The Lisa Jardine Annual English Lecture 2025

Please join the Department of English for the The Lisa Jardine Annual English Lecture 2025.

This year the lecture will be given by Professor Jo McDonagh from the University of Chicago. The lecture will begin at 6.30 p.m. and will be followed by a reception.

The “Gift” of a Child: Imperial Transactions in the History of Childhood, from Charlotte Brontë to Oscar Wilde

Literature provides many examples of “gifting” children in the context of empire. Take for example the Enfant, a child character in a story written by a twelve-year-old Charlotte Brontë in 1829. Abducted and trafficked as a chimney sweep, the Enfant’s fortunes change when he is saved by a man who turns out to be his father. They live happily ever after on a gift of 200,000 livres from the Emperor Napoleon. Eccentric though it is, Brontë’s tale leads us back to stories of children as “gifts” on which Brontë drew, as well as forward to subsequent literary children subjected to adult and colonial transactions. Oscar Wilde’s short story “The Infanta’s Birthday” (1891), in which a child dwarf is given to a Spanish princess, presents a powerful example of transactions involving children in the fin-de-siècle imperial world. These narratives pose complex issues for both the history of childhood and the history of empire, which the lecture will seek to confront and disentangle. These are ongoing histories, and the lecture will also reflect on their trajectories in current debates about child migrants.

Biography

Josephine McDonagh is Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Chair of the Development of the Novel in English and Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago, where she is also Director of the Nicholson Center for British Studies. She has previously held positions at Universities of Exeter, Birkbeck, Oxford, and King’s College London where she was Professor of English between 2007-2017.

Her publications include the monographs Child M**der and British Culture, 1720–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), George Eliot (Northcote House Press/British Council, 1997), and De Quincey's Disciplines (Clarendon Press, 1994). She has also edited volumes of essays on a range of interdisciplinary topics, with a focus on nineteenth-century British literature. Most recently her work has interrogated the role of literature in settler colonisation, migration and emigration. Her monograph, Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815-1876 (Oxford University Press, 2021), explores the ways in which literature both responded to and helped to shape a transcontinental migratory culture at a time of mass emigration from Britain.

The Lisa Jardine Annual English Lecture

The Lisa Jardine Annual English Lecture is named in honour of Lisa Jardine CBE HonFRS FRHistS, who died on the 25 October 2015, at the age of just 71. Lisa joined the English department in 1989, and was with us for 23 years, until 2012. She was both a dedicated teacher and researcher and a major public intellectual who used her profile to address key contemporary issues in historical perspective. During the 1990s, Lisa brought together at Queen Mary a young and dynamic group of scholars who broke new ground in fields as diverse as queer theory, modernism and Renaissance studies. Her commitment to young women scholars and students from non-traditional backgrounds was total, such as when she sponsored Bosnian Muslim students from the University of Sarajevo whose academic studies had been interrupted by the Balkan wars, bringing them to finish their degrees at Queen Mary. Later, she founded the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (now at UCL) to make archives matter, using cutting edge technology.

With this lecture, the School of the Arts remembers Lisa as an intellectual and a figurehead who will always be associated with its foundations and its ethos, but most especially as our friend. Simon Schama has best captured what it was like to have her as a friend and a colleague. She had, he wrote, “the merriest mind, the least cloistered scholarship and the most warmly expansive intellect that many of us will ever know. The vitality of her writing and the exuberance of her teaching were of a piece with her personality, which was gleefully humane, insatiably omnivorous and mischievously irreverent. Her laugh alone could fell a pedant at a hundred paces.”

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