Friends of Stony Stratford Library: Writing One Hot Summer
Venue: Stony Stratford Library, 5-7 Church Street, Stony Stratford
Date: 17 Apr 2018
Time: 19:00
Friends of Stony Stratford Library
WRITING ONE HOT SUMMER: DICKENS, DARWIN, DISRAELI AND THE GREAT STINK OF 1858
Writing One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and The Great Stink of 1858 - A talk by Rosemary Ashton, Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature, University College London.
Tickets available at the Library from 27 March
Rosemary Ashton's One Hot Summer, published in 2017, describes a year which was pivotal in the lives of three great Victorians - and which also saw the river Thames so polluted and foul-smelling that Parliament was nearly forced to decamp to the provinces. She will talk both about the year 1858 itself and also about the way she came to write the book and the challenges she faced in structuring it.
Professor Ashton is an eminent scholar of the Victorian period. She has published many books, including a life of of George Eliot and studies of nineteenth-century intellectuals and Victorian Bloomsbury.