The final meeting of this year’s series of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar will take place on Friday 2 May 2025 in Room 349 (third floor), Senate House, University of London, starting at 5.30 p.m. As our distinguished guest speaker, we are delighted to welcome Dr Elizabeth Denlinger of the New York Public Library, who will present a paper entitled “What Trade shall I be?”: Career Choices and Children’s Culture in the Romantic Age. This will be followed by a discussion and wine reception. The seminar will be chaired by David Duff (Queen Mary University of London).

The event is free and open to everyone, including postgraduates and members of the public.

Elizabeth Denlinger had no idea what to do with her life, so she stayed in school until she’d finished a PhD at NYU. Following her nose through a series of chance encounters and unplanned development, it was gradually borne in on her that rare book curatorship was the way to go. She worked first at the Morgan Library & Museum, and then at the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library. She has been there since 2008 and has curated or co-curated exhibitions on women in British Romantic era, Frankenstein, Byron, Shelley, and more. Her publications include It’s Alive! a Visual History of Frankenstein; Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era; and “Horrid Mysteries of Cl Cl 26: A Tale of Mothers and Daughters.”

Regarding the subject of her paper, Liz writes:

“This talk explores how young Britons entered the work force during a long Romantic age. The central object of my research is the 1790s reappearance of a sixteenth-century genre describing and illustrating various trades. These encyclopedic books carried titles such as The Book of English Trades or Library of the Useful Arts, went into multiple editions and remained in print into the 1850s. Illustrated with one engraving per trade, e.g., wool-comber, spinner, waterman, bricklayer, they also include sculptor and architect. They are overwhelmingly aimed at boys, and I will pay disproportionate attention to the trades inflected toward girls. I’ll be also look at a variety of other materials: books, chapbooks, games, fiction, periodicals, and autobiographical accounts. In our period there were rising numbers of both literate youth and of books for them; and a high percentage of those young people were at work before they were sixteen. I hope that examining this material will offer some insight into a moment when young people in Britain began first to be known as ‘teens,’ and in which, for a lucky handful, there were real choices to be made for one’s future.”