Percy Shelley, archived at Huntingdon Library

Shelley's Steam Ship: a hidden history of romanticism and technology

Mon 11 September 2023

Cambridge Museum of Technology

This talk is about the poet Percy Shelley’s attempt to build a steam ship to trade between Livorno and Marseilles in 1820.
As Phil Connell writes, ‘Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Shelley have typically been identified with an?unambiguous?hostility to industrial society and its intellectual apologists’ (Romanticism, Economics and the Question of Culture, 2005, vii).

Nonetheless this was a period when there were fewer distinctions between the arts of Engineering and the Humanities. In this talk, Dr Gardner will discuss these interactions at a time when amateur engineers, such as Shelley, felt that they could engage in the development of new technology.

Cost: £5 / £3 (students) cash-only