Edward Rushton and Romantic Liverpool: A Bicentennial Conference

2014 marks the bicentenary of the death of poet Edward Rushton (1756-1814), Liverpool’s most radical voice in the Age of Revolution. Rushton was an uncompromising abolitionist and antislavery fighter, as well as a champion of human rights at large. In a varied career, he also kept a tavern, became a bookseller, edited a newspaper, campaigned against the use of the press gang and, as a blind person himself, he initiated local efforts to support the visually impaired. Liverpool is planning to celebrate his life, writing, and legacy through exhibitions at National Museums Liverpool and the Victoria Gallery & Museum, a theatrical production of a specially-commissioned biographical play at the Everyman/Playhouse, new publications from Liverpool University Press, public lectures, and other events. To coincide with these activities, University of Liverpool, in association with Università degli Studi di Bari “Aldo Moro” (Italy), is hosting a two-day academic conference (14-15 November 2014) which aims to evaluate critically Rushton’s life and works, and foster a new sense of the Romantic and radical writing that emerged within his home town during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The conference is centred upon Rushton but seeks to encourage more generally the study of Liverpool during the period of his life, when the town emerged as a place of importance in an international network of trade in objects, ideas and cultures. The conference will seek to expand our understanding of the relationship between cultures of writing, reading, publishing, bookselling, journalism and education in Rushton’s Liverpool, and explore the role of imaginative writing in the formation of local, global and civic identities.

Conference Programme.

More information available here.