ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Public Lecture
“Adam Walker, Electrical Itinerant: Science, Showmanship and Sedition 1760-1820”, Dr Mary Fairclough (University of York)

Date: 5 March 2015
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: Webb Lecture Theatre (Geography and Geology Building, UWA)

All Welcome!

This lecture will track the routes and the practices of scientific lecturers in the north of England in the late eighteenth century, focusing in particular on the displays of Adam Walker, a virtuoso experimenter in electricity. Walker’s lectures showcased spectacular displays of electrical phenomena. His experiments proved how electric sparks and shocks could be communicated from person to person, and this lecture will explore how electricity itself became a metaphor for many kinds of communication at this period. Walker’s lectures were open to all, and they thus raise interesting questions about the access of women and the ‘lower orders’ to scientific practice in the late eighteenth century. Despite the polite fashionable status of his lectures, electricity for Walker always stood for something politically radical. For Walker as for a man who was later his student, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, there is ‘an electric life which burns within… words’ which has the potential to change the world.

Dr Mary Fairclough, University of York, UK, based in the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York, is a Visiting Fellow to the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. She has published a monograph, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and is now researching the ways in which the discourse of electrical science is appropriated in literary and political texts in the long eighteenth century.