Nick Groom

William Henry Ireland: From Forgery To Fish ’N’ Chips

William Henry Ireland, “otherwise Shakspeare,” was a late eighteenth-century literary forger. By the time he was twentyone he had produced a substantial archive of Shakespearean manuscripts, had his supposedly original new Shakespeare play Vortigern performed at Drury Lane, confessed to the forgery, been disowned by his father, revealed to be the illegitimate child of the housekeeper, and written his autobiography. He spent the remainder of his life as a Grub Street hack, counterfeiting his Shakespearean forgeries for collectors of curiosities. He died in 1835.

Healthy publics: enabling cultures and environments for health

Despite extraordinary advances in biomedicine and associated gains in human health and well-being, a growing number of health and well-being related challenges have remained or emerged in recent years. These challenges are often ‘more than biomedical’ in complexion, being social, cultural and environmental in terms of their key drivers and determinants, and underline the necessity of a concerted policy focus on generating healthy societies. Despite the apparent agreement on this diagnosis, the means to produce change are seldom clear, even when the turn to health and well-being requires sizable shifts in our understandings of public health and research practices. This paper sets out a platform from which research approaches, methods and translational pathways for enabling health and well-being can be built. The term ‘healthy publics’ allows us to shift the focus of public health away from ‘the public’ or individuals as targets for intervention, and away from the view that culture acts as a barrier to efficient biomedical intervention, towards a greater recognition of the public struggles that are involved in raising health issues, questioning what counts as healthy and unhealthy and assembling the evidence and experience to change practices and outcomes. Creating the conditions for health and well-being, we argue, requires an engaged research process in which public experiments in building and repairing social and material relations are staged and sustained even if, and especially when, the fates of those publics remain fragile and buffeted by competing and often more powerful public formations.

‘Al under the wyllowe tree’: Chatterton and the Ecology of the West Country

In considering English Romantic poets and their relationship with the West Country, the place of Thomas Chatterton appears at first sight to be straightforward and uncomplicated. Chatterton is the Bristol poet. He was so in the eighteenth century; he remains so today. Eighteenth-century commemorations such as The Ode, Songs, Chorusses, c indeed, the subtitle of an edited collection published in 2005 is Thomas Chatterton’s Bristol.2 He made the city and the city made him — and in a sense, Chatterton quite literally made its history: William Barrett’s History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol (1789) includes medieval material ‘forged’ by Chatterton.

Plastic Daffodils: The Pastoral, the Picturesque, and Cultural Environmentalism

This chapter argues that cultural perspectives are necessary for integrated climate change research. By examining the history of perceptions of the natural world, primarily through literature and the genres of the pastoral and the picturesque in the eighteenth century and Romantic periods, the analysis shows how the English countryside was represented as a figurative rather than a literal space, which in turn became an ideological justification for the agrarian revolution: the enclosure and privatisation of common land; the migration of the workforce into industrial cities; and the commercialisation of the countryside for bourgeois leisure pursuits. Contemporary attitudes to the environment and hence climate change are based on these historical distortions. However, developing an awareness of ‘cultural environmentalism’ and promoting innovative creative work can help introduce the notion of cultural stewardship into sustainable living.

Gothic histories: The taste for terror, 1764 to the present

Part Three, each of the contributions provides a clear introduction to the areas of pneumatology, missiology, practical theology and ecumenism as these relate to Pentecostalism. This section of the collection is in many ways its most original contribution, considering areas of theology that have often been neglected by the Pentecostal scholars, and offering opportunities for interdisciplinary research on these issues by addressing the intersection of these with social scientific approaches. Overall, this volume provides an excellent overview of current scholarship on global Pentecostalism. Whilst most of the individual chapters do not offer significant new theoretical perspectives for scholars already familiar with the different bodies of literature on Pentecostalism, they nevertheless offer the possibility of a shared vocabulary and insights from different disciplinary perspectives for approaching this rapidly growing field of study, and the collection is edited in such a way that the different approaches are brought into conversation with each other. Drawing theological perspectives into this dialogue is a new and welcome move, and in doing so the volume gestures towards innovative and fruitful possibilities for future interdisciplinary modes of inquiry.

Please wash your hands before leaving the 20th century Nick Groom

Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. The Authorised Autobiography. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. John Lydon with Keith and Kent Zimmerman. London, Sydney, Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993. viii + 342 pp. £14.99 Cloth. Imagologies: Media Philosophy. Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. 320 pp. £40.00 Cloth, £14.99 Paper.