Thomas Hardy Conference & Festival

THE THOMAS HARDY SOCIETY presents the Twenty- second International Thomas Hardy Conference & Festival Dorchester, Dorset, England PROGRAMME Saturday 23rd July - Saturday 30th July 2016 Conference & Festival Foreword As a recent newcomer as a resident to the town and for my first Conference as Chairperson, I am delighted to welcome you to Dorchester and to the Thomas Hardy Society’s 22nd International Conference and Festival. You will certainly see a few differences to the town since 2014, most of which should enhance your visit. The Conference itself will follow the trusted pattern of recent years, but with some new events which we hope will prove popular. We are very pleased that our President, Julian Fellowes-Kitchener, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, is opening our Conference this year, accompanied by his wife, Emma. The Mayor, this year Councillor Tim Harries and his wife Anita will be our guests at this occasion, as will, for the first time, the High Sheriff of Dorset, Sir Philip Williams and his wife, Lady Catherine. Another esteemed guest will be Simon Armitage, Oxford Professor of Poetry and one of our most renowned contemporary poets. He will be our after dinner speaker, reading from his own works. For our weekday mornings we are returning to a full programme of keynote speakers, including some familiar names and old friends. The afternoons also have a full programme, of Postgraduate and Call-for Papers speakers, alongside our Tours and Walks, which include some exciting new ideas. For the evenings, we believe we have provided a varied entertainments programme without over-loading the ends of these busy days. I hope you will agree and that you will find there is not only something for everyone, but many things for many different people with their own individual approaches to Hardy. Helen Lange, Honorary Chairperson Conference & Festival Committee Conference Chairman - Helen Lange Conference Co-ordinator - Mike Nixon (07812 677485) Academic Director - Dr. Jane Thomas Post-Graduate Convenor: Tracy Hayes Sponsorship - Mike Nixon Catering - Mike Nixon Accommodation - Sue Clarke Tours Co-ordinator - Pat Withers Programmes, Posters etc - Andrew Leah Publications - Dee Tolfree Merchandise - Vivien Geddes If you would like further information about the Conference & Festival, The Thomas Hardy Society or THS membership please contact: The Thomas Hardy Society c/o Dorset County Museum, High West Street, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1XA Tel: (0)1305 251501; email: [email protected] 2 Conference & Festival Programme Notes An award-winning poet, playwright, novelist, lyricist and broadcaster. Simon Armitage also writes extensively for television and radio. He is the author of over a dozen collections of poetry, most recently ‘Paper Aeroplane - Selected Poems 1989 - 2014’. Armitage’s translations of medieval verse include his acclaimed ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. His new translation of ‘Pearl’ is came out in May. He is also the author of two novels and three best-selling non-fiction titles, ‘All Points North’, ‘Walking Home’ and ‘Walking Away. Armitage was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004 and awarded the CBE for services to poetry in 2010. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield and was elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2015. Tim Laycock is a well-known local folk-singer, storyteller and actor. He is currently Artist in Residence at the National Trust Hardy Country properties. Tim is also artistic director of the New Hardy Players, and will be directing Under the Greenwood Tree with Emma Hill in the Dorchester Corn Exchange in December this year. In this session Tim will be giving us ‘A Taste of Dorset’ recounting Dorset folk tales and playing and singing traditional songs in his own inimitable style. Colin Thompson is a superb player of the English style of folk fiddle, and an authority on the dance tunes of the Hardy repertoire. He is very active musically in Dorset and, together with Tim performs several words and music programmes including Ha Ha Hardy! And the Year Clock. Colin has recently been touring his own play about the Irish harpist O’Carolan. Here he also works with his wife Ruth, an accomplished violinist and country dance teacher. Alan Chedzoy is a founder member of the William Barnes Society and an authority on the Dorset dialect. He has written two biographies of Barnes and edited the poetry, while his public readings, recordings and broadcasts of the poetry of both Barnes and Hardy have been widely praised. In 2011 he was presented, by the Poet Laureate, with the Dorset Award for one of his own poems at the Bridport Literary Festival. Hardy’s obituary of Barnes and the preface to his edition of the poetry are replete with critical comments which have rarely been examined. By present- ing a selection of Barnes’s poems on this occasion he will consider whether, and how far, Hardy got it right. Alistair Chisholm is well known locally and nationally as the award-winning Dorchester Town Crier. As a recently elected Town Councillor he is keen to see much more being made of the county town’s rich and diverse cultural heritage. Alistair represents Dorchester Town Council on the THS Council of Management. 