through the prison however it came is a mystery but there it did come a rumor to the prison even the dark cells of a ship standing for australia australia the ship another chance for the old dreams and the wild thought was wilder than ever he's hoping to escape and you can see why the story of the mayflower might have attracted iraily later in life um on board ship he writes seven editions of a newspaper um to keep up the morale of his fellow convicts um he found lasting fame however for staging an audacious escape from the penal colony of western australia this is just a um an image of the the newspaper that o'reilly han wrote on board on board ship you can see it's very close to sort of irish revolutionary newspapers this is the flag of island um that were published uh in ireland at this time encouraging uh revolution and reform this is an image of the the prison that o'reilly was sent sent to i'll just skip through a few slides here to move on um eventually after a few failed attempts o'reilly escapes on the u.s. whaling ship gazelle he disembarks in philadelphia in november of 1869 and he eventually settles in boston where he found work as a reporter on the boston pilot uh his obituary kind of gives an idea of how well known he was in america at this time um he was one of easily the most distinguished irish man in america he was one of the country's foremost poets and one of its most influential journalists an orator of unusual power and he was endowed with such a gift of a friendship of few men are blessed with um so his status as a leading literary figure with connections to boston saw him asked to write a poem for the dedication of the national monument of the pilgrim fathers in massachusetts in 1889 this is a controversial choice some commented that o'reilly had extolled the narrow puritans forgotten their intolerance and accused him of having brought the blarney stone into conjunction with plymouth rock um i'll just move on to give you a brief extract from this poem it's a highly radical revolutionary interpretation of the pilgrim fathers so this is o'reilly's uh dedication in 1889 one righteous word for law the common will one living truth of faith god reagan and still one primal test of freedom for all combined one sacred revolution change of mind one trust unfailing for the night and the need the tyrant flower shall cast the freedom seed they could not live by king made codes and creeds they chose the path for every footstep bleeds protesting not rebelling scorned and banned through pains and prisons harried from the land so he's associating his own transportation to australia by britain with the sailing of the mayflower in 1620 and he sees america as a potential land of freedom and rather than celebrating this connection of britain america which was taking place in the late 19th century o'reilly is trying to remind his readership that britain is still um as he sees it a very um negative colonial power in the way it's exercising control over people's lives so he's he's using a very radical uh radical interpretation of the mayflower story so it's an irish revolutionary reading of the mayflower myth um the pilgrim fathers escape from england which has been covered by a weed where the richer conspirators against the poor and indulgent nobles claim all rights for themselves england is portrayed as a rotten state replete with corrupt courts and venal bishops it's highly anti-monarchical here on this rock on this sterile soil began the kingdom not of kings but of men um it's a long poem it's six hundred and uh 260 lines written in rhyming pentameter it's very seldom read um today so if you guys want to have a look at this in more detail i really recommend it it mixes irish uh revolutionary with english chartis terminology vocabulary and ideas attempting this really ambitious synthesis between different traditions advocates for an idea of global revolution extends us into a form of anti-nationalism even o'reilly's revolution in the poem is one that he hopes will encompass the death of nations which were but robber holds and they gave him the universal extension of freeborn heritage the conclusion of the poem offers a vision of a world of outborders where the sea so joy not limit mountain stand dividing farm from farm not land from land so the idea of this 1620 voyage of highly religiously intolerant puritans becoming associated with global revolution in the late 19th century i find this fantastic change and reinterpretation of a historical story which is kind of what our project is is trying to to to examine um again the flag of island have a really positive response to this work but i better wrap up now because i'm slightly running out of time um so in conclusion the narrative that may flower is an overlooked footnotes in the narrative of colonization in north america before the 18th century something that very few people pay attention to and suddenly during the american crisis the story the pilgrim fathers rises to public prominence for those opposing the government both in britain and in america and then the romantic period sees the term pilgrim fathers popularized them hemmons plays a really key role in this they become celebrated emigrants of conscience um something to look back on fondly as a as a beautiful moment in sort of the history of britain in america but then you have this other battle that ensues afterwards between browning and hemmons or elliot and hemmons as they both fight to sort of reinterpret the story themselves browning particularly attempting to remind us of modern day inequality and not celebrate these people as as pilgrims of conscience um so as well as christian conservatives authors