Race, Physiognomy, and Early Photography in “Moby Dick”

In January 1839, Louis Daguerre publicly announced the invention of the Daguerreotype - one of the first working cameras - to the French Academy of Sciences. In June of the same year, Herman Melville sailed from New York to Liverpool as a green-hand onboard the merchant ship, the St. Lawrence. When Melville [...]

Living through literature: the value of Romances

Over lockdown last year I read Umberto Eco's second novel, Foucault's Pendulum, which sees three sceptics stumble their way into the heart of a centuries old conspiracy theory associated with the esotericism of the Jewish Kabbalah and the Knights Templar. The whole premise of the story ties into Eco's interest [...]

Extraordinary People and Civil Disobedience: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In my previous blogpost, discussing Thoreau's notion of Civil Disobedience, I argued that crime is often warranted when movements for change identify injustices in the existing order of society. Thoreau was speaking about slavery; last week I focused on Rosa Parks and the toppling of a statue of Edward Colston [...]

Extraordinary People and Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau

Speaking in regard to the toppling of a statue of Edward Colston during a Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol, Labour politician David Lammy recently said, in an interview with GMB, that, "those young people who brought that statue down knew they would be facing the law, but that's [...]

Keats and ‘Hyperion’: Beauty, Knowledge and Power

Keats is most popularly known for the Odes he wrote in 1819, in particular ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, which have been established as some of the greatest poems in English Literature. Though I love the Odes, for me, ‘Hyperion’ has always been the most [...]

Try All Things: Reading in Quarantine

I try all things; I achieve what I can.This quote is taken from Chapter 78 of Moby Dick, 'The Praire'. In it, Ishmael defends his right to offer scientific observations of sperm whales, despite not being 'qualified', in order to conjure a more accurate image of them for his reader […]