Danish Fire of 1795 and Mary Wollstonecraft

William Godwin called Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark (1795), the kind of book to make a reader fall in love with its author, so he did. He and Wollstonecraft were an unlikely couple, and their relationship was cut short when she died after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley in 1797.

Today we had a wonderful interview with Christian Holm Donetzky, a Danish historian why runs History Tours in Copenhagen. We wanted to talk with him to fill out information for the portion of Swimming with Byron that deals with Wollstonecraft’s trip here.

Christian had an excellent way of showing us around the parts of Copenhagen affected by the fire, which radically changed Copenhagen, and left people 6,000 people living in tents and in the ruins of the Christiansborg Palace, which had just been wrecked by fire the year before.

She wasn’t impressed by Copenhagen, and it wasn’t just because of what the fire had done:

If I say that the houses did not disgust me, I tell you all I remember of them; for I cannot recollect any pleasurable sensations they excited; or that any object, produced by nature or art, took me out of myself. The view of the city, as we drew near, was rather grand, but without any striking feature to interest the imagination, excepting the trees which shade the foot-paths.

 

Great Post on William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Walking as Subversive

Swimming with Byron

This post by Pamela Clemit in The Idler quotes from the letters of Godwin (which Clemit has been editing for Oxford University Press since 2011), and shows how walking could be considered walking in the time of the French Revolution.

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Mid-Production, and all’s well

We’ve been filming for several weeks now, and have a ton of footage. We’ve met a lot of interesting people along the way. An early view of our progress just appeared on the Wordsworth Trust blog – Swimming with Byron.

We’ve filmed in a variety of places, including a pub in Cockermouth, England, almost up to the Scottish border, on the ferry from Dover to Calais, along Wordsworth’s 1790 hike south through France, at the Royal Crescent in Bath, and in front of Kate Moss’s house (where Coleridge lived out the end of his life) in Highgate.