How Birmingham and Shakespeare won the American Midwest

How Birmingham and Shakespeare won the American Midwest

In this second of two podcasts on the voyage to America made in 1874 by Birmingham’s lost philosopher, Professor Ewan Fernie, Director of the ‘Everything to Everybody’ Project, and the project’s American Lead, Professor Katherine Scheil, continue their discussion with the Publisher of History West Midlands, Mike Gibbs.  In this episode,  they discuss how Dawson and Shakespeare reached the American frontier.  They bring out the wider impact of Birmingham’s nineteenth-century culture on the developing cultural identity of the United States.  They unfold a range of intimate relationships between American Shakespeareans and Dawson.  And they discuss how Dawson’s quiet right-hand man, the industrialist and bibliophile, Samuel Timmins, was also a major influence on American Shakespeareans. 

Overall, this programme evokes an energetic transatlantic scholarly community reaching from Birmingham across America, an international Shakespearean fellowship who were working out a new culture for new times.  The podcast ends by dwelling on the implications of an exciting discovery recently made by Scheil and Fernie of some 300 letters by Samuel Timmins to the American Shakespearean, J. Parker Norris, in the Folger Shakespeare Library, now the greatest Shakespeare Library in the world.  As Scheil and Fernie explain, this is just one of the historic connections between Birmingham’s great Shakespeare Library and America’s, and it confirms a lost Shakespearean axis which links Birmingham to the cultural history of the United States.

The ‘Everything to Everybody’ Project is a major lottery-funded collaboration between the University of Birmingham and Birmingham City Council.  Dawson founded the world’s first great Shakespeare Library in the city in 1864 and the project aims to unlock that pioneering public resource for all the citizens of contemporary Birmingham and to recover the ‘everything to everybody’ ethos it embodies.  To get involved and for more podcasts, articles, films, Please see the project website: https://everythingtoeverybody.bham.ac.uk/.  Follow us on Twitter @E2EShakespeare.

Keywords: George Dawson, Everything to Everybody, Professor Ewan Fernie, Joseph Chamberlain, Birmingham

Featuring:

Professor Ewan Fernie

In: Birmingham, Shakespeare, Everything to Everybody, Ewan Fernie, George Dawson,

History WM iTunes Podcast

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