such as webs and and and hemmons radicals and revolutionaries such as elliot and oriley adapt the myth to suit their own political ends so this is why i'm fascinated with this with this story because it encapsulates and deals with so many different different ideological variants um in terms of speaking to and writing for different audiences over over the 19th century and yeah i better wrap up there so thanks every day everybody for listening i hope i didn't rattle through that too quickly so thanks guys well thank you um very much ed that was really really excellent so if you could stop sharing your screen um we have a bit of time for for questions so i have i have a few questions already come in so thank you very much to to our audience um yes this is obviously the bit of digital event delivery which is particularly strange because obviously you know if we were all in a room together you have that nice opportunity to kind of look around and and yeah gauge people's responses but obviously we're we're we're working with what we've got so um and we're obviously glad that so many people are able to join us who wouldn't necessarily been able to come to a lunchtime talk at the library um so i'm going to kick off um ed and ask a question from phil who says obviously to modern eyes one of the most objectionable aspects of the mayflower story is the way it presents america as an empty land waiting to be filled with the promise of english and that's americans of enterprise and freedom um is there any acknowledgement of the native american presence in any of these um kind of not yet up to the 19th century period that you're that you're looking at yeah um there is a lot of the time it is conveniently sidestepped by a number of these authors so elliot for example who wants to celebrate america's a land of freedom in contrast than modern britain to agitate for reform it just doesn't mention the native americans at all um they're often used very problematically um web for example has them as a form of kind of danger that the pilgrims overcome so they battle against the wilderness and the native americans are seen as an extension of the wilderness so a problem that has to be overcome or in other texts they're they're presented as having really good um cordial relations with the native americans which wasn't really the case um and that's another way i think of sort of sidestepping the issue so they're there but they hover around the margins of the story and they're not really dealt with they're either ignored or they use a sort of dangerous savages or they're presented as um having great relations with the native americans which leads into the um thanksgiving kind of story which is own mythos really so they are there but they're not grappled with uh and they're very problematically represented in victorian texts i didn't really have time to go into native american aspects today but it's a really important part of the way this story has been interpreted and reinterpreted and particularly with the celebrations in america today the native american aspect of that has been included a lot more i think yeah and another sort of element which i think a listener sort of noticed kind of falls out of the discussion um so keneth says uh though we're dealing with british literature can you sketch in why the dissenters went to leiden um why did it take them such a long time to come to satisfied and leave and why did they leave from england um and lastly um have the pilgrims being commemorated in holland and um just following up from that i thought that was really noticeable that you gave the the early example of was adams who mentions the the holland connection and then it seems to slightly sort of fall by the wayside so could you just give a very quick little overview of that sort of the holland period and kind of how it then gets used yeah so they're persecuted in england in places like like boston and gainsborough in sort of the north of england and eventually they leave and resettle in holland and it's a very tolerant um culture at that period of time but it's too tolerant for the puritans to deal with so people are singing hymns in the streets and you know there's all sorts of like frivolous forms of religious um culture that the the puritans absolutely despise so they don't want to stay there it's too tolerant for their form of puritanical um religion so they they decide to relocate to north america where they can have control really of their religious culture now that's a problem for the story of immigrants of conscience that go through persecution because they could have stayed where they were but it it's kind of ignored by many different story writers um and some people include it and some people don't oh riley includes a lot within that poem i didn't get a chance to go into that but he's he wants to make an example that britain was is still an intolerant country i was an intolerant country in the 17th century so he writes a lot about holland um but it again it's one of those things that hangs around the margins but yes it is um commemorated in leiden i was recently uh another online conference uh that was held in leiden talking about the connection between the pilgrim fathers and holland but it again it's a problematic aspect of the story that's glossed over intentionally i think a lot of the time no that's fascinating i've got a couple of questions now kind of about the literary culture um and one of one of our listeners asks why were the poems such as emin's hemmons and elliott's published in magazines rather than books of poetry that's quite common for romantic authors to publish in magazines before they set them in in books and hemmons very quickly like the next year six 1826 publishes in boston and she publishes um with an advert for the sheet music and so she zooms in on the american market immediately so the first book publication of that poem wasn't in britain it was actually in america and quite quickly afterwards um again for elliott it's a reason um to reach a broad and popular audience so if you can get reprinted in all of the major radical reformist newspapers you reach a bigger audience than you you get in a book publication or an anthology later in life his poems are collected in anthologies of elliott's poetry but he wants specifically to have everyone read his work and it's the best way that he can do that that's interesting and this is a question um the the asker does preface that it's an american literature question so if it's a bit beyond the scope it might be a little but but jim says not british but how significant was longfellow's the courtship of mild standish in further escalating the profile of the mayflower story absolutely huge i've looked at longfellow quite a lot because i'm trying to trace hemmons influence united states um longfellow um massive fan of hemmons like collects her sort of signatures and poems and manuscripts and everything and that poem particularly courtship and mild standish i think it really helps romanticize this this narrative um in that poem the the pilgrims romanticize old england they talk about the church covered in ivy at home that they miss when they've come over the atlantic to settle new plumber so it's it's presenting that old picture of beautiful england which you see in some of the artwork that becomes quite important part of the the story of of the mayflower over the years but that romanticist element it's not just an exclusively british and component it becomes very important in america as well i'm sort of arguing in my research that hemmons sets that ball rolling um and longfellow kind of goes with it and writes a beautiful very successful poem of his own many different uh lydia segourney as well american author also touches on the mayflower known as the american hemmons herself so hemmons success in america was absolutely huge and she's very canny she changes publisher just before she writes and publishes this poem who has better links to the american market so she can get her books out there really quickly and it works really well as a strategy and i just find it funny that wordsworth's publishers like william you need to do something similar your books aren't selling as well and he doesn't sell nearly as well as hemmons and he does he tries to write it's not particularly good but it's it's an attempt i mean he wants to sell his work in america too and the way you do that is attach it to a well-known story like the pilgrim fathers no that's that's really that's really fascinating isn't it you know and particularly when you think about how canonization then worked in the sort of 20th century and how hemmons is fundamentally almost forgotten bigger against you know someone like wordsworth who's who's you know survived so i have another question actually about um romantics um christian says i'm wondering if there's any depictions of the first thanksgiving this would seem to be great fodder for the romantics so does that does that kind of is it really just the ship and the voyage which which you've been looking at or have you come across these yeah the Thanksgiving story as well i've traced the the Thanksgiving story and it's not until outside of the Romantic period really a bit later that you get an american reverence of his name escapes me but he publishes a text claiming that mort's relation the first text published on new plymouth is evidence for the first Thanksgiving story itself and again the issue there is mort's relation wants to present this is a fantastic colony we didn't all die in the first winter everyone should come over here and invest in our colony we have great relations with the native americans isn't really true and it's presenting a very fictionalized view you do have very romantic um some of the images i i i put up show sort of native americans having a wonderful meal but again the way they're presented is is completely inaccurate so they they have feathered headdresses that are more representative of the native americans at the great plains rather than the new england um native american culture so already in those stories um you have kind of a mishmash of different inputs that aren't always particularly accurate um so hemmons isn't really aware of the Thanksgiving story it hasn't been associated yet had she known about it i think she might have attempted something along those lines uh but again she's a good example of somebody that completely leaves out the native americans it's a wilderness there's nobody there and that that's a huge issue for the way this story has been retold i think over over the generations no that's excellent thank you and that's that is that's a good um point to make isn't it about the period that the periodization in 19th century when thanksgiving starts to it's actually quite distinct from this sort of initial discussion of the pilgrims and the maker it emerges later um and i have another question um john says to what extent do other european countries pick up on the pilgrim fathers i think especially the massive interest of french writers in america during the 19th century does any of this feature in any of the sort of revolutionary work and then later i actually that's something really interesting that i i think i should look into i've done a bit what a bit of work on on holland's relationship and how that's celebrated and sort of canonized