English Seminar: Dr Amy Wilcockson, Fleeman Fellow Thomas Campbell: Correspondent and Canon-creator

Drawing on my forthcoming edition of his selected letters for Liverpool University Press, this paper examines the ways in which the correspondence and networks of the Scottish Romantic poet, Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) were vital to his contemporary success as a poet, canon-creator, and periodical editor.
Campbell was one of the bestselling poets of the Romantic period, far surpassing the sales and reputations of contemporaries who now dominate our sense of the period's culture. Aged just 21, Campbell became immensely popular as the ‘Lion of Edinburgh' following the publication of The Pleasures of Hope (1799), a Whiggish poem of political optimism. He was also the renowned editor of the periodical, the New Monthly Magazine, from 1821-1830, and in 1819 published his seven-volume Specimens of the British Poets, a conscious rethinking of Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets.
My paper argues for the importance of considering Campbell's correspondence with a variety of literary, political, artistic, national and international names as invaluable to his work as a poet, successful celebrity editor, and key figure of the long eighteenth century.
I will also touch on the preliminary work I have undertaken so far as a Fleeman Fellow at the University of St Andrews, which focuses on the relationship between Campbell's Specimens of the British Poets and Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets.
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Dr Amy Wilcockson is currently an MHRA Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, working on The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley project. This academic year she has also conducted a Visiting Fellowship at Chawton House, the Daiches-Manning Memorial Fellowship in 18th-Century Scottish Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and a Fleeman Fellowship at the University of St Andrews. Based on her PhD thesis, Amy's edition of The Selected Letters of Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.