Online Autumn Lecture Series 2025
Hot Off The Press: Victorians in the Bookshops
Our autumn lecture series celebrates the remarkable recent flourishing of publications on Victorian architecture and related topics. All the speakers are the authors of new books, either just published or forthcoming. Among them are two contributors to the highly successful series Victorian Architects, published by the Victorian Society in collaboration with Liverpool University Press. As well as discussions of individual architects, the subjects of the lectures range from interiors of the Aesthetic Movement to one of the greatest of all Victorian collectors.
Online Autumn Lecture Series: 1
Lady Charlotte Schreiber: Extraordinary Art Collector by Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth
Tue 21 October, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Also known as Lady Charlotte Guest, née Bertie, Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812–95) was one of the most significant women in the history of collecting. A woman who subverted gendered norms and challenged Victorian conventions, Schreiber made major contributions to ceramic history and cultural education, played an influential role in transnational artistic networks and donated thousands of objects to the Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Museum. Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth’s long awaited study of this great Victorian collector will be published by Lund Humphries in September.
Online Autumn Lecture Series: 2
Halsey Ricardo: A Life in Arts and Crafts by Mark Bertram
Wed 29 October, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Halsey Ricardo (1854–1928) is a well known Arts and Crafts figure thanks to his business partnership with William De Morgan, for whom he designed tiles and vases, and his role as head of architecture at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. He was an engaging personality, as well as a forward-looking thinker and gifted lecturer and essayist, and his architectural work, most famously No. 8 Addison Road, London (designed for Ernest Debenham in 1905) was often highly individualistic in its innovative use of colour and glazed materials. Mark Bertram’s monograph on Ricardo (his great-grandfather) was published by Lund Humphries in March.
Online Autumn Lecture Series: 3
Clumber Park: A Queer Inheritance by Michael Hall
Tue 4 November, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Although Clumber Park, seat until the 1930s of the Pelham-Clintons, Dukes of Newcastle, and one of the famous ‘Dukeries’ of north Nottinghamshire, has been demolished, its park – now owned by the National Trust – attracts admirers of Victorian architecture for its magnificent chapel, designed by G.F. Bodley for the 7th Duke in 1886. As the dukedom is extinct, the history of the family who lived at Clumber has largely been forgotten, but the four generations who spanned the nineteenth century were links in a remarkable series of events that begin with the execution for sodomy of the 4th Duke’s valet and concludes with the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Michael Hall, author of A Queer Inheritance: Alternative Histories in the National Trust, to be published by Bloomsbury next February, reconstructs this strange, queer saga.
Online Autumn Lecture Series: 4
Matthew Digby Wyatt by Robert Thorne
Tue 11 November, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
The polymath Wyatt – architect, administrator, designer, writer and connoisseur – was project manager to the Great Exhibition of 1851 and spent his final years advising the South Kensington Museum on its collections. He played a key part in mid-Victorian developments in architecture, design and museum display and worked with such leading figures as I. K. Brunel, George Gilbert Scott, Herbert Minton, Henry Cole and Owen Jones. Robert Thorne is the author of the first full-length study of Wyatt’s work, which was published in Liverpool University’s Victorian Architects series in collaboration with the Society in the spring of this year.
Online Autumn Lecture Series: 5
The Aesthetic Movement in Five English interiors by Steven Brindle
Tue 18 November, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
This talk will examine five celebrated interiors of the Aesthetic Movement that involved Edward Burne-Jones and Morris & Co.: three dining rooms – at 1, Palace Green, Kensington, for George Howard; Rounton Grange, Yorkshire, for Sir Lowthian Bell; and Stanmore Hall, Harrow, for William Knox D’Arcy – as well as the unrealised music room at 4 Carlton Gardens for Arthur Balfour, and the saloon at Buscot Park, Oxfordshire for Alexander Henderson (the only room that survives). Steven Brindle, the author of London’s Lost Interiors, published by Atlantic Publishing last year, will discuss the clients, their artists, the rooms, their fate and what survives of them.
Online Autumn Lecture Series: 6
Toronto Edwardian: Frank Darling, Architect of Canada’s Imperial Age by David Winterton
Wed 26 November, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
In 1870–73 a young Canadian architectural student, Frank Darling (1850–1923), was employed in London in the office of George Edmund Street. After his return to Canada, he became a leading exponent of Edwardian Baroque and one of the country’s most prominent architects, responsible in particular for many of Toronto’s key buildings, including the headquarters of the Bank of Montreal and the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall. David Winterton’s Toronto Edwardian, the first monograph on Darling, will be published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in the autumn.
Online Autumn Lecture Series: 7
E.W. Godwin by Aileen Reid
Tue 2 December, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Although his fame today rests largely on his distinguished Aesthetic Movement furniture and friendships with Oscar Wilde and J.M. Whistler, throughout his life E.W. Godwin (1833–86) styled himself ‘architect’ above and before anything else. Although the legacy of his buildings is relatively small, his architectural design reached unmatched heights of creativity and distinctiveness, whether in his early years as a leading exponent of Ruskinian Gothic at Northampton Town Hall or in his radical approach to domestic design in his later artists’ studio houses in Chelsea. Aileen Reid’s monograph on Godwin, the first to focus on his buildings, will be published in Liverpool University Press’s Victorian Architects series in collaboration with the Society in the spring of next year
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All proceeds go to supporting the Victorian Society and the fight to save England and Wales’ Victorian and Edwardian heritage.