almost and that comes a bit later in the 19th century once you get this very well known um kind of phenomenon around the story and it all it's like tourist literature the songs this music this painting and then holland sorts the want get in on the act this is way later than sort of john john adams but i haven't looked at french interpretations i think that's really important because it it's often seen as this anglo-american story and it isn't really there's lots of other sort of national inputs as well and it's just i think very ironic it becomes part of the special relationship around the first world war and into the 20th century when originally it was about fighting the british and getting rid of the british and saying hey we were always independent of you guys we didn't need your help we had we like our country was founded by persecuted pilgrims of conscience so leave us alone and then later on it becomes about encouraging a connection and military cooperation so you have this complete shift from ideology of one period in just about a century but yeah i need to look into the french the french component i think and just to to pick up on that if you start to touch on it so i'll get to pull it out a bit more um we have a question says it seems that the mayflower story has been used by people for their own aims for and against america for example um do you think this story will continue to be used in the future for similar purposes as propaganda or condemnation i suppose that's an opportunity to reflect on where you've you feel that there's 400th anniversary commemorations of where have they sat yeah so i think tom at tom and martha will we be better at sort of um addressing this issue and one of the elements of our research has been looking at a decline of significance of the story over the 20th century the big moment is the tertiary the 300th anniversary in 1920 have american dignitaries huge celebrations um in plymouth and south hampton but by the 350th anniversary in 1970 it's not very well received it's not met many people take part i was speaking to somebody that remembered the celebrations in plymouth and they tried to sell it as may as mayflower 70 but the locals called it mayflop 70 because not that many people actually went it wasn't a huge success and the story just isn't very fashionable anymore it appeals to a victorian sense of imperialism um but i think people are a lot more knowledgeable about native american cultures persecution things like that took place so you can't simply celebrate a narrative of colonialism like you could in 1920 anymore and i think even by 1970 it really declined so you have this story of being very popular exploding about 100 or 200 years after it took place and then you have a a century of decline as well afterwards stays in american national consciousness but really declines in british national consciousness so how it's going to manifest and modify itself in the future is really um up for debate i think but i think it's probably going to continue to decline i mean covid hasn't helped this year but it hasn't been a huge success in terms of um the anniversary celebrations so far well that has been such a wonderful um conversation and thank you so much ed for showing us such you know a wonderfully varied um selection of uh of material because i think i'm sure i speak for everybody that you know there's a lot there that i wasn't aware of i rattled through a bit fast but it was a lot to get through so well thank you so much and thank you very much for all the questions that's really wonderful it's one of the strange things of doing these digital events is i can ed and i can see each other but we can't see you as our our audience so um so thank you so much and i i've dropped the um link into the chat box again which um takes you to the eckel center recent mailing list which lists these three events in the in our mini series on the mayflower in britain and as ed mentioned in his closing remarks his colleagues tom and martha who are both being um both contributing to the next two sessions have been looking at uh the slightly kind of later period so the um into the 20th century and kind of how this the tertiary tenary played out um and they also will obviously have reflections on the current sort of moment um so thank you so much we've reached two o'clock which is the end of our appointed slot um there's also a link in in the chat to um to the survey monkey which would be very uh grateful if you wouldn't mind just clicking through um and there is a recording being made and um i've just seen the questions come in saying where will it be made available i don't know if my colleague brett wants to just jump in quickly um to to give us an idea about that one um he's resolutely muted so um i i just say that i know some of the of our recent events have been going up on the the library's youtube pages um if you if you're interested if you want to keep an eye on the ecklesenters um social media um we can always update you i've just seen brett thank you in in pop to note there in the in the chat to say that this will go up on on the youtube channel so if you want to share it with anyone who wasn't able to come today or wanted to revisit any of ed's points you're very welcome to um and just to say thank you so much once again to ed and i'm going to give you applause even though you can't hear everyone else um and say thank you and thank you again for coming and we hope to see you um this time next monday so thank you very much have a lovely afternoon thanks car all the best cheers thank you bye bye are you listening to me uh yeah well i said thanks every day everybody at the end that annoyed me