3 *The New Hardy Players present ‘ A Hardy Welcome’ at Max Gate. Thomas Hardy and Hermann Lea plan a motoring trip in the Dining Room, and the domestic staff gossip in the Kitchen. The Hardy Players rehearse scenes from The Woodlanders in the First Study, and Emma Hardy reminisces in her attic boudoir- and all the time, an old country dance tune drifts through the corridors. Max Gate comes to life in this innovative and immersive theatrical evening devised and directed by Emma Hill and Tim Laycock. Please note that this is a prome- nade play; the audience move from room to room, and while some seating is provided, it may be necessary to stand for part of the time. The performance lasts approximately 75 minutes. (*Available to Conference delegates only) THE MELLSTOCK TRIO entertain with a unique combina- tion of singing, instrumental music and spoken word, encompassing west gallery harmony, traditional songs, glees, dances, marches, poems and stories. As well as performing their popular themed costume shows, they play for dances, present workshops and provide rural sounds for all kinds of public and private events. Here they play and sing songs from the Mellstock Band’s latest album: ‘The Thomas Hardy Song Book’. Helen Gibson is Honorary Curator of the Thomas Hardy Collection in the Dorset County Museum. She was involved in writing the successful bid for the inscription of the Hardy Archive and Collection to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register of Important Literary Heritage. Helen holds an MA in English Literature from the university of Kent and taught in primary schools for 23 years. She was secretary to the Hardy Society for five years and is a member of the Hardy Society’s Council of Management. Pianist Philip Lange made highly successful debuts at the Wigmore Hall and South Bank whilst still a student at the Royal College of Music. Since then he has combined a career on the concert plat- form, playing all over the world, with a busy teaching schedule. Philip gave annual recitals in Mallorca from 2005 to 2014, organised by his great friend, the late BBC journalist Sue Lloyd- Roberts. He has a love of accompanying and works with students at the London music colleges. Philip has a passion for English Song and Schubert Lieder. Away from his professional life, he enjoys the theatre, walking, gardening and listening to jazz. 4 The Academic Programme Academic Director: Dr Jane Thomas (Reader in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Literature University of Hull). Jane has directed the academic side of the International Thomas Hardy Conference since 2010 Jane Thomas has published numerous articles on the life and work of Thomas Hardy and is the author of Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the Minor Novels (Palgrave:1999) and Thomas Hardy and Desire: Conceptions of the Self (Palgrave: 2013). She is currently co-editing, with Phillip Mallett, the Norton Critical Edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and editing the Cambridge University Press scholarly edition of A Pair of Blue Eyes. Her projects include a critical study of the role and place of sculpture in Hardy’s oeuvre, and conceptions of place in the novels and short stories of Winifred Holtby. She has made a number of media appearances as a Hardy expert including BBC Radio Four’s ‘Woman’s Hour’ and ‘In Our Time’ and BBC4’s ‘Great British Railway Journeys’. Monday 25th July, 9.15am: Professor Barrie Bullen (Emeritus Profes- sor, Reading University; Visiting Fellow Kellogg College, Oxford.) ‘"Tess", Painting, Place and Music' J.B. Bullen also held the Chair of English Literature and Culture in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has a longstanding interest in the relations between word and image in the nineteenth century. His first book on Thomas Hardy, The Expressive Eye was published in 1986. The Pre-Raphaelite Body appeared in 1998 and a history of the Byzantine Revival, Byzantium Rediscovered in 2003. He published Rossetti: Painter and Poet in 2012, and a second book on Hardy, Thomas Hardy: The World of His Novels in 2013. Monday 25th July, 11.00am: Dr Indy Clark (University of Queensland, Australia) ‘Wessex and the Pastoral Tradition’. Indy Clark teaches at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Thomas Hardy’s Pastoral: An Unkindly May published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. His other publications include: “Imagined Villages and Knowable Communities: Work and the Pastoral in Thomas Hardy’s Poetry” in Pockets of Change (2011), and articles for the Hardy Society Journal and Colloquy